THE EVERLASTING MAN
by G.K. Chesterton
(1925)
Prefatory Note Introduction: The Plan of This Book
PART I: ON THE CREATURE CALLED MAN
I The Man in the Cave II Professors and Prehistoric Men III The Antiquity of Civilisation IV God and Comparative Religion V Man and Mythologies VI The Demons and the Philosophers VII The War of the Gods and Demons VIII The End of the World
PART II: ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST
I The God in the Cave II The Riddles of the Gospel III The Strangest Story in the World IV The Witness of the Heretics V The Escape from Paganism VI The Five Deaths of the Faith
CONCLUSION: THE SUMMARY OF THIS BOOK
Appendix I. On Prehistoric Man Appendix II. On Authority and Accuracy
PREFARATORY NOTE
This book needs a preliminary note that its scope be not misunderstood. The view suggested is historical rather than theological, and does not deal directly with a religious change which has been the chief event of my own life; and about which I am already writing a more purely controversial volume. It is impossible, I hope, for any Catholic to write any book on any subject, above all this subject, without showing that he is a Catholic; but this study is not specially concerned with the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant. Much of it is devoted to many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians; and its thesis is that those who say that Christ stands side by side with similar myths, and his religion side by side with similar religions, are only repeating a very stale formula contradicted by a very striking fact. To suggest this I have not needed to go much beyond matters known to us all; I make no claim to learning; and have to depend for some things, as has rather become the fashion, on those who are more learned. As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the courage and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and varied and intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.
INTRODUCTION
THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK
There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote. It is, however, a relief to turn from that topic to another story that I never wrote. Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written. It is only too probable that I shall never write it, so I will use it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth. I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping sides, like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was far enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchen-garden, shining flat on the hill-side like the colours and quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some such gigantic figure, on which he had always lived, but which was too large and too close to be seen. That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today; and that is the point of this book.
The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were plain clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward’s castle; though they do not call an editor’s office a coward’s castle. It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it would be much truer of journalist. The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church; the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him. They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press about why the churches are empty, without even going there to find out if they are empty, or which of them are empty. Their suggestions are more vapid and vacant than the most insipid curate in a three-act farce, and move us to comfort him after the manner of the curate in the Bab Ballads; ‘Your mind is not so blank as that of Hopley Porter.’ So we may truly say to the very feeblest cleric: ‘Your mind is not so blank as that of Indignant Layman or Plain Man or Man in the Street, or any of your critics in the newspapers; for they have not the most shadowy notion of what they want themselves. Let alone of what you ought to give them.’ They will suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented the War, which they themselves did not want to prevent; and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent, except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan sceptics who are the chief enemies of the Church. It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War— they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. But that marks their mood about the whole religious tradition they are in a state of reaction against it. It is well with the boy when he lives on his father’s land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.
Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because his followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be far better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be battered by iconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-handed cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika. Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In other words, I recommend these critics to try to do as much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages.
But with this we come to the final and vital point I shall try to show in these pages that when we do make this imaginative effort to see the whole thing from the outside, we find that it really looks like what is traditionally said about it inside. It is exactly when the boy gets far enough off to see the giant that he sees that he really is a giant. It is exactly when we do at last see the Christian Church afar under those clear and level eastern skies that we see that it is really the Church of Christ. To put it shortly, the moment we are really impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it. But this second proposition requires more serious discussion; and I shall here set myself to discuss it.
As soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something solid in the solitary and unique character of the divine story, it struck me that there was exactly the same strange and yet solid character in the human story that had led up to it; because that human story also had a root that was divine. I mean that just as the Church seems to grow more remarkable when it is fairly compared with the common religious life of mankind, so mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable when we compare it with the common life of nature. And I have noticed that most modern history is driven to something like sophistry, first to soften the sharp transition from animals to men, and then to soften the sharp transition from heathens to Christians. Now the more we really read in a realistic spirit of those two transitions the sharper we shall find them to be. It is because the critics are not detached that they do not see this detachment; it is because they are not looking at things in a dry light that they cannot see the difference between black and white. It is because they are in a particular mood of reaction and revolt that they have a motive for making out that all the white is dirty grey and the black not so black as it is painted. I do not say there are not human excuses for their revolt; I do not say it is not in some ways sympathetic; what I say is that it is not in any way scientific. An iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but an iconoclast is not impartial. And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial. Why should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope? I do not pretend to be impartial in the sense that the final act of faith fixes a man’s mind because it satisfies his mind. But I do profess to be a great deal more impartial than they are; in the sense that I can tell the story fairly, with some sort of imaginative justice to all sides; and they cannot. I do profess to be impartial in the sense that I should be ashamed to talk such nonsense about the Lama of Thibet as they do about the Pope of Rome, or to have as little sympathy with Julian the Apostate as they have with the Society of Jesus. They are not impartial; they never by any chance hold the historical scales even; and above all they are never impartial upon this point of evolution and transition. They suggest everywhere the grey gradations of twilight, because they believe it is the twilight of the gods. I propose to maintain that whether or no it is the twilight of gods, it is not the daylight of men.
I maintain that when brought out into the daylight these two things look altogether strange and unique; and that it is only in the false twilight of an imaginary period of transition that they can be made to look in the least like anything else. The first of these is the creature called man and the second is the man called Christ. I have therefore divided this book into two parts: the former being a sketch of the main adventure of the human race in so far as it remained heathen; and the second a summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming Christian. Both motives necessitate a certain method, a method which is not very easy to manage, and perhaps even less easy to define or defend.
In order to strike, in the only sane or possible sense, the note of impartiality, it is necessary to touch the nerve of novelty. I mean that in one sense we see things fairly when we see them first. That, I may remark in passing, is why children generally have very little difficulty about the dogmas of the Church. But the Church, being a highly practical thing for working and fighting, is necessarily a thing for men and not merely for children. There must be in it for working purposes a great deal of tradition, of familiarity, and even of routine. So long as its fundamentals are sincerely felt, this may even be the saner condition. But when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural. Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as are here considered, whatever our view of them, contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort of imagination; the imagination that can see what is there.
The only way to suggest the point is by an example of something, indeed of almost anything, that has been considered beautiful or wonderful. George Wyndham once told me that he had seen one of the first aeroplanes rise for the first time and it was very wonderful but not so wonderful as a horse allowing a man to ride on him. Somebody else has said that a fine man on a fine horse is the noblest bodily object in the world. Now, so long as people feel this in the right way, all is well. The first and best way of appreciating it is to come of people with a tradition of treating animals properly; of men in the right relation to horses. A boy who remembers his father who rode a horse, who rode it well and treated it well, will know that the relation can be satisfactory and will be satisfied. He will be all the more indignant at the ill-treatment of horses because he knows how they ought to be treated; but he will see nothing but what is normal in a man riding on a horse. He will not listen to the great modern philosopher who explains to him that the horse ought to be riding on the man. He will not pursue the pessimist fancy of Swift and say that men must be despised as monkeys and horses worshipped as gods. And horse and man together making an image that is to him human and civilised, it will be easy, as it were, to lift horse and man together into something heroic or symbolical; like a vision of St. George in the clouds. The fable of the winged horse will not be wholly unnatural to him: and he will know why Ariosto set many a Christian hero in such an airy saddle, and made him the rider of the sky. For the horse has really been lifted up along with the man in the wildest fashion in the very word we use when we speak ‘chivalry.’ The very name of the horse has been given to the highest mood and moment of the man; so that we might almost say that the handsomest compliment to a man is to call him a horse.
But if a man has got into a mood in which he is not able to feel this sort of wonder, then his cure must begin right at the other end. We must now suppose that he has drifted into a dull mood, in which somebody sitting on a horse means no more than somebody sitting on a chair. The wonder of which Wyndham spoke, the beauty that made the thing seem an equestrian statue, the meaning of the more chivalric horseman, may have become to him merely a convention and a bore. Perhaps they have been merely a fashion; perhaps they have gone out of fashion; perhaps they have been talked about too much or talked about in the wrong way; perhaps it was then difficult to care for horses without the horrible risk of being horsy. Anyhow, he has got into a condition when he cares no more for a horse than for a towel-horse. His grandfather’s charge at Balaclava seems to him as dull and dusty as the album containing such family portraits. Such a person has not really become enlightened about the album; on the contrary, he has only become blind with the dust. But when he has reached that degree of blindness, he will not be able to look at a horse or a horseman at all until he has seen the whole thing as a thing entirely unfamiliar and almost unearthly.
Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there must come towards us, with lumbering yet dancing motions, one of the very queerest of the prehistoric creatures. We must see for the first time the strangely small head set on a neck not only longer but thicker than itself, as the face of a gargoyle is thrust out upon a gutter-spout, the one disproportionate crest of hair running along the ridge of that heavy neck like a beard in the wrong place; the feet, each like a solid club of horn, alone amid the feet of so many cattle; so that the true fear is to be found in showing, not the cloven, but the uncloven hoof. Nor is it mere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster; for in a sense a monster means what is unique, and he is really unique. But the point is that when we thus see him as the first man saw him, we begin once more to have some imaginative sense of what it meant when the first man rode him. In such a dream he may seem ugly, but he does not seem unimpressive; and certainly that two-legged dwarf who could get on top of him will not seem unimpressive. By a longer and more erratic road we shall come back to the same marvel of the man and the horse; and the marvel will be, if possible, even more marvellous. We shall have again a glimpse of St. George; the more glorious because St. George is not riding on the horse, but rather riding on the dragon.
In this example, which I have taken merely because it is an example, it will be noted that I do not say that the nightmare seen by the first man of the forest is either more true or more wonderful than the normal mare of the stable seen by the civilised person who can appreciate what is normal. Of the two extremes, I think on the whole that the traditional grasp of truth is the better. But I say that the truth is found at one or other of these two extremes, and is lost in the intermediate condition of mere fatigue and forgetfulness of tradition. In other words, I say it is better to see a horse as a monster than to see it only as a slow substitute for a motor-car. If we have got into that state of mind about a horse as something stale, it is far better to be frightened of a horse because it is a good deal too fresh.
Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is always to have regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature will feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view, and will be satisfied. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just as seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, and not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the really detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to, and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him.
In short, it is the purpose of this introduction to maintain this thesis: that it is exactly when we do regard man as an animal that we know he is not an animal. It is precisely when we do try to picture him as a sort of horse on its hind legs, that we suddenly realise that he must be something as miraculous as the winged horse that towered up into the clouds of heaven. All roads lead to Rome, all ways lead round again to the central and civilised philosophy, including this road through elf-land and topsyturvydom. But it may be that it is better never to have left the land of the reasonable tradition, where men ride lightly upon horses and are mighty hunters before the Lord.
So also in the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold tread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know; we believe every common Indian conjurer who chooses to come to us and talk in the same style. If Christianity were only a new oriental fashion, it would never be reproached with being an old and oriental faith. I do not propose in this book to follow the alleged example of St. Francis Xavier with the opposite imaginative intention, and turn the Twelve Apostles into Mandarins; not so much to make them look like natives as to make them look like foreigners. I do not propose to work what I believe would be a completely successful practical joke; that of telling the whole story of the Gospel and the whole history of the church in a setting of pagodas and pigtails; and noting with malignant humour how much it was admired as a heathen story, in the very quarters where it is condemned as a Christian story. But I do propose to strike wherever possible this note of what is new and strange, and for that reason the style even on so serious a subject may sometimes be deliberately grotesque and fanciful. I do desire to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things. And I say that in both cases, when seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernatural things. They do not fade into the rest with the colours of impressionism; they stand out from the rest with the colours of heraldry; as vivid as a red cross on a white shield or a black lion on a ground of gold. So stands the Red Clay against the green field of nature, or the White Christ against the red clay of his race.
But in order to see them clearly we have to see them as a whole. We have to see how they developed as well as how they began; for the most incredible part of the story is that things which began thus should have developed thus. Anyone who chooses to indulge in mere imagination can imagine that other things might have happened or other entities evolved. Anyone thinking of what might have happened may conceive a sort of evolutionary equality; but anyone facing what did happen must face an exception and a prodigy. If there was ever a moment when man was only an animal, we can if we choose make a fancy picture of his career transferred to some other animal. An entertaining fantasia might be made in which elephants built in elephantine architecture, with towers and turrets like tusks and trunks, cities beyond the scale of any colossus. A pleasant fable might be conceived in which a cow had developed a costume, and put on four boots and two pairs of trousers. We could imagine a Supermonkey more marvellous than any Superman, a quadrumanous creature carving and painting with his hands and cooking and carpentering with his feet. But if we are considering what did happen, we shall certainly decide that man has distanced everything else with a distance like that of the astronomical spaces and a speed like that of the still thunderbolt of the light. And in the same fashion, while we can if we choose see the Church amid a mob of Mithraic or Manichean superstitions squabbling and killing each other at the end of the Empire, while we can if we choose imagine the Church killed in the struggle and some other chance cult taking its place, we shall be the more surprised (and possibly puzzled) if we meet it two thousand years afterwards rushing through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought and everlasting enthusiasm; a thing without rival or resemblance; and still as new as it is old.
PART I
On the Creature Called Man
I
THE MAN IN THE CAVE
Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely remote, there is a small star, which astronomers may some day discover. At least I could never observe in the faces or demeanour of most astronomers or men of science any evidence that they have discovered it; though as a matter of fact they were walking about on it all the time. It is a star that brings forth out of itself very strange plants and very strange animals; and none stranger than the men of science. That at least is the way in which I should begin a history of the world, if I had to follow the scientific custom of beginning with an account of the astronomical universe. I should try to see even this earth from the outside, not by the hackneyed insistence of its relative position to the sun, but by some imaginative effort to conceive its remote position for the dehumanised spectator. Only I do not believe in being dehumanised in order to study humanity. I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances that are supposed to dwarf the world; I think there is even something a trifle vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size. And as the first idea is not feasible, that of making the earth a strange planet so as to make it significant, I will not stoop to the other trick of making it a small planet in order to make it insignificant. I would rather insist that we do not even know that it is a planet at all, in the sense in which we know that it is a place; and a very extraordinary place too. That is the note which I wish to strike from the first, if not in the astronomical, then in some more familiar fashion.
One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, ‘I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.’ My remark was strictly pious and proper confessing the divine purpose even in its most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations. In that hour I learned many things, including the fact that there is something purely acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.
But this little incident has always lingered in my mind as a sort of parable. Most modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution, and with a rather wordy exposition of evolution, for much the same reason that operated in this case. There is something slow and soothing and gradual about the word and even about the idea. As a matter of fact, it is not, touching these primary things, a very practical word or a very profitable idea. Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ even if you only mean ‘In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.’ For God is by its nature a name of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he could create one. But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read the Origin of Species.
But this notion of something smooth and slow, like the ascent of a slope, is a great part of the illusion. It is an illogicality as well as an illusion; for slowness has really nothing to do with the question. An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny. The medieval wizard may have flown through the air from the top of a tower; but to see an old gentleman walking through the air, in a leisurely and lounging manner, would still seem to call for some explanation. Yet there runs through all the rationalistic treatment of history this curious and confused idea that difficulty is avoided, or even mystery eliminated, by dwelling on mere delay or on something dilatory in the processes of things. There will be something to be said upon particular examples elsewhere; the question here is the false atmosphere of facility and ease given by the mere suggestion of going slow; the sort of comfort that might be given to a nervous old woman travelling for the first time in a motor-car.
Mr. H. G. Wells has confessed to being a prophet; and in this matter he was a prophet at his own expense. It is curious that his first fairy-tale was a complete answer to his last book of history. The Time Machine destroyed in advance all comfortable conclusions founded on the mere relativity of time. In that sublime nightmare the hero saw trees shoot up like green rockets, and vegetation spread visibly like a green conflagration, or the sun shoot across the sky from east to west with the swiftness of a meteor. Yet in his sense these things were quite as natural when they went swiftly; and in our sense they are quite as supernatural when they go slowly. The ultimate question is why they go at all; and anybody who really understands that question will know that it always has been and always will be a religious question; or at any rate a philosophical or metaphysical question. And most certainly he will not think the question answered by some substitution of gradual for abrupt change; or, in other words by a merely relative question of the same story being spun out or rattled rapidly through, as can be done with any story at a cinema by turning a handle.
Now what is needed for these problems of primitive existence is something more like a primitive spirit. In calling up this vision of the first things, I would ask the reader to make with me a sort of experiment in simplicity. And by simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but rather the sort of clarity that sees things like life rather than words like evolution. For this purpose it would really be better to turn the handle of the Time Machine a little more quickly and see the grass growing and the trees springing up into the sky, if that experiment could contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of the whole affair. What we know, in a sense in which we know nothing else, is that the trees and the grass did grow and that number of other extraordinary things do in fact happen; that queer creatures support themselves in the empty air by beating it with fans of various fantastic shapes; that other queer creatures steer themselves about alive under a load of mighty waters; that other queer creatures walk about on four legs, and that the queerest creature of all walks about on two. These are things and not theories; and compared with them evolution and the atom and even the solar system are merely theories. The matter here is one of history and not of philosophy so that it need only be noted that no philosopher denies that a mystery still attaches to the two great transitions: the origin of the universe itself and the origin of the principle of life itself. Most philosophers have the enlightenment to add that a third mystery attaches to the origin of man himself. In other words, a third bridge was built across a third abyss of the unthinkable when there came into the world what we call reason and what we call will. Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution. That he has a backbone or other parts upon a similar pattern to birds and fishes is an obvious fact, whatever be the meaning of the fact. But if we attempt to regard him, as it were, as a quadruped standing on his hind legs, we shall find what follows far more fantastic and subversive than if he were standing on his head.
I will take one example to serve for an introduction to the story of man. It illustrates what I mean by saying that a certain childish directness is needed to see the truth about the childhood of the world. It illustrates what I mean by saying that a mixture of popular science and journalistic jargon have confused the facts about the first things, so that we cannot see which of them really comes first. It illustrates, though only in one convenient illustration, all that I mean by the necessity of seeing the sharp differences that give its shape to history, instead of being submerged in all these generalisations about slowness and sameness. For we do indeed require, in Mr. Wells’s phrase, an outline of history. But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini’s phrase, that this evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd outline. But, above all, it illustrates what I mean by saying that the more we really look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one.
To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as ‘rough stuff.’ I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romance of the hippopotami are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy. The cave-man may have been no better that the cave-bear; but the child she-bear, so famous in hymnology, is not trained with any such bias for spinsterhood. In short these details of the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either the revolutionary or the static hypothesis; and in any case I should like to look into the evidence for them, but unfortunately I have never been able to find it. But the curious thing is this: that while ten thousand tongues of more or less scientific or literary gossip seemed to be talking at once about this unfortunate fellow, under the title of the cave-man, the one connection in which it is really relevant and sensible to talk about him as the cave-man has been comparatively neglected. People have used this loose term in twenty loose ways, but they have never even looked at their own term for what could really be learned from it.
In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man except what he did in the cave. Now there does happen to be some real evidence of what he did in the cave. It is little enough, like all the prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the real cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club. And it will be valuable to our sense of reality to consider quite simply what that real evidence is, and not to go beyond it. What was found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory club notched with the number of women it had knocked on the head. The cave was not a Bluebeard’s Chamber filled with the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs. It was something quite unconnected, one way or the other, with all the modern phrases and philosophical implications and literary rumours which confuse the whole question for us. And if we wish to see as it really is this authentic glimpse of the morning of the world, it will be far better to conceive even the story of its discovery as some such legend of the land of morning. It would be far better to tell the tale of what was really found as simply as the tale of heroes finding the Golden Fleece or the Gardens of the Hesperides, if we could so escape from a fog of controversial theories into the clear colours and clean-cut outlines of such a dawn. The old epic poets at least knew how to tell a story, possibly a tall story but never a twisted story, never a story tortured out of its own shape to fit theories and philosophies invented centuries afterwards. It would be well if modern investigators could describe their discoveries in the bald narrative style of the earliest travellers, and without any of these long allusive words that are full of irrelevant implication and suggestion. Then we might realise exactly what we do know about the cave-man, or at any rate about the cave.
A priest and a boy entered sometime ago a hollow in the hills and passed into a sort of subterranean tunnel that led into a labyrinth of such sealed and secret corridors of rock. They crawled through cracks that seemed almost impassable, they crept through tunnels that might have been made for moles, they dropped into holes as hopeless as wells, they seemed to be burying themselves alive seven times over beyond the hope of resurrection. This is but the commonplace of all such courageous exploration; but what is needed here is some one who shall put such stories in the primary light, in which they are not commonplace. There is, for instance, something strangely symbolic in the accident that the first intruders into that sunken world were a priest and a boy, the types of the antiquity and of youth of the world. But here I am even more concerned with the symbolism of the boy than with that of the priest. Nobody who remembers boyhood needs to be told what it might be to a boy to enter like Peter Pan under a roof of the roots of all the trees and go deeper and deeper, till he reach what William Morris called the very roots of the mountains. Suppose somebody, with that simple and unspoilt realism that is a part of innocence, to pursue that journey to its end, not for the sake of what he could deduce or demonstrate in some dusty magazine controversy, but simply for the sake of what he could see. What he did see at last was a cavern so far from the light of day that it might have been the legendary Domdaniel cavern, that was under the floor of the sea. This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man’s hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.
Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds, that blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning the cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, ‘Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick’s brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,’ the novelist’s readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, ‘The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,’ he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words the cave-man as commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we know next to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall.
But this is not the point about the pictures or the particular moral here to be drawn from them. That moral is something much larger and simpler, so large and simple that when it is first stated it will sound childish. And indeed it is in the highest sense childish; and that is why I have in this apologue in some sense seen it through the eyes of a child. It is the biggest of all the facts really facing the boy in the cavern; and is perhaps too big to be seen. If the boy was one of the flock of the priest, it may be presumed that he had been trained in a certain quality of common sense; that common sense that often comes to us in the form of tradition. In that case he would simply recognise the primitive man’s work as the work of a man, interesting but in no way incredible in being primitive. He would see what was there to see; and he would not be tempted into seeing what was not there, by any evolutionary excitement or fashionable speculation. If he had heard of such things he would admit, of course, that the speculations might be true and were not incompatible with the facts that were true. The artist may have had another side to his character besides that which he has alone left on record in his works of art. The primitive man may have taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals; all we can say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be true that when the cave-man’s finished jumping on his mother, or his wife as the case may be, he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and also to watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook. These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant. The common sense of the child could confine itself to learning from the facts what the facts have to teach; and the pictures in the cave are very nearly all the facts there are. So far as that evidence goes, the child would be justified in assuming that a man had represented animals with rock and red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit of trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk. The man had drawn a stag just as the child had drawn a horse; because it was fun. The man had drawn a stag with his head turned as the child had drawn a pig with his eyes shut; because it was difficult. The child and the man, being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men; and the brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages than when it bridges only the chasm of class. But anyhow he would see no evidence of the cave man of crude evolutionism; because there is none to be seen. If somebody told him that the pictures had all been drawn by St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals, there would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.
Indeed I once knew a lady who half-humorously suggested that the cave was a creche, in which the babies were put to be specially safe, and that coloured animals were drawn on the walls to amuse them; very much as diagrams of elephants and giraffes adorn a modern infant school. And though this was but a jest, it does draw attention to some of the other assumptions that we make only too readily. The pictures do not prove even that the cave-men lived in caves, any more than the discovery of a wine-cellar in Balham (long after that suburb had been destroyed by human or divine wrath) would prove that the Victorian middle classes lived entirely underground. The cave might have had a special purpose like the cellar; it might have been a religious shrine or a refuge in war or the meeting place of a secret society or all sorts of things. But it is quite true that its artistic decoration has much more of the atmosphere of a nursery than of any of these nightmares of anarchical fury and fear. I have conceived a child as standing in the cave; and it is easy to conceive any child, modern or immeasurably remote, as making a living gesture as if to pat the painted beasts upon the wall. In that gesture there is a foreshadowing, as we shall see later, of another cavern and another child.
But suppose the boy had not been taught by a priest but by a professor, by one of the professors who simplify the relation of men and beasts to a mere evolutionary variation. Suppose the boy saw himself, with the same simplicity and sincerity, as a mere Mowgli running with the pack of nature and roughly indistinguishable from the rest save by a relative and recent variation. What would be for him the simplest lesson of that strange stone picture-book? After all, it would come back to this; that he had dug very deep and found the place where a man had drawn the picture of a reindeer. But he would dig a good deal deeper before he found a place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man. That sounds like a truism, but in this connection it is really a very tremendous truth. He might descend to depths unthinkable, he might sink into sunken continents as strange as remote stars, he might find himself in the inside of the world as far from men as the other side of the moon; he might see in those cold chasms or colossal terraces of stone, traced in the faint hieroglyphic of the fossil, the ruins of lost dynasties of biological life, rather like the ruins of successive creations and separate universes than the stages in the story of one. He would find the trail of monsters blindly developing in directions outside all our common imagery of fish and bird; groping and grasping and touching life with every extravagant elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle; growing a forest of fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and the finger. But nowhere would he find one finger that had traced one significant line upon the sand; nowhere one claw that had even begun to scratch the faint suggestion of a form. To all appearance, the thing would be as unthinkable in all those countless cosmic variations of forgotten aeons as it would be in the beasts and birds before our eyes. The child would no more expect to see it than to see the cat scratch on the wall a vindictive caricature of the dog. The childish common sense would keep the most evolutionary child from expecting to see anything like that; yet in the traces of the rude and recently evolved ancestors of humanity he would have seen exactly that. It must surely strike him as strange that men so remote from him should be so near, and that beasts so near to him should be so remote. To his simplicity it must seem at least odd that he could not find any trace of the beginning of any arts among any animals. That is the simplest lesson to learn in the cavern of the coloured pictures; only it is too simple to be learnt. It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.
That is the sort of simple truth with which a story of the beginnings ought really to begin. The evolutionist stands staring in the painted cavern at the things that are too large to be seen and too simple to be understood. He tries to deduce all sorts of other indirect and doubtful things from the details of the pictures, because he can not see the primary significance of the whole; thin and theoretical deductions about the absence of religion or the presence of superstition; about tribal government and hunting and human sacrifice and heaven knows what. In the next chapter I shall try to trace in a little more detail the much disputed question about these prehistoric origins of human ideas and especially of the religious idea. Here I am only taking this one case of the cave as a sort of symbol of the simpler sort of truth with which the story ought to start. When all is said, the main fact that the record of the reindeer men attests, along with all other records, is that the reindeer man could draw and the reindeer could not. If the reindeer man was as much an animal as the reindeer, it was all the more extraordinary that he could do what all other animals could not. If he was an ordinary product of biological growth, like any other beast or bird, then it is all the more extraordinary that he was not in the least like any other beast or bird. He seems rather more supernatural as a natural product than as a supernatural one.
But I have begun this story in the cave, like the cave of the speculations of Plato, because it is a sort of model of the mistake of merely evolutionary introductions and prefaces. It is useless to begin by saying that everything was slow and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree. For in the plain matter like the pictures there is in fact not a trace of any such development or degree. Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well. The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate from nature. In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone. How he came there, or indeed how anything else came there, is a thing for theologians and philosophers and scientists and not for historians. But an excellent test case of this isolation and mystery is the matter of the impulse of art. This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature. Nothing in that sense could be made in any other image but the image of man. But the truth is so true that, even in the absence of any religious belief, it must be assumed in the form of some moral or metaphysical principle. In the next chapter we shall see how this principle applies to all the historical hypotheses and evolutionary ethics now in fashion; to the origins of tribal government or mythological belief. But the clearest and most convenient example to start with is this popular one of what the cave-man really did in his cave. It means that somehow or other a new thing had appeared in the cavernous night of nature, a mind that is like a mirror. It is like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection. It is like a mirror because in it alone all the other shapes can be seen like shining shadows in a vision. Above all, it is like a mirror because it is the only thing of its kind. Other things may resemble it or resemble each other in various ways; other things may excel it or excel each other in various ways; just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than a mirror. But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all. Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God. These are the only real lessons to be learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it for the open road.
It will be well in this place, however, to sum up once and for all what is meant by saying that man is at once the exception to everything and the mirror and the measure of all things. But to see man as he is, it is necessary once more to keep close to that simplicity that can clear itself of accumulated clouds of sophistry. The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique. This is realised by the whole popular instinct called religion, until disturbed by pedants, especially the laborious pedants of the Simple Life. The most sophistical of all sophists are gymnosophists.
It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality. It is reached by stretching a point, by making out a case, by artificially selecting a certain light and shade, by bringing into prominence the lesser or lower things which may happen to be similar. The solid thing standing in the sunlight, the thing we can walk round and see from all sides, is quite different. It is also quite extraordinary, and the more sides we see of it the more extraordinary it seems. It is emphatically not a thing that follows or flows naturally from anything else. If we imagine that an inhuman or impersonal intelligence could have felt from the first the general nature of the non-human world sufficiently to see that things would evolve in whatever way they did evolve, there would have been nothing whatever in all that natural world to prepare such a mind for such an unnatural novelty. To such a mind, man would most certainly not have seemed something like one herd out of a hundred herds finding richer pasture, or one swallow out of a hundred swallows making a summer under a strange sky. It would not be in the same scale and scarcely in the same dimension. We might as truly say that it would not be in the same universe. It would be more like seeing one cow out of a hundred cows suddenly jump over the moon or one pig out of a hundred pigs grow wings in a flash and fly. It would not be a question of the cattle finding their own grazing ground but of their building their own cattle-sheds, not a question of one swallow making a summer but of his making a summer house. For the very fact that birds do build nests is one of those similarities that sharpen the startling difference. The very fact that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot get any farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind; it proves it more completely than if he built nothing at all. If he built nothing at all, he might possibly be a philosopher of the Quietist or Buddhistic school, indifferent to all but the mind within. But when he builds as he does build and is satisfied and sings aloud with satisfaction, then we know there is really an invisible veil like a pane of glass between him and us, like the window on which a bird will beat in vain. But suppose our abstract onlooker saw one of the birds begin to build as men build. Suppose in an incredibly short space of time there were seven styles of architecture for one style of nest. Suppose the bird carefully selected forked twigs and pointed leaves to express the piercing piety of Gothic, but turned to broad foliage and black mud when he sought in a darker mood to call up the heavy columns of Bel and Ashtaroth; making his nest indeed one of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Suppose the bird made little clay statues of birds celebrated in letters or politics and stuck them up in front of the nest. Suppose that one bird out of a thousand birds began to do one of the thousand things that man had already done even in the morning of the world; and we can be quite certain that the onlooker would not regard such a bird as a mere evolutionary variety of the other birds; he would regard it as a very fearful wild-fowl indeed; possibly as a bird of ill-omen, certainly as an omen. That bird would tell the augurs, not of something that would happen, but of some thing that had happened. That something would be the appearance of a mind with a new dimension of depth; a mind like that of man. If there be no God, no other mind could conceivably have foreseen it.
Now, as a matter of fact, there is not a shadow of evidence that this thing was evolved at all. There is not a particle of roof that this transition came slowly, or even that it came naturally. In a strictly scientific sense, we simply know nothing whatever about how it grew, or whether it grew, or what it is. There may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time. It has therefore nothing to do with history in the ordinary sense. The historian must take it or something like it for granted; it is not his business as a historian to explain it. But if he cannot explain it as a historian, he will not explain it as a biologist. In neither case is there any disgrace to him in accepting it without explaining it; for it is a reality, and history and biology deal with realities. He is quite justified in calmly confronting the pig with wings and the cow that jumped over the moon, merely because they have happened. He can reasonably accept man as a freak, because he accepts man as a fact. He can be perfectly comfortable in a crazy and disconnected world, or in a world that can produce such a crazy and disconnected thing. For reality is a thing in which we can all repose, even if it hardly seems related to anything else. The thing is there; and that is enough for most of us. But if we do indeed want to know how it can conceivably have come there, if we do indeed wish to see it related realistically to other things, if we do insist on seeing it evolved before our very eyes from an environment nearer to its own nature, then assuredly it is to very different things that we must go. We must stir very strange memories and return to very simple dreams, if we desire some origin that can make man other than a monster. We shall have discovered very different causes before he becomes a creature of causation; and invoked other authority to turn him into something reasonable, or even into anything probable. That way lies all that is at once awful and familiar and forgotten, with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. We can accept man as a fact, if we are content with an unexplained fact. We can accept him as an animal, if we can live with a fabulous animal. But if we must needs have sequence and necessity, then indeed we must provide a prelude and crescendo of mounting miracles, that ushered in with unthinkable thunders in all the seven heavens of another order, a man may be an ordinary thing.
II
PROFESSORS AND PREHISTORIC MEN
Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that has hardly been noticed. The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds by incessantly adding to its data. In all practical inventions, in most natural discoveries, it can always increase evidence by experiment. But it cannot experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men make. An inventor can advance step by step in the construction of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his own back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane will correct it by crashing to the ground. But if he has made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor, he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree. He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him to see whether he does really practice cannibalism or carry off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a pack of hounds and notice how far they are influenced by the herd instinct. If he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he can get other birds and see if they behave in that way; but if he finds a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill, he cannot multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones. In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and not by experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential. Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
We talk very truly of the patience of science; but in this department it would be truer to talk of the impatience of science. Owing to the difficulty above described, the theorist is in far too much of a hurry. We have a series of hypotheses so hasty that they may well be called fancies, and cannot in any case be further corrected by facts. The most empirical anthropologist is here as limited as an antiquary. He can only cling to a fragment of the past and has no way of increasing it for the future. He can only clutch his fragment of fact, almost as the primitive man clutched his fragment of flint. And indeed he does deal with it in much the same way and for much the same reason. It is his tool and his only tool. It is his weapon and his only weapon. He often wields it with a fanaticism far in excess of anything shown by men of science when they can collect more facts from experience and even add new facts by experiment. Sometimes the professor with his bone becomes almost as dangerous as a dog with his bone. And the dog at least does not deduce a theory from it, proving that mankind is going to the dogs— or that it came from them.
For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey and watching it evolve into a man. Experimental evidence of such an evolution being impossible, the professor is not content to say (as most of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough anyhow. He produces his little bone, or little collection of bones, and deduces the most marvellous things from it. He found in Java a piece of a skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human. Somewhere near it he found an upright thigh-bone and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human. If they all form part of one creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the creature would be almost equally doubtful. But the effect on popular science was to produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered. No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium. In the same way people talked about him as if he were an individual whose influence and character were familiar to us all. I have just read a story in a magazine about Java, and how modern white inhabitants of that island are prevailed on to misbehave themselves by the personal influence of poor old Pithecanthropus. That the modern inhabitants of Java misbehave themselves I can very readily believe; but I do not imagine that they need any encouragement from the discovery of a few highly doubtful bones. Anyhow, those bones are far too few and fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole of the vast void that does in reason and in reality lie between man and his bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors. On the assumption of that evolutionary connection (a connection which I am not in the least concerned to deny), the really arresting and remarkable fact is the comparative absence of any such remains recording that connection at that point. The sincerity of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image. They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a non-sequitur or dining with an undistributed middle.
In this sketch, therefore, of man in his relation to certain religious and historical problems, I shall waste no further space on these speculations on the nature of man before he became man. His body may have been evolved from the brutes; but we know nothing of any such transition that throws the smallest light upon his soul as it has shown itself in history. Unfortunately the same school of writers pursue the same style of reasoning when they come to the first real evidence about the first real men. Strictly speaking of course we know nothing about prehistoric man, for the simple reason that he was prehistoric. The history of prehistoric man is a very obvious contradiction in terms. It is the sort of unreason in which only rationalists are allowed to indulge. If a parson had casually observed that the Flood was ante-diluvian, it is possible that he might be a little chaffed about his logic. If a bishop were to say that Adam was Preadamite, we might think it a little odd. But we are not supposed to notice such verbal trifles when sceptical historians talk of the part of history that is prehistoric. The truth is that they are using the terms historic and prehistoric without any clear test or definition in their minds. What they mean is that there are traces of human lives before the beginning of human stories; and in that sense we do at least know that humanity was before history.
Human civilisation is older than human records. That is the sane way of stating our relations to these remote things. Humanity has left examples of its other arts earlier than the art of writing; or at least of any writing that we can read. But it is certain that the primitive arts were arts; and it is in every way probable that the primitive civilisations were civilisations. The man left a picture of the reindeer, but he did not leave a narrative of how he hunted the reindeer; and therefore what we say of him is hypothesis and not history. But the art he did practice was quite artistic; his drawing was quite intelligent and there is no reason to doubt that his story of the hunt would be quite intelligent, only if it exists it is not intelligible. In short, the prehistoric period need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period. It does not mean the time before civilisation or the time before arts and crafts. It simply means the time before any connected narratives that we can read. This does indeed make all the practical difference between remembrance and forgetfulness; but it is perfectly possible that there were all sorts of forgotten forms of civilisation, as well as all sorts of forgotten forms of barbarism. And in any case everything indicated that many of these forgotten or half-forgotten social stages were much more civilised and much less barbaric than is vulgarly imagined today. But even about these unwritten histories of humanity, when humanity was quite certainly human, we can only conjecture with the greatest doubt and caution. And unfortunately doubt and caution are the last things commonly encouraged by the loose evolutionism of current culture. For that culture is full of curiosity; and the one thing that it cannot endure is the agony of agnosticism. It was in the Darwinian age that the word first became known and the thing first became impossible.
It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered by impudence. Statements are made so plainly and positively that men have hardly the moral courage to pause upon them and find that they are without support. The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric tribe began confidently with the words ‘They wore no clothes.’ Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come to know whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything has perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet. It was evidently anticipated that we might discover an everlasting pair of trousers of the same substance as the everlasting rock. But to persons of a less sanguine temperament it will be immediately apparent that people might wear simple garments, or even highly ornamental garments, without leaving any more traces of them than these people have left. The plaiting of rushes and grasses, for instance, might have become more and more elaborate without in the least becoming more eternal. One civilisation might specialise in things that happened to be perishable, like weaving and embroidery, and not in things that happen to be more permanent, like architecture and sculpture. There have been plenty of examples of such specialist societies. A man of the future finding the ruins of our factory machinery might as fairly say that we were acquainted with iron and with no other substance; and announce the discovery that the proprietor and manager of the factory undoubtedly walked about naked— or possibly wore iron hats and trousers.
It is not contended here that these primitive men did wear clothes any more than they did weave rushes; but merely that we have not enough evidence to know whether they did or not. But it may be worthwhile to look back for a moment at some of the very few things that we do know and that they did do. If we consider them, we shall certainly not find them inconsistent with such ideas as dress and decoration. We do not know whether they decorated other things. We do not know whether they had embroideries, and if they had the embroideries could not be expected to have remained. But we do know that they did have pictures; and the pictures have remained. And there remains with them, as already suggested, the testimony to something that is absolute and unique; that belongs to man and to nothing else except man; that is a difference of kind and not a difference of degree. A monkey does not draw clumsily and a man cleverly; a monkey does not begin the art of representation and a man carry it to perfection. A monkey does not do it at all; he does not begin to do it at all; he does not begin to begin to do it at all. A line of some kind is crossed before the first faint line can begin.
Another distinguished writer, again, in commenting on the cave drawings attributed to the neolithic men of the reindeer period, said that none of their pictures appeared to have any religious purpose; and he seemed almost to infer that they had no religion. I can hardly imagine a thinner thread of argument than this which reconstructs the very inmost moods of the pre-historic mind from the fact that somebody who has scrawled a few sketches on a rock, from what motive we do not know, for what purpose we do not know, acting under what customs or conventions we do not know, may possibly have found it easier to draw reindeer than to draw religion. He may have drawn it because it was his religious symbol. He may have drawn it because it was not his religious symbol. He may have drawn anything except his religious symbol. He may have drawn his real religious symbol somewhere else; or it may have been deliberately destroyed when it was drawn. He may have done or not done half a million things; but in any case it is an amazing leap of logic to infer that he had no religious symbol, or even to infer from his having no religious symbol that he had no religion. Now this particular case happens to illustrate the insecurity of these guesses very clearly. For a little while afterwards, people discovered not only paintings but sculptures of animals in the caves. Some of these were said to be damaged with dints or holes supposed to be the marks of arrows; and the damaged images were conjectured to be the remains of some magic rite of killing the beasts in effigy; while the undamaged images were explained in connection with another magic rite invoking fertility upon the herds. Here again there is something faintly humorous about the scientific habit of having it both ways. If the image is damaged it proves one superstition and if it is undamaged it proves another. Here again there is a rather reckless jumping to conclusions; it has hardly occurred to the speculators that a crowd of hunters imprisoned in winter in a cave might conceivably have aimed at a mark for fun, as a sort of primitive parlour game. But in any case, if it was done out of superstition, what has become of the thesis that it had nothing to do with religion? The truth is that all this guess work has nothing to do with anything. It is not half such a good parlour game as shooting arrows at a carved reindeer, for it is shooting them into the air.
Such speculators rather tend to forget, for instance, that men in the modern world also sometimes make marks in caves. When a crowd of trippers is conducted through the labyrinth of the Marvelous Grotto or the Magic Stalactite Cavern, it has been observed that hieroglyphics spring into sight where they have passed; initials and inscriptions which the learned refuse to refer to any remote date. But the time will come when these inscriptions will really be of remote date. And if the professors of the future are anything like the professors of the present, they will be able to deduce a vast number of very vivid and interesting things from these cave-writings of the twentieth century. If I know anything about the breed, and if they have not fallen away from the full-blooded confidence of their fathers, they will be able to discover the most fascinating facts about us from the initials left in the Magic Grotto by ‘Arry and ‘Arriet, possibly in the form of two intertwined A’s. From this alone they will know (1) That as the letters are rudely chipped with a blunt pocket knife, the twentieth century possessed no delicate graving-tools and was unacquainted with the art of sculpture. (2) That as the letters are capital letters, our civilisation never evolved any small letters or anything like a running hand. (3) That because initial consonants stand together in an unpronounceable fashion, our language was possibly akin to Welsh or more probably of the early Semitic type that ignored vowels. (4) That as the initials of ‘Arry and ‘Arriet do not in any special fashion profess to be religious symbols, our civilisation possessed no religion. Perhaps the last is about the nearest to the truth; for a civilisation that had religion would have a little more reason.
It is commonly affirmed, again, that religion grew in a very slow and evolutionary manner; and even that it grew not from one cause; but from a combination that might be called a coincidence. Generally speaking, the three chief elements in the combination are, first, the fear of the chief of the tribe (whom Mr. Wells insists on calling, with regrettable familiarity, the Old Man), second, the phenomena of dreams, and third, the sacrificial associations of the harvest and the resurrection symbolised in the growing corn. I may remark in passing that it seems to me very doubtful psychology to refer one living and single spirit to three dead and disconnected causes, if they were merely dead and disconnected causes. Suppose Mr. Wells, in one of his fascinating novels of the future, were to tell us that there would arise among men a new and as yet nameless passion, of which men will dream as they dream of first love, for which they will die as they die for a flag and a fatherland. I think we should be a little puzzled if he told us that this singular sentiment would be a combination of the habit of smoking Woodbines, the increase of the income tax and the pleasure of a motorist in exceeding the speed limit. We could not easily imagine this, because we could not imagine any connection between the three or any common feeling that could include them all. Nor could anyone imagine any connection between corn and dreams and an old chief with a spear, unless there was already a common feeling to include them all. But if there was such a common feeling it could only be the religious feeling; and these things could not be the beginnings of a religious feeling that existed already. I think anybody’s common sense will tell him that it is far more likely that this sort of mystical sentiment did exist already; and that in the light of it dreams and kings and corn-fields could appear mystical then, as they can appear mystical now.
For the plain truth is that all this is a trick of making things seem distant and dehumanised, merely by pretending not to understand things that we do understand. It is like saying that prehistoric men had an ugly and uncouth habit of opening their mouths wide at intervals and stuffing strange substances into them, as if we had never heard of eating. It is like saying that the terrible Troglodytes of the Stone Age lifted alternate legs in rotation, as if we never heard of walking. If it were meant to touch the mystical nerve and awaken us to the wonder of walking and eating, it might be a legitimate fancy. As it is here intended to kill the mystical nerve and deaden us to the wonder of religion, it is irrational rubbish. It pretends to find some thing incomprehensible in the feelings that we all comprehend. Who does not find dreams mysterious, and feel that they lie on the dark borderland of being? Who does not feel the death and resurrection of the growing things of the earth as something near to the secret of the universe? Who does not understand that there must always be the savour of something sacred about authority and the solidarity that is the soul of the tribe? If there be any anthropologist who really finds these things remote and impossible to realise, we can say nothing of that scientific gentleman except that he has not got so large and enlightened a mind as a primitive man. To me it seems obvious that nothing but a spiritual sentiment already active could have clothed these separate and diverse things with sanctity. To say that religion came from reverencing a chief or sacrificing at a harvest is to put a highly elaborate cart before a really primitive horse. It is like saying that the impulse to draw pictures came from the contemplation of the pictures of reindeers in the cave. In other words, it is explaining painting by saying that it arose out of the work of painters; or accounting for art by saying that it arose out of art. It is even more like saying that the thing we call poetry arose as the result of certain customs; such as that of an ode being officially composed to celebrate the advent of spring; or that of a young man rising at a regular hour to listen to the skylark and then writing his report on a piece of paper. It is quite true that young men often become poets in the spring; and it is quite true that when once there are poets, no mortal power can restrain them from writing about the skylark. But the poems did not exist before the poets. The poetry did not arise out of the poetic forms. In other words, it is hardly an adequate explanation of how a thing appeared for the first time to say it existed already. Similarly, we cannot say that religion arose out of the religious forms, because that is only another way of saying that it only arose when it existed already. It needed a certain sort of mind to see that there was anything mystical about the dreams or the dead, as it needed a particular sort of mind to see that there was any thing poetical about the skylark or the spring. That mind was presumably what we call the human mind, very much as it exists to this day; for mystics still meditate upon death and dreams as poets still write about spring and skylarks. But there is not the faintest hint to suggest that anything short of the human mind we know feels any of these mystical associations at all. A cow in a field seems to derive no lyrical impulse or instruction from her unrivalled opportunities for listening to the skylark. And similarly there is no reason to suppose that live sheep will ever begin to use dead sheep as the basis of a system of elaborate ancestor-worship. It is true that in the spring a young quadruped’s fancy may lightly turn to thoughts of love, but no succession of springs has ever led it to turn however lightly to thoughts of literature. And in the same way, while it is true that a dog has dreams, while most other quadrupeds do not seem even to have that, we have waited a long time for the dog to develop his dreams into an elaborate system or religious ceremonial. We have waited so long that we have really ceased to expect it; and we no more look to see a dog apply his dreams to ecclesiastical construction than to see him examine his dreams by the rules of psycho-analysis. It is obvious, in short, that for some reason or other these natural experiences, and even natural excitements, never do pass the line that separates them from creative expression like art and religion, in any creature except man. They never do, they never have, and it is now to all appearance very improbable that they ever will. It is not impossible, in the sense of self-contradictory, that we should see cows fasting from grass every Friday or going on their knees as in the old legend about Christmas Eve. It is not in that sense impossible that cows should contemplate death until they can lift up a sublime psalm of lamentation to the tune the old cow died of. It is not in that sense impossible that they should express their hopes of a heavenly career in a symbolic dance, in honour of the cow that jumped over the moon. It may be that the dog will at last have laid in a sufficient store of dreams to enable him to build a temple to Cerberus as a sort of canine trinity. It may be that his dreams have already begun to turn into visions capable of verbal expression, in some revelation about the Dog Star as the spiritual home for lost dogs. These things are logically possible, in the sense that it is logically difficult to prove the universal negative which we call an impossibility. But all that instinct for the probable, which we call common sense, must long ago have told us that the animals are not to all appearance evolving in that sense; and that, to say the least, we are not likely to have any personal evidence of their passing from the animal experience to the human experiments. But spring and death and even dreams, considered merely as experiences, are their experiences as much as ours. The only possible conclusion is that these experiences, considered as experiences, do not generate anything like a religious sense in any mind except a mind like ours. We come back to the fact of a certain kind of mind that was already alive and alone. It was unique and it could make creeds as it could make cave-drawings. The materials for religion had lain there for countless ages like the materials for everything else; but the power of religion was in the mind. Man could already see in these things the riddles and hints and hopes that he still sees in them. He could not only dream but dream about dreams. He could not only see the dead but see the shadow of death; and was possessed with that mysterious mystification that forever finds death incredible.
It is quite true that we have even these hints chiefly about man when he unmistakably appears as man. We cannot affirm this or anything else about the alleged animal originally connecting man and the brutes. But that is only because he is not an animal but an allegation. We cannot be certain the Pithecanthropus ever worshipped, because we cannot be certain that he ever lived. He is only a vision called up to fill the void that does in fact yawn between the first creatures who were certainly men and any other creatures that are certainly apes or other animals. A few very doubtful fragments are scraped together to suggest such an intermediate creature because it is required by a certain philosophy; but nobody supposes that these are sufficient to establish anything philosophical even in support of that philosophy. A scrap of skull found in Java cannot establish anything about religion or about the absence of religion. If there ever was any such ape-man, he may have exhibited as much ritual in religion as a man or as much simplicity in religion as an ape. He may have been a mythologist or he may have been a myth. It might be interesting to inquire whether this mystical quality appeared in a transition from the ape to the man, if there were really any types of the transition to inquire about. In other words, the missing link might or might not be mystical if he were not missing. But compared with the evidence we have of real human beings, we have no evidence that he was a human being or a half-human being or a being at all. Even the most extreme evolutionists do not attempt to deduce any evolutionary views about the origin of religion from him. Even in trying to prove that religion grew slowly from rude or irrational sources, they begin their proof with the first men who were men. But their own proof only proves that the men who were already men were already mystics. They used the rude and irrational elements as only men and mystics can use them. We come back once more to the simple truth; that at sometime too early for these critics to trace, a transition had occurred to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness; and man became a living soul.
Touching this matter of the origin of religion, the truth is that those who are thus trying to explain it are trying to explain it away. Subconsciously they feel that it looks less formidable when thus lengthened out into a gradual and almost invisible process. But in fact this perspective entirely falsifies the reality of experience. They bring together two things that are totally different, the stray hints of evolutionary origins and the solid and self-evident block of humanity, and try to shift their standpoint till they see them in a single foreshortened line. But it is an optical illusion. Men do not in fact stand related to monkeys or missing links in any such chain as that in which men stand related to men. There may have been intermediate creatures whose faint traces can be found here and there in the huge gap. Of these beings, if they ever existed, it may be true that they were things very unlike men or men very unlike ourselves. But of prehistoric men, such as those called the cave-men or the reindeer men, it is not true in any sense whatever. Prehistoric men of that sort were things exactly like men and men exceedingly like our selves. They only happened to be men about whom we do not know much, for the simple reason that they have left no records or chronicles; but all that we do know about them makes them just as human and ordinary as men in a medieval manor or a Greek city.
Looking from our human standpoint up the long perspective of humanity, we simply recognise this thing as human. If we had to recognise it as animal we should have had to recognise it as abnormal. If we chose to look through the other end of the telescope, as I have done more than once in these speculations, if we chose to project the human figure forward out of an unhuman world, we could only say that one of the animals had obviously gone mad. But seeing the thing from the right end, or rather from the inside, we know it is sanity; and we know that these primitive men were sane. We hail a certain human freemasonry wherever we see it, in savages, in foreigners or in historical characters. For instance, all we can infer from primitive legend, and all we know of barbaric life, supports a certain moral and even mystical idea of which the commonest symbol is clothes. For clothes are very literally vestments and man wears them because he is a priest. It is true that even as an animal he is here different from the animals. Nakedness is not nature to him; it is not his life but rather his death; even in the vulgar sense of his death of cold. But clothes are worn for dignity or decency or decoration where they are not in any way wanted for warmth. It would sometimes appear that they are valued for ornament before they are valued for use. It would almost always appear that they are felt to have some connection with decorum. Conventions of this sort vary a great deal with various times and places; and there are some who cannot get over this reflection, and for whom it seems a sufficient argument for letting all conventions slide. They never tire of repeating, with simple wonder, that dress is different in the Cannibal Islands and in Camden Town; they cannot get any further and throw up the whole idea of decency in despair. They might as well say that because there have been hats of a good many different shapes, and some rather eccentric shapes, therefore hats do not matter or do not exist. They would probably add that there is no such thing as sunstroke or going bald. Men have felt everywhere that certain norms were necessary to fence off and protect certain private things from contempt or coarse misunderstanding; and the keeping of those forms, whatever they were, made for dignity and mutual respect. The fact that they mostly refer, more or less remotely, to the relations of the sexes illustrates the two facts that must be put at the very beginning of the record of the race. The first is the fact that original sin is really original. Not merely in theology but in history it is a thing rooted in the origins. Whatever else men have believed, they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind. This sense of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no clothes, just as it has made it impossible to be natural and have no laws. But above all it is to be found in that other fact, which is the father and mother of all laws as it is itself founded on a father and mother; the thing that is before all thrones and even all commonwealths.
That fact is the family. Here again we must keep the enormous proportions of a normal thing clear of various modifications and degrees and doubts more or less reasonable, like clouds clinging about a mountain. It may be that what we call the family had to fight its way from or through various anarchies and aberrations; but it certainly survived them and is quite as likely as not to have also preceded them. As we shall see in the case of communism and nomadism, more formless things could and did lie on the flank of societies that had taken a fixed form; but there is nothing to show that the form did not exist before the formlessness. What is vital is that form is more important than formlessness; and that the material called mankind has taken this form. For instance, of the rules revolving round sex, which were recently mentioned, none is more curious than the savage custom commonly called the couvade. That seems like a law out of topsyturvydom; by which the father is treated as if he were the mother. In any case it clearly involves the mystical sense of sex; but many have maintained that it is really a symbolic act by which the father accepts the responsibility of fatherhood. In that case that grotesque antic is really a very solemn act; for it is the foundation of all we call the family and all we know as human society. Some groping in these dark beginnings have said that mankind was once under a matriarchy; I suppose that under a matriarchy it would not be called mankind but womankind. But others have conjectured that what is called matriarchy was simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remained fixed because all the fathers were fugitive and irresponsible. Then came the moment when the man decided to guard and guide what he had created. So he became the head of the family, not as a bully with a big club to beat women with, but rather as a respectable person trying to be a responsible person. Now all that might be perfectly true, and might even have been the first family act, and it would still be true that man then for the first time acted like a man, and therefore for the first time became fully a man. But it might quite as well be true that the matriarchy or moral anarchy, or whatever we call it, was only one of the hundred social dissolutions or barbaric backslidings which may have occurred at intervals in prehistoric as they certainly did in historic times. A symbol like the couvade, if it was really such a symbol, may have commemorated the suppression of a heresy rather than the first rise of a religion. We cannot conclude with any certainty about these things, except in their big results in the building of mankind, but we can say in what style the bulk of it and the best of it is built. We can say that the family is the unit of the state; that it is the cell that makes up the formation. Round the family do indeed gather the sanctities that separate men from ants and bees. Decency is the curtain of that tent; liberty is the wall of that city; property is but the family farm; honour is but the family flag. In the practical proportions of human history, we come back to that fundamental of the father and the mother and the child. It has been said already that if this story cannot start with religious assumptions, it must none the less start with some moral or metaphysical assumptions, or no sense can be made of the story of man. And this is a very good instance of that alternative necessity. If we are not of those who begin by invoking a divine Trinity, we must none the less invoke a human Trinity; and see that triangle repeated everywhere in the pattern of the world. For the highest event in history, to which all history looks forward and leads up, is only something that is at once the reversal and the renewal of that triangle. Or rather it is the one triangle superimposed so as to intersect the other, making a sacred pentacle of which, in a mightier sense than that of the magicians, the fiends are afraid. The old Trinity was of father and mother and child and is called the human family. The new is of child and mother and father and has the name of the Holy Family. It is in no way altered except in being entirely reversed; just as the world which is transformed was not in the least different, except in being turned upside-down.
III
THE ANTIQUITY OF CIVILISATION
The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been like a man watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting to see that dawn breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks. But that dawn is breaking behind the black bulk of great cities long builded and lost for us in the original night; colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees; in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size of the man; with tombs like mountains of man set four-square and pointing to the stars; with winged and bearded bulls standing and staring enormous at the gates of temples; standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake the world. The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilized. Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old. And among other more important things, it reveals the folly of most of the generalisations about the previous and unknown period when it was really young. The two first human societies of which we have any reliable and detailed record are Babylon and Egypt. It so happens that these two vast and splendid achievements of the genius of the ancients bear witness against two of the commonest and crudest assumptions of the culture of the moderns. If we want to get rid of half the nonsense about nomads and cave-men and the old man of the forest, we need only look steadily at the two solid and stupendous facts called Egypt and Babylon.
Of course most of these speculators who are talking about primitive men are thinking about modern savages. They prove their progressive evolution by assuming that a great part of the human race has not progressed or evolved; or even changed in any way at all. I do not agree with their theory of change; nor do I agree with their dogma of things unchangeable. I may not believe that civilised man has had so rapid and recent a progress; but I cannot quite understand why uncivilised man should be so mystically immortal and immutable. A somewhat simpler mode of thought and speech seems to me to be needed throughout this inquiry. Modern savages cannot be exactly like primitive man, because they are not primitive. Modern savages are not ancient because they are modern. Something has happened to their race as much as to ours, during the thousands of years of our existence and endurance on the earth. They have had some experiences, and have presumably acted on them if not profited by them. Like the rest of us. They have had some environment, and even some change of environment, and have presumably adapted themselves to it in a proper and decorous evolutionary manner. This would be true even if the experiences were mild or the environment dreary; for there is an effect in mere time when it takes the moral form of monotony. But it has appeared to a good many intelligent and well-informed people quite as probable that the experience of the savages has been that of a decline from civilisation. Most of those who criticise this view do not seem to have any very clear notion of what a decline from civilisation would be like. Heaven help them, it is likely enough that they will soon find out. They seem to be content if cave-men and cannibal islanders have some things in common; such as certain particular implements. But it is obvious on the face of it that any peoples reduced for any reason to a ruder life would have some things in common. If we lost all our firearms we should make bows and arrows; but we should not necessarily resemble in every way the first men who made bows and arrows. It is said that the Russians in their great retreat were so short of armament that they fought with clubs cut in the wood. But a professor of the future would err in supposing that the Russian army of 1916 was a naked Scythian tribe that had never been out of the wood. It is like saying that a man in his second childhood must exactly copy his first. A baby is bald like an old man; but it would be an error for one ignorant of infancy to infer that the baby had a long white beard. Both a baby and an old man walk with difficulty; but he who shall expect the old gentleman to lie on his back, and kick joyfully instead, will be disappointed.
It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must have been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings of it. There were almost certainly some things, there were probably many things, in which the two were widely different or flatly contrary. An example of the way in which this distinction works, and an example essential to our argument here, is that of the nature and origin of government. I have already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells and the Old Man, with whom he appears to be on such intimate terms. If we considered the cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this portrait of the prehistoric chief of the tribe, we could only excuse it by saying that its brilliant and versatile author simply forgot for a moment that he was supposed to be writing a history, and dreamed he was writing one of his own very wonderful and imaginative romances. At least I cannot imagine how he can possibly know that the prehistoric ruler was called the Old Man or that court etiquette requires it to be spelt with capital letters. He says of the same potentate, ‘No one was allowed to touch his spear or to sit in his seat.’ I have difficulty in believing that anybody has dug up a prehistoric spear with a prehistoric label, ‘Visitors are Requested not to Touch,’ or a complete throne with the inscription, ‘Reserved for the Old Man.’ But it may be presumed that the writer, who can hardly be supposed to be merely making up things out of his own head, was merely taking for granted this very dubious parallel between the prehistoric and the decivilised man. It may be that in certain savage tribes the chief is called the Old Man and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or sit on his seat. It may be that in those cases he is surrounded with superstitious and traditional terrors; and it may be that in those cases, for all I know, he is despotic and tyrannical. But there is not a grain of evidence that primitive government was despotic and tyrannical. It may have been, of course, for it may have been anything or even nothing; it may not have existed at all. But the despotism in certain dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth century does not prove that the first men were ruled despotically. It does not even suggest it; it does not even begin to hint at it. If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. It is also true that they sometimes needed him for some sudden and militant act of reform; it is equally true that he often took advantage of being the strong man armed to be a tyrant like some of the Sultans of the East. But I cannot see why the Sultan should have appeared any earlier in history than many other human figures. On the contrary, the strong man armed obviously depends upon the superiority of his armour, and armament of that sort comes with more complex civilisation. One man may kill twenty with a machine-gum; it is obviously less likely that he could do it with a piece of flint. As for the current cant about the strongest man ruling by force and fear, it is simply a nursery fairy-tale about a giant with a hundred hands. Twenty men could hold down the strongest strong man in any society, ancient or modern. Undoubtedly they might admire, in a romantic and poetical sense, the man who was really the strongest; but that is quite a different thing, and is as purely moral and even mystical as the admiration for the purest or the wisest. But the spirit that endures the mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is the spirit of an ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new one. As his name implies, the Old Man is the ruler of an old humanity.
It is far more probable that a primitive society was something like a pure democracy. To this day the comparatively simple agricultural communities are by far the purest democracies. Democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilisation. Anyone who likes may state it by saying that democracy is the foe of civilisation. But he must remember that some of us really prefer democracy to civilisation, in the sense of preferring democracy to complexity. Anyhow, peasants tilling patches of their own land in a rough equality, and meeting to vote directly under a village tree, are the most truly self-governing of men. It is surely as likely as not that such a simple idea was found in the first condition of even simpler men. Indeed the despotic vision is exaggerated, even if we do not regard the men as men. Even on an evolutionary assumption of the most materialistic sort, there is really no reason why men should not have had at least as much camaraderie as rats or rooks. Leadership of some sort they doubtless had, as have the gregarious animals; but leadership implies no such irrational servility as that attributed to the superstitious subjects of the Old Man. There was doubtless some body corresponding, to use Tennyson’s expression, to the many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home. But I fancy that if that venerable fowl began to act after the fashion of some Sultans in ancient and decayed Asia, it would become a very clanging rookery and the many-wintered crow would not see many more winters. It may be remarked, in this connection, but even among animals it would seem that something else is respected more than bestial violence, if it be only the familiarity which in men is called tradition or the experience which in men is called wisdom. I do not know if crows really follow the oldest crow, but if they do they are certainly not following the strongest crow. And I do know, in the human case, that if some ritual of seniority keeps savages reverencing somebody called Old Man, then at least they have not our own servile sentimental weakness for worshipping the Strong Man.
It may be said then that primitive government, like primitive art and religion and everything else, is very imperfectly known or rather guessed at; but that it is at least as good a guess to suggest that it was as popular as a Balkan or Pyrenean village as that it was as capricious and secret as a Turkish divan. Both the mountain democracy and the oriental palace are modern in the sense that they are still there, or are some sort of growth of history; but of the two the palace has much more the look of being an accumulation and a corruption, the village much more the look of being a really unchanged and primitive thing. But my suggestions at this point do not go beyond expressing a wholesome doubt about the current assumption. I think it interesting, for instance, that liberal institutions have been traced even by moderns back to barbarians or undeveloped states, when it happened to be convenient for the support of some race or nation or philosophy. So the Socialists profess that their ideal of communal property existed in very early times. So the Jews are proud of the Jubilees or juster redistributions under their ancient law. So the Teutonists boasted of tracing parliaments and juries and various popular things among the Germanic tribes of the north. So the Celtophiles and those testifying to the wrongs of Ireland have pleaded the more equal justice of the clan system, to which the Irish chiefs bore witness before Strongbow. The strength of the case varies in the different cases; but as there is some case for all of them, I suspect there is some case for the general proposition that popular institutions of some sort were by no means uncommon in early and simple societies. Each of these separate schools were making the admission to prove a particular modern thesis; but taken together they suggest a more ancient and general truth, that there was something more in prehistoric councils than ferocity and fear. Each of these separate theorists had his own axe to grind, but he was willing to use a stone axe; and he manages to suggest that the stone axe might have been as republican as the guillotine.
But the truth is that the curtain rises upon the play already in progress. In one sense it is a true paradox that there was history before history. But it is not the irrational paradox implied in prehistoric history; for it is a history we do not know. Very probably it was exceedingly like the history we do know, except in the one detail that we do not know it. It is thus the very opposite of the pretentious prehistoric history, which professes to trace everything in a consistent course from the amoeba to the anthropoid and from the anthropoid to the agnostic. So far from being a question of our knowing all about queer creatures very different from ourselves, they were very probably people very like ourselves, except that we know nothing about them. In other words, our most ancient records only reach back to a time when humanity had long been human, and even long been civilised. The most ancient records we have not only mention but take for granted things like kings and priests and princes and assemblies of the people; they describe communities that are roughly recognisable as communities in our own sense. Some of them are despotic; but we cannot tell that they have always been despotic. Some of them may be already decadent and nearly all are mentioned as if they were old. We do not know what really happened in the world before those records; but the little we do know would leave us anything but astonished if we learnt that it was very much like what happens in this world now. There would be nothing inconsistent or confounding about the discovery that those unknown ages were full of republics collapsing under monarchies and rising again as republics, empires expanding and finding colonies and then losing colonies. Kingdoms combining again into world states and breaking up again into small nationalities, classes selling themselves into slavery and marching out once more into liberty; all that procession of humanity which may or may not be a progress but most assuredly a romance. But the first chapters of the romance have been torn out of the book; and we shall never read them.
It is so also with the more special fancy about evolution and social stability. According to the real records available, barbarism and civilisation were not successive states in the progress of the world. They were conditions that existed side by side, as they still exist side by side. There were civilisations then as there are civilisations now; there are savages now as there were savages then. It is suggested that all men passed through a nomadic stage; but it is certain that there are some who have never passed out of it, and it seems not unlikely that there were some who never passed into it. It is probable that from very primitive times the static tiller of the soil and the wandering shepherd were two distinct types of men; and the chronological rearrangement of them is but a mark of that mania for progressive stages that has largely falsified history. It is suggested that there was a communist stage, in which private property was everywhere unknown, a whole humanity living on the negation of property; but the evidences of this negation are themselves rather negative. Redistributions of property, jubilees, and agrarian laws, occur at various intervals and in various forms; but that humanity inevitably passed through a communist stage seems as doubtful as the parallel proposition that humanity will inevitably return to it. It is chiefly interesting as evidence that the boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary. There is an amusing parallel example in the case of what is called feminism. In spite of all the pseudo-scientific gossip about marriage by capture and the cave-man beating the cave-woman with a club, it may be noted that as soon as feminism became a fashionable cry, it was insisted that human civilisation in its first stage had been a matriarchy. Apparently it was the cave-woman who carried the club. Anyhow all these ideas are little better than guesses; they have a curious way of following the fortune of modern theories and fads. In any case they are not history in the sense of record; and we may repeat that when it comes to record, the broad truth is that barbarism and civilisation have always dwelt side by side in the world, the civilisation sometimes spreading to absorb the barbarians, sometimes decaying into relative barbarism, and in almost all cases possessing in a more finished form certain ideas and institutions which the barbarians possess in a ruder form; such as government or social authority, the arts and especially the decorative arts, mysteries and taboos of various kinds especially surrounding the matter of sex, and some form of that fundamental thing which is the chief concern of this enquiry; the thing that we call religion.
Now Egypt and Babylon, those two primeval monsters, might in this matter have been specially provided as models. They might almost be called working models to show how these modern theories do not work. The two great truths we know about these two great cultures happen to contradict flatly the two current fallacies which have just been considered. The story of Egypt might have been invented to point the moral that man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is exhausted. And the story of Babylon might have been invented to point the moral that man need not be a nomad or a communist before he becomes a peasant or a citizen, and that such cultures are not always in successive stages but often in contemporary states. Even touching these great civilisations with which our written history begins there is a temptation of course to be too ingenious or too cocksure. We can read the bricks of Babylon in a very different sense from that in which we guess about the Cup and Ring stones; and we do definitely know what is meant by the animals in the Egyptian hieroglyphic as we know nothing of the animal in the neolithic cave. But even here the admirable archeologists who have deciphered line after line of miles of hieroglyphics may be tempted to read too much between the lines; even the real authority on Babylon may forget how fragmentary is his hard-won knowledge; may forget that Babylon has only heaved half a brick at him, though half a brick is better than no cuneiform. But some truths, historic and not prehistoric, dogmatic and not evolutionary, facts and not fancies, do indeed emerge from Egypt and Babylon; and these two truths are among them.
Egypt is a green ribbon along the river edging the dark red desolation of the desert. It is a proverb, and one of vast antiquity, that it is created by the mysterious bounty and almost sinister benevolence of the Nile. When we first hear of Egyptians they are living as in a string of river-side villages, in small and separate but co-operative communities along the bank of the Nile. Where the river branched into the broad Delta there was traditionally the beginning of a somewhat different district or people; but this need not complicate the main truth. These more or less independent though interdependent peoples were considerably civilised already. They had a sort of heraldry; that is, decorative art used for symbolic and social purposes; each sailing the Nile under its own ensign representing some bird or animal. Heraldry involves two things of enormous importance to normal humanity; the combination of the two making that noble thing called co-operation; on which rest all peasantries and peoples that are free. The art of heraldry means independence; an image chosen by the imagination to express the individuality. The science of heraldry means interdependence; an agreement between different bodies to recognise different images; a science of imagery. We have here therefore exactly that compromise of co-operation between free families or groups which is the most normal mode of life for humanity and is particularly apparent wherever men own their own land and live on it. With the very mention of the image of bird and beast the student of mythology will murmur the word ‘totem’ almost in his sleep. But to my mind much of the trouble arises from his habit of saying such words as if in his sleep. Throughout this rough outline I have made a necessarily inadequate attempt to keep on the inside rather than the outside of such things; to consider them where possible in terms of thought and not merely in terms of terminology. There is very little value in talking about totems unless we have some feeling of what it really felt like to have a totem. Granted that they had totems and we have no totems; was it because they had more fear of animals or more familiarity with animals? Did a man whose totem was a wolf feel like a were-wolf or like a man running away from a were-wolf? Did he feel like Uncle Remus about Brer Wolf or like St. Francis about his brother the wolf, or like Mowgli about his brothers the wolves? Was a totem a thing like the British lion or a thing like the British bull-dog? Was the worship of a totem like the feeling of niggers about Mumbo Jumbo, or of children about Jumbo? I have never read any book of folk-lore, however learned, that gave me any light upon this question, which I think by far the most important one. I will confine myself to repeating that the earliest Egyptian communities had a common understanding about the images that stood for their individual states; and that this amount of communication is prehistoric in the sense that it is already there at the beginning of history. But as history unfolds itself, this question of communication is clearly the main question of these riverside communities. With the need of communication comes the need of a common government and the growing greatness and spreading shadow of the king. The other binding force besides the king, and perhaps older than the king, is the priesthood; and the priesthood has presumably even more to do with these ritual symbols and signals by which men can communicate. And here in Egypt arose probably the primary and certainly the typical invention to which we owe all history, and the whole difference between the historic and the prehistoric: the archetypal script, the art of writing.
The popular pictures of these primeval empires are not half so popular as they might be. There is shed over them the shadow of an exaggerated gloom, more than the normal and even healthy sadness of heathen men. It is part of the same sort of secret pessimism that loves to make primitive man a crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is fear. It comes of course from the fact that men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion. For them anything primary and elemental must be evil. But it is the curious consequence that while we have been deluged with the wildest experiments in primitive romance, they have all missed the real romance of being primitive. They have described scenes that are wholly imaginary, in which the men of the Stone Age are men of stone like walking statues; in which the Assyrians or Egyptians are as stiff or as painted as their own most archaic art. But none of these makers of imaginary scenes have tried to imagine what it must really have been like to see those things as fresh which we see as familiar. They have not seen a man discovering fire like a child discovering fireworks. They have not seen a man playing with the wonderful invention called the wheel, like a boy playing at putting up a wireless station. They have never put the spirit of youth into their descriptions of the youth of the world. It follows that amid all their primitive or prehistoric fancies there are no jokes. There are not even practical jokes, in connection with the practical inventions. And this is very sharply defined in the particular case of hieroglyphics; for there seems to be serious indication that the whole high human art of scripture or writing began with a joke.
There are some who will learn with regret that it seems to have begun with a pun. The king or the priests or some responsible persons, wishing to send a message up the river in that inconveniently long and narrow territory, hit on the idea of sending it in picture writing, like that of the Red Indian. Like most people who have written picture-writing for fun, he found the words did not always fit. But when the word for taxes sounded rather like the word for pig, he boldly put down a pig as a bad pun and chanced it. So a modern hieroglyphist might represent ‘at once’ by unscrupulously drawing a hat followed by a series of upright numerals. It was good enough for the Pharaohs and ought to be good enough for him. But it must have been great fun to write or even to read these messages, when writing and reading were really a new thing. And if people must write romances about ancient Egypt (and it seems that neither prayers nor tears nor curses can withhold them from the habit), I suggest that scenes like this would really remind us that the ancient Egyptians were human beings. I suggest that somebody should describe the scene of the great monarch sitting among his priests, and all of them roaring with laughter and bubbling over with suggestions as the royal puns grew more and more wild and indefensible. There might be another scene of almost equal excitement about the decoding of this cipher; the guesses and clues and discoveries having all the popular thrill of a detective story. That is how primitive romance and primitive history really ought to be written. For whatever was the quality of the religious or moral life of remote times, and it was probably much more human than is conventionally supposed, the scientific interest of such a time must have been intense. Words must have been more wonderful than wireless telegraphy; and experiments with common things a series of electric shocks. We are still waiting for somebody to write a lively story of primitive life. The point is in some sense a parenthesis here; but it is connected with the general matter of political development, by the institution which was most active in these first and most fascinating of all the fairy-tales of science.
It is admitted that we owe most of this science to the priests. Modern writers like Mr. Wells cannot be accused of any weakness of sympathy with a pontifical hierarchy; but they agree at least in recognising what pagan priesthoods did for the arts and sciences. Among the more ignorant of the enlightened there was indeed a convention of saying that priests had obstructed progress in all ages; and a politician once told me in a debate that I was resisting modern reforms exactly as some ancient priest probably resisted the discovery of wheels. I pointed out, in reply, that it was far more likely that the ancient priest made the discovery of the wheels. It is overwhelmingly probable that the ancient priest had a great deal to do with the discovery of the art of writing. It is obvious enough in the fact that the very word hieroglyphic is akin to the word hierarchy. The religion of these priests was apparently a more or less tangled polytheism of a type that is more particularly described elsewhere. It passed through a period when it cooperated with the king, another period when it was temporarily destroyed by the king, who happened to be a prince with a private theism of his own, and a third period when it practically destroyed the king and ruled in his stead. But the world has to thank it for many things which it considers common and necessary: and the creators of those common things ought really to have a place among the heroes of humanity. If we were at rest in a real paganism, instead of being restless in a rather irrational reaction from Christianity, we might pay some sort of pagan honour to these nameless makers of mankind. We might have veiled statues of the man who first found fire or the man who first made a boat or the man who first tamed a horse. And if we brought them garlands or sacrifices, there would be more sense in it than in disfiguring our cities with cockney statues of stale politicians and philanthropists. But one of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilisation has been able to be really human.
The point is here, however, that the Egyptian government, whether pontifical or royal, found it more and more necessary to establish communication; and there always went with communication a certain element of coercion. It is not necessarily an indefensible thing that the state grew more despotic as it grew more civilised; it is arguable that it had to grow more despotic in order to grow more civilised. That is the argument for autocracy in every age; and the interest lies in seeing it illustrated in the earliest age. But it is emphatically not true that it was most despotic in the earliest age and grew more liberal in a later age; the practical process of history is exactly the reverse. It is not true that the tribe began in the extreme of terror of the Old Man and his seat and spear; it is probable, at least in Egypt, that the Old Man was rather a New Man armed to attack new conditions. His spear grew longer and longer and his throne rose higher and higher, as Egypt rose into a complex and complete civilisation. That is what I mean by saying that the history of the Egyptian territory is in this the history of the earth; and directly denies the vulgar assumption that terrorism can only come at the beginning and cannot come at the end. We do not know what was the very first condition of the more or less feudal amalgam of land owners, peasants and slaves in the little commonwealths beside the Nile; but it may have been a peasantry of an even more popular sort. What we do know is that it was by experience and education that little commonwealths lose their liberty; that absolute sovereignty is something not merely ancient but rather relatively modern; and it is at the end of the path called progress that men return to the king.
Egypt exhibits, in that brief record of its remotest beginnings, the primary problem of liberty and civilisation. It is the fact that men actually lose variety by complexity. We have not solved the problem properly any more than they did; but it vulgarises the human dignity of the problem itself to suggest that even tyranny has no motive save in tribal terror. And just as the Egyptian example refutes the fallacy about despotism and civilisation, so does the Babylonian example refute the fallacy about civilisation and barbarism. Babylon also we first hear of when it is already civilised; for the simple reason that we cannot hear of anything until it is educated enough to talk. It talks to us in what is called cuneiform; that strange and stiff triangular symbolism that contrasts with the picturesque alphabet of Egypt. However relatively rigid Egyptian art may be, there is always something different from the Babylonian spirit which was too rigid to have any art. There is always a living grace in the lines of the lotus and something of rapidity as well as rigidity in the movement of the arrows and the birds. Perhaps there is something of the restrained but living curve of the river, which makes us in talking of the serpent of old Nile almost think of the Nile as a serpent. Babylon was a civilisation of diagrams rather than of drawings. Mr. W.B. Yeats who has a historical imagination to match his mythological imagination (and indeed the former is impossible without the latter) wrote truly of the men who watched the stars ‘from their pedantic Babylon.’ The cuneiform was cut upon bricks, of which all their architecture was built up; the bricks were of baked mud and perhaps the material had something in it forbidding the sense of form to develop in sculpture or relief. Theirs was a static but a scientific civilisation, far advanced in the machinery of life and in some ways highly modern. It is said that they had much of the modern cult of the higher spinsterhood and recognised an official class of independent working women. There is perhaps something in that mighty stronghold of hardened mud that suggests the utilitarian activity of a huge hive. But though it was huge it was human; we see many of the same social problems as in ancient Egypt or modern England; and whatever its evils this also was one of the earliest masterpieces of man. It stood, of course, in the triangle formed by the almost legendary rivers of Tigris and Euphrates, and the vast agriculture of its empire, on which its towns depended, was perfected by a highly scientific system of canals. It had by tradition a high intellectual life, though rather philosophic than artistic; and there preside over its primal foundation those figures who have come to stand for the star-gazing wisdom of antiquity; the teachers of Abraham; the Chaldees.
Against this solid society, as against some vast bare wall of brick, there surged age after age the nameless armies of the Nomads. They came out of the deserts where the nomadic life had been lived from the beginning and where it is still lived to-day. It is needless to dwell on the nature of that life; it was obvious enough and even easy enough to follow a herd or a flock which generally found its own grazing-ground and to live on the milk or meat it provided. Nor is there any reason to doubt that this habit of life could give almost every human thing except a home. Many such shepherds or herds men may have talked in the earliest time of all the truths and enigmas of the Book of Job; and of these were Abraham and his children, who have given to the modern world for an endless enigma the almost mono-maniac monotheism of the Jews. But they were a wild people without comprehension of complex social organisation; and a spirit like the wind within them made them wage war on it again and again. The history of Babylonia is largely the history of its defence against the desert hordes; who came on at intervals of a century or two and generally retreated as they came. Some say that an admixture of nomad invasion built at Nineveh the arrogant kingdom of the Assyrians, who carved great monsters upon their temples, bearded bulls with wings like cherubim, and who sent forth many military conquerors who stamped the world as if with such colossal hooves. Assyria was an imperial interlude; but it was an interlude. The main story of all that land is the war between the wandering peoples and the state that was truly static. Presumably in prehistoric times, and certainly in historic times, those wanderers went westward to waste whatever they could find. The last time they came they found Babylon vanished; but that was in historic times and the name of their leader was Mahomet.
Now it is worth while to pause upon that story because, as has been suggested, it directly contradicts the impression still current that nomadism is merely a prehistoric thing and social settlement a comparatively recent thing. There is nothing to show that the Babylonians had ever wandered; there is very little to show that the tribes of the desert ever settled down. Indeed it is probable that this notion of a nomadic stage followed by a static stage has already been abandoned by the sincere and genuine scholars to whose researches we all owe so much. But I am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine scholars, but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from certain imperfect investigations, and which has made fashionable a false notion of the whole history of humanity. It is the whole vague notion that a monkey evolved into a man and in the same way a barbarian evolved into a civilised man and therefore at every stage we have to look back to barbarism and forward to civilisation. Unfortunately this notion is in a double sense entirely in the air. It is an atmosphere in which men live rather than a thesis which they defend. Men in that mood are more easily answered by objects than by theories; and it will be well if anyone tempted to make that assumption, in some trivial turn of talk or writing, can be checked for a moment by shutting his eyes and seeing for an instant, vast and vaguely crowded, like a populous precipice, the wonder of the Babylonian wall.
One fact does certainly fall across us like its shadow. Our glimpses of both these early empires show that the first domestic relation had been complicated by something which was less human, but was often regarded as equally domestic. The dark giant called Slavery had been called up like a genii and was labouring on gigantic works of brick and stone. Here again we must not too easily assume that what was backward was barbaric; in the matter of manumission the earlier servitude seems in some ways more liberal than the later; perhaps more liberal than the servitude of the future. To insure food for humanity by forcing part of it to work was after all a very human expedient; which is why it will probably be tried again. But in one sense there is a significance in the old slavery. It stands for one fundamental fact about all antiquity before Christ; something to be assumed from first to last. It is the insignificance of the individual before the State. It was as true of the most democratic City State in Hellas as of any despotism in Babylon. It is one of the signs of this spirit that a whole class of individuals could be insignificant or even invisible. It must be normal because it was needed for what would now be called ‘social service.’ Somebody said, ‘The Man is nothing and the Work is all,’ meaning it for a breezy Carlylean commonplace. It was the sinister motto of the heathen Servile State. In that sense there is truth in the traditional vision of vast pillars and pyramids going up under those everlasting skies for ever by the labour of numberless and nameless men, toiling like ants and dying like flies, wiped out by the work of their own hands.
But there are two other reasons for beginning with the two fixed points of Egypt and Babylon. For one thing they are fixed in tradition as the types of antiquity; and history without tradition is dead. Babylon is still the burden of a nursery rhyme, and Egypt (with its enormous population of princesses awaiting reincarnation) is still the topic of an unnecessary number of novels. But a tradition is generally a truth; so long as the tradition is sufficiently popular; even if it is almost vulgar. And there is a significance in this Babylonian and Egyptian element in nursery rhymes and novels; even the news papers, normally so much behind the times, have already got as far as the reign of Tutankhamen. The first reason is full of the common sense of popular legend; it is the simple fact that we do know more of these traditional things than of other contemporary things; and that we always did. All travellers from Herodotus to Lord Carnarvon follow this route. Scientific speculations of to-day do indeed spread out a map of the whole primitive world, with streams of racial emigration or admixture marked in dotted lines everywhere; over spaces which the unscientific medieval map-maker would have been content to call ‘Terra incognita,’ if he did not fill the inviting blank with a picture of a dragon, to indicate the probable reception given to pilgrims. But these speculations are only speculations at the best; and at the worst the dotted lines can be far more fabulous than the dragon.
There is unfortunately one fallacy here into which it is very easy for men to fall, even those who are most intelligent and perhaps especially those who are most imaginative. It is the fallacy of suppositing that because an idea is greater in the sense of larger, therefore it is greater in the sense of more fundamental and fixed and certain. If a man lives alone in a straw hut in the middle of Thibet, he may be told that he is living in the Chinese Empire; and the Chinese Empire is certainly a splendid and spacious and impressive thing. Or alternatively he may be told that he is living in the British Empire, and be duly impressed. But the curious thing is that in certain mental states he can feel much more certain about the Chinese Empire that he can not see than about the straw hut that he can see. He has some strange magical juggle in his mind, by which his argument begins with the empire though his experience begins with the hut. Sometimes he goes mad and appears to be proving that a straw hut cannot exist in the domains of the Dragon Throne; that it is impossible for such a civilisation as he enjoys to contain such a hovel as he inhabits. But his insanity arises from the intellectual slip of supposing that because China is a large and all-embracing hypothesis, therefore it is something more than a hypothesis. Now modern people are perpetually arguing in this way; and they extend it to things much less real and certain than the Chinese Empire. They seem to forget, for instance, that a man is not even certain of the Solar System as he is certain of the South Downs. The Solar System is a deduction, and doubtless a true deduction; but the point is that it is a very vast and far-reaching deduction and therefore he forgets that it is a deduction at all and treats it as a first principle. He might discover that the whole calculation is a mis-calculation; and the sun and stars and street-lamps would look exactly the same. But he has forgotten that it is a calculation, and is almost ready to contradict the sun if it does not fit into the solar system. If this is a fallacy even in the case of facts pretty well ascertained, such as the Solar System and the Chinese Empire, it is an even more devastating fallacy in connection with theories and other things that are not really ascertained at all. Thus history, especially prehistoric history, has a horrible habit of beginning with certain generalisations about races. I will not describe the disorder and misery this inversion has produced in modern politics. Because the race is vaguely supposed to have produced the nation, men talk as if the nation were something vaguer than the race. Because they have themselves invented a reason to explain a result, they almost deny the result in order to justify the reason. They first treat a Celt as an axiom and then treat an Irishman as an inference. And then they are surprised that a great fighting, roaring Irishman is angry at being treated as an inference. They cannot see that the Irish are Irish whether or no they are Celtic, whether or no there ever were any Celts. And what misleads them once more is the size of the theory; the sense that the fancy is bigger than the fact. A great scattered Celtic race is supposed to contain the Irish, so of course the Irish must depend for their very existence upon it. The same confusion, of course, has eliminated the English and the Germans by swamping them in the Teutonic race; and some tried to prove from the races being at one that the nations could not be at war. But I only give these vulgar and hackneyed examples in passing, as more familiar examples of the fallacy; the matter at issue here is not its application to these modern things but rather to the most ancient things. But the more remote and unrecorded was the racial problem, the more fixed was this curious inverted certainty in the Victorian man of science. To this day it gives a man of those scientific traditions the same sort of shock to question these things, which were only the last inferences when he turned them into first principles. He is still more certain that he is an Aryan even than that he is an Anglo-Saxon, just as he is more certain that he is an Anglo-Saxon than that he is an Englishman. He has never really discovered that he is a European. But he has never doubted that he is an Indo-European. These Victorian theories have shifted a great deal in their shape and scope; but this habit of a rapid hardening of a hypothesis into a theory, and of a theory into an assumption, has hardly yet gone out of fashion. People cannot easily get rid of the mental confusion of feeling that the foundations of history must surely be secure; that the first steps must be safe; that the biggest generalisation must be obvious. But though the contradiction may seem to them a paradox, this is the very contrary of the truth. It is the large thing that is secret and invisible; it is the small thing that is evident and enormous.
Every race on the face of the earth has been the subject of these speculations, and it is impossible even to suggest an outline of the subject. But if we take the European race alone, its history, or rather its prehistory, has undergone many retrospective revolutions in the short period of my own lifetime. It used to be called the Caucasian race; and I read in childhood an account of its collision with the Mongolian race; it was written by Bret Harte and opened with the query ‘Or is the Caucasian played out?’ Apparently the Caucasian was played out, for in a very short time he had been turned into the Indo-European man; sometimes, I regret to say, proudly presented as the Indo-Germanic man. It seems that the Hindu and the German have similar words for mother or father; there were other similarities between Sanskrit and various Western tongues; and with that all superficial differences between a Hindu and a German seemed suddenly to disappear. Generally this composite person was more conveniently described as the Aryan, and the really important point was that he had marched westward out of those high lands of India where fragments of his language could still be found. When I read this as a child, I had the fancy that after all the Aryan need not have marched westward and left his language behind him; he might also have marched eastward and taken his language with him. If I were to read it now, I should content myself with confessing my ignorance of the whole matter. But as a matter of fact I have great difficulty in reading it now, because it is not being written now. It looks as if the Aryan is also played out. Anyhow he has not merely changed his name but changed his address; his starting-place and his route of travel. One new theory maintains that our race did not come to its present home from the East but from the South. Some say the Europeans did not come from Asia but from Africa. Some have even had the wild idea that the Europeans came from Europe; or rather that they never left it.
Then there is a certain amount of evidence of a more or less prehistoric pressure from the North, such as that which seems to have brought the Greeks to inherit the Cretan culture and so often brought the Gauls over the hills into the fields in Italy. But I merely mention this example of European ethnology to point out that the learned have pretty well boxed the compass by this time; and that I, who am not one of the learned, cannot pretend for a moment to decide where such doctors disagree. But I can use my own common sense, and I sometimes fancy that theirs is a little rusty from want of use. The first act of common sense is to recognise the difference between a cloud and a mountain. And I will affirm that nobody knows any of these things, in the sense that we all know of the existence of the Pyramids of Egypt.
The truth, it may be repeated, is that what we really see, as distinct from what we may reasonably guess, in this earliest phase of history is darkness covering the earth and great darkness the peoples, with a light or two gleaming here and there on chance patches of humanity; and that two of these flames do burn upon two of these tall primeval towns; upon the high terraces of Babylon and the huge pyramids of the Nile. There are indeed other ancient lights, or lights that may be conjectured to be very ancient, in very remote parts of that vast wilderness of night. Far away to the east there is a high civilisation of vast antiquity in China; there are the remains of civilisations in Mexico and South America and other places, some of them apparently so high in civilisation as to have reached the most refined forms of devil-worship. But the difference lies in the element old tradition; the tradition of these lost cultures has been broken off, and though the tradition of China still lives, it is doubtful whether we know anything about it. Moreover, a man trying to measure the Chinese antiquity has to use Chinese traditions of measurement; and he has a strange sensation of having passed into another world under other laws of time and space. Time is telescoped outwards and centuries assume the slow and stiff movement of aeons; the white man trying to see it as the yellow man sees, feels as if his head were turning round and wonders wildly whether it is growing a pigtail. Any how he cannot take in a scientific sense that queer perspective that leads up to the primeval pagoda of the first of the Sons of Heaven. He is the real antipodes; the only true alternative world to Christendom; and he is after a fashion walking upside down. I have spoken of the medieval map-maker and his dragon; but what medieval traveller, however much interested in monsters, would expect to find a country where a dragon is a benevolent and amiable being? Of the more serious side of Chinese tradition something will be said in another connection; but I am only talking of tradition and the test of antiquity. And I only mention China as an antiquity that is not for us reached by a bridge old tradition; and Babylon and Egypt as antiquities that are. Herodotus is a human being, in a sense in which a Chinaman in a billy-cock hat, sitting opposite to us in a London tea shop, is hardly human. We feel as if we knew what David and Isaiah felt like, in a way in which we never were quite certain what Li Hung Chang felt like. The very sins that snatched away Helen or Bathsheba have passed into a proverb of private human weakness, of pathos and even of pardon. The very virtues of the Chinaman have about them something terrifying. This is the difference made by the destruction or preservation of a continuous historical inheritance; as from ancient Egypt to modern Europe. But when we ask what was that world that we inherit, and why those particular people and places seem to belong to it, we are led to the central fact of civilised history.
That centre was the Mediterranean; which was not so much a piece of water as a world. But it was a world with something of the character of such a water; for it became more and more a place of unification in which the streams of strange and very diverse cultures met. The Nile and the Tiber alike flow into the Mediterranean; so did the Egyptian and the Etrurian alike contribute to a Mediterranean civilisation. The glamour of the great sea spread indeed very far in land and the unity was felt among the Arabs alone in the deserts and the Gauls beyond the northern hills. But the gradual building up of a common culture running round all the coasts of this inner sea is the main business of antiquity. As will be seen, it was sometimes a bad business as well as a good business. In that orbis terrarum or circle of lands there were the extremes of evil and of piety, there were contrasted races and still more contrasted religions. It was the scene of an endless struggle between Asia and Europe from the night of the Persian ships at Salamis to the flight of the Turkish ships at Lepanto. It was the scene, as will be more especially suggested later, of a supreme spiritual struggle between the two types of paganism, confronting each other in the Latin and the Phoenician cities; in the Roman forum and the Punic mart. It was the world of war and peace, the world of good and evil, the world of all that matters most, with all respect to the Aztecs and the Mongols of the Far East, they did not matter as the Mediterranean tradition mattered and still matters. Between it and the Far East there were, of course, interesting cults and conquests of various kinds, more or less in touch with it, and in proportion as they were so intelligible also to us. The Persians came riding in to make an end of Babylon; and we are told in a Greek story how these barbarians learned to draw the bow and tell the truth. Alexander the great Greek marched with his Macedonians into the sunrise and brought back strange birds coloured like the sunrise clouds and strange flowers and jewels from the gardens and treasuries of nameless kings. Islam went eastward into that world and made it partly imaginable to us; precisely because Islam itself was born in that circle of lands that fringed our own ancient and ancestral sea. In the Middle Ages the empire of the Moguls increased its majesty without losing its mystery; the Tartars conquered China and the Chinese apparently took very little notice of them. All these things are interesting in themselves; but it is impossible to shift the centre of gravity to the inland spaces of Asia from the inland sea of Europe. When all is said, if there were nothing in the world but what was said and done and written and built in the lands lying round the Mediterranean, it would still be in all the most vital and valuable things the world in which we live. When that southern culture spread to the north-west it produced many very wonderful things; of which doubtless we ourselves are the most wonderful. When it spread thence to colonies and new countries, it was still the same culture so long as it was culture at all. But round that little sea like a lake were the things themselves, apart from all extensions and echoes and commentaries on the things, the Republic and the Church; the Bible and the heroic epics; Islam and Israel and the memories of the lost empires, Aristotle and the measure of all things. It is because the first light upon this world is really light, the daylight in which we are still walking to-day, and not merely the doubtful visitation of strange stars, that I have begun here with noting where that light first falls on the towered cities of the eastern Mediterranean.
But though Babylon and Egypt have thus a sort of first claim, in the very fact of being familiar and traditional, fascinating riddles to us but also fascinating riddles to our fathers, we must not imagine that they were the only old civilisations on the southern sea; or that all the civilisation was merely Sumerian or Semitic or Coptic, still less merely Asiatic or African. Real research is more and more exalting the ancient civilisation of Europe and especially of what we may still vaguely call the Greeks. It must be understood in the sense that there were Greeks before the Greeks, as in so many of their mythologies there were gods before the gods. The island of Crete was the centre of the civilisation now called Minoan, after the Minos who lingered in ancient legend and whose labyrinth was actually discovered by modern archeology. This elaborate European society, with its harbours and its drainage and its domestic machinery, seems to have gone down before some invasion of its northern neighbours, who made or inherited the Hellas we know in history. But that earlier period did not pass till it had given to the world gifts so great that the world has ever since been striving in vain to repay them, if only by plagiarism.
Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as a blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
But in this one great human revelation of antiquity there is another element of great historical importance; which has hardly I think been given its proper place in history. The poet has so conceived the poem that his sympathies apparently, and those of his reader certainly, are on the side of the vanquished rather than of the victor. And this is a sentiment which increases in the poetical tradition even as the poetical origin itself recedes. Achilles had some status as a sort of demigod in pagan times; but he disappears altogether in late times. But Hector grows greater as the ages pass, and it is his name that is the name of a Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.
The tale of the end of Troy shall have no ending, for it is lifted up forever into living echoes, immortal as our hopelessness and our hope. Troy standing was a small thing that may have stood nameless for ages. But Troy falling has been caught up in a flame and suspended in an immortal instant of annihilation; and because it was destroyed with fire the fire shall never be destroyed. And as with the city so with the hero; traced in archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the first figure of the Knight. There is a prophetic coincidence in his title; we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle the horseman with the horse. It is almost anticipated ages before in the thunder of the Homeric hexameter, and that long leaping word with which the Iliad ends. It is that very unity for which we can find no name but the holy centaur of chivalry. But there are other reasons for giving in this glimpse of antiquity the name upon the sacred town. The sanctity of such towns ran like a fire round the coasts and islands of the northern Mediterranean, the high-fenced hamlet for which heroes died. From the smallness of the city came the greatness of the citizen. Hellas with her hundred statues produced nothing statelier than that walking statue; the ideal of the self-commanding man. Hellas of the hundred statues was one legend and literature; and all that labyrinth of little walled nations resounding with the lament of Troy.
A later legend, an afterthought but not an accident, said that stragglers from Troy founded a republic on the Italian shore. It was true in spirit that republican virtue had such a root. A mystery of honour, that was not born of Babylon or the Egyptian pride, there shone like the shield of Hector, defying Asia and Africa; till the light of a new day was loosened, with the rushing of the eagles and the coming of the name; the name that came like a thunderclap when the world woke to Rome.
IV
GOD AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION
I was once escorted over the Roman foundations of an ancient British city by a professor, who said something that seems to me a satire on a good many other professors. Possibly the professor saw the joke, though he maintained an iron gravity, and may or may not have realised that it was a joke against a great deal of what is called comparative religion. I pointed out a sculpture of the head of the sun with the usual halo of rays, but with the difference that the face in the disc, instead of being boyish like Apollo, was bearded like Neptune or Jupiter. ‘Yes,’ he said with a certain delicate exactitude, ‘that is supposed to represent the local god Sul. The best authorities identify Sul with Minerva, but this has been held to show that the identification is not complete.’
That is what we call a powerful understatement. The modern world is madder than any satires on it; long ago Mr. Belloc made his burlesque don say that a bust of Ariadne had been proved by modern research to be a Silenus. But that is not better than the real appearance of Minerva as the Bearded Woman of Mr. Barnum. Only both of them are very like many identifications by ‘the best authorities’ on comparative religion; and when Catholic creeds are identified with various wild myths, I do not laugh or curse or misbehave myself; I confine myself decorously to saying that the identification is not complete.
In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly applied to Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped corporate mankind as a Supreme Being. Even in the days of my youth, I remarked that there was something slightly odd about despising and dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even maniacal contradiction; and then asking us to adore a deity who is a hundred million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
But there is another entity, more or less definable and much more imaginable than the many-headed and monstrous idol of mankind. And it has a much better light to be called, in a reasonable sense, the religion of humanity. Man is not indeed the idol; but man is almost everywhere the idolator. And these multitudinous idolatries of mankind have something about them in many ways more human and sympathetic than modern metaphysical abstractions. If an Asiatic god has three heads and seven arms, there is at least in it an idea of material incarnation bringing an unknown power nearer to us and not farther away. But if our friends Brown, Jones, and Robinson, when out for a Sunday walk, were transformed and amalgamated into an Asiatic idol before our eyes, they would surely seem farther away. If the arms of Brown and the legs of Robinson waved from the same composite body, they would seem to be waving something of a sad farewell. If the heads of all three gentlemen appeared smiling on the same neck, we should hesitate even by what name to address our new and somewhat abnormal friend. In the many-headed and many-handed Oriental idol there is a certain sense of mysteries becoming at least partly intelligible; of formless forces of nature taking some dark but material form, but though this may be true of the multiform god it is not so of the multiform man. The human beings become less human by becoming less separate; we might say less human in being less lonely. The human beings become less intelligible as they become less isolated; we might say with strict truth that the closer they are to us the farther they are away. An Ethical Hymn-book of this humanitarian sort of religion was carefully selected and expurgated on the principle of preserving anything human and eliminating anything divine. One consequence was that a hymn appeared in the amended form of ‘Nearer Mankind to Thee, nearer to Thee.’ It always suggested to me the sensations of a strap-hanged during a crush on the Tube. But it is strange and wonderful how far away the souls of men can seem, when their bodies are so near as all that.
The human unity with which I deal here is not to be confounded with this modern industrial monotony and herding, which is rather a congestion than a communion. It is a thing to which human groups left to themselves, and even human individuals left to themselves, have everywhere tended by an instinct that may truly be called human. Like all healthy human things, it has varied very much within the limits of a general character; for that is characteristic of everything belonging to that ancient land of liberty that lies before and around the servile industrial town. Industrialism actually boasts that its products are all of one pattern; that men in Jamaica or Japan can break the same seal and drink the same bad whiskey, that a man at the North Pole and another at the South might recognise the same optimistic level on the same dubious tinned salmon. But wine, the gift of gods to men, can vary with every valley and every vineyard, can turn into a hundred wines without any wine once reminding us of whiskey; and cheeses can change from county to county without forgetting the difference between chalk and cheese. When I am speaking of this thing, therefore, I am speaking of something that doubtless includes very wide differences; nevertheless I will here maintain that it is one thing. I will maintain that most of the modern botheration comes from not realising that it is really one thing. I will advance the thesis that before all talk about comparative religion and the separate religious founders of the world, the first essential is to recognise this thing as a whole, as a thing almost native and normal to the great fellowship that we call mankind. This thing is Paganism, and I propose to show in these pages that it is the one real rival to the Church of Christ.
Comparative religion is very comparative indeed. That is, it is so much a matter of degree and distance and difference that it is only comparatively successful when it tries to compare. When we come to look at it closely we find it comparing things that are really quite incomparable. We are accustomed to see a table or catalogue of the world’s great religions in parallel columns, until we fancy they are really parallel. We are accustomed to see the names of the great religious founders all in a row: Christ; Mahomet; Buddha; Confucius. But in truth this is only a trick, another of these optical illusions by which any objects may be put into a particular relation by shifting to a particular point of sight. Those religions and religious founders, or rather those whom we choose to lump together as religions and religious founders, do not really show any common character. The illusion is partly produced by Islam coming immediately after Christianity in the list; as Islam did come after Christianity and was largely an imitation of Christianity. But the other eastern religions, or what we call religions, not only do not resemble the Church but do not resemble each other. When we come to Confucianism at the end of the list, we come to something in a totally different world of thought. To compare the Christian and Confucian religions is like comparing a theist with an English squire or asking whether a man is a believer in immortality or a hundred-per-cent American. Confucianism may be a civilisation but it is not a religion.
In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel. It is not easy, therefore, to expose the fallacy by which a false classification is created to swamp a unique thing, when it really is a unique thing. As there is nowhere else exactly the same fact, so there is nowhere else exactly the same fallacy. But I will take the nearest thing I can find to such a solitary social phenomenon, in order to show how it is thus swamped and assimilated. I imagine most of us would agree that there is something unusual and unique about the position of the Jews. There is nothing that is quite in the same sense an international nation; an ancient culture scattered in different countries but still distinct and indestructible. Now this business is like an attempt to make a list of Nomadic Nations in order to soften the strange solitude of the Jew. It would be easy enough to do it, by the same process of putting a plausible approximation first, and then tailing off into totally different things thrown in somehow to make up the list. Thus in the new list of nomadic nations the Jews would be followed by the Gypsies; who at least are really nomadic if they are not really national. Then the professor of the new science of Comparative Nomadics could pass easily on to something different; even if it was very different. He could remark on the wandering adventure of the English who had scattered their colonies over so many seas; and call them nomads. It is quite true that a great many Englishmen seem to be strangely restless in England. It is quite true that not all of them have left their country for their country’s good. The moment we mention the wandering empire of the English, we must add the strange exiled empire of the Irish. For it is a curious fact, to be noted in our imperial literature, that the same ubiquity and unrest which is a proof of English enterprise and triumph is a proof of Irish futility and failure. Then the professor of Nomadism would look round thoughtfully and remember that there was great talk recently of German waiters, German barbers, German clerks, Germans naturalising themselves in England and the United States and the South American republics. The Germans would go down as the fifth nomadic race; the words Wanderlust and Folk-Wandering would come in very useful here. For there really have been historians who explained the Crusades by suggesting that the Germans were found wandering (as the police say) in what happened to be the neighbourhood of Palestine. Then the professor, feeling he was now near the end, would make a last leap in desperation. He would recall the fact that the French army has captured nearly every capital in Europe, that it marched across countless conquered lands under Charlemagne or Napoleon; and that would be wanderlust and that would be the note of a nomadic race. Thus he would have his six nomadic nations all compact and complete, and would feel that the Jew was no longer a sort of mysterious and even mystical exception. But people with more common sense would probably realise that he had only extended nomadism by extending the meaning of nomadism, and that he had extended that until it really had no meaning at all. It is quite true that the French soldier has made some of the finest marches in all military history. But it is equally true, and far more self-evident, that if the French peasant is not a rooted reality there is no such thing as a rooted reality in the world; or in other words, if he is a nomad there is nobody who is not a nomad.
Now that is the sort of trick that has been tried in the case of comparative religion and the world’s religious founders all standing respectably in a row. It seeks to classify Jesus as the other would classify Jews, by inventing a new class for the purpose and filling up the rest of it with stop-gaps and second-rate copies. I do not mean that these other things are not often great things in their own real character and class. Confucianism and Buddhism are great things, but it is not true to call them Churches; just as the French and English are great peoples, but it is nonsense to call them nomads. There are some points of resemblance between Christendom and its imitation in Islam; for that matter there are some points of resemblance between Jews and Gypsies. But after that the lists are made up of anything that comes to hand; of anything that can be put in the same catalogue without being in the same category.
In this sketch of religious history, with all decent deference to men much more learned than myself, I propose to cut across and disregard this modern method of classification, which I feel sure has falsified the facts of history. I shall here submit an alternative classification of religion or religions, which I believe would be found to cover all the facts and, what is quite as important here, all the fancies. Instead of dividing religion geographically and as it were vertically, into Christian, Moslem, Brahmin, Buddhist, and so on, I would divide it psychologically and in some sense horizontally; into the strata of spiritual elements and influences that could sometimes exist in the same country, or even in the same man. Putting the Church apart for the moment, I should be disposed to divide the natural religion of the mass of mankind under such headings as these: God; the Gods; the Demons; the Philosophers. I believe some such classification will help us to sort out the spiritual experiences of men much more successfully than the conventional business of comparing religions; and that many famous figures will naturally fall into their place in this way who are only forced into their place in the other. As I shall make use of these titles or terms more than once in narrative and allusion, it will be well to define at this stage for what I mean them to stand. And I will begin with the first, the simplest and the most sublime, in this chapter.
In considering the elements of pagan humanity, we must begin by an attempt to describe the indescribable. Many get over the difficulty of describing it by the expedient of denying it, or at least ignoring it; but the whole point of it is that it was something that was never quite eliminated even when it was ignored. They are obsessed by their evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed comes from a tree, or something larger than itself. Now there is very good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come from some detail that was forgotten, because it was too small to be traced. Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be managed. There is very good reason to suppose that many people did begin with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all; and afterwards fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a sort of secret dissipation. Even the test of savage beliefs, of which the folk-lore students are so fond, is admittedly often found to support such a view. Some of the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense in which anthropologists use the word, the Australian aborigines for instance, are found to have a pure monotheism with a high moral tone. A missionary was preaching to a very wild tribe of polytheists, who had told him all their polytheistic tales, and telling them in return of the existence of the one good God who is a spirit and judges men by spiritual standards. And there was a sudden buzz of excitement among these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was letting out a secret, and they cried to each other, ‘Atahocan! He is speaking of Atahocan!’
Probably it was a point of politeness and even decency among those polytheists not to speak of Atahocan. The name is not perhaps so much adapted as some of our own to direct and solemn religious exhortation but many other social forces are always covering up and confusing such simple ideas. Possibly the old god stood for an old morality found irksome in more expansive moments; possibly intercourse with demons was more fashionable among the best people, as in the modern fashion of Spiritualism. Anyhow, there are any number of similar examples. They all testify to the unmistakable psychology of a thing taken for granted, as distinct from a thing talked about. There is a striking example in a tale taken down word for word from a Red Indian in California which starts out with hearty legendary and literary relish: ‘The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his wife and the stars are their children’; and so on through a most ingenious and complicated story, in the middle of which is a sudden parenthesis saying that the sun and moon have to do something because ‘It is ordered that way by the Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.’ That is exactly the attitude of most paganism towards God. He is something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident; a habit possibly not peculiar to pagans. Sometimes the higher deity is remembered in the higher moral grades and is a sort of mystery. But always, it has been truly said, the savage is talkative about his mythology and taciturn about his religion. The Australian savages, indeed, exhibit a topsyturveydom such as the ancients might have thought truly worthy of the antipodes. The savage who thinks nothing of tossing off such a trifle as a tale of the sun and moon being the halves of a baby chopped in two, or dropping into small-talk about a colossal cosmic cow milked to make the rain, merely in order to be sociable, will then retire to secret caverns sealed against women and white men, temples of terrible initiation where to the thunder of the bull-roarer and the dripping of sacrificial blood, the priest whispers the final secrets, known only to the initiate: that honesty is the best policy, that a little kindness does nobody any harm, that all men are brothers and that there is but one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible.
In other words, we have here the curiosity of religious history that the savage seems to be parading all the most repulsive and impossible parts of his belief and concealing all the most sensible and creditable parts. But the explanation is that they are not in that sense parts of his belief, or at least not parts of the same sort of belief. The myths are merely tall stories, though as tall as the sky, the water spout, or the tropic rain. The mysteries are true stories, and are taken secretly that they may be taken seriously. Indeed it is only too easy to forget that there is a thrill in theism. A novel in which a number of separate characters all turned out to be the same character would certainly be a sensational novel. It is so with the idea that sun and tree and river are the disguises of one god and not of many. Alas, we also find it only too easy to take Atahocan for granted. But whether he is allowed to fade into a truism or preserved as a sensation by being preserved as a secret, it is clear that he is always either an old truism or an old tradition. There is nothing to show that he is an improved product of the mere mythology and everything to show that he preceded it. He is worshipped by the simplest tribes with no trace of ghosts or grave-offerings, or any of the complications in which Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen sought the origin of the simplest of all ideas. Whatever else there was, there was never as such thing as the Evolution of the Idea of God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten, was even explained away; but it was never evolved.
There are not a few indications of this change in other places. It is implied, for instance, in the fact that even polytheism seems often the combination of several monotheisms. A god will gain only a minor seat on Mount Olympus, when he had owned earth and heaven and all the stars while he lived in his own little valley. Like many a small nation melting in a great empire, he gives up local universality only to come under universal limitation. The very name of Pan suggests that he became a god of the wood when he had been a god of the world. The very name of Jupiter is almost a pagan translation of the words ‘Our Father which art in heaven.’ As with the Great Father symbolised by the sky, so with the Great Mother whom we still call Mother Earth. Demeter and Ceres and Cybele often seem to be almost capable of taking over the whole business of godhood, so that men should need no other gods. It seems reasonably probable that a good many men did have no other gods but one of these, worshipped as the author of all.
Over some of the most immense and populous tracts of the world such as China, it would seem that the simpler idea of the Great Father has never been very much complicated with rival cults, though it may have in some sense ceased to be a cult itself. The best authorities seem to think that though Confucianism is in one sense agnosticism, it does not directly contradict the old theism, precisely because it has become a rather vague theism. It is one in which God is called Heaven, as in the case of polite persons tempted to swear in drawing-rooms. But Heaven is still overhead, even if it is very far overhead. We have all the impression of a simple truth that has receded, until it was remote without ceasing to be true. And this phrase alone would bring us back to the same idea even in the pagan mythology of the West. There is surely something of this very notion of the withdrawal of some higher power, in all those mysterious and very imaginative myths about the separation of earth and sky. In a hundred forms we are told that heaven and earth were once lovers, or were once at one, when some upstart thing, often some undutiful child, thrust them apart; and the world was built on an abyss; upon a division and a parting. One of its grossest versions was given by Greek civilisation in the myth of Uranus and Saturn. One of its most charming versions was that of some savage niggers, who say that a little pepper-plant grew taller and taller and lifted the whole sky like a lid; a beautiful barbaric vision of daybreak for some of our painters who love that tropical twilight. Of myths, and the highly mythical explanations which the moderns offer of myths, something will be said in another section; for I cannot but think that most mythology is on another and more superficial plane. But in this primeval vision of the rending of one world into two there is surely something more of ultimate ideas. As to what it means, a man will learn far more about it by lying on his back in a field, and merely looking at the sky, than by reading all the libraries even of the most learned and valuable folklore. He will know what is meant by saying that the sky ought to be nearer to us than it is, that perhaps it was once nearer than it is, that it is not a thing merely alien and abysmal but in some fashion sundered from us and saying farewell. There will creep across his mind the curious suggestion that after all, perhaps, the myth-maker was not merely a moon-calf or village idiot thinking he could cut up the clouds like a cake, but had in him something more than it is fashionable to attribute to the Troglodyte; that it is just possible that Thomas Hood was not talking like a Troglodyte when he said that, as time went on, the tree-tops only told him he was further off from heaven than when he was a boy. But anyhow the legend of Uranus the Lord of Heaven dethroned by Saturn the Time Spirit would mean something to the author of that poem. And it would mean, among other things, this banishment of the first fatherhood. There is the idea of God in the very notion that there were gods before the gods. There is an idea of greater simplicity in all the allusions to that more ancient order. The suggestion is supported by the process of propagation we see in historic times. Gods and demigods and heroes breed like herrings before our very eyes and suggest of themselves that the family may have had one founder; mythology grows more and more complicated, and the very complication suggests that at the beginning it was more simple. Even on the external evidence, of the sort called scientific, there is therefore a very good case for the suggestion that man began with monotheism before it developed or degenerated into polytheism. But I am concerned rather with an internal than an external truth; and, as I have already said, the internal truth is almost indescribable. We have to speak of something of which it is the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have not merely to translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence.
I suspect an immense implication behind all polytheism and paganism. I suspect we have only a hint of it here and there in these savage creeds or Greek origins. It is not exactly what we mean by the presence of God; in a sense it might more truly be called the absence of God. But absence does not mean non-existence; and a man drinking the toast of absent friends does not mean that from his life all friendship is absent. It is a void but it is not a negation; it is some thing as positive as an empty chair. It would be an exaggeration to say that the pagan saw higher than Olympus an empty throne. It would be nearer the truth to take the gigantic imagery of the Old Testament, in which the prophet saw God from behind; it was as if some immeasurable presence had turned its back on the world. Yet the meaning will again be missed, if it is supposed to be anything so conscious and vivid as the monotheism of Moses and his people. I do not mean that the pagan peoples were in the least overpowered by this idea merely because it is overpowering. On the contrary, it was so large that they all carried it lightly, as we all carry the load of the sky. Gazing at some detail like a bird or a cloud, we can all ignore its awful blue background; we can neglect the sky; and precisely because it bears down upon us with an annihilating force it is felt as nothing. A thing of this kind can only be an impressing and a rather subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made by pagan literature and religion. I repeat that in our special sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of the presence of God. But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I doubt if there was ever in all the marvellous manhood of antiquity a man who was happy as St. Francis was happy. We feel it in the legend of a Golden Age and again in the vague implication that the gods themselves are ultimately related to something else, even when that Unknown God has faded into a Fate. Above all we feel it in those immortal moments when the pagan literature seems to return to a more innocent antiquity and speak with a more direct voice, so that no word is worthy of it except our own monotheistic monosyllable. We cannot say anything but ‘God’ in a sentence like that of Socrates bidding farewell to his judges: ‘I go to die and you remain to live; and God alone knows which of us goes the better way.’ We can use no other word even for the best moments of Marcus Aurelius: ‘Can they say dear city of Cecrops, and canst thou not say dear city of God?’ We can use no other word in that mighty line in which Virgil spoke to all who suffer with the veritable cry of a Christian before Christ: ‘O you that have borne things more terrible, to this also God shall give an end.’
In short, there is a feeling that there is something higher than the gods; but because it is higher it is also further away. Not yet could even Virgil have read the riddle and the paradox of that other divinity, who is both higher and nearer. For them what was truly divine was very distant, so distant that they dismissed it more and more from their minds. It had less and less to do with the mere mythology of which I shall write later. Yet even in this there was a sort of tacit admission of its intangible purity, when we consider what most of the mythologies like. As the Jews would not degrade it by images, so the Greeks did not degrade it even by imaginations. When the gods were more and more remembered only by pranks and profligacies, it was relatively a movement of reverence. It was an act of piety to forget God. In other words, there is something in the whole tone of the time suggesting that men had accepted a lower level, and still were half conscious that it was a lower level. It is hard to find words for these things; yet the one really just word stands ready. These men were conscious of the Fall if they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of an heathen humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment. There is such a thing as the momentary power to remember that we forget. And the most ignorant of humanity know by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven. But it remains true that even for these men there were moments, like the memories of childhood, when they heard themselves talking with a simpler language; there were moments when the Roman, like Virgil in the line already quoted, cut his way with a sword-stroke of song out of the tangle of the mythologies, the motley mob of gods and goddesses sank suddenly out of sight and the Sky-Father was alone in the sky.
This latter example is very relevant to the next step in the process. A white light as of a lost morning still lingers on the figure of Jupiter, of Pan or of the elder Apollo; and it may well be, as already noted, that each was once a divinity as solitary as Jehovah or Allah. They lost this lonely universality by a process it is here very necessary to note; a process of amalgamation very like what was afterwards called syncretism. The whole pagan world set itself to build a Pantheon. They admitted more and more gods, gods not only of the Greeks but of the barbarians; gods not only of Europe but of Asia and Africa. The more the merrier, though some of the Asian and African ones were not very merry. They admitted them to equal thrones with their own, sometimes they identified them with their own. They may have regarded it as an enrichment of their religious life; but it meant the final loss of all that we now call religion. It meant that ancient light of simplicity, that had a single source like the sun, finally fades away in a dazzle of conflicting Lights and colours. God is really sacrificed to the Gods; in a very literal sense of the flippant phrase, they have been too many for him.
Polytheism, therefore, was really a sort of pool; in the sense of the pagans having consented to the pooling of their pagan religions. And this point is very important in many controversies ancient and modern. It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing to say that the god of the stranger may be as good as our own; and doubtless the pagans thought themselves very liberal and enlightened when they agreed to add to the gods of the city or the hearth some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming down from the mountains or some shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of the woods. But exactly what it lost by these larger ideas is the largest idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole world one. And the converse is also true. Doubtless those more antiquated men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and their single sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages benighted and left behind. But these superstitious savages were preserving something that is much more like the cosmic power as conceived by philosophy, or even as conceived by science. This paradox by which the rude reactionary was a sort of prophetic progressive has one consequence very much to the point. In a purely historical sense, and apart from any other controversies in the same connection, it throws a light, a single and a steady light, that shines from the beginning on a little and lonely people. In this paradox, as in some riddle of religion of which the answer was sealed up for centuries, lies the mission and the meaning of the Jews.
It is true in this sense, humanly speaking, that the world owes God to the Jews. It owes that truth to much that is blamed on the Jews, possibly to much that is blameable in the Jews. We have already noted the nomadic position of the Jews amid the other pastoral peoples upon the fringe of the Babylonian Empire, and something of that strange erratic course of theirs blazed across the dark territory of extreme antiquity, as they passed from the seat of Abraham and the shepherd princes into Egypt and doubled back into the Palestinian hills and held them against the Philistines from Crete and fell into captivity in Babylon; and yet again returned to their mountain city by the Zionist policy of the Persian conquerors; and so continued that amazing romance of restlessness of which we have not yet seen the end. But through all their wanderings, and especially through all their early wanderings, they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle, that held perhaps a featureless symbol and certainly an invisible god. We may say that one most essential feature was that it was featureless. Much as we may prefer that creative liberty which the Christian culture has declared and by which it has eclipsed even the arts of antiquity, we must not underrate the determining importance at the time of the Hebrew inhibition of images. It is a typical example of one of those limitations that did in fact preserve and perpetuate enlargement, like a wall built round a wide open space. The God who could not have a statue remained a spirit. Nor would his statue in any case have had the disarming dignity and grace of the Greek statues then or the Christian statues afterwards. He was living in a land of monsters. We shall have occasion to consider more fully what those monsters were, Moloch and Dagon and Tanit the terrible goddess. If the deity of Israel had ever had an image, he would have had a phallic image. By merely giving him a body they would have brought in all the worst elements of mythology; all the polygamy of polytheism; the vision of the harem in heaven. This point about the refusal of art is the first example of the limitations which are often adversely criticised, only because the critics themselves are limited. But an even stronger case can be found in the other criticism offered by the same critics. It is often said with a sneer that the God of Israel was only a God of battles, ‘a mere barbaric Lord of Hosts’ pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their envious foe. Well it is for the world that he was a God of Battles. Well it is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a foe. In the ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved the desolate disaster of conceiving him as a friend. It would have been only too easy for them to have seen him stretching out his hands in love and reconciliation, embracing Baal and kissing the painted face of Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods; the last god to sell his crown of stars for the Soma of the Indian pantheon or the nectar of Olympus or the mead of Valhalla. It would have been easy enough for his worshippers to follow the enlightened course of Syncretism and the pooling of all the pagan traditions. It is obvious indeed that his followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it required the almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to the divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and ruin. The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe. In a word, there was a popular pagan god called Jupiter-Ammon. There was never a god called Jehovah-Ammon. There was never a god called Jehovah-Jupiter. If there had been, there would certainly have been another called Jehovah-Moloch. Long before the liberal and enlightened amalgamators had got so far afield as Jupiter, the image of the Lord of Hosts would have been deformed out of all suggestion of a monotheistic maker and ruler and would have become an idol far worse than any savage fetish; for he might have been as civilised as the gods of Tyre and Carthage. What that civilisation meant we shall consider more fully in the chapter that follows; when we note how the power of demons nearly destroyed Europe and even the heathen health of the world. But the world’s destiny would have been distorted still more fatally if monotheism had failed in the Mosaic tradition. I hope in a subsequent section to show that I am not without sympathy with all that health in the heathen world that made its fairy-tales and its fanciful romances of religion. But I hope also to show that these were bound to fail in the long run; and the world would have been lost if it had been unable to return to that great original simplicity of a single authority in all things. That we do preserve something of that primary simplicity that poets and philosophers can still indeed in some sense say an Universal Prayer, that we live in a large and serene world under a sky that stretches paternally over all the peoples of the earth, that philosophy and philanthropy are truisms in a religion of reasonable men, all that we do most truly owe, under heaven, to a secretive and restless nomadic people; who bestowed on men the supreme and serene blessing of a jealous God.
The unique possession was not available or accessible to the pagan world, because it was also the possession of a jealous people. The Jews were unpopular, partly because of this narrowness already noted in the Roman world, partly perhaps because they had already fallen into that habit of merely handling things for exchange instead of working to make them with their hands. It was partly also because polytheism had become a sort of jungle in which solitary monotheism could be lost; but it is strange to realise how completely it really was lost. Apart from more disputed matters, there were things in the tradition of Israel which belong to all humanity now, and might have belonged to all humanity then. They had one of the colossal corner-stones of the world: the Book of Job. It obviously stands over against the Iliad and the Greek tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and parting of poetry and philosophy in the mornings of the world. It is a solemn and uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really perfects the pagan tragic irony, precisely because it is more monotheistic and therefore more mystical. Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say ‘I do not understand,’ it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding. But this mighty monotheistic poem remained unremarked by the whole world of antiquity, which was thronged with polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the way in which the Jews stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, that they should have kept a thing like the Book of Job out of the whole intellectual world of antiquity. It is as if the Egyptians had modestly concealed the Great Pyramid. But there were other reasons for a cross-purpose and an impasse, characteristic of the whole of the end of paganism. After all, the tradition of Israel had only got hold of one-half of the truth, even if we use the popular paradox and call it the bigger half. I shall try to sketch in the next chapter that love of locality and personality that ran through mythology; here it need only be said that there was a truth in it that could not be let out though it were a lighter and less essential truth. The sorrow of Job had to be joined with the sorrow of Hector; and while the former was the sorrow of the universe the latter was the sorrow of the city; for Hector could only stand pointing to heaven as the pillar of holy Troy. When God speaks out of the whirlwind he may well speak in the wilderness. But the monotheism of the nomad was not enough for all that varied civilisation of fields and fences and walled cities and temples and towns; and the turn of these things also was to come, when the two could be combined in a more definite and domestic religion. Here and there in all that pagan crowd could be found a philosopher whose thought ran of pure theism; but he never had, or supposed that he had, the power to change the customs of the whole populace. Nor is it easy even in such philosophies to find a true definition of this deep business of the relation of polytheism and theism. Perhaps the nearest we can come to striking the note, or giving the thing a name, is in something far away from all that civilisation and more remote from Rome than the isolation of Israel. It is in a saying I once heard from some Hindu tradition; that gods as well as men are only the dreams of Brahma; and will perish when Brahma wakes. There is indeed in such an image something of the soul of Asia which is less sane than the soul of Christendom. We should call it despair, even if they would call it peace. This note of nihilism can be considered later in a fuller comparison between Asia and Europe. It is enough to say here that there is more of disillusion in that idea of a divine awakening than is implied for us in the passage from mythology to religion. But the symbol is very subtle and exact in one respect; that it does suggest the disproportion and even disruption between the very ideas of mythology and religion, the chasm between the two categories. It is really the collapse of comparative religion that there is no comparison between God and the gods. There is no more comparison than there is between a man and the men who walked about in his dreams. Under the next heading some attempt will be made to indicate the twilight of that dream in which the gods walk about like men. But if anyone fancies the contrast of monotheism and polytheism is only a matter of some people having one god and others a few more, for him it will be far nearer the truth to plunge into the elephantine extravagance of Brahmin cosmology; that he may feel a shudder going through the veil of things, the many-handed creators, and the throned and haloed animals and all the network of entangled stars and rulers of the night, as the eyes of Brahma open like dawn upon the death of all.
V
MAN AND MYTHOLOGIES
What are here called the Gods might almost alternatively be called the day-dreams. To compare them to dreams is not to deny that dreams can come true. To compare them to travellers’ tales is not to deny that they may be true tales, or at least truthful tales. In truth they are the sort of tales the traveller tells to himself. All this mythological business belongs to the poetical part of men. It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticise it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems. We do not submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all. When the professor is told by the Polynesian that once there was nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless the learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wish it were true, he is no judge of such things at all. When he is assured, on the best Red Indian authority, that a primitive hero carried the sun and moon and stars in a box, unless he clasps his hands and almost kicks his legs as a child would at such a charming fancy, he knows nothing about the matter. This test is not nonsensical; primitive children and barbaric children do laugh and kick like other children; and we must have a certain simplicity to repicture the childhood of the world. When Hiawatha was told by his nurse that a warrior threw his grandmother up to the moon, he laughed like any English child told by his nurse that a cow jumped over the moon. The child sees the joke as well as most men, and better than some scientific men. But the ultimate test even of the fantastic is the appropriateness of the inappropriate. And the test must appear merely arbitrary because it is merely artistic. If any student tells me that the infant Hiawatha only laughed out of respect for tribal custom of sacrificing the aged to economical housekeeping, I say he did not. If any scholar tells me that the cow jumped over the moon only because a heifer was sacrificed to Diana, I answer that it did not. It happened because it is obviously the right thing for a cow to jump over the moon. Mythology is a lost art, one of the few arts that really are lost; but it is an art. The horned moon and the horned mooncalf make a harmonious and almost a quiet pattern. And throwing your grandmother into the sky is not good behaviour; but it is perfectly good taste.
Thus scientists seldom understand, as artists understand, that one branch of the beautiful is the ugly. They seldom allow for the legitimate liberty of the grotesque. And they will dismiss a savage myth as merely coarse and clumsy and an evidence of degradation, because it has not all the beauty of the herald Mercury new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill; when it really has the beauty of the Mock Turtle or the Mad Hatter. It is the supreme proof of a man being prosaic that he always insists on poetry being poetical. Sometimes the humour is in the very subject as well as the style of the fable. The Australian aborigines, regarded as the rudest of savages, have a story about a giant frog who had swallowed the sea and all the waters of the world; and who was only forced to spill them by being made to laugh. All the animals with all their antics passed before him and, like Queen Victoria, he was not amused. He collapsed at last before an eel who stood delicately balanced on the tip of its tail, doubtless with a rather desperate dignity. Any amount of fine fantastic literature might be made out of that fable. There is philosophy in that vision of the dry world before the beatific Deluge of laughter. There is imagination in the mountainous monster erupting like an aqueous volcano; there is plenty of fun in the thought of his goggling visage as the pelican or the penguin passed by. Anyhow the frog laughed; but the folk-lore student remains grave.
Moreover, even where the fables are inferior as art, they cannot be properly judged by science; still less properly judged as science. Some myths are very crude and queer like the early drawings of children; but the child is trying to draw. It is none the less an error to treat his drawing as if it were a diagram, or intended to be a diagram. The student cannot make a scientific statement about the savage, because the savage is not making a scientific statement about the world. He is saying something quite different; what might be called the gossip of the gods. We may say, if we like, that it is believed before there is time to examine it. It would be truer to say it is accepted before there is time to believe it.
I confess I doubt the whole theory of the dissemination of myths or (as it commonly is) of one myth. It is true that something in our nature and conditions makes many stories similar; but each of them may be original. One man does not borrow the story from the other man, though he may tell it from the same motive as the other man. It would be easy to apply the whole argument about legend to literature; and turn it into a vulgar monomania of plagiarism. I would undertake to trace a notion like that of the Golden Bough through individual modern novels as easily as through communal and antiquated myths. I would undertake to find something like a bunch of flowers figuring again and again from the fatal bouquet of Becky Sharpe to the spray of roses sent by the Princess of Ruritania. But though these flowers may spring from the same soil, it is not the same faded flower that is flung from hand to hand. Those flowers are always fresh.
The true origin of all the myths has been discovered much too often. There are too many keys to mythology, as there are too many cryptograms in Shakespeare. Everything is phallic; everything is totemistic; everything is seed-time and harvest; everything is ghosts and grave-offerings; everything is the golden bough of sacrifice; everything is the sun and moon; everything is everything. Every folk-lore student who knew a little more than his own monomania, every man of wider reading and critical culture like Andrew Lang, has practically confessed that the bewilderment of these things left his brain spinning. Yet the whole trouble comes from a man trying to look at these stories from the outside, as if they were scientific objects. He has only to look at them from the inside, and ask himself how he would begin a story. A story may start with anything and go anywhere. It may start with a bird without the bird being a totem; it may start with the sun without being a solar myth. It is said there are only ten plots in the world; and there will certainly be common and recurrent elements. Set ten thousand children talking at once, and telling tarradiddles about what they did in the wood, and it will not be hard to find parallels suggesting sun-worship or animal worship. Some of the stories may be pretty and some silly and some perhaps dirty; but they can only be judged as stories. In the modern dialect, they can only be judged aesthetically. It is strange that aesthetics, or mere feeling, which is now allowed to usurp where it has no rights at all, to wreck reason with pragmatism and morals with anarchy, is apparently not allowed to give a purely aesthetic judgement on what is obviously a purely aesthetic question. We may be fanciful about everything except fairy-tales.
Now the first fact is that the most simple people have the most subtle ideas. Everybody ought to know that, for everybody has been a child. Ignorant as a child is, he knows more than he can say and feels not only atmospheres but fine shades. And in this matter there are several fine shades. Nobody understands it who has not had what can only be called the ache of the artist to find some sense and some story in the beautiful things he sees; his hunger for secrets and his anger at any tower or tree escaping with its tale untold. He feels that nothing is perfect unless it is personal. Without that the blind unconscious beauty of the world stands in its garden like a headless statue. One need only be a very minor poet to have wrestled with the tower or the tree until it spoke like a titan or a dryad. It is often said that pagan mythology was a personification of the powers of nature. The phrase is true in a sense, but it is very unsatisfactory; because it implies that the forces are abstractions and the personification is artificial. Myths are not allegories. Natural powers are not in this case abstractions. It is not as if there were a God of Gravitation. There may be a genius of the waterfall; but not of mere falling, even less than of mere water. The impersonation is not of something impersonal. The point is that the personality perfects the water with significance. Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens, so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold. The test therefore is purely imaginative. But imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.
Now we do not comprehend this process in ourselves, far less in our most remote fellow-creatures. And the danger of these things being classified is that they may seem to be comprehended. A really fine work of folklore, like The Golden Bough, will leave too many readers with the idea, for instance, that this or that story of a giant’s or wizard’s heart in a casket or a cave only ‘means’ some stupid and static superstition called ‘the external soul.’ But we do not know what these things mean, simply because we do not know what we ourselves mean when we are moved by them. Suppose somebody in a story says ‘Pluck this flower and a princess will die in a castle beyond the sea,’ we do not know why something stirs in the subconsciousness, or why what is impossible seems almost inevitable. Suppose we read ‘And in the hour when the king extinguished the candle his ships were wrecked far away on the coast of Hebrides.’ We do not know why the imagination has accepted that image before the reason can reject it; or why such correspondences seem really to correspond to something in the soul. Very deep things in our nature, some dim sense of the dependence of great things upon small, some dark suggestion that the things nearest to us stretch far beyond our power, some sacramental feeling of the magic in material substances, and many more emotions past fading out, are in an idea like that of the external soul. The power even in the myths of savages is like the power in the metaphors of poets. The soul of such a metaphor is often very emphatically an external soul. The best critics have remarked that in the best poets the simile is often a picture that seems quite separate from the text. It is as irrelevant as the remote castle to the flower or the Hebridean coast to the candle. Shelley compares the skylark to a young woman on a turret, to a rose embedded in thick foliage, to a series of things that seem to be about as unlike a skylark in the sky as anything we can imagine. I suppose the most potent piece of pure magic in English literature is the much-quoted passage in Keats’s Nightingale about the casements opening on the perilous foam. And nobody notices that the image seems to come from nowhere; that it appears abruptly after some almost equally irrelevant remarks about Ruth; and that it has nothing in the world to do with the subject of the poem. If there is one place in the world where nobody could reasonably expect to find a nightingale, it is on a window-sill at the seaside. But it is only in the same sense that nobody would expect to find a giant’s heart in a casket under the sea. Now, it would be very dangerous to classify the metaphors of the poets. When Shelley says that the cloud will rise ‘like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,’ it would be quite possible to call the first a case of the coarse primitive birth-myth and the second a survival of the ghost-worship which became ancestor-worship. But it is the wrong way of dealing with a cloud; and is liable to leave the learned in the condition of Polonius, only too ready to think it like a weasel, or very like a whale.
Two facts follow from this psychology of day-dreams, which must be kept in mind throughout their development in mythologies and even religions. First, these imaginative impressions are often strictly local. So far from being abstractions turned into allegories, they are often images almost concentrated into idols. The poet feels the mystery of a particular forest; not of the science of afforestation or the department of woods and forests. He worships the peak of a particular mountain, not the abstract idea of altitude. So we find the god is not merely water but often one special river; he may be the sea because the sea is single like a stream; the river that runs round the world. Ultimately doubtless many deities are enlarged into elements; but they are something more than omnipresent. Apollo does not merely dwell wherever the sun shines; his home is on the rock of Delphi. Diana is great enough to be in three places at once, earth and heaven and hell, but greater is Diana of the Ephesians. This localised feeling has its lowest form in the mere fetish or talisman, such as millionaires put on their motor-cars. But it can also harden into something like a high and serious religion, where it is connected with high and serious duties; into the gods of the city or even the gods of the hearth.
The second consequence is this; that in these pagan cults there is every shade of sincerity—and insincerity. In what sense exactly did an Athenian really think he had to sacrifice to Pallas Athena? What scholar is really certain of the answer? In what sense did Dr. Johnson really think that he had to touch all the posts in the street or that he had to collect orange-peel? In what sense does a child really think that he ought to step on every alternate paving-stone? Two things are at least fairly clear. First, in simpler and less self-conscious times these forms could become more solid without really becoming more serious. Day-dreams could be acted in broad daylight, with more liberty of artistic expression; but still perhaps with something of the light step of the somnambulist. Wrap Dr. Johnson in an antique mantle, crown him (by his kind permission) with a garland, and he will move in state under those ancient skies of morning; touching a series of sacred posts carved with the heads of the strange terminal gods, that stand at the limits of the land and of the life of man. Make the child free of the marbles and mosaics of some classic temples to play on a whole floor inlaid with squares of black and white; and he will willingly make this fulfilment of his idle and drifting daydream the clear field for a grave and graceful dance. But the posts and the paving-stones are little more and little less real than they are under modern limits. They are not really much more serious for being taken seriously. They have the sort of sincerity that they always had; the sincerity of art as a symbol that expresses very real spiritualities under the surface of life. But they are only sincere in the same sense as art; not sincere in the same sense as morality. The eccentric’s collection of orange-peel may turn to oranges in a Mediterranean festival or to golden apples in a Mediterranean myth. But they are never on the same plane with the difference between giving the orange to a blind beggar and carefully placing the orange-peel so that the beggar may fall and break his leg. Between these two things there is a difference of kind and not of degree. The child does not think it wrong to step on the paving-stone as he thinks it wrong to step on the dog’s tail. And it is very certain that whatever jest or sentiment or fancy first set Johnson touching the wooden posts, he never touched wood with any of the feeling with which he stretched out his hands to the timber of that terrible tree, which was the death of God and the life of man.
As already noted, this does not mean that there was no reality or even no religious sentiment in such a mood. As a matter of fact the Catholic Church has taken over with uproarious success the whole of this popular business of giving people local legends and lighter ceremonial movements. In so far as all this sort of paganism was innocent and in touch with nature, there is no reason why it should not be patronised by patron saints as much as by pagan gods. And in any case there are degrees of seriousness in the most natural make-believe. There is all the difference between fancying there are fairies in the wood, which often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really frightening ourselves until we walk a mile rather than pass a house we have told ourselves is haunted. Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul. We all understand that and the pagans understood it. The point is that paganism did not really stir the soul except with these doubts and fancies, with the consequence that we to-day can have little beyond doubts and fancies about paganism. All the best critics agree that all the greatest poets, in pagan Hellas for example, had an attitude towards their gods which is quite queer and puzzling to men in the Christian era. There seems to be an admitted conflict between the god and the man; but everybody seems to be doubtful about which is the hero and which is the villain. This doubt does not merely apply to a doubter like Euripides in the Bacchae; it applies to a moderate conservative like Sophocles in the Antigone; or even to a regular Tory and reactionary like Aristophanes in the Frogs. Sometimes it would seem that the Greeks believed above all things in reverence, only they had nobody to revere. But the point of the puzzle is this, that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that the whole thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
This is the mighty and branching tree called mythology which ramifies round the whole world, whose remote branches under separate skies bear like coloured birds the costly idols of Asia and the half-baked fetishes of Africa and the fairy kings and princesses of the folk-tales of the forest, and buried amid vines and olives the Lares of the Latins, and carried on the clouds of Olympus the buoyant supremacy of the gods of Greece. These are the myths: and he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men. But he who has most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion. They satisfy some of the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality. But though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say ‘I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,’ etc., as he stands up and says ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty,’ and the rest of the Apostles Creed. Many believed in some and not in others, or more in some and less in others, or only in a very vague poetical sense in any. There was no moment when they were all collected into an orthodox order which men would fight and be tortured to keep intact. Still less did anybody ever say in that fashion: ‘I believe in Odin and Thor and Freya,’ for outside Olympus even the Olympian order grows cloudy and chaotic. It seems clear to me that Thor was not a god at all but a hero. Nothing resembling a religion would picture anybody resembling a god as groping like a pigmy in a great cavern, that turned out to be the glove of a giant. That is the glorious ignorance called adventure. Thor may have been a great adventurer; but to call him a god is like trying to compare Jehovah with Jack and the Beanstalk. Odin seems to have been a real barbarian chief, possibly of the Dark Ages after Christianity. Polytheism fades away at its fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories; it is not a thing like monotheism as held by serious monotheists. Again it does satisfy the need to cry out on some uplifted name or some noble memory in moments that are themselves noble and uplifted; such as the birth of a child or the saving of a city. But the name was so used by many to whom it was only a name. Finally it did satisfy, or rather it partially satisfied, a thing very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of surrendering something as the portion of the unknown powers; of pouring of wine upon the ground, of throwing a ring into the sea; in a word, of sacrifice. It is the wise and worthy idea of not taking our advantage to the full; of putting something in the other balance to ballast our dubious pride, of paying tithes to nature for our land. This deep truth of the danger of insolence, or being too big for our boots, runs through all the great Greek tragedies and makes them great. But it runs side by side with an almost cryptic agnosticism about the real nature of the gods to be propitiated. Where that gesture of surrender is most magnificent, as among the great Greeks, there is really much more idea that the man will be the better for losing the ox than that the god will be the better for getting it. It is said that in its grosser forms there are often actions grotesquely suggestive of the god really eating the sacrifice. But this fact is falsified by the error that I put first in this note on mythology. It is misunderstanding the psychology of day-dreams. A child pretending there is a goblin in a hollow tree will do a crude and material thing, like leaving a piece of cake for him. A poet might do a more dignified and elegant thing, like bringing to the god fruits as well as flowers. But the degree of seriousness in both acts may be the same or it may vary in almost any degree. The crude fancy is no more a creed than the ideal fancy is a creed. Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had ignorantly worshipped.
The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers. Mythology, then, sought god through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty, in the sense in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque ugliness. But the imagination has its own laws and therefore its own triumphs, which neither logicians nor men of science can understand. It remained true to that imaginative instinct through a thousand extravagances, through every crude cosmic pantomime of a pig eating the moon or the world being cut out of a cow, through all the dizzy convolutions and mystic malformations of Asiatic art, through all the stark and staring rigidity of Egyptian and Assyrian portraiture, through every kind of cracked mirror of mad art that seemed to deform the world and displace the sky, it remained true to something about which there can be no argument; something that makes it possible for some artist of some school to stand suddenly still before that particular deformity and say, ‘My dream has come true.’ Therefore do we all in fact feel that pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are wise enough not to inquire what they suggest. Therefore we all feel what is meant by Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, until some prig of a pessimist or progressive person explains what it means. Therefore we all know the meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told. In this sense it is true that it is the ignorant who accept myths, but only because it is the ignorant who appreciate poems. Imagination has its own laws and triumphs; and a tremendous power began to clothe its images, whether images in the mind or in the mud, whether in the bamboo of the South Sea Islands or the marble of the mountains of Hellas. But there was always a trouble in the triumph, which in these pages I have tried to analyse in vain; but perhaps I might in conclusion state it thus.
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and even maim him for ever. Henceforth being merely secular would be a servitude and an inhibition. If man cannot pray he is gagged; if he cannot kneel he is in irons. We therefore feel throughout the whole of paganism a curious double feeling of trust and distrust. When the man makes the gesture of salutation and of sacrifice, when he pours out the libation or lifts up the sword, he knows he is doing a worthy and a virile thing. He knows he is doing one of the things for which a man was made. His imaginative experiment is therefore justified. But precisely because it began with imagination, there is to the end something of mockery in it, and especially in the object of it. This mockery, in the more intense moments of the intellect, becomes the almost intolerable irony of Greek tragedy. There seems a disproportion between the priest and the altar or between the altar and the god. The priest seems more solemn and almost more sacred than the god. All the order of the temple is solid and sane and satisfactory to certain parts of our nature; except the very centre of it, which seems strangely mutable and dubious, like a dancing flame. It is the first thought round which the whole has been built; and the first thought is still a fancy and almost a frivolity. In that strange place of meeting, the man seems more statuesque than the statue. He himself can stand for ever in the noble and natural attitude of the statue of the Praying Boy. But whatever name be written on the pedestal, whether Zeus or Ammon or Apollo, the god whom he worships is Proteus.
The Praying Boy may be said to express a need rather than to satisfy a need. It is by a normal and necessary action that his hands are lifted; but it is no less a parable that his hands are empty. About the nature of that need there will be more to say; but at this point it may be said that perhaps after all this true instinct, that prayer and sacrifice are a liberty and an enlargement, refers back to that vast and half-forgotten conception of universal fatherhood, which we have already seen everywhere fading from the morning sky. This is true; and yet it is not all the truth. There remains an indestructible instinct, in the poet as represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely wrong in localising his God. It is something in the soul of poetry if not of piety. And the greatest of poets, when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us the universe or the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger language, a local habitation and a name. No poet is merely a pantheist; those who are counted most pantheistic, like Shelley, start with some local and particular image as the pagans did. After all, Shelley wrote of the skylark because it was a skylark. You could not issue an imperial or international translation of it for use in South America, in which it was changed to an ostrich. So the mythological imagination moves as it were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places found. So far could the lonely imagination lead, and we must turn later to the lonely reason. Nowhere along this road did the two ever travel together.
That is where all these things differed from religion or the reality in which these different dimensions met in a sort of solid. They differed from the reality not in what they looked like but in what they were. A picture may look like a landscape; it may look in every detail exactly like a landscape. The only detail in which it differs is that it is not a landscape. The difference is only that which divides a portrait of Queen Elizabeth from Queen Elizabeth. Only in this mythical and mystical world the portrait could exist before the person; and the portrait was therefore more vague and doubtful. But anybody who has felt and fed on the atmosphere of these myths will know what I mean, when I say that in one sense they did not really profess to be realities. The pagans had dreams about realities; and they would have been the first to admit, in their own words, that some came through the gate of ivory and others through the gate of horn. The dreams do indeed tend to be very vivid dreams when they touch on those tender or tragic things, which can really make a sleeper awaken with the sense that his heart has been broken in his sleep. They tend continually to hover over certain passionate themes of meeting and parting, of a life that ends in death or a death that is the beginning of life. Demeter wanders over a stricken world looking for a stolen child; Isis stretches out her arms over the earth in vain to gather the limbs of Osiris; and there is lamentation upon the hills for Atys and through the woods for Adonis. There mingles with all such mourning the mystical and profound sense that death can be a deliverer and an appeasement; that such death gives us a divine blood for a renovating river and that all good is found in gathering the broken body of the god. We may truly call these foreshadowing; so long as we remember that foreshadowings are shadows. And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces shape but not texture. These things were something like the real thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were different. Saying something is like a dog is another way of saying it is not a dog; and it is in this sense of identity that a myth is not a man. Nobody really thought of Isis as a human being, nobody really thought of Demeter as a historical character, nobody thought of Adonis as the founder of a Church. There was no idea that any one of them had changed the world; but rather that their recurrent death and life bore the sad and beautiful burden of the changelessness of the world. Not one of them was a revolution, save in the sense of the revolution of the sun and moon. Their whole meaning is missed if we do not see that they mean the shadows that we are and the shadows that we pursue. In certain sacrificial and communal aspects they naturally suggest what sort of a god might satisfy them; but they do not profess to be satisfied. Anyone who says they do is a bad judge of poetry.
Those who talk about Pagan Christs have less sympathy with Paganism than with Christianity. Those who call these cults ‘religions,’ and ‘compare’ them with the certitude and challenge of the Church have much less appreciation than we have of what made heathenism human, or of why classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song. It is no very human tenderness for the hungry to prove that hunger is the same as food. It is no very genial understanding of youth to argue that hope destroys the need for happiness. And it is utterly unreal to argue that these images in the mind, admired entirely in the abstract, were even in the same world with a living man and a living polity that were worshipped because they were concrete. We might as well say that a boy playing at robbers is the same as a man in his first day in the trenches; or that boy’s first fancies about ‘the not impossible she’ are the same as the sacrament of marriage. They are fundamentally different exactly where they are superficially similar; we might almost say they are not the same even when they are the same. They are only different because one is real and the other is not. I do not mean merely that I myself believe that one is true and the other is not. I mean that one was never meant to be true in the same sense as the other. The sense in which it was meant to be true I have tried to suggest vaguely here, but it is undoubtedly very subtle and almost indescribable. It is so subtle that the students who profess to put it up as a rival to our religion miss the whole meaning and purport of their own study. We know better than the scholars, even those of us who are no scholars, what was in that hollow cry that went forth over the dead Adonis and why the Great Mother had a daughter wedded to death. We have entered more deeply than they into the Eleusinian Mysteries and have passed a higher grade, where gate within gate guarded the wisdom of Orpheus. We know the meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret revealed to the perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet saying ‘These things are.’ It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist crying, ‘Why cannot these things be?’
VI
THE DEMONS AND THE PHILOSOPHERS
I have dwelt at some little length on this imaginative sort of paganism, which has crowded the world with temples and is everywhere the parent of popular festivity. For the central history of civilisation, as I see it, consists of two further stages before the final stage of Christendom. The first was the struggle between this paganism and something less worthy than itself, and the second the process by which it grew in itself less worthy. In this very varied and often very vague polytheism there was a weakness of original sin. Pagan gods were depicted as tossing men like dice; and indeed they are loaded dice. About sex especially men are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are born mad. They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity. This disproportion dragged down the winged fancies; and filled the end of paganism with a mere filth and litter of spawning gods. But the first point to realise is that this sort of paganism had an early collision with another sort of paganism; and that the issue of that essentially spiritual struggle really determined the history of the world. In order to understand it we must pass to a review of the other kind of paganism. It can be considered much more briefly; indeed there is a very real sense in which the less that is said about it the better. If we have called the first sort of mythology the day-dream, we might very well call the second sort of mythology the nightmare.
Superstition recurs in all ages, and especially in rationalistic ages. I remember defending the religious tradition against a whole luncheon table of distinguished agnostics; and before the end of our conversation every one of them had procured from his pocket, or exhibited on his watch-chain, some charm or talisman from which he admitted that he was never separated. I was the only person present who had neglected to provide himself with a fetish. Superstition recurs in a rationalist age because it rests on something which, if not identical with rationalism, is not unconnected with scepticism. It is at least very closely connected with agnosticism. It rests on something that is really a very human and intelligible sentiment, like the local invocations of the numen in popular paganism. But it is an agnostic sentiment, for it rests on two feelings: first that we do not really know the laws of the universe; and second that they may be very different to all we call reason. Such men realise the real truth that enormous things do often turn upon tiny things. When a whisper comes, from tradition or what not, that one particular tiny thing is the key or clue, something deep and not altogether senseless in human nature tells them that it is not unlikely. This feeling exists in both the forms of paganism here under consideration. But when we come to the second form of it, we find it transformed and filled with another and more terrible spirit.
In dealing with the lighter thing called mythology, I have said little about the most disputable aspect of it; the extent to which such invocation of the spirits of the sea or the elements can indeed call spirits from the vasty deep; or rather, (as the Shakespearean scoffer put it) whether the spirits come when they are called. I believe that I am right in thinking that this problem, practical as it sounds, did not play a dominant part in the poetical business of mythology. But I think it even more obvious, on the evidence, that things of that sort have sometimes appeared, even if they were only appearances. But when we come to the world of superstition, in a more subtle sense, there is a shade of difference; a deepening and a darkening shade. Doubtless most popular superstition is as frivolous as any popular mythology. Men do not believe as a dogma that God would throw a thunderbolt at them for walking under a ladder; more often they amuse themselves with the not very laborious exercise of walking round it. There is no more in it than what I have already adumbrated; a sort of airy agnosticism about the possibilities of so strange a world. But there is another sort of superstition that does definitely look for results; what might be called a realistic superstition. And with that the question of whether spirits do answer or do appear becomes much more serious. As I have said, it seems to me pretty certain that they sometimes do; but about that there is a distinction that has been the beginning of much evil in the world. Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them. And indeed that popular phase exactly expresses the point. The gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective; that it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an assignation. But the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that he had broken them.
In the accounts given us of many rude or savage races we gather that the cult of demons often came after the cult of deities, and even after the cult of one single and supreme deity. It may be suspected that in almost all such places the higher deity is felt to be too far off for appeal in certain petty matters, and men invoke the spirits because they are in a more literal sense familiar spirits. But with the idea of employing the demons who get things done, a new idea appears more worthy of the demons. It may indeed be truly described as the idea of being worthy of the demons; of making oneself fit for their fastidious and exacting society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the hidden spring that works the mysterious machinery of the world. And there is after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a monkey trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world. This is the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world. For most cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is artificial and even artistic, a sort of art for art’s sake. Men do not do it because they do not think it horrible; but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible. They wish, in the most literal sense, to sup on horrors. That is why it is often found that rude races like the Australian natives are not cannibals; while much more refined and intelligent races, like the New Zealand Maories, occasionally are. They are refined and intelligent enough to indulge sometimes in a self-conscious diabolism. But if we could understand their minds, or even really understand their language, we should probably find that they were not acting as ignorant, that is as innocent cannibals. They are not doing it because they do not think it wrong, but precisely because they do think it wrong. They are acting like a Parisian decadent at a Black Mass. But the Black Mass has to hide underground from the presence of the real Mass. In other words, the demons have really been in hiding since the coming of Christ on earth. The cannibalism of the higher barbarians is in hiding from the civilisation of the white man. But before Christendom, and especially outside Europe, this was not always so. In the ancient world the demons often wandered abroad like dragons. They could be positively and publicly enthroned as gods. Their enormous images could be set up in public temples in the centre of populous cities. And all over the world the traces can be found of this striking and solid fact, so curiously overlooked by the moderns who speak of all such evil as primitive and early in evolution, that as a matter of fact some of the very highest civilisations of the world were the very places where the horns of Satan were exalted, not only to the stars but in the face of the sun. Take for example the Aztecs and American Indians of the ancient empires of Mexico and Peru. They were at least as elaborate as Egypt or China and only less lively than that central civilisation which is our own. But those who criticise that central civilisation (which is always their own civilisation) have a curious habit of not merely doing their legitimate duty in condemning its crimes, but of going out of their way to idealise its victims. They always assume that before the advent of Europe there was nothing anywhere but Eden. And Swinburne, in that spirited chorus of the nations in ‘Songs before Sunrise,’ used an expression about Spain in her South American conquests which always struck me as very strange. He said something about ‘her sins and sons through sinless lands dispersed,’ and how they ‘made accursed the name of man and thrice accursed the name of God.’ It may be reasonable enough that he should say the Spaniards were sinful, but why in the world should he say that the South Americans were sinless? Why should he have supposed that continent to be exclusively populated by archangels or saints perfect in heaven? It would be a strong thing to say of the most respectable neighbourhood; but when we come to think of what we really do know of that society the remark is rather funny. We know that the sinless priests of this sinless people worshipped sinless gods, who accepted as the nectar and ambrosia of their sunny paradise nothing but incessant human sacrifice accompanied by horrible torments. We may note also in the mythology of this American civilisation that element of reversal or violence against instinct of which Dante wrote; which runs backwards everywhere through the unnatural religion of the demons. It is notable not only in ethics but in aesthetics. A South American idol was made as ugly as possible, as a Greek image was made as beautiful as possible. They were seeking the secret of power, by working backwards against their own nature and the nature of things. There was always a sort of yearning to carve at last, in gold or granite or the dark red timber of the forests, a face at which the sky itself would break like a cracked mirror.
In any case it is clear enough that the painted and gilded civilisation of tropical America systematically indulged in human sacrifice. It is by no means clear, so far as I know, that the Eskimos ever indulged in human sacrifice. They were not civilised enough. They were too closely imprisoned by the white winter and the endless dark. Chill penury repressed their noble rage and froze the genial current of the soul. It was in brighter days and broader daylight that the noble rage is found unmistakably raging. It was in richer and more instructed lands that the genial current flowed on the altars, to be drunk by great gods wearing goggling and grinning masks and called on in terror or torment by long cacophonous names that sound like laughter in hell. A warmer climate and a more scientific cultivation were needed to bring forth these blooms; to draw up towards the sun the large leaves and flamboyant blossoms that gave their gold and crimson and purple to that garden, which Swinburne compares to the Hesperides. There was at least no doubt about the dragon.
I do not raise in this connection the special controversy about Spain and Mexico; but I may remark in passing that it resembles exactly the question that must in some sense be raised afterwards about Rome and Carthage. In both cases there has been a queer habit among the English of always siding against the Europeans, and representing the rival civilisation, in Swinburne’s phrase, as sinless; when its sins were obviously crying or rather screaming to heaven. For Carthage also was a high civilisation, indeed a much more highly civilised civilisation. And Carthage also founded that civilisation on a religion of fear, sending up everywhere the smoke of human sacrifice. Now it is very right to rebuke our own race or religion for falling short of our own standards and ideals. But it is absurd to pretend that they fell lower than the other races and religions that professed the very opposite standards and ideals. There is a very real sense in which the Christian is worse than the heathen, the Spaniard worse than the Red Indian, or even the Roman potentially worse than the Carthaginian. But there is only one sense in which he is worse; and that is not in being positively worse. The Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better.
This inverted imagination produces things of which it is better not to speak. Some of them indeed might almost be named without being known; for they are of that extreme evil which seems innocent to the innocent. They are too inhuman even to be indecent. But without dwelling much longer in these dark corners, it may be noted as not irrelevant here that certain anti-human antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic. There may be suspected as running through it everywhere, for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. People would understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth of children. The Hebrew prophets were perpetually protesting against the Hebrew race relapsing into an idolatry that involved such a war upon children; and it is probable enough that this abominable apostasy from the God of Israel has occasionally appeared in Israel since, in the form of what is called ritual murder; not of course by any representative of the religion of Judaism, but by individual and irresponsible diabolists who did happen to be Jews. This sense that the forces of evil especially threaten childhood is found again in the enormous popularity of the Child Martyr of the Middle Ages. Chaucer did but give another version of a very national English legend, when he conceived the wickedest of all possible witches as the dark alien woman watching behind her high lattice and heading, like the babble of a brook down the stony street, the singing of little St. Hugh.
Anyhow the part of such speculations that concerns this story centered especially round that eastern end of the Mediterranean, where the nomads had turned gradually into traders and had begun to trade with the whole world. Indeed in the sense of trade and travel and colonial extension, it already had something like an empire of the whole world. Its purple dye, the emblem of its rich pomp and luxury, had steeped the wares which were sold far away amid the last crags of Cornwall and the sails that entered the silence of tropic seas amid all the mystery of Africa. It might be said truly to have painted the map purple. It was already a world-wide success, when the princes of Tyre would hardly have troubled to notice that one of their princesses had condescended to marry the chief of some tribe called Judah; when the merchants of its African outpost would only have curled their bearded and Semitic lips with a slight smile at the mention of a village called Rome. And indeed no two things could have seemed more distant from each other, not only in space but in Spirit, than the monotheism of the Palestinian tribe and the very virtues of the small Italian republic. There was but one thing between them; and the thing which divided them has united them. Very various and incompatible were the things that could be loved by the consuls of Rome and the prophets of Israel; but they were at one in what they hated. It is very easy in both cases to represent that hatred as something merely hateful. It is easy enough to make a merely harsh and inhuman figure either of Elijah raving above the slaughter of Carmel or Cato thundering against the amnesty of Africa. These men had their limitations and their local passions; but this criticism of them is unimaginative and therefore unreal. It leaves out something, something immense and intermediate, facing east and west and calling up this passion in its eastern and western enemies; and that something is the first subject of this chapter.
The civilisation that centered in Tyre and Sidon was above all things practical. It has left little in the way of art and nothing in the way of poetry. But it prided itself upon being very efficient; and it followed in its philosophy and religion that strange and sometimes secret train of thought which we have already noted in those who look for immediate effects. There is always in such a mentality an idea that there is a short cut to the secret of all success; something that would shock the world by this sort of shameless thoroughness. They believed, in the appropriate modern phrase, in people who delivered the goods. In their dealings with their god Moloch, they themselves were always careful to deliver the goods. It was an interesting transaction, upon which we shall have to touch more than once in the rest of the narrative; it is enough to say here that it involved the theory I have suggested, about a certain attitude towards children. This was what called up against it in simultaneous fury the servant of one God in Palestine and the guardians of all the household gods in Rome. This is what challenged two things naturally so much divided by every sort of distance and disunion, whose union was to save the world.
I have called the fourth and final division of the spiritual elements into which I should divide heathen humanity by the name of The Philosophers. I confess that it covers in my mind much that would generally be classified otherwise; and that what are here called philosophies are very often called religions. I believe however that my own description will be found to be much the more realistic and not the less respectful. But we must first take philosophy in its purest and clearest form that we may trace its normal outline; and that is to be found in the world of the purest and clearest outlines, that culture of the Mediterranean of which we have been considering the mythologies and idolatries in the last two chapters.
Polytheism, or that aspect of paganism, was never to the pagan what Catholicism is to the Catholic. It was never a view of the universe satisfying all sides of life; a complete and complex truth with something to say about everything. It was only a satisfaction of one side of the soul of man, even if we call it the religious side; and I think it is truer to call it the imaginative side. But this it did satisfy; in the end it satisfied it to satiety. All that world was a tissue of interwoven tales and cults, and there ran in and out of it, as we have already seen, that black thread among its more blameless colours; the darker paganism that was really diabolism. But we all know that this did not mean that all pagan men thought of nothing but pagan gods. Precisely because mythology only satisfied one mood, they turned in other moods to something totally different. But it is very important to realise that it was totally different. It was too different to be inconsistent. It was so alien that it did not clash. While a mob of people were pouring on a public holiday to the feast of Adonis or the games in honour of Apollo, this or that man would prefer to stop at home and think out a little theory about the nature of things. Sometimes his hobby would even take the form of thinking about the nature of God; or even in that sense about the nature of the gods. But he very seldom thought of pitting his nature of the gods against the gods of nature.
It is necessary to insist on this abstraction in the first student of abstractions. He was not so much antagonistic as absent-minded. His hobby might be the universe; but at first the hobby was as private as if it had been numismatics or playing draughts. And even when his wisdom came to be a public possession, and almost a political situation, it was very seldom on the same plane as the popular and religious institutions. Aristotle, with his colossal common sense, was perhaps the greatest of all philosophers; certainly the most practical of all philosophies. But Aristotle would no more have set up the Absolute side by side with the Apollo of Delphi, as a similar or rival religion, than Archimedes would have thought of setting up the lever as a sort of idol or fetish to be substituted for the Palladium of the city. Or we might as well imagine Euclid building an altar to an isosceles triangle, or offering sacrifices to the square of the hypotenuse. The one man meditated on metaphysics as the other man did on mathematics; for the love of truth or for curiosity or for the fun of the thing. But that sort of fun never seems to have interfered very much with the other sort of fun; the fun of dancing or singing to celebrate some rascally romance about Zeus becoming a bull or a swan. It is perhaps the proof of a certain superficiality and even insincerity about the popular polytheism, that men could be philosophers and even sceptics without disturbing it. These thinkers could move the foundations of the world without altering even the outline of that coloured cloud that hung above it in the air.
For the thinkers did move the foundations of the world, even when a curious compromise seemed to prevent them from moving the foundations of the city. The two great philosophers of antiquity do indeed appear to us as defenders of sane and even of sacred ideas; their maxims often read like the answers to sceptical questions too completely answered to be always recorded. Aristotle annihilated a hundred anarchists and nature-worshipping cranks by the fundamental statement that man is a political animal. Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism, as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on the equally fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men exist. Plato however seemed sometimes almost to fancy that ideas exist as men do not exist; or that the men need hardly be considered where they conflict with the ideas. He had something of the social sentiment that we call Fabian in his ideal of fitting the citizen to the city. Like an imaginary head to an ideal hat; and great and glorious as he remains, he has been the Father of all faddists. Aristotle anticipated more fully the sacramental sanity that was to combine the body and the soul of things; for he considered the nature of men as well as the nature of morals, and looked to the eyes as well as to the light. But though these great men were in that sense constructive and conservative, they belonged to a world where thought was free to the point of being fanciful. Many other great intellects did indeed follow them, some exalting an abstract vision of virtue, others following more rationalistically the necessity of the human pursuit of happiness. The former had the name of Stoics; and their name has passed into a proverb for what is indeed one of the main moral ideals of mankind: that of strengthening the mind itself until it is of a texture to resist calamity or even pain. But it is admitted that a great number of the philosophers degenerated into what we still call sophists. They became a sort of professional sceptics who went about asking uncomfortable questions, and were handsomely paid for making themselves a nuisance to normal people. It was perhaps an accidental resemblance to such questioning quacks that was responsible for the unpopularity of the great Socrates; whose death might seem to contradict the suggestion of the permanent truce between the philosophers and the gods. But Socrates did not die as a monotheist who denounced polytheism; certainly not as a prophet who denounced idols. It is clear to anyone reading between the lines that there was some notion, right or wrong, of a purely personal influence affecting morals and perhaps politics. The general compromise remained, whether it was that the Greeks thought their myths a joke or that they thought their theories a joke. There was never any collision in which one really destroyed the other, and there was never any combination in which one was really reconciled with the other. They certainly did not work together; if anything the philosopher was a rival of the priest. But both seemed to have accepted a sort of separation of functions and remained parts of the same social system. Another important tradition descends from Pythagoras; who is significant because he stands nearest to the Oriental mystics who must be considered in their turn. He taught a sort of mysticism of mathematics, that number is the ultimate reality; but he also seems to have taught the transmigration of souls like the Brahmins; and to have left to his followers certain traditional tricks of vegetarianism and water-drinking very common among the eastern sages, especially those who figure in fashionable drawing-rooms, like those of the later Roman Empire. But in passing to eastern sages, and the somewhat different atmosphere of the east, we may approach a rather important truth by other path.
One of the great philosophers said that it would be well if philosophers were kings, or kings were philosophers. He spoke as of something too good to be true; but, as a matter of fact, it not unfrequently was true. A certain type, perhaps too little noticed in history, may really be called the royal philosopher. To begin with, apart from actual royalty, it did occasionally become possible for the sage, though he was not what we call a religious founder, to be something like a political founder. And the great example of this, one of the very greatest in the world, will with the very thought of it carry us thousands of miles across the vast spaces of Asia to that very wonderful and in some ways that very wise world of ideas and institutions, which we dismiss somewhat cheaply when we talk of China. Men have served many very strange gods; and trusted themselves loyally to many ideals and even idols. China is a society that has really chosen to believe in intellect. It has taken intellect seriously; and it may be that it stands alone in the world. From a very early age it faced the dilemma of the king and the philosopher by actually appointing a philosopher to advise the king. It made a public institution out of a private individual, who had nothing in the world to do but to be intellectual. It had and has, of course, many other things on the same pattern. It creates all ranks and privileges by public examination; it has nothing that we call an aristocracy; it is a democracy dominated by an intelligensia. But the point here is that it had philosophers to advise kings; and one of those philosophers must have been a great philosopher and a great statesman.
Confucius was not a religious founder or even a religious teacher; possibly not even a religious man. He was not an atheist; he was apparently what we call an agnostic. But the really vital point is that it is utterly irrelevant to talk about his religion at all. It is like talking of theology as the first thing in the story of how Rowland Hill established the postal system or Baden Powell organised the Boy Scouts. Confucius was not there to bring a message from heaven to humanity, but to organise China; and he must have organised it exceedingly well. It follows that he dealt much with morals; but he bound them up strictly with manners. The peculiarity of his scheme and of his country, in which it contrasts with its great pendant the system of Christendom, is that he insisted on perpetuating an external life with all its forms, that outward continuity might preserve internal peace. Anyone who knows how much habit has to do with health, of mind as well as body, will see the truth in his idea. But he will also see that the ancestor-worship and the reverence for the Sacred Emperor were habits and not creeds. It is unfair to the great Confucius to say he was a religious founder. It is even unfair to him to say he was not a religious founder. It is as unfair as going out of one’s way to say that Jeremy Bentham was not a Christian martyr.
But there is a class of most interesting cases in which philosophers were kings, and not merely the friends of kings. The combination is not accidental. It has a great deal to do with this rather elusive question of the function of the philosopher. It contains in it some hint of why philosophy and mythology seldom came to an open rupture. It was not only because there was something a little frivolous about the mythology. It was also because there was something a little supercilious about the philosopher. He despised the myths, but he also despised the mob; and thought they suited each other. The pagan philosopher was seldom a man of the people, at any rate in spirit; he was seldom a democrat and often a bitter critic of democracy. He had about him an air of aristocratic and humane leisure; and his part was most easily played by men who happened to be in such a position. It was very easy and natural for a prince or a prominent person to play at being as philosophical as Hamlet or Theseus in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. And from very early ages we find ourselves in the presence of these princely intellectuals. In fact, we find one of them in the very first recorded ages of the world; sitting on the primeval throne that looked over ancient Egypt.
The most intense interest of the incident of Akenahten, commonly called the Heretic Pharaoh, lies in the fact that he was the one example, at any rate before Christian times, of one of these royal philosophers who set himself to fight popular mythology in the name of private philosophy. Most of them assumed the attitude of Marcus Aurelius, who is in many ways the model of this sort of monarch and sage. Marcus Aurelius has been blamed for tolerating the pagan amphitheatre or the Christian martyrdoms. But it was characteristic; for this sort of man really thought of popular religion just as he thought of popular circuses. Of him Professor Phillimore has profoundly said ‘a great and good man—and he knew it.’ The heretic Pharaoh had a philosophy more earnest and perhaps more humble. For there is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting. Anyhow, the Egyptian prince was simple enough to take his own philosophy seriously, and alone among such intellectual princes he affected a sort of coup d’etat; hurling down the high gods of Egypt with one imperial gesture and lifting up for all men, like a blazing mirror of monotheistic truth, the disc of the universal sun. He had other interesting ideas often to be found in such idealists. In the sense in which we speak of a Little Englander he was a Little Egypter. In art he was a realist because he was an idealist; for realism is more impossible than any other ideal. But after all there falls on him something of the shadow of Marcus Aurelius, stalked by the shadow of Professor Phillimore. That is the matter with this noble sort of prince is that he has nowhere quite escaped being something of a prig. Priggishness is so pungent a smell that it clings amid the faded spices even to an Egyptian mummy. That was the matter with the heretic Pharaoh, as with a good many other heretics, was that he probably never paused to ask himself whether there was anything in the popular beliefs and tales of people less educated than himself. And, as already suggested, there was something in them. There was a real human hunger in all that element of feature and locality, that procession of deities like enormous pet animals, in that unwearied watching at certain haunted spots, in all the many wanderings of mythology. Nature may not have the name of Isis; Isis may not be really looking for Osiris. But it is true that Nature is really looking for something; Nature is always looking for the supernatural. Something much more definite was to satisfy that need; but a dignified monarch with a disc of the sun did not satisfy it. The royal experiment failed amid a roaring reaction of popular superstitions, in which the priests rose on the shoulders of the people and ascended the throne of the kings.
The next great example I shall take of the princely sage is Gautama, the great Lord Buddha. I know he is not generally classed merely with the philosophers; but I am more and more convinced from all information that reaches me, that this is the real interpretation of his immense importance. He was by far the greatest and the best of these intellectuals born in the purple. His reaction was perhaps the noblest and most sincere of all the resultant actions of that combination of thinkers and of thrones. For his reaction was renunciation. Marcus Aurelius was content to say, with a refined irony, that even in a palace life could be lived well. The fierier Egyptian king concluded that it could be lived even better after a palace revolution. But the great Gautama was the only one of them who proved he could really do without his palace. One fell back on toleration and the other on revolution. But after all there is something more absolute about abdication. Abdication is perhaps the one really absolute action of an absolute monarch. The Indian prince, reared in Oriental luxury and pomp, deliberately went out and lived the life of a beggar. That is magnificent, but it is not war; that is, it is not necessarily a Crusade in the Christian sense. It does not decide the question of whether the life of a beggar was the life of a saint or the life of a philosopher. It does not decide whether this great man is really to go into the tub of Diogenes or the cave of St. Jerome. Now those who seem to be nearest to the study of Buddha, and certainly those who write most clearly and intelligently about him, convince me for one that he was simply a philosopher who founded a successful school of philosophy, and was turned into a sort of divus or sacred being merely by the more mysterious and unscientific atmosphere of all such traditions in Asia. So that it is necessary to say at this point a word about that invisible yet vivid border-line that we cross in passing from the Mediterranean into the mystery of the East.
Perhaps there are no things out of which we get so little of the truth as the truisms; especially when they are really true. We are all in the habit of saying certain things about Asia, which are true enough but which hardly help us because we do not understand their truth; as that Asia is old or looks to the past or is not progressive. Now it is true that Christendom is more progressive, in a sense that has very little to do with the rather provincial notion of an endless fuss of political improvement. Christendom does believe, for Christianity does believe, that man can eventually get somewhere, here or hereafter, or in various ways according to various doctrines. The world’s desire can somehow be satisfied as desires are satisfied, whether by a new life or an old love or some form of positive possession and fulfilment. For the rest, we all know there is a rhythm and not a mere progress in things, that things rise and fall; only with us the rhythm is a fairly free and incalculable rhythm. For most of Asia the rhythm has hardened into a recurrence. It is no longer merely a rather topsy-turvy sort of world; it is a wheel. What has happened to all those highly intelligent and highly civilised peoples is that they have been caught up in a sort of cosmic rotation, of which the hollow hub is really nothing. In that sense the worst part of existence is that it may just as well go on like that forever. That is what we really mean when we say that Asia is old or unprogressive or looking backwards. That is why we see even her curved swords as arcs broken from that blinding wheel; why we see her serpentine ornament as returning everywhere, like a snake that is never slain. It has very little to do with the political varnish of progress; all Asiatics might have top-hats on their heads but if they had this spirit still in their hearts, they would only think the hats would vanish and come round again like the planets; not that running after a hat could lead them to heaven or even to home.
Now when the genius of Buddha arose to deal with the matter, this sort of cosmic sentiment was already common to almost everything in the east. There was indeed the jungle of an extraordinarily extravagant and almost asphyxiating mythology. Nevertheless it is possible to have more sympathy with this popular fruitfulness in folk-lore than with some of the higher pessimism that might have withered it. It must always be remembered, however, when all fair allowances are made, that a great deal of spontaneous eastern imagery really is idolatry; the local and literal worship of an idol. This is probably not true of the ancient Brahminical system, at least as seen by Brahmins. But that phrase alone will remind us of a reality of much greater moment. This great reality is the Caste System of ancient India. It may have had some of the practical advantages of the Guild System of Medieval Europe. But it contrasts not only with that Christian democracy, but with every extreme type of Christian aristocracy, in the fact that it does really conceive the social superiority as a spiritual superiority. This not only divides it fundamentally from the fraternity of Christendom, but leaves it standing like a mighty and terraced mountain of pride between the relatively egalitarian levels both of Islam and of China. But the fixity of this formation through thousands of years is another illustration of that spirit of repetition that has marked time from time immemorial. Now we may also presume the prevalence of another idea which we associate with the Buddhists as interpreted by the Theosophists. As a fact, some of the strictest Buddhists repudiate the idea and still more scornfully repudiate the Theosophists. But whether the idea is in Buddhism, or only in the birthplace of Buddhism, or only in a tradition or a travesty of Buddhism, it is an idea entirely proper to this principle of recurrence. I mean of course the idea of Reincarnation.
But Reincarnation is not really a mystical idea. It is not really a transcendental idea, or in that sense a religious idea. Mysticism conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them. It is no more transcendental for a man to remember what he did in Babylon before he was born than to remember what he did in Brixton before he had a knock on the head. His successive lives need not be any more than human lives, under whatever limitations burden human life. It has nothing to do with seeing God or even conjuring up the devil. In other words, reincarnation as such does not necessarily escape from the wheel of destiny, in some sense it is the wheel of destiny. And whether it was something that Buddha founded, or something that Buddha found, or something that Buddha entirely renounced when he found, it is certainly something having the general character of that Asiatic atmosphere in which he had to play his part. And the part he played was that of an intellectual philosopher, with a particular theory about the right intellectual attitude towards it.
I can understand that Buddhists might resent the view that Buddhism is merely a philosophy, if we understand by a philosophy merely an intellectual game such as Greek sophists played, tossing up worlds and catching them like balls. Perhaps a more exact statement would be that Buddha was a man who made a metaphysical discipline; which might even be called a psychological discipline. He proposed a way of escaping from all this recurrent sorrow; and that was simply by getting rid of the delusion that is called desire. It was emphatically not that we should get what we want better by restraining our impatience for part of it, or that we should get it in a better way or in a better world. It was emphatically that we should leave off wanting it. If once a man realised that there is really no reality, that everything, including his soul, is in dissolution at every instant, he would anticipate disappointment and be intangible to change, existing (in so far as he could be said to exist) in a sort of ecstasy of indifference. The Buddhists call this beatitude and we will not stop our story to argue the point; certainly to us it is indistinguishable from despair. I do not see, for instance, why the disappointment of desire should not apply as much to the most benevolent desires as to the most selfish ones. Indeed the Lord of Compassion seems to pity people for living rather than for dying. For the rest, an intelligent Buddhist wrote ‘the explanation of popular Chinese and Japanese Buddhism is that it is not Buddhism.’ That has doubtless ceased to be a mere philosophy, but only by becoming a mere mythology. One thing is certain; it has never become anything remotely resembling what we call a Church.
It will appear only a jest to say that all religious history has really been a pattern of noughts and crosses. But I do not by noughts mean nothings, but only things that are negative compared with the positive shape or pattern of the other. And though the symbol is of course only a coincidence, it is a coincidence that really does coincide. The mind of Asia can really be represented by a round 0, if not in the sense of a cypher at least of a circle. The great Asiatic symbol of a serpent with its tail in its mouth is really a very perfect image of a certain idea of unity and recurrence that does indeed belong to the Eastern philosophies and religions. It really is a curve that in one sense includes everything, and in another sense comes to nothing. In that sense it does confess, or rather boast, that all argument is an argument in a circle. And though the figure is but a symbol, we can see how sound is the symbolic sense that produces it, the parallel symbol of the Wheel of Buddha generally called the Swastika. The cross is a thing at right angles pointing boldly in opposite directions; but the Swastika is the same thing in the very act of returning to the recurrent curve. That crooked cross is in fact a cross turning into a wheel. Before we dismiss even these symbols as if they were arbitrary symbols, we must remember how intense was the imaginative instinct that produced them or selected them both in the east and the west. The cross has become something more than a historical memory; it does convey, almost as by a mathematical diagram, the truth about the real point at issue; the idea of a conflict stretching outwards into eternity. It is true, and even tautological, to say that the cross is the crux of the whole matter.
In other words the cross, in fact as well as figure, does really stand for the idea of breaking out of the circle that is everything and nothing. It does escape from the circular argument by which everything begins and ends in the mind. Since we are still dealing in symbols, it might be put in a parable in the form of that story about St. Francis, which says that the birds departing with his benediction could wing their way into the infinites of the four winds of heaven, their tracks making a vast cross upon the sky; for compared with the freedom of that flight of birds, the very shape of the Swastika is like a kitten chasing its tail. In a more popular allegory, we might say that when St. George thrust his spear into the monster’s jaws, he broke in upon the solitude of the self-devouring serpent and gave it something to bite besides its own tail. But while many fancies might be used as figures of the truth, the truth itself is abstract and absolute; though it is not very easy to sum up except by such figures. Christianity does appeal to a solid truth outside itself; to something which is in that sense external as well as eternal. It does declare that things are really there; or in other words that things are really things—In this Christianity is at one with common sense; but all religious history shows that this common sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it.
It cannot otherwise exist, or at least endure, because mere thought does not remain sane. In a sense it becomes too simple to be sane. The temptation of the philosophers is simplicity rather than subtlety. They are always attracted by insane simplifications, as men poised above abysses are fascinated by death and nothingness and the empty air. It needed another kind of philosopher to stand poised upon the pinnacle of the Temple and keep his balance without casting himself down. One of these obvious, these too obvious explanations is that everything is a dream and a delusion and there is nothing outside the ego. Another is that all things recur; another, which is said to be Buddhist and is certainly Oriental, is the idea that what is the matter with us is our creation, in the sense of our coloured differentiation and personality, and that nothing will be well till we are again melted into one unity. By this theory, in short, the Creation was the Fall. It is important historically because it was stored up in the dark heart of Asia and went forth at various times in various forms over the dim borders of Europe. Here we can place the mysterious figure of Manes or Manichaeus, the mystic of inversion, whom we should call a pessimist, parent of many sects and heresies; here, in a higher place, the figure of Zoroaster. He has been popularly identified with another of these too simple explanations; the equality of evil and good, balanced and battling in every atom. He also is of the school of sages that may be called mystics; and from the same mysterious Persian garden came upon ponderous wings Mithras, the unknown god, to trouble the last twilight of Rome.
That circle or disc of the sun set up in the morning of the world by the remote Egyptian has been a mirror and a model for all the philosophers. They have made many things out of it, and sometimes gone mad about it, especially when as in these eastern sages the circle became a wheel going round and round in their heads. But the point about them is that they all think that existence can be represented by a diagram instead of a drawing; and the rude drawings of the childish myth-makers are a sort of crude and spirited protest against that view. They cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture. Still less can they believe that it is a picture of something that really exists outside our minds. Sometimes the philosophy paints the disc all black and calls himself a pessimist; sometimes he paints it all white and calls himself an optimist; sometimes he divides it exactly into halves of black and white and calls himself a dualist, like those Persian mystics to whom I wish there were space to do justice. None of them could understand a thing that began to draw the proportions just as if they were real proportions, disposed in the living fashion which the mathematical draughtsman would call disproportionate. Like the first artist in the cave, it revealed to incredulous eyes the suggestion of a new purpose in what looked like a wildly crooked pattern; he seemed only to be distorting his diagram, when he began for the first time in all the ages to trace the lines of a form—and of a Face.
VII
THE WAR OF THE GODS AND DEMONS
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings. Man cannot live without the two props of food and drink, which support him like two legs; but to suggest that they have been the motives of all his movements in history is like saying that the goal of all his military marches or religious pilgrimages must have been the Golden Leg of Miss Kilmansegg or the ideal and perfect leg of Sir Willoughby Patterne. But it is such movements that make up the story of mankind and without them there would practically be no story at all. Cows may be purely economic, in the sense that we cannot see that they do much beyond grazing and seeking better grazing grounds; and that is why a history of cows in twelve volumes would not be very lively reading. Sheep and goats may be pure economists in their external action at least; but that is why the sheep has hardly been a hero of epic wars and empires thought worthy of detailed narration; and even the more active quadruped has not inspired a book for boys called Golden Deeds of Gallant Goats or any similar title. But so far from the movements that make up the story of man being economic, we may say that the story only begins where the motive of the cows and sheep leaves off. It will be hard to maintain that the Crusaders went from their homes into a howling wilderness because cows go from a wilderness to a more comfortable grazing-grounds. It will be hard to maintain that the Arctic explorers went north with the same material motive that made the swallows go south. And if you leave things like all the religious wars and all the merely adventurous explorations out of the human story, it will not only cease to be human at all but cease to be a story at all. The outline of history is made of these decisive curves and angles determined by the will of man. Economic history would not even be history.
But there is a deeper fallacy besides this obvious fact; that men need not live for food merely because they cannot live without food. The truth is that the thing most present to the mind of man is not the economic machinery necessary to his existence; but rather that existence itself; the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in it. There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood, and that is life. For once that he remembers exactly what work produces his wages and exactly what wages produce his meals, he reflects ten times that it is a fine day or it is a queer world, or wonders whether life is worth living, or wonders whether marriage is a failure, or is pleased and puzzled with his own children, or remembers his own youth, or in any such fashion vaguely reviews the mysterious lot of man. This is true of the majority even of the wage-slaves of our morbid modern industrialism, which by its hideousness and in-humanity has really forced the economic issue to the front. It is immeasurably more true of the multitude of peasants or hunters or fishers who make up the real mass of mankind. Even those dry pedants who think that ethics depend on economics must admit that economics depend on existence. And any number of normal doubts and day-dreams are about existence; not about how we can live, but about why we do. And the proof of it is simple; as simple as suicide. Turn the universe upside down in the mind and you turn all the political economists upside down with it. Suppose that a man wishes to die, and the professor of political economy becomes rather a bore with his elaborate explanations of how he is to live. And all the departures and decisions that make our human past into a story have this character of diverting the direct course of pure economics. As the economist may be excused from calculating the future salary of a suicide, so he may be excused from providing an old age pension for a martyr. As he need not provide for the future of a martyr so he need not provide for the family of a monk. His plan is modified in lesser and varying degrees by a man being a soldier and dying for his own country, by a man being a peasant and specially loving his own land, by a man being more or less affected by any religion that forbids or allows him to do this or that. But all these come back not to an economic calculation about livelihood but to an elemental outlook upon life. They all come back to what a man fundamentally feels, when he looks forth from those strange windows which we call the eyes, upon that strange vision that we call the world.
No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world. But it may be allowable to say that we need a new thing; which may be called psychological history. I mean the consideration of what things meant in the mind of a man, especially an ordinary man; as distinct from what is defined or deduced merely from official forms or political pronouncements. I have already touched on it in such a case as the totem or indeed any other popular myth. It is not enough to be told that a tom-cat was called a totem; especially when it was not called a totem. We want to know what it felt like. Was it like Whittington’s cat or like a witch’s cat? Was its real name Pashtl or Puss-in-Boots? That is the sort of thing we need touching the nature of political and social relations. We want to know the real sentiment that was the social bond of many common men, as sane and as selfish as we are. What did soldiers feel when they saw splendid in the sky that strange totem that we call the Golden Eagle of the Legions? What did vassals feel about those other totems the lions or the leopards upon the shield of their lord? So long as we neglect this subjective side of history, which may more simply be called the inside of history, there will always be a certain limitation on that science which can be better transcended by art. So long as the historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than fact. There will be more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel.
In nothing is this new history needed so much as in the psychology of war. Our history is stiff with official documents, public or private, which tell us nothing of the thing itself. At the worst we only have the official posters, which could not have been spontaneous precisely because they were official. At the best we have only the secret diplomacy, which could not have been popular precisely because it was secret. Upon one or other of these is based the historical judgement about the real reasons that sustained the struggle. Governments fight for colonies or commercial rights; governments fight about harbours or high tariffs; governments fight for a gold mine or a pearl fishery. It seems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why do the fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terrible and wonderful thing called a war? Nobody who knows anything of soldiers believes the silly notion of the dons, that millions of men can be ruled by force. If they were all to slack, it would be impossible to punish all the slackers. And the least little touch of slacking would lose a whole campaign in half a day. What did men really feel about the policy? If it be said that they accepted the policy from the politician, what did they feel about the politician? If the vassals warred blindly for their prince what did those blind men see in their prince?
There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in an appropriate language, as realpolitik. As a matter of fact, it is an almost insanely unreal politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidly repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for a moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who fight. In any case no man will die for practical politics, just as no man will die for pay. Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be eaten by lions at a shilling an hour; for men will not be martyred for money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics, is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world believe that a soldier says, ‘My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of Finland.’ Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, ‘If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments, but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen.’ Materialist history is the most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances. Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life and about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustained by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. They are generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea. The first is the love of something said to be threatened, if it be only vaguely known as home; the second is dislike and defiance of some strange thing that threatens it. The first is far more philosophical than it sounds, though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house. But the negative side of it is quite as noble as well as quite as strong. Men fight hardest when they feel that the foe is at once an old enemy and an eternal stranger, that his atmosphere is alien and antagonistic, as the French feel about the Prussian or the Eastern Christians about the Turk. If we say it is a difference of religion, people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas. We will pity them and say it is a difference about death and daylight; a difference that does really come like a dark shadow between our eyes and the day. Men can think of this difference even at the point of death; for it is a difference about the meaning of life.
Men are moved in these things by something far higher and holier than policy; by hatred. When men hung on in the darkest days of the Great War, suffering either in their bodies or in their souls for those they loved, they were long past caring about details of diplomatic objects as motives for their refusal to surrender. Of myself and those I knew best I can answer for the vision that made surrender impossible. It was the vision of the German Emperor’s face as he rode into Paris. This is not the sentiment which some of my idealistic friends describe as Love. I am quite content to call it hatred; the hatred of hell and all its works, and to agree that as they do not believe in hell they need not believe in hatred. But in the face of this prevalent prejudice, this long introduction has been unfortunately necessary, to ensure an understanding of what is meant by a religious war. There is a religious war when two worlds meet; that is when two visions of the world meet; or in more modern language when two moral atmospheres meet. What is the one man’s breath is the other man’s poison; and it is vain to talk of giving a pestilence a place in the sun. And this is what we must understand, even at the expense of digression, if we would see what really happened in the Mediterranean; when right athwart the rising of the Republic on the Tiber, a thing overtopping and disdaining it, dark with all the riddles of Asia and trailing all the tribes and dependencies of imperialism, came Carthage riding on the sea.
The ancient religion of Italy was on the whole that mixture which we have considered under the head of mythology; save that where the Greeks had a natural turn for the mythology, the Latins seem to have had a real turn for religion. Both multiplied gods, yet they sometimes seem to have multiplied them for almost opposite reasons. It would seem sometimes as if the Greek polytheism branched and blossomed upwards like the boughs of a tree, while the Italian polytheism ramified downward like the roots. Perhaps it would be truer to say that the former branches lifted themselves lightly, bearing flowers; while the latter hung down, being heavy with fruit. I mean that the Latins seem to multiply gods to bring them nearer to men, while the Greek gods rose and radiated outwards into the morning sky. What strikes us in the Italian cults is their local and especially their domestic character. We gain the impression of divinities swarming about the house like flies; of deities clustering and clinging like bats about the pillars or building like birds under the eaves. We have a vision of a god of roofs and a god of gate-posts, of a god of doors and even a god of drains. It has been suggested that all mythology was a sort of fairy-tale; but this was a particular sort of fairy-tale which may truly be called a fireside tale, or a nursery-tale; because it was a tale of the interior of the home; like those which make chairs and tables talk like elves. The old household gods of the Italian peasants seem to have been great, clumsy, wooden images, more featureless than the figure-head which Quilp battered with the poker. This religion of the home was very homely. Of course there were other less human elements in the tangle of Italian mythology. There were Greek deities superimposed on the Roman; there were here and there uglier things underneath, experiments in the cruel kind of paganism, like the Arician rite of the priest slaying the slayer. But these things were always potential in paganism; they are certainly not the peculiar character of Latin paganism. The peculiarity of that may be roughly covered by saying that if mythology personified the forces of nature, this mythology personified nature as transformed by the forces of man. It was the god of the corn and not of the grass, of the cattle and not the wild things of the forest; in short the cult was literally a culture; as when we speak of it as agriculture.
With this there was a paradox which is still for many the puzzle or riddle of the Latins. With religion running through every domestic detail like a climbing plant, there went what seems to many the very opposite spirit; the spirit of revolt. Imperialists and reactionaries often involve Rome as the very model of order and obedience; but Rome was the very reverse. The real history of ancient Rome is much more like the history of modern Paris. It might be called in modern language a city built out of barricades. It is said that the gate of Janus was never closed because there was an eternal war without; it is almost as true that there was an eternal revolution within. From the first Plebeian riots to the last Servile Wars, the state that imposed peace on the world was never really at peace. The rulers were themselves rebels.
There is a real relation between this religion in private and this revolution in public life. Stories none the less heroic for being hackneyed remind us that the Republic was founded on a tyrannicide that avenged an insult to a wife; that the Tribunes of the people were re-established after another which avenged an insult to a daughter. The truth is that only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticise the state. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city; the gods of the hearth. That is why men are mystified in seeing that the same nations that are thought rigid in domesticity are also thought restless in politics, for instance the Irish and the French. It is worth while to dwell on this domestic point because it is an exact example of what is meant here by the inside of history, like the inside of houses. Merely political histories of Rome may be right enough in saying that this or that was a cynical or cruel act of the Roman politicians; but the spirit that lifted Rome from beneath was the spirit of all the Romans; and it is not a cant to call it the ideal of Cincinnatus passing from the senate to the plough. Men of that sort had strengthened their village on every side, had extended its victories already over Italians and even over Greeks, when they found themselves confronted with a war that changed the world. I have called it here the war of the gods and demons.
There was established on the opposite coast of the inland sea a city that bore the name of the New Town. It was already much older, more powerful, and more prosperous than the Italian town; but there still remained about it an atmosphere that made the name not inappropriate. It had been called new because it was a colony like New York or New Zealand. It was an outpost or settlement of the energy and expansion of the great commercial cities of Tyre and Sidon. There was a note of the new countries and colonies about it, a confident and commercial outlook. It was fond of saying things that rang with a certain metallic assurance; as that nobody could wash his hands in the sea without the leave of the New Town. For it depended almost entirely on the greatness of its ships, as did the two great ports and markets from which its people came. It brought from Tyre and Sidon a prodigious talent for trade and considerable experience of travel. It brought other things as well.
In a previous chapter I have hinted at something of the psychology that lies behind a certain type of religion. There was a tendency in those hungry for practical results, apart from poetical results, to call upon spirits of terror and compulsion; to move Acheron in despair of bending the Gods. There is always a sort of dim idea that these darker powers will really do things, with no nonsense about it. In the interior psychology of the Punic peoples this strange sort of pessimistic practicality had grown to great proportions. In the New Town, which the Romans called Carthage, as in the parent cities of Phoenicia, the god who got things done bore the name of Moloch, who was perhaps identical with the other deity whom we know as Baal, the Lord. The Romans did not at first quite know what to call him or what to make of him; they had to go back to the grossest myth of Greek or Roman origins and compare him to Saturn devouring his children. But the worshippers of Moloch were not gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished civilisation, abounding in refinements and luxuries; they were probably far more civilised than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth; or at any rate his meal was not a myth. These highly civilised people really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace. We can only realise the combination by imagining a number of Manchester merchants with chimney-pot hats and mutton-chop whiskers, going to church every Sunday at eleven o’clock to see a baby roasted alive.
The first stages of the political or commercial quarrel can be followed in far too much detail, precisely because it is merely political or commercial. The Punic Wars looked at one time as if they would never end; and it is not easy to say when they ever began. The Greeks and the Sicilians had already been fighting vaguely on the European side against the African city. Carthage had defeated Greece and conquered Sicily. Carthage had also planted herself firmly in Spain; and between Spain and Sicily the Latin city was contained and would have been crushed; if the Romans had been of the sort to be easily crushed. Yet the interest of the story really consists in the fact that Rome was crushed. If there had not been certain moral elements as well as the material elements, the story would have ended where Carthage certainly thought it had ended. It is common enough to blame Rome for not making peace. But it was a true popular instinct that there could be no peace with that sort of people. It is common enough to blame the Roman for his Delenda est Carthago; Carthage must be destroyed. It is commoner to forget that, to all appearance, Rome itself was destroyed. The sacred savour that hung round Rome for ever, it is too often forgotten, clung to her partly because she had risen suddenly from the dead. Carthage was an aristocracy, as are most of such mercantile states. The pressure of the rich on the poor was impersonal as well as irresistible. For such aristocracies never permit personal government, which is perhaps why this one was jealous of personal talent. But genius can turn up anywhere, even in a governing class. As if to make the world’s supreme test as terrible as possible, it was ordained that one of the great houses of Carthage should produce a man who came out of those gilded palaces with all the energy and originality of Napoleon coming from nowhere. At the worst crisis of the war Rome learned that Italy itself, by a military miracle, was invaded from the north. Hannibal, the Grace of Baal as his name ran in his own tongue, had dragged a ponderous chain of armaments over the starry solitudes of the Alps; and pointed southward to the city which he had been pledged by all his dreadful gods to destroy.
Hannibal marched down the road to Rome, and the Romans who rushed to war with him felt as if they were fighting with a magician. Two great armies sank to right and left of him into the swamps of the Trebia; more and more were sucked into the horrible whirlpool of Cannae; more and more went forth only to fall in ruin at his touch. The supreme sign of all disasters, which is treason, turned tribe after tribe against the falling cause of Rome, and still the unconquerable enemy rolled nearer and nearer to the city; and following their great leader the swelling cosmopolitan army of Carthage passed like a pageant of the whole world; the elephants shaking the earth like marching mountains and the gigantic Gauls with their barbaric panoply and the dark Spaniards girt in gold and the brown Numidians on their unbridled desert horses wheeling and darting like hawks, and whole mobs of deserters and mercenaries and miscellaneous peoples; and the grace of Baal went before them.
The Roman augurs and scribes who said in that hour that it brought forth unearthly prodigies, that a child was born with the head of an elephant or that stars fell down like hailstones, had a far more philosophical grasp of what had really happened than the modern historian who can see nothing in it but a success of strategy concluding a rivalry in commerce. Something far different was felt at the time and on the spot, as it is always felt by those who experience a foreign atmosphere entering their own like a fog or a foul savour. It was no mere military defeat, it was certainly no mere mercantile rivalry, that filled the Roman imagination with such hideous omens of nature herself becoming unnatural. It was Moloch upon the mountain of the Latins, looking with his appalling face across the plain; it was Baal who trampled the vineyards with his feet of stone; it was the voice of Tanit the invisible, behind her trailing veils, whispering of the love that is more horrible than hate. The burning of the Italian cornfields, the ruin of the Italian vines, were some thing more than actual; they were allegorical. They were the destruction of domestic and fruitful things, the withering of what was human before that inhumanity that is far beyond the human thing called cruelty. The household gods bowed low in darkness under their lowly roofs; and above them went the demons upon a wind from beyond all walls, blowing the trumpet of the Tramontane. The door of the Alps was broken down; and in no vulgar but a very solemn sense, it was Hell let loose. The war of the gods and demons seemed already to have ended; and the gods were dead. The eagles were lost, the legions were broken; and in Rome nothing remained but honour and the cold courage of despair.
In the whole world one thing still threatened Carthage, and that was Carthage. There still remained the inner working of an element strong in all successful commercial states, and the presence of a spirit that we know. There was still the solid sense and shrewdness of the men who manage big enterprises; there was still the advice of the best financial experts; there was still business government; there was still the broad and sane outlook of practical men of affairs, and in these things could the Romans hope. As the war trailed on to what seemed its tragic end, there grew gradually a faint and strange possibility that even now they might not hope in vain. The plain business men of Carthage, thinking as such men do in terms of living and dying races, saw clearly that Rome was not only dying but dead. The war was over; it was obviously hopeless for the Italian city to resist any longer, and inconceivable that anybody should resist when it was hopeless. Under these circumstances, another set of broad, sound business principles remained to be considered. Wars were waged with money, and consequently cost money; perhaps they felt in their hearts, as do so many of their kind, that after all war must be a little wicked because it costs money. The time had now come for peace; and still more for economy. The messages sent by Hannibal from time to time asking for reinforcements were a ridiculous anachronism; there were much more important things to attend to now. It might be true that some consul or other had made a last dash to the Metaurus, had killed Hannibal’s brother and flung his head, with Latin fury, into Hannibal’s camp; and mad actions of that sort showed how utterly hopeless the Latins felt about their cause. But even excitable Latins could not be so mad as to cling to a lost cause for ever. So argued the best financial experts; and tossed aside more and more letters, full of rather queer alarmist reports. So argued and acted the great Carthaginian Empire. That meaningless prejudice, the curse of commercial states, that stupidity is in some way practical and that genius is in some way futile, led them to starve and abandon that great artist in the school of arms, whom the gods had given them in vain.
Why do men entertain this queer idea that what is sordid must always overthrow what is magnanimous; that there is some dim connection between brains and brutality, or that it does not matter if a man is dull so long as he is also mean? Why do they vaguely think of all chivalry as sentiment and all sentiment as weakness? They do it because they are, like all men, primarily inspired by religion. For them, as for all men, the first fact is their notion of the nature of things; their idea about what world they are living in. And it is their faith that the only ultimate thing is fear and therefore that the very heart of the world is evil. They believe that death is stronger than life, and therefore dead things must be stronger than living things; whether those dead things are gold and iron and machinery or rocks and rivers and forces of nature. It may sound fanciful to say that men we meet at tea-tables or talk to at garden-parties are secretly worshippers of Baal or Moloch. But this sort of commercial mind has its own cosmic vision and it is the vision of Carthage. It has in it the brutal blunder that was the ruin of Carthage. The Punic power fell because there is in this materialism a mad indifference to real thought. By disbelieving in the soul, it comes to disbelieving in the mind. Being too practical to be moral, it denies what every practical soldier calls the moral of an army. It fancies that money will fight when men will no longer fight. So it was with the Punic merchant princes. Their religion was a religion of despair, even when their practical fortunes were hopeful. How could they understand that the Romans could hope even when their fortunes were hopeless? Their religion was a religion of force and fear; how could they understand that men can still despise fear even when they submit to force? Their philosophy of the world had weariness in its very heart; above all they were weary of warfare; how should they understand those who still wage war even when they are weary of it? In a word, how should they understand the mind of Man, who had so long bowed down before mindless things, money and brute force and gods who had the hearts of beasts? They awoke suddenly to the news that the embers they had disdained too much even to tread out were again breaking everywhere into flames; that Hasdrubal was defeated, that Hannibal was outnumbered, that Scipio had carried the war into Spain; that he had carried it into Africa. Before the very gates of the golden city Hannibal fought his last fight for it and lost; and Carthage fell as nothing has fallen since Satan. The name of the New City remains only as a name. There is no stone of it left upon the sand. Another war was indeed waged before the final destruction: but the destruction was final. Only men digging in its deep foundation centuries after found a heap of hundreds of little skeletons, the holy relics of that religion. For Carthage fell because she was faithful to her own philosophy and had followed out to its logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten his children.
The gods had risen again, and the demons had been defeated after all. But they had been defeated by the defeated, and almost defeated by the dead. Nobody understands the romance of Rome, and why she rose afterwards to a representative leadership that seemed almost fated and fundamentally natural. Who does not keep in mind the agony of horror and humiliation through which she had continued to testify to the sanity that is the soul of Europe? She came to stand alone in the midst of an empire because she had once stood alone in the midst of a ruin and a waste. After that all men knew in their hearts that she had been representative of mankind, even when she was rejected of men. And there fell on her the shadow from a shining and as yet invisible light and the burden of things to be. It is not for us to guess in what manner or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome. We have to thank the patience of the Punic wars if, in after ages, divine things descended at least upon human things and not inhuman. Europe evolved into its own vices and its own impotence, as will be suggested on another page; but the worst into which it evolved was not like what it had escaped. Can any man in his senses compare the great wooden doll, whom the children expected to eat a little bit of the dinner, with the great idol who would have been expected to eat the children? That is the measure of how far the world went astray, compared with how far it might have gone astray. If the Romans were ruthless, it was in a true sense to an enemy, and certainly not merely a rival. They remembered not trade routes and regulations, but the faces of sneering men; and hated the hateful soul of Carthage. And we owe them something if we never needed to cut down the groves of Venus exactly as men cut down the groves of Baal. We owe it partly to their harshness that our thoughts of our human past are not wholly harsh. If the passage from heathenry to Christianity was a bridge as well as a breach, we owe it to those who kept that heathenry human. If, after all these ages, we are in some sense at peace with paganism, and can think more kindly of our fathers, it is well to remember the things that were and the things that might have been. For this reason alone we can take lightly the load of antiquity and need not shudder at a nymph on a fountain or a cupid on a valentine. Laughter and sadness link us with things long past away and remembered without dishonour; and we can see not altogether without tenderness the twilight sinking around the Sabine farm and hear the household gods rejoice when Catullus comes home to Sirmio. Deleta est Carthago.
VIII
THE END OF THE WORLD
I was once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under the shadow of a little village church, with a rather curious companion with whom I had just been walking through the woods. He was one of a group of eccentrics I had come across in my wanderings who had a new religion called Higher Thought; in which I had been so far initiated as to realise a general atmosphere of loftiness or height, and was hoping at some later and more esoteric stage to discover the beginnings of thought. My companion was the most amusing of them, for however he may have stood towards thought, he was at least very much their superior in experience, having travelled beyond the tropics while they were meditating in the suburbs; though he had been charged with excess in telling travellers’ tales. In spite of anything said against him, I preferred him to his companions and willingly went with him through the wood; where I could not but feel that his sunburnt face and fierce tufted eyebrows and pointed beard gave him something of the look of Pan. Then we sat down in the meadow and gazed idly at the tree-tops and the spire of the village church; while the warm afternoon began to mellow into early evening and the song of a speck of a bird was faint far up in the sky and no more than a whisper of breeze soothed rather than stirred the ancient orchards of the garden of England. Then my companion said to me: ‘Do you know why the spire of that church goes up like that, I expressed a respectable agnosticism, and he answered in an off-hand way, ‘Oh, the same as the obelisks; the Phallic Worship of antiquity.’ Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there leering above his goatlike beard; and for the moment I thought he was not Pan but the Devil. No mortal words can express the immense, the insane incongruity and unnatural perversion of thought involved in saying such a thing at such a moment and in such a place. For one moment I was in the mood in which men burned witches; and then a sense of absurdity equally enormous seemed to open about me like a dawn. ‘Why, of course,’ I said after a moment’s reflection, ‘if it hadn’t been for phallic worship, they would have built the spire pointing downwards and standing on its own apex.’ I could have sat in that field and laughed for an hour. My friend did not seem offended, for indeed he was never thin-skinned about his scientific discoveries. I had only met him by chance and I never met him again, and I believe he is now dead; but though it has nothing to do with the argument, it may be worth while to mention the name of this adherent of Higher Thought and interpreter of primitive religious origins; or at any rate the name by which he was known. It was Louis de Rougemont.
That insane image of the Kentish church standing on the point of its spire, as in some old rustic, topsy-turvy tale, always comes back into my imagination when I hear these things said about pagan origins; and calls to my aid the laughter of the giants. Then I feel as genially and charitably to all other scientific investigators, higher critics, and authorities on ancient and modern religion, as I do to poor Louis de Rougemont. But the memory of that immense absurdity remains as a sort of measure and check by which to keep sane, not only on the subject of Christian churches, but also on the subject of heathen temples. Now a great many people have talked about heathen origins as the distinguished traveller talked about Christian origins. Indeed a great many modern heathens have been very hard on heathenism. A great many modern humanitarians have been very hard on the real religion of humanity. They have represented it as being everywhere and from the first rooted only in these repulsive arcana; and carrying the character of something utterly shameless and anarchical. Now I do not believe this for a moment. I should never dream of thinking about the whole worship of Apollo what De Rougemont could think about the worship of Christ. I would never admit that there was such an atmosphere in a Greek city as that madman was able to smell in a Kentish village. On the contrary, it is the whole point, even of this final chapter upon the final decay of paganism, to insist once more that the worst sort of paganism had already been defeated by the best sort. It was the best sort of paganism that conquered the gold of Carthage. It was the best sort of paganism that wore the laurels of Rome. It was the best thing the world had yet seen, all things considered and on any large scale, that ruled from the wall of the Grampians to the garden of the Euphrates. It was the best that conquered; it was the best that ruled; and it was the best that began to decay.
Unless this broad truth be grasped, the whole story is seen askew. Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We might almost say that in a society without such good things we should hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that is why some of the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather an air in history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and swathed and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old. But Carthage at any rate was dead, and the worst assault ever made by the demons on mortal society had been defeated. But how much would it matter that the worst was dead if the best was dying?
To begin with, it must be noted that the relation of Rome to Carthage was partially repeated and extended in her relation to nations more normal and more nearly akin to her than Carthage. I am not here concerned to controvert the merely political view that Roman statesmen acted unscrupulously towards Corinth or the Greek cities. But I am concerned to contradict the notion that there was nothing but a hypocritical excuse in the ordinary Roman dislike of Greek cities. I am not presenting these pagans as paladins of chivalry, with a sentiment about nationalism never known until Christian times. But I am presenting them as men with the feelings of men; and those feelings were not a pretence. The truth is that one of the weaknesses in nature-worship and mere mythology had already produced a perversion among the Greeks due to the worst sophistry; the sophistry of simplicity. Just as they became unnatural by worshipping nature, so they actually became unmanly by worshipping man. If Greece led her conqueror, she might have misled her conqueror; but these were things he did originally wish to conquer— ever in himself. It is true that in one sense there was less inhumanity even in Sodom and Gomorrah than in Tyre and Sidon. When we consider the war of the demons on the children, we cannot compare even Greek decadence to Punic devil-worship. But it is not true that the sincere revulsion from either need be merely pharisaical. It is not true to human nature or to common sense. Let any lad who has had the luck to grow up sane and simple in his day-dreams of love hear for the first time of the cult of Ganymede; he will not be merely shocked but sickened. And that first impression, as has been said here so often about first impressions, will be right. Our cynical indifference is an illusion; it is the greatest of all illusions; the illusion of familiarity. It is right to conceive the more or less rustic virtues of the ruck of the original Romans as reacting against the very rumour of it, with complete spontaneity and sincerity. It is right to regard them as reacting, if in a lesser degree, exactly as they did against the cruelty of Carthage. Because it was in a less degree they did not destroy Corinth as they destroyed Carthage. But if their attitude and action was rather destructive, in neither case need their indignation have been mere self-righteousness covering mere selfishness. And if anybody insists that nothing could have operated in either case but reasons of state and commercial conspiracies, we can only tell him that there is something which he does not understand; something which possibly he will never understand; something which, until he does understand, he will never understand the Latins. That something is called democracy. He has probably heard the word a good many times and even used it himself; but he has no notion of what it means. All through the revolutionary history of Rome there was an incessant drive towards democracy; the state and the statesman could do nothing without a considerable backing of democracy; the sort of democracy that never has anything to do with diplomacy. It is precisely because of the presence of Roman democracy that we hear so much about Roman oligarchy. For instance, recent historians have tried to explain the valour and victory of Rome in terms of that detestable and detested usury which was practised by some of the Patricians; as if Curius had conquered the men of the Macedonian phalanx by lending them money; or the consul Nero had negotiated the victory of Metaurus at five per cent. But we realise the usury of the Patricians because of the perpetual revolt of the Plebeians. The rule of the Punic merchant princes had the very soul of usury. But there was never a Punic mob that dared to call them usurers.
Burdened like all mortal things with all mortal sin and weakness, the rise of Rome had really been the rise of normal and especially of popular things; and in nothing more than in the thoroughly normal and profoundly popular hatred of perversion. Now among the Greeks a perversion had become a convention. It is true that it had become so much of a convention, especially a literary convention, that it was sometimes conventionally copied by Roman literary men. But this is one of those complications that always arise out of conventions. It must not obscure our sense of the difference of tone in the two societies as a whole. It is true that Virgil would once in a way take over a theme of Theocritus; but nobody can get the impression that Virgil was particularly fond of that theme. The themes of Virgil were specially and notably the normal themes and nowhere more than in morals; piety and patriotism and the honour of the countryside. And we may well pause upon the name of the poet as we pass into the autumn of antiquity; upon his name who was in so supreme a sense the very voice of autumn of its maturity and its melancholy; of its fruits of fulfilment and its prospect of decay. Nobody who reads even a few lines of Virgil can doubt that he understood what moral sanity means to mankind. Nobody can doubt his feelings when the demons were driven in flight before the household gods. But there are two particular points about him and his work which are particularly important to the main thesis here. The first is that the whole of his great patriotic epic is in a very peculiar sense founded upon the fall of Troy; that is upon an avowed pride in Troy although she had fallen. In tracing to Trojans the foundation of his beloved race and republic, he began what may be called the great Trojan tradition which runs through medieval and modern history. We have already seen the first hint of it in the pathos of Homer about Hector. But Virgil turned it not merely into a literature but into a legend. And it was a legend of the almost divine dignity that belongs to the defeated. This was one of the traditions that did truly prepare the world for the coming of Christianity and especially of Christian chivalry. This is what did help to sustain civilisation through the incessant defeats of the Dark Ages and the barbarian wars; out of which what we call chivalry was born. It is the moral attitude of the man with his back to the wall; and it was the wall of Troy. All through medieval and modern times this version of the virtues in the Homeric conflict can be traced in a hundred ways co-operating with all that was akin to it in Christian sentiment. Our own countrymen, and the men of other countries, loved to claim like Virgil that their own nation was descended from the heroic Trojans. All sorts of people thought it the most superb sort of heraldry to claim to be descended from Hector. Nobody seems to have wanted to be descended from Achilles. The very fact that the Trojan name has become a Christian name, and been scattered to the last limits of Christendom, to Ireland or the Gaelic Highlands, while the Greek name has remained relatively rare and pedantic, is a tribute to the same truth. Indeed it involves a curiosity of language almost in the nature of a joke. The name has been turned into a verb; and the very phrase about hectoring, in the sense of swaggering, suggests the myriads of soldiers who have taken the fallen Trojan for a model. As a matter of fact, nobody in antiquity was less given to hectoring than Hector. But even the bully pretending to be a conqueror took his title from the conquered. That is why the popularisation of the Trojan origin by Virgil has a vital relation to all those elements that have made men say that Virgil was almost a Christian. It is almost as if two great tools or toys of the same timber, the divine and the human, had been in the hands of Providence; and the only thing comparable to the Wooden Cross of Calvary was the Wooden Horse of Troy. So, in some wild allegory, pious in purpose if almost profane in form, the Holy Child might have fought the dragon with a wooden sword and a wooden horse.
The other element in Virgil which is essential to the argument is the particular nature of his relation to mythology; or what may here in a special sense be called folklore, the faiths and fancies of the populace. Everybody knows that his poetry at its most perfect is less concerned with the pomposity of Olympus than with the numina of natural and agricultural life. Everyone knows where Virgil looked for the causes of things. He speaks of finding them not so much in cosmic allegories of Uranus and Chronos; but rather in Pan and the sisterhood of the nymphs and Sylvanus the old man of the forest. He is perhaps most himself in some passages of the Eclogues, in which he has perpetuated for ever the great legend of Arcadia and the shepherds. Here again it is easy enough to miss the point with petty criticism about all the things that happen to separate his literary convention from ours. There is nothing more artificial than the cry of artificiality as directed against the old pastoral poetry. We have entirely missed all that our fathers meant by looking at the externals of what they wrote. People have been so much amused with the mere fact that the china shepherdess was made of china that they have not even asked why she was made at all. They have been so content to consider the Merry Peasant as a figure in an opera that they have not asked even how he came to go to the opera, or how he strayed on to the stage.
In short, one have only to ask why there is a china shepherdess and not a china shopkeeper. Why were not mantelpieces adorned with figures of city merchants in elegant attitudes; of ironmasters wrought in iron or gold speculators in gold? Why did the opera exhibit a Merry Peasant and not a Merry Politician? Why was there not a ballet of bankers, pirouetting upon pointed toes? Because the ancient instinct and humour of humanity have always told them, under whatever conventions, that the conventions of complex cities were less really healthy and happy than the customs of the countryside. So it is with the eternity of the Eclogues. A modern poet did indeed write things called Fleet Street Eclogues, in which poets took the place of the shepherds. But nobody has yet written anything called Wall Street Eclogues, in which millionaires should take the place of the poets. And the reason is that there is a real if only a recurrent yearning for that sort of simplicity; and there is never that sort of yearning for that sort of complexity. The key to the mystery of the Merry Peasant is that the peasant often is merry. Those who do not believe it are simply those who do not know anything about him, and therefore do not know which are his times for merriment. Those who do not believe in the shepherd’s feast or song are merely ignorant of the shepherd’s calendar. The real shepherd is indeed very different from the ideal shepherd, but that is no reason for forgetting the reality at the root of the ideal. It needs a truth to make a tradition. It needs a tradition to make a convention. Pastoral poetry is certainly often a convention, especially in a social decline. It was in a social decline that Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses lounged about the gardens of Versailles. It was also in a social decline that shepherds and shepherdesses continued to pipe and dance through the most faded imitations of Virgil. But that is no reason for dismissing the dying paganism without ever understanding its life. It is no reason for forgetting that the very word Pagan is the same as the word Peasant. We may say that this art is only artificiality; but it is not a love of the artificial. On the contrary, it is in its very nature only the failure of nature-worship, or the love of the natural
For the shepherds were dying because their gods were dying. Paganism lived upon poetry; that poetry already considered under the name of mythology. But everywhere, and especially in Italy, it had been a mythology and a poetry rooted in the countryside; and that rustic religion had been largely responsible for the rustic happiness. Only as the whole society grew in age and experience, there began to appear that weakness in all mythology already noted in the chapter under that name. This religion was not quite a religion. In other words, this religion was not quite a reality. It was the young world’s riot with images and ideas like a young man’s riot with wine or love-making; it was not so much immoral as irresponsible; it had no foresight of the final test of time. Because it was creative to any extent it was credulous to any extent. It belonged to the artistic side of man, yet even considered artistically it had long become overloaded and entangled. The family trees sprung from the seed of Jupiter were a jungle rather than a forest; the claims of the gods and demi-gods seemed like things to be settled rather by a lawyer or a professional herald than by a poet. But it is needless to say that it was not only in the artistic sense that these things had grown more anarchic. There had appeared in more and more flagrant fashion that flower of evil that is really implicit in the very seed of nature-worship, however natural it may seem. I have said that I do not believe that natural worship necessarily begins with this particular passion; I am not of the De Rougemont school of scientific folk-lore. I do not believe that mythology must begin with eroticism. But I do believe that mythology must end in it. I am quite certain that mythology did end in it. Moreover, not only did the poetry grow more immoral, but the immorality grew more indefensible. Greek vices, oriental vices, hints of the old horrors of the Semitic demons began to fill the fancies of decaying Rome, swarming like flies on a dung heap. The psychology of it is really human enough to anyone who will try that experiment of seeing history from the inside. There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.
At that stage even of paganism therefore the peasant songs and dances sound fainter and fainter in the forest. For one thing the peasant civilisation was fading, or had already faded from the whole countryside. The Empire at the end was organised more and more on that servile system which generally goes with the boast of organisation, indeed it was almost as senile as the modern schemes for the organisation of industry. It is proverbial that what would once have been a peasantry became a mere populace of the town dependent for bread and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles and cinemas. In this as in many other respects the modern return to heathenism has been a return not even to the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age. But the causes of it were spiritual in both cases; and especially the spirit of paganism had departed with its familiar spirits. The heat had gone out of it with its household gods, who went along with the gods of the garden and the field and the forest. The Old Man of the Forest was too old; he was already dying. It is said truly in a sense that Pan died because Christ was born. It is almost as true in another sense that men knew that Christ was born because Pan was already dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the whole mythology of mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been filled with theology. But the point for the moment is that the mythology could not have lasted like a theology in any case. Theology is thought, whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of glamour and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only ceased to believe in the gods, but they realised that they had never believed in them. They had sung their praises; they had danced round their altars. They had played the flute; they had played the fool.
So came the twilight upon Arcady and the last notes of the pipe sound sadly from the beechen grove. In the great Virgilian poems there is already something of the sadness; but the loves and the household gods linger in lovely lines like that which Mr. Belloc took for a test of understanding; incipe parve puer risu cognoscere matrem. But with them as with us, the human family itself began to break down under servile organisation and the herding of the towns. The urban mob became enlightened; that is it lost the mental energy that could create myths. All round the circle of the Mediterranean cities the people mourned for the loss of gods and were consoled with gladiators. And meanwhile something similar was happening to that intellectual aristocracy of antiquity that had been walking about and talking at large ever since Socrates and Pythagoras. They began to betray to the world the fact that they were walking in a circle and saying the same thing over and over again. Philosophy began to be a joke; it also began to be a bore. That unnatural simplification of everything into one system or another, which we have noted as the fault of the philosopher, revealed at once its finality and its futility. Everything was virtue or everything was happiness or everything was fate or everything was good or everything was bad; anyhow, everything was everything and there was no more to be said; so they said it. Everywhere the sages had degenerated into sophists; that is, into hired rhetoricians or askers of riddles. It is one of the symptoms of this that the sage begins to turn not only into a sophist but into a magician. A touch of oriental occultism is very much appreciated in the best houses. As the philosopher is already a society entertainer, he may as well also be a conjurer.
Many moderns have insisted on the smallness of that Mediterranean world; and the wider horizons that might have awaited it with the discovery of the other continents. But this is an illusion, one of the many illusions of materialism. The limits that paganism had reached in Europe were the limits of human existence; at its best it had only reached the same limits anywhere else. The Roman stoics did not need any Chinamen to teach them stoicism. The Pythagoreans did not need any Hindus to teach them about recurrence or the simple life or the beauty of being a vegetarian. In so far as they could get these things from the East, they had already got rather too much of them from the East. The Syncretists were as convinced as Theosophists that all religions are really the same. And how else could they have extended philosophy merely by extending geography? It can hardly be proposed that they should learn a purer religion from the Aztecs or sit at the feet of the Incas of Peru. All the rest of the world was a welter of barbarism. It is essential to recognise that the Roman Empire was recognised as the highest achievement of the human race; and also as the broadest. A dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal amphitheatres and aqueducts. Man could do no more.
For it was not the message blazed on the Babylonian wall, that one king was found wanting or his one kingdom given to a stranger. It was no such good news as the news of invasion and conquest. There was nothing left that could conquer Rome; but there was also nothing left that could improve it. It was the strongest thing that was growing weak. It was the best thing that was going to the bad. It is necessary to insist again and again that many civilisations had met in one civilisation of the Mediterranean sea; that it was already universal with a stale and sterile universality. The peoples had pooled their resources and still there was not enough. The empires had gone into partnership and they were still bankrupt. No philosopher who was really philosophical could think anything except that, in that central sea, the wave of the world had risen to its highest, seeming to touch the stars. But the wave was already stooping; for it was only the wave of the world.
That mythology and that philosophy into which paganism has already been analysed had thus both of them been drained most literally to the dregs. If with the multiplication of magic the third department, which we have called the demons, was even increasingly active, it was never anything but destructive. There remains only the fourth element or rather the first; that which had been in a sense forgotten because it was the first. I mean the primary and overpowering yet impalpable impression that the universe after all has one origin and one aim; and because it has an aim must have an author. What became of this great truth in the background of men’s minds, at this time, it is perhaps more difficult to determine. Some of the Stoics undoubtedly saw it more and more clearly as the clouds of mythology cleared and thinned away; and great men among them did much even to the last to lay the foundations of a concept of the moral unity of the world. The Jews still held their secret certainty of it jealously behind high fences of exclusiveness; yet it is intensely characteristic of the society and the situation that some fashionable figures, especially fashionable ladies, actually embraced Judaism. But in the case of many others I fancy there entered at this point a new negation. Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees. Lucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavoured to substitute Evolution for God, had already dangled before men’s eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos. But it was not his strong poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it possible for men to entertain such a vision. It was something in the sense of impotence and despair with which men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp. They could easily believe that even creation itself was not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight. They could fancy that all the stars were falling stars; and that the very pillars of their own solemn porticos were bowed under a sort of gradual deluge. To men in that mood there was a reason for atheism that is in some sense reasonable. Mythology might fade and philosophy might stiffen; but if behind these things there was a reality, surely that reality might have sustained things as they sank. There was no God; if there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He would have moved and saved the world.
The life of the great civilisation went on with dreary industry and even with dreary festivity. It was the end of the world, and the worst of it was that it need never end. A convenient compromise had been made between all the multitudinous myths and religions of the Empire; that each group should worship freely and merely live a sort of official flourish of thanks to the tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense to him under his official title of Divus. Naturally there was no difficulty about that; or rather it was a long time before the world realised that there ever had been even a trivial difficulty anywhere. The members of some Eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. The incident occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seem quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun. But it was not the strange story to which anybody paid any particular attention; people in that world had seen queer religions enough to fill a madhouse. It was something in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation. They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military; they moved together and were very absolute about who and what was really a part of their little system; and about what they said. However mildly, there was a ring like iron. Men used to many mythologies and moralities could make no analysis of the mystery, except the curious conjecture that they meant what they said. All attempts to make them see reason in the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor’s statue seemed to be spoken to deaf men. It was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth; it was a difference of substance to the touch. Those who touched their foundation fancied they had struck a rock.
With a strange rapidity, like the changes of a dream, the proportions of things seemed to change in their presence. Before most men knew what had happened, these few men were palpably present. They were important enough to be ignored. People became suddenly silent about them and walked stiffly past them. We see a new scene, in which the world has drawn its skirts away from these men and women and they stand in the centre of a great space like lepers. The scene changes again and the great space where they stand is overhung on every side with a cloud of witnesses, interminable terraces full of faces looking down towards them intently; for strange things are happening to them. New tortures have been invented for the madmen who have brought good news. That sad and weary society seems almost to find a new energy in establishing its first religious persecution. Nobody yet knows very clearly why that level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst; but they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to revolve round them. And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.
PART II
ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST
I
THE GOD IN THE CAVE
This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which popular science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery has really found archaic drawings of animals. The second half of human history, which was like a new creation of the world, also begins in a cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that animals were again present; for it was a cave used as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem; who still drive their cattle into such holes and caverns at night. It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle when the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was here beneath the very feet of the passers-by, in a cellar under the very floor of the world, that Jesus Christ was born. But in that second creation there was indeed something symbolical in the roots of the primeval rock or the horns of the prehistoric herd. God also was a Cave-Man, and had also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously coloured, upon the wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life.
A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded. It is at least like a jest in this, that it is something which the scientific critic cannot see. He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly and almost derisively exaggerated; and mildly condemns as improbable something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible; as something that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true. When that contrast between the cosmic creation and the little local infancy has been repeated, reiterated, underlined, emphasised, exulted in, sung, shouted, roared, not to say howled, in a hundred thousand hymns, carols, rhymes, rituals, pictures, poems, and popular sermons, it may be suggested that we hardly need a higher critic to draw our attention to something a little odd about it; especially one of the sort that seems to take a long time to see a joke, even his own joke. But about this contrast and combination of ideas one thing may be said here, because it is relevant to the whole thesis of this book. The sort of modern critic of whom I speak is generally much impressed with the importance of education in life and the importance of psychology in education. That sort of man is never tired of telling us that first impressions fix character by the law of causation; and he will become quite nervous if a child’s visual sense is poisoned by the wrong colours on a golliwog or his nervous system prematurely shaken by a cacophonous rattle. Yet he will think us very narrow-minded, if we say that this is exactly why there really is a difference between being brought up as a Christian and being brought up as a Jew or a Moslem or an atheist. The difference is that every Catholic child has learned from pictures, and even every Protestant child from stories, this incredible combination of contrasted ideas as one of the very first impressions on his mind. It is not merely a theological difference. It is a psychological difference which can outlast any theologies. It really is, as that sort of scientist loves to say about anything, incurable. Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection; for him there will always be some savour of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God. But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined. They would not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman, even for Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians, because we are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase, altered human nature. There is really a difference between the man who knows it and the man who does not. It may not be a difference of moral worth, for the Moslem or the Jew might be worthier according to his lights; but it is a plain fact about the crossing of two particular lights, the conjunction of two stars in our particular horoscope. Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and infancy, do definitely make a sort of epigram which a million repetitions cannot turn into a platitude. It is not unreasonable to call it unique. Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet.
Here begins, it is needless to say, another mighty influence for the humanisation of Christendom. If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect (I could never at any stage of my opinions imagine why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. When I was a boy a more Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon. But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You can not suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.
It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing had happened in that fold or crack in the great grey hills except that the whole universe had been turned inside out. I mean that all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing were now turned inward to the smallest. The very image will suggest all that multitudinous marvel of converging eyes that makes so much of the coloured Catholic imagery like a peacock’s tail. But it is true in a sense that God who had been only a circumference was seen as a centre; and a centre is infinitely small. It is true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal. The faith becomes, in more ways than one, a religion of little things. But its traditions in art and literature and popular fable have quite sufficiently attested, as has been said, this particular paradox of the divine being in the cradle. Perhaps they have not so clearly emphasised the significance of the divine being in the cave. Curiously enough, indeed, tradition has not very clearly emphasised the cave. It is a familiar fact that the Bethlehem scene has been represented in every possible setting of time and country, of landscape and architecture; and it is a wholly happy and admirable fact that men have conceived it as quite different according to their different individual traditions and tastes. But while all have realised that it was a stable, not so many have realised that it was a cave. Some critics have even been so silly as to suppose that there was some contradiction between the stable and the cave; in which case they cannot know much about caves or stables in Palestine. As they see differences that are not there, it is needless to add that they do not see differences that are there. When a well-known critic says, for instance, that Christ being born in a rocky cavern is like Mithras having sprung alive out of a rock, it sounds like a parody upon comparative religion. There is such a thing as the point of a story, even if it is a story in the sense of a lie. And the notion of a hero appearing, like Pallas from the brain of Zeus, mature and without a mother, is obviously the very opposite of the idea of a god being born like an ordinary baby and entirely dependent on a mother. Whichever ideal we might prefer, we should surely see that they are contrary ideals. It is as stupid to connect them because they both contain a substance called stone as to identify the punishment of the Deluge with the baptism in the Jordan because they both contain a substance called water. Whether as a myth or a mystery, Christ was obviously conceived as born in a hole in the rocks primarily because it marked the position of one outcast and homeless. Nevertheless it is true, as I have said, that the cave has not been so commonly or so clearly used as a symbol as the other realities that surrounded the first Christmas.
And the reason for this also refers to the very nature of that new world. It was in a sense the difficulty of a new dimension. Christ was not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set up above the sight-seer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of sight; and that is an idea very difficult to express in most modes of artistic expression. It is the idea of simultaneous happenings on different levels of life. Something like it might have been attempted in the more archaic and decorative medieval art. But the more the artists learned of realism and perspective, the less they could depict at once the angels in the heavens and the shepherds on the hills, and the glory in the darkness that was under the hills. Perhaps it could have been best conveyed by the characteristic expedient of some of the medieval guilds, when they wheeled about the streets a theatre with three stages one above the other, with heaven above the earth and hell under the earth. But in the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the earth.
There is in that alone the touch of a revolution, as of the world turned upside down. It would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or anything new, about the change which this conception of a deity born like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole conception of law and its duties to the poor and outcast. It is profoundly true to say that after that moment there could be no slaves. There could be and were people bearing that legal title, until the Church was strong enough to weed them out, but there could be no more of the pagan repose in the mere advantage to the state of keeping it a servile state. Individuals became important, in a sense in which no instruments can be important. A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man’s end. All this popular and fraternal element in the story has been rightly attached by tradition to the episode of the Shepherds; the hinds who found themselves talking face to face with the princes of heaven. But there is another aspect of the popular element as represented by the shepherds which has not perhaps been so fully developed; and which is more directly relevant here.
Men of the people, like the shepherds, men of the popular tradition, had everywhere been the makers of the mythologies. It was they who had felt most directly, with least check or chill from philosophy or the corrupt cults of civilisation, the need we have already considered; the images that were adventures of the imagination; the mythology that was a sort of search; the tempting and tantalising hints of something half-human in nature; the dumb significance of seasons and special places. They had best understood that the soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of a story is a personality. But rationalism had already begun to rot away these really irrational though imaginative treasures of the peasant; even as systematic slavery had eaten the peasant out of house and home. Upon all such peasantries everywhere there was descending a dusk and twilight of disappointment, in the hour when these few men discovered what they sought. Everywhere else Arcadia was fading from the forest. Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep. And though no man knew it, the hour was near which was to end and to fulfil all things; and though no man heard it, there was one far-off cry in an unknown tongue upon the heaving wilderness of the mountains. The shepherds had found their Shepherd.
And the thing they found was of a kind with the things they sought. The populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity need not disdain the limits of time and space. And the barbarian who conceived the crudest fancy about the sun being stolen and hidden in a box, or the wildest myth about the god being rescued and his enemy deceived with a stone, was nearer to the secret of the cave and knew more about the crisis of the world, than all those in the circle of cities round the Mediterranean who had become content with cold abstractions or cosmopolitan generalisations; than all those who were spinning thinner and thinner threads of thought out of the transcendentalism of Plato or the orientalism of Pythagoras. The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true. Since that hour no mythologies have been made in the world. Mythology is a search.
We all know that the popular presentation of this popular story, in so many miracle plays and carols, has given to the shepherds the costumes, the language, and the landscape of the separate English and European countrysides. We all know that one shepherd will talk in a Somerset dialect or another talk of driving his sheep from Conway towards Clyde. Most of us know by this time how true is that error, how wise, how artistic, how intensely Christian and Catholic is that anachronism. But some who have seen it in these scenes of medieval rusticity have perhaps not seen it in another sort of poetry, which it is sometimes the fashion to call artificial rather than artistic. I fear that many modern critics will see only a faded classicism in the fact that men like Crashaw and Herrick conceived the shepherds of Bethlehem under the form of the shepherds of Virgil. Yet they were profoundly right; and in turning their Bethlehem play into a Latin Eclogue they took up one of the most important links in human history. Virgil, as we have already seen, does stand for all that saner heathenism that had over-thrown the insane heathenism of human sacrifice; but the very fact that even the Virgilian virtues and the sane heathenism were in incurable decay is the whole problem to which the revelation to the shepherds is the solution. If the world had ever had the chance to grow weary of being demoniac, it might have been healed merely by becoming sane. But if it had grown weary even of being sane, what was to happen, except what did happen? Nor is it false to conceive the Arcadian shepherd of the Eclogues as rejoicing in what did happen. One of the Eclogues has even been claimed as a prophecy of what did happen. But it is quite as much in the tone and incidental diction of the great poet that we feel the potential sympathy with the great event; and even in their own human phrases the voices of the Virgilian shepherds might more than once have broken upon more than the tenderness of Italy ‘Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem.’ They might have found in that strange place all that was best in the last traditions of the Latins; and something better than a wooden idol standing up for ever for the pillar of the human family; a household god. But they and all the other mythologists would be justified in rejoicings that the event had fulfilled not merely the mysticism but the materialism of mythology. Mythology had many sins; but it had not been wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation. But something of the ancient voice that was supposed to have rung through the graves, it could cry again, ‘We have seen, he hath seen us, a visible god.’ So the ancient shepherds might have danced, and their feet have been beautiful upon the mountains, rejoicing over the philosophers. But the philosophers had also heard.
It is still a strange story, though an old one, how they came out of orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all the sages. They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things, and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion of the incomplete.
Such learned men would doubtless have come, as these learned men did come, to find themselves confirmed in much that was true in their own traditions and right in their own reasoning. Confucius would have found a new foundation for the family in the very reversal of the Holy Family; Buddha would have looked upon a new renunciation, of stars rather than jewels and divinity than royalty. These learned men would still have the right to say, or rather a new right to say, that there was truth in their old teaching. But after all these learned men would have come to learn. They would have come to complete their conceptions with something they had not yet conceived; even to balance their imperfect universe with something they might once have contradicted. Buddha would have come from his impersonal paradise to worship a person. Confucius would have come from his temples of ancestor-worship to worship a child.
We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos; that it was larger than the old cosmos. In that sense Christendom is larger than creation; as creation had been before Christ. It included things that had not been there; it also included the things that had been there. The point happens to be well illustrated in this example of Chinese piety, but it would be true of other pagan virtues or pagan beliefs. Nobody can doubt that a reasonable respect for parents is part of a gospel in which God himself was subject in childhood to earthly parents. But the other sense in which the parents were subject to him does introduce an idea that is not Confucian. The infant Christ is not like the infant Confucius; our mysticism conceives him in an immortal infancy. I do not know what Confucius would have done with the Bambino had it come to life in his arms as it did in the arms of St. Francis. But this is true in relation to all the other religions and philosophies; it is the challenge of the Church. The Church contains what the world does not contain. Life itself does not provide as she does for all sides of life. That every other single system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma. Where is the Holy child amid the Stoics and the ancestor-worshippers? Where is Our Lady of the Moslems, a woman made for no man and set above all angels? Where is St. Michael of the monks of Buddha, rider and master of the trumpets, guarding for every soldier the honour of the sword? What could St. Thomas Aquinas do with the mythology of Brahminism, he who set forth all the science and rationality and even rationalism of Christianity? Yet even if we compare Aquinas with Aristotle, at the other extreme of reason, we shall find the same sense of something added. Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas. Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn. How would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of the Manchester School? Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching peace and preventing wars. It is the same with all the modern attempts at Syncretism. They are never able to make something larger than the Creed without leaving something out. I do not mean leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the inn or the boy’s tale of battle or the hedge at the end of the field. The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is only a pantheon for pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christians were invited to set up the image of Jesus side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of Ammon. It was the refusal of the Christians that was the turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting. It was an awful and an appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realise that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
Here it is the important point that the Magi, who stand for mysticism and philosophy, are truly conceived as seeking something new and even as finding something unexpected. That tense sense of crisis which still tingles in the Christmas story and even in every Christmas celebration, accentuates the idea of a search and a discovery. The discovery is, in this case, truly a scientific discovery. For the other mystical figures in the miracle play; for the angel and the mother, the shepherds and the soldiers of Herod, there may be aspects both simpler and more supernatural, more elemental or more emotional. But the wise Men must be seeking wisdom, and for them there must be a light also in the intellect. And this is the light; that the Catholic creed is catholic and that nothing else is catholic. The philosophy of the Church is universal. The philosophy of the philosophers was not universal. Had Plato and Pythagoras and Aristotle stood for an instant in the light that came out of that little cave, they would have known that their own light was not universal. It is far from certain, indeed, that they did not know it already. Philosophy also, like mythology, had very much the air of a search. It is the realisation of this truth that gives its traditional majesty and mystery to the figures of the Three Kings; the discovery that religion is broader than philosophy and that this is the broadest of religions, contained within this narrow space. The Magicians were gazing at the strange pentacle with the human triangle reversed; and they have never come to the end of their calculations about it. For it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch with a never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even of our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a child.
We might well be content to say that mythology had come with the shepherds and philosophy with the philosophers; and that it only remained for them to combine in the recognisation of religion. But there was a third element that must not be ignored and one which that religion for ever refuses to ignore, in any revel or reconciliation. There was present in the primary scenes of the drama that Enemy that had rotted the legends with lust and frozen theories into atheism, but which answered the direct challenge with something of that more direct method which we have seen in the conscious cult of the demons. In the description of that demon-worship, of the devouring detestation of innocence shown in the works of its witchcraft and the most inhuman of its human sacrifice, I have said less of its incorrect and secret penetration of the saner paganism; the soaking of mythological imagination with sex; the rise of imperial pride into insanity. But both the indirect and the direct influence make themselves felt in the drama of Bethlehem. A ruler under the Roman suzerainty, probably equipped and surrounded with the Roman ornament and order though himself of eastern blood, seems in that hour to have felt stirring within him the spirit of strange things. We all know the story of how Herod, alarmed at some rumour of a mysterious rival, remembered the wild gesture of the capricious despots of Asia and ordered a massacre of suspects of the new generation of the populace. Everyone knows the story; but not everyone has perhaps noted its place in the story of the strange religions of men. Not everybody has seen the significance even of its very contrast with the Corinthian columns and Roman pavement of that conquered and superficially civilised world. Only, as the purpose in his dark spirit began to show and shine in the eyes of the Idumean, a seer might perhaps have seen something like a great grey ghost that looked over his shoulder; have seen behind him filling the dome of night and hovering for the last time over history, that vast and fearful face that was Moloch of the Carthaginians; awaiting his last tribute from a ruler of the races of Shem. The demons also, in that first festival of Christmas, feasted after their own fashion.
Unless we understand the presence of that enemy, we shall not only miss the point of Christianity, but even miss the point of Christmas. Christmas for us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing. But like all the truths of that tradition, it is in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama. It is not only an occasion for the peacemakers any more than for the merry-makers; it is not only a Hindu peace conference any more than it is only a Scandinavian winter feast. There is something defiant in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace. By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaw’s den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicings in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky. It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.
That is perhaps the mightiest of the mysteries of the cave. It is already apparent that though men are said to have looked for hell under the earth, in this case it is rather heaven that is under the earth. And there follows in this strange story the idea of an upheaval of heaven. That is the paradox of the whole position; that henceforth the highest thing can only work from below. Royalty can only return to its own by a sort of rebellion. Indeed the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps especially in its beginnings, was not so much a principality as a revolution against the prince of the world. This sense that the world had been conquered by the great usurper, and was in his possession, has been much deplored or derided by those optimists who identify enlightenment with ease. But it was responsible for all that thrill of defiance and a beautiful danger that made the good news seem to be really both good and new. It was in truth against a huge unconscious usurpation that it raised a revolt, and originally so obscure a revolt. Olympus still occupied the sky like a motionless cloud moulded into many mighty forms; philosophy still sat in the high places and even on the thrones of the kings, when Christ was born in the cave and Christianity in the catacombs. In both cases we may remark the same paradox of revolution; the sense of something despised and of something feared. The cave in one aspect is only a hole or corner into which the outcasts are swept like rubbish; yet in the other aspect it is a hiding-place of something valuable which the tyrants are seeking like treasure. In one sense they are there because the innkeeper would not even remember them, and in another because the king can never forget them. We have already noted that this paradox appeared also in the treatment of the early Church. It was important while it was still insignificant, and certainly while it was still impotent. It was important solely because it was intolerable; and in that sense it is true to say that it was intolerable because it was intolerant. It was resented, because, in its own still and almost secret way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck the heaven and earth of heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that creation of gold and marble; but it contemplated a world without it. It dared to look right through it as though the gold and marble had been glass. Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.
Herod had his place, therefore, in the miracle play of Bethlehem because he is the menace to the Church Militant and shows it from the first as under persecution and fighting for its life. For those who think this a discord, it is a discord that sounds simultaneously with the Christmas bells. For those who think the idea of the Crusade is one that spoils the idea of the Cross, we can only say that for them the idea of the Cross is spoiled; the idea of the cross is spoiled quite literally in the cradle. It is not here to the purpose to argue with them on the abstract ethics of fighting; the purpose in this place is merely to sum up the combination of ideas that make up the Christian and Catholic idea, and to note that all of them are already crystallised in the first Christmas story. They are three distinct and commonly contrasted things which are nevertheless one thing; but this is the only thing which can make them one. The first is the human instinct for a heaven that shall be as literal and almost as local as a home. It is the idea pursued by all poets and pagans making myths; that a particular place must be the shrine of the god or the abode of the blest; that fairyland is a land; or that the return of the ghost must be the resurrection of the body. I do not here reason about the refusal of rationalism to satisfy this need. I only say that if the rationalists refuse to satisfy it, the pagans will not be satisfied. This is present in the story of Bethlehem and Jerusalem as it is present in the story of Delos and Delphi; and as it is not present in the whole universe of Lucretius or the whole universe of Herbert Spencer. The second element is a philosophy larger than other philosophies; larger than that of Lucretius and infinitely larger than that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a hundred windows where the ancient stoic or the modern agnostic only looks through one. It sees life with thousands of eyes belonging to thousands of different sorts of people, where the other is only the individual standpoint of a stoic or an agnostic. It has something for all moods of man, it finds work for all kinds of men, it understands secrets of psychology, it is aware of depths of evil, it is able to distinguish between ideal and unreal marvels and miraculous exceptions, it trains itself in tact about hard cases, all with a multiplicity and subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far beyond the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modern moral philosophy. In a word, there is more in it; it finds more in existence to think about; it gets more out of life. Masses of this material about our many-sided life have been added since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. But St. Thomas Aquinas alone would have found himself limited in the world of Confucius or of Comte. And the third point is this; that while it is local enough for poetry and larger than any other philosophy, it is also a challenge and a fight. While it is deliberately broadened to embrace every aspect of truth, it is still stiffly embattled against every mode of error. It gets every kind of man to fight for it, it gets every kind of weapon to fight with, it widens its knowledge of the things that are fought for and against with every art of curiosity or sympathy; but it never forgets that it is fighting. It proclaims peace on earth and never forgets why there was war in heaven.
This is the trinity of truths symbolised here by the three types in the old Christmas story; the shepherds and the kings and that other king who warred upon the children. It is simply not true to say that other religions and philosophies are in this respect its rivals. It is not true to say that any one of them combines these characters; it is not true to say that any one of them pretends to combine them. Buddhism may profess to be equally mystical; it does not even profess to be equally military. Islam may profess to be equally military; it does not even profess to be equally metaphysical and subtle. Confucianism may profess to satisfy the need of the philosophers for order and reason; it does not even profess to satisfy the need of the mystics for miracle and sacrament and the consecration of concrete things. There are many evidences of this presence of a spirit at once universal and unique. One will serve here which is the symbol of the subject of this chapter; that no other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal and classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with the sense that he was going home. He might admire it because it was poetical, or because it was philosophical, or any number of other things in separation; but not because it was itself. The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend or the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which are turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero-worship. It does not exactly work outwards, adventurously, to the wonders to be found at the ends of the earth. It is rather something that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and personal part of our being; like that which can some times take us off our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the poor. It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that is there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity.
II
THE RIDDLES OF THE GOSPEL
To understand the nature of this chapter, it is necessary to recur to the nature of this book. The argument which is meant to be the backbone of the book is of the kind called the reductio ad absurdum. It suggests that the results of assuming the rationalist thesis are more irrational than ours; but to prove it we must assume that thesis. Thus in the first section I often treated man as merely an animal, to show that the effect was more impossible than if he were treated as an angel. In the sense in which it was necessary to treat man merely as an animal, it is necessary to treat Christ merely as a man. I have to suspend my own beliefs, which are much more positive; and assume this limitation even in order to remove it. I must try to imagine what would happen to a man who did really read the story of Christ as the story of a man; and even of a man of whom he had never heard before. And I wish to point out that a really impartial reading of that kind would lead, if not immediately to belief, at least to a bewilderment of which there is really no solution except in belief. In this chapter, for this reason, I shall bring in nothing of the spirit of my own creed; I shall exclude the very style of diction, and even of lettering, which I should think fitting in speaking in my own person. I am speaking as an imaginary heathen human being, honestly, staring at the Gospel story for the first time.
Now it is not at all easy to regard the New Testament as a New Testament. It is not at all easy to realise the good news as new. Both for good and evil familiarity fills us with assumptions and associations; and no man of our civilisation, whatever he thinks of our religion, can really read the thing as if he had never heard of it before. Of course it is in any case utterly unhistorical to talk as if the New Testament were a neatly bound book that had fallen from heaven. It is simply the selection made by the authority of the Church from a mass of early Christian literature. But apart from any such question there is a psychological difficulty in feeling the New Testament as new. There is a psychological difficulty in seeing those well-known words simply as they stand and without going beyond what they intrinsically stand for. And this difficulty must indeed be very great; for the result of it is very curious. The result of it is that most modern critics and most current criticism, even popular criticism, makes a comment that is the exact reverse of the truth. It is so completely the reverse of the truth that one could almost suspect that they had never read the New Testament at all.
We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the Gospels does indeed utter in words of almost heart-breaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words that he utters. Nevertheless they are almost the only kind of words that the Church in its popular imagery ever represents him as uttering. That popular imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound popular instinct. The mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor, and for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction of the incredible compassion of God. But nobody with his eyes open can doubt that it is chiefly this idea of compassion that the popular machinery of the Church does seek to carry. The popular imagery carries a great deal to excess the sentiment of ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.’ It is the first thing that the outsider feels and criticises in a Pieta or a shrine of the Sacred Heart. As I say, while the art may be insufficient, I am not sure that the instinct is unsound. In any case there is something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner of a street or coming out into the spaces of a marketplace, to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure as it turned upon a generation of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite. The Church can reasonably be justified therefore if she turns the most merciful face or aspect towards men; but it is certainly the most merciful aspect that she does turn. And the point is here that it is very much more specially and exclusively merciful than any impression that could be formed by a man merely reading the New Testament for the first time. A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand would form quite another impression; an impression full of mystery and possibly of inconsistency; but certainly not merely an impression of mildness. It would be intensely interesting; but part of the interest would consist in its leaving a good deal to be guessed at or explained. It is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly know what they signify, of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies. The outbreaks of wrath, like storms above our atmosphere, do not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them, but to follow some higher weather-chart of their own. The Peter whom popular Church teaching presents is very rightly the Peter to whom Christ said in forgiveness, ‘Feed my lambs.’ He is not the Peter upon whom Christ turned as if he were the devil, crying in that obscure wrath, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ Christ lamented with nothing but love and pity over Jerusalem which was to murder him. We do not know what strange spiritual atmosphere or spiritual insight led him to sink Bethsaida lower in the pit than Sodom. I am putting aside for the moment all questions of doctrinal inferences or expositions, orthodox or otherwise; I am simply imagining the effect on a man’s mind if he did really do what these critics are always talking about doing; if he did really read the New Testament without reference to orthodoxy and even without reference to doctrine. He would find a number of things which fit in far less with the current unorthodoxy than they do with the current orthodoxy. He would find, for instance, that if there are any descriptions that deserved to be called realistic, they are precisely the descriptions of the supernatural. If there is one aspect of the New Testament Jesus in which he may be said to present himself eminently as a practical person, it is in the aspect of an exorcist. There is nothing meek and mild, there is nothing even in the ordinary sense mystical, about the tone of the voice that says ‘Hold thy peace and come out of him.’ It is much more like the tone of a very business-like lion-tamer or a strong-minded doctor dealing with a homicidal maniac. But this is only a side issue for the sake of illustration; I am not now raising these controversies; but considering the case of the imaginary man from the moon to whom the New Testament is new.
Now the first thing to note is that if we take it merely as a human story, it is in some ways a very strange story. I do not refer here to its tremendous and tragic culmination or to any implications involving triumph in that tragedy. I do not refer to what is commonly called the miraculous element; for on that point philosophies vary and modern philosophies very decidedly waver. Indeed the educated Englishman of to-day may be said to have passed from an old fashion, in which he would not believe in any miracles unless they were ancient, and adopted a new fashion in which he will not believe in any miracles unless they are modern. He used to hold that miraculous cures stopped with the first Christians and is now inclined to suspect that they began with the first Christian Scientists. But I refer here rather specially to unmiraculous and even to unnoticed and inconspicuous parts of the story. There are a great many things about it which nobody would have invented, for they are things that nobody has ever made any particular use of; things which if they were remarked at all have remained rather as puzzles. For instance, there is that long stretch of silence in the life of Christ up to the age of thirty. It is of all silences the most immense and imaginatively impressive. But it is not the sort of thing that anybody is particularly likely to invent in order to prove something; and no body so far as I know has ever tried to prove anything in particular from it. It is impressive, but it is only impressive as a fact; there is nothing particularly popular or obvious about it as a fable. The ordinary trend of hero-worship and myth-making is much more likely to say the precise opposite. It is much more likely to say (as I believe some of the gospels rejected by the Church do say) that Jesus displayed a divine precocity and began his mission at a miraculously early age. And there is indeed something strange in the thought that he who of all humanity needed least preparation seems to have had most. Whether it was some mode of the divine humility, or some truth of which we see the shadow of the longer domestic tutelage of the higher creatures of the earth. I do not propose to speculate; I mention it simply as an example of the sort of thing that does in any case give rise to speculations, quite apart from recognised religious speculations. Now the whole story is full of these things. It is not by any means, as baldly presented in print, a story that it is easy to get to the bottom of. It is anything but what these people talk of as a simple Gospel. Relatively speaking, it is the Gospel that has the mysticism and the Church that has the rationalism. As I should put it, of course, it is the Gospel that is the riddle and the Church that is the answer. But whatever be the answer, the Gospel as it stands is almost a book of riddles.
First, a man reading the Gospel sayings would not find platitudes. If he had read even in the most respectful spirit the majority of ancient philosophers and of modern moralists, he would appreciate the unique importance of saying that he did not find platitudes. It is more than can be said even of Plato. It is much more than can be said of Epictetus or Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or Apollonius of Tyana. And it is immeasurably more than can be said of most of the agnostic moralists and the preachers of the ethical societies; with their songs of service and their religion of brotherhood. The morality of most moralists ancient and modern, has been one solid and polished cataract of platitudes flowing for ever and ever. That would certainly not be the impression of the imaginary independent outsider studying the New Testament. He would be conscious of nothing so commonplace and in a sense of nothing so continuous as that stream. He would find a number of strange claims that might sound like the claim to be the brother of the sun and moon; a number of very startling pieces of advice; a number of stunning rebukes; a number of strangely beautiful stories. He would see some very gigantesque figures of speech about the impossibility of threading a needle with a camel or the possibility of throwing a mountain into the sea. He would see a number of very daring simplifications of the difficulties of life; like the advice to shine upon everybody indifferently as does the sunshine or not to worry about the future any more than the birds. He would find on the other hand some passages of almost impenetrable darkness, so far as he is concerned, such as the moral of the parable of the Unjust Steward. Some of these things might strike him as fables and some as truths; but none as truisms. For instance, he would not find the ordinary platitudes in favour of peace. He would find several paradoxes in favour of peace. He would find several ideals of non-resistance, which taken as they stand would be rather too pacific for any pacifist. He would be told in one passage to treat a robber not with passive resistance, but rather with positive and enthusiastic encouragement, if the terms be taken literally; heaping up gifts upon the man who had stolen goods. But he would not find a word of all that obvious rhetoric against war which has filled countless books and odes and orations; not a word about the wickedness of war, the wastefulness of war, the appalling scale of the slaughter in war and all the rest of the familiar frenzy; indeed not a word about war at all. There is nothing that throws any particular light on Christ’s attitude towards organised warfare, except that he seems to have been rather fond of Roman soldiers. Indeed it is another perplexity, speaking from the same external and human stand point, that he seems to have got on much better with Romans than he did with Jews. But the question here is a certain tone to be appreciated by merely reading a certain text; and we might give any number of instances of it.
The statement that the meek shall inherit the earth is very far from being a meek statement. I mean it is not meek in the ordinary sense of mild and moderate and inoffensive. To justify it, it would be necessary to go very deep into history and anticipate things undreamed of then and by many unrealised even now; such as the way in which the mystical monks reclaimed the lands which the practical kings had lost. If it was a truth at all, it was because it was a prophecy. But certainly it was not a truth in the sense of a truism. The blessing upon the meek would seem to be a very violent statement; in the sense of doing violence to reason and probability. And with this we come to another important stage in the speculation. As a prophecy it really was fulfilled; but it was only fulfilled long afterwards. The monasteries were the most practical and prosperous estates and experiments in reconstruction after the barbaric deluge; the meek did really inherit the earth. But nobody could have known anything of the sort at the time—unless indeed there was one who knew. Something of the same thing may be said about the incident of Martha and Mary; which has been interpreted in retrospect and from the inside by the mystics of the Christian contemplative life. But it was not at all an obvious view of it; and most moralists, ancient and modern, could be trusted to make a rush for the obvious. What torrents of effortless eloquence would have flowed from them to swell any slight superiority on the part of Martha; what splendid sermons about the Joy of Service and the Gospel of Work and the World Left Better Than We Found It, and generally all the ten thousand platitudes that can be uttered in favour of taking trouble—by people who need take no trouble to utter them. If in Mary the mystic and child of love Christ was guarding the seed of something more subtle, who was likely to understand it at the time? Nobody else could have seen Clare and Catherine and Teresa shining above the little roof at Bethany. It is so in another way with that magnificent menace about bringing into the world a sword to sunder and divide. Nobody could have guessed then either how it could be fulfilled or how it could be justified. Indeed some freethinkers are still so simple as to fall into the trap and be shocked at a phrase so deliberately defiant. They actually complain of the paradox for not being a platitude.
But the point here is that if we could read the Gospel reports as things as new as newspaper reports, they would puzzle us and perhaps terrify us much more than the same things as developed by historical Christianity. For instance, Christ after a clear allusion to the eunuchs of eastern courts, said there would be eunuchs of the kingdom of heaven. If this does not mean the voluntary enthusiasm of virginity, it could only be made to mean something much more unnatural or uncouth. It is the historical religion that humanises it for us by experience of Franciscans or of Sisters of Mercy. The mere statement standing by itself might very well suggest a rather dehumanised atmosphere; the sinister and inhuman silence of the Asiatic harem and divan. This is but one instance out of scores; but the moral is that the Christ of the Gospel might actually seem more strange and terrible than the Christ of the Church.
I am dwelling on the dark or dazzling or defiant or mysterious side of the Gospel words, not because they had not obviously a more obvious and popular side, but because this is the answer to a common criticism on a vital point. The freethinker frequently says that Jesus of Nazareth was a man of his time, even if he was in advance of his time; and that we cannot accept his ethics as final for humanity. The freethinker then goes on to criticise his ethics, saying plausibly enough that men cannot turn the other cheek, or that they must take thought for the morrow, or that the self-denial is too ascetic or the monogamy too severe. But the Zealots and the Legionaries did not turn the other cheek any more than we do, if so much. The Jewish traders and Roman tax-gatherers took thought for the morrow as much as we, if not more. We cannot pretend to be abandoning the morality of the past for one more suited to the present. It is certainly not the morality of another age, but it might be of another world.
In short, we can say that these ideals are impossible in themselves. Exactly what we cannot say is that they are impossible for us. They are rather notably marked by a mysticism which, if it be a sort of madness, would always have struck the same sort of people as mad. Take, for instance, the case of marriage and the relations of the sexes. It might very well have been true that a Galilean teacher taught things natural to a Galilean environment; but it is not. It might rationally be expected that a man in the time of Tiberius would have advanced a view conditioned by the time of Tiberius; but he did not. What he advanced was something quite different; something very difficult; but something no more difficult now than it was then. When, for instance, Mahomet made his polygamous compromise we may reasonably say that it was conditioned by a polygamous society. When he allowed a man four wives he was really doing something suited to the circumstances, which might have been less suited to other circumstances. Nobody will pretend that the four wives were like the four winds, something seemingly a part of the order of nature; nobody will say that the figure four was written for ever in stars upon the sky. But neither will anyone say that the figure four is an inconceivable ideal; that it is beyond the power of the mind of man to count up to four; or to count the number of his wives and see whether it amounts to four. It is a practical compromise carrying with it the character of a particular society. If Mahomet had been born in Acton in the nineteenth century, we may well doubt whether he would instantly have filled that suburb with harems of four wives apiece. As he was born in Arabia in the sixth century, he did in his conjugal arrangements suggest the conditions of Arabia in the sixth century. But Christ in his view of marriage does not in the least suggest the conditions of Palestine of the first century. He does not suggest anything at all, except the sacramental view of marriage as developed long afterwards by the Catholic Church. It was quite as difficult for people then as for people now. It was much more puzzling to people then than to people now. Jews and Romans and Greeks did not believe, and did not even understand enough to disbelieve, the mystical idea that the man and the woman had become one sacramental substance. We may think it an incredible or impossible ideal; but we cannot think it any more incredible or impossible than they would have thought it. In other words, whatever else is true, it is not true that the controversy has been altered by time. Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to his time, but are no longer suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they were to his time is perhaps suggested in the end of his story.
The same truth might be stated in another way by saying that if the story be regarded as merely human and historical, it is extraordinary how very little there is in the recorded words of Christ that ties him at all to his own time. I do not mean the details of a period, which even a man of the period knows to be passing. I mean the fundamentals which even the wisest man often vaguely assumes to be eternal. For instance, Aristotle was perhaps the wisest and most wide-minded man who ever lived. He founded himself entirely upon fundamentals, which have been generally found to remain rational and solid through all social and historical changes. Still, he lived in a world in which it was thought as natural to have slaves as to have children. And therefore he did permit himself a serious recognition of a difference between slaves and free men. Christ as much as Aristotle lived in a world that took slavery for granted. He did not particularly denounce slavery. He started a movement that could exist in a world with slavery. But he started a movement that could exist in a world without slavery. He never used a phrase that made his philosophy depend even upon the very existence of the social order in which he lived. He spoke as one conscious that everything was ephemeral, including the things that Aristotle thought eternal. By that time the Roman Empire had come to be merely the orbis terrarum, another name for the world. But he never made his morality dependent on the existence of the Roman Empire or even on the existence of the world. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’
The truth is that when critics have spoken of the local limitations of the Galilean, it has always been a case of the local limitations of the critics. He did undoubtedly believe in certain things that one particular modern sect of materialists do not believe. But they were not things particularly peculiar to his time. It would be nearer the truth to say that the denial of them is quite peculiar to our time. Doubtless it would be nearer still to the truth to say merely that a certain solemn social importance, in the minority disbelieving them, is peculiar to our time. He believed, for instance, in evil spirits or in the psychic healing of bodily ills; but not because he was a Galilean born under Augustus. It is absurd to say that a man believed things because he was a Galilean under Augustus when he might have believed the same things if he had been an Egyptian under Tutenkamen or an Indian under Gengis Khan. But with this general question of the philosophy of diabolism or of divine miracles I deal elsewhere. It is enough to say that the materialists have to prove the impossibility of miracles against the testimony of all mankind, not against the prejudices of provincials in North Palestine under the first Roman Emperors. What they have to prove, for the present argument, is the presence in the Gospels of those particular prejudices of those particular provincials. And, humanly speaking, it is astonishing how little they can produce even to make a beginning of proving it.
So it is in this case of the sacrament of marriage. We may not believe in sacraments, as we may not believe in spirits, but it is quite clear that Christ believed in this sacrament in his own way and not in any current or contemporary way. He certainly did not get his argument against divorce from the Mosaic law or the Roman law or the habits of the Palestinian people. It would appear to his critics then exactly what it appears to his critics now; an arbitrary and transcendental dogma coming from nowhere save in the sense that it came from him. I am not at all concerned here to defend that dogma; the point here is that it is just as easy to defend it now as it was to defend it then. It is an ideal altogether outside time; difficult at any period; impossible at no period. In other words, if anyone says it is what might be expected of a man walking about in that place at that period, we can quite fairly answer that it is much more like what might be the mysterious utterance of a being beyond man, if he walked alive among men.
I maintain therefore that a man reading the New Testament frankly and freshly would not get the impression of what is now often meant by a human Christ. The merely human Christ is a made-up figure, a piece of artificial selection, like the merely evolutionary man. Moreover there have been too many of these human Christs found in the same story, just as there have been too many keys to mythology found in the same stories. Three or four separate schools of rationalism have worked over the ground and produced three or four equally rational explanations of his life. The first rational explanation of his life was that he never lived. And this in turn gave an opportunity for three or four different explanations, as that he was a sun-myth or a corn-myth, or any other kind of myth that is also a monomania. Then the idea that he was a divine being who did not exist gave place to the idea that he was a human being who did exist. In my youth it was the fashion to say that he was merely an ethical teacher in the manner of the Essenes, who had apparently nothing very much to say that Hillel or a hundred other Jews might not have said; as that it is a kindly thing to be kind and an assistance to purification to be pure. Then somebody said he was a madman with a Messianic delusion. Then others said he was indeed an original teacher because he cared about nothing but Socialism; or (as others said) about nothing but Pacifism. Then a more grimly scientific character appeared who said that Jesus would never have been heard of at all except for his prophecies of the end of the world. He was important merely as a Millenarian like Dr. Cumming; and created a provincial scare by announcing the exact date of the crack of doom. Among other variants on the same theme was the theory that he was a spiritual healer and nothing else; a view implied by Christian Science, which has really to expound a Christianity without the Crucifixion in order to explain the curing of Peter’s wife’s mother or the daughter of a centurion. There is another theory that concentrates entirely on the business of diabolism and what it would call the contemporary superstition about demoniacs, as if Christ, like a young deacon taking his first orders, had got as far as exorcism and never got any further. Now, each of these explanations in itself seems to me singularly inadequate; but taken together they do suggest something of the very mystery which they miss. There must surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him. If the Christian Scientist is satisfied with him as a spiritual healer and the Christian Socialist is satisfied with him as a social reformer, so satisfied that they do not even expect him to be anything else, it looks as if he really covered rather more ground than they could be expected to expect. And it does seem to suggest that there might be more than they fancy in these other mysterious attributes of casting out devils or prophesying doom.
Above all, would not such a new reader of the New Testament stumble over something that would startle him much more than it startles us? I have here more than once attempted the rather impossible task of reversing time and the historic method; and in fancy looking forward to the facts, instead of backward through the memories. So I have imagined the monster that man might have seemed at first to the mere nature around him. We should have a worse shock if we really imagined the nature of Christ named for the first time. What should we feel at the first whisper of a certain suggestion about a certain man? Certainly it is not for us to blame anybody who should find that first wild whisper merely impious and insane. On the contrary, stumbling on that rock of scandal is the first step. Stark staring incredulity is a far more loyal tribute to that truth than a modernist metaphysic that would make it out merely a matter of degree. It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgement, or to lay hold of the man as a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of so catastrophic a claim. There is more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter’s apprentice said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’
III
THE STRANGEST STORY IN THE WORLD
In the last chapter I have deliberately stressed what seems to be nowadays a neglected side of the New Testament story, but nobody will suppose, I imagine, that it is meant to obscure that side that may truly be called human. That Christ was and is the most merciful of judges and the most sympathetic of friends is a fact of considerably more importance in our own private lives than in anybody’s historical speculations. But the purpose of this book is to point out that something unique has been swamped in cheap generalisations; and for that purpose it is relevant to insist that even what was most universal was also most original. For instance, we might take a topic which really is sympathetic to the modern mood, as the ascetic vocations recently referred to are not. The exaltation of childhood is something which we do really understand; but it was by no means a thing that was then in that sense understood. If we wanted an example of the originality of the Gospels we could hardly take a stronger or more startling one. Nearly two thousand years afterwards we happen to find ourselves in a mood that does really feel the mystical charm of the child; we express it in romances and regrets about childhood, in Peter Pan or The Child’s Garden of Verses. And we can say of the words of Christ with so angry an anti-Christian as Swinburne:—
‘No sign that ever was given To faithful or faithless eyes Showed ever beyond clouds riven So clear a paradise.
Earth’s creeds may be seventy times seven And blood have defiled each creed But if such be the kingdom of heaven It must be heaven indeed.’
But that paradise was not clear until Christianity had gradually cleared it. The pagan world, as such, would not have understood any such thing as a serious suggestion that a child is higher or holier than a man. It would have seemed like the suggestion that a tadpole is higher or holier than a frog. To the merely rationalistic mind, it would sound like saying that a bud must be more beautiful than a flower or that an unripe apple must be better than a ripe one. In other words, this modern feeling is an entirely mystical feeling. It is quite as mystical as the cult of virginity; in fact it is the cult of virginity. But pagan antiquity had much more idea of the holiness of the virgin than of the holiness of the child. For various reasons we have come nowadays to venerate children, perhaps partly because we envy children for still doing what men used to do; such as play simple games and enjoy fairy-tales. Over and above this, however, there is a great deal of real and subtle psychology in our appreciation of childhood; but if we turn it into a modern discovery, we must once more admit that the historical Jesus of Nazareth had already discovered it two thousand years too soon. There was certainly nothing in the world around him to help him to the discovery. Here Christ was indeed human; but more human than a human being was then likely to be. Peter Pan does not belong to the world of Pan but the world of Peter.
Even in the matter of mere literary style, if we suppose ourselves thus sufficiently detached to look at it in that light, there is a curious quality to which no critic seems to have done justice. It had among other things a singular air of piling tower upon tower by the use of the a fortiori; making a pagoda of degrees like the seven heavens. I have already noted that almost inverted imaginative vision which pictured the impossible penance of the Cities of the Plain. There is perhaps nothing so perfect in all language or literature as the use of these three degrees in the parable of the lilies of the field; in which he seems first to take one small flower in his hand and note its simplicity and even its impotence; then suddenly expands it in flamboyant colours into all the palaces and pavilions full of a great name in national legend and national glory; and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels into nothing once more with a gesture as if flinging it away ‘and if God so clothes the grass that today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven— how much more’ It is like the building of a good Babel tower by white magic in a moment and in the movement of a hand; a tower heaved suddenly up to heaven on the top of which can be seen afar off, higher than we had fancied possible, the figure of man; lifted by three infinities above all other things, on a starry ladder of light logic and swift imagination. Merely in a literary sense it would be more of a masterpiece than most of the masterpieces in the libraries; yet it seems to have been uttered almost at random while a man might pull a flower. But merely in a literary sense also, this use of the comparative in several degrees has about it a quality which seems to me to hint of much higher things than the modern suggestion of the simple teaching of pastoral or communal ethics. There is nothing that really indicates a subtle and in the true sense a superior mind so much as this power of comparing a lower thing with a higher and yet that higher with a higher still; of thinking on three planes at once. There is nothing that wants the rarest sort of wisdom so much as to see, let us say, that the citizen is higher than the slave and yet that the soul is infinitely higher than the citizen or the city. It is not by any means a faculty that commonly belongs to these simplifiers of the Gospel; those who insist on what they call a simple morality and others call a sentimental morality. It is not at all covered by those who are content to tell everybody to remain at peace. On the contrary, there is a very striking example of it in the apparent inconsistency between Christ’s sayings about peace and about a sword. It is precisely this power which perceives that while a good peace is better than a good war, even a good war is better than a bad peace. These far-flung comparisons are nowhere so common as in the Gospels; and to me they suggest something very vast. So a thing solitary and solid, with the added dimension of depth or height, might tower over the flat creatures living only on a plane.
This quality of something that can only be called subtle and superior, something that is capable of long views and even of double meanings, is not noted here merely as a counterblast to the commonplace exaggerations of amiability and mild idealism. It is also to be noted in connection with the more tremendous truth touched upon at the end of the last chapter. For this is the very last character that commonly goes with mere megalomania; especially such steep and staggering megalomania as might be involved in that claim. This quality that can only be called intellectual distinction is not, of course, an evidence of divinity. But it is an evidence of a probable distaste for vulgar and vainglorious claims to divinity. A man of that sort, if he were only a man, would be the last man in the world to suffer from that intoxication by one notion from nowhere in particular, which is the mark of the self-deluding sensationalist in religion. Nor is it even avoided by denying that Christ did make this claim. Of no such man as that, of no other prophet or philosopher of the same intellectual order, would it be even possible to pretend that he had made it. Even if the Church had mistaken his meaning, it would still be true that no other historical tradition except the Church had ever even made the same mistake. Mahomedans did not misunderstand Mahomet and suppose he was Allah. Jews did not misinterpret Moses and identify him with Jehovah. Why was this claim alone exaggerated unless this alone was made. Even if Christianity was one vast universal blunder, it is still a blunder as solitary as the Incarnation.
The purpose of these pages is to fix the falsity of certain vague and vulgar assumptions; and we have here one of the most false. There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders were rivals, that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The claim to that crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique. Mahomet did not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did not make it any more that Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he was Brahma. Zoroaster no more claimed to be Ormuz than to be Ahriman. The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just as we should expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy. It is exactly the other way. Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim. Outside the unique case we are considering, the only kind of man who ever does make that kind of claim is a very small man; a secretive or self-centered monomaniac. Nobody can imagine Aristotle claiming to be the father of gods and men, come down from the sky; though we might imagine some insane Roman Emperor like Caligula claiming it for him, or more probably for himself. Nobody can imagine Shakespeare talking as if he were literally divine; though we might imagine some crazy American crank finding it as a cryptogram in Shakespeare’s works, or preferably in his own works. It is possible to find here and there human beings who make this supremely superhuman claim. It is possible to find them in lunatic asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait waistcoats. But what is much more important than their mere materialistic fate in our very materialistic society, under very crude and clumsy laws about lunacy, the type we know as tinged with this, or tending towards it, is a diseased and disproportionate type; narrow yet swollen and morbid to monstrosity. It is by rather an unlucky metaphor that we talk of a madman as cracked; for in a sense he is not cracked enough. He is cramped rather than cracked; there are not enough holes in his head to ventilate it. This impossibility of letting in daylight on a delusion does sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity. It can be found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only among a low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument becomes intensely interesting; because the argument proves too much. For nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that sort of person. No modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad idea like a cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical criticism, he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that. Yet by all analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of all.
In fact, those who can really take it (as I here hypothetically take it) in a quite dry and detached spirit, have here a most curious and interesting human problem. It is so intensely interesting, considered as a human problem, that it is in a spirit quite disinterested, so to speak, that I wish some of them had turned that intricate human problem into something like an intelligible human portrait. If Christ was simply a human character, he really was a highly complex and contradictory human character. For he combined exactly the two things that lie at the two extremes of human variation. He was exactly what the man with a delusion never is; he was wise; he was a good judge. What he said was always unexpected; but it was always unexpectedly magnanimous and often unexpectedly moderate. Take a thing like the point of the parable of the tares and the wheat. It has the quality that unites sanity and subtlety. It has not the simplicity of a madman. It has not even the simplicity of a fanatic. It might be uttered by a philosopher a hundred years old, at the end of a century of Utopias. Nothing could be less like this quality of seeing beyond and all round obvious things, than the condition of the egomaniac with the one sensitive spot on his brain. I really do not see how these two characters could be convincingly combined, except in the astonishing way in which the creed combines them. For until we reach the full acceptance of the fact as a fact, however marvellous, all mere approximations to it are actually further and further away from it. Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it. Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A lunatic may think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only knows, but knows that he knows.
Even on the purely human and sympathetic side, therefore, the Jesus of the New Testament seems to me to have in a great many ways the note of something superhuman; that is of something human and more than human. But there is another quality running through all his teachings which seems to me neglected in most modern talk about them as teachings; and that is the persistent suggestion that he has not really come to teach. If there is one incident in the record which affects me personally as grandly and gloriously human, it is the incident of giving wine for the wedding-feast. That is really human in the sense in which a whole crowd of prigs, having the appearance of human beings, can hardly be described as human. It rises superior to all superior persons. It is as human as Herrick and as democratic as Dickens. But even in that story there is something else that has that note of things not fully explained; and in a way here very relevant. I mean the first hesitation, not on any ground touching the nature of the miracle, but on that of the propriety of working any miracles at all, at least at that stage; ‘my time is not yet come.’ What does that mean? At least it certainly meant a general plan or purpose in the mind, with which certain things did or did not fit in. And if we leave out that solitary strategic plan, we not only leave out the point of the story, but the story.
We often hear of Jesus of Nazareth as a wandering teacher, and there is a vital truth in that view in so far as it emphasises an attitude towards luxury and convention which most respectable people would still regard as that of a vagabond. It is expressed in his own great saying about the holes of the foxes and the nests of the birds, and, like many of his great sayings, it is felt as less powerful than it is, through lack of appreciation of that great paradox by which he spoke of his own humanity as in some way collectively and representatively human; calling himself simply the Son of Man; that is, in effect, calling himself simply Man. It is fitting that the New Man or the Second Adam should repeat in so ringing a voice and with so arresting a gesture the great fact which came first in the original story, that man differs from the brutes by everything, even by deficiency; that he is in a sense less normal and even less native; a stranger upon the earth. It is well to speak of his wanderings in this sense and in the sense that he shared the drifting life of the most homeless and hopeless of the poor. It is assuredly well to remember that he would quite certainly have been moved on by the police and almost certainly arrested by the police for having no visible means of subsistence. For our law has in it a turn of humour or touch of fancy which Nero and Herod never happened to think of, that of actually punishing homeless people for not sleeping at home.
But in another sense the word ‘wandering’ as applied to his life is a little misleading. As a matter of fact, a great many of the pagan sages and not a few of the pagan sophists might truly be described as wandering teachers. In some of them their rambling journeys were not altogether without a parallel in their rambling remarks. Apollonius of Tyana, who figured in some fashionable cults as a sort of ideal philosopher, is represented as rambling as far as the Ganges and Ethiopia, more or less talking all the time. There was actually a school of philosophers called the Peripatetics; and most even of the great philosophers give us a vague impression of having very little to do except to walk and talk. The great conversations which give us our glimpses of the great minds of Socrates or Buddha or even Confucius often seem to be parts of a never-ending picnic; and especially, which is the important point, to have neither beginning nor end. Socrates did indeed find the conversation interrupted by the incident of his execution. But it is the whole point and the whole particular merit, of the position of Socrates that death was only an interruption and an incident. We miss the real moral importance of the great philosopher if we miss that point; that he stares at the executioner with an innocent surprise, and almost an innocent annoyance, at finding anyone so unreasonable as to cut short a little conversation for the elucidation of truth. He is looking for truth and not looking for death. Death is but a stone in the road which can trip him up. His work in life is to wander on the roads of the world and talk about truth for ever. Buddha, on the other hand, did arrest attention by one gesture; it was the gesture of renunciation, and therefore in a sense of denial. But by one dramatic negation he passed into a world of negation that was not dramatic; which he would have been the first to insist was not dramatic. Here again we miss the particular moral importance of the great mystic if we do not see the distinction; that it was his whole point that he had done with drama, which consists of desire and struggle and generally of defeat and disappointment. He passes into peace and lives to instruct others how to pass into it. Henceforth his life is that of the ideal philosopher; certainly a far more really ideal philosopher than Apollonius of Tyana; but still a philosopher in the sense that it is not his business to do anything but rather to explain everything; in his case, we might almost say, mildly and softly to explore everything. For the messages are basically different. Christ said ‘Seek first the kingdom, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ Buddha said ‘Seek first the kingdom, and then you will need none of these things.’
Now compared to these wanderers the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did above all things consist in doing something that had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done, if Jesus had walked about the world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth. And even the external movement of it must not be described as a wandering in the sense of forgetting that it was a journey. This is where it was a fulfilment of the myths rather than of the philosophies; it is a journey with a goal and an object, like Jason going to find the Golden Fleece, or Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides. The gold that he was seeking was death. The primary thing that he was going to do was to die. He was going to do other things equally definite and objective; we might almost say equally external and material. But from first to last the most definite fact is that he is going to die. No two things could possibly be more different than the death of Socrates and the death of Christ. We are meant to feel that the death of Socrates was, from the point of view of his friends at least, a stupid muddle and miscarriage of justice interfering with the flow of a humane and lucid, I had almost said a light philosophy. We are meant to feel that Death was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice. From the moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the moment when the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond words.
Therefore the story of Christ is the story of a journey, almost in the manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a hero moving to his achievement or his doom. It is a story that begins in the paradise of Galilee, a pastoral and peaceful land having really some hint of Eden, and gradually climbs the rising country into the mountains that are nearer to the storm-clouds and the stars, as to a Mountain of Purgatory. He may be met as if straying in strange places, or stopped on the way for discussion or dispute; but his face is set towards the mountain city. That is the meaning of that great culmination when he crested the ridge and stood at the turning of the road and suddenly cried aloud, lamenting over Jerusalem. Some light touch of that lament is in every patriotic poem; or if it is absent, the patriotism stinks with vulgarity. That is the meaning the stirring and startling incident at the gates of the Temple, when the tables were hurled like lumber down the steps, and the rich merchants driven forth with bodily blows; the incident that must be at least as much of a puzzle to the pacifists as any paradox about non resistance can be to any of the militarists. I have compared the quest to the journey of Jason, but we must never forget that in a deeper sense it is rather to be compared to the journey of Ulysses. It was not only a romance of travel but a romance of return; and of the end of a usurpation. No healthy boy reading the story regards the rout of the Ithacan suitors as anything but a happy ending. But there are doubtless some who regard the rout of the Jewish merchants and money changers with that refined repugnance which never fails to move them in the presence of violence, and especially of violence against the well-to-do. The point, here however, is that all these incidents have in them a character of mounting crisis. In other words. these incidents are not incidental. When Apollonius the ideal philosopher is brought before the judgement-seat of Domitian and vanishes by magic, the miracle is entirely incidental. It might have occurred at any time in the wandering life of the Tyanean; indeed, I believe it is doubtful in date as well as in substance. The ideal philosopher merely vanished, and resumed his ideal existence somewhere else for an indefinite period. It is characteristic of the contrast perhaps that Apollonius was supposed to have lived to an almost miraculous old age. Jesus of Nazareth was less prudent in his miracles. When Jesus was brought before the judgement-seat of Pontius Pilate, he did not vanish. It was the crisis and the goal; it was the hour and the power of darkness. It was the supremely supernatural act, of all his miraculous life, that he did not vanish.
Every attempt to amplify that story has diminished it. The task has been attempted by many men of real genius and eloquence as well as by only too many vulgar sentimentalists and self-conscious rhetoricians. The tale has been retold with patronising pathos by elegant sceptics and with fluent enthusiasm by boisterous best-sellers. It will not be retold here. The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is like the power of mill-stones; and those who can read them simply enough will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them. Criticism is only words about words; and of what use are words about such words as these? What is the use of word-painting about the dark garden filled suddenly with torchlight and furious faces? ‘Are you come out with swords and staves as against a robber? All day I sat in your temple teaching, and you took me not.’ Can anything be added to the massive and gathered restraint of that irony; like a great wave lifted to the sky and refusing to fall? ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me but weep for yourselves and for your children.’ As the High Priest asked what further need he had of witnesses, we might well ask what further need we have of words. Peter in a panic repudiated him: ‘and immediately the cock crew; and Jesus looked upon Peter, and Peter went out and wept bitterly.’ Has anyone any further remarks to offer. Just before the murder he prayed for all the murderous race of men, saying, ‘They know not what they do’; is there anything to say to that, except that we know as little what we say? Is there any need to repeat and spin out the story of how the tragedy trailed up the Via Dolorosa and how they threw him in haphazard with two thieves in one of the ordinary batches of execution; and how in all that horror and howling wilderness of desertion one voice spoke in homage, a startling voice from the very last place where it was looked for, the gibbet of the criminal; and he said to that nameless ruffian, ‘This night shalt thou be with me in Paradise’? Is there anything to put after that but a full stop? Or is anyone prepared to answer adequately that farewell gesture to all flesh which created for his Mother a new Son?
It is more within my powers, and here more immediately to my purpose, to point out that in that scene were symbolically gathered all the human forces that have been vaguely sketched in this story. As kings and philosophers and the popular element had been symbolically present at his birth, so they were more practically concerned in his death; and with that we come face to face with the essential fact to be realised. All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract. Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.
In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask: ‘What is truth?’ So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgement-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.
There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the most important truth in the world; and even that could not save the world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism; like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some intermediaries divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away. Anyhow it could not save the world; it could not even conquer the world. There were philosophers who held it in its highest and noblest form; but they not only could not convert the world, but they never tried. You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a private opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket-knife. The Jewish priests had guarded it jealously in the good and the bad sense. They had kept it as a gigantic secret. As savage heroes might have kept the sun in a box, they kept the Everlasting in the tabernacle. They were proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a single deity; and they did not know that they had themselves gone blind. Since that day their representatives have been like blind men in broad daylight, striking to right and left with their staffs, and cursing the darkness. But there has been that in their monumental monotheism that it has at least remained like a monument, the last thing of its kind, and in a sense motionless in the more restless world which it cannot satisfy. For it is certain that for some reason it cannot satisfy. Since that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, since the rumour that God had left his heavens to set it right.
And as it was with these powers that were good, or at least had once been good, so it was with the element which was perhaps the best, or which Christ himself seems certainly to have felt as the best. The poor to whom he preached the good news, the common people who heard him gladly, the populace that had made so many popular heroes and demigods in the old pagan world, showed also the weaknesses that were dissolving the world. They suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city, and especially the mob of the capital, during the decline of a society. The same thing that makes the rural population live on tradition makes the urban population live on rumour. Just as its myths at the best had been irrational, so its likes and dislikes are easily changed by baseless assertion that is arbitrary without being authoritative. Some brigand or other was artificially turned into a picturesque and popular figure and run as a kind of candidate against Christ. In all this we recognise the urban population that we know, with its newspaper scares and scoops. But there was present in this ancient population an evil more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the neglect of the individual, even of the individual voting the condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was the soul of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in that hour, ‘It is well that one man die for the people.’ Yet this spirit in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had also been in itself and in its time a noble spirit. It had its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honoured for ever. It was failing through its weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The mob went along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.
There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.
They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture and guarded by the authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.
IV
THE WITNESS OF THE HERETICS
Christ founded the Church with two great figures of speech; in the final words to the Apostles who received authority to found it. The first was the phrase about founding it on Peter as on a rock; the second was the symbol of the keys. About the meaning of the former there is naturally no doubt in my own case; but it does not directly affect the argument here save in two more secondary aspects. It is yet another example of a thing that could only fully expand and explain itself afterwards, and even long afterwards. And it is yet another example of something the very reverse of simple and self-evident even in the language, in so far as it described a man as a rock when he had much more the appearance of a reed.
But the other image of the keys has an exactitude that has hardly been exactly noticed. The keys have been conspicuous enough in the art and heraldry of Christendom; but not everyone has noted the peculiar aptness of the allegory. We have now reached the point in history where something must be said of the first appearance and activities of the Church in the Roman Empire; and for that brief description nothing could be more perfect than that ancient metaphor. The Early Christian was very precisely a person carrying about a key, or what he said was a key. The whole Christian movement consisted in claiming to possess that key. It was not merely a vague forward movement, which might be better represented by a battering-ram. It was not something that swept along with it similar or dissimilar things, as does a modern social movement. As we shall see in a moment, it rather definitely refused to do so. It definitely asserted that there was a key and that it possessed that key and that no other key was like it; in that sense it was as narrow as you please. Only it happened to be the key that could unlock the prison of the whole world; and let in the white daylight of liberty.
The creed was like a key in three respects; which can be most conveniently summed up under this symbol. First, a key is above all things a thing with a shape. It is a thing that depends entirely upon keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness. That is where it differs from all that formless infinity, Manichean or Buddhist, which makes a sort of pool of night in the dark heart of Asia; the ideal of uncreating all the creatures. That is where it differs also from the analogous vagueness of mere evolutionism, the idea of creatures constantly losing their shape. A man told that his solitary latchkey had been melted down with a million others into a Buddhistic unity would be annoyed. But a man told that his key was gradually growing and sprouting in his pocket, and branching into new wards or complications, would not be more gratified.
Second, the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape. A savage who did not know it was a key would have the greatest difficulty in guessing what it could possibly be. And it is fantastic because it is in a sense arbitrary. A key is not a matter of abstractions; in that sense a key is not a matter of argument. It either fits the lock or it does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered by itself; or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or decorative art. It is senseless for a man to say he would like a simple key; it would be far more sensible to do his best with a crowbar. And thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so this was one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. When people complain of the religion being so early complicated with theology and things of the kind, they forget that the world had not only got into a hole, but had got into a whole maze of holes and corners. The problem itself was a complicated problem; it did not in the ordinary sense merely involve anything so simple as sin. It was also full of secrets, of unexplored and unfathomable fallacies, of unconscious mental diseases, of dangers in all directions. If the faith had faced the world only with the platitudes about peace and simplicity some moralists would confine it to, it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious and labyrinthine lunatic asylum. What it did do we must now roughly describe; it is enough to say here that there was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex, indeed there was only one thing about it that was simple. It opened the door.
There are certain recognised and accepted statements in this matter which may for brevity and convenience be described as lies. We have all heard people say that Christianity arose in an age of barbarism. They might just as well say that Christian Science arose in an age of barbarism. They may think Christianity was a symptom of social decay, as I think Christian Science a symptom of mental decay. They may think Christianity a superstition that ultimately destroyed a civilisation, as I think Christian Science a superstition capable (if taken seriously) of destroying any number of civilisations. But to say that a Christian of the fourth or fifth centuries was a barbarian living in a barbarous time is exactly like saying that Mrs. Eddy was a Red Indian. And if I allowed my constitutional impatience with Mrs. Eddy to impel me to call her a Red Indian, I should incidentally be telling a lie. We may like or dislike the imperial civilisation of Rome in the fourth century; we may like or dislike the industrial civilisation of America in the nineteenth century; but that they both were what we commonly mean by a civilisation no person of commonsense could deny if he wanted to. This is a very obvious fact but it is also a very fundamental one; and we must make it the foundation of any further description of constructive Christianity in the past. For good or evil, it was pre-eminently the product of a civilised age, perhaps of an over-civilised age. This is the first fact apart from all praise or blame; indeed I am so unfortunate as not to feel that I praise a thing when I compare it to Christian Science. But it is at least desirable to know something of the savour of a society in which we are condemning or praising anything; and the science that connects Mrs. Eddy with tomahawks or the Mater Dolorosa with totems may for our general convenience be eliminated. The dominant fact, not merely about the Christian religion, but about the whole pagan civilisation, was that which has been more than once repeated in these pages. The Mediterranean was a lake in the real sense of a pool; in which a number of different cults or cultures were, as the phrase goes, pooled. Those cities facing each other round the circle of the lake became more and more one cosmopolitan culture. On its legal and military side it was the Roman Empire, but it was very many-sided. It might be called superstitious in the sense that it contained a great number of varied superstitions; but by no possibility can any part of it be called barbarous.
In this level of cosmopolitan culture arose the Christian religion and the Catholic Church; and everything in the story suggests that it was felt to be something new and strange. Those who have tried to suggest that it evolved out of something much milder or more ordinary have found that in this case their evolutionary method is very difficult to apply. They may suggest that Essenes or Ebionites or such things were the seed; but the seed is invisible; the tree appears very rapidly full-grown; and the tree is something totally different. It is certainly a Christmas tree in the sense that it keeps the kindliness and moral beauty of the story of Bethlehem; but it was as ritualistic as the seven-branched candlestick, and the candles it carried were considerably more than were probably permitted by the first prayer-book of Edward the Sixth. It might well be asked, indeed, why any one accepting the Bethlehem tradition should object to golden or gilded ornament since the Magi themselves brought gold, why he should dislike incense in the church since incense was brought even to the stable. But these are controversies that do not concern me here. I am concerned only with the historical fact, more and more admitted by historians, that very early in its history this thing became visible to the civilisation of antiquity; and that already the Church appeared as a Church; with everything that is implied in a Church and much that is disliked in a Church. We will discuss in a moment how far it was like other ritualistic or magical or ascetical mysteries in its own time. It was certainly not in the least like merely ethical and idealistic movements in our time. It had a doctrine; it had a discipline; it had sacraments; it had degrees of initiation, it admitted people and expelled people; it affirmed one dogma with authority and repudiated another with anathemas. If all these things be the marks of Antichrist, the reign of Antichrist followed very rapidly upon Christ.
Those who maintain that Christianity was not a Church but a moral movement of idealists have been forced to push the period of its perversion or disappearance further and further back. A bishop of Rome writes claiming authority in the very lifetime of St. John the Evangelist; and it is described as the first papal aggression. A friend of the Apostles writes of them as men he knew and says they taught him the doctrine of the Sacrament, and Mr. Wells can only murmur that the reaction towards barbaric blood-rites may have happened rather earlier than might be expected. The date of the Fourth Gospel, which at one time was steadily growing later and later, is now steadily growing earlier and earlier; until critics are staggered at the dawning and dreadful possibility that it might be something like what it professes to be. The last limit of an early date for the extinction of true Christianity has probably been found by the latest German professor whose authority is invoked by Dean Inge. This learned scholar says that Pentecost was the occasion for the first founding of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic, and despotic Church utterly alien to the simple ideals of Jesus of Nazareth. This may be called, in a popular as well as a learned sense, the limit. What do professors of this kind imagine that men are made of? Suppose it were a matter of any merely human movement, let us say that of the conscientious objectors. Some say the early Christians were Pacifists; I do not believe it for a moment; but I am quite ready to accept the parallel for the sake of the argument. Tolstoy or some great preacher of peace among peasants has been shot as a mutineer for defying conscription; and a little while afterwards his few followers meet together in an upper room in remembrance of him. They never had any reason for coming together except that common memory; they are men of many kinds with nothing to bind them, except that the greatest event in all their lives was this tragedy of the teacher of universal peace. They are always repeating his words, revolving his problems, trying to imitate his character. The Pacifists meet at their Pentecost and are possessed of a sudden ecstasy of enthusiasm and wild rush of the whirlwind of inspiration, in the course of which they proceed to establish universal Conscription, to increase the Navy Estimates, to insist on everybody going about armed to the teeth and on all the frontiers bristling with artillery; the proceedings concluded with the singing of ‘Boys of the Bulldog Breed’ and ‘Don’t let them scrap the British Navy.’ That is something like a fair parallel to the theory of these critics; that the transition from their idea of Jesus to their idea of Catholicism could have been made in the little upper room at Pentecost. Surely anybody’s commonsense would tell him that enthusiasts who only met through their common enthusiasm for a leader whom they loved, would not instantly rush away to establish everything that he hated. No, if the ‘ecclesiastical and dogmatic system’ is as old as Pentecost it is as old as Christmas. If we trace it back to such very early Christians we must trace it back to Christ.
We may begin then with these two negations. It is nonsense to say that the Christian faith appeared in a simple age; in the sense of an unlettered and gullible age. It is equally nonsense to say that the Christian faith was a simple thing; in the sense of a vague or childish or merely instinctive thing. Perhaps the only point in which we could possibly say that the Church fitted into the pagan world, is the fact that they were both not only highly civilised but rather complicated. They were both emphatically many-sided; but antiquity was then a many-sided hole, like a hexagonal hole waiting for an equally hexagonal stopper. In that sense only the Church was many-sided enough to fit the world. The six sides of the Mediterranean world faced each other across the sea and waited for something that should look all ways at once. The Church had to be both Roman and Greek and Jewish and African and Asiatic. In the very words of the Apostle of the Gentiles, it was indeed all things to all men. Christianity then was not merely crude and simple and was the very reverse of the growth of a barbaric time. But when we come to the contrary charge, we come to a much more plausible charge. It is very much more tenable that the Faith was but the final phase of the decay of civilisation, in the sense of the excess of civilisation; that this superstition was a sign that Rome was dying, and dying of being much too civilised. That is an argument much better worth considering; and we will proceed to consider it.
At the beginning of this book I ventured on a general summary of it, in a parallel between the rise of humanity out of nature and the rise of Christianity out of history. I pointed out that in both cases what had gone before might imply something coming after; but did not in the least imply what did come after. If a detached mind had seen certain apes it might have deduced more anthropoids; it would not have deduced man or anything within a thousand miles of what man has done. In short, it might have seen Pithecanthropus or the Missing Link looming in the future, if possible almost as dimly and doubtfully as we see him looming in the past. But if it foresaw him appearing it would also foresee him disappearing, and leaving a few faint traces just as he has left a few faint traces; if they are traces. To foresee that Missing Link would not be to foresee Man, or anything like Man. Now this earlier explanation must be kept in mind; because it is an exact parallel to the true view of the Church; and the suggestion of it having evolved naturally out of the Empire in decay.
The truth is that in one sense a man might very well have predicted that the imperial decadence would produce something like Christianity. That is, something a little like and gigantically different. A man might very well have said, for instance, ‘Pleasure has been pursued so extravagantly that there will be a reaction into pessimism. Perhaps it will take the form of asceticism; men will mutilate themselves instead of merely hanging themselves.’ Or a man might very reasonably have said, ‘If we weary of our Greek and Latin gods we shall be hankering after some eastern mystery or other; there will be a fashion in Persians or Hindoos.’ Or a man of the world might well have been shrewd enough to say, ‘Powerful people are picking up these fads; some day the court will adopt one of them and it may become official.’ Or yet another and gloomier prophet might be pardoned for saying, ‘The world is going down-hill; dark and barbarous superstitions will return, it does not matter much which. They will all be formless and fugitive like dreams of the night.’
Now it is the intense interest of the case that all these prophecies were really fulfilled; but it was not the Church that fulfilled them. It was the Church that escaped from them, confounded them, and rose above them in triumph. In so far as it was probable that the mere nature of hedonism would produce a mere reaction of asceticism it did produce a mere reaction of asceticism. It was the movement called Manichean and the Church was its mortal enemy. In so far as it would have naturally appeared at that point of history, it did appear; it did also disappear, which was equally natural. The mere pessimist reaction did come with the Manichees and did go with the Manichees. But the Church did not come with them or go with them; and she had much more to do with them going than with their coming. Or again, in so far as it was probable that even the growth of scepticism would bring in a fashion of eastern religion, it did bring it in; Mithras came from far beyond Palestine out of the heart of Persia, bringing strange mysteries of the blood of bulls. Certainly there was everything to show that some such fashion would have come in any case but certainly there is nothing in the world to show that it would not have passed away in any case. Certainly an Oriental fad was something eminently fitted to the fourth or fifth century; but that hardly explains it having remained to the twentieth century, and still going strong. In short, in so far as things of the kind might have been expected then, things like Mithraism were experienced then; but it scarcely explains our more recent experiences. And if we were still Mithraists merely because Mithraic head-dresses and other Persian apparatuses might be expected to be all the rage in the days of Domitian, it would almost seem by this time that we must be a little dowdy.
It is the same, as will be suggested in a moment, with the idea of official favouritism. In so far as such favouritism shown towards a fad was something that might have been looked for during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it was something that did exist in that Empire and did decline and fall with it. It throws no sort of light on the thing that resolutely refused to decline and fall; that grew steadily while the other was declining and falling; and which even at this moment is going forward with fearless energy, when an other aeon has completed its cycle and another civilisation seems almost ready to fall or to decline.
Now the curious fact is this; that the very heresies which the early Church is blamed for crushing testify to the unfairness for which she is blamed. In so far as something deserved the blame, it was precisely the things that she is blamed for blaming. In so far as something was merely a superstition, she herself condemned that superstition. In so far as something was a mere reaction into barbarism, she herself resisted it because it was a reaction into barbarism. In so far as something was a fad of the fading empire, that died and deserved to die, it was the Church alone that killed it. The Church is reproached for being exactly what the heresy was repressed for being. The explanations of the evolutionary historians and higher critics do really explain why Arianism and Gnosticism and Nestorianism were born—and also why they died. They do not explain why the Church was born or why she has refused to die. Above all, they do not explain why she should have made war on the very evils she is supposed to share.
Let us take a few practical examples of the principle; the principle that if there was anything that was really a superstition of the dying empire, it did really die with the dying empire; and certainly was not the same as the very thing that destroyed it. For this purpose we will take in order two or three of the most ordinary explanations of Christian origins among the modern critics of Christianity. Nothing is more common, for instance, than to find such a modern critic writing something like this: ‘Christianity was above all a movement of ascetics, a rush into the desert, a refuge in the cloister, a renunciation of all life and happiness; and this was a part of a gloomy and inhuman reaction against nature itself, a hatred of the body, a horror of the material universe, a sort of universal suicide of the senses and even of the self. It came from an eastern fanaticism like that of the fakirs and was ultimately founded on an eastern pessimism, which seems to feel existence itself as an evil.’
Now the most extraordinary thing about this is that it is all quite true; it is true in every detail except that it happens to be attributed entirely to the wrong person. It is not true of the Church; but it is true of the heretics condemned by the Church. It is as if one were to write a most detailed analysis of the mistakes and misgovernment of the ministers of George the Third, merely with the small inaccuracy that the whole story was told about George Washington; or as if somebody made a list of the crimes of the Bolshevists with no variation except that they were all attributed to the Czar. The early Church was indeed very ascetic in connection with a totally different philosophy; but the philosophy of a war on life and nature as such really did exist in the world, if the critics only knew where to look for it.
What really happened was this. When the Faith first emerged into the world, the very first thing that happened to it was that it was caught in a sort of swarm of mystical and metaphysical sects, mostly out of the East; like one lonely golden bee caught in a swarm of wasps. To the ordinary onlooker, there did not seem to be much difference, or anything beyond a general buzz; indeed in a sense there was not much difference so far as stinging and being stung were concerned. The difference was that only one golden dot in all that whirring gold-dust had the power of going forth to make hives for all humanity; to give the world honey and wax or (as was so finely said in a context too easily forgotten) ‘the two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.’ The wasps all died that winter; and half the difficulty is that hardly anyone knows anything about them and most people do not know that they ever existed; so that the whole story of that first phase of our religion is lost. Or, to vary the metaphor, when this movement or some other movement pierced the dyke between the east and west and brought more mystical ideas into Europe, it brought with it a whole flood of other mystical ideas besides its own, most of them ascetical and nearly all of them pessimistic. They very nearly flooded and over-whelmed the purely Christian element. They came mostly from that region that was a sort of dim borderland between the eastern philosophies and the eastern mythologies, and which shared with the wilder philosophers that curious crave for making fantastic patterns of the cosmos in the shape of maps and genealogical trees. Those that are supposed to derive from the mysterious Manes are called Manichean; kindred cults are more generally known as Gnostic; they are mostly of a labyrinthine complexity, but the point to insist on is the pessimism; the fact that nearly all in one form or another regarded the creation of the world as the work of an evil spirit. Some of them had that Asiatic atmosphere that surrounds Buddhism; the suggestion that life is a corruption of the purity of being. Some of them suggested a purely spiritual order which had been betrayed by the coarse and clumsy trick of making such toys as the sun and moon and stars. Anyhow all this dark tide out of the metaphysical sea in the midst of Asia poured through the dykes simultaneously with the creed of Christ; but it is the whole point of the story that the two were not the same; that they flowed like oil and water. That creed remained in the shape of a miracle; a river still flowing through the sea. And the proof of the miracle was practical once more; it was merely that while all that sea was salt and bitter with the savour of death, of this one stream in the midst of it a man could drink.
Now that purity was preserved by dogmatic definitions and exclusions. It could not possibly have been preserved by anything else. If the Church had not renounced the Manicheans it might have become merely Manichean. If it had not renounced the Gnostics it might have become Gnostic. But by the very fact that it did renounce them it proved that it was not either Gnostic or Manichean. At any rate it proved that something was not either Gnostic or Manichean; and what could it be that condemned them, if it was not the original good news of the runners from Bethlehem and the trumpet of the Resurrection? The early Church was ascetic, but she proved that she was not pessimistic, simply by condemning the pessimists. The creed declared that man was sinful, but it did not declare that life was evil, and it proved it by damning those who did. The condemnation of the early heretics is itself condemned as something crabbed and narrow; but it was in truth the very proof that the Church meant to be brotherly and broad. It proved that the primitive Catholics were specially eager to explain that they did not think man utterly vile; that they did not think life incurably miserable; that they did not think marriage a sin or procreation a tragedy. They were ascetic because asceticism was the only possible purge of the sins of the world; but in the very thunder of their anathemas they affirmed for ever that their asceticism was not to be anti-human or anti-natural; that they did wish to purge the world and not destroy it. And nothing else except those anathemas could possibly have made it clear, amid a confusion which still confuses them with their mortal enemies. Nothing else but dogma could have resisted the riot of imaginative invention with which the pessimists were waging their war against nature; with their Aeons and their Demiurge, their strange Logos and their sinister Sophia. If the Church had not insisted on theology, it would have melted into a mad mythology of the mystics, yet further removed from reason or even from rationalism; and, above all yet further removed from life and from the love of life. Remember that it would have been an inverted mythology, one contradicting everything natural in paganism; a mythology in which Pluto would be above Jupiter and Hades hang higher than Olympus; in which Brahma and all that has the breath of life would be subject to Seeva, shining with the eye of death.
That the early Church was itself full of an ecstatic enthusiasm for renunciation and virginity makes this distinction much more striking and not less so. It makes all the more important the place where the dogma drew the line. A man might crawl about on all fours like a beast because he was an ascetic. He might stand night and day on the top of a pillar and be adored for being an ascetic, but he could not say that the world was a mistake or the marriage state a sin without being a heretic. What was it that thus deliberately disengaged itself from eastern asceticism by sharp definition and fierce refusal, if it was not something with an individuality of its own; and one that was quite different? If the Catholics are to be confused with the Gnostics, we can only say it was not their fault if they are. And it is rather hard that the Catholics should be blamed by the same critics for persecuting the heretics and also for sympathising with the heresy.
The Church was not a Manichean movement if only because it was not a movement at all. It was not even merely an ascetical movement, because it was not a movement at all. It would be nearer the truth to call it the tamer of asceticism than the mere leader or loosener of it. It was a thing having its own theory of asceticism, its own type of asceticism, but most conspicuous at the moment as the moderator of other theories and types. This is the only sense that can be made, for instance, of the story of St. Augustine. As long as he was a mere man of the world, a mere man drifting with his time, he actually was a Manichean. It really was quite modern and fashionable to be a Manichean. But when he became a Catholic, the people he instantly turned on and rent in pieces were the Manicheans. The Catholic way of putting it is that he left off being a pessimist to become an ascetic. But as the pessimists interpreted asceticism, it ought to be said that he left off being an ascetic to become a saint. The war upon life, the denial of nature, were exactly the things he had already found in the heathen world outside the Church, and had to renounce when he entered the Church. The very fact that St. Augustine remains a somewhat sterner or sadder figure than St. Francis or St. Teresa only accentuates the dilemma. Face to face with the gravest or even grimmest of Catholics, we can still ask, ‘Why did Catholicism make war on Manichees, if Catholicism was Manichean?’
Take another rationalistic explanation of the rise of Christendom. It is common enough to find another critic saying, ‘Christianity did not really rise at all; that is, it did not merely rise from below; it was imposed from above. It is an example of the power of the executive, especially in despotic states. The Empire was really an Empire; that is, it was really ruled by the Emperor. One of the Emperors happened to become a Christian. He might just as well have become a Mithraist or a Jew or a Fire-Worshipper; it was common in the decline of the Empire for eminent and educated people to adopt these eccentric eastern cults. But when he adopted it, it became the official religion of the Roman Empire; and when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it became as strong, as universal and as invincible as the Roman Empire. It has only remained in the world as a relic of that Empire; or, as many have put it, it is but the ghost of Caesar still hovering over Rome.’ This also is a very ordinary line taken in the criticism of orthodoxy, to say that it was only officialism that ever made it orthodoxy. And here again we can call on the heretics to refute it.
The whole great history of the Arian heresy might have been invented to explode this idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in this connection; and the upshot of it is in that in so far as there ever was a merely official religion, it actually died because it was merely an official religion; and what destroyed it was the real religion. Arius advanced a version of Christianity which moved, more or less vaguely, in the direction of what we should call Unitarianism; though it was not the same, for it gave to Christ a curious intermediary position between the divine and human. The point is that it seemed to many more reasonable and less fanatical; and among these were many of the educated class in a sort of reaction against the first romance of conversion. Arians were a sort of moderates and a sort of modernists. And it was felt that after the first squabbles this was the final form of rationalised religion into which civilisation might well settle down. It was accepted by Divus Caesar himself and became the official orthodoxy; the generals and military princes drawn from the new barbarian powers of the north, full of the future, supported it strongly. But the sequel is still more important. Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism to complete agnosticism, so the greatest of the Arian emperors ultimately shed the last and thinnest pretense of Christianity; he abandoned ever Arius and returned to Apollo. He was a Caesar of the Caesars; a soldier, a scholar, a man of large ambitions and ideals; another of the philosopher kings. It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose again. The oracles began to speak like birds beginning to sing at dawn; paganism was itself again; the gods returned. It seemed the end of that strange interlude of an alien superstition. And indeed it was the end of it, so far as there was a mere interlude of mere superstition. It was the end of it, in so far as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion of a generation. If there really was something that began with Constantine, then it ended with Julian.
But there was something that did not end. There had arisen in that hour of history, defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the Church, Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this religious history, and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put it this way. If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, ‘God is Love.’ Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.
That this purely Christian dogma actually for a second time rebelled against the Empire, and actually for a second time refounded the Church in spite of the Empire, is itself a proof that there was something positive and personal working in the world, other than whatever official faith the Empire chose to adopt. This power utterly destroyed the official faith that the Empire did adopt. It went on its own way as it is going on its own way still. There are any number of other examples in which is repeated precisely the same process we have reviewed in the case of the Manichean and the Arian. A few centuries afterwards, for instance, the Church had to maintain the same Trinity, which is simply the logical side of love, against another appearance of the isolated and simplified deity in the religion of Islam. Yet there are some who cannot see what the Crusaders were fighting for; and some even who talk as if Christianity had never been anything but a form of what they call Hebraism coming in with the decay of Hellenism. Those people must certainly be very much puzzled by the war between the Crescent and the Cross. If Christianity had never been anything but a simpler morality sweeping away polytheism, there is no reason why Christendom should not have been swept into Islam. The truth is that Islam itself was a barbaric reaction against that very humane complexity that is really a Christian character; that idea of balance in the deity, as of balance in the family, that makes that creed a sort of sanity, and that sanity the soul of civilisation. And that is why the Church is from the first a thing holding its own position and point of view, quite apart from the accidents and anarchies of its age. That is why it deals blows impartially right and left, at the pessimism of the Manichean or the optimism of the Pelagian. It was not a Manichean movement because it was not a movement at all. It was not an official fashion because it was not a fashion at all. It was something that could coincide with movements and fashions, could control them and could survive them.
So might rise from their graves the great heresiarchs to confound their comrades of to-day. There is nothing that the critics now affirm that we cannot call on these great witnesses to deny. The modern critic will say lightly enough that Christianity was but a reaction into asceticism and anti-natural spirituality, a dance of fakirs furious against life and love. But Manes the great mystic will answer them from his secret throne and cry, ‘These Christians have no right to be called spiritual; these Christians have no title to be called ascetics, they who compromised with the curse of life and all the filth of the family. Through them the earth is still foul with fruit and harvest and polluted with population. Theirs was no movement against nature, or my children would have carried it to triumph; but these fools renewed the world when I would have ended it with a gesture.’ And another critic will write that the Church was but the shadow of the Empire, the fad of a chance Emperor, and that it remains in Europe only as the ghost of the power of Rome. And Arius the deacon will answer out of the darkness of oblivious ‘No, indeed, or the world would have followed my more reasonable religion. For mine went down before demagogues and men defying Caesar; and around my champion was the purple cloak and mine was the glory of the eagles. It was not for lack of these things that I failed.’ And yet a third modern will maintain that the creed spread only as a sort of panic of hell-fire; men everywhere attempting impossible things in fleeing from incredible vengeance; a nightmare of imaginary remorse; and such an explanation will satisfy many who see something dreadful in the doctrine of orthodoxy. And then there will go up against it the terrible voice of Tertullian, saying, ‘And why then was I cast out; and why did soft hearts and heads decide against me when I proclaimed the perdition of all sinners; and what was this power that thwarted me when I threatened all backsliders with hell? For none ever went up that hard road so far as I; and mine was the Credo Quia Impossible.’ Then there is the fourth suggestion that there was something of the Semitic secret society in the whole matter; that it was a new invasion of the nomad spirit shaking a kindlier and more comfortable paganism, its cities and its household gods; whereby the jealous monotheistic races could after all establish their jealous God. And Mahomet shall answer out of the whirlwind, the red whirlwind of the desert, ‘Who ever served the jealousy of God as I did or left him more lonely in the sky? Who ever paid more honour to Moses and Abraham or won more victories over idols and the images of paganism? And what was this thing that thrust me back with the energy of a thing alive; whose fanaticism could drive me from Sicily and tear up my deep roots out of the rock of Spain? What faith was theirs who thronged in thousands of every class a country crying out that my ruin was the will of God; and what hurled great Godfrey as from a catapult over the wall of Jerusalem, and what brought great Sobieski like a thunderbolt to the gates of Vienna? I think there was more than you fancy in the religion that has so matched itself with mine.’
Those who would suggest that the faith was a fanaticism are doomed to an eternal perplexity. In their account it is bound to appear as fanatical for nothing, and fanatical against everything. It is ascetical and at war with ascetics, Roman and in revolt against Rome, monotheistic and fighting furiously against monotheism; harsh in its condemnation of harshness; a riddle not to be explained even as unreason. And what sort of unreason is it that seems reasonable to millions of educated Europeans through all the revolutions of some sixteen hundred years? People are not amused with a puzzle or a paradox or a mere muddle in the mind for all that time. I know of no explanation except that such a thing is not unreason but reason; that if it is fanatical it is fanatical for reason and fanatical against all the unreasonable things. That is the only explanation I can find of a thing from the first so detached and so confident, condemning things that looked so like itself, refusing help from powers that seemed so essential to its existence, sharing on its human side all the passions of the age, yet always at the supreme moment suddenly rising superior to them, never saying exactly what it was expected to say and never needing to unsay what it had said; I can find no explanation except that, like Pallas from the brain of Jove, it had indeed come forth out of the mind of God, mature and mighty and armed for judgement and for war.
V
THE ESCAPE FROM PAGANISM
The modern missionary, with his palm-leaf hat and his umbrella, has become rather a figure of fun. He is chaffed among men of the world for the ease with which he can be eaten by cannibals and the narrow bigotry which makes him regard the cannibal culture as lower than his own. Perhaps the best part of the joke is that the men of the world do not see that the joke is against themselves. It is rather ridiculous to ask a man just about to be boiled in a pot and eaten, at a purely religious feast, why he does not regard all religions as equally friendly and fraternal. But there is a more subtle criticism uttered against the more old-fashioned missionary; to the effect that he generalises too broadly about the heathen and pays too little attention to the difference between Mahomet and Mumbo-Jumbo. There was probably truth in this complaint, especially in the past; but it is my main contention here that the exaggeration is all the other way at present. It is the temptation of the professors to treat mythologies too much as theologies; as things thoroughly thought out are seriously held. It is the temptation of the intellectuals to take much too seriously the fine shades of various schools in the rather irresponsible metaphysics of Asia. Above all it is their temptation to miss the real truth implied in the idea of Aquinas contra Gentiles or Athanasius contra mundum.
If the missionary says, in fact, that he is exceptional in being a Christian, and that the rest of the races and religions can be collectively classified as heathen, he is perfectly right. He may say it in quite the wrong spirit, in which case he is spiritually wrong. But in the cold light of philosophy and history, he is intellectually right. He may not be right minded, but he is right. He may not even have a right to be right, but he is right. The outer world to which he brings his creed really is some thing subject to certain generalisations covering all its varieties, and is not merely a variety of similar creeds. Perhaps it is in any case too much of a temptation to pride or hypocrisy to call it heathenry. Perhaps it could be better simply to call it humanity. But there are certain broad characteristics of what we call humanity while it remains in what we call heathenry. They are not necessarily bad characteristics; some of them are worthy of the respect of Christendom; some of them have been absorbed and transfigured in the substance of Christendom. But they existed before Christendom and they still exist outside Christendom, as certainly as the sea existed before a boat and all round a boat; and they have as strong and as universal and as unmistakable a savour as the sea.
For instance, all real scholars who have studied the Greek and Roman culture say one thing about it. They agree that in the ancient world religion was one thing and philosophy quite another. There was very little effort to rationalise and at the same time to realise a real belief in the gods. There was very little pretense of any such real belief among the philosophers. But neither had the passion or perhaps the power to persecute the others save in particular and peculiar cases; and neither the philosopher in his school nor the priest in his temple seems ever to have seriously contemplated his own concept as covering the world. A priest sacrificing to Artemis in Calydon did not seem to think that people would some day sacrifice to her instead of to Isis beyond the sea; a sage following the vegetarian rule of the Neo-Pythagoreans did not seem to think it would universally prevail and exclude the methods of Epictetus or Epicurus. We may call this liberality if we like; I am not dealing with an argument but describing an atmosphere. All this, I say, is admitted by all scholars; but what neither the learned nor the unlearned have fully realised, perhaps, is that this description is really an exact description of all non-Christian civilisation today; and especially of the great civilisations of the East. Eastern paganism really is much more all of a piece, just as ancient paganism was much more all of a piece, than the modern critics admit. It is a many-coloured Persian Carpet as the other was a varied and tessellated Roman pavement; but the one real crack right across that pavement came from the earthquake of the Crucifixion.
The modern European seeking his religion in Asia is reading his religion into Asia. Religion there is something different; it is both more and less. He is like a man mapping out the sea as land; marking waves as mountains; not understanding the nature of its peculiar permanence. It is perfectly true that Asia has its own dignity and poetry and high civilisation. But it is not in the least true that Asia has its own definite dominions of moral government, where all loyalty is conceived in terms of morality; as when we say that Ireland is Catholic or that New England was Puritan. The map is not marked out in religions, in our sense of churches. The state of mind is far more subtle, more relative, more secretive, more varied and changing, like the colours of the snake. The Moslem is the nearest approach to a militant Christian; and that is precisely because he is a much nearer approach to an envoy from western civilisation. The Moslem in the heart of Asia almost stands for the soul of Europe. And as he stands between them and Europe in the matter of space so he stands between them and Christianity in the matter of time. In that sense the Moslems in Asia are merely like the Nestorians in Asia. Islam, historically speaking, is the greatest of the Eastern heresies. It owed something to the quite isolated and unique individuality of Israel; but it owed more to Byzantium and the theological enthusiasm of Christendom. It owed something even to the Crusades. It owed nothing whatever to Asia. It owed nothing to the atmosphere of the ancient and traditional world of Asia, with its immemorial etiquette and its bottomless or bewildering philosophies. All that ancient and actual Asia felt the entrance of Islam as something foreign and western and warlike, piercing it like a spear.
Even where we might trace in dotted lines the domains of Asiatic religions, we should probably be reading into them something dogmatic and ethical belonging to our own religion. It is as if a European ignorant of the American atmosphere were to suppose that each ‘state’ was a separate sovereign state as patriotic as France or Poland; or that when a Yankee referred fondly to his ‘home town’ he meant he had no other nation, like a citizen of ancient Athens or Rome. As he would be reading a particular sort of loyalty into America, so we are reading a particular sort of loyalty into Asia. There are loyalties of other kinds; but not what men in the West mean by being a believer, by trying to be a Christian, by being a good Protestant or a practising Catholic. In the intellectual world it means something far more vague and varied by doubts and speculations. In the moral world it means something far more loose and drifting. A professor of Persian at one of our great universities, so passionate a partisan of the East as practically to profess a contempt for the West, said to a friend of mine: ‘You will never understand oriental religions, because you always conceive religion as connected with ethics. This kind has really nothing to do with ethics.’ We have most of us known some Masters of the Higher Wisdom, some Pilgrims upon the Path to Power, some eastern esoteric saints and seers, who had really nothing to do with ethics. Something different, something detached and irresponsible, tinges the moral atmosphere of Asia and touches even that of Islam. It was very realistically caught in the atmosphere of Hassan; and a very horrible atmosphere too. It is even more vivid in such glimpses as we get of the genuine and ancient cults of Asia. Deeper than the depths of metaphysics, far down in the abysses of mystical meditations under all that solemn universe of spiritual things, is a secret, an intangible and a terrible levity. It does not really very much matter what one does. Either because they do not believe in a devil, or because they do believe in a destiny, or because experience here is everything and eternal life something totally different, but for some reason they are totally different. I have read somewhere that there were three great friends famous in medieval Persia for their unity of mind. One became the responsible and respected Vizier of the Great King; the second was the poet Omar, pessimist and epicurean, drinking wine in mockery of Mahomet; the third was the Old Man of the Mountain who maddened his people with hashish that they might murder other people with daggers. It does not really much matter what one does.
The Sultan in Hassan would have understood all those three men; indeed he was all those three men. But this sort of universalist cannot have what we call a character; it is what we call a chaos. He cannot choose; he cannot fight; he cannot repent; he cannot hope. He is not in the same sense creating something; for creation means rejection. He is not, in our religious phrase, making his soul. For our doctrine of salvation does really mean a labour like that of a man trying to make a statue beautiful; a victory with wings. For that there must be a final choice, for a man cannot make statues without rejecting stone. And there really is this ultimate unmorality behind the metaphysics of Asia. And the reason is that there has been nothing through all those unthinkable ages to bring the human mind sharply to the point; to tell it that the time has come to choose. The mind has lived too much in eternity. The soul has been too immortal, in the special sense that it ignores the idea of mortal sin. It has had too much of eternity, in the sense that it has not had enough of the hour of death and the day of judgement. It is not crucial enough; in the literal sense that it has not had enough of the cross. That is what we mean when we say that Asia is very old. But strictly speaking Europe is quite as old as Asia; indeed in a sense any place is as old as any other place. What we mean is that Europe has not merely gone on growing older. It has been born again.
Asia is all humanity; as it has worked out its human doom. Asia, in its vast territory, in its varied populations, in its heights of past achievement and its depths of dark speculation, is itself a world; and represents something of what we mean when we speak of the world. It is a cosmos rather than a continent. It is the world as man has made it; and contains many of the most wonderful things that man has made. Therefore Asia stands as the one representative of paganism and the one rival to Christendom. But everywhere else where we get glimpses of that mortal destiny, they suggest stages in the same story. Where Asia trails away into the southern archipelagoes of the savages, or where a darkness full of nameless shapes dwells in the heart of Africa, or where the last survivors of lost races linger in the cold volcano of prehistoric America, it is all the same story; sometimes perhaps later chapters of the same story. It is men entangled in the forest of their own mythology; it is men drowned in the sea of their own metaphysics. Polytheists have grown weary of the wildest of fictions. Monotheists have grown weary of the most wonderful of truths. Diabolists here and there have such a hatred of heaven and earth that they have tried to take refuge in hell. It is the Fall of Man; and it is exactly that fall that was being felt by our own fathers at the first moment of the Roman decline. We also were going down that side road; down that easy slope; following the magnificent procession of the high civilisations of the world.
If the Church had not entered the world then, it seems probable that Europe would be now very much what Asia is now. Something may be allowed for a real difference of race and environment, visible in the ancient as in the modern world. But after all we talk about the changeless East very largely because it has not suffered the great change. Paganism in its last phase showed considerable signs of becoming equally changeless. This would not mean that new schools or sects of philosophy would not arise; as new schools did arise in Antiquity and do arise in Asia. It does not mean that there would be no real mystics or visionaries; as there were mystics in Antiquity and are mystics in Asia. It does not mean that there would be no social codes, as there were codes in Antiquity and are codes in Asia. It does not mean that there could not be good men or happy lives, for God has given all men a conscience and conscience can give all men a kind of peace. But it does mean that the tone and proportion of all these things, and especially the proportion of good and evil things, would be in the unchanged West what they are in the changeless East. And nobody who looks at that changeless East honestly, and with a real sympathy, can believe that there is anything there remotely resembling the challenge and revolution of the Faith.
In short, if classic paganism had lingered until now, a number of things might well have lingered with it; and they would look very like what we call the religions of the East. There would still be Pythagoreans teaching reincarnation, as there are still Hindus teaching reincarnation. There would still be Stoics making a religion out of reason and virtue, as there are still Confucians making a religion out of reason and virtue. There would still be Neo-Platonists studying transcendental truths, the meaning of which was mysterious to other people and disputed even amongst themselves; as the Buddhists still study a transcendentalism mysterious to others and disputed among themselves. There would still be intelligent Apollonians apparently worshipping the sun-god but explaining that they were worshipping the divine principle; just as there are still intelligent Parsees apparently worshipping the sun but explaining that they are worshipping the deity. There would still be wild Dionysians dancing on the mountain as there are still wild Dervishes dancing in the desert. There would still be crowds of people attending the popular feasts of the gods, in pagan Europe as in pagan Asia. There would still be crowds of gods, local and other, for them to worship. And there would still be a great many more people who worshipped them than people who believed in them. Finally there would still be a very large number of people who did worship gods and did believe in gods; and who believed in gods and worshipped gods simply because they were demons. There would still be Levantines secretly sacrificing to Moloch as there are still Thugs secretly sacrificing to Kalee. There would still be a great deal of magic; and a great deal of it would be black magic. There would still be a considerable admiration of Seneca and a considerable imitation of Nero; just as the exalted epigrams of Confucius could coexist with the tortures of China. And over all that tangled forest of traditions growing wild or withering would brood the broad silence of a singular and even nameless mood; but the nearest name of it is nothing. All these things, good and bad, would have an indescribable air of being too old to die.
None of these things occupying Europe in the absence of Christendom would bear the least likeness to Christendom. Since the Pythagorean Metempsychosis would still be there, we might call it the Pythagorean religion as we talk about the Buddhist religion. As the noble maxims of Socrates would still be there, we might call it the Socratic religion as we talk about the Confucian religion. As the popular holiday was still marked by a mythological hymn to Adonis, we might call it the religion of Adonis as we talk about the religion of Juggernaut. As literature would still be based on the Greek mythology, we might call that mythology a religion, as we call the Hindu mythology a religion. We might say that there were so many thousands or millions of people belonging to that religion, in the sense of frequenting such temples or merely living in a land full of such temples. But if we called the last tradition of Pythagoras or the lingering legend of Adonis by the name of a religion, then we must find some other name for the Church of Christ.
If anybody says that philosophic maxims presented through many ages, or mythological temples frequented by many people, are things of the same class and category as the Church, it is enough to answer quite simply that they are not. Nobody thinks they are the same when he sees them in the old civilisation of Greece and Rome; nobody would think they were the same if that civilisation had lasted two thousand years longer and existed at the present day; nobody can in reason think they are the same in the parallel pagan civilisation in the East, as it is at the present day. None of these philosophies or mythologies are anything like a Church; certainly nothing like a Church Militant. And, as I have shown elsewhere, even if this rule were not already proved, the exception would prove the rule. The rule is that pre-Christian or pagan history does not produce a Church Militant; and the exception, or what some would call the exception, is that Islam is at least militant if it is not Church. And that is precisely because Islam is the one religious rival that is not pre-Christian and therefore not in that sense pagan. Islam was a product of Christianity; even if it was a by-product; even if it was a bad product. It was a heresy or parody emulating and therefore imitating the Church. It is no more surprising that Mahomedanism had something of her fighting spirit than that Quakerism had something of her peaceful spirit. After Christianity there are any number of such emulations or extensions. Before it there are none.
The Church Militant is thus unique because it is an army marching to effect a universal deliverance. The bondage from which the world is thus to be delivered is something that is very well symbolised by the state of Asia as by the state of pagan Europe. I do not mean merely their moral or immoral state. The missionary, as a matter of fact, has much more to say for himself than the enlightened imagine even when he says that the heathen are idolatrous and immoral. A touch or two of realistic experience about Eastern religion, even about Moslem religion, will reveal some startling insensibilities in ethics; such as the practical indifference to the line between passion and perversion. It is not prejudice but practical experience which says that Asia is full of demons as well as gods. But the evil I mean is in the mind. And it is in the mind wherever the mind has worked for a long time alone. It is what happens when all dreaming and thinking have come to an end in an emptiness that is at once negation and necessity. It sounds like an anarchy, but it is also a slavery. It is what has been called already the wheel of Asia; all those recurrent arguments about cause and effect or things beginning and ending in the mind, which make it impossible for the soul really to strike out and go anywhere or do anything. And the point is that it is not necessarily peculiar to Asiatics; it would have been true in the end of Europeans— if something had not happened. If the Church Militant had not been a thing marching, all men would have been marking time. If the Church Militant had not endured a discipline, all men would have endured a slavery.
What that universal yet fighting faith brought into the world was hope. Perhaps the one thing common to mythology and philosophy was that both were really sad; in the sense that they had not this hope even if they had touches of faith or charity. We may call Buddhism a faith; though to us it seems more like a doubt. We may call the Lord of Compassion a Lord of Charity, though it seems to us a very pessimist sort of pity. But those who insist most on the antiquity and size of such cults must agree that in all their ages they have not covered all their areas with that sort of practical and pugnacious hope. In Christendom hope has never been absent; rather it has been errant, extravagant, excessively fixed upon fugitive chances. Its perpetual revolution and reconstruction has at least been an evidence of people being in better spirits. Europe did very truly renew its youth like the eagles; just as the eagles of Rome rose again over the legions of Napoleon, or we have seen soaring but yesterday the silver eagle of Poland. But in the Polish case ever revolution always went with religion. Napoleon himself sought a reconciliation with religion. Religion could never be finally separated even from the most hostile of the hopes; simply because it was the very source of the hopefulness. And the cause of this is to be found simply in the religion itself. Those who quarrel about it seldom even consider it in itself. There is neither space nor place for such a full consideration here; but a word may be said to explain a reconciliation that always recurs and still seems to require explanation.
There will be no end to the weary debates about liberalising theology, until people face the fact that the only liberal part of it is really the dogmatic part. If dogma is incredible, it is because it is incredibly liberal. If it is irrational, it can only be in giving us more assurance of freedom than is justified by reason. The obvious example is that essential form of freedom which we call free-will. It is absurd to say that a man shows his liberality in denying his liberty. But it is tenable that he has to affirm a transcendental doctrine in order to affirm his liberty. There is a sense in which we might reasonably say that if man has a primary power of choice, he has in that fact a super-natural power of creation, as if he could raise the dead or give birth to the unbegotten. Possibly in that case a man must be a miracle; and certainly in that case he must be a miracle in order to be a man; and most certainly in order to be a free man. But it is absurd to forbid him to be a free man and do it in the name of a more free religion.
But it is true in twenty other matters. Anybody who believes at all in God must believe in the absolute supremacy of God. But in so far as that supremacy does allow of any degrees that can be called liberal or illiberal, it is self-evident that the illiberal power is the deity of the rationalists and the liberal power is the deity of the dogmatists. Exactly in proportion as you turn monotheism into monism you turn it into despotism. It is precisely the unknown God of the scientist, with his impenetrable purpose and his inevitable and unalterable law, that reminds us of a Prussian autocrat making rigid plans in a remote tent and moving mankind like machinery. It is precisely the God of miracles and of answered prayers who reminds us of a liberal and popular prince, receiving petitions, listening to parliaments and considering the cases of a whole people. I am not now arguing the rationality of this conception in other respects; as a matter of fact it is not, as some suppose, irrational; for there is nothing irrational in the wisest and most well-informed king acting differently according to the action of those he wishes to save. But I am here only noting the general nature of liberality, or of free or enlarged atmosphere of action. And in this respect it is certain that the king can only be what we call magnanimous if he is what some call capricious. It is the Catholic, who has the feeling that his prayers do make a difference, when offered for the living and the dead, who also has the feeling of living like a free citizen in something almost like a constitutional commonwealth. It is the monist who lives under a single iron law who must have the feeling of living like a slave under a sultan. Indeed I believe that the original use of the word suffragium, which we now use in politics for a vote, was that employed in theology about a prayer. The dead in Purgatory were said to have the suffrages of the living. And in this sense, of a sort of right of petition to the supreme ruler, we may truly say that the whole of the Communion of Saints, as well as the whole of the Church Militant, is founded on universal suffrage.
But above all, it is true of the most tremendous issue; of that tragedy which has created the divine comedy of our creed. Nothing short of the extreme and strong and startling doctrine of the divinity of Christ will give that particular effect that can truly stir the popular sense like a trumpet; the idea of the king himself serving in the ranks like a common soldier. By making that figure merely human we make that story much less human. We take away the point of the story which actually pierces humanity; the point of the story which was quite literally the point of a spear. It does not especially humanise the universe to say that good and wise men can die for their opinions; any more than it would be any sort of uproariously popular news in an army that good soldiers may easily get killed. It is no news that King Leonidas is dead any more than that Queen Anne is dead; and men did not wait for Christianity to be men, in the full sense of being heroes. But if we are describing, for the moment, the atmosphere of what is generous and popular and even picturesque, any knowledge of human nature will tell us that no sufferings of the sons of men, or even of the servants of God, strike the same note as the notion of the master suffering instead of his servants. And this is given by the theological and emphatically not by the scientific deity. No mysterious monarch, hidden in his starry pavilion at the base of the cosmic campaign, is in the least like that celestial chivalry of the Captain who carries his five wounds in the front of battle.
What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma is bad; but rather that dogma is too good to be true. That is, he means that dogma is too liberal to be likely. Dogma gives man too much freedom when it permits him to fall. Dogma gives even God too much freedom when it permits him to die. That is what the intelligent sceptics ought to say; and it is not in the least my intention to deny that there is something to be said for it. They mean that the universe is itself a universal prison; that existence itself is a limitation and a control; and it is not for nothing that they call causation a chain. In a word, they mean quite simply that they cannot believe these things; not in the least that they are unworthy of belief. We say not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth. To them it is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom as we enjoy. It is like believing in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer. This is a manly and a rational negation for which I for one shall always show respect. But I decline to show any respect for those who first of all clip the wings and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought and a more liberal theology.
The moral of all this is an old one; that religion is revelation. In other words it is a vision, and a vision received by faith; but it is a vision of reality. The faith consists in a conviction of its reality. That, for example, is the difference between a vision and a day-dream. And that is the difference between religion and mythology. That is the difference between faith and all that fancy-work, quite human and more or less healthy, which we considered under the head of mythology. There is something in the reasonable use of the very word vision that implies two things about it; first that it comes very rarely, possibly that it comes only once; and secondly that it probably comes once and for all. A day-dream may come every day. A day-dream may be different every day. It is something more than the difference between telling ghost-stories and meeting a ghost.
But if it is not a mythology neither is it a philosophy. It is not a philosophy because, being a vision, it is not a pattern but a picture. It is not one of those simplifications which resolve everything into an abstract explanation; as that everything is recurrent; or everything is relative; or everything is inevitable; or everything is illusive. It is not a process but a story. It has proportions, of the sort seen in a picture or a story; it has not the regular repetitions of a pattern or a process; but it replaces them by being convincing as a picture or a story is convincing. In other words, it is exactly, as the phrase goes, like life. For indeed it is life. An example of what is meant here might well be found in the treatment of the problem of evil. It is easy enough to make a plan of life of which the background is black, as the pessimists do; and then admit a speck or two of star-dust more or less accidental, or at least in the literal sense insignificant. And it is easy enough to make another plan on white paper, as the Christian Scientists do, and explain or explain away somehow such dots or smudges as may be difficult to deny. Lastly it is easiest of all perhaps, to say as the dualists do, that life is like a chess-board in which the two are equal, and can as truly be said to consist of white squares on a black board or of black squares on a white board. But every man feels in his heart that none of these three paper plans is like life; that none of these worlds is one in which he can live. Something tells him that the ultimate idea of a world is not bad or even neutral; staring at the sky or the grass or the truths of mathematics or even a new-laid egg, he has a vague feeling like the shadow of that saying of the great Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘Every existence, as such, is good.’ On the other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly and debased and even diseased to minimise evil to a dot or even a blot. He realises that optimism is morbid. It is if possible even more morbid than pessimism. These vague but healthy feelings, if he followed them out, would result in the idea that evil is in some way an exception but an enormous exception; and ultimately that evil is an invasion or yet more truly a rebellion. He does not think that everything is right or that every thing is wrong, or that everything is equally right and wrong. But he does think that right has a right to be right and therefore a right to be there, and wrong has no right to be wrong and therefore no right to be there. It is the prince of the world; but it is also a usurper. So he will apprehend vaguely what the vision will give to him vividly; no less than all that strange story of treason in heaven and the great desertion by which evil damaged and tried to destroy a cosmos that it could not create. It is a very strange story and its proportions and its lines and colours are as arbitrary and absolute as the artistic composition of a picture. It is a vision which we do in fact symbolise in pictures by titanic limbs and passionate tints of plumage; all that abysmal vision of falling stars and the peacock panoplies of the night. But that strange story has one small advantage over the diagrams. It is like life.
Another example might be found, not in the problem of evil, but in what is called the problem of progress. One of the ablest agnostics of the age once asked me whether I thought mankind grew better or grew worse or remained the same. He was confident that the alternative covered all possibilities. He did not see that it only covered patterns and not pictures; processes and not stories. I asked him whether he thought that Mr. Smith of Golder’s Green got better or worse or remained exactly the same between the age of thirty and forty. It then seemed to dawn on him that it would rather depend on Mr. Smith; and how he chose to go on. It had never occurred to him that it might depend on how mankind chose to go on; and that its course was not a straight line or an upward or downward curve, but a track like that of a man across a valley, going where he liked and stopping where he chose, going into a church or falling down in a ditch. The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God.
The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realisation both of mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life. But above all, it is a reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal narrative instinct which produced all the fairy tales is something that is neglected by all the philosophies—except one. The Faith is the justification of that popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both there is an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it. Now this deep and democratic and dramatic instinct is derided and dismissed in all the other philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin; and it is the definition of a story that it ends differently; that it begins in one place and ends in another. From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story. There is none of them that really grasps this human notion of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man. Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral consequences; or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgement.
And that is the reason why the myths and the philosophers were at war until Christ came. That is why the Athenian democracy killed Socrates out of respect for the gods; and why every strolling sophist gave himself the airs of a Socrates whenever he could talk in a superior fashion of the gods; and why the heretic Pharaoh wrecked his huge idols and temples for an abstraction and why the priests could return in triumph and trample his dynasty under foot; and why Buddhism had to divide itself from Brahminism, and why in every age and country outside Christendom there has been a feud for ever between the philosopher and the priest. It is easy enough to say that the philosopher is generally the more rational; it is easier still to forget that the priest is always the more popular. For the priest told the people stories; and the philosopher did not understand the philosophy of stories. It came into the world with the story of Christ.
And this is why it had to be a revelation or vision given from above. Any one who will think of the theory of stories or pictures will easily see the point. The true story of the world must be told by somebody to somebody else. By the very nature of a story it cannot be left to occur to anybody. A story has proportions, variations, surprises, particular dispositions, which cannot be worked out by rule in the abstract, like a sum. We could not deduce whether or no Achilles would give back the body of Hector from a Pythagorean theory of number or recurrence; and we could not infer for ourselves in what way the world would get back the body of Christ, merely from being told that all things go round and round upon the wheel of Buddha. A man might perhaps work out a proposition of Euclid without having heard of Euclid; but he would not work out the precise legend of Eurydice without having heard of Eurydice. At any rate he would not be certain how the story would end and whether Orpheus was ultimately defeated. Still less could he guess the end of our story; or the legend of our Orpheus rising, not defeated from, the dead.
To sum up; the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of man offered salvation by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring tendencies of the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most certainly never satisfied together. It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story. That is why the ideal figure had to be a historical character, as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical character. But that is also why the historical character had to be the ideal figure; and even fulfil many of the functions given to these other ideal figures; why he was at once the sacrifice and the feast, why he could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the rising sun. The more deeply we think of the matter the more we shall conclude that, if there be indeed a God, his creation could hardly have reached any other culmination than this granting of a real romance to the world. Otherwise the two sides of the human mind could never have touched at all; and the brain of man would have remained cloven and double; one lobe of it dreaming impossible dreams and the other repeating invariable calculations. The picture-makers would have remained forever painting the portrait of nobody. The sages would have remained for ever adding up numerals that came to nothing. It was that abyss that nothing but an incarnation could cover; a divine embodiment of our dreams; and he stands above that chasm whose name is more than priest and older even than Christendom; Pontifex Maximus, the mightiest maker of a bridge.
But even with that we return to the more specially Christian symbol in the same tradition; the perfect pattern of the keys. This is a historical and not a theological outline, and it is not my duty here to defend in detail that theology, but merely to point out that it could not even be justified in design without being justified in detail—like a key. Beyond the broad suggestion of this chapter I attempt no apologetic about why the creed should be accepted. But in answer to the historical query of why it was accepted and is accepted, I answer for millions of others in my reply; because it fits the lock, because it is like life. It is one among many stories; only it happens to be a true story. It is one among many philosophies; only it happens to be the truth. We accept it; and the ground is solid under our feet and the road is open before us. It does not imprison us in a dream of destiny or a consciousness of the universal delusion. It opens to us not only incredible heavens but what seems to some an equally incredible earth, and makes it credible. This is the sort of truth that is hard to explain because it is a fact; but it is a fact to which we can call witnesses. We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.
VI
THE FIVE DEATHS OF THE FAITH
It is not the purpose of this book to trace the subsequent history of Christianity, especially the later history of Christianity; which involves controversies of which I hope to write more fully elsewhere. It is devoted only to the suggestion that Christianity, appearing amid heathen humanity, had all the character of a unique thing and even of a supernatural thing. It was not like any of the other things; and the more we study it the less it looks like any of them. But there is a certain rather peculiar character which marked it henceforward even down to the present moment, with a note on which this book may well conclude.
I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion. This truth is hidden from many by a convention that is too little noticed. Curiously enough, it is a convention of the sort which those who ignore it claim especially to detect and denounce. They are always telling us that priests and ceremonies are not religion and that religious organisation can be a hollow sham, but they hardly realise how true it is. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man in his heart expected its end. This fact is only masked in medieval and other times by that very official religion which such critics pride themselves on seeing through. Christianity remained the official religion of a Renaissance prince or the official religion of an eighteenth-century bishop, just as an ancient mythology remained the official religion of Julius Caesar or the Arian creed long remained the official religion of Julian the Apostate. But there was a difference between the cases of Julius and of Julian; because the Church had begun its strange career. There was no reason why men like Julius should not worship gods like Jupiter for ever in public and laugh at them for ever in private. But when Julian treated Christianity as dead, he found it had come to life again. He also found, incidentally, that there was not the faintest sign of Jupiter ever coming to life again. This case of Julian and the episode of Arianism is but the first of a series of examples that can only be roughly indicated here. Arianism, as has been said, had every human appearance of being the natural way in which that particular superstition of Constantine might be expected to peter out. All the ordinary stages had been passed through; the creed had become a respectable thing, had become a ritual thing, had then been modified into a rational thing; and the rationalists were ready to dissipate the last remains of it, just as they do to-day. When Christianity rose again suddenly and threw them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising from the dead. But there are many other examples of the same thing, even about the same time. The rush of missionaries from Ireland, for instance, has all the air of an unexpected onslaught of young men on an old world, and even on a Church that showed signs of growing old. Some of them were martyred on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief authority on Cornish antiquities told me that he did not believe for a moment that they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed it with some humour) ‘by rather slack Christians.’
Now if we were to dip below the surface of history, as it is not in the scope of this argument to do, I suspect that we should find several occasions when Christendom was thus to all appearance hollowed out from within by doubt and indifference, so that only the old Christian shell stood as the pagan shell had stood so long. But the difference is that in every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the fathers had been slack about it. This is obvious in the case of the transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. It is obvious in the case of a transition from the eighteenth century to the many Catholic revivals of our own time. But I suspect many other examples which would be worthy of separate studies.
The Faith is not a survival. It is not as if the Druids had managed somehow to survive somewhere for two thousand years. That is what might have happened in Asia or ancient Europe, in that indifference or tolerance in which mythologies and philosophies could live for ever side by side. It has not survived; it has returned again and again in this Western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing. Europe, in the tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution and reconstruction; rebuilding a universal republic. And it always began by rejecting this old stone and ended by making it the head of the corner; by bringing it back from the rubbish-heap to make it the crown of the capitol. Some stones of Stonehenge are standing and some are fallen; and as the stone falleth so shall it lie. There has not been a Druidic renaissance every century or two, with the young Druids crowned with fresh mistletoe, dancing in the sun on Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge has not been rebuilt in every style of architecture from the rude round Norman to the last rococo of the Baroque. The sacred place of the Druids is safe from the vandalism of restoration.
But the Church in the West was not in a world where things were too old to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed. The consequence was that superficially and externally it often did get killed; nay, it sometimes wore out even without getting killed. And there follows a fact I find it somewhat difficult to describe, yet which I believe to be very real and rather important. As a ghost is the shadow of a man, and in that sense the shadow of life, so at intervals there passed across this endless life a sort of shadow of death. It came at the moment when it would have perished had it been perishable. It withered away everything that was perishable. If such animal parallels were worthy of the occasion we might say that the snake shuddered and shed a skin and went on, or even that the cat went into convulsions as it lost only one of its nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lives. It is truer to say, in a more dignified image, that a clock struck and nothing happened; or that a bell tolled for an execution that was everlastingly postponed.
What was the meaning of all that dim but vast unrest of the twelfth century; when, as it has been so finely said, Julian stirred in his sleep? Why did there appear so strangely early, in the twilight of dawn after the Dark Ages, so deep a scepticism as that involved in urging nominalism against realism? For realism against nominalism was really realism against rationalism, or something more destructive than what we call rationalism. The answer is that just as some might have thought the Church simply a part of the Roman Empire, so others later might have thought the Church only a part of the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages ended as the Empire had ended, and the Church should have departed with them, if she had been also one of the shades of night. It was another of those spectral deaths or simulations of death. I mean that if nominalism had succeeded, it would have been as if Arianism had succeeded, it would have been the beginning of a confession that Christianity had failed. For nominalism is a far more fundamental scepticism than mere atheism. Such was the question that was openly asked as the Dark Ages broadened into that daylight that we call the modern world. But what was the answer? The answer was Aquinas in the chair of Aristotle, taking all knowledge for his province; and tens of thousands of lads down to the lowest ranks of peasant and serf, living in rags and on crusts about the great colleges, to listen to the scholastic philosophy.
What was the meaning of all that whisper of fear that ran round the west under the shadow of Islam, and fills every old romance with incongruous images of Saracen knights swaggering in Norway or the Hebrides? Why were men in the extreme west, such as King John if I remember rightly, accused of being secretly Moslems, as men are accused of being secretly atheists? Why was there that fierce alarm among some of the authorities about the rationalistic Arab version of Aristotle? Authorities are seldom alarmed like that except when it is too late. The answer is that hundreds of people probably believed in their hearts that Islam would conquer Christendom; that Averroes was more rational than Anselm; that the Saracen Culture was really, as it was superficially, a superior culture. Here again we should probably find a whole generation, the older generation, serve doubtful and depressed and weary. The coming of Islam would only have been the coming of Unitarianism a thousand years before its time. To many it may have seemed quite reasonable and quite probable and quite likely to happen. If so, they would have been surprised at what did happen. What did happen was a roar like thunder from thousands and thousands of young men, throwing all their youth into one exultant counter-charge, the Crusades. It was the sons of St. Francis, the Jugglers of God, wandering singing over all the roads of the world; it was the Gothic going up like a flight of arrows; it was the waking of the world. In considering the war of the Albigensians, we come to the breach in the heart of Europe and the landslide of a new philosophy that nearly ended Christendom for ever. In that case the new philosophy was also a very new philosophy; it was pessimism. It was none the less like modern ideas because it was as old as Asia; most modern ideas are. It was the Gnostics returning; but why did the Gnostics return? Because it was the end of an epoch, like the end of the Empire; and should have been the end of the Church. It was Schopenhauer hovering over the future; but it was also Manichaeus rising from the dead; that men might have death and that they might have it more abundantly.
It is rather more obvious in the case of the Renaissance, simply because the period is so much nearer to us and people know so much more about it. But there is more even in that example than most people know. Apart from the particular controversies which I wish to reserve for a separate study, the period was far more chaotic that those controversies commonly imply. When Protestants call Latimer a martyr to Protestantism, and Catholics reply that Campion was a martyr to Catholicism, it is often forgotten that many who perished in such persecutions could only be described as martyrs to atheism or anarchism or even diabolism. That world was almost as wild as our own; the men wandering about in it included the sort of man who says there is no God, the sort of man who says he is himself God, the sort of man who says something that nobody can make head or tail of. If we could have the conversation of the age following the Renaissance, we should probably be shocked by its shameless negations. The remarks attributed to Marlowe are probably pretty typical of the talk in many intellectual taverns. The transition from Pre-Reformation to Post-Reformation Europe was through a void of very yawning questions; yet again in the long run the answer was the same. It was one of those moments when, as Christ walked on the water, so was Christianity walking in the air.
But all these cases are remote in date and could only be proved in detail. We can see the fact much more clearly in the case when the paganism of the Renaissance ended Christianity and Christianity unaccountably began all over again. But we can see it most clearly of all in the case which is close to us and full of manifest and minute evidence; the case of the great decline of religion that began about the time of Voltaire. For indeed it is our own case, and we ourselves have seen the decline of that decline. The two hundred years since Voltaire do not flash past us at a glance like the fourth and fifth centuries or the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In our own case we can see this oft-repeated process close at hand; we know how completely a society can lose its fundamental religion without abolishing its official religion; we know how men can all become agnostics long before they abolish bishops. And we know that also in this last ending, which really did look to us like the final ending, the incredible thing has happened again; the Faith has a better following among the young men than among the old. When Ibsen spoke of the new generation knocking at the door, he certainly never expected that it would be the church-door.
At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died. How complete was the collapse and how strange the reversal we can only see in detail in the case nearest to our own time.
A thousand things have been said about the Oxford Movement and the parallel French Catholic revival; but few have made us feel the simplest fact about it; that it was a surprise. It was a puzzle as well as a surprise; because it seemed to most people like a river turning backwards from the sea and trying to climb back into the mountains. To have read the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is to know that nearly everybody had come to take it for granted that religion was a thing that would continually broaden like a river, till it reached an infinite sea. Some of them expected it to go down in a cataract of catastrophe, most of them expected it to widen into an estuary of equality and moderation; but all of them thought its returning on itself a prodigy as incredible as witchcraft. In other words, most moderate people thought that faith like freedom would be slowly broadened down, and some advanced people thought that it would be very rapidly broadened down, not to say flattened out. All that world of Guizot and Macaulay and the commercial and scientific liberality was perhaps more certain than any men before or since about the direction in which the world is going. People were so certain about the direction that they only differed about the pace. Many anticipated with alarm, and a few with sympathy, a Jacobin revolt that should guillotine the Archbishop of Canterbury or a Chartist riot that should hang the parsons on the lampposts. But it seemed like a convulsion in nature that the Archbishop instead of losing his head should be looking for his mitre; and that instead of diminishing the respect due to parsons we should strengthen it to the respect due to priests. It revolutionised their very vision of revolution; and turned their very topsyturveydom topsyturvey.
In short, the whole world being divided about whether the stream was going slower or faster, became conscious of something vague but vast that was going against the stream. Both in fact and figure there is something deeply disturbing about this, and that for an essential reason. A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. A dead dog can be lifted on the leaping water with all the swiftness of a leaping hound; but only a live dog can swim backwards. A paper boat can ride the rising deluge with all the airy arrogance of a fairy ship, but if the fairy ship sails up stream it is really rowed by the fairies. And among the things that merely went with the tide of apparent progress and enlargement there was many a demagogue or sophist whose wild gestures were in truth as lifeless as the movement of a dead dog’s limbs wavering in the eddying water; and many a philosophy uncommonly like a paper boat, of the sort that it is not difficult to knock into a cocked hat. But even the truly living and even life-giving things that went with that stream did not thereby prove that they were living or life-giving. It was this other force that was unquestionably and unaccountably alive; the mysterious and unmeasured energy that was thrusting back the river. That was felt to be like the movement of some great monster; and it was none the less clearly a living monster because most people thought it a prehistoric monster. It was none the less an unnatural, an incongruous, and to some a comic upheaval; as if the Great Sea Serpent had suddenly risen out of the Round Pond—unless we consider the Sea Serpent as more likely to live in the Serpentine. This flippant element in the fantasy must not be missed, for it was one of the clearest testimonies to the unexpected nature of the reversal. That age did really feel that a preposterous quality in prehistoric animals belonged also to historic rituals; that mitres and tiaras were like the horns or crests of antediluvian creatures; and that appealing to a Primitive Church was like dressing up as a Primitive Man.
The world is still puzzled by that movement; but most of all because it still moves. I have said something elsewhere of the rather random sort of reproaches that are still directed against it and its much greater consequences; it is enough to say here that the more such critics reproach it the less they explain it. In a sense it is my concern here, if not to explain it, at least to suggest the direction of the explanation; but above all, it is my concern to point out one particular thing about it. And that is that it had all happened before; and even many times before.
To sum up, in so far as it is true that recent centuries have seen an attenuation of Christian doctrine, recent centuries have only seen what the most remote centuries have seen. And even the modern example has only ended as the medieval and pre-medieval examples ended. It is already clear, and grows clearer every day, that it is not going to end in the disappearance of the diminished creed; but rather in the return of those parts of it that had really disappeared. It is going to end as the Arian compromise ended, as the attempts at a compromise with Nominalism and even with Albigensianism ended. But the point to seize in the modern case, as in all the other cases is that what returns is not in that sense a simplified theology; not according to that view a purified theology; it is simply theology. It is that enthusiasm for theological studies that marked the most doctrinal ages; it is the divine science. An old Don with D. D. after his name may have become the typical figure of a bore; but that was because he was himself bored with his theology, not because he was excited about it. It was precisely because he was admittedly more interested in the Latin of Plautus than in the Latin of Augustine, in the Greek of Xenophon than in the Greek of Chrysostom. It was precisely because he was more interested in a dead tradition than in a decidedly living tradition. In short, it was precisely because he was himself a type of the time in which Christian faith was weak. It was not because men would not hail, if they could, the wonderful and almost wild vision of a Doctor of Divinity.
There are people who say they wish Christianity to remain as a spirit. They mean, very literally, that they wish it to remain as a ghost. But it is not going to remain as a ghost. What follows this process of apparent death is not the lingerings of the shade; it is the resurrection of the body. These people are quite prepared to shed pious and reverential tears over the Sepulchre of the Son of Man; what they are not prepared for is the Son of God walking once more upon the hills of morning. These people, and indeed most people, were indeed by this time quite accustomed to the idea that the old Christian candle-light would fade into the light of common day. To many of them it did quite honestly appear like that pale yellow flame of a candle when it is left burning in daylight. It was all the more unexpected, and therefore all the more unmistakable, that the seven branched candle-stick suddenly towered to heaven like a miraculous tree and flamed until the sun turned pale. But other ages have seen the day conquer the candle-light and then the candle-light conquer the day. Again and again, before our time, men have grown content with a diluted doctrine. And again and again there has followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson cataract, the strength of the red original wine. And we only say once more to-day as has been said many times by our fathers: ‘Long years and centuries ago our fathers or the founders of our people drank, as they dreamed, of the blood of God. Long years and centuries have passed since the strength of that giant vintage has been anything but a legend of the age of giants. Centuries ago already is the dark time of the second fermentation, when the wine of Catholicism turned into the vinegar of Calvinism. Long since that bitter drink has been itself diluted; rinsed out and washed away by the waters of oblivion and the wave of the world. Never did we think to taste again even that bitter tang of sincerity and the spirit, still less the richer and the sweeter strength of the purple vineyards in our dreams of the age of gold. Day by day and year by year we have lowered our hopes and lessened our convictions; we have grown more and more used to seeing those vats and vineyards overwhelmed in the water-floods and the last savour and suggestion of that special element fading like a stain of purple upon a sea of grey. We have grown used to dilution, to dissolution, to a watering down that went on for ever. But ‘Thou hast kept the good wine until now.”
This is the final fact, and it is the most extraordinary of all. The faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age. It has not only been often killed but it has often died a natural death; in the sense of coming to a natural and necessary end. It is obvious that it has survived the most savage and the most universal persecutions from the shock of the Diocletian fury to the shock of the French Revolution. But it has a more strange and even a more weird tenacity; it has survived not only war but peace. It has not only died often but degenerated often and decayed often; it has survived its own weakness and even its own surrender. We need not repeat what is so obvious about the beauty of the end of Christ in its wedding of youth and death. But this is almost as if Christ had lived to the last possible span, had been a white-haired sage of a hundred and died of natural decay, and then had risen again rejuvenated, with trumpets and the rending of the sky. It was said truly enough that human Christianity in its recurrent weakness was sometimes too much wedded to the powers of the world; but if it was wedded it has very often been widowed. It is a strangely immortal sort of widow. An enemy may have said at one moment that it was but an aspect of the power of the Caesars; and it sounds as strange to-day as to call it an aspect of the Pharaohs. An enemy might say that it was the official faith of feudalism; and it sounds as convincing now as to say that it was bound to perish with the ancient Roman villa. All these things did indeed run their course to its normal end; and there seemed no course for the religion but to end with them. It ended and it began again.
‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ The civilisation of antiquity was the whole world: and men no more dreamed of its ending than of the ending of daylight. They could not imagine another order unless it were in another world. The civilisation of the world has passed away and those words have not passed away. In the long night of the Dark Ages feudalism was so familiar a thing that no man could imagine himself without a lord: and religion was so woven into that network that no man would have believed they could be torn asunder. Feudalism itself was torn to rags and rotted away in the popular life of the true Middle Ages; and the first and freshest power in that new freedom was the old religion. Feudalism had passed away, and the words did not pass away. The whole medieval order, in many ways so complete and almost cosmic a home for man, wore out gradually in its turn and here at least it was thought that the words would die. They went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty years were using all its light and learning for new religious foundations, new apologetics, new saints. It was supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of Revolution. Science explained it away; and it was still there. History disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future. To-day it stands once more in our path; and even as we watch it, it grows.
If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if men really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a story, it would seem that sooner or later even its enemies will learn from their incessant and interminable disappointments not to look for anything so simple as its death. They may continue to war with it, but it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as they war with the skies. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ They will watch for it to stumble; they will watch for it to err; they will no longer watch for it to end. Insensibly, even unconsciously, they will in their own silent anticipations fulfil the relative terms of that astounding prophecy; they will forget to watch for the mere extinction of what has so often been vainly extinguished; and will learn instinctively to look first for the coming of the comet or the freezing of the star.
CONCLUSION
THE SUMMARY OF THIS BOOK
I have taken the liberty once or twice of borrowing the excellent phrase about an Outline of History; though this study of a special truth and a special error can of course claim no sort of comparison with the rich and many-sided encyclopedia of history, for which that name was chosen. And yet there is a certain reason in the reference: and a sense in which the one thing touches and even cuts across the other. For the story of the world as told by Mr. Wells could here only be criticised as an outline. And, strangely enough, it seems to me that it is only wrong as an outline. It is admirable as an accumulation of history; it is splendid as a store-house or treasure of history; it is a fascinating disquisition on history; it is most attractive as an amplification of history; but it is quite false as an outline of history. The one thing that seems to me quite wrong about it is the outline; the sort of outline that can really be a single line, like that which makes all the difference between a caricature of the profile of Mr. Winston Churchill and of Sir Alfred Mond. In simple and homely language, I mean the things that stick out; the things that make the simplicity of a silhouette. I think the proportions are wrong; the proportions of what is certain as compared with what is uncertain, of what played a great part as compared with what played a smaller part, of what is ordinary and what is extraordinary, of what really lies level with an average and what stands out as an exception.
I do not say it as a small criticism of a great writer, and I have no reason to do so; for in my own much smaller task I feel I have failed in very much the same way. I am very doubtful whether I have conveyed to the reader the main point I meant about the proportions of history, and why I have dwelt so much more on some things than others. I doubt whether I have clearly fulfilled the plan that I set out in the introductory chapter; and for that reason I add these lines as a sort of summary in a concluding chapter. I do believe that the things on which I have insisted are more essential to an outline of history than the things which I have subordinated or dismissed. I do not believe that the past is most truly pictured as a thing in which humanity merely fades away into nature, or civilisation merely fades away into barbarism, or religion fades away into mythology, or our own religion fades away into the religions of the world. In short I do not believe that the best way to produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines. I believe that, of the two, it would be far nearer the truth to tell the tale very simply, like a primitive myth about a man who made the sun and stars or a god who entered the body of a sacred monkey. I will therefore sum up all that has gone before in what seems to me a realistic and reasonably proportioned statement; the short story of mankind.
In the land lit by that neighbouring star, whose blaze is the broad daylight, there are many and very various things motionless and moving. There moves among them a race that is in its relation to others a race of gods. The fact is not lessened but emphasised because it can behave like a race of demons. Its distinction is not an individual illusion, like one bird pluming itself on its own plumes; it is a solid and a many-sided thing. It is demonstrated in the very speculations that have led to its being denied. That men, the gods of this lower world, are linked with it in various ways is true; but it is another aspect of the same truth. That they grow as the grass grows and walk as the beasts walk is a secondary necessity that sharpens the primary distinction. It is like saying that a magician must after all have the appearance of a man; or that even the fairies could not dance without feet. It has lately been the fashion to focus the mind entirely on these mild and subordinate resemblances and to forget the main fact altogether. It is customary to insist that man resembles the other creatures. Yes; and that very resemblance he alone can see. The fish does not trace the fish-bone pattern in the fowls of the air; or the elephant and the emu compare skeletons. Even in the sense in which man is at one with the universe it is an utterly lonely universality. The very sense that he is united with all things is enough to sunder him from all.
Looking around him by this unique light, as lonely as the literal flame that he alone has kindled, this demigod or demon of the visible world makes that world visible. He sees around him a world of a certain style or type. It seems to proceed by certain rules or at least repetitions. He sees a green architecture that builds itself without visible hands; but which builds itself into a very exact plan or pattern, like a design already drawn in the air by an invisible finger. It is not, as is now vaguely suggested, a vague thing. It is not a growth or a groping of blind life. Each seeks an end; a glorious and radiant end, even for every daisy or dandelion we see in looking across the level of a common field. In the very shape of things there is more than green growth; there is the finality of the flower. It is a world of crowns. This impression, whether or no it be an illusion, has so profoundly influenced this race of thinkers and masters of the material world, that the vast majority have been moved to take a certain view of that world. They have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the world had a plan as the tree seemed to have a plan; and an end and crown like the flower. But so long as the race of thinkers was able to think, it was obvious that the admission of this idea of a plan brought with it another thought more thrilling and even terrible. There was someone else, some strange and unseen being, who had designed these things, if indeed they were designed. There was a stranger who was also a friend; a mysterious benefactor who had been before them and built up the woods and hills for their coming, and had kindled the sunrise against their rising, as a servant kindles a fire. Now this idea of a mind that gives a meaning to the universe has received more and more confirmation within the minds of men, by meditations and experiences much more subtle and searching than any such argument about the external plan of the world. But I am concerned here with keeping the story in its most simple and even concrete terms; and it is enough to say here that most men, including the wisest men, have come to the conclusion that the world has such a final purpose and therefore such a first cause. But most men in some sense separated themselves from the wisest men, when it came to the treatment of that idea. There came into existence two ways of treating that idea, which between them made up most of the religious history of the world. The majority, like the minority, had this strong sense of a second meaning in things; of a strange master who knew the secret of the world. But the majority, the mob or mass of men, naturally tended to treat it rather in the spirit of gossip. The gossip, like all gossip, contained a great deal of truth and falsehood. The world began to tell itself tales about the unknown being or his sons or servants or messengers. Some of the tales may truly be called old wives’ tales; as professing only to be very remote memories of the morning of the world; myths about the baby moon or the half-baked mountains. Some of them might more truly be called travellers’ tales; as being curious but contemporary tales brought from certain borderlands of experience; such as miraculous cures or those that bring whispers of what has happened to the dead. Many of them are probably true tales; enough of them are probably true to keep a person of real commonsense more or less conscious that there really is something rather marvellous behind the cosmic curtain. But in a sense it is only going by appearances; even if the appearances are called apparitions. It is a matter of appearances—and disappearances. At the most these gods are ghosts; that is, they are glimpses. For most of us they are rather gossip about glimpses. And for the rest, the whole world is full of rumours, most of which are almost avowedly romances. The great majority of the tales about gods and ghosts and the invisible king are told, if not for the sake of the tale, at least for the sake of the topic. They are evidence of the eternal interest of the theme; they are not evidence of anything else, and they are not meant to be. They are mythology or the poetry that is not bound in books— or bound in any other way.
Meanwhile the minority, the sages or thinkers, had withdrawn apart and had taken up an equally congenial trade. They were drawing up plans of the world; of the world which all believed to have a plan. They were trying to set forth the plan seriously and to scale. They were setting their minds directly to the mind that had made the mysterious world; considering what sort of a mind it might be and what its ultimate purpose might be. Some of them made that mind much more impersonal than mankind has generally made it; some simplified it almost to a blank; a few, a very few, doubted it altogether. One or two of the more morbid fancied that it might be evil and an enemy; just one or two of the more degraded in the other class worshipped demons instead of gods. But most of these theorists were theists: and they not only saw a moral plan in nature, but they generally laid down a moral plan for humanity. Most of them were good men who did good work: and they were remembered and reverenced in various ways. They were scribes; any their scriptures became more or less holy scriptures. They were law-givers; and their tradition became not only legal but ceremonial. We may say that they received divine honours, in the sense in which kings and great captains in certain countries often received divine honours. In a word, wherever the other popular spirit, the spirit of legend and gossip could come into play, it surrounded them with the more mystical atmosphere of the myths. Popular poetry turned the sages into saints. But that was all it did. They remained themselves; men never really forgot that they were men, only made into gods in the sense that they were made into heroes. Divine Plato, like Divus Ceasar, was a title and not a dogma. In Asia, where the atmosphere was more mythological, the man was made to look more like a myth, but he remained a man. He remained a man of a certain social class or school of men, receiving and deserving great honour from mankind. It is the order or school of the philosophers; the men who have set themselves seriously to trace the order across any apparent chaos in the vision of life. Instead of living on imaginative rumours and remote traditions and the tail-end of exceptional experiences about the mind and meaning behind the world, they have tried in a sense to project the primary purpose of that mind a priori. They have tried to put on paper a possible plan of the world; almost as if the world were not yet made.
Right in the middle of all these things stands up an enormous exception. It is quite unlike anything else. It is a thing final like the trump of doom, though it is also a piece of good news; or news that seems too good to be true. It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand down myths; the Man Who Made the World. That such a higher personality exists behind all things had indeed always been implied by all the best thinkers, as well as by all the most beautiful legends. But nothing of this sort had ever been implied in any of them. It is simply false to say that the other sages and heroes had claimed to be that mysterious master and maker, of whom the world had dreamed and disputed. Not one of them had ever claimed to be anything of the sort. Not one of their sects or schools had even claimed that they had claimed to be anything of the sort. The most that any religious prophet had said was that he was the true servant of such a being. The most that any visionary had ever said was that men might catch glimpses of the glory of that spiritual being; or much more often of lesser spiritual beings. The most that any primitive myth had even suggested was that the Creator was present at the Creation. But that the Creator was present at scenes a little subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with tax-collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted by the whole of that great civilisation for more than a thousand years— that is something utterly unlike anything else in nature. It is the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word, instead of barking like a dog. Its unique character can be used as an argument against it as well as for it. It would be easy to concentrate on it as a case of isolated insanity; but it makes nothing but dust and nonsense of comparative religion.
It came on the world with a wind and rush of running messengers proclaiming that apocalyptic portent, and it is not unduly fanciful to say that they are running still. What puzzles the world, and its wise philosophers and fanciful pagan poets, about the priests and people of the Catholic Church is that they still behave as if they were messengers. A messenger does not dream about what his message might be, or argue about what it probably would be; he delivers it as it is. It is not a theory or a fancy but a fact. It is not relevant to this intentionally rudimentary outline to prove in detail that it is a fact; but merely to point out that these messengers do deal with it as men deal with a fact. All that is condemned in Catholic tradition, authority, and dogmatism and the refusal to retract and modify, are but the natural human attributes of a man with a message relating to a fact. I desire to avoid in this last summary all the controversial complexities that may once more cloud the simple lines of that strange story; which I have already called, in words that are much too weak, the strangest story in the world. I desire merely to mark those main lines and specially to mark where the great line is really to be drawn. The religion of the world, in its right proportions, is not divided into fine shades of mysticism or more or less rational forms of mythology. It is divided by the line between the men who are bringing that message and the men who have not yet heard it, or cannot yet believe it.
But when we translate the terms of that strange tale back into the more concrete and complicated terminology of our time, we find it covered by names and memories of which the very familiarity is a falsification. For instance, when we say that a country contains so many Moslems, we really mean that it contains so many monotheists; and we really mean, by that, that it contains so many men; men with the old average assumption of men—that the invisible ruler remains invisible. They hold it along with the customs of a certain culture and under the simpler laws of a certain law-giver; but so they would if their law-giver were Lycurgus or Solon. They testify to something which is a necessary and noble truth; but was never a new truth. Their creed is not a new colour; it is the neutral and normal tint that is the background of the many-coloured life of man. Mahomet did not, like the Magi, find a new star; he saw through his own particular window a glimpse of the great grey field of the ancient starlight. So when we say that the country contains so many Confucians or Buddhists, we mean it contains so many pagans whose prophets have given them another and rather vaguer version of the invisible power; making it not only invisible but almost impersonal. When we say that they also have temples and idols and priests and periodical festivals, we simply mean that this sort of heathen is enough of a human being to admit the popular element of pomp and pictures and feasts and fairy-tales. We only mean that Pagans have more sense than Puritans. But what the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.
Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.
For this is the last proof of the miracle; that something so supernatural should have become so natural. I mean that anything so unique when seen from the outside should only seem universal when seen from the inside. I have not minimised the scale of the miracle, as some of our wilder theologians think it wise to do. Rather have I deliberately dwelt on that incredible interruption, as a blow that broke the very backbone of history. I have great sympathy with the monotheists, the Moslems, or the Jews, to whom it seems a blasphemy; a blasphemy that might shake the world. But it did not shake the world; it steadied the world. That fact, the more we consider it, will seem more solid and more strange. I think it a piece of plain justice to all the unbelievers to insist upon the audacity of the act of faith that is demanded of them. I willingly and warmly agree that it is, in itself, a suggestion at which we might expect even the brain of the believer to reel, when he realised his own belief. But the brain of the believer does not reel; it is the brains of the unbelievers that reel. We can see their brains reeling on every side and into every extravagance of ethics and psychology; into pessimism and the denial of life; into pragmatism and the denial of logic; seeking their omens in nightmares and their canons in contradictions; shrieking for fear at the far-off sight of things beyond good and evil, or whispering of strange stars where two and two make five. Meanwhile this solitary thing that seems at first so outrageous in outline remains solid and sane in substance. It remains the moderator of all these manias; rescuing reason from the Pragmatists exactly as it rescued laughter from the Puritans. I repeat that I have deliberately emphasised its intrinsically defiant and dogmatic character. The mystery is how anything so startling should have remained defiant and dogmatic and yet become perfectly normal and natural. I have admitted freely that, considering the incident in itself, a man who says he is God may be classed with a man who says he is glass. But the man who says he is glass is not a glazier making windows for all the world. He does not remain for after ages as a shining and crystalline figure, in whose light everything is as clear as crystal.
But this madness has remained sane. The madness has remained sane when everything else went mad. The madhouse has been a house to which, age after age, men are continually coming back as to a home. That is the riddle that remains; that anything so abrupt and abnormal should still be found a habitable and hospitable thing. I care not if the sceptic says it is a tall story; I cannot see how so toppling a tower could stand so long without foundation. Still less can I see how it could become, as it has become, the home of man. Had it merely appeared and disappeared, it might possibly have been remembered or explained as the last leap of the rage of illusion, the ultimate myth of the ultimate mood, in which the mind struck the sky and broke. But the mind did not break. It is the one mind that remains unbroken in the break-up of the world. If it were an error, it seems as if the error could hardly have lasted a day. If it were a mere ecstasy, it would seem that such an ecstasy could not endure for an hour. It has endured for nearly two thousand years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more level-headed, more reasonable in its hopes, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of fate and death, than all the world outside. For it was the soul of Christendom that came forth from the incredible Christ; and the soul of it was common sense. Though we dared not look on His face we could look on His fruits; and by His fruits we should know Him. The fruits are solid and the fruitfulness is much more than a metaphor; and nowhere in this sad world are boys happier in apple-trees, or men in more equal chorus singing as they tread the vine, than under the fixed flash of this instant and intolerant enlightenment; the lightning made eternal as the light.
APPENDIX I
ON PREHISTORIC MAN
On re-reading these pages I feel that I have tried in many places and with many words, to say something that might be said in one word. In a sense this study is meant to be superficial. That is, it is not meant as a study of the things that need to be studied. It is rather a reminder of the things that are seen so quickly that they are forgotten almost as quickly. Its moral, in a manner of speaking, is that first thoughts are best; so a flash might reveal a landscape; with the Eiffel Tower or the Matterhorn standing up in it as they would never stand up again in the light of common day. I ended the book with an image of everlasting lightning; in a very different sense, alas, this little flash has lasted only too long. But the method has also certain practical disadvantages upon which I think it well to add these two notes. It may seem to simplify too much and to ignore out of ignorance. I feel this especially in the passage about the prehistoric pictures; which is not concerned with all that the learned may learn from prehistoric pictures, but with the single point of what anyone could learn from there being any prehistoric pictures at all. I am conscious that this attempt to express it in terms of innocence may exaggerate even my own ignorance. Without any pretence of scientific research or information, I should be sorry to have it thought that I knew no more than what was needed, in that passage, of the states into which primitive humanity has been divided. I am aware, of course, that the story is elaborately stratified; and that there were many such stages before the Cro-Magnon or any peoples with whom we associate such pictures. Indeed recent studies about the Neanderthal and other races rather tend to repeat the moral that is here most relevant. The notion noted in these pages of something necessarily slow or late in the development of religion, will gain little indeed from these later revelations about the precursors of the reindeer picture-maker. The learned appear to hold that, whether the reindeer picture could be religious or not, the people that lived before it were religious already; burying their dead with the significant signs of mystery and hope. This obviously brings us back to the same argument; an argument that is not approached by any measurement of the earlier man’s skull. It is little use here to compare the head of the man with the head of the monkey, if it certainly never came into the head of the monkey to bury another monkey with nuts in his grave to help him towards a heavenly monkey house. Talking of skulls, I am also aware of the story of the Cro-Magnon skull that was much larger and finer than a modern skull. It is a very funny story; because an eminent evolutionist, awakening to a somewhat belated caution, protested against anything being inferred from one specimen. It is the duty of a solitary skull to prove that our fathers were our inferiors. Any solitary skull presuming to prove that they were superior is felt to be suffering from swelled head.
APPENDIX II
ON AUTHORITY AND ACCURACY
In this book which is merely meant as a popular criticism of popular fallacies, often indeed of very vulgar errors, I feel that I have sometimes given an impression of scoffing at serious scientific work. It was however the very reverse of my intentions. I am not arguing with the scientist who explains the elephant, but only with the sophist who explains it away. And as a matter of fact the sophist plays to the gallery, as he did in ancient Greece. He appeals to the ignorant, especially when he appeals to the learned. But I never meant my own criticism to be an impertinence to the truly learned. We all owe an infinite debt to the researches, especially the recent researches, of single minded students in these matters; and I have only professed to pick up things here and there from them. I have not loaded my abstract argument with quotations and references, which only make a man look more learned than he is; but in some cases I find that my own loose fashion of allusion is rather misleading about my own meaning. The passage about Chaucer and the Child Martyr is badly expressed; I only mean that the English poet probably had in mind the English saint; of whose story he gives a sort of foreign version. In the same way two statements in the chapter on Mythology follow each other in such a way that it may seem to be suggested that the second story about monotheism refers to the Southern Seas. I may explain that Atahocan belongs not to Australasian but to American savages. So in the chapter called “The Antiquity of Civilisation,” which I feel to be the most unsatisfactory, I have given my own impression of the meaning of the development of Egyptian monarchy too much, perhaps, as if it were identical with the facts on which it was formed as given in works like those of Professor J. L Myres. But the confusion was not intentional; still less was there any intention to imply, in the remainder of the chapter, that the anthropological speculations about races are less valuable than they undoubtedly are. My criticism is strictly relative; I may say that the pyramids are plainer than the tracks of the desert; without denying that wiser men than I may see tracks in what is to me the trackless sand.
PREFARATORY NOTE
This book needs a preliminary note that its scope be not misunderstood. The view suggested is historical rather than theological, and does not deal directly with a religious change which has been the chief event of my own life; and about which I am already writing a more purely controversial volume. It is impossible, I hope, for any Catholic to write any book on any subject, above all this subject, without showing that he is a Catholic; but this study is not specially concerned with the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant. Much of it is devoted to many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians; and its thesis is that those who say that Christ stands side by side with similar myths, and his religion side by side with similar religions, are only repeating a very stale formula contradicted by a very striking fact. To suggest this I have not needed to go much beyond matters known to us all; I make no claim to learning; and have to depend for some things, as has rather become the fashion, on those who are more learned. As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the courage and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and varied and intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.
NOTA PRELIMINARE
Questo libro ha bisogno di una nota preliminare, affinché non se ne fraintenda la portata. La prospettiva che vi si suggerisce è storica più che teologica, e non tratta direttamente di quel mutamento religioso che è stato l’evento capitale della mia stessa vita, e intorno al quale sto già scrivendo un volume di natura più schiettamente controversistica. È impossibile, lo spero, per qualsiasi cattolico scrivere un libro su un qualunque argomento, e soprattutto su questo, senza mostrare di essere cattolico; ma questo studio non si occupa in modo particolare delle differenze tra un cattolico e un protestante. Buona parte di esso è dedicata a molte specie di pagani più che a qualsiasi specie di cristiani; e la sua tesi è che coloro i quali affermano che Cristo sta a fianco di miti a lui simili, e la sua religione a fianco di religioni simili, non fanno che ripetere una formula assai stantia, contraddetta da un fatto assai clamoroso. Per suggerire questo non ho avuto bisogno di spingermi molto oltre le cose note a tutti noi; non pretendo di essere erudito, e per alcune cose devo affidarmi, come è ormai piuttosto di moda, a chi è più dotto di me. Poiché ho più di una volta dissentito dal signor H. G. Wells sulla sua visione della storia, è tanto più giusto che io mi congratuli qui con lui per il coraggio e l’immaginazione costruttiva che hanno condotto in porto la sua opera vasta, varia e intensamente interessante; ma ancor più per aver rivendicato il ragionevole diritto del dilettante a fare quel che può con i fatti che gli specialisti gli forniscono.
INTRODUCTION
THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK
There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote. It is, however, a relief to turn from that topic to another story that I never wrote. Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written. It is only too probable that I shall never write it, so I will use it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth. I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping sides, like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was far enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchen-garden, shining flat on the hill-side like the colours and quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some such gigantic figure, on which he had always lived, but which was too large and too close to be seen. That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today; and that is the point of this book.
The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were plain clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward’s castle; though they do not call an editor’s office a coward’s castle. It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it would be much truer of journalist. The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church; the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him. They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press about why the churches are empty, without even going there to find out if they are empty, or which of them are empty. Their suggestions are more vapid and vacant than the most insipid curate in a three-act farce, and move us to comfort him after the manner of the curate in the Bab Ballads; ‘Your mind is not so blank as that of Hopley Porter.’ So we may truly say to the very feeblest cleric: ‘Your mind is not so blank as that of Indignant Layman or Plain Man or Man in the Street, or any of your critics in the newspapers; for they have not the most shadowy notion of what they want themselves. Let alone of what you ought to give them.’ They will suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented the War, which they themselves did not want to prevent; and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent, except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan sceptics who are the chief enemies of the Church. It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War— they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. But that marks their mood about the whole religious tradition they are in a state of reaction against it. It is well with the boy when he lives on his father’s land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.
Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because his followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be far better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be battered by iconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-handed cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika. Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In other words, I recommend these critics to try to do as much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages.
INTRODUZIONE
IL DISEGNO DI QUESTO LIBRO
Vi sono due modi di tornare a casa; e uno di essi è restarci. L’altro è camminare tutt’intorno al mondo finché non si ritorni allo stesso punto; e ho tentato di tracciare un tale viaggio in un racconto che scrissi un tempo. È però un sollievo passare da quel tema a un’altra storia che non ho mai scritto. Come ogni libro che non ho mai scritto, è di gran lunga il miglior libro che io abbia mai scritto. È fin troppo probabile che non lo scriverò mai, sicché me ne servirò qui in senso simbolico; perché era il simbolo di una medesima verità. Lo concepii come un romanzo di quelle immense vallate dai fianchi digradanti, come quelle lungo cui gli antichi Cavalli Bianchi del Wessex sono tracciati a graffio sui costoni delle colline. Riguardava un ragazzo la cui fattoria o casetta sorgeva su un simile pendio, e che si mise in viaggio in cerca di qualcosa, come l’effigie e la tomba di qualche gigante; e quando fu abbastanza lontano da casa si volse indietro e vide che la sua fattoria e l’orto della cucina, splendenti e piatti sul fianco della collina come i colori e le partizioni di uno scudo, non erano che parti di una qualche gigantesca figura, sulla quale egli aveva sempre vissuto, ma che era troppo grande e troppo vicina per essere vista. Questo, io credo, è un vero ritratto del progredire di ogni intelligenza davvero indipendente al giorno d’oggi; ed è questo il senso di questo libro.
Il senso di questo libro, in altre parole, è che la cosa migliore, dopo l’essere davvero dentro la Cristianità, è l’esserne davvero fuori. E un punto particolare è che i critici popolari del Cristianesimo non ne sono realmente fuori. Si trovano su un terreno controverso, in ogni senso del termine. Sono dubbiosi persino nei loro dubbi. La loro critica ha assunto un tono curioso; quello di una contestazione casuale e ignorante. Così spingono in circolazione le frasi fatte anticlericali alla stregua di chiacchiere da salotto. Si lagnano che i pastori si vestano da pastori; come se fossimo più liberi qualora tutti i poliziotti che ci pedinano o ci acciuffano fossero agenti in borghese. Oppure si lagnano che un sermone non possa essere interrotto, e chiamano un pulpito il castello del vigliacco; sebbene non chiamino l’ufficio di un direttore di giornale il castello del vigliacco. Sarebbe ingiusto tanto verso i giornalisti quanto verso i preti; ma sarebbe assai più vero del giornalista. L’uomo di chiesa compare di persona e potrebbe essere facilmente preso a pedate all’uscita dalla chiesa; il giornalista cela persino il proprio nome, così che nessuno possa prenderlo a pedate. Scrivono articoli e lettere sfrenati e insensati sulla stampa sul perché le chiese siano vuote, senza nemmeno andarvi per accertare se siano vuote, o quali di esse lo siano. I loro suggerimenti sono più insipidi e vacui del più scipito curato di una farsa in tre atti, e ci muovono a consolarlo alla maniera del curato delle Bab Ballads: «La tua mente non è così vuota come quella di Hopley Porter». Sicché possiamo dire in tutta verità al più fiacco dei chierici: «La tua mente non è così vuota come quella dell’Indignato Laico o dell’Uomo Comune o dell’Uomo della Strada, o di uno qualunque dei tuoi critici sui giornali; perché costoro non hanno la più vaga idea di ciò che essi stessi vogliono. Per non parlare di ciò che tu dovresti dar loro». D’un tratto si voltano e vituperano la Chiesa per non aver impedito la Guerra, che essi stessi non volevano impedire; e che nessuno aveva mai preteso di poter impedire, tranne alcuni di quella stessa scuola di scettici progressisti e cosmopoliti che sono i principali nemici della Chiesa. Fu il mondo anticlericale e agnostico a profetizzare sempre l’avvento di una pace universale; è quel mondo che fu, o avrebbe dovuto essere, sconcertato e confuso dall’avvento di una guerra universale. Quanto all’opinione generale che la Chiesa sia stata screditata dalla Guerra, potrebbero altrettanto bene dire che l’Arca fu screditata dal Diluvio. Quando il mondo va storto, ciò dimostra piuttosto che la Chiesa ha ragione. La Chiesa è giustificata non perché i suoi figli non pecchino, ma perché peccano. Ma ciò segna il loro stato d’animo verso l’intera tradizione religiosa: sono in uno stato di reazione contro di essa. Bene è per il ragazzo quando vive sulla terra di suo padre; e bene di nuovo per lui quando è abbastanza lontano da essa per volgersi indietro a guardarla e vederla come un tutto. Ma questa gente è caduta in uno stato intermedio, è precipitata in una valle interposta dalla quale non può vedere né le alture al di là né le alture alle sue spalle. Non riescono a uscire dalla penombra della controversia cristiana. Non possono essere cristiani e non possono smettere di essere anticristiani. La loro intera atmosfera è l’atmosfera di una reazione: malumori, ostinazione, critica meschina. Vivono ancora nell’ombra della fede e hanno perduto la luce della fede.
Ora, la miglior relazione con la nostra dimora spirituale è essere abbastanza vicini da amarla. Ma la seconda migliore è essere abbastanza lontani da non odiarla. È l’assunto di queste pagine che, mentre il miglior giudice del Cristianesimo è un cristiano, il secondo miglior giudice sarebbe qualcosa di più simile a un confuciano. Il peggior giudice di tutti è l’uomo oggi più pronto a emettere giudizi; il cristiano mal istruito che si va trasformando a poco a poco nell’agnostico dal cattivo carattere, invischiato nella coda di una faida di cui non ha mai capito l’inizio, funestato da una sorta di noia ereditaria per non sa che cosa, e già stanco di udire ciò che non ha mai udito. Egli non giudica il Cristianesimo con la calma con cui lo farebbe un confuciano; non lo giudica come giudicherebbe il confucianesimo. Non riesce, con uno sforzo di fantasia, a collocare la Chiesa cattolica a migliaia di miglia di distanza, in strani cieli mattutini, e a giudicarla con l’imparzialità con cui giudicherebbe una pagoda cinese. Si dice che il grande san Francesco Saverio, che quasi riuscì a erigervi la Chiesa come una torre sovrastante tutte le pagode, fallì in parte perché i suoi seguaci furono accusati dagli altri missionari di rappresentare i Dodici Apostoli con le vesti o gli attributi di cinesi. Ma sarebbe assai meglio vederli come cinesi, e giudicarli lealmente come cinesi, che vederli come idoli senza volto, fatti solo per essere fracassati dagli iconoclasti; o piuttosto come bersagli da colpire da parte di cockneys a mani vuote. Sarebbe meglio vedere l’intera faccenda come un remoto culto asiatico; le mitre dei suoi vescovi come i torreggianti copricapi di misteriosi bonzi; i suoi bastoni pastorali come le verghe attorte a serpente portate in qualche processione asiatica; vedere il libro delle preghiere fantastico quanto la ruota delle preghiere e la Croce tanto ricurva quanto la svastica. Allora, almeno, non perderemmo le staffe come sembrano perderle alcuni dei critici scettici, per non dire il senno. Il loro anticlericalismo è divenuto un’atmosfera, un’atmosfera di negazione e ostilità dalla quale non riescono a evadere. In confronto a questo, sarebbe meglio vedere l’intera faccenda come qualcosa che appartiene a un altro continente, o a un altro pianeta. Sarebbe più filosofico fissare con indifferenza dei bonzi che brontolare perpetuamente e inutilmente contro i vescovi. Sarebbe meglio passare davanti a una chiesa come se fosse una pagoda che restarsene stabilmente sotto il portico, incapaci tanto di entrare per aiutare quanto di uscire e dimenticare. A coloro nei quali una mera reazione è così diventata un’ossessione, raccomando sul serio lo sforzo immaginativo di concepire i Dodici Apostoli come cinesi. In altre parole, raccomando a questi critici di tentare di rendere ai santi cristiani tanta giustizia quanta ne renderebbero a dei saggi pagani.
But with this we come to the final and vital point I shall try to show in these pages that when we do make this imaginative effort to see the whole thing from the outside, we find that it really looks like what is traditionally said about it inside. It is exactly when the boy gets far enough off to see the giant that he sees that he really is a giant. It is exactly when we do at last see the Christian Church afar under those clear and level eastern skies that we see that it is really the Church of Christ. To put it shortly, the moment we are really impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it. But this second proposition requires more serious discussion; and I shall here set myself to discuss it.
As soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something solid in the solitary and unique character of the divine story, it struck me that there was exactly the same strange and yet solid character in the human story that had led up to it; because that human story also had a root that was divine. I mean that just as the Church seems to grow more remarkable when it is fairly compared with the common religious life of mankind, so mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable when we compare it with the common life of nature. And I have noticed that most modern history is driven to something like sophistry, first to soften the sharp transition from animals to men, and then to soften the sharp transition from heathens to Christians. Now the more we really read in a realistic spirit of those two transitions the sharper we shall find them to be. It is because the critics are not detached that they do not see this detachment; it is because they are not looking at things in a dry light that they cannot see the difference between black and white. It is because they are in a particular mood of reaction and revolt that they have a motive for making out that all the white is dirty grey and the black not so black as it is painted. I do not say there are not human excuses for their revolt; I do not say it is not in some ways sympathetic; what I say is that it is not in any way scientific. An iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but an iconoclast is not impartial. And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial. Why should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope? I do not pretend to be impartial in the sense that the final act of faith fixes a man’s mind because it satisfies his mind. But I do profess to be a great deal more impartial than they are; in the sense that I can tell the story fairly, with some sort of imaginative justice to all sides; and they cannot. I do profess to be impartial in the sense that I should be ashamed to talk such nonsense about the Lama of Thibet as they do about the Pope of Rome, or to have as little sympathy with Julian the Apostate as they have with the Society of Jesus. They are not impartial; they never by any chance hold the historical scales even; and above all they are never impartial upon this point of evolution and transition. They suggest everywhere the grey gradations of twilight, because they believe it is the twilight of the gods. I propose to maintain that whether or no it is the twilight of gods, it is not the daylight of men.
I maintain that when brought out into the daylight these two things look altogether strange and unique; and that it is only in the false twilight of an imaginary period of transition that they can be made to look in the least like anything else. The first of these is the creature called man and the second is the man called Christ. I have therefore divided this book into two parts: the former being a sketch of the main adventure of the human race in so far as it remained heathen; and the second a summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming Christian. Both motives necessitate a certain method, a method which is not very easy to manage, and perhaps even less easy to define or defend.
In order to strike, in the only sane or possible sense, the note of impartiality, it is necessary to touch the nerve of novelty. I mean that in one sense we see things fairly when we see them first. That, I may remark in passing, is why children generally have very little difficulty about the dogmas of the Church. But the Church, being a highly practical thing for working and fighting, is necessarily a thing for men and not merely for children. There must be in it for working purposes a great deal of tradition, of familiarity, and even of routine. So long as its fundamentals are sincerely felt, this may even be the saner condition. But when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural. Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as are here considered, whatever our view of them, contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort of imagination; the imagination that can see what is there.
The only way to suggest the point is by an example of something, indeed of almost anything, that has been considered beautiful or wonderful. George Wyndham once told me that he had seen one of the first aeroplanes rise for the first time and it was very wonderful but not so wonderful as a horse allowing a man to ride on him. Somebody else has said that a fine man on a fine horse is the noblest bodily object in the world. Now, so long as people feel this in the right way, all is well. The first and best way of appreciating it is to come of people with a tradition of treating animals properly; of men in the right relation to horses. A boy who remembers his father who rode a horse, who rode it well and treated it well, will know that the relation can be satisfactory and will be satisfied. He will be all the more indignant at the ill-treatment of horses because he knows how they ought to be treated; but he will see nothing but what is normal in a man riding on a horse. He will not listen to the great modern philosopher who explains to him that the horse ought to be riding on the man. He will not pursue the pessimist fancy of Swift and say that men must be despised as monkeys and horses worshipped as gods. And horse and man together making an image that is to him human and civilised, it will be easy, as it were, to lift horse and man together into something heroic or symbolical; like a vision of St. George in the clouds. The fable of the winged horse will not be wholly unnatural to him: and he will know why Ariosto set many a Christian hero in such an airy saddle, and made him the rider of the sky. For the horse has really been lifted up along with the man in the wildest fashion in the very word we use when we speak ‘chivalry.’ The very name of the horse has been given to the highest mood and moment of the man; so that we might almost say that the handsomest compliment to a man is to call him a horse.
Ma con ciò giungiamo al punto ultimo e vitale: cercherò di mostrare in queste pagine che, quando compiamo davvero questo sforzo immaginativo di vedere l’intera faccenda dall’esterno, scopriamo che essa somiglia realmente a ciò che tradizionalmente se ne dice all’interno. È esattamente quando il ragazzo si allontana abbastanza da vedere il gigante che si accorge che è davvero un gigante. È esattamente quando finalmente scorgiamo la Chiesa cristiana lontana, sotto quei cieli orientali limpidi e distesi, che ci accorgiamo che essa è realmente la Chiesa di Cristo. Per dirla in breve, nel momento stesso in cui siamo davvero imparziali verso di essa, capiamo perché la gente le sia parziale. Ma questa seconda proposizione richiede una discussione più seria; e qui mi accingo a discuterla.
Non appena ebbi chiaramente in mente questa concezione di qualcosa di solido nel carattere solitario e unico della storia divina, mi colpì il fatto che vi fosse esattamente lo stesso carattere strano eppure solido nella storia umana che vi aveva condotto; perché anche quella storia umana aveva una radice che era divina. Voglio dire che, così come la Chiesa sembra crescere in prodigiosità quando la si paragona equamente alla comune vita religiosa dell’umanità, così l’umanità stessa sembra crescere in prodigiosità quando la paragoniamo alla comune vita della natura. E ho notato che la maggior parte della storia moderna è spinta a qualcosa come un sofisma, dapprima per attenuare la brusca transizione dagli animali all’uomo, e poi per attenuare la brusca transizione dai pagani ai cristiani. Ora, quanto più leggiamo con spirito realistico di quelle due transizioni, tanto più nette le troveremo. È perché i critici non sono distaccati che non vedono questo distacco; è perché non guardano le cose in una luce asciutta che non riescono a vedere la differenza tra il bianco e il nero. È perché si trovano in un particolare stato d’animo di reazione e rivolta che hanno un motivo per far apparire tutto il bianco come grigio sporco e il nero non così nero come lo si dipinge. Non dico che non vi siano scuse umane per la loro rivolta; non dico che essa non sia per certi versi simpatica; quel che dico è che essa non è in alcun modo scientifica. Un iconoclasta può essere indignato; un iconoclasta può essere giustamente indignato; ma un iconoclasta non è imparziale. Ed è pura ipocrisia fingere che nove decimi degli alti critici, degli evoluzionisti scientifici e dei professori di religione comparata siano minimamente imparziali. Perché dovrebbero essere imparziali, che cos’è essere imparziali, quando il mondo intero è in guerra sul se una data cosa sia una superstizione divorante o una divina speranza? Non pretendo di essere imparziale nel senso che l’atto finale di fede fissi la mente di un uomo perché ne appaga la mente. Ma professo di essere assai più imparziale di loro; nel senso che io so raccontare la storia con lealtà, con una qualche sorta di giustizia immaginativa verso tutte le parti; e loro non lo sanno fare. Professo di essere imparziale nel senso che mi vergognerei di dire tante sciocchezze sul Lama del Tibet quante ne dicono loro sul Papa di Roma, o di avere così poca simpatia per Giuliano l’Apostata quanta ne hanno loro per la Compagnia di Gesù. Non sono imparziali; non tengono mai, per nessun caso, la bilancia storica in equilibrio; e soprattutto non sono mai imparziali su questo punto dell’evoluzione e della transizione. Suggeriscono ovunque le grigie gradazioni del crepuscolo, perché credono che sia il crepuscolo degli dèi. Mi propongo di sostenere che, sia o no il crepuscolo degli dèi, non è certo il pieno giorno degli uomini.
Sostengo che, quando le si porti alla luce del giorno, queste due cose appaiono del tutto strane e uniche; e che è soltanto nel falso crepuscolo di un immaginario periodo di transizione che le si può far sembrare minimamente simili a qualcos’altro. La prima di esse è la creatura chiamata uomo, e la seconda è l’uomo chiamato Cristo. Ho perciò diviso questo libro in due parti: la prima è uno schizzo della principale avventura del genere umano nella misura in cui rimase pagano; e la seconda un compendio della reale differenza prodotta dal suo diventare cristiano. Entrambi i moventi impongono un certo metodo, un metodo che non è molto facile da maneggiare, e forse ancor meno facile da definire o difendere.
Per toccare, nell’unico senso sano o possibile, la nota dell’imparzialità, è necessario toccare il nervo della novità. Voglio dire che, in un certo senso, vediamo le cose con lealtà quando le vediamo per la prima volta. Ed è per questo, lo noto di sfuggita, che i bambini generalmente hanno assai poca difficoltà con i dogmi della Chiesa. Ma la Chiesa, essendo una cosa altamente pratica, fatta per lavorare e combattere, è necessariamente una cosa per uomini e non soltanto per bambini. Vi dev’essere in essa, a fini operativi, una gran quantità di tradizione, di familiarità e persino di consuetudine. Finché i suoi fondamenti sono sinceramente sentiti, questa può persino essere la condizione più sana. Ma quando i suoi fondamenti sono messi in dubbio, come al presente, dobbiamo tentare di recuperare il candore e la meraviglia del fanciullo; il non guastato realismo e l’oggettività dell’innocenza. O, se non possiamo far questo, dobbiamo tentare almeno di scuoterci di dosso la nube della mera consuetudine e vedere la cosa come nuova, non foss’altro che vedendola come innaturale. Le cose che possono ben essere familiari finché la familiarità genera affetto farebbero assai meglio a diventare estranee quando la familiarità genera disprezzo. Poiché, riguardo a cose così grandi come quelle qui considerate, qualunque sia la nostra opinione su di esse, il disprezzo dev’essere un errore. Anzi, il disprezzo dev’essere un’illusione. Dobbiamo invocare la specie più selvaggia e più alta d’immaginazione; l’immaginazione capace di vedere ciò che è là.
L’unico modo per suggerire il punto è per mezzo di un esempio di qualcosa, anzi di quasi qualsiasi cosa, che sia stata considerata bella o meravigliosa. George Wyndham mi disse un giorno di aver visto uno dei primi aeroplani sollevarsi per la prima volta, ed era cosa assai meravigliosa, ma non tanto meravigliosa quanto un cavallo che consente a un uomo di cavalcarlo. Qualcun altro ha detto che un bell’uomo su un bel cavallo è il più nobile oggetto corporeo del mondo. Ora, finché la gente sente questo nel modo giusto, tutto va bene. Il primo e miglior modo di apprezzarlo è discendere da gente con una tradizione di trattare gli animali come si deve; da uomini nel giusto rapporto coi cavalli. Un ragazzo che ricorda suo padre il quale cavalcava un cavallo, lo cavalcava bene e lo trattava bene, saprà che quel rapporto può essere soddisfacente e ne sarà soddisfatto. Sarà tanto più indignato per il maltrattamento dei cavalli perché sa come dovrebbero essere trattati; ma non vedrà nulla se non ciò che è normale in un uomo che cavalca un cavallo. Non darà retta al grande filosofo moderno che gli spiega che dovrebbe essere il cavallo a cavalcare l’uomo. Non perseguirà la pessimistica fantasia di Swift, e non dirà che gli uomini vanno disprezzati come scimmie e i cavalli adorati come dèi. E poiché cavallo e uomo, insieme, formano per lui un’immagine umana e civile, sarà facile, per così dire, sollevare cavallo e uomo insieme in qualcosa di eroico o simbolico; come una visione di san Giorgio tra le nubi. La favola del cavallo alato non gli riuscirà del tutto innaturale: e saprà perché l’Ariosto pose più di un eroe cristiano su una simile aerea sella, e ne fece il cavaliere del cielo. Poiché il cavallo è stato realmente innalzato insieme all’uomo, nel modo più sfrenato, in quella stessa parola che usiamo quando diciamo «cavalleria». Il nome stesso del cavallo è stato dato all’umore e al momento più alto dell’uomo; al punto che potremmo quasi dire che il più bel complimento a un uomo è chiamarlo un cavallo.
But if a man has got into a mood in which he is not able to feel this sort of wonder, then his cure must begin right at the other end. We must now suppose that he has drifted into a dull mood, in which somebody sitting on a horse means no more than somebody sitting on a chair. The wonder of which Wyndham spoke, the beauty that made the thing seem an equestrian statue, the meaning of the more chivalric horseman, may have become to him merely a convention and a bore. Perhaps they have been merely a fashion; perhaps they have gone out of fashion; perhaps they have been talked about too much or talked about in the wrong way; perhaps it was then difficult to care for horses without the horrible risk of being horsy. Anyhow, he has got into a condition when he cares no more for a horse than for a towel-horse. His grandfather’s charge at Balaclava seems to him as dull and dusty as the album containing such family portraits. Such a person has not really become enlightened about the album; on the contrary, he has only become blind with the dust. But when he has reached that degree of blindness, he will not be able to look at a horse or a horseman at all until he has seen the whole thing as a thing entirely unfamiliar and almost unearthly.
Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there must come towards us, with lumbering yet dancing motions, one of the very queerest of the prehistoric creatures. We must see for the first time the strangely small head set on a neck not only longer but thicker than itself, as the face of a gargoyle is thrust out upon a gutter-spout, the one disproportionate crest of hair running along the ridge of that heavy neck like a beard in the wrong place; the feet, each like a solid club of horn, alone amid the feet of so many cattle; so that the true fear is to be found in showing, not the cloven, but the uncloven hoof. Nor is it mere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster; for in a sense a monster means what is unique, and he is really unique. But the point is that when we thus see him as the first man saw him, we begin once more to have some imaginative sense of what it meant when the first man rode him. In such a dream he may seem ugly, but he does not seem unimpressive; and certainly that two-legged dwarf who could get on top of him will not seem unimpressive. By a longer and more erratic road we shall come back to the same marvel of the man and the horse; and the marvel will be, if possible, even more marvellous. We shall have again a glimpse of St. George; the more glorious because St. George is not riding on the horse, but rather riding on the dragon.
In this example, which I have taken merely because it is an example, it will be noted that I do not say that the nightmare seen by the first man of the forest is either more true or more wonderful than the normal mare of the stable seen by the civilised person who can appreciate what is normal. Of the two extremes, I think on the whole that the traditional grasp of truth is the better. But I say that the truth is found at one or other of these two extremes, and is lost in the intermediate condition of mere fatigue and forgetfulness of tradition. In other words, I say it is better to see a horse as a monster than to see it only as a slow substitute for a motor-car. If we have got into that state of mind about a horse as something stale, it is far better to be frightened of a horse because it is a good deal too fresh.
Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is always to have regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature will feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view, and will be satisfied. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just as seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, and not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the really detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to, and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him.
In short, it is the purpose of this introduction to maintain this thesis: that it is exactly when we do regard man as an animal that we know he is not an animal. It is precisely when we do try to picture him as a sort of horse on its hind legs, that we suddenly realise that he must be something as miraculous as the winged horse that towered up into the clouds of heaven. All roads lead to Rome, all ways lead round again to the central and civilised philosophy, including this road through elf-land and topsyturvydom. But it may be that it is better never to have left the land of the reasonable tradition, where men ride lightly upon horses and are mighty hunters before the Lord.
So also in the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold tread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know; we believe every common Indian conjurer who chooses to come to us and talk in the same style. If Christianity were only a new oriental fashion, it would never be reproached with being an old and oriental faith. I do not propose in this book to follow the alleged example of St. Francis Xavier with the opposite imaginative intention, and turn the Twelve Apostles into Mandarins; not so much to make them look like natives as to make them look like foreigners. I do not propose to work what I believe would be a completely successful practical joke; that of telling the whole story of the Gospel and the whole history of the church in a setting of pagodas and pigtails; and noting with malignant humour how much it was admired as a heathen story, in the very quarters where it is condemned as a Christian story. But I do propose to strike wherever possible this note of what is new and strange, and for that reason the style even on so serious a subject may sometimes be deliberately grotesque and fanciful. I do desire to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things. And I say that in both cases, when seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernatural things. They do not fade into the rest with the colours of impressionism; they stand out from the rest with the colours of heraldry; as vivid as a red cross on a white shield or a black lion on a ground of gold. So stands the Red Clay against the green field of nature, or the White Christ against the red clay of his race.
But in order to see them clearly we have to see them as a whole. We have to see how they developed as well as how they began; for the most incredible part of the story is that things which began thus should have developed thus. Anyone who chooses to indulge in mere imagination can imagine that other things might have happened or other entities evolved. Anyone thinking of what might have happened may conceive a sort of evolutionary equality; but anyone facing what did happen must face an exception and a prodigy. If there was ever a moment when man was only an animal, we can if we choose make a fancy picture of his career transferred to some other animal. An entertaining fantasia might be made in which elephants built in elephantine architecture, with towers and turrets like tusks and trunks, cities beyond the scale of any colossus. A pleasant fable might be conceived in which a cow had developed a costume, and put on four boots and two pairs of trousers. We could imagine a Supermonkey more marvellous than any Superman, a quadrumanous creature carving and painting with his hands and cooking and carpentering with his feet. But if we are considering what did happen, we shall certainly decide that man has distanced everything else with a distance like that of the astronomical spaces and a speed like that of the still thunderbolt of the light. And in the same fashion, while we can if we choose see the Church amid a mob of Mithraic or Manichean superstitions squabbling and killing each other at the end of the Empire, while we can if we choose imagine the Church killed in the struggle and some other chance cult taking its place, we shall be the more surprised (and possibly puzzled) if we meet it two thousand years afterwards rushing through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought and everlasting enthusiasm; a thing without rival or resemblance; and still as new as it is old.
Ma se un uomo è caduto in uno stato d’animo in cui non è capace di sentire questa sorta di meraviglia, allora la sua cura deve cominciare proprio dall’altro capo. Dobbiamo ora supporre che sia scivolato in uno stato d’animo ottuso, in cui qualcuno seduto su un cavallo non significa più di qualcuno seduto su una sedia. La meraviglia di cui parlava Wyndham, la bellezza che faceva della cosa una statua equestre, il significato del cavaliere più cavalleresco, possono essergli diventati una mera convenzione e una noia. Forse sono stati soltanto una moda; forse sono passati di moda; forse se n’è parlato troppo, o se n’è parlato nel modo sbagliato; forse era allora difficile avere a cuore i cavalli senza l’orribile rischio di darsi arie da cavallerizzo. Comunque sia, è caduto in una condizione in cui non gli importa più di un cavallo di quanto gli importi di un attaccapanni. La carica di suo nonno a Balaklava gli sembra tediosa e polverosa quanto l’album che contiene simili ritratti di famiglia. Una tale persona non si è realmente illuminata sull’album; al contrario, si è soltanto accecata con la polvere. Ma quando avrà raggiunto quel grado di cecità, non sarà in grado di guardare affatto un cavallo o un cavaliere finché non avrà visto l’intera cosa come qualcosa di del tutto insolito e quasi ultraterreno.
Da qualche foresta oscura, sotto qualche antica alba, deve venire verso di noi, con movenze goffe eppure danzanti, una delle più bizzarre creature preistoriche. Dobbiamo vedere per la prima volta la testa stranamente piccola posata su un collo non solo più lungo ma più spesso di essa, come il volto di un gargoyle protende sopra un doccione, l’unica sproporzionata cresta di peli che corre lungo il crinale di quel collo pesante come una barba fuori posto; gli zoccoli, ciascuno simile a una solida clava di corno, soli tra i piedi di tanto bestiame; sicché il vero terrore si trova nel mostrare non lo zoccolo fesso, ma quello non fesso. Né è mera fantasia verbale vederlo così come un Mostro unico; poiché, in un certo senso, un mostro significa ciò che è unico, ed egli è davvero unico. Ma il punto è che, quando lo vediamo così come lo vide il primo uomo, cominciamo di nuovo ad avere un qualche senso immaginativo di ciò che significò quando il primo uomo lo cavalcò. In un tale sogno può sembrare brutto, ma non sembra privo di grandezza; e certamente quel nano bipede che riuscì a montargli in groppa non sembrerà privo di grandezza. Per una strada più lunga e più erratica torneremo alla stessa meraviglia dell’uomo e del cavallo; e la meraviglia sarà, se possibile, ancor più meravigliosa. Avremo di nuovo un barlume di san Giorgio; tanto più glorioso in quanto san Giorgio non cavalca il cavallo, bensì cavalca il drago.
In questo esempio, che ho scelto semplicemente perché è un esempio, si noterà che io non dico che l’incubo visto dal primo uomo della foresta sia più vero o più meraviglioso della normale cavalla della stalla vista dalla persona civilizzata che sa apprezzare ciò che è normale. Dei due estremi, credo nel complesso che il tradizionale possesso della verità sia il migliore. Ma dico che la verità si trova all’uno o all’altro di questi due estremi, e si perde nella condizione intermedia della mera stanchezza e dell’oblio della tradizione. In altre parole, dico che è meglio vedere un cavallo come un mostro che vederlo soltanto come un lento surrogato di un’automobile. Se siamo caduti in quello stato d’animo verso un cavallo come qualcosa di stantìo, è di gran lunga meglio essere spaventati da un cavallo perché è di gran lunga troppo fresco.
Ora, come è del mostro che si chiama cavallo, così è del mostro che si chiama uomo. Naturalmente la condizione migliore di tutte, a mio parere, è aver sempre considerato l’uomo come lo si considera nella mia filosofia. Chi tiene per la visione cristiana e cattolica della natura umana sentirà con certezza che è una visione universale e perciò sana, e ne sarà appagato. Ma se ha perduto la visione sana, può riacquistarla soltanto mediante qualcosa di molto simile a una visione folle; ossia vedendo l’uomo come uno strano animale e rendendosi conto di quanto strano animale sia. Ma proprio come il vedere il cavallo come un prodigio preistorico condusse infine di nuovo verso, e non lontano da, un’ammirazione per la padronanza dell’uomo, così la considerazione davvero distaccata della curiosa carriera dell’uomo condurrà di nuovo verso, e non lontano da, l’antica fede nei tenebrosi disegni di Dio. In altre parole, è esattamente quando vediamo quanto sia bizzarro il quadrupede che lodiamo l’uomo che lo monta; ed esattamente quando vediamo quanto sia bizzarro il bipede che lodiamo la Provvidenza che lo fece.
In breve, è scopo di questa introduzione sostenere questa tesi: che è esattamente quando consideriamo l’uomo come un animale che sappiamo che egli non è un animale. È precisamente quando tentiamo di raffigurarcelo come una sorta di cavallo sulle zampe posteriori che d’un tratto ci accorgiamo che egli dev’essere qualcosa di miracoloso quanto il cavallo alato che si levò torreggiando fino alle nubi del cielo. Tutte le strade conducono a Roma, tutte le vie riportano di nuovo alla centrale e civile filosofia, compresa questa strada attraverso il paese degli elfi e il mondo alla rovescia. Ma può darsi che sia meglio non aver mai lasciato la terra della ragionevole tradizione, dove gli uomini cavalcano leggeri e sono possenti cacciatori al cospetto del Signore.
Così pure, nel caso specialmente cristiano, dobbiamo reagire contro la pesante inclinazione della stanchezza. È quasi impossibile rendere vividi i fatti, perché i fatti sono familiari; e per gli uomini caduti è spesso vero che la familiarità è stanchezza. Sono convinto che, se potessimo raccontare la storia soprannaturale di Cristo parola per parola come quella di un eroe cinese, chiamandolo il Figlio del Cielo invece del Figlio di Dio, e tracciandone il nimbo raggiante nell’oro dei ricami cinesi o nella lacca dorata delle ceramiche cinesi, invece che nella foglia d’oro delle nostre antiche pitture cattoliche, vi sarebbe una testimonianza unanime della purezza spirituale della storia. Non udremmo allora nulla dell’ingiustizia della sostituzione o dell’illogicità dell’espiazione, della superstiziosa esagerazione del peso del peccato o dell’impossibile insolenza di un’invasione delle leggi della natura. Ammireremmo la cavalleria della cinese concezione di un dio che cadde dal cielo per combattere i draghi e salvare i malvagi dall’essere divorati dalla loro stessa colpa e follia. Ammireremmo la sottigliezza della cinese visione della vita, che scorge come ogni umana imperfezione sia in vera verità un’imperfezione clamorosa. Ammireremmo la cinese saggezza esoterica e superiore, la quale diceva che vi sono leggi cosmiche più alte delle leggi che conosciamo; prestiamo fede a ogni comune giocoliere indiano che scelga di venire da noi a parlare nel medesimo stile. Se il Cristianesimo fosse soltanto una nuova moda orientale, non gli si rimprovererebbe mai di essere una vecchia e orientale fede. Non mi propongo, in questo libro, di seguire il presunto esempio di san Francesco Saverio con l’opposta intenzione immaginativa, e trasformare i Dodici Apostoli in mandarini; non tanto per farli sembrare indigeni quanto per farli sembrare stranieri. Non mi propongo di mettere in atto quello che, credo, sarebbe uno scherzo pratico pienamente riuscito; quello di raccontare l’intera storia del Vangelo e l’intera storia della chiesa in una cornice di pagode e codini; e di notare con maligno umorismo quanto essa venisse ammirata come storia pagana, proprio in quei circoli dove è condannata come storia cristiana. Ma mi propongo di far risuonare, ovunque sia possibile, questa nota di ciò che è nuovo e strano, e per questa ragione lo stile, persino su un argomento così serio, potrà talora essere deliberatamente grottesco e fantasioso. Desidero aiutare il lettore a vedere la Cristianità dall’esterno, nel senso di vederla come un tutto, sullo sfondo di altre cose storiche; proprio come desidero che egli veda l’umanità come un tutto sullo sfondo delle cose naturali. E dico che in entrambi i casi, viste così, esse spiccano dal loro sfondo come cose soprannaturali. Non sfumano nel resto coi colori dell’impressionismo; spiccano dal resto coi colori dell’araldica; vivide come una croce rossa su uno scudo bianco o un leone nero su un fondo d’oro. Così si erge la Rossa Argilla contro il verde campo della natura, o il Bianco Cristo contro la rossa argilla della sua stirpe.
Ma per vederle chiaramente dobbiamo vederle come un tutto. Dobbiamo vedere come si svilupparono tanto quanto come cominciarono; poiché la parte più incredibile della storia è che cose le quali cominciarono così avrebbero dovuto svilupparsi così. Chiunque scelga di abbandonarsi alla mera immaginazione può immaginare che sarebbero potute accadere altre cose o essersi evolute altre entità. Chiunque pensi a ciò che sarebbe potuto accadere può concepire una sorta di eguaglianza evolutiva; ma chiunque affronti ciò che accadde davvero deve affrontare un’eccezione e un prodigio. Se mai vi fu un momento in cui l’uomo era soltanto un animale, possiamo, se vogliamo, farci un quadro fantasioso della sua carriera trasferita a qualche altro animale. Si potrebbe comporre una divertente fantasia in cui elefanti costruivano in architettura elefantina, con torri e torrette simili a zanne e proboscidi, città al di là della scala di ogni colosso. Si potrebbe concepire una piacevole favola in cui una mucca avesse messo su un abbigliamento, e indossato quattro stivali e due paia di pantaloni. Potremmo immaginare una Superscimmia più prodigiosa di qualsiasi Superuomo, una creatura quadrumane che intaglia e dipinge con le mani e cucina e fa il falegname con i piedi. Ma se stiamo considerando ciò che accadde davvero, decideremo di certo che l’uomo ha distanziato tutto il resto con una distanza pari a quella degli spazi astronomici e una velocità pari a quella dell’immobile folgore della luce. E allo stesso modo, mentre possiamo, se vogliamo, vedere la Chiesa in mezzo a una folla di superstizioni mitraiche o manichee che si accapigliano e si uccidono a vicenda alla fine dell’Impero, mentre possiamo, se vogliamo, immaginare la Chiesa uccisa nella lotta e qualche altro culto fortuito a prenderne il posto, saremo tanto più sorpresi (e forse sconcertati) se la incontriamo duemila anni dopo sfrecciare attraverso i secoli come l’alata folgore del pensiero e dell’eterno entusiasmo; una cosa senza rivali né somiglianze; e ancora nuova quanto è antica.
I
THE MAN IN THE CAVE
Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely remote, there is a small star, which astronomers may some day discover. At least I could never observe in the faces or demeanour of most astronomers or men of science any evidence that they have discovered it; though as a matter of fact they were walking about on it all the time. It is a star that brings forth out of itself very strange plants and very strange animals; and none stranger than the men of science. That at least is the way in which I should begin a history of the world, if I had to follow the scientific custom of beginning with an account of the astronomical universe. I should try to see even this earth from the outside, not by the hackneyed insistence of its relative position to the sun, but by some imaginative effort to conceive its remote position for the dehumanised spectator. Only I do not believe in being dehumanised in order to study humanity. I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances that are supposed to dwarf the world; I think there is even something a trifle vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size. And as the first idea is not feasible, that of making the earth a strange planet so as to make it significant, I will not stoop to the other trick of making it a small planet in order to make it insignificant. I would rather insist that we do not even know that it is a planet at all, in the sense in which we know that it is a place; and a very extraordinary place too. That is the note which I wish to strike from the first, if not in the astronomical, then in some more familiar fashion.
One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, ‘I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.’ My remark was strictly pious and proper confessing the divine purpose even in its most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations. In that hour I learned many things, including the fact that there is something purely acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.
But this little incident has always lingered in my mind as a sort of parable. Most modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution, and with a rather wordy exposition of evolution, for much the same reason that operated in this case. There is something slow and soothing and gradual about the word and even about the idea. As a matter of fact, it is not, touching these primary things, a very practical word or a very profitable idea. Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ even if you only mean ‘In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.’ For God is by its nature a name of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he could create one. But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read the Origin of Species.
But this notion of something smooth and slow, like the ascent of a slope, is a great part of the illusion. It is an illogicality as well as an illusion; for slowness has really nothing to do with the question. An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny. The medieval wizard may have flown through the air from the top of a tower; but to see an old gentleman walking through the air, in a leisurely and lounging manner, would still seem to call for some explanation. Yet there runs through all the rationalistic treatment of history this curious and confused idea that difficulty is avoided, or even mystery eliminated, by dwelling on mere delay or on something dilatory in the processes of things. There will be something to be said upon particular examples elsewhere; the question here is the false atmosphere of facility and ease given by the mere suggestion of going slow; the sort of comfort that might be given to a nervous old woman travelling for the first time in a motor-car.
I
L’UOMO NELLA CAVERNA
Lontano, in qualche strana costellazione entro cieli infinitamente remoti, vi è una piccola stella che forse un giorno gli astronomi scopriranno. O almeno, nei volti e nel contegno della maggior parte degli astronomi e degli uomini di scienza non ho mai potuto scorgere prova alcuna che l’abbiano scoperta; sebbene, a dire il vero, essi vi camminassero sopra da sempre, per tutto il tempo. È una stella che trae fuori da sé piante assai strane e assai strani animali; e nessuno più strano degli uomini di scienza. Così, quantomeno, comincerei una storia del mondo, se dovessi seguire l’uso scientifico di aprire con un ragguaglio sull’universo astronomico. Cercherei di vedere anche questa terra dal di fuori, non con la trita insistenza sulla sua posizione relativa rispetto al sole, ma con qualche sforzo d’immaginazione per concepire la sua remota collocazione agli occhi di uno spettatore disumanizzato. Se non che io non credo che ci si debba disumanizzare per studiare l’umanità. Non credo che valga la pena di indugiare sulle distanze che si suppone impiccioliscano il mondo; anzi, trovo che ci sia qualcosa di un tantino volgare in questa idea di voler mortificare lo spirito con la mole. E poiché la prima idea non è praticabile, quella cioè di fare della terra un pianeta strano per renderla significativa, non mi abbasserò all’altro espediente di farne un piccolo pianeta per renderla insignificante. Preferirei insistere sul fatto che noi non sappiamo neppure che sia un pianeta, nel senso in cui sappiamo che è un luogo; e per giunta un luogo straordinarissimo. Questa è la nota che desidero far risuonare fin da principio, se non in chiave astronomica, almeno in qualche foggia più familiare.
Una delle mie prime avventure, o disavventure, giornalistiche riguardò un commento a Grant Allen, il quale aveva scritto un libro sull’Evoluzione dell’Idea di Dio. Mi accadde di osservare che sarebbe stato assai più interessante se Dio avesse scritto un libro sull’evoluzione dell’idea di Grant Allen. E ricordo che il direttore obiettò al mio rilievo sostenendo che fosse blasfemo; il che, com’è naturale, mi divertì non poco. Poiché il bello, s’intende, era che non gli venne mai in mente di badare al titolo stesso del libro, il quale sì che era davvero blasfemo; giacché esso significava, tradotto in italiano: «Vi mostrerò come questa insensata fantasticheria che esista un Dio abbia preso a germogliare fra gli uomini». Il mio rilievo era invece rigorosamente pio e conveniente, poiché confessava il disegno divino perfino nelle sue manifestazioni all’apparenza più oscure o prive di senso. In quell’ora imparai molte cose, compreso il fatto che vi è qualcosa di puramente acustico in gran parte di quella riverenza di stampo agnostico. Il direttore non aveva colto il punto, perché nel titolo del libro la parola lunga veniva al principio e quella breve alla fine; mentre nei miei commenti la parola breve veniva al principio e gli procurava una specie di scossa. Ho notato che, se si mette una parola come Dio nella stessa frase con una parola come cane, questi vocaboli bruschi e angolosi colpiscono la gente come colpi di pistola. Che si dica che Dio ha fatto il cane o che il cane ha fatto Dio non pare avere importanza; è soltanto una delle sterili dispute dei teologi troppo sottili. Ma finché si comincia con una parola lunga come evoluzione, tutto il resto scivolerà via senza danno; molto probabilmente il direttore non aveva letto per intero il titolo, giacché è un titolo piuttosto lungo ed egli era un uomo piuttosto indaffarato.
Ma questo piccolo episodio mi è sempre rimasto nella mente come una sorta di parabola. La maggior parte delle storie moderne dell’umanità comincia con la parola evoluzione, e con una esposizione dell’evoluzione piuttosto prolissa, per la medesima ragione che operò in quel caso. C’è qualcosa di lento, di blando e di graduale in quella parola e perfino in quell’idea. In realtà, toccando queste cose primordiali, non è una parola molto pratica né un’idea molto proficua. Nessuno riesce a immaginare come il nulla possa mutarsi in qualcosa. Nessuno si avvicina di un pollice alla cosa spiegando come qualcosa possa mutarsi in qualcos’altro. È in verità assai più logico cominciare col dire «In principio Dio creò il cielo e la terra», anche se con ciò si intende soltanto «In principio una qualche potenza impensabile diede avvio a un qualche processo impensabile». Poiché Dio è per sua natura un nome di mistero, e nessuno ha mai supposto che l’uomo potesse immaginare come un mondo fosse creato, più di quanto potesse crearne uno. L’evoluzione, invece, viene davvero scambiata per una spiegazione. Ha la fatale qualità di lasciare in molte menti l’impressione che esse comprendano l’evoluzione e ogni altra cosa; proprio come molti di costoro vivono in una sorta d’illusione di aver letto l’Origine delle specie.
Ma questa nozione di qualcosa di dolce e lento, come il salire di un pendio, è gran parte dell’illusione. È un’illogicità non meno che pure un’illusione; giacché la lentezza non ha in realtà nulla a che vedere con la questione. Un evento non è intrinsecamente più intelligibile o inintelligibile a seconda del passo con cui procede. Per un uomo che non crede al miracolo, un miracolo lento sarebbe altrettanto incredibile quanto uno rapido. La maga greca può aver mutato i marinai in porci con un colpo di bacchetta. Ma vedere un gentiluomo di marina di nostra conoscenza somigliare ogni giorno un po’ di più a un maiale, finché non finisse con quattro zampette e una coda arricciata, non sarebbe punto più rasserenante. Sarebbe forse alquanto più raccapricciante e perturbante. Il mago medievale può aver volato per l’aria dalla cima di una torre; ma vedere un vecchio signore passeggiare per l’aria, con fare agiato e indolente, sembrerebbe pur sempre reclamare qualche spiegazione. Eppure per tutta la trattazione razionalistica della storia corre questa curiosa e confusa idea che la difficoltà si eluda, o addirittura il mistero si elimini, indugiando sul mero ritardo o su qualcosa di dilatorio nel corso delle cose. Vi sarà qualcosa da dire su esempi particolari altrove; qui la questione è la falsa atmosfera di agevolezza e di comodità offerta dalla semplice suggestione dell’andare adagio; quella sorta di conforto che si potrebbe dare a una vecchietta nervosa che viaggia per la prima volta in automobile.
Mr. H. G. Wells has confessed to being a prophet; and in this matter he was a prophet at his own expense. It is curious that his first fairy-tale was a complete answer to his last book of history. The Time Machine destroyed in advance all comfortable conclusions founded on the mere relativity of time. In that sublime nightmare the hero saw trees shoot up like green rockets, and vegetation spread visibly like a green conflagration, or the sun shoot across the sky from east to west with the swiftness of a meteor. Yet in his sense these things were quite as natural when they went swiftly; and in our sense they are quite as supernatural when they go slowly. The ultimate question is why they go at all; and anybody who really understands that question will know that it always has been and always will be a religious question; or at any rate a philosophical or metaphysical question. And most certainly he will not think the question answered by some substitution of gradual for abrupt change; or, in other words by a merely relative question of the same story being spun out or rattled rapidly through, as can be done with any story at a cinema by turning a handle.
Now what is needed for these problems of primitive existence is something more like a primitive spirit. In calling up this vision of the first things, I would ask the reader to make with me a sort of experiment in simplicity. And by simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but rather the sort of clarity that sees things like life rather than words like evolution. For this purpose it would really be better to turn the handle of the Time Machine a little more quickly and see the grass growing and the trees springing up into the sky, if that experiment could contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of the whole affair. What we know, in a sense in which we know nothing else, is that the trees and the grass did grow and that number of other extraordinary things do in fact happen; that queer creatures support themselves in the empty air by beating it with fans of various fantastic shapes; that other queer creatures steer themselves about alive under a load of mighty waters; that other queer creatures walk about on four legs, and that the queerest creature of all walks about on two. These are things and not theories; and compared with them evolution and the atom and even the solar system are merely theories. The matter here is one of history and not of philosophy so that it need only be noted that no philosopher denies that a mystery still attaches to the two great transitions: the origin of the universe itself and the origin of the principle of life itself. Most philosophers have the enlightenment to add that a third mystery attaches to the origin of man himself. In other words, a third bridge was built across a third abyss of the unthinkable when there came into the world what we call reason and what we call will. Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution. That he has a backbone or other parts upon a similar pattern to birds and fishes is an obvious fact, whatever be the meaning of the fact. But if we attempt to regard him, as it were, as a quadruped standing on his hind legs, we shall find what follows far more fantastic and subversive than if he were standing on his head.
I will take one example to serve for an introduction to the story of man. It illustrates what I mean by saying that a certain childish directness is needed to see the truth about the childhood of the world. It illustrates what I mean by saying that a mixture of popular science and journalistic jargon have confused the facts about the first things, so that we cannot see which of them really comes first. It illustrates, though only in one convenient illustration, all that I mean by the necessity of seeing the sharp differences that give its shape to history, instead of being submerged in all these generalisations about slowness and sameness. For we do indeed require, in Mr. Wells’s phrase, an outline of history. But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini’s phrase, that this evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd outline. But, above all, it illustrates what I mean by saying that the more we really look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one.
To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as ‘rough stuff.’ I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romance of the hippopotami are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy. The cave-man may have been no better that the cave-bear; but the child she-bear, so famous in hymnology, is not trained with any such bias for spinsterhood. In short these details of the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either the revolutionary or the static hypothesis; and in any case I should like to look into the evidence for them, but unfortunately I have never been able to find it. But the curious thing is this: that while ten thousand tongues of more or less scientific or literary gossip seemed to be talking at once about this unfortunate fellow, under the title of the cave-man, the one connection in which it is really relevant and sensible to talk about him as the cave-man has been comparatively neglected. People have used this loose term in twenty loose ways, but they have never even looked at their own term for what could really be learned from it.
Il signor H. G. Wells ha confessato di essere un profeta; e in questa faccenda fu un profeta a proprie spese. È curioso che la sua prima fiaba fosse una risposta compiuta al suo ultimo libro di storia. La Macchina del Tempo distruggeva in anticipo ogni comoda conclusione fondata sulla mera relatività del tempo. In quel sublime incubo l’eroe vedeva gli alberi schizzare in alto come verdi razzi, e la vegetazione propagarsi a vista d’occhio come un verde incendio, oppure il sole sfrecciare per il cielo da oriente a occidente con la rapidità di una meteora. Eppure, nel suo modo di sentire, tali cose erano del tutto naturali quando avvenivano in fretta; e nel nostro modo di sentire sono altrettanto soprannaturali quando avvengono lentamente. La domanda ultima è perché avvengano affatto; e chiunque comprenda davvero quella domanda saprà che essa sempre è stata e sempre sarà una domanda religiosa; o comunque una domanda filosofica o metafisica. E di certo non riterrà la domanda risolta da una qualche sostituzione del mutamento graduale a quello brusco; o, in altre parole, da una questione meramente relativa, come quella della medesima storia dipanata lentamente o fatta scorrere in fretta, così come si può fare con qualunque storia al cinematografo girando una manovella.
Ora, ciò che occorre a questi problemi dell’esistenza primitiva è qualcosa di più simile a uno spirito primitivo. Nell’evocare questa visione delle prime cose, chiederei al lettore di compiere con me una sorta di esperimento in semplicità. E per semplicità non intendo stupidità, bensì piuttosto quella sorta di chiarezza che vede cose come la vita anziché parole come l’evoluzione. A questo scopo sarebbe davvero meglio girare la manovella della Macchina del Tempo un poco più in fretta e veder crescere l’erba e gli alberi slanciarsi verso il cielo, se quell’esperimento potesse contrarre e concentrare e rendere vivido l’esito dell’intera faccenda. Ciò che sappiamo, in un senso in cui non sappiamo nient’altro, è che gli alberi e l’erba crebbero davvero e che un certo numero di altre cose straordinarie di fatto accadono; che bizzarre creature si sostengono nell’aria vuota battendola con ventagli di svariate forme fantastiche; che altre bizzarre creature si dirigono vive sotto un carico di possenti acque; che altre bizzarre creature vanno attorno su quattro zampe, e che la più bizzarra creatura di tutte va attorno su due. Questi sono fatti e non teorie; e al loro confronto l’evoluzione e l’atomo e persino il sistema solare non sono che teorie. La materia, qui, è di storia e non di filosofia, sicché basterà notare che nessun filosofo nega che un mistero ancora si accompagni alle due grandi transizioni: l’origine dell’ universo stesso e l’origine del principio della vita stessa. La maggior parte dei filosofi ha l’accortezza di aggiungere che un terzo mistero si accompagna all’origine dell’uomo stesso. In altre parole, un terzo ponte fu gettato su un terzo abisso dell’impensabile quando venne al mondo ciò che chiamiamo ragione e ciò che chiamiamo volontà. L’uomo non è semplicemente un’evoluzione, bensì piuttosto una rivoluzione. Che egli abbia una spina dorsale o altre parti su un disegno simile a quello degli uccelli e dei pesci è un fatto ovvio, quale che ne sia il significato. Ma se tentiamo di considerarlo, per così dire, come un quadrupede ritto sulle zampe posteriori, troveremo ciò che ne segue assai più fantastico e sovversivo che se stesse ritto sulla testa.
Prenderò un solo esempio a servire d’introduzione alla storia dell’uomo. Esso illustra ciò che intendo dicendo che una certa fanciullesca schiettezza è necessaria per vedere la verità intorno all’infanzia del mondo. Illustra ciò che intendo dicendo che un miscuglio di scienza popolare e di gergo giornalistico ha confuso i fatti intorno alle prime cose, sicché non riusciamo a vedere quale di essi venga davvero per primo. Illustra, sebbene in una sola comoda illustrazione, tutto ciò che intendo con la necessità di vedere le nette differenze che danno forma alla storia, anziché restarne sommersi in tutte queste generalizzazioni sulla lentezza e sull’uniformità. Poiché noi abbiamo davvero bisogno, per dirla con la frase del signor Wells, di un abbozzo di storia. Ma possiamo azzardarci a dire, per dirla con la frase del signor Mantalini, che questa storia evoluzionistica non ha abbozzo, o è un maledetto abbozzo. Ma, soprattutto, illustra ciò che intendo dicendo che quanto più guardiamo davvero all’uomo come a un animale, tanto meno egli somiglierà a uno.
Oggi tutti i nostri romanzi e giornali si troveranno brulicanti di innumerevoli allusioni a un personaggio popolare chiamato l’uomo delle caverne. Egli ci pare del tutto familiare, non solo come personaggio pubblico ma come personaggio privato. La sua psicologia è presa sul serio in considerazione nella narrativa psicologica e nella medicina psicologica. Per quanto riesco a capire, la sua principale occupazione nella vita era malmenare la moglie, o trattare le donne in genere con ciò che, a quanto credo, è noto nel mondo del film come «roba pesante». Non mi è mai capitato d’imbattermi nella prova di quest’idea; e non so su quali diari primitivi o resoconti preistorici di divorzio essa si fondi. Né, come ho spiegato altrove, ho mai potuto scorgerne la probabilità, nemmeno considerata a priori. Ci vien sempre detto, senza alcuna spiegazione né autorità, che l’uomo primitivo brandiva una clava e atterrava la donna prima di portarla via. Ma, su ogni analogia animale, parrebbe una modestia e una riluttanza quasi morbose, da parte della signora, insistere sempre per essere atterrata prima di acconsentire a farsi portare via. E ripeto che non riuscirò mai a comprendere perché, quando il maschio era così rozzo, la femmina dovesse essere così raffinata. L’uomo delle caverne può essere stato un bruto, ma non c’è ragione per cui dovesse essere stato più brutale delle bestie brute. E gli amori delle giraffe e la romanza fluviale degl’ippopotami si compiono senza nulla di questo preliminare parapiglia o baccano. L’uomo delle caverne può essere stato non migliore dell’orso delle caverne; ma l’orsa bambina, così celebre nell’innologia, non è educata con una simile inclinazione allo zitellaggio. Insomma, questi particolari della vita domestica delle caverne mi lasciano perplesso tanto sull’ipotesi rivoluzionaria quanto su quella statica; e in ogni caso vorrei esaminare le prove che li sostengono, ma sfortunatamente non sono mai riuscito a trovarle. Ma la cosa curiosa è questa: che mentre diecimila lingue di pettegolezzo più o meno scientifico o letterario parevano parlare tutte in una volta di questo sventurato individuo, sotto il titolo di uomo delle caverne, l’unico ambito in cui è davvero pertinente e sensato parlare di lui come dell’uomo delle caverne è stato comparativamente trascurato. La gente ha usato questo termine vago in venti modi vaghi, ma non ha mai nemmeno guardato il proprio termine per ciò che davvero se ne potrebbe apprendere.
In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man except what he did in the cave. Now there does happen to be some real evidence of what he did in the cave. It is little enough, like all the prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the real cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club. And it will be valuable to our sense of reality to consider quite simply what that real evidence is, and not to go beyond it. What was found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory club notched with the number of women it had knocked on the head. The cave was not a Bluebeard’s Chamber filled with the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs. It was something quite unconnected, one way or the other, with all the modern phrases and philosophical implications and literary rumours which confuse the whole question for us. And if we wish to see as it really is this authentic glimpse of the morning of the world, it will be far better to conceive even the story of its discovery as some such legend of the land of morning. It would be far better to tell the tale of what was really found as simply as the tale of heroes finding the Golden Fleece or the Gardens of the Hesperides, if we could so escape from a fog of controversial theories into the clear colours and clean-cut outlines of such a dawn. The old epic poets at least knew how to tell a story, possibly a tall story but never a twisted story, never a story tortured out of its own shape to fit theories and philosophies invented centuries afterwards. It would be well if modern investigators could describe their discoveries in the bald narrative style of the earliest travellers, and without any of these long allusive words that are full of irrelevant implication and suggestion. Then we might realise exactly what we do know about the cave-man, or at any rate about the cave.
A priest and a boy entered sometime ago a hollow in the hills and passed into a sort of subterranean tunnel that led into a labyrinth of such sealed and secret corridors of rock. They crawled through cracks that seemed almost impassable, they crept through tunnels that might have been made for moles, they dropped into holes as hopeless as wells, they seemed to be burying themselves alive seven times over beyond the hope of resurrection. This is but the commonplace of all such courageous exploration; but what is needed here is some one who shall put such stories in the primary light, in which they are not commonplace. There is, for instance, something strangely symbolic in the accident that the first intruders into that sunken world were a priest and a boy, the types of the antiquity and of youth of the world. But here I am even more concerned with the symbolism of the boy than with that of the priest. Nobody who remembers boyhood needs to be told what it might be to a boy to enter like Peter Pan under a roof of the roots of all the trees and go deeper and deeper, till he reach what William Morris called the very roots of the mountains. Suppose somebody, with that simple and unspoilt realism that is a part of innocence, to pursue that journey to its end, not for the sake of what he could deduce or demonstrate in some dusty magazine controversy, but simply for the sake of what he could see. What he did see at last was a cavern so far from the light of day that it might have been the legendary Domdaniel cavern, that was under the floor of the sea. This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man’s hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.
Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds, that blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning the cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, ‘Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick’s brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,’ the novelist’s readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, ‘The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,’ he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words the cave-man as commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we know next to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall.
In realtà, la gente si è interessata di ogni cosa riguardante l’uomo delle caverne, tranne che di ciò che egli faceva nella caverna. Ora, si dà il caso che di ciò che egli faceva nella caverna esista qualche prova concreta. È ben poca cosa, come tutte le prove preistoriche, ma riguarda il vero uomo delle caverne e la sua caverna, e non l’uomo delle caverne della letteratura con la sua clava. E gioverà al nostro senso della realtà considerare in tutta semplicità quale sia questa prova autentica, senza spingerci oltre. Ciò che si trovò nella caverna non fu la clava, l’orribile clava insanguinata, intaccata da tante tacche quante erano le donne che aveva accoppato. La caverna non era la Camera di Barbablù piena degli scheletri di mogli trucidate; non era piena di teschi femminili disposti in file e tutti spaccati come uova. Era qualcosa di del tutto slegato, nell’uno o nell’altro senso, da tutte le frasi moderne, dalle implicazioni filosofiche e dalle voci letterarie che confondono per noi l’intera questione. E se desideriamo vedere qual è davvero questo autentico scorcio del mattino del mondo, sarà assai meglio concepire perfino la storia della sua scoperta come una qualche leggenda della terra del mattino. Sarebbe assai meglio raccontare la vicenda di ciò che realmente si trovò con la stessa semplicità con cui si narra la storia degli eroi che scoprono il Vello d’Oro o i Giardini delle Esperidi, se così potessimo sfuggire da una nebbia di teorie controverse verso i colori limpidi e i contorni netti di una tale alba. Gli antichi poeti epici sapevano almeno raccontare una storia, magari una storia esagerata, ma mai una storia contorta, mai una storia torturata e strappata alla propria forma per adattarsi a teorie e filosofie inventate secoli dopo. Sarebbe bene che gli studiosi moderni descrivessero le loro scoperte con lo stile narrativo scarno dei primi viaggiatori, senza tutte quelle lunghe parole allusive che sono cariche di implicazioni e suggestioni irrilevanti. Allora potremmo renderci conto esattamente di ciò che davvero sappiamo dell’uomo delle caverne, o quantomeno della caverna.
Un sacerdote e un ragazzo entrarono, qualche tempo fa, in una cavità tra le colline, e s’inoltrarono in una sorta di galleria sotterranea che conduceva a un labirinto di corridoi di roccia così sigillati e segreti. Strisciarono attraverso fenditure che parevano quasi impraticabili, s’insinuarono per cunicoli che avrebbero potuto essere scavati da talpe, si calarono in buche disperate come pozzi, parevano seppellirsi vivi sette volte, di là da ogni speranza di resurrezione. Ma tutto ciò non è che l’ordinaria consuetudine di ogni esplorazione così ardimentosa; ciò che qui occorre è invece qualcuno che sappia porre simili storie sotto quella luce primigenia in cui esse non sono affatto ordinarie. C’è, per esempio, qualcosa di stranamente simbolico nel caso volle che i primi intrusi in quel mondo sommerso fossero un sacerdote e un ragazzo, i tipi dell’antichità e della giovinezza del mondo. Ma qui mi preme ancor più il simbolismo del ragazzo che quello del sacerdote. Chiunque ricordi la propria fanciullezza non ha bisogno che gli si dica cosa potesse significare per un ragazzo entrare, come Peter Pan, sotto un tetto fatto delle radici di tutti gli alberi, e scendere sempre più giù, fino a raggiungere ciò che William Morris chiamava le radici stesse delle montagne. Si supponga che qualcuno, con quel realismo semplice e non guastato che è parte dell’innocenza, compia quel viaggio fino in fondo, non per amore di ciò che avrebbe potuto dedurre o dimostrare in qualche polverosa polemica da rivista, ma semplicemente per amore di ciò che avrebbe potuto vedere. Ciò che egli vide alla fine fu una caverna tanto lontana dalla luce del giorno che avrebbe potuto essere la leggendaria caverna di Domdaniel, che si trovava sotto il fondo del mare. Questa segreta camera di roccia, illuminata dopo la sua lunga notte di ere innumerevoli, rivelò sulle sue pareti contorni ampi e sparsi, ravvivati da terre colorate; e quando ne seguirono le linee, essi riconobbero, attraverso quel vasto vuoto delle ere, il movimento e il gesto della mano di un uomo. Erano disegni o pitture di animali; ed erano stati disegnati o dipinti non solo da un uomo, ma da un artista. Sotto qualunque arcaica limitazione, essi rivelavano quell’amore per la lunga linea slanciata o per la lunga linea ondeggiante che ogni uomo il quale abbia mai disegnato, o tentato di disegnare, saprà riconoscere; e riguardo alla quale nessun artista permetterà mai di essere contraddetto da alcuno scienziato. Rivelavano lo spirito sperimentale e avventuroso dell’artista, lo spirito che non evita ma tenta le cose difficili; come là dove il disegnatore aveva rappresentato il gesto del cervo quando volge di scatto la testa all’indietro e fiuta verso la propria coda, un gesto abbastanza familiare nel cavallo. Ma vi sono molti pittori d’animali moderni che si troverebbero non poco impegnati a renderlo fedelmente. In questo e in venti altri particolari è chiaro che l’artista aveva osservato gli animali con un certo interesse e, presumibilmente, con un certo piacere. In tal senso parrebbe che egli non fosse soltanto un artista, ma anche un naturalista; quella specie di naturalista che è davvero naturale.
Ora è superfluo osservare, se non di sfuggita, che non v’è nulla nell’atmosfera di quella caverna che suggerisca la tetra e pessimistica atmosfera di quella giornalistica caverna dei venti, che soffia e mugghia intorno a noi con echi innumerevoli a proposito dell’uomo delle caverne. Per quanto un carattere umano possa essere adombrato da simili tracce del passato, quel carattere umano è del tutto umano, e persino umanissimo. Non è certo l’ideale di un carattere disumano, come l’astrazione invocata dalla scienza popolare. Quando romanzieri, pedagoghi e psicologi di ogni sorta parlano dell’uomo delle caverne, non lo concepiscono mai in rapporto a qualcosa che sia realmente nella caverna. Quando il realista del romanzo erotico scrive: «Scintille rosse danzavano nel cervello di Dagmar Doubledick; egli sentiva lo spirito dell’uomo delle caverne destarsi dentro di sé», i lettori del romanziere resterebbero assai delusi se Dagmar se ne andasse soltanto a disegnare grandi immagini di mucche sulla parete del salotto. Quando lo psicanalista scrive a un paziente: «Gli istinti sommersi dell’uomo delle caverne la spingono senza dubbio a soddisfare un impulso violento», egli non allude all’impulso di dipingere ad acquerello; né a fare coscienziosi studi sul modo in cui il bestiame volge la testa mentre pascola. Eppure sappiamo per certo che l’uomo delle caverne faceva queste cose miti e innocenti; e non abbiamo il più minuscolo granello di prova che egli facesse alcuna di quelle cose violente e feroci. In altre parole, l’uomo delle caverne così come comunemente ci viene presentato non è che un mito, o piuttosto un guazzabuglio; giacché un mito ha almeno un immaginoso contorno di verità. L’intero modo corrente di parlarne è semplicemente una confusione e un fraintendimento, fondato su nessuna sorta di prova scientifica e apprezzato solo come pretesto per un umore assai moderno di anarchia. Se un qualche signore ha voglia di malmenare una donna, può bene essere un mascalzone senza per questo togliere la reputazione all’uomo delle caverne, del quale non sappiamo quasi nulla, tranne ciò che possiamo desumere da poche innocue e gradevoli immagini su una parete.
But this is not the point about the pictures or the particular moral here to be drawn from them. That moral is something much larger and simpler, so large and simple that when it is first stated it will sound childish. And indeed it is in the highest sense childish; and that is why I have in this apologue in some sense seen it through the eyes of a child. It is the biggest of all the facts really facing the boy in the cavern; and is perhaps too big to be seen. If the boy was one of the flock of the priest, it may be presumed that he had been trained in a certain quality of common sense; that common sense that often comes to us in the form of tradition. In that case he would simply recognise the primitive man’s work as the work of a man, interesting but in no way incredible in being primitive. He would see what was there to see; and he would not be tempted into seeing what was not there, by any evolutionary excitement or fashionable speculation. If he had heard of such things he would admit, of course, that the speculations might be true and were not incompatible with the facts that were true. The artist may have had another side to his character besides that which he has alone left on record in his works of art. The primitive man may have taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals; all we can say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be true that when the cave-man’s finished jumping on his mother, or his wife as the case may be, he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and also to watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook. These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant. The common sense of the child could confine itself to learning from the facts what the facts have to teach; and the pictures in the cave are very nearly all the facts there are. So far as that evidence goes, the child would be justified in assuming that a man had represented animals with rock and red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit of trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk. The man had drawn a stag just as the child had drawn a horse; because it was fun. The man had drawn a stag with his head turned as the child had drawn a pig with his eyes shut; because it was difficult. The child and the man, being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men; and the brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages than when it bridges only the chasm of class. But anyhow he would see no evidence of the cave man of crude evolutionism; because there is none to be seen. If somebody told him that the pictures had all been drawn by St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals, there would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.
Indeed I once knew a lady who half-humorously suggested that the cave was a creche, in which the babies were put to be specially safe, and that coloured animals were drawn on the walls to amuse them; very much as diagrams of elephants and giraffes adorn a modern infant school. And though this was but a jest, it does draw attention to some of the other assumptions that we make only too readily. The pictures do not prove even that the cave-men lived in caves, any more than the discovery of a wine-cellar in Balham (long after that suburb had been destroyed by human or divine wrath) would prove that the Victorian middle classes lived entirely underground. The cave might have had a special purpose like the cellar; it might have been a religious shrine or a refuge in war or the meeting place of a secret society or all sorts of things. But it is quite true that its artistic decoration has much more of the atmosphere of a nursery than of any of these nightmares of anarchical fury and fear. I have conceived a child as standing in the cave; and it is easy to conceive any child, modern or immeasurably remote, as making a living gesture as if to pat the painted beasts upon the wall. In that gesture there is a foreshadowing, as we shall see later, of another cavern and another child.
But suppose the boy had not been taught by a priest but by a professor, by one of the professors who simplify the relation of men and beasts to a mere evolutionary variation. Suppose the boy saw himself, with the same simplicity and sincerity, as a mere Mowgli running with the pack of nature and roughly indistinguishable from the rest save by a relative and recent variation. What would be for him the simplest lesson of that strange stone picture-book? After all, it would come back to this; that he had dug very deep and found the place where a man had drawn the picture of a reindeer. But he would dig a good deal deeper before he found a place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man. That sounds like a truism, but in this connection it is really a very tremendous truth. He might descend to depths unthinkable, he might sink into sunken continents as strange as remote stars, he might find himself in the inside of the world as far from men as the other side of the moon; he might see in those cold chasms or colossal terraces of stone, traced in the faint hieroglyphic of the fossil, the ruins of lost dynasties of biological life, rather like the ruins of successive creations and separate universes than the stages in the story of one. He would find the trail of monsters blindly developing in directions outside all our common imagery of fish and bird; groping and grasping and touching life with every extravagant elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle; growing a forest of fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and the finger. But nowhere would he find one finger that had traced one significant line upon the sand; nowhere one claw that had even begun to scratch the faint suggestion of a form. To all appearance, the thing would be as unthinkable in all those countless cosmic variations of forgotten aeons as it would be in the beasts and birds before our eyes. The child would no more expect to see it than to see the cat scratch on the wall a vindictive caricature of the dog. The childish common sense would keep the most evolutionary child from expecting to see anything like that; yet in the traces of the rude and recently evolved ancestors of humanity he would have seen exactly that. It must surely strike him as strange that men so remote from him should be so near, and that beasts so near to him should be so remote. To his simplicity it must seem at least odd that he could not find any trace of the beginning of any arts among any animals. That is the simplest lesson to learn in the cavern of the coloured pictures; only it is too simple to be learnt. It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.
Ma non è questo il punto che riguarda le pitture, né la morale particolare che se ne deve trarre. Quella morale è qualcosa di assai più vasto e più semplice, tanto vasto e semplice che, a enunciarla per la prima volta, suonerà puerile. E in verità è puerile nel senso più alto; ed è per questo che in questo apologo l’ho in un certo senso vista con gli occhi di un bambino. È il più grande di tutti i fatti che realmente si presentano al ragazzo nella caverna; e forse è troppo grande per essere visto. Se il ragazzo faceva parte del gregge del sacerdote, si può presumere che fosse stato educato a una certa qualità di buon senso; quel buon senso che spesso ci giunge sotto forma di tradizione. In tal caso egli riconoscerebbe semplicemente l’opera dell’uomo primitivo come l’opera di un uomo, interessante ma per nulla incredibile in quanto primitiva. Vedrebbe ciò che c’era da vedere; e non si lascerebbe tentare a vedere ciò che non c’era, spinto da qualche eccitazione evoluzionistica o da qualche speculazione alla moda. Se avesse sentito parlare di simili cose, ammetterebbe, naturalmente, che le speculazioni potrebbero essere vere e non erano incompatibili con i fatti che erano veri. L’artista può aver avuto un altro lato del suo carattere oltre a quello che egli ha soltanto affidato alla memoria nelle sue opere d’arte. L’uomo primitivo può aver provato piacere tanto a picchiare le donne quanto a disegnare animali; tutto ciò che possiamo dire è che i disegni testimoniano l’uno ma non l’altro. Può darsi che, quando l’uomo delle caverne ha finito di saltare addosso a sua madre, o a sua moglie a seconda dei casi, ami udire il gorgoglio del ruscelletto, e anche osservare i cervi che scendono a bere al ruscello. Queste cose non sono impossibili, ma sono irrilevanti. Il buon senso del bambino potrebbe limitarsi a imparare dai fatti ciò che i fatti hanno da insegnare; e le pitture nella caverna sono press’a poco tutti i fatti che ci sono. Per quanto quella prova permette, il bambino sarebbe giustificato nel supporre che un uomo avesse rappresentato animali con la roccia e l’ocra rossa per la stessa ragione per cui egli stesso soleva tentare di rappresentare animali col carboncino e il gesso rosso. L’uomo aveva disegnato un cervo proprio come il bambino aveva disegnato un cavallo; perché era divertente. L’uomo aveva disegnato un cervo con la testa voltata come il bambino aveva disegnato un maiale con gli occhi chiusi; perché era difficile. Il bambino e l’uomo, essendo entrambi umani, sarebbero uniti dalla fratellanza degli uomini; e la fratellanza degli uomini è ancor più nobile quando getta un ponte sull’abisso delle età che quando ne getta uno soltanto sulla voragine delle classi. Ma in ogni caso non vedrebbe alcuna prova dell’uomo delle caverne del rozzo evoluzionismo; perché non ce n’è alcuna da vedere. Se qualcuno gli dicesse che le pitture erano state tutte disegnate da san Francesco d’Assisi per puro e santo amore degli animali, non ci sarebbe nulla nella caverna a contraddirlo.
In verità conobbi una volta una signora che, mezzo per scherzo, avanzò l’ipotesi che la caverna fosse un asilo, in cui si mettevano i bambini perché fossero particolarmente al sicuro, e che gli animali colorati fossero dipinti sulle pareti per divertirli; press’a poco come le figure di elefanti e giraffe adornano una moderna scuola per l’infanzia. E per quanto questo non fosse che una facezia, richiama pur l’attenzione su alcune altre supposizioni che facciamo fin troppo prontamente. Le pitture non provano nemmeno che gli uomini delle caverne vivessero nelle caverne, non più di quanto la scoperta di una cantina di vini a Balham (molto tempo dopo che quel sobborgo fosse stato distrutto dall’ira umana o divina) proverebbe che la borghesia vittoriana viveva interamente sottoterra. La caverna può aver avuto uno scopo speciale come la cantina; può essere stata un santuario religioso o un rifugio in tempo di guerra o il luogo di ritrovo di una società segreta o ogni sorta di cose. Ma è del tutto vero che la sua decorazione artistica ha molto più l’atmosfera di una stanza dei bambini che di alcuno di questi incubi di furore anarchico e di paura. Ho immaginato un bambino in piedi nella caverna; ed è facile immaginare qualunque bambino, moderno o incommensurabilmente remoto, mentre fa un gesto vivo come per accarezzare le bestie dipinte sulla parete. In quel gesto vi è un presagio, come vedremo più avanti, di un’altra caverna e di un altro bambino.
Ma supponiamo che il ragazzo non fosse stato istruito da un sacerdote ma da un professore, da uno di quei professori che riducono la relazione tra gli uomini e le bestie a una semplice variazione evolutiva. Supponiamo che il ragazzo vedesse se stesso, con la stessa semplicità e sincerità, come un semplice Mowgli che corre col branco della natura e grossolanamente indistinguibile dagli altri salvo che per una variazione relativa e recente. Quale sarebbe per lui la lezione più semplice di quello strano libro illustrato di pietra? Dopo tutto, si ridurrebbe a questo: che aveva scavato molto in profondità e trovato il luogo dove un uomo aveva disegnato l’immagine di una renna. Ma dovrebbe scavare ben più a fondo prima di trovare un luogo dove una renna avesse disegnato l’immagine di un uomo. Questo suona come un truismo, ma in questo contesto è davvero una verità tremenda. Potrebbe scendere a profondità impensabili, potrebbe sprofondare in continenti sommersi strani quanto stelle remote, potrebbe ritrovarsi nell’interno del mondo lontano dagli uomini quanto l’altra faccia della luna; potrebbe vedere in quei freddi abissi o in quelle colossali terrazze di pietra, tracciate nel debole geroglifico del fossile, le rovine di perdute dinastie di vita biologica, più simili alle rovine di creazioni successive e di universi separati che alle tappe della storia di uno solo. Troverebbe la traccia di mostri che si sviluppano ciecamente in direzioni al di fuori di tutta la nostra comune immagine del pesce e dell’uccello; brancolando e afferrando e toccando la vita con ogni stravagante allungamento di corno e di lingua e di tentacolo; facendo crescere una foresta di fantastiche caricature dell’artiglio e della pinna e del dito. Ma in nessun luogo troverebbe un dito che avesse tracciato una sola linea significativa sulla sabbia; in nessun luogo un artiglio che avesse anche solo cominciato a graffiare il debole accenno di una forma. A ogni apparenza, la cosa sarebbe altrettanto impensabile in tutte quelle innumerevoli variazioni cosmiche di eoni dimenticati quanto lo sarebbe nelle bestie e negli uccelli sotto i nostri occhi. Il bambino non si aspetterebbe di vederla, più di quanto si aspetterebbe di veder il gatto graffiare sul muro una vendicativa caricatura del cane. Il buon senso infantile impedirebbe al più evoluzionista dei bambini di aspettarsi di vedere qualcosa del genere; eppure nelle tracce dei rozzi e da poco evoluti antenati dell’umanità egli avrebbe visto esattamente quello. Deve certo colpirlo come strano che uomini tanto remoti da lui siano così vicini, e che bestie tanto vicine a lui siano così remote. Alla sua semplicità deve sembrare quanto meno singolare che non riesca a trovare alcuna traccia dell’inizio di alcuna arte tra alcun animale. Questa è la lezione più semplice da imparare nella caverna delle pitture colorate; solo che è troppo semplice per essere imparata. È la semplice verità che l’uomo differisce dai bruti per natura e non per grado; e la prova di ciò è qui: che suona come un truismo dire che l’uomo più primitivo disegnò l’immagine di una scimmia, e suona come una barzelletta dire che la scimmia più intelligente disegnò l’immagine di un uomo. Qualcosa di divisione e di sproporzione è comparso; ed è unico. L’arte è la firma dell’uomo.
That is the sort of simple truth with which a story of the beginnings ought really to begin. The evolutionist stands staring in the painted cavern at the things that are too large to be seen and too simple to be understood. He tries to deduce all sorts of other indirect and doubtful things from the details of the pictures, because he can not see the primary significance of the whole; thin and theoretical deductions about the absence of religion or the presence of superstition; about tribal government and hunting and human sacrifice and heaven knows what. In the next chapter I shall try to trace in a little more detail the much disputed question about these prehistoric origins of human ideas and especially of the religious idea. Here I am only taking this one case of the cave as a sort of symbol of the simpler sort of truth with which the story ought to start. When all is said, the main fact that the record of the reindeer men attests, along with all other records, is that the reindeer man could draw and the reindeer could not. If the reindeer man was as much an animal as the reindeer, it was all the more extraordinary that he could do what all other animals could not. If he was an ordinary product of biological growth, like any other beast or bird, then it is all the more extraordinary that he was not in the least like any other beast or bird. He seems rather more supernatural as a natural product than as a supernatural one.
But I have begun this story in the cave, like the cave of the speculations of Plato, because it is a sort of model of the mistake of merely evolutionary introductions and prefaces. It is useless to begin by saying that everything was slow and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree. For in the plain matter like the pictures there is in fact not a trace of any such development or degree. Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well. The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate from nature. In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone. How he came there, or indeed how anything else came there, is a thing for theologians and philosophers and scientists and not for historians. But an excellent test case of this isolation and mystery is the matter of the impulse of art. This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature. Nothing in that sense could be made in any other image but the image of man. But the truth is so true that, even in the absence of any religious belief, it must be assumed in the form of some moral or metaphysical principle. In the next chapter we shall see how this principle applies to all the historical hypotheses and evolutionary ethics now in fashion; to the origins of tribal government or mythological belief. But the clearest and most convenient example to start with is this popular one of what the cave-man really did in his cave. It means that somehow or other a new thing had appeared in the cavernous night of nature, a mind that is like a mirror. It is like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection. It is like a mirror because in it alone all the other shapes can be seen like shining shadows in a vision. Above all, it is like a mirror because it is the only thing of its kind. Other things may resemble it or resemble each other in various ways; other things may excel it or excel each other in various ways; just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than a mirror. But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all. Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God. These are the only real lessons to be learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it for the open road.
It will be well in this place, however, to sum up once and for all what is meant by saying that man is at once the exception to everything and the mirror and the measure of all things. But to see man as he is, it is necessary once more to keep close to that simplicity that can clear itself of accumulated clouds of sophistry. The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique. This is realised by the whole popular instinct called religion, until disturbed by pedants, especially the laborious pedants of the Simple Life. The most sophistical of all sophists are gymnosophists.
Questa è la sorta di semplice verità con cui una storia delle origini dovrebbe davvero cominciare. L’evoluzionista se ne sta a fissare, nella caverna dipinta, le cose che sono troppo grandi per essere viste e troppo semplici per essere comprese. Tenta di dedurre ogni sorta di altre cose indirette e dubbie dai particolari delle immagini, perché non riesce a scorgere il significato primario dell’insieme; sottili e teoriche deduzioni sull’assenza di religione o sulla presenza di superstizione; sul governo tribale e sulla caccia e sul sacrificio umano e su Dio sa cos’altro. Nel capitolo seguente cercherò di rintracciare con qualche dettaglio in più la controversa questione di queste origini preistoriche delle idee umane e specialmente dell’idea religiosa. Qui prendo soltanto questo singolo caso della caverna come una sorta di simbolo del genere più semplice di verità con cui la storia dovrebbe cominciare. Tutto sommato, il fatto principale che la testimonianza degli uomini della renna attesta, insieme a tutte le altre testimonianze, è che l’uomo della renna sapeva disegnare e la renna no. Se l’uomo della renna era altrettanto animale quanto la renna, tanto più straordinario era che egli potesse fare ciò che tutti gli altri animali non potevano. Se era un prodotto ordinario della crescita biologica, come qualsiasi altra bestia o uccello, tanto più straordinario è che non somigliasse minimamente ad alcun’altra bestia o uccello. Egli appare piuttosto più soprannaturale come prodotto naturale che come prodotto soprannaturale.
Ma ho cominciato questa storia nella caverna, come la caverna delle speculazioni di Platone, perché essa è una sorta di modello dell’errore delle introduzioni e delle prefazioni puramente evoluzionistiche. È inutile cominciare col dire che tutto fu lento e graduale e mera questione di sviluppo e di grado. Poiché nella cosa più piana, come le immagini, non v’è in realtà traccia alcuna di un simile sviluppo o grado. Le scimmie non cominciarono le immagini e gli uomini non le portarono a compimento; il Pithecanthropus non disegnò male una renna e l’Homo Sapiens non la disegnò bene. Gli animali superiori non disegnarono ritratti sempre migliori; il cane non dipinse meglio nel suo periodo migliore che nella sua precoce cattiva maniera di sciacallo; il cavallo selvaggio non era un impressionista e il cavallo da corsa un post-impressionista. Tutto ciò che possiamo dire di questa nozione di riprodurre le cose in ombra o in forma rappresentativa è che essa non esiste in alcun luogo della natura tranne che nell’uomo; e che non possiamo nemmeno parlarne senza trattare l’uomo come qualcosa di separato dalla natura. In altre parole, ogni sana specie di storia deve cominciare con l’uomo in quanto uomo, una cosa che sta assoluta e sola. Come sia giunto là, o invero come qualsiasi altra cosa sia giunta là, è faccenda per teologi e filosofi e scienziati, non per storici. Ma un eccellente caso di prova di questo isolamento e mistero è la questione dell’impulso all’arte. Questa creatura era veramente diversa da tutte le altre creature; perché era un creatore oltre che una creatura. Nulla, in tal senso, poteva essere fatto a immagine di altro che dell’immagine dell’uomo. Ma la verità è così vera che, perfino in assenza di ogni credenza religiosa, essa deve essere assunta sotto forma di qualche principio morale o metafisico. Nel capitolo seguente vedremo come questo principio si applichi a tutte le ipotesi storiche e alle etiche evoluzionistiche ora di moda; alle origini del governo tribale o della credenza mitologica. Ma l’esempio più chiaro e più comodo da cui partire è questo, così diffuso, di ciò che l’uomo della caverna realmente fece nella sua caverna. Significa che in un modo o nell’altro una cosa nuova era apparsa nella notte cavernosa della natura, una mente che è come uno specchio. È come uno specchio perché è veramente una cosa di riflessione. È come uno specchio perché in esso soltanto tutte le altre forme possono essere vedute come ombre splendenti in una visione. Soprattutto, è come uno specchio perché è l’unica cosa del suo genere. Altre cose possono somigliargli o somigliarsi a vicenda in vari modi; altre cose possono superarlo o superarsi a vicenda in vari modi; proprio come, tra le suppellettili di una stanza, una tavola può essere rotonda come uno specchio o una credenza può essere più grande di uno specchio. Ma lo specchio è l’unica cosa che può contenerle tutte. L’uomo è il microcosmo; l’uomo è la misura di tutte le cose; l’uomo è l’immagine di Dio. Queste sono le uniche vere lezioni da apprendere nella caverna, ed è tempo di abbandonarla per la strada aperta.
Sarà bene, tuttavia, riassumere in questo punto una volta per tutte che cosa si intenda dicendo che l’uomo è a un tempo l’eccezione a ogni cosa e lo specchio e la misura di tutte le cose. Ma per vedere l’uomo qual è, è necessario ancora una volta tenersi stretti a quella semplicità che sa liberarsi delle nubi accumulate della sofisticheria. La più semplice verità intorno all’uomo è che egli è un essere assai strano; quasi nel senso di essere uno straniero sulla terra. In tutta sobrietà, egli ha molto più l’apparenza esteriore di uno che rechi abitudini aliene da un’altra terra che non di un mero prodotto di questa. Ha un vantaggio ingiusto e uno svantaggio ingiusto. Non sa dormire nella propria pelle; non sa fidarsi dei propri istinti. È a un tempo un creatore che muove mani e dita miracolose e una specie di storpio. È avvolto in bende artificiali chiamate abiti; è puntellato su stampelle artificiali chiamate mobili. La sua mente ha le stesse dubbie libertà e gli stessi selvaggi limiti. Solo fra gli animali, egli è scosso dalla bella follia chiamata riso; come se avesse intravisto qualche segreto nella forma stessa dell’universo, nascosto all’universo medesimo. Solo fra gli animali, egli sente il bisogno di distogliere il proprio pensiero dalle radici reali del proprio essere corporeo; di nasconderle come al cospetto di qualche possibilità più alta che crea il mistero della vergogna. Che lodiamo queste cose come naturali all’uomo o le biasimiamo come artificiali nella natura, esse rimangono nel medesimo senso uniche. Ciò è avvertito da tutto l’istinto popolare chiamato religione, finché non venga turbato dai pedanti, specialmente dai laboriosi pedanti della Vita Semplice. I più sofistici di tutti i sofisti sono i gimnosofisti.
It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality. It is reached by stretching a point, by making out a case, by artificially selecting a certain light and shade, by bringing into prominence the lesser or lower things which may happen to be similar. The solid thing standing in the sunlight, the thing we can walk round and see from all sides, is quite different. It is also quite extraordinary, and the more sides we see of it the more extraordinary it seems. It is emphatically not a thing that follows or flows naturally from anything else. If we imagine that an inhuman or impersonal intelligence could have felt from the first the general nature of the non-human world sufficiently to see that things would evolve in whatever way they did evolve, there would have been nothing whatever in all that natural world to prepare such a mind for such an unnatural novelty. To such a mind, man would most certainly not have seemed something like one herd out of a hundred herds finding richer pasture, or one swallow out of a hundred swallows making a summer under a strange sky. It would not be in the same scale and scarcely in the same dimension. We might as truly say that it would not be in the same universe. It would be more like seeing one cow out of a hundred cows suddenly jump over the moon or one pig out of a hundred pigs grow wings in a flash and fly. It would not be a question of the cattle finding their own grazing ground but of their building their own cattle-sheds, not a question of one swallow making a summer but of his making a summer house. For the very fact that birds do build nests is one of those similarities that sharpen the startling difference. The very fact that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot get any farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind; it proves it more completely than if he built nothing at all. If he built nothing at all, he might possibly be a philosopher of the Quietist or Buddhistic school, indifferent to all but the mind within. But when he builds as he does build and is satisfied and sings aloud with satisfaction, then we know there is really an invisible veil like a pane of glass between him and us, like the window on which a bird will beat in vain. But suppose our abstract onlooker saw one of the birds begin to build as men build. Suppose in an incredibly short space of time there were seven styles of architecture for one style of nest. Suppose the bird carefully selected forked twigs and pointed leaves to express the piercing piety of Gothic, but turned to broad foliage and black mud when he sought in a darker mood to call up the heavy columns of Bel and Ashtaroth; making his nest indeed one of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Suppose the bird made little clay statues of birds celebrated in letters or politics and stuck them up in front of the nest. Suppose that one bird out of a thousand birds began to do one of the thousand things that man had already done even in the morning of the world; and we can be quite certain that the onlooker would not regard such a bird as a mere evolutionary variety of the other birds; he would regard it as a very fearful wild-fowl indeed; possibly as a bird of ill-omen, certainly as an omen. That bird would tell the augurs, not of something that would happen, but of some thing that had happened. That something would be the appearance of a mind with a new dimension of depth; a mind like that of man. If there be no God, no other mind could conceivably have foreseen it.
Now, as a matter of fact, there is not a shadow of evidence that this thing was evolved at all. There is not a particle of roof that this transition came slowly, or even that it came naturally. In a strictly scientific sense, we simply know nothing whatever about how it grew, or whether it grew, or what it is. There may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time. It has therefore nothing to do with history in the ordinary sense. The historian must take it or something like it for granted; it is not his business as a historian to explain it. But if he cannot explain it as a historian, he will not explain it as a biologist. In neither case is there any disgrace to him in accepting it without explaining it; for it is a reality, and history and biology deal with realities. He is quite justified in calmly confronting the pig with wings and the cow that jumped over the moon, merely because they have happened. He can reasonably accept man as a freak, because he accepts man as a fact. He can be perfectly comfortable in a crazy and disconnected world, or in a world that can produce such a crazy and disconnected thing. For reality is a thing in which we can all repose, even if it hardly seems related to anything else. The thing is there; and that is enough for most of us. But if we do indeed want to know how it can conceivably have come there, if we do indeed wish to see it related realistically to other things, if we do insist on seeing it evolved before our very eyes from an environment nearer to its own nature, then assuredly it is to very different things that we must go. We must stir very strange memories and return to very simple dreams, if we desire some origin that can make man other than a monster. We shall have discovered very different causes before he becomes a creature of causation; and invoked other authority to turn him into something reasonable, or even into anything probable. That way lies all that is at once awful and familiar and forgotten, with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. We can accept man as a fact, if we are content with an unexplained fact. We can accept him as an animal, if we can live with a fabulous animal. But if we must needs have sequence and necessity, then indeed we must provide a prelude and crescendo of mounting miracles, that ushered in with unthinkable thunders in all the seven heavens of another order, a man may be an ordinary thing.
Non è naturale vedere nell’uomo un prodotto naturale. Non è buon senso chiamare l’uomo un oggetto comune della campagna o del litorale. Non è vedere con occhio retto scorgere in lui un animale. Non è sano di mente. È un peccato contro la luce; contro quella piena luce del giorno che è la proporzione, principio di ogni realtà. Vi si arriva forzando un poco le cose, costruendo un’arringa, selezionando artificiosamente una certa distribuzione di luci e di ombre, mettendo in risalto le cose minori o più basse che per caso possono somigliargli. La cosa solida che sta ritta nel sole, quella intorno a cui possiamo camminare e che possiamo vedere da ogni lato, è tutt’altra faccenda. Ed è pure del tutto straordinaria, e quanti più lati ne vediamo, tanto più straordinaria appare. Non è affatto, con enfasi lo si dica, una cosa che segua o scaturisca naturalmente da qualcos’altro. Se immaginassimo che un’intelligenza disumana o impersonale avesse potuto avvertire fin da principio la natura generale del mondo non umano abbastanza da prevedere che le cose si sarebbero evolute nel modo, qualunque esso fosse, in cui in effetti si evolsero, non ci sarebbe stato proprio nulla, in tutto quel mondo naturale, capace di preparare una simile mente a una simile innaturale novità. A una tale mente l’uomo non sarebbe di certo apparso come una mandria su cento mandrie che trova un pascolo più ricco, o come una rondine su cento rondini che fa estate sotto un cielo straniero. Non sarebbe stato nella stessa scala e a stento nella stessa dimensione. Con altrettanta verità potremmo dire che non sarebbe stato nemmeno nello stesso universo. Somiglierebbe piuttosto al vedere una mucca su cento mucche saltare d’un tratto oltre la luna, o un maiale su cento maiali metter le ali in un lampo e volare. Non si tratterebbe del bestiame che trova il proprio terreno da pascolo, ma che si costruisce le proprie stalle; non di una rondine che fa estate, ma che si fabbrica una casa d’estate — una casa da villeggiatura. Giacché il fatto stesso che gli uccelli costruiscano i nidi è una di quelle somiglianze che acuiscono la differenza sconcertante. Il fatto stesso che un uccello sappia spingersi fino a costruire un nido, e non sappia andare oltre, prova che egli non ha una mente come l’uomo ha una mente; lo prova più compiutamente che se non costruisse nulla del tutto. Se non costruisse nulla, potrebbe forse essere un filosofo della scuola quietista o buddhista, indifferente a tutto tranne che alla mente interiore. Ma quando costruisce come costruisce, ed è soddisfatto, e canta a gran voce per la soddisfazione, allora sappiamo che tra lui e noi c’è davvero un velo invisibile come una lastra di vetro, come la vetrata contro cui un uccello si dibatterà invano. Ma supponiamo che il nostro astratto osservatore vedesse uno degli uccelli cominciare a costruire come costruiscono gli uomini. Supponiamo che in uno spazio di tempo incredibilmente breve vi fossero sette stili d’architettura per un solo stile di nido. Supponiamo che l’uccello scegliesse con cura ramoscelli biforcuti e foglie appuntite per esprimere la pungente pietà del gotico, ma passasse a larghe fronde e a fango nero quando cercasse, in un umore più cupo, di evocare le pesanti colonne di Bel e di Astaroth, facendo davvero del suo nido uno dei giardini pensili di Babilonia. Supponiamo che l’uccello facesse piccole statue d’argilla di uccelli illustri nelle lettere o nella politica e le rizzasse dinanzi al nido. Supponiamo che un uccello su mille uccelli cominciasse a fare una delle mille cose che l’uomo aveva già fatto persino nel mattino del mondo; e possiamo esser ben certi che l’osservatore non riguarderebbe un tale uccello come una semplice varietà evolutiva degli altri uccelli; lo riguarderebbe come un pennuto selvatico davvero spaventoso; forse come un uccello di malaugurio, di certo come un augurio. Quell’uccello direbbe agli auguri non di qualcosa che sarebbe accaduto, ma di qualcosa che era accaduto. Quel qualcosa sarebbe l’apparire di una mente con una nuova dimensione di profondità; una mente come quella dell’uomo. Se non esiste Dio, nessun’altra mente avrebbe potuto concepibilmente prevederlo.
Ora, di fatto, non c’è l’ombra di una prova che questa cosa si sia mai evoluta affatto. Non c’è una particella di prova che questa transizione sia avvenuta lentamente, né tantomeno che sia avvenuta naturalmente. In senso strettamente scientifico, semplicemente non sappiamo nulla di nulla su come essa sia cresciuta, o se sia cresciuta, o che cosa sia. Vi può essere una traccia spezzata di pietra e d’osso che vagamente suggerisce lo sviluppo del corpo umano. Non c’è nulla che suggerisca, neppure vagamente, un simile sviluppo di questa mente umana. Non era, e fu: non sappiamo in quale istante o in quale infinità d’anni. Qualcosa accadde; e ha tutta l’apparenza di una transazione al di fuori del tempo. Non ha perciò nulla a che vedere con la storia nel senso ordinario. Lo storico deve prenderla, o qualcosa di simile, come un dato di fatto; non è compito suo, come storico, spiegarla. Ma se non può spiegarla come storico, non la spiegherà come biologo. In nessuno dei due casi vi è per lui disdoro nell’accettarla senza spiegarla; poiché essa è una realtà, e la storia e la biologia hanno a che fare con le realtà. È del tutto giustificato nel confrontarsi con calma col maiale alato e con la mucca che saltò oltre la luna, per il solo fatto che sono accaduti. Può ragionevolmente accettare l’uomo come un fenomeno bizzarro, perché accetta l’uomo come un fatto. Può stare perfettamente a suo agio in un mondo pazzo e sconnesso, o in un mondo capace di produrre una cosa tanto pazza e sconnessa. Giacché la realtà è una cosa in cui tutti possiamo riposare, anche se pare a stento imparentata con qualsiasi altra cosa. La cosa è lì; e ciò basta ai più di noi. Ma se davvero vogliamo sapere come essa possa concepibilmente essere giunta lì, se davvero desideriamo vederla imparentata realisticamente con le altre cose, se davvero insistiamo nel vederla evolversi dinanzi ai nostri stessi occhi da un ambiente più prossimo alla sua propria natura, allora è di certo verso cose ben diverse che dobbiamo volgerci. Dovremo destare memorie assai strane e tornare a sogni assai semplici, se desideriamo un’origine capace di fare dell’uomo qualcosa di diverso da un mostro. Avremo scoperto cause assai diverse prima che egli divenga una creatura della causazione; e invocato un’altra autorità per mutarlo in qualcosa di ragionevole, o anche solo in qualcosa di probabile. Da quella parte giace tutto ciò che è al tempo stesso tremendo e familiare e dimenticato, con folle di terribili volti e braccia di fuoco. Possiamo accettare l’uomo come un fatto, se ci accontentiamo di un fatto inspiegato. Possiamo accettarlo come un animale, se sappiamo convivere con un animale favoloso. Ma se ci occorrono a ogni costo la sequenza e la necessità, allora dobbiamo davvero predisporre un preludio e un crescendo di miracoli sempre più alti, affinché, introdotto con impensabili tuoni in tutti i sette cieli di un altro ordine, un uomo possa essere una cosa ordinaria.
II
PROFESSORS AND PREHISTORIC MEN
Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that has hardly been noticed. The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds by incessantly adding to its data. In all practical inventions, in most natural discoveries, it can always increase evidence by experiment. But it cannot experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men make. An inventor can advance step by step in the construction of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his own back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane will correct it by crashing to the ground. But if he has made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor, he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree. He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him to see whether he does really practice cannibalism or carry off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a pack of hounds and notice how far they are influenced by the herd instinct. If he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he can get other birds and see if they behave in that way; but if he finds a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill, he cannot multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones. In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and not by experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential. Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
We talk very truly of the patience of science; but in this department it would be truer to talk of the impatience of science. Owing to the difficulty above described, the theorist is in far too much of a hurry. We have a series of hypotheses so hasty that they may well be called fancies, and cannot in any case be further corrected by facts. The most empirical anthropologist is here as limited as an antiquary. He can only cling to a fragment of the past and has no way of increasing it for the future. He can only clutch his fragment of fact, almost as the primitive man clutched his fragment of flint. And indeed he does deal with it in much the same way and for much the same reason. It is his tool and his only tool. It is his weapon and his only weapon. He often wields it with a fanaticism far in excess of anything shown by men of science when they can collect more facts from experience and even add new facts by experiment. Sometimes the professor with his bone becomes almost as dangerous as a dog with his bone. And the dog at least does not deduce a theory from it, proving that mankind is going to the dogs— or that it came from them.
For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey and watching it evolve into a man. Experimental evidence of such an evolution being impossible, the professor is not content to say (as most of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough anyhow. He produces his little bone, or little collection of bones, and deduces the most marvellous things from it. He found in Java a piece of a skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human. Somewhere near it he found an upright thigh-bone and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human. If they all form part of one creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the creature would be almost equally doubtful. But the effect on popular science was to produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered. No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium. In the same way people talked about him as if he were an individual whose influence and character were familiar to us all. I have just read a story in a magazine about Java, and how modern white inhabitants of that island are prevailed on to misbehave themselves by the personal influence of poor old Pithecanthropus. That the modern inhabitants of Java misbehave themselves I can very readily believe; but I do not imagine that they need any encouragement from the discovery of a few highly doubtful bones. Anyhow, those bones are far too few and fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole of the vast void that does in reason and in reality lie between man and his bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors. On the assumption of that evolutionary connection (a connection which I am not in the least concerned to deny), the really arresting and remarkable fact is the comparative absence of any such remains recording that connection at that point. The sincerity of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image. They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a non-sequitur or dining with an undistributed middle.
II
I PROFESSORI E GLI UOMINI PREISTORICI
La scienza è debole riguardo a queste cose preistoriche in un modo che quasi non è mai stato notato. La scienza, le cui moderne meraviglie tutti ammiriamo, riesce nei suoi intenti aggiungendo incessantemente ai propri dati. In tutte le invenzioni pratiche, nella maggior parte delle scoperte naturali, essa può sempre accrescere le prove per mezzo dell’esperimento. Ma non può fare esperimenti sul modo di fabbricare gli uomini; e nemmeno stare a osservare che cosa fabbrichino i primi uomini. Un inventore può avanzare passo dopo passo nella costruzione di un aeroplano, anche se non fa altro che sperimentare con stecchi e ritagli di metallo nel proprio cortile. Ma non può stare a guardare l’Anello Mancante che si evolve nel proprio cortile. Se ha commesso un errore nei suoi calcoli, sarà l’aeroplano a correggerlo schiantandosi al suolo. Ma se ha commesso un errore riguardo all’habitat arboreo del suo antenato, non può vedere il suo antenato arboreo cadere giù dall’albero. Non può tenere un uomo delle caverne come un gatto nel cortile e osservarlo per vedere se davvero pratichi il cannibalismo o porti via la propria compagna secondo i princìpi del matrimonio per ratto. Non può tenere una tribù di uomini primitivi come una muta di segugi e notare fino a che punto siano influenzati dall’istinto del gregge. Se vede un determinato uccello comportarsi in un determinato modo, può procurarsi altri uccelli e vedere se si comportino allo stesso modo; ma se trova un teschio, o il frammento di un teschio, nella cavità di una collina, non può moltiplicarlo fino a ottenere una visione della valle delle ossa aride. Nel trattare con un passato che è quasi interamente perito, egli può procedere soltanto per prove e non per esperimenti. E le prove bastano appena a essere anche solo indiziarie. Così, mentre la maggior parte della scienza si muove in una sorta di curva, essendo costantemente corretta da nuove prove, questa scienza vola via nello spazio in linea retta, non corretta da nulla. Ma l’abitudine di trarre conclusioni, così come esse possono realmente essere tratte in campi più fecondi, è talmente radicata nella mente scientifica che questa non sa resistere al parlare in tal modo. Essa discorre dell’idea suggerita da un frammento d’osso come se fosse qualcosa di simile all’aeroplano che alla fine viene costruito con interi cumuli di rottami di metallo. Il guaio con il professore del preistorico è che egli non può gettar via il proprio frammento fra i rottami. Il meraviglioso e trionfante aeroplano è fatto di cento errori. Lo studioso delle origini può fare un solo errore e attenersi a quello.
Parliamo con molta verità della pazienza della scienza; ma in questo settore sarebbe più veritiero parlare dell’impazienza della scienza. A causa della difficoltà sopra descritta, il teorico ha di gran lunga troppa fretta. Abbiamo una serie di ipotesi tanto affrettate che possono bene essere chiamate fantasie, e che in ogni caso non possono essere ulteriormente corrette dai fatti. Il più empirico degli antropologi è qui limitato quanto un antiquario. Egli può solo aggrapparsi a un frammento del passato e non ha modo di accrescerlo per il futuro. Può solo stringere il suo frammento di fatto, quasi come l’uomo primitivo stringeva il suo frammento di selce. E in verità lo maneggia più o meno nello stesso modo e per più o meno la stessa ragione. È il suo strumento e il suo unico strumento. È la sua arma e la sua unica arma. Spesso lo brandisce con un fanatismo di gran lunga superiore a qualsiasi cosa mostrata dagli uomini di scienza quando possono raccogliere più fatti dall’esperienza e persino aggiungere fatti nuovi per mezzo dell’esperimento. Talvolta il professore con il suo osso diventa quasi pericoloso quanto un cane con il suo osso. E il cane, almeno, non ne deduce una teoria, dimostrando che l’umanità va in rovina come i cani… o che è venuta da loro.
Per esempio, ho fatto notare la difficoltà di tenere una scimmia e osservarla evolversi in uomo. Essendo impossibile una prova sperimentale di una simile evoluzione, il professore non si accontenta di dire (come la maggior parte di noi sarebbe pronta a dire) che una tale evoluzione è comunque abbastanza probabile. Egli tira fuori il suo piccolo osso, o la sua piccola collezione di ossa, e ne deduce le cose più meravigliose. Trovò a Giava un pezzo di teschio, che dal suo contorno sembrava più piccolo di quello umano. Da qualche parte nei pressi trovò un osso di femore eretto e, nella medesima maniera sparpagliata, alcuni denti che non erano umani. Se tutti insieme fanno parte di un’unica creatura, il che è dubbio, la nostra concezione di quella creatura sarebbe quasi altrettanto dubbia. Ma l’effetto sulla scienza popolare fu di produrre una figura completa e persino complessa, rifinita fin nei minimi dettagli dei capelli e delle abitudini. Gli fu dato un nome come se fosse un ordinario personaggio storico. Si parlava del Pitecantropo come di Pitt o di Fox o di Napoleone. Le storie divulgative ne pubblicarono ritratti come i ritratti di Carlo Primo e di Giorgio Quarto. Fu riprodotto un disegno dettagliato, accuratamente ombreggiato, per mostrare che perfino i capelli del suo capo erano tutti contati. Nessuna persona non informata, guardando quel volto accuratamente delineato e quegli occhi malinconici, immaginerebbe per un istante che quello fosse il ritratto di un osso di femore; o di qualche dente e di un frammento di cranio. Allo stesso modo si parlava di lui come se fosse un individuo la cui influenza e il cui carattere fossero familiari a tutti noi. Ho appena letto in una rivista un racconto su Giava, e su come i moderni abitanti bianchi di quell’isola si lascino indurre a comportarsi male per l’influenza personale del povero vecchio Pitecantropo. Che i moderni abitanti di Giava si comportino male, lo posso credere prontissimamente; ma non immagino che abbiano bisogno di alcun incoraggiamento dalla scoperta di poche ossa altamente dubbie. In ogni caso, quelle ossa sono di gran lunga troppo poche e frammentarie e dubbie per colmare l’intero, vasto vuoto che, secondo ragione e secondo realtà, si stende tra l’uomo e i suoi antenati bestiali, se mai furono suoi antenati. Ammessa quella connessione evolutiva (una connessione che non ho il minimo interesse a negare), il fatto davvero sorprendente e notevole è la relativa assenza di qualsiasi resto simile che registri quella connessione in quel punto. La sincerità di Darwin lo ammetteva realmente; ed è così che siamo giunti a usare un termine come l’Anello Mancante. Ma il dogmatismo dei darwiniani è stato troppo forte per l’agnosticismo di Darwin; e gli uomini sono caduti insensibilmente nel trasformare questo termine interamente negativo in un’immagine positiva. Parlano di andare in cerca delle abitudini e dell’habitat dell’Anello Mancante; come se si parlasse di essere in rapporti amichevoli con la lacuna di una narrazione o con il buco di un ragionamento, di fare una passeggiata con un non sequitur o di pranzare con un medio non distribuito.
In this sketch, therefore, of man in his relation to certain religious and historical problems, I shall waste no further space on these speculations on the nature of man before he became man. His body may have been evolved from the brutes; but we know nothing of any such transition that throws the smallest light upon his soul as it has shown itself in history. Unfortunately the same school of writers pursue the same style of reasoning when they come to the first real evidence about the first real men. Strictly speaking of course we know nothing about prehistoric man, for the simple reason that he was prehistoric. The history of prehistoric man is a very obvious contradiction in terms. It is the sort of unreason in which only rationalists are allowed to indulge. If a parson had casually observed that the Flood was ante-diluvian, it is possible that he might be a little chaffed about his logic. If a bishop were to say that Adam was Preadamite, we might think it a little odd. But we are not supposed to notice such verbal trifles when sceptical historians talk of the part of history that is prehistoric. The truth is that they are using the terms historic and prehistoric without any clear test or definition in their minds. What they mean is that there are traces of human lives before the beginning of human stories; and in that sense we do at least know that humanity was before history.
Human civilisation is older than human records. That is the sane way of stating our relations to these remote things. Humanity has left examples of its other arts earlier than the art of writing; or at least of any writing that we can read. But it is certain that the primitive arts were arts; and it is in every way probable that the primitive civilisations were civilisations. The man left a picture of the reindeer, but he did not leave a narrative of how he hunted the reindeer; and therefore what we say of him is hypothesis and not history. But the art he did practice was quite artistic; his drawing was quite intelligent and there is no reason to doubt that his story of the hunt would be quite intelligent, only if it exists it is not intelligible. In short, the prehistoric period need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period. It does not mean the time before civilisation or the time before arts and crafts. It simply means the time before any connected narratives that we can read. This does indeed make all the practical difference between remembrance and forgetfulness; but it is perfectly possible that there were all sorts of forgotten forms of civilisation, as well as all sorts of forgotten forms of barbarism. And in any case everything indicated that many of these forgotten or half-forgotten social stages were much more civilised and much less barbaric than is vulgarly imagined today. But even about these unwritten histories of humanity, when humanity was quite certainly human, we can only conjecture with the greatest doubt and caution. And unfortunately doubt and caution are the last things commonly encouraged by the loose evolutionism of current culture. For that culture is full of curiosity; and the one thing that it cannot endure is the agony of agnosticism. It was in the Darwinian age that the word first became known and the thing first became impossible.
It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered by impudence. Statements are made so plainly and positively that men have hardly the moral courage to pause upon them and find that they are without support. The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric tribe began confidently with the words ‘They wore no clothes.’ Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come to know whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything has perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet. It was evidently anticipated that we might discover an everlasting pair of trousers of the same substance as the everlasting rock. But to persons of a less sanguine temperament it will be immediately apparent that people might wear simple garments, or even highly ornamental garments, without leaving any more traces of them than these people have left. The plaiting of rushes and grasses, for instance, might have become more and more elaborate without in the least becoming more eternal. One civilisation might specialise in things that happened to be perishable, like weaving and embroidery, and not in things that happen to be more permanent, like architecture and sculpture. There have been plenty of examples of such specialist societies. A man of the future finding the ruins of our factory machinery might as fairly say that we were acquainted with iron and with no other substance; and announce the discovery that the proprietor and manager of the factory undoubtedly walked about naked— or possibly wore iron hats and trousers.
It is not contended here that these primitive men did wear clothes any more than they did weave rushes; but merely that we have not enough evidence to know whether they did or not. But it may be worthwhile to look back for a moment at some of the very few things that we do know and that they did do. If we consider them, we shall certainly not find them inconsistent with such ideas as dress and decoration. We do not know whether they decorated other things. We do not know whether they had embroideries, and if they had the embroideries could not be expected to have remained. But we do know that they did have pictures; and the pictures have remained. And there remains with them, as already suggested, the testimony to something that is absolute and unique; that belongs to man and to nothing else except man; that is a difference of kind and not a difference of degree. A monkey does not draw clumsily and a man cleverly; a monkey does not begin the art of representation and a man carry it to perfection. A monkey does not do it at all; he does not begin to do it at all; he does not begin to begin to do it at all. A line of some kind is crossed before the first faint line can begin.
In questo abbozzo, dunque, dell’uomo nella sua relazione con certi problemi religiosi e storici, non sprecherò altro spazio in queste speculazioni sulla natura dell’uomo prima che divenisse uomo. Il suo corpo può bene essersi evoluto dalle bestie; ma non sappiamo nulla di alcuna simile transizione che getti il più piccolo barlume di luce sulla sua anima quale si è manifestata nella storia. Purtroppo la medesima scuola di scrittori insegue il medesimo stile di ragionamento quando giunge alla prima prova reale intorno ai primi uomini reali. A rigor di termini, naturalmente, dell’uomo preistorico non sappiamo nulla, per la semplice ragione che era preistorico. La storia dell’uomo preistorico è una assai evidente contraddizione in termini. È quella sorta di sragionatezza che soltanto ai razionalisti è concesso concedersi. Se un parroco osservasse con noncuranza che il Diluvio fu antidiluviano, è possibile che verrebbe un poco canzonato per la sua logica. Se un vescovo dicesse che Adamo era preadamitico, potremmo trovarlo un tantino bizzarro. Ma non ci è dato accorgerci di simili inezie verbali quando storici scettici parlano di quella parte della storia che è preistorica. La verità è che essi adoperano i termini storico e preistorico senza alcun chiaro criterio o definizione nella mente. Ciò che intendono è che vi sono tracce di vite umane prima del principio delle storie umane; e in tal senso almeno noi sappiamo che l’umanità esisteva prima della storia.
La civiltà umana è più antica dei documenti umani. Questo è il modo assennato di enunciare le nostre relazioni con queste cose remote. L’umanità ha lasciato esempi delle sue altre arti prima dell’arte dello scrivere; o almeno di qualunque scrittura che noi sappiamo leggere. Ma è certo che le arti primitive erano arti; ed è in ogni modo probabile che le civiltà primitive fossero civiltà. L’uomo lasciò un’immagine della renna, ma non lasciò un racconto di come cacciasse la renna; e perciò quel che diciamo di lui è ipotesi e non storia. Ma l’arte che egli praticò era quanto mai artistica; il suo disegno era quanto mai intelligente e non v’è ragione di dubitare che il suo racconto della caccia sarebbe stato quanto mai intelligente, senonché, se esiste, non è intelligibile. In breve, il periodo preistorico non deve significare il periodo primitivo, nel senso del periodo barbarico o bestiale. Non significa il tempo prima della civiltà o il tempo prima delle arti e dei mestieri. Significa semplicemente il tempo prima di qualunque racconto connesso che noi sappiamo leggere. Ciò fa davvero tutta la pratica differenza tra il ricordo e l’oblio; ma è perfettamente possibile che vi fossero ogni sorta di forme dimenticate di civiltà, come pure ogni sorta di forme dimenticate di barbarie. E in ogni caso ogni cosa indicava che molti di questi stadi sociali dimenticati o mezzo dimenticati erano assai più civili e assai meno barbarici di quanto oggi volgarmente si immagini. Ma anche intorno a queste non scritte storie dell’umanità, quando l’umanità era di certo pienamente umana, non possiamo che congetturare con il più grande dubbio e con la più grande cautela. E purtroppo il dubbio e la cautela sono le ultime cose che comunemente vengano incoraggiate dal fiacco evoluzionismo della cultura corrente. Poiché quella cultura è colma di curiosità; e l’unica cosa che essa non può sopportare è l’angoscia dell’agnosticismo. Fu nell’età darwiniana che la parola divenne per la prima volta nota e la cosa divenne per la prima volta impossibile.
È necessario dire schiettamente che tutta questa ignoranza è semplicemente coperta dalla sfrontatezza. Le affermazioni si fanno tanto schiettamente e positivamente che gli uomini a stento hanno il morale coraggio di soffermarvisi e di scoprire che sono prive di sostegno. L’altro giorno un compendio scientifico sullo stato di una tribù preistorica cominciava fiducioso con le parole «Non portavano vestiti». Non un lettore su cento, probabilmente, si fermò a domandarsi come dovremmo giungere a sapere se un tempo i vestiti fossero stati portati da gente di cui tutto è perito eccetto pochi frammenti d’osso e di pietra. Si sperava senza dubbio che avremmo trovato un cappello di pietra come pure un’accetta di pietra. Si prevedeva evidentemente che noi si potesse scoprire un eterno paio di calzoni della medesima sostanza dell’eterna roccia. Ma alle persone di temperamento meno sanguigno apparirà immediatamente evidente che la gente poteva bene portare vesti semplici, o anche vesti riccamente ornate, senza lasciarne più tracce di quante ne abbia lasciate questa gente. L’intreccio di giunchi e di erbe, per esempio, potrebbe essere divenuto sempre più elaborato senza per questo divenire punto più eterno. Una civiltà potrebbe specializzarsi in cose che si dà il caso siano deperibili, come la tessitura e il ricamo, e non in cose che si dà il caso siano più durevoli, come l’architettura e la scultura. Vi sono stati esempi in abbondanza di simili società specialiste. Un uomo del futuro che trovasse le rovine dei macchinari delle nostre fabbriche potrebbe con altrettanta imparzialità dire che noi conoscevamo il ferro e nessun’altra sostanza; e annunciare la scoperta che il proprietario e direttore della fabbrica indubbiamente andava attorno nudo — o forse portava cappello e calzoni di ferro.
Non si sostiene qui che questi uomini primitivi portassero vestiti, non più di quanto intrecciassero giunchi; ma soltanto che noi non abbiamo prove sufficienti per sapere se lo facessero o no. Ma può valere la pena di volgere per un momento lo sguardo ad alcune delle pochissime cose che sappiamo e che essi facevano. Se le consideriamo, non le troveremo di certo incompatibili con idee quali l’abito e l’ornamento. Non sappiamo se adornassero altre cose. Non sappiamo se avessero ricami, e se li avevano i ricami non ci si potrebbe attendere che fossero rimasti. Ma sappiamo che avevano immagini; e le immagini sono rimaste. E con esse rimane, come già s’è suggerito, la testimonianza di qualcosa che è assoluto e unico; che appartiene all’uomo e a null’altro se non all’uomo; che è una differenza di genere e non una differenza di grado. Una scimmia non disegna goffamente e un uomo abilmente; una scimmia non comincia l’arte della rappresentazione e un uomo la porta alla perfezione. Una scimmia non lo fa affatto; non comincia affatto a farlo; non comincia affatto a cominciare a farlo. Una linea di qualche specie è varcata prima che la prima debole linea possa cominciare.
Another distinguished writer, again, in commenting on the cave drawings attributed to the neolithic men of the reindeer period, said that none of their pictures appeared to have any religious purpose; and he seemed almost to infer that they had no religion. I can hardly imagine a thinner thread of argument than this which reconstructs the very inmost moods of the pre-historic mind from the fact that somebody who has scrawled a few sketches on a rock, from what motive we do not know, for what purpose we do not know, acting under what customs or conventions we do not know, may possibly have found it easier to draw reindeer than to draw religion. He may have drawn it because it was his religious symbol. He may have drawn it because it was not his religious symbol. He may have drawn anything except his religious symbol. He may have drawn his real religious symbol somewhere else; or it may have been deliberately destroyed when it was drawn. He may have done or not done half a million things; but in any case it is an amazing leap of logic to infer that he had no religious symbol, or even to infer from his having no religious symbol that he had no religion. Now this particular case happens to illustrate the insecurity of these guesses very clearly. For a little while afterwards, people discovered not only paintings but sculptures of animals in the caves. Some of these were said to be damaged with dints or holes supposed to be the marks of arrows; and the damaged images were conjectured to be the remains of some magic rite of killing the beasts in effigy; while the undamaged images were explained in connection with another magic rite invoking fertility upon the herds. Here again there is something faintly humorous about the scientific habit of having it both ways. If the image is damaged it proves one superstition and if it is undamaged it proves another. Here again there is a rather reckless jumping to conclusions; it has hardly occurred to the speculators that a crowd of hunters imprisoned in winter in a cave might conceivably have aimed at a mark for fun, as a sort of primitive parlour game. But in any case, if it was done out of superstition, what has become of the thesis that it had nothing to do with religion? The truth is that all this guess work has nothing to do with anything. It is not half such a good parlour game as shooting arrows at a carved reindeer, for it is shooting them into the air.
Such speculators rather tend to forget, for instance, that men in the modern world also sometimes make marks in caves. When a crowd of trippers is conducted through the labyrinth of the Marvelous Grotto or the Magic Stalactite Cavern, it has been observed that hieroglyphics spring into sight where they have passed; initials and inscriptions which the learned refuse to refer to any remote date. But the time will come when these inscriptions will really be of remote date. And if the professors of the future are anything like the professors of the present, they will be able to deduce a vast number of very vivid and interesting things from these cave-writings of the twentieth century. If I know anything about the breed, and if they have not fallen away from the full-blooded confidence of their fathers, they will be able to discover the most fascinating facts about us from the initials left in the Magic Grotto by ‘Arry and ‘Arriet, possibly in the form of two intertwined A’s. From this alone they will know (1) That as the letters are rudely chipped with a blunt pocket knife, the twentieth century possessed no delicate graving-tools and was unacquainted with the art of sculpture. (2) That as the letters are capital letters, our civilisation never evolved any small letters or anything like a running hand. (3) That because initial consonants stand together in an unpronounceable fashion, our language was possibly akin to Welsh or more probably of the early Semitic type that ignored vowels. (4) That as the initials of ‘Arry and ‘Arriet do not in any special fashion profess to be religious symbols, our civilisation possessed no religion. Perhaps the last is about the nearest to the truth; for a civilisation that had religion would have a little more reason.
It is commonly affirmed, again, that religion grew in a very slow and evolutionary manner; and even that it grew not from one cause; but from a combination that might be called a coincidence. Generally speaking, the three chief elements in the combination are, first, the fear of the chief of the tribe (whom Mr. Wells insists on calling, with regrettable familiarity, the Old Man), second, the phenomena of dreams, and third, the sacrificial associations of the harvest and the resurrection symbolised in the growing corn. I may remark in passing that it seems to me very doubtful psychology to refer one living and single spirit to three dead and disconnected causes, if they were merely dead and disconnected causes. Suppose Mr. Wells, in one of his fascinating novels of the future, were to tell us that there would arise among men a new and as yet nameless passion, of which men will dream as they dream of first love, for which they will die as they die for a flag and a fatherland. I think we should be a little puzzled if he told us that this singular sentiment would be a combination of the habit of smoking Woodbines, the increase of the income tax and the pleasure of a motorist in exceeding the speed limit. We could not easily imagine this, because we could not imagine any connection between the three or any common feeling that could include them all. Nor could anyone imagine any connection between corn and dreams and an old chief with a spear, unless there was already a common feeling to include them all. But if there was such a common feeling it could only be the religious feeling; and these things could not be the beginnings of a religious feeling that existed already. I think anybody’s common sense will tell him that it is far more likely that this sort of mystical sentiment did exist already; and that in the light of it dreams and kings and corn-fields could appear mystical then, as they can appear mystical now.
Un altro scrittore di chiara fama, poi, commentando i disegni rupestri della caverna attribuiti agli uomini neolitici dell’età delle renne, osservava che nessuna di quelle immagini pareva avere un qualche scopo religioso; e sembrava quasi dedurne che quegli uomini non avessero religione. Difficilmente saprei immaginare un filo argomentativo più sottile di questo, che ricostruisce le pieghe più intime della mente preistorica a partire dal fatto che qualcuno, il quale ha graffiato pochi schizzi sopra una roccia, per quale motivo non sappiamo, con quale scopo non sappiamo, sottomesso a quali usi o convenzioni non sappiamo, forse ha semplicemente trovato più facile disegnare renne che disegnare la religione. Può averla disegnata perché era il suo simbolo religioso. Può averla disegnata perché non era il suo simbolo religioso. Può aver disegnato qualsiasi cosa tranne il suo simbolo religioso. Può aver disegnato il suo vero simbolo religioso in un altro luogo; oppure quel simbolo può essere stato deliberatamente distrutto una volta disegnato. Può aver fatto o non fatto mezzo milione di cose; ma in ogni caso è un salto sbalorditivo di logica dedurre che egli non avesse alcun simbolo religioso, o addirittura dedurre, dal fatto che non avesse un simbolo religioso, che egli non avesse religione. Ora questo caso particolare si dà il caso illustri con singolare chiarezza l’inconsistenza di simili congetture. Poiché poco tempo dopo si scoprirono nelle caverne non soltanto pitture ma sculture di animali. Di alcune si disse che fossero sciupate da incavi o fori supposti essere i segni di frecce; e le immagini danneggiate furono congetturate come i resti di qualche rito magico volto a uccidere in effigie le bestie; mentre le immagini intatte venivano spiegate in rapporto a un altro rito magico che invocava la fertilità sulle mandrie. Anche qui vi è qualcosa di vagamente comico nell’abitudine scientifica di prendersi la ragione in ogni caso. Se l’immagine è danneggiata prova una superstizione, e se è intatta ne prova un’altra. Anche qui vi è un balzo alle conclusioni piuttosto avventato; a stento è venuto in mente a questi teorizzatori che una folla di cacciatori rinchiusi d’inverno in una caverna potrebbe concepibilmente aver mirato a un bersaglio per divertimento, come una sorta di primitivo gioco di società. Ma in ogni caso, se fu fatto per superstizione, che ne è stato della tesi secondo cui esso non aveva nulla a che vedere con la religione? La verità è che tutto questo congetturare non ha nulla a che vedere con alcunché. Non è nemmeno un gioco di società altrettanto buono che scoccare frecce contro una renna intagliata, giacché le scaglia in aria.
Simili teorizzatori tendono piuttosto a dimenticare, per esempio, che gli uomini del mondo moderno pure fanno talvolta segni nelle caverne. Quando una folla di gitanti viene condotta per il labirinto della Grotta Meravigliosa o della Magica Caverna delle Stalattiti, si è osservato che dei geroglifici balzano alla vista là dov’essa è passata; iniziali e iscrizioni che i dotti si rifiutano di riferire a qualsivoglia data remota. Ma verrà il tempo in cui queste iscrizioni saranno davvero di data remota. E se i professori del futuro somiglieranno in qualche modo ai professori del presente, sapranno dedurre un gran numero di cose assai vivide e interessanti da queste scritte della caverna del ventesimo secolo. Se conosco qualcosa della razza, e se essi non saranno decaduti dalla piena e sanguigna sicurezza dei loro padri, sapranno scoprire i fatti più affascinanti sul conto nostro a partire dalle iniziali lasciate nella Magica Grotta da ‘Arry e ‘Arriet, forse nella forma di due A intrecciate. Da questo soltanto essi sapranno (1) che, siccome le lettere sono rozzamente intaccate con un temperino spuntato, il ventesimo secolo non possedeva delicati strumenti d’incisione ed era ignaro dell’arte della scultura. (2) Che, siccome le lettere sono maiuscole, la nostra civiltà non sviluppò mai lettere minuscole né alcunché di simile a una scrittura corsiva. (3) Che, poiché consonanti iniziali stanno insieme in modo impronunciabile, la nostra lingua era forse affine al gallese o più probabilmente del tipo semitico arcaico che ignorava le vocali. (4) Che, siccome le iniziali di ‘Arry e ‘Arriet non pretendono in alcun modo particolare di essere simboli religiosi, la nostra civiltà non possedeva religione. Forse quest’ultima è quella che più si avvicina alla verità; giacché una civiltà che avesse religione avrebbe un po’ più di ragione.
Si afferma comunemente, poi, che la religione crebbe in maniera molto lenta ed evolutiva; e persino che essa non nacque da una sola causa, ma da una combinazione che si potrebbe chiamare coincidenza. In linea generale, i tre elementi principali della combinazione sono, primo, la paura del capo della tribù (che il signor Wells si ostina a chiamare, con deplorevole familiarità, il Vecchio), secondo, il fenomeno dei sogni, e terzo, le associazioni sacrificali del raccolto e della resurrezione simboleggiata nel grano che cresce. Osserverò di passaggio che mi pare psicologia assai dubbia riferire un solo spirito vivo e unico a tre cause morte e sconnesse, se davvero non fossero che cause morte e sconnesse. Supponiamo che il signor Wells, in uno dei suoi affascinanti romanzi del futuro, venisse a dirci che sorgerà tra gli uomini una passione nuova e finora senza nome, di cui gli uomini sogneranno come si sogna del primo amore, per la quale moriranno come si muore per una bandiera e una patria. Credo che resteremmo un poco sconcertati s’egli ci dicesse che questo singolare sentimento sarebbe una combinazione dell’abitudine di fumare Woodbines, dell’aumento dell’imposta sul reddito e del piacere di un automobilista nel superare il limite di velocità. Non riusciremmo facilmente a immaginarlo, perché non riusciremmo a immaginare alcun legame tra i tre elementi né alcun sentimento comune capace di includerli tutti. Né alcuno potrebbe immaginare un legame tra il grano e i sogni e un vecchio capo con una lancia, a meno che non esistesse già un sentimento comune a includerli tutti. Ma se un tale sentimento comune esisteva, esso non poteva essere che il sentimento religioso; e queste cose non potevano essere gli inizi di un sentimento religioso che esisteva già. Credo che il buon senso di chiunque gli dirà che è assai più probabile che questa sorta di sentimento mistico esistesse già; e che alla sua luce i sogni e i re e i campi di grano potessero apparire mistici allora, come possono apparire mistici oggi.
For the plain truth is that all this is a trick of making things seem distant and dehumanised, merely by pretending not to understand things that we do understand. It is like saying that prehistoric men had an ugly and uncouth habit of opening their mouths wide at intervals and stuffing strange substances into them, as if we had never heard of eating. It is like saying that the terrible Troglodytes of the Stone Age lifted alternate legs in rotation, as if we never heard of walking. If it were meant to touch the mystical nerve and awaken us to the wonder of walking and eating, it might be a legitimate fancy. As it is here intended to kill the mystical nerve and deaden us to the wonder of religion, it is irrational rubbish. It pretends to find some thing incomprehensible in the feelings that we all comprehend. Who does not find dreams mysterious, and feel that they lie on the dark borderland of being? Who does not feel the death and resurrection of the growing things of the earth as something near to the secret of the universe? Who does not understand that there must always be the savour of something sacred about authority and the solidarity that is the soul of the tribe? If there be any anthropologist who really finds these things remote and impossible to realise, we can say nothing of that scientific gentleman except that he has not got so large and enlightened a mind as a primitive man. To me it seems obvious that nothing but a spiritual sentiment already active could have clothed these separate and diverse things with sanctity. To say that religion came from reverencing a chief or sacrificing at a harvest is to put a highly elaborate cart before a really primitive horse. It is like saying that the impulse to draw pictures came from the contemplation of the pictures of reindeers in the cave. In other words, it is explaining painting by saying that it arose out of the work of painters; or accounting for art by saying that it arose out of art. It is even more like saying that the thing we call poetry arose as the result of certain customs; such as that of an ode being officially composed to celebrate the advent of spring; or that of a young man rising at a regular hour to listen to the skylark and then writing his report on a piece of paper. It is quite true that young men often become poets in the spring; and it is quite true that when once there are poets, no mortal power can restrain them from writing about the skylark. But the poems did not exist before the poets. The poetry did not arise out of the poetic forms. In other words, it is hardly an adequate explanation of how a thing appeared for the first time to say it existed already. Similarly, we cannot say that religion arose out of the religious forms, because that is only another way of saying that it only arose when it existed already. It needed a certain sort of mind to see that there was anything mystical about the dreams or the dead, as it needed a particular sort of mind to see that there was any thing poetical about the skylark or the spring. That mind was presumably what we call the human mind, very much as it exists to this day; for mystics still meditate upon death and dreams as poets still write about spring and skylarks. But there is not the faintest hint to suggest that anything short of the human mind we know feels any of these mystical associations at all. A cow in a field seems to derive no lyrical impulse or instruction from her unrivalled opportunities for listening to the skylark. And similarly there is no reason to suppose that live sheep will ever begin to use dead sheep as the basis of a system of elaborate ancestor-worship. It is true that in the spring a young quadruped’s fancy may lightly turn to thoughts of love, but no succession of springs has ever led it to turn however lightly to thoughts of literature. And in the same way, while it is true that a dog has dreams, while most other quadrupeds do not seem even to have that, we have waited a long time for the dog to develop his dreams into an elaborate system or religious ceremonial. We have waited so long that we have really ceased to expect it; and we no more look to see a dog apply his dreams to ecclesiastical construction than to see him examine his dreams by the rules of psycho-analysis. It is obvious, in short, that for some reason or other these natural experiences, and even natural excitements, never do pass the line that separates them from creative expression like art and religion, in any creature except man. They never do, they never have, and it is now to all appearance very improbable that they ever will. It is not impossible, in the sense of self-contradictory, that we should see cows fasting from grass every Friday or going on their knees as in the old legend about Christmas Eve. It is not in that sense impossible that cows should contemplate death until they can lift up a sublime psalm of lamentation to the tune the old cow died of. It is not in that sense impossible that they should express their hopes of a heavenly career in a symbolic dance, in honour of the cow that jumped over the moon. It may be that the dog will at last have laid in a sufficient store of dreams to enable him to build a temple to Cerberus as a sort of canine trinity. It may be that his dreams have already begun to turn into visions capable of verbal expression, in some revelation about the Dog Star as the spiritual home for lost dogs. These things are logically possible, in the sense that it is logically difficult to prove the universal negative which we call an impossibility. But all that instinct for the probable, which we call common sense, must long ago have told us that the animals are not to all appearance evolving in that sense; and that, to say the least, we are not likely to have any personal evidence of their passing from the animal experience to the human experiments. But spring and death and even dreams, considered merely as experiences, are their experiences as much as ours. The only possible conclusion is that these experiences, considered as experiences, do not generate anything like a religious sense in any mind except a mind like ours. We come back to the fact of a certain kind of mind that was already alive and alone. It was unique and it could make creeds as it could make cave-drawings. The materials for religion had lain there for countless ages like the materials for everything else; but the power of religion was in the mind. Man could already see in these things the riddles and hints and hopes that he still sees in them. He could not only dream but dream about dreams. He could not only see the dead but see the shadow of death; and was possessed with that mysterious mystification that forever finds death incredible.
La semplice verità è che tutto questo non è che un trucco per far apparire le cose lontane e disumanizzate, fingendo semplicemente di non comprendere cose che invece comprendiamo benissimo. È come dire che gli uomini preistorici avevano la brutta e sgraziata abitudine di spalancare a intervalli la bocca e di cacciarvi dentro strane sostanze, come se non avessimo mai sentito parlare del mangiare. È come dire che i terribili Trogloditi dell’età della pietra sollevavano alternativamente le gambe a turno, come se non avessimo mai sentito parlare del camminare. Se ciò fosse inteso a toccare il nervo mistico e a destarci alla meraviglia del camminare e del mangiare, potrebbe essere una fantasia legittima. Ma poiché qui è inteso a uccidere il nervo mistico e a intorpidirci alla meraviglia della religione, è una sciocchezza irrazionale. Pretende di trovare qualcosa di incomprensibile in sentimenti che tutti comprendiamo. Chi non trova misteriosi i sogni, e non sente che essi giacciono sull’oscuro confine dell’essere? Chi non sente la morte e la risurrezione delle cose che crescono sulla terra come qualcosa di prossimo al segreto dell’universo? Chi non comprende che deve esservi sempre il sapore di qualcosa di sacro nell’autorità e nella solidarietà che è l’anima della tribù? Se vi fosse un antropologo che davvero trovasse queste cose remote e impossibili da concepire, di quel signore scientifico non potremmo dire altro se non che non possiede una mente così vasta e illuminata quanto quella di un uomo primitivo. A me pare ovvio che nient’altro se non un sentimento spirituale già attivo poteva aver rivestito di santità queste cose separate e diverse. Dire che la religione nacque dal venerare un capo o dal sacrificare al tempo del raccolto è mettere un carro assai elaborato davanti a un cavallo davvero primitivo. È come dire che l’impulso a disegnare figure nacque dalla contemplazione delle figure di renne nella caverna. In altre parole, è spiegare la pittura dicendo che essa sorse dall’opera dei pittori; ovvero rendere conto dell’arte dicendo che essa sorse dall’arte. È ancor più simile al dire che la cosa che chiamiamo poesia sorse come risultato di certe consuetudini; come quella di comporre ufficialmente un’ode per celebrare l’avvento della primavera; oppure quella di un giovane che si leva a un’ora fissa per ascoltare l’allodola e poi scrive il suo resoconto su un foglio di carta. È verissimo che i giovani spesso divengono poeti in primavera; ed è verissimo che, una volta che vi siano poeti, nessun potere mortale può trattenerli dallo scrivere dell’allodola. Ma le poesie non esistevano prima dei poeti. La poesia non sorse dalle forme poetiche. In altre parole, non è certo una spiegazione adeguata di come una cosa sia apparsa per la prima volta dire che essa esisteva già. Similmente, non possiamo dire che la religione sorse dalle forme religiose, perché questo è soltanto un altro modo di dire che essa sorse solo quando già esisteva. Occorreva una certa specie di mente per vedere che vi fosse alcunché di mistico nei sogni o nei morti, come occorreva una particolare specie di mente per vedere che vi fosse alcunché di poetico nell’allodola o nella primavera. Quella mente era presumibilmente ciò che chiamiamo la mente umana, molto simile a com’è ancor oggi; poiché i mistici ancora meditano sulla morte e sui sogni come i poeti ancora scrivono della primavera e delle allodole. Ma non v’è il più tenue indizio che suggerisca che qualcosa al di sotto della mente umana che conosciamo provi in alcun modo queste associazioni mistiche. Una mucca in un prato non sembra ricavare alcun impulso lirico né alcun insegnamento dalle sue impareggiabili occasioni di ascoltare l’allodola. E similmente non v’è ragione di supporre che le pecore vive comincino mai a servirsi delle pecore morte come base di un sistema di elaborato culto degli antenati. È vero che in primavera la fantasia di un giovane quadrupede può volgersi lievemente a pensieri d’amore, ma nessun succedersi di primavere l’ha mai indotto a volgersi, per quanto lievemente, a pensieri di letteratura. E allo stesso modo, benché sia vero che un cane fa sogni, mentre la maggior parte degli altri quadrupedi non pare neppure averne, abbiamo atteso un lungo tempo che il cane sviluppasse i suoi sogni in un elaborato sistema o cerimoniale religioso. Abbiamo atteso tanto a lungo che davvero abbiamo cessato di aspettarcelo; e non ci aspettiamo più di vedere un cane applicare i suoi sogni alla costruzione ecclesiastica, di quanto ci aspettiamo di vederlo esaminare i suoi sogni secondo le regole della psicoanalisi. È evidente, in breve, che per una ragione o per l’altra queste esperienze naturali, e persino queste eccitazioni naturali, non oltrepassano mai la linea che le separa dall’espressione creativa come l’arte e la religione, in nessuna creatura tranne l’uomo. Non l’hanno mai fatto, non lo fanno mai, e ora, a quanto pare, è assai improbabile che mai lo faranno. Non è impossibile, nel senso di essere in contraddizione con sé stesso, che possiamo vedere le mucche digiunare dall’erba ogni venerdì o mettersi in ginocchio come nell’antica leggenda della vigilia di Natale. Non è impossibile, in quel senso, che le mucche contemplino la morte fino a poter levare un sublime salmo di lamentazione sull’aria di cui morì la vecchia mucca. Non è impossibile, in quel senso, che esprimano le loro speranze di una carriera celeste in una danza simbolica, in onore della mucca che saltò oltre la luna. Può darsi che il cane abbia infine accumulato una scorta sufficiente di sogni da consentirgli di erigere un tempio a Cerbero come una sorta di trinità canina. Può darsi che i suoi sogni abbiano già cominciato a mutarsi in visioni capaci di espressione verbale, in qualche rivelazione intorno alla Stella del Cane come dimora spirituale per i cani smarriti. Queste cose sono logicamente possibili, nel senso che è logicamente difficile provare quella negazione universale che chiamiamo impossibilità. Ma tutto quell’istinto per il probabile, che chiamiamo buon senso, deve averci detto da tempo che gli animali, a quanto pare, non si stanno evolvendo in quel senso; e che, a dir poco, è improbabile che abbiamo mai una qualche prova personale del loro passaggio dall’esperienza animale agli esperimenti umani. Ma la primavera e la morte e persino i sogni, considerati semplicemente come esperienze, sono loro esperienze tanto quanto nostre. L’unica conclusione possibile è che tali esperienze, considerate come esperienze, non generano nulla di simile a un senso religioso in nessuna mente tranne una mente come la nostra. Torniamo così al fatto di una certa specie di mente che era già viva e sola. Era unica e poteva creare credi come poteva creare disegni nelle caverne. I materiali per la religione erano rimasti là per età incalcolabili, come i materiali per ogni altra cosa; ma la potenza della religione era nella mente. L’uomo poteva già vedere in queste cose gli enigmi e i cenni e le speranze che ancora vi vede. Egli poteva non solo sognare, ma sognare intorno ai sogni. Poteva non solo vedere i morti, ma vedere l’ombra della morte; ed era posseduto da quella misteriosa mistificazione che per sempre trova la morte incredibile.
It is quite true that we have even these hints chiefly about man when he unmistakably appears as man. We cannot affirm this or anything else about the alleged animal originally connecting man and the brutes. But that is only because he is not an animal but an allegation. We cannot be certain the Pithecanthropus ever worshipped, because we cannot be certain that he ever lived. He is only a vision called up to fill the void that does in fact yawn between the first creatures who were certainly men and any other creatures that are certainly apes or other animals. A few very doubtful fragments are scraped together to suggest such an intermediate creature because it is required by a certain philosophy; but nobody supposes that these are sufficient to establish anything philosophical even in support of that philosophy. A scrap of skull found in Java cannot establish anything about religion or about the absence of religion. If there ever was any such ape-man, he may have exhibited as much ritual in religion as a man or as much simplicity in religion as an ape. He may have been a mythologist or he may have been a myth. It might be interesting to inquire whether this mystical quality appeared in a transition from the ape to the man, if there were really any types of the transition to inquire about. In other words, the missing link might or might not be mystical if he were not missing. But compared with the evidence we have of real human beings, we have no evidence that he was a human being or a half-human being or a being at all. Even the most extreme evolutionists do not attempt to deduce any evolutionary views about the origin of religion from him. Even in trying to prove that religion grew slowly from rude or irrational sources, they begin their proof with the first men who were men. But their own proof only proves that the men who were already men were already mystics. They used the rude and irrational elements as only men and mystics can use them. We come back once more to the simple truth; that at sometime too early for these critics to trace, a transition had occurred to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness; and man became a living soul.
Touching this matter of the origin of religion, the truth is that those who are thus trying to explain it are trying to explain it away. Subconsciously they feel that it looks less formidable when thus lengthened out into a gradual and almost invisible process. But in fact this perspective entirely falsifies the reality of experience. They bring together two things that are totally different, the stray hints of evolutionary origins and the solid and self-evident block of humanity, and try to shift their standpoint till they see them in a single foreshortened line. But it is an optical illusion. Men do not in fact stand related to monkeys or missing links in any such chain as that in which men stand related to men. There may have been intermediate creatures whose faint traces can be found here and there in the huge gap. Of these beings, if they ever existed, it may be true that they were things very unlike men or men very unlike ourselves. But of prehistoric men, such as those called the cave-men or the reindeer men, it is not true in any sense whatever. Prehistoric men of that sort were things exactly like men and men exceedingly like our selves. They only happened to be men about whom we do not know much, for the simple reason that they have left no records or chronicles; but all that we do know about them makes them just as human and ordinary as men in a medieval manor or a Greek city.
Looking from our human standpoint up the long perspective of humanity, we simply recognise this thing as human. If we had to recognise it as animal we should have had to recognise it as abnormal. If we chose to look through the other end of the telescope, as I have done more than once in these speculations, if we chose to project the human figure forward out of an unhuman world, we could only say that one of the animals had obviously gone mad. But seeing the thing from the right end, or rather from the inside, we know it is sanity; and we know that these primitive men were sane. We hail a certain human freemasonry wherever we see it, in savages, in foreigners or in historical characters. For instance, all we can infer from primitive legend, and all we know of barbaric life, supports a certain moral and even mystical idea of which the commonest symbol is clothes. For clothes are very literally vestments and man wears them because he is a priest. It is true that even as an animal he is here different from the animals. Nakedness is not nature to him; it is not his life but rather his death; even in the vulgar sense of his death of cold. But clothes are worn for dignity or decency or decoration where they are not in any way wanted for warmth. It would sometimes appear that they are valued for ornament before they are valued for use. It would almost always appear that they are felt to have some connection with decorum. Conventions of this sort vary a great deal with various times and places; and there are some who cannot get over this reflection, and for whom it seems a sufficient argument for letting all conventions slide. They never tire of repeating, with simple wonder, that dress is different in the Cannibal Islands and in Camden Town; they cannot get any further and throw up the whole idea of decency in despair. They might as well say that because there have been hats of a good many different shapes, and some rather eccentric shapes, therefore hats do not matter or do not exist. They would probably add that there is no such thing as sunstroke or going bald. Men have felt everywhere that certain norms were necessary to fence off and protect certain private things from contempt or coarse misunderstanding; and the keeping of those forms, whatever they were, made for dignity and mutual respect. The fact that they mostly refer, more or less remotely, to the relations of the sexes illustrates the two facts that must be put at the very beginning of the record of the race. The first is the fact that original sin is really original. Not merely in theology but in history it is a thing rooted in the origins. Whatever else men have believed, they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind. This sense of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no clothes, just as it has made it impossible to be natural and have no laws. But above all it is to be found in that other fact, which is the father and mother of all laws as it is itself founded on a father and mother; the thing that is before all thrones and even all commonwealths.
È verissimo che questi indizi, sia pure tanto scarsi, li abbiamo soprattutto intorno all’uomo quando esso appare, inconfondibilmente, come uomo. Non possiamo affermare questo né alcun’altra cosa a proposito del presunto animale che in origine avrebbe collegato l’uomo e i bruti. Ma ciò dipende soltanto dal fatto che egli non è un animale, bensì una supposizione. Non possiamo essere certi che il Pitecantropo abbia mai adorato, perché non possiamo essere certi che abbia mai vissuto. Non è che una visione evocata a colmare il vuoto che di fatto si spalanca fra le prime creature che furono con certezza uomini e qualunque altra creatura che sia con certezza scimmia o altro genere di animali. Alcuni frammenti assai dubbi vengono raccogliticci accostati per suggerire una simile creatura intermedia, perché una certa filosofia lo esige; ma nessuno pretende che essi bastino a fondare alcunché di filosofico, neppure a sostegno di quella filosofia. Un frammento di cranio rinvenuto a Giava non può fondare nulla intorno alla religione o all’assenza di religione. Se mai vi fu un simile uomo-scimmia, egli può aver esibito nella religione tanto rituale quanto un uomo, oppure tanta semplicità quanto una scimmia. Può essere stato un mitologo oppure può essere stato un mito. Sarebbe interessante indagare se questa qualità mistica sia comparsa in una transizione dalla scimmia all’uomo, ammesso che vi fossero davvero esemplari di quella transizione su cui indagare. In altre parole, l’anello mancante potrebbe essere o non essere mistico, se non fosse mancante. Ma, a paragone delle prove che abbiamo di esseri umani reali, non abbiamo prova alcuna che egli fosse un essere umano, o un mezzo essere umano, o addirittura un essere. Neppure gli evoluzionisti più intransigenti tentano di dedurre da lui una qualsiasi veduta evolutiva sull’origine della religione. Perfino nello sforzo di dimostrare che la religione crebbe lentamente da fonti rozze o irrazionali, essi cominciano la loro dimostrazione dai primi uomini che furono uomini. Ma la loro stessa dimostrazione prova soltanto che gli uomini i quali erano già uomini erano già mistici. Usavano gli elementi rozzi e irrazionali come soltanto gli uomini e i mistici sanno usarli. Torniamo ancora una volta alla semplice verità: che in un tempo troppo remoto perché questi critici lo possano rintracciare, era avvenuta una transizione della quale ossa e pietre non possono per loro natura rendere testimonianza; e l’uomo divenne un’anima vivente.
Toccando questa faccenda dell’origine della religione, la verità è che coloro i quali cercano così di spiegarla cercano di spiegarla via. Sottilmente sentono che essa appare meno formidabile quando venga in tal modo distesa in un processo graduale e quasi invisibile. Ma in realtà questa prospettiva falsa interamente la verità dell’esperienza. Essi accostano due cose totalmente diverse, gli sparsi indizi di origini evolutive e il blocco solido ed evidente di per sé dell’umanità, e si sforzano di spostare il proprio punto di vista finché non li scorgano allineati in un’unica linea scorciata. Ma è un’illusione ottica. Gli uomini, di fatto, non stanno rispetto alle scimmie o agli anelli mancanti in nessuna di quelle catene in cui gli uomini stanno rispetto agli uomini. Vi possono essere state creature intermedie le cui tracce sbiadite si ritrovano qua e là nell’enorme lacuna. Di questi esseri, se mai esisterono, può darsi che fosse vero che erano cose assai dissimili dagli uomini, ovvero uomini assai dissimili da noi stessi. Ma degli uomini preistorici, come quelli che si chiamano uomini delle caverne o uomini delle renne, ciò non è vero in nessun senso. Gli uomini preistorici di quella specie erano cose esattamente simili agli uomini, e uomini straordinariamente simili a noi stessi. Erano soltanto uomini sui quali non sappiamo gran che, per la semplice ragione che non hanno lasciato documenti né cronache; ma tutto quello che di essi sappiamo li rende umani e ordinari esattamente quanto gli uomini di un maniero medievale o di una città greca.
Guardando dal nostro punto di vista umano su per la lunga prospettiva dell’umanità, riconosciamo semplicemente questa cosa come umana. Se dovessimo riconoscerla come animale, avremmo dovuto riconoscerla come anormale. Se scegliessimo di guardare attraverso l’altra estremità del cannocchiale, come ho fatto più d’una volta in queste speculazioni, se scegliessimo di proiettare la figura umana in avanti a partire da un mondo non umano, potremmo solo dire che uno degli animali era evidentemente impazzito. Ma vedendo la cosa dall’estremità giusta, o meglio dal di dentro, sappiamo che è sanità di mente; e sappiamo che questi uomini primitivi erano sani di mente. Salutiamo una certa massoneria umana ovunque la scorgiamo, nei selvaggi, negli stranieri o nei personaggi storici. Per esempio, tutto ciò che possiamo inferire dalla leggenda primitiva, e tutto ciò che sappiamo della vita barbarica, avvalora una certa idea morale e persino mistica, il cui simbolo più comune sono gli abiti. Poiché gli abiti sono, assai letteralmente, paramenti, e l’uomo li indossa perché è un sacerdote. È vero che perfino come animale egli è, in questo, diverso dagli animali. La nudità non gli è natura; non è la sua vita, ma piuttosto la sua morte; anche nel senso volgare della sua morte per il freddo. Ma gli abiti si portano per dignità o decenza o ornamento là dove non servono in alcun modo a riscaldare. Talvolta parrebbe che siano apprezzati per l’ornamento prima ancora che per l’uso. E parrebbe quasi sempre che li si senta connessi con un qualche decoro. Le convenzioni di questo genere variano assai col variare dei tempi e dei luoghi; e vi è chi non riesce a superare tale riflessione, e a cui essa sembra argomento sufficiente per lasciar cadere ogni convenzione. Non si stancano mai di ripetere, con ingenua meraviglia, che l’abito è diverso nelle Isole dei Cannibali e a Camden Town; non sanno andare oltre, e gettano a mare tutta l’idea della decenza nella disperazione. Tanto varrebbe che dicessero che, poiché sono esistiti cappelli di parecchie fogge diverse, e certe fogge alquanto stravaganti, allora i cappelli non contano o non esistono. Aggiungerebbero probabilmente che non esistono l’insolazione né la calvizie. Gli uomini hanno sentito dappertutto che certe norme erano necessarie per recingere e proteggere certe cose intime dal disprezzo o dal grossolano fraintendimento; e l’osservanza di quelle forme, quali che fossero, giovava alla dignità e al rispetto reciproco. Il fatto che esse per lo più si riferiscano, più o meno remotamente, ai rapporti fra i sessi illustra i due fatti che devono essere posti proprio all’inizio della cronaca della stirpe. Il primo è il fatto che il peccato originale è davvero originario. Non soltanto in teologia, ma nella storia, è una cosa radicata nelle origini. Qualunque altra cosa gli uomini abbiano creduto, tutti hanno creduto che qualcosa non vada nel genere umano. Questo senso del peccato ha reso impossibile essere naturali e non aver vesti, così come ha reso impossibile essere naturali e non aver leggi. Ma soprattutto lo si ritrova in quell’altro fatto, che è il padre e la madre di tutte le leggi, come esso stesso è fondato su un padre e una madre; la cosa che precede tutti i troni e persino tutte le repubbliche.
That fact is the family. Here again we must keep the enormous proportions of a normal thing clear of various modifications and degrees and doubts more or less reasonable, like clouds clinging about a mountain. It may be that what we call the family had to fight its way from or through various anarchies and aberrations; but it certainly survived them and is quite as likely as not to have also preceded them. As we shall see in the case of communism and nomadism, more formless things could and did lie on the flank of societies that had taken a fixed form; but there is nothing to show that the form did not exist before the formlessness. What is vital is that form is more important than formlessness; and that the material called mankind has taken this form. For instance, of the rules revolving round sex, which were recently mentioned, none is more curious than the savage custom commonly called the couvade. That seems like a law out of topsyturvydom; by which the father is treated as if he were the mother. In any case it clearly involves the mystical sense of sex; but many have maintained that it is really a symbolic act by which the father accepts the responsibility of fatherhood. In that case that grotesque antic is really a very solemn act; for it is the foundation of all we call the family and all we know as human society. Some groping in these dark beginnings have said that mankind was once under a matriarchy; I suppose that under a matriarchy it would not be called mankind but womankind. But others have conjectured that what is called matriarchy was simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remained fixed because all the fathers were fugitive and irresponsible. Then came the moment when the man decided to guard and guide what he had created. So he became the head of the family, not as a bully with a big club to beat women with, but rather as a respectable person trying to be a responsible person. Now all that might be perfectly true, and might even have been the first family act, and it would still be true that man then for the first time acted like a man, and therefore for the first time became fully a man. But it might quite as well be true that the matriarchy or moral anarchy, or whatever we call it, was only one of the hundred social dissolutions or barbaric backslidings which may have occurred at intervals in prehistoric as they certainly did in historic times. A symbol like the couvade, if it was really such a symbol, may have commemorated the suppression of a heresy rather than the first rise of a religion. We cannot conclude with any certainty about these things, except in their big results in the building of mankind, but we can say in what style the bulk of it and the best of it is built. We can say that the family is the unit of the state; that it is the cell that makes up the formation. Round the family do indeed gather the sanctities that separate men from ants and bees. Decency is the curtain of that tent; liberty is the wall of that city; property is but the family farm; honour is but the family flag. In the practical proportions of human history, we come back to that fundamental of the father and the mother and the child. It has been said already that if this story cannot start with religious assumptions, it must none the less start with some moral or metaphysical assumptions, or no sense can be made of the story of man. And this is a very good instance of that alternative necessity. If we are not of those who begin by invoking a divine Trinity, we must none the less invoke a human Trinity; and see that triangle repeated everywhere in the pattern of the world. For the highest event in history, to which all history looks forward and leads up, is only something that is at once the reversal and the renewal of that triangle. Or rather it is the one triangle superimposed so as to intersect the other, making a sacred pentacle of which, in a mightier sense than that of the magicians, the fiends are afraid. The old Trinity was of father and mother and child and is called the human family. The new is of child and mother and father and has the name of the Holy Family. It is in no way altered except in being entirely reversed; just as the world which is transformed was not in the least different, except in being turned upside-down.
Questo fatto è la famiglia. Anche qui dobbiamo mantenere le enormi proporzioni di una cosa normale al riparo dalle varie modificazioni, dalle gradazioni e dai dubbi più o meno ragionevoli, come nuvole aggrappate a una montagna. Può darsi che ciò che chiamiamo famiglia abbia dovuto farsi strada a partire da, o attraverso, varie anarchie e aberrazioni; ma di certo è sopravvissuta ad esse ed è altrettanto probabile che le abbia anche precedute. Come vedremo nel caso del comunismo e del nomadismo, cose più informi potevano stare, e stettero, sul fianco di società che avevano assunto una forma fissa; ma nulla prova che la forma non esistesse prima dell’informità. Ciò che è vitale è che la forma sia più importante dell’informità; e che la materia chiamata umanità abbia assunto questa forma. Per esempio, tra le regole che ruotano attorno al sesso, di cui si è fatta poco fa menzione, nessuna è più curiosa della selvaggia usanza comunemente detta la couvade. Sembra una legge uscita dal paese del sottosopra; per la quale il padre viene trattato come se fosse la madre. In ogni caso essa implica chiaramente il senso mistico del sesso; ma molti hanno sostenuto che si tratti in realtà di un atto simbolico con cui il padre accetta la responsabilità della paternità. In tal caso quella grottesca pantomima è in realtà un atto solennissimo; poiché è il fondamento di tutto ciò che chiamiamo famiglia e di tutto ciò che conosciamo come società umana. Alcuni, brancolando in questi oscuri inizi, hanno detto che l’umanità fu un tempo sotto un matriarcato; suppongo che sotto un matriarcato non la si chiamerebbe umanità ma femminilità. Ma altri hanno congetturato che ciò che si chiama matriarcato fosse semplicemente anarchia morale, in cui la madre sola rimaneva fissa perché tutti i padri erano fuggitivi e irresponsabili. Poi venne il momento in cui l’uomo decise di custodire e guidare ciò che aveva creato. Così divenne il capo della famiglia, non come un bruto con una grossa clava per picchiare le donne, ma piuttosto come una persona rispettabile che cerca di essere una persona responsabile. Ora, tutto ciò potrebbe essere perfettamente vero, e potrebbe persino essere stato il primo atto familiare, e sarebbe pur sempre vero che l’uomo allora per la prima volta agì da uomo, e perciò per la prima volta divenne pienamente uomo. Ma potrebbe altrettanto bene essere vero che il matriarcato o l’anarchia morale, o comunque la si chiami, fosse solo una delle cento dissoluzioni sociali o ricadute barbariche che possono essersi verificate a intervalli nella preistoria come certamente accaddero in tempi storici. Un simbolo come la couvade, se davvero fu un tale simbolo, può aver commemorato la soppressione di un’eresia più che il primo sorgere di una religione. Non possiamo concludere nulla con certezza su queste cose, salvo che nei loro grandi risultati nell’edificazione dell’umanità, ma possiamo dire in quale stile ne sia costruita la maggior parte e la parte migliore. Possiamo dire che la famiglia è l’unità dello Stato; che è la cellula che compone la formazione. Attorno alla famiglia si radunano davvero le sacralità che separano gli uomini dalle formiche e dalle api. Il decoro è la tenda di quel padiglione; la libertà è il muro di quella città; la proprietà non è che la fattoria di famiglia; l’onore non è che la bandiera di famiglia. Nelle proporzioni pratiche della storia umana, torniamo a quel fondamento del padre, della madre e del figlio. Si è già detto che, se questa storia non può cominciare con assunti religiosi, deve nondimeno cominciare con qualche assunto morale o metafisico, altrimenti non si può dare senso alcuno alla storia dell’uomo. E questo è un ottimo esempio di quella necessità alternativa. Se non siamo di coloro che cominciano invocando una Trinità divina, dobbiamo nondimeno invocare una Trinità umana; e vedere quel triangolo ripetersi ovunque nel disegno del mondo. Poiché il più alto evento della storia, a cui tutta la storia guarda e conduce, è soltanto qualcosa che è a un tempo il rovesciamento e il rinnovamento di quel triangolo. O piuttosto è l’unico triangolo sovrapposto in modo da intersecare l’altro, formando un sacro pentacolo di cui, in un senso più possente di quello dei maghi, i demòni hanno paura. L’antica Trinità era di padre, madre e figlio e si chiama la famiglia umana. La nuova è di figlio, madre e padre e ha il nome della Sacra Famiglia. Non è in alcun modo mutata, se non nell’essere interamente rovesciata; proprio come il mondo che ne viene trasformato non era per nulla diverso, se non nell’essere capovolto.
III
THE ANTIQUITY OF CIVILISATION
The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been like a man watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting to see that dawn breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks. But that dawn is breaking behind the black bulk of great cities long builded and lost for us in the original night; colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees; in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size of the man; with tombs like mountains of man set four-square and pointing to the stars; with winged and bearded bulls standing and staring enormous at the gates of temples; standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake the world. The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilized. Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old. And among other more important things, it reveals the folly of most of the generalisations about the previous and unknown period when it was really young. The two first human societies of which we have any reliable and detailed record are Babylon and Egypt. It so happens that these two vast and splendid achievements of the genius of the ancients bear witness against two of the commonest and crudest assumptions of the culture of the moderns. If we want to get rid of half the nonsense about nomads and cave-men and the old man of the forest, we need only look steadily at the two solid and stupendous facts called Egypt and Babylon.
Of course most of these speculators who are talking about primitive men are thinking about modern savages. They prove their progressive evolution by assuming that a great part of the human race has not progressed or evolved; or even changed in any way at all. I do not agree with their theory of change; nor do I agree with their dogma of things unchangeable. I may not believe that civilised man has had so rapid and recent a progress; but I cannot quite understand why uncivilised man should be so mystically immortal and immutable. A somewhat simpler mode of thought and speech seems to me to be needed throughout this inquiry. Modern savages cannot be exactly like primitive man, because they are not primitive. Modern savages are not ancient because they are modern. Something has happened to their race as much as to ours, during the thousands of years of our existence and endurance on the earth. They have had some experiences, and have presumably acted on them if not profited by them. Like the rest of us. They have had some environment, and even some change of environment, and have presumably adapted themselves to it in a proper and decorous evolutionary manner. This would be true even if the experiences were mild or the environment dreary; for there is an effect in mere time when it takes the moral form of monotony. But it has appeared to a good many intelligent and well-informed people quite as probable that the experience of the savages has been that of a decline from civilisation. Most of those who criticise this view do not seem to have any very clear notion of what a decline from civilisation would be like. Heaven help them, it is likely enough that they will soon find out. They seem to be content if cave-men and cannibal islanders have some things in common; such as certain particular implements. But it is obvious on the face of it that any peoples reduced for any reason to a ruder life would have some things in common. If we lost all our firearms we should make bows and arrows; but we should not necessarily resemble in every way the first men who made bows and arrows. It is said that the Russians in their great retreat were so short of armament that they fought with clubs cut in the wood. But a professor of the future would err in supposing that the Russian army of 1916 was a naked Scythian tribe that had never been out of the wood. It is like saying that a man in his second childhood must exactly copy his first. A baby is bald like an old man; but it would be an error for one ignorant of infancy to infer that the baby had a long white beard. Both a baby and an old man walk with difficulty; but he who shall expect the old gentleman to lie on his back, and kick joyfully instead, will be disappointed.
It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must have been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings of it. There were almost certainly some things, there were probably many things, in which the two were widely different or flatly contrary. An example of the way in which this distinction works, and an example essential to our argument here, is that of the nature and origin of government. I have already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells and the Old Man, with whom he appears to be on such intimate terms. If we considered the cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this portrait of the prehistoric chief of the tribe, we could only excuse it by saying that its brilliant and versatile author simply forgot for a moment that he was supposed to be writing a history, and dreamed he was writing one of his own very wonderful and imaginative romances. At least I cannot imagine how he can possibly know that the prehistoric ruler was called the Old Man or that court etiquette requires it to be spelt with capital letters. He says of the same potentate, ‘No one was allowed to touch his spear or to sit in his seat.’ I have difficulty in believing that anybody has dug up a prehistoric spear with a prehistoric label, ‘Visitors are Requested not to Touch,’ or a complete throne with the inscription, ‘Reserved for the Old Man.’ But it may be presumed that the writer, who can hardly be supposed to be merely making up things out of his own head, was merely taking for granted this very dubious parallel between the prehistoric and the decivilised man. It may be that in certain savage tribes the chief is called the Old Man and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or sit on his seat. It may be that in those cases he is surrounded with superstitious and traditional terrors; and it may be that in those cases, for all I know, he is despotic and tyrannical. But there is not a grain of evidence that primitive government was despotic and tyrannical. It may have been, of course, for it may have been anything or even nothing; it may not have existed at all. But the despotism in certain dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth century does not prove that the first men were ruled despotically. It does not even suggest it; it does not even begin to hint at it. If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. It is also true that they sometimes needed him for some sudden and militant act of reform; it is equally true that he often took advantage of being the strong man armed to be a tyrant like some of the Sultans of the East. But I cannot see why the Sultan should have appeared any earlier in history than many other human figures. On the contrary, the strong man armed obviously depends upon the superiority of his armour, and armament of that sort comes with more complex civilisation. One man may kill twenty with a machine-gum; it is obviously less likely that he could do it with a piece of flint. As for the current cant about the strongest man ruling by force and fear, it is simply a nursery fairy-tale about a giant with a hundred hands. Twenty men could hold down the strongest strong man in any society, ancient or modern. Undoubtedly they might admire, in a romantic and poetical sense, the man who was really the strongest; but that is quite a different thing, and is as purely moral and even mystical as the admiration for the purest or the wisest. But the spirit that endures the mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is the spirit of an ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new one. As his name implies, the Old Man is the ruler of an old humanity.
III
L’ANTICHITÀ DELLA CIVILTÀ
L’uomo moderno che guarda alle più antiche origini è stato come un uomo che spia lo spuntar del giorno in una terra straniera; e si aspetta di vedere quell’alba sorgere dietro nude alture o vette solitarie. Ma quell’alba sorge dietro la nera mole di grandi città edificate da tempo e per noi perdute nell’originaria notte; città colossali come le case dei giganti, in cui perfino gli scolpiti animali ornamentali sono più alti delle palme; in cui il ritratto dipinto può essere dodici volte la grandezza dell’uomo; con tombe simili a montagne d’uomo poste in quadrato e puntate verso le stelle; con tori alati e barbuti ritti a fissare enormi ai portali dei templi; ritti immobili in eterno come se un colpo di zoccolo dovesse scuotere il mondo. L’alba della storia rivela un’umanità già civilizzata. Forse rivela una civiltà già antica. E fra altre cose più importanti, rivela la follia di gran parte delle generalizzazioni sul precedente e ignoto periodo in cui essa era davvero giovane. Le due prime società umane di cui abbiamo qualche testimonianza attendibile e particolareggiata sono Babilonia e l’Egitto. Accade che questi due vasti e splendidi risultati del genio degli antichi rechino testimonianza contro due dei più comuni e grossolani assunti della cultura dei moderni. Se vogliamo sbarazzarci di metà delle sciocchezze sui nomadi, sugli uomini delle caverne e sul vecchio della foresta, basta guardare fermamente ai due solidi e stupendi fatti chiamati Egitto e Babilonia.
Naturalmente la maggior parte di questi teorici che parlano dell’uomo primitivo hanno in mente i selvaggi moderni. Dimostrano la loro evoluzione progressiva presupponendo che gran parte del genere umano non sia progredita né si sia evoluta; anzi, che non sia affatto mutata in alcun modo. Non condivido la loro teoria del mutamento; né condivido il loro dogma delle cose immutabili. Potrò anche non credere che l’uomo civile abbia compiuto un progresso tanto rapido e recente; ma non riesco a capire bene perché l’uomo incivile debba essere così misticamente immortale e immutabile. Mi pare che in tutta questa indagine occorra un modo di pensare e di parlare alquanto più semplice. I selvaggi moderni non possono essere esattamente come l’uomo primitivo, per la ragione che non sono primitivi. I selvaggi moderni non sono antichi, per la ragione che sono moderni. Qualcosa è accaduto alla loro stirpe non meno che alla nostra, durante le migliaia di anni della nostra esistenza e della nostra resistenza sulla terra. Hanno avuto qualche esperienza, e presumibilmente hanno agito in base a essa, se non ne hanno tratto profitto. Come tutti noialtri. Hanno avuto un qualche ambiente, e persino un qualche mutamento d’ambiente, e presumibilmente vi si sono adattati in una maniera evolutiva conveniente e decorosa. E ciò sarebbe vero anche se le esperienze fossero state blande o l’ambiente monotono; poiché vi è un effetto nel puro tempo, quando esso assume la forma morale della monotonia. Ma a un buon numero di persone intelligenti e bene informate è parso altrettanto probabile che l’esperienza dei selvaggi sia stata quella di un declino dalla civiltà. Quasi nessuno di coloro che criticano questa opinione sembra avere un’idea molto chiara di che cosa sarebbe un declino dalla civiltà. Il Cielo li aiuti: è assai verosimile che presto lo scopriranno. Sembrano appagarsi del fatto che gli uomini delle caverne e i cannibali delle isole abbiano alcune cose in comune; per esempio certi particolari strumenti. Ma è evidente a prima vista che due popoli qualsiasi ridotti per un qualunque motivo a una vita più rozza avrebbero alcune cose in comune. Se perdessimo tutte le nostre armi da fuoco, ci costruiremmo archi e frecce; ma non assomiglieremmo necessariamente in ogni cosa ai primi uomini che fabbricarono archi e frecce. Si dice che i Russi, nella loro grande ritirata, fossero così a corto di armi da combattere con clave tagliate nel bosco. Ma un professore del futuro sbaglierebbe nel supporre che l’esercito russo del 1916 fosse una nuda tribù di Sciti che non era mai uscita dal bosco. È come dire che un uomo nella sua seconda fanciullezza debba ricopiare esattamente la prima. Un neonato è calvo come un vecchio; ma sarebbe un errore, per chi ignorasse che cosa sia l’infanzia, dedurne che il neonato avesse una lunga barba bianca. Sia il neonato sia il vecchio camminano a stento; ma chi si aspettasse che il vecchio signore si sdrai supino e scalci allegramente resterebbe deluso.
È dunque assurdo sostenere che i primi pionieri dell’umanità debbano essere stati identici ad alcune delle sue ultime e più stagnanti scorie. Vi erano quasi certamente alcune cose, e probabilmente molte cose, in cui i due erano ampiamente diversi o addirittura del tutto contrari. Un esempio del modo in cui questa distinzione opera, ed esempio essenziale al nostro argomento in questa sede, è quello della natura e dell’origine del governo. Ho già accennato al signor H. G. Wells e al Vecchio, col quale egli pare essere in così intimi rapporti. Se considerassimo i freddi fatti della testimonianza preistorica a proposito di questo ritratto del preistorico capo della tribù, potremmo scusarlo soltanto dicendo che il suo brillante e versatile autore semplicemente dimenticò per un momento di dover scrivere una storia, e sognò di scrivere uno dei suoi meravigliosi e fantasiosi romanzi. Per lo meno non riesco a immaginare come egli possa mai sapere che il sovrano preistorico fosse chiamato il Vecchio, o che l’etichetta di corte esiga che lo si scriva con le lettere maiuscole. Del medesimo potentato egli dice: «A nessuno era consentito toccare la sua lancia o sedersi al suo posto». Faccio fatica a credere che qualcuno abbia dissotterrato una lancia preistorica con una etichetta preistorica: «Si prega i visitatori di non toccare», oppure un trono completo con la iscrizione: «Riservato al Vecchio». Ma si può presumere che lo scrittore, il quale non si può certo supporre stia semplicemente inventando cose di sana pianta, stesse semplicemente dando per scontato questo assai dubbio parallelo tra l’uomo preistorico e l’uomo decivilizzato. Può darsi che presso certe tribù selvagge il capo sia chiamato il Vecchio e a nessuno sia consentito toccare la sua lancia o sedersi al suo posto. Può darsi che in quei casi egli sia circondato da terrori superstiziosi e tradizionali; e può darsi che in quei casi, per quel che ne so, egli sia dispotico e tirannico. Ma non vi è un briciolo di prova che il governo primitivo fosse dispotico e tirannico. Può esserlo stato, s’intende, giacché può essere stato qualsiasi cosa o anche niente; può darsi che non sia affatto esistito. Ma il dispotismo di certe squallide e decadute tribù del ventesimo secolo non prova che i primi uomini fossero governati dispoticamente. Non lo lascia neppure supporre; non comincia neppure ad accennarlo. Se vi è un fatto che possiamo davvero provare, dalla storia che davvero conosciamo, è che il dispotismo può essere uno sviluppo, spesso uno sviluppo tardivo e ben sovente la fine di società che erano state altamente democratiche. Un dispotismo si potrebbe quasi definire una democrazia stanca. Man mano che la stanchezza cala su una comunità, i cittadini sono meno inclini a quell’eterna vigilanza che è stata giustamente chiamata il prezzo della libertà; e preferiscono armare una sola sentinella a guardia della città mentre essi dormono. È altrettanto vero che talvolta ne avevano bisogno per qualche improvviso e battagliero atto di riforma; ed è ugualmente vero che egli spesso approfittò di essere l’uomo forte in armi per farsi tiranno, come alcuni dei Sultani d’Oriente. Ma non vedo perché il Sultano avrebbe dovuto comparire nella storia prima di tante altre figure umane. Al contrario, l’uomo forte in armi dipende evidentemente dalla superiorità della sua armatura, e un armamento di quel genere viene con una civiltà più complessa. Un solo uomo può ucciderne venti con una mitragliatrice; è evidentemente meno probabile che possa farlo con una scheggia di selce. Quanto alle correnti chiacchiere sul più forte che governa con la forza e con la paura, non è che una favola da nursery su un gigante dalle cento mani. Venti uomini potrebbero tenere a terra l’uomo più forte di qualsiasi società, antica o moderna. Senza dubbio potrebbero ammirare, in senso romantico e poetico, l’uomo che era davvero il più forte; ma questa è cosa del tutto diversa, ed è puramente morale e persino mistica quanto l’ammirazione per il più puro o il più saggio. Ma lo spirito che sopporta le mere crudeltà e i capricci di un dispota costituito è lo spirito di una società antica e assestata e probabilmente irrigidita, non lo spirito di una società nuova. Come il suo nome implica, il Vecchio è il sovrano di un’umanità vecchia.
It is far more probable that a primitive society was something like a pure democracy. To this day the comparatively simple agricultural communities are by far the purest democracies. Democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilisation. Anyone who likes may state it by saying that democracy is the foe of civilisation. But he must remember that some of us really prefer democracy to civilisation, in the sense of preferring democracy to complexity. Anyhow, peasants tilling patches of their own land in a rough equality, and meeting to vote directly under a village tree, are the most truly self-governing of men. It is surely as likely as not that such a simple idea was found in the first condition of even simpler men. Indeed the despotic vision is exaggerated, even if we do not regard the men as men. Even on an evolutionary assumption of the most materialistic sort, there is really no reason why men should not have had at least as much camaraderie as rats or rooks. Leadership of some sort they doubtless had, as have the gregarious animals; but leadership implies no such irrational servility as that attributed to the superstitious subjects of the Old Man. There was doubtless some body corresponding, to use Tennyson’s expression, to the many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home. But I fancy that if that venerable fowl began to act after the fashion of some Sultans in ancient and decayed Asia, it would become a very clanging rookery and the many-wintered crow would not see many more winters. It may be remarked, in this connection, but even among animals it would seem that something else is respected more than bestial violence, if it be only the familiarity which in men is called tradition or the experience which in men is called wisdom. I do not know if crows really follow the oldest crow, but if they do they are certainly not following the strongest crow. And I do know, in the human case, that if some ritual of seniority keeps savages reverencing somebody called Old Man, then at least they have not our own servile sentimental weakness for worshipping the Strong Man.
It may be said then that primitive government, like primitive art and religion and everything else, is very imperfectly known or rather guessed at; but that it is at least as good a guess to suggest that it was as popular as a Balkan or Pyrenean village as that it was as capricious and secret as a Turkish divan. Both the mountain democracy and the oriental palace are modern in the sense that they are still there, or are some sort of growth of history; but of the two the palace has much more the look of being an accumulation and a corruption, the village much more the look of being a really unchanged and primitive thing. But my suggestions at this point do not go beyond expressing a wholesome doubt about the current assumption. I think it interesting, for instance, that liberal institutions have been traced even by moderns back to barbarians or undeveloped states, when it happened to be convenient for the support of some race or nation or philosophy. So the Socialists profess that their ideal of communal property existed in very early times. So the Jews are proud of the Jubilees or juster redistributions under their ancient law. So the Teutonists boasted of tracing parliaments and juries and various popular things among the Germanic tribes of the north. So the Celtophiles and those testifying to the wrongs of Ireland have pleaded the more equal justice of the clan system, to which the Irish chiefs bore witness before Strongbow. The strength of the case varies in the different cases; but as there is some case for all of them, I suspect there is some case for the general proposition that popular institutions of some sort were by no means uncommon in early and simple societies. Each of these separate schools were making the admission to prove a particular modern thesis; but taken together they suggest a more ancient and general truth, that there was something more in prehistoric councils than ferocity and fear. Each of these separate theorists had his own axe to grind, but he was willing to use a stone axe; and he manages to suggest that the stone axe might have been as republican as the guillotine.
But the truth is that the curtain rises upon the play already in progress. In one sense it is a true paradox that there was history before history. But it is not the irrational paradox implied in prehistoric history; for it is a history we do not know. Very probably it was exceedingly like the history we do know, except in the one detail that we do not know it. It is thus the very opposite of the pretentious prehistoric history, which professes to trace everything in a consistent course from the amoeba to the anthropoid and from the anthropoid to the agnostic. So far from being a question of our knowing all about queer creatures very different from ourselves, they were very probably people very like ourselves, except that we know nothing about them. In other words, our most ancient records only reach back to a time when humanity had long been human, and even long been civilised. The most ancient records we have not only mention but take for granted things like kings and priests and princes and assemblies of the people; they describe communities that are roughly recognisable as communities in our own sense. Some of them are despotic; but we cannot tell that they have always been despotic. Some of them may be already decadent and nearly all are mentioned as if they were old. We do not know what really happened in the world before those records; but the little we do know would leave us anything but astonished if we learnt that it was very much like what happens in this world now. There would be nothing inconsistent or confounding about the discovery that those unknown ages were full of republics collapsing under monarchies and rising again as republics, empires expanding and finding colonies and then losing colonies. Kingdoms combining again into world states and breaking up again into small nationalities, classes selling themselves into slavery and marching out once more into liberty; all that procession of humanity which may or may not be a progress but most assuredly a romance. But the first chapters of the romance have been torn out of the book; and we shall never read them.
È assai più probabile che una società primitiva assomigliasse a una pura democrazia. Ancora oggi le comunità agricole relativamente semplici sono di gran lunga le democrazie più pure. La democrazia è una cosa che continua a rovinare per la complessità della civiltà. Chi voglia può esprimerlo dicendo che la democrazia è la nemica della civiltà. Ma deve ricordare che alcuni di noi preferiscono davvero la democrazia alla civiltà, nel senso di preferire la democrazia alla complessità. Comunque sia, i contadini che coltivano i propri appezzamenti in una rozza uguaglianza, e si riuniscono per votare direttamente sotto l’albero del villaggio, sono gli uomini che più veramente si governano da sé. È dunque tanto probabile quanto no che un’idea così semplice si trovasse nella prima condizione di uomini persino più semplici. In verità la visione dispotica è esagerata, anche se non consideriamo gli uomini come uomini. Persino in un’ipotesi evoluzionistica del tipo più materialistico, non vi è davvero alcuna ragione perché gli uomini non dovessero avere almeno tanto cameratismo quanto i ratti o le cornacchie. Una qualche forma di guida senza dubbio l’avevano, come l’hanno gli animali gregari; ma la guida non implica quella servilità irrazionale che si attribuisce ai sudditi superstiziosi del Vecchio. Vi era senza dubbio qualche corpo corrispondente, per usare l’espressione di Tennyson, alla cornacchia dai molti inverni che conduce a casa lo stormo garrulo. Ma immagino che, se quel venerabile volatile cominciasse ad agire alla maniera di certi Sultani dell’antica e decaduta Asia, diverrebbe uno stormo assai garrulo e la cornacchia dai molti inverni non vedrebbe molti altri inverni. Si può osservare, a questo proposito, che persino tra gli animali parrebbe che qualcos’altro sia rispettato più della violenza bestiale, non fosse che quella familiarità che negli uomini si chiama tradizione o quell’esperienza che negli uomini si chiama saggezza. Non so se le cornacchie seguano davvero la cornacchia più vecchia, ma se lo fanno, di certo non seguono la cornacchia più forte. E so, nel caso umano, che se qualche rito di anzianità induce i selvaggi a riverire qualcuno chiamato il Vecchio, allora almeno essi non hanno la nostra servile e sentimentale debolezza per l’adorazione dell’Uomo Forte.
Si può dunque dire che il governo primitivo, come l’arte e la religione primitive e ogni altra cosa, è conosciuto — o piuttosto congetturato — assai imperfettamente; ma che è almeno una congettura tanto buona supporre che fosse popolare come un villaggio balcanico o pirenaico, quanto che fosse capriccioso e segreto come un divano turco. Sia la democrazia montanara sia il palazzo orientale sono moderni nel senso che sono ancora là, o sono una qualche sorta di crescita della storia; ma dei due il palazzo ha molto più l’aspetto di un’accumulazione e di una corruzione, il villaggio molto più l’aspetto di una cosa davvero immutata e primitiva. Ma i miei suggerimenti a questo punto non vanno oltre l’esprimere un salutare dubbio sull’assunto corrente. Trovo interessante, per esempio, che le istituzioni liberali siano state fatte risalire persino da moderni ai barbari o a stati non sviluppati, quando ciò accadeva di tornare comodo a sostegno di qualche razza o nazione o filosofia. Così i Socialisti professano che il loro ideale di proprietà comune esisteva in tempi assai remoti. Così gli Ebrei si vantano dei Giubilei o delle più giuste ridistribuzioni sotto la loro antica legge. Così i Teutonisti si vantavano di rintracciare parlamenti e giurie e varie cose popolari tra le tribù germaniche del nord. Così i Celtofili e coloro che testimoniano dei torti dell’Irlanda hanno addotto la più equa giustizia del sistema clanico, di cui i capi irlandesi resero testimonianza prima di Strongbow. La forza dell’argomento varia nei diversi casi; ma poiché vi è qualche argomento per tutti, sospetto che vi sia qualche argomento per la proposizione generale che istituzioni popolari di qualche sorta non erano affatto rare nelle società precoci e semplici. Ciascuna di queste scuole separate faceva l’ammissione per provare una particolare tesi moderna; ma prese insieme suggeriscono una verità più antica e generale, che vi era qualcosa di più, nei consigli preistorici, che ferocia e paura. Ciascuno di questi teorici separati aveva il proprio interesse da difendere, ma era disposto a usare un’ascia di pietra; e riesce a suggerire che l’ascia di pietra potesse essere tanto repubblicana quanto la ghigliottina.
Ma la verità è che il sipario si leva su una recita già in corso. In un certo senso è un vero paradosso che vi fosse storia prima della storia. Ma non è l’irrazionale paradosso implicito nella storia preistorica; poiché è una storia che non conosciamo. Assai probabilmente essa era straordinariamente simile alla storia che conosciamo, tranne nell’unico particolare che non la conosciamo. Essa è dunque l’esatto opposto della pretenziosa storia preistorica, che pretende di rintracciare ogni cosa in un corso coerente dall’ameba all’antropoide e dall’antropoide all’agnostico. Ben lungi dall’essere questione del nostro sapere tutto su strane creature molto diverse da noi, essi erano assai probabilmente gente molto simile a noi, tranne che di loro non sappiamo nulla. In altre parole, i nostri documenti più antichi risalgono soltanto a un tempo in cui l’umanità era da lungo umana, e persino da lungo civilizzata. I documenti più antichi che abbiamo non solo menzionano ma danno per scontate cose come re e sacerdoti e principi e assemblee del popolo; descrivono comunità che sono grossolanamente riconoscibili come comunità nel nostro stesso senso. Alcune di esse sono dispotiche; ma non possiamo dire che siano state sempre dispotiche. Alcune di esse possono essere già decadenti e quasi tutte sono menzionate come se fossero antiche. Non sappiamo che cosa realmente accadde nel mondo prima di quei documenti; ma il poco che sappiamo non ci lascerebbe affatto stupiti se apprendessimo che fu molto simile a ciò che accade in questo mondo oggi. Non vi sarebbe nulla di incoerente o di sconcertante nella scoperta che quelle età ignote fossero piene di repubbliche che crollavano sotto le monarchie e risorgevano di nuovo come repubbliche, di imperi che si espandevano e trovavano colonie e poi perdevano colonie. Regni che si combinavano di nuovo in stati mondiali e si frantumavano di nuovo in piccole nazionalità, classi che si vendevano nella schiavitù e marciavano ancora una volta verso la libertà; tutta quella processione dell’umanità che può essere o non essere un progresso, ma è assai certamente un romanzo. Ma i primi capitoli del romanzo sono stati strappati dal libro; e non li leggeremo mai.
It is so also with the more special fancy about evolution and social stability. According to the real records available, barbarism and civilisation were not successive states in the progress of the world. They were conditions that existed side by side, as they still exist side by side. There were civilisations then as there are civilisations now; there are savages now as there were savages then. It is suggested that all men passed through a nomadic stage; but it is certain that there are some who have never passed out of it, and it seems not unlikely that there were some who never passed into it. It is probable that from very primitive times the static tiller of the soil and the wandering shepherd were two distinct types of men; and the chronological rearrangement of them is but a mark of that mania for progressive stages that has largely falsified history. It is suggested that there was a communist stage, in which private property was everywhere unknown, a whole humanity living on the negation of property; but the evidences of this negation are themselves rather negative. Redistributions of property, jubilees, and agrarian laws, occur at various intervals and in various forms; but that humanity inevitably passed through a communist stage seems as doubtful as the parallel proposition that humanity will inevitably return to it. It is chiefly interesting as evidence that the boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary. There is an amusing parallel example in the case of what is called feminism. In spite of all the pseudo-scientific gossip about marriage by capture and the cave-man beating the cave-woman with a club, it may be noted that as soon as feminism became a fashionable cry, it was insisted that human civilisation in its first stage had been a matriarchy. Apparently it was the cave-woman who carried the club. Anyhow all these ideas are little better than guesses; they have a curious way of following the fortune of modern theories and fads. In any case they are not history in the sense of record; and we may repeat that when it comes to record, the broad truth is that barbarism and civilisation have always dwelt side by side in the world, the civilisation sometimes spreading to absorb the barbarians, sometimes decaying into relative barbarism, and in almost all cases possessing in a more finished form certain ideas and institutions which the barbarians possess in a ruder form; such as government or social authority, the arts and especially the decorative arts, mysteries and taboos of various kinds especially surrounding the matter of sex, and some form of that fundamental thing which is the chief concern of this enquiry; the thing that we call religion.
Now Egypt and Babylon, those two primeval monsters, might in this matter have been specially provided as models. They might almost be called working models to show how these modern theories do not work. The two great truths we know about these two great cultures happen to contradict flatly the two current fallacies which have just been considered. The story of Egypt might have been invented to point the moral that man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is exhausted. And the story of Babylon might have been invented to point the moral that man need not be a nomad or a communist before he becomes a peasant or a citizen, and that such cultures are not always in successive stages but often in contemporary states. Even touching these great civilisations with which our written history begins there is a temptation of course to be too ingenious or too cocksure. We can read the bricks of Babylon in a very different sense from that in which we guess about the Cup and Ring stones; and we do definitely know what is meant by the animals in the Egyptian hieroglyphic as we know nothing of the animal in the neolithic cave. But even here the admirable archeologists who have deciphered line after line of miles of hieroglyphics may be tempted to read too much between the lines; even the real authority on Babylon may forget how fragmentary is his hard-won knowledge; may forget that Babylon has only heaved half a brick at him, though half a brick is better than no cuneiform. But some truths, historic and not prehistoric, dogmatic and not evolutionary, facts and not fancies, do indeed emerge from Egypt and Babylon; and these two truths are among them.
Egypt is a green ribbon along the river edging the dark red desolation of the desert. It is a proverb, and one of vast antiquity, that it is created by the mysterious bounty and almost sinister benevolence of the Nile. When we first hear of Egyptians they are living as in a string of river-side villages, in small and separate but co-operative communities along the bank of the Nile. Where the river branched into the broad Delta there was traditionally the beginning of a somewhat different district or people; but this need not complicate the main truth. These more or less independent though interdependent peoples were considerably civilised already. They had a sort of heraldry; that is, decorative art used for symbolic and social purposes; each sailing the Nile under its own ensign representing some bird or animal. Heraldry involves two things of enormous importance to normal humanity; the combination of the two making that noble thing called co-operation; on which rest all peasantries and peoples that are free. The art of heraldry means independence; an image chosen by the imagination to express the individuality. The science of heraldry means interdependence; an agreement between different bodies to recognise different images; a science of imagery. We have here therefore exactly that compromise of co-operation between free families or groups which is the most normal mode of life for humanity and is particularly apparent wherever men own their own land and live on it. With the very mention of the image of bird and beast the student of mythology will murmur the word ‘totem’ almost in his sleep. But to my mind much of the trouble arises from his habit of saying such words as if in his sleep. Throughout this rough outline I have made a necessarily inadequate attempt to keep on the inside rather than the outside of such things; to consider them where possible in terms of thought and not merely in terms of terminology. There is very little value in talking about totems unless we have some feeling of what it really felt like to have a totem. Granted that they had totems and we have no totems; was it because they had more fear of animals or more familiarity with animals? Did a man whose totem was a wolf feel like a were-wolf or like a man running away from a were-wolf? Did he feel like Uncle Remus about Brer Wolf or like St. Francis about his brother the wolf, or like Mowgli about his brothers the wolves? Was a totem a thing like the British lion or a thing like the British bull-dog? Was the worship of a totem like the feeling of niggers about Mumbo Jumbo, or of children about Jumbo? I have never read any book of folk-lore, however learned, that gave me any light upon this question, which I think by far the most important one. I will confine myself to repeating that the earliest Egyptian communities had a common understanding about the images that stood for their individual states; and that this amount of communication is prehistoric in the sense that it is already there at the beginning of history. But as history unfolds itself, this question of communication is clearly the main question of these riverside communities. With the need of communication comes the need of a common government and the growing greatness and spreading shadow of the king. The other binding force besides the king, and perhaps older than the king, is the priesthood; and the priesthood has presumably even more to do with these ritual symbols and signals by which men can communicate. And here in Egypt arose probably the primary and certainly the typical invention to which we owe all history, and the whole difference between the historic and the prehistoric: the archetypal script, the art of writing.
Lo stesso accade con la più particolare fantasticheria intorno all’evoluzione e alla stabilità sociale. Stando alle testimonianze reali di cui disponiamo, barbarie e civiltà non furono stadi successivi nel progresso del mondo. Furono condizioni che esistevano fianco a fianco, come ancora esistono fianco a fianco. C’erano allora civiltà come oggi vi sono civiltà; ci sono oggi selvaggi come allora vi erano selvaggi. Si suggerisce che tutti gli uomini attraversarono uno stadio nomade; ma è certo che ve ne sono alcuni che non ne sono mai usciti, e non pare inverosimile che ve ne fossero alcuni che non vi entrarono mai. È probabile che fin da tempi assai primitivi lo statico coltivatore del suolo e il pastore errante fossero due tipi d’uomo distinti; e la loro sistemazione cronologica non è che il segno di quella mania per gli stadi progressivi che ha in gran parte falsificato la storia. Si suggerisce che vi fu uno stadio comunista, in cui la proprietà privata era ovunque sconosciuta, un’intera umanità che viveva sulla negazione della proprietà; ma le prove di questa negazione sono esse stesse piuttosto negative. Redistribuzioni della proprietà, giubilei e leggi agrarie ricorrono a vari intervalli e in varie forme; ma che l’umanità sia inevitabilmente passata attraverso uno stadio comunista pare tanto dubbio quanto la parallela proposizione che l’umanità vi ritornerà inevitabilmente. È interessante soprattutto come prova che i piani più arditi per l’avvenire invocano l’autorità del passato; e che perfino un rivoluzionario cerca di persuadersi d’essere anche un reazionario. C’è un divertente esempio parallelo nel caso di ciò che si chiama femminismo. A dispetto di tutte le chiacchiere pseudoscientifiche sul matrimonio per ratto e sull’uomo delle caverne che picchia la donna delle caverne con una clava, si può osservare che, non appena il femminismo divenne un grido di moda, si prese a sostenere che la civiltà umana nel suo primo stadio fosse stata un matriarcato. A quanto pare era la donna delle caverne a portare la clava. In ogni caso tutte queste idee non valgono molto più di congetture; hanno una curiosa maniera di seguire la fortuna delle teorie e delle mode moderne. In ogni caso non sono storia nel senso di documento; e possiamo ripetere che, quando si viene al documento, l’ampia verità è che barbarie e civiltà sono sempre coesistite nel mondo, la civiltà talvolta espandendosi fino ad assorbire i barbari, talvolta decadendo in relativa barbarie, e quasi in tutti i casi possedendo in forma più compiuta certe idee e istituzioni che i barbari possiedono in forma più rozza; quali il governo o l’autorità sociale, le arti e specialmente le arti decorative, misteri e tabù di vario genere specialmente intorno alla questione del sesso, e qualche forma di quella cosa fondamentale che è la principale preoccupazione di questa indagine: la cosa che chiamiamo religione.
Ora l’Egitto e Babilonia, quei due mostri primigeni, in questa materia avrebbero potuto essere forniti apposta come modelli. Si potrebbero quasi chiamare modelli funzionanti per mostrare come queste teorie moderne non funzionino. Le due grandi verità che conosciamo intorno a queste due grandi culture si dà il caso che contraddicano nettamente le due correnti fallacie or ora considerate. La storia dell’Egitto avrebbe potuto essere inventata per illustrare la morale che l’uomo non comincia necessariamente col dispotismo perché è barbaro, ma assai spesso trova la via del dispotismo perché è civile. La trova perché è esperto; o, ciò che spesso è quasi lo stesso, perché è esausto. E la storia di Babilonia avrebbe potuto essere inventata per illustrare la morale che l’uomo non ha bisogno di essere un nomade o un comunista prima di diventare un contadino o un cittadino, e che tali culture non sono sempre in stadi successivi ma spesso in stati contemporanei. Perfino toccando queste grandi civiltà con cui comincia la nostra storia scritta c’è naturalmente la tentazione di essere troppo ingegnosi o troppo presuntuosi. Possiamo leggere i mattoni di Babilonia in un senso assai diverso da quello in cui congetturiamo intorno alle pietre a coppelle e anelli; e sappiamo con certezza che cosa significhino gli animali nel geroglifico egizio, come nulla sappiamo dell’animale nella caverna neolitica. Ma anche qui gli ammirevoli archeologi che hanno decifrato riga dopo riga miglia di geroglifici possono essere tentati di leggere troppo tra le righe; perfino la vera autorità in materia di Babilonia può dimenticare quanto frammentaria sia la sua faticosamente conquistata conoscenza; può dimenticare che Babilonia gli ha scagliato addosso soltanto mezzo mattone, benché mezzo mattone sia meglio di nessun cuneiforme. Ma alcune verità, storiche e non preistoriche, dogmatiche e non evolutive, fatti e non fantasie, emergono davvero dall’Egitto e da Babilonia; e queste due verità sono fra esse.
L’Egitto è un nastro verde lungo il margine del fiume che orla la cupa rossa desolazione del deserto. È un proverbio, e d’antichità immensa, che esso sia creato dalla misteriosa munificenza e dalla quasi sinistra benevolenza del Nilo. Quando per la prima volta udiamo parlare degli Egiziani, essi vivono come in una fila di villaggi lungo il fiume, in comunità piccole e distinte ma cooperative lungo la sponda del Nilo. Là dove il fiume si ramificava nell’ampio Delta si trovava tradizionalmente il principio di un distretto o popolo alquanto diverso; ma questo non deve complicare la verità principale. Questi popoli più o meno indipendenti benché interdipendenti erano già considerevolmente civili. Avevano una sorta di araldica; cioè, arte decorativa usata a fini simbolici e sociali; ciascuno navigando sul Nilo sotto la propria insegna che rappresentava qualche uccello o animale. L’araldica implica due cose d’enorme importanza per la normale umanità; la combinazione delle due formando quella nobile cosa chiamata cooperazione; su cui riposano tutte le contadinerie e i popoli che sono liberi. L’arte dell’araldica significa indipendenza; un’immagine scelta dall’immaginazione per esprimere l’individualità. La scienza dell’araldica significa interdipendenza; un accordo fra corpi diversi per riconoscere immagini diverse; una scienza dell’immagine. Abbiamo qui dunque esattamente quel compromesso di cooperazione fra famiglie o gruppi liberi che è il più normale modo di vita per l’umanità ed è particolarmente evidente ovunque gli uomini possiedano la propria terra e vi vivano. Alla sola menzione dell’immagine di uccello e bestia lo studioso di mitologia mormorerà la parola «totem» quasi nel sonno. Ma a mio giudizio gran parte del guaio nasce dalla sua abitudine di pronunciare tali parole come nel sonno. In tutto questo rozzo abbozzo ho fatto un tentativo necessariamente inadeguato di tenermi all’interno piuttosto che all’esterno di simili cose; di considerarle dove possibile in termini di pensiero e non meramente in termini di terminologia. Ha ben poco valore parlare di totem se non abbiamo qualche sentimento di che cosa significasse davvero avere un totem. Ammesso che essi avessero i totem e noi non ne abbiamo; era perché avevano più paura degli animali o più familiarità con gli animali? Un uomo il cui totem era un lupo si sentiva come un lupo mannaro o come un uomo che fugge da un lupo mannaro? Si sentiva come lo Zio Remo verso Fratel Lupo, o come san Francesco verso il suo fratello lupo, o come Mowgli verso i suoi fratelli lupi? Un totem era una cosa come il leone britannico o una cosa come il bulldog britannico? Il culto di un totem era come il sentimento dei negri verso Mumbo Jumbo, o dei bambini verso Jumbo? Non ho mai letto alcun libro di folklore, per quanto dotto, che mi abbia gettato qualche luce su questa questione, che ritengo di gran lunga la più importante. Mi limiterò a ripetere che le prime comunità egizie avevano una comune intesa intorno alle immagini che stavano per i loro singoli stati; e che questa quantità di comunicazione è preistorica nel senso che è già presente al principio della storia. Ma man mano che la storia si dispiega, questa questione della comunicazione è chiaramente la questione principale di queste comunità rivierasche. Col bisogno di comunicazione viene il bisogno di un comune governo e la crescente grandezza e la sempre più estesa ombra del re. L’altra forza vincolante oltre al re, e forse più antica del re, è il sacerdozio; e il sacerdozio ha presumibilmente ancora più a che fare con quei simboli e segnali rituali per mezzo dei quali gli uomini possono comunicare. E qui in Egitto sorse probabilmente la primaria e certamente la tipica invenzione a cui dobbiamo tutta la storia, e l’intera differenza tra lo storico e il preistorico: la scrittura archetipica, l’arte di scrivere.
The popular pictures of these primeval empires are not half so popular as they might be. There is shed over them the shadow of an exaggerated gloom, more than the normal and even healthy sadness of heathen men. It is part of the same sort of secret pessimism that loves to make primitive man a crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is fear. It comes of course from the fact that men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion. For them anything primary and elemental must be evil. But it is the curious consequence that while we have been deluged with the wildest experiments in primitive romance, they have all missed the real romance of being primitive. They have described scenes that are wholly imaginary, in which the men of the Stone Age are men of stone like walking statues; in which the Assyrians or Egyptians are as stiff or as painted as their own most archaic art. But none of these makers of imaginary scenes have tried to imagine what it must really have been like to see those things as fresh which we see as familiar. They have not seen a man discovering fire like a child discovering fireworks. They have not seen a man playing with the wonderful invention called the wheel, like a boy playing at putting up a wireless station. They have never put the spirit of youth into their descriptions of the youth of the world. It follows that amid all their primitive or prehistoric fancies there are no jokes. There are not even practical jokes, in connection with the practical inventions. And this is very sharply defined in the particular case of hieroglyphics; for there seems to be serious indication that the whole high human art of scripture or writing began with a joke.
There are some who will learn with regret that it seems to have begun with a pun. The king or the priests or some responsible persons, wishing to send a message up the river in that inconveniently long and narrow territory, hit on the idea of sending it in picture writing, like that of the Red Indian. Like most people who have written picture-writing for fun, he found the words did not always fit. But when the word for taxes sounded rather like the word for pig, he boldly put down a pig as a bad pun and chanced it. So a modern hieroglyphist might represent ‘at once’ by unscrupulously drawing a hat followed by a series of upright numerals. It was good enough for the Pharaohs and ought to be good enough for him. But it must have been great fun to write or even to read these messages, when writing and reading were really a new thing. And if people must write romances about ancient Egypt (and it seems that neither prayers nor tears nor curses can withhold them from the habit), I suggest that scenes like this would really remind us that the ancient Egyptians were human beings. I suggest that somebody should describe the scene of the great monarch sitting among his priests, and all of them roaring with laughter and bubbling over with suggestions as the royal puns grew more and more wild and indefensible. There might be another scene of almost equal excitement about the decoding of this cipher; the guesses and clues and discoveries having all the popular thrill of a detective story. That is how primitive romance and primitive history really ought to be written. For whatever was the quality of the religious or moral life of remote times, and it was probably much more human than is conventionally supposed, the scientific interest of such a time must have been intense. Words must have been more wonderful than wireless telegraphy; and experiments with common things a series of electric shocks. We are still waiting for somebody to write a lively story of primitive life. The point is in some sense a parenthesis here; but it is connected with the general matter of political development, by the institution which was most active in these first and most fascinating of all the fairy-tales of science.
It is admitted that we owe most of this science to the priests. Modern writers like Mr. Wells cannot be accused of any weakness of sympathy with a pontifical hierarchy; but they agree at least in recognising what pagan priesthoods did for the arts and sciences. Among the more ignorant of the enlightened there was indeed a convention of saying that priests had obstructed progress in all ages; and a politician once told me in a debate that I was resisting modern reforms exactly as some ancient priest probably resisted the discovery of wheels. I pointed out, in reply, that it was far more likely that the ancient priest made the discovery of the wheels. It is overwhelmingly probable that the ancient priest had a great deal to do with the discovery of the art of writing. It is obvious enough in the fact that the very word hieroglyphic is akin to the word hierarchy. The religion of these priests was apparently a more or less tangled polytheism of a type that is more particularly described elsewhere. It passed through a period when it cooperated with the king, another period when it was temporarily destroyed by the king, who happened to be a prince with a private theism of his own, and a third period when it practically destroyed the king and ruled in his stead. But the world has to thank it for many things which it considers common and necessary: and the creators of those common things ought really to have a place among the heroes of humanity. If we were at rest in a real paganism, instead of being restless in a rather irrational reaction from Christianity, we might pay some sort of pagan honour to these nameless makers of mankind. We might have veiled statues of the man who first found fire or the man who first made a boat or the man who first tamed a horse. And if we brought them garlands or sacrifices, there would be more sense in it than in disfiguring our cities with cockney statues of stale politicians and philanthropists. But one of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilisation has been able to be really human.
Le raffigurazioni popolari di questi imperi primordiali non sono neppure lontanamente popolari quanto potrebbero essere. Si è distesa su di esse l’ombra di una cupezza esagerata, ben più grave della normale e persino salubre tristezza degli uomini pagani. Fa parte di quella stessa specie di segreto pessimismo che si compiace di fare dell’uomo primitivo una creatura strisciante, il cui corpo è lordura e la cui anima è paura. Nasce, s’intende, dal fatto che gli uomini sono mossi soprattutto dalla loro religione; specialmente quando è irreligione. Per costoro tutto ciò che è primario ed elementare non può che essere malvagio. Ma la conseguenza curiosa è che, mentre siamo stati inondati dai più sfrenati esperimenti di romanzo primitivo, essi hanno mancato tutti il vero romanticismo dell’essere primitivi. Hanno descritto scene interamente immaginarie, in cui gli uomini dell’età della pietra sono uomini di pietra, come statue che camminano; in cui gli Assiri o gli Egizi sono rigidi o dipinti quanto la loro stessa arte più arcaica. Ma nessuno di questi fabbricatori di scene immaginarie ha tentato di immaginare che cosa dovette essere davvero vedere come cose fresche ciò che noi vediamo come cose familiari. Non hanno visto un uomo che scopre il fuoco come un bambino che scopre i fuochi d’artificio. Non hanno visto un uomo che gioca con la meravigliosa invenzione chiamata la ruota, come un ragazzo che gioca a montare una stazione radiotelegrafica. Non hanno mai infuso lo spirito della giovinezza nelle loro descrizioni della giovinezza del mondo. Ne consegue che, in mezzo a tutte le loro fantasie primitive o preistoriche, non ci sono scherzi. Non ci sono nemmeno scherzi pratici, in rapporto con le invenzioni pratiche. E ciò si delinea assai nettamente nel caso particolare dei geroglifici; poiché sembra esservi un serio indizio che l’intera nobile arte umana della scrittura sia cominciata con uno scherzo.
Vi sarà chi apprenderà con rammarico che pare sia cominciata con un gioco di parole. Il re, o i sacerdoti, o qualche persona responsabile, desiderando inviare un messaggio su per il fiume in quel territorio scomodamente lungo e stretto, ebbe l’idea di mandarlo in scrittura per immagini, come quella dei Pellirosse. Come la maggior parte di coloro che hanno scritto per gioco con figure, s’accorse che le parole non sempre combaciavano. Ma quando la parola per «tasse» suonava piuttosto simile alla parola per «porco», egli mise arditamente giù un porco, come un cattivo bisticcio, e tirò a indovinare. Così un moderno geroglifista potrebbe rappresentare «at once» disegnando senza scrupoli un cappello («hat») seguito da una serie di cifre in verticale («ones»). Andava bene per i Faraoni e dovrebbe andar bene anche per lui. Ma dovette essere un grande spasso scrivere, e persino leggere, questi messaggi, quando scrivere e leggere erano davvero cosa nuova. E se proprio si devono scrivere romanzi sull’antico Egitto (e pare che né preghiere né lacrime né maledizioni possano trattenerne gli uomini dall’abitudine), suggerisco che scene come questa ci ricorderebbero davvero che gli antichi Egizi erano esseri umani. Suggerisco che qualcuno descriva la scena del grande monarca seduto in mezzo ai suoi sacerdoti, tutti scoppianti di risa e traboccanti di suggerimenti man mano che i giochi di parole regali si facevano sempre più bizzarri e indifendibili. Vi potrebbe essere un’altra scena di eccitazione quasi pari, intorno alla decifrazione di questo codice; con le congetture, gli indizi e le scoperte cariche di tutto il brivido popolare di un racconto poliziesco. È così che il romanzo primitivo e la storia primitiva dovrebbero davvero essere scritti. Perché, quale che fosse la qualità della vita religiosa o morale delle epoche remote — e fu probabilmente assai più umana di quanto convenzionalmente si supponga — l’interesse scientifico di un simile tempo dovette essere intenso. Le parole dovettero essere più prodigiose della telegrafia senza fili; e gli esperimenti con le cose comuni una serie di scariche elettriche. Attendiamo ancora che qualcuno scriva una vivace storia della vita primitiva. Il punto è, in un certo senso, una parentesi qui; ma si ricollega alla questione generale dello sviluppo politico, per il tramite dell’istituzione che fu più attiva in queste prime e più affascinanti fra tutte le fiabe della scienza.
Si ammette che dobbiamo gran parte di questa scienza ai sacerdoti. Scrittori moderni come il signor Wells non possono essere accusati di alcuna debolezza di simpatia verso una gerarchia pontificale; eppure concordano almeno nel riconoscere ciò che i sacerdozi pagani fecero per le arti e le scienze. Fra i più ignoranti degli illuminati vi era in effetti l’uso di dire che i sacerdoti avevano ostacolato il progresso in ogni epoca; e un uomo politico un giorno mi disse, in un dibattito, che io mi opponevo alle riforme moderne esattamente come qualche antico sacerdote si oppose probabilmente alla scoperta delle ruote. Replicai, obiettando, che era assai più verosimile che l’antico sacerdote avesse fatto egli stesso la scoperta delle ruote. È in modo schiacciante probabile che l’antico sacerdote abbia avuto molto a che fare con la scoperta dell’arte della scrittura. È abbastanza evidente nel fatto che la parola stessa «geroglifico» è affine alla parola «gerarchia». La religione di questi sacerdoti era, a quanto pare, un politeismo più o meno aggrovigliato, di un tipo descritto più particolarmente altrove. Attraversò un periodo in cui cooperò con il re, un altro periodo in cui fu temporaneamente distrutta dal re, che si dava il caso fosse un principe fornito d’un suo privato teismo, e un terzo periodo in cui essa distrusse praticamente il re e regnò in sua vece. Ma il mondo deve esserle grato per molte cose che considera comuni e necessarie: e i creatori di quelle cose comuni dovrebbero davvero avere un posto tra gli eroi dell’umanità. Se fossimo in pace dentro un paganesimo autentico, invece di essere inquieti in una reazione piuttosto irrazionale contro il Cristianesimo, potremmo tributare qualche sorta di onore pagano a questi anonimi artefici del genere umano. Potremmo avere statue velate dell’uomo che per primo trovò il fuoco, o dell’uomo che per primo costruì una barca, o dell’uomo che per primo domò un cavallo. E se recassimo loro ghirlande o sacrifici, vi sarebbe più senno che nel deturpare le nostre città con statue plebee di politici e filantropi ormai stantii. Ma uno dei segni singolari della forza del Cristianesimo è che, da quando esso venne, nessun pagano della nostra civiltà è stato capace di essere davvero umano.
The point is here, however, that the Egyptian government, whether pontifical or royal, found it more and more necessary to establish communication; and there always went with communication a certain element of coercion. It is not necessarily an indefensible thing that the state grew more despotic as it grew more civilised; it is arguable that it had to grow more despotic in order to grow more civilised. That is the argument for autocracy in every age; and the interest lies in seeing it illustrated in the earliest age. But it is emphatically not true that it was most despotic in the earliest age and grew more liberal in a later age; the practical process of history is exactly the reverse. It is not true that the tribe began in the extreme of terror of the Old Man and his seat and spear; it is probable, at least in Egypt, that the Old Man was rather a New Man armed to attack new conditions. His spear grew longer and longer and his throne rose higher and higher, as Egypt rose into a complex and complete civilisation. That is what I mean by saying that the history of the Egyptian territory is in this the history of the earth; and directly denies the vulgar assumption that terrorism can only come at the beginning and cannot come at the end. We do not know what was the very first condition of the more or less feudal amalgam of land owners, peasants and slaves in the little commonwealths beside the Nile; but it may have been a peasantry of an even more popular sort. What we do know is that it was by experience and education that little commonwealths lose their liberty; that absolute sovereignty is something not merely ancient but rather relatively modern; and it is at the end of the path called progress that men return to the king.
Egypt exhibits, in that brief record of its remotest beginnings, the primary problem of liberty and civilisation. It is the fact that men actually lose variety by complexity. We have not solved the problem properly any more than they did; but it vulgarises the human dignity of the problem itself to suggest that even tyranny has no motive save in tribal terror. And just as the Egyptian example refutes the fallacy about despotism and civilisation, so does the Babylonian example refute the fallacy about civilisation and barbarism. Babylon also we first hear of when it is already civilised; for the simple reason that we cannot hear of anything until it is educated enough to talk. It talks to us in what is called cuneiform; that strange and stiff triangular symbolism that contrasts with the picturesque alphabet of Egypt. However relatively rigid Egyptian art may be, there is always something different from the Babylonian spirit which was too rigid to have any art. There is always a living grace in the lines of the lotus and something of rapidity as well as rigidity in the movement of the arrows and the birds. Perhaps there is something of the restrained but living curve of the river, which makes us in talking of the serpent of old Nile almost think of the Nile as a serpent. Babylon was a civilisation of diagrams rather than of drawings. Mr. W.B. Yeats who has a historical imagination to match his mythological imagination (and indeed the former is impossible without the latter) wrote truly of the men who watched the stars ‘from their pedantic Babylon.’ The cuneiform was cut upon bricks, of which all their architecture was built up; the bricks were of baked mud and perhaps the material had something in it forbidding the sense of form to develop in sculpture or relief. Theirs was a static but a scientific civilisation, far advanced in the machinery of life and in some ways highly modern. It is said that they had much of the modern cult of the higher spinsterhood and recognised an official class of independent working women. There is perhaps something in that mighty stronghold of hardened mud that suggests the utilitarian activity of a huge hive. But though it was huge it was human; we see many of the same social problems as in ancient Egypt or modern England; and whatever its evils this also was one of the earliest masterpieces of man. It stood, of course, in the triangle formed by the almost legendary rivers of Tigris and Euphrates, and the vast agriculture of its empire, on which its towns depended, was perfected by a highly scientific system of canals. It had by tradition a high intellectual life, though rather philosophic than artistic; and there preside over its primal foundation those figures who have come to stand for the star-gazing wisdom of antiquity; the teachers of Abraham; the Chaldees.
Against this solid society, as against some vast bare wall of brick, there surged age after age the nameless armies of the Nomads. They came out of the deserts where the nomadic life had been lived from the beginning and where it is still lived to-day. It is needless to dwell on the nature of that life; it was obvious enough and even easy enough to follow a herd or a flock which generally found its own grazing-ground and to live on the milk or meat it provided. Nor is there any reason to doubt that this habit of life could give almost every human thing except a home. Many such shepherds or herds men may have talked in the earliest time of all the truths and enigmas of the Book of Job; and of these were Abraham and his children, who have given to the modern world for an endless enigma the almost mono-maniac monotheism of the Jews. But they were a wild people without comprehension of complex social organisation; and a spirit like the wind within them made them wage war on it again and again. The history of Babylonia is largely the history of its defence against the desert hordes; who came on at intervals of a century or two and generally retreated as they came. Some say that an admixture of nomad invasion built at Nineveh the arrogant kingdom of the Assyrians, who carved great monsters upon their temples, bearded bulls with wings like cherubim, and who sent forth many military conquerors who stamped the world as if with such colossal hooves. Assyria was an imperial interlude; but it was an interlude. The main story of all that land is the war between the wandering peoples and the state that was truly static. Presumably in prehistoric times, and certainly in historic times, those wanderers went westward to waste whatever they could find. The last time they came they found Babylon vanished; but that was in historic times and the name of their leader was Mahomet.
Il punto, tuttavia, è questo: il governo egiziano, sia esso pontificale o regale, trovò sempre più necessario stabilire una comunicazione; e alla comunicazione si accompagnò sempre un certo elemento di coercizione. Non è cosa necessariamente indifendibile che lo stato si facesse più dispotico man mano che si faceva più civile; anzi, si può sostenere che dovette farsi più dispotico proprio per potersi fare più civile. È questo l’argomento a favore dell’autocrazia in ogni epoca; e l’interesse sta nel vederlo illustrato nell’epoca più remota. Ma non è affatto vero che esso fosse più dispotico nell’epoca più antica e divenisse più liberale in un’epoca posteriore; il processo concreto della storia è esattamente il contrario. Non è vero che la tribù cominciò nell’estremo del terrore del Vecchio con il suo seggio e la sua lancia; è probabile, almeno in Egitto, che il Vecchio fosse piuttosto un Nuovo armato per far fronte a nuove condizioni. La sua lancia si allungò sempre più e il suo trono si innalzò sempre più in alto, man mano che l’Egitto si innalzava verso una civiltà complessa e compiuta. È questo che intendo quando dico che la storia del territorio egiziano è, in ciò, la storia della terra; e nega direttamente la volgare presunzione secondo cui il terrorismo può venire soltanto all’inizio e non può venire alla fine. Non sappiamo quale fosse la condizione primissima di quel più o meno feudale amalgama di proprietari terrieri, contadini e schiavi nelle piccole comunità in riva al Nilo; ma può darsi che fosse un contadiname di natura ancor più popolare. Ciò che sappiamo è che è per esperienza e per educazione che le piccole comunità perdono la loro libertà; che la sovranità assoluta è qualcosa non semplicemente antico, ma piuttosto relativamente moderno; ed è alla fine del sentiero chiamato progresso che gli uomini fanno ritorno al re.
L’Egitto presenta, in quel breve resoconto dei suoi più remoti inizi, il problema primario della libertà e della civiltà. È il fatto che gli uomini realmente perdono varietà per via della complessità. Non abbiamo risolto il problema meglio di quanto lo risolsero loro; ma volgarizza la dignità umana del problema stesso il suggerire che perfino la tirannia non abbia altro movente se non il terrore tribale. E come l’esempio egiziano confuta la fallacia sul dispotismo e la civiltà, così l’esempio babilonese confuta la fallacia sulla civiltà e la barbarie. Anche di Babilonia sentiamo parlare per la prima volta quando è già civile; per la semplice ragione che non possiamo sentir parlare di nulla finché non sia abbastanza istruito da saper parlare. Essa ci parla in ciò che si chiama cuneiforme; quel simbolismo triangolare strano e rigido che contrasta con il pittoresco alfabeto dell’Egitto. Per quanto relativamente rigida possa essere l’arte egizia, vi è sempre qualcosa che la distingue dallo spirito babilonese, il quale era troppo rigido per avere un’arte qualsiasi. Vi è sempre una grazia viva nelle linee del loto e qualcosa di rapidità così come di rigidità nel movimento delle frecce e degli uccelli. Forse vi è qualcosa della curva contenuta ma viva del fiume, che ci induce, parlando del serpente dell’antico Nilo, a pensare quasi al Nilo come a un serpente. Babilonia fu una civiltà di diagrammi più che di disegni. Il signor W.B. Yeats, che possiede un’immaginazione storica pari alla sua immaginazione mitologica (e in verità la prima è impossibile senza la seconda), scrisse con verità degli uomini che osservavano le stelle «dalla loro pedantesca Babilonia». Il cuneiforme veniva inciso sui mattoni, con i quali era edificata tutta la loro architettura; i mattoni erano di fango cotto, e forse quel materiale aveva in sé qualcosa che vietava al senso della forma di svilupparsi nella scultura o nel rilievo. La loro era una civiltà statica ma scientifica, assai progredita nel meccanismo della vita e per certi versi altamente moderna. Si dice che avessero molto del moderno culto della zitellità superiore e riconoscessero una classe ufficiale di lavoratrici indipendenti. Vi è forse qualcosa, in quella possente roccaforte di fango indurito, che suggerisce l’attività utilitaria di un enorme alveare. Ma per quanto enorme, era umana; vi scorgiamo molti degli stessi problemi sociali che nell’antico Egitto o nell’Inghilterra moderna; e quali che fossero i suoi mali, anche questo fu uno dei primissimi capolavori dell’uomo. Sorgeva, s’intende, nel triangolo formato dai fiumi quasi leggendari del Tigri e dell’Eufrate, e la vasta agricoltura del suo impero, da cui dipendevano le sue città, era perfezionata da un sistema di canali altamente scientifico. Aveva per tradizione un’alta vita intellettuale, benché più filosofica che artistica; e presiedono alla sua fondazione primordiale quelle figure che sono venute a incarnare la sapienza dell’antichità che scrutava gli astri: i maestri di Abramo, i Caldei.
Contro questa società solida, come contro una vasta e nuda muraglia di mattoni, si infransero epoca dopo epoca gli eserciti senza nome dei Nomadi. Venivano dai deserti dove la vita nomade era stata vissuta fin dal principio e dove è vissuta ancor oggi. È inutile soffermarsi sulla natura di quella vita; era abbastanza evidente e persino abbastanza facile seguire una mandria o un gregge che generalmente trovava da sé il proprio pascolo, e vivere del latte o della carne che esso forniva. Né vi è ragione di dubitare che questa abitudine di vita potesse dare quasi ogni cosa umana tranne una casa. Molti di tali pastori o mandriani possono aver discusso, nel primo tempo di tutti, tutte le verità e gli enigmi del Libro di Giobbe; e di questi furono Abramo e i suoi figli, che hanno dato al mondo moderno, come enigma senza fine, il monoteismo quasi maniacale degli Ebrei. Ma erano un popolo selvaggio, privo di comprensione della complessa organizzazione sociale; e uno spirito simile al vento dentro di loro li spingeva a farle guerra ancora e ancora. La storia della Babilonia è in gran parte la storia della sua difesa contro le orde del deserto, che si presentavano a intervalli di un secolo o due e generalmente si ritiravano come erano venute. Alcuni dicono che una mescolanza di invasione nomade edificò a Ninive l’arrogante regno degli Assiri, i quali intagliarono grandi mostri sui loro templi, tori barbuti con ali come cherubini, e mandarono innumerevoli conquistatori militari che marcarono il mondo come con colossali zoccoli. L’Assiria fu un interludio imperiale; ma fu un interludio. La vicenda principale di tutta quella terra è la guerra tra i popoli erranti e lo stato che era veramente statico. Presumibilmente in tempi preistorici, e certamente in tempi storici, quegli erranti mossero verso occidente per devastare tutto ciò che potessero trovare. L’ultima volta che vennero trovarono Babilonia scomparsa; ma ciò accadde in tempi storici, e il nome del loro condottiero era Maometto.
Now it is worth while to pause upon that story because, as has been suggested, it directly contradicts the impression still current that nomadism is merely a prehistoric thing and social settlement a comparatively recent thing. There is nothing to show that the Babylonians had ever wandered; there is very little to show that the tribes of the desert ever settled down. Indeed it is probable that this notion of a nomadic stage followed by a static stage has already been abandoned by the sincere and genuine scholars to whose researches we all owe so much. But I am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine scholars, but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from certain imperfect investigations, and which has made fashionable a false notion of the whole history of humanity. It is the whole vague notion that a monkey evolved into a man and in the same way a barbarian evolved into a civilised man and therefore at every stage we have to look back to barbarism and forward to civilisation. Unfortunately this notion is in a double sense entirely in the air. It is an atmosphere in which men live rather than a thesis which they defend. Men in that mood are more easily answered by objects than by theories; and it will be well if anyone tempted to make that assumption, in some trivial turn of talk or writing, can be checked for a moment by shutting his eyes and seeing for an instant, vast and vaguely crowded, like a populous precipice, the wonder of the Babylonian wall.
One fact does certainly fall across us like its shadow. Our glimpses of both these early empires show that the first domestic relation had been complicated by something which was less human, but was often regarded as equally domestic. The dark giant called Slavery had been called up like a genii and was labouring on gigantic works of brick and stone. Here again we must not too easily assume that what was backward was barbaric; in the matter of manumission the earlier servitude seems in some ways more liberal than the later; perhaps more liberal than the servitude of the future. To insure food for humanity by forcing part of it to work was after all a very human expedient; which is why it will probably be tried again. But in one sense there is a significance in the old slavery. It stands for one fundamental fact about all antiquity before Christ; something to be assumed from first to last. It is the insignificance of the individual before the State. It was as true of the most democratic City State in Hellas as of any despotism in Babylon. It is one of the signs of this spirit that a whole class of individuals could be insignificant or even invisible. It must be normal because it was needed for what would now be called ‘social service.’ Somebody said, ‘The Man is nothing and the Work is all,’ meaning it for a breezy Carlylean commonplace. It was the sinister motto of the heathen Servile State. In that sense there is truth in the traditional vision of vast pillars and pyramids going up under those everlasting skies for ever by the labour of numberless and nameless men, toiling like ants and dying like flies, wiped out by the work of their own hands.
But there are two other reasons for beginning with the two fixed points of Egypt and Babylon. For one thing they are fixed in tradition as the types of antiquity; and history without tradition is dead. Babylon is still the burden of a nursery rhyme, and Egypt (with its enormous population of princesses awaiting reincarnation) is still the topic of an unnecessary number of novels. But a tradition is generally a truth; so long as the tradition is sufficiently popular; even if it is almost vulgar. And there is a significance in this Babylonian and Egyptian element in nursery rhymes and novels; even the news papers, normally so much behind the times, have already got as far as the reign of Tutankhamen. The first reason is full of the common sense of popular legend; it is the simple fact that we do know more of these traditional things than of other contemporary things; and that we always did. All travellers from Herodotus to Lord Carnarvon follow this route. Scientific speculations of to-day do indeed spread out a map of the whole primitive world, with streams of racial emigration or admixture marked in dotted lines everywhere; over spaces which the unscientific medieval map-maker would have been content to call ‘Terra incognita,’ if he did not fill the inviting blank with a picture of a dragon, to indicate the probable reception given to pilgrims. But these speculations are only speculations at the best; and at the worst the dotted lines can be far more fabulous than the dragon.
There is unfortunately one fallacy here into which it is very easy for men to fall, even those who are most intelligent and perhaps especially those who are most imaginative. It is the fallacy of suppositing that because an idea is greater in the sense of larger, therefore it is greater in the sense of more fundamental and fixed and certain. If a man lives alone in a straw hut in the middle of Thibet, he may be told that he is living in the Chinese Empire; and the Chinese Empire is certainly a splendid and spacious and impressive thing. Or alternatively he may be told that he is living in the British Empire, and be duly impressed. But the curious thing is that in certain mental states he can feel much more certain about the Chinese Empire that he can not see than about the straw hut that he can see. He has some strange magical juggle in his mind, by which his argument begins with the empire though his experience begins with the hut. Sometimes he goes mad and appears to be proving that a straw hut cannot exist in the domains of the Dragon Throne; that it is impossible for such a civilisation as he enjoys to contain such a hovel as he inhabits. But his insanity arises from the intellectual slip of supposing that because China is a large and all-embracing hypothesis, therefore it is something more than a hypothesis. Now modern people are perpetually arguing in this way; and they extend it to things much less real and certain than the Chinese Empire. They seem to forget, for instance, that a man is not even certain of the Solar System as he is certain of the South Downs. The Solar System is a deduction, and doubtless a true deduction; but the point is that it is a very vast and far-reaching deduction and therefore he forgets that it is a deduction at all and treats it as a first principle. He might discover that the whole calculation is a mis-calculation; and the sun and stars and street-lamps would look exactly the same. But he has forgotten that it is a calculation, and is almost ready to contradict the sun if it does not fit into the solar system. If this is a fallacy even in the case of facts pretty well ascertained, such as the Solar System and the Chinese Empire, it is an even more devastating fallacy in connection with theories and other things that are not really ascertained at all. Thus history, especially prehistoric history, has a horrible habit of beginning with certain generalisations about races. I will not describe the disorder and misery this inversion has produced in modern politics. Because the race is vaguely supposed to have produced the nation, men talk as if the nation were something vaguer than the race. Because they have themselves invented a reason to explain a result, they almost deny the result in order to justify the reason. They first treat a Celt as an axiom and then treat an Irishman as an inference. And then they are surprised that a great fighting, roaring Irishman is angry at being treated as an inference. They cannot see that the Irish are Irish whether or no they are Celtic, whether or no there ever were any Celts. And what misleads them once more is the size of the theory; the sense that the fancy is bigger than the fact. A great scattered Celtic race is supposed to contain the Irish, so of course the Irish must depend for their very existence upon it. The same confusion, of course, has eliminated the English and the Germans by swamping them in the Teutonic race; and some tried to prove from the races being at one that the nations could not be at war. But I only give these vulgar and hackneyed examples in passing, as more familiar examples of the fallacy; the matter at issue here is not its application to these modern things but rather to the most ancient things. But the more remote and unrecorded was the racial problem, the more fixed was this curious inverted certainty in the Victorian man of science. To this day it gives a man of those scientific traditions the same sort of shock to question these things, which were only the last inferences when he turned them into first principles. He is still more certain that he is an Aryan even than that he is an Anglo-Saxon, just as he is more certain that he is an Anglo-Saxon than that he is an Englishman. He has never really discovered that he is a European. But he has never doubted that he is an Indo-European. These Victorian theories have shifted a great deal in their shape and scope; but this habit of a rapid hardening of a hypothesis into a theory, and of a theory into an assumption, has hardly yet gone out of fashion. People cannot easily get rid of the mental confusion of feeling that the foundations of history must surely be secure; that the first steps must be safe; that the biggest generalisation must be obvious. But though the contradiction may seem to them a paradox, this is the very contrary of the truth. It is the large thing that is secret and invisible; it is the small thing that is evident and enormous.
Ora vale la pena di soffermarsi su quella storia perché, come si è suggerito, essa contraddice direttamente l’impressione tuttora diffusa che il nomadismo sia soltanto una cosa preistorica e la stanzialità sociale una cosa relativamente recente. Nulla dimostra che i Babilonesi avessero mai errato di luogo in luogo; ben poco dimostra che le tribù del deserto si siano mai stabilite. Anzi, è probabile che questa nozione di uno stadio nomade seguito da uno stadio statico sia già stata abbandonata dagli studiosi sinceri e autentici alle cui ricerche tutti dobbiamo tanto. Ma in questo libro io non sono in polemica con studiosi sinceri e autentici, bensì con una vasta e vaga opinione pubblica che è stata prematuramente diffusa a partire da certe indagini imperfette, e che ha reso di moda una falsa nozione dell’intera storia dell’umanità. È tutta quella vaga nozione secondo cui una scimmia si è evoluta in un uomo e allo stesso modo un barbaro si è evoluto in un uomo civile e dunque a ogni stadio dobbiamo guardare all’indietro verso la barbarie e in avanti verso la civiltà. Purtroppo questa nozione è, in un duplice senso, interamente campata in aria. È un’atmosfera in cui gli uomini vivono più che una tesi che essi difendano. Gli uomini in quella disposizione si confutano più facilmente con gli oggetti che con le teorie; e sarà bene se chiunque sia tentato di fare quell’assunzione, in qualche banale svolta di discorso o di scrittura, possa essere trattenuto per un istante chiudendo gli occhi e vedendo per un attimo, vasto e vagamente gremito, come un precipizio popoloso, la meraviglia della muraglia babilonese.
Un fatto certo cade su di noi come la sua ombra. I nostri sprazzi di veduta su entrambi questi imperi antichi mostrano che la prima relazione domestica era stata complicata da qualcosa che era meno umano, ma che spesso veniva considerato altrettanto domestico. Il tetro gigante chiamato Schiavitù era stato evocato come un genio e affaticava a gigantesche opere di mattoni e di pietra. Anche qui non dobbiamo troppo facilmente supporre che ciò che era arretrato fosse barbarico; in materia di affrancamento la servitù più antica sembra per certi versi più liberale di quella più tarda; forse più liberale della servitù dell’avvenire. Assicurare il cibo all’umanità costringendone una parte a lavorare era, in fondo, un espediente assai umano; ed è per questo che probabilmente verrà tentato di nuovo. Ma in un senso c’è un significato nell’antica schiavitù. Essa sta a rappresentare un fatto fondamentale riguardo a tutta l’antichità prima di Cristo; qualcosa da presupporre dal principio alla fine. È l’insignificanza dell’individuo di fronte allo Stato. Ciò era vero della più democratica Città-Stato dell’Ellade come di qualunque dispotismo in Babilonia. È uno dei segni di questo spirito che un’ intera classe di individui potesse essere insignificante o persino invisibile. Doveva essere normale perché era necessaria a ciò che oggi si chiamerebbe «servizio sociale». Qualcuno disse: «L’Uomo è nulla e l’Opera è tutto», intendendolo come un arioso luogo comune carlyliano. Era il sinistro motto del pagano Stato Servile. In quel senso c’è verità nella tradizionale visione di enormi pilastri e piramidi che salgono sotto quei cieli eterni per sempre grazie alla fatica di uomini innumerevoli e senza nome, che sgobbano come formiche e muoiono come mosche, spazzati via dall’opera delle loro stesse mani.
Ma vi sono altre due ragioni per cominciare dai due punti fissi dell’Egitto e di Babilonia. Anzitutto perché essi sono fissati nella tradizione come i tipi dell’antichità; e la storia senza tradizione è morta. Babilonia è ancora il ritornello di una filastrocca infantile, e l’Egitto (con la sua enorme popolazione di principesse in attesa di reincarnazione) è ancora il tema di un inutile numero di romanzi. Ma una tradizione è generalmente una verità; purché la tradizione sia sufficientemente popolare; anche se è quasi volgare. E vi è un significato in questo elemento babilonese ed egizio nelle filastrocche e nei romanzi; perfino i giornali, normalmente tanto in ritardo sui tempi, sono già arrivati fino al regno di Tutankhamon. La prima ragione è tutta impregnata del buon senso della leggenda popolare; è il semplice fatto che di queste cose tradizionali sappiamo davvero di più che di altre cose a esse contemporanee; e che così è sempre stato. Tutti i viaggiatori, da Erodoto a Lord Carnarvon, seguono questo itinerario. Le speculazioni scientifiche d’oggi dispiegano bensì una mappa dell’intero mondo primitivo, con flussi di emigrazione o di mescolanza razziale segnati ovunque in linee punteggiate; su spazi che il non scientifico cartografo medievale si sarebbe accontentato di chiamare «Terra incognita», se non avesse riempito l’invitante vuoto con la figura di un drago, a indicare la probabile accoglienza riservata ai pellegrini. Ma queste speculazioni sono, nel migliore dei casi, soltanto speculazioni; e nel peggiore le linee punteggiate possono essere assai più favolose del drago.
C’è purtroppo qui un errore in cui è molto facile per gli uomini cadere, anche per i più intelligenti e forse specialmente per i più fantasiosi. È l’errore di supporre che, poiché un’idea è più grande nel senso di più ampia, essa perciò sia più grande nel senso di più fondamentale e fissa e certa. Se un uomo vive solo in una capanna di paglia nel mezzo del Tibet, gli si potrà dire che vive nell’Impero Cinese; e l’Impero Cinese è certamente una cosa splendida e spaziosa e imponente. Oppure, in alternativa, gli si potrà dire che vive nell’Impero Britannico, e ne sarà debitamente impressionato. Ma la cosa curiosa è che in certi stati mentali egli può sentirsi molto più certo dell’Impero Cinese che non può vedere di quanto lo sia della capanna di paglia che può vedere. Ha nella mente qualche strano giuoco di prestigio magico, per cui il suo ragionamento comincia con l’impero benché la sua esperienza cominci con la capanna. Talvolta impazzisce e sembra dimostrare che una capanna di paglia non può esistere nei domini del Trono del Drago; che è impossibile che una tale civiltà quale egli gode contenga un tugurio quale egli abita. Ma la sua follia nasce dallo scivolone intellettuale di supporre che, poiché la Cina è un’ipotesi grande e onnicomprensiva, essa perciò sia qualcosa di più di un’ipotesi. Ora le persone moderne ragionano perpetuamente in questo modo; e lo estendono a cose assai meno reali e certe dell’Impero Cinese. Sembrano dimenticare, per esempio, che un uomo non è certo del Sistema Solare quanto lo è delle South Downs. Il Sistema Solare è una deduzione, e senza dubbio una deduzione vera; ma il punto è che è una deduzione vastissima e di larghissima portata e perciò egli dimentica che è affatto una deduzione e la tratta come un primo principio. Potrebbe scoprire che l’intero calcolo è un calcolo sbagliato; e il sole e le stelle e i lampioni avrebbero esattamente lo stesso aspetto. Ma egli ha dimenticato che è un calcolo, ed è quasi pronto a contraddire il sole se questo non si accorda con il sistema solare. Se questo è un errore perfino nel caso di fatti abbastanza bene accertati, come il Sistema Solare e l’Impero Cinese, è un errore ancora più devastante in rapporto alle teorie e ad altre cose che non sono affatto realmente accertate. Così la storia, e specialmente la storia preistorica, ha l’orribile abitudine di cominciare con certe generalizzazioni sulle razze. Non descriverò il disordine e la miseria che questa inversione ha prodotto nella politica moderna. Poiché si suppone vagamente che la razza abbia prodotto la nazione, gli uomini parlano come se la nazione fosse qualcosa di più vago della razza. Poiché hanno essi stessi inventato una ragione per spiegare un risultato, quasi negano il risultato pur di giustificare la ragione. Trattano dapprima un Celta come un assioma e poi trattano un Irlandese come un’inferenza. E poi si stupiscono che un grande, combattivo, ruggente Irlandese si adiri d’essere trattato come un’inferenza. Non riescono a vedere che gli Irlandesi sono Irlandesi, siano o no Celti, siano o non siano mai esistiti Celti. E ciò che ancora una volta li trae in inganno è la mole della teoria; la sensazione che la fantasticheria sia più grande del fatto. Si suppone che una grande e sparsa razza celtica contenga gli Irlandesi, sicché naturalmente gli Irlandesi devono dipendere per la loro stessa esistenza da essa. La stessa confusione, s’intende, ha eliminato gli Inglesi e i Tedeschi sommergendoli nella razza teutonica; e alcuni cercarono di provare dal fatto che le razze fossero una sola che le nazioni non potessero essere in guerra. Ma io porto questi esempi volgari e triti soltanto di passaggio, come esempi più familiari dell’errore; la questione qui in gioco non è la sua applicazione a queste cose moderne, bensì piuttosto alle cose più antiche. Ma quanto più remoto e non documentato era il problema razziale, tanto più fissa era questa curiosa certezza rovesciata nell’uomo di scienza vittoriano. Ancora oggi dà a un uomo di quelle tradizioni scientifiche lo stesso tipo di scossa mettere in dubbio queste cose, che erano soltanto le ultime inferenze quando egli le convertì in primi principi. Egli è ancora più certo di essere un Ariano di quanto non sia di essere un Anglosassone, proprio come è più certo di essere un Anglosassone di quanto non sia di essere un Inglese. Non ha mai realmente scoperto di essere un Europeo. Ma non ha mai dubitato di essere un Indoeuropeo. Queste teorie vittoriane hanno mutato molto nella loro forma e nella loro portata; ma questa abitudine di un rapido indurirsi di un’ipotesi in una teoria, e di una teoria in un’assunzione, non è ancora affatto passata di moda. Le persone non riescono a liberarsi facilmente della confusione mentale di sentire che le fondamenta della storia devono pur essere sicure; che i primi passi devono essere saldi; che la generalizzazione più grande dev’essere ovvia. Ma per quanto la contraddizione possa sembrar loro un paradosso, questo è proprio il contrario della verità. È la cosa grande a essere segreta e invisibile; è la cosa piccola a essere evidente ed enorme.
Every race on the face of the earth has been the subject of these speculations, and it is impossible even to suggest an outline of the subject. But if we take the European race alone, its history, or rather its prehistory, has undergone many retrospective revolutions in the short period of my own lifetime. It used to be called the Caucasian race; and I read in childhood an account of its collision with the Mongolian race; it was written by Bret Harte and opened with the query ‘Or is the Caucasian played out?’ Apparently the Caucasian was played out, for in a very short time he had been turned into the Indo-European man; sometimes, I regret to say, proudly presented as the Indo-Germanic man. It seems that the Hindu and the German have similar words for mother or father; there were other similarities between Sanskrit and various Western tongues; and with that all superficial differences between a Hindu and a German seemed suddenly to disappear. Generally this composite person was more conveniently described as the Aryan, and the really important point was that he had marched westward out of those high lands of India where fragments of his language could still be found. When I read this as a child, I had the fancy that after all the Aryan need not have marched westward and left his language behind him; he might also have marched eastward and taken his language with him. If I were to read it now, I should content myself with confessing my ignorance of the whole matter. But as a matter of fact I have great difficulty in reading it now, because it is not being written now. It looks as if the Aryan is also played out. Anyhow he has not merely changed his name but changed his address; his starting-place and his route of travel. One new theory maintains that our race did not come to its present home from the East but from the South. Some say the Europeans did not come from Asia but from Africa. Some have even had the wild idea that the Europeans came from Europe; or rather that they never left it.
Then there is a certain amount of evidence of a more or less prehistoric pressure from the North, such as that which seems to have brought the Greeks to inherit the Cretan culture and so often brought the Gauls over the hills into the fields in Italy. But I merely mention this example of European ethnology to point out that the learned have pretty well boxed the compass by this time; and that I, who am not one of the learned, cannot pretend for a moment to decide where such doctors disagree. But I can use my own common sense, and I sometimes fancy that theirs is a little rusty from want of use. The first act of common sense is to recognise the difference between a cloud and a mountain. And I will affirm that nobody knows any of these things, in the sense that we all know of the existence of the Pyramids of Egypt.
The truth, it may be repeated, is that what we really see, as distinct from what we may reasonably guess, in this earliest phase of history is darkness covering the earth and great darkness the peoples, with a light or two gleaming here and there on chance patches of humanity; and that two of these flames do burn upon two of these tall primeval towns; upon the high terraces of Babylon and the huge pyramids of the Nile. There are indeed other ancient lights, or lights that may be conjectured to be very ancient, in very remote parts of that vast wilderness of night. Far away to the east there is a high civilisation of vast antiquity in China; there are the remains of civilisations in Mexico and South America and other places, some of them apparently so high in civilisation as to have reached the most refined forms of devil-worship. But the difference lies in the element old tradition; the tradition of these lost cultures has been broken off, and though the tradition of China still lives, it is doubtful whether we know anything about it. Moreover, a man trying to measure the Chinese antiquity has to use Chinese traditions of measurement; and he has a strange sensation of having passed into another world under other laws of time and space. Time is telescoped outwards and centuries assume the slow and stiff movement of aeons; the white man trying to see it as the yellow man sees, feels as if his head were turning round and wonders wildly whether it is growing a pigtail. Any how he cannot take in a scientific sense that queer perspective that leads up to the primeval pagoda of the first of the Sons of Heaven. He is the real antipodes; the only true alternative world to Christendom; and he is after a fashion walking upside down. I have spoken of the medieval map-maker and his dragon; but what medieval traveller, however much interested in monsters, would expect to find a country where a dragon is a benevolent and amiable being? Of the more serious side of Chinese tradition something will be said in another connection; but I am only talking of tradition and the test of antiquity. And I only mention China as an antiquity that is not for us reached by a bridge old tradition; and Babylon and Egypt as antiquities that are. Herodotus is a human being, in a sense in which a Chinaman in a billy-cock hat, sitting opposite to us in a London tea shop, is hardly human. We feel as if we knew what David and Isaiah felt like, in a way in which we never were quite certain what Li Hung Chang felt like. The very sins that snatched away Helen or Bathsheba have passed into a proverb of private human weakness, of pathos and even of pardon. The very virtues of the Chinaman have about them something terrifying. This is the difference made by the destruction or preservation of a continuous historical inheritance; as from ancient Egypt to modern Europe. But when we ask what was that world that we inherit, and why those particular people and places seem to belong to it, we are led to the central fact of civilised history.
Ogni stirpe sulla faccia della terra è stata oggetto di queste congetture, ed è impossibile persino accennare a un quadro d’insieme della questione. Ma se prendiamo la razza europea da sola, la sua storia, o piuttosto la sua preistoria, ha subìto molte rivoluzioni retrospettive nel breve arco della mia stessa vita. Un tempo la si chiamava razza caucasica; e nella fanciullezza lessi il racconto del suo scontro con la razza mongolica; l’aveva scritto Bret Harte, e si apriva con la domanda «O forse il Caucasico è ormai bell’e finito?». A quanto pare il Caucasico era bell’e finito, giacché in brevissimo tempo venne trasformato nell’uomo indoeuropeo; talvolta, mi duole dirlo, orgogliosamente presentato come l’uomo indogermanico. Sembra che l’indù e il tedesco abbiano parole simili per madre o padre; vi erano altre somiglianze tra il sanscrito e varie lingue occidentali; e con ciò tutte le differenze superficiali tra un indù e un tedesco parvero d’un tratto svanire. Di solito questo personaggio composito veniva descritto più comodamente come l’Ariano, e il punto davvero importante era che egli aveva marciato verso occidente muovendo da quelle alte terre dell’India dove si potevano ancora rinvenire frammenti della sua lingua. Quando lessi tutto ciò da bambino, mi venne la fantasia che, dopotutto, l’Ariano non avesse bisogno di marciare verso occidente lasciandosi dietro la propria lingua; poteva anche aver marciato verso oriente portandosi appresso la lingua. Se lo leggessi adesso, mi accontenterei di confessare la mia ignoranza dell’intera faccenda. Ma di fatto ho grande difficoltà a leggerlo adesso, perché adesso non lo si scrive più. Pare che anche l’Ariano sia ormai bell’e finito. In ogni caso non ha soltanto cambiato nome, ma ha cambiato indirizzo: il suo punto di partenza e il suo itinerario di viaggio. Una nuova teoria sostiene che la nostra stirpe non sia giunta all’attuale dimora dall’Oriente, bensì dal Meridione. Alcuni dicono che gli Europei non vennero dall’Asia, ma dall’Africa. Alcuni hanno perfino avuto la balzana idea che gli Europei venissero dall’Europa; o meglio, che non l’avessero mai lasciata.
Vi è poi una certa quantità di indizi di una pressione più o meno preistorica proveniente dal Nord, come quella che sembra aver condotto i Greci a ereditare la civiltà cretese e che tanto spesso portò i Galli oltre i monti nelle campagne d’Italia. Ma menziono questo esempio di etnologia europea soltanto per mettere in luce che i dotti hanno ormai piuttosto bene percorso l’intera rosa dei venti a questo punto; e che io, che non sono tra i dotti, non posso pretendere neppure per un istante di decidere là dove tali dottori dissentono. Ma posso servirmi del mio buon senso, e talvolta immagino che il loro sia un po’ arrugginito per mancanza d’uso. Il primo atto del buon senso è riconoscere la differenza tra una nuvola e una montagna. E affermerò che nessuno conosce alcuna di queste cose nel senso in cui tutti conosciamo l’esistenza delle Piramidi d’Egitto.
La verità, si può ripeterlo, è che ciò che realmente vediamo, a differenza di ciò che possiamo ragionevolmente congetturare, in questa prima fase della storia è tenebra che copre la terra e fitta tenebra che avvolge i popoli, con uno o due lumi che baluginano qua e là su fortuiti lembi di umanità; e che due di queste fiamme ardono davvero su due di quelle alte città primeve: sulle eccelse terrazze di Babilonia e sulle immani piramidi del Nilo. Vi sono in verità altri lumi antichi, o lumi che si possono congetturare antichissimi, in parti remotissime di quella vasta landa deserta della notte. Lontano, a oriente, vi è una civiltà elevata e di sterminata antichità in Cina; vi sono i resti di civiltà in Messico e nell’America meridionale e in altri luoghi, alcune delle quali apparentemente così alte in civiltà da aver raggiunto le forme più raffinate del culto del diavolo. Ma la differenza sta nell’elemento dell’antica tradizione; la tradizione di queste culture perdute si è spezzata, e sebbene la tradizione della Cina viva ancora, è dubbio che noi ne sappiamo alcunché. Inoltre, chi cerchi di misurare l’antichità cinese deve usare le misure tradizionali cinesi; ed egli ha la strana sensazione di essere passato in un altro mondo, sotto altre leggi del tempo e dello spazio. Il tempo si dilata come un cannocchiale verso l’esterno e i secoli assumono il moto lento e rigido degli eoni; l’uomo bianco che cerca di vederlo come lo vede l’uomo giallo sente come se la testa gli girasse e si domanda con smarrimento se non gli stia spuntando un codino. In ogni caso egli non riesce a cogliere in senso scientifico quella bizzarra prospettiva che conduce alla pagoda primeva del primo dei Figli del Cielo. Egli è il vero antipode; l’unico autentico mondo alternativo alla Cristianità; e in un certo qual modo cammina a testa in giù. Ho parlato del cartografo medievale e del suo drago; ma quale viaggiatore medievale, per quanto interessato ai mostri, si aspetterebbe di trovare un paese in cui il drago è un essere benevolo e amabile? Del lato più serio della tradizione cinese si dirà qualcosa in altra sede; ma qui sto parlando soltanto di tradizione e del criterio dell’antichità. E menziono la Cina solo come un’antichità a cui, per noi, non si giunge attraverso un ponte di antica tradizione; e Babilonia ed Egitto come antichità a cui invece si giunge. Erodoto è un essere umano, nel senso in cui un cinese con la bombetta in capo, seduto di fronte a noi in una sala da tè di Londra, è a stento umano. Sentiamo di sapere che cosa provassero Davide e Isaia, in un modo in cui non fummo mai del tutto certi di che cosa provasse Li Hung Chang. Gli stessi peccati che ghermirono Elena o Betsabea sono trapassati in un proverbio dell’umana debolezza privata, del patetico e persino del perdono. Le stesse virtù del cinese hanno in sé qualcosa di terrificante. È questa la differenza prodotta dalla distruzione o dalla conservazione di un’eredità storica ininterrotta; come da un antico Egitto all’Europa moderna. Ma quando ci domandiamo quale fosse quel mondo che ereditiamo, e perché quei particolari popoli e luoghi paiano appartenervi, siamo condotti al fatto centrale della storia civile.
That centre was the Mediterranean; which was not so much a piece of water as a world. But it was a world with something of the character of such a water; for it became more and more a place of unification in which the streams of strange and very diverse cultures met. The Nile and the Tiber alike flow into the Mediterranean; so did the Egyptian and the Etrurian alike contribute to a Mediterranean civilisation. The glamour of the great sea spread indeed very far in land and the unity was felt among the Arabs alone in the deserts and the Gauls beyond the northern hills. But the gradual building up of a common culture running round all the coasts of this inner sea is the main business of antiquity. As will be seen, it was sometimes a bad business as well as a good business. In that orbis terrarum or circle of lands there were the extremes of evil and of piety, there were contrasted races and still more contrasted religions. It was the scene of an endless struggle between Asia and Europe from the night of the Persian ships at Salamis to the flight of the Turkish ships at Lepanto. It was the scene, as will be more especially suggested later, of a supreme spiritual struggle between the two types of paganism, confronting each other in the Latin and the Phoenician cities; in the Roman forum and the Punic mart. It was the world of war and peace, the world of good and evil, the world of all that matters most, with all respect to the Aztecs and the Mongols of the Far East, they did not matter as the Mediterranean tradition mattered and still matters. Between it and the Far East there were, of course, interesting cults and conquests of various kinds, more or less in touch with it, and in proportion as they were so intelligible also to us. The Persians came riding in to make an end of Babylon; and we are told in a Greek story how these barbarians learned to draw the bow and tell the truth. Alexander the great Greek marched with his Macedonians into the sunrise and brought back strange birds coloured like the sunrise clouds and strange flowers and jewels from the gardens and treasuries of nameless kings. Islam went eastward into that world and made it partly imaginable to us; precisely because Islam itself was born in that circle of lands that fringed our own ancient and ancestral sea. In the Middle Ages the empire of the Moguls increased its majesty without losing its mystery; the Tartars conquered China and the Chinese apparently took very little notice of them. All these things are interesting in themselves; but it is impossible to shift the centre of gravity to the inland spaces of Asia from the inland sea of Europe. When all is said, if there were nothing in the world but what was said and done and written and built in the lands lying round the Mediterranean, it would still be in all the most vital and valuable things the world in which we live. When that southern culture spread to the north-west it produced many very wonderful things; of which doubtless we ourselves are the most wonderful. When it spread thence to colonies and new countries, it was still the same culture so long as it was culture at all. But round that little sea like a lake were the things themselves, apart from all extensions and echoes and commentaries on the things, the Republic and the Church; the Bible and the heroic epics; Islam and Israel and the memories of the lost empires, Aristotle and the measure of all things. It is because the first light upon this world is really light, the daylight in which we are still walking to-day, and not merely the doubtful visitation of strange stars, that I have begun here with noting where that light first falls on the towered cities of the eastern Mediterranean.
But though Babylon and Egypt have thus a sort of first claim, in the very fact of being familiar and traditional, fascinating riddles to us but also fascinating riddles to our fathers, we must not imagine that they were the only old civilisations on the southern sea; or that all the civilisation was merely Sumerian or Semitic or Coptic, still less merely Asiatic or African. Real research is more and more exalting the ancient civilisation of Europe and especially of what we may still vaguely call the Greeks. It must be understood in the sense that there were Greeks before the Greeks, as in so many of their mythologies there were gods before the gods. The island of Crete was the centre of the civilisation now called Minoan, after the Minos who lingered in ancient legend and whose labyrinth was actually discovered by modern archeology. This elaborate European society, with its harbours and its drainage and its domestic machinery, seems to have gone down before some invasion of its northern neighbours, who made or inherited the Hellas we know in history. But that earlier period did not pass till it had given to the world gifts so great that the world has ever since been striving in vain to repay them, if only by plagiarism.
Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as a blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
Quel centro era il Mediterraneo; che non era tanto una distesa d’acqua quanto un mondo. Ma era un mondo che aveva qualcosa del carattere di una simile acqua; perché divenne sempre più un luogo di unificazione in cui confluivano le correnti di culture strane e assai diverse. Il Nilo e il Tevere sfociano entrambi nel Mediterraneo; e così l’Egizio e l’Etrusco contribuirono del pari a una civiltà mediterranea. Il fascino del grande mare si diffuse invero assai lontano nell’entroterra, e l’unità fu avvertita tra gli Arabi soli nei deserti e i Galli oltre le colline settentrionali. Ma il graduale edificarsi di una cultura comune che si stende lungo tutte le coste di questo mare interno è l’affare principale dell’antichità. Come si vedrà, fu talvolta un cattivo affare non meno che un buon affare. In quell’orbis terrarum, ossia cerchia di terre, vi erano gli estremi del male e della pietà, vi erano razze contrapposte e religioni ancor più contrapposte. Fu il teatro di una lotta senza fine tra l’Asia e l’Europa, dalla notte delle navi persiane a Salamina alla fuga delle navi turche a Lepanto. Fu il teatro, come si suggerirà più specialmente in seguito, di una suprema lotta spirituale tra i due tipi di paganesimo, che si fronteggiavano nelle città latine e in quelle fenicie; nel foro romano e nel mercato punico. Fu il mondo della guerra e della pace, il mondo del bene e del male, il mondo di tutto ciò che più conta: con tutto il rispetto per gli Aztechi e i Mongoli dell’Estremo Oriente, essi non contarono come contò, e conta ancora, la tradizione mediterranea. Fra esso e l’Estremo Oriente vi furono, certo, culti e conquiste interessanti di vario genere, più o meno in contatto con esso, e nella misura in cui lo erano, intelligibili anche a noi. I Persiani vennero cavalcando per porre fine a Babilonia; e una storia greca ci narra come questi barbari imparassero a tendere l’arco e a dire la verità. Alessandro, il grande Greco, marciò con i suoi Macedoni verso l’aurora e ne riportò strani uccelli colorati come le nuvole dell’alba e strani fiori e gioielli dai giardini e dai tesori di re senza nome. L’Islam penetrò a oriente in quel mondo e in parte ce lo rese immaginabile; proprio perché l’Islam stesso era nato in quella cerchia di terre che orlava il nostro mare antico e avito. Nel Medioevo l’impero dei Moghul accrebbe la propria maestà senza perdere il proprio mistero; i Tartari conquistarono la Cina e i Cinesi, a quanto pare, ne fecero pochissimo conto. Tutte queste cose sono interessanti in sé; ma è impossibile spostare il centro di gravità dagli spazi interni dell’Asia e portarlo lontano dal mare interno dell’Europa. A conti fatti, se nel mondo non vi fosse null’altro che ciò che fu detto e fatto e scritto ed edificato nelle terre che circondano il Mediterraneo, esso sarebbe ancora, in tutte le cose più vitali e preziose, il mondo in cui viviamo. Quando quella cultura meridionale si diffuse verso nord-ovest produsse molte cose meravigliose; delle quali senza dubbio noi stessi siamo le più meravigliose. Quando di lì si diffuse alle colonie e ai paesi nuovi, rimase pur sempre la stessa cultura, finché fu cultura del tutto. Ma attorno a quel piccolo mare simile a un lago vi erano le cose stesse, a prescindere da tutte le estensioni, gli echi e i commenti sulle cose: la Repubblica e la Chiesa; la Bibbia e i poemi eroici; l’Islam e Israele e la memoria degli imperi perduti, Aristotele e la misura di tutte le cose. È perché la prima luce su questo mondo è davvero luce, la luce del giorno in cui ancora oggi camminiamo, e non la dubbia visita di strane stelle, che ho cominciato qui col rilevare dove quella luce cade per la prima volta sulle città turrite del Mediterraneo orientale.
Ma benché Babilonia e l’Egitto abbiano così una sorta di primo diritto, per il fatto stesso di essere enigmi familiari e tradizionali, affascinanti per noi ma affascinanti anche per i nostri padri, non dobbiamo immaginare che fossero le uniche antiche civiltà del mare meridionale; o che tutta la civiltà fosse meramente sumera o semitica o copta, e tanto meno meramente asiatica o africana. La ricerca autentica va sempre più esaltando l’antica civiltà dell’Europa e specialmente di ciò che possiamo ancora vagamente chiamare i Greci. Va inteso nel senso che vi furono Greci prima dei Greci, come in tante delle loro mitologie vi furono dèi prima degli dèi. L’isola di Creta era il centro della civiltà oggi detta minoica, dal Minosse che indugiò nell’antica leggenda e il cui labirinto fu realmente scoperto dall’archeologia moderna. Questa elaborata società europea, con i suoi porti e le sue fognature e i suoi congegni domestici, sembra essere crollata sotto qualche invasione dei suoi vicini settentrionali, che fecero o ereditarono l’Ellade che conosciamo nella storia. Ma quel periodo anteriore non tramontò prima di aver dato al mondo doni così grandi che il mondo si è da allora sforzato invano di ripagarli, non foss’altro col plagio.
Da qualche parte lungo la costa ionica, di fronte a Creta e alle isole, sorgeva una città di qualche sorta, probabilmente della sorta che noi chiameremmo un villaggio o un borgo con una cinta. Si chiamava Ilio, ma finì per chiamarsi Troia, e il nome non perirà mai dalla terra. Un poeta che forse fu un mendicante e un cantastorie, che forse non sapeva né leggere né scrivere, e che la tradizione descrisse come cieco, compose un poema sui Greci che mossero guerra a questa città per riconquistare la donna più bella del mondo. Che la donna più bella del mondo vivesse in quell’unica cittadina suona come una leggenda; che il poema più bello del mondo fosse scritto da qualcuno che non conosceva nulla di più grande di simili cittadine è un fatto storico. Si dice che il poema venisse alla fine del periodo; che la cultura primitiva lo generasse nel suo declino; nel qual caso si sarebbe voluto vedere quella cultura nel suo fiore. Ma comunque sia, è vero che questo, che è il nostro primo poema, potrebbe benissimo essere anche il nostro ultimo poema. Potrebbe benissimo essere l’ultima parola non meno che la prima parola pronunciata dall’uomo intorno alla sua sorte mortale, quale la vede lo sguardo meramente mortale. Se il mondo diventasse pagano e perisse, l’ultimo uomo rimasto in vita farebbe bene a citare l’Iliade e a morire.
But in this one great human revelation of antiquity there is another element of great historical importance; which has hardly I think been given its proper place in history. The poet has so conceived the poem that his sympathies apparently, and those of his reader certainly, are on the side of the vanquished rather than of the victor. And this is a sentiment which increases in the poetical tradition even as the poetical origin itself recedes. Achilles had some status as a sort of demigod in pagan times; but he disappears altogether in late times. But Hector grows greater as the ages pass, and it is his name that is the name of a Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.
The tale of the end of Troy shall have no ending, for it is lifted up forever into living echoes, immortal as our hopelessness and our hope. Troy standing was a small thing that may have stood nameless for ages. But Troy falling has been caught up in a flame and suspended in an immortal instant of annihilation; and because it was destroyed with fire the fire shall never be destroyed. And as with the city so with the hero; traced in archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the first figure of the Knight. There is a prophetic coincidence in his title; we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle the horseman with the horse. It is almost anticipated ages before in the thunder of the Homeric hexameter, and that long leaping word with which the Iliad ends. It is that very unity for which we can find no name but the holy centaur of chivalry. But there are other reasons for giving in this glimpse of antiquity the name upon the sacred town. The sanctity of such towns ran like a fire round the coasts and islands of the northern Mediterranean, the high-fenced hamlet for which heroes died. From the smallness of the city came the greatness of the citizen. Hellas with her hundred statues produced nothing statelier than that walking statue; the ideal of the self-commanding man. Hellas of the hundred statues was one legend and literature; and all that labyrinth of little walled nations resounding with the lament of Troy.
A later legend, an afterthought but not an accident, said that stragglers from Troy founded a republic on the Italian shore. It was true in spirit that republican virtue had such a root. A mystery of honour, that was not born of Babylon or the Egyptian pride, there shone like the shield of Hector, defying Asia and Africa; till the light of a new day was loosened, with the rushing of the eagles and the coming of the name; the name that came like a thunderclap when the world woke to Rome.
Ma in questa grande rivelazione umana dell’antichità v’è un altro elemento di grande importanza storica, al quale non è stato dato, credo, il posto che gli spetta nella storia. Il poeta ha concepito il poema in modo tale che le sue simpatie, a quanto pare, e quelle del lettore, di certo, stanno dalla parte del vinto piuttosto che del vincitore. Ed è un sentimento che cresce nella tradizione poetica via via che la stessa origine poetica si allontana. Achille godeva di un certo rango, come una sorta di semidio, ai tempi pagani; ma scompare del tutto nelle epoche più tarde. Ettore invece si fa più grande col passare dei secoli, ed è il suo nome quello di un Cavaliere della Tavola Rotonda, e la sua spada quella che la leggenda pone nella mano di Orlando, mentre mena colpi all’intorno con l’arma dello sconfitto Ettore, nell’estrema rovina e nello splendore della propria disfatta. Il nome anticipa tutte le sconfitte attraverso cui sarebbero passate la nostra stirpe e la nostra religione; quella sopravvivenza a cento sconfitte che è il suo trionfo.
Il racconto della fine di Troia non avrà fine, perché è innalzato per sempre in echi viventi, immortale come la nostra disperazione e la nostra speranza. Troia in piedi era una piccola cosa, che poté restare senza nome per età intere. Ma Troia che cade è stata rapita in una fiamma e sospesa in un istante immortale d’annientamento; e poiché fu distrutta col fuoco, il fuoco non sarà mai distrutto. E come per la città così per l’eroe; tracciata in linee arcaiche in quel crepuscolo primevo si trova la prima figura del Cavaliere. V’è una coincidenza profetica nel suo titolo; abbiamo parlato della parola cavalleria e di come essa sembri fondere il cavaliere col cavallo. Ciò è quasi anticipato secoli prima nel tuono dell’esametro omerico, e in quella lunga parola balzante con cui si chiude l’Iliade. È quella stessa unità alla quale non sappiamo dare altro nome se non il santo centauro della cavalleria. Ma vi sono altre ragioni per dare, in questo scorcio d’antichità, il nome alla città sacra. La santità di tali città correva come un fuoco lungo le coste e le isole del Mediterraneo settentrionale, il borgo dalle alte mura per cui morivano gli eroi. Dalla piccolezza della città veniva la grandezza del cittadino. L’Ellade dalle cento statue non produsse nulla di più maestoso di quella statua che cammina; l’ideale dell’uomo padrone di sé. L’Ellade dalle cento statue era una sola leggenda e letteratura; e tutto quel labirinto di piccole nazioni cinte di mura risuonava del lamento di Troia.
Una leggenda posteriore, un ripensamento ma non un accidente, narrò che alcuni fuggiaschi da Troia fondarono una repubblica sulla sponda italica. Era vero, nello spirito, che la virtù repubblicana avesse una tale radice. Un mistero di onore, che non era nato da Babilonia né dall’orgoglio egizio, vi splendeva come lo scudo di Ettore, sfidando l’Asia e l’Africa; finché la luce di un nuovo giorno si sciolse, con l’irrompere delle aquile e il venire del nome; il nome che giunse come uno scoppio di tuono quando il mondo si destò a Roma.
IV
GOD AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION
I was once escorted over the Roman foundations of an ancient British city by a professor, who said something that seems to me a satire on a good many other professors. Possibly the professor saw the joke, though he maintained an iron gravity, and may or may not have realised that it was a joke against a great deal of what is called comparative religion. I pointed out a sculpture of the head of the sun with the usual halo of rays, but with the difference that the face in the disc, instead of being boyish like Apollo, was bearded like Neptune or Jupiter. ‘Yes,’ he said with a certain delicate exactitude, ‘that is supposed to represent the local god Sul. The best authorities identify Sul with Minerva, but this has been held to show that the identification is not complete.’
That is what we call a powerful understatement. The modern world is madder than any satires on it; long ago Mr. Belloc made his burlesque don say that a bust of Ariadne had been proved by modern research to be a Silenus. But that is not better than the real appearance of Minerva as the Bearded Woman of Mr. Barnum. Only both of them are very like many identifications by ‘the best authorities’ on comparative religion; and when Catholic creeds are identified with various wild myths, I do not laugh or curse or misbehave myself; I confine myself decorously to saying that the identification is not complete.
In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly applied to Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped corporate mankind as a Supreme Being. Even in the days of my youth, I remarked that there was something slightly odd about despising and dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even maniacal contradiction; and then asking us to adore a deity who is a hundred million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
But there is another entity, more or less definable and much more imaginable than the many-headed and monstrous idol of mankind. And it has a much better light to be called, in a reasonable sense, the religion of humanity. Man is not indeed the idol; but man is almost everywhere the idolator. And these multitudinous idolatries of mankind have something about them in many ways more human and sympathetic than modern metaphysical abstractions. If an Asiatic god has three heads and seven arms, there is at least in it an idea of material incarnation bringing an unknown power nearer to us and not farther away. But if our friends Brown, Jones, and Robinson, when out for a Sunday walk, were transformed and amalgamated into an Asiatic idol before our eyes, they would surely seem farther away. If the arms of Brown and the legs of Robinson waved from the same composite body, they would seem to be waving something of a sad farewell. If the heads of all three gentlemen appeared smiling on the same neck, we should hesitate even by what name to address our new and somewhat abnormal friend. In the many-headed and many-handed Oriental idol there is a certain sense of mysteries becoming at least partly intelligible; of formless forces of nature taking some dark but material form, but though this may be true of the multiform god it is not so of the multiform man. The human beings become less human by becoming less separate; we might say less human in being less lonely. The human beings become less intelligible as they become less isolated; we might say with strict truth that the closer they are to us the farther they are away. An Ethical Hymn-book of this humanitarian sort of religion was carefully selected and expurgated on the principle of preserving anything human and eliminating anything divine. One consequence was that a hymn appeared in the amended form of ‘Nearer Mankind to Thee, nearer to Thee.’ It always suggested to me the sensations of a strap-hanged during a crush on the Tube. But it is strange and wonderful how far away the souls of men can seem, when their bodies are so near as all that.
The human unity with which I deal here is not to be confounded with this modern industrial monotony and herding, which is rather a congestion than a communion. It is a thing to which human groups left to themselves, and even human individuals left to themselves, have everywhere tended by an instinct that may truly be called human. Like all healthy human things, it has varied very much within the limits of a general character; for that is characteristic of everything belonging to that ancient land of liberty that lies before and around the servile industrial town. Industrialism actually boasts that its products are all of one pattern; that men in Jamaica or Japan can break the same seal and drink the same bad whiskey, that a man at the North Pole and another at the South might recognise the same optimistic level on the same dubious tinned salmon. But wine, the gift of gods to men, can vary with every valley and every vineyard, can turn into a hundred wines without any wine once reminding us of whiskey; and cheeses can change from county to county without forgetting the difference between chalk and cheese. When I am speaking of this thing, therefore, I am speaking of something that doubtless includes very wide differences; nevertheless I will here maintain that it is one thing. I will maintain that most of the modern botheration comes from not realising that it is really one thing. I will advance the thesis that before all talk about comparative religion and the separate religious founders of the world, the first essential is to recognise this thing as a whole, as a thing almost native and normal to the great fellowship that we call mankind. This thing is Paganism, and I propose to show in these pages that it is the one real rival to the Church of Christ.
Comparative religion is very comparative indeed. That is, it is so much a matter of degree and distance and difference that it is only comparatively successful when it tries to compare. When we come to look at it closely we find it comparing things that are really quite incomparable. We are accustomed to see a table or catalogue of the world’s great religions in parallel columns, until we fancy they are really parallel. We are accustomed to see the names of the great religious founders all in a row: Christ; Mahomet; Buddha; Confucius. But in truth this is only a trick, another of these optical illusions by which any objects may be put into a particular relation by shifting to a particular point of sight. Those religions and religious founders, or rather those whom we choose to lump together as religions and religious founders, do not really show any common character. The illusion is partly produced by Islam coming immediately after Christianity in the list; as Islam did come after Christianity and was largely an imitation of Christianity. But the other eastern religions, or what we call religions, not only do not resemble the Church but do not resemble each other. When we come to Confucianism at the end of the list, we come to something in a totally different world of thought. To compare the Christian and Confucian religions is like comparing a theist with an English squire or asking whether a man is a believer in immortality or a hundred-per-cent American. Confucianism may be a civilisation but it is not a religion.
IV
DIO E LA RELIGIONE COMPARATA
Un tempo fui accompagnato tra le fondamenta romane di un’antica città britannica da un professore, il quale disse qualcosa che mi pare una satira su un buon numero di altri professori. Forse il professore colse lo scherzo, benché mantenesse una gravità di ferro, e può darsi che si rendesse conto, o no, che era uno scherzo ai danni di gran parte di ciò che si chiama religione comparata. Additai una scultura della testa del sole con la consueta aureola di raggi, ma con la differenza che il volto nel disco, invece di essere fanciullesco come Apollo, era barbuto come Nettuno o Giove. «Sì», disse con una certa delicata esattezza, «quello dovrebbe rappresentare il dio locale Sul. Le migliori autorità identificano Sul con Minerva, ma questo è stato addotto a dimostrazione che l’identificazione non è completa.»
Ecco ciò che chiamiamo una potente attenuazione. Il mondo moderno è più folle di qualsiasi satira su di esso; tempo fa il signor Belloc fece dire al suo caricaturale professore che un busto di Arianna era stato dimostrato dalla ricerca moderna essere un Sileno. Ma ciò non è meglio della reale apparizione di Minerva come la Donna Barbuta del signor Barnum. Se non che entrambe assomigliano molto a numerose identificazioni operate dalle «migliori autorità» della religione comparata; e quando i credi cattolici vengono identificati con svariati miti selvaggi, io non rido né impreco né mi comporto male; mi limito con decoro a dire che l’identificazione non è completa.
Ai giorni della mia giovinezza la Religione dell’Umanità era un termine comunemente applicato al comtismo, la teoria di certi razionalisti che adoravano l’umanità corporativa come un Essere Supremo. Già ai giorni della mia giovinezza notavo che v’era qualcosa di lievemente strano nel disprezzare e liquidare la dottrina della Trinità come una contraddizione mistica e persino maniacale; e poi nel chiederci di adorare una divinità che è cento milioni di persone in un solo Dio, senza confondere le persone né dividere la sostanza.
Ma v’è un’altra entità, più o meno definibile e assai più immaginabile del molteplice e mostruoso idolo dell’umanità. Ed essa ha un titolo assai migliore per essere chiamata, in un senso ragionevole, la religione dell’umanità. L’uomo non è invero l’idolo; ma l’uomo è quasi dovunque l’idolatra. E queste moltitudinarie idolatrie dell’umanità hanno in sé qualcosa che, per molti versi, è più umano e più simpatico delle moderne astrazioni metafisiche. Se un dio asiatico ha tre teste e sette braccia, vi è almeno in ciò un’idea di incarnazione materiale che avvicina a noi una potenza ignota, invece di allontanarla. Ma se i nostri amici Brown, Jones e Robinson, usciti per una passeggiata della domenica, venissero trasformati e amalgamati sotto i nostri occhi in un idolo asiatico, ci parrebbero di certo più lontani. Se le braccia di Brown e le gambe di Robinson si agitassero dal medesimo corpo composito, sembrerebbero agitare qualcosa come un triste addio. Se le teste di tutti e tre i signori apparissero sorridenti sul medesimo collo, esiteremmo perfino sul nome con cui rivolgerci al nostro nuovo e alquanto anomalo amico. Nel molteplice idolo orientale, dalle molte teste e dalle molte mani, v’è un certo senso di misteri che divengono almeno in parte intelligibili; di forze informi della natura che assumono una forma oscura ma materiale; ma ciò che può valere per il dio multiforme non vale per l’uomo multiforme. Gli esseri umani divengono meno umani facendosi meno separati; potremmo dire meno umani nell’essere meno soli. Gli esseri umani divengono meno intelligibili quanto meno restano isolati; potremmo dire con rigorosa verità che quanto più ci sono vicini, tanto più sono lontani. Un Innario etico di questa religione umanitaria fu accuratamente selezionato ed espurgato secondo il principio di conservare tutto ciò che era umano ed eliminare tutto ciò che era divino. Una conseguenza fu che un inno apparve nella forma emendata di «Più presso all’Umanità, o Te, più presso a Te». Mi ha sempre suggerito le sensazioni di uno che sta aggrappato alla maniglia durante una calca nel Tube. Ma è strano e mirabile quanto lontane possano sembrare le anime degli uomini, quando i loro corpi sono così vicini come tutto ciò.
L’unità umana di cui mi occupo qui non va confusa con questa moderna monotonia industriale e con questo istinto di gregge, che è piuttosto una congestione che una comunione. È qualcosa verso cui i gruppi umani lasciati a se stessi, e perfino i singoli individui lasciati a se stessi, hanno ovunque teso per un istinto che si può davvero chiamare umano. Come tutte le cose umane sane, essa ha variato moltissimo entro i limiti di un carattere generale; ché tale è la caratteristica di ogni cosa appartenente a quell’antica terra di libertà che si stende dinanzi e attorno alla servile città industriale. L’industrialismo si vanta anzi che i suoi prodotti siano tutti di un solo modello; che uomini in Giamaica o in Giappone possano rompere lo stesso sigillo e bere lo stesso pessimo whisky, che un uomo al Polo Nord e un altro al Polo Sud possano riconoscere lo stesso livello ottimistico sullo stesso dubbio salmone in scatola. Ma il vino, dono degli dèi agli uomini, sa variare con ogni valle e ogni vigna, sa mutarsi in cento vini senza che un solo vino ci rammenti mai il whisky; e i formaggi sanno cambiare da contea a contea senza mai dimenticare la differenza fra il gesso e il formaggio. Quando parlo di questa cosa, dunque, parlo di qualcosa che senza dubbio comprende differenze amplissime; nondimeno sosterrò qui che essa è una cosa sola. Sosterrò che la maggior parte del moderno arrovellìo nasce dal non capire che essa è realmente una cosa sola. Avanzerò la tesi che, prima di ogni discorso sulla religione comparata e sui separati fondatori religiosi del mondo, la cosa essenziale è riconoscere questa cosa come un tutto, come una cosa quasi nativa e normale a quella grande consorteria che chiamiamo genere umano. Questa cosa è il Paganesimo, e mi propongo di mostrare in queste pagine che esso è l’unico vero rivale della Chiesa di Cristo.
La religione comparata è comparativa per davvero. Vale a dire, è a tal punto una faccenda di gradazione e di distanza e di differenza, che riesce soltanto comparativamente quando tenta di comparare. Quando la guardiamo da vicino, la troviamo intenta a comparare cose che sono in realtà del tutto incomparabili. Siamo avvezzi a vedere una tavola o un catalogo delle grandi religioni del mondo in colonne parallele, finché non ci immaginiamo che siano realmente parallele. Siamo avvezzi a vedere i nomi dei grandi fondatori religiosi tutti in fila: Cristo; Maometto; Budda; Confucio. Ma in verità questo non è che un trucco, un’altra di quelle illusioni ottiche per cui oggetti qualsiasi possono essere posti in una relazione particolare spostando l’occhio a un particolare punto di vista. Quelle religioni e quei fondatori religiosi, o piuttosto coloro che scegliamo di ammucchiare insieme come religioni e fondatori religiosi, non mostrano in realtà alcun carattere comune. L’illusione è in parte prodotta dal fatto che l’Islam viene immediatamente dopo il Cristianesimo nella lista; come l’Islam effettivamente venne dopo il Cristianesimo e fu in larga misura un’imitazione del Cristianesimo. Ma le altre religioni orientali, o ciò che chiamiamo religioni, non solo non somigliano alla Chiesa, ma non somigliano l’una all’altra. Quando arriviamo al Confucianesimo in fondo alla lista, arriviamo a qualcosa che sta in un mondo di pensiero totalmente diverso. Comparare la religione cristiana e quella confuciana è come comparare un teista con uno squire inglese, o come domandare se un uomo sia un credente nell’immortalità o un americano al cento per cento. Il Confucianesimo potrà essere una civiltà, ma non è una religione.
In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel. It is not easy, therefore, to expose the fallacy by which a false classification is created to swamp a unique thing, when it really is a unique thing. As there is nowhere else exactly the same fact, so there is nowhere else exactly the same fallacy. But I will take the nearest thing I can find to such a solitary social phenomenon, in order to show how it is thus swamped and assimilated. I imagine most of us would agree that there is something unusual and unique about the position of the Jews. There is nothing that is quite in the same sense an international nation; an ancient culture scattered in different countries but still distinct and indestructible. Now this business is like an attempt to make a list of Nomadic Nations in order to soften the strange solitude of the Jew. It would be easy enough to do it, by the same process of putting a plausible approximation first, and then tailing off into totally different things thrown in somehow to make up the list. Thus in the new list of nomadic nations the Jews would be followed by the Gypsies; who at least are really nomadic if they are not really national. Then the professor of the new science of Comparative Nomadics could pass easily on to something different; even if it was very different. He could remark on the wandering adventure of the English who had scattered their colonies over so many seas; and call them nomads. It is quite true that a great many Englishmen seem to be strangely restless in England. It is quite true that not all of them have left their country for their country’s good. The moment we mention the wandering empire of the English, we must add the strange exiled empire of the Irish. For it is a curious fact, to be noted in our imperial literature, that the same ubiquity and unrest which is a proof of English enterprise and triumph is a proof of Irish futility and failure. Then the professor of Nomadism would look round thoughtfully and remember that there was great talk recently of German waiters, German barbers, German clerks, Germans naturalising themselves in England and the United States and the South American republics. The Germans would go down as the fifth nomadic race; the words Wanderlust and Folk-Wandering would come in very useful here. For there really have been historians who explained the Crusades by suggesting that the Germans were found wandering (as the police say) in what happened to be the neighbourhood of Palestine. Then the professor, feeling he was now near the end, would make a last leap in desperation. He would recall the fact that the French army has captured nearly every capital in Europe, that it marched across countless conquered lands under Charlemagne or Napoleon; and that would be wanderlust and that would be the note of a nomadic race. Thus he would have his six nomadic nations all compact and complete, and would feel that the Jew was no longer a sort of mysterious and even mystical exception. But people with more common sense would probably realise that he had only extended nomadism by extending the meaning of nomadism, and that he had extended that until it really had no meaning at all. It is quite true that the French soldier has made some of the finest marches in all military history. But it is equally true, and far more self-evident, that if the French peasant is not a rooted reality there is no such thing as a rooted reality in the world; or in other words, if he is a nomad there is nobody who is not a nomad.
Now that is the sort of trick that has been tried in the case of comparative religion and the world’s religious founders all standing respectably in a row. It seeks to classify Jesus as the other would classify Jews, by inventing a new class for the purpose and filling up the rest of it with stop-gaps and second-rate copies. I do not mean that these other things are not often great things in their own real character and class. Confucianism and Buddhism are great things, but it is not true to call them Churches; just as the French and English are great peoples, but it is nonsense to call them nomads. There are some points of resemblance between Christendom and its imitation in Islam; for that matter there are some points of resemblance between Jews and Gypsies. But after that the lists are made up of anything that comes to hand; of anything that can be put in the same catalogue without being in the same category.
In this sketch of religious history, with all decent deference to men much more learned than myself, I propose to cut across and disregard this modern method of classification, which I feel sure has falsified the facts of history. I shall here submit an alternative classification of religion or religions, which I believe would be found to cover all the facts and, what is quite as important here, all the fancies. Instead of dividing religion geographically and as it were vertically, into Christian, Moslem, Brahmin, Buddhist, and so on, I would divide it psychologically and in some sense horizontally; into the strata of spiritual elements and influences that could sometimes exist in the same country, or even in the same man. Putting the Church apart for the moment, I should be disposed to divide the natural religion of the mass of mankind under such headings as these: God; the Gods; the Demons; the Philosophers. I believe some such classification will help us to sort out the spiritual experiences of men much more successfully than the conventional business of comparing religions; and that many famous figures will naturally fall into their place in this way who are only forced into their place in the other. As I shall make use of these titles or terms more than once in narrative and allusion, it will be well to define at this stage for what I mean them to stand. And I will begin with the first, the simplest and the most sublime, in this chapter.
In verità la Chiesa è troppo unica per poter provare la propria unicità. Ché la prova più popolare e agevole è quella per parallelo; e qui non v’è parallelo alcuno. Non è facile, dunque, smascherare il sofisma per cui si crea una falsa classificazione allo scopo di sommergere una cosa unica, quando essa è realmente una cosa unica. Come in nessun altro luogo si dà esattamente lo stesso fatto, così in nessun altro luogo si dà esattamente lo stesso sofisma. Ma prenderò la cosa più vicina che io riesca a trovare a un simile fenomeno sociale solitario, per mostrare come esso venga in tal modo sommerso e assimilato. Immagino che i più di noi converrebbero che v’è qualcosa di insolito e di unico nella posizione degli Ebrei. Non v’è nulla che sia, esattamente nel medesimo senso, una nazione internazionale; un’antica cultura sparsa in paesi diversi eppure ancora distinta e indistruttibile. Ora, questa faccenda somiglia al tentativo di compilare una lista di Nazioni Nomadi allo scopo di attenuare la strana solitudine dell’Ebreo. Sarebbe abbastanza facile riuscirvi, con il medesimo procedimento di porre per primo un plausibile termine di approssimazione, e poi di sfumare in cose del tutto diverse, buttate lì in qualche modo per completare la lista. Così, nella nuova lista delle nazioni nomadi, agli Ebrei seguirebbero gli Zingari; i quali almeno sono realmente nomadi, se non sono realmente nazionali. Poi il professore della nuova scienza della Nomadica Comparata potrebbe agevolmente passare a qualcosa di diverso; anche se molto diverso. Potrebbe osservare la vagante avventura degli Inglesi, che hanno disseminato le loro colonie per tanti mari; e chiamarli nomadi. È verissimo che moltissimi Inglesi paiono stranamente inquieti in Inghilterra. È verissimo che non tutti hanno lasciato il proprio paese per il bene del proprio paese. Nel momento stesso in cui menzioniamo l’impero vagante degli Inglesi, dobbiamo aggiungere lo strano impero esiliato degli Irlandesi. Ché è un fatto curioso, da notarsi nella nostra letteratura imperiale, che quella stessa ubiquità e irrequietezza che è prova di intraprendenza e di trionfo inglese, è prova di futilità e di fallimento irlandese. Poi il professore del Nomadismo si guarderebbe attorno pensoso e rammenterebbe che di recente si è fatto gran parlare di camerieri tedeschi, di barbieri tedeschi, di impiegati tedeschi, di Tedeschi che si naturalizzano in Inghilterra e negli Stati Uniti e nelle repubbliche sudamericane. I Tedeschi finirebbero nella lista come quinta razza nomade; e le parole Wanderlust e Migrazione dei Popoli tornerebbero qui molto utili. Poiché ci sono stati davvero storici che spiegavano le Crociate suggerendo che i Tedeschi vennero trovati a vagabondare (come dice la polizia) in quelle che si dava il caso fossero le vicinanze della Palestina. Poi il professore, sentendo di essere ormai vicino alla fine, farebbe un ultimo balzo disperato. Rammenterebbe il fatto che l’esercito francese ha catturato quasi ogni capitale d’Europa, che ha marciato attraverso innumerevoli terre conquistate sotto Carlomagno o Napoleone; e anche quella sarebbe Wanderlust, e anche quella sarebbe la nota di una razza nomade. Così avrebbe le sue sei nazioni nomadi tutte compatte e complete, e sentirebbe che l’Ebreo non è più una sorta di misteriosa e perfino mistica eccezione. Ma le persone dotate di maggior buon senso si accorgerebbero probabilmente che egli non ha fatto che estendere il nomadismo estendendo il significato di nomadismo, e che lo ha esteso fino al punto in cui esso non ha più alcun significato. È verissimo che il soldato francese ha compiuto alcune delle più belle marce di tutta la storia militare. Ma è ugualmente vero, e assai più auto-evidente, che se il contadino francese non è una realtà radicata, allora non esiste al mondo cosa alcuna che sia una realtà radicata; o, in altre parole, se egli è un nomade, non c’è nessuno che non sia un nomade.
Ora, questo è esattamente il genere di trucco che si è tentato nel caso della religione comparata, con i fondatori delle religioni del mondo tutti schierati rispettabilmente in fila. Si cerca di classificare Gesù come si classificherebbero gli Ebrei, inventando allo scopo una nuova classe e riempiendone il resto con tappabuchi e copie di seconda mano. Non voglio dire che queste altre cose non siano spesso cose grandi, nel loro carattere e nella loro classe reali. Il confucianesimo e il buddhismo sono cose grandi, ma non è vero chiamarle Chiese; così come i Francesi e gli Inglesi sono grandi popoli, ma è un’assurdità chiamarli nomadi. Vi sono alcuni punti di somiglianza fra la cristianità e la sua imitazione nell’Islam; e, se è per questo, vi sono alcuni punti di somiglianza fra gli Ebrei e gli Zingari. Ma dopo di ciò gli elenchi si compongono di qualunque cosa capiti sotto mano; di qualunque cosa possa essere messa nello stesso catalogo senza appartenere alla stessa categoria.
In questo abbozzo di storia religiosa, con tutta la debita deferenza verso uomini assai più dotti di me, mi propongo di tagliare per traverso e di ignorare questo moderno metodo di classificazione, che sono certo abbia falsato i fatti della storia. Sottoporrò qui una classificazione alternativa della religione o delle religioni, che credo si troverebbe a coprire tutti i fatti e, cosa qui altrettanto importante, tutte le fantasie. Invece di dividere la religione geograficamente e, per così dire, verticalmente, in cristiana, mussulmana, brahmanica, buddhista e via dicendo, la dividerei psicologicamente e, in un certo senso, orizzontalmente; negli strati di elementi e influenze spirituali che potevano talora coesistere nello stesso paese, o perfino nello stesso uomo. Mettendo per il momento da parte la Chiesa, sarei incline a dividere la religione naturale della massa dell’umanità sotto intestazioni come queste: Dio; gli Dèi; i Dèmoni; i Filosofi. Credo che una qualche classificazione di questo genere ci aiuterà a ordinare le esperienze spirituali degli uomini con assai maggior successo del convenzionale mestiere di comparare le religioni; e che molte figure celebri troveranno per questa via il loro posto naturale, mentre nell’altra vi vengono soltanto forzate. E poiché mi servirò di questi titoli o termini più d’una volta, nella narrazione e nell’allusione, sarà bene definire fin d’ora ciò per cui intendo che essi stiano. E comincerò dal primo, il più semplice e il più sublime, in questo capitolo.
In considering the elements of pagan humanity, we must begin by an attempt to describe the indescribable. Many get over the difficulty of describing it by the expedient of denying it, or at least ignoring it; but the whole point of it is that it was something that was never quite eliminated even when it was ignored. They are obsessed by their evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed comes from a tree, or something larger than itself. Now there is very good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come from some detail that was forgotten, because it was too small to be traced. Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be managed. There is very good reason to suppose that many people did begin with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all; and afterwards fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a sort of secret dissipation. Even the test of savage beliefs, of which the folk-lore students are so fond, is admittedly often found to support such a view. Some of the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense in which anthropologists use the word, the Australian aborigines for instance, are found to have a pure monotheism with a high moral tone. A missionary was preaching to a very wild tribe of polytheists, who had told him all their polytheistic tales, and telling them in return of the existence of the one good God who is a spirit and judges men by spiritual standards. And there was a sudden buzz of excitement among these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was letting out a secret, and they cried to each other, ‘Atahocan! He is speaking of Atahocan!’
Probably it was a point of politeness and even decency among those polytheists not to speak of Atahocan. The name is not perhaps so much adapted as some of our own to direct and solemn religious exhortation but many other social forces are always covering up and confusing such simple ideas. Possibly the old god stood for an old morality found irksome in more expansive moments; possibly intercourse with demons was more fashionable among the best people, as in the modern fashion of Spiritualism. Anyhow, there are any number of similar examples. They all testify to the unmistakable psychology of a thing taken for granted, as distinct from a thing talked about. There is a striking example in a tale taken down word for word from a Red Indian in California which starts out with hearty legendary and literary relish: ‘The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his wife and the stars are their children’; and so on through a most ingenious and complicated story, in the middle of which is a sudden parenthesis saying that the sun and moon have to do something because ‘It is ordered that way by the Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.’ That is exactly the attitude of most paganism towards God. He is something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident; a habit possibly not peculiar to pagans. Sometimes the higher deity is remembered in the higher moral grades and is a sort of mystery. But always, it has been truly said, the savage is talkative about his mythology and taciturn about his religion. The Australian savages, indeed, exhibit a topsyturveydom such as the ancients might have thought truly worthy of the antipodes. The savage who thinks nothing of tossing off such a trifle as a tale of the sun and moon being the halves of a baby chopped in two, or dropping into small-talk about a colossal cosmic cow milked to make the rain, merely in order to be sociable, will then retire to secret caverns sealed against women and white men, temples of terrible initiation where to the thunder of the bull-roarer and the dripping of sacrificial blood, the priest whispers the final secrets, known only to the initiate: that honesty is the best policy, that a little kindness does nobody any harm, that all men are brothers and that there is but one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible.
In other words, we have here the curiosity of religious history that the savage seems to be parading all the most repulsive and impossible parts of his belief and concealing all the most sensible and creditable parts. But the explanation is that they are not in that sense parts of his belief, or at least not parts of the same sort of belief. The myths are merely tall stories, though as tall as the sky, the water spout, or the tropic rain. The mysteries are true stories, and are taken secretly that they may be taken seriously. Indeed it is only too easy to forget that there is a thrill in theism. A novel in which a number of separate characters all turned out to be the same character would certainly be a sensational novel. It is so with the idea that sun and tree and river are the disguises of one god and not of many. Alas, we also find it only too easy to take Atahocan for granted. But whether he is allowed to fade into a truism or preserved as a sensation by being preserved as a secret, it is clear that he is always either an old truism or an old tradition. There is nothing to show that he is an improved product of the mere mythology and everything to show that he preceded it. He is worshipped by the simplest tribes with no trace of ghosts or grave-offerings, or any of the complications in which Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen sought the origin of the simplest of all ideas. Whatever else there was, there was never as such thing as the Evolution of the Idea of God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten, was even explained away; but it was never evolved.
There are not a few indications of this change in other places. It is implied, for instance, in the fact that even polytheism seems often the combination of several monotheisms. A god will gain only a minor seat on Mount Olympus, when he had owned earth and heaven and all the stars while he lived in his own little valley. Like many a small nation melting in a great empire, he gives up local universality only to come under universal limitation. The very name of Pan suggests that he became a god of the wood when he had been a god of the world. The very name of Jupiter is almost a pagan translation of the words ‘Our Father which art in heaven.’ As with the Great Father symbolised by the sky, so with the Great Mother whom we still call Mother Earth. Demeter and Ceres and Cybele often seem to be almost capable of taking over the whole business of godhood, so that men should need no other gods. It seems reasonably probable that a good many men did have no other gods but one of these, worshipped as the author of all.
Nel considerare gli elementi dell’umanità pagana, dobbiamo cominciare con un tentativo di descrivere l’indescrivibile. Molti superano la difficoltà di descriverlo con l’espediente di negarlo, o quanto meno di ignorarlo; ma tutto il punto sta in ciò, che esso era qualcosa che non venne mai del tutto eliminato, nemmeno quando veniva ignorato. Sono ossessionati dalla loro monomania evoluzionistica, secondo cui ogni cosa grande cresce da un seme, o da qualcosa di più piccolo di sé. Sembrano dimenticare che ogni seme viene da un albero, o da qualcosa di più grande di sé. Ora, vi è un ottimo fondamento per congetturare che la religione non sia in origine venuta da qualche particolare che fu dimenticato perché troppo piccolo per lasciar traccia. Assai più probabilmente fu un’idea che venne abbandonata perché troppo grande per essere maneggiata. Vi è ottima ragione per supporre che molti popoli abbiano davvero cominciato con l’idea semplice ma travolgente di un solo Dio che governa ogni cosa; e che poi siano decaduti in cose come il culto dei dèmoni, quasi come una sorta di segreta dissipazione. Perfino la prova delle credenze selvagge, di cui gli studiosi di folclore sono tanto ghiotti, si trova per ammissione comune a sostenere spesso una simile veduta. Alcuni fra i selvaggi più rozzi in assoluto, primitivi in ogni senso in cui gli antropologi usino la parola, gli aborigeni australiani per esempio, si trovano ad avere un puro monoteismo dall’alto tono morale. Un missionario predicava a una tribù molto selvaggia di politeisti, i quali gli avevano raccontato tutte le loro storie politeistiche, ed egli raccontava loro in cambio dell’esistenza dell’unico Dio buono, che è uno spirito e giudica gli uomini secondo criteri spirituali. E vi fu un improvviso brusio di eccitazione fra quei flemmatici barbari, come dinanzi a qualcuno che lasciasse trapelare un segreto, e si gridarono l’un l’altro: «Atahocan! Sta parlando di Atahocan!».
Probabilmente era un punto di cortesia e perfino di decenza, fra quei politeisti, non parlare di Atahocan. Il nome non è forse così adatto come alcuni dei nostri all’esortazione religiosa diretta e solenne, ma molte altre forze sociali sono sempre intente a coprire e a confondere idee tanto semplici. Può darsi che l’antico dio rappresentasse un’antica morale avvertita come molesta nei momenti più espansivi; può darsi che il commercio con i dèmoni fosse più alla moda fra le persone migliori, come nella moderna voga dello Spiritismo. In ogni caso, vi sono innumerevoli esempi simili. Tutti testimoniano l’inconfondibile psicologia di una cosa data per scontata, distinta da una cosa di cui si parla. Vi è un esempio impressionante in un racconto trascritto parola per parola da un Pellerossa della California, che esordisce con cordiale gusto leggendario e letterario: «Il sole è il padre e il signore dei cieli. È il gran capo. La luna è sua moglie e le stelle sono i loro figli»; e così via, attraverso una storia quanto mai ingegnosa e complicata, nel mezzo della quale s’inserisce un’improvvisa parentesi che dice come il sole e la luna debbano fare qualcosa perché «è così ordinato dal Grande Spirito che dimora al di sopra del luogo di ogni cosa». Questo è esattamente l’atteggiamento della maggior parte del paganesimo verso Dio. Egli è qualcosa di presupposto e di dimenticato e di ricordato per caso; un’abitudine forse non peculiare dei pagani. Talora la divinità superiore è ricordata nei gradi morali più alti ed è una sorta di mistero. Ma sempre, è stato detto con verità, il selvaggio è loquace intorno alla sua mitologia e taciturno intorno alla sua religione. I selvaggi australiani, in verità, esibiscono un capovolgimento tale quale gli antichi avrebbero potuto ritenere davvero degno degli antipodi. Il selvaggio che non si fa scrupolo di buttar là come un nonnulla un racconto sul sole e sulla luna che sarebbero le due metà di un bambino tagliato in due, o di scendere a chiacchiere su una colossale vacca cosmica munta per fare la pioggia, unicamente per essere socievole, si ritirerà poi in caverne segrete, sbarrate alle donne e agli uomini bianchi, templi di terribile iniziazione dove, al rombo del rombo sacro e allo stillare del sangue sacrificale, il sacerdote sussurra i segreti finali, noti solo all’iniziato: che l’onestà è la miglior politica, che un po’ di gentilezza non fa male a nessuno, che tutti gli uomini sono fratelli e che vi è un solo Dio, il Padre Onnipotente, creatore di tutte le cose visibili e invisibili.
In altre parole, ci troviamo qui dinanzi a quella curiosità della storia religiosa per cui il selvaggio sembra ostentare tutte le parti più ripugnanti e inverosimili della sua credenza e nascondere invece tutte quelle più sensate e degne di stima. Ma la spiegazione è che esse non sono, in quel senso, parti della sua credenza, o almeno non parti dello stesso genere di credenza. I miti sono soltanto storie esagerate, per quanto esagerate sino all’altezza del cielo, della tromba d’acqua o della pioggia tropicale. I misteri sono storie vere, e vengono accolti in segreto affinché possano essere presi sul serio. Anzi, non è che troppo facile dimenticare che nel teismo v’è un brivido. Un romanzo in cui un certo numero di personaggi distinti si rivelasse tutti quanti essere il medesimo personaggio sarebbe di certo un romanzo sensazionale. Così è con l’idea che il sole e l’albero e il fiume siano i travestimenti di un solo dio e non di molti. Ahimè, troviamo anche fin troppo facile dare Atahocan per scontato. Ma sia che gli si permetta di sbiadire in un truismo, sia che lo si conservi come sensazione conservandolo come segreto, è chiaro ch’egli è sempre o un vecchio truismo o una vecchia tradizione. Nulla induce a credere ch’egli sia un prodotto perfezionato della semplice mitologia, e tutto induce a credere che l’abbia preceduta. Egli è adorato dalle tribù più semplici senza alcuna traccia di spiriti o di offerte funebri, né di alcuna di quelle complicazioni in cui Herbert Spencer e Grant Allen cercarono l’origine della più semplice di tutte le idee. Qualunque altra cosa vi sia stata, non vi fu mai una cosa come l’Evoluzione dell’Idea di Dio. L’idea fu celata, fu evitata, fu quasi dimenticata, fu perfino spiegata via; ma non fu mai evoluta.
Non sono poche le indicazioni di questo mutamento in altri luoghi. Esso è implicito, per esempio, nel fatto che perfino il politeismo sembra spesso la combinazione di più monoteismi. Un dio otterrà soltanto un seggio secondario sul Monte Olimpo, quando aveva posseduto la terra e il cielo e tutte le stelle mentre viveva nella sua piccola valle. Come tante piccole nazioni che si dissolvono in un grande impero, egli rinuncia all’universalità locale solo per cadere sotto una limitazione universale. Il nome stesso di Pan lascia intendere ch’egli divenne un dio del bosco dopo essere stato un dio del mondo. Il nome stesso di Giove è quasi una traduzione pagana delle parole “Padre nostro che sei nei cieli”. Come col Grande Padre simboleggiato dal cielo, così con la Grande Madre che ancora chiamiamo Madre Terra. Demetra e Cerere e Cibele spesso paiono quasi capaci di assumersi l’intera incombenza della divinità, sì che agli uomini non occorressero altri dèi. Sembra ragionevolmente probabile che non pochi uomini non avessero altri dèi se non una di queste, adorata come autrice di tutto.
Over some of the most immense and populous tracts of the world such as China, it would seem that the simpler idea of the Great Father has never been very much complicated with rival cults, though it may have in some sense ceased to be a cult itself. The best authorities seem to think that though Confucianism is in one sense agnosticism, it does not directly contradict the old theism, precisely because it has become a rather vague theism. It is one in which God is called Heaven, as in the case of polite persons tempted to swear in drawing-rooms. But Heaven is still overhead, even if it is very far overhead. We have all the impression of a simple truth that has receded, until it was remote without ceasing to be true. And this phrase alone would bring us back to the same idea even in the pagan mythology of the West. There is surely something of this very notion of the withdrawal of some higher power, in all those mysterious and very imaginative myths about the separation of earth and sky. In a hundred forms we are told that heaven and earth were once lovers, or were once at one, when some upstart thing, often some undutiful child, thrust them apart; and the world was built on an abyss; upon a division and a parting. One of its grossest versions was given by Greek civilisation in the myth of Uranus and Saturn. One of its most charming versions was that of some savage niggers, who say that a little pepper-plant grew taller and taller and lifted the whole sky like a lid; a beautiful barbaric vision of daybreak for some of our painters who love that tropical twilight. Of myths, and the highly mythical explanations which the moderns offer of myths, something will be said in another section; for I cannot but think that most mythology is on another and more superficial plane. But in this primeval vision of the rending of one world into two there is surely something more of ultimate ideas. As to what it means, a man will learn far more about it by lying on his back in a field, and merely looking at the sky, than by reading all the libraries even of the most learned and valuable folklore. He will know what is meant by saying that the sky ought to be nearer to us than it is, that perhaps it was once nearer than it is, that it is not a thing merely alien and abysmal but in some fashion sundered from us and saying farewell. There will creep across his mind the curious suggestion that after all, perhaps, the myth-maker was not merely a moon-calf or village idiot thinking he could cut up the clouds like a cake, but had in him something more than it is fashionable to attribute to the Troglodyte; that it is just possible that Thomas Hood was not talking like a Troglodyte when he said that, as time went on, the tree-tops only told him he was further off from heaven than when he was a boy. But anyhow the legend of Uranus the Lord of Heaven dethroned by Saturn the Time Spirit would mean something to the author of that poem. And it would mean, among other things, this banishment of the first fatherhood. There is the idea of God in the very notion that there were gods before the gods. There is an idea of greater simplicity in all the allusions to that more ancient order. The suggestion is supported by the process of propagation we see in historic times. Gods and demigods and heroes breed like herrings before our very eyes and suggest of themselves that the family may have had one founder; mythology grows more and more complicated, and the very complication suggests that at the beginning it was more simple. Even on the external evidence, of the sort called scientific, there is therefore a very good case for the suggestion that man began with monotheism before it developed or degenerated into polytheism. But I am concerned rather with an internal than an external truth; and, as I have already said, the internal truth is almost indescribable. We have to speak of something of which it is the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have not merely to translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence.
I suspect an immense implication behind all polytheism and paganism. I suspect we have only a hint of it here and there in these savage creeds or Greek origins. It is not exactly what we mean by the presence of God; in a sense it might more truly be called the absence of God. But absence does not mean non-existence; and a man drinking the toast of absent friends does not mean that from his life all friendship is absent. It is a void but it is not a negation; it is some thing as positive as an empty chair. It would be an exaggeration to say that the pagan saw higher than Olympus an empty throne. It would be nearer the truth to take the gigantic imagery of the Old Testament, in which the prophet saw God from behind; it was as if some immeasurable presence had turned its back on the world. Yet the meaning will again be missed, if it is supposed to be anything so conscious and vivid as the monotheism of Moses and his people. I do not mean that the pagan peoples were in the least overpowered by this idea merely because it is overpowering. On the contrary, it was so large that they all carried it lightly, as we all carry the load of the sky. Gazing at some detail like a bird or a cloud, we can all ignore its awful blue background; we can neglect the sky; and precisely because it bears down upon us with an annihilating force it is felt as nothing. A thing of this kind can only be an impressing and a rather subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made by pagan literature and religion. I repeat that in our special sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of the presence of God. But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I doubt if there was ever in all the marvellous manhood of antiquity a man who was happy as St. Francis was happy. We feel it in the legend of a Golden Age and again in the vague implication that the gods themselves are ultimately related to something else, even when that Unknown God has faded into a Fate. Above all we feel it in those immortal moments when the pagan literature seems to return to a more innocent antiquity and speak with a more direct voice, so that no word is worthy of it except our own monotheistic monosyllable. We cannot say anything but ‘God’ in a sentence like that of Socrates bidding farewell to his judges: ‘I go to die and you remain to live; and God alone knows which of us goes the better way.’ We can use no other word even for the best moments of Marcus Aurelius: ‘Can they say dear city of Cecrops, and canst thou not say dear city of God?’ We can use no other word in that mighty line in which Virgil spoke to all who suffer with the veritable cry of a Christian before Christ: ‘O you that have borne things more terrible, to this also God shall give an end.’
Su alcune delle più immense e popolose distese del mondo, come la Cina, parrebbe che l’idea più semplice del Grande Padre non si sia mai troppo complicata con culti rivali, benché in un certo senso possa aver cessato essa stessa di essere un culto. Le migliori autorità sembrano ritenere che, sebbene il confucianesimo sia in un senso agnosticismo, esso non contraddica direttamente l’antico teismo, appunto perché è divenuto un teismo piuttosto vago. È un teismo in cui Dio è chiamato Cielo, come nel caso delle persone garbate tentate di bestemmiare nei salotti. Ma il Cielo è pur sempre lassù, anche se molto in alto. Abbiamo tutta l’impressione di una semplice verità che si è ritirata, finché non è divenuta remota senza cessare di essere vera. E questa frase da sola ci ricondurrebbe alla medesima idea perfino nella mitologia pagana dell’Occidente. Vi è di certo qualcosa di questa medesima nozione del ritrarsi di una qualche potenza superiore, in tutti quei misteriosi e assai fantasiosi miti sulla separazione della terra e del cielo. In cento forme ci viene detto che il cielo e la terra furono un tempo amanti, o furono un tempo una cosa sola, quando qualche cosa arrogante, spesso qualche figlio snaturato, li separò con la forza; e il mondo fu edificato sopra un abisso; sopra una divisione e un distacco. Una delle sue versioni più grossolane fu data dalla civiltà greca nel mito di Urano e di Saturno. Una delle sue versioni più affascinanti fu quella di certi selvaggi negri, i quali raccontano che una piccola pianta di pepe crebbe sempre più alta e sollevò l’intero cielo come un coperchio; una bella visione barbarica dell’alba per alcuni dei nostri pittori che amano quel crepuscolo tropicale. Dei miti, e delle spiegazioni altamente mitiche che i moderni offrono dei miti, qualcosa si dirà in un’altra sezione; poiché non posso non pensare che la maggior parte della mitologia si collochi su un piano diverso e più superficiale. Ma in questa primeva visione della lacerazione di un solo mondo in due vi è di certo qualcosa di più delle idee ultime. Quanto al suo significato, un uomo ne imparerà assai di più giacendo supino in un campo, e limitandosi a contemplare il cielo, che leggendo tutte le biblioteche anche del più dotto e prezioso folclore. Egli saprà che cosa si intende dicendo che il cielo dovrebbe esserci più vicino di quanto non sia, che forse un tempo era più vicino di quanto non sia, che non è una cosa meramente aliena e abissale ma in qualche modo separata da noi e in atto di dirci addio. Gli si insinuerà nella mente il curioso suggerimento che, dopotutto, forse il creatore di miti non era soltanto un citrullo o l’idiota del villaggio che si figurava di poter tagliare le nuvole come una torta, ma aveva in sé qualcosa di più di quanto sia di moda attribuire al Troglodita; che è appena possibile che Thomas Hood non parlasse da Troglodita quando disse che, col passare del tempo, le cime degli alberi non facevano che dirgli che era più lontano dal cielo di quando era fanciullo. Ma comunque la leggenda di Urano, Signore del Cielo, detronizzato da Saturno lo Spirito del Tempo, significherebbe qualcosa per l’autore di quella poesia. E significherebbe, tra le altre cose, questo bando della prima paternità. Vi è l’idea di Dio nella nozione stessa che vi furono dèi prima degli dèi. Vi è un’idea di maggiore semplicità in tutte le allusioni a quell’ordine più antico. Il suggerimento è avvalorato dal processo di propagazione che vediamo nei tempi storici. Dèi e semidèi ed eroi si moltiplicano come aringhe sotto i nostri stessi occhi e suggeriscono da sé che la famiglia possa aver avuto un solo fondatore; la mitologia si fa sempre più complicata, e la complicazione stessa suggerisce che al principio fosse più semplice. Perfino sulla prova esterna, di quella specie detta scientifica, vi è dunque un ottimo argomento a favore dell’ipotesi che l’uomo cominciò con il monoteismo prima che questo si sviluppasse o degenerasse in politeismo. Ma io mi occupo piuttosto di una verità interna che di una esterna; e, come ho già detto, la verità interna è quasi indescrivibile. Dobbiamo parlare di qualcosa il cui punto essenziale è per l’appunto che di essa la gente non parlava; non dobbiamo semplicemente tradurre da una lingua o da un idioma stranieri, ma da uno strano silenzio.
Dietro tutto il politeismo e il paganesimo io sospetto un’immensa implicazione. Sospetto che qua e là, in questi credi selvaggi o in queste origini greche, non ne cogliamo che un accenno. Non è esattamente ciò che intendiamo con la presenza di Dio; in un certo senso la si potrebbe più propriamente chiamare l’assenza di Dio. Ma assenza non significa inesistenza; e chi leva il calice agli amici assenti non intende dire che dalla sua vita ogni amicizia sia assente. È un vuoto, ma non è una negazione; è qualcosa di positivo come una sedia vuota. Sarebbe un’esagerazione dire che il pagano vedesse, più in alto dell’Olimpo, un trono vuoto. Sarebbe più vicino alla verità riprendere quella gigantesca immagine dell’Antico Testamento, in cui il profeta vide Dio di spalle; era come se qualche presenza incommensurabile avesse voltato le spalle al mondo. Eppure il senso andrà di nuovo perduto, se lo si suppone tanto cosciente e vivido quanto il monoteismo di Mosè e del suo popolo. Non intendo dire che i popoli pagani fossero minimamente soggiogati da questa idea solo perché essa è soverchiante. Al contrario, era così vasta che tutti la portavano con leggerezza, come tutti portiamo il peso del cielo. Fissando lo sguardo su qualche particolare, come un uccello o una nuvola, possiamo tutti ignorare il suo tremendo sfondo azzurro; possiamo trascurare il cielo; e proprio perché grava su di noi con una forza annientante lo si avverte come nulla. Una cosa di questo genere non può essere che un’impressione, e un’impressione piuttosto sottile; ma per me è un’impressione molto forte, prodotta dalla letteratura e dalla religione pagane. Ripeto che, nel nostro speciale senso sacramentale, vi è naturalmente l’assenza della presenza di Dio. Ma vi è, in un senso assai reale, la presenza dell’assenza di Dio. La avvertiamo nella insondabile tristezza della poesia pagana; poiché dubito che vi sia mai stato, in tutta la meravigliosa virilità dell’antichità, un uomo felice come lo fu san Francesco. La avvertiamo nella leggenda di un’Età dell’oro, e ancora nel vago suggerimento che gli dèi stessi siano in ultima analisi legati a qualcos’altro, anche quando quel Dio Ignoto è sbiadito in un Fato. La avvertiamo soprattutto in quei momenti immortali in cui la letteratura pagana sembra tornare a un’antichità più innocente e parlare con voce più diretta, sicché nessuna parola le è degna se non il nostro stesso monosillabo monoteistico. Non possiamo dire altro che «Dio» in una frase come quella di Socrate che si accomiata dai suoi giudici: «Io vado a morire e voi restate a vivere; e Dio solo sa chi di noi segua la via migliore». Non possiamo usare altra parola nemmeno per i momenti migliori di Marco Aurelio: «Possono esse dire, cara città di Cecrope, e tu non puoi dire, cara città di Dio?». Non possiamo usare altra parola in quel possente verso in cui Virgilio parlò a tutti coloro che soffrono con il grido autentico di un cristiano prima di Cristo: «O voi che avete sopportato cose più terribili, anche a questa Dio porrà fine».
In short, there is a feeling that there is something higher than the gods; but because it is higher it is also further away. Not yet could even Virgil have read the riddle and the paradox of that other divinity, who is both higher and nearer. For them what was truly divine was very distant, so distant that they dismissed it more and more from their minds. It had less and less to do with the mere mythology of which I shall write later. Yet even in this there was a sort of tacit admission of its intangible purity, when we consider what most of the mythologies like. As the Jews would not degrade it by images, so the Greeks did not degrade it even by imaginations. When the gods were more and more remembered only by pranks and profligacies, it was relatively a movement of reverence. It was an act of piety to forget God. In other words, there is something in the whole tone of the time suggesting that men had accepted a lower level, and still were half conscious that it was a lower level. It is hard to find words for these things; yet the one really just word stands ready. These men were conscious of the Fall if they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of an heathen humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment. There is such a thing as the momentary power to remember that we forget. And the most ignorant of humanity know by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven. But it remains true that even for these men there were moments, like the memories of childhood, when they heard themselves talking with a simpler language; there were moments when the Roman, like Virgil in the line already quoted, cut his way with a sword-stroke of song out of the tangle of the mythologies, the motley mob of gods and goddesses sank suddenly out of sight and the Sky-Father was alone in the sky.
This latter example is very relevant to the next step in the process. A white light as of a lost morning still lingers on the figure of Jupiter, of Pan or of the elder Apollo; and it may well be, as already noted, that each was once a divinity as solitary as Jehovah or Allah. They lost this lonely universality by a process it is here very necessary to note; a process of amalgamation very like what was afterwards called syncretism. The whole pagan world set itself to build a Pantheon. They admitted more and more gods, gods not only of the Greeks but of the barbarians; gods not only of Europe but of Asia and Africa. The more the merrier, though some of the Asian and African ones were not very merry. They admitted them to equal thrones with their own, sometimes they identified them with their own. They may have regarded it as an enrichment of their religious life; but it meant the final loss of all that we now call religion. It meant that ancient light of simplicity, that had a single source like the sun, finally fades away in a dazzle of conflicting Lights and colours. God is really sacrificed to the Gods; in a very literal sense of the flippant phrase, they have been too many for him.
Polytheism, therefore, was really a sort of pool; in the sense of the pagans having consented to the pooling of their pagan religions. And this point is very important in many controversies ancient and modern. It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing to say that the god of the stranger may be as good as our own; and doubtless the pagans thought themselves very liberal and enlightened when they agreed to add to the gods of the city or the hearth some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming down from the mountains or some shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of the woods. But exactly what it lost by these larger ideas is the largest idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole world one. And the converse is also true. Doubtless those more antiquated men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and their single sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages benighted and left behind. But these superstitious savages were preserving something that is much more like the cosmic power as conceived by philosophy, or even as conceived by science. This paradox by which the rude reactionary was a sort of prophetic progressive has one consequence very much to the point. In a purely historical sense, and apart from any other controversies in the same connection, it throws a light, a single and a steady light, that shines from the beginning on a little and lonely people. In this paradox, as in some riddle of religion of which the answer was sealed up for centuries, lies the mission and the meaning of the Jews.
It is true in this sense, humanly speaking, that the world owes God to the Jews. It owes that truth to much that is blamed on the Jews, possibly to much that is blameable in the Jews. We have already noted the nomadic position of the Jews amid the other pastoral peoples upon the fringe of the Babylonian Empire, and something of that strange erratic course of theirs blazed across the dark territory of extreme antiquity, as they passed from the seat of Abraham and the shepherd princes into Egypt and doubled back into the Palestinian hills and held them against the Philistines from Crete and fell into captivity in Babylon; and yet again returned to their mountain city by the Zionist policy of the Persian conquerors; and so continued that amazing romance of restlessness of which we have not yet seen the end. But through all their wanderings, and especially through all their early wanderings, they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle, that held perhaps a featureless symbol and certainly an invisible god. We may say that one most essential feature was that it was featureless. Much as we may prefer that creative liberty which the Christian culture has declared and by which it has eclipsed even the arts of antiquity, we must not underrate the determining importance at the time of the Hebrew inhibition of images. It is a typical example of one of those limitations that did in fact preserve and perpetuate enlargement, like a wall built round a wide open space. The God who could not have a statue remained a spirit. Nor would his statue in any case have had the disarming dignity and grace of the Greek statues then or the Christian statues afterwards. He was living in a land of monsters. We shall have occasion to consider more fully what those monsters were, Moloch and Dagon and Tanit the terrible goddess. If the deity of Israel had ever had an image, he would have had a phallic image. By merely giving him a body they would have brought in all the worst elements of mythology; all the polygamy of polytheism; the vision of the harem in heaven. This point about the refusal of art is the first example of the limitations which are often adversely criticised, only because the critics themselves are limited. But an even stronger case can be found in the other criticism offered by the same critics. It is often said with a sneer that the God of Israel was only a God of battles, ‘a mere barbaric Lord of Hosts’ pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their envious foe. Well it is for the world that he was a God of Battles. Well it is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a foe. In the ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved the desolate disaster of conceiving him as a friend. It would have been only too easy for them to have seen him stretching out his hands in love and reconciliation, embracing Baal and kissing the painted face of Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods; the last god to sell his crown of stars for the Soma of the Indian pantheon or the nectar of Olympus or the mead of Valhalla. It would have been easy enough for his worshippers to follow the enlightened course of Syncretism and the pooling of all the pagan traditions. It is obvious indeed that his followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it required the almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to the divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and ruin. The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe. In a word, there was a popular pagan god called Jupiter-Ammon. There was never a god called Jehovah-Ammon. There was never a god called Jehovah-Jupiter. If there had been, there would certainly have been another called Jehovah-Moloch. Long before the liberal and enlightened amalgamators had got so far afield as Jupiter, the image of the Lord of Hosts would have been deformed out of all suggestion of a monotheistic maker and ruler and would have become an idol far worse than any savage fetish; for he might have been as civilised as the gods of Tyre and Carthage. What that civilisation meant we shall consider more fully in the chapter that follows; when we note how the power of demons nearly destroyed Europe and even the heathen health of the world. But the world’s destiny would have been distorted still more fatally if monotheism had failed in the Mosaic tradition. I hope in a subsequent section to show that I am not without sympathy with all that health in the heathen world that made its fairy-tales and its fanciful romances of religion. But I hope also to show that these were bound to fail in the long run; and the world would have been lost if it had been unable to return to that great original simplicity of a single authority in all things. That we do preserve something of that primary simplicity that poets and philosophers can still indeed in some sense say an Universal Prayer, that we live in a large and serene world under a sky that stretches paternally over all the peoples of the earth, that philosophy and philanthropy are truisms in a religion of reasonable men, all that we do most truly owe, under heaven, to a secretive and restless nomadic people; who bestowed on men the supreme and serene blessing of a jealous God.
In breve, vi è il sentimento che esista qualcosa di più alto degli dèi; ma proprio perché è più alto, è anche più lontano. Neppure Virgilio poteva ancora sciogliere l’enigma e il paradosso di quell’altra divinità, che è insieme più alta e più vicina. Per loro ciò che era veramente divino era assai distante, così distante che sempre più lo scacciavano dalla mente. Sempre meno aveva a che fare con la mera mitologia di cui scriverò più avanti. Eppure anche in questo vi era una sorta di tacita ammissione della sua intangibile purezza, se si considera come sono la maggior parte delle mitologie. Come gli Ebrei non volevano degradarlo con immagini, così i Greci non lo degradavano neppure con immaginazioni. Quando gli dèi venivano ricordati sempre più soltanto per birbonate e dissolutezze, era relativamente un moto di reverenza. Era un atto di pietà dimenticare Dio. In altre parole, vi è qualcosa nell’intero tono del tempo che suggerisce come gli uomini avessero accettato un livello più basso, ed erano ancora a metà consapevoli che era un livello più basso. È difficile trovare parole per queste cose; eppure l’unica parola davvero giusta sta pronta. Questi uomini erano coscienti della Caduta, se erano coscienti di nient’altro; e lo stesso vale per un’umanità pagana. Coloro che sono caduti possono ricordare la caduta, anche quando dimenticano l’altezza. Un simile tantalico vuoto o strappo nella memoria sta al fondo di ogni sentimento pagano. Esiste una cosa come il potere momentaneo di ricordare che dimentichiamo. E i più ignoranti dell’umanità sanno, dal solo aspetto della terra, di avere dimenticato il cielo. Ma resta vero che anche per questi uomini vi furono momenti, simili ai ricordi dell’infanzia, in cui si udirono parlare con un linguaggio più semplice; vi furono momenti in cui il Romano, come Virgilio nel verso già citato, si aprì la via con un colpo di spada di canto fuori dal groviglio delle mitologie, e la variopinta ressa di dèi e di dee sprofondò d’un tratto fuori dalla vista, e il Padre-Cielo rimase solo nel cielo.
Quest’ultimo esempio è molto pertinente al passo successivo del processo. Una bianca luce, come di un mattino perduto, indugia ancora sulla figura di Giove, di Pan o del più antico Apollo; e può ben darsi, come già notato, che ciascuno fosse un tempo una divinità solitaria quanto Jahvè o Allah. Persero questa solitaria universalità per un processo che qui è molto necessario notare; un processo di amalgama assai simile a ciò che in seguito fu chiamato sincretismo. L’intero mondo pagano si mise a edificare un Pantheon. Ammisero sempre più dèi, dèi non solo dei Greci ma dei barbari; dèi non solo d’Europa ma d’Asia e d’Africa. Più erano, meglio era, benché alcuni di quelli asiatici e africani non fossero granché allegri. Li ammisero su troni pari ai propri, talvolta li identificarono con i propri. Poterono considerarlo un arricchimento della loro vita religiosa; ma esso significò la perdita definitiva di tutto ciò che noi oggi chiamiamo religione. Significò che quell’antica luce di semplicità, che aveva un’unica sorgente come il sole, finalmente si spegne in un abbaglio di luci e colori contrastanti. Dio viene realmente sacrificato agli dèi; in un senso assai letterale della frase frivola, essi sono stati troppi per lui.
Il politeismo, dunque, era in realtà una sorta di fondo comune; nel senso che i pagani avevano acconsentito a mettere in comune le loro religioni pagane. E questo punto è importantissimo in molte controversie antiche e moderne. Passa per cosa liberale e illuminata affermare che il dio dello straniero possa essere buono quanto il nostro; e senza dubbio i pagani si credevano assai liberali e illuminati quando acconsentivano ad aggiungere agli dèi della città o del focolare qualche selvaggio e fantastico Dioniso che scendeva dalle montagne, o qualche irsuto e rustico Pan che sbucava dai boschi. Ma proprio ciò che si perdeva con queste idee più larghe è la più larga idea di tutte. È l’idea della paternità che rende uno il mondo intero. E vale anche il contrario. Senza dubbio quegli uomini più antiquati dell’antichità che si aggrappavano alle loro statue solitarie e ai loro unici nomi sacri erano considerati selvaggi superstiziosi, ottenebrati e rimasti indietro. Ma questi selvaggi superstiziosi custodivano qualcosa che assomiglia assai di più alla potenza cosmica quale la concepisce la filosofia, o anche quale la concepisce la scienza. Questo paradosso, per cui il rozzo reazionario era una specie di progressista profetico, ha una conseguenza molto pertinente. In senso puramente storico, e a prescindere da ogni altra controversia connessa, esso getta una luce, una luce sola e costante, che risplende fin dal principio su un popolo piccolo e solitario. In questo paradosso, come in qualche enigma di religione la cui risposta rimase sigillata per secoli, sta la missione e il significato degli Ebrei.
È vero in questo senso, umanamente parlando, che il mondo deve Dio agli Ebrei. Deve quella verità a molto di ciò che si rimprovera agli Ebrei, e forse a molto di ciò che è rimproverabile negli Ebrei. Abbiamo già notato la posizione nomade degli Ebrei in mezzo agli altri popoli pastorali ai margini dell’Impero babilonese, e qualcosa di quella loro strana rotta erratica che divampò attraverso l’oscuro territorio dell’estrema antichità, mentre passavano dalla sede di Abramo e dei principi pastori in Egitto, e tornavano indietro fino alle colline della Palestina e le difendevano contro i Filistei venuti da Creta, e cadevano prigionieri a Babilonia; e poi di nuovo tornavano alla loro città montana per la politica sionista dei conquistatori persiani; e così proseguivano quello stupefacente romanzo d’inquietudine di cui non abbiamo ancora visto la fine. Ma attraverso tutte le loro peregrinazioni, e specialmente attraverso tutte le loro peregrinazioni antiche, essi portarono davvero il destino del mondo in quel tabernacolo di legno, che conteneva forse un simbolo privo di sembianze e certamente un dio invisibile. Possiamo dire che uno dei tratti più essenziali fosse proprio l’essere privo di tratti. Per quanto possiamo preferire quella libertà creativa che la cultura cristiana ha proclamato e con cui ha eclissato perfino le arti dell’antichità, non dobbiamo sottovalutare l’importanza decisiva, a quel tempo, della proibizione ebraica delle immagini. È un tipico esempio di una di quelle limitazioni che di fatto conservarono e perpetuarono un ampliamento, come un muro eretto intorno a un vasto spazio aperto. Il Dio che non poteva avere una statua rimase uno spirito. Né la sua statua avrebbe in ogni caso avuto la disarmante dignità e grazia delle statue greche di allora o delle statue cristiane di poi. Egli viveva in una terra di mostri. Avremo occasione di considerare più a fondo cosa fossero quei mostri: Moloch e Dagon e Tanit, la terribile dea. Se la divinità d’Israele avesse mai avuto un’immagine, avrebbe avuto un’immagine fallica. Col semplice dargli un corpo avrebbero introdotto tutti i peggiori elementi della mitologia; tutta la poligamia del politeismo; la visione dell’harem in cielo. Questo punto del rifiuto dell’arte è il primo esempio delle limitazioni che vengono spesso criticate in modo avverso, solo perché i critici stessi sono limitati. Ma un caso ancora più forte si può trovare nell’altra critica avanzata dagli stessi critici. Si dice spesso con sarcasmo che il Dio d’Israele era soltanto un Dio delle battaglie, «un mero e barbaro Signore degli Eserciti», messo in rivalità con gli altri dèi solo come loro invidioso nemico. Fu una fortuna per il mondo che egli fosse un Dio delle Battaglie. Fu una fortuna per noi che per tutti gli altri egli fosse soltanto un rivale e un nemico. In circostanze ordinarie, sarebbe stato fin troppo facile per loro compiere la desolata sciagura di concepirlo come un amico. Sarebbe stato fin troppo facile per loro vederlo tendere le mani in amore e riconciliazione, abbracciando Baal e baciando il volto dipinto di Astarte, banchettando in compagnia degli dèi; l’ultimo dio a vendere la sua corona di stelle per il Soma del pantheon indiano, o il nettare dell’Olimpo, o l’idromele del Valhalla. Sarebbe stato abbastanza facile per i suoi adoratori seguire il corso illuminato del sincretismo e la messa in comune di tutte le tradizioni pagane. È evidente, in effetti, che i suoi seguaci scivolavano sempre lungo questo facile pendio; e ci volle l’energia quasi demoniaca di certi ispirati demagoghi, che testimoniarono l’unità divina con parole che sono ancora come venti d’ispirazione e di rovina. Quanto più comprendiamo davvero le antiche condizioni che contribuirono alla cultura finale della Fede, tanto più avremo una reale e perfino realistica venerazione per la grandezza dei Profeti d’Israele. Così come stavano le cose, mentre il mondo intero si scioglieva in questa massa di mitologia confusa, questa Divinità che vien detta tribale e angusta, proprio perché era ciò che si dice tribale e angusto, conservò la religione primaria di tutto il genere umano. Egli era tribale abbastanza da essere universale. Era angusto quanto l’universo. In una parola, esisteva un dio pagano popolare chiamato Giove-Ammone. Non ci fu mai un dio chiamato Jehovah-Ammone. Non ci fu mai un dio chiamato Jehovah-Giove. Se ci fosse stato, ce ne sarebbe stato di certo un altro chiamato Jehovah-Moloch. Molto prima che i liberali e illuminati fusori di dèi si fossero spinti così lontano fino a Giove, l’immagine del Signore degli Eserciti sarebbe stata deformata al punto da non suggerire più alcun creatore e sovrano monoteistico, e sarebbe divenuta un idolo assai peggiore di qualunque feticcio selvaggio; poiché avrebbe potuto essere civilizzata quanto gli dèi di Tiro e di Cartagine. Cosa significasse quella civiltà lo considereremo più a fondo nel capitolo che segue, quando noteremo come la potenza dei demoni quasi distrusse l’Europa e perfino la pagana salute del mondo. Ma il destino del mondo sarebbe stato distorto in modo ancora più fatale se il monoteismo fosse venuto meno nella tradizione mosaica. Spero, in una sezione successiva, di mostrare che non sono privo di simpatia per tutta quella salute nel mondo pagano che produsse le sue fiabe e i suoi fantasiosi romanzi di religione. Ma spero anche di mostrare che questi erano destinati a fallire alla lunga; e il mondo sarebbe andato perduto se non fosse stato capace di tornare a quella grande, originaria semplicità di un’unica autorità in tutte le cose. Che noi conserviamo qualcosa di quella semplicità primaria, tanto che poeti e filosofi possono ancora in un certo senso recitare una Preghiera universale, che viviamo in un mondo vasto e sereno sotto un cielo che si stende paternamente su tutti i popoli della terra, che la filosofia e la filantropia siano truismi in una religione di uomini ragionevoli: tutto questo lo dobbiamo davvero, sotto il cielo, a un popolo nomade, riservato e inquieto; che elargì agli uomini la suprema e serena benedizione di un Dio geloso.
The unique possession was not available or accessible to the pagan world, because it was also the possession of a jealous people. The Jews were unpopular, partly because of this narrowness already noted in the Roman world, partly perhaps because they had already fallen into that habit of merely handling things for exchange instead of working to make them with their hands. It was partly also because polytheism had become a sort of jungle in which solitary monotheism could be lost; but it is strange to realise how completely it really was lost. Apart from more disputed matters, there were things in the tradition of Israel which belong to all humanity now, and might have belonged to all humanity then. They had one of the colossal corner-stones of the world: the Book of Job. It obviously stands over against the Iliad and the Greek tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and parting of poetry and philosophy in the mornings of the world. It is a solemn and uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really perfects the pagan tragic irony, precisely because it is more monotheistic and therefore more mystical. Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say ‘I do not understand,’ it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding. But this mighty monotheistic poem remained unremarked by the whole world of antiquity, which was thronged with polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the way in which the Jews stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, that they should have kept a thing like the Book of Job out of the whole intellectual world of antiquity. It is as if the Egyptians had modestly concealed the Great Pyramid. But there were other reasons for a cross-purpose and an impasse, characteristic of the whole of the end of paganism. After all, the tradition of Israel had only got hold of one-half of the truth, even if we use the popular paradox and call it the bigger half. I shall try to sketch in the next chapter that love of locality and personality that ran through mythology; here it need only be said that there was a truth in it that could not be let out though it were a lighter and less essential truth. The sorrow of Job had to be joined with the sorrow of Hector; and while the former was the sorrow of the universe the latter was the sorrow of the city; for Hector could only stand pointing to heaven as the pillar of holy Troy. When God speaks out of the whirlwind he may well speak in the wilderness. But the monotheism of the nomad was not enough for all that varied civilisation of fields and fences and walled cities and temples and towns; and the turn of these things also was to come, when the two could be combined in a more definite and domestic religion. Here and there in all that pagan crowd could be found a philosopher whose thought ran of pure theism; but he never had, or supposed that he had, the power to change the customs of the whole populace. Nor is it easy even in such philosophies to find a true definition of this deep business of the relation of polytheism and theism. Perhaps the nearest we can come to striking the note, or giving the thing a name, is in something far away from all that civilisation and more remote from Rome than the isolation of Israel. It is in a saying I once heard from some Hindu tradition; that gods as well as men are only the dreams of Brahma; and will perish when Brahma wakes. There is indeed in such an image something of the soul of Asia which is less sane than the soul of Christendom. We should call it despair, even if they would call it peace. This note of nihilism can be considered later in a fuller comparison between Asia and Europe. It is enough to say here that there is more of disillusion in that idea of a divine awakening than is implied for us in the passage from mythology to religion. But the symbol is very subtle and exact in one respect; that it does suggest the disproportion and even disruption between the very ideas of mythology and religion, the chasm between the two categories. It is really the collapse of comparative religion that there is no comparison between God and the gods. There is no more comparison than there is between a man and the men who walked about in his dreams. Under the next heading some attempt will be made to indicate the twilight of that dream in which the gods walk about like men. But if anyone fancies the contrast of monotheism and polytheism is only a matter of some people having one god and others a few more, for him it will be far nearer the truth to plunge into the elephantine extravagance of Brahmin cosmology; that he may feel a shudder going through the veil of things, the many-handed creators, and the throned and haloed animals and all the network of entangled stars and rulers of the night, as the eyes of Brahma open like dawn upon the death of all.
Quel possesso unico non era disponibile né accessibile al mondo pagano, poiché era altresì il possesso di un popolo geloso. Gli Ebrei erano malvisti, in parte a causa di quella ristrettezza già rilevata nel mondo romano, in parte forse perché erano già scivolati in quell’abitudine di limitarsi a maneggiare le cose per lo scambio, invece di lavorare a produrle con le proprie mani. Fu in parte anche perché il politeismo era divenuto una sorta di giungla in cui il monoteismo solitario poteva smarrirsi; ma è strano rendersi conto di quanto completamente esso vi si smarrì davvero. A prescindere da questioni più controverse, vi erano nella tradizione d’Israele cose che appartengono ora all’intera umanità, e che avrebbero potuto appartenere all’intera umanità già allora. Possedevano una delle colossali pietre angolari del mondo: il Libro di Giobbe. Esso ovviamente si erge di fronte all’Iliade e alle tragedie greche; e ancor più di quelle fu un precoce incontro e commiato della poesia e della filosofia nei mattini del mondo. È uno spettacolo solenne ed edificante vedere quei due eterni stolti, l’ottimista e il pessimista, annientati nell’alba del tempo. E la filosofia perfeziona davvero l’ironia tragica pagana, proprio perché è più monoteistica e dunque più mistica. In verità il Libro di Giobbe dichiaratamente non risponde al mistero che con altro mistero. Giobbe è consolato con enigmi; ma è consolato. In ciò vi è davvero una figura, nel senso di una profezia, di cose che parlano con autorità. Poiché, quando colui che dubita non sa dire che «Io non capisco», è vero che colui che sa non può che replicare o ripetere «Tu non capisci». E sotto quel rimprovero vi è sempre un’improvvisa speranza nel cuore; e il sentore di qualcosa che varrebbe la pena di comprendere. Ma questo possente poema monoteistico rimase inosservato dall’intero mondo dell’antichità, che pullulava di poesia politeistica. È un segno del modo in cui gli Ebrei si tennero in disparte e mantennero la propria tradizione incrollabile e incondivisa, l’aver essi tenuto una cosa come il Libro di Giobbe fuori dall’intero mondo intellettuale dell’antichità. È come se gli Egizi avessero modestamente nascosto la Grande Piramide. Ma vi erano altre ragioni per un contrasto di intenti e per un vicolo cieco, caratteristici di tutta la fine del paganesimo. Dopo tutto, la tradizione d’Israele si era impadronita solo di una metà della verità, anche se, adoperando il popolare paradosso, la chiamiamo la metà più grande. Cercherò di abbozzare nel prossimo capitolo quell’amore del luogo e della personalità che percorreva la mitologia; qui basti dire che vi era in essa una verità che non poteva essere lasciata uscire, pur essendo una verità più lieve e meno essenziale. Il dolore di Giobbe doveva unirsi al dolore di Ettore; e mentre il primo era il dolore dell’universo, il secondo era il dolore della città; poiché Ettore poteva soltanto stare a indicare il cielo, come il pilastro della sacra Troia. Quando Dio parla dal turbine, ben può parlare nel deserto. Ma il monoteismo del nomade non bastava a tutta quella varia civiltà di campi e siepi e città murate e templi e borghi; e sarebbe venuto il turno anche di queste cose, quando i due si fossero potuti combinare in una religione più definita e domestica. Qua e là, in tutta quella folla pagana, si poteva trovare un filosofo il cui pensiero verteva sul puro teismo; ma egli non ebbe mai, né suppose di avere, il potere di mutare i costumi dell’intera popolazione. Né è facile, persino in tali filosofie, trovare una vera definizione di questa profonda faccenda del rapporto fra politeismo e teismo. Forse ciò che più si avvicina a cogliere la nota, o a dare un nome alla cosa, sta in qualcosa di assai lontano da tutta quella civiltà e più remoto da Roma dell’isolamento d’Israele. Sta in un detto che udii una volta da qualche tradizione indù; che tanto gli dèi quanto gli uomini sono soltanto i sogni di Brahma, e periranno quando Brahma si desterà. Vi è davvero in una tale immagine qualcosa dell’anima dell’Asia che è meno sana dell’anima della cristianità. Noi la chiameremmo disperazione, anche se essi la chiamerebbero pace. Questa nota di nichilismo potrà essere considerata più avanti in un confronto più ampio fra l’Asia e l’Europa. Basti dire qui che vi è più disillusione in quell’idea di un risveglio divino di quanta ne sia implicata per noi nel passaggio dalla mitologia alla religione. Ma il simbolo è assai sottile ed esatto sotto un aspetto: che suggerisce davvero la sproporzione e persino la frattura fra le idee stesse di mitologia e religione, l’abisso fra le due categorie. È davvero il crollo della religione comparata il fatto che non vi sia comparazione fra Dio e gli dèi. Non vi è più comparazione di quanta ve ne sia fra un uomo e gli uomini che si aggiravano nei suoi sogni. Sotto il prossimo titolo si tenterà di indicare il crepuscolo di quel sogno in cui gli dèi si aggirano come uomini. Ma se qualcuno si immagina che il contrasto fra monoteismo e politeismo sia soltanto questione che alcuni popoli abbiano un solo dio e altri qualcuno in più, per lui sarà assai più vicino alla verità tuffarsi nell’elefantesca stravaganza della cosmologia braminica; affinché possa sentire un brivido correre attraverso il velo delle cose, i creatori dalle molte mani, e gli animali intronizzati e aureolati e tutta la rete degli intricati astri e dei signori della notte, mentre gli occhi di Brahma si aprono come un’alba sulla morte di ogni cosa.
V
MAN AND MYTHOLOGIES
What are here called the Gods might almost alternatively be called the day-dreams. To compare them to dreams is not to deny that dreams can come true. To compare them to travellers’ tales is not to deny that they may be true tales, or at least truthful tales. In truth they are the sort of tales the traveller tells to himself. All this mythological business belongs to the poetical part of men. It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticise it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems. We do not submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all. When the professor is told by the Polynesian that once there was nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless the learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wish it were true, he is no judge of such things at all. When he is assured, on the best Red Indian authority, that a primitive hero carried the sun and moon and stars in a box, unless he clasps his hands and almost kicks his legs as a child would at such a charming fancy, he knows nothing about the matter. This test is not nonsensical; primitive children and barbaric children do laugh and kick like other children; and we must have a certain simplicity to repicture the childhood of the world. When Hiawatha was told by his nurse that a warrior threw his grandmother up to the moon, he laughed like any English child told by his nurse that a cow jumped over the moon. The child sees the joke as well as most men, and better than some scientific men. But the ultimate test even of the fantastic is the appropriateness of the inappropriate. And the test must appear merely arbitrary because it is merely artistic. If any student tells me that the infant Hiawatha only laughed out of respect for tribal custom of sacrificing the aged to economical housekeeping, I say he did not. If any scholar tells me that the cow jumped over the moon only because a heifer was sacrificed to Diana, I answer that it did not. It happened because it is obviously the right thing for a cow to jump over the moon. Mythology is a lost art, one of the few arts that really are lost; but it is an art. The horned moon and the horned mooncalf make a harmonious and almost a quiet pattern. And throwing your grandmother into the sky is not good behaviour; but it is perfectly good taste.
Thus scientists seldom understand, as artists understand, that one branch of the beautiful is the ugly. They seldom allow for the legitimate liberty of the grotesque. And they will dismiss a savage myth as merely coarse and clumsy and an evidence of degradation, because it has not all the beauty of the herald Mercury new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill; when it really has the beauty of the Mock Turtle or the Mad Hatter. It is the supreme proof of a man being prosaic that he always insists on poetry being poetical. Sometimes the humour is in the very subject as well as the style of the fable. The Australian aborigines, regarded as the rudest of savages, have a story about a giant frog who had swallowed the sea and all the waters of the world; and who was only forced to spill them by being made to laugh. All the animals with all their antics passed before him and, like Queen Victoria, he was not amused. He collapsed at last before an eel who stood delicately balanced on the tip of its tail, doubtless with a rather desperate dignity. Any amount of fine fantastic literature might be made out of that fable. There is philosophy in that vision of the dry world before the beatific Deluge of laughter. There is imagination in the mountainous monster erupting like an aqueous volcano; there is plenty of fun in the thought of his goggling visage as the pelican or the penguin passed by. Anyhow the frog laughed; but the folk-lore student remains grave.
Moreover, even where the fables are inferior as art, they cannot be properly judged by science; still less properly judged as science. Some myths are very crude and queer like the early drawings of children; but the child is trying to draw. It is none the less an error to treat his drawing as if it were a diagram, or intended to be a diagram. The student cannot make a scientific statement about the savage, because the savage is not making a scientific statement about the world. He is saying something quite different; what might be called the gossip of the gods. We may say, if we like, that it is believed before there is time to examine it. It would be truer to say it is accepted before there is time to believe it.
I confess I doubt the whole theory of the dissemination of myths or (as it commonly is) of one myth. It is true that something in our nature and conditions makes many stories similar; but each of them may be original. One man does not borrow the story from the other man, though he may tell it from the same motive as the other man. It would be easy to apply the whole argument about legend to literature; and turn it into a vulgar monomania of plagiarism. I would undertake to trace a notion like that of the Golden Bough through individual modern novels as easily as through communal and antiquated myths. I would undertake to find something like a bunch of flowers figuring again and again from the fatal bouquet of Becky Sharpe to the spray of roses sent by the Princess of Ruritania. But though these flowers may spring from the same soil, it is not the same faded flower that is flung from hand to hand. Those flowers are always fresh.
V
L’UOMO E LE MITOLOGIE
Ciò che qui è chiamato gli Dèi potrebbe quasi in alternativa esser chiamato i sogni a occhi aperti. Paragonarli ai sogni non significa negare che i sogni possano avverarsi. Paragonarli ai racconti di viaggiatori non significa negare che possano essere racconti veri, o almeno racconti veritieri. In verità essi sono il genere di racconti che il viaggiatore narra a sé stesso. Tutta questa faccenda mitologica appartiene alla parte poetica dell’uomo. Sembra stranamente dimenticato, oggigiorno, che un mito è un’opera di immaginazione e dunque un’opera d’arte. Occorre un poeta per farlo. Occorre un poeta per criticarlo. Vi sono al mondo più poeti che non-poeti, come prova l’origine popolare di simili leggende. Ma per qualche ragione che non ho mai sentito spiegare, è solo alla minoranza delle persone prive di poesia che è concesso scrivere studi critici su questi poemi popolari. Non sottoponiamo un sonetto a un matematico né una canzone a un ragazzo prodigio del calcolo; eppure indulgiamo all’idea egualmente fantastica che il folclore possa essere trattato come una scienza. Se queste cose non sono apprezzate artisticamente, non sono affatto apprezzate. Quando il professore si sente dire dal polinesiano che un tempo non c’era nulla tranne un grande serpente piumato, se il dotto non prova un fremito e una mezza tentazione di desiderare che sia vero, non è affatto giudice di tali cose. Quando gli si assicura, sulla migliore autorità dei Pellirosse, che un eroe primitivo portava il sole e la luna e le stelle in una scatola, se non congiunge le mani e non scalcia quasi con le gambe, come farebbe un bambino dinanzi a una così deliziosa fantasia, non sa nulla della faccenda. Questa prova non è insensata; i bambini primitivi e i bambini barbari ridono e scalciano come tutti gli altri bambini; e dobbiamo possedere una certa semplicità per raffigurarci di nuovo l’infanzia del mondo. Quando la sua balia disse a Hiawatha che un guerriero scagliò la propria nonna fin sulla luna, egli rise come qualunque bambino inglese cui la sua balia racconti che una mucca saltò oltre la luna. Il bambino coglie lo scherzo bene quanto la maggior parte degli uomini, e meglio di certi uomini di scienza. Ma la prova ultima, persino del fantastico, è l’appropriatezza dell’inappropriato. E la prova deve apparire meramente arbitraria perché è meramente artistica. Se qualche studioso mi dice che il piccolo Hiawatha rise soltanto per rispetto dell’usanza tribale di sacrificare i vecchi a una parsimoniosa economia domestica, io rispondo che non fu così. Se qualche erudito mi dice che la mucca saltò oltre la luna soltanto perché una giovenca fu sacrificata a Diana, io rispondo che non fu così. Accadde perché è ovviamente la cosa giusta, per una mucca, saltare oltre la luna. La mitologia è un’arte perduta, una delle poche arti che davvero siano perdute; ma è un’arte. La luna cornuta e il cornuto vitello lunare compongono un disegno armonioso e quasi quieto. E scagliare la propria nonna in cielo non è buona condotta; ma è di gusto perfettamente eccellente.
Così gli scienziati raramente comprendono, come lo comprendono gli artisti, che un ramo del bello è il brutto. Raramente concedono la legittima libertà del grottesco. E liquideranno un mito selvaggio come rozzo e goffo e nient’altro, prova di degradazione, perché non possiede tutta la bellezza dell’araldo Mercurio appena posatosi su un colle che bacia il cielo; mentre in realtà possiede la bellezza della Falsa Tartaruga o del Cappellaio Matto. È la prova suprema che un uomo è prosaico il fatto che egli insista sempre perché la poesia sia poetica. A volte l’umorismo sta nel soggetto stesso non meno che nello stile della favola. Gli aborigeni australiani, considerati i più rozzi tra i selvaggi, hanno una storia su un rana gigante che aveva inghiottito il mare e tutte le acque del mondo; e che fu costretto a rovesciarle fuori solo perché lo si fece ridere. Tutti gli animali con tutte le loro buffonerie gli sfilarono davanti e, come la Queen Vittoria, egli non si divertì. Alla fine crollò davanti a un’anguilla che stava delicatamente in equilibrio sulla punta della coda, senza dubbio con una dignità piuttosto disperata. Da quella favola si potrebbe ricavare una quantità di raffinata letteratura fantastica. C’è filosofia in quella visione del mondo arido prima del beatifico Diluvio di risa. C’è immaginazione nel montuoso mostro che erutta come un vulcano acquoreo; c’è un mondo di comicità nel pensiero del suo volto sbarrato mentre il pellicano o il pinguino gli passavano davanti. Comunque sia, la rana rise; ma lo studioso di folclore rimane serio.
Inoltre, anche là dove le favole sono inferiori in quanto arte, non possono essere giudicate propriamente dalla scienza; e ancor meno propriamente giudicate come scienza. Alcuni miti sono assai grezzi e bizzarri, come i primi disegni dei bambini; ma il bambino sta cercando di disegnare. Non è meno un errore trattare il suo disegno come se fosse un diagramma, o come se pretendesse di essere un diagramma. Lo studioso non può fare un’affermazione scientifica sul selvaggio, perché il selvaggio non sta facendo un’affermazione scientifica sul mondo. Egli sta dicendo qualcosa di del tutto diverso; qualcosa che si potrebbe chiamare il pettegolezzo degli dèi. Possiamo dire, se ci piace, che vi si crede prima che ci sia il tempo di esaminarlo. Sarebbe più esatto dire che lo si accetta prima che ci sia il tempo di crederci.
Confesso di dubitare dell’intera teoria della disseminazione dei miti o (come di solito la si intende) di un unico mito. È vero che qualcosa nella nostra natura e nelle nostre condizioni rende simili molte storie; ma ciascuna di esse può essere originale. Un uomo non prende in prestito la storia dall’altro uomo, benché possa raccontarla mosso dallo stesso movente dell’altro uomo. Sarebbe facile applicare tutto il ragionamento sulla leggenda alla letteratura; e trasformarlo in una volgare monomania del plagio. Mi impegnerei a rintracciare una nozione come quella del Ramo d’Oro attraverso singoli romanzi moderni con la stessa facilità con cui la si segue nei miti comuni e antichi. Mi impegnerei a trovare qualcosa come un mazzo di fiori che ricompare di continuo, dal fatale bouquet di Becky Sharpe al ramoscello di rose inviato dalla Principessa di Ruritania. Ma benché questi fiori possano sgorgare dallo stesso suolo, non è lo stesso fiore appassito a passare di mano in mano. Quei fiori sono sempre freschi.
The true origin of all the myths has been discovered much too often. There are too many keys to mythology, as there are too many cryptograms in Shakespeare. Everything is phallic; everything is totemistic; everything is seed-time and harvest; everything is ghosts and grave-offerings; everything is the golden bough of sacrifice; everything is the sun and moon; everything is everything. Every folk-lore student who knew a little more than his own monomania, every man of wider reading and critical culture like Andrew Lang, has practically confessed that the bewilderment of these things left his brain spinning. Yet the whole trouble comes from a man trying to look at these stories from the outside, as if they were scientific objects. He has only to look at them from the inside, and ask himself how he would begin a story. A story may start with anything and go anywhere. It may start with a bird without the bird being a totem; it may start with the sun without being a solar myth. It is said there are only ten plots in the world; and there will certainly be common and recurrent elements. Set ten thousand children talking at once, and telling tarradiddles about what they did in the wood, and it will not be hard to find parallels suggesting sun-worship or animal worship. Some of the stories may be pretty and some silly and some perhaps dirty; but they can only be judged as stories. In the modern dialect, they can only be judged aesthetically. It is strange that aesthetics, or mere feeling, which is now allowed to usurp where it has no rights at all, to wreck reason with pragmatism and morals with anarchy, is apparently not allowed to give a purely aesthetic judgement on what is obviously a purely aesthetic question. We may be fanciful about everything except fairy-tales.
Now the first fact is that the most simple people have the most subtle ideas. Everybody ought to know that, for everybody has been a child. Ignorant as a child is, he knows more than he can say and feels not only atmospheres but fine shades. And in this matter there are several fine shades. Nobody understands it who has not had what can only be called the ache of the artist to find some sense and some story in the beautiful things he sees; his hunger for secrets and his anger at any tower or tree escaping with its tale untold. He feels that nothing is perfect unless it is personal. Without that the blind unconscious beauty of the world stands in its garden like a headless statue. One need only be a very minor poet to have wrestled with the tower or the tree until it spoke like a titan or a dryad. It is often said that pagan mythology was a personification of the powers of nature. The phrase is true in a sense, but it is very unsatisfactory; because it implies that the forces are abstractions and the personification is artificial. Myths are not allegories. Natural powers are not in this case abstractions. It is not as if there were a God of Gravitation. There may be a genius of the waterfall; but not of mere falling, even less than of mere water. The impersonation is not of something impersonal. The point is that the personality perfects the water with significance. Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens, so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold. The test therefore is purely imaginative. But imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.
Now we do not comprehend this process in ourselves, far less in our most remote fellow-creatures. And the danger of these things being classified is that they may seem to be comprehended. A really fine work of folklore, like The Golden Bough, will leave too many readers with the idea, for instance, that this or that story of a giant’s or wizard’s heart in a casket or a cave only ‘means’ some stupid and static superstition called ‘the external soul.’ But we do not know what these things mean, simply because we do not know what we ourselves mean when we are moved by them. Suppose somebody in a story says ‘Pluck this flower and a princess will die in a castle beyond the sea,’ we do not know why something stirs in the subconsciousness, or why what is impossible seems almost inevitable. Suppose we read ‘And in the hour when the king extinguished the candle his ships were wrecked far away on the coast of Hebrides.’ We do not know why the imagination has accepted that image before the reason can reject it; or why such correspondences seem really to correspond to something in the soul. Very deep things in our nature, some dim sense of the dependence of great things upon small, some dark suggestion that the things nearest to us stretch far beyond our power, some sacramental feeling of the magic in material substances, and many more emotions past fading out, are in an idea like that of the external soul. The power even in the myths of savages is like the power in the metaphors of poets. The soul of such a metaphor is often very emphatically an external soul. The best critics have remarked that in the best poets the simile is often a picture that seems quite separate from the text. It is as irrelevant as the remote castle to the flower or the Hebridean coast to the candle. Shelley compares the skylark to a young woman on a turret, to a rose embedded in thick foliage, to a series of things that seem to be about as unlike a skylark in the sky as anything we can imagine. I suppose the most potent piece of pure magic in English literature is the much-quoted passage in Keats’s Nightingale about the casements opening on the perilous foam. And nobody notices that the image seems to come from nowhere; that it appears abruptly after some almost equally irrelevant remarks about Ruth; and that it has nothing in the world to do with the subject of the poem. If there is one place in the world where nobody could reasonably expect to find a nightingale, it is on a window-sill at the seaside. But it is only in the same sense that nobody would expect to find a giant’s heart in a casket under the sea. Now, it would be very dangerous to classify the metaphors of the poets. When Shelley says that the cloud will rise ‘like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,’ it would be quite possible to call the first a case of the coarse primitive birth-myth and the second a survival of the ghost-worship which became ancestor-worship. But it is the wrong way of dealing with a cloud; and is liable to leave the learned in the condition of Polonius, only too ready to think it like a weasel, or very like a whale.
La vera origine di tutti i miti è stata scoperta fin troppe volte. Ci sono troppe chiavi della mitologia, come ci sono troppi crittogrammi in Shakespeare. Tutto è fallico; tutto è totemico; tutto è semina e raccolto; tutto è fantasmi e offerte alla tomba; tutto è il ramo d’oro del sacrificio; tutto è il sole e la luna; tutto è tutto. Ogni studioso di folclore che sapesse un po’ più della propria monomania, ogni uomo di più ampie letture e di cultura critica come Andrew Lang, ha praticamente confessato che lo smarrimento di fronte a queste cose gli lasciava la testa in un vortice. Eppure tutto il guaio nasce dal fatto che un uomo cerca di guardare queste storie dall’esterno, come se fossero oggetti scientifici. Non deve fare altro che guardarle dall’interno, e domandarsi come lui stesso comincerebbe una storia. Una storia può cominciare da qualsiasi cosa e andare ovunque. Può cominciare da un uccello senza che l’uccello sia un totem; può cominciare dal sole senza essere un mito solare. Si dice che al mondo esistano soltanto dieci trame; e vi saranno di certo elementi comuni e ricorrenti. Mettete diecimila bambini a chiacchierare tutti insieme, a raccontare frottole su ciò che hanno fatto nel bosco, e non sarà difficile trovare paralleli che facciano pensare al culto del sole o al culto degli animali. Alcune delle storie potranno essere graziose, altre sciocche e altre forse sconce; ma possono essere giudicate soltanto come storie. Nel dialetto moderno, possono essere giudicate soltanto esteticamente. È strano che l’estetica, o il puro sentire, cui oggi si consente di usurpare là dove non ha alcun diritto, di far naufragare la ragione con il pragmatismo e la morale con l’anarchia, non sia a quanto pare autorizzata a dare un giudizio puramente estetico su ciò che è manifestamente una questione puramente estetica. Possiamo essere fantasiosi su qualunque cosa tranne che sulle fiabe.
Ora, il primo dato di fatto è che le persone più semplici hanno le idee più sottili. Tutti dovrebbero saperlo, perché tutti sono stati bambini. Per quanto ignorante sia un bambino, egli sa più di quanto sappia dire e avverte non soltanto le atmosfere, ma le sfumature più delicate. E in questa materia vi sono parecchie sfumature delicate. Nessuno la comprende se non ha provato ciò che si può chiamare soltanto lo struggimento dell’artista nel cercare qualche senso e qualche storia nelle cose belle che vede; la sua fame di segreti e la sua ira verso ogni torre o albero che gli sfugga lasciando il proprio racconto non narrato. Egli sente che nulla è perfetto se non è personale. Senza di ciò la cieca, inconsapevole bellezza del mondo se ne sta nel suo giardino come una statua senza testa. Basta essere un poeta minore di quart’ordine per aver lottato con la torre o con l’albero finché non ha parlato come un titano o una driade. Si dice spesso che la mitologia pagana fosse una personificazione delle potenze della natura. La frase è vera in un certo senso, ma è assai insoddisfacente; perché implica che le forze siano astrazioni e la personificazione sia artificiale. I miti non sono allegorie. Le potenze naturali non sono, in questo caso, astrazioni. Non è come se ci fosse un Dio della Gravitazione. Può esserci un genio della cascata; ma non del mero cadere, e ancor meno che della mera acqua. La personificazione non è di qualcosa d’impersonale. Il punto è che la personalità perfeziona l’acqua con un significato. Babbo Natale non è un’allegoria della neve e dell’agrifoglio; non è semplicemente la sostanza chiamata neve cui in seguito si sia dato artificialmente forma umana, come a un pupazzo di neve. Egli è qualcosa che dà un nuovo significato al mondo bianco e ai sempreverdi, sicché la neve stessa pare calda anziché fredda. La prova, dunque, è puramente immaginativa. Ma immaginativo non significa immaginario. Non ne consegue che tutto sia ciò che i moderni chiamano soggettivo, quando intendono falso. Ogni vero artista sente davvero, consapevolmente o inconsapevolmente, di toccare verità trascendentali; che le sue immagini sono ombre di cose viste attraverso il velo. In altre parole, il mistico naturale sa che c’è qualcosa là; qualcosa dietro le nuvole o dentro gli alberi; ma crede che la ricerca della bellezza sia la via per trovarlo; che l’immaginazione sia una sorta d’incantesimo capace di evocarlo.
Ora, noi non comprendiamo questo processo in noi stessi, e ancor meno nelle nostre più remote creature consimili. E il pericolo, quando queste cose vengono classificate, è che esse possano sembrare comprese. Un’opera di folklore davvero pregevole, come Il ramo d’oro, lascerà troppi lettori con l’idea, per esempio, che questa o quella storia del cuore di un gigante o di un mago rinchiuso in uno scrigno o in una caverna non ‘significhi’ altro che qualche stupida e inerte superstizione chiamata ‘l’anima esterna’. Ma noi non sappiamo che cosa queste cose significhino, semplicemente perché non sappiamo che cosa significhiamo noi stessi quando ne siamo commossi. Supponiamo che in una storia qualcuno dica: «Cogli questo fiore e una principessa morirà in un castello di là dal mare», noi non sappiamo perché qualcosa si agiti nel subcosciente, né perché ciò che è impossibile sembri quasi inevitabile. Supponiamo di leggere: «E nell’ora in cui il re spense la candela, le sue navi naufragarono lontano, sulla costa delle Ebridi». Noi non sappiamo perché l’immaginazione abbia accolto quell’immagine prima che la ragione possa respingerla; né perché tali corrispondenze sembrino davvero corrispondere a qualcosa nell’anima. Cose molto profonde della nostra natura, un oscuro senso della dipendenza delle cose grandi da quelle piccole, un tenebroso suggerimento che le cose a noi più vicine si protendano assai al di là del nostro potere, un sentimento sacramentale della magia insita nelle sostanze materiali, e molte altre emozioni ormai quasi svanite, sono racchiuse in un’idea come quella dell’anima esterna. Il potere che è persino nei miti dei selvaggi è simile al potere che è nelle metafore dei poeti. L’anima di una tale metafora è spesso, e con grande enfasi, un’anima esterna. I migliori critici hanno osservato che, nei migliori poeti, la similitudine è spesso un quadro che pare del tutto separato dal testo. È tanto irrilevante quanto il remoto castello rispetto al fiore, o la costa delle Ebridi rispetto alla candela. Shelley paragona l’allodola a una fanciulla su una torretta, a una rosa annidata in un fitto fogliame, a una serie di cose che sembrano tanto dissimili da un’allodola nel cielo quanto qualsiasi altra cosa possiamo immaginare. Suppongo che il più potente frammento di pura magia della letteratura inglese sia il tanto citato passo dell’Usignolo di Keats sulle finestre che si aprono sulla spuma perigliosa. E nessuno nota che l’immagine sembra venire dal nulla; che essa compare bruscamente dopo alcune osservazioni quasi altrettanto irrilevanti su Ruth; e che non ha nulla al mondo a che vedere con il soggetto della poesia. Se c’è un luogo al mondo dove nessuno potrebbe ragionevolmente aspettarsi di trovare un usignolo, è il davanzale di una finestra in riva al mare. Ma è solo nel medesimo senso in cui nessuno si aspetterebbe di trovare il cuore di un gigante in uno scrigno sotto il mare. Ora, sarebbe assai pericoloso classificare le metafore dei poeti. Quando Shelley dice che la nube sorgerà «come un bimbo dal grembo, come un fantasma dalla tomba», sarebbe del tutto possibile chiamare la prima un caso del rozzo e primitivo mito della nascita, e la seconda una sopravvivenza del culto dei fantasmi, che divenne culto degli antenati. Ma è il modo sbagliato di trattare una nube; e rischia di lasciare i dotti nella condizione di Polonio, fin troppo pronti a giudicarla simile a una donnola, o assai simile a una balena.
Two facts follow from this psychology of day-dreams, which must be kept in mind throughout their development in mythologies and even religions. First, these imaginative impressions are often strictly local. So far from being abstractions turned into allegories, they are often images almost concentrated into idols. The poet feels the mystery of a particular forest; not of the science of afforestation or the department of woods and forests. He worships the peak of a particular mountain, not the abstract idea of altitude. So we find the god is not merely water but often one special river; he may be the sea because the sea is single like a stream; the river that runs round the world. Ultimately doubtless many deities are enlarged into elements; but they are something more than omnipresent. Apollo does not merely dwell wherever the sun shines; his home is on the rock of Delphi. Diana is great enough to be in three places at once, earth and heaven and hell, but greater is Diana of the Ephesians. This localised feeling has its lowest form in the mere fetish or talisman, such as millionaires put on their motor-cars. But it can also harden into something like a high and serious religion, where it is connected with high and serious duties; into the gods of the city or even the gods of the hearth.
The second consequence is this; that in these pagan cults there is every shade of sincerity—and insincerity. In what sense exactly did an Athenian really think he had to sacrifice to Pallas Athena? What scholar is really certain of the answer? In what sense did Dr. Johnson really think that he had to touch all the posts in the street or that he had to collect orange-peel? In what sense does a child really think that he ought to step on every alternate paving-stone? Two things are at least fairly clear. First, in simpler and less self-conscious times these forms could become more solid without really becoming more serious. Day-dreams could be acted in broad daylight, with more liberty of artistic expression; but still perhaps with something of the light step of the somnambulist. Wrap Dr. Johnson in an antique mantle, crown him (by his kind permission) with a garland, and he will move in state under those ancient skies of morning; touching a series of sacred posts carved with the heads of the strange terminal gods, that stand at the limits of the land and of the life of man. Make the child free of the marbles and mosaics of some classic temples to play on a whole floor inlaid with squares of black and white; and he will willingly make this fulfilment of his idle and drifting daydream the clear field for a grave and graceful dance. But the posts and the paving-stones are little more and little less real than they are under modern limits. They are not really much more serious for being taken seriously. They have the sort of sincerity that they always had; the sincerity of art as a symbol that expresses very real spiritualities under the surface of life. But they are only sincere in the same sense as art; not sincere in the same sense as morality. The eccentric’s collection of orange-peel may turn to oranges in a Mediterranean festival or to golden apples in a Mediterranean myth. But they are never on the same plane with the difference between giving the orange to a blind beggar and carefully placing the orange-peel so that the beggar may fall and break his leg. Between these two things there is a difference of kind and not of degree. The child does not think it wrong to step on the paving-stone as he thinks it wrong to step on the dog’s tail. And it is very certain that whatever jest or sentiment or fancy first set Johnson touching the wooden posts, he never touched wood with any of the feeling with which he stretched out his hands to the timber of that terrible tree, which was the death of God and the life of man.
As already noted, this does not mean that there was no reality or even no religious sentiment in such a mood. As a matter of fact the Catholic Church has taken over with uproarious success the whole of this popular business of giving people local legends and lighter ceremonial movements. In so far as all this sort of paganism was innocent and in touch with nature, there is no reason why it should not be patronised by patron saints as much as by pagan gods. And in any case there are degrees of seriousness in the most natural make-believe. There is all the difference between fancying there are fairies in the wood, which often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really frightening ourselves until we walk a mile rather than pass a house we have told ourselves is haunted. Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul. We all understand that and the pagans understood it. The point is that paganism did not really stir the soul except with these doubts and fancies, with the consequence that we to-day can have little beyond doubts and fancies about paganism. All the best critics agree that all the greatest poets, in pagan Hellas for example, had an attitude towards their gods which is quite queer and puzzling to men in the Christian era. There seems to be an admitted conflict between the god and the man; but everybody seems to be doubtful about which is the hero and which is the villain. This doubt does not merely apply to a doubter like Euripides in the Bacchae; it applies to a moderate conservative like Sophocles in the Antigone; or even to a regular Tory and reactionary like Aristophanes in the Frogs. Sometimes it would seem that the Greeks believed above all things in reverence, only they had nobody to revere. But the point of the puzzle is this, that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that the whole thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
Da questa psicologia dei sogni a occhi aperti discendono due fatti, che vanno tenuti a mente lungo tutto il loro sviluppo nelle mitologie e persino nelle religioni. In primo luogo, queste impressioni immaginative sono spesso strettamente locali. Ben lungi dall’essere astrazioni mutate in allegorie, esse sono spesso immagini quasi concentrate in idoli. Il poeta sente il mistero di una foresta particolare; non della scienza del rimboschimento né del dipartimento dei boschi e delle foreste. Egli adora la vetta di una montagna particolare, non l’idea astratta dell’altezza. Così troviamo che il dio non è semplicemente acqua, ma spesso un unico, speciale fiume; egli può essere il mare, perché il mare è unico come una corrente; il fiume che scorre intorno al mondo. In ultimo, senza dubbio, molte divinità vengono ampliate fino a farsi elementi; ma esse sono qualcosa di più che onnipresenti. Apollo non dimora soltanto ovunque splenda il sole; la sua dimora è sulla rupe di Delfi. Diana è tanto grande da essere in tre luoghi al tempo stesso, terra, cielo e inferno, ma più grande è la Diana degli Efesini. Questo sentimento localizzato ha la sua forma più bassa nel semplice feticcio o talismano, come quelli che i milionari appendono alle loro automobili. Ma esso può anche indurirsi in qualcosa che somigli a una religione alta e seria, laddove si lega a doveri alti e seri; negli dèi della città o persino negli dèi del focolare.
La seconda conseguenza è questa: che in questi culti pagani si dà ogni sfumatura di sincerità — e di insincerità. In che senso, esattamente, un ateniese pensava davvero di dover sacrificare a Pallade Atena? Quale studioso è davvero certo della risposta? In che senso il dottor Johnson pensava davvero di dover toccare tutti i pali della strada, o di dover raccogliere le bucce d’arancia? In che senso un bambino pensa davvero di dover calpestare una pietra sì e una no del selciato? Almeno due cose sono abbastanza chiare. In primo luogo, in tempi più semplici e meno consapevoli di sé, queste forme potevano farsi più solide senza per questo farsi davvero più serie. I sogni a occhi aperti potevano essere recitati in pieno giorno, con maggiore libertà di espressione artistica; ma forse ancora con qualcosa del passo leggero del sonnambulo. Avvolgete il dottor Johnson in un mantello antico, incoronatelo (col suo cortese permesso) con una ghirlanda, ed egli si muoverà in pompa sotto quegli antichi cieli del mattino; toccando una serie di pali sacri, scolpiti con le teste degli strani dèi terminali, che stanno ai confini della terra e della vita dell’uomo. Rendete il bambino libero fra i marmi e i mosaici di qualche tempio classico, per giocare su un intero pavimento intarsiato di riquadri bianchi e neri; ed egli farà volentieri di questo compimento del suo ozioso e vagante sogno a occhi aperti il campo sgombro per una danza grave e aggraziata. Ma i pali e le pietre del selciato sono poco più e poco meno reali di quanto lo siano entro i confini moderni. Non sono davvero molto più seri per il fatto di essere presi sul serio. Hanno quella sorta di sincerità che hanno sempre avuto; la sincerità dell’arte come simbolo che esprime spiritualità assai reali sotto la superficie della vita. Ma sono sinceri soltanto nello stesso senso in cui lo è l’arte; non sinceri nello stesso senso in cui lo è la moralità. La collezione di bucce d’arancia dell’eccentrico può mutarsi in arance in una festa mediterranea, o in mele d’oro in un mito mediterraneo. Ma esse non sono mai sullo stesso piano della differenza che passa tra il dare l’arancia a un mendicante cieco e il collocare accuratamente la buccia d’arancia perché il mendicante inciampi e si rompa una gamba. Tra queste due cose vi è una differenza di genere e non di grado. Il bambino non pensa che sia male calpestare la pietra del selciato come pensa che sia male calpestare la coda del cane. Ed è cosa certissima che, quale che sia lo scherzo, il sentimento o la fantasia che spinse per la prima volta Johnson a toccare i pali di legno, egli non toccò mai il legno con nessuno di quei sentimenti con cui tese le mani verso il legno di quell’albero terribile, che fu la morte di Dio e la vita dell’uomo.
Come già osservato, ciò non significa che in un simile stato d’animo non vi fosse alcuna realtà, né alcun sentimento religioso. Di fatto la Chiesa cattolica ha rilevato con clamoroso successo tutta questa faccenda popolare consistente nel donare alle genti leggende locali e movimenti cerimoniali più lievi. Nella misura in cui tutto questo paganesimo era innocente e in contatto con la natura, non vi è ragione perché non debba essere patrocinato dai santi patroni non meno che dagli dèi pagani. E in ogni caso vi sono gradi di serietà anche nella più naturale delle finzioni. Corre tutta la differenza tra l’immaginare che vi siano fate nel bosco — il che spesso significa soltanto immaginare un certo bosco come adatto alle fate — e lo spaventarci davvero fino a farci camminare un miglio pur di non passare davanti a una casa che ci siamo detti essere infestata. Dietro tutte queste cose sta il fatto che la bellezza e il terrore sono cose molto reali e connesse a un mondo spirituale reale; e sfiorarle anche solo un poco, sia pure nel dubbio o nella fantasia, significa smuovere le cose profonde dell’anima. Tutti lo intendiamo, e i pagani lo intendevano. Il punto è che il paganesimo non smuoveva davvero l’anima se non con questi dubbi e queste fantasie, con la conseguenza che noi oggi non possiamo avere sul paganesimo molto più di dubbi e fantasie. Tutti i migliori critici concordano nel dire che tutti i più grandi poeti, per esempio nell’Ellade pagana, avevano verso i loro dèi un atteggiamento che riesce assai bizzarro e sconcertante agli uomini dell’era cristiana. Pare esservi un conflitto ammesso tra il dio e l’uomo; ma tutti sembrano incerti su chi sia l’eroe e chi il malvagio. Questo dubbio non si applica soltanto a un dubbioso come Euripide nelle Baccanti; si applica a un moderato conservatore come Sofocle nell’Antigone; o persino a un tory e reazionario di stretta osservanza come Aristofane nelle Rane. Talvolta parrebbe che i Greci credessero sopra ogni cosa nella riverenza, se non che non avevano nessuno da riverire. Ma il nodo dell’enigma è questo: che tutta questa vaghezza e mutevolezza nascono dal fatto che l’intera faccenda cominciò nella fantasia e nel sogno; e che non vi sono regole d’architettura per un castello tra le nuvole.
This is the mighty and branching tree called mythology which ramifies round the whole world, whose remote branches under separate skies bear like coloured birds the costly idols of Asia and the half-baked fetishes of Africa and the fairy kings and princesses of the folk-tales of the forest, and buried amid vines and olives the Lares of the Latins, and carried on the clouds of Olympus the buoyant supremacy of the gods of Greece. These are the myths: and he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men. But he who has most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion. They satisfy some of the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality. But though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say ‘I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,’ etc., as he stands up and says ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty,’ and the rest of the Apostles Creed. Many believed in some and not in others, or more in some and less in others, or only in a very vague poetical sense in any. There was no moment when they were all collected into an orthodox order which men would fight and be tortured to keep intact. Still less did anybody ever say in that fashion: ‘I believe in Odin and Thor and Freya,’ for outside Olympus even the Olympian order grows cloudy and chaotic. It seems clear to me that Thor was not a god at all but a hero. Nothing resembling a religion would picture anybody resembling a god as groping like a pigmy in a great cavern, that turned out to be the glove of a giant. That is the glorious ignorance called adventure. Thor may have been a great adventurer; but to call him a god is like trying to compare Jehovah with Jack and the Beanstalk. Odin seems to have been a real barbarian chief, possibly of the Dark Ages after Christianity. Polytheism fades away at its fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories; it is not a thing like monotheism as held by serious monotheists. Again it does satisfy the need to cry out on some uplifted name or some noble memory in moments that are themselves noble and uplifted; such as the birth of a child or the saving of a city. But the name was so used by many to whom it was only a name. Finally it did satisfy, or rather it partially satisfied, a thing very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of surrendering something as the portion of the unknown powers; of pouring of wine upon the ground, of throwing a ring into the sea; in a word, of sacrifice. It is the wise and worthy idea of not taking our advantage to the full; of putting something in the other balance to ballast our dubious pride, of paying tithes to nature for our land. This deep truth of the danger of insolence, or being too big for our boots, runs through all the great Greek tragedies and makes them great. But it runs side by side with an almost cryptic agnosticism about the real nature of the gods to be propitiated. Where that gesture of surrender is most magnificent, as among the great Greeks, there is really much more idea that the man will be the better for losing the ox than that the god will be the better for getting it. It is said that in its grosser forms there are often actions grotesquely suggestive of the god really eating the sacrifice. But this fact is falsified by the error that I put first in this note on mythology. It is misunderstanding the psychology of day-dreams. A child pretending there is a goblin in a hollow tree will do a crude and material thing, like leaving a piece of cake for him. A poet might do a more dignified and elegant thing, like bringing to the god fruits as well as flowers. But the degree of seriousness in both acts may be the same or it may vary in almost any degree. The crude fancy is no more a creed than the ideal fancy is a creed. Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had ignorantly worshipped.
The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers. Mythology, then, sought god through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty, in the sense in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque ugliness. But the imagination has its own laws and therefore its own triumphs, which neither logicians nor men of science can understand. It remained true to that imaginative instinct through a thousand extravagances, through every crude cosmic pantomime of a pig eating the moon or the world being cut out of a cow, through all the dizzy convolutions and mystic malformations of Asiatic art, through all the stark and staring rigidity of Egyptian and Assyrian portraiture, through every kind of cracked mirror of mad art that seemed to deform the world and displace the sky, it remained true to something about which there can be no argument; something that makes it possible for some artist of some school to stand suddenly still before that particular deformity and say, ‘My dream has come true.’ Therefore do we all in fact feel that pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are wise enough not to inquire what they suggest. Therefore we all feel what is meant by Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, until some prig of a pessimist or progressive person explains what it means. Therefore we all know the meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told. In this sense it is true that it is the ignorant who accept myths, but only because it is the ignorant who appreciate poems. Imagination has its own laws and triumphs; and a tremendous power began to clothe its images, whether images in the mind or in the mud, whether in the bamboo of the South Sea Islands or the marble of the mountains of Hellas. But there was always a trouble in the triumph, which in these pages I have tried to analyse in vain; but perhaps I might in conclusion state it thus.
Questo è il possente e ramificato albero chiamato mitologia, che si dirama attorno al mondo intero, e i cui rami remoti, sotto cieli diversi, recano come uccelli variopinti i costosi idoli dell’Asia e i feticci mal cotti dell’Africa e i re e le principesse fatate delle fiabe della foresta, e, sepolti tra le viti e gli olivi, i Lari dei Latini, e portata sulle nubi dell’Olimpo la baldanzosa supremazia degli dèi di Grecia. Questi sono i miti: e chi non ha simpatia per i miti non ha simpatia per gli uomini. Ma chi più ha simpatia per i miti più pienamente comprenderà che essi non sono, e non furono mai, una religione, nel senso in cui il Cristianesimo o perfino l’Islam è una religione. Essi soddisfano alcuni dei bisogni soddisfatti da una religione; e in particolare il bisogno di compiere certe cose in certe date; il bisogno delle due idee gemelle della festività e della formalità. Ma benché forniscano all’uomo un calendario, non gli forniscono un credo. Un uomo non si alzava in piedi a dire «Credo in Giove e Giunone e Nettuno», e via dicendo, come si alza in piedi e dice «Credo in Dio Padre onnipotente», e il resto del Credo degli Apostoli. Molti credevano in alcuni e non in altri, o più in alcuni e meno in altri, o soltanto in un senso poetico assai vago in uno qualsiasi. Non vi fu mai un momento in cui tutti fossero raccolti in un ordine ortodosso che gli uomini avrebbero combattuto e sofferto il supplizio per mantenere intatto. E ancor meno qualcuno disse mai a quel modo: «Credo in Odino e Thor e Freya», poiché fuori dall’Olimpo persino l’ordine olimpico si fa nuvoloso e caotico. A me pare chiaro che Thor non fosse affatto un dio, bensì un eroe. Nulla che assomigli a una religione raffigurerebbe qualcuno che assomigli a un dio mentre brancola come un pigmeo in una grande caverna che si rivela essere il guanto di un gigante. Questa è la gloriosa ignoranza chiamata avventura. Thor può essere stato un grande avventuriero; ma chiamarlo dio è come voler paragonare Jehovah con Giacomino e il fagiolo magico. Odino sembra essere stato un vero capo barbaro, forse dei secoli bui successivi al Cristianesimo. Il politeismo si stempera ai suoi margini in fiabe o memorie barbariche; non è una cosa come il monoteismo quale è tenuto dai monoteisti seri. Di nuovo, esso soddisfa davvero il bisogno di gridare qualche nome elevato o qualche nobile memoria in momenti che sono essi stessi nobili ed elevati; come la nascita di un bambino o la salvezza di una città. Ma il nome era usato in tal modo da molti per i quali era soltanto un nome. Infine esso soddisfaceva, o piuttosto soddisfaceva in parte, una cosa davvero molto profonda nell’umanità; l’idea di rinunciare a qualcosa come porzione delle potenze ignote; di versare del vino sul suolo, di gettare un anello nel mare; in una parola, di sacrificio. È l’idea saggia e degna di non spingere fino in fondo il nostro vantaggio; di porre qualcosa sull’altro piatto della bilancia per zavorrare il nostro dubbio orgoglio, di pagare la decima alla natura per la nostra terra. Questa profonda verità del pericolo dell’insolenza, dell’essere troppo grandi per le nostre scarpe, percorre tutte le grandi tragedie greche e le rende grandi. Ma corre fianco a fianco con un agnosticismo quasi criptico circa la reale natura degli dèi da propiziare. Là dove quel gesto di resa è più magnifico, come tra i grandi Greci, vi è in realtà molto più l’idea che l’uomo si troverà meglio per aver perduto il bue che non che il dio si troverà meglio per averlo ottenuto. Si dice che nelle sue forme più grossolane vi siano spesso azioni grottescamente suggestive del dio che davvero mangia il sacrificio. Ma questo fatto è falsato dall’errore che ho posto per primo in questa nota sulla mitologia. È un fraintendimento della psicologia dei sogni a occhi aperti. Un bambino che finge esservi un folletto in un albero cavo compirà una cosa cruda e materiale, come lasciargli un pezzo di torta. Un poeta potrebbe compiere una cosa più dignitosa ed elegante, come portare al dio frutti oltre che fiori del pari. Ma il grado di serietà nei due atti può essere il medesimo, oppure può variare in quasi qualsiasi misura. La fantasia cruda non è un credo più di quanto lo sia la fantasia ideale. Certo il pagano non miscrede alla maniera di un ateo, non più di quanto creda alla maniera di un cristiano. Egli sente la presenza di potenze intorno alle quali indovina e inventa. San Paolo disse che i Greci avevano un altare a un dio ignoto. Ma in verità tutti i loro dèi erano dèi ignoti. E la vera frattura nella storia avvenne quando San Paolo annunciò loro colui che avevano ignorantemente adorato.
La sostanza di ogni paganesimo simile si può riassumere così. È un tentativo di raggiungere la realtà divina attraverso la sola immaginazione; nel proprio campo la ragione non lo trattiene affatto. È essenziale, per comprendere tutta la storia, che la ragione sia qualcosa di distinto dalla religione perfino nella più razionale di queste civiltà. È soltanto per ripensamento, quando tali culti sono decadenti o sulla difensiva, che si trovano pochi neoplatonici o pochi brahmani intenti a razionalizzarli, e anche allora unicamente cercando di allegorizzarli. Ma in realtà i fiumi della mitologia e della filosofia corrono paralleli e non si mescolano finché non si incontrano nel mare della cristianità. I laicisti ingenui parlano ancora come se la Chiesa avesse introdotto una sorta di scisma tra ragione e religione. La verità è che la Chiesa fu in realtà la prima cosa che abbia mai tentato di unire ragione e religione. Non era mai esistita prima una simile unione dei sacerdoti e dei filosofi. La mitologia, dunque, cercava dio attraverso l’immaginazione; ovvero cercava la verità per mezzo della bellezza, nel senso in cui la bellezza comprende molta della più grottesca bruttezza. Ma l’immaginazione ha leggi proprie e perciò propri trionfi, che né i logici né gli uomini di scienza sanno comprendere. Rimase fedele a quell’istinto immaginativo attraverso mille stravaganze, attraverso ogni rozza pantomima cosmica di un maiale che divora la luna o del mondo ricavato tagliando una mucca, attraverso tutte le vertiginose convoluzioni e le mistiche deformità dell’arte asiatica, attraverso tutta la rigidità fissa e stralunata del ritratto egizio e assiro, attraverso ogni sorta di specchio incrinato di arte folle che sembrava sfigurare il mondo e spostare il cielo, rimase fedele a qualcosa su cui non può esserci discussione; qualcosa che rende possibile a un qualche artista di una qualche scuola arrestarsi d’improvviso immobile dinanzi a quella particolare deformità e dire: «Il mio sogno si è avverato.» Perciò tutti sentiamo di fatto che i miti pagani o primitivi sono infinitamente suggestivi, purché siamo abbastanza saggi da non domandare che cosa suggeriscano. Perciò tutti sentiamo che cosa significhi Prometeo che ruba il fuoco dal cielo, finché qualche saccente pessimista o progressista non ci spiega che cosa significhi. Perciò tutti conosciamo il significato di Jack e il fagiolo magico, finché non ce lo dicono. In questo senso è vero che sono gli ignoranti ad accettare i miti, ma solo perché sono gli ignoranti ad apprezzare le poesie. L’immaginazione ha leggi e trionfi propri; e un potere immenso cominciò a rivestire le sue immagini, siano esse immagini nella mente o nel fango, sia nel bambù delle isole dei Mari del Sud sia nel marmo dei monti dell’Ellade. Ma vi era sempre un turbamento nel trionfo, che in queste pagine ho tentato invano di analizzare; ma forse potrei, in conclusione, enunciarlo così.
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and even maim him for ever. Henceforth being merely secular would be a servitude and an inhibition. If man cannot pray he is gagged; if he cannot kneel he is in irons. We therefore feel throughout the whole of paganism a curious double feeling of trust and distrust. When the man makes the gesture of salutation and of sacrifice, when he pours out the libation or lifts up the sword, he knows he is doing a worthy and a virile thing. He knows he is doing one of the things for which a man was made. His imaginative experiment is therefore justified. But precisely because it began with imagination, there is to the end something of mockery in it, and especially in the object of it. This mockery, in the more intense moments of the intellect, becomes the almost intolerable irony of Greek tragedy. There seems a disproportion between the priest and the altar or between the altar and the god. The priest seems more solemn and almost more sacred than the god. All the order of the temple is solid and sane and satisfactory to certain parts of our nature; except the very centre of it, which seems strangely mutable and dubious, like a dancing flame. It is the first thought round which the whole has been built; and the first thought is still a fancy and almost a frivolity. In that strange place of meeting, the man seems more statuesque than the statue. He himself can stand for ever in the noble and natural attitude of the statue of the Praying Boy. But whatever name be written on the pedestal, whether Zeus or Ammon or Apollo, the god whom he worships is Proteus.
The Praying Boy may be said to express a need rather than to satisfy a need. It is by a normal and necessary action that his hands are lifted; but it is no less a parable that his hands are empty. About the nature of that need there will be more to say; but at this point it may be said that perhaps after all this true instinct, that prayer and sacrifice are a liberty and an enlargement, refers back to that vast and half-forgotten conception of universal fatherhood, which we have already seen everywhere fading from the morning sky. This is true; and yet it is not all the truth. There remains an indestructible instinct, in the poet as represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely wrong in localising his God. It is something in the soul of poetry if not of piety. And the greatest of poets, when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us the universe or the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger language, a local habitation and a name. No poet is merely a pantheist; those who are counted most pantheistic, like Shelley, start with some local and particular image as the pagans did. After all, Shelley wrote of the skylark because it was a skylark. You could not issue an imperial or international translation of it for use in South America, in which it was changed to an ostrich. So the mythological imagination moves as it were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places found. So far could the lonely imagination lead, and we must turn later to the lonely reason. Nowhere along this road did the two ever travel together.
That is where all these things differed from religion or the reality in which these different dimensions met in a sort of solid. They differed from the reality not in what they looked like but in what they were. A picture may look like a landscape; it may look in every detail exactly like a landscape. The only detail in which it differs is that it is not a landscape. The difference is only that which divides a portrait of Queen Elizabeth from Queen Elizabeth. Only in this mythical and mystical world the portrait could exist before the person; and the portrait was therefore more vague and doubtful. But anybody who has felt and fed on the atmosphere of these myths will know what I mean, when I say that in one sense they did not really profess to be realities. The pagans had dreams about realities; and they would have been the first to admit, in their own words, that some came through the gate of ivory and others through the gate of horn. The dreams do indeed tend to be very vivid dreams when they touch on those tender or tragic things, which can really make a sleeper awaken with the sense that his heart has been broken in his sleep. They tend continually to hover over certain passionate themes of meeting and parting, of a life that ends in death or a death that is the beginning of life. Demeter wanders over a stricken world looking for a stolen child; Isis stretches out her arms over the earth in vain to gather the limbs of Osiris; and there is lamentation upon the hills for Atys and through the woods for Adonis. There mingles with all such mourning the mystical and profound sense that death can be a deliverer and an appeasement; that such death gives us a divine blood for a renovating river and that all good is found in gathering the broken body of the god. We may truly call these foreshadowing; so long as we remember that foreshadowings are shadows. And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces shape but not texture. These things were something like the real thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were different. Saying something is like a dog is another way of saying it is not a dog; and it is in this sense of identity that a myth is not a man. Nobody really thought of Isis as a human being, nobody really thought of Demeter as a historical character, nobody thought of Adonis as the founder of a Church. There was no idea that any one of them had changed the world; but rather that their recurrent death and life bore the sad and beautiful burden of the changelessness of the world. Not one of them was a revolution, save in the sense of the revolution of the sun and moon. Their whole meaning is missed if we do not see that they mean the shadows that we are and the shadows that we pursue. In certain sacrificial and communal aspects they naturally suggest what sort of a god might satisfy them; but they do not profess to be satisfied. Anyone who says they do is a bad judge of poetry.
Those who talk about Pagan Christs have less sympathy with Paganism than with Christianity. Those who call these cults ‘religions,’ and ‘compare’ them with the certitude and challenge of the Church have much less appreciation than we have of what made heathenism human, or of why classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song. It is no very human tenderness for the hungry to prove that hunger is the same as food. It is no very genial understanding of youth to argue that hope destroys the need for happiness. And it is utterly unreal to argue that these images in the mind, admired entirely in the abstract, were even in the same world with a living man and a living polity that were worshipped because they were concrete. We might as well say that a boy playing at robbers is the same as a man in his first day in the trenches; or that boy’s first fancies about ‘the not impossible she’ are the same as the sacrament of marriage. They are fundamentally different exactly where they are superficially similar; we might almost say they are not the same even when they are the same. They are only different because one is real and the other is not. I do not mean merely that I myself believe that one is true and the other is not. I mean that one was never meant to be true in the same sense as the other. The sense in which it was meant to be true I have tried to suggest vaguely here, but it is undoubtedly very subtle and almost indescribable. It is so subtle that the students who profess to put it up as a rival to our religion miss the whole meaning and purport of their own study. We know better than the scholars, even those of us who are no scholars, what was in that hollow cry that went forth over the dead Adonis and why the Great Mother had a daughter wedded to death. We have entered more deeply than they into the Eleusinian Mysteries and have passed a higher grade, where gate within gate guarded the wisdom of Orpheus. We know the meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret revealed to the perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet saying ‘These things are.’ It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist crying, ‘Why cannot these things be?’
Il nodo e la crisi stanno nel fatto che l’uomo trovò naturale adorare; naturale perfino adorare cose innaturali. La posa dell’idolo poteva essere rigida e strana; ma il gesto dell’adorante era generoso e bello. Egli non solo si sentiva più libero quando si piegava; si sentiva realmente più alto quando si inchinava. D’ora innanzi qualunque cosa togliesse il gesto dell’adorazione lo avrebbe atrofizzato e persino mutilato per sempre. D’ora innanzi essere meramente laici sarebbe stata una servitù e un’inibizione. Se l’uomo non può pregare è imbavagliato; se non può inginocchiarsi è in catene. Perciò avvertiamo, in tutto il paganesimo, un curioso duplice sentimento di fiducia e diffidenza. Quando l’uomo compie il gesto del saluto e del sacrificio, quando versa la libagione o leva la spada, sa di compiere una cosa degna e virile. Sa di compiere una di quelle cose per cui l’uomo fu fatto. Il suo esperimento immaginativo è dunque giustificato. Ma proprio perché ebbe inizio con l’immaginazione, vi è sino alla fine qualcosa di beffardo in esso, e specialmente nel suo oggetto. Questa beffa, nei momenti più intensi dell’intelletto, diventa l’ironia quasi intollerabile della tragedia greca. Sembra esservi una sproporzione tra il sacerdote e l’altare, o tra l’altare e il dio. Il sacerdote sembra più solenne e quasi più sacro del dio. Tutto l’ordine del tempio è saldo, sano e soddisfacente per certe parti della nostra natura; tranne il suo centro stesso, che sembra stranamente mutevole e dubbio, come una fiamma danzante. È il primo pensiero attorno al quale l’intero è stato edificato; e il primo pensiero è ancora una fantasia e quasi una frivolezza. In quello strano luogo d’incontro, l’uomo sembra più statuario della statua. Egli stesso può restare per sempre nell’atteggiamento nobile e naturale della statua del Fanciullo Orante. Ma qualunque nome sia scritto sul piedistallo, sia esso Zeus o Ammone o Apollo, il dio che egli adora è Proteo.
Del Fanciullo Orante si può dire che esprime un bisogno più che soddisfarlo. È per un atto normale e necessario che le sue mani sono levate; ma non è meno una parabola che le sue mani siano vuote. Della natura di quel bisogno ci sarà altro da dire; ma a questo punto si può dire che forse, dopo tutto, questo vero istinto, per cui la preghiera e il sacrificio sono una libertà e un ampliamento, rimanda a quella vasta e semidimenticata concezione della paternità universale, che abbiamo già visto ovunque svanire dal cielo del mattino. Questo è vero; e tuttavia non è tutta la verità. Rimane un istinto indistruttibile, nel poeta quale è rappresentato dal pagano, per cui egli non ha del tutto torto nel localizzare il proprio Dio. È qualcosa nell’anima della poesia, se non della pietà. E il più grande dei poeti, quando definì il poeta, non disse che egli ci dà l’universo o l’assoluto o l’infinito; bensì, nella sua più ampia lingua, una dimora locale e un nome. Nessun poeta è meramente panteista; quelli che sono ritenuti più panteisti, come Shelley, prendono le mosse da qualche immagine locale e particolare, come facevano i pagani. Dopo tutto, Shelley scrisse dell’allodola perché era un’allodola. Non se ne potrebbe pubblicare una traduzione imperiale o internazionale da usarsi nel Sud America, in cui essa fosse mutata in uno struzzo. Così l’immaginazione mitologica si muove per così dire in cerchi, librandosi ora per trovare un luogo, ora per farvi ritorno. In una parola, la mitologia è una ricerca; è qualcosa che combina un desiderio ricorrente con un dubbio ricorrente, mescolando una sincerità affamatissima nell’idea di cercare un luogo con una levità oscurissima, profondissima e misteriosa riguardo a tutti i luoghi trovati. Fin qui poté condurre la solitaria immaginazione, e dovremo volgerci più tardi alla solitaria ragione. In nessun punto lungo questa strada i due viaggiarono mai insieme.
È in questo che tutte queste cose differivano dalla religione, ossia dalla realtà in cui queste diverse dimensioni si incontravano in una sorta di solido. Differivano dalla realtà non per l’aspetto che avevano, ma per ciò che erano. Un quadro può somigliare a un paesaggio; può somigliare, in ogni singolo particolare, esattamente a un paesaggio. L’unico particolare in cui differisce è che non è un paesaggio. La differenza è soltanto quella che separa un ritratto di Elisabetta da Elisabetta stessa. Solo che, in questo mondo mitico e mistico, il ritratto poteva esistere prima della persona; e il ritratto era perciò più vago e più incerto. Ma chiunque abbia sentito e si sia nutrito dell’atmosfera di questi miti capirà ciò che intendo quando dico che, in un certo senso, essi non pretendevano affatto di essere realtà. I pagani avevano sogni intorno a realtà; e sarebbero stati i primi ad ammettere, con parole loro, che alcuni venivano attraverso la porta d’avorio e altri attraverso la porta di corno. I sogni tendono davvero a farsi sogni assai vividi quando sfiorano quelle cose tenere o tragiche che possono realmente far svegliare un dormiente con la sensazione che il cuore gli si sia spezzato nel sonno. Tendono di continuo ad aleggiare su certi temi appassionati d’incontro e di distacco, di una vita che si conclude nella morte o di una morte che è il principio della vita. Demetra vaga per un mondo colpito dalla sventura in cerca di un figlio rapito; Iside tende invano le braccia sopra la terra per raccogliere le membra di Osiride; e c’è un lamento sui colli per Attis e per i boschi per Adonis. A ogni tale cordoglio si mescola il senso mistico e profondo che la morte possa essere una liberatrice e una pacificazione; che una tale morte ci dia un sangue divino per un fiume che rinnova, e che ogni bene si trovi nel raccogliere il corpo spezzato del dio. Possiamo davvero chiamare queste cose prefigurazioni; purché ricordiamo che le prefigurazioni sono ombre. E la metafora dell’ombra coglie per l’appunto con grande esattezza la verità che qui è di importanza vitale. Poiché un’ombra è una forma; una cosa che riproduce la forma ma non la sostanza. Queste cose erano qualcosa di simile alla cosa reale; e dire che erano simili è dire che erano diverse. Dire che qualcosa somiglia a un cane è un altro modo di dire che non è un cane; ed è in questo senso di identità che un mito non è un uomo. Nessuno pensava davvero a Iside come a un essere umano, nessuno pensava davvero a Demetra come a un personaggio storico, nessuno pensava ad Adone come al fondatore di una Chiesa. Non c’era l’idea che alcuno di essi avesse mutato il mondo; ma piuttosto che la loro ricorrente morte e vita recasse il fardello triste e bello dell’immutabilità del mondo. Nessuno di essi era una rivoluzione, se non nel senso della rivoluzione del sole e della luna. Tutto il loro significato ci sfugge se non vediamo che essi significano le ombre che noi siamo e le ombre che noi inseguiamo. In certi aspetti sacrificali e comunitari essi suggeriscono naturalmente quale sorta di dio potrebbe appagarli; ma non pretendono di essere appagati. Chiunque affermi che lo siano è un cattivo giudice di poesia.
Coloro che parlano di Cristi pagani hanno meno simpatia per il Paganesimo di quanta ne abbiano per il Cristianesimo. Coloro che chiamano questi culti «religioni» e li «confrontano» con la certezza e la sfida della Chiesa hanno assai meno apprezzamento di quanto ne abbiamo noi di ciò che rese umano il paganesimo, o del perché la letteratura classica sia ancora qualcosa che resta sospeso nell’aria come un canto. Non è una gran tenerezza umana verso l’affamato dimostrare che la fame è la stessa cosa del cibo. Non è una gran comprensione geniale della giovinezza sostenere che la speranza distrugge il bisogno della felicità. Ed è del tutto irreale sostenere che queste immagini della mente, ammirate interamente nell’astratto, fossero anche solo nel medesimo mondo di un uomo vivente e di una comunità vivente che venivano adorati proprio perché erano concreti. Tanto varrebbe dire che un ragazzo che gioca ai briganti è la stessa cosa di un uomo al suo primo giorno in trincea; o che le prime fantasticherie di quel ragazzo intorno alla «non impossibile lei» siano la stessa cosa del sacramento del matrimonio. Sono fondamentalmente diverse proprio là dove sono superficialmente simili; potremmo quasi dire che non sono la stessa cosa nemmeno quando sono la stessa cosa. Sono diverse solo perché una è reale e l’altra no. Non intendo semplicemente che io stesso creda che una sia vera e l’altra no. Intendo che una non fu mai concepita per essere vera nello stesso senso dell’altra. Il senso in cui essa fu concepita per essere vera ho cercato di suggerirlo qui vagamente, ma è senza dubbio assai sottile e quasi indescrivibile. È talmente sottile che gli studiosi i quali pretendono di erigerlo a rivale della nostra religione mancano tutto il significato e l’intento del loro stesso studio. Noi sappiamo meglio degli eruditi, anche quelli fra noi che eruditi non sono, che cosa vi fosse in quel grido vuoto che si levò sopra l’Adone morto e perché la Grande Madre avesse una figlia sposata alla morte. Noi siamo penetrati più a fondo di loro nei Misteri Eleusini e abbiamo varcato un grado più alto, là dove porta dentro porta custodiva la sapienza di Orfeo. Noi conosciamo il significato di tutti i miti. Noi conosciamo l’ultimo segreto rivelato all’iniziato perfetto. E non è la voce di un sacerdote o di un profeta che dice: «Queste cose sono». È la voce di un sognatore e di un idealista che grida: «Perché queste cose non possono essere?».
VI
THE DEMONS AND THE PHILOSOPHERS
I have dwelt at some little length on this imaginative sort of paganism, which has crowded the world with temples and is everywhere the parent of popular festivity. For the central history of civilisation, as I see it, consists of two further stages before the final stage of Christendom. The first was the struggle between this paganism and something less worthy than itself, and the second the process by which it grew in itself less worthy. In this very varied and often very vague polytheism there was a weakness of original sin. Pagan gods were depicted as tossing men like dice; and indeed they are loaded dice. About sex especially men are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are born mad. They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity. This disproportion dragged down the winged fancies; and filled the end of paganism with a mere filth and litter of spawning gods. But the first point to realise is that this sort of paganism had an early collision with another sort of paganism; and that the issue of that essentially spiritual struggle really determined the history of the world. In order to understand it we must pass to a review of the other kind of paganism. It can be considered much more briefly; indeed there is a very real sense in which the less that is said about it the better. If we have called the first sort of mythology the day-dream, we might very well call the second sort of mythology the nightmare.
Superstition recurs in all ages, and especially in rationalistic ages. I remember defending the religious tradition against a whole luncheon table of distinguished agnostics; and before the end of our conversation every one of them had procured from his pocket, or exhibited on his watch-chain, some charm or talisman from which he admitted that he was never separated. I was the only person present who had neglected to provide himself with a fetish. Superstition recurs in a rationalist age because it rests on something which, if not identical with rationalism, is not unconnected with scepticism. It is at least very closely connected with agnosticism. It rests on something that is really a very human and intelligible sentiment, like the local invocations of the numen in popular paganism. But it is an agnostic sentiment, for it rests on two feelings: first that we do not really know the laws of the universe; and second that they may be very different to all we call reason. Such men realise the real truth that enormous things do often turn upon tiny things. When a whisper comes, from tradition or what not, that one particular tiny thing is the key or clue, something deep and not altogether senseless in human nature tells them that it is not unlikely. This feeling exists in both the forms of paganism here under consideration. But when we come to the second form of it, we find it transformed and filled with another and more terrible spirit.
In dealing with the lighter thing called mythology, I have said little about the most disputable aspect of it; the extent to which such invocation of the spirits of the sea or the elements can indeed call spirits from the vasty deep; or rather, (as the Shakespearean scoffer put it) whether the spirits come when they are called. I believe that I am right in thinking that this problem, practical as it sounds, did not play a dominant part in the poetical business of mythology. But I think it even more obvious, on the evidence, that things of that sort have sometimes appeared, even if they were only appearances. But when we come to the world of superstition, in a more subtle sense, there is a shade of difference; a deepening and a darkening shade. Doubtless most popular superstition is as frivolous as any popular mythology. Men do not believe as a dogma that God would throw a thunderbolt at them for walking under a ladder; more often they amuse themselves with the not very laborious exercise of walking round it. There is no more in it than what I have already adumbrated; a sort of airy agnosticism about the possibilities of so strange a world. But there is another sort of superstition that does definitely look for results; what might be called a realistic superstition. And with that the question of whether spirits do answer or do appear becomes much more serious. As I have said, it seems to me pretty certain that they sometimes do; but about that there is a distinction that has been the beginning of much evil in the world. Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them. And indeed that popular phase exactly expresses the point. The gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective; that it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an assignation. But the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that he had broken them.
VI
I DEMONI E I FILOSOFI
Mi sono soffermato con una certa ampiezza su questa specie immaginativa di paganesimo, che ha affollato il mondo di templi ed è dovunque il genitore della festività popolare. Poiché la storia centrale della civiltà, per come io la vedo, consiste di due ulteriori stadi prima dello stadio finale della Cristianità. Il primo fu la lotta tra questo paganesimo e qualcosa di meno degno di esso, e il secondo il processo per cui esso divenne in se stesso meno degno. In questo politeismo tanto vario e spesso tanto vago c’era una debolezza di peccato originale. Gli dèi pagani venivano raffigurati mentre gettavano gli uomini come dadi; e in verità sono dadi truccati. Riguardo al sesso in particolare gli uomini nascono squilibrati; potremmo quasi dire che gli uomini nascono folli. A stento raggiungono la sanità mentale prima di raggiungere la santità. Questa sproporzione trascinò a terra le fantasie alate; e riempì la fine del paganesimo di una mera sozzura e di un rifiuto di dèi che si riproducevano. Ma il primo punto da comprendere è che questa specie di paganesimo ebbe una precoce collisione con un’altra specie di paganesimo; e che l’esito di quella lotta essenzialmente spirituale determinò davvero la storia del mondo. Per comprenderla dobbiamo passare a una rassegna dell’altro genere di paganesimo. Lo si può considerare assai più brevemente; anzi, c’è un senso ben reale in cui meno se ne dice, meglio è. Se abbiamo chiamato la prima specie di mitologia il sogno a occhi aperti, potremmo assai bene chiamare la seconda specie di mitologia l’incubo.
La superstizione ritorna in ogni epoca, e specialmente nelle epoche razionalistiche. Ricordo di aver difeso la tradizione religiosa contro un’intera tavolata di eminenti agnostici a colazione; e prima che la conversazione volgesse al termine, ciascuno di loro aveva tratto di tasca, o esibito sulla catena dell’orologio, qualche amuleto o talismano dal quale, come confessava, non si separava mai. Ero l’unico presente ad aver trascurato di munirmi di un feticcio. La superstizione ritorna in un’epoca razionalista perché poggia su qualcosa che, se non è identico al razionalismo, non è però estraneo allo scetticismo. Con l’agnosticismo, quanto meno, è strettamente imparentata. Poggia su qualcosa che è davvero un sentimento molto umano e comprensibile, simile alle invocazioni locali del numen nel paganesimo popolare. Ma è un sentimento agnostico, poiché poggia su due convinzioni: primo, che in realtà non conosciamo le leggi dell’universo; e secondo, che esse possono essere assai diverse da tutto ciò che chiamiamo ragione. Uomini simili colgono la vera verità che le cose enormi dipendono spesso da cose minime. Quando giunge un sussurro, dalla tradizione o da chissà dove, che una certa cosa minuta sia la chiave o l’indizio, qualcosa di profondo e non del tutto insensato nella natura umana dice loro che non è improbabile. Questo sentimento esiste in entrambe le forme di paganesimo qui prese in esame. Ma quando giungiamo alla seconda di esse, la troviamo trasformata e colma di un altro e più terribile spirito.
Trattando della cosa più leggera che si chiama mitologia, ho detto poco del suo aspetto più discutibile: fino a che punto una simile invocazione degli spiriti del mare o degli elementi possa davvero chiamare gli spiriti dai vasti abissi; o piuttosto (come diceva il beffardo personaggio di Shakespeare) se gli spiriti vengano quando li si chiama. Credo di aver ragione nel pensare che questo problema, per quanto pratico possa sembrare, non abbia avuto una parte dominante nell’affare poetico della mitologia. Ma ritengo ancora più evidente, alla luce dei fatti, che cose di tal genere siano talvolta apparse, anche se erano soltanto apparenze. Ma quando giungiamo al mondo della superstizione, in un senso più sottile, vi è una sfumatura di differenza; una sfumatura che si fa più cupa e più profonda. Senza dubbio la maggior parte della superstizione popolare è frivola quanto qualsiasi mitologia popolare. Gli uomini non credono come a un dogma che Dio scaglierebbe loro contro un fulmine per aver camminato sotto una scala; più spesso si divertono con il non troppo faticoso esercizio di farne il giro. Non c’è nulla di più di ciò che ho già adombrato: una sorta di aereo agnosticismo circa le possibilità di un mondo tanto strano. Ma esiste un’altra specie di superstizione che cerca decisamente dei risultati: quella che si potrebbe chiamare una superstizione realistica. E con essa la questione se gli spiriti rispondano davvero o appaiano davvero diventa assai più seria. Come ho detto, mi pare pressoché certo che talvolta lo facciano; ma a questo proposito vi è una distinzione che è stata l’origine di molto male nel mondo. Sia perché la Caduta ha davvero avvicinato gli uomini a vicini meno desiderabili del mondo spirituale, sia semplicemente perché l’animo degli uomini avidi o bramosi trova più facile immaginare il male, credo che la magia nera della stregoneria sia stata assai più pratica e assai meno poetica della magia bianca della mitologia. Immagino che il giardino della strega sia stato coltivato con molta più cura del bosco della ninfa. Immagino che il campo del male sia stato persino più fecondo di quello del bene. Tanto per cominciare, un qualche impulso, forse una sorta di impulso disperato, spinse gli uomini verso le potenze più tenebrose quando avevano a che fare con problemi pratici. Vi era una sorta di sentimento segreto e perverso che le potenze più tenebrose avrebbero davvero fatto le cose; che non ammettevano sciocchezze. E in verità quella frase popolare esprime esattamente il punto. Gli dèi della semplice mitologia avevano in sé moltissime sciocchezze. Avevano in sé moltissime buone sciocchezze; nel senso lieto e ilare in cui parliamo delle sciocchezze del Jabberwocky o del Paese dove vivono i Jumblies. Ma l’uomo che consultava un demone provava ciò che molti hanno provato consultando un investigatore, specialmente un investigatore privato: che era un lavoro sporco, ma il lavoro sarebbe stato davvero fatto. Un uomo non entrava propriamente nel bosco per incontrare una ninfa; vi entrava piuttosto con la speranza di incontrarne una. Era un’avventura più che un appuntamento. Ma il diavolo manteneva davvero i suoi appuntamenti e, in un certo senso, manteneva persino le sue promesse; anche se talvolta, in seguito, un uomo avrebbe voluto, come Macbeth, averle infrante.
In the accounts given us of many rude or savage races we gather that the cult of demons often came after the cult of deities, and even after the cult of one single and supreme deity. It may be suspected that in almost all such places the higher deity is felt to be too far off for appeal in certain petty matters, and men invoke the spirits because they are in a more literal sense familiar spirits. But with the idea of employing the demons who get things done, a new idea appears more worthy of the demons. It may indeed be truly described as the idea of being worthy of the demons; of making oneself fit for their fastidious and exacting society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the hidden spring that works the mysterious machinery of the world. And there is after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a monkey trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world. This is the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world. For most cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is artificial and even artistic, a sort of art for art’s sake. Men do not do it because they do not think it horrible; but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible. They wish, in the most literal sense, to sup on horrors. That is why it is often found that rude races like the Australian natives are not cannibals; while much more refined and intelligent races, like the New Zealand Maories, occasionally are. They are refined and intelligent enough to indulge sometimes in a self-conscious diabolism. But if we could understand their minds, or even really understand their language, we should probably find that they were not acting as ignorant, that is as innocent cannibals. They are not doing it because they do not think it wrong, but precisely because they do think it wrong. They are acting like a Parisian decadent at a Black Mass. But the Black Mass has to hide underground from the presence of the real Mass. In other words, the demons have really been in hiding since the coming of Christ on earth. The cannibalism of the higher barbarians is in hiding from the civilisation of the white man. But before Christendom, and especially outside Europe, this was not always so. In the ancient world the demons often wandered abroad like dragons. They could be positively and publicly enthroned as gods. Their enormous images could be set up in public temples in the centre of populous cities. And all over the world the traces can be found of this striking and solid fact, so curiously overlooked by the moderns who speak of all such evil as primitive and early in evolution, that as a matter of fact some of the very highest civilisations of the world were the very places where the horns of Satan were exalted, not only to the stars but in the face of the sun. Take for example the Aztecs and American Indians of the ancient empires of Mexico and Peru. They were at least as elaborate as Egypt or China and only less lively than that central civilisation which is our own. But those who criticise that central civilisation (which is always their own civilisation) have a curious habit of not merely doing their legitimate duty in condemning its crimes, but of going out of their way to idealise its victims. They always assume that before the advent of Europe there was nothing anywhere but Eden. And Swinburne, in that spirited chorus of the nations in ‘Songs before Sunrise,’ used an expression about Spain in her South American conquests which always struck me as very strange. He said something about ‘her sins and sons through sinless lands dispersed,’ and how they ‘made accursed the name of man and thrice accursed the name of God.’ It may be reasonable enough that he should say the Spaniards were sinful, but why in the world should he say that the South Americans were sinless? Why should he have supposed that continent to be exclusively populated by archangels or saints perfect in heaven? It would be a strong thing to say of the most respectable neighbourhood; but when we come to think of what we really do know of that society the remark is rather funny. We know that the sinless priests of this sinless people worshipped sinless gods, who accepted as the nectar and ambrosia of their sunny paradise nothing but incessant human sacrifice accompanied by horrible torments. We may note also in the mythology of this American civilisation that element of reversal or violence against instinct of which Dante wrote; which runs backwards everywhere through the unnatural religion of the demons. It is notable not only in ethics but in aesthetics. A South American idol was made as ugly as possible, as a Greek image was made as beautiful as possible. They were seeking the secret of power, by working backwards against their own nature and the nature of things. There was always a sort of yearning to carve at last, in gold or granite or the dark red timber of the forests, a face at which the sky itself would break like a cracked mirror.
In any case it is clear enough that the painted and gilded civilisation of tropical America systematically indulged in human sacrifice. It is by no means clear, so far as I know, that the Eskimos ever indulged in human sacrifice. They were not civilised enough. They were too closely imprisoned by the white winter and the endless dark. Chill penury repressed their noble rage and froze the genial current of the soul. It was in brighter days and broader daylight that the noble rage is found unmistakably raging. It was in richer and more instructed lands that the genial current flowed on the altars, to be drunk by great gods wearing goggling and grinning masks and called on in terror or torment by long cacophonous names that sound like laughter in hell. A warmer climate and a more scientific cultivation were needed to bring forth these blooms; to draw up towards the sun the large leaves and flamboyant blossoms that gave their gold and crimson and purple to that garden, which Swinburne compares to the Hesperides. There was at least no doubt about the dragon.
Nei resoconti che ci vengono dati di molte razze rozze o selvagge apprendiamo che il culto dei demoni venne spesso dopo il culto delle divinità, e persino dopo il culto di un’unica e suprema divinità. Si può sospettare che in quasi tutti quei luoghi la divinità superiore sia sentita come troppo lontana perché ci si appelli a lei in certe faccende meschine, e gli uomini invocano gli spiriti perché essi sono, in senso più letterale, spiriti familiari. Ma con l’idea di impiegare i demoni che sbrigano le cose, appare una nuova idea più degna dei demoni. La si può invero descrivere con verità come l’idea di essere degni dei demoni; di rendersi adatti alla loro società schifiltosa ed esigente. La superstizione di specie più leggera trastulla con l’idea che una qualche inezia, un piccolo gesto come il gettare il sale, possa toccare la molla nascosta che aziona il misterioso meccanismo del mondo. E in fondo c’è qualcosa nell’idea di un simile Apriti Sesamo. Ma con l’appello agli spiriti inferiori giunge l’orribile nozione che il gesto non debba essere soltanto molto piccolo, ma anche molto vile; che debba essere una scimmiesca buffoneria di specie del tutto brutta e indegna. Prima o poi un uomo si accinge deliberatamente a compiere la cosa più disgustosa che riesca a immaginare. Si avverte che l’estremo del male estorcerà una sorta di attenzione o di risposta dalle potenze malvagie che stanno sotto la superficie del mondo. Questo è il significato di gran parte del cannibalismo nel mondo. Poiché la maggior parte del cannibalismo non è un’abitudine primitiva né tanto meno bestiale. È artificiale e persino artistica, una sorta di arte per l’arte. Gli uomini non lo fanno perché non lo ritengono orribile; ma, al contrario, proprio perché lo ritengono orribile. Desiderano, nel senso più letterale, cenare a base di orrori. È per questo che spesso si scopre che razze rozze come gli indigeni australiani non sono cannibali; mentre razze assai più raffinate e intelligenti, come i Maori della Nuova Zelanda, talvolta lo sono. Sono abbastanza raffinati e intelligenti da concedersi talvolta un diabolismo consapevole di sé. Ma se potessimo comprendere le loro menti, o anche solo comprendere davvero la loro lingua, probabilmente scopriremmo che non agivano da cannibali ignoranti, vale a dire innocenti. Non lo fanno perché non lo ritengono un male, ma proprio perché lo ritengono un male. Agiscono come un decadente parigino durante una Messa Nera. Ma la Messa Nera deve nascondersi sottoterra dalla presenza della Messa vera. In altre parole, i demoni si sono davvero nascosti dopo la venuta di Cristo sulla terra. Il cannibalismo dei barbari superiori si nasconde dalla civiltà dell’uomo bianco. Ma prima della Cristianità, e specialmente fuori d’Europa, non fu sempre così. Nel mondo antico i demoni spesso vagavano all’aperto come draghi. Potevano essere positivamente e pubblicamente intronizzati come dèi. Le loro enormi immagini potevano essere erette in templi pubblici nel centro di città popolose. E in tutto il mondo si possono trovare le tracce di questo fatto notevole e concreto, così curiosamente trascurato dai moderni che parlano di ogni male simile come di qualcosa di primitivo e di precoce nell’evoluzione: e cioè che in realtà alcune tra le più alte civiltà del mondo furono proprio i luoghi in cui le corna di Satana vennero esaltate, non solo fino alle stelle, ma in faccia al sole. Si prendano ad esempio gli Aztechi e gli indiani d’America degli antichi imperi del Messico e del Perù. Erano elaborati almeno quanto l’Egitto o la Cina, e solo meno vivaci di quella civiltà centrale che è la nostra. Ma coloro che criticano quella civiltà centrale (che è sempre la loro stessa civiltà) hanno la curiosa abitudine non solo di adempiere al loro legittimo dovere condannandone i crimini, ma di scomodarsi per idealizzarne le vittime. Danno sempre per scontato che prima dell’avvento dell’Europa non vi fosse in nessun luogo altro che l’Eden. E Swinburne, in quel vivace coro delle nazioni in ‘Songs before Sunrise’, usò a proposito della Spagna nelle sue conquiste sudamericane un’espressione che mi è sempre parsa assai strana. Disse qualcosa a proposito dei «suoi peccati e dei suoi figli dispersi per terre senza peccato», e di come essi «resero maledetto il nome dell’uomo e tre volte maledetto il nome di Dio». Può essere abbastanza ragionevole che egli dica che gli spagnoli erano peccatori, ma perché mai al mondo dovrebbe dire che i sudamericani erano senza peccato? Perché avrebbe dovuto supporre che quel continente fosse abitato esclusivamente da arcangeli o da santi perfetti in cielo? Sarebbe una cosa forte da dire del più rispettabile dei vicinati; ma quando ci mettiamo a pensare a ciò che davvero sappiamo di quella società l’osservazione risulta piuttosto comica. Sappiamo che i sacerdoti senza peccato di questo popolo senza peccato adoravano dèi senza peccato, i quali accettavano come nettare e ambrosia del loro soleggiato paradiso null’altro che incessanti sacrifici umani accompagnati da orribili tormenti. Possiamo notare anche nella mitologia di questa civiltà americana quell’elemento di rovesciamento o di violenza contro l’istinto di cui scrisse Dante; elemento che scorre a ritroso ovunque attraverso la religione innaturale dei demoni. È notevole non solo nell’etica, ma nell’estetica. Un idolo sudamericano era reso quanto più brutto possibile, come un’immagine greca era resa quanto più bella possibile. Cercavano il segreto della potenza, operando a ritroso contro la propria natura e la natura delle cose. Vi era sempre una sorta di anelito a scolpire finalmente, nell’oro o nel granito o nel rosso cupo legname delle foreste, un volto dinanzi al quale il cielo stesso si sarebbe infranto come uno specchio incrinato.
In ogni caso è abbastanza chiaro che la civiltà dipinta e dorata dell’America tropicale si abbandonava sistematicamente al sacrificio umano. Non è affatto chiaro, per quanto ne so, che gli eschimesi si siano mai abbandonati al sacrificio umano. Non erano abbastanza civilizzati. Erano troppo strettamente imprigionati dal bianco inverno e dalle tenebre infinite. La gelida penuria reprimeva la loro nobile furia e gelava la genial corrente dell’anima. Fu in giorni più luminosi e in un più ampio chiarore che la nobile furia si trova a infuriare in modo inconfondibile. Fu in terre più ricche e più erudite che la genial corrente scorreva sopra gli altari, per essere bevuta da grandi dèi dai volti coperti di maschere sbarrate d’occhi e ghignanti, invocati nel terrore o nel tormento con lunghi nomi cacofonici che suonano come risate all’inferno. Occorrevano un clima più caldo e una coltivazione più scientifica per far sbocciare simili fioriture; per far salire verso il sole le grandi foglie e i fiori sgargianti che diedero il loro oro, il loro cremisi e la loro porpora a quel giardino che Swinburne paragona alle Esperidi. Sul drago, almeno, non c’era alcun dubbio.
I do not raise in this connection the special controversy about Spain and Mexico; but I may remark in passing that it resembles exactly the question that must in some sense be raised afterwards about Rome and Carthage. In both cases there has been a queer habit among the English of always siding against the Europeans, and representing the rival civilisation, in Swinburne’s phrase, as sinless; when its sins were obviously crying or rather screaming to heaven. For Carthage also was a high civilisation, indeed a much more highly civilised civilisation. And Carthage also founded that civilisation on a religion of fear, sending up everywhere the smoke of human sacrifice. Now it is very right to rebuke our own race or religion for falling short of our own standards and ideals. But it is absurd to pretend that they fell lower than the other races and religions that professed the very opposite standards and ideals. There is a very real sense in which the Christian is worse than the heathen, the Spaniard worse than the Red Indian, or even the Roman potentially worse than the Carthaginian. But there is only one sense in which he is worse; and that is not in being positively worse. The Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better.
This inverted imagination produces things of which it is better not to speak. Some of them indeed might almost be named without being known; for they are of that extreme evil which seems innocent to the innocent. They are too inhuman even to be indecent. But without dwelling much longer in these dark corners, it may be noted as not irrelevant here that certain anti-human antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic. There may be suspected as running through it everywhere, for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. People would understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth of children. The Hebrew prophets were perpetually protesting against the Hebrew race relapsing into an idolatry that involved such a war upon children; and it is probable enough that this abominable apostasy from the God of Israel has occasionally appeared in Israel since, in the form of what is called ritual murder; not of course by any representative of the religion of Judaism, but by individual and irresponsible diabolists who did happen to be Jews. This sense that the forces of evil especially threaten childhood is found again in the enormous popularity of the Child Martyr of the Middle Ages. Chaucer did but give another version of a very national English legend, when he conceived the wickedest of all possible witches as the dark alien woman watching behind her high lattice and heading, like the babble of a brook down the stony street, the singing of little St. Hugh.
Anyhow the part of such speculations that concerns this story centered especially round that eastern end of the Mediterranean, where the nomads had turned gradually into traders and had begun to trade with the whole world. Indeed in the sense of trade and travel and colonial extension, it already had something like an empire of the whole world. Its purple dye, the emblem of its rich pomp and luxury, had steeped the wares which were sold far away amid the last crags of Cornwall and the sails that entered the silence of tropic seas amid all the mystery of Africa. It might be said truly to have painted the map purple. It was already a world-wide success, when the princes of Tyre would hardly have troubled to notice that one of their princesses had condescended to marry the chief of some tribe called Judah; when the merchants of its African outpost would only have curled their bearded and Semitic lips with a slight smile at the mention of a village called Rome. And indeed no two things could have seemed more distant from each other, not only in space but in Spirit, than the monotheism of the Palestinian tribe and the very virtues of the small Italian republic. There was but one thing between them; and the thing which divided them has united them. Very various and incompatible were the things that could be loved by the consuls of Rome and the prophets of Israel; but they were at one in what they hated. It is very easy in both cases to represent that hatred as something merely hateful. It is easy enough to make a merely harsh and inhuman figure either of Elijah raving above the slaughter of Carmel or Cato thundering against the amnesty of Africa. These men had their limitations and their local passions; but this criticism of them is unimaginative and therefore unreal. It leaves out something, something immense and intermediate, facing east and west and calling up this passion in its eastern and western enemies; and that something is the first subject of this chapter.
The civilisation that centered in Tyre and Sidon was above all things practical. It has left little in the way of art and nothing in the way of poetry. But it prided itself upon being very efficient; and it followed in its philosophy and religion that strange and sometimes secret train of thought which we have already noted in those who look for immediate effects. There is always in such a mentality an idea that there is a short cut to the secret of all success; something that would shock the world by this sort of shameless thoroughness. They believed, in the appropriate modern phrase, in people who delivered the goods. In their dealings with their god Moloch, they themselves were always careful to deliver the goods. It was an interesting transaction, upon which we shall have to touch more than once in the rest of the narrative; it is enough to say here that it involved the theory I have suggested, about a certain attitude towards children. This was what called up against it in simultaneous fury the servant of one God in Palestine and the guardians of all the household gods in Rome. This is what challenged two things naturally so much divided by every sort of distance and disunion, whose union was to save the world.
Non sollevo, a questo proposito, la particolare controversia sulla Spagna e sul Messico; ma posso osservare di sfuggita che essa somiglia esattamente alla questione che in un certo senso dovrà poi essere sollevata su Roma e Cartagine. In entrambi i casi c’è stata una bizzarra abitudine, fra gli inglesi, di schierarsi sempre contro gli europei, e di rappresentare la civiltà rivale, per usare la frase di Swinburne, come senza peccato; mentre i suoi peccati gridavano, o piuttosto urlavano, palesemente al cielo. Poiché anche Cartagine era un’alta civiltà, anzi una civiltà molto più altamente civilizzata. E anche Cartagine fondò quella civiltà su una religione del terrore, levando dappertutto il fumo del sacrificio umano. Ora, è giustissimo rimproverare alla nostra stessa razza o alla nostra religione di non essere all’altezza dei nostri stessi ideali e criteri. Ma è assurdo pretendere che essa sia caduta più in basso delle altre razze e religioni che professavano criteri e ideali esattamente opposti. C’è un senso molto reale in cui il cristiano è peggiore del pagano, lo spagnolo peggiore del pellerossa, o persino il romano potenzialmente peggiore del cartaginese. Ma c’è un solo senso in cui egli è peggiore; e non è quello di essere positivamente peggiore. Il cristiano è peggiore solo perché è suo compito essere migliore.
Questa immaginazione rovesciata produce cose di cui è meglio non parlare. Alcune di esse, in verità, potrebbero quasi essere nominate senza essere comprese; poiché sono di quell’estremo male che pare innocente agli innocenti. Sono troppo inumane persino per essere indecenti. Ma senza indugiare più a lungo in questi angoli oscuri, può notarsi come non irrilevante qui che certi antagonismi anti-umani sembrano ricorrere in questa tradizione di magia nera. Vi si può sospettare, per esempio, come qualcosa che la percorre dappertutto, un mistico odio per l’idea dell’infanzia. Si comprenderebbe meglio la furia popolare contro le streghe, se si ricordasse che la malvagità più comunemente loro attribuita era d’impedire la nascita dei bambini. I profeti ebrei protestavano di continuo contro la razza ebraica che ricadeva in un’idolatria che comportava una simile guerra contro i bambini; ed è assai probabile che questa abominevole apostasia dal Dio d’Israele sia riapparsa occasionalmente in Israele da allora, nella forma di ciò che si chiama omicidio rituale; non certo per opera di alcun rappresentante della religione del giudaismo, ma di diabolisti individuali e irresponsabili che si dava il caso fossero ebrei. Questo senso che le forze del male minaccino in special modo l’infanzia si ritrova di nuovo nell’enorme popolarità del Fanciullo Martire del Medioevo. Chaucer non fece che dare un’altra versione di una leggenda inglese assai nazionale, quando concepì la più malvagia di tutte le streghe possibili come l’oscura donna straniera che spiava dietro la sua alta grata e udiva, come il chiacchiericcio di un ruscello giù per la strada selciata, il canto del piccolo San Ugo.
Comunque, la parte di simili speculazioni che riguarda questa storia si accentrava soprattutto intorno a quell’estremità orientale del Mediterraneo, dove i nomadi si erano gradualmente trasformati in mercanti e avevano cominciato a commerciare con il mondo intero. Anzi, nel senso del commercio, dei viaggi e dell’espansione coloniale, essa possedeva già qualcosa come un impero sul mondo intero. La sua tintura purpurea, l’emblema del suo ricco fasto e della sua lussuria, aveva intriso le merci che venivano vendute lontano, fra gli ultimi scogli della Cornovaglia, e le vele che entravano nel silenzio dei mari tropicali in mezzo a tutto il mistero dell’Africa. Si potrebbe dire con verità che essa aveva dipinto di porpora la carta geografica. Era già un successo di portata mondiale, quando i principi di Tiro si sarebbero appena scomodati a notare che una delle loro principesse aveva accondisceso a sposare il capo di una tribù chiamata Giuda; quando i mercanti del suo avamposto africano avrebbero soltanto piegato le loro labbra barbute e semitiche in un lieve sorriso alla menzione di un villaggio chiamato Roma. E in verità due cose non avrebbero potuto sembrare più distanti l’una dall’altra, non solo nello spazio ma nello spirito, del monoteismo della tribù palestinese e delle stesse virtù della piccola repubblica italica. Una sola cosa stava fra loro; e ciò che le divideva le ha unite. Assai diverse e incompatibili erano le cose che potevano essere amate dai consoli di Roma e dai profeti d’Israele; ma erano concordi in ciò che odiavano. È facilissimo, in entrambi i casi, rappresentare quell’odio come qualcosa di semplicemente odioso. È abbastanza facile fare una figura meramente aspra e inumana tanto di Elia che smania sopra la strage del Carmelo quanto di Catone che tuona contro l’amnistia dell’Africa. Questi uomini avevano i loro limiti e le loro passioni locali; ma questa critica nei loro confronti è priva d’immaginazione e perciò irreale. Tralascia qualcosa, qualcosa d’immenso e d’intermedio, che guarda a oriente e a occidente e suscita questa passione nei suoi nemici orientali e occidentali; e quel qualcosa è il primo argomento di questo capitolo.
La civiltà che aveva il proprio centro in Tiro e Sidone era soprattutto pratica. Ha lasciato poco in fatto di arte e nulla in fatto di poesia. Ma si vantava di essere oltremodo efficiente; e seguiva, nella sua filosofia e nella sua religione, quello strano e talvolta segreto filo di pensiero che abbiamo già notato in coloro che cercano effetti immediati. In una simile mentalità c’è sempre l’idea che esista una scorciatoia verso il segreto di ogni successo; qualcosa che sconvolgerebbe il mondo con questa sorta di sfrontata radicalità. Essi credevano, per usare l’appropriata formula moderna, in coloro che consegnano la merce. Nei loro rapporti col dio Moloch, essi stessi erano sempre attenti a consegnare la merce. Era un’operazione curiosa, sulla quale dovremo tornare più di una volta nel resto del racconto; qui basti dire che implicava la teoria che ho suggerito, circa un certo atteggiamento verso i figli. Fu questo a suscitargli contro, in un furore simultaneo, il servo dell’unico Dio in Palestina e i custodi di tutti gli dèi domestici a Roma. Fu questo a sfidare due realtà per natura tanto divise da ogni sorta di distanza e disunione, la cui unione doveva salvare il mondo.
I have called the fourth and final division of the spiritual elements into which I should divide heathen humanity by the name of The Philosophers. I confess that it covers in my mind much that would generally be classified otherwise; and that what are here called philosophies are very often called religions. I believe however that my own description will be found to be much the more realistic and not the less respectful. But we must first take philosophy in its purest and clearest form that we may trace its normal outline; and that is to be found in the world of the purest and clearest outlines, that culture of the Mediterranean of which we have been considering the mythologies and idolatries in the last two chapters.
Polytheism, or that aspect of paganism, was never to the pagan what Catholicism is to the Catholic. It was never a view of the universe satisfying all sides of life; a complete and complex truth with something to say about everything. It was only a satisfaction of one side of the soul of man, even if we call it the religious side; and I think it is truer to call it the imaginative side. But this it did satisfy; in the end it satisfied it to satiety. All that world was a tissue of interwoven tales and cults, and there ran in and out of it, as we have already seen, that black thread among its more blameless colours; the darker paganism that was really diabolism. But we all know that this did not mean that all pagan men thought of nothing but pagan gods. Precisely because mythology only satisfied one mood, they turned in other moods to something totally different. But it is very important to realise that it was totally different. It was too different to be inconsistent. It was so alien that it did not clash. While a mob of people were pouring on a public holiday to the feast of Adonis or the games in honour of Apollo, this or that man would prefer to stop at home and think out a little theory about the nature of things. Sometimes his hobby would even take the form of thinking about the nature of God; or even in that sense about the nature of the gods. But he very seldom thought of pitting his nature of the gods against the gods of nature.
It is necessary to insist on this abstraction in the first student of abstractions. He was not so much antagonistic as absent-minded. His hobby might be the universe; but at first the hobby was as private as if it had been numismatics or playing draughts. And even when his wisdom came to be a public possession, and almost a political situation, it was very seldom on the same plane as the popular and religious institutions. Aristotle, with his colossal common sense, was perhaps the greatest of all philosophers; certainly the most practical of all philosophies. But Aristotle would no more have set up the Absolute side by side with the Apollo of Delphi, as a similar or rival religion, than Archimedes would have thought of setting up the lever as a sort of idol or fetish to be substituted for the Palladium of the city. Or we might as well imagine Euclid building an altar to an isosceles triangle, or offering sacrifices to the square of the hypotenuse. The one man meditated on metaphysics as the other man did on mathematics; for the love of truth or for curiosity or for the fun of the thing. But that sort of fun never seems to have interfered very much with the other sort of fun; the fun of dancing or singing to celebrate some rascally romance about Zeus becoming a bull or a swan. It is perhaps the proof of a certain superficiality and even insincerity about the popular polytheism, that men could be philosophers and even sceptics without disturbing it. These thinkers could move the foundations of the world without altering even the outline of that coloured cloud that hung above it in the air.
For the thinkers did move the foundations of the world, even when a curious compromise seemed to prevent them from moving the foundations of the city. The two great philosophers of antiquity do indeed appear to us as defenders of sane and even of sacred ideas; their maxims often read like the answers to sceptical questions too completely answered to be always recorded. Aristotle annihilated a hundred anarchists and nature-worshipping cranks by the fundamental statement that man is a political animal. Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism, as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on the equally fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men exist. Plato however seemed sometimes almost to fancy that ideas exist as men do not exist; or that the men need hardly be considered where they conflict with the ideas. He had something of the social sentiment that we call Fabian in his ideal of fitting the citizen to the city. Like an imaginary head to an ideal hat; and great and glorious as he remains, he has been the Father of all faddists. Aristotle anticipated more fully the sacramental sanity that was to combine the body and the soul of things; for he considered the nature of men as well as the nature of morals, and looked to the eyes as well as to the light. But though these great men were in that sense constructive and conservative, they belonged to a world where thought was free to the point of being fanciful. Many other great intellects did indeed follow them, some exalting an abstract vision of virtue, others following more rationalistically the necessity of the human pursuit of happiness. The former had the name of Stoics; and their name has passed into a proverb for what is indeed one of the main moral ideals of mankind: that of strengthening the mind itself until it is of a texture to resist calamity or even pain. But it is admitted that a great number of the philosophers degenerated into what we still call sophists. They became a sort of professional sceptics who went about asking uncomfortable questions, and were handsomely paid for making themselves a nuisance to normal people. It was perhaps an accidental resemblance to such questioning quacks that was responsible for the unpopularity of the great Socrates; whose death might seem to contradict the suggestion of the permanent truce between the philosophers and the gods. But Socrates did not die as a monotheist who denounced polytheism; certainly not as a prophet who denounced idols. It is clear to anyone reading between the lines that there was some notion, right or wrong, of a purely personal influence affecting morals and perhaps politics. The general compromise remained, whether it was that the Greeks thought their myths a joke or that they thought their theories a joke. There was never any collision in which one really destroyed the other, and there was never any combination in which one was really reconciled with the other. They certainly did not work together; if anything the philosopher was a rival of the priest. But both seemed to have accepted a sort of separation of functions and remained parts of the same social system. Another important tradition descends from Pythagoras; who is significant because he stands nearest to the Oriental mystics who must be considered in their turn. He taught a sort of mysticism of mathematics, that number is the ultimate reality; but he also seems to have taught the transmigration of souls like the Brahmins; and to have left to his followers certain traditional tricks of vegetarianism and water-drinking very common among the eastern sages, especially those who figure in fashionable drawing-rooms, like those of the later Roman Empire. But in passing to eastern sages, and the somewhat different atmosphere of the east, we may approach a rather important truth by other path.
Ho chiamato col nome di Filosofi la quarta e ultima divisione degli elementi spirituali in cui dovrei suddividere l’umanità pagana. Confesso che essa comprende, nella mia mente, molto di ciò che di solito si classificherebbe altrimenti; e che quelle che qui si chiamano filosofie molto spesso si chiamano religioni. Credo tuttavia che la mia descrizione risulterà assai più realistica e non meno rispettosa. Ma dobbiamo anzitutto prendere la filosofia nella sua forma più pura e limpida, per poterne tracciare il profilo normale; e ciò lo si trova nel mondo dei profili più puri e limpidi, in quella cultura del Mediterraneo di cui abbiamo considerato le mitologie e le idolatrie negli ultimi due capitoli.
Il politeismo, ovvero quell’aspetto del paganesimo, non fu mai per il pagano ciò che il cattolicesimo è per il cattolico. Non fu mai una visione dell’ universo capace di appagare tutti i lati della vita; una verità completa e complessa, con qualcosa da dire su ogni cosa. Era soltanto l’appagamento di un lato dell’anima dell’uomo, anche a volerlo chiamare il lato religioso; e io penso sia più esatto chiamarlo il lato immaginativo. Ma questo esso lo appagava; e alla fine lo appagò fino alla sazietà. Tutto quel mondo era un tessuto di racconti e culti intrecciati, e vi correva dentro e fuori, come già abbiamo visto, quel filo nero tra i suoi colori più innocenti; il paganesimo più tenebroso che era in realtà demonismo. Ma tutti sappiamo che ciò non significava che tutti i pagani pensassero soltanto agli dèi pagani. Proprio perché la mitologia appagava soltanto un umore, in altri umori essi si volgevano a qualcosa di totalmente diverso. Ma è importantissimo rendersi conto che era totalmente diverso. Era troppo diverso per essere incoerente. Era tanto estraneo che non entrava in urto. Mentre una folla di gente si riversava, in un giorno di festa pubblica, alla festa di Adone o ai giochi in onore di Apollo, questo o quell’uomo preferiva restarsene a casa a elaborare una piccola teoria sulla natura delle cose. Talvolta il suo passatempo prendeva perfino la forma di riflettere sulla natura di Dio; o anche, in quel senso, sulla natura degli dèi. Ma assai di rado gli veniva in mente di contrapporre la sua natura degli dèi agli dèi della natura.
È necessario insistere su questa astrazione nel primo studioso delle astrazioni. Egli non era tanto ostile quanto distratto. Il suo passatempo poteva essere l’universo; ma dapprima il passatempo era privato come se si fosse trattato di numismatica o di una partita a dama. E anche quando la sua saggezza divenne un possesso pubblico, e quasi una situazione politica, ben di rado si collocò sullo stesso piano delle istituzioni popolari e religiose. Aristotele, col suo colossale buon senso, fu forse il più grande di tutti i filosofi; certamente la più pratica di tutte le filosofie. Ma Aristotele non avrebbe eretto l’Assoluto accanto all’Apollo di Delfi, come religione simile o rivale, più di quanto Archimede avrebbe pensato di erigere la leva a una sorta di idolo o feticcio da sostituire al Palladio della città. Oppure potremmo altrettanto bene immaginare Euclide che innalza un altare a un triangolo isoscele, o che offre sacrifici al quadrato dell’ipotenusa. L’uno meditava sulla metafisica come l’altro sulla matematica; per amore della verità, o per curiosità, o per il gusto della cosa. Ma quel genere di gusto non sembra mai aver interferito granché con l’altro genere di gusto; il gusto di danzare o di cantare per celebrare qualche briccona storia su Zeus che si tramuta in toro o in cigno. È forse la prova di una certa superficialità e persino insincerità del politeismo popolare, che degli uomini potessero essere filosofi e persino scettici senza turbarlo. Quei pensatori potevano smuovere le fondamenta del mondo senza alterare nemmeno il contorno di quella nube colorata che pendeva su di esso nell’aria.
Poiché i pensatori smuovevano davvero le fondamenta del mondo, anche quando un curioso compromesso sembrava impedir loro di smuovere le fondamenta della città. I due grandi filosofi dell’antichità ci appaiono in effetti come difensori di idee sane e persino sacre; le loro massime spesso si leggono come le risposte a domande scettiche troppo compiutamente risolte per essere sempre registrate. Aristotele annientò un centinaio di anarchici e di maniaci adoratori della natura con l’affermazione fondamentale che l’uomo è un animale politico. Platone in un certo senso anticipò il realismo cattolico, quale fu attaccato dal nominalismo eretico, insistendo sul fatto ugualmente fondamentale che le idee sono realtà; che le idee esistono proprio come esistono gli uomini. Platone tuttavia sembrava talvolta quasi immaginare che le idee esistano come gli uomini non esistono; o che degli uomini quasi non occorra tener conto laddove essi confliggano con le idee. Aveva qualcosa di quel sentimento sociale che chiamiamo fabiano, nel suo ideale di adattare il cittadino alla città. Come una testa immaginaria a un cappello ideale; e per quanto grande e glorioso egli resti, è stato il Padre di tutti i maniaci delle fisime. Aristotele anticipò più pienamente la sanità sacramentale che doveva combinare il corpo e l’anima delle cose; poiché egli considerò la natura degli uomini così come la natura della morale, e guardò agli occhi così come alla luce. Ma benché questi grandi uomini fossero in quel senso costruttivi e conservatori, appartenevano a un mondo dove il pensiero era libero fino al punto di essere fantasioso. Molti altri grandi ingegni li seguirono in effetti, alcuni esaltando una visione astratta della virtù, altri seguendo più razionalisticamente la necessità dell’umana ricerca della felicità. I primi ebbero il nome di Stoici; e il loro nome è passato in proverbio per quello che è in effetti uno dei principali ideali morali dell’umanità: quello di fortificare la mente stessa finché non sia di una tempra tale da resistere alla sciagura o persino al dolore. Ma è ammesso che un gran numero di filosofi degenerò in ciò che ancora chiamiamo sofisti. Divennero una sorta di scettici di professione che andavano in giro a porre domande scomode, ed erano lautamente pagati per rendersi molesti alle persone normali. Fu forse un’accidentale somiglianza con simili ciarlatani questuanti a essere responsabile dell’impopolarità del grande Socrate; la cui morte potrebbe sembrare contraddire l’ipotesi di una tregua permanente tra i filosofi e gli dèi. Ma Socrate non morì come un monoteista che denunciava il politeismo; e certamente non come un profeta che denunciava gli idoli. È chiaro a chiunque sappia leggere tra le righe che vi era una certa idea, giusta o sbagliata, di un influsso puramente personale che toccava la morale e forse la politica. Il compromesso generale rimase, sia che i Greci ritenessero i loro miti uno scherzo, sia che ritenessero le loro teorie uno scherzo. Non vi fu mai alcuna collisione in cui l’uno davvero distruggesse l’altro, né vi fu mai alcuna combinazione in cui l’uno fosse davvero riconciliato con l’altro. Di certo non lavoravano insieme; semmai il filosofo era un rivale del sacerdote. Ma entrambi parevano aver accettato una sorta di separazione delle funzioni e restavano parti dello stesso sistema sociale. Un’altra importante tradizione discende da Pitagora; il quale è significativo perché sta più vicino di ogni altro ai mistici orientali che a loro volta dovranno essere considerati. Egli insegnò una sorta di misticismo della matematica, che il numero è la realtà ultima; ma sembra anche aver insegnato la trasmigrazione delle anime come i Brahmini; e aver lasciato ai suoi seguaci certi trucchi tradizionali di vegetarianismo e di bevitura d’acqua, assai comuni tra i saggi orientali, specie tra quelli che figurano nei salotti alla moda, come quelli del tardo Impero Romano. Ma nel passare ai saggi orientali, e all’atmosfera alquanto diversa dell’oriente, possiamo accostarci a una verità piuttosto importante per un’altra via.
One of the great philosophers said that it would be well if philosophers were kings, or kings were philosophers. He spoke as of something too good to be true; but, as a matter of fact, it not unfrequently was true. A certain type, perhaps too little noticed in history, may really be called the royal philosopher. To begin with, apart from actual royalty, it did occasionally become possible for the sage, though he was not what we call a religious founder, to be something like a political founder. And the great example of this, one of the very greatest in the world, will with the very thought of it carry us thousands of miles across the vast spaces of Asia to that very wonderful and in some ways that very wise world of ideas and institutions, which we dismiss somewhat cheaply when we talk of China. Men have served many very strange gods; and trusted themselves loyally to many ideals and even idols. China is a society that has really chosen to believe in intellect. It has taken intellect seriously; and it may be that it stands alone in the world. From a very early age it faced the dilemma of the king and the philosopher by actually appointing a philosopher to advise the king. It made a public institution out of a private individual, who had nothing in the world to do but to be intellectual. It had and has, of course, many other things on the same pattern. It creates all ranks and privileges by public examination; it has nothing that we call an aristocracy; it is a democracy dominated by an intelligensia. But the point here is that it had philosophers to advise kings; and one of those philosophers must have been a great philosopher and a great statesman.
Confucius was not a religious founder or even a religious teacher; possibly not even a religious man. He was not an atheist; he was apparently what we call an agnostic. But the really vital point is that it is utterly irrelevant to talk about his religion at all. It is like talking of theology as the first thing in the story of how Rowland Hill established the postal system or Baden Powell organised the Boy Scouts. Confucius was not there to bring a message from heaven to humanity, but to organise China; and he must have organised it exceedingly well. It follows that he dealt much with morals; but he bound them up strictly with manners. The peculiarity of his scheme and of his country, in which it contrasts with its great pendant the system of Christendom, is that he insisted on perpetuating an external life with all its forms, that outward continuity might preserve internal peace. Anyone who knows how much habit has to do with health, of mind as well as body, will see the truth in his idea. But he will also see that the ancestor-worship and the reverence for the Sacred Emperor were habits and not creeds. It is unfair to the great Confucius to say he was a religious founder. It is even unfair to him to say he was not a religious founder. It is as unfair as going out of one’s way to say that Jeremy Bentham was not a Christian martyr.
But there is a class of most interesting cases in which philosophers were kings, and not merely the friends of kings. The combination is not accidental. It has a great deal to do with this rather elusive question of the function of the philosopher. It contains in it some hint of why philosophy and mythology seldom came to an open rupture. It was not only because there was something a little frivolous about the mythology. It was also because there was something a little supercilious about the philosopher. He despised the myths, but he also despised the mob; and thought they suited each other. The pagan philosopher was seldom a man of the people, at any rate in spirit; he was seldom a democrat and often a bitter critic of democracy. He had about him an air of aristocratic and humane leisure; and his part was most easily played by men who happened to be in such a position. It was very easy and natural for a prince or a prominent person to play at being as philosophical as Hamlet or Theseus in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. And from very early ages we find ourselves in the presence of these princely intellectuals. In fact, we find one of them in the very first recorded ages of the world; sitting on the primeval throne that looked over ancient Egypt.
The most intense interest of the incident of Akenahten, commonly called the Heretic Pharaoh, lies in the fact that he was the one example, at any rate before Christian times, of one of these royal philosophers who set himself to fight popular mythology in the name of private philosophy. Most of them assumed the attitude of Marcus Aurelius, who is in many ways the model of this sort of monarch and sage. Marcus Aurelius has been blamed for tolerating the pagan amphitheatre or the Christian martyrdoms. But it was characteristic; for this sort of man really thought of popular religion just as he thought of popular circuses. Of him Professor Phillimore has profoundly said ‘a great and good man—and he knew it.’ The heretic Pharaoh had a philosophy more earnest and perhaps more humble. For there is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting. Anyhow, the Egyptian prince was simple enough to take his own philosophy seriously, and alone among such intellectual princes he affected a sort of coup d’etat; hurling down the high gods of Egypt with one imperial gesture and lifting up for all men, like a blazing mirror of monotheistic truth, the disc of the universal sun. He had other interesting ideas often to be found in such idealists. In the sense in which we speak of a Little Englander he was a Little Egypter. In art he was a realist because he was an idealist; for realism is more impossible than any other ideal. But after all there falls on him something of the shadow of Marcus Aurelius, stalked by the shadow of Professor Phillimore. That is the matter with this noble sort of prince is that he has nowhere quite escaped being something of a prig. Priggishness is so pungent a smell that it clings amid the faded spices even to an Egyptian mummy. That was the matter with the heretic Pharaoh, as with a good many other heretics, was that he probably never paused to ask himself whether there was anything in the popular beliefs and tales of people less educated than himself. And, as already suggested, there was something in them. There was a real human hunger in all that element of feature and locality, that procession of deities like enormous pet animals, in that unwearied watching at certain haunted spots, in all the many wanderings of mythology. Nature may not have the name of Isis; Isis may not be really looking for Osiris. But it is true that Nature is really looking for something; Nature is always looking for the supernatural. Something much more definite was to satisfy that need; but a dignified monarch with a disc of the sun did not satisfy it. The royal experiment failed amid a roaring reaction of popular superstitions, in which the priests rose on the shoulders of the people and ascended the throne of the kings.
Uno dei grandi filosofi disse che sarebbe stato un bene se i filosofi fossero re, o i re filosofi. Ne parlava come di qualcosa di troppo bello per essere vero; ma, in realtà, non di rado lo era davvero. Un certo tipo d’uomo, forse troppo poco notato nella storia, può a buon diritto essere chiamato il filosofo regale. Tanto per cominciare, a prescindere dalla regalità vera e propria, capitava talvolta che al saggio, per quanto non fosse ciò che noi chiamiamo un fondatore di religione, riuscisse di diventare qualcosa di simile a un fondatore politico. E il grande esempio di questo, uno dei più grandi in assoluto al mondo, al solo pensarlo ci porterà a migliaia di miglia di distanza attraverso le vaste distese dell’Asia, verso quel mondo di idee e di istituzioni tanto meraviglioso e per certi versi tanto saggio, che liquidiamo un po’ a buon mercato quando parliamo della Cina. Gli uomini hanno servito molti dèi assai strani; e si sono affidati con lealtà a molti ideali e persino a molti idoli. La Cina è una società che ha davvero scelto di credere nell’intelletto. Ha preso sul serio l’intelletto; e può darsi che sia sola al mondo. Fin da un’epoca molto antica affrontò il dilemma del re e del filosofo, nominando concretamente un filosofo perché consigliasse il re. Fece una pubblica istituzione di un individuo privato, che non aveva altro da fare al mondo se non essere intellettuale. Aveva, e ha, naturalmente, molte altre cose sullo stesso modello. Crea tutti i ranghi e i privilegi mediante esami pubblici; non ha nulla che noi chiameremmo un’aristocrazia; è una democrazia dominata da un’intellighenzia. Ma il punto qui è che aveva filosofi che consigliavano i re; e uno di quei filosofi dev’essere stato un grande filosofo e un grande statista.
Confucio non fu un fondatore di religione e nemmeno un maestro religioso; forse non fu neppure un uomo religioso. Non era ateo; era, a quanto pare, ciò che noi chiamiamo un agnostico. Ma il punto davvero cruciale è che è del tutto irrilevante parlare della sua religione. È come parlare di teologia come della cosa più importante nella storia di come Rowland Hill fondò il sistema postale, o Baden Powell organizzò i Boy Scout. Confucio non era lì per recare un messaggio dal cielo all’umanità, ma per organizzare la Cina; e dev’essere stato un organizzatore straordinariamente bravo. Ne consegue che si occupò molto di morale; ma la legò strettamente alle buone maniere. La particolarità del suo disegno e del suo paese, in ciò che contrasta col suo grande pendant, il sistema della Cristianità, è che egli insistette nel perpetuare una vita esteriore con tutte le sue forme, affinché la continuità esterna preservasse la pace interiore. Chiunque sappia quanta parte abbia l’abitudine nella salute, tanto della mente quanto del corpo, vedrà la verità della sua idea. Ma vedrà anche che il culto degli antenati e la venerazione per il Sacro Imperatore erano abitudini e non credi. È ingiusto verso il grande Confucio dire che fu un fondatore di religione. È persino ingiusto verso di lui dire che non fu un fondatore di religione. È ingiusto come andarsi a scomodare per dire che Jeremy Bentham non fu un martire cristiano.
Ma esiste una categoria di casi assai interessanti in cui i filosofi furono re, e non semplicemente amici dei re. La combinazione non è casuale. Ha molto a che vedere con questa piuttosto sfuggente questione della funzione del filosofo. Racchiude in sé qualche indizio del perché filosofia e mitologia di rado giunsero a una rottura aperta. Non fu solo perché c’era qualcosa di un po’ frivolo nella mitologia. Fu anche perché c’era qualcosa di un po’ altezzoso nel filosofo. Egli disprezzava i miti, ma disprezzava anche la plebe; e riteneva che l’una si addicesse agli altri. Il filosofo pagano fu di rado un uomo del popolo, quanto meno nello spirito; fu di rado un democratico e spesso un aspro critico della democrazia. Aveva in sé un’aria di aristocratico e umano ozio; e la sua parte era recitata con la massima facilità da uomini che si trovavano in una tale condizione. Era assai facile e naturale per un principe o un personaggio di rilievo giocare a essere filosofico come Amleto o Teseo nel Sogno di una notte di mezza estate. E fin dalle epoche più remote ci troviamo alla presenza di questi principeschi intellettuali. Anzi, ne troviamo uno proprio nelle prime età del mondo di cui si abbia memoria; assiso sul trono primevo che dominava l’antico Egitto.
L’interesse più intenso dell’episodio di Akhenaton, comunemente chiamato il Faraone Eretico, sta nel fatto che egli fu l’unico esempio, quanto meno prima dell’era cristiana, di uno di questi filosofi regali che si accinse a combattere la mitologia popolare in nome di una filosofia privata. La maggior parte di essi assunse l’atteggiamento di Marco Aurelio, che è per molti versi il modello di questa specie di monarca e di saggio. Marco Aurelio è stato biasimato per aver tollerato l’anfiteatro pagano o i martìri cristiani. Ma era caratteristico; perché quest’uomo pensava davvero alla religione popolare proprio come pensava ai circhi popolari. Di lui il professor Phillimore ha detto profondamente: «un uomo grande e buono — e lo sapeva». Il faraone eretico ebbe una filosofia più seria e forse più umile. Poiché c’è un corollario alla concezione dell’essere troppo fieri per combattere. Ed è che agli umili tocca gran parte del combattere. In ogni caso, il principe egizio fu abbastanza ingenuo da prendere sul serio la propria filosofia, e, solo fra questi principi intellettuali, attuò una sorta di colpo di Stato; abbattendo gli alti dèi dell’Egitto con un unico gesto imperiale e innalzando davanti a tutti gli uomini, come uno specchio fiammeggiante di verità monoteistica, il disco del sole universale. Ebbe altre idee interessanti che spesso si ritrovano in tali idealisti. Nel senso in cui parliamo di un Little Englander, egli fu un Little Egypter. Nell’arte fu realista perché fu idealista; poiché il realismo è più impossibile di qualunque altro ideale. Ma dopo tutto cade su di lui qualcosa dell’ombra di Marco Aurelio, braccato dall’ombra del professor Phillimore. Il guaio con questa nobile specie di principe è che non è mai riuscito del tutto a sfuggire all’essere un po’ saccente. La saccenteria è un odore così pungente che si attacca, in mezzo alle spezie sbiadite, persino a una mummia egizia. Il guaio col faraone eretico, come con parecchi altri eretici, fu che probabilmente non si fermò mai a chiedersi se ci fosse qualcosa nelle credenze popolari e nei racconti di gente meno istruita di lui. E, come già si è suggerito, qualcosa c’era. C’era una vera fame umana in tutto quell’elemento di tratto e di luogo, in quella processione di divinità simili a enormi animali domestici, in quel vigilare instancabile presso certi luoghi incantati, in tutti i molti vagabondaggi della mitologia. La Natura può non avere il nome di Iside; Iside può non essere davvero alla ricerca di Osiride. Ma è vero che la Natura è davvero in cerca di qualcosa; la Natura è sempre in cerca del soprannaturale. Qualcosa di ben più definito avrebbe soddisfatto quel bisogno; ma un dignitoso monarca con un disco del sole non lo soddisfece. Il regale esperimento fallì fra una rombante reazione di superstizioni popolari, nella quale i sacerdoti si levarono sulle spalle del popolo e ascesero il trono dei re.
The next great example I shall take of the princely sage is Gautama, the great Lord Buddha. I know he is not generally classed merely with the philosophers; but I am more and more convinced from all information that reaches me, that this is the real interpretation of his immense importance. He was by far the greatest and the best of these intellectuals born in the purple. His reaction was perhaps the noblest and most sincere of all the resultant actions of that combination of thinkers and of thrones. For his reaction was renunciation. Marcus Aurelius was content to say, with a refined irony, that even in a palace life could be lived well. The fierier Egyptian king concluded that it could be lived even better after a palace revolution. But the great Gautama was the only one of them who proved he could really do without his palace. One fell back on toleration and the other on revolution. But after all there is something more absolute about abdication. Abdication is perhaps the one really absolute action of an absolute monarch. The Indian prince, reared in Oriental luxury and pomp, deliberately went out and lived the life of a beggar. That is magnificent, but it is not war; that is, it is not necessarily a Crusade in the Christian sense. It does not decide the question of whether the life of a beggar was the life of a saint or the life of a philosopher. It does not decide whether this great man is really to go into the tub of Diogenes or the cave of St. Jerome. Now those who seem to be nearest to the study of Buddha, and certainly those who write most clearly and intelligently about him, convince me for one that he was simply a philosopher who founded a successful school of philosophy, and was turned into a sort of divus or sacred being merely by the more mysterious and unscientific atmosphere of all such traditions in Asia. So that it is necessary to say at this point a word about that invisible yet vivid border-line that we cross in passing from the Mediterranean into the mystery of the East.
Perhaps there are no things out of which we get so little of the truth as the truisms; especially when they are really true. We are all in the habit of saying certain things about Asia, which are true enough but which hardly help us because we do not understand their truth; as that Asia is old or looks to the past or is not progressive. Now it is true that Christendom is more progressive, in a sense that has very little to do with the rather provincial notion of an endless fuss of political improvement. Christendom does believe, for Christianity does believe, that man can eventually get somewhere, here or hereafter, or in various ways according to various doctrines. The world’s desire can somehow be satisfied as desires are satisfied, whether by a new life or an old love or some form of positive possession and fulfilment. For the rest, we all know there is a rhythm and not a mere progress in things, that things rise and fall; only with us the rhythm is a fairly free and incalculable rhythm. For most of Asia the rhythm has hardened into a recurrence. It is no longer merely a rather topsy-turvy sort of world; it is a wheel. What has happened to all those highly intelligent and highly civilised peoples is that they have been caught up in a sort of cosmic rotation, of which the hollow hub is really nothing. In that sense the worst part of existence is that it may just as well go on like that forever. That is what we really mean when we say that Asia is old or unprogressive or looking backwards. That is why we see even her curved swords as arcs broken from that blinding wheel; why we see her serpentine ornament as returning everywhere, like a snake that is never slain. It has very little to do with the political varnish of progress; all Asiatics might have top-hats on their heads but if they had this spirit still in their hearts, they would only think the hats would vanish and come round again like the planets; not that running after a hat could lead them to heaven or even to home.
Now when the genius of Buddha arose to deal with the matter, this sort of cosmic sentiment was already common to almost everything in the east. There was indeed the jungle of an extraordinarily extravagant and almost asphyxiating mythology. Nevertheless it is possible to have more sympathy with this popular fruitfulness in folk-lore than with some of the higher pessimism that might have withered it. It must always be remembered, however, when all fair allowances are made, that a great deal of spontaneous eastern imagery really is idolatry; the local and literal worship of an idol. This is probably not true of the ancient Brahminical system, at least as seen by Brahmins. But that phrase alone will remind us of a reality of much greater moment. This great reality is the Caste System of ancient India. It may have had some of the practical advantages of the Guild System of Medieval Europe. But it contrasts not only with that Christian democracy, but with every extreme type of Christian aristocracy, in the fact that it does really conceive the social superiority as a spiritual superiority. This not only divides it fundamentally from the fraternity of Christendom, but leaves it standing like a mighty and terraced mountain of pride between the relatively egalitarian levels both of Islam and of China. But the fixity of this formation through thousands of years is another illustration of that spirit of repetition that has marked time from time immemorial. Now we may also presume the prevalence of another idea which we associate with the Buddhists as interpreted by the Theosophists. As a fact, some of the strictest Buddhists repudiate the idea and still more scornfully repudiate the Theosophists. But whether the idea is in Buddhism, or only in the birthplace of Buddhism, or only in a tradition or a travesty of Buddhism, it is an idea entirely proper to this principle of recurrence. I mean of course the idea of Reincarnation.
Il prossimo grande esempio di saggio principesco che intendo prendere è Gautama, il grande Signore Buddha. So bene che di solito non lo si annovera semplicemente tra i filosofi; ma sono sempre più convinto, da tutte le informazioni che mi giungono, che questa sia la vera interpretazione della sua immensa importanza. Fu di gran lunga il più grande e il migliore di questi intellettuali nati nella porpora. La sua reazione fu forse la più nobile e la più sincera fra tutte le azioni scaturite da quel connubio di pensatori e di troni. Poiché la sua reazione fu la rinuncia. Marco Aurelio si accontentava di dire, con raffinata ironia, che perfino in un palazzo si poteva vivere bene. Il più focoso re egiziano concluse che vi si poteva vivere anche meglio dopo una rivoluzione di palazzo. Ma il grande Gautama fu l’unico fra loro che dimostrò di poter davvero fare a meno del suo palazzo. L’uno ripiegò sulla tolleranza e l’altro sulla rivoluzione. Ma dopo tutto vi è qualcosa di più assoluto nell’abdicazione. L’abdicazione è forse l’unica azione davvero assoluta di un monarca assoluto. Il principe indiano, cresciuto nel lusso e nel fasto orientali, uscì deliberatamente e visse la vita di un mendicante. Ciò è magnifico, ma non è guerra; vale a dire, non è necessariamente una Crociata in senso cristiano. Non decide la questione se la vita del mendicante fosse la vita del santo o la vita del filosofo. Non decide se questo grande uomo debba davvero finire nella botte di Diogene o nella caverna di san Girolamo. Ora coloro che sembrano più vicini allo studio del Buddha, e certamente coloro che scrivono di lui nel modo più chiaro e intelligente, convincono almeno me che egli fu semplicemente un filosofo, il quale fondò una fortunata scuola di filosofia, e fu trasformato in una sorta di divus o essere sacro soltanto per l’atmosfera più misteriosa e antiscientifica di tutte le tradizioni di questo genere in Asia. Sicché è necessario dire a questo punto una parola su quella linea di confine invisibile eppure vivida che attraversiamo passando dal Mediterraneo al mistero dell’Oriente.
Forse non vi sono cose da cui ricaviamo così poca verità come dai truismi; specialmente quando sono davvero veri. Abbiamo tutti l’abitudine di dire certe cose sull’Asia, abbastanza vere ma che a stento ci giovano, perché non ne comprendiamo la verità; come quando diciamo che l’Asia è vecchia, o che guarda al passato, o che non è progressiva. Ora è vero che la Cristianità è più progressiva, in un senso che ha ben poco a che fare con la nozione piuttosto provinciale di un interminabile affannarsi di migliorie politiche. La Cristianità crede davvero, poiché il Cristianesimo crede davvero, che l’uomo possa in definitiva approdare a qualcosa, qui o nell’aldilà, o in vari modi secondo varie dottrine. Il desiderio del mondo può in qualche modo essere soddisfatto come si soddisfano i desideri, sia mediante una vita nuova, sia mediante un antico amore, sia mediante qualche forma di possesso e di appagamento positivi. Del resto, sappiamo tutti che nelle cose vi è un ritmo e non un mero progresso, che le cose salgono e cadono; solo che presso di noi il ritmo è un ritmo assai libero e incalcolabile. Per la maggior parte dell’Asia il ritmo si è indurito in una ricorrenza. Non è più semplicemente un mondo alquanto capovolto; è una ruota. Ciò che è accaduto a tutti quei popoli così intelligenti e così inciviliti è che sono stati risucchiati in una sorta di rotazione cosmica, il cui mozzo cavo è in realtà nulla. In questo senso la parte peggiore dell’esistenza è che essa potrebbe altrettanto bene proseguire così per sempre. È questo che intendiamo veramente quando diciamo che l’Asia è vecchia, o non progressiva, o rivolta all’indietro. È per questo che vediamo perfino le sue spade ricurve come archi spezzati da quella accecante ruota; per questo vediamo il suo ornamento serpentino ritornare ovunque, come un serpente che non viene mai ucciso. Ciò ha ben poco a che fare con la vernice politica del progresso; tutti gli asiatici potrebbero avere in testa un cilindro, ma se conservassero ancora questo spirito nel cuore, penserebbero soltanto che i cilindri svaniranno e torneranno a girare come i pianeti; non che correre dietro a un cappello possa condurli in cielo, o anche solo a casa.
Ora, quando il genio del Buddha sorse ad affrontare la questione, questa sorta di sentimento cosmico era già comune a quasi ogni cosa in Oriente. Vi era, per la verità, la giungla di una mitologia straordinariamente stravagante e quasi asfissiante. Ciononostante è possibile provare più simpatia per questa popolare fecondità del folklore che per un certo pessimismo più elevato che avrebbe potuto inaridirla. Bisogna sempre ricordare, tuttavia, fatte tutte le debite concessioni, che gran parte della spontanea immaginazione orientale è realmente idolatria; l’adorazione locale e letterale di un idolo. Ciò probabilmente non vale per l’antico sistema brahmanico, almeno come lo vedono i bramini. Ma quell’espressione da sola ci richiamerà alla mente una realtà di ben maggiore portata. Questa grande realtà è il Sistema delle Caste dell’antica India. Può darsi che esso avesse alcuni dei vantaggi pratici del Sistema delle Corporazioni dell’Europa medievale. Ma esso si contrappone non solo a quella democrazia cristiana, bensì a ogni tipo estremo di aristocrazia cristiana, per il fatto che concepisce davvero la superiorità sociale come una superiorità spirituale. Ciò non solo lo divide fondamentalmente dalla fraternità della Cristianità, ma lo lascia eretto come una possente e terrazzata montagna d’orgoglio fra i livelli relativamente egualitari tanto dell’Islam quanto della Cina. Ma la fissità di questa formazione attraverso migliaia di anni è un’altra illustrazione di quello spirito di ripetizione che ha segnato il tempo da tempo immemorabile. Ora possiamo anche presumere la prevalenza di un’altra idea che associamo ai buddisti come vengono interpretati dai teosofi. In realtà, alcuni dei buddisti più rigorosi ripudiano l’idea, e ancor più sdegnosamente ripudiano i teosofi. Ma sia che l’idea appartenga al buddismo, o soltanto alla culla del buddismo, o soltanto a una tradizione o a una parodia del buddismo, essa è un’idea del tutto propria a questo principio di ricorrenza. Intendo, naturalmente, l’idea della Reincarnazione.
But Reincarnation is not really a mystical idea. It is not really a transcendental idea, or in that sense a religious idea. Mysticism conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them. It is no more transcendental for a man to remember what he did in Babylon before he was born than to remember what he did in Brixton before he had a knock on the head. His successive lives need not be any more than human lives, under whatever limitations burden human life. It has nothing to do with seeing God or even conjuring up the devil. In other words, reincarnation as such does not necessarily escape from the wheel of destiny, in some sense it is the wheel of destiny. And whether it was something that Buddha founded, or something that Buddha found, or something that Buddha entirely renounced when he found, it is certainly something having the general character of that Asiatic atmosphere in which he had to play his part. And the part he played was that of an intellectual philosopher, with a particular theory about the right intellectual attitude towards it.
I can understand that Buddhists might resent the view that Buddhism is merely a philosophy, if we understand by a philosophy merely an intellectual game such as Greek sophists played, tossing up worlds and catching them like balls. Perhaps a more exact statement would be that Buddha was a man who made a metaphysical discipline; which might even be called a psychological discipline. He proposed a way of escaping from all this recurrent sorrow; and that was simply by getting rid of the delusion that is called desire. It was emphatically not that we should get what we want better by restraining our impatience for part of it, or that we should get it in a better way or in a better world. It was emphatically that we should leave off wanting it. If once a man realised that there is really no reality, that everything, including his soul, is in dissolution at every instant, he would anticipate disappointment and be intangible to change, existing (in so far as he could be said to exist) in a sort of ecstasy of indifference. The Buddhists call this beatitude and we will not stop our story to argue the point; certainly to us it is indistinguishable from despair. I do not see, for instance, why the disappointment of desire should not apply as much to the most benevolent desires as to the most selfish ones. Indeed the Lord of Compassion seems to pity people for living rather than for dying. For the rest, an intelligent Buddhist wrote ‘the explanation of popular Chinese and Japanese Buddhism is that it is not Buddhism.’ That has doubtless ceased to be a mere philosophy, but only by becoming a mere mythology. One thing is certain; it has never become anything remotely resembling what we call a Church.
It will appear only a jest to say that all religious history has really been a pattern of noughts and crosses. But I do not by noughts mean nothings, but only things that are negative compared with the positive shape or pattern of the other. And though the symbol is of course only a coincidence, it is a coincidence that really does coincide. The mind of Asia can really be represented by a round 0, if not in the sense of a cypher at least of a circle. The great Asiatic symbol of a serpent with its tail in its mouth is really a very perfect image of a certain idea of unity and recurrence that does indeed belong to the Eastern philosophies and religions. It really is a curve that in one sense includes everything, and in another sense comes to nothing. In that sense it does confess, or rather boast, that all argument is an argument in a circle. And though the figure is but a symbol, we can see how sound is the symbolic sense that produces it, the parallel symbol of the Wheel of Buddha generally called the Swastika. The cross is a thing at right angles pointing boldly in opposite directions; but the Swastika is the same thing in the very act of returning to the recurrent curve. That crooked cross is in fact a cross turning into a wheel. Before we dismiss even these symbols as if they were arbitrary symbols, we must remember how intense was the imaginative instinct that produced them or selected them both in the east and the west. The cross has become something more than a historical memory; it does convey, almost as by a mathematical diagram, the truth about the real point at issue; the idea of a conflict stretching outwards into eternity. It is true, and even tautological, to say that the cross is the crux of the whole matter.
In other words the cross, in fact as well as figure, does really stand for the idea of breaking out of the circle that is everything and nothing. It does escape from the circular argument by which everything begins and ends in the mind. Since we are still dealing in symbols, it might be put in a parable in the form of that story about St. Francis, which says that the birds departing with his benediction could wing their way into the infinites of the four winds of heaven, their tracks making a vast cross upon the sky; for compared with the freedom of that flight of birds, the very shape of the Swastika is like a kitten chasing its tail. In a more popular allegory, we might say that when St. George thrust his spear into the monster’s jaws, he broke in upon the solitude of the self-devouring serpent and gave it something to bite besides its own tail. But while many fancies might be used as figures of the truth, the truth itself is abstract and absolute; though it is not very easy to sum up except by such figures. Christianity does appeal to a solid truth outside itself; to something which is in that sense external as well as eternal. It does declare that things are really there; or in other words that things are really things—In this Christianity is at one with common sense; but all religious history shows that this common sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it.
Ma la Reincarnazione non è in realtà un’idea mistica. Non è propriamente un’idea trascendentale, né in questo senso un’idea religiosa. Il misticismo concepisce qualcosa che trascende l’esperienza; la religione cerca barlumi di un bene migliore o di un male peggiore di quanto l’esperienza possa dare. La reincarnazione non fa che estendere le esperienze nel senso di ripeterle. Non v’è nulla di più trascendentale nel ricordare, per un uomo, ciò che fece a Babilonia prima di nascere, che nel ricordare ciò che fece a Brixton prima di prendere un colpo in testa. Le sue vite successive non hanno bisogno di essere altro che vite umane, sotto qualunque limitazione gravi sull’esistenza umana. Non ha nulla a che vedere con il vedere Dio o anche solo con l’evocare il diavolo. In altre parole, la reincarnazione in quanto tale non sfugge necessariamente alla ruota del destino: in un certo senso è essa stessa la ruota del destino. E che sia qualcosa che Buddha fondò, o qualcosa che Buddha trovò, o qualcosa a cui Buddha rinunciò interamente una volta trovatala, è certamente qualcosa che ha il carattere generale di quell’atmosfera asiatica in cui gli toccò recitare la sua parte. E la parte che recitò fu quella di un filosofo intellettuale, con una particolare teoria sull’atteggiamento intellettuale giusto da tenere verso di essa.
Posso capire che i buddhisti si risentano dell’idea che il Buddhismo sia semplicemente una filosofia, se per filosofia intendiamo soltanto un gioco intellettuale come quello dei sofisti greci, che lanciavano in aria i mondi e li riafferravano come palle. Forse un’affermazione più esatta sarebbe che Buddha fu un uomo che creò una disciplina metafisica; la quale potrebbe persino essere chiamata una disciplina psicologica. Egli propose un modo di sfuggire a tutto questo dolore ricorrente; e ciò semplicemente liberandosi dell’illusione che si chiama desiderio. Non si trattava affatto di ottenere meglio ciò che vogliamo raffrenando la nostra impazienza per una parte di esso, né di ottenerlo in un modo migliore o in un mondo migliore. Si trattava, con ogni enfasi, di smettere di volerlo. Se una volta un uomo comprendesse che non esiste realmente alcuna realtà, che ogni cosa, compresa la sua anima, è in dissoluzione a ogni istante, egli anticiperebbe la delusione e diverrebbe intangibile al mutamento, esistendo (nella misura in cui si possa dire che esista) in una sorta di estasi dell’indifferenza. I buddhisti chiamano questo beatitudine, e non fermeremo la nostra storia per discutere il punto; certo, per noi essa è indistinguibile dalla disperazione. Non vedo, per esempio, perché la delusione del desiderio non debba applicarsi tanto ai desideri più benevoli quanto a quelli più egoistici. Anzi, il Signore della Compassione sembra compiangere gli uomini per il fatto di vivere più che per il fatto di morire. Del resto, un intelligente buddhista scrisse che «la spiegazione del Buddhismo popolare cinese e giapponese è che esso non è Buddhismo.» Ciò ha senza dubbio cessato di essere una mera filosofia, ma solo per diventare una mera mitologia. Una cosa è certa: non è mai diventato nulla che somigli neppure lontanamente a ciò che noi chiamiamo una Chiesa.
Sembrerà solo uno scherzo dire che tutta la storia religiosa è stata in realtà un disegno di zeri e croci. Ma con gli zeri non intendo dei nulla, bensì soltanto cose che sono negative rispetto alla forma o al disegno positivo dell’altra. E benché il simbolo sia naturalmente solo una coincidenza, è una coincidenza che davvero coincide. La mente dell’Asia può essere davvero rappresentata da uno 0 tondo, se non nel senso di una cifra, almeno nel senso di un cerchio. Il grande simbolo asiatico del serpente con la coda in bocca è davvero un’immagine assai perfetta di una certa idea di unità e di ricorrenza che appartiene in effetti alle filosofie e alle religioni orientali. È davvero una curva che in un senso include ogni cosa, e in un altro senso non approda a nulla. In tal senso essa confessa, o piuttosto si vanta, che ogni argomento è un argomento in circolo. E per quanto la figura sia solo un simbolo, possiamo vedere quanto sia giusto il senso simbolico che la produce, il simbolo parallelo della ruota di Buddha comunemente chiamato la Svastica. La croce è una cosa ad angoli retti che punta arditamente in direzioni opposte; ma la Svastica è la stessa cosa nell’atto stesso di ritornare alla curva ricorrente. Quella croce storta è di fatto una croce che si trasforma in una ruota. Prima di liquidare anche questi simboli come se fossero simboli arbitrari, dobbiamo ricordare quanto fosse intenso l’istinto immaginativo che li produsse o li scelse, tanto in oriente quanto in occidente. La croce è divenuta qualcosa di più di un ricordo storico; essa esprime, quasi come per un diagramma matematico, la verità sul vero punto in questione: l’idea di un conflitto che si protende verso l’esterno nell’eternità. È vero, e persino tautologico, dire che la croce è il nodo cruciale di tutta la faccenda.
In altre parole la croce, di fatto oltre che come figura, sta davvero per l’idea di rompere fuori dal cerchio che è tutto e nulla. Essa sfugge davvero all’argomento circolare per cui ogni cosa comincia e finisce nella mente. Poiché stiamo ancora trattando di simboli, la si potrebbe esprimere in una parabola nella forma di quella storia su san Francesco, la quale dice che gli uccelli partendo con la sua benedizione poterono spiegare il volo negli infiniti dei quattro venti del cielo, e le loro scie tracciarono una vasta croce sul cielo; ché, al confronto della libertà di quel volo di uccelli, la forma stessa della Svastica è come un gattino che rincorre la propria coda. In un’allegoria più popolare, potremmo dire che quando san Giorgio conficcò la sua lancia nelle fauci del mostro, egli irruppe nella solitudine del serpente che divora sé stesso e gli diede qualcosa da mordere oltre alla propria coda. Ma se molte fantasie possono essere usate come figure della verità, la verità stessa è astratta e assoluta; per quanto non sia molto facile riassumerla se non mediante tali figure. Il Cristianesimo si appella davvero a una solida verità fuori di sé; a qualcosa che in tal senso è esterno oltre che eterno. Esso dichiara che le cose ci sono davvero; ovvero, in altre parole, che le cose sono davvero cose. In questo il Cristianesimo concorda con il senso comune; ma tutta la storia religiosa mostra che questo senso comune perisce, tranne là dove c’è il Cristianesimo a preservarlo.
It cannot otherwise exist, or at least endure, because mere thought does not remain sane. In a sense it becomes too simple to be sane. The temptation of the philosophers is simplicity rather than subtlety. They are always attracted by insane simplifications, as men poised above abysses are fascinated by death and nothingness and the empty air. It needed another kind of philosopher to stand poised upon the pinnacle of the Temple and keep his balance without casting himself down. One of these obvious, these too obvious explanations is that everything is a dream and a delusion and there is nothing outside the ego. Another is that all things recur; another, which is said to be Buddhist and is certainly Oriental, is the idea that what is the matter with us is our creation, in the sense of our coloured differentiation and personality, and that nothing will be well till we are again melted into one unity. By this theory, in short, the Creation was the Fall. It is important historically because it was stored up in the dark heart of Asia and went forth at various times in various forms over the dim borders of Europe. Here we can place the mysterious figure of Manes or Manichaeus, the mystic of inversion, whom we should call a pessimist, parent of many sects and heresies; here, in a higher place, the figure of Zoroaster. He has been popularly identified with another of these too simple explanations; the equality of evil and good, balanced and battling in every atom. He also is of the school of sages that may be called mystics; and from the same mysterious Persian garden came upon ponderous wings Mithras, the unknown god, to trouble the last twilight of Rome.
That circle or disc of the sun set up in the morning of the world by the remote Egyptian has been a mirror and a model for all the philosophers. They have made many things out of it, and sometimes gone mad about it, especially when as in these eastern sages the circle became a wheel going round and round in their heads. But the point about them is that they all think that existence can be represented by a diagram instead of a drawing; and the rude drawings of the childish myth-makers are a sort of crude and spirited protest against that view. They cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture. Still less can they believe that it is a picture of something that really exists outside our minds. Sometimes the philosophy paints the disc all black and calls himself a pessimist; sometimes he paints it all white and calls himself an optimist; sometimes he divides it exactly into halves of black and white and calls himself a dualist, like those Persian mystics to whom I wish there were space to do justice. None of them could understand a thing that began to draw the proportions just as if they were real proportions, disposed in the living fashion which the mathematical draughtsman would call disproportionate. Like the first artist in the cave, it revealed to incredulous eyes the suggestion of a new purpose in what looked like a wildly crooked pattern; he seemed only to be distorting his diagram, when he began for the first time in all the ages to trace the lines of a form—and of a Face.
Non può esistere altrimenti, o almeno non può durare, perché il puro pensiero non resta sano di mente. In un certo senso diventa troppo semplice per essere sano. La tentazione dei filosofi è la semplicità, più che la sottigliezza. Sono sempre attratti da semplificazioni folli, come gli uomini sospesi sopra gli abissi restano affascinati dalla morte e dal nulla e dall’aria vuota. Ci volle un altro genere di filosofo per stare sospeso sul pinnacolo del Tempio e mantenere l’equilibrio senza gettarsi giù. Una di queste spiegazioni ovvie, di queste spiegazioni troppo ovvie, è che tutto sia un sogno e un’illusione e che nulla esista al di fuori dell’io. Un’altra è che tutte le cose ritornano; un’altra ancora, che si dice buddhista ed è certamente orientale, è l’idea che ciò che c’è di sbagliato in noi sia la nostra creazione, nel senso della nostra differenziazione colorata e della nostra personalità, e che nulla andrà bene finché non saremo di nuovo fusi in un’unica unità. Secondo questa teoria, in breve, la Creazione fu la Caduta. Essa è importante storicamente perché fu custodita nel cuore oscuro dell’Asia e ne uscì in vari tempi e in varie forme oltre i confini indistinti dell’Europa. Qui possiamo collocare la misteriosa figura di Mani o Manicheo, il mistico dell’inversione, che noi chiameremmo pessimista, padre di molte sette ed eresie; qui, in un luogo più alto, la figura di Zoroastro. Egli è stato popolarmente identificato con un’altra di queste spiegazioni troppo semplici: l’uguaglianza di male e bene, in equilibrio e in lotta dentro ogni atomo. Anch’egli appartiene alla scuola di sapienti che si possono chiamare mistici; e dallo stesso misterioso giardino persiano venne su ponderose ali Mitra, il dio ignoto, a turbare l’ultimo crepuscolo di Roma.
Quel cerchio o disco del sole innalzato nel mattino del mondo dal remoto egiziano è stato uno specchio e un modello per tutti i filosofi. Ne hanno tratto molte cose, e talvolta ne sono impazziti, specialmente quando, come in questi sapienti orientali, il cerchio divenne una ruota che girava e rigirava nelle loro teste. Ma il punto che li riguarda è che tutti pensano che l’esistenza possa essere rappresentata da un diagramma anziché da un disegno; e i rozzi disegni degli infantili creatori di miti sono una sorta di grezza e vivace protesta contro quella concezione. Non riescono a credere che la religione non sia davvero uno schema, ma un quadro. E ancor meno riescono a credere che sia il quadro di qualcosa che esiste realmente al di fuori delle nostre menti. Talvolta la filosofia dipinge il disco tutto nero e si chiama pessimista; talvolta lo dipinge tutto bianco e si chiama ottimista; talvolta lo divide esattamente in due metà di nero e di bianco e si chiama dualista, come quei mistici persiani ai quali vorrei avere spazio per rendere giustizia. Nessuno di loro poté comprendere una cosa che cominciava a tracciare le proporzioni proprio come se fossero proporzioni reali, disposte in quel modo vivo che il disegnatore matematico chiamerebbe sproporzionato. Come il primo artista nella caverna, essa rivelò a occhi increduli il suggerimento di un nuovo intento in ciò che sembrava uno schema follemente storto; sembrava soltanto deformare il proprio diagramma, quando cominciò per la prima volta in tutte le età a tracciare le linee di una forma—e di un Volto.
VII
THE WAR OF THE GODS AND DEMONS
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings. Man cannot live without the two props of food and drink, which support him like two legs; but to suggest that they have been the motives of all his movements in history is like saying that the goal of all his military marches or religious pilgrimages must have been the Golden Leg of Miss Kilmansegg or the ideal and perfect leg of Sir Willoughby Patterne. But it is such movements that make up the story of mankind and without them there would practically be no story at all. Cows may be purely economic, in the sense that we cannot see that they do much beyond grazing and seeking better grazing grounds; and that is why a history of cows in twelve volumes would not be very lively reading. Sheep and goats may be pure economists in their external action at least; but that is why the sheep has hardly been a hero of epic wars and empires thought worthy of detailed narration; and even the more active quadruped has not inspired a book for boys called Golden Deeds of Gallant Goats or any similar title. But so far from the movements that make up the story of man being economic, we may say that the story only begins where the motive of the cows and sheep leaves off. It will be hard to maintain that the Crusaders went from their homes into a howling wilderness because cows go from a wilderness to a more comfortable grazing-grounds. It will be hard to maintain that the Arctic explorers went north with the same material motive that made the swallows go south. And if you leave things like all the religious wars and all the merely adventurous explorations out of the human story, it will not only cease to be human at all but cease to be a story at all. The outline of history is made of these decisive curves and angles determined by the will of man. Economic history would not even be history.
But there is a deeper fallacy besides this obvious fact; that men need not live for food merely because they cannot live without food. The truth is that the thing most present to the mind of man is not the economic machinery necessary to his existence; but rather that existence itself; the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in it. There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood, and that is life. For once that he remembers exactly what work produces his wages and exactly what wages produce his meals, he reflects ten times that it is a fine day or it is a queer world, or wonders whether life is worth living, or wonders whether marriage is a failure, or is pleased and puzzled with his own children, or remembers his own youth, or in any such fashion vaguely reviews the mysterious lot of man. This is true of the majority even of the wage-slaves of our morbid modern industrialism, which by its hideousness and in-humanity has really forced the economic issue to the front. It is immeasurably more true of the multitude of peasants or hunters or fishers who make up the real mass of mankind. Even those dry pedants who think that ethics depend on economics must admit that economics depend on existence. And any number of normal doubts and day-dreams are about existence; not about how we can live, but about why we do. And the proof of it is simple; as simple as suicide. Turn the universe upside down in the mind and you turn all the political economists upside down with it. Suppose that a man wishes to die, and the professor of political economy becomes rather a bore with his elaborate explanations of how he is to live. And all the departures and decisions that make our human past into a story have this character of diverting the direct course of pure economics. As the economist may be excused from calculating the future salary of a suicide, so he may be excused from providing an old age pension for a martyr. As he need not provide for the future of a martyr so he need not provide for the family of a monk. His plan is modified in lesser and varying degrees by a man being a soldier and dying for his own country, by a man being a peasant and specially loving his own land, by a man being more or less affected by any religion that forbids or allows him to do this or that. But all these come back not to an economic calculation about livelihood but to an elemental outlook upon life. They all come back to what a man fundamentally feels, when he looks forth from those strange windows which we call the eyes, upon that strange vision that we call the world.
No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world. But it may be allowable to say that we need a new thing; which may be called psychological history. I mean the consideration of what things meant in the mind of a man, especially an ordinary man; as distinct from what is defined or deduced merely from official forms or political pronouncements. I have already touched on it in such a case as the totem or indeed any other popular myth. It is not enough to be told that a tom-cat was called a totem; especially when it was not called a totem. We want to know what it felt like. Was it like Whittington’s cat or like a witch’s cat? Was its real name Pashtl or Puss-in-Boots? That is the sort of thing we need touching the nature of political and social relations. We want to know the real sentiment that was the social bond of many common men, as sane and as selfish as we are. What did soldiers feel when they saw splendid in the sky that strange totem that we call the Golden Eagle of the Legions? What did vassals feel about those other totems the lions or the leopards upon the shield of their lord? So long as we neglect this subjective side of history, which may more simply be called the inside of history, there will always be a certain limitation on that science which can be better transcended by art. So long as the historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than fact. There will be more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel.
VII
LA GUERRA DEGLI DEI E DEI DEMONI
La teoria materialistica della storia, secondo cui tutta la politica e l’etica non sono che l’espressione dell’economia, è davvero un’assai semplice fallacia. Consiste semplicemente nel confondere le condizioni necessarie della vita con le preoccupazioni normali della vita, che sono cosa del tutto diversa. È come dire che, poiché un uomo può camminare soltanto su due gambe, egli perciò non cammina mai se non per comprare scarpe e calze. L’uomo non può vivere senza i due sostegni del cibo e della bevanda, che lo reggono come due gambe; ma suggerire che essi siano stati i moventi di tutti i suoi movimenti nella storia è come dire che la meta di tutte le sue marce militari o dei suoi pellegrinaggi religiosi debba essere stata la Gamba d’Oro di Miss Kilmansegg oppure la gamba ideale e perfetta di Sir Willoughby Patterne. Ma sono proprio tali movimenti che compongono la storia dell’umanità, e senza di essi non vi sarebbe in pratica alcuna storia. Le mucche possono essere puramente economiche, nel senso che non riusciamo a vedere che facciano molto oltre al brucare e al cercare pascoli migliori; ed è per questo che una storia delle mucche in dodici volumi non sarebbe una lettura molto avvincente. Le pecore e le capre possono essere puri economisti almeno nella loro azione esteriore; ma è per questo che la pecora non è quasi mai stata l’eroe di guerre epiche e di imperi ritenuti degni di dettagliata narrazione; e persino il più attivo quadrupede non ha ispirato un libro per ragazzi intitolato Aurei Gesti di Galanti Capre o un qualsiasi titolo simile. Ma, ben lungi dall’essere economici i movimenti che compongono la storia dell’uomo, possiamo dire che la storia comincia soltanto là dove il movente delle mucche e delle pecore cessa. Sarà difficile sostenere che i Crociati abbiano lasciato le loro case per una landa ululante perché le mucche vanno da una landa a un pascolo più comodo. Sarà difficile sostenere che gli esploratori artici siano andati a nord con lo stesso movente materiale che spinse le rondini ad andare a sud. E se togliete dalla storia umana cose come tutte le guerre di religione e tutte le esplorazioni meramente avventurose, essa non solo cesserà di essere umana, ma cesserà del tutto di essere una storia. Il profilo della storia è fatto di queste curve e di questi angoli decisivi determinati dalla volontà dell’uomo. Una storia economica non sarebbe nemmeno storia.
Ma vi è una fallacia più profonda oltre a questo fatto ovvio: che gli uomini non devono vivere per il cibo solo perché non possono vivere senza il cibo. La verità è che ciò che è più presente alla mente dell’uomo non è la macchina economica necessaria alla sua esistenza, ma piuttosto l’esistenza stessa; il mondo che egli vede quando si sveglia ogni mattina e la natura della sua posizione generale in esso. C’è qualcosa che gli è più vicino del sostentamento, ed è la vita. Perché, una volta che ricorda esattamente quale lavoro produce il suo salario ed esattamente quale salario produce i suoi pasti, egli riflette dieci volte che è una bella giornata, o che è un mondo strano, o si chiede se la vita valga la pena di essere vissuta, o si chiede se il matrimonio sia un fallimento, o è compiaciuto e stupito dei suoi stessi figli, o ricorda la propria giovinezza, o in qualche simile maniera passa vagamente in rassegna il misterioso destino dell’uomo. Questo è vero anche per la maggior parte degli schiavi del salario del nostro morboso industrialismo moderno, che con la sua bruttezza e disumanità ha davvero spinto la questione economica in primo piano. È incomparabilmente più vero per la moltitudine di contadini o di cacciatori o di pescatori che costituiscono la vera massa dell’umanità. Persino quei aridi pedanti che pensano che l’etica dipenda dall’economia devono ammettere che l’economia dipende dall’esistenza. E un numero qualsiasi di normali dubbi e di sogni ad occhi aperti riguarda l’esistenza; non come noi possiamo vivere, ma perché lo facciamo. E la prova di ciò è semplice; semplice come il suicidio. Capovolgi l’universo nella mente e capovolgerai con esso tutti gli economisti politici. Supponi che un uomo desideri morire, e il professore di economia politica diventa piuttosto noioso con le sue elaborate spiegazioni su come egli debba vivere. E tutte le partenze e le decisioni che fanno del nostro passato umano una storia hanno questo carattere di deviare il corso diretto della pura economia. Come l’economista può essere dispensato dal calcolare il salario futuro di un suicida, così può essere dispensato dal fornire una pensione di vecchiaia a un martire. Come non deve provvedere al futuro di un martire, così non deve provvedere alla famiglia di un monaco. Il suo piano è modificato in gradi minori e variabili dal fatto che un uomo sia un soldato e muoia per la propria patria, dal fatto che un uomo sia un contadino e ami in modo particolare la propria terra, dal fatto che un uomo sia più o meno influenzato da una qualche religione che gli vieta o gli permette di fare questo o quello. Ma tutte queste cose non riconducono a un calcolo economico sul sostentamento, bensì a uno sguardo elementare sulla vita. Riconducono tutte a ciò che un uomo sente fondamentalmente, quando guarda fuori da quelle strane finestre che chiamiamo occhi, verso quella strana visione che chiamiamo il mondo.
Nessun uomo saggio desidererà mettere al mondo altre parole lunghe. Ma sia forse lecito dire che ci occorre una cosa nuova, che potremmo chiamare storia psicologica. Intendo la considerazione di ciò che le cose significavano nella mente di un uomo, e specialmente di un uomo comune, distinta da ciò che si definisce o si deduce meramente da formule ufficiali o da proclami politici. Vi ho già accennato in un caso come quello del totem, o anzi di qualsiasi altro mito popolare. Non basta che ci si dica che un gattaccio veniva chiamato totem, tanto più quando non veniva affatto chiamato totem. Vogliamo sapere che cosa si provasse. Era come il gatto di Whittington oppure come il gatto di una strega? Il suo vero nome era Pashtl o il Gatto con gli Stivali? È questo il genere di cosa che ci occorre riguardo alla natura delle relazioni politiche e sociali. Vogliamo conoscere il sentimento reale che costituiva il legame sociale di molti uomini comuni, sani di mente ed egoisti quanto lo siamo noi. Che cosa provavano i soldati quando vedevano splendere nel cielo quello strano totem che noi chiamiamo l’Aquila d’Oro delle Legioni? Che cosa provavano i vassalli riguardo a quegli altri totem, i leoni o i leopardi sullo scudo del loro signore? Finché trascureremo questo lato soggettivo della storia, che si potrebbe più semplicemente chiamare l’interiorità della storia, vi sarà sempre un certo limite in quella scienza, un limite che l’arte può meglio trascendere. Finché lo storico non sarà capace di questo, la finzione sarà più vera del fatto. Vi sarà più realtà in un romanzo; sì, perfino in un romanzo storico.
In nothing is this new history needed so much as in the psychology of war. Our history is stiff with official documents, public or private, which tell us nothing of the thing itself. At the worst we only have the official posters, which could not have been spontaneous precisely because they were official. At the best we have only the secret diplomacy, which could not have been popular precisely because it was secret. Upon one or other of these is based the historical judgement about the real reasons that sustained the struggle. Governments fight for colonies or commercial rights; governments fight about harbours or high tariffs; governments fight for a gold mine or a pearl fishery. It seems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why do the fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terrible and wonderful thing called a war? Nobody who knows anything of soldiers believes the silly notion of the dons, that millions of men can be ruled by force. If they were all to slack, it would be impossible to punish all the slackers. And the least little touch of slacking would lose a whole campaign in half a day. What did men really feel about the policy? If it be said that they accepted the policy from the politician, what did they feel about the politician? If the vassals warred blindly for their prince what did those blind men see in their prince?
There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in an appropriate language, as realpolitik. As a matter of fact, it is an almost insanely unreal politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidly repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for a moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who fight. In any case no man will die for practical politics, just as no man will die for pay. Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be eaten by lions at a shilling an hour; for men will not be martyred for money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics, is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world believe that a soldier says, ‘My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of Finland.’ Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, ‘If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments, but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen.’ Materialist history is the most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances. Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life and about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustained by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. They are generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea. The first is the love of something said to be threatened, if it be only vaguely known as home; the second is dislike and defiance of some strange thing that threatens it. The first is far more philosophical than it sounds, though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house. But the negative side of it is quite as noble as well as quite as strong. Men fight hardest when they feel that the foe is at once an old enemy and an eternal stranger, that his atmosphere is alien and antagonistic, as the French feel about the Prussian or the Eastern Christians about the Turk. If we say it is a difference of religion, people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas. We will pity them and say it is a difference about death and daylight; a difference that does really come like a dark shadow between our eyes and the day. Men can think of this difference even at the point of death; for it is a difference about the meaning of life.
Men are moved in these things by something far higher and holier than policy; by hatred. When men hung on in the darkest days of the Great War, suffering either in their bodies or in their souls for those they loved, they were long past caring about details of diplomatic objects as motives for their refusal to surrender. Of myself and those I knew best I can answer for the vision that made surrender impossible. It was the vision of the German Emperor’s face as he rode into Paris. This is not the sentiment which some of my idealistic friends describe as Love. I am quite content to call it hatred; the hatred of hell and all its works, and to agree that as they do not believe in hell they need not believe in hatred. But in the face of this prevalent prejudice, this long introduction has been unfortunately necessary, to ensure an understanding of what is meant by a religious war. There is a religious war when two worlds meet; that is when two visions of the world meet; or in more modern language when two moral atmospheres meet. What is the one man’s breath is the other man’s poison; and it is vain to talk of giving a pestilence a place in the sun. And this is what we must understand, even at the expense of digression, if we would see what really happened in the Mediterranean; when right athwart the rising of the Republic on the Tiber, a thing overtopping and disdaining it, dark with all the riddles of Asia and trailing all the tribes and dependencies of imperialism, came Carthage riding on the sea.
In nulla questa nuova storia è tanto necessaria quanto nella psicologia della guerra. La nostra storia è irrigidita da documenti ufficiali, pubblici o privati, che nulla ci dicono della cosa in sé. Nel peggiore dei casi abbiamo soltanto i manifesti ufficiali, che non potevano essere spontanei appunto perché erano ufficiali. Nel migliore dei casi abbiamo soltanto la diplomazia segreta, che non poteva essere popolare appunto perché era segreta. Sull’uno o sull’altro di questi si fonda il giudizio storico intorno alle vere ragioni che sostenevano la lotta. I governi combattono per colonie o per diritti commerciali; i governi combattono per porti o per alte tariffe; i governi combattono per una miniera d’oro o per una pesca di perle. Sembra sufficiente rispondere che i governi non combattono affatto. Perché combattono i combattenti? Qual è la psicologia che sostiene quella cosa terribile e meravigliosa che si chiama guerra? Nessuno che sappia qualcosa dei soldati crede alla sciocca idea dei dotti, secondo cui milioni di uomini possano essere governati con la forza. Se tutti insieme si mettessero a battere la fiacca, sarebbe impossibile punire tutti gli sfaticati. E il più piccolo accenno di fiacca perderebbe un’intera campagna in mezza giornata. Che cosa provavano davvero gli uomini riguardo alla politica seguita? Se si dice che accettavano la politica dal politico, che cosa provavano riguardo al politico? Se i vassalli guerreggiavano ciecamente per il loro principe, che cosa vedevano quegli uomini ciechi nel loro principe?
C’è qualcosa che tutti noi conosciamo e che può essere reso, in una lingua appropriata, soltanto con la parola realpolitik. In verità è una politik quasi follemente irreale. Ripete sempre, con ostinazione e stupidità, che gli uomini combattono per fini materiali, senza riflettere un istante che quei fini materiali non hanno quasi mai importanza per gli uomini che combattono. In ogni caso nessun uomo morrà per la politica pratica, così come nessun uomo morrà per la paga. Nerone non avrebbe potuto ingaggiare cento cristiani perché si facessero divorare dai leoni a uno scellino l’ora; giacché gli uomini non si lasciano martirizzare per denaro. Ma la visione evocata dalla realpolitik, ossia dalla politica realistica, è al di là di ogni esempio insensata e incredibile. C’è forse qualcuno al mondo che creda che un soldato dica: «La mia gamba sta quasi per staccarsi, ma andrò avanti finché non cadrà; poiché in fondo godrò di tutti i vantaggi derivanti dal fatto che il mio governo otterrà un porto in acque calde nel Golfo di Finlandia»? Si può forse supporre che un impiegato divenuto coscritto dica: «Se verrò gassato, probabilmente morirò tra i tormenti, ma è una consolazione riflettere che, qualora un giorno decidessi di farmi pescatore di perle nei Mari del Sud, quella carriera è ora aperta a me e ai miei compatrioti»? La storia materialista è la più follemente incredibile di tutte le storie, o anche di tutti i romanzi. Qualunque cosa dia inizio alle guerre, ciò che le sostiene è qualcosa che sta nell’anima; qualcosa di affine alla religione. È ciò che gli uomini sentono riguardo alla vita e alla morte. Un uomo prossimo alla morte ha a che fare direttamente con un assoluto; è un’assurdità dire che egli si preoccupi soltanto di complicazioni relative e remote che la morte in ogni caso porrà fine. Se è sostenuto da certe fedeltà, esse devono essere fedeltà semplici quanto la morte. Sono generalmente due idee, che non sono se non due facce di una sola idea. La prima è l’amore di qualcosa che si dice minacciato, foss’anche conosciuto soltanto vagamente come patria; la seconda è l’avversione e la sfida verso qualche cosa estranea che la minaccia. La prima è assai più filosofica di quanto non sembri, benché non occorra qui discuterne. Un uomo non vuole che la sua patria venga distrutta o anche solo mutata, perché non riesce neppure a ricordare tutte le cose buone che le si accompagnano; proprio come non vuole che la sua casa gli venga bruciata, perché a stento saprebbe contare tutte le cose che gli mancherebbero. Perciò egli combatte per ciò che suona come una vaga astrazione, ma che in realtà è una casa. Ma il lato negativo di ciò è nobile non meno che forte, e altrettanto potente. Gli uomini combattono con maggior accanimento quando sentono che il nemico è a un tempo un vecchio avversario e un eterno straniero, che la sua atmosfera è aliena e ostile, come i Francesi sentono riguardo al Prussiano o i Cristiani d’Oriente riguardo al Turco. Se diciamo che è una differenza di religione, la gente scivolerà in tediosi battibecchi su sette e dogmi. Avremo pietà di loro e diremo che è una differenza riguardo alla morte e alla luce del giorno; una differenza che davvero cala come un’oscura ombra tra i nostri occhi e la luce. Gli uomini possono pensare a questa differenza perfino in punto di morte; poiché è una differenza riguardo al significato della vita.
Gli uomini, in queste cose, sono mossi da qualcosa di assai più alto e più santo della politica: dall’odio. Quando gli uomini tennero duro nei giorni più tenebrosi della Grande Guerra, soffrendo nel corpo o nell’anima per coloro che amavano, avevano da tempo smesso di curarsi dei dettagli degli obiettivi diplomatici come motivi del loro rifiuto di arrendersi. Di me stesso e di coloro che meglio conobbi posso rispondere della visione che rendeva impossibile la resa. Era la visione del volto dell’Imperatore di Germania mentre entrava a cavallo in Parigi. Non è questo il sentimento che alcuni dei miei amici idealisti chiamano Amore. Sono ben contento di chiamarlo odio: l’odio dell’inferno e di tutte le sue opere, e di convenire che, poiché essi non credono all’inferno, non hanno bisogno di credere all’odio. Ma di fronte a questo pregiudizio diffuso, questa lunga introduzione è stata purtroppo necessaria per garantire la comprensione di ciò che s’intende per guerra di religione. Vi è guerra di religione quando due mondi s’incontrano; vale a dire quando due visioni del mondo s’incontrano; o, in linguaggio più moderno, quando due atmosfere morali s’incontrano. Ciò che per l’uno è il respiro, per l’altro è il veleno; ed è vano parlare di concedere alla pestilenza un posto al sole. E questo è ciò che dobbiamo comprendere, anche a costo di una digressione, se vogliamo vedere ciò che davvero accadde nel Mediterraneo; quando, proprio di traverso al sorgere della Repubblica sul Tevere, una cosa che la sovrastava e la disdegnava, oscura di tutti gli enigmi dell’Asia e trascinante con sé tutte le tribù e le dipendenze dell’imperialismo, venne Cartagine cavalcando sul mare.
The ancient religion of Italy was on the whole that mixture which we have considered under the head of mythology; save that where the Greeks had a natural turn for the mythology, the Latins seem to have had a real turn for religion. Both multiplied gods, yet they sometimes seem to have multiplied them for almost opposite reasons. It would seem sometimes as if the Greek polytheism branched and blossomed upwards like the boughs of a tree, while the Italian polytheism ramified downward like the roots. Perhaps it would be truer to say that the former branches lifted themselves lightly, bearing flowers; while the latter hung down, being heavy with fruit. I mean that the Latins seem to multiply gods to bring them nearer to men, while the Greek gods rose and radiated outwards into the morning sky. What strikes us in the Italian cults is their local and especially their domestic character. We gain the impression of divinities swarming about the house like flies; of deities clustering and clinging like bats about the pillars or building like birds under the eaves. We have a vision of a god of roofs and a god of gate-posts, of a god of doors and even a god of drains. It has been suggested that all mythology was a sort of fairy-tale; but this was a particular sort of fairy-tale which may truly be called a fireside tale, or a nursery-tale; because it was a tale of the interior of the home; like those which make chairs and tables talk like elves. The old household gods of the Italian peasants seem to have been great, clumsy, wooden images, more featureless than the figure-head which Quilp battered with the poker. This religion of the home was very homely. Of course there were other less human elements in the tangle of Italian mythology. There were Greek deities superimposed on the Roman; there were here and there uglier things underneath, experiments in the cruel kind of paganism, like the Arician rite of the priest slaying the slayer. But these things were always potential in paganism; they are certainly not the peculiar character of Latin paganism. The peculiarity of that may be roughly covered by saying that if mythology personified the forces of nature, this mythology personified nature as transformed by the forces of man. It was the god of the corn and not of the grass, of the cattle and not the wild things of the forest; in short the cult was literally a culture; as when we speak of it as agriculture.
With this there was a paradox which is still for many the puzzle or riddle of the Latins. With religion running through every domestic detail like a climbing plant, there went what seems to many the very opposite spirit; the spirit of revolt. Imperialists and reactionaries often involve Rome as the very model of order and obedience; but Rome was the very reverse. The real history of ancient Rome is much more like the history of modern Paris. It might be called in modern language a city built out of barricades. It is said that the gate of Janus was never closed because there was an eternal war without; it is almost as true that there was an eternal revolution within. From the first Plebeian riots to the last Servile Wars, the state that imposed peace on the world was never really at peace. The rulers were themselves rebels.
There is a real relation between this religion in private and this revolution in public life. Stories none the less heroic for being hackneyed remind us that the Republic was founded on a tyrannicide that avenged an insult to a wife; that the Tribunes of the people were re-established after another which avenged an insult to a daughter. The truth is that only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticise the state. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city; the gods of the hearth. That is why men are mystified in seeing that the same nations that are thought rigid in domesticity are also thought restless in politics, for instance the Irish and the French. It is worth while to dwell on this domestic point because it is an exact example of what is meant here by the inside of history, like the inside of houses. Merely political histories of Rome may be right enough in saying that this or that was a cynical or cruel act of the Roman politicians; but the spirit that lifted Rome from beneath was the spirit of all the Romans; and it is not a cant to call it the ideal of Cincinnatus passing from the senate to the plough. Men of that sort had strengthened their village on every side, had extended its victories already over Italians and even over Greeks, when they found themselves confronted with a war that changed the world. I have called it here the war of the gods and demons.
There was established on the opposite coast of the inland sea a city that bore the name of the New Town. It was already much older, more powerful, and more prosperous than the Italian town; but there still remained about it an atmosphere that made the name not inappropriate. It had been called new because it was a colony like New York or New Zealand. It was an outpost or settlement of the energy and expansion of the great commercial cities of Tyre and Sidon. There was a note of the new countries and colonies about it, a confident and commercial outlook. It was fond of saying things that rang with a certain metallic assurance; as that nobody could wash his hands in the sea without the leave of the New Town. For it depended almost entirely on the greatness of its ships, as did the two great ports and markets from which its people came. It brought from Tyre and Sidon a prodigious talent for trade and considerable experience of travel. It brought other things as well.
In a previous chapter I have hinted at something of the psychology that lies behind a certain type of religion. There was a tendency in those hungry for practical results, apart from poetical results, to call upon spirits of terror and compulsion; to move Acheron in despair of bending the Gods. There is always a sort of dim idea that these darker powers will really do things, with no nonsense about it. In the interior psychology of the Punic peoples this strange sort of pessimistic practicality had grown to great proportions. In the New Town, which the Romans called Carthage, as in the parent cities of Phoenicia, the god who got things done bore the name of Moloch, who was perhaps identical with the other deity whom we know as Baal, the Lord. The Romans did not at first quite know what to call him or what to make of him; they had to go back to the grossest myth of Greek or Roman origins and compare him to Saturn devouring his children. But the worshippers of Moloch were not gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished civilisation, abounding in refinements and luxuries; they were probably far more civilised than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth; or at any rate his meal was not a myth. These highly civilised people really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace. We can only realise the combination by imagining a number of Manchester merchants with chimney-pot hats and mutton-chop whiskers, going to church every Sunday at eleven o’clock to see a baby roasted alive.
L’antica religione dell’Italia era nel complesso quella mescolanza che abbiamo considerato sotto il titolo di mitologia; salvo che, laddove i Greci avevano una naturale inclinazione per la mitologia, i Latini sembrano aver avuto una vera inclinazione per la religione. Entrambi moltiplicarono gli dèi, eppure talvolta sembra che li abbiano moltiplicati per ragioni quasi opposte. Parrebbe a volte che il politeismo greco si ramificasse e fiorisse verso l’alto come i rami di un albero, mentre il politeismo italico si ramificasse verso il basso come le radici. Forse sarebbe più giusto dire che i primi rami si sollevavano lievi, recando fiori, mentre gli altri pendevano in basso, gravidi di frutti. Voglio dire che i Latini sembrano moltiplicare gli dèi per avvicinarli agli uomini, mentre gli dèi greci si levavano e si irradiavano verso il cielo del mattino. Ciò che ci colpisce nei culti italici è il loro carattere locale e soprattutto domestico. Ne ricaviamo l’impressione di divinità che sciamano intorno alla casa come mosche; di deità che si raggruppano e si aggrappano come pipistrelli ai pilastri, o che nidificano come uccelli sotto le grondaie. Abbiamo la visione di un dio dei tetti e di un dio degli stipiti dei cancelli, di un dio delle porte e persino di un dio delle fogne. È stato suggerito che ogni mitologia fosse una sorta di fiaba; ma questa era una particolare sorta di fiaba che si può davvero chiamare racconto del focolare, o racconto della cameretta; perché era un racconto dell’interno della casa; come quelli che fanno parlare sedie e tavoli al modo degli elfi. Gli antichi dèi domestici dei contadini italici sembra fossero grandi, goffe, rozze immagini di legno, più prive di lineamenti della polena che Quilp percuoteva con l’attizzatoio. Questa religione della casa era assai casalinga. Naturalmente vi erano altri elementi meno umani nel groviglio della mitologia italica. Vi erano divinità greche sovrapposte a quelle romane; vi erano qua e là cose più laide al di sotto, esperimenti nella specie crudele del paganesimo, come il rito ariciano del sacerdote che uccide l’uccisore. Ma queste cose furono sempre potenziali nel paganesimo; non sono certo il carattere peculiare del paganesimo latino. La peculiarità di quest’ultimo può essere approssimativamente riassunta dicendo che, se la mitologia personificava le forze della natura, questa mitologia personificava la natura quale trasformata dalle forze dell’uomo. Era il dio del grano e non dell’erba, del bestiame e non delle creature selvatiche della foresta; in breve, il culto era letteralmente una coltura; come quando ne parliamo dicendo agricoltura.
A questo si accompagnava un paradosso che è ancora per molti l’enigma o l’indovinello dei Latini. Con la religione che scorreva attraverso ogni dettaglio domestico come una pianta rampicante, andava ciò che a molti sembra lo spirito addirittura opposto: lo spirito di rivolta. Imperialisti e reazionari chiamano spesso in causa Roma come il modello stesso dell’ordine e dell’obbedienza; ma Roma era esattamente il contrario. La vera storia dell’antica Roma somiglia molto di più alla storia della Parigi moderna. Si potrebbe chiamare, in linguaggio moderno, una città costruita di barricate. Si dice che la porta di Giano non fosse mai chiusa perché vi era un’eterna guerra al di fuori; è quasi altrettanto vero che vi era un’eterna rivoluzione all’interno. Dai primi tumulti plebei alle ultime Guerre Servili, lo Stato che imponeva la pace al mondo non fu mai realmente in pace. I governanti erano essi stessi ribelli.
Vi è una reale relazione fra questa religione nel privato e questa rivoluzione nella vita pubblica. Storie non meno eroiche per essere trite ci rammentano che la Repubblica fu fondata su un tirannicidio che vendicava un’offesa a una moglie; che i Tribuni della plebe furono ristabiliti dopo un altro che vendicava un’offesa a una figlia. La verità è che soltanto gli uomini per i quali la famiglia è sacra avranno mai un criterio o uno stato da cui criticare lo Stato. Essi soli possono appellarsi a qualcosa di più santo degli dèi della città: gli dèi del focolare. Ecco perché gli uomini restano sconcertati nel vedere che le stesse nazioni ritenute rigide nella vita domestica sono anche ritenute irrequiete in politica, per esempio gli Irlandesi e i Francesi. Vale la pena di soffermarsi su questo punto domestico, perché è un esempio preciso di ciò che qui s’intende per l’interno della storia, come l’interno delle case. Le storie meramente politiche di Roma possono ben avere ragione nel dire che questo o quell’atto dei politici romani fu cinico o crudele; ma lo spirito che sollevò Roma dal basso era lo spirito di tutti i Romani; e non è una frase fatta chiamarlo l’ideale di Cincinnato che passa dal senato all’aratro. Uomini di quella tempra avevano rafforzato il loro villaggio da ogni lato, ne avevano già esteso le vittorie sugli Italici e persino sui Greci, quando si trovarono di fronte a una guerra che mutò il mondo. L’ho chiamata qui la guerra degli dèi e dei demoni.
Sulla costa opposta del mare interno si era stabilita una città che portava il nome di Città Nuova. Era già assai più antica, più potente e più prospera della città italica; eppure le restava ancora attorno un’atmosfera che rendeva il nome non del tutto inappropriato. Era stata chiamata nuova perché era una colonia come New York o come la Nuova Zelanda. Era un avamposto, un insediamento dell’energia e dell’espansione delle grandi città commerciali di Tiro e di Sidone. Aveva in sé qualcosa dei paesi nuovi e delle colonie, uno sguardo fiducioso e mercantile. Amava dire cose che risuonavano di una certa metallica sicurezza; come che nessuno potesse lavarsi le mani nel mare senza il permesso della Città Nuova. Poiché dipendeva quasi interamente dalla grandezza delle sue navi, come i due grandi porti e mercati da cui proveniva la sua gente. Portava da Tiro e da Sidone un talento prodigioso per il commercio e una considerevole esperienza dei viaggi. Portava anche altre cose.
In un capitolo precedente ho accennato a qualcosa della psicologia che sta dietro un certo tipo di religione. C’era, in coloro che avevano fame di risultati pratici, al di là dei risultati poetici, una tendenza a invocare gli spiriti del terrore e della costrizione; a muovere l’Acheronte nella disperazione di piegare gli Dèi. C’è sempre una sorta di vaga idea che queste potenze più oscure facciano davvero le cose, senza tante storie. Nell’intima psicologia dei popoli punici questa strana specie di praticità pessimistica era cresciuta a grandi proporzioni. Nella Città Nuova, che i Romani chiamarono Cartagine, come nelle città madri della Fenicia, il dio che portava a compimento le cose recava il nome di Moloch, forse identico all’altra divinità che noi conosciamo come Baal, il Signore. I Romani in un primo tempo non seppero bene come chiamarlo né che cosa pensare di lui; dovettero risalire al più rozzo mito delle origini greche o romane e paragonarlo a Saturno che divora i propri figli. Ma gli adoratori di Moloch non erano rozzi né primitivi. Erano membri di una civiltà matura e raffinata, ricca di eleganze e di lussi; erano probabilmente assai più civili dei Romani. E Moloch non era un mito; o quanto meno il suo pasto non era un mito. Questa gente altamente civile si radunava davvero insieme per invocare la benedizione del cielo sul proprio impero gettando centinaia dei propri neonati in una grande fornace. Possiamo cogliere la combinazione soltanto immaginando un certo numero di mercanti di Manchester col cilindro in testa e i favoriti a costoletta, che ogni domenica alle undici in punto si recano in chiesa a vedere un bambino arrostito vivo.
The first stages of the political or commercial quarrel can be followed in far too much detail, precisely because it is merely political or commercial. The Punic Wars looked at one time as if they would never end; and it is not easy to say when they ever began. The Greeks and the Sicilians had already been fighting vaguely on the European side against the African city. Carthage had defeated Greece and conquered Sicily. Carthage had also planted herself firmly in Spain; and between Spain and Sicily the Latin city was contained and would have been crushed; if the Romans had been of the sort to be easily crushed. Yet the interest of the story really consists in the fact that Rome was crushed. If there had not been certain moral elements as well as the material elements, the story would have ended where Carthage certainly thought it had ended. It is common enough to blame Rome for not making peace. But it was a true popular instinct that there could be no peace with that sort of people. It is common enough to blame the Roman for his Delenda est Carthago; Carthage must be destroyed. It is commoner to forget that, to all appearance, Rome itself was destroyed. The sacred savour that hung round Rome for ever, it is too often forgotten, clung to her partly because she had risen suddenly from the dead. Carthage was an aristocracy, as are most of such mercantile states. The pressure of the rich on the poor was impersonal as well as irresistible. For such aristocracies never permit personal government, which is perhaps why this one was jealous of personal talent. But genius can turn up anywhere, even in a governing class. As if to make the world’s supreme test as terrible as possible, it was ordained that one of the great houses of Carthage should produce a man who came out of those gilded palaces with all the energy and originality of Napoleon coming from nowhere. At the worst crisis of the war Rome learned that Italy itself, by a military miracle, was invaded from the north. Hannibal, the Grace of Baal as his name ran in his own tongue, had dragged a ponderous chain of armaments over the starry solitudes of the Alps; and pointed southward to the city which he had been pledged by all his dreadful gods to destroy.
Hannibal marched down the road to Rome, and the Romans who rushed to war with him felt as if they were fighting with a magician. Two great armies sank to right and left of him into the swamps of the Trebia; more and more were sucked into the horrible whirlpool of Cannae; more and more went forth only to fall in ruin at his touch. The supreme sign of all disasters, which is treason, turned tribe after tribe against the falling cause of Rome, and still the unconquerable enemy rolled nearer and nearer to the city; and following their great leader the swelling cosmopolitan army of Carthage passed like a pageant of the whole world; the elephants shaking the earth like marching mountains and the gigantic Gauls with their barbaric panoply and the dark Spaniards girt in gold and the brown Numidians on their unbridled desert horses wheeling and darting like hawks, and whole mobs of deserters and mercenaries and miscellaneous peoples; and the grace of Baal went before them.
The Roman augurs and scribes who said in that hour that it brought forth unearthly prodigies, that a child was born with the head of an elephant or that stars fell down like hailstones, had a far more philosophical grasp of what had really happened than the modern historian who can see nothing in it but a success of strategy concluding a rivalry in commerce. Something far different was felt at the time and on the spot, as it is always felt by those who experience a foreign atmosphere entering their own like a fog or a foul savour. It was no mere military defeat, it was certainly no mere mercantile rivalry, that filled the Roman imagination with such hideous omens of nature herself becoming unnatural. It was Moloch upon the mountain of the Latins, looking with his appalling face across the plain; it was Baal who trampled the vineyards with his feet of stone; it was the voice of Tanit the invisible, behind her trailing veils, whispering of the love that is more horrible than hate. The burning of the Italian cornfields, the ruin of the Italian vines, were some thing more than actual; they were allegorical. They were the destruction of domestic and fruitful things, the withering of what was human before that inhumanity that is far beyond the human thing called cruelty. The household gods bowed low in darkness under their lowly roofs; and above them went the demons upon a wind from beyond all walls, blowing the trumpet of the Tramontane. The door of the Alps was broken down; and in no vulgar but a very solemn sense, it was Hell let loose. The war of the gods and demons seemed already to have ended; and the gods were dead. The eagles were lost, the legions were broken; and in Rome nothing remained but honour and the cold courage of despair.
In the whole world one thing still threatened Carthage, and that was Carthage. There still remained the inner working of an element strong in all successful commercial states, and the presence of a spirit that we know. There was still the solid sense and shrewdness of the men who manage big enterprises; there was still the advice of the best financial experts; there was still business government; there was still the broad and sane outlook of practical men of affairs, and in these things could the Romans hope. As the war trailed on to what seemed its tragic end, there grew gradually a faint and strange possibility that even now they might not hope in vain. The plain business men of Carthage, thinking as such men do in terms of living and dying races, saw clearly that Rome was not only dying but dead. The war was over; it was obviously hopeless for the Italian city to resist any longer, and inconceivable that anybody should resist when it was hopeless. Under these circumstances, another set of broad, sound business principles remained to be considered. Wars were waged with money, and consequently cost money; perhaps they felt in their hearts, as do so many of their kind, that after all war must be a little wicked because it costs money. The time had now come for peace; and still more for economy. The messages sent by Hannibal from time to time asking for reinforcements were a ridiculous anachronism; there were much more important things to attend to now. It might be true that some consul or other had made a last dash to the Metaurus, had killed Hannibal’s brother and flung his head, with Latin fury, into Hannibal’s camp; and mad actions of that sort showed how utterly hopeless the Latins felt about their cause. But even excitable Latins could not be so mad as to cling to a lost cause for ever. So argued the best financial experts; and tossed aside more and more letters, full of rather queer alarmist reports. So argued and acted the great Carthaginian Empire. That meaningless prejudice, the curse of commercial states, that stupidity is in some way practical and that genius is in some way futile, led them to starve and abandon that great artist in the school of arms, whom the gods had given them in vain.
Le prime fasi della contesa politica o commerciale si possono seguire in un dettaglio fin troppo minuto, proprio perché non è che politica o commerciale. Le Guerre Puniche parvero a un certo momento non dover finire mai; e non è facile dire quando mai siano cominciate. I Greci e i Siciliani si erano già battuti confusamente, dalla parte europea, contro la città africana. Cartagine aveva sconfitto la Grecia e conquistato la Sicilia. Cartagine si era anche piantata saldamente in Spagna; e fra la Spagna e la Sicilia la città latina era serrata e sarebbe stata schiacciata, se i Romani fossero stati di quella pasta che si lascia schiacciare facilmente. Eppure l’interesse della storia consiste in verità nel fatto che Roma fu schiacciata. Se non ci fossero stati certi elementi morali oltre agli elementi materiali, la storia sarebbe finita là dove Cartagine credette senz’altro che fosse finita. È abbastanza comune biasimare Roma per non aver fatto la pace. Ma era un vero istinto popolare quello per cui con quella sorta di gente non poteva esserci pace. È abbastanza comune biasimare il Romano per il suo Delenda est Carthago; Cartagine dev’essere distrutta. È più comune dimenticare che, a ogni apparenza, fu Roma stessa a essere distrutta. Il sacro profumo che aleggiò per sempre intorno a Roma, troppo spesso lo si dimentica, le si attaccò addosso in parte perché essa era risorta improvvisamente dai morti. Cartagine era un’aristocrazia, come lo sono la maggior parte di simili Stati mercantili. La pressione dei ricchi sui poveri era impersonale non meno che irresistibile. Poiché tali aristocrazie non permettono mai un governo personale, il che è forse la ragione per cui questa era gelosa del talento personale. Ma il genio può spuntare dovunque, anche in una classe dirigente. Come per rendere la prova suprema del mondo quanto più terribile possibile, fu stabilito che una delle grandi casate di Cartagine dovesse produrre un uomo che uscì da quei palazzi dorati con tutta l’energia e l’originalità di un Napoleone venuto dal nulla. Nella crisi più tremenda della guerra Roma apprese che l’Italia stessa, per un miracolo militare, era invasa da settentrione. Annibale, la Grazia di Baal come suonava il suo nome nella sua lingua, aveva trascinato una pesante catena di armamenti sulle stellate solitudini delle Alpi; e puntava verso mezzogiorno, verso la città che aveva giurato di distruggere davanti a tutti i suoi terribili dèi.
Annibale scese lungo la strada di Roma, e i Romani che si precipitarono a combatterlo si sentirono come se si battessero con un mago. Due grandi eserciti sprofondarono alla sua destra e alla sua sinistra nelle paludi della Trebbia; sempre più uomini furono risucchiati nell’orribile gorgo di Canne; sempre più uscirono in campo solo per cadere in rovina al suo tocco. Il segno supremo di ogni disastro, che è il tradimento, rivolse tribù dopo tribù contro la causa declinante di Roma, e ancora l’invincibile nemico si rovesciava sempre più vicino alla città; e dietro il loro grande capo il rigonfio esercito cosmopolita di Cartagine passava come un corteo del mondo intero: gli elefanti che scuotevano la terra come montagne in marcia, e i giganteschi Galli con le loro barbariche panoplie, e gli scuri Spagnoli cinti d’oro, e i bruni Numidi sui loro cavalli senza briglia del deserto, che roteavano e saettavano come falchi, e intere torme di disertori e mercenari e popoli d’ogni sorta; e la grazia di Baal andava davanti a loro.
Gli àuguri e gli scribi romani che dissero in quell’ora che l’evento aveva generato prodigi soprannaturali, che era nato un bambino con la testa di elefante, o che le stelle erano cadute come chicchi di grandine, ebbero una percezione assai più filosofica di ciò che era realmente accaduto rispetto allo storico moderno, che in tutto ciò non sa vedere altro che un successo di strategia a conclusione di una rivalità commerciale. Qualcosa di ben diverso fu sentito in quel momento e in quel luogo, come sempre lo sentono coloro che avvertono un’atmosfera straniera entrare nella propria come una nebbia o un lezzo maligno. Non fu una semplice sconfitta militare, non fu di certo una semplice rivalità mercantile, ciò che riempì l’immaginazione romana di presagi così spaventosi della natura stessa che si faceva innaturale. Era Moloch sul monte dei Latini, che guardava con la sua faccia terrificante di là dalla pianura; era Baal che calpestava le vigne con i suoi piedi di pietra; era la voce di Tanit l’invisibile, dietro i suoi veli fluenti, che sussurrava di quell’amore che è più orribile dell’odio. L’incendio dei campi di grano italici, la rovina delle vigne italiche, erano qualcosa di più che reali; erano allegorici. Erano la distruzione delle cose domestiche e feconde, l’appassire di ciò che era umano dinanzi a quell’inumanità che è ben al di là di quella cosa umana che si chiama crudeltà. Gli dèi domestici si chinavano profondamente nelle tenebre sotto i loro umili tetti; e sopra di essi passavano i demoni su un vento venuto di là da ogni muro, che soffiava nella tromba della Tramontana. La porta delle Alpi era stata abbattuta; e, in un senso non volgare ma solennissimo, era l’Inferno scatenato. La guerra degli dèi e dei demoni pareva già finita; e gli dèi erano morti. Le aquile erano perdute, le legioni infrante; e in Roma non restava altro che l’onore e il freddo coraggio della disperazione.
In tutto il mondo una sola cosa minacciava ancora Cartagine, e quella cosa era Cartagine. Restava ancora l’intima azione di un elemento forte in tutti gli Stati commerciali di successo, e la presenza di uno spirito che ben conosciamo. C’era ancora il buonsenso solido e l’accortezza degli uomini che dirigono le grandi imprese; c’era ancora il consiglio dei migliori esperti di finanza; c’era ancora il governo degli affari; c’era ancora la visione ampia e assennata degli uomini pratici, degli uomini di mondo, e in queste cose i Romani potevano sperare. Mentre la guerra si trascinava verso quella che sembrava la sua tragica fine, crebbe a poco a poco una fioca e strana possibilità che perfino allora essi potessero non sperare invano. I sobri uomini d’affari di Cartagine, ragionando come ragionano tali uomini, in termini di razze che vivono e muoiono, videro con chiarezza che Roma non solo era morente, ma morta. La guerra era finita; era palesemente disperato per la città italica resistere ancora, e inconcepibile che chiunque resistesse quando ormai era disperato. Stando così le cose, restava da considerare un altro complesso di sani, robusti princìpi d’affari. Le guerre si conducevano col denaro, e di conseguenza costavano denaro; forse sentivano in cuor loro, come tanti della loro specie, che dopotutto la guerra dev’essere un poco malvagia perché costa denaro. Era ormai venuto il tempo della pace; e ancor più quello dell’economia. I messaggi che Annibale inviava di tempo in tempo chiedendo rinforzi erano un ridicolo anacronismo; c’erano cose ben più importanti a cui badare, ormai. Poteva anche esser vero che un console o un altro avesse fatto un’ultima sortita fino al Metauro, avesse ucciso il fratello di Annibale e scagliato la sua testa, con furia latina, nell’accampamento di Annibale; e simili gesti folli mostravano quanto assolutamente disperati si sentissero i Latini per la loro causa. Ma neppure i focosi Latini potevano essere tanto folli da aggrapparsi in eterno a una causa perduta. Così ragionavano i migliori esperti di finanza; e gettavano da parte sempre più lettere, colme di rapporti alquanto strani e allarmistici. Così ragionava e agiva il grande Impero cartaginese. Quel pregiudizio insensato, la maledizione degli Stati commerciali, per cui la stupidità è in qualche modo pratica e il genio in qualche modo inutile, li indusse ad affamare e abbandonare quel grande artista nella scuola delle armi, che gli dèi avevano loro donato invano.
Why do men entertain this queer idea that what is sordid must always overthrow what is magnanimous; that there is some dim connection between brains and brutality, or that it does not matter if a man is dull so long as he is also mean? Why do they vaguely think of all chivalry as sentiment and all sentiment as weakness? They do it because they are, like all men, primarily inspired by religion. For them, as for all men, the first fact is their notion of the nature of things; their idea about what world they are living in. And it is their faith that the only ultimate thing is fear and therefore that the very heart of the world is evil. They believe that death is stronger than life, and therefore dead things must be stronger than living things; whether those dead things are gold and iron and machinery or rocks and rivers and forces of nature. It may sound fanciful to say that men we meet at tea-tables or talk to at garden-parties are secretly worshippers of Baal or Moloch. But this sort of commercial mind has its own cosmic vision and it is the vision of Carthage. It has in it the brutal blunder that was the ruin of Carthage. The Punic power fell because there is in this materialism a mad indifference to real thought. By disbelieving in the soul, it comes to disbelieving in the mind. Being too practical to be moral, it denies what every practical soldier calls the moral of an army. It fancies that money will fight when men will no longer fight. So it was with the Punic merchant princes. Their religion was a religion of despair, even when their practical fortunes were hopeful. How could they understand that the Romans could hope even when their fortunes were hopeless? Their religion was a religion of force and fear; how could they understand that men can still despise fear even when they submit to force? Their philosophy of the world had weariness in its very heart; above all they were weary of warfare; how should they understand those who still wage war even when they are weary of it? In a word, how should they understand the mind of Man, who had so long bowed down before mindless things, money and brute force and gods who had the hearts of beasts? They awoke suddenly to the news that the embers they had disdained too much even to tread out were again breaking everywhere into flames; that Hasdrubal was defeated, that Hannibal was outnumbered, that Scipio had carried the war into Spain; that he had carried it into Africa. Before the very gates of the golden city Hannibal fought his last fight for it and lost; and Carthage fell as nothing has fallen since Satan. The name of the New City remains only as a name. There is no stone of it left upon the sand. Another war was indeed waged before the final destruction: but the destruction was final. Only men digging in its deep foundation centuries after found a heap of hundreds of little skeletons, the holy relics of that religion. For Carthage fell because she was faithful to her own philosophy and had followed out to its logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten his children.
The gods had risen again, and the demons had been defeated after all. But they had been defeated by the defeated, and almost defeated by the dead. Nobody understands the romance of Rome, and why she rose afterwards to a representative leadership that seemed almost fated and fundamentally natural. Who does not keep in mind the agony of horror and humiliation through which she had continued to testify to the sanity that is the soul of Europe? She came to stand alone in the midst of an empire because she had once stood alone in the midst of a ruin and a waste. After that all men knew in their hearts that she had been representative of mankind, even when she was rejected of men. And there fell on her the shadow from a shining and as yet invisible light and the burden of things to be. It is not for us to guess in what manner or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome. We have to thank the patience of the Punic wars if, in after ages, divine things descended at least upon human things and not inhuman. Europe evolved into its own vices and its own impotence, as will be suggested on another page; but the worst into which it evolved was not like what it had escaped. Can any man in his senses compare the great wooden doll, whom the children expected to eat a little bit of the dinner, with the great idol who would have been expected to eat the children? That is the measure of how far the world went astray, compared with how far it might have gone astray. If the Romans were ruthless, it was in a true sense to an enemy, and certainly not merely a rival. They remembered not trade routes and regulations, but the faces of sneering men; and hated the hateful soul of Carthage. And we owe them something if we never needed to cut down the groves of Venus exactly as men cut down the groves of Baal. We owe it partly to their harshness that our thoughts of our human past are not wholly harsh. If the passage from heathenry to Christianity was a bridge as well as a breach, we owe it to those who kept that heathenry human. If, after all these ages, we are in some sense at peace with paganism, and can think more kindly of our fathers, it is well to remember the things that were and the things that might have been. For this reason alone we can take lightly the load of antiquity and need not shudder at a nymph on a fountain or a cupid on a valentine. Laughter and sadness link us with things long past away and remembered without dishonour; and we can see not altogether without tenderness the twilight sinking around the Sabine farm and hear the household gods rejoice when Catullus comes home to Sirmio. Deleta est Carthago.
Perché mai gli uomini nutrono questa strana idea che ciò che è sordido debba sempre sopraffare ciò che è magnanimo; che vi sia un oscuro legame tra l’ingegno e la brutalità, o che non importi se un uomo è ottuso purché sia anche meschino? Perché pensano vagamente a ogni cavalleria come sentimentalismo e a ogni sentimento come debolezza? Lo fanno perché sono, come tutti gli uomini, ispirati anzitutto dalla religione. Per loro, come per tutti gli uomini, il primo fatto è la loro idea della natura delle cose; la loro idea di quale mondo essi abitino. Ed è loro fede che l’unica cosa ultima sia la paura e che perciò il cuore stesso del mondo sia malvagio. Credono che la morte sia più forte della vita, e che perciò le cose morte debbano essere più forti delle cose viventi; siano quelle cose morte oro e ferro e macchinari, oppure rocce e fiumi e forze della natura. Può suonare fantasioso dire che gli uomini che incontriamo attorno ai tavolini del tè o con cui chiacchieriamo alle feste in giardino sono in segreto adoratori di Baal o di Moloch. Ma questa sorta di mente commerciale ha la propria visione cosmica, ed è la visione di Cartagine. Racchiude in sé il brutale abbaglio che fu la rovina di Cartagine. La potenza punica cadde perché in questo materialismo vi è una folle indifferenza al pensiero vero. Non credendo nell’anima, si arriva a non credere nella mente. Troppo pratica per essere morale, nega ciò che ogni soldato pratico chiama il morale di un esercito. S’immagina che il denaro combatterà quando gli uomini non combatteranno più. Così fu per i mercanti principi punici. La loro religione era una religione della disperazione, anche quando le loro sorti concrete erano promettenti. Come potevano comprendere che i Romani potessero sperare anche quando le loro sorti erano disperate? La loro religione era una religione della forza e della paura; come potevano comprendere che gli uomini possono ancora disprezzare la paura anche quando si sottomettono alla forza? La loro filosofia del mondo aveva la stanchezza nel cuore stesso; soprattutto erano stanchi della guerra; come avrebbero potuto comprendere coloro che fanno ancora guerra anche quando ne sono stanchi? In una parola, come avrebbero potuto comprendere la mente dell’Uomo, essi che così a lungo si erano prostrati dinanzi a cose prive di mente, il denaro e la forza bruta e dèi che avevano cuori di bestie? Si destarono d’un tratto alla notizia che le braci che avevano sdegnato troppo persino di calpestare divampavano di nuovo dovunque in fiamme; che Asdrubale era sconfitto, che Annibale era inferiore di numero, che Scipione aveva portato la guerra in Spagna; che l’aveva portata in Africa. Dinanzi alle porte stesse della città dorata Annibale combatté la sua ultima battaglia per essa e la perse; e Cartagine cadde come nulla è caduto dopo Satan. Il nome della Nuova Città rimane soltanto come un nome. Non ne resta una pietra sopra la sabbia. Un’altra guerra fu invero condotta prima della distruzione finale: ma la distruzione fu finale. Solo uomini che scavavano nelle sue profonde fondamenta secoli dopo trovarono un mucchio di centinaia di piccoli scheletri, le sacre reliquie di quella religione. Poiché Cartagine cadde perché fu fedele alla propria filosofia e aveva seguito fino alla sua conclusione logica la propria visione dell’universo. Moloch aveva divorato i suoi figli.
Gli dèi erano risorti, e i demoni erano stati sconfitti dopotutto. Ma erano stati sconfitti dagli sconfitti, e quasi sconfitti dai morti. Nessuno comprende il romanzo di Roma, e perché essa più tardi si levò a una supremazia rappresentativa che parve quasi predestinata e fondamentalmente naturale. Chi non tiene a mente l’agonia d’orrore e umiliazione attraverso cui essa aveva continuato a testimoniare la sanità che è l’anima dell’Europa? Essa giunse a stare sola in mezzo a un impero perché una volta era stata sola in mezzo a una rovina e a una desolazione. Dopo di ciò tutti gli uomini seppero in cuor loro che essa era stata rappresentante dell’umanità, anche quando era rifiutata dagli uomini. E su di lei cadde l’ombra di una luce splendente e ancora invisibile e il peso delle cose a venire. Non spetta a noi indovinare in quale modo o momento la misericordia di Dio avrebbe potuto in ogni caso salvare il mondo; ma è certo che la lotta che fondò la Cristianità sarebbe stata assai diversa se ci fosse stato un impero di Cartagine invece di un impero di Roma. Dobbiamo alla pazienza delle guerre puniche se, nelle età successive, le cose divine discesero almeno su cose umane e non disumane. L’Europa si evolse nei propri vizi e nella propria impotenza, come si accennerà in un’altra pagina; ma il peggio in cui si evolse non fu simile a ciò da cui era scampata. Può un uomo sano di mente paragonare il grande fantoccio di legno, da cui i bambini si aspettavano che mangiasse un pezzetto del pranzo, con il grande idolo da cui ci si sarebbe aspettati che mangiasse i bambini? Questa è la misura di quanto il mondo si sviò, in confronto a quanto avrebbe potuto sviarsi. Se i Romani furono spietati, lo furono in un vero senso verso un nemico, e certo non un semplice rivale. Non ricordavano rotte commerciali e regolamenti, ma i volti di uomini beffardi; e odiarono l’odiosa anima di Cartagine. E qualcosa dobbiamo loro se mai avemmo bisogno di abbattere i boschetti di Venere esattamente come gli uomini abbatterono i boschetti di Baal. Dobbiamo in parte alla loro durezza il fatto che i nostri pensieri sul nostro passato umano non siano del tutto duri. Se il passaggio dal paganesimo al Cristianesimo fu tanto un ponte quanto una frattura, lo dobbiamo a coloro che mantennero umano quel paganesimo. Se, dopo tutte queste età, siamo in un certo senso in pace col paganesimo, e possiamo pensare con più benevolenza ai nostri padri, è bene ricordare le cose che furono e le cose che avrebbero potuto essere. Per questa ragione soltanto possiamo prendere alla leggera il peso dell’antichità e non dobbiamo rabbrividire dinanzi a una ninfa su una fontana o a un cupido su un biglietto di San Valentino. Il riso e la tristezza ci legano a cose scomparse da tempo e ricordate senza disonore; e possiamo vedere non del tutto senza tenerezza il crepuscolo calare intorno alla fattoria sabina e udire gli dèi domestici esultare quando Catullo torna a casa, a Sirmione. Deleta est Carthago.
VIII
THE END OF THE WORLD
I was once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under the shadow of a little village church, with a rather curious companion with whom I had just been walking through the woods. He was one of a group of eccentrics I had come across in my wanderings who had a new religion called Higher Thought; in which I had been so far initiated as to realise a general atmosphere of loftiness or height, and was hoping at some later and more esoteric stage to discover the beginnings of thought. My companion was the most amusing of them, for however he may have stood towards thought, he was at least very much their superior in experience, having travelled beyond the tropics while they were meditating in the suburbs; though he had been charged with excess in telling travellers’ tales. In spite of anything said against him, I preferred him to his companions and willingly went with him through the wood; where I could not but feel that his sunburnt face and fierce tufted eyebrows and pointed beard gave him something of the look of Pan. Then we sat down in the meadow and gazed idly at the tree-tops and the spire of the village church; while the warm afternoon began to mellow into early evening and the song of a speck of a bird was faint far up in the sky and no more than a whisper of breeze soothed rather than stirred the ancient orchards of the garden of England. Then my companion said to me: ‘Do you know why the spire of that church goes up like that, I expressed a respectable agnosticism, and he answered in an off-hand way, ‘Oh, the same as the obelisks; the Phallic Worship of antiquity.’ Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there leering above his goatlike beard; and for the moment I thought he was not Pan but the Devil. No mortal words can express the immense, the insane incongruity and unnatural perversion of thought involved in saying such a thing at such a moment and in such a place. For one moment I was in the mood in which men burned witches; and then a sense of absurdity equally enormous seemed to open about me like a dawn. ‘Why, of course,’ I said after a moment’s reflection, ‘if it hadn’t been for phallic worship, they would have built the spire pointing downwards and standing on its own apex.’ I could have sat in that field and laughed for an hour. My friend did not seem offended, for indeed he was never thin-skinned about his scientific discoveries. I had only met him by chance and I never met him again, and I believe he is now dead; but though it has nothing to do with the argument, it may be worth while to mention the name of this adherent of Higher Thought and interpreter of primitive religious origins; or at any rate the name by which he was known. It was Louis de Rougemont.
That insane image of the Kentish church standing on the point of its spire, as in some old rustic, topsy-turvy tale, always comes back into my imagination when I hear these things said about pagan origins; and calls to my aid the laughter of the giants. Then I feel as genially and charitably to all other scientific investigators, higher critics, and authorities on ancient and modern religion, as I do to poor Louis de Rougemont. But the memory of that immense absurdity remains as a sort of measure and check by which to keep sane, not only on the subject of Christian churches, but also on the subject of heathen temples. Now a great many people have talked about heathen origins as the distinguished traveller talked about Christian origins. Indeed a great many modern heathens have been very hard on heathenism. A great many modern humanitarians have been very hard on the real religion of humanity. They have represented it as being everywhere and from the first rooted only in these repulsive arcana; and carrying the character of something utterly shameless and anarchical. Now I do not believe this for a moment. I should never dream of thinking about the whole worship of Apollo what De Rougemont could think about the worship of Christ. I would never admit that there was such an atmosphere in a Greek city as that madman was able to smell in a Kentish village. On the contrary, it is the whole point, even of this final chapter upon the final decay of paganism, to insist once more that the worst sort of paganism had already been defeated by the best sort. It was the best sort of paganism that conquered the gold of Carthage. It was the best sort of paganism that wore the laurels of Rome. It was the best thing the world had yet seen, all things considered and on any large scale, that ruled from the wall of the Grampians to the garden of the Euphrates. It was the best that conquered; it was the best that ruled; and it was the best that began to decay.
Unless this broad truth be grasped, the whole story is seen askew. Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We might almost say that in a society without such good things we should hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that is why some of the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather an air in history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and swathed and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old. But Carthage at any rate was dead, and the worst assault ever made by the demons on mortal society had been defeated. But how much would it matter that the worst was dead if the best was dying?
To begin with, it must be noted that the relation of Rome to Carthage was partially repeated and extended in her relation to nations more normal and more nearly akin to her than Carthage. I am not here concerned to controvert the merely political view that Roman statesmen acted unscrupulously towards Corinth or the Greek cities. But I am concerned to contradict the notion that there was nothing but a hypocritical excuse in the ordinary Roman dislike of Greek cities. I am not presenting these pagans as paladins of chivalry, with a sentiment about nationalism never known until Christian times. But I am presenting them as men with the feelings of men; and those feelings were not a pretence. The truth is that one of the weaknesses in nature-worship and mere mythology had already produced a perversion among the Greeks due to the worst sophistry; the sophistry of simplicity. Just as they became unnatural by worshipping nature, so they actually became unmanly by worshipping man. If Greece led her conqueror, she might have misled her conqueror; but these were things he did originally wish to conquer— ever in himself. It is true that in one sense there was less inhumanity even in Sodom and Gomorrah than in Tyre and Sidon. When we consider the war of the demons on the children, we cannot compare even Greek decadence to Punic devil-worship. But it is not true that the sincere revulsion from either need be merely pharisaical. It is not true to human nature or to common sense. Let any lad who has had the luck to grow up sane and simple in his day-dreams of love hear for the first time of the cult of Ganymede; he will not be merely shocked but sickened. And that first impression, as has been said here so often about first impressions, will be right. Our cynical indifference is an illusion; it is the greatest of all illusions; the illusion of familiarity. It is right to conceive the more or less rustic virtues of the ruck of the original Romans as reacting against the very rumour of it, with complete spontaneity and sincerity. It is right to regard them as reacting, if in a lesser degree, exactly as they did against the cruelty of Carthage. Because it was in a less degree they did not destroy Corinth as they destroyed Carthage. But if their attitude and action was rather destructive, in neither case need their indignation have been mere self-righteousness covering mere selfishness. And if anybody insists that nothing could have operated in either case but reasons of state and commercial conspiracies, we can only tell him that there is something which he does not understand; something which possibly he will never understand; something which, until he does understand, he will never understand the Latins. That something is called democracy. He has probably heard the word a good many times and even used it himself; but he has no notion of what it means. All through the revolutionary history of Rome there was an incessant drive towards democracy; the state and the statesman could do nothing without a considerable backing of democracy; the sort of democracy that never has anything to do with diplomacy. It is precisely because of the presence of Roman democracy that we hear so much about Roman oligarchy. For instance, recent historians have tried to explain the valour and victory of Rome in terms of that detestable and detested usury which was practised by some of the Patricians; as if Curius had conquered the men of the Macedonian phalanx by lending them money; or the consul Nero had negotiated the victory of Metaurus at five per cent. But we realise the usury of the Patricians because of the perpetual revolt of the Plebeians. The rule of the Punic merchant princes had the very soul of usury. But there was never a Punic mob that dared to call them usurers.
VIII
LA FINE DEL MONDO
Un giorno d’estate me ne stavo seduto in un prato del Kent, all’ombra di una piccola chiesa di villaggio, in compagnia di un tipo piuttosto singolare con cui avevo appena attraversato i boschi. Apparteneva a un gruppo di eccentrici in cui mi ero imbattuto nei miei vagabondaggi, i quali professavano una nuova religione detta Pensiero Superiore; nella quale ero stato iniziato quel tanto che bastava a coglierne una generale atmosfera di elevatezza o di altezza, e speravo, in qualche stadio più avanzato ed esoterico, di scoprirvi i primordi del pensiero. Il mio compagno era il più divertente di tutti, poiché, comunque stessero le cose fra lui e il pensiero, era quantomeno assai superiore agli altri quanto a esperienza, avendo viaggiato oltre i tropici mentre quelli meditavano nei sobborghi; per quanto lo si accusasse di eccedere nel raccontare storie da viaggiatore. A dispetto di tutto ciò che si diceva contro di lui, lo preferivo ai suoi compagni e lo seguii volentieri per il bosco; dove non potei fare a meno di notare che il suo volto abbronzato, le folte sopracciglia irsute e la barba a punta gli davano qualcosa dell’aspetto di Pan. Poi ci sedemmo nel prato e volgemmo lo sguardo, oziosi, alle cime degli alberi e alla guglia della chiesa del villaggio; mentre il caldo pomeriggio cominciava a maturare nel primo crepuscolo e il canto di un uccellino, un puntolino lassù, giungeva fioco altissimo nel cielo, e non più di un sussurro di brezza carezzava, più che agitare, gli antichi frutteti del giardino d’Inghilterra. Allora il mio compagno mi disse: «Sapete perché la guglia di quella chiesa si slancia così verso l’alto?». Espressi un rispettabile agnosticismo, ed egli rispose con noncuranza: «Oh, la stessa ragione degli obelischi: il culto fallico dell’antichità». Allora mi voltai di scatto a guardarlo, mentre giaceva lì sogghignando al di sopra della sua barba caprina; e per un istante pensai che non fosse Pan, ma il Diavolo. Nessuna parola mortale può esprimere l’immensa, l’insana incongruità e la perversione innaturale del pensiero implicita nel dire una cosa simile in un simile momento e in un simile luogo. Per un istante fui preso dallo stato d’animo in cui gli uomini bruciavano le streghe; e poi un senso d’assurdità altrettanto enorme parve schiudersi intorno a me come un’alba. «Ma certo», dissi dopo un attimo di riflessione, «se non fosse stato per il culto fallico, avrebbero costruito la guglia rivolta all’ingiù, ritta sulla propria punta.» Avrei potuto restare seduto in quel campo a ridere per un’ora intera. Il mio amico non parve offendersi, poiché in verità non fu mai suscettibile riguardo alle sue scoperte scientifiche. L’avevo incontrato solo per caso e non lo rividi mai più, e credo che ora sia morto; ma benché non abbia nulla a che vedere con l’argomento, forse val la pena di riferire il nome di questo adepto del Pensiero Superiore e interprete delle primitive origini religiose; o quantomeno il nome con cui era conosciuto. Era Louis de Rougemont.
Quell’immagine folle della chiesa del Kent ritta sulla punta della sua guglia, come in qualche vecchia fiaba rustica alla rovescia, mi torna sempre nell’immaginazione quando sento dire queste cose sulle origini pagane; e chiama in mio soccorso la risata dei giganti. Allora provo per tutti gli altri ricercatori scientifici, alti critici e autorità in materia di religioni antiche e moderne un sentimento tanto cordiale e caritatevole quanto quello che nutro per il povero Louis de Rougemont. Ma il ricordo di quell’immensa assurdità rimane come una sorta di misura e di freno con cui conservare la sanità di mente, non solo a proposito delle chiese cristiane, ma anche a proposito dei templi pagani. Ora, moltissimi hanno parlato delle origini pagane come l’illustre viaggiatore parlava delle origini cristiane. Anzi, moltissimi pagani moderni sono stati durissimi con il paganesimo. Moltissimi umanitari moderni sono stati durissimi con la vera religione dell’umanità. L’hanno rappresentata come radicata dappertutto, e fin dall’inizio, unicamente in quei ripugnanti arcani; e come portatrice del carattere di qualcosa di assolutamente svergognato e anarchico. Ebbene, io non lo credo neppure per un istante. Non mi sognerei mai di pensare dell’intero culto di Apollo ciò che de Rougemont poteva pensare del culto di Cristo. Non ammetterei mai che vi fosse in una città greca quell’atmosfera che quel folle riuscì ad annusare in un villaggio del Kent. Al contrario, è proprio questo il punto, anche di quest’ultimo capitolo sulla decadenza finale del paganesimo: insistere ancora una volta sul fatto che la peggiore specie di paganesimo era già stata sconfitta dalla migliore. Fu la migliore specie di paganesimo a conquistare l’oro di Cartagine. Fu la migliore specie di paganesimo a cingere gli allori di Roma. Fu la cosa migliore che il mondo avesse ancora veduto, tutto sommato e su qualsiasi grande scala, quella che regnò dal vallo dei Grampiani al giardino dell’Eufrate. Fu il meglio a conquistare; fu il meglio a regnare; e fu il meglio a cominciare a decadere.
Se non si afferra questa ampia verità, l’intera vicenda appare stravolta. Il pessimismo non sta nell’essere stanchi del male, ma nell’essere stanchi del bene. La disperazione non consiste nell’essere stanchi della sofferenza, ma nell’essere stanchi della gioia. È quando, per una ragione o per l’altra, le cose buone di una società cessano di funzionare che la società comincia a declinare; quando il suo cibo non nutre più, quando i suoi rimedi non guariscono, quando le sue benedizioni si rifiutano di benedire. Potremmo quasi dire che in una società priva di simili cose buone difficilmente avremmo un metro con cui registrare un declino; ecco perché alcune delle statiche oligarchie commerciali come Cartagine hanno, nella storia, piuttosto l’aria di stare ritte a fissare il vuoto come mummie, tanto disseccate, fasciate e imbalsamate che nessuno sa quando siano nuove o vecchie. Ma Cartagine, in ogni caso, era morta, e il peggiore assalto mai sferrato dai demoni contro la società mortale era stato respinto. Ma quanto poteva importare che il peggio fosse morto, se il meglio stava morendo?
Per cominciare, va notato che il rapporto di Roma con Cartagine si ripeté in parte e si estese nel suo rapporto con nazioni più normali e a lei più affini di Cartagine. Non mi propongo qui di confutare la tesi meramente politica secondo cui gli uomini di Stato romani agirono senza scrupoli verso Corinto o le città greche. Ma mi propongo di contraddire l’idea che nell’ordinaria avversione romana per le città greche non vi fosse altro che un pretesto ipocrita. Non presento questi pagani come paladini di cavalleria, dotati di un sentimento nazionalistico ignoto fino all’epoca cristiana. Ma li presento come uomini dotati dei sentimenti degli uomini; e quei sentimenti non erano una finzione. La verità è che una delle debolezze insite nel culto della natura e nella pura mitologia aveva già prodotto tra i Greci una perversione dovuta alla peggiore delle sofisticherie: la sofisticheria della semplicità. Come divennero innaturali adorando la natura, così divennero davvero disumani adorando l’uomo. Se la Grecia guidò il suo conquistatore, poté anche traviarlo; ma queste erano cose che egli in origine desiderava davvero conquistare — sempre in sé stesso. È vero che, in un certo senso, vi fu meno disumanità perfino a Sodoma e Gomorra che a Tiro e Sidone. Quando consideriamo la guerra dei demoni contro i fanciulli, non possiamo paragonare neppure la decadenza greca al culto punico del diavolo. Ma non è vero che la sincera ripugnanza verso l’una o l’altro debba essere per forza soltanto farisaica. Non è vero secondo la natura umana né secondo il buon senso. Che un qualunque ragazzo che abbia avuto la fortuna di crescere sano e semplice nei suoi sogni d’amore senta per la prima volta parlare del culto di Ganimede: non ne sarà soltanto scandalizzato, ma disgustato. E quella prima impressione, come s’è detto qui tanto spesso a proposito delle prime impressioni, sarà quella giusta. La nostra cinica indifferenza è un’illusione; è la più grande di tutte le illusioni; l’illusione della familiarità. È giusto concepire le virtù più o meno rustiche della massa dei Romani delle origini come reagenti contro la sola voce di ciò, con piena spontaneità e sincerità. È giusto considerarli come reagenti, se pure in grado minore, esattamente come reagirono contro la crudeltà di Cartagine. Fu perché lo fecero in grado minore che non distrussero Corinto come distrussero Cartagine. Ma se il loro atteggiamento e la loro azione furono piuttosto distruttivi, in nessuno dei due casi la loro indignazione dovette essere mera ipocrisia farisaica a coprire mero egoismo. E se qualcuno insiste che in nessuno dei due casi poté operare altro che ragioni di Stato e congiure commerciali, non possiamo che dirgli che c’è qualcosa che egli non comprende; qualcosa che forse non comprenderà mai; qualcosa che, finché non lo comprenderà, gli impedirà per sempre di comprendere i Latini. Quel qualcosa si chiama democrazia. Probabilmente ha udito la parola parecchie volte e l’ha persino usata lui stesso; ma non ha la minima idea di che cosa significhi. Per tutta la storia rivoluzionaria di Roma vi fu un incessante impulso verso la democrazia; lo Stato e l’uomo di Stato nulla potevano senza un notevole sostegno della democrazia; quella specie di democrazia che non ha mai nulla a che fare con la diplomazia. È proprio a causa della presenza della democrazia romana che sentiamo parlare tanto dell’oligarchia romana. Per esempio, storici recenti hanno cercato di spiegare il valore e la vittoria di Roma in termini di quella detestabile e detestata usura praticata da alcuni dei Patrizi; come se Curio avesse sconfitto gli uomini della falange macedone prestando loro denaro, o come se il console Nerone avesse negoziato la vittoria del Metauro al cinque per cento. Ma è per la perpetua rivolta dei Plebei che ci rendiamo conto dell’usura dei Patrizi. Il dominio dei principi mercanti punici aveva la vera anima dell’usura. Ma non vi fu mai una plebe punica che osasse chiamarli usurai.
Burdened like all mortal things with all mortal sin and weakness, the rise of Rome had really been the rise of normal and especially of popular things; and in nothing more than in the thoroughly normal and profoundly popular hatred of perversion. Now among the Greeks a perversion had become a convention. It is true that it had become so much of a convention, especially a literary convention, that it was sometimes conventionally copied by Roman literary men. But this is one of those complications that always arise out of conventions. It must not obscure our sense of the difference of tone in the two societies as a whole. It is true that Virgil would once in a way take over a theme of Theocritus; but nobody can get the impression that Virgil was particularly fond of that theme. The themes of Virgil were specially and notably the normal themes and nowhere more than in morals; piety and patriotism and the honour of the countryside. And we may well pause upon the name of the poet as we pass into the autumn of antiquity; upon his name who was in so supreme a sense the very voice of autumn of its maturity and its melancholy; of its fruits of fulfilment and its prospect of decay. Nobody who reads even a few lines of Virgil can doubt that he understood what moral sanity means to mankind. Nobody can doubt his feelings when the demons were driven in flight before the household gods. But there are two particular points about him and his work which are particularly important to the main thesis here. The first is that the whole of his great patriotic epic is in a very peculiar sense founded upon the fall of Troy; that is upon an avowed pride in Troy although she had fallen. In tracing to Trojans the foundation of his beloved race and republic, he began what may be called the great Trojan tradition which runs through medieval and modern history. We have already seen the first hint of it in the pathos of Homer about Hector. But Virgil turned it not merely into a literature but into a legend. And it was a legend of the almost divine dignity that belongs to the defeated. This was one of the traditions that did truly prepare the world for the coming of Christianity and especially of Christian chivalry. This is what did help to sustain civilisation through the incessant defeats of the Dark Ages and the barbarian wars; out of which what we call chivalry was born. It is the moral attitude of the man with his back to the wall; and it was the wall of Troy. All through medieval and modern times this version of the virtues in the Homeric conflict can be traced in a hundred ways co-operating with all that was akin to it in Christian sentiment. Our own countrymen, and the men of other countries, loved to claim like Virgil that their own nation was descended from the heroic Trojans. All sorts of people thought it the most superb sort of heraldry to claim to be descended from Hector. Nobody seems to have wanted to be descended from Achilles. The very fact that the Trojan name has become a Christian name, and been scattered to the last limits of Christendom, to Ireland or the Gaelic Highlands, while the Greek name has remained relatively rare and pedantic, is a tribute to the same truth. Indeed it involves a curiosity of language almost in the nature of a joke. The name has been turned into a verb; and the very phrase about hectoring, in the sense of swaggering, suggests the myriads of soldiers who have taken the fallen Trojan for a model. As a matter of fact, nobody in antiquity was less given to hectoring than Hector. But even the bully pretending to be a conqueror took his title from the conquered. That is why the popularisation of the Trojan origin by Virgil has a vital relation to all those elements that have made men say that Virgil was almost a Christian. It is almost as if two great tools or toys of the same timber, the divine and the human, had been in the hands of Providence; and the only thing comparable to the Wooden Cross of Calvary was the Wooden Horse of Troy. So, in some wild allegory, pious in purpose if almost profane in form, the Holy Child might have fought the dragon with a wooden sword and a wooden horse.
The other element in Virgil which is essential to the argument is the particular nature of his relation to mythology; or what may here in a special sense be called folklore, the faiths and fancies of the populace. Everybody knows that his poetry at its most perfect is less concerned with the pomposity of Olympus than with the numina of natural and agricultural life. Everyone knows where Virgil looked for the causes of things. He speaks of finding them not so much in cosmic allegories of Uranus and Chronos; but rather in Pan and the sisterhood of the nymphs and Sylvanus the old man of the forest. He is perhaps most himself in some passages of the Eclogues, in which he has perpetuated for ever the great legend of Arcadia and the shepherds. Here again it is easy enough to miss the point with petty criticism about all the things that happen to separate his literary convention from ours. There is nothing more artificial than the cry of artificiality as directed against the old pastoral poetry. We have entirely missed all that our fathers meant by looking at the externals of what they wrote. People have been so much amused with the mere fact that the china shepherdess was made of china that they have not even asked why she was made at all. They have been so content to consider the Merry Peasant as a figure in an opera that they have not asked even how he came to go to the opera, or how he strayed on to the stage.
In short, one have only to ask why there is a china shepherdess and not a china shopkeeper. Why were not mantelpieces adorned with figures of city merchants in elegant attitudes; of ironmasters wrought in iron or gold speculators in gold? Why did the opera exhibit a Merry Peasant and not a Merry Politician? Why was there not a ballet of bankers, pirouetting upon pointed toes? Because the ancient instinct and humour of humanity have always told them, under whatever conventions, that the conventions of complex cities were less really healthy and happy than the customs of the countryside. So it is with the eternity of the Eclogues. A modern poet did indeed write things called Fleet Street Eclogues, in which poets took the place of the shepherds. But nobody has yet written anything called Wall Street Eclogues, in which millionaires should take the place of the poets. And the reason is that there is a real if only a recurrent yearning for that sort of simplicity; and there is never that sort of yearning for that sort of complexity. The key to the mystery of the Merry Peasant is that the peasant often is merry. Those who do not believe it are simply those who do not know anything about him, and therefore do not know which are his times for merriment. Those who do not believe in the shepherd’s feast or song are merely ignorant of the shepherd’s calendar. The real shepherd is indeed very different from the ideal shepherd, but that is no reason for forgetting the reality at the root of the ideal. It needs a truth to make a tradition. It needs a tradition to make a convention. Pastoral poetry is certainly often a convention, especially in a social decline. It was in a social decline that Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses lounged about the gardens of Versailles. It was also in a social decline that shepherds and shepherdesses continued to pipe and dance through the most faded imitations of Virgil. But that is no reason for dismissing the dying paganism without ever understanding its life. It is no reason for forgetting that the very word Pagan is the same as the word Peasant. We may say that this art is only artificiality; but it is not a love of the artificial. On the contrary, it is in its very nature only the failure of nature-worship, or the love of the natural
Gravata, come ogni cosa mortale, di ogni peccato e debolezza mortale, l’ascesa di Roma era stata in realtà l’ascesa di ciò che è normale e, soprattutto, di ciò che è popolare; e in nulla più che nell’odio schiettamente normale e profondamente popolare per la perversione. Ora, presso i Greci una perversione era divenuta una convenzione. È vero che era divenuta a tal punto una convenzione, e specialmente una convenzione letteraria, da essere talvolta imitata per convenzione dai letterati romani. Ma questa è una di quelle complicazioni che sorgono sempre dalle convenzioni. Non deve offuscare la nostra percezione della differenza di tono fra le due società prese nel loro insieme. È vero che Virgilio poteva, di quando in quando, riprendere un tema di Teocrito; ma nessuno può ricavarne l’impressione che Virgilio fosse particolarmente affezionato a quel tema. I temi di Virgilio erano in modo speciale e cospicuo i temi normali, e in nessun campo più che in quello della morale: la pietà, il patriottismo e l’onore della vita agreste. E ben possiamo indugiare sul nome del poeta mentre passiamo nell’autunno dell’antichità; sul nome di colui che fu, in un senso così supremo, la voce stessa dell’autunno, della sua maturità e della sua malinconia; dei suoi frutti d’adempimento e della sua prospettiva di decadenza. Nessuno che legga anche solo poche righe di Virgilio può dubitare che egli comprendesse che cosa significhi per l’umanità la sanità morale. Nessuno può dubitare dei suoi sentimenti quando i demòni vennero messi in fuga davanti agli dèi domestici. Ma vi sono due punti particolari, a proposito suo e della sua opera, che rivestono un’importanza particolare per la tesi principale che qui si sostiene. Il primo è che l’intero suo grande poema patriottico si fonda, in un senso assai peculiare, sulla caduta di Troia; ossia su un dichiarato orgoglio per Troia, benché fosse caduta. Facendo risalire ai Troiani la fondazione della sua amata stirpe e repubblica, egli diede inizio a ciò che si potrebbe chiamare la grande tradizione troiana che attraversa la storia medievale e moderna. Ne abbiamo già visto il primo accenno nel pathos di Omero riguardo a Ettore. Ma Virgilio la trasformò non soltanto in letteratura, bensì in leggenda. Ed era una leggenda di quella dignità quasi divina che appartiene ai vinti. Questa fu una delle tradizioni che davvero prepararono il mondo alla venuta del Cristianesimo e specialmente della cavalleria cristiana. Questo è ciò che contribuì a sostenere la civiltà attraverso le incessanti sconfitte dei Secoli Bui e delle guerre barbariche, dalle quali nacque ciò che chiamiamo cavalleria. È l’atteggiamento morale dell’uomo con le spalle al muro; e quel muro era il muro di Troia. Lungo tutto il corso dei tempi medievali e moderni questa versione delle virtù nel conflitto omerico si può rintracciare in cento modi, cooperando con tutto ciò che le era affine nel sentimento cristiano. I nostri stessi connazionali, e gli uomini di altri paesi, amavano vantarsi, come Virgilio, che la propria nazione discendesse dagli eroici Troiani. Ogni sorta di gente riteneva che fosse la specie più superba di araldica il vantare la discendenza da Ettore. Nessuno, a quanto pare, ha mai voluto discendere da Achille. Il fatto stesso che il nome troiano sia divenuto un nome di battesimo, e sia stato disseminato fino agli estremi confini della Cristianità, in Irlanda o negli altopiani gaelici, mentre il nome greco è rimasto relativamente raro e pedantesco, è un tributo alla medesima verità. Anzi, esso comporta una curiosità linguistica quasi nella natura di uno scherzo. Il nome è stato mutato in verbo; e la stessa espressione inglese to hector, nel senso di spavaldeggiare, evoca le miriadi di soldati che hanno preso a modello il Troiano caduto. In realtà, nessuno nell’antichità fu meno incline a spavaldeggiare di Ettore. Ma persino il bullo che si spacciava per conquistatore traeva il suo titolo dal conquistato. Ecco perché la divulgazione dell’origine troiana operata da Virgilio ha una relazione vitale con tutti quegli elementi che hanno indotto gli uomini a dire che Virgilio era quasi un cristiano. È quasi come se due grandi strumenti o balocchi ricavati dal medesimo legno, il divino e l’umano, fossero stati nelle mani della Provvidenza; e la sola cosa comparabile alla Croce di legno del Calvario fosse il Cavallo di legno di Troia. Così, in qualche selvaggia allegoria, pia nell’intento se pur quasi profana nella forma, il santo Bambino avrebbe potuto combattere il drago con una spada di legno e un cavallo di legno.
L’altro elemento in Virgilio che è essenziale all’argomento è la particolare natura del suo rapporto con la mitologia; o con ciò che qui, in un senso speciale, si può chiamare folclore, le fedi e le fantasie del popolo. Tutti sanno che la sua poesia, nel suo culmine di perfezione, si occupa meno della pomposità dell’Olimpo che dei numina della vita naturale e agricola. Tutti sanno dove Virgilio cercasse le cause delle cose. Egli dice di trovarle non tanto nelle allegorie cosmiche di Urano e di Crono, quanto piuttosto in Pan e nella sorellanza delle ninfe e in Silvano, il vecchio della foresta. Egli è forse più se stesso in alcuni passi delle Ecloghe, in cui ha perpetuato per sempre la grande leggenda dell’Arcadia e dei pastori. Anche qui è fin troppo facile mancare il punto con una critica meschina intorno a tutte le cose che per caso separano la sua convenzione letteraria dalla nostra. Non c’è nulla di più artificioso del grido di artificiosità levato contro l’antica poesia pastorale. Abbiamo interamente frainteso tutto ciò che i nostri padri intendevano, guardando alle apparenze esteriori di ciò che scrivevano. La gente si è tanto divertita del mero fatto che la pastorella di porcellana fosse fatta di porcellana, da non essersi neppure chiesta perché fosse stata fatta. Si è talmente accontentata di considerare l’Allegro Contadino come una figura d’opera lirica, da non essersi domandata neppure come sia giunto ad andare all’opera, o come sia capitato sul palcoscenico.
In breve, basta chiedersi perché esista una pastorella di porcellana e non un bottegaio di porcellana. Perché le mensole dei camini non venivano adornate con figure di mercanti di città in eleganti atteggiamenti; di padroni delle ferriere forgiati in ferro, o di speculatori d’oro forgiati in oro? Perché l’opera lirica esibiva un Allegro Contadino e non un Allegro Politico? Perché non c’era un balletto di banchieri che piroettano sulle punte dei piedi? Perché l’antico istinto e l’umorismo dell’umanità hanno sempre detto agli uomini, sotto qualsiasi convenzione, che le convenzioni delle città complesse erano meno realmente sane e felici delle usanze della campagna. Così è dell’eternità delle Ecloghe. Un poeta moderno scrisse davvero delle cose intitolate Fleet Street Eclogues, in cui i poeti prendevano il posto dei pastori. Ma nessuno ha ancora scritto qualcosa intitolato Wall Street Eclogues, in cui i milionari dovessero prendere il posto dei poeti. E la ragione è che esiste un desiderio reale, per quanto solo ricorrente, di quella sorta di semplicità; e non esiste mai quel genere di desiderio per quel genere di complessità. La chiave del mistero dell’Allegro Contadino è che il contadino spesso è allegro. Coloro che non lo credono sono semplicemente coloro che non sanno nulla di lui, e perciò non sanno quali siano i suoi tempi di allegria. Coloro che non credono al banchetto o al canto del pastore sono soltanto ignari del calendario del pastore. Il pastore reale è invero assai diverso dal pastore ideale, ma questa non è una ragione per dimenticare la realtà alla radice dell’ideale. Occorre una verità per fare una tradizione. Occorre una tradizione per fare una convenzione. La poesia pastorale è certamente spesso una convenzione, specialmente in un declino sociale. Fu in un declino sociale che i pastori e le pastorelle di Watteau oziavano per i giardini di Versailles. Fu del pari in un declino sociale che pastori e pastorelle continuarono a suonare la zampogna e a danzare attraverso le più sbiadite imitazioni di Virgilio. Ma questa non è una ragione per liquidare il paganesimo morente senza mai comprenderne la vita. Non è una ragione per dimenticare che la parola stessa Pagano è la medesima della parola Contadino. Possiamo dire che quest’arte è solo artificiosità; ma non è un amore dell’artificiale. Al contrario, essa è nella sua stessa natura soltanto il fallimento del culto della natura, o dell’amore del naturale
For the shepherds were dying because their gods were dying. Paganism lived upon poetry; that poetry already considered under the name of mythology. But everywhere, and especially in Italy, it had been a mythology and a poetry rooted in the countryside; and that rustic religion had been largely responsible for the rustic happiness. Only as the whole society grew in age and experience, there began to appear that weakness in all mythology already noted in the chapter under that name. This religion was not quite a religion. In other words, this religion was not quite a reality. It was the young world’s riot with images and ideas like a young man’s riot with wine or love-making; it was not so much immoral as irresponsible; it had no foresight of the final test of time. Because it was creative to any extent it was credulous to any extent. It belonged to the artistic side of man, yet even considered artistically it had long become overloaded and entangled. The family trees sprung from the seed of Jupiter were a jungle rather than a forest; the claims of the gods and demi-gods seemed like things to be settled rather by a lawyer or a professional herald than by a poet. But it is needless to say that it was not only in the artistic sense that these things had grown more anarchic. There had appeared in more and more flagrant fashion that flower of evil that is really implicit in the very seed of nature-worship, however natural it may seem. I have said that I do not believe that natural worship necessarily begins with this particular passion; I am not of the De Rougemont school of scientific folk-lore. I do not believe that mythology must begin with eroticism. But I do believe that mythology must end in it. I am quite certain that mythology did end in it. Moreover, not only did the poetry grow more immoral, but the immorality grew more indefensible. Greek vices, oriental vices, hints of the old horrors of the Semitic demons began to fill the fancies of decaying Rome, swarming like flies on a dung heap. The psychology of it is really human enough to anyone who will try that experiment of seeing history from the inside. There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.
At that stage even of paganism therefore the peasant songs and dances sound fainter and fainter in the forest. For one thing the peasant civilisation was fading, or had already faded from the whole countryside. The Empire at the end was organised more and more on that servile system which generally goes with the boast of organisation, indeed it was almost as senile as the modern schemes for the organisation of industry. It is proverbial that what would once have been a peasantry became a mere populace of the town dependent for bread and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles and cinemas. In this as in many other respects the modern return to heathenism has been a return not even to the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age. But the causes of it were spiritual in both cases; and especially the spirit of paganism had departed with its familiar spirits. The heat had gone out of it with its household gods, who went along with the gods of the garden and the field and the forest. The Old Man of the Forest was too old; he was already dying. It is said truly in a sense that Pan died because Christ was born. It is almost as true in another sense that men knew that Christ was born because Pan was already dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the whole mythology of mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been filled with theology. But the point for the moment is that the mythology could not have lasted like a theology in any case. Theology is thought, whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of glamour and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only ceased to believe in the gods, but they realised that they had never believed in them. They had sung their praises; they had danced round their altars. They had played the flute; they had played the fool.
So came the twilight upon Arcady and the last notes of the pipe sound sadly from the beechen grove. In the great Virgilian poems there is already something of the sadness; but the loves and the household gods linger in lovely lines like that which Mr. Belloc took for a test of understanding; incipe parve puer risu cognoscere matrem. But with them as with us, the human family itself began to break down under servile organisation and the herding of the towns. The urban mob became enlightened; that is it lost the mental energy that could create myths. All round the circle of the Mediterranean cities the people mourned for the loss of gods and were consoled with gladiators. And meanwhile something similar was happening to that intellectual aristocracy of antiquity that had been walking about and talking at large ever since Socrates and Pythagoras. They began to betray to the world the fact that they were walking in a circle and saying the same thing over and over again. Philosophy began to be a joke; it also began to be a bore. That unnatural simplification of everything into one system or another, which we have noted as the fault of the philosopher, revealed at once its finality and its futility. Everything was virtue or everything was happiness or everything was fate or everything was good or everything was bad; anyhow, everything was everything and there was no more to be said; so they said it. Everywhere the sages had degenerated into sophists; that is, into hired rhetoricians or askers of riddles. It is one of the symptoms of this that the sage begins to turn not only into a sophist but into a magician. A touch of oriental occultism is very much appreciated in the best houses. As the philosopher is already a society entertainer, he may as well also be a conjurer.
Poiché i pastori morivano perché morivano i loro dèi. Il paganesimo viveva di poesia; quella poesia già considerata sotto il nome di mitologia. Ma ovunque, e specialmente in Italia, era stata una mitologia e una poesia radicate nella campagna; e quella religione rustica era stata in gran parte responsabile della felicità rustica. Solo quando l’intera società crebbe in età ed esperienza, cominciò ad affiorare quella debolezza propria di ogni mitologia già rilevata nel capitolo che ne porta il nome. Questa religione non era propriamente una religione. In altre parole, questa religione non era propriamente una realtà. Era la baldoria del mondo giovane con immagini e idee, come la baldoria di un giovane con il vino o con l’amore; non era tanto immorale quanto irresponsabile; non aveva alcuna previdenza della prova finale del tempo. Poiché era creativa senza misura, era credula senza misura. Apparteneva al lato artistico dell’uomo, eppure, anche considerata artisticamente, era da tempo divenuta sovraccarica e ingarbugliata. Gli alberi genealogici germogliati dal seme di Giove erano una giungla più che una foresta; le pretese degli dèi e dei semidèi parevano faccende da risolvere piuttosto da un avvocato o da un araldo di professione che da un poeta. Ma è superfluo dire che non era solo in senso artistico che queste cose erano divenute più anarchiche. Era apparso in forma sempre più sfacciata quel fiore del male che è davvero implicito nel seme stesso del culto della natura, per quanto naturale possa sembrare. Ho detto che non credo che il culto naturale cominci necessariamente con questa particolare passione; non appartengo alla scuola di De Rougemont del folklore scientifico. Non credo che la mitologia debba cominciare con l’erotismo. Ma credo davvero che la mitologia debba finirvi. Sono del tutto certo che la mitologia vi è finita. Inoltre, non solo la poesia si fece più immorale, ma l’immoralità si fece più indifendibile. Vizi greci, vizi orientali, sentori degli antichi orrori dei demoni semitici cominciarono a riempire le fantasie di una Roma in decadenza, sciamando come mosche su un letamaio. La psicologia della cosa è davvero abbastanza umana per chiunque voglia tentare quell’esperimento di vedere la storia dall’interno. Viene un’ora del pomeriggio in cui il bambino è stanco del «far finta»; in cui è stufo di fare il brigante o il pellerossa. È allora che tormenta il gatto. Viene un momento, nel corso ordinato di una civiltà ben regolata, in cui l’uomo è stanco di giocare alla mitologia e di far finta che un albero sia una fanciulla o che la luna facesse l’amore con un uomo. L’effetto di questo languore è ovunque il medesimo; lo si vede in ogni assunzione di droghe e in ogni tracannare di liquori e in ogni forma di quella tendenza ad aumentare la dose. Gli uomini cercano peccati più strani o oscenità più sconvolgenti come stimolanti al loro senso ottuso. Cercano per la stessa ragione folli religioni orientali. Tentano di pugnalare i propri nervi per riportarli in vita, foss’anche con i coltelli dei sacerdoti di Baal. Camminano nel sonno e tentano di svegliarsi con gli incubi.
A quello stadio anche del paganesimo, dunque, i canti e le danze dei contadini risuonano sempre più fiochi nella foresta. Anzitutto la civiltà contadina stava svanendo, o era già svanita da tutta la campagna. L’Impero, alla fine, era organizzato sempre più secondo quel sistema servile che generalmente si accompagna al vanto dell’organizzazione, e anzi era quasi tanto senile quanto i moderni progetti di organizzazione dell’industria. È risaputo che ciò che un tempo sarebbe stato un contadiname divenne un mero popolino cittadino dipendente per il pane e i circhi; il che può di nuovo suggerire ad alcuni una folla dipendente dai sussidi e dai cinema. In questo, come in molti altri riguardi, il moderno ritorno al paganesimo è stato un ritorno non già alla giovinezza pagana, ma piuttosto alla vecchiaia pagana. Ma le cause di ciò furono spirituali in entrambi i casi; e in particolare lo spirito del paganesimo se n’era andato con i suoi spiriti familiari. Il calore ne era uscito insieme ai suoi dèi domestici, che se ne andarono insieme agli dèi del giardino e del campo e della foresta. Il Vecchio della Foresta era troppo vecchio; stava già morendo. Si dice giustamente, in un certo senso, che Pan morì perché nacque Cristo. È quasi altrettanto vero, in un altro senso, che gli uomini seppero che Cristo era nato perché Pan era già morto. Un vuoto fu prodotto dallo svanire dell’intera mitologia dell’umanità, che sarebbe rimasta asfissiata come in un vacuum se non fosse stata riempita di teologia. Ma il punto, per il momento, è che la mitologia non avrebbe potuto durare come una teologia in nessun caso. La teologia è pensiero, che vi si consenta o meno. La mitologia non fu mai pensiero, e nessuno poteva davvero consentirvi o dissentirne. Era un mero stato d’animo di incanto, e quando lo stato d’animo se ne andò non poté essere recuperato. Gli uomini non solo cessarono di credere negli dèi, ma compresero di non averci mai creduto. Ne avevano cantato le lodi; avevano danzato attorno ai loro altari. Avevano suonato il flauto; avevano fatto la parte dello sciocco.
Così scese il crepuscolo sull’Arcadia e le ultime note della zampogna risuonano tristi dal boschetto di faggi. Nei grandi poemi virgiliani c’è già qualcosa di quella tristezza; ma gli amori e gli dèi domestici indugiano in versi leggiadri come quello che il signor Belloc prese come prova di intelligenza: incipe parve puer risu cognoscere matrem. Ma per loro, come per noi, la stessa famiglia umana cominciò a sgretolarsi sotto l’organizzazione servile e l’ammassarsi nelle città. La plebe urbana divenne illuminata; vale a dire perse l’energia mentale capace di creare miti. Lungo tutto il cerchio delle città del Mediterraneo il popolo piangeva la perdita degli dèi ed era consolato con i gladiatori. E intanto qualcosa di simile stava accadendo a quell’aristocrazia intellettuale dell’antichità che era andata passeggiando e discorrendo in lungo e in largo fin dai tempi di Socrate e Pitagora. Cominciarono a tradire davanti al mondo il fatto che stavano camminando in cerchio e ripetevano la stessa cosa più e più volte. La filosofia cominciò a essere una barzelletta; cominciò anche a essere una noia. Quella innaturale semplificazione di ogni cosa in un sistema o in un altro, che abbiamo rilevato come il difetto del filosofo, rivelò a un tempo la propria finalità e la propria futilità. Tutto era virtù o tutto era felicità o tutto era fato o tutto era bene o tutto era male; comunque, tutto era tutto e non c’era altro da dire; e così lo dissero. Ovunque i saggi erano degenerati in sofisti; cioè in retori a pagamento o in proponitori di indovinelli. È uno dei sintomi di ciò che il saggio comincia a mutarsi non solo in sofista ma in mago. Un tocco di occultismo orientale è molto apprezzato nelle case migliori. Poiché il filosofo è già un intrattenitore mondano, tanto vale che allora sia anche un prestigiatore.
Many moderns have insisted on the smallness of that Mediterranean world; and the wider horizons that might have awaited it with the discovery of the other continents. But this is an illusion, one of the many illusions of materialism. The limits that paganism had reached in Europe were the limits of human existence; at its best it had only reached the same limits anywhere else. The Roman stoics did not need any Chinamen to teach them stoicism. The Pythagoreans did not need any Hindus to teach them about recurrence or the simple life or the beauty of being a vegetarian. In so far as they could get these things from the East, they had already got rather too much of them from the East. The Syncretists were as convinced as Theosophists that all religions are really the same. And how else could they have extended philosophy merely by extending geography? It can hardly be proposed that they should learn a purer religion from the Aztecs or sit at the feet of the Incas of Peru. All the rest of the world was a welter of barbarism. It is essential to recognise that the Roman Empire was recognised as the highest achievement of the human race; and also as the broadest. A dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal amphitheatres and aqueducts. Man could do no more.
For it was not the message blazed on the Babylonian wall, that one king was found wanting or his one kingdom given to a stranger. It was no such good news as the news of invasion and conquest. There was nothing left that could conquer Rome; but there was also nothing left that could improve it. It was the strongest thing that was growing weak. It was the best thing that was going to the bad. It is necessary to insist again and again that many civilisations had met in one civilisation of the Mediterranean sea; that it was already universal with a stale and sterile universality. The peoples had pooled their resources and still there was not enough. The empires had gone into partnership and they were still bankrupt. No philosopher who was really philosophical could think anything except that, in that central sea, the wave of the world had risen to its highest, seeming to touch the stars. But the wave was already stooping; for it was only the wave of the world.
That mythology and that philosophy into which paganism has already been analysed had thus both of them been drained most literally to the dregs. If with the multiplication of magic the third department, which we have called the demons, was even increasingly active, it was never anything but destructive. There remains only the fourth element or rather the first; that which had been in a sense forgotten because it was the first. I mean the primary and overpowering yet impalpable impression that the universe after all has one origin and one aim; and because it has an aim must have an author. What became of this great truth in the background of men’s minds, at this time, it is perhaps more difficult to determine. Some of the Stoics undoubtedly saw it more and more clearly as the clouds of mythology cleared and thinned away; and great men among them did much even to the last to lay the foundations of a concept of the moral unity of the world. The Jews still held their secret certainty of it jealously behind high fences of exclusiveness; yet it is intensely characteristic of the society and the situation that some fashionable figures, especially fashionable ladies, actually embraced Judaism. But in the case of many others I fancy there entered at this point a new negation. Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees. Lucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavoured to substitute Evolution for God, had already dangled before men’s eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos. But it was not his strong poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it possible for men to entertain such a vision. It was something in the sense of impotence and despair with which men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp. They could easily believe that even creation itself was not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight. They could fancy that all the stars were falling stars; and that the very pillars of their own solemn porticos were bowed under a sort of gradual deluge. To men in that mood there was a reason for atheism that is in some sense reasonable. Mythology might fade and philosophy might stiffen; but if behind these things there was a reality, surely that reality might have sustained things as they sank. There was no God; if there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He would have moved and saved the world.
The life of the great civilisation went on with dreary industry and even with dreary festivity. It was the end of the world, and the worst of it was that it need never end. A convenient compromise had been made between all the multitudinous myths and religions of the Empire; that each group should worship freely and merely live a sort of official flourish of thanks to the tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense to him under his official title of Divus. Naturally there was no difficulty about that; or rather it was a long time before the world realised that there ever had been even a trivial difficulty anywhere. The members of some Eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. The incident occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seem quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun. But it was not the strange story to which anybody paid any particular attention; people in that world had seen queer religions enough to fill a madhouse. It was something in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation. They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military; they moved together and were very absolute about who and what was really a part of their little system; and about what they said. However mildly, there was a ring like iron. Men used to many mythologies and moralities could make no analysis of the mystery, except the curious conjecture that they meant what they said. All attempts to make them see reason in the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor’s statue seemed to be spoken to deaf men. It was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth; it was a difference of substance to the touch. Those who touched their foundation fancied they had struck a rock.
With a strange rapidity, like the changes of a dream, the proportions of things seemed to change in their presence. Before most men knew what had happened, these few men were palpably present. They were important enough to be ignored. People became suddenly silent about them and walked stiffly past them. We see a new scene, in which the world has drawn its skirts away from these men and women and they stand in the centre of a great space like lepers. The scene changes again and the great space where they stand is overhung on every side with a cloud of witnesses, interminable terraces full of faces looking down towards them intently; for strange things are happening to them. New tortures have been invented for the madmen who have brought good news. That sad and weary society seems almost to find a new energy in establishing its first religious persecution. Nobody yet knows very clearly why that level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst; but they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to revolve round them. And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.
Molti moderni hanno insistito sull’angustia di quel mondo mediterraneo; e sugli orizzonti più vasti che avrebbero potuto attenderlo con la scoperta degli altri continenti. Ma questa è un’illusione, una delle tante illusioni del materialismo. I limiti che il paganesimo aveva toccato in Europa erano i limiti dell’esistenza umana; nel suo momento migliore aveva toccato quei medesimi limiti anche altrove. Gli stoici romani non avevano bisogno di alcun cinese per imparare lo stoicismo. I pitagorici non avevano bisogno di alcun indù per apprendere la dottrina del ricorso, o la vita semplice, o la bellezza dell’essere vegetariani. Nella misura in cui potevano attingere queste cose dall’Oriente, ne avevano già attinte anche troppe dall’Oriente. I sincretisti erano convinti quanto i teosofi che tutte le religioni siano in fondo la stessa cosa. E come mai avrebbero potuto ampliare la filosofia semplicemente ampliando la geografia? Difficilmente si potrebbe proporre che imparassero una religione più pura dagli aztechi, o si mettessero a sedere ai piedi degli incas del Perù. Tutto il resto del mondo era un guazzabuglio di barbarie. È essenziale riconoscere che l’Impero romano era riconosciuto come la più alta conquista della razza umana; e insieme come la più ampia. Un segreto tremendo pareva scritto quasi in oscuri geroglifici attraverso quelle possenti opere di marmo e di pietra, quei colossali anfiteatri e acquedotti. L’uomo non poteva fare di più.
Poiché non era il messaggio fiammeggiante sulla parete babilonese, che un solo re era stato trovato manchevole o il suo unico regno consegnato a uno straniero. Non era una notizia così buona come la notizia di un’invasione e di una conquista. Non restava più nulla che potesse conquistare Roma; ma non restava neppure nulla che potesse migliorarla. Era la cosa più forte che stava indebolendosi. Era la cosa migliore che stava andando in rovina. È necessario insistere ancora e ancora sul fatto che molte civiltà si erano incontrate in un’unica civiltà del mare mediterraneo; che essa era già universale di un’universalità stantia e sterile. I popoli avevano messo in comune le loro risorse, e non bastava ancora. Gli imperi si erano associati, ed erano tuttavia in bancarotta. Nessun filosofo che fosse davvero filosofico poteva pensare altro se non che, in quel mare centrale, l’onda del mondo si era levata al suo culmine, quasi a sfiorare le stelle. Ma l’onda era già in declino; poiché non era che l’onda del mondo.
Quella mitologia e quella filosofia nelle quali il paganesimo è stato già analizzato erano state così entrambe prosciugate, nel senso più letterale, fino alla feccia. Se con il moltiplicarsi della magia il terzo dipartimento, che abbiamo chiamato dei demoni, si faceva perfino sempre più attivo, non fu mai altro che distruttivo. Rimane soltanto il quarto elemento, o piuttosto il primo; quello che in un certo senso era stato dimenticato proprio perché era il primo. Intendo l’impressione primaria e soverchiante, eppure impalpabile, che l’universo abbia, dopo tutto, una sola origine e un solo fine; e, poiché ha un fine, debba avere un autore. Che ne sia stato di questa grande verità sullo sfondo delle menti umane, in quel tempo, è forse più difficile stabilire. Alcuni fra gli stoici indubbiamente la videro sempre più chiaramente man mano che le nubi della mitologia si diradavano e si assottigliavano; e uomini grandi tra loro fecero molto, fino all’ultimo, per gettare le fondamenta di un concetto dell’unità morale del mondo. Gli ebrei serbavano ancora gelosamente la loro segreta certezza di essa, dietro alte barriere di esclusivismo; eppure è quanto mai caratteristico della società e della situazione che alcune figure alla moda, e specialmente alcune dame alla moda, abbracciassero davvero il giudaismo. Ma nel caso di molti altri m’immagino che a questo punto entrasse in scena una nuova negazione. L’ateismo divenne realmente possibile in quel tempo anormale; poiché l’ateismo è anormalità. Non è soltanto la negazione di un dogma. È il rovesciamento di un presupposto subcosciente nell’anima; il senso che vi sia un significato e una direzione nel mondo che essa contempla. Lucrezio, il primo evoluzionista che si sforzò di sostituire l’Evoluzione a Dio, aveva già fatto danzare dinanzi agli occhi degli uomini la sua danza di atomi scintillanti, per la quale concepiva il cosmo come creato dal caos. Ma non fu la sua vigorosa poesia né la sua triste filosofia, a quanto immagino, a rendere possibile agli uomini l’accogliere una simile visione. Fu qualcosa nel senso d’impotenza e di disperazione con cui gli uomini scuotevano invano i pugni contro le stelle, mentre vedevano tutta la migliore opera dell’umanità affondare lentamente e senza scampo in una palude. Potevano facilmente credere che perfino la creazione stessa non fosse una creazione ma una caduta perpetua, quando vedevano che la più grave e la più degna di tutte le creazioni umane precipitava per il proprio peso. Potevano fantasticare che tutte le stelle fossero stelle cadenti; e che le colonne stesse dei loro solenni porticati si piegassero sotto una specie di diluvio graduale. Per uomini in tale stato d’animo vi era una ragione per l’ateismo che è in un certo senso ragionevole. La mitologia poteva dileguarsi e la filosofia poteva irrigidirsi; ma se dietro queste cose vi era una realtà, certo quella realtà avrebbe potuto sorreggere le cose mentre affondavano. Non c’era Dio; se ci fosse stato un Dio, di certo questo era proprio il momento in cui Egli si sarebbe mosso e avrebbe salvato il mondo.
La vita della grande civiltà proseguiva con tetra operosità e persino con tetra festosità. Era la fine del mondo, e il peggio era che non aveva alcuna necessità di finire mai. Un comodo compromesso era stato stipulato fra tutti i molteplici miti e le religioni dell’Impero: che ciascun gruppo adorasse liberamente e si limitasse a vivere una sorta di ufficiale ostentazione di ringraziamento verso il tollerante Imperatore, gettando un po’ d’incenso in suo onore sotto il suo titolo ufficiale di Divus. Naturalmente non v’era alcuna difficoltà in ciò; o meglio passò lungo tempo prima che il mondo si accorgesse che vi fosse mai stata, in qualche luogo, anche una difficoltà da nulla. I membri di una qualche setta orientale, o società segreta, o quel che fosse, sembravano aver fatto una scenata da qualche parte; nessuno riusciva a immaginare perché. L’incidente si ripeté una volta o due e cominciò a suscitare un’irritazione sproporzionata alla sua insignificanza. Non era esattamente ciò che quei provinciali dicevano; per quanto, s’intende, suonasse abbastanza strano. Sembravano dire che Dio era morto e che essi stessi lo avevano visto morire. Poteva essere una delle molte manie prodotte dalla disperazione dell’epoca; solo che non parevano particolarmente disperati. Sembravano innaturalmente gioiosi al riguardo, e ne davano per ragione che la morte di Dio aveva permesso loro di mangiarlo e di berne il sangue. Secondo altri resoconti Dio non era propriamente morto, dopo tutto; s’insinuava per la sbigottita immaginazione una sorta di fantastica processione del funerale di Dio, durante la quale il sole si faceva nero, ma che terminava con l’onnipotenza defunta che irrompeva fuori dal sepolcro e risorgeva come il sole. Ma non era la strana storia ciò a cui alcuno prestasse una particolare attenzione; la gente di quel mondo aveva visto religioni bizzarre a sufficienza per riempire un manicomio. Era qualcosa nel tono di quei pazzi e nel loro tipo di formazione. Erano un’accozzaglia raccogliticcia di barbari e di schiavi e di gente povera e insignificante; ma la loro formazione era militare; si muovevano insieme ed erano assai categorici su chi e che cosa facesse realmente parte del loro piccolo sistema; e su ciò che dicevano. Per quanto blandamente, vi era in essi un suono come di ferro. Uomini avvezzi a molte mitologie e a molte morali non riuscivano a fare alcuna analisi del mistero, se non la curiosa congettura che intendessero ciò che dicevano. Tutti i tentativi di far loro intendere ragione nella questione perfettamente semplice della statua dell’Imperatore parevano rivolti a sordi. Era come se un nuovo metallo meteorico fosse caduto sulla terra; era una differenza di sostanza al tatto. Coloro che toccavano il loro fondamento credevano d’aver urtato una roccia.
Con una strana rapidità, come i mutamenti di un sogno, le proporzioni delle cose parevano mutare in loro presenza. Prima che la maggior parte degli uomini si accorgesse di ciò che era accaduto, quei pochi uomini erano palpabilmente presenti. Erano abbastanza importanti da essere ignorati. La gente d’un tratto ammutoliva sul loro conto e passava loro accanto impettita. Vediamo una nuova scena, in cui il mondo ha ritratto le proprie vesti lontano da questi uomini e da queste donne, ed essi stanno al centro di un grande spazio come lebbrosi. La scena muta di nuovo e il grande spazio in cui essi stanno è sovrastato da ogni lato da una nube di testimoni, interminabili gradinate gremite di volti che li guardano dall’alto intensamente; poiché cose strane stanno accadendo loro. Nuove torture sono state inventate per i pazzi che hanno recato una buona novella. Quella società triste e stanca sembra quasi trovare una nuova energia nell’istituire la sua prima persecuzione religiosa. Nessuno ancora sa con precisione perché quel mondo così piatto abbia in tal modo perduto l’equilibrio a proposito della gente in mezzo a sé; ma essi stanno innaturalmente immobili mentre l’arena e il mondo sembrano ruotare loro intorno. E in quell’ora oscura risplendette su di essi una luce che non è mai stata oscurata; un bianco fuoco avvinghiato a quel gruppo come una fosforescenza ultraterrena, che divampa lungo il suo cammino attraverso i crepuscoli della storia e confonde ogni sforzo di confonderlo con le nebbie della mitologia e della teoria; quel dardo di luce o di folgore con cui il mondo stesso l’ha colpito e isolato e coronato; con cui i suoi stessi nemici l’hanno reso più illustre e i suoi stessi critici l’hanno reso più inesplicabile; l’aureola d’odio intorno alla Chiesa di Dio.
I
THE GOD IN THE CAVE
This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which popular science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery has really found archaic drawings of animals. The second half of human history, which was like a new creation of the world, also begins in a cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that animals were again present; for it was a cave used as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem; who still drive their cattle into such holes and caverns at night. It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle when the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was here beneath the very feet of the passers-by, in a cellar under the very floor of the world, that Jesus Christ was born. But in that second creation there was indeed something symbolical in the roots of the primeval rock or the horns of the prehistoric herd. God also was a Cave-Man, and had also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously coloured, upon the wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life.
A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded. It is at least like a jest in this, that it is something which the scientific critic cannot see. He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly and almost derisively exaggerated; and mildly condemns as improbable something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible; as something that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true. When that contrast between the cosmic creation and the little local infancy has been repeated, reiterated, underlined, emphasised, exulted in, sung, shouted, roared, not to say howled, in a hundred thousand hymns, carols, rhymes, rituals, pictures, poems, and popular sermons, it may be suggested that we hardly need a higher critic to draw our attention to something a little odd about it; especially one of the sort that seems to take a long time to see a joke, even his own joke. But about this contrast and combination of ideas one thing may be said here, because it is relevant to the whole thesis of this book. The sort of modern critic of whom I speak is generally much impressed with the importance of education in life and the importance of psychology in education. That sort of man is never tired of telling us that first impressions fix character by the law of causation; and he will become quite nervous if a child’s visual sense is poisoned by the wrong colours on a golliwog or his nervous system prematurely shaken by a cacophonous rattle. Yet he will think us very narrow-minded, if we say that this is exactly why there really is a difference between being brought up as a Christian and being brought up as a Jew or a Moslem or an atheist. The difference is that every Catholic child has learned from pictures, and even every Protestant child from stories, this incredible combination of contrasted ideas as one of the very first impressions on his mind. It is not merely a theological difference. It is a psychological difference which can outlast any theologies. It really is, as that sort of scientist loves to say about anything, incurable. Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection; for him there will always be some savour of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God. But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined. They would not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman, even for Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians, because we are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase, altered human nature. There is really a difference between the man who knows it and the man who does not. It may not be a difference of moral worth, for the Moslem or the Jew might be worthier according to his lights; but it is a plain fact about the crossing of two particular lights, the conjunction of two stars in our particular horoscope. Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and infancy, do definitely make a sort of epigram which a million repetitions cannot turn into a platitude. It is not unreasonable to call it unique. Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet.
Here begins, it is needless to say, another mighty influence for the humanisation of Christendom. If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect (I could never at any stage of my opinions imagine why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. When I was a boy a more Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon. But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You can not suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.
I
IL DIO NELLA CAVERNA
Questo abbozzo della vicenda umana cominciava in una caverna; la caverna che la scienza divulgativa associa all’uomo delle caverne e nella quale la scoperta pratica ha realmente rinvenuto disegni arcaici di animali. Anche la seconda metà della storia umana, che fu come una nuova creazione del mondo, comincia in una caverna. C’è persino un’ombra di tale fantasia nel fatto che di nuovo erano presenti degli animali; poiché era una caverna usata come stalla dai montanari degli altopiani intorno a Betlemme, i quali ancor oggi spingono il loro bestiame dentro simili buche e antri di notte. Fu qui che una coppia senza tetto si era intrufolata sottoterra con gli animali quando le porte del gremito caravanserraglio le erano state chiuse in faccia; e fu qui, proprio sotto i piedi dei passanti, in una cantina sotto il pavimento stesso del mondo, che nacque Gesù Cristo. Ma in quella seconda creazione c’era davvero qualcosa di simbolico nelle radici della roccia primordiale o nelle corna della mandria preistorica. Anche Dio fu un Uomo della Caverna, e aveva anch’egli tracciato strane figure di creature, curiosamente colorate, sulla parete del mondo; ma le immagini che egli fece erano prese vita.
Una massa di leggenda e di letteratura, che cresce e non avrà mai fine, ha ripetuto e variato in ogni tono quell’unico paradosso: che le mani che avevano fatto il sole e le stelle erano troppo piccole per giungere alle enormi teste del bestiame. Su questo paradosso, potremmo quasi dire su questa facezia, si fonda tutta la letteratura della nostra fede. Somiglia almeno a una facezia in questo, che è qualcosa che il critico scientifico non riesce a vedere. Egli spiega faticosamente la difficoltà che noi abbiamo sempre esagerato con aria di sfida e quasi di scherno; e condanna blandamente come improbabile qualcosa che noi abbiamo quasi follemente esaltato come incredibile; come qualcosa che sarebbe troppo bello per essere vero, se non fosse che è vero. Quando quel contrasto tra la creazione cosmica e la piccola infanzia locale è stato ripetuto, reiterato, sottolineato, rimarcato, esultato, cantato, gridato, ruggito, per non dire ululato, in centomila inni, canti natalizi, filastrocche, riti, immagini, poesie e sermoni popolari, si può supporre che non abbiamo certo bisogno di un critico superiore per attirare la nostra attenzione su qualcosa di un po’ strano al riguardo; specialmente uno di quel genere che pare impiegare molto tempo a cogliere una battuta, persino la propria. Ma su questo contrasto e questa combinazione di idee si può dire qui una cosa, perché è pertinente all’intera tesi di questo libro. Il tipo di critico moderno di cui parlo è generalmente assai colpito dall’importanza dell’educazione nella vita e dall’importanza della psicologia nell’educazione. Quel tipo d’uomo non si stanca mai di dirci che le prime impressioni fissano il carattere secondo la legge di causalità; e diventerà del tutto nervoso se il senso visivo di un bambino viene avvelenato dai colori sbagliati su un pupazzo o il suo sistema nervoso scosso prematuramente da un sonaglio cacofonico. Eppure ci giudicherà molto meschini se diciamo che è proprio per questo che c’è davvero una differenza tra l’essere cresciuti come cristiani e l’essere cresciuti come ebrei, o musulmani, o atei. La differenza è che ogni bambino cattolico ha appreso dalle immagini, e persino ogni bambino protestante dalle storie, questa incredibile combinazione di idee contrastanti come una delle primissime impressioni della sua mente. Non è soltanto una differenza teologica. È una differenza psicologica che può sopravvivere a qualsiasi teologia. È davvero, come quel genere di scienziato ama dire di qualunque cosa, incurabile. Ogni agnostico o ateo la cui infanzia abbia conosciuto un vero Natale ha per sempre poi, che gli piaccia o no, un’associazione nella mente tra due idee che la maggior parte dell’umanità deve considerare remote l’una dall’altra: l’idea di un neonato e l’idea di una forza ignota che sostiene le stelle. I suoi istinti e la sua immaginazione possono ancora collegarle, quando la sua ragione non vede più la necessità del nesso; per lui ci sarà sempre un qualche sapore di religione intorno alla semplice immagine di una madre e di un bambino; qualche accenno di misericordia e di dolcezza nella semplice menzione del terribile nome di Dio. Ma le due idee non sono naturalmente né necessariamente combinate. Non sarebbero necessariamente combinate per un antico greco o per un cinese, nemmeno per Aristotele o per Confucio. Non è più inevitabile collegare Dio a un infante di quanto lo sia collegare la gravitazione a un gattino. Ciò è stato creato nelle nostre menti dal Natale perché siamo cristiani, perché siamo cristiani psicologici anche quando non lo siamo teologici. In altre parole, questa combinazione di idee ha, nella frase tanto contestata, decisamente mutato la natura umana. C’è realmente una differenza tra l’uomo che lo sa e l’uomo che non lo sa. Può non essere una differenza di valore morale, poiché il musulmano o l’ebreo potrebbe essere più degno secondo la sua luce; ma è un fatto lampante circa l’incrocio di due luci particolari, la congiunzione di due stelle nel nostro particolare oroscopo. Onnipotenza e impotenza, ovvero divinità e infanzia, formano davvero una sorta di epigramma che un milione di ripetizioni non può ridurre a un luogo comune. Non è irragionevole chiamarlo unico. Betlemme è enfaticamente un luogo dove gli estremi si incontrano.
Qui comincia, non c’è bisogno di dirlo, un’altra possente influenza per l’umanizzazione della cristianità. Se il mondo volesse ciò che si chiama un aspetto non controverso del cristianesimo, sceglierebbe probabilmente il Natale. Eppure esso è manifestamente legato a quello che si suppone sia un aspetto controverso (non ho mai potuto, in nessuna fase delle mie opinioni, immaginare perché): il rispetto tributato alla Beata Vergine. Quando ero ragazzo, una generazione più puritana obiettava a una statua sulla mia chiesa parrocchiale che rappresentava la Vergine e il Bambino. Dopo molte controversie, scesero a un compromesso portando via il Bambino. Si penserebbe che ciò fosse ancora più corrotto di mariolatria, a meno che la madre non venisse ritenuta meno pericolosa una volta privata di una sorta di arma. Ma la difficoltà pratica è anche una parabola. Non si può scalpellare via la statua di una madre da tutto ciò che circonda quella di un bambino appena nato. Non si può sospendere a mezz’aria il bambino appena nato; anzi, non si può affatto avere davvero una statua di un bambino appena nato. Similmente, non si può sospendere nel vuoto l’idea di un bambino appena nato, né pensarlo senza pensare a sua madre. Non si può far visita al bambino senza far visita alla madre; non si può, nella comune vita umana, accostarsi al bambino se non attraverso la madre. Se dobbiamo pensare a Cristo sotto questo aspetto, l’altra idea segue come segue nella storia. Dobbiamo o lasciare Cristo fuori dal Natale, o il Natale fuori da Cristo, oppure dobbiamo ammettere, non fosse che come lo ammettiamo in un vecchio dipinto, che quelle sante teste sono troppo vicine l’una all’altra perché le aureole non si mescolino e si incrocino.
It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing had happened in that fold or crack in the great grey hills except that the whole universe had been turned inside out. I mean that all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing were now turned inward to the smallest. The very image will suggest all that multitudinous marvel of converging eyes that makes so much of the coloured Catholic imagery like a peacock’s tail. But it is true in a sense that God who had been only a circumference was seen as a centre; and a centre is infinitely small. It is true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal. The faith becomes, in more ways than one, a religion of little things. But its traditions in art and literature and popular fable have quite sufficiently attested, as has been said, this particular paradox of the divine being in the cradle. Perhaps they have not so clearly emphasised the significance of the divine being in the cave. Curiously enough, indeed, tradition has not very clearly emphasised the cave. It is a familiar fact that the Bethlehem scene has been represented in every possible setting of time and country, of landscape and architecture; and it is a wholly happy and admirable fact that men have conceived it as quite different according to their different individual traditions and tastes. But while all have realised that it was a stable, not so many have realised that it was a cave. Some critics have even been so silly as to suppose that there was some contradiction between the stable and the cave; in which case they cannot know much about caves or stables in Palestine. As they see differences that are not there, it is needless to add that they do not see differences that are there. When a well-known critic says, for instance, that Christ being born in a rocky cavern is like Mithras having sprung alive out of a rock, it sounds like a parody upon comparative religion. There is such a thing as the point of a story, even if it is a story in the sense of a lie. And the notion of a hero appearing, like Pallas from the brain of Zeus, mature and without a mother, is obviously the very opposite of the idea of a god being born like an ordinary baby and entirely dependent on a mother. Whichever ideal we might prefer, we should surely see that they are contrary ideals. It is as stupid to connect them because they both contain a substance called stone as to identify the punishment of the Deluge with the baptism in the Jordan because they both contain a substance called water. Whether as a myth or a mystery, Christ was obviously conceived as born in a hole in the rocks primarily because it marked the position of one outcast and homeless. Nevertheless it is true, as I have said, that the cave has not been so commonly or so clearly used as a symbol as the other realities that surrounded the first Christmas.
And the reason for this also refers to the very nature of that new world. It was in a sense the difficulty of a new dimension. Christ was not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set up above the sight-seer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of sight; and that is an idea very difficult to express in most modes of artistic expression. It is the idea of simultaneous happenings on different levels of life. Something like it might have been attempted in the more archaic and decorative medieval art. But the more the artists learned of realism and perspective, the less they could depict at once the angels in the heavens and the shepherds on the hills, and the glory in the darkness that was under the hills. Perhaps it could have been best conveyed by the characteristic expedient of some of the medieval guilds, when they wheeled about the streets a theatre with three stages one above the other, with heaven above the earth and hell under the earth. But in the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the earth.
There is in that alone the touch of a revolution, as of the world turned upside down. It would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or anything new, about the change which this conception of a deity born like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole conception of law and its duties to the poor and outcast. It is profoundly true to say that after that moment there could be no slaves. There could be and were people bearing that legal title, until the Church was strong enough to weed them out, but there could be no more of the pagan repose in the mere advantage to the state of keeping it a servile state. Individuals became important, in a sense in which no instruments can be important. A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man’s end. All this popular and fraternal element in the story has been rightly attached by tradition to the episode of the Shepherds; the hinds who found themselves talking face to face with the princes of heaven. But there is another aspect of the popular element as represented by the shepherds which has not perhaps been so fully developed; and which is more directly relevant here.
Men of the people, like the shepherds, men of the popular tradition, had everywhere been the makers of the mythologies. It was they who had felt most directly, with least check or chill from philosophy or the corrupt cults of civilisation, the need we have already considered; the images that were adventures of the imagination; the mythology that was a sort of search; the tempting and tantalising hints of something half-human in nature; the dumb significance of seasons and special places. They had best understood that the soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of a story is a personality. But rationalism had already begun to rot away these really irrational though imaginative treasures of the peasant; even as systematic slavery had eaten the peasant out of house and home. Upon all such peasantries everywhere there was descending a dusk and twilight of disappointment, in the hour when these few men discovered what they sought. Everywhere else Arcadia was fading from the forest. Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep. And though no man knew it, the hour was near which was to end and to fulfil all things; and though no man heard it, there was one far-off cry in an unknown tongue upon the heaving wilderness of the mountains. The shepherds had found their Shepherd.
Si potrebbe suggerire, con un’immagine alquanto violenta, che nulla fosse accaduto in quella piega o fenditura tra le grandi colline grigie, se non che l’universo intero era stato rovesciato come un guanto. Voglio dire che tutti gli occhi della meraviglia e dell’adorazione, che erano stati rivolti all’infuori verso la cosa più grande, ora erano rivolti all’interno verso la più piccola. La stessa immagine suggerirà tutta quella moltitudine mirabile di occhi convergenti che rende buona parte dell’iconografia cattolica variopinta simile a una coda di pavone. Ma è vero, in un certo senso, che Dio, il quale era stato soltanto una circonferenza, fu visto come un centro; e un centro è infinitamente piccolo. È vero che la spirale spirituale d’ora innanzi opera all’interno anziché all’esterno, e in tal senso è centripeta e non centrifuga. La fede diventa, in più di un modo, una religione delle piccole cose. Ma le sue tradizioni nell’arte, nella letteratura e nella favola popolare hanno attestato a sufficienza, come si è detto, questo particolare paradosso della divinità nella culla. Forse non hanno sottolineato con altrettanta chiarezza il significato della divinità nella grotta. Cosa abbastanza curiosa, in verità, la tradizione non ha posto in gran risalto la grotta. È un fatto notorio che la scena di Betlemme sia stata rappresentata in ogni possibile ambientazione di tempo e di paese, di paesaggio e di architettura; ed è un fatto del tutto felice e ammirevole che gli uomini l’abbiano concepita in modo assai diverso secondo le loro diverse tradizioni e i loro diversi gusti individuali. Ma mentre tutti hanno compreso che si trattava di una stalla, non altrettanti hanno compreso che si trattava di una grotta. Alcuni critici sono stati perfino tanto sciocchi da supporre che vi fosse una qualche contraddizione tra la stalla e la grotta; nel qual caso non devono sapere granché di grotte o di stalle in Palestina. Poiché vedono differenze che non ci sono, è superfluo aggiungere che non vedono le differenze che ci sono. Quando un critico celebre afferma, per esempio, che Cristo nato in una caverna rocciosa somiglia a Mitra sbucato vivo da una roccia, la cosa suona come una parodia della religione comparata. Esiste una cosa come il senso di una storia, anche quando è una storia nel senso di una menzogna. E l’idea di un eroe che appare, come Pallade dal cervello di Zeus, adulto e senza madre, è ovviamente l’esatto contrario dell’idea di un dio che nasce come un bambino qualunque e interamente dipendente da una madre. Quale che sia l’ideale che potremmo preferire, dovremmo di certo vedere che si tratta di ideali contrari. È tanto stolto collegarli perché entrambi contengono una sostanza chiamata pietra, quanto identificare il castigo del Diluvio con il battesimo nel Giordano perché entrambi contengono una sostanza chiamata acqua. Sia come mito sia come mistero, Cristo fu ovviamente concepito come nato in un buco tra le rocce anzitutto perché ciò segnava la condizione di un reietto e di un senzatetto. Ciò nondimeno è vero, come ho detto, che la grotta non è stata così comunemente o così chiaramente usata come simbolo quanto le altre realtà che circondavano il primo Natale.
E la ragione di questo si riferisce anch’essa alla natura stessa di quel nuovo mondo. Era, in un certo senso, la difficoltà di una nuova dimensione. Cristo non solo nacque al livello del mondo, ma perfino più in basso del mondo. Il primo atto del dramma divino fu recitato non solo su nessun palcoscenico eretto al di sopra dello spettatore, ma su una scena buia e velata da tende, sprofondata fuori dalla vista; e questa è un’idea assai difficile da esprimere nella maggior parte dei modi dell’espressione artistica. È l’idea di avvenimenti simultanei su diversi piani della vita. Qualcosa di simile avrebbe potuto essere tentato nell’arte medievale più arcaica e decorativa. Ma quanto più gli artisti apprendevano il realismo e la prospettiva, tanto meno potevano raffigurare a un tempo gli angeli nei cieli e i pastori sulle colline, e la gloria nelle tenebre che stava sotto le colline. Forse la cosa avrebbe potuto essere resa al meglio dal caratteristico espediente di alcune corporazioni medievali, quando facevano girare per le strade un teatro con tre palchi l’uno sopra l’altro, con il paradiso sopra la terra e l’inferno sotto la terra. Ma nell’enigma di Betlemme era il paradiso a stare sotto la terra.
In questo soltanto c’è il tocco di una rivoluzione, come di un mondo capovolto. Sarebbe vano tentare di dire alcunché di adeguato, o alcunché di nuovo, sul mutamento che questa concezione di una divinità nata come un reietto o addirittura un fuorilegge produsse sull’intera concezione della legge e dei suoi doveri verso i poveri e i reietti. È profondamente vero affermare che dopo quel momento non poterono più esservi schiavi. Poterono esservi, e vi furono, persone che portavano quel titolo giuridico, finché la Chiesa non fu abbastanza forte da estirparle, ma non poté più esservi quel pagano acquietarsi nel mero vantaggio che lo Stato traeva dal mantenersi Stato servile. Gli individui divennero importanti, in un senso in cui nessuno strumento può essere importante. Un uomo non poteva essere un mezzo per un fine, in ogni caso non per il fine di un altro uomo. Tutto questo elemento popolare e fraterno della storia è stato giustamente collegato dalla tradizione all’episodio dei Pastori; i bifolchi che si trovarono a parlare faccia a faccia con i principi del cielo. Ma vi è un altro aspetto dell’elemento popolare, quale è rappresentato dai pastori, che forse non è stato sviluppato con altrettanta pienezza; e che qui è più direttamente pertinente.
Gli uomini del popolo, come i pastori, gli uomini della tradizione popolare, erano stati ovunque i creatori delle mitologie. Erano stati loro a sentire nel modo più diretto, con il minimo freno o gelo da parte della filosofia o dei culti corrotti della civiltà, quel bisogno che abbiamo già considerato; le immagini che erano avventure dell’immaginazione; la mitologia che era una sorta di ricerca; i suggerimenti tentatori e stuzzicanti di qualcosa di semi-umano nella natura; il muto significato delle stagioni e dei luoghi particolari. Avevano compreso meglio di ogni altro che l’anima di un paesaggio è una storia e l’anima di una storia è una personalità. Ma il razionalismo aveva già cominciato a far marcire questi tesori del contadino, davvero irrazionali eppure ricchi di immaginazione; così come la schiavitù sistematica aveva divorato il contadino, cacciandolo di casa e dal focolare. Su tutte queste genti contadine, ovunque, calava un crepuscolo e una penombra di delusione, nell’ora in cui questi pochi uomini scoprivano ciò che cercavano. Dappertutto altrove l’Arcadia stava dileguando dalla foresta. Pan era morto e i pastori erano dispersi come pecore. E benché nessuno lo sapesse, era vicina l’ora che doveva porre fine a tutte le cose e adempierle; e benché nessuno la udisse, vi era un grido lontano in una lingua sconosciuta sull’ondeggiante deserto delle montagne. I pastori avevano trovato il loro Pastore.
And the thing they found was of a kind with the things they sought. The populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity need not disdain the limits of time and space. And the barbarian who conceived the crudest fancy about the sun being stolen and hidden in a box, or the wildest myth about the god being rescued and his enemy deceived with a stone, was nearer to the secret of the cave and knew more about the crisis of the world, than all those in the circle of cities round the Mediterranean who had become content with cold abstractions or cosmopolitan generalisations; than all those who were spinning thinner and thinner threads of thought out of the transcendentalism of Plato or the orientalism of Pythagoras. The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true. Since that hour no mythologies have been made in the world. Mythology is a search.
We all know that the popular presentation of this popular story, in so many miracle plays and carols, has given to the shepherds the costumes, the language, and the landscape of the separate English and European countrysides. We all know that one shepherd will talk in a Somerset dialect or another talk of driving his sheep from Conway towards Clyde. Most of us know by this time how true is that error, how wise, how artistic, how intensely Christian and Catholic is that anachronism. But some who have seen it in these scenes of medieval rusticity have perhaps not seen it in another sort of poetry, which it is sometimes the fashion to call artificial rather than artistic. I fear that many modern critics will see only a faded classicism in the fact that men like Crashaw and Herrick conceived the shepherds of Bethlehem under the form of the shepherds of Virgil. Yet they were profoundly right; and in turning their Bethlehem play into a Latin Eclogue they took up one of the most important links in human history. Virgil, as we have already seen, does stand for all that saner heathenism that had over-thrown the insane heathenism of human sacrifice; but the very fact that even the Virgilian virtues and the sane heathenism were in incurable decay is the whole problem to which the revelation to the shepherds is the solution. If the world had ever had the chance to grow weary of being demoniac, it might have been healed merely by becoming sane. But if it had grown weary even of being sane, what was to happen, except what did happen? Nor is it false to conceive the Arcadian shepherd of the Eclogues as rejoicing in what did happen. One of the Eclogues has even been claimed as a prophecy of what did happen. But it is quite as much in the tone and incidental diction of the great poet that we feel the potential sympathy with the great event; and even in their own human phrases the voices of the Virgilian shepherds might more than once have broken upon more than the tenderness of Italy ‘Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem.’ They might have found in that strange place all that was best in the last traditions of the Latins; and something better than a wooden idol standing up for ever for the pillar of the human family; a household god. But they and all the other mythologists would be justified in rejoicings that the event had fulfilled not merely the mysticism but the materialism of mythology. Mythology had many sins; but it had not been wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation. But something of the ancient voice that was supposed to have rung through the graves, it could cry again, ‘We have seen, he hath seen us, a visible god.’ So the ancient shepherds might have danced, and their feet have been beautiful upon the mountains, rejoicing over the philosophers. But the philosophers had also heard.
It is still a strange story, though an old one, how they came out of orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all the sages. They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things, and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion of the incomplete.
Such learned men would doubtless have come, as these learned men did come, to find themselves confirmed in much that was true in their own traditions and right in their own reasoning. Confucius would have found a new foundation for the family in the very reversal of the Holy Family; Buddha would have looked upon a new renunciation, of stars rather than jewels and divinity than royalty. These learned men would still have the right to say, or rather a new right to say, that there was truth in their old teaching. But after all these learned men would have come to learn. They would have come to complete their conceptions with something they had not yet conceived; even to balance their imperfect universe with something they might once have contradicted. Buddha would have come from his impersonal paradise to worship a person. Confucius would have come from his temples of ancestor-worship to worship a child.
We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos; that it was larger than the old cosmos. In that sense Christendom is larger than creation; as creation had been before Christ. It included things that had not been there; it also included the things that had been there. The point happens to be well illustrated in this example of Chinese piety, but it would be true of other pagan virtues or pagan beliefs. Nobody can doubt that a reasonable respect for parents is part of a gospel in which God himself was subject in childhood to earthly parents. But the other sense in which the parents were subject to him does introduce an idea that is not Confucian. The infant Christ is not like the infant Confucius; our mysticism conceives him in an immortal infancy. I do not know what Confucius would have done with the Bambino had it come to life in his arms as it did in the arms of St. Francis. But this is true in relation to all the other religions and philosophies; it is the challenge of the Church. The Church contains what the world does not contain. Life itself does not provide as she does for all sides of life. That every other single system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma. Where is the Holy child amid the Stoics and the ancestor-worshippers? Where is Our Lady of the Moslems, a woman made for no man and set above all angels? Where is St. Michael of the monks of Buddha, rider and master of the trumpets, guarding for every soldier the honour of the sword? What could St. Thomas Aquinas do with the mythology of Brahminism, he who set forth all the science and rationality and even rationalism of Christianity? Yet even if we compare Aquinas with Aristotle, at the other extreme of reason, we shall find the same sense of something added. Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas. Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn. How would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of the Manchester School? Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching peace and preventing wars. It is the same with all the modern attempts at Syncretism. They are never able to make something larger than the Creed without leaving something out. I do not mean leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the inn or the boy’s tale of battle or the hedge at the end of the field. The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is only a pantheon for pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christians were invited to set up the image of Jesus side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of Ammon. It was the refusal of the Christians that was the turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting. It was an awful and an appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realise that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
E ciò che essi trovarono era della stessa natura delle cose che cercavano. La gente comune si era sbagliata in molte cose; ma non si era sbagliata nel credere che le cose sacre potessero avere una dimora e che la divinità non dovesse sdegnare i limiti del tempo e dello spazio. E il barbaro che concepì la più rozza fantasia sul sole rubato e nascosto in una cassa, o il mito più selvaggio sul dio soccorso e sul suo nemico ingannato con una pietra, era più vicino al segreto della caverna e sapeva più cose sulla crisi del mondo di tutti coloro che, nel cerchio delle città intorno al Mediterraneo, si erano accontentati di fredde astrazioni o di generalizzazioni cosmopolite; di tutti coloro che filavano fili di pensiero sempre più sottili traendoli dal trascendentalismo di Platone o dall’orientalismo di Pitagora. Il luogo che i pastori trovarono non era un’accademia né una repubblica astratta, non era un luogo di miti allegorizzati o sezionati o spiegati o spiegati via. Era un luogo di sogni avverati. Da quell’ora non sono più stati creati miti nel mondo. La mitologia è una ricerca.
Tutti sappiamo che la rappresentazione popolare di questa storia popolare, in tanti drammi sacri e canti natalizi, ha dato ai pastori i costumi, la lingua e il paesaggio delle diverse campagne inglesi ed europee. Tutti sappiamo che un pastore parlerà in un dialetto del Somerset o un altro parlerà di spingere le sue pecore da Conway verso il Clyde. I più di noi sanno a questo punto quanto sia vero quell’errore, quanto sia saggio, quanto sia artistico, quanto intensamente cristiano e cattolico sia quell’anacronismo. Ma alcuni che l’hanno visto in queste scene di rusticità medievale forse non l’hanno visto in un’altra sorta di poesia, quella che a volte si usa chiamare artificiosa piuttosto che artistica. Temo che molti critici moderni vedranno soltanto uno stinto classicismo nel fatto che uomini come Crashaw e Herrick concepirono i pastori di Betlemme sotto la forma dei pastori di Virgilio. Eppure avevano profondamente ragione; e trasformando la loro sacra rappresentazione betlemita in un’Ecloga latina raccolsero uno degli anelli più importanti della storia umana. Virgilio, come già abbiamo visto, sta bensì per tutto quel paganesimo più sano che aveva rovesciato l’insano paganesimo del sacrificio umano; ma il fatto stesso che perfino le virtù virgiliane e il sano paganesimo fossero in inguaribile decadenza è tutto il problema di cui la rivelazione ai pastori è la soluzione. Se il mondo avesse mai avuto occasione di stancarsi dell’essere demoniaco, avrebbe potuto essere guarito semplicemente col tornare sano. Ma se si era stancato perfino dell’essere sano, che cosa poteva accadere, se non ciò che accadde? Né è falso concepire il pastore arcadico delle Ecloghe come esultante di ciò che accadde. Una delle Ecloghe è stata perfino rivendicata come profezia di ciò che accadde. Ma è altrettanto nel tono e nella dizione incidentale del grande poeta che avvertiamo la potenziale simpatia con il grande evento; e perfino nelle loro stesse frasi umane le voci dei pastori virgiliani più d’una volta avrebbero potuto rompersi in qualcosa di più della tenerezza dell’Italia: «Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem.» Essi avrebbero potuto trovare in quello strano luogo tutto il meglio delle ultime tradizioni dei Latini; e qualcosa di migliore di un idolo di legno eretto in eterno a colonna della famiglia umana: un dio domestico. Ma essi e tutti gli altri mitologi sarebbero giustificati nell’esultare per il fatto che l’evento aveva compiuto non solo il misticismo ma il materialismo della mitologia. La mitologia ebbe molti peccati; ma non si era sbagliata nell’essere carnale quanto l’Incarnazione. Ma qualcosa dell’antica voce che si supponeva avesse risuonato per le tombe, poteva gridare di nuovo: «Abbiamo veduto, egli ci ha veduti, un dio visibile.» Così gli antichi pastori avrebbero potuto danzare, e i loro piedi essere belli sui monti, esultando sopra i filosofi. Ma anche i filosofi avevano udito.
È ancora una storia strana, benché antica, di come essi vennero da terre d’oriente, coronati della maestà dei re e vestiti di qualcosa del mistero dei maghi. Quella verità che è tradizione li ha saggiamente ricordati quasi come incognite, misteriosi quanto i loro nomi misteriosi e melodiosi: Melchiorre, Gaspare, Baldassarre. Ma con essi venne tutto quel mondo di sapienza che aveva scrutato le stelle in Caldea e il sole in Persia; e non sbaglieremo se scorgiamo in loro la stessa curiosità che muove tutti i saggi. Rappresenterebbero il medesimo ideale umano se i loro nomi fossero stati davvero Confucio o Pitagora o Platone. Erano coloro che cercavano non favole ma la verità delle cose, e poiché la loro sete di verità era essa stessa una sete di Dio, anch’essi ebbero la loro ricompensa. Ma anche per comprendere quella ricompensa, dobbiamo comprendere che per la filosofia non meno che per la mitologia quella ricompensa fu il compimento dell’incompiuto.
Uomini tanto dotti sarebbero senza dubbio venuti, come questi dotti vennero, a trovarsi confermati in molto di ciò che era vero nelle loro proprie tradizioni e giusto nel loro proprio ragionare. Confucio avrebbe trovato un nuovo fondamento per la famiglia nel rovesciamento stesso della Sacra Famiglia; Budda avrebbe contemplato una nuova rinuncia, di stelle piuttosto che di gioielli e di divinità piuttosto che di regalità. Questi dotti avrebbero ancora avuto il diritto di dire, o piuttosto un nuovo diritto di dire, che vi era verità nel loro antico insegnamento. Ma dopotutto questi dotti sarebbero venuti a imparare. Sarebbero venuti a completare le loro concezioni con qualcosa che non avevano ancora concepito; perfino a bilanciare il loro imperfetto universo con qualcosa che una volta avrebbero potuto contraddire. Budda sarebbe venuto dal suo paradiso impersonale ad adorare una persona. Confucio sarebbe venuto dai suoi templi del culto degli antenati ad adorare un bambino.
Dobbiamo cogliere fin da principio questo carattere del nuovo cosmo: che esso era più grande del vecchio cosmo. In quel senso la Cristianità è più grande della creazione; come la creazione era stata prima di Cristo. Comprendeva cose che prima non c’erano; comprendeva anche le cose che c’erano state. Il punto viene ben illustrato in questo esempio di pietà cinese, ma sarebbe vero di altre virtù pagane o credenze pagane. Nessuno può dubitare che un ragionevole rispetto per i genitori sia parte di un vangelo in cui Dio stesso fu soggetto, nell’infanzia, a genitori terreni. Ma l’altro senso in cui i genitori erano soggetti a lui introduce un’idea che non è confuciana. Il Cristo infante non è come l’infante Confucio; il nostro misticismo lo concepisce in un’infanzia immortale. Non so che cosa Confucio avrebbe fatto del Bambino se esso gli fosse preso vita fra le braccia come prese vita fra le braccia di san Francesco. Ma questo è vero in rapporto a tutte le altre religioni e filosofie; è la sfida della Chiesa. La Chiesa contiene ciò che il mondo non contiene. La vita stessa non provvede come provvede lei a tutti i lati della vita. Che ogni altro singolo sistema sia angusto e insufficiente in confronto a questo; non è un vanto retorico: è un fatto reale e un dilemma reale. Dov’è il santo bambino tra gli Stoici e gli adoratori degli antenati? Dov’è la Madonna dei Musulmani, una donna fatta per nessun uomo e posta al di sopra di tutti gli angeli? Dov’è il san Michele dei monaci di Budda, cavaliere e signore delle trombe, che custodisce per ogni soldato l’onore della spada? Che cosa avrebbe potuto fare san Tommaso d’Aquino della mitologia del Brahmanesimo, lui che espose tutta la scienza e la razionalità e perfino il razionalismo del Cristianesimo? Eppure anche se paragoniamo l’Aquinate ad Aristotele, all’estremo opposto della ragione, troveremo il medesimo senso di qualcosa di aggiunto. L’Aquinate poteva comprendere le parti più logiche di Aristotele; è dubbio che Aristotele avrebbe potuto comprendere le parti più mistiche dell’Aquinate. Anche là dove a stento possiamo dire più grande il cristiano, siamo costretti a dirlo più ampio. Ma è così a qualunque filosofia o eresia o movimento moderno ci volgiamo. Come se la sarebbe cavata Francesco il Trovatore tra i Calvinisti, o del resto tra gli Utilitaristi della Scuola di Manchester? Eppure uomini come Bossuet e Pascal sapevano essere austeri e logici quanto qualsiasi Calvinista o Utilitarista. Come se la sarebbe cavata santa Giovanna d’Arco, una donna che spronava gli uomini alla guerra con la spada, tra i Quaccheri o i Duchobori o la setta tolstoiana dei pacifisti? Eppure un numero infinito di santi cattolici hanno speso la vita a predicare la pace e a impedire le guerre. Lo stesso accade con tutti i moderni tentativi di Sincretismo. Non riescono mai a fare qualcosa di più grande del Credo senza lasciar fuori qualcosa. Non intendo lasciar fuori qualcosa di divino ma qualcosa di umano: la bandiera o la locanda o il racconto di battaglia del ragazzo o la siepe in fondo al campo. I Teosofi costruiscono un pantheon; ma è soltanto un pantheon per panteisti. Convocano un Parlamento delle Religioni come una riunione di tutti i popoli; ma è soltanto una riunione di tutti i saccenti. Eppure proprio un tale pantheon era stato eretto duemila anni prima sulle sponde del Mediterraneo; e i cristiani furono invitati a erigere l’immagine di Gesù fianco a fianco con l’immagine di Giove, di Mitra, di Osiride, di Attis o di Ammone. Fu il rifiuto dei cristiani a essere la svolta della storia. Se i cristiani avessero accettato, essi e il mondo intero sarebbero certamente, in una grottesca ma esatta metafora, finiti in pentola. Sarebbero stati tutti bolliti fino a ridursi a un unico liquido tiepido in quella grande pentola di corruzione cosmopolita in cui tutti gli altri miti e misteri già si stavano sciogliendo. Fu uno scampo tremendo e spaventoso. Nessuno comprende la natura della Chiesa, o la nota squillante del credo che discende dall’antichità, se non si rende conto che il mondo intero una volta stette per morire di larghezza di vedute e di fratellanza di tutte le religioni.
Here it is the important point that the Magi, who stand for mysticism and philosophy, are truly conceived as seeking something new and even as finding something unexpected. That tense sense of crisis which still tingles in the Christmas story and even in every Christmas celebration, accentuates the idea of a search and a discovery. The discovery is, in this case, truly a scientific discovery. For the other mystical figures in the miracle play; for the angel and the mother, the shepherds and the soldiers of Herod, there may be aspects both simpler and more supernatural, more elemental or more emotional. But the wise Men must be seeking wisdom, and for them there must be a light also in the intellect. And this is the light; that the Catholic creed is catholic and that nothing else is catholic. The philosophy of the Church is universal. The philosophy of the philosophers was not universal. Had Plato and Pythagoras and Aristotle stood for an instant in the light that came out of that little cave, they would have known that their own light was not universal. It is far from certain, indeed, that they did not know it already. Philosophy also, like mythology, had very much the air of a search. It is the realisation of this truth that gives its traditional majesty and mystery to the figures of the Three Kings; the discovery that religion is broader than philosophy and that this is the broadest of religions, contained within this narrow space. The Magicians were gazing at the strange pentacle with the human triangle reversed; and they have never come to the end of their calculations about it. For it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch with a never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even of our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a child.
We might well be content to say that mythology had come with the shepherds and philosophy with the philosophers; and that it only remained for them to combine in the recognisation of religion. But there was a third element that must not be ignored and one which that religion for ever refuses to ignore, in any revel or reconciliation. There was present in the primary scenes of the drama that Enemy that had rotted the legends with lust and frozen theories into atheism, but which answered the direct challenge with something of that more direct method which we have seen in the conscious cult of the demons. In the description of that demon-worship, of the devouring detestation of innocence shown in the works of its witchcraft and the most inhuman of its human sacrifice, I have said less of its incorrect and secret penetration of the saner paganism; the soaking of mythological imagination with sex; the rise of imperial pride into insanity. But both the indirect and the direct influence make themselves felt in the drama of Bethlehem. A ruler under the Roman suzerainty, probably equipped and surrounded with the Roman ornament and order though himself of eastern blood, seems in that hour to have felt stirring within him the spirit of strange things. We all know the story of how Herod, alarmed at some rumour of a mysterious rival, remembered the wild gesture of the capricious despots of Asia and ordered a massacre of suspects of the new generation of the populace. Everyone knows the story; but not everyone has perhaps noted its place in the story of the strange religions of men. Not everybody has seen the significance even of its very contrast with the Corinthian columns and Roman pavement of that conquered and superficially civilised world. Only, as the purpose in his dark spirit began to show and shine in the eyes of the Idumean, a seer might perhaps have seen something like a great grey ghost that looked over his shoulder; have seen behind him filling the dome of night and hovering for the last time over history, that vast and fearful face that was Moloch of the Carthaginians; awaiting his last tribute from a ruler of the races of Shem. The demons also, in that first festival of Christmas, feasted after their own fashion.
Unless we understand the presence of that enemy, we shall not only miss the point of Christianity, but even miss the point of Christmas. Christmas for us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing. But like all the truths of that tradition, it is in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama. It is not only an occasion for the peacemakers any more than for the merry-makers; it is not only a Hindu peace conference any more than it is only a Scandinavian winter feast. There is something defiant in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace. By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaw’s den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicings in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky. It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.
Qui sta il punto importante: i Magi, che rappresentano il misticismo e la filosofia, sono concepiti davvero come coloro che cercano qualcosa di nuovo e che addirittura trovano qualcosa di inatteso. Quel teso senso di crisi che ancora vibra nel racconto del Natale, e persino in ogni celebrazione natalizia, accentua l’idea di una ricerca e di una scoperta. La scoperta, in questo caso, è veramente una scoperta scientifica. Per le altre figure mistiche della sacra rappresentazione — per l’angelo e la madre, per i pastori e i soldati di Erode — vi possono essere aspetti insieme più semplici e più soprannaturali, più elementari o più emotivi. Ma i sapienti dovevano cercare la sapienza, e per loro doveva esservi una luce anche nell’intelletto. E la luce è questa: che il credo cattolico è cattolico e che nient’altro è cattolico. La filosofia della Chiesa è universale. La filosofia dei filosofi non era universale. Se Platone, Pitagora e Aristotele fossero stati un solo istante nella luce che usciva da quella piccola grotta, avrebbero saputo che la loro luce non era universale. È tutt’altro che certo, del resto, che non lo sapessero già. Anche la filosofia, come la mitologia, aveva molto l’aria di una ricerca. È la consapevolezza di questa verità a conferire la loro tradizionale maestà e il loro mistero alle figure dei Tre Re: la scoperta che la religione è più ampia della filosofia e che questa è la più ampia delle religioni, racchiusa in quello spazio angusto. I Magi contemplavano lo strano pentacolo con il triangolo umano rovesciato; e non sono mai giunti al termine dei loro calcoli su di esso. Poiché questo è il paradosso di quel gruppo nella grotta: che, mentre le nostre emozioni al riguardo sono di fanciullesca semplicità, i nostri pensieri al riguardo possono ramificarsi con una complessità senza fine. E non possiamo mai giungere al termine neppure delle nostre stesse idee sul bambino che era un padre e sulla madre che era una bambina.
Potremmo ben accontentarci di dire che la mitologia era venuta con i pastori e la filosofia con i filosofi; e che restava loro soltanto di combinarsi nel riconoscimento della religione. Ma vi era un terzo elemento che non si deve ignorare, e che quella religione si rifiuta per sempre di ignorare, in ogni festa o riconciliazione. Era presente, nelle scene prime del dramma, quel Nemico che aveva corrotto le leggende con la lussuria e agghiacciato le teorie nell’ateismo, ma che rispondeva alla sfida diretta con qualcosa di quel metodo più diretto che abbiamo visto nel culto consapevole dei demoni. Nella descrizione di quel culto demoniaco, del divorante odio dell’innocenza manifestato nelle opere della sua stregoneria e nel più disumano dei suoi sacrifici umani, ho detto meno della sua scorretta e segreta penetrazione nel paganesimo più sano; dell’impregnarsi di sesso dell’immaginazione mitologica; del salire dell’orgoglio imperiale fino alla follia. Ma tanto l’influenza indiretta quanto quella diretta si fanno sentire nel dramma di Betlemme. Un sovrano sotto la sovranità romana, probabilmente rivestito e circondato dall’ornamento e dall’ordine romani benché egli stesso di sangue orientale, sembra in quell’ora aver sentito agitarsi dentro di sé lo spirito di cose strane. Tutti conosciamo la storia di come Erode, allarmato da qualche voce di un misterioso rivale, si ricordò del gesto selvaggio dei capricciosi despoti dell’Asia e ordinò un massacro di sospetti fra la nuova generazione del popolo. Tutti conoscono la storia; ma non tutti forse ne hanno notato il posto nella storia delle strane religioni degli uomini. Non tutti hanno colto il significato persino del suo stesso contrasto con le colonne corinzie e il selciato romano di quel mondo conquistato e superficialmente civilizzato. Soltanto, quando il proposito nel suo oscuro spirito cominciò a mostrarsi e a brillare negli occhi dell’Idumeo, un veggente forse avrebbe potuto scorgere qualcosa come un grande spettro grigio che gli guardava sopra la spalla; avrebbe potuto scorgere dietro di lui, a riempire la cupola della notte e a librarsi per l’ultima volta sulla storia, quel volto vasto e terribile che era il Moloch dei Cartaginesi, in attesa del suo ultimo tributo da parte di un sovrano delle stirpi di Sem. Anche i demoni, in quella prima festa di Natale, banchettarono a modo loro.
Se non comprendiamo la presenza di quel nemico, non solo mancheremo il senso del cristianesimo, ma mancheremo perfino il senso del Natale. Il Natale, per noi della cristianità, è divenuto una cosa sola, e in un certo senso persino una cosa semplice. Ma, come tutte le verità di quella tradizione, in un altro senso è una cosa assai complessa. La sua nota singolare è il simultaneo percuotere di molte note: di umiltà, di allegria, di gratitudine, di mistico timore, ma anche di vigilanza e di dramma. Non è un’occasione per gli operatori di pace più di quanto lo sia per i festeggianti; non è solo una conferenza di pace indù più di quanto sia solo una festa invernale scandinava. Vi è in esso anche qualcosa di ardito; qualcosa che fa risuonare le brusche campane di mezzanotte come i grandi cannoni di una battaglia appena vinta. Tutta questa cosa indescrivibile che chiamiamo l’atmosfera del Natale non aleggia nell’aria se non come una fragranza persistente o un vapore che svanisce dall’esultante esplosione di quell’unica ora sulle colline della Giudea, quasi duemila anni fa. Ma il sapore è ancora inconfondibile, ed è qualcosa di troppo sottile o troppo solitario per essere racchiuso nel nostro uso della parola pace. Per la natura stessa della storia, il giubilo nella caverna era il giubilo in una fortezza o in un covo di fuorilegge; a rigore, non è troppo irriverente dire che era un giubilo in una trincea. Non è soltanto vero che una simile camera sotterranea era un nascondiglio dai nemici; e che i nemici già battevano la pietrosa pianura che si stendeva su di essa come un cielo. Non è soltanto che gli zoccoli stessi dei cavalli di Erode potrebbero, in quel senso, essere passati come tuono sopra il capo sepolto di Cristo. È anche che in quell’immagine vi è una vera idea di un avamposto, di un trafiggere la roccia e di un ingresso in un territorio nemico. Vi è in questa divinità sepolta un’idea di minare il mondo; di scuotere dal basso le torri e i palazzi; proprio come Erode il grande re sentì quel terremoto sotto di sé e vacillò insieme al suo palazzo vacillante.
That is perhaps the mightiest of the mysteries of the cave. It is already apparent that though men are said to have looked for hell under the earth, in this case it is rather heaven that is under the earth. And there follows in this strange story the idea of an upheaval of heaven. That is the paradox of the whole position; that henceforth the highest thing can only work from below. Royalty can only return to its own by a sort of rebellion. Indeed the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps especially in its beginnings, was not so much a principality as a revolution against the prince of the world. This sense that the world had been conquered by the great usurper, and was in his possession, has been much deplored or derided by those optimists who identify enlightenment with ease. But it was responsible for all that thrill of defiance and a beautiful danger that made the good news seem to be really both good and new. It was in truth against a huge unconscious usurpation that it raised a revolt, and originally so obscure a revolt. Olympus still occupied the sky like a motionless cloud moulded into many mighty forms; philosophy still sat in the high places and even on the thrones of the kings, when Christ was born in the cave and Christianity in the catacombs. In both cases we may remark the same paradox of revolution; the sense of something despised and of something feared. The cave in one aspect is only a hole or corner into which the outcasts are swept like rubbish; yet in the other aspect it is a hiding-place of something valuable which the tyrants are seeking like treasure. In one sense they are there because the innkeeper would not even remember them, and in another because the king can never forget them. We have already noted that this paradox appeared also in the treatment of the early Church. It was important while it was still insignificant, and certainly while it was still impotent. It was important solely because it was intolerable; and in that sense it is true to say that it was intolerable because it was intolerant. It was resented, because, in its own still and almost secret way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck the heaven and earth of heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that creation of gold and marble; but it contemplated a world without it. It dared to look right through it as though the gold and marble had been glass. Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.
Herod had his place, therefore, in the miracle play of Bethlehem because he is the menace to the Church Militant and shows it from the first as under persecution and fighting for its life. For those who think this a discord, it is a discord that sounds simultaneously with the Christmas bells. For those who think the idea of the Crusade is one that spoils the idea of the Cross, we can only say that for them the idea of the Cross is spoiled; the idea of the cross is spoiled quite literally in the cradle. It is not here to the purpose to argue with them on the abstract ethics of fighting; the purpose in this place is merely to sum up the combination of ideas that make up the Christian and Catholic idea, and to note that all of them are already crystallised in the first Christmas story. They are three distinct and commonly contrasted things which are nevertheless one thing; but this is the only thing which can make them one. The first is the human instinct for a heaven that shall be as literal and almost as local as a home. It is the idea pursued by all poets and pagans making myths; that a particular place must be the shrine of the god or the abode of the blest; that fairyland is a land; or that the return of the ghost must be the resurrection of the body. I do not here reason about the refusal of rationalism to satisfy this need. I only say that if the rationalists refuse to satisfy it, the pagans will not be satisfied. This is present in the story of Bethlehem and Jerusalem as it is present in the story of Delos and Delphi; and as it is not present in the whole universe of Lucretius or the whole universe of Herbert Spencer. The second element is a philosophy larger than other philosophies; larger than that of Lucretius and infinitely larger than that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a hundred windows where the ancient stoic or the modern agnostic only looks through one. It sees life with thousands of eyes belonging to thousands of different sorts of people, where the other is only the individual standpoint of a stoic or an agnostic. It has something for all moods of man, it finds work for all kinds of men, it understands secrets of psychology, it is aware of depths of evil, it is able to distinguish between ideal and unreal marvels and miraculous exceptions, it trains itself in tact about hard cases, all with a multiplicity and subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far beyond the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modern moral philosophy. In a word, there is more in it; it finds more in existence to think about; it gets more out of life. Masses of this material about our many-sided life have been added since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. But St. Thomas Aquinas alone would have found himself limited in the world of Confucius or of Comte. And the third point is this; that while it is local enough for poetry and larger than any other philosophy, it is also a challenge and a fight. While it is deliberately broadened to embrace every aspect of truth, it is still stiffly embattled against every mode of error. It gets every kind of man to fight for it, it gets every kind of weapon to fight with, it widens its knowledge of the things that are fought for and against with every art of curiosity or sympathy; but it never forgets that it is fighting. It proclaims peace on earth and never forgets why there was war in heaven.
È questo, forse, il più possente dei misteri della grotta. Appare già chiaro che, sebbene si dica che gli uomini abbiano cercato l’inferno sotto la terra, in questo caso è piuttosto il cielo a trovarsi sotto la terra. E in questa strana vicenda ne consegue l’idea di un sommovimento del cielo. È questo il paradosso di tutta la situazione: che d’ora innanzi la cosa più alta non potrà operare se non dal basso. La regalità potrà rientrare in possesso di ciò che le spetta solo attraverso una sorta di ribellione. Anzi, la Chiesa, fin dai suoi inizi, e forse specialmente ai suoi inizi, non fu tanto un principato quanto una rivoluzione contro il principe di questo mondo. Questa consapevolezza che il mondo era stato conquistato dal grande usurpatore e si trovava in suo possesso è stata assai deplorata o derisa da quegli ottimisti che identificano l’illuminazione con la comodità. Ma essa fu responsabile di tutto quel fremito di sfida e di quel bel pericolo che facevano sembrare la buona novella davvero buona e davvero nuova. In verità fu contro un’immensa e inconsapevole usurpazione che essa sollevò una rivolta, e in origine una rivolta tanto oscura. L’Olimpo occupava ancora il cielo come una nube immobile plasmata in molte forme possenti; la filosofia sedeva ancora nei luoghi eminenti e persino sui troni dei re, quando Cristo nacque nella grotta e il cristianesimo nelle catacombe. In entrambi i casi possiamo osservare lo stesso paradosso della rivoluzione: il senso di qualcosa di disprezzato e di qualcosa di temuto. La grotta, sotto un aspetto, non è che un buco o un cantuccio in cui i reietti vengono spazzati come immondizia; eppure, sotto l’altro aspetto, è il nascondiglio di qualcosa di prezioso che i tiranni vanno cercando come un tesoro. In un senso essi si trovano là perché l’oste non li avrebbe nemmeno ricordati, e nell’altro perché il re non potrà mai dimenticarli. Abbiamo già osservato che questo paradosso apparve anche nel modo in cui fu trattata la Chiesa primitiva. Essa era importante mentre era ancora insignificante, e certamente mentre era ancora impotente. Era importante unicamente perché era intollerabile; e in questo senso è vero dire che era intollerabile perché era intollerante. Suscitava risentimento perché, a suo modo silenzioso e quasi segreto, aveva dichiarato guerra. Era sorta dal suolo per demolire il cielo e la terra del paganesimo. Non tentava di distruggere tutta quella creazione d’oro e di marmo; ma contemplava un mondo senza di essa. Osava guardarvi attraverso da parte a parte, come se l’oro e il marmo fossero stati vetro. Coloro che accusavano i cristiani di aver incendiato Roma con le fiaccole erano calunniatori; ma erano almeno assai più vicini alla natura del cristianesimo di quanti, tra i moderni, ci dicono che i cristiani furono una specie di società etica, martirizzata in maniera languida per aver detto agli uomini che avevano un dovere verso il prossimo, e solo blandamente malvista perché mite e mansueta.
Erode ebbe dunque il suo posto nella sacra rappresentazione di Betlemme perché è la minaccia alla Chiesa Militante e la mostra fin dal principio come perseguitata e in lotta per la propria vita. Per chi ritiene che questa sia una dissonanza, è una dissonanza che risuona simultaneamente alle campane di Natale. A chi ritiene che l’idea della Crociata sia tale da guastare l’idea della Croce, non possiamo che dire che per loro l’idea della Croce è già guastata; l’idea della croce è guastata, in senso quanto mai letterale, già nella culla. Non è qui il caso di discutere con loro sull’etica astratta del combattere; lo scopo, in questo luogo, è semplicemente di riassumere quella combinazione di idee che compongono l’idea cristiana e cattolica, e di notare come tutte esse siano già cristallizzate nella prima storia del Natale. Sono tre cose distinte e comunemente contrapposte, che nondimeno sono una cosa sola; ma questa è l’unica cosa capace di renderle una sola. La prima è l’istinto umano di un cielo che sia letterale, e quasi altrettanto locale, come una casa. È l’idea perseguita da tutti i poeti e i pagani che foggiano miti: che un luogo particolare debba essere il santuario del dio o la dimora dei beati; che il paese delle fate sia un paese; o che il ritorno del fantasma debba essere la risurrezione del corpo. Non intendo qui ragionare sul rifiuto del razionalismo di soddisfare questo bisogno. Dico soltanto che, se i razionalisti si rifiutano di soddisfarlo, i pagani non saranno soddisfatti. Ciò è presente nella storia di Betlemme e di Gerusalemme come è presente nella storia di Delo e di Delfi; e come non è presente nell’intero universo di Lucrezio o nell’intero universo di Herbert Spencer. Il secondo elemento è una filosofia più ampia delle altre filosofie; più ampia di quella di Lucrezio e infinitamente più ampia di quella di Herbert Spencer. Essa guarda il mondo attraverso cento finestre, là dove l’antico stoico o il moderno agnostico guardano soltanto attraverso una. Vede la vita con migliaia di occhi appartenenti a migliaia di tipi diversi di persone, mentre l’altro non è che il punto di vista individuale di uno stoico o di un agnostico. Ha qualcosa per ogni stato d’animo dell’uomo, trova un compito per ogni genere di uomini, comprende i segreti della psicologia, è consapevole degli abissi del male, sa distinguere fra prodigi ideali e irreali ed eccezioni miracolose, si esercita al tatto nei casi ardui, e tutto ciò con una molteplicità, una sottigliezza e un’immaginazione intorno alle varietà della vita che vanno di gran lunga oltre le nude o spensierate banalità della gran parte della filosofia morale antica o moderna. In una parola, c’è di più in essa; trova di più nell’esistenza su cui riflettere; ricava di più dalla vita. Masse di questo materiale sulla nostra vita dai molti lati sono state aggiunte dai tempi di san Tommaso d’Aquino. Ma san Tommaso d’Aquino da solo si sarebbe trovato limitato nel mondo di Confucio o di Comte. E il terzo punto è questo: che, pur essendo abbastanza locale per la poesia e più ampia di ogni altra filosofia, essa è anche una sfida e un combattimento. Pur essendo deliberatamente allargata ad abbracciare ogni aspetto della verità, resta rigidamente schierata in armi contro ogni forma di errore. Chiama a combattere per sé ogni genere di uomo, si procura ogni genere di arma per combattere, allarga la propria conoscenza delle cose per cui e contro cui si combatte con ogni arte della curiosità o della simpatia; ma non dimentica mai di stare combattendo. Proclama pace in terra e non dimentica mai perché in cielo vi fu guerra.
This is the trinity of truths symbolised here by the three types in the old Christmas story; the shepherds and the kings and that other king who warred upon the children. It is simply not true to say that other religions and philosophies are in this respect its rivals. It is not true to say that any one of them combines these characters; it is not true to say that any one of them pretends to combine them. Buddhism may profess to be equally mystical; it does not even profess to be equally military. Islam may profess to be equally military; it does not even profess to be equally metaphysical and subtle. Confucianism may profess to satisfy the need of the philosophers for order and reason; it does not even profess to satisfy the need of the mystics for miracle and sacrament and the consecration of concrete things. There are many evidences of this presence of a spirit at once universal and unique. One will serve here which is the symbol of the subject of this chapter; that no other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal and classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with the sense that he was going home. He might admire it because it was poetical, or because it was philosophical, or any number of other things in separation; but not because it was itself. The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend or the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which are turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero-worship. It does not exactly work outwards, adventurously, to the wonders to be found at the ends of the earth. It is rather something that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and personal part of our being; like that which can some times take us off our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the poor. It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that is there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity.
È questa la trinità di verità qui simboleggiata dalle tre figure dell’antico racconto natalizio: i pastori, i re e quell’altro re che mosse guerra ai fanciulli. Non è affatto vero dire che, sotto questo rispetto, le altre religioni e filosofie le siano rivali. Non è vero dire che alcuna di esse combini insieme questi caratteri; non è vero dire che alcuna di esse pretenda anche solo di combinarli. Il buddismo potrà professarsi altrettanto mistico; non pretende però nemmeno di essere altrettanto militare. L’islam potrà professarsi altrettanto militare; non pretende però nemmeno di essere altrettanto metafisico e sottile. Il confucianesimo potrà professare di appagare il bisogno che i filosofi hanno di ordine e di ragione; non pretende però nemmeno di appagare il bisogno che i mistici hanno del miracolo, del sacramento e della consacrazione delle cose concrete. Molte sono le testimonianze di questa presenza di uno spirito ad un tempo universale e unico. Qui ne basterà una, che è il simbolo stesso del soggetto di questo capitolo: nessun’altra storia, nessuna leggenda pagana o aneddoto filosofico o evento storico ci tocca di fatto con quell’impressione peculiare e persino struggente che suscita in noi la parola Betlemme. Nessun’altra nascita di un dio o infanzia di un saggio ci pare essere il Natale, o alcunché di simile al Natale. È troppo fredda, o troppo frivola, o troppo formale e classica, o troppo semplice e selvaggia, o troppo occulta e complicata. Nessuno di noi, quali che siano le sue opinioni, si recherebbe mai a una tale scena col senso di tornare a casa. Potrà ammirarla perché poetica, o perché filosofica, o per una quantità di altre cose prese separatamente; ma non perché è quella che è. La verità è che vi è un carattere del tutto peculiare e individuale nella presa che questa storia esercita sulla natura umana; nella sua sostanza psicologica essa non somiglia affatto a una semplice leggenda o alla vita di un grand’uomo. Non volge propriamente la nostra mente, nel senso comune, alla grandezza: a quelle estensioni ed esagerazioni dell’umanità che vengono trasformate in dèi ed eroi, anche dalla più sana specie di culto degli eroi. Non lavora propriamente verso l’esterno, avventurosamente, verso le meraviglie che si trovano ai confini della terra. È piuttosto qualcosa che ci coglie di sorpresa alle spalle, dalla parte nascosta e personale del nostro essere; come ciò che talvolta può prenderci alla sprovvista nel pathos degli oggetti minuti o nelle cieche devozioni dei poveri. È piuttosto come se un uomo avesse scoperto una stanza segreta nel cuore stesso della propria casa, di cui non aveva mai sospettato l’esistenza; e vi avesse scorto una luce provenire dall’interno. È come se egli trovasse qualcosa in fondo al proprio cuore che lo tradisce inducendolo al bene. Non è fatta di ciò che il mondo chiamerebbe materia robusta; o meglio, è fatta di materia la cui forza sta in quell’alata leggerezza con cui ci sfiora e passa. È tutto ciò che in noi non è se non una breve tenerezza, qui resa eterna; tutto ciò che non significa più di un momentaneo intenerimento, divenuto in qualche strano modo un rafforzarsi e un riposo; è la parola spezzata e la parola perduta rese positive e sospese, integre; mentre i re stranieri svaniscono verso una terra lontana e i monti non risuonano più del passo dei pastori; e soltanto la notte e la caverna giacciono, piega su piega, sopra qualcosa di più umano dell’umanità stessa.
II
THE RIDDLES OF THE GOSPEL
To understand the nature of this chapter, it is necessary to recur to the nature of this book. The argument which is meant to be the backbone of the book is of the kind called the reductio ad absurdum. It suggests that the results of assuming the rationalist thesis are more irrational than ours; but to prove it we must assume that thesis. Thus in the first section I often treated man as merely an animal, to show that the effect was more impossible than if he were treated as an angel. In the sense in which it was necessary to treat man merely as an animal, it is necessary to treat Christ merely as a man. I have to suspend my own beliefs, which are much more positive; and assume this limitation even in order to remove it. I must try to imagine what would happen to a man who did really read the story of Christ as the story of a man; and even of a man of whom he had never heard before. And I wish to point out that a really impartial reading of that kind would lead, if not immediately to belief, at least to a bewilderment of which there is really no solution except in belief. In this chapter, for this reason, I shall bring in nothing of the spirit of my own creed; I shall exclude the very style of diction, and even of lettering, which I should think fitting in speaking in my own person. I am speaking as an imaginary heathen human being, honestly, staring at the Gospel story for the first time.
Now it is not at all easy to regard the New Testament as a New Testament. It is not at all easy to realise the good news as new. Both for good and evil familiarity fills us with assumptions and associations; and no man of our civilisation, whatever he thinks of our religion, can really read the thing as if he had never heard of it before. Of course it is in any case utterly unhistorical to talk as if the New Testament were a neatly bound book that had fallen from heaven. It is simply the selection made by the authority of the Church from a mass of early Christian literature. But apart from any such question there is a psychological difficulty in feeling the New Testament as new. There is a psychological difficulty in seeing those well-known words simply as they stand and without going beyond what they intrinsically stand for. And this difficulty must indeed be very great; for the result of it is very curious. The result of it is that most modern critics and most current criticism, even popular criticism, makes a comment that is the exact reverse of the truth. It is so completely the reverse of the truth that one could almost suspect that they had never read the New Testament at all.
We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the Gospels does indeed utter in words of almost heart-breaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words that he utters. Nevertheless they are almost the only kind of words that the Church in its popular imagery ever represents him as uttering. That popular imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound popular instinct. The mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor, and for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction of the incredible compassion of God. But nobody with his eyes open can doubt that it is chiefly this idea of compassion that the popular machinery of the Church does seek to carry. The popular imagery carries a great deal to excess the sentiment of ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.’ It is the first thing that the outsider feels and criticises in a Pieta or a shrine of the Sacred Heart. As I say, while the art may be insufficient, I am not sure that the instinct is unsound. In any case there is something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner of a street or coming out into the spaces of a marketplace, to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure as it turned upon a generation of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite. The Church can reasonably be justified therefore if she turns the most merciful face or aspect towards men; but it is certainly the most merciful aspect that she does turn. And the point is here that it is very much more specially and exclusively merciful than any impression that could be formed by a man merely reading the New Testament for the first time. A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand would form quite another impression; an impression full of mystery and possibly of inconsistency; but certainly not merely an impression of mildness. It would be intensely interesting; but part of the interest would consist in its leaving a good deal to be guessed at or explained. It is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly know what they signify, of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies. The outbreaks of wrath, like storms above our atmosphere, do not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them, but to follow some higher weather-chart of their own. The Peter whom popular Church teaching presents is very rightly the Peter to whom Christ said in forgiveness, ‘Feed my lambs.’ He is not the Peter upon whom Christ turned as if he were the devil, crying in that obscure wrath, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ Christ lamented with nothing but love and pity over Jerusalem which was to murder him. We do not know what strange spiritual atmosphere or spiritual insight led him to sink Bethsaida lower in the pit than Sodom. I am putting aside for the moment all questions of doctrinal inferences or expositions, orthodox or otherwise; I am simply imagining the effect on a man’s mind if he did really do what these critics are always talking about doing; if he did really read the New Testament without reference to orthodoxy and even without reference to doctrine. He would find a number of things which fit in far less with the current unorthodoxy than they do with the current orthodoxy. He would find, for instance, that if there are any descriptions that deserved to be called realistic, they are precisely the descriptions of the supernatural. If there is one aspect of the New Testament Jesus in which he may be said to present himself eminently as a practical person, it is in the aspect of an exorcist. There is nothing meek and mild, there is nothing even in the ordinary sense mystical, about the tone of the voice that says ‘Hold thy peace and come out of him.’ It is much more like the tone of a very business-like lion-tamer or a strong-minded doctor dealing with a homicidal maniac. But this is only a side issue for the sake of illustration; I am not now raising these controversies; but considering the case of the imaginary man from the moon to whom the New Testament is new.
II
GLI ENIGMI DEL VANGELO
Per comprendere la natura di questo capitolo, è necessario risalire alla natura di questo libro. L’argomento che vuol essere la spina dorsale del libro è di quelli che si dicono reductio ad absurdum. Esso suggerisce che i risultati dell’assumere la tesi razionalista sono più irrazionali dei nostri; ma per provarlo dobbiamo assumere quella tesi. Così, nella prima sezione ho spesso trattato l’uomo come un mero animale, per mostrare che l’effetto era più impossibile che se lo si fosse trattato come un angelo. Nel senso in cui era necessario trattare l’uomo come un mero animale, è necessario trattare Cristo come un mero uomo. Devo sospendere le mie stesse convinzioni, che sono assai più positive; e assumere questa limitazione anche solo per rimuoverla. Devo cercare di immaginare che cosa accadrebbe a un uomo che leggesse davvero la storia di Cristo come la storia di un uomo; e per giunta di un uomo di cui non avesse mai sentito parlare prima. E desidero far notare che una lettura davvero imparziale di tal genere condurrebbe, se non immediatamente alla fede, quanto meno a uno sconcerto che non ha in realtà altra soluzione che nella fede. In questo capitolo, per tale ragione, non introdurrò nulla dello spirito del mio credo; escluderò persino lo stile della dizione, e financo della grafia, che riterrei acconcio parlando in prima persona. Parlo come un immaginario essere umano pagano che, onestamente, fissa per la prima volta la storia del Vangelo.
Ora, non è affatto facile guardare al Nuovo Testamento come a un Nuovo Testamento. Non è affatto facile percepire la buona novella come nuova. Nel bene e nel male, la familiarità ci riempie di presupposti e di associazioni; e nessun uomo della nostra civiltà, qualunque cosa pensi della nostra religione, può davvero leggere questa cosa come se non ne avesse mai udito parlare prima. Certo, è in ogni caso del tutto astorico discorrere come se il Nuovo Testamento fosse un libro ordinatamente rilegato caduto dal cielo. Esso è semplicemente la selezione operata dall’autorità della Chiesa entro una massa di antica letteratura cristiana. Ma, a prescindere da ogni questione simile, vi è una difficoltà psicologica nel sentire il Nuovo Testamento come nuovo. Vi è una difficoltà psicologica nel vedere quelle parole ben note semplicemente per quello che sono, senza andare oltre ciò che intrinsecamente significano. E questa difficoltà dev’essere davvero grandissima; perché il suo risultato è assai curioso. Il risultato è che la maggior parte dei critici moderni e la maggior parte della critica corrente, persino la critica popolare, formula un commento che è l’esatto rovescio della verità. È a tal punto il rovescio della verità che si potrebbe quasi sospettare che costoro non abbiano mai letto affatto il Nuovo Testamento.
Abbiamo tutti sentito dire cento volte, giacché pare che non ci si stanchi mai di ripeterlo, che il Gesù del Nuovo Testamento è bensì un misericordiosissimo e umanissimo amante dell’umanità, ma che la Chiesa ha nascosto questo carattere umano sotto dogmi ripugnanti e lo ha irrigidito con terrori ecclesiastici finché esso ha assunto un carattere inumano. Questo, ardisco ripeterlo, è pressoché il rovescio della verità. La verità è che è l’immagine di Cristo nelle chiese quella quasi interamente mite e misericordiosa. È l’immagine di Cristo nei Vangeli quella che è anche molte altre cose. La figura dei Vangeli esprime bensì, con parole di bellezza quasi straziante, la sua pietà per i nostri cuori spezzati. Ma queste sono ben lungi dall’essere le uniche parole ch’egli pronuncia. Eppure sono quasi le uniche parole che la Chiesa, nella sua iconografia popolare, lo rappresenti mai come pronunciare. Quella iconografia popolare è ispirata da un istinto popolare perfettamente sano. La massa dei poveri è spezzata, e la massa della gente è povera, e per la massa dell’umanità la cosa principale è recare la persuasione dell’incredibile compassione di Dio. Ma nessuno che abbia gli occhi aperti può dubitare che sia soprattutto questa idea di compassione che l’apparato popolare della Chiesa cerca di recare. L’iconografia popolare porta all’eccesso, in gran misura, il sentimento del «dolce Gesù, mite e mansueto». È la prima cosa che l’estraneo avverte e critica in una Pietà o in un santuario del Sacro Cuore. Come dico, per quanto l’arte possa essere insufficiente, non sono certo che l’istinto sia malsano. In ogni caso, vi è qualcosa di spaventoso, qualcosa che fa gelare il sangue, nell’idea di avere una statua di Cristo adirato. Vi è qualcosa di insopportabile persino all’immaginazione nell’idea di svoltare l’angolo di una via o di sbucare negli spazi di un mercato per incontrare la pietrificante pietrificazione di quella figura quale si volse contro una generazione di vipere, o di quel volto quale guardò in faccia un ipocrita. La Chiesa può dunque ragionevolmente giustificarsi se volge verso gli uomini il volto o l’aspetto più misericordioso; ma è certamente l’aspetto più misericordioso quello ch’essa volge. E il punto è che esso è di gran lunga più specificamente ed esclusivamente misericordioso di qualsiasi impressione potrebbe formarsi un uomo che leggesse per la prima volta il Nuovo Testamento. Un uomo che prendesse semplicemente le parole della storia per quello che sono si formerebbe tutt’altra impressione; un’impressione piena di mistero e forse di incoerenza; ma certo non semplicemente un’impressione di mansuetudine. Sarebbe intensamente interessante; ma parte dell’interesse consisterebbe nel fatto ch’essa lascia molto da indovinare o da spiegare. È piena di gesti improvvisi, evidentemente significativi, salvo che a stento sappiamo che cosa significhino, di silenzi enigmatici, di risposte ironiche. Le esplosioni d’ira, come tempeste al di sopra della nostra atmosfera, non paiono scoppiare esattamente là dove ce le aspetteremmo, ma seguire una loro più alta carta del tempo. Il Pietro che l’insegnamento popolare della Chiesa presenta è, ben a ragione, il Pietro al quale Cristo disse, perdonandolo: «Pasci i miei agnelli». Non è il Pietro contro cui Cristo si volse come s’egli fosse il diavolo, gridando in quell’oscura collera: «Vàttene lontano da me, Satana». Cristo si lamentò con null’altro che amore e pietà su Gerusalemme, che stava per assassinarlo. Non sappiamo quale strana atmosfera spirituale o quale intuizione spirituale lo condusse a sprofondare Betsaida più giù nell’abisso di Sodoma. Metto per il momento da parte ogni questione di inferenze o di esposizioni dottrinali, ortodosse o meno; sto semplicemente immaginando l’effetto sulla mente di un uomo se egli facesse davvero ciò di cui questi critici parlano sempre di fare; se egli leggesse davvero il Nuovo Testamento senza riferimento all’ortodossia e persino senza riferimento alla dottrina. Egli vi troverebbe una quantità di cose che si accordano assai meno con l’eterodossia corrente di quanto non si accordino con l’ortodossia corrente. Troverebbe, per esempio, che se vi sono descrizioni che meritino di dirsi realistiche, esse sono precisamente le descrizioni del soprannaturale. Se vi è un aspetto sotto cui il Gesù del Nuovo Testamento può dirsi presentarsi eminentemente come una persona pratica, è l’aspetto dell’esorcista. Non v’è nulla di mite e mansueto, non v’è nulla di mistico neppure nel senso comune, nel tono della voce che dice: «Taci ed esci da lui». Somiglia assai più al tono di un domatore di leoni molto sbrigativo, o di un medico dal carattere fermo alle prese con un maniaco omicida. Ma questo è soltanto un tema laterale, a scopo di illustrazione; non sto ora sollevando queste controversie, bensì considerando il caso dell’immaginario uomo venuto dalla luna, per il quale il Nuovo Testamento è nuovo.
Now the first thing to note is that if we take it merely as a human story, it is in some ways a very strange story. I do not refer here to its tremendous and tragic culmination or to any implications involving triumph in that tragedy. I do not refer to what is commonly called the miraculous element; for on that point philosophies vary and modern philosophies very decidedly waver. Indeed the educated Englishman of to-day may be said to have passed from an old fashion, in which he would not believe in any miracles unless they were ancient, and adopted a new fashion in which he will not believe in any miracles unless they are modern. He used to hold that miraculous cures stopped with the first Christians and is now inclined to suspect that they began with the first Christian Scientists. But I refer here rather specially to unmiraculous and even to unnoticed and inconspicuous parts of the story. There are a great many things about it which nobody would have invented, for they are things that nobody has ever made any particular use of; things which if they were remarked at all have remained rather as puzzles. For instance, there is that long stretch of silence in the life of Christ up to the age of thirty. It is of all silences the most immense and imaginatively impressive. But it is not the sort of thing that anybody is particularly likely to invent in order to prove something; and no body so far as I know has ever tried to prove anything in particular from it. It is impressive, but it is only impressive as a fact; there is nothing particularly popular or obvious about it as a fable. The ordinary trend of hero-worship and myth-making is much more likely to say the precise opposite. It is much more likely to say (as I believe some of the gospels rejected by the Church do say) that Jesus displayed a divine precocity and began his mission at a miraculously early age. And there is indeed something strange in the thought that he who of all humanity needed least preparation seems to have had most. Whether it was some mode of the divine humility, or some truth of which we see the shadow of the longer domestic tutelage of the higher creatures of the earth. I do not propose to speculate; I mention it simply as an example of the sort of thing that does in any case give rise to speculations, quite apart from recognised religious speculations. Now the whole story is full of these things. It is not by any means, as baldly presented in print, a story that it is easy to get to the bottom of. It is anything but what these people talk of as a simple Gospel. Relatively speaking, it is the Gospel that has the mysticism and the Church that has the rationalism. As I should put it, of course, it is the Gospel that is the riddle and the Church that is the answer. But whatever be the answer, the Gospel as it stands is almost a book of riddles.
First, a man reading the Gospel sayings would not find platitudes. If he had read even in the most respectful spirit the majority of ancient philosophers and of modern moralists, he would appreciate the unique importance of saying that he did not find platitudes. It is more than can be said even of Plato. It is much more than can be said of Epictetus or Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or Apollonius of Tyana. And it is immeasurably more than can be said of most of the agnostic moralists and the preachers of the ethical societies; with their songs of service and their religion of brotherhood. The morality of most moralists ancient and modern, has been one solid and polished cataract of platitudes flowing for ever and ever. That would certainly not be the impression of the imaginary independent outsider studying the New Testament. He would be conscious of nothing so commonplace and in a sense of nothing so continuous as that stream. He would find a number of strange claims that might sound like the claim to be the brother of the sun and moon; a number of very startling pieces of advice; a number of stunning rebukes; a number of strangely beautiful stories. He would see some very gigantesque figures of speech about the impossibility of threading a needle with a camel or the possibility of throwing a mountain into the sea. He would see a number of very daring simplifications of the difficulties of life; like the advice to shine upon everybody indifferently as does the sunshine or not to worry about the future any more than the birds. He would find on the other hand some passages of almost impenetrable darkness, so far as he is concerned, such as the moral of the parable of the Unjust Steward. Some of these things might strike him as fables and some as truths; but none as truisms. For instance, he would not find the ordinary platitudes in favour of peace. He would find several paradoxes in favour of peace. He would find several ideals of non-resistance, which taken as they stand would be rather too pacific for any pacifist. He would be told in one passage to treat a robber not with passive resistance, but rather with positive and enthusiastic encouragement, if the terms be taken literally; heaping up gifts upon the man who had stolen goods. But he would not find a word of all that obvious rhetoric against war which has filled countless books and odes and orations; not a word about the wickedness of war, the wastefulness of war, the appalling scale of the slaughter in war and all the rest of the familiar frenzy; indeed not a word about war at all. There is nothing that throws any particular light on Christ’s attitude towards organised warfare, except that he seems to have been rather fond of Roman soldiers. Indeed it is another perplexity, speaking from the same external and human stand point, that he seems to have got on much better with Romans than he did with Jews. But the question here is a certain tone to be appreciated by merely reading a certain text; and we might give any number of instances of it.
The statement that the meek shall inherit the earth is very far from being a meek statement. I mean it is not meek in the ordinary sense of mild and moderate and inoffensive. To justify it, it would be necessary to go very deep into history and anticipate things undreamed of then and by many unrealised even now; such as the way in which the mystical monks reclaimed the lands which the practical kings had lost. If it was a truth at all, it was because it was a prophecy. But certainly it was not a truth in the sense of a truism. The blessing upon the meek would seem to be a very violent statement; in the sense of doing violence to reason and probability. And with this we come to another important stage in the speculation. As a prophecy it really was fulfilled; but it was only fulfilled long afterwards. The monasteries were the most practical and prosperous estates and experiments in reconstruction after the barbaric deluge; the meek did really inherit the earth. But nobody could have known anything of the sort at the time—unless indeed there was one who knew. Something of the same thing may be said about the incident of Martha and Mary; which has been interpreted in retrospect and from the inside by the mystics of the Christian contemplative life. But it was not at all an obvious view of it; and most moralists, ancient and modern, could be trusted to make a rush for the obvious. What torrents of effortless eloquence would have flowed from them to swell any slight superiority on the part of Martha; what splendid sermons about the Joy of Service and the Gospel of Work and the World Left Better Than We Found It, and generally all the ten thousand platitudes that can be uttered in favour of taking trouble—by people who need take no trouble to utter them. If in Mary the mystic and child of love Christ was guarding the seed of something more subtle, who was likely to understand it at the time? Nobody else could have seen Clare and Catherine and Teresa shining above the little roof at Bethany. It is so in another way with that magnificent menace about bringing into the world a sword to sunder and divide. Nobody could have guessed then either how it could be fulfilled or how it could be justified. Indeed some freethinkers are still so simple as to fall into the trap and be shocked at a phrase so deliberately defiant. They actually complain of the paradox for not being a platitude.
La prima cosa da notare è che, se la prendiamo semplicemente come una vicenda umana, è per certi versi una vicenda assai singolare. Non mi riferisco qui al suo culmine tremendo e tragico, né ad alcuna implicazione che comporti un trionfo dentro quella tragedia. Non mi riferisco a ciò che comunemente si chiama l’elemento miracoloso; ché su quel punto le filosofie divergono, e le filosofie moderne vacillano in modo assai marcato. Anzi, si potrebbe dire che l’inglese colto d’oggi sia passato da una vecchia moda, per cui non voleva credere a nessun miracolo se non era antico, a una moda nuova, per cui non vuol credere a nessun miracolo se non è moderno. Un tempo sosteneva che le guarigioni miracolose si erano arrestate con i primi cristiani, e ora è propenso a sospettare che siano cominciate con i primi Scienziati Cristiani. Ma qui mi riferisco piuttosto, e in special modo, alle parti non miracolose, e persino alle parti inosservate e poco appariscenti della vicenda. Vi sono moltissime cose che nessuno avrebbe inventato, poiché sono cose di cui nessuno ha mai fatto un uso particolare; cose che, ammesso siano state notate, sono rimaste piuttosto come enigmi. Per esempio, c’è quel lungo tratto di silenzio nella vita di Cristo fino all’età di trent’anni. È, fra tutti i silenzi, il più immenso e il più suggestivo per l’immaginazione. Ma non è il genere di cosa che qualcuno sia particolarmente incline a inventare per dimostrare qualcosa; e nessuno, per quel che ne so, ha mai cercato di dimostrare alcunché di particolare a partire da esso. È impressionante, ma è impressionante soltanto come fatto; non c’è nulla di particolarmente popolare o ovvio in esso come favola. La tendenza consueta del culto degli eroi e della fabbricazione dei miti è molto più incline a dire l’esatto contrario. È molto più incline a dire (come credo dicano alcuni dei vangeli respinti dalla Chiesa) che Gesù mostrò una divina precocità e diede inizio alla sua missione a un’età miracolosamente prematura. E c’è in effetti qualcosa di strano nel pensiero che colui il quale, fra tutta l’umanità, aveva bisogno di minor preparazione, sembra averne avuta di più. Se ciò fu un qualche modo dell’umiltà divina, o una qualche verità di cui scorgiamo l’ombra nel più lungo apprendistato domestico delle creature più elevate della terra, non mi propongo di congetturarlo; lo cito semplicemente come un esempio di quel genere di cose che in ogni caso danno luogo a congetture, del tutto a prescindere dalle riconosciute congetture religiose. Ora, l’intera vicenda è colma di cose siffatte. Non è affatto, così come è nudamente presentata a stampa, una vicenda di cui sia facile venire a capo. È tutt’altro che ciò che questa gente chiama un semplice Vangelo. Relativamente parlando, è il Vangelo ad avere il misticismo ed è la Chiesa ad avere il razionalismo. Come lo formulerei io, naturalmente, è il Vangelo a essere l’indovinello ed è la Chiesa a essere la risposta. Ma quale che sia la risposta, il Vangelo così com’è quasi un libro di indovinelli.
Anzitutto, chi leggesse le sentenze del Vangelo non vi troverebbe luoghi comuni. Se avesse letto, anche nello spirito più rispettoso, la maggior parte dei filosofi antichi e dei moralisti moderni, apprezzerebbe l’importanza unica del dire che egli non vi trova luoghi comuni. È più di quanto si possa dire persino di Platone. È molto più di quanto si possa dire di Epitteto o di Seneca o di Marco Aurelio o di Apollonio di Tiana. Ed è incommensurabilmente più di quanto si possa dire della maggior parte dei moralisti agnostici e dei predicatori delle società etiche, con i loro cantici del servizio e la loro religione della fratellanza. La morale della maggior parte dei moralisti, antichi e moderni, è stata una compatta e levigata cateratta di luoghi comuni che scorre in eterno. Questa non sarebbe certo l’impressione dell’immaginario spettatore indipendente ed esterno che studiasse il Nuovo Testamento. Egli non avvertirebbe nulla di così banale e, in un certo senso, nulla di così continuo come quel torrente. Troverebbe una serie di strane pretese, che potrebbero suonare come la pretesa di essere fratello del sole e della luna; una serie di consigli oltremodo sconcertanti; una serie di rimproveri fulminanti; una serie di storie stranamente belle. Vedrebbe alcune figure retoriche assai gigantesche circa l’impossibilità di far passare un cammello per la cruna di un ago o la possibilità di gettare una montagna nel mare. Vedrebbe una serie di semplificazioni assai temerarie delle difficoltà della vita; come il consiglio di splendere su tutti indifferentemente, come fa la luce del sole, o di non preoccuparsi dell’avvenire più di quanto facciano gli uccelli. D’altra parte troverebbe alcuni passi di tenebra pressoché impenetrabile, per quanto lo riguarda, come la morale della parabola dell’Amministratore Infedele. Alcune di queste cose potrebbero colpirlo come favole e alcune come verità; ma nessuna come ovvietà. Per esempio, non vi troverebbe gli ordinari luoghi comuni a favore della pace. Vi troverebbe parecchi paradossi a favore della pace. Vi troverebbe parecchi ideali di non resistenza, i quali, presi così come stanno, risulterebbero fin troppo pacifici per qualsiasi pacifista. In un passo gli verrebbe detto di trattare un ladro non con la resistenza passiva, ma piuttosto con un incoraggiamento positivo ed entusiastico, se i termini si prendono alla lettera; colmando di doni l’uomo che aveva rubato la roba. Ma non vi troverebbe una parola di tutta quella ovvia retorica contro la guerra che ha riempito innumerevoli libri e odi e orazioni; non una parola sulla malvagità della guerra, sullo spreco della guerra, sulla scala spaventosa del massacro nella guerra e su tutto il resto della consueta frenesia; anzi, non una parola sulla guerra affatto. Non c’è nulla che getti una luce particolare sull’atteggiamento di Cristo verso la guerra organizzata, salvo che egli sembra aver nutrito una certa simpatia per i soldati romani. Anzi, è un’altra perplessità, parlando dallo stesso punto di vista esterno e umano, che egli sembra essersi trovato molto meglio con i Romani che non con i Giudei. Ma la questione qui è un certo tono che si coglie soltanto leggendo un certo testo; e potremmo darne un numero qualsiasi di esempi.
L’affermazione che i miti erediteranno la terra è ben lungi dall’essere un’affermazione mite. Voglio dire che non è mite nel senso ordinario di mansueto e moderato e inoffensivo. Per giustificarla, sarebbe necessario scendere assai a fondo nella storia e anticipare cose allora nemmeno sognate e da molti non comprese neppure oggi; come il modo in cui i monaci mistici riconquistarono le terre che i re pratici avevano perduto. Se era una verità, lo era in quanto era una profezia. Ma di certo non era una verità nel senso di un’ovvietà. La benedizione sui miti parrebbe un’affermazione oltremodo violenta, nel senso di fare violenza alla ragione e alla probabilità. E con ciò giungiamo a un altro stadio importante della congettura. Come profezia essa fu davvero adempiuta; ma fu adempiuta solo molto tempo dopo. I monasteri furono i possedimenti e gli esperimenti di ricostruzione più pratici e prosperi dopo il diluvio barbarico; i miti ereditarono davvero la terra. Ma nessuno avrebbe potuto sapere nulla del genere all’epoca, a meno che, in verità, non ci fosse uno che sapeva. Qualcosa di analogo si può dire dell’episodio di Marta e Maria, che è stato interpretato retrospettivamente e dall’interno dai mistici della vita contemplativa cristiana. Ma non era affatto una lettura ovvia di esso; e ci si poteva fidare che la maggior parte dei moralisti, antichi e moderni, si sarebbe precipitata sull’ovvio. Quali torrenti di eloquenza senza sforzo sarebbero sgorgati da loro a ingigantire ogni lieve superiorità dalla parte di Marta; quali splendide prediche sulla Gioia del Servizio e sul Vangelo del Lavoro e sul Mondo Lasciato Migliore di Come lo Trovammo, e in generale tutte le diecimila ovvietà che si possono proferire in favore del darsi pena, da parte di gente che nessuna pena deve darsi per proferirle. Se in Maria, la mistica e figlia dell’amore, Cristo custodiva il seme di qualcosa di più sottile, chi mai era in grado di comprenderlo a quel tempo? Nessun altro avrebbe potuto scorgere Chiara e Caterina e Teresa risplendere sopra il piccolo tetto di Betania. Così è, in altro modo, con quella magnifica minaccia circa il portare nel mondo una spada per fendere e dividere. Nessuno avrebbe potuto indovinare allora né come essa potesse adempiersi né come potesse giustificarsi. Anzi, alcuni liberi pensatori sono ancora tanto ingenui da cadere nella trappola e scandalizzarsi di una frase così deliberatamente provocatoria. Si lagnano addirittura del paradosso perché non è un luogo comune.
But the point here is that if we could read the Gospel reports as things as new as newspaper reports, they would puzzle us and perhaps terrify us much more than the same things as developed by historical Christianity. For instance, Christ after a clear allusion to the eunuchs of eastern courts, said there would be eunuchs of the kingdom of heaven. If this does not mean the voluntary enthusiasm of virginity, it could only be made to mean something much more unnatural or uncouth. It is the historical religion that humanises it for us by experience of Franciscans or of Sisters of Mercy. The mere statement standing by itself might very well suggest a rather dehumanised atmosphere; the sinister and inhuman silence of the Asiatic harem and divan. This is but one instance out of scores; but the moral is that the Christ of the Gospel might actually seem more strange and terrible than the Christ of the Church.
I am dwelling on the dark or dazzling or defiant or mysterious side of the Gospel words, not because they had not obviously a more obvious and popular side, but because this is the answer to a common criticism on a vital point. The freethinker frequently says that Jesus of Nazareth was a man of his time, even if he was in advance of his time; and that we cannot accept his ethics as final for humanity. The freethinker then goes on to criticise his ethics, saying plausibly enough that men cannot turn the other cheek, or that they must take thought for the morrow, or that the self-denial is too ascetic or the monogamy too severe. But the Zealots and the Legionaries did not turn the other cheek any more than we do, if so much. The Jewish traders and Roman tax-gatherers took thought for the morrow as much as we, if not more. We cannot pretend to be abandoning the morality of the past for one more suited to the present. It is certainly not the morality of another age, but it might be of another world.
In short, we can say that these ideals are impossible in themselves. Exactly what we cannot say is that they are impossible for us. They are rather notably marked by a mysticism which, if it be a sort of madness, would always have struck the same sort of people as mad. Take, for instance, the case of marriage and the relations of the sexes. It might very well have been true that a Galilean teacher taught things natural to a Galilean environment; but it is not. It might rationally be expected that a man in the time of Tiberius would have advanced a view conditioned by the time of Tiberius; but he did not. What he advanced was something quite different; something very difficult; but something no more difficult now than it was then. When, for instance, Mahomet made his polygamous compromise we may reasonably say that it was conditioned by a polygamous society. When he allowed a man four wives he was really doing something suited to the circumstances, which might have been less suited to other circumstances. Nobody will pretend that the four wives were like the four winds, something seemingly a part of the order of nature; nobody will say that the figure four was written for ever in stars upon the sky. But neither will anyone say that the figure four is an inconceivable ideal; that it is beyond the power of the mind of man to count up to four; or to count the number of his wives and see whether it amounts to four. It is a practical compromise carrying with it the character of a particular society. If Mahomet had been born in Acton in the nineteenth century, we may well doubt whether he would instantly have filled that suburb with harems of four wives apiece. As he was born in Arabia in the sixth century, he did in his conjugal arrangements suggest the conditions of Arabia in the sixth century. But Christ in his view of marriage does not in the least suggest the conditions of Palestine of the first century. He does not suggest anything at all, except the sacramental view of marriage as developed long afterwards by the Catholic Church. It was quite as difficult for people then as for people now. It was much more puzzling to people then than to people now. Jews and Romans and Greeks did not believe, and did not even understand enough to disbelieve, the mystical idea that the man and the woman had become one sacramental substance. We may think it an incredible or impossible ideal; but we cannot think it any more incredible or impossible than they would have thought it. In other words, whatever else is true, it is not true that the controversy has been altered by time. Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to his time, but are no longer suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they were to his time is perhaps suggested in the end of his story.
The same truth might be stated in another way by saying that if the story be regarded as merely human and historical, it is extraordinary how very little there is in the recorded words of Christ that ties him at all to his own time. I do not mean the details of a period, which even a man of the period knows to be passing. I mean the fundamentals which even the wisest man often vaguely assumes to be eternal. For instance, Aristotle was perhaps the wisest and most wide-minded man who ever lived. He founded himself entirely upon fundamentals, which have been generally found to remain rational and solid through all social and historical changes. Still, he lived in a world in which it was thought as natural to have slaves as to have children. And therefore he did permit himself a serious recognition of a difference between slaves and free men. Christ as much as Aristotle lived in a world that took slavery for granted. He did not particularly denounce slavery. He started a movement that could exist in a world with slavery. But he started a movement that could exist in a world without slavery. He never used a phrase that made his philosophy depend even upon the very existence of the social order in which he lived. He spoke as one conscious that everything was ephemeral, including the things that Aristotle thought eternal. By that time the Roman Empire had come to be merely the orbis terrarum, another name for the world. But he never made his morality dependent on the existence of the Roman Empire or even on the existence of the world. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’
Ma il punto, qui, è che se potessimo leggere i resoconti evangelici come cose nuove al pari di notizie di giornale, ci lascerebbero perplessi, e forse ci atterrirebbero, assai più delle medesime cose quali le ha svolte il cristianesimo storico. Per esempio, Cristo, dopo una chiara allusione agli eunuchi delle corti orientali, disse che vi sarebbero stati eunuchi del regno dei cieli. Se ciò non significa il volontario entusiasmo della verginità, non lo si potrebbe far significare che qualcosa di assai più innaturale o rozzo. È la religione storica a umanizzarlo per noi, attraverso l’esperienza dei francescani o delle Suore della Misericordia. La sola affermazione, presa in sé, potrebbe benissimo suggerire un’atmosfera piuttosto disumanizzata; il silenzio sinistro e inumano dell’harem e del divano asiatico. Questo non è che un caso fra decine; ma la morale è che il Cristo del Vangelo potrebbe in realtà apparire più strano e terribile del Cristo della Chiesa.
Mi soffermo sul lato oscuro, o abbagliante, o provocatorio, o misterioso delle parole evangeliche, non perché esse non avessero manifestamente anche un lato più ovvio e popolare, ma perché questa è la risposta a una critica assai diffusa su un punto vitale. Il libero pensatore dice di frequente che Gesù di Nazaret fu un uomo del suo tempo, ancorché fosse in anticipo sul suo tempo; e che non possiamo accettarne l’etica come definitiva per l’umanità. Il libero pensatore prosegue poi criticandone l’etica, dicendo con verosimiglianza sufficiente che gli uomini non possono porgere l’altra guancia, o che devono darsi pensiero del domani, o che l’abnegazione è troppo ascetica o la monogamia troppo severa. Ma gli Zeloti e i Legionari non porgevano l’altra guancia più di quanto la porgiamo noi, se pure altrettanto. I mercanti ebrei e gli esattori romani si davano pensiero del domani quanto noi, se non più. Non possiamo pretendere di star abbandonando la morale del passato per una più adatta al presente. Non è certo la morale di un’altra epoca, ma potrebbe essere quella di un altro mondo.
In breve, possiamo dire che questi ideali sono impossibili in se stessi. Ciò che precisamente non possiamo dire è che siano impossibili per noi. Essi sono anzi notevolmente segnati da un misticismo che, se è una sorta di follia, avrebbe sempre colpito come folle il medesimo genere di persone. Si prenda, per esempio, il caso del matrimonio e dei rapporti tra i sessi. Potrebbe benissimo essere stato vero che un maestro galileo insegnasse cose naturali a un ambiente galileo; ma non è così. Ci si potrebbe razionalmente aspettare che un uomo del tempo di Tiberio avanzasse una veduta condizionata dal tempo di Tiberio; ma egli non lo fece. Ciò che avanzò era qualcosa di del tutto diverso; qualcosa di assai difficile; ma qualcosa non più difficile oggi di quanto lo fosse allora. Quando, per esempio, Maometto operò il suo compromesso poligamico, possiamo ragionevolmente dire che esso fu condizionato da una società poligamica. Quando concesse a un uomo quattro mogli, faceva realmente qualcosa di adatto alle circostanze, che avrebbe potuto essere meno adatto ad altre circostanze. Nessuno pretenderà che le quattro mogli fossero come i quattro venti, qualcosa che sembrasse far parte dell’ordine della natura; nessuno dirà che il numero quattro fu scritto per sempre a stelle nel cielo. Ma nemmeno alcuno dirà che il numero quattro sia un ideale inconcepibile; che sia oltre il potere della mente umana contare fino a quattro; o contare il numero delle proprie mogli e vedere se ammonti a quattro. È un compromesso pratico che reca con sé il carattere di una società particolare. Se Maometto fosse nato ad Acton nel diciannovesimo secolo, possiamo ben dubitare che avrebbe all’istante riempito quel sobborgo di harem di quattro mogli ciascuno. Essendo nato in Arabia nel sesto secolo, egli in effetti, nelle sue disposizioni coniugali, suggeriva le condizioni dell’Arabia del sesto secolo. Ma Cristo, nella sua veduta del matrimonio, non suggerisce minimamente le condizioni della Palestina del primo secolo. Non suggerisce assolutamente nulla, se non la veduta sacramentale del matrimonio quale fu sviluppata molto tempo dopo dalla Chiesa cattolica. Era per gli uomini di allora tanto difficile quanto per gli uomini di oggi. Era per gli uomini di allora assai più sconcertante che per gli uomini di oggi. Ebrei, Romani e Greci non credevano, e non capivano nemmeno abbastanza da non credere, l’idea mistica che l’uomo e la donna fossero divenuti un’unica sostanza sacramentale. Possiamo giudicarlo un ideale incredibile o impossibile; ma non possiamo giudicarlo più incredibile o impossibile di quanto l’avrebbero giudicato loro. In altre parole, qualunque altra cosa sia vera, non è vero che la controversia sia stata alterata dal tempo. Qualunque altra cosa sia vera, non è affatto vero, con ogni enfasi, che le idee di Gesù di Nazaret fossero adatte al suo tempo, ma non siano più adatte al nostro. Quanto precisamente fossero adatte al suo tempo è forse suggerito dalla fine della sua storia.
La stessa verità potrebbe essere enunciata in altro modo dicendo che, se si considera la storia come meramente umana e storica, è straordinario quanto pochissimo vi sia nelle parole registrate di Cristo che lo leghi in qualche modo al suo tempo. Non intendo i particolari di un’epoca, che perfino un uomo dell’epoca sa essere caduchi. Intendo i fondamenti che perfino l’uomo più saggio spesso vagamente presume eterni. Per esempio, Aristotele fu forse l’uomo più saggio e di più ampia mente che sia mai vissuto. Si fondò interamente su fondamenti che si sono generalmente rivelati capaci di restare razionali e solidi attraverso tutti i mutamenti sociali e storici. Eppure egli visse in un mondo in cui si riteneva altrettanto naturale avere schiavi quanto avere figli. E perciò si permise davvero un serio riconoscimento di una differenza tra schiavi e uomini liberi. Cristo, non meno di Aristotele, visse in un mondo che dava per scontata la schiavitù. Non denunciò in particolare la schiavitù. Diede inizio a un movimento che poteva esistere in un mondo con la schiavitù. Ma diede inizio a un movimento che poteva esistere in un mondo senza schiavitù. Non usò mai una frase che facesse dipendere la sua filosofia perfino dall’esistenza stessa dell’ordine sociale in cui viveva. Parlò come uno consapevole che tutto fosse effimero, comprese le cose che Aristotele riteneva eterne. A quel tempo l’Impero Romano era giunto a essere semplicemente l’orbis terrarum, un altro nome per il mondo. Ma egli non fece mai dipendere la sua morale dall’esistenza dell’Impero Romano, né perfino dall’esistenza del mondo. «Il cielo e la terra passeranno, ma le mie parole non passeranno».
The truth is that when critics have spoken of the local limitations of the Galilean, it has always been a case of the local limitations of the critics. He did undoubtedly believe in certain things that one particular modern sect of materialists do not believe. But they were not things particularly peculiar to his time. It would be nearer the truth to say that the denial of them is quite peculiar to our time. Doubtless it would be nearer still to the truth to say merely that a certain solemn social importance, in the minority disbelieving them, is peculiar to our time. He believed, for instance, in evil spirits or in the psychic healing of bodily ills; but not because he was a Galilean born under Augustus. It is absurd to say that a man believed things because he was a Galilean under Augustus when he might have believed the same things if he had been an Egyptian under Tutenkamen or an Indian under Gengis Khan. But with this general question of the philosophy of diabolism or of divine miracles I deal elsewhere. It is enough to say that the materialists have to prove the impossibility of miracles against the testimony of all mankind, not against the prejudices of provincials in North Palestine under the first Roman Emperors. What they have to prove, for the present argument, is the presence in the Gospels of those particular prejudices of those particular provincials. And, humanly speaking, it is astonishing how little they can produce even to make a beginning of proving it.
So it is in this case of the sacrament of marriage. We may not believe in sacraments, as we may not believe in spirits, but it is quite clear that Christ believed in this sacrament in his own way and not in any current or contemporary way. He certainly did not get his argument against divorce from the Mosaic law or the Roman law or the habits of the Palestinian people. It would appear to his critics then exactly what it appears to his critics now; an arbitrary and transcendental dogma coming from nowhere save in the sense that it came from him. I am not at all concerned here to defend that dogma; the point here is that it is just as easy to defend it now as it was to defend it then. It is an ideal altogether outside time; difficult at any period; impossible at no period. In other words, if anyone says it is what might be expected of a man walking about in that place at that period, we can quite fairly answer that it is much more like what might be the mysterious utterance of a being beyond man, if he walked alive among men.
I maintain therefore that a man reading the New Testament frankly and freshly would not get the impression of what is now often meant by a human Christ. The merely human Christ is a made-up figure, a piece of artificial selection, like the merely evolutionary man. Moreover there have been too many of these human Christs found in the same story, just as there have been too many keys to mythology found in the same stories. Three or four separate schools of rationalism have worked over the ground and produced three or four equally rational explanations of his life. The first rational explanation of his life was that he never lived. And this in turn gave an opportunity for three or four different explanations, as that he was a sun-myth or a corn-myth, or any other kind of myth that is also a monomania. Then the idea that he was a divine being who did not exist gave place to the idea that he was a human being who did exist. In my youth it was the fashion to say that he was merely an ethical teacher in the manner of the Essenes, who had apparently nothing very much to say that Hillel or a hundred other Jews might not have said; as that it is a kindly thing to be kind and an assistance to purification to be pure. Then somebody said he was a madman with a Messianic delusion. Then others said he was indeed an original teacher because he cared about nothing but Socialism; or (as others said) about nothing but Pacifism. Then a more grimly scientific character appeared who said that Jesus would never have been heard of at all except for his prophecies of the end of the world. He was important merely as a Millenarian like Dr. Cumming; and created a provincial scare by announcing the exact date of the crack of doom. Among other variants on the same theme was the theory that he was a spiritual healer and nothing else; a view implied by Christian Science, which has really to expound a Christianity without the Crucifixion in order to explain the curing of Peter’s wife’s mother or the daughter of a centurion. There is another theory that concentrates entirely on the business of diabolism and what it would call the contemporary superstition about demoniacs, as if Christ, like a young deacon taking his first orders, had got as far as exorcism and never got any further. Now, each of these explanations in itself seems to me singularly inadequate; but taken together they do suggest something of the very mystery which they miss. There must surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him. If the Christian Scientist is satisfied with him as a spiritual healer and the Christian Socialist is satisfied with him as a social reformer, so satisfied that they do not even expect him to be anything else, it looks as if he really covered rather more ground than they could be expected to expect. And it does seem to suggest that there might be more than they fancy in these other mysterious attributes of casting out devils or prophesying doom.
Above all, would not such a new reader of the New Testament stumble over something that would startle him much more than it startles us? I have here more than once attempted the rather impossible task of reversing time and the historic method; and in fancy looking forward to the facts, instead of backward through the memories. So I have imagined the monster that man might have seemed at first to the mere nature around him. We should have a worse shock if we really imagined the nature of Christ named for the first time. What should we feel at the first whisper of a certain suggestion about a certain man? Certainly it is not for us to blame anybody who should find that first wild whisper merely impious and insane. On the contrary, stumbling on that rock of scandal is the first step. Stark staring incredulity is a far more loyal tribute to that truth than a modernist metaphysic that would make it out merely a matter of degree. It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgement, or to lay hold of the man as a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of so catastrophic a claim. There is more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter’s apprentice said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’
La verità è che quando i critici hanno parlato dei limiti locali del Galileo, si è sempre trattato in realtà dei limiti locali dei critici. Egli credeva senza dubbio in certe cose in cui una particolare setta moderna di materialisti non crede. Ma non erano cose particolarmente peculiari della sua epoca. Sarebbe più vicino al vero dire che è la loro negazione a essere del tutto peculiare della nostra epoca. Senza dubbio sarebbe ancora più vicino al vero dire semplicemente che a essere peculiare della nostra epoca è una certa solenne importanza sociale attribuita alla minoranza che non vi crede. Egli credeva, per esempio, negli spiriti maligni o nella guarigione psichica dei mali del corpo; ma non perché fosse un Galileo nato sotto Augusto. È assurdo dire che un uomo credeva certe cose perché era un Galileo sotto Augusto, quando avrebbe potuto credere le stesse cose se fosse stato un egiziano sotto Tutankhamon o un indiano sotto Gengis Khan. Ma di questa questione generale della filosofia del diabolismo o dei miracoli divini mi occupo altrove. Basti dire che i materialisti devono provare l’impossibilità dei miracoli contro la testimonianza di tutta l’umanità, non contro i pregiudizi dei provinciali della Palestina settentrionale sotto i primi imperatori romani. Ciò che devono provare, ai fini del presente ragionamento, è la presenza nei Vangeli di quei particolari pregiudizi di quei particolari provinciali. E, umanamente parlando, è stupefacente quanto poco riescano a produrre anche solo per cominciare a provarlo.
Così è in questo caso del sacramento del matrimonio. Possiamo non credere nei sacramenti, come possiamo non credere negli spiriti, ma è del tutto chiaro che Cristo credeva in questo sacramento a modo suo e non in alcun modo corrente o contemporaneo. Egli non trasse certo il suo argomento contro il divorzio dalla legge mosaica o dalla legge romana o dalle abitudini del popolo palestinese. Esso apparve allora ai suoi critici esattamente come appare oggi ai suoi critici: un dogma arbitrario e trascendentale che non viene da nessun luogo, se non nel senso che veniva da lui. Qui non mi preoccupo affatto di difendere quel dogma; il punto è che difenderlo oggi è altrettanto facile quanto lo era difenderlo allora. È un ideale del tutto fuori dal tempo: difficile in ogni epoca; impossibile in nessuna. In altre parole, se qualcuno dice che è ciò che ci si potrebbe aspettare da un uomo che passeggiava in quel luogo in quell’epoca, possiamo rispondere con tutta franchezza che assomiglia molto di più a ciò che potrebbe essere la misteriosa pronuncia di un essere al di là dell’uomo, qualora camminasse vivo tra gli uomini.
Sostengo dunque che un uomo il quale leggesse il Nuovo Testamento con franchezza e freschezza non ne ricaverebbe l’impressione di ciò che oggi spesso si intende con un Cristo umano. Il Cristo meramente umano è una figura artefatta, un pezzo di selezione artificiale, come l’uomo meramente evolutivo. Per di più, si sono trovati troppi di questi Cristi umani nella medesima storia, così come si sono trovate troppe chiavi della mitologia nelle medesime storie. Tre o quattro distinte scuole di razionalismo hanno lavorato sul terreno e prodotto tre o quattro spiegazioni ugualmente razionali della sua vita. La prima spiegazione razionale della sua vita fu che egli non era mai vissuto. E questo, a sua volta, offrì l’occasione per tre o quattro diverse spiegazioni: che fosse un mito solare o un mito del grano, o qualunque altra sorta di mito che è anche una monomania. Poi l’idea che fosse un essere divino che non esisteva cedette il posto all’idea che fosse un essere umano che esisteva. Nella mia giovinezza andava di moda dire che era semplicemente un maestro di etica alla maniera degli Esseni, il quale a quanto pare non aveva granché da dire che Hillel o cento altri ebrei non avrebbero potuto dire; per esempio che è cosa gentile essere gentili e un aiuto alla purificazione l’essere puri. Poi qualcuno disse che era un pazzo affetto da delirio messianico. Poi altri dissero che era davvero un maestro originale perché non si curava di nulla se non del Socialismo; oppure (come altri dissero) di nulla se non del Pacifismo. Poi comparve un personaggio più cupamente scientifico, il quale disse che di Gesù non si sarebbe mai sentito parlare affatto se non fosse stato per le sue profezie sulla fine del mondo. Egli sarebbe importante soltanto come un millenarista alla maniera del dottor Cumming; e avrebbe suscitato un panico provinciale annunciando la data esatta del crollo finale. Tra le altre varianti sullo stesso tema vi era la teoria secondo cui era un guaritore spirituale e nient’altro; una visione implicata dalla Scienza Cristiana, che è costretta a esporre un cristianesimo senza la Crocifissione per poter spiegare la guarigione della suocera di Pietro o della figlia di un centurione. Vi è un’altra teoria che si concentra interamente sulla faccenda del diabolismo e su ciò che chiamerebbe la superstizione contemporanea intorno agli indemoniati, come se Cristo, al pari di un giovane diacono che riceve i primi ordini, fosse giunto fino all’esorcismo e non fosse mai andato oltre. Ora, ciascuna di queste spiegazioni mi sembra in sé singolarmente inadeguata; ma prese insieme esse suggeriscono in qualche modo proprio quel mistero che mancano. Doveva pur esserci qualcosa non solo di misterioso ma di poliedrico in Cristo, se da lui si possono intagliare tanti Cristi più piccoli. Se lo Scienziato Cristiano si accontenta di lui come guaritore spirituale e il Socialista Cristiano si accontenta di lui come riformatore sociale, tanto contenti da non aspettarsi nemmeno che sia qualcos’altro, sembra proprio che egli abbracciasse assai più terreno di quanto ci si potesse aspettare che loro si aspettassero. E ciò sembra suggerire che ci potrebbe essere più di quanto essi immaginino in questi altri misteriosi attributi dello scacciare i demoni o del profetizzare la rovina.
Soprattutto, un tale nuovo lettore del Nuovo Testamento non inciamperebbe in qualcosa che lo sconvolgerebbe assai più di quanto sconvolga noi? Ho qui tentato più di una volta l’impresa piuttosto impossibile di rovesciare il tempo e il metodo storico; e di guardare con la fantasia in avanti verso i fatti, invece che all’indietro attraverso i ricordi. Così ho immaginato il mostro che l’uomo potrebbe essere apparso in un primo momento alla mera natura che lo circondava. Avremmo uno choc anche peggiore se davvero immaginassimo la natura di Cristo nominata per la prima volta. Che cosa proveremmo al primo sussurro di una certa insinuazione su un certo uomo? Certo non tocca a noi biasimare chiunque trovasse quel primo folle sussurro semplicemente empio e insensato. Al contrario, inciampare su quella pietra dello scandalo è il primo passo. Un’incredulità sbarrata e a occhi sgranati è un tributo assai più leale a quella verità di quanto lo sia una metafisica modernista che ne farebbe una mera questione di grado. Meglio sarebbe stracciarci le vesti con un gran grido contro la bestemmia, come Caifa nel giudizio, o afferrare l’uomo come un maniaco posseduto dai demoni, come i parenti e la folla, piuttosto che starsene stupidamente a discutere di sottili sfumature di panteismo al cospetto di una pretesa tanto catastrofica. Vi è più di quella saggezza che è tutt’uno con lo stupore in qualsiasi persona semplice, colma della sensibilità della semplicità, che si aspettasse che l’erba appassisse e gli uccelli cadessero morti dal cielo, quando un girovago apprendista falegname disse con calma e quasi con noncuranza, come chi si volge a guardare oltre la spalla: «Prima che Abramo fosse, io sono».
III
THE STRANGEST STORY IN THE WORLD
In the last chapter I have deliberately stressed what seems to be nowadays a neglected side of the New Testament story, but nobody will suppose, I imagine, that it is meant to obscure that side that may truly be called human. That Christ was and is the most merciful of judges and the most sympathetic of friends is a fact of considerably more importance in our own private lives than in anybody’s historical speculations. But the purpose of this book is to point out that something unique has been swamped in cheap generalisations; and for that purpose it is relevant to insist that even what was most universal was also most original. For instance, we might take a topic which really is sympathetic to the modern mood, as the ascetic vocations recently referred to are not. The exaltation of childhood is something which we do really understand; but it was by no means a thing that was then in that sense understood. If we wanted an example of the originality of the Gospels we could hardly take a stronger or more startling one. Nearly two thousand years afterwards we happen to find ourselves in a mood that does really feel the mystical charm of the child; we express it in romances and regrets about childhood, in Peter Pan or The Child’s Garden of Verses. And we can say of the words of Christ with so angry an anti-Christian as Swinburne:—
‘No sign that ever was given To faithful or faithless eyes Showed ever beyond clouds riven So clear a paradise.
Earth’s creeds may be seventy times seven And blood have defiled each creed But if such be the kingdom of heaven It must be heaven indeed.’
But that paradise was not clear until Christianity had gradually cleared it. The pagan world, as such, would not have understood any such thing as a serious suggestion that a child is higher or holier than a man. It would have seemed like the suggestion that a tadpole is higher or holier than a frog. To the merely rationalistic mind, it would sound like saying that a bud must be more beautiful than a flower or that an unripe apple must be better than a ripe one. In other words, this modern feeling is an entirely mystical feeling. It is quite as mystical as the cult of virginity; in fact it is the cult of virginity. But pagan antiquity had much more idea of the holiness of the virgin than of the holiness of the child. For various reasons we have come nowadays to venerate children, perhaps partly because we envy children for still doing what men used to do; such as play simple games and enjoy fairy-tales. Over and above this, however, there is a great deal of real and subtle psychology in our appreciation of childhood; but if we turn it into a modern discovery, we must once more admit that the historical Jesus of Nazareth had already discovered it two thousand years too soon. There was certainly nothing in the world around him to help him to the discovery. Here Christ was indeed human; but more human than a human being was then likely to be. Peter Pan does not belong to the world of Pan but the world of Peter.
Even in the matter of mere literary style, if we suppose ourselves thus sufficiently detached to look at it in that light, there is a curious quality to which no critic seems to have done justice. It had among other things a singular air of piling tower upon tower by the use of the a fortiori; making a pagoda of degrees like the seven heavens. I have already noted that almost inverted imaginative vision which pictured the impossible penance of the Cities of the Plain. There is perhaps nothing so perfect in all language or literature as the use of these three degrees in the parable of the lilies of the field; in which he seems first to take one small flower in his hand and note its simplicity and even its impotence; then suddenly expands it in flamboyant colours into all the palaces and pavilions full of a great name in national legend and national glory; and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels into nothing once more with a gesture as if flinging it away ‘and if God so clothes the grass that today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven— how much more’ It is like the building of a good Babel tower by white magic in a moment and in the movement of a hand; a tower heaved suddenly up to heaven on the top of which can be seen afar off, higher than we had fancied possible, the figure of man; lifted by three infinities above all other things, on a starry ladder of light logic and swift imagination. Merely in a literary sense it would be more of a masterpiece than most of the masterpieces in the libraries; yet it seems to have been uttered almost at random while a man might pull a flower. But merely in a literary sense also, this use of the comparative in several degrees has about it a quality which seems to me to hint of much higher things than the modern suggestion of the simple teaching of pastoral or communal ethics. There is nothing that really indicates a subtle and in the true sense a superior mind so much as this power of comparing a lower thing with a higher and yet that higher with a higher still; of thinking on three planes at once. There is nothing that wants the rarest sort of wisdom so much as to see, let us say, that the citizen is higher than the slave and yet that the soul is infinitely higher than the citizen or the city. It is not by any means a faculty that commonly belongs to these simplifiers of the Gospel; those who insist on what they call a simple morality and others call a sentimental morality. It is not at all covered by those who are content to tell everybody to remain at peace. On the contrary, there is a very striking example of it in the apparent inconsistency between Christ’s sayings about peace and about a sword. It is precisely this power which perceives that while a good peace is better than a good war, even a good war is better than a bad peace. These far-flung comparisons are nowhere so common as in the Gospels; and to me they suggest something very vast. So a thing solitary and solid, with the added dimension of depth or height, might tower over the flat creatures living only on a plane.
III
LA STORIA PIÙ STRANA DEL MONDO
Nel capitolo precedente ho deliberatamente insistito su quello che oggi sembra essere un aspetto trascurato del racconto del Nuovo Testamento, ma nessuno supporrà, immagino, che ciò intenda oscurare quell’altro aspetto che può veramente dirsi umano. Che il Cristo fosse ed è il più misericordioso dei giudici e il più partecipe degli amici è un fatto di ben maggiore importanza nella nostra vita privata che in qualsivoglia speculazione storica. Ma lo scopo di questo libro è mostrare che qualcosa di unico è stato sommerso da vane generalizzazioni; e a tale scopo è pertinente insistere sul fatto che perfino ciò che vi era di più universale era anche di più originale. Prendiamo, per esempio, un tema che è davvero congeniale all’animo moderno, come non lo sono le vocazioni ascetiche cui si è accennato poco fa. L’esaltazione dell’infanzia è qualcosa che noi comprendiamo davvero; ma non era affatto una cosa che allora, in quel senso, fosse compresa. Se volessimo un esempio dell’originalità dei Vangeli difficilmente potremmo sceglierne uno più forte o più sorprendente. Quasi duemila anni dopo, ci troviamo per caso in una disposizione d’animo che sente davvero il fascino mistico del bambino; lo esprimiamo in romanzi e rimpianti sull’infanzia, in Peter Pan o in The Child’s Garden of Verses. E delle parole di Cristo possiamo dire, con un anticristiano tanto rabbioso quanto Swinburne:
‘No sign that ever was given To faithful or faithless eyes Showed ever beyond clouds riven So clear a paradise.
Earth’s creeds may be seventy times seven And blood have defiled each creed But if such be the kingdom of heaven It must be heaven indeed.’
Ma quel paradiso non fu limpido finché il cristianesimo non lo ebbe a poco a poco rischiarato. Il mondo pagano, in quanto tale, non avrebbe compreso alcunché di simile a una seria proposta che un bambino sia più alto o più santo di un uomo. Sarebbe suonata come la proposta che un girino sia più alto o più santo di una rana. Alla mente meramente razionalistica sarebbe parso come dire che un bocciolo debba essere più bello di un fiore o che una mela acerba debba essere migliore di una matura. In altre parole, questo sentimento moderno è un sentimento interamente mistico. È mistico esattamente quanto il culto della verginità; anzi è il culto della verginità. Ma l’antichità pagana aveva un’idea assai più chiara della santità della vergine che della santità del bambino. Per varie ragioni siamo giunti oggi a venerare i bambini, forse in parte perché li invidiamo per il fatto che fanno ancora ciò che gli uomini facevano un tempo; come giocare a giochi semplici e godere delle fiabe. Oltre a questo, tuttavia, vi è un gran fondo di psicologia reale e sottile nel nostro apprezzamento dell’infanzia; ma se ne facciamo una scoperta moderna, dobbiamo ancora una volta ammettere che il Gesù storico di Nazareth l’aveva già scoperta duemila anni troppo presto. Non c’era certo nulla nel mondo intorno a lui che potesse aiutarlo alla scoperta. Qui il Cristo fu davvero umano; ma più umano di quanto un essere umano fosse allora verosimilmente capace di essere. Peter Pan non appartiene al mondo di Pan, bensì al mondo di Peter.
Persino in materia di puro stile letterario, se supponiamo di essere così sufficientemente distaccati da guardarlo sotto quella luce, vi è una curiosa qualità a cui nessun critico sembra aver reso giustizia. Aveva, tra le altre cose, una singolare aria di ammucchiare torre su torre mediante l’uso dell’a fortiori; facendo una pagoda di gradi come i sette cieli. Ho già notato quella visione immaginativa quasi rovesciata che raffigurava l’impossibile penitenza delle Città della Pianura. Non v’è forse nulla di così perfetto in tutta la lingua o la letteratura quanto l’uso di questi tre gradi nella parabola dei gigli del campo; nella quale egli sembra dapprima prendere un piccolo fiore nella mano e notarne la semplicità e persino l’impotenza; poi d’un tratto lo dilata in colori sgargianti in tutti i palazzi e i padiglioni pieni di un gran nome nella leggenda nazionale e nella gloria nazionale; e poi, con un terzo capovolgimento ancora, lo fa raggrinzire di nuovo nel nulla con un gesto come se lo gettasse via ‘e se Dio così riveste l’erba che oggi è e domani è gettata nel forno— quanto più’ È come la costruzione di una buona torre di Babele mediante bianca magia in un attimo e nel movimento di una mano; una torre issata d’un tratto fino al cielo, sulla cui cima si può scorgere da lontano, più alta di quanto avessimo immaginato possibile, la figura dell’uomo; sollevata da tre infiniti al di sopra di tutte le altre cose, su una scala stellata di limpida logica e rapida immaginazione. Anche solo in senso letterario sarebbe più un capolavoro della maggior parte dei capolavori delle biblioteche; eppure sembra essere stato pronunciato quasi a caso, nel tempo in cui un uomo potrebbe cogliere un fiore. Ma anche solo in senso letterario, questo uso del comparativo in più gradi ha in sé una qualità che a me sembra alludere a cose assai più alte della moderna suggestione del semplice insegnamento dell’etica pastorale o comunitaria. Non v’è nulla che davvero indichi una mente sottile e, nel vero senso, superiore quanto questa capacità di paragonare una cosa più bassa con una più alta e poi quella più alta con una più alta ancora; di pensare su tre piani a un tempo. Non v’è nulla che richieda la specie più rara di saggezza quanto il vedere, poniamo, che il cittadino è più alto dello schiavo e tuttavia che l’anima è infinitamente più alta del cittadino o della città. Non è affatto una facoltà che comunemente appartenga a questi semplificatori del Vangelo; a coloro che insistono su ciò che chiamano una semplice moralità e altri chiamano una sentimentale moralità. Non è affatto un ambito coperto da coloro che si accontentano di dire a tutti di restare in pace. Al contrario, ve n’è un esempio assai notevole nell’apparente incoerenza tra i detti di Cristo sulla pace e sulla spada. È precisamente questa potenza che percepisce che, mentre una buona pace è migliore di una buona guerra, perfino una buona guerra è migliore di una cattiva pace. Questi paragoni spinti tanto lontano non sono in nessun luogo così frequenti come nei Vangeli; e a me suggeriscono qualcosa di assai vasto. Così una cosa solitaria e solida, con la dimensione aggiunta della profondità o dell’altezza, potrebbe torreggiare sopra le creature piatte che vivono soltanto su un piano.
This quality of something that can only be called subtle and superior, something that is capable of long views and even of double meanings, is not noted here merely as a counterblast to the commonplace exaggerations of amiability and mild idealism. It is also to be noted in connection with the more tremendous truth touched upon at the end of the last chapter. For this is the very last character that commonly goes with mere megalomania; especially such steep and staggering megalomania as might be involved in that claim. This quality that can only be called intellectual distinction is not, of course, an evidence of divinity. But it is an evidence of a probable distaste for vulgar and vainglorious claims to divinity. A man of that sort, if he were only a man, would be the last man in the world to suffer from that intoxication by one notion from nowhere in particular, which is the mark of the self-deluding sensationalist in religion. Nor is it even avoided by denying that Christ did make this claim. Of no such man as that, of no other prophet or philosopher of the same intellectual order, would it be even possible to pretend that he had made it. Even if the Church had mistaken his meaning, it would still be true that no other historical tradition except the Church had ever even made the same mistake. Mahomedans did not misunderstand Mahomet and suppose he was Allah. Jews did not misinterpret Moses and identify him with Jehovah. Why was this claim alone exaggerated unless this alone was made. Even if Christianity was one vast universal blunder, it is still a blunder as solitary as the Incarnation.
The purpose of these pages is to fix the falsity of certain vague and vulgar assumptions; and we have here one of the most false. There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders were rivals, that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The claim to that crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique. Mahomet did not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did not make it any more that Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he was Brahma. Zoroaster no more claimed to be Ormuz than to be Ahriman. The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just as we should expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy. It is exactly the other way. Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim. Outside the unique case we are considering, the only kind of man who ever does make that kind of claim is a very small man; a secretive or self-centered monomaniac. Nobody can imagine Aristotle claiming to be the father of gods and men, come down from the sky; though we might imagine some insane Roman Emperor like Caligula claiming it for him, or more probably for himself. Nobody can imagine Shakespeare talking as if he were literally divine; though we might imagine some crazy American crank finding it as a cryptogram in Shakespeare’s works, or preferably in his own works. It is possible to find here and there human beings who make this supremely superhuman claim. It is possible to find them in lunatic asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait waistcoats. But what is much more important than their mere materialistic fate in our very materialistic society, under very crude and clumsy laws about lunacy, the type we know as tinged with this, or tending towards it, is a diseased and disproportionate type; narrow yet swollen and morbid to monstrosity. It is by rather an unlucky metaphor that we talk of a madman as cracked; for in a sense he is not cracked enough. He is cramped rather than cracked; there are not enough holes in his head to ventilate it. This impossibility of letting in daylight on a delusion does sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity. It can be found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only among a low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument becomes intensely interesting; because the argument proves too much. For nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that sort of person. No modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad idea like a cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical criticism, he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that. Yet by all analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of all.
In fact, those who can really take it (as I here hypothetically take it) in a quite dry and detached spirit, have here a most curious and interesting human problem. It is so intensely interesting, considered as a human problem, that it is in a spirit quite disinterested, so to speak, that I wish some of them had turned that intricate human problem into something like an intelligible human portrait. If Christ was simply a human character, he really was a highly complex and contradictory human character. For he combined exactly the two things that lie at the two extremes of human variation. He was exactly what the man with a delusion never is; he was wise; he was a good judge. What he said was always unexpected; but it was always unexpectedly magnanimous and often unexpectedly moderate. Take a thing like the point of the parable of the tares and the wheat. It has the quality that unites sanity and subtlety. It has not the simplicity of a madman. It has not even the simplicity of a fanatic. It might be uttered by a philosopher a hundred years old, at the end of a century of Utopias. Nothing could be less like this quality of seeing beyond and all round obvious things, than the condition of the egomaniac with the one sensitive spot on his brain. I really do not see how these two characters could be convincingly combined, except in the astonishing way in which the creed combines them. For until we reach the full acceptance of the fact as a fact, however marvellous, all mere approximations to it are actually further and further away from it. Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it. Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A lunatic may think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only knows, but knows that he knows.
Questa qualità di qualcosa che si può soltanto definire sottile e superiore, qualcosa che è capace di sguardi lunghi e persino di significati doppi, non viene qui rilevata soltanto come contraltare alle esagerazioni convenzionali dell’affabilità e del blando idealismo. Va rilevata anche in rapporto con la verità ben più tremenda a cui si accennava in chiusura del capitolo precedente. Poiché questo è proprio l’ultimo carattere che di solito si accompagna alla pura megalomania; specialmente a una megalomania così ripida e vertiginosa quale sarebbe implicita in quella pretesa. Questa qualità che si può soltanto definire distinzione intellettuale non è, certo, una prova di divinità. Ma è una prova di un probabile disgusto per le pretese volgari e vanagloriose di divinità. Un uomo di quella tempra, se fosse soltanto un uomo, sarebbe l’ultimo al mondo a soffrire di quell’ebbrezza da una nozione venuta da nessun luogo in particolare, che è il marchio del sensazionalista religioso che inganna se stesso. Né lo si evita negando che il Cristo abbia davvero avanzato quella pretesa. Di nessun uomo simile a lui, di nessun altro profeta o filosofo del medesimo ordine intellettuale, sarebbe possibile fingere che l’avesse avanzata. Anche se la Chiesa avesse frainteso il suo significato, resterebbe comunque vero che nessun’altra tradizione storica all’infuori della Chiesa ha mai fatto neppure il medesimo errore. I maomettani non fraintesero Maometto supponendolo Allah. Gli ebrei non interpretarono male Mosè identificandolo con Jehovah. Perché mai fu esagerata soltanto questa pretesa, se non perché soltanto questa fu avanzata? Anche se il cristianesimo fosse un unico immenso, universale abbaglio, resterebbe pur sempre un abbaglio solitario quanto l’Incarnazione.
Lo scopo di queste pagine è di fissare la falsità di certe assunzioni vaghe e volgari; e qui ne abbiamo una fra le più false. Circola dappertutto nell’aria una specie di idea che tutte le religioni siano uguali perché tutti i fondatori religiosi furono rivali, che stiano tutti combattendo per la medesima corona di stelle. È del tutto falso. La pretesa a quella corona, o a qualcosa di simile a quella corona, è in realtà così rara da essere unica. Maometto non l’avanzò più di quanto la avanzassero Michea o Malachia. Confucio non l’avanzò più di quanto la avanzassero Platone o Marco Aurelio. Buddha non disse mai di essere Brahma. Zoroastro non pretese di essere Ormuzd più di quanto pretendesse di essere Ahriman. La verità è che, nel corso ordinario dei casi, le cose stanno esattamente come dovremmo aspettarci che stiano, secondo il buon senso e certamente secondo la filosofia cristiana. Va esattamente all’inverso. Di norma, quanto più un uomo è grande, tanto meno è probabile che avanzi la pretesa più grande di tutte. Al di fuori del caso unico che stiamo considerando, l’unico tipo d’uomo che avanzi una simile pretesa è un uomo molto piccolo; un monomaniaco chiuso o centrato su se stesso. Nessuno può immaginare Aristotele che pretenda di essere il padre degli dèi e degli uomini, disceso dal cielo; benché potremmo immaginare qualche folle imperatore romano come Caligola avanzare quella pretesa per lui, o più probabilmente per se stesso. Nessuno può immaginare Shakespeare parlare come se fosse letteralmente divino; benché potremmo immaginare qualche svitato americano trovarla come crittogramma nelle opere di Shakespeare, o preferibilmente nelle proprie. È possibile trovare qua e là esseri umani che avanzano questa pretesa supremamente sovrumana. È possibile trovarli nei manicomi; nelle celle imbottite; magari in camicia di forza. Ma ciò che è assai più importante della loro mera sorte materialistica, nella nostra società oltremodo materialistica, sotto leggi assai rozze e goffe riguardo alla follia, è che il tipo che conosciamo come intinto di questo, o incline a questo, è un tipo malato e sproporzionato; angusto eppure gonfio e morboso fino alla mostruosità. È per una metafora piuttosto sfortunata che parliamo di un pazzo come di un uomo «incrinato»; perché in un certo senso egli non è abbastanza incrinato. È compresso, piuttosto che incrinato; non ci sono abbastanza fessure nella sua testa per ventilarla. Questa impossibilità di lasciar entrare la luce del giorno su un’illusione talvolta copre e cela un’illusione di divinità. La si può trovare, non tra i profeti e i saggi e i fondatori di religioni, ma soltanto tra una bassa genìa di dementi. Ma è proprio qui che l’argomento si fa intensamente interessante; perché l’argomento prova troppo. Poiché nessuno suppone che Gesù di Nazareth fosse quel genere di persona. Nessun critico moderno in possesso dei suoi cinque sensi ritiene che il predicatore del Sermone sul Monte fosse un orribile imbecille mezzo idiota che scarabocchiava stelle sui muri di una cella. Nessun ateo o bestemmiatore crede che l’autore della Parabola del Figliuol Prodigo fosse un mostro con una sola idea folle, come un ciclope con un solo occhio. Su qualsiasi possibile critica storica, egli va posto più in alto, nella scala degli esseri umani, che a quel livello. Eppure, per ogni analogia, dobbiamo davvero porlo lì, oppure nel posto più alto di tutti.
In verità, coloro che sanno davvero prenderla (come io qui ipoteticamente la prendo) in uno spirito del tutto asciutto e distaccato, hanno qui un curiosissimo e interessantissimo problema umano. È così intensamente interessante, considerato come problema umano, che è in uno spirito del tutto disinteressato, per così dire, che avrei voluto che alcuni di loro avessero trasformato quell’intricato problema umano in qualcosa come un intelligibile ritratto umano. Se il Cristo fu semplicemente un carattere umano, fu davvero un carattere umano assai complesso e contraddittorio. Poiché egli combinava esattamente le due cose che stanno ai due estremi della variazione umana. Egli era esattamente ciò che l’uomo affetto da un’illusione non è mai; era saggio; era un buon giudice. Ciò che diceva era sempre inatteso; ma era sempre inaspettatamente magnanimo e spesso inaspettatamente moderato. Si prenda una cosa come il fulcro della parabola della zizzania e del grano. Ha quella qualità che unisce la sanità di mente e la sottigliezza. Non ha la semplicità di un pazzo. Non ha nemmeno la semplicità di un fanatico. Potrebbe essere pronunciata da un filosofo di cent’anni, al termine di un secolo di Utopie. Nulla potrebbe essere meno simile a questa qualità di vedere al di là e tutt’intorno alle cose ovvie, che la condizione dell’egomaniaco con l’unico punto sensibile nel suo cervello. Davvero non vedo come questi due caratteri potrebbero essere combinati in modo convincente, se non nel modo sbalorditivo in cui li combina il credo. Poiché finché non giungiamo alla piena accettazione del fatto come fatto, per quanto meraviglioso, tutte le mere approssimazioni a esso se ne allontanano in realtà sempre di più. La divinità è abbastanza grande da essere divina; è abbastanza grande da chiamarsi divina. Ma man mano che l’umanità si fa più grande, si fa sempre meno incline a farlo. Dio è Dio, come dicono i musulmani; ma un grand’uomo sa di non essere Dio, e quanto più è grande, tanto meglio lo sa. Questo è il paradosso; tutto ciò che si limita ad avvicinarsi a quel punto se ne va semplicemente allontanando. Socrate, l’uomo più saggio, sa di non sapere nulla. Un pazzo può credersi onnisciente, e uno sciocco può parlare come se lo fosse. Ma il Cristo è onnisciente in un altro senso, se non solo sa, ma sa di sapere.
Even on the purely human and sympathetic side, therefore, the Jesus of the New Testament seems to me to have in a great many ways the note of something superhuman; that is of something human and more than human. But there is another quality running through all his teachings which seems to me neglected in most modern talk about them as teachings; and that is the persistent suggestion that he has not really come to teach. If there is one incident in the record which affects me personally as grandly and gloriously human, it is the incident of giving wine for the wedding-feast. That is really human in the sense in which a whole crowd of prigs, having the appearance of human beings, can hardly be described as human. It rises superior to all superior persons. It is as human as Herrick and as democratic as Dickens. But even in that story there is something else that has that note of things not fully explained; and in a way here very relevant. I mean the first hesitation, not on any ground touching the nature of the miracle, but on that of the propriety of working any miracles at all, at least at that stage; ‘my time is not yet come.’ What does that mean? At least it certainly meant a general plan or purpose in the mind, with which certain things did or did not fit in. And if we leave out that solitary strategic plan, we not only leave out the point of the story, but the story.
We often hear of Jesus of Nazareth as a wandering teacher, and there is a vital truth in that view in so far as it emphasises an attitude towards luxury and convention which most respectable people would still regard as that of a vagabond. It is expressed in his own great saying about the holes of the foxes and the nests of the birds, and, like many of his great sayings, it is felt as less powerful than it is, through lack of appreciation of that great paradox by which he spoke of his own humanity as in some way collectively and representatively human; calling himself simply the Son of Man; that is, in effect, calling himself simply Man. It is fitting that the New Man or the Second Adam should repeat in so ringing a voice and with so arresting a gesture the great fact which came first in the original story, that man differs from the brutes by everything, even by deficiency; that he is in a sense less normal and even less native; a stranger upon the earth. It is well to speak of his wanderings in this sense and in the sense that he shared the drifting life of the most homeless and hopeless of the poor. It is assuredly well to remember that he would quite certainly have been moved on by the police and almost certainly arrested by the police for having no visible means of subsistence. For our law has in it a turn of humour or touch of fancy which Nero and Herod never happened to think of, that of actually punishing homeless people for not sleeping at home.
But in another sense the word ‘wandering’ as applied to his life is a little misleading. As a matter of fact, a great many of the pagan sages and not a few of the pagan sophists might truly be described as wandering teachers. In some of them their rambling journeys were not altogether without a parallel in their rambling remarks. Apollonius of Tyana, who figured in some fashionable cults as a sort of ideal philosopher, is represented as rambling as far as the Ganges and Ethiopia, more or less talking all the time. There was actually a school of philosophers called the Peripatetics; and most even of the great philosophers give us a vague impression of having very little to do except to walk and talk. The great conversations which give us our glimpses of the great minds of Socrates or Buddha or even Confucius often seem to be parts of a never-ending picnic; and especially, which is the important point, to have neither beginning nor end. Socrates did indeed find the conversation interrupted by the incident of his execution. But it is the whole point and the whole particular merit, of the position of Socrates that death was only an interruption and an incident. We miss the real moral importance of the great philosopher if we miss that point; that he stares at the executioner with an innocent surprise, and almost an innocent annoyance, at finding anyone so unreasonable as to cut short a little conversation for the elucidation of truth. He is looking for truth and not looking for death. Death is but a stone in the road which can trip him up. His work in life is to wander on the roads of the world and talk about truth for ever. Buddha, on the other hand, did arrest attention by one gesture; it was the gesture of renunciation, and therefore in a sense of denial. But by one dramatic negation he passed into a world of negation that was not dramatic; which he would have been the first to insist was not dramatic. Here again we miss the particular moral importance of the great mystic if we do not see the distinction; that it was his whole point that he had done with drama, which consists of desire and struggle and generally of defeat and disappointment. He passes into peace and lives to instruct others how to pass into it. Henceforth his life is that of the ideal philosopher; certainly a far more really ideal philosopher than Apollonius of Tyana; but still a philosopher in the sense that it is not his business to do anything but rather to explain everything; in his case, we might almost say, mildly and softly to explore everything. For the messages are basically different. Christ said ‘Seek first the kingdom, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ Buddha said ‘Seek first the kingdom, and then you will need none of these things.’
Now compared to these wanderers the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did above all things consist in doing something that had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done, if Jesus had walked about the world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth. And even the external movement of it must not be described as a wandering in the sense of forgetting that it was a journey. This is where it was a fulfilment of the myths rather than of the philosophies; it is a journey with a goal and an object, like Jason going to find the Golden Fleece, or Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides. The gold that he was seeking was death. The primary thing that he was going to do was to die. He was going to do other things equally definite and objective; we might almost say equally external and material. But from first to last the most definite fact is that he is going to die. No two things could possibly be more different than the death of Socrates and the death of Christ. We are meant to feel that the death of Socrates was, from the point of view of his friends at least, a stupid muddle and miscarriage of justice interfering with the flow of a humane and lucid, I had almost said a light philosophy. We are meant to feel that Death was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice. From the moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the moment when the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond words.
Anche sul versante puramente umano e simpatetico, dunque, il Gesù del Nuovo Testamento mi pare avere, per moltissimi rispetti, quella nota di qualcosa di sovrumano; vale a dire di qualcosa che è umano e più che umano. Ma vi è un’altra qualità che percorre tutto il suo insegnamento e che mi sembra trascurata nella maggior parte dei discorsi moderni che ne trattano come di un insegnamento; ed è la persistente suggestione che egli non sia venuto realmente a insegnare. Se vi è un episodio, in tutto il racconto, che mi tocca personalmente come grandiosamente e gloriosamente umano, è l’episodio del vino donato per il banchetto di nozze. Quello è umano nel senso in cui un’intera folla di saccenti, che hanno l’apparenza di esseri umani, difficilmente può dirsi umana. Si eleva al di sopra di tutte le persone superiori. È umano come Herrick e democratico come Dickens. Ma perfino in quel racconto vi è qualcos’altro che porta quella nota di cose non pienamente spiegate; e qui, per un certo verso, assai pertinente. Intendo la prima esitazione, non su alcun terreno che tocchi la natura del miracolo, ma su quello dell’opportunità di operare un miracolo qualsiasi, almeno a quello stadio; «il mio tempo non è ancora venuto». Che cosa significa? Significava per lo meno, di certo, un piano o disegno generale nella mente, con cui certe cose si accordavano o non si accordavano. E se lasciamo fuori quel solitario piano strategico, non lasciamo fuori soltanto il senso del racconto, ma il racconto stesso.
Sentiamo spesso parlare di Gesù di Nazaret come di un maestro errante, e vi è una verità vitale in questa visione, nella misura in cui essa mette in risalto un atteggiamento verso il lusso e la convenzione che la maggior parte delle persone rispettabili giudicherebbe ancora quello di un vagabondo. Esso è espresso nel suo grande detto sulle tane delle volpi e i nidi degli uccelli, e, come molti dei suoi grandi detti, è avvertito come meno potente di quanto sia, per mancata comprensione di quel grande paradosso con cui egli parlava della propria umanità come in qualche modo collettivamente e rappresentativamente umana; chiamando se stesso semplicemente il Figlio dell’Uomo; ossia, in effetti, chiamando se stesso semplicemente Uomo. È conveniente che l’Uomo Nuovo, o il Secondo Adamo, ripeta con voce così squillante e con gesto così arrestante il grande fatto che veniva per primo nel racconto originario: che l’uomo differisce dai bruti per ogni cosa, perfino per difetto; che egli è in un certo senso meno normale e persino meno indigeno; uno straniero sulla terra. È bene parlare delle sue peregrinazioni in questo senso e nel senso che egli condivise la vita alla deriva dei più privi di casa e di speranza fra i poveri. È certamente bene ricordare che egli sarebbe stato quasi di sicuro allontanato dalla polizia e quasi certamente arrestato dalla polizia per non avere alcun visibile mezzo di sostentamento. Poiché la nostra legge ha in sé una vena di umorismo o un tocco di fantasia che a Nerone e a Erode non capitò mai di concepire: quello di punire realmente le persone senza casa per non aver dormito a casa.
Ma in un altro senso la parola «errante», applicata alla sua vita, è un poco fuorviante. Di fatto, moltissimi dei saggi pagani e non pochi dei sofisti pagani potrebbero a buon diritto essere descritti come maestri erranti. In alcuni di loro i vagabondi viaggi non erano del tutto privi di riscontro nei loro vagabondi discorsi. Apollonius di Tiana, che figurava in certi culti alla moda come una sorta di filosofo ideale, è rappresentato mentre vagabonda fino al Gange e all’Etiopia, più o meno parlando per tutto il tempo. Vi era realmente una scuola di filosofi detti i Peripatetici; e la maggior parte perfino dei grandi filosofi ci lascia una vaga impressione di aver avuto ben poco da fare, se non camminare e discorrere. Le grandi conversazioni che ci offrono qualche scorcio delle grandi menti di Socrate o di Buddha o perfino di Confucio sembrano spesso parti di un picnic che non finisce mai; e soprattutto, ed è questo il punto importante, di non avere né principio né fine. Socrate trovò invero la conversazione interrotta dall’episodio della propria esecuzione. Ma è tutto il senso, e tutto il particolare merito, della posizione di Socrate che la morte fosse soltanto un’interruzione e un episodio. Manchiamo la vera importanza morale del grande filosofo se manchiamo quel punto: che egli fissa il carnefice con un innocente stupore, e quasi con un innocente fastidio, nel trovare qualcuno tanto irragionevole da troncare una piccola conversazione volta a chiarire la verità. Egli cerca la verità e non cerca la morte. La Death non è che una pietra sulla strada che può farlo inciampare. Il suo compito nella vita è di errare sulle strade del mondo e discorrere della verità in eterno. Buddha, d’altra parte, arrestò invero l’attenzione con un gesto: era il gesto della rinuncia, e perciò, in un certo senso, della negazione. Ma con una sola drammatica negazione egli passò in un mondo di negazione che non era drammatico; e sarebbe stato il primo a insistere che non era drammatico. Anche qui manchiamo la particolare importanza morale del grande mistico se non vediamo la distinzione: che era tutto il suo assunto l’aver chiuso con il dramma, il quale consiste di desiderio e lotta e generalmente di sconfitta e delusione. Egli passa nella pace e vive per istruire gli altri su come passarvi. D’ora innanzi la sua vita è quella del filosofo ideale; certamente un filosofo assai più realmente ideale di Apollonius di Tiana; ma pur sempre un filosofo nel senso che non è suo compito fare alcunché, bensì piuttosto spiegare ogni cosa; nel suo caso, potremmo quasi dire, esplorare con mitezza e dolcezza ogni cosa. Poiché i messaggi sono fondamentalmente diversi. Cristo disse: «Cercate prima il regno, e tutte queste cose vi saranno date in aggiunta». Buddha disse: «Cercate prima il regno, e allora non avrete bisogno di alcuna di queste cose».
Ora, a confronto di questi erranti, la vita di Gesù procedette rapida e diritta come una folgore. Fu al di sopra di ogni cosa drammatica; consistette al di sopra di ogni cosa nel fare qualcosa che doveva essere fatto. Con ogni evidenza non sarebbe stata compiuta, se Gesù avesse camminato per il mondo in eterno senza fare nient’altro che dire la verità. E persino il suo movimento esteriore non va descritto come un errare, nel senso di dimenticare che era un viaggio. È qui che essa fu un compimento dei miti piuttosto che delle filosofie; è un viaggio con una meta e uno scopo, come Giasone che va a cercare il Vello d’Oro, o Ercole i pomi d’oro delle Esperidi. L’oro che egli cercava era la morte. La cosa prima che egli stava per compiere era morire. Stava per compiere altre cose ugualmente definite e oggettive; potremmo quasi dire ugualmente esterne e materiali. Ma dal principio alla fine il fatto più definito è che egli sta per morire. Non potrebbero esservi due cose più diverse della morte di Socrate e della morte di Cristo. Siamo indotti a sentire che la morte di Socrate fu, almeno dal punto di vista dei suoi amici, uno stupido pasticcio e un errore giudiziario che interferiva con lo scorrere di una filosofia umana e lucida, avrei quasi detto lieve. Siamo indotti a sentire che la Death fu la sposa di Cristo come la Povertà fu la sposa di san Francesco. Siamo indotti a sentire che la sua vita fu, in quel senso, una sorta di storia d’amore con la morte, un romanzo della ricerca del sacrificio supremo. Dal momento in cui la stella sale come un razzo di compleanno al momento in cui il sole si spegne come una torcia funebre, l’intera storia procede sulle ali con la velocità e la direzione di un dramma, terminando in un atto che va oltre le parole.
Therefore the story of Christ is the story of a journey, almost in the manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a hero moving to his achievement or his doom. It is a story that begins in the paradise of Galilee, a pastoral and peaceful land having really some hint of Eden, and gradually climbs the rising country into the mountains that are nearer to the storm-clouds and the stars, as to a Mountain of Purgatory. He may be met as if straying in strange places, or stopped on the way for discussion or dispute; but his face is set towards the mountain city. That is the meaning of that great culmination when he crested the ridge and stood at the turning of the road and suddenly cried aloud, lamenting over Jerusalem. Some light touch of that lament is in every patriotic poem; or if it is absent, the patriotism stinks with vulgarity. That is the meaning the stirring and startling incident at the gates of the Temple, when the tables were hurled like lumber down the steps, and the rich merchants driven forth with bodily blows; the incident that must be at least as much of a puzzle to the pacifists as any paradox about non resistance can be to any of the militarists. I have compared the quest to the journey of Jason, but we must never forget that in a deeper sense it is rather to be compared to the journey of Ulysses. It was not only a romance of travel but a romance of return; and of the end of a usurpation. No healthy boy reading the story regards the rout of the Ithacan suitors as anything but a happy ending. But there are doubtless some who regard the rout of the Jewish merchants and money changers with that refined repugnance which never fails to move them in the presence of violence, and especially of violence against the well-to-do. The point, here however, is that all these incidents have in them a character of mounting crisis. In other words. these incidents are not incidental. When Apollonius the ideal philosopher is brought before the judgement-seat of Domitian and vanishes by magic, the miracle is entirely incidental. It might have occurred at any time in the wandering life of the Tyanean; indeed, I believe it is doubtful in date as well as in substance. The ideal philosopher merely vanished, and resumed his ideal existence somewhere else for an indefinite period. It is characteristic of the contrast perhaps that Apollonius was supposed to have lived to an almost miraculous old age. Jesus of Nazareth was less prudent in his miracles. When Jesus was brought before the judgement-seat of Pontius Pilate, he did not vanish. It was the crisis and the goal; it was the hour and the power of darkness. It was the supremely supernatural act, of all his miraculous life, that he did not vanish.
Every attempt to amplify that story has diminished it. The task has been attempted by many men of real genius and eloquence as well as by only too many vulgar sentimentalists and self-conscious rhetoricians. The tale has been retold with patronising pathos by elegant sceptics and with fluent enthusiasm by boisterous best-sellers. It will not be retold here. The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is like the power of mill-stones; and those who can read them simply enough will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them. Criticism is only words about words; and of what use are words about such words as these? What is the use of word-painting about the dark garden filled suddenly with torchlight and furious faces? ‘Are you come out with swords and staves as against a robber? All day I sat in your temple teaching, and you took me not.’ Can anything be added to the massive and gathered restraint of that irony; like a great wave lifted to the sky and refusing to fall? ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me but weep for yourselves and for your children.’ As the High Priest asked what further need he had of witnesses, we might well ask what further need we have of words. Peter in a panic repudiated him: ‘and immediately the cock crew; and Jesus looked upon Peter, and Peter went out and wept bitterly.’ Has anyone any further remarks to offer. Just before the murder he prayed for all the murderous race of men, saying, ‘They know not what they do’; is there anything to say to that, except that we know as little what we say? Is there any need to repeat and spin out the story of how the tragedy trailed up the Via Dolorosa and how they threw him in haphazard with two thieves in one of the ordinary batches of execution; and how in all that horror and howling wilderness of desertion one voice spoke in homage, a startling voice from the very last place where it was looked for, the gibbet of the criminal; and he said to that nameless ruffian, ‘This night shalt thou be with me in Paradise’? Is there anything to put after that but a full stop? Or is anyone prepared to answer adequately that farewell gesture to all flesh which created for his Mother a new Son?
It is more within my powers, and here more immediately to my purpose, to point out that in that scene were symbolically gathered all the human forces that have been vaguely sketched in this story. As kings and philosophers and the popular element had been symbolically present at his birth, so they were more practically concerned in his death; and with that we come face to face with the essential fact to be realised. All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract. Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.
Perciò la storia di Cristo è la storia di un viaggio, quasi alla maniera di una marcia militare; e certamente alla maniera della ricerca di un eroe che avanza verso il proprio compimento o la propria rovina. È una storia che comincia nel paradiso della Galilea, una terra pastorale e pacifica che serba davvero qualche sentore dell’Eden, e a poco a poco sale per la contrada montuosa verso i monti che sono più vicini alle nubi della tempesta e alle stelle, come verso un Monte del Purgatorio. Lo si può incontrare mentre par vagare in luoghi strani, o mentre lo si ferma lungo il cammino per una discussione o una disputa; ma il suo volto è rivolto verso la città della montagna. Questo è il senso di quel grande culmine, quando egli valicò il crinale e sostò alla svolta della strada e a un tratto gridò forte, piangendo su Gerusalemme. Un lieve tocco di quel pianto è in ogni poema patriottico; o, se manca, il patriottismo puzza di volgarità. Questo è il senso dell’episodio commovente e sconcertante alle porte del Tempio, quando le tavole furono scagliate come ciarpame giù per i gradini, e i ricchi mercanti cacciati fuori a percosse; l’episodio che deve costituire per i pacifisti almeno tanto un enigma quanto ogni paradosso sulla non resistenza può costituirlo per uno qualsiasi dei militaristi. Ho paragonato la ricerca al viaggio di Giasone, ma non dobbiamo mai dimenticare che, in un senso più profondo, essa va piuttosto paragonata al viaggio di Ulisse. Non era soltanto un romanzo di viaggio, ma un romanzo di ritorno; e della fine di un’usurpazione. Nessun ragazzo sano che legga la storia considera la disfatta dei pretendenti di Itaca come qualcosa di diverso da un lieto fine. Ma ve ne sono senza dubbio alcuni che considerano la disfatta dei mercanti e dei cambiavalute ebrei con quella raffinata ripugnanza che non manca mai di commuoverli alla presenza della violenza, e specialmente della violenza contro i benestanti. Il punto, qui, è però che tutti questi episodi recano in sé un carattere di crisi crescente. In altre parole, questi episodi non sono incidentali. Quando Apollonio, il filosofo ideale, è condotto dinanzi al tribunale di Domiziano e svanisce per magia, il miracolo è del tutto incidentale. Sarebbe potuto avvenire in qualsiasi momento della vita errabonda del Tianeo; anzi, credo che sia dubbio nella data non meno che nella sostanza. Il filosofo ideale semplicemente svanì, e riprese altrove la sua ideale esistenza per un periodo indefinito. È forse caratteristico del contrasto che Apollonio si supponesse fosse vissuto fino a un’età quasi miracolosa. Gesù di Nazaret fu meno prudente nei suoi miracoli. Quando Gesù fu condotto dinanzi al tribunale di Ponzio Pilato, egli non svanì. Era la crisi e la meta; era l’ora e il potere delle tenebre. Fu l’atto supremamente soprannaturale, di tutta la sua vita miracolosa, che egli non svanisse.
Ogni tentativo di amplificare quella storia l’ha sminuita. All’impresa si sono cimentati molti uomini di autentico genio ed eloquenza, non meno che troppi volgari sentimentali e retori compiaciuti di sé. Il racconto è stato ripetuto con pathos condiscendente da eleganti scettici e con facondo entusiasmo da chiassosi autori di best-seller. Non sarà ripetuto qui. La forza schiacciante delle nude parole della storia evangelica è come la forza delle macine; e chi sappia leggerle con sufficiente semplicità sentirà come se rocce gli fossero state rotolate addosso. La critica è soltanto parole su parole; e a che servono parole su parole come queste? A che serve dipingere a parole il buio giardino riempito d’improvviso di fiaccole e di volti furibondi? «Siete usciti con spade e bastoni come contro un brigante? Tutto il giorno sedevo nel vostro tempio a insegnare, e non mi prendeste.» Si può aggiungere qualcosa al massiccio e raccolto ritegno di quell’ironia, simile a una grande onda sollevata fino al cielo e che rifiuta di ricadere? «Figlie di Gerusalemme, non piangete per me, ma piangete per voi stesse e per i vostri figli.» Come il Sommo Sacerdote chiese quale ulteriore bisogno avesse di testimoni, così noi potremmo ben chiederci quale ulteriore bisogno abbiamo di parole. Pietro in preda al panico lo rinnegò: «e subito il gallo cantò; e Gesù guardò Pietro, e Pietro uscì e pianse amaramente.» Ha qualcuno qualche ulteriore osservazione da offrire? Poco prima dell’assassinio egli pregò per tutta la razza omicida degli uomini, dicendo: «Non sanno quello che fanno»; c’è qualcosa da dire a ciò, se non che noi sappiamo altrettanto poco quello che diciamo? C’è bisogno di ripetere e dipanare la storia di come la tragedia si trascinò su per la Via Dolorosa e di come lo gettarono alla rinfusa insieme a due ladroni in una delle ordinarie infornate d’esecuzione; e di come, in tutto quell’orrore e quel deserto ululante di abbandono, una voce parlò in atto d’omaggio, una voce sorprendente dal luogo più impensato, la forca del criminale; ed egli disse a quel senza nome furfante: «Questa notte tu sarai con me in Paradiso»? C’è qualcosa da mettere dopo di ciò se non un punto fermo? O v’è qualcuno pronto a rispondere adeguatamente a quel gesto d’addio a tutta la carne, che creò per sua Madre un nuovo Figlio?
È più alla mia portata, e qui più immediatamente conforme al mio scopo, far notare che in quella scena erano simbolicamente raccolte tutte le forze umane che sono state vagamente abbozzate in questa storia. Come re e filosofi e l’elemento popolare erano stati simbolicamente presenti alla sua nascita, così furono più concretamente implicati nella sua morte; e con ciò giungiamo faccia a faccia con il fatto essenziale da comprendere. Tutti i grandi gruppi che stavano intorno alla Croce rappresentano in un modo o nell’altro la grande verità storica di quel tempo: che il mondo non poteva salvarsi da sé. L’uomo non poteva far di più. Roma e Gerusalemme e Atene e ogni altra cosa precipitavano come un mare mutato in una lenta cateratta. Esteriormente, invero, il mondo antico era ancora al suo apice; ed è sempre in quel momento che comincia la più intima debolezza. Ma per comprendere quella debolezza dobbiamo ripetere ciò che è stato detto più d’una volta: che non era la debolezza di una cosa in origine debole. Era, con ogni enfasi, la forza del mondo che si mutava in debolezza e la sapienza del mondo che si mutava in follia.
In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask: ‘What is truth?’ So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgement-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.
There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the most important truth in the world; and even that could not save the world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism; like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some intermediaries divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away. Anyhow it could not save the world; it could not even conquer the world. There were philosophers who held it in its highest and noblest form; but they not only could not convert the world, but they never tried. You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a private opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket-knife. The Jewish priests had guarded it jealously in the good and the bad sense. They had kept it as a gigantic secret. As savage heroes might have kept the sun in a box, they kept the Everlasting in the tabernacle. They were proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a single deity; and they did not know that they had themselves gone blind. Since that day their representatives have been like blind men in broad daylight, striking to right and left with their staffs, and cursing the darkness. But there has been that in their monumental monotheism that it has at least remained like a monument, the last thing of its kind, and in a sense motionless in the more restless world which it cannot satisfy. For it is certain that for some reason it cannot satisfy. Since that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, since the rumour that God had left his heavens to set it right.
And as it was with these powers that were good, or at least had once been good, so it was with the element which was perhaps the best, or which Christ himself seems certainly to have felt as the best. The poor to whom he preached the good news, the common people who heard him gladly, the populace that had made so many popular heroes and demigods in the old pagan world, showed also the weaknesses that were dissolving the world. They suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city, and especially the mob of the capital, during the decline of a society. The same thing that makes the rural population live on tradition makes the urban population live on rumour. Just as its myths at the best had been irrational, so its likes and dislikes are easily changed by baseless assertion that is arbitrary without being authoritative. Some brigand or other was artificially turned into a picturesque and popular figure and run as a kind of candidate against Christ. In all this we recognise the urban population that we know, with its newspaper scares and scoops. But there was present in this ancient population an evil more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the neglect of the individual, even of the individual voting the condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was the soul of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in that hour, ‘It is well that one man die for the people.’ Yet this spirit in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had also been in itself and in its time a noble spirit. It had its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honoured for ever. It was failing through its weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The mob went along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.
There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.
They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture and guarded by the authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.
In questa vicenda del Venerdì Santo sono le cose migliori del mondo a mostrarsi nel loro peggio. Ed è appunto questo a rivelarci il mondo nel suo momento peggiore. Erano, per esempio, i sacerdoti di un autentico monoteismo e i soldati di una civiltà internazionale. Roma, la leggenda fondata sulla caduta di Troia e trionfante sulla caduta di Cartagine, aveva incarnato un eroismo che fu quanto di più vicino alla cavalleria un pagano abbia mai raggiunto. Roma aveva difeso gli dèi domestici e le decenze umane contro gli orchi dell’Africa e le mostruosità ermafrodite della Grecia. Ma nel guizzo di folgore di questo episodio vediamo la grande Roma, la repubblica imperiale, scivolare verso il basso sotto la sua condanna lucreziana. Lo scetticismo aveva corroso perfino la sicura sanità di mente dei conquistatori del mondo. Colui che siede in trono per dire che cosa sia la giustizia sa solo domandare: «Che cos’è la verità?». Così, in quel dramma che decise l’intero destino dell’antichità, una delle figure centrali resta fissata in ciò che sembra il rovescio del suo vero ruolo. Roma era quasi un altro nome della responsabilità. Eppure egli sta lì per sempre come una sorta di statua vacillante dell’irresponsabile. L’uomo non poteva far di più. Perfino il pratico era divenuto l’impraticabile. Ritto fra le colonne del suo stesso tribunale, un Romano se ne era lavato le mani del mondo.
Là si trovavano anche i sacerdoti di quella pura e originaria verità che stava dietro tutte le mitologie come il cielo dietro le nubi. Era la verità più importante del mondo; eppure neppure essa poteva salvare il mondo. Forse vi è qualcosa di soverchiante nel puro teismo personale, come vedere il sole, la luna e il cielo convergere a formare un unico volto che fissa. Forse la verità è troppo tremenda quando non sia spezzata da qualche intermediario, divino o umano; forse è semplicemente troppo pura e troppo lontana. Comunque sia, essa non poté salvare il mondo; non poté nemmeno conquistarlo. Vi furono filosofi che la possedettero nella sua forma più alta e più nobile; ma non solo non poterono convertire il mondo, bensì non ci provarono mai. Non si poteva combattere la giungla della mitologia popolare con un’opinione privata più di quanto si potesse sgombrare una foresta con un temperino. I sacerdoti ebrei l’avevano custodita gelosamente, nel senso buono e nel senso cattivo. L’avevano tenuta come un segreto gigantesco. Come eroi selvaggi avrebbero potuto tenere il sole in una cassa, essi tenevano l’Eterno nel tabernacolo. Erano orgogliosi di poter essi soli contemplare l’accecante sole di una divinità unica; e non sapevano di essere divenuti ciechi essi stessi. Da quel giorno i loro rappresentanti sono stati come ciechi in pieno mezzogiorno, che vibrano colpi a destra e a sinistra con i loro bastoni e maledicono le tenebre. Ma vi è stato, in quel loro monumentale monoteismo, qualcosa per cui esso è almeno rimasto come un monumento, l’ultima cosa del suo genere, e in un certo senso immobile nel mondo più inquieto che esso non riesce ad appagare. Poiché è certo che, per qualche ragione, esso non riesce ad appagare. Da quel giorno non è mai più bastato del tutto dire che Dio è nel suo cielo e tutto va bene nel mondo, da quando corse voce che Dio avesse lasciato i suoi cieli per mettere le cose a posto.
E come fu di queste potenze che erano buone, o che almeno un tempo erano state buone, così fu dell’elemento che era forse il migliore, o che Christ stesso sembra di certo aver sentito come il migliore. I poveri ai quali egli annunciava la buona novella, la gente comune che lo ascoltava volentieri, il popolo che aveva creato tanti eroi e semidèi popolari nel vecchio mondo pagano, mostrarono anch’essi le debolezze che stavano dissolvendo il mondo. Soffrivano i mali che spesso si vedono nella plebe della città, e specialmente nella plebe della capitale, durante il declino di una società. La stessa cosa che fa vivere la popolazione rurale di tradizione fa vivere la popolazione urbana di dicerie. Come i suoi miti, nel migliore dei casi, erano stati irrazionali, così le sue simpatie e antipatie si mutano facilmente per un’asserzione infondata, arbitraria senza essere autorevole. Un brigante qualunque fu artificiosamente trasformato in una figura pittoresca e popolare e messo in campo come una sorta di candidato contro Christ. In tutto ciò riconosciamo la popolazione urbana che conosciamo, con i suoi allarmismi e le sue notizie a sensazione da giornale. Ma in questa antica popolazione era presente un male più proprio del mondo antico. Lo abbiamo già rilevato come la noncuranza dell’individuo, perfino dell’individuo che vota la condanna, e ancor più dell’individuo condannato. Era l’anima dell’alveare; una cosa pagana. Anche il grido di questo spirito si udì in quell’ora: «È bene che un uomo solo muoia per il popolo». Eppure questo spirito, nell’antichità, di dedizione alla città e allo stato, era stato anch’esso, in sé e nel suo tempo, uno spirito nobile. Aveva avuto i suoi poeti e i suoi martiri; uomini ancora degni di essere onorati per sempre. Veniva meno per la sua debolezza nel non vedere l’anima separata di un uomo, il sacrario di ogni misticismo; ma veniva meno solo come tutto il resto veniva meno. La plebe si accompagnò ai Sadducei e ai Farisei, ai filosofi e ai moralisti. Si accompagnò ai magistrati imperiali e ai sacri sacerdoti, agli scribi e ai soldati, affinché l’unico universale spirito umano subisse una condanna universale; affinché vi fosse un solo profondo, unanime coro di approvazione e di armonia quando l’Uomo fu ripudiato dagli uomini.
Vi erano solitudini al di là, dove nessuno potrà seguire. Vi erano segreti nella parte più interna e invisibile di quel dramma che non hanno simbolo nella parola; né in alcuna separazione di un uomo dagli uomini. Né è facile, con parole meno spoglie e risolute di quelle della nuda narrazione, anche solo alludere all’orrore di esaltazione che si levava al di sopra della collina. Sterminate esposizioni non ne sono giunte alla fine, e nemmeno all’inizio. E se vi è un suono che possa generare un silenzio, possiamo certo tacere sulla fine e sull’estremità; quando un grido fu strappato da quelle tenebre in parole tremendamente distinte e tremendamente inintelligibili, che l’uomo mai comprenderà in tutta l’eternità che esse gli hanno acquistato; e per un solo annientante istante un abisso che non è fatto per i nostri pensieri si era aperto perfino nell’unità dell’assoluto; e Dio era stato abbandonato da Dio.
Calarono il corpo giù dalla croce, e uno dei pochi uomini ricchi tra i primi cristiani ottenne il permesso di seppellirlo in un sepolcro scavato nella roccia, nel suo giardino; e i Romani vi posero una guardia armata, per timore che scoppiasse qualche tumulto e si tentasse di recuperare il corpo. Ancora una volta vi era un simbolismo naturale in questi eventi naturali; fu bene che il sepolcro venisse sigillato con tutta la segretezza delle antiche sepolture orientali e custodito dall’autorità dei Cesari. Poiché in quella seconda caverna fu raccolta e ricoperta tutta quella grande e gloriosa umanità che chiamiamo antichità; e in quel luogo fu sepolta. Era la fine di una cosa grandissima chiamata storia umana; la storia che era semplicemente umana. Le mitologie e le filosofie furono sepolte là, gli dèi e gli eroi e i sapienti. Nella grande espressione romana, essi avevano vissuto. Ma poiché potevano soltanto vivere, così potevano soltanto morire; ed erano morti.
Il terzo giorno gli amici di Cristo, giungendo all’alba al luogo, trovarono il sepolcro vuoto e la pietra rotolata via. In modi diversi presero coscienza del nuovo prodigio; ma neppure essi si avvidero appieno che il mondo era morto nella notte. Ciò che avevano davanti agli occhi era il primo giorno di una nuova creazione, con un cielo nuovo e una terra nuova; e sotto le sembianze del giardiniere Dio camminava di nuovo nel giardino, nel fresco non della sera ma dell’alba.
IV
THE WITNESS OF THE HERETICS
Christ founded the Church with two great figures of speech; in the final words to the Apostles who received authority to found it. The first was the phrase about founding it on Peter as on a rock; the second was the symbol of the keys. About the meaning of the former there is naturally no doubt in my own case; but it does not directly affect the argument here save in two more secondary aspects. It is yet another example of a thing that could only fully expand and explain itself afterwards, and even long afterwards. And it is yet another example of something the very reverse of simple and self-evident even in the language, in so far as it described a man as a rock when he had much more the appearance of a reed.
But the other image of the keys has an exactitude that has hardly been exactly noticed. The keys have been conspicuous enough in the art and heraldry of Christendom; but not everyone has noted the peculiar aptness of the allegory. We have now reached the point in history where something must be said of the first appearance and activities of the Church in the Roman Empire; and for that brief description nothing could be more perfect than that ancient metaphor. The Early Christian was very precisely a person carrying about a key, or what he said was a key. The whole Christian movement consisted in claiming to possess that key. It was not merely a vague forward movement, which might be better represented by a battering-ram. It was not something that swept along with it similar or dissimilar things, as does a modern social movement. As we shall see in a moment, it rather definitely refused to do so. It definitely asserted that there was a key and that it possessed that key and that no other key was like it; in that sense it was as narrow as you please. Only it happened to be the key that could unlock the prison of the whole world; and let in the white daylight of liberty.
The creed was like a key in three respects; which can be most conveniently summed up under this symbol. First, a key is above all things a thing with a shape. It is a thing that depends entirely upon keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness. That is where it differs from all that formless infinity, Manichean or Buddhist, which makes a sort of pool of night in the dark heart of Asia; the ideal of uncreating all the creatures. That is where it differs also from the analogous vagueness of mere evolutionism, the idea of creatures constantly losing their shape. A man told that his solitary latchkey had been melted down with a million others into a Buddhistic unity would be annoyed. But a man told that his key was gradually growing and sprouting in his pocket, and branching into new wards or complications, would not be more gratified.
Second, the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape. A savage who did not know it was a key would have the greatest difficulty in guessing what it could possibly be. And it is fantastic because it is in a sense arbitrary. A key is not a matter of abstractions; in that sense a key is not a matter of argument. It either fits the lock or it does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered by itself; or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or decorative art. It is senseless for a man to say he would like a simple key; it would be far more sensible to do his best with a crowbar. And thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so this was one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. When people complain of the religion being so early complicated with theology and things of the kind, they forget that the world had not only got into a hole, but had got into a whole maze of holes and corners. The problem itself was a complicated problem; it did not in the ordinary sense merely involve anything so simple as sin. It was also full of secrets, of unexplored and unfathomable fallacies, of unconscious mental diseases, of dangers in all directions. If the faith had faced the world only with the platitudes about peace and simplicity some moralists would confine it to, it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious and labyrinthine lunatic asylum. What it did do we must now roughly describe; it is enough to say here that there was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex, indeed there was only one thing about it that was simple. It opened the door.
There are certain recognised and accepted statements in this matter which may for brevity and convenience be described as lies. We have all heard people say that Christianity arose in an age of barbarism. They might just as well say that Christian Science arose in an age of barbarism. They may think Christianity was a symptom of social decay, as I think Christian Science a symptom of mental decay. They may think Christianity a superstition that ultimately destroyed a civilisation, as I think Christian Science a superstition capable (if taken seriously) of destroying any number of civilisations. But to say that a Christian of the fourth or fifth centuries was a barbarian living in a barbarous time is exactly like saying that Mrs. Eddy was a Red Indian. And if I allowed my constitutional impatience with Mrs. Eddy to impel me to call her a Red Indian, I should incidentally be telling a lie. We may like or dislike the imperial civilisation of Rome in the fourth century; we may like or dislike the industrial civilisation of America in the nineteenth century; but that they both were what we commonly mean by a civilisation no person of commonsense could deny if he wanted to. This is a very obvious fact but it is also a very fundamental one; and we must make it the foundation of any further description of constructive Christianity in the past. For good or evil, it was pre-eminently the product of a civilised age, perhaps of an over-civilised age. This is the first fact apart from all praise or blame; indeed I am so unfortunate as not to feel that I praise a thing when I compare it to Christian Science. But it is at least desirable to know something of the savour of a society in which we are condemning or praising anything; and the science that connects Mrs. Eddy with tomahawks or the Mater Dolorosa with totems may for our general convenience be eliminated. The dominant fact, not merely about the Christian religion, but about the whole pagan civilisation, was that which has been more than once repeated in these pages. The Mediterranean was a lake in the real sense of a pool; in which a number of different cults or cultures were, as the phrase goes, pooled. Those cities facing each other round the circle of the lake became more and more one cosmopolitan culture. On its legal and military side it was the Roman Empire, but it was very many-sided. It might be called superstitious in the sense that it contained a great number of varied superstitions; but by no possibility can any part of it be called barbarous.
IV
LA TESTIMONIANZA DEGLI ERETICI
Cristo fondò la Chiesa con due grandi figure retoriche, nelle parole conclusive rivolte agli Apostoli che ricevettero l’autorità di fondarla. La prima fu l’espressione del fondarla su Pietro come su una roccia; la seconda fu il simbolo delle chiavi. Sul significato della prima non vi è naturalmente alcun dubbio nel mio caso; ma essa non tocca direttamente l’argomento qui trattato, se non in due aspetti più secondari. È l’ennesimo esempio di una cosa che poté pienamente dispiegarsi e spiegarsi soltanto in seguito, e persino molto tempo dopo. Ed è l’ennesimo esempio di qualcosa che è l’esatto contrario di semplice ed evidente da sé, anche solo nel linguaggio, in quanto descriveva un uomo come una roccia quando aveva assai più l’aspetto di una canna.
Ma l’altra immagine, quella delle chiavi, possiede un’esattezza che non è stata quasi esattamente notata. Le chiavi sono state abbastanza cospicue nell’arte e nell’araldica della cristianità; ma non tutti hanno colto la peculiare appropriatezza dell’allegoria. Siamo ora giunti al punto della storia in cui bisogna dire qualcosa della prima comparsa e delle prime attività della Chiesa nell’Impero romano; e per quella breve descrizione nulla potrebbe essere più perfetto di quell’antica metafora. Il primo cristiano era assai precisamente una persona che portava con sé una chiave, o ciò che diceva essere una chiave. L’intero movimento cristiano consisteva nel pretendere di possedere quella chiave. Non era semplicemente un vago movimento in avanti, che sarebbe meglio rappresentato da un ariete. Non era qualcosa che trascinava con sé cose simili o dissimili, come fa un moderno movimento sociale. Come vedremo tra un momento, esso piuttosto decisamente rifiutava di farlo. Affermava con decisione che vi era una chiave, e che esso possedeva quella chiave, e che nessun’altra chiave le somigliava; in tal senso era angusto quanto vi piaccia. Solo che si dava il caso che fosse la chiave che poteva schiudere la prigione del mondo intero; e far entrare la bianca luce del giorno della libertà.
Il credo somigliava a una chiave sotto tre aspetti, che possono essere riassunti nella maniera più conveniente sotto questo simbolo. Primo, una chiave è soprattutto una cosa dotata di una forma. È una cosa che dipende interamente dal conservare la propria forma. Il credo cristiano è soprattutto la filosofia delle forme e il nemico dell’informe. È qui che esso differisce da tutta quella infinità senza forma, manichea o buddhista, che forma una sorta di stagno di notte nel cuore oscuro dell’Asia; l’ideale di dis-creare tutte le creature. È qui che esso differisce anche dall’analoga vaghezza del mero evoluzionismo, l’idea di creature che vanno costantemente perdendo la loro forma. Un uomo a cui si dicesse che la sua unica chiave di casa è stata fusa insieme a un milione di altre in un’unità buddhistica ne sarebbe seccato. Ma un uomo a cui si dicesse che la sua chiave sta gradualmente crescendo e germogliando in tasca, e ramificandosi in nuovi ingegni o complicazioni, non ne sarebbe più compiaciuto.
Secondo, la forma di una chiave è in sé una forma piuttosto fantastica. Un selvaggio che non sapesse essere una chiave avrebbe la più grande difficoltà a indovinare che cosa mai potesse essere. Ed è fantastica perché è in un certo senso arbitraria. Una chiave non è questione di astrazioni; in tal senso una chiave non è questione di argomentazione. O si adatta alla serratura, o non vi si adatta. È inutile che gli uomini stiano a disputarne, considerata in sé; o a ricostruirla su puri principi di geometria o d’arte decorativa. È insensato che un uomo dica di desiderare una chiave semplice; sarebbe assai più sensato che facesse del suo meglio con un piede di porco. E terzo, poiché la chiave è necessariamente una cosa dotata di un disegno, così questa ne aveva uno per certi versi piuttosto elaborato. Quando la gente si lamenta che la religione fu così presto complicata dalla teologia e da cose del genere, dimentica che il mondo non solo era finito in un buco, ma era finito in un intero labirinto di buchi e di anfratti. Il problema stesso era un problema complicato; non implicava, nel senso ordinario, qualcosa di così semplice come il peccato. Era anche pieno di segreti, di fallacie inesplorate e insondabili, di inconsce malattie mentali, di pericoli in ogni direzione. Se la fede avesse affrontato il mondo soltanto con i luoghi comuni sulla pace e sulla semplicità a cui certi moralisti vorrebbero ridurla, non avrebbe avuto il minimo effetto su quel lussuoso e labirintico manicomio. Ciò che essa fece dobbiamo ora descriverlo per sommi capi; qui basti dire che vi era senza dubbio molto, nella chiave, che sembrava complesso, anzi vi era una sola cosa, in essa, che era semplice. Apriva la porta.
Vi sono, in questa materia, certe affermazioni riconosciute e accettate che, per brevità e comodità, si possono definire menzogne. Tutti abbiamo sentito dire che il Cristianesimo sorse in un’epoca di barbarie. Con altrettanta ragione si potrebbe bene dire che la Christian Science sorse in un’epoca di barbarie. Si può ritenere che il Cristianesimo fosse un sintomo di decadenza sociale, così come io ritengo la Christian Science un sintomo di decadenza mentale. Si può ritenere il Cristianesimo una superstizione che finì per distruggere una civiltà, così come io ritengo la Christian Science una superstizione capace (se presa sul serio) di distruggere un numero qualsiasi di civiltà. Ma dire che un cristiano del quarto o del quinto secolo fosse un barbaro vissuto in un tempo barbaro equivale esattamente a dire che la signora Eddy era una Pellerossa. E se lasciassi che la mia costituzionale insofferenza verso la signora Eddy mi spingesse a chiamarla Pellerossa, per inciso starei dicendo una menzogna. Ci può piacere o non piacere la civiltà imperiale di Roma nel quarto secolo; ci può piacere o non piacere la civiltà industriale dell’America nel diciannovesimo secolo; ma che entrambe fossero ciò che comunemente intendiamo per civiltà nessuna persona di buon senso potrebbe negarlo, ove pur lo volesse. È un fatto assai ovvio, ma è anche un fatto assai fondamentale; e dobbiamo farne il fondamento di ogni ulteriore descrizione del Cristianesimo costruttivo del passato. Nel bene o nel male, esso fu in sommo grado il prodotto di un’epoca civile, forse di un’epoca fin troppo civile. Questo è il primo fatto, al di là di ogni lode o biasimo; anzi, sono tanto sfortunato da non riuscire a sentire di lodare una cosa quando la paragono alla Christian Science. Ma è quanto meno desiderabile conoscere qualcosa del sapore di una società entro la quale stiamo condannando o lodando checchessia; e la scienza che collega la signora Eddy ai tomahawk, o la Mater Dolorosa ai totem, per nostra generale comodità può essere eliminata. Il fatto dominante, non soltanto riguardo alla religione cristiana, ma riguardo all’intera civiltà pagana, era quello che in queste pagine è stato più di una volta ripetuto. Il Mediterraneo era un lago nel senso proprio di una vasca; nella quale un certo numero di culti o di culture erano, come si suol dire, messi in comune. Quelle città che si fronteggiavano intorno al cerchio del lago divennero sempre più un’unica cultura cosmopolita. Dal suo lato giuridico e militare era l’Impero Romano, ma aveva moltissime facce. La si poteva dire superstiziosa nel senso che conteneva un gran numero di svariate superstizioni; ma in nessun modo una qualsiasi sua parte può dirsi barbara.
In this level of cosmopolitan culture arose the Christian religion and the Catholic Church; and everything in the story suggests that it was felt to be something new and strange. Those who have tried to suggest that it evolved out of something much milder or more ordinary have found that in this case their evolutionary method is very difficult to apply. They may suggest that Essenes or Ebionites or such things were the seed; but the seed is invisible; the tree appears very rapidly full-grown; and the tree is something totally different. It is certainly a Christmas tree in the sense that it keeps the kindliness and moral beauty of the story of Bethlehem; but it was as ritualistic as the seven-branched candlestick, and the candles it carried were considerably more than were probably permitted by the first prayer-book of Edward the Sixth. It might well be asked, indeed, why any one accepting the Bethlehem tradition should object to golden or gilded ornament since the Magi themselves brought gold, why he should dislike incense in the church since incense was brought even to the stable. But these are controversies that do not concern me here. I am concerned only with the historical fact, more and more admitted by historians, that very early in its history this thing became visible to the civilisation of antiquity; and that already the Church appeared as a Church; with everything that is implied in a Church and much that is disliked in a Church. We will discuss in a moment how far it was like other ritualistic or magical or ascetical mysteries in its own time. It was certainly not in the least like merely ethical and idealistic movements in our time. It had a doctrine; it had a discipline; it had sacraments; it had degrees of initiation, it admitted people and expelled people; it affirmed one dogma with authority and repudiated another with anathemas. If all these things be the marks of Antichrist, the reign of Antichrist followed very rapidly upon Christ.
Those who maintain that Christianity was not a Church but a moral movement of idealists have been forced to push the period of its perversion or disappearance further and further back. A bishop of Rome writes claiming authority in the very lifetime of St. John the Evangelist; and it is described as the first papal aggression. A friend of the Apostles writes of them as men he knew and says they taught him the doctrine of the Sacrament, and Mr. Wells can only murmur that the reaction towards barbaric blood-rites may have happened rather earlier than might be expected. The date of the Fourth Gospel, which at one time was steadily growing later and later, is now steadily growing earlier and earlier; until critics are staggered at the dawning and dreadful possibility that it might be something like what it professes to be. The last limit of an early date for the extinction of true Christianity has probably been found by the latest German professor whose authority is invoked by Dean Inge. This learned scholar says that Pentecost was the occasion for the first founding of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic, and despotic Church utterly alien to the simple ideals of Jesus of Nazareth. This may be called, in a popular as well as a learned sense, the limit. What do professors of this kind imagine that men are made of? Suppose it were a matter of any merely human movement, let us say that of the conscientious objectors. Some say the early Christians were Pacifists; I do not believe it for a moment; but I am quite ready to accept the parallel for the sake of the argument. Tolstoy or some great preacher of peace among peasants has been shot as a mutineer for defying conscription; and a little while afterwards his few followers meet together in an upper room in remembrance of him. They never had any reason for coming together except that common memory; they are men of many kinds with nothing to bind them, except that the greatest event in all their lives was this tragedy of the teacher of universal peace. They are always repeating his words, revolving his problems, trying to imitate his character. The Pacifists meet at their Pentecost and are possessed of a sudden ecstasy of enthusiasm and wild rush of the whirlwind of inspiration, in the course of which they proceed to establish universal Conscription, to increase the Navy Estimates, to insist on everybody going about armed to the teeth and on all the frontiers bristling with artillery; the proceedings concluded with the singing of ‘Boys of the Bulldog Breed’ and ‘Don’t let them scrap the British Navy.’ That is something like a fair parallel to the theory of these critics; that the transition from their idea of Jesus to their idea of Catholicism could have been made in the little upper room at Pentecost. Surely anybody’s commonsense would tell him that enthusiasts who only met through their common enthusiasm for a leader whom they loved, would not instantly rush away to establish everything that he hated. No, if the ‘ecclesiastical and dogmatic system’ is as old as Pentecost it is as old as Christmas. If we trace it back to such very early Christians we must trace it back to Christ.
We may begin then with these two negations. It is nonsense to say that the Christian faith appeared in a simple age; in the sense of an unlettered and gullible age. It is equally nonsense to say that the Christian faith was a simple thing; in the sense of a vague or childish or merely instinctive thing. Perhaps the only point in which we could possibly say that the Church fitted into the pagan world, is the fact that they were both not only highly civilised but rather complicated. They were both emphatically many-sided; but antiquity was then a many-sided hole, like a hexagonal hole waiting for an equally hexagonal stopper. In that sense only the Church was many-sided enough to fit the world. The six sides of the Mediterranean world faced each other across the sea and waited for something that should look all ways at once. The Church had to be both Roman and Greek and Jewish and African and Asiatic. In the very words of the Apostle of the Gentiles, it was indeed all things to all men. Christianity then was not merely crude and simple and was the very reverse of the growth of a barbaric time. But when we come to the contrary charge, we come to a much more plausible charge. It is very much more tenable that the Faith was but the final phase of the decay of civilisation, in the sense of the excess of civilisation; that this superstition was a sign that Rome was dying, and dying of being much too civilised. That is an argument much better worth considering; and we will proceed to consider it.
In questo livello di cultura cosmopolita sorsero la religione cristiana e la Chiesa Cattolica; e tutto, nella vicenda, suggerisce che essa fu avvertita come qualcosa di nuovo e di strano. Coloro che hanno tentato di suggerire che si sviluppò a partire da qualcosa di assai più mite o più ordinario hanno trovato che, in questo caso, il loro metodo evolutivo è assai difficile da applicare. Possono suggerire che gli Esseni, o gli Ebioniti, o cose simili, fossero il seme; ma il seme è invisibile; l’albero appare assai rapidamente già cresciuto; e l’albero è qualcosa di totalmente diverso. È certamente un albero di Natale nel senso che conserva la benevolenza e la bellezza morale della storia di Betlemme; ma era ritualistico quanto il candelabro a sette braccia, e le candele che portava erano assai più numerose di quante ne fossero probabilmente consentite dal primo libro di preghiere di Edoardo Sesto. Ci si potrebbe ben chiedere, invero, perché chiunque accetti la tradizione di Betlemme dovrebbe obiettare all’ornamento d’oro o dorato, dal momento che i Magi stessi recarono oro, o perché dovrebbe avere in uggia l’incenso nella chiesa, dal momento che l’incenso fu recato perfino alla stalla. Ma queste sono controversie che qui non mi riguardano. Mi interessa soltanto il fatto storico, sempre più ammesso dagli storici, che assai per tempo, nella sua storia, questa cosa divenne visibile alla civiltà dell’antichità; e che già la Chiesa appariva come una Chiesa, con tutto ciò che una Chiesa implica e molto di ciò che in una Chiesa si detesta. Discuteremo fra poco quanto essa fosse simile ad altri misteri ritualistici, o magici, o ascetici, del suo tempo. Non era di certo minimamente simile ai movimenti meramente etici e idealistici del nostro tempo. Aveva una dottrina; aveva una disciplina; aveva sacramenti; aveva gradi di iniziazione, ammetteva gente ed espelleva gente; affermava con autorità un dogma e ne ripudiava un altro con anatemi. Se tutte queste cose sono i segni dell’Anticristo, il regno dell’Anticristo seguì assai rapidamente al Cristo.
Coloro che sostengono che il Cristianesimo non fu una Chiesa bensì un movimento morale di idealisti sono stati costretti a spingere il periodo della sua perversione o scomparsa sempre più indietro. Un vescovo di Roma scrive rivendicando autorità mentre San Giovanni Evangelista era ancora in vita; e ciò viene descritto come la prima aggressione papale. Un amico degli Apostoli scrive di loro come di uomini che aveva conosciuto e dice che gli insegnarono la dottrina del Sacramento, e il signor Wells non può che mormorare che la reazione verso i barbarici riti del sangue potrebbe essersi verificata un po’ prima di quanto ci si aspetterebbe. La data del Quarto Vangelo, che un tempo veniva fatta scendere sempre più tardi, ora viene fatta risalire sempre più presto; finché i critici restano sbigottiti dinanzi all’albeggiante e tremenda possibilità che esso sia qualcosa di simile a ciò che dichiara di essere. L’ultimo limite di una data precoce per l’estinzione del vero Cristianesimo è stato probabilmente rinvenuto dall’ultimo professore tedesco la cui autorità è invocata dal decano Inge. Questo dotto studioso afferma che la Pentecoste fu l’occasione della prima fondazione di una Chiesa ecclesiastica, dogmatica e dispotica, del tutto estranea ai semplici ideali di Gesù di Nazareth. Questo si può ben definire, in senso tanto popolare quanto dotto, il limite. Di che cosa immaginano che siano fatti gli uomini, i professori di questa razza? Supponiamo che si trattasse di un qualsiasi movimento meramente umano, diciamo quello degli obiettori di coscienza. Alcuni dicono che i primi cristiani fossero pacifisti; non ci credo neppure per un istante; ma sono ben pronto ad accettare il parallelo per amor di discussione. Tolstoj, o qualche grande predicatore di pace fra contadini, è stato fucilato come ammutinato per aver sfidato la coscrizione; e poco tempo dopo i suoi pochi seguaci si riuniscono in una stanza al piano di sopra in memoria di lui. Non ebbero mai alcuna ragione di ritrovarsi insieme se non quel ricordo comune; sono uomini di molte specie, senza nulla che li leghi, salvo che il più grande evento di tutta la loro vita fu questa tragedia del maestro della pace universale. Ripetono di continuo le sue parole, rimuginano i suoi problemi, cercano di imitarne il carattere. I pacifisti si riuniscono alla loro Pentecoste e sono presi da un’improvvisa estasi di entusiasmo e da un impetuoso turbine d’ispirazione, nel corso del quale procedono a istituire la coscrizione universale, ad accrescere i bilanci della Marina, a esigere che tutti vadano in giro armati fino ai denti e che tutte le frontiere siano irte di artiglieria; e la seduta si conclude col canto di «Boys of the Bulldog Breed» e «Don’t let them scrap the British Navy». Ecco qualcosa di simile a un giusto parallelo con la teoria di questi critici: che il passaggio dalla loro idea di Gesù alla loro idea di Cattolicesimo si sarebbe potuto compiere nella piccola stanza al piano di sopra, a Pentecoste. Il buon senso di chiunque gli direbbe di certo che degli entusiasti, riunitisi solo attraverso il comune entusiasmo per un capo che amavano, non correrebbero all’istante a instaurare tutto ciò che egli odiava. No, se il «sistema ecclesiastico e dogmatico» è antico quanto la Pentecoste, è antico quanto il Natale. Se lo facciamo risalire a cristiani così antichi, dobbiamo farlo risalire al Cristo.
Possiamo dunque cominciare da queste due negazioni. È un’assurdità dire che la fede cristiana comparve in un’epoca semplice, nel senso di un’epoca illetterata e credulona. È altrettanto assurdo dire che la fede cristiana fosse una cosa semplice, nel senso di una cosa vaga o puerile o meramente istintiva. Forse l’unico punto per cui potremmo davvero dire che la Chiesa s’incastrò nel mondo pagano è il fatto che entrambi non solo erano assai civili, ma piuttosto complicati. Erano entrambi enfaticamente poliedrici; ma l’antichità era allora un buco poliedrico, come un foro esagonale in attesa di un tappo egualmente esagonale. Solo in questo senso la Chiesa fu abbastanza poliedrica da adattarsi al mondo. I sei lati del mondo mediterraneo si fronteggiavano attraverso il mare e aspettavano qualcosa che sapesse guardare in tutte le direzioni a un tempo. La Chiesa dovette essere insieme romana e greca e giudaica e africana e asiatica. Nelle parole stesse dell’Apostolo delle genti, essa fu davvero tutto per tutti. Il Cristianesimo non fu dunque semplicemente rozzo e semplice, e fu l’esatto contrario del germoglio di un’età barbarica (tempo). Ma quando veniamo all’accusa contraria, veniamo a un’accusa assai più plausibile. È molto più sostenibile che la fede non fosse che la fase finale della decadenza della civiltà, nel senso dell’eccesso di civiltà; che questa superstizione fosse un segno che Roma stava morendo, e morendo d’essere troppo civilizzata. Quello è un argomento assai più degno d’essere considerato; e procederemo a considerarlo.
At the beginning of this book I ventured on a general summary of it, in a parallel between the rise of humanity out of nature and the rise of Christianity out of history. I pointed out that in both cases what had gone before might imply something coming after; but did not in the least imply what did come after. If a detached mind had seen certain apes it might have deduced more anthropoids; it would not have deduced man or anything within a thousand miles of what man has done. In short, it might have seen Pithecanthropus or the Missing Link looming in the future, if possible almost as dimly and doubtfully as we see him looming in the past. But if it foresaw him appearing it would also foresee him disappearing, and leaving a few faint traces just as he has left a few faint traces; if they are traces. To foresee that Missing Link would not be to foresee Man, or anything like Man. Now this earlier explanation must be kept in mind; because it is an exact parallel to the true view of the Church; and the suggestion of it having evolved naturally out of the Empire in decay.
The truth is that in one sense a man might very well have predicted that the imperial decadence would produce something like Christianity. That is, something a little like and gigantically different. A man might very well have said, for instance, ‘Pleasure has been pursued so extravagantly that there will be a reaction into pessimism. Perhaps it will take the form of asceticism; men will mutilate themselves instead of merely hanging themselves.’ Or a man might very reasonably have said, ‘If we weary of our Greek and Latin gods we shall be hankering after some eastern mystery or other; there will be a fashion in Persians or Hindoos.’ Or a man of the world might well have been shrewd enough to say, ‘Powerful people are picking up these fads; some day the court will adopt one of them and it may become official.’ Or yet another and gloomier prophet might be pardoned for saying, ‘The world is going down-hill; dark and barbarous superstitions will return, it does not matter much which. They will all be formless and fugitive like dreams of the night.’
Now it is the intense interest of the case that all these prophecies were really fulfilled; but it was not the Church that fulfilled them. It was the Church that escaped from them, confounded them, and rose above them in triumph. In so far as it was probable that the mere nature of hedonism would produce a mere reaction of asceticism it did produce a mere reaction of asceticism. It was the movement called Manichean and the Church was its mortal enemy. In so far as it would have naturally appeared at that point of history, it did appear; it did also disappear, which was equally natural. The mere pessimist reaction did come with the Manichees and did go with the Manichees. But the Church did not come with them or go with them; and she had much more to do with them going than with their coming. Or again, in so far as it was probable that even the growth of scepticism would bring in a fashion of eastern religion, it did bring it in; Mithras came from far beyond Palestine out of the heart of Persia, bringing strange mysteries of the blood of bulls. Certainly there was everything to show that some such fashion would have come in any case but certainly there is nothing in the world to show that it would not have passed away in any case. Certainly an Oriental fad was something eminently fitted to the fourth or fifth century; but that hardly explains it having remained to the twentieth century, and still going strong. In short, in so far as things of the kind might have been expected then, things like Mithraism were experienced then; but it scarcely explains our more recent experiences. And if we were still Mithraists merely because Mithraic head-dresses and other Persian apparatuses might be expected to be all the rage in the days of Domitian, it would almost seem by this time that we must be a little dowdy.
It is the same, as will be suggested in a moment, with the idea of official favouritism. In so far as such favouritism shown towards a fad was something that might have been looked for during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it was something that did exist in that Empire and did decline and fall with it. It throws no sort of light on the thing that resolutely refused to decline and fall; that grew steadily while the other was declining and falling; and which even at this moment is going forward with fearless energy, when an other aeon has completed its cycle and another civilisation seems almost ready to fall or to decline.
Now the curious fact is this; that the very heresies which the early Church is blamed for crushing testify to the unfairness for which she is blamed. In so far as something deserved the blame, it was precisely the things that she is blamed for blaming. In so far as something was merely a superstition, she herself condemned that superstition. In so far as something was a mere reaction into barbarism, she herself resisted it because it was a reaction into barbarism. In so far as something was a fad of the fading empire, that died and deserved to die, it was the Church alone that killed it. The Church is reproached for being exactly what the heresy was repressed for being. The explanations of the evolutionary historians and higher critics do really explain why Arianism and Gnosticism and Nestorianism were born—and also why they died. They do not explain why the Church was born or why she has refused to die. Above all, they do not explain why she should have made war on the very evils she is supposed to share.
Let us take a few practical examples of the principle; the principle that if there was anything that was really a superstition of the dying empire, it did really die with the dying empire; and certainly was not the same as the very thing that destroyed it. For this purpose we will take in order two or three of the most ordinary explanations of Christian origins among the modern critics of Christianity. Nothing is more common, for instance, than to find such a modern critic writing something like this: ‘Christianity was above all a movement of ascetics, a rush into the desert, a refuge in the cloister, a renunciation of all life and happiness; and this was a part of a gloomy and inhuman reaction against nature itself, a hatred of the body, a horror of the material universe, a sort of universal suicide of the senses and even of the self. It came from an eastern fanaticism like that of the fakirs and was ultimately founded on an eastern pessimism, which seems to feel existence itself as an evil.’
All’inizio di questo libro mi arrischiai in un compendio generale di esso, in un parallelo tra il sorgere dell’umanità dalla natura e il sorgere del Cristianesimo dalla storia. Feci notare che in entrambi i casi ciò che era venuto prima poteva implicare qualcosa che venisse dopo; ma non implicava minimamente ciò che venne dopo. Se una mente distaccata avesse visto certe scimmie, avrebbe potuto dedurne altri antropoidi; non avrebbe dedotto l’uomo o alcunché a mille miglia di distanza da ciò che l’uomo ha fatto. In breve, avrebbe potuto scorgere il Pitecantropo o l’Anello Mancante profilarsi nel futuro, se possibile quasi altrettanto fioco e incerto come noi lo vediamo profilarsi nel passato. Ma se ne avesse previsto la comparsa, ne avrebbe pure previsto la scomparsa, e che lasciasse poche deboli tracce proprio come egli ha lasciato poche deboli tracce; ammesso che siano tracce. Prevedere quell’Anello Mancante non sarebbe stato prevedere l’Uomo, o alcunché di simile all’Uomo. Ora, questa spiegazione anteriore va tenuta a mente; perché è un esatto parallelo alla vera visione della Chiesa; e all’idea che essa si sia evoluta naturalmente dall’Impero in decadenza.
La verità è che, in un certo senso, un uomo avrebbe potuto benissimo (bene) predire che la decadenza imperiale avrebbe prodotto qualcosa di simile al Cristianesimo. Cioè, qualcosa di un poco simile e gigantescamente diverso. Un uomo avrebbe potuto benissimo (bene) dire, per esempio: «Il piacere è stato inseguito così smodatamente che vi sarà una reazione nel pessimismo. Forse prenderà la forma dell’ascetismo; gli uomini si mutileranno invece di limitarsi a impiccarsi». Oppure un uomo avrebbe potuto ben ragionevolmente dire: «Se ci stanchiamo dei nostri dèi greci e latini, andremo agognando qualche mistero orientale o l’altro; ci sarà una moda di Persiani o di Indù». Oppure un uomo di mondo sarebbe potuto essere abbastanza accorto (bene) da dire: «Personaggi potenti stanno raccogliendo queste manie; un giorno la corte ne adotterà una e potrà divenire ufficiale». Oppure un altro e più tetro profeta potrebbe essere perdonato per aver detto: «Il mondo va in declino (china); torneranno superstizioni oscure e barbariche, e poco importa quali. Saranno tutte informi e fuggevoli come sogni della notte».
Ora, è il vivo interesse del caso che tutte queste profezie si adempirono davvero; ma non fu la Chiesa ad adempierle. Fu la Chiesa a scampare loro, a confonderle, e a levarsi (sorse) al di sopra di esse in trionfo. Nella misura in cui era probabile che la mera natura dell’edonismo producesse una mera reazione d’ascetismo, essa produsse una mera reazione d’ascetismo. Fu il movimento chiamato manicheo, e la Chiesa ne fu la nemica mortale. Nella misura in cui sarebbe naturalmente comparso a quel punto della storia, comparve; e pure scomparve, il che fu egualmente naturale. La mera reazione pessimistica venne coi Manichei e se ne andò coi Manichei. Ma la Chiesa non venne con loro né se ne andò con loro; ed ebbe assai più a che fare con la loro dipartita che con la loro venuta. Oppure, ancora, nella misura in cui era probabile che perfino il crescere dello scetticismo introducesse una moda di religione orientale, la introdusse; Mitra venne da ben oltre la Palestina, dal cuore della Persia, recando strani misteri del sangue dei tori. Certo, tutto stava a mostrare che una tale moda sarebbe comunque venuta; ma di certo non v’è nulla al mondo che mostri che essa non sarebbe comunque svanita. Certo, una mania orientale era qualcosa eminentemente adatto al quarto o quinto secolo; ma ciò spiega ben poco il suo esser rimasta fino al ventesimo secolo, e per giunta ancora in gran voga. In breve, nella misura in cui cose del genere si sarebbero potute attendere allora, cose come il mitraismo furono sperimentate allora; ma questo spiega a malapena le nostre esperienze più recenti. E se fossimo ancora mitraisti solo perché copricapi mitraici e altri apparati persiani ci si potevano attendere in gran moda ai giorni di Domiziano, sembrerebbe quasi, a quest’ora (tempo), che dovremmo essere un tantino fuori moda.
È lo stesso, come si suggerirà tra poco, con l’idea del favoritismo ufficiale. Nella misura in cui tale favore mostrato verso una mania era qualcosa che si sarebbe potuto attendere durante la decadenza e la caduta dell’Impero romano, era qualcosa che esistette davvero in quell’Impero e davvero decadde e cadde con esso. Non getta luce alcuna sulla cosa che risolutamente rifiutò di decadere e cadere; che crebbe costantemente mentre l’altra decadeva e cadeva; e che perfino in questo momento avanza con intrepida energia, ora che un altro eone ha compiuto il suo ciclo e un’altra civiltà pare quasi pronta a cadere o a declinare.
Ora, il fatto curioso è questo: che proprio le eresie che alla Chiesa primitiva si rimprovera di aver soffocato testimoniano dell’ingiustizia di cui essa viene accusata. Nella misura in cui qualcosa meritava biasimo, era precisamente ciò per cui la si biasima di aver biasimato. Nella misura in cui qualcosa era mera superstizione, fu lei stessa a condannare quella superstizione. Nella misura in cui qualcosa era un semplice ritorno alla barbarie, fu lei stessa a resistervi, proprio perché era un ritorno alla barbarie. Nella misura in cui qualcosa era un capriccio dell’impero morente, destinato a morire e che meritava di morire, fu la Chiesa sola a ucciderlo. Alla Chiesa si rimprovera di essere esattamente ciò per cui l’eresia veniva repressa. Le spiegazioni degli storici evoluzionisti e dei critici superiori spiegano davvero perché l’arianesimo, lo gnosticismo e il nestorianesimo nacquero — e anche perché morirono. Non spiegano perché la Chiesa nacque, né perché essa si sia rifiutata di morire. Soprattutto, non spiegano perché essa avrebbe dovuto muovere guerra proprio a quei mali che si suppone essa condivida.
Prendiamo qualche esempio pratico del principio; il principio secondo cui, se vi era qualcosa che era davvero una superstizione dell’impero morente, essa morì davvero con l’impero morente, e certo non era la medesima cosa che lo distrusse. A tale scopo prenderemo in ordine due o tre fra le più comuni spiegazioni delle origini cristiane che si trovano presso i critici moderni del Cristianesimo. Nulla è più frequente, per esempio, che imbattersi in un simile critico moderno il quale scrive qualcosa di questo genere: «Il Cristianesimo fu innanzitutto un movimento di asceti, una fuga nel deserto, un rifugio nel chiostro, una rinuncia a ogni vita e felicità; e ciò fu parte di una cupa e disumana reazione contro la natura stessa, un odio del corpo, un orrore dell’universo materiale, una sorta di universale suicidio dei sensi e persino dell’io. Esso venne da un fanatismo orientale come quello dei fachiri, e in ultima analisi si fondava su un pessimismo orientale, che sembra sentire l’esistenza stessa come un male».
Now the most extraordinary thing about this is that it is all quite true; it is true in every detail except that it happens to be attributed entirely to the wrong person. It is not true of the Church; but it is true of the heretics condemned by the Church. It is as if one were to write a most detailed analysis of the mistakes and misgovernment of the ministers of George the Third, merely with the small inaccuracy that the whole story was told about George Washington; or as if somebody made a list of the crimes of the Bolshevists with no variation except that they were all attributed to the Czar. The early Church was indeed very ascetic in connection with a totally different philosophy; but the philosophy of a war on life and nature as such really did exist in the world, if the critics only knew where to look for it.
What really happened was this. When the Faith first emerged into the world, the very first thing that happened to it was that it was caught in a sort of swarm of mystical and metaphysical sects, mostly out of the East; like one lonely golden bee caught in a swarm of wasps. To the ordinary onlooker, there did not seem to be much difference, or anything beyond a general buzz; indeed in a sense there was not much difference so far as stinging and being stung were concerned. The difference was that only one golden dot in all that whirring gold-dust had the power of going forth to make hives for all humanity; to give the world honey and wax or (as was so finely said in a context too easily forgotten) ‘the two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.’ The wasps all died that winter; and half the difficulty is that hardly anyone knows anything about them and most people do not know that they ever existed; so that the whole story of that first phase of our religion is lost. Or, to vary the metaphor, when this movement or some other movement pierced the dyke between the east and west and brought more mystical ideas into Europe, it brought with it a whole flood of other mystical ideas besides its own, most of them ascetical and nearly all of them pessimistic. They very nearly flooded and over-whelmed the purely Christian element. They came mostly from that region that was a sort of dim borderland between the eastern philosophies and the eastern mythologies, and which shared with the wilder philosophers that curious crave for making fantastic patterns of the cosmos in the shape of maps and genealogical trees. Those that are supposed to derive from the mysterious Manes are called Manichean; kindred cults are more generally known as Gnostic; they are mostly of a labyrinthine complexity, but the point to insist on is the pessimism; the fact that nearly all in one form or another regarded the creation of the world as the work of an evil spirit. Some of them had that Asiatic atmosphere that surrounds Buddhism; the suggestion that life is a corruption of the purity of being. Some of them suggested a purely spiritual order which had been betrayed by the coarse and clumsy trick of making such toys as the sun and moon and stars. Anyhow all this dark tide out of the metaphysical sea in the midst of Asia poured through the dykes simultaneously with the creed of Christ; but it is the whole point of the story that the two were not the same; that they flowed like oil and water. That creed remained in the shape of a miracle; a river still flowing through the sea. And the proof of the miracle was practical once more; it was merely that while all that sea was salt and bitter with the savour of death, of this one stream in the midst of it a man could drink.
Now that purity was preserved by dogmatic definitions and exclusions. It could not possibly have been preserved by anything else. If the Church had not renounced the Manicheans it might have become merely Manichean. If it had not renounced the Gnostics it might have become Gnostic. But by the very fact that it did renounce them it proved that it was not either Gnostic or Manichean. At any rate it proved that something was not either Gnostic or Manichean; and what could it be that condemned them, if it was not the original good news of the runners from Bethlehem and the trumpet of the Resurrection? The early Church was ascetic, but she proved that she was not pessimistic, simply by condemning the pessimists. The creed declared that man was sinful, but it did not declare that life was evil, and it proved it by damning those who did. The condemnation of the early heretics is itself condemned as something crabbed and narrow; but it was in truth the very proof that the Church meant to be brotherly and broad. It proved that the primitive Catholics were specially eager to explain that they did not think man utterly vile; that they did not think life incurably miserable; that they did not think marriage a sin or procreation a tragedy. They were ascetic because asceticism was the only possible purge of the sins of the world; but in the very thunder of their anathemas they affirmed for ever that their asceticism was not to be anti-human or anti-natural; that they did wish to purge the world and not destroy it. And nothing else except those anathemas could possibly have made it clear, amid a confusion which still confuses them with their mortal enemies. Nothing else but dogma could have resisted the riot of imaginative invention with which the pessimists were waging their war against nature; with their Aeons and their Demiurge, their strange Logos and their sinister Sophia. If the Church had not insisted on theology, it would have melted into a mad mythology of the mystics, yet further removed from reason or even from rationalism; and, above all yet further removed from life and from the love of life. Remember that it would have been an inverted mythology, one contradicting everything natural in paganism; a mythology in which Pluto would be above Jupiter and Hades hang higher than Olympus; in which Brahma and all that has the breath of life would be subject to Seeva, shining with the eye of death.
Ora, la cosa più straordinaria a questo proposito è che tutto ciò è verissimo; è vero in ogni particolare, salvo che accade di essere attribuito interamente alla persona sbagliata. Non è vero della Chiesa; ma è vero degli eretici da lei condannati. È come se si scrivesse un’analisi minuziosissima degli errori e del malgoverno dei ministri di Giorgio III, con la sola piccola inesattezza che l’intera vicenda venisse raccontata a proposito di George Washington; o come se qualcuno stilasse la lista dei crimini dei bolscevichi senza altra variante se non che li attribuisse tutti allo Zar. La Chiesa primitiva fu davvero assai ascetica, ma in connessione con una filosofia del tutto diversa; però la filosofia di una guerra alla vita e alla natura in quanto tali esisteva davvero nel mondo, se solo i critici sapessero dove cercarla.
Ciò che davvero accadde fu questo. Quando la Fede emerse per la prima volta nel mondo, la primissima cosa che le capitò fu di restare presa in una sorta di sciame di sette mistiche e metafisiche, per lo più provenienti dall’Oriente; come un’unica solitaria ape d’oro presa in uno sciame di vespe. All’osservatore comune non pareva esservi molta differenza, né altro che un generale ronzio; e in un certo senso, in effetti, non vi era molta differenza, per quanto riguardava il pungere e l’essere punti. La differenza era che un solo punto dorato in tutta quella vorticante polvere d’oro aveva il potere di andare avanti a costruire alveari per l’intera umanità; a dare al mondo miele e cera, ovvero (come fu detto tanto finemente in un contesto troppo facilmente dimenticato) «le due cose più nobili, che sono la dolcezza e la luce». Le vespe morirono tutte quell’inverno; e metà della difficoltà sta nel fatto che quasi nessuno sa nulla di esse, e i più non sanno neppure che siano mai esistite; sicché l’intera storia di quella prima fase della nostra religione è perduta. Oppure, per variare la metafora, quando questo movimento o qualche altro movimento squarciò la diga tra oriente e occidente e portò in Europa idee più mistiche, esso trascinò con sé un’intera fiumana di altre idee mistiche oltre alle proprie, per lo più ascetiche e quasi tutte pessimistiche. Poco mancò che sommergessero e travolgessero l’elemento puramente cristiano. Venivano per lo più da quella regione che era una sorta di oscura terra di confine tra le filosofie orientali e le mitologie orientali, e che condivideva con i filosofi più selvaggi quella curiosa brama di comporre fantastici disegni del cosmo in forma di mappe e di alberi genealogici. Quelle che si suppongono derivate dal misterioso Mani sono dette manichee; culti affini sono più genericamente noti come gnostici; sono per lo più di una complessità labirintica, ma il punto su cui insistere è il pessimismo; il fatto che quasi tutte, in una forma o nell’altra, consideravano la creazione del mondo come opera di uno spirito maligno. Alcune di esse avevano quell’atmosfera asiatica che circonda il buddhismo; il suggerimento che la vita sia una corruzione della purezza dell’essere. Alcune di esse suggerivano un ordine puramente spirituale che era stato tradito dal rozzo e goffo trucco di fabbricare giocattoli come il sole, la luna e le stelle. Comunque sia, tutta questa oscura marea proveniente dal mare metafisico nel cuore dell’Asia si riversò attraverso le dighe simultaneamente al credo di Cristo; ma tutto il senso della storia è che i due non erano la medesima cosa; che scorrevano come l’olio e l’acqua. Quel credo rimase nella forma di un miracolo; un fiume che ancora scorre attraverso il mare. E la prova del miracolo fu, ancora una volta, pratica; consisteva semplicemente nel fatto che, mentre tutto quel mare era salato e amaro del sapore della morte, di quest’unico ruscello in mezzo ad esso un uomo poteva bere.
Ora, quella purezza fu preservata mediante definizioni ed esclusioni dogmatiche. Non avrebbe potuto in alcun modo essere preservata da nient’altro. Se la Chiesa non avesse rinnegato i manichei, sarebbe potuta diventare semplicemente manichea. Se non avesse rinnegato gli gnostici, sarebbe potuta diventare gnostica. Ma per il fatto stesso di averli rinnegati, provò di non essere né gnostica né manichea. In ogni caso provò che qualcosa non era né gnostico né manicheo; e che cosa poteva essere ciò che li condannava, se non la buona novella originaria dei corrieri di Betlemme e la tromba della Resurrezione? La Chiesa primitiva fu ascetica, ma provò di non essere pessimista, semplicemente condannando i pessimisti. Il credo dichiarava che l’uomo era peccatore, ma non dichiarava che la vita fosse un male, e lo provò dannando coloro che così affermavano. La condanna dei primi eretici è essa stessa condannata come qualcosa di arcigno e di angusto; ma era in verità la prova stessa che la Chiesa intendeva essere fraterna e larga. Provò che i cattolici primitivi erano particolarmente premurosi di spiegare che non ritenevano l’uomo del tutto vile; che non ritenevano la vita irrimediabilmente misera; che non ritenevano il matrimonio un peccato né la procreazione una tragedia. Erano ascetici perché l’ascesi era l’unica purga possibile dei peccati del mondo; ma nel tuono stesso dei loro anatemi affermarono per sempre che la loro ascesi non doveva essere antiumana né antinaturale; che essi desideravano purgare il mondo e non distruggerlo. E nient’altro se non quegli anatemi avrebbe potuto renderlo chiaro, in mezzo a una confusione che ancora li confonde con i loro nemici mortali. Nient’altro se non il dogma avrebbe potuto resistere alla sfrenatezza dell’invenzione fantastica con cui i pessimisti conducevano la loro guerra contro la natura; con i loro Eoni e il loro Demiurgo, il loro strano Logos e la loro sinistra Sofia. Se la Chiesa non avesse insistito sulla teologia, si sarebbe dissolta in una folle mitologia dei mistici, ancora più lontana dalla ragione o persino dal razionalismo; e, soprattutto, ancora più lontana dalla vita e dall’amore della vita. Si ricordi che sarebbe stata una mitologia rovesciata, che contraddiceva tutto ciò che nel paganesimo è naturale; una mitologia in cui Plutone starebbe al di sopra di Giove e l’Ade penderebbe più in alto dell’Olimpo; in cui Brahma e tutto ciò che ha il respiro della vita sarebbe soggetto a Shiva, splendente con l’occhio della morte.
That the early Church was itself full of an ecstatic enthusiasm for renunciation and virginity makes this distinction much more striking and not less so. It makes all the more important the place where the dogma drew the line. A man might crawl about on all fours like a beast because he was an ascetic. He might stand night and day on the top of a pillar and be adored for being an ascetic, but he could not say that the world was a mistake or the marriage state a sin without being a heretic. What was it that thus deliberately disengaged itself from eastern asceticism by sharp definition and fierce refusal, if it was not something with an individuality of its own; and one that was quite different? If the Catholics are to be confused with the Gnostics, we can only say it was not their fault if they are. And it is rather hard that the Catholics should be blamed by the same critics for persecuting the heretics and also for sympathising with the heresy.
The Church was not a Manichean movement if only because it was not a movement at all. It was not even merely an ascetical movement, because it was not a movement at all. It would be nearer the truth to call it the tamer of asceticism than the mere leader or loosener of it. It was a thing having its own theory of asceticism, its own type of asceticism, but most conspicuous at the moment as the moderator of other theories and types. This is the only sense that can be made, for instance, of the story of St. Augustine. As long as he was a mere man of the world, a mere man drifting with his time, he actually was a Manichean. It really was quite modern and fashionable to be a Manichean. But when he became a Catholic, the people he instantly turned on and rent in pieces were the Manicheans. The Catholic way of putting it is that he left off being a pessimist to become an ascetic. But as the pessimists interpreted asceticism, it ought to be said that he left off being an ascetic to become a saint. The war upon life, the denial of nature, were exactly the things he had already found in the heathen world outside the Church, and had to renounce when he entered the Church. The very fact that St. Augustine remains a somewhat sterner or sadder figure than St. Francis or St. Teresa only accentuates the dilemma. Face to face with the gravest or even grimmest of Catholics, we can still ask, ‘Why did Catholicism make war on Manichees, if Catholicism was Manichean?’
Take another rationalistic explanation of the rise of Christendom. It is common enough to find another critic saying, ‘Christianity did not really rise at all; that is, it did not merely rise from below; it was imposed from above. It is an example of the power of the executive, especially in despotic states. The Empire was really an Empire; that is, it was really ruled by the Emperor. One of the Emperors happened to become a Christian. He might just as well have become a Mithraist or a Jew or a Fire-Worshipper; it was common in the decline of the Empire for eminent and educated people to adopt these eccentric eastern cults. But when he adopted it, it became the official religion of the Roman Empire; and when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it became as strong, as universal and as invincible as the Roman Empire. It has only remained in the world as a relic of that Empire; or, as many have put it, it is but the ghost of Caesar still hovering over Rome.’ This also is a very ordinary line taken in the criticism of orthodoxy, to say that it was only officialism that ever made it orthodoxy. And here again we can call on the heretics to refute it.
The whole great history of the Arian heresy might have been invented to explode this idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in this connection; and the upshot of it is in that in so far as there ever was a merely official religion, it actually died because it was merely an official religion; and what destroyed it was the real religion. Arius advanced a version of Christianity which moved, more or less vaguely, in the direction of what we should call Unitarianism; though it was not the same, for it gave to Christ a curious intermediary position between the divine and human. The point is that it seemed to many more reasonable and less fanatical; and among these were many of the educated class in a sort of reaction against the first romance of conversion. Arians were a sort of moderates and a sort of modernists. And it was felt that after the first squabbles this was the final form of rationalised religion into which civilisation might well settle down. It was accepted by Divus Caesar himself and became the official orthodoxy; the generals and military princes drawn from the new barbarian powers of the north, full of the future, supported it strongly. But the sequel is still more important. Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism to complete agnosticism, so the greatest of the Arian emperors ultimately shed the last and thinnest pretense of Christianity; he abandoned ever Arius and returned to Apollo. He was a Caesar of the Caesars; a soldier, a scholar, a man of large ambitions and ideals; another of the philosopher kings. It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose again. The oracles began to speak like birds beginning to sing at dawn; paganism was itself again; the gods returned. It seemed the end of that strange interlude of an alien superstition. And indeed it was the end of it, so far as there was a mere interlude of mere superstition. It was the end of it, in so far as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion of a generation. If there really was something that began with Constantine, then it ended with Julian.
But there was something that did not end. There had arisen in that hour of history, defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the Church, Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this religious history, and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put it this way. If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, ‘God is Love.’ Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.
Che la Chiesa delle origini fosse essa stessa colma di un estatico entusiasmo per la rinuncia e per la verginità rende questa distinzione tanto più sorprendente, e non meno. Rende ancor più importante il punto in cui il dogma tracciò la linea. Un uomo poteva strisciare carponi come una bestia perché era un asceta. Poteva starsene notte e giorno in cima a una colonna ed essere venerato in quanto asceta, ma non poteva dire che il mondo fosse un errore o che lo stato del matrimonio fosse un peccato senza divenire un eretico. Che cos’era dunque ciò che così deliberatamente si distaccava dall’ascetismo orientale con nette definizioni e fiero rifiuto, se non qualcosa dotato di una propria individualità, e per giunta affatto diversa? Se i cattolici devono essere confusi con gli gnostici, possiamo soltanto dire che non è colpa loro, se lo sono. Ed è piuttosto duro che i cattolici debbano essere biasimati dagli stessi critici per aver perseguitato gli eretici e insieme per aver simpatizzato con l’eresia.
La Chiesa non fu un movimento manicheo, non foss’altro perché non fu affatto un movimento. Non fu nemmeno semplicemente un movimento ascetico, perché non fu affatto un movimento. Sarebbe più vicino alla verità chiamarla la domatrice dell’ascetismo piuttosto che il suo mero capofila o il suo mero incitatore. Era una cosa che possedeva una propria teoria dell’ascetismo, un proprio tipo di ascetismo, ma che in quel momento spiccava soprattutto come moderatrice di altre teorie e di altri tipi. Questo è l’unico senso che si possa ricavare, per esempio, dalla storia di sant’Agostino. Finché fu un semplice uomo di mondo, un semplice uomo che si lasciava trascinare dal proprio tempo, egli fu davvero un manicheo. Era davvero cosa assai moderna e alla moda essere manicheo. Ma quando si fece cattolico, coloro contro cui si scagliò all’istante, facendoli a pezzi, furono i manichei. Il modo cattolico di dirlo è che egli smise di essere un pessimista per diventare un asceta. Ma nel senso in cui i pessimisti intendevano l’ascetismo, si dovrebbe dire che egli smise di essere un asceta per diventare un santo. La guerra alla vita, la negazione della natura, erano esattamente le cose che egli aveva già trovato nel mondo pagano fuori della Chiesa, e alle quali dovette rinunciare quando entrò nella Chiesa. Il fatto stesso che sant’Agostino rimanga una figura in qualche modo più severa o più triste di san Francesco o di santa Teresa non fa che accentuare il dilemma. Faccia a faccia con il più grave, o addirittura il più arcigno dei cattolici, possiamo ancora domandare: «Perché il cattolicesimo mosse guerra ai manichei, se il cattolicesimo era manicheo?».
Prendiamo un’altra spiegazione razionalistica della nascita della cristianità. È abbastanza comune imbattersi in un altro critico che dice: «Il cristianesimo non sorse affatto, in realtà; cioè non sorse semplicemente dal basso; fu imposto dall’alto. È un esempio della potenza dell’esecutivo, specialmente negli Stati dispotici. L’Impero era davvero un Impero; cioè era davvero governato dall’Imperatore. Uno degli imperatori si trovò a diventare cristiano. Avrebbe potuto benissimo diventare mitraico, o ebreo, o adoratore del fuoco; era cosa comune, nel declino dell’Impero, che persone eminenti e colte adottassero questi eccentrici culti orientali. Ma quando egli lo adottò, esso divenne la religione ufficiale dell’Impero romano; e quando divenne la religione ufficiale dell’Impero romano, divenne forte, universale e invincibile quanto l’Impero romano. È rimasto al mondo soltanto come una reliquia di quell’Impero; o, come molti hanno detto, non è che il fantasma di Cesare che ancora aleggia su Roma». Anche questa è una linea assai ordinaria assunta nella critica dell’ortodossia: dire che fu soltanto l’ufficialità a farne mai un’ortodossia. E anche qui possiamo chiamare in causa gli eretici a confutarla.
L’intera grande storia dell’eresia ariana avrebbe potuto essere inventata apposta per far saltare in aria questa idea. È una storia assai interessante, spesso ripetuta a questo proposito; e il suo esito è che, nella misura in cui vi fu mai una religione meramente ufficiale, essa in realtà morì proprio perché era una religione meramente ufficiale; e ciò che la distrusse fu la religione vera. Ario avanzò una versione del cristianesimo che si muoveva, più o meno vagamente, nella direzione di ciò che noi chiameremmo unitarianismo; benché non fosse la stessa cosa, poiché attribuiva a Cristo una curiosa posizione intermedia tra il divino e l’umano. Il punto è che a molti parve più ragionevole e meno fanatica; e fra questi vi erano molti della classe colta, in una sorta di reazione contro la prima avventura romanzesca della conversione. Gli ariani erano una sorta di moderati e una sorta di modernisti. E si sentiva che, dopo le prime baruffe, questa fosse la forma definitiva di religione razionalizzata nella quale la civiltà potesse benissimo assestarsi. Fu accettata dallo stesso Divus Caesar e divenne l’ortodossia ufficiale; i generali e i principi militari usciti dalle nuove potenze barbariche del nord, colmi di avvenire, la sostennero con vigore. Ma il seguito è ancora più importante. Esattamente come un uomo moderno potrebbe passare dall’unitarianismo al completo agnosticismo, così il più grande degli imperatori ariani finì per gettare via l’ultimo e più sottile pretesto di cristianesimo; abbandonò perfino Ario e ritornò ad Apollo. Egli era un Cesare fra i Cesari; un soldato, un erudito, un uomo di grandi ambizioni e di grandi ideali; un altro dei re filosofi. Gli parve che, a un suo cenno, il sole risorgesse di nuovo. Gli oracoli cominciarono a parlare come uccelli che principiano a cantare all’alba; il paganesimo era di nuovo se stesso; gli dèi tornavano. Sembrava la fine di quello strano intermezzo di una superstizione straniera. E davvero ne fu la fine, in quanto vi era un mero intermezzo di mera superstizione. Ne fu la fine, in quanto essa era la fisima di un imperatore o la moda di una generazione. Se davvero ci fu qualcosa che cominciò con Costantino, allora esso finì con Giuliano.
Ma vi era qualcosa che non finì. Si era levato, in quell’ora della storia, sfidante al di sopra del tumulto democratico dei Concili della Chiesa, Atanasio contro il mondo. Possiamo soffermarci sul punto in questione, perché è pertinente all’intera storia religiosa, e il mondo moderno sembra coglierne tutto il senso a rovescio. Potremmo metterla così. Se c’è una questione che gli illuminati e i liberali hanno l’abitudine di deridere e di additare come tremendo esempio di dogma sterile e di insensata contesa settaria, è proprio questa questione atanasiana della Co-eternità del Figlio divino. D’altra parte, se c’è una cosa che gli stessi liberali ci offrono sempre come un frammento di cristianesimo puro e semplice, immune dalle dispute dottrinali, è quell’unica frase: «Dio è Amore». Eppure le due affermazioni sono quasi identiche; per lo meno, l’una è quasi priva di senso senza l’altra. Il dogma sterile è soltanto il modo logico di enunciare il bel sentimento. Perché, se esiste un essere senza principio, esistente prima di tutte le cose, amava Egli quando non v’era nulla da amare? Se attraverso quell’impensabile eternità Egli è solo, che senso ha dire che Egli è Amore? L’unica giustificazione di un simile mistero è la concezione mistica che nella sua stessa natura vi fosse qualcosa di analogo all’auto-espressione; qualcosa di ciò che genera e contempla ciò che ha generato. Senza qualche idea di questo genere, è davvero illogico complicare l’ultima essenza della divinità con un’idea come quella dell’Amore. Se i moderni vogliono davvero una semplice religione dell’Amore, devono cercarla nel Credo atanasiano. La verità è che la tromba del vero cristianesimo, la sfida delle carità e delle semplicità di Betlemme o del giorno di Natale, non squillò mai in modo più avvincente e inequivocabile che nella sfida di Atanasio al freddo compromesso degli ariani. Fu enfaticamente lui a battersi davvero per un Dio d’Amore contro un Dio di incolore e remoto controllo cosmico; il Dio degli stoici e degli agnostici. Fu enfaticamente lui a battersi per il Santo Bambino contro la grigia divinità dei farisei e dei sadducei. Egli si batteva per quel medesimo equilibrio di bella interdipendenza e intimità, nella stessa Trinità della Natura divina, che attira i nostri cuori verso la Trinità della Sacra Famiglia. Il suo dogma, se la frase non venga fraintesa, muta perfino Dio in una Sacra Famiglia.
That this purely Christian dogma actually for a second time rebelled against the Empire, and actually for a second time refounded the Church in spite of the Empire, is itself a proof that there was something positive and personal working in the world, other than whatever official faith the Empire chose to adopt. This power utterly destroyed the official faith that the Empire did adopt. It went on its own way as it is going on its own way still. There are any number of other examples in which is repeated precisely the same process we have reviewed in the case of the Manichean and the Arian. A few centuries afterwards, for instance, the Church had to maintain the same Trinity, which is simply the logical side of love, against another appearance of the isolated and simplified deity in the religion of Islam. Yet there are some who cannot see what the Crusaders were fighting for; and some even who talk as if Christianity had never been anything but a form of what they call Hebraism coming in with the decay of Hellenism. Those people must certainly be very much puzzled by the war between the Crescent and the Cross. If Christianity had never been anything but a simpler morality sweeping away polytheism, there is no reason why Christendom should not have been swept into Islam. The truth is that Islam itself was a barbaric reaction against that very humane complexity that is really a Christian character; that idea of balance in the deity, as of balance in the family, that makes that creed a sort of sanity, and that sanity the soul of civilisation. And that is why the Church is from the first a thing holding its own position and point of view, quite apart from the accidents and anarchies of its age. That is why it deals blows impartially right and left, at the pessimism of the Manichean or the optimism of the Pelagian. It was not a Manichean movement because it was not a movement at all. It was not an official fashion because it was not a fashion at all. It was something that could coincide with movements and fashions, could control them and could survive them.
So might rise from their graves the great heresiarchs to confound their comrades of to-day. There is nothing that the critics now affirm that we cannot call on these great witnesses to deny. The modern critic will say lightly enough that Christianity was but a reaction into asceticism and anti-natural spirituality, a dance of fakirs furious against life and love. But Manes the great mystic will answer them from his secret throne and cry, ‘These Christians have no right to be called spiritual; these Christians have no title to be called ascetics, they who compromised with the curse of life and all the filth of the family. Through them the earth is still foul with fruit and harvest and polluted with population. Theirs was no movement against nature, or my children would have carried it to triumph; but these fools renewed the world when I would have ended it with a gesture.’ And another critic will write that the Church was but the shadow of the Empire, the fad of a chance Emperor, and that it remains in Europe only as the ghost of the power of Rome. And Arius the deacon will answer out of the darkness of oblivious ‘No, indeed, or the world would have followed my more reasonable religion. For mine went down before demagogues and men defying Caesar; and around my champion was the purple cloak and mine was the glory of the eagles. It was not for lack of these things that I failed.’ And yet a third modern will maintain that the creed spread only as a sort of panic of hell-fire; men everywhere attempting impossible things in fleeing from incredible vengeance; a nightmare of imaginary remorse; and such an explanation will satisfy many who see something dreadful in the doctrine of orthodoxy. And then there will go up against it the terrible voice of Tertullian, saying, ‘And why then was I cast out; and why did soft hearts and heads decide against me when I proclaimed the perdition of all sinners; and what was this power that thwarted me when I threatened all backsliders with hell? For none ever went up that hard road so far as I; and mine was the Credo Quia Impossible.’ Then there is the fourth suggestion that there was something of the Semitic secret society in the whole matter; that it was a new invasion of the nomad spirit shaking a kindlier and more comfortable paganism, its cities and its household gods; whereby the jealous monotheistic races could after all establish their jealous God. And Mahomet shall answer out of the whirlwind, the red whirlwind of the desert, ‘Who ever served the jealousy of God as I did or left him more lonely in the sky? Who ever paid more honour to Moses and Abraham or won more victories over idols and the images of paganism? And what was this thing that thrust me back with the energy of a thing alive; whose fanaticism could drive me from Sicily and tear up my deep roots out of the rock of Spain? What faith was theirs who thronged in thousands of every class a country crying out that my ruin was the will of God; and what hurled great Godfrey as from a catapult over the wall of Jerusalem, and what brought great Sobieski like a thunderbolt to the gates of Vienna? I think there was more than you fancy in the religion that has so matched itself with mine.’
Those who would suggest that the faith was a fanaticism are doomed to an eternal perplexity. In their account it is bound to appear as fanatical for nothing, and fanatical against everything. It is ascetical and at war with ascetics, Roman and in revolt against Rome, monotheistic and fighting furiously against monotheism; harsh in its condemnation of harshness; a riddle not to be explained even as unreason. And what sort of unreason is it that seems reasonable to millions of educated Europeans through all the revolutions of some sixteen hundred years? People are not amused with a puzzle or a paradox or a mere muddle in the mind for all that time. I know of no explanation except that such a thing is not unreason but reason; that if it is fanatical it is fanatical for reason and fanatical against all the unreasonable things. That is the only explanation I can find of a thing from the first so detached and so confident, condemning things that looked so like itself, refusing help from powers that seemed so essential to its existence, sharing on its human side all the passions of the age, yet always at the supreme moment suddenly rising superior to them, never saying exactly what it was expected to say and never needing to unsay what it had said; I can find no explanation except that, like Pallas from the brain of Jove, it had indeed come forth out of the mind of God, mature and mighty and armed for judgement and for war.
Che questo dogma puramente cristiano si sia effettivamente ribellato, anche solo per un attimo, all’Impero, e abbia effettivamente per un attimo rifondato la Chiesa a dispetto dell’Impero, è di per sé una prova che nel mondo operava qualcosa di positivo e di personale, distinto da qualunque fede ufficiale l’Impero scegliesse di adottare. Questa forza distrusse interamente la fede ufficiale che l’Impero adottò. Proseguì per la propria via, come per la propria via prosegue ancora. Vi è un numero sterminato di altri esempi in cui si ripete esattamente lo stesso processo che abbiamo esaminato nel caso del manicheo e dell’ariano. Qualche secolo dopo, per esempio, la Chiesa dovette difendere la medesima Trinità, che non è altro che il lato logico dell’amore, contro un’altra apparizione della divinità isolata e semplificata nella religione dell’Islam. Eppure vi è chi non riesce a vedere per che cosa combattessero i Crociati; e vi è persino chi parla come se il Cristianesimo non fosse mai stato altro che una forma di ciò che essi chiamano ebraismo, subentrato con la decadenza dell’ellenismo. Costoro devono certamente restare assai perplessi davanti alla guerra tra la Mezzaluna e la Croce. Se il Cristianesimo non fosse mai stato altro che una morale più semplice, volta a spazzar via il politeismo, non vi sarebbe ragione per cui la Cristianità non avrebbe dovuto essere spazzata dentro l’Islam. La verità è che l’Islam stesso fu una reazione barbarica proprio contro quella umanissima complessità che è davvero un tratto cristiano; contro quell’idea di equilibrio nella divinità, come di equilibrio nella famiglia, che fa di quel credo una sorta di sanità, e di quella sanità l’anima della civiltà. Ed è per questo che la Chiesa è fin dal principio una realtà che tiene ferma la propria posizione e il proprio punto di vista, del tutto al di fuori degli accidenti e delle anarchie della sua epoca. È per questo che vibra colpi imparziali a destra e a sinistra, contro il pessimismo del manicheo o l’ottimismo del pelagiano. Non fu un movimento manicheo perché non fu affatto un movimento. Non fu una moda ufficiale perché non fu affatto una moda. Fu qualcosa che poteva coincidere con i movimenti e con le mode, poteva dominarli e poteva sopravvivere loro.
Così potrebbero levarsi dalle loro tombe i grandi eresiarchi a confondere i loro compagni di oggi. Non c’è nulla che i critici oggi affermino che noi non possiamo chiamare questi grandi testimoni a smentire. Il critico moderno dirà con leggerezza che il Cristianesimo non fu che una reazione verso l’ascetismo e una spiritualità antinaturale, una danza di fachiri furiosi contro la vita e l’amore. Ma Mani, il grande mistico, risponderà loro dal suo trono segreto e griderà: «Questi cristiani non hanno alcun diritto di essere chiamati spirituali; questi cristiani non hanno alcun titolo per essere chiamati asceti, essi che vennero a patti con la maledizione della vita e con tutta la sozzura della famiglia. Per opera loro la terra è ancora contaminata di frutti e di messi, e inquinata di popolazione. La loro non fu affatto una rivolta contro la natura, altrimenti i miei figli l’avrebbero condotta al trionfo; ma questi stolti rinnovarono il mondo, quando io l’avrei posto fine con un solo gesto». E un altro critico scriverà che la Chiesa non fu che l’ombra dell’Impero, la fisima di un Imperatore capitato per caso, e che essa permane in Europa soltanto come il fantasma della potenza di Roma. E Ario, il diacono, risponderà dalle tenebre dell’oblio: «No, davvero, altrimenti il mondo avrebbe seguito la mia religione, ben più ragionevole. Ché la mia soccombette dinanzi a demagoghi e a uomini che sfidavano Cesare; e attorno al mio campione stava il manto purpureo, e mia era la gloria delle aquile. Non fu per mancanza di queste cose che fallii». E un terzo moderno ancora sosterrà che il credo si diffuse soltanto come una sorta di panico del fuoco infernale; uomini che dappertutto tentavano imprese impossibili fuggendo da una vendetta incredibile; un incubo di rimorso immaginario; e una simile spiegazione soddisferà molti, che vedono qualcosa di spaventoso nella dottrina dell’ortodossia. E allora si leverà contro di essa la voce terribile di Tertulliano, che dirà: «E perché allora fui espulso; e perché cuori e teste molli si pronunciarono contro di me, quando proclamai la perdizione di tutti i peccatori; e quale fu questa potenza che mi contrastò, quando minacciai dell’inferno tutti gli apostati? Ché nessuno mai percorse quella via ardua tanto lontano quanto me; e mio era il Credo Quia Impossibile». Vi è poi la quarta ipotesi, che in tutta la faccenda vi fosse qualcosa della società segreta semitica; che si trattasse di una nuova invasione dello spirito nomade a scuotere un paganesimo più mite e più agiato, con le sue città e i suoi dèi domestici; sicché le gelose razze monoteiste potessero, in fin dei conti, imporre il loro geloso Dio. E Maometto risponderà dal turbine, il rosso turbine del deserto: «Chi mai servì la gelosia di Dio come feci io, o lo lasciò più solo nel cielo? Chi mai rese maggiore onore a Mosè e ad Abramo, o riportò più vittorie sugli idoli e sulle immagini del paganesimo? E quale fu questa cosa che mi respinse con l’energia di un essere vivo; il cui fanatismo poté scacciarmi dalla Sicilia e strappare le mie profonde radici dalla roccia di Spagna? Quale fede fu la loro, di coloro che si accalcavano a migliaia, d’ogni ceto, in un paese, gridando che la mia rovina era volontà di Dio; e che cosa scagliò il grande Goffredo come da una catapulta oltre le mura di Gerusalemme, e che cosa spinse il grande Sobieski come una folgore alle porte di Vienna? Io credo che nella religione che tanto si è misurata con la mia vi fosse più di quanto voi immaginiate».
Coloro che vorrebbero suggerire che quella fede fu un fanatismo sono condannati a un’eterna perplessità. Nel loro resoconto essa è destinata ad apparire fanatica per niente e fanatica contro tutto. È ascetica e in guerra con gli asceti, romana e in rivolta contro Roma, monoteista e furiosamente in lotta contro il monoteismo; dura nella sua condanna della durezza; un enigma che non si spiega neppure come irragionevolezza. E che sorta di irragionevolezza è mai quella che appare ragionevole a milioni di europei colti, attraverso tutte le rivoluzioni di quasi milleseicento anni? La gente non si diverte con un rompicapo o un paradosso o un semplice groviglio della mente per tutto quel tempo. Non conosco altra spiegazione se non che una cosa simile non è irragionevolezza ma ragione; che, se è fanatica, è fanatica per la ragione e fanatica contro tutte le cose irragionevoli. È l’unica spiegazione che io riesca a trovare di una cosa fin dal principio così distaccata e così sicura di sé, che condanna cose tanto somiglianti a se stessa, che rifiuta l’aiuto di poteri che parevano tanto essenziali alla sua esistenza, che condivide, dal suo lato umano, tutte le passioni dell’epoca, eppure sempre, nel momento supremo, improvvisamente si eleva al di sopra di esse, senza mai dire esattamente ciò che ci si aspettava che dicesse e senza mai aver bisogno di disdire ciò che aveva detto; non trovo altra spiegazione se non che, come Pallade dal cervello di Giove, essa fosse davvero uscita dalla mente di Dio, matura e possente e armata per il giudizio e per la guerra.
V
THE ESCAPE FROM PAGANISM
The modern missionary, with his palm-leaf hat and his umbrella, has become rather a figure of fun. He is chaffed among men of the world for the ease with which he can be eaten by cannibals and the narrow bigotry which makes him regard the cannibal culture as lower than his own. Perhaps the best part of the joke is that the men of the world do not see that the joke is against themselves. It is rather ridiculous to ask a man just about to be boiled in a pot and eaten, at a purely religious feast, why he does not regard all religions as equally friendly and fraternal. But there is a more subtle criticism uttered against the more old-fashioned missionary; to the effect that he generalises too broadly about the heathen and pays too little attention to the difference between Mahomet and Mumbo-Jumbo. There was probably truth in this complaint, especially in the past; but it is my main contention here that the exaggeration is all the other way at present. It is the temptation of the professors to treat mythologies too much as theologies; as things thoroughly thought out are seriously held. It is the temptation of the intellectuals to take much too seriously the fine shades of various schools in the rather irresponsible metaphysics of Asia. Above all it is their temptation to miss the real truth implied in the idea of Aquinas contra Gentiles or Athanasius contra mundum.
If the missionary says, in fact, that he is exceptional in being a Christian, and that the rest of the races and religions can be collectively classified as heathen, he is perfectly right. He may say it in quite the wrong spirit, in which case he is spiritually wrong. But in the cold light of philosophy and history, he is intellectually right. He may not be right minded, but he is right. He may not even have a right to be right, but he is right. The outer world to which he brings his creed really is some thing subject to certain generalisations covering all its varieties, and is not merely a variety of similar creeds. Perhaps it is in any case too much of a temptation to pride or hypocrisy to call it heathenry. Perhaps it could be better simply to call it humanity. But there are certain broad characteristics of what we call humanity while it remains in what we call heathenry. They are not necessarily bad characteristics; some of them are worthy of the respect of Christendom; some of them have been absorbed and transfigured in the substance of Christendom. But they existed before Christendom and they still exist outside Christendom, as certainly as the sea existed before a boat and all round a boat; and they have as strong and as universal and as unmistakable a savour as the sea.
For instance, all real scholars who have studied the Greek and Roman culture say one thing about it. They agree that in the ancient world religion was one thing and philosophy quite another. There was very little effort to rationalise and at the same time to realise a real belief in the gods. There was very little pretense of any such real belief among the philosophers. But neither had the passion or perhaps the power to persecute the others save in particular and peculiar cases; and neither the philosopher in his school nor the priest in his temple seems ever to have seriously contemplated his own concept as covering the world. A priest sacrificing to Artemis in Calydon did not seem to think that people would some day sacrifice to her instead of to Isis beyond the sea; a sage following the vegetarian rule of the Neo-Pythagoreans did not seem to think it would universally prevail and exclude the methods of Epictetus or Epicurus. We may call this liberality if we like; I am not dealing with an argument but describing an atmosphere. All this, I say, is admitted by all scholars; but what neither the learned nor the unlearned have fully realised, perhaps, is that this description is really an exact description of all non-Christian civilisation today; and especially of the great civilisations of the East. Eastern paganism really is much more all of a piece, just as ancient paganism was much more all of a piece, than the modern critics admit. It is a many-coloured Persian Carpet as the other was a varied and tessellated Roman pavement; but the one real crack right across that pavement came from the earthquake of the Crucifixion.
The modern European seeking his religion in Asia is reading his religion into Asia. Religion there is something different; it is both more and less. He is like a man mapping out the sea as land; marking waves as mountains; not understanding the nature of its peculiar permanence. It is perfectly true that Asia has its own dignity and poetry and high civilisation. But it is not in the least true that Asia has its own definite dominions of moral government, where all loyalty is conceived in terms of morality; as when we say that Ireland is Catholic or that New England was Puritan. The map is not marked out in religions, in our sense of churches. The state of mind is far more subtle, more relative, more secretive, more varied and changing, like the colours of the snake. The Moslem is the nearest approach to a militant Christian; and that is precisely because he is a much nearer approach to an envoy from western civilisation. The Moslem in the heart of Asia almost stands for the soul of Europe. And as he stands between them and Europe in the matter of space so he stands between them and Christianity in the matter of time. In that sense the Moslems in Asia are merely like the Nestorians in Asia. Islam, historically speaking, is the greatest of the Eastern heresies. It owed something to the quite isolated and unique individuality of Israel; but it owed more to Byzantium and the theological enthusiasm of Christendom. It owed something even to the Crusades. It owed nothing whatever to Asia. It owed nothing to the atmosphere of the ancient and traditional world of Asia, with its immemorial etiquette and its bottomless or bewildering philosophies. All that ancient and actual Asia felt the entrance of Islam as something foreign and western and warlike, piercing it like a spear.
V
LA FUGA DAL PAGANESIMO
Il missionario moderno, col suo cappello di foglie di palma e il suo ombrello, è diventato una figura piuttosto comica. Lo si canzona, tra gli uomini di mondo, per la disinvoltura con cui si lascia divorare dai cannibali e per la gretta bigotteria che lo induce a considerare la cultura cannibale come inferiore alla propria. Il bello della facezia sta forse nel fatto che gli uomini di mondo non si avvedono che la facezia è rivolta contro loro stessi. È piuttosto ridicolo domandare a un uomo che sta per essere bollito in una pentola e mangiato, durante un banchetto puramente religioso, perché mai non consideri tutte le religioni ugualmente amiche e fraterne. Ma vi è una critica più sottile mossa contro il missionario di stampo più antiquato: quella di generalizzare troppo largamente a proposito dei pagani e di prestare troppo poca attenzione alla differenza fra Maometto e Mumbo-Jumbo. Probabilmente vi era del vero in questa lagnanza, specie nel passato; ma la mia tesi principale, qui, è che oggi l’esagerazione va tutta nel verso opposto. È la tentazione dei professori trattare le mitologie troppo come teologie; come cose accuratamente meditate vengano seriamente professate. È la tentazione degli intellettuali prendere troppo sul serio le sottili sfumature delle varie scuole nella metafisica piuttosto irresponsabile dell’Asia. Soprattutto è loro tentazione lasciarsi sfuggire la vera verità implicita nell’idea di Aquinas contra Gentiles o di Athanasius contra mundum.
Se il missionario afferma, in sostanza, di essere un’eccezione in quanto cristiano, e che il resto delle razze e delle religioni può essere collettivamente classificato come pagano, ha perfettamente ragione. Può darsi che lo dica con lo spirito del tutto sbagliato, e in tal caso ha torto spiritualmente. Ma alla fredda luce della filosofia e della storia, ha ragione intellettualmente. Può darsi che non abbia l’animo nel giusto, eppure è nel giusto. Può darsi che non abbia neppure il diritto di essere nel giusto, eppure è nel giusto. Il mondo esterno al quale egli reca il suo credo è davvero qualcosa di soggetto a certe generalizzazioni che ne abbracciano tutte le varietà, e non è semplicemente una varietà di credi affini. Forse è comunque troppo esposto alla tentazione dell’orgoglio o dell’ipocrisia chiamarlo paganesimo. Forse sarebbe meglio chiamarlo semplicemente umanità. Ma vi sono certe larghe caratteristiche di ciò che chiamiamo umanità finché essa permane in ciò che chiamiamo paganesimo. Non sono necessariamente cattive caratteristiche; alcune sono degne del rispetto della Cristianità; alcune sono state assorbite e trasfigurate nella sostanza della Cristianità. Ma esistevano prima della Cristianità ed esistono ancora fuori della Cristianità, con la stessa certezza con cui il mare esisteva prima di una barca e tutt’intorno a una barca; e hanno un sapore altrettanto forte, altrettanto universale, altrettanto inconfondibile del mare.
Per esempio, tutti i veri studiosi che hanno esaminato la cultura greca e romana dicono una cosa sola a suo riguardo. Convengono che nel mondo antico la religione era una cosa e la filosofia tutt’altra. Ben poco ci si adoperava per razionalizzare e insieme rendere reale una vera credenza negli dèi. Ben poca era la pretesa di una tale reale credenza tra i filosofi. Ma né gli uni né gli altri avevano la passione, o forse il potere, di perseguitare gli altri, salvo in casi particolari e peculiari; e né il filosofo nella sua scuola né il sacerdote nel suo tempio sembrano mai aver seriamente concepito il proprio pensiero come esteso a tutto il mondo. Un sacerdote che sacrificava ad Artemide a Calidone non sembrava pensare che la gente un giorno avrebbe sacrificato a lei invece che a Iside al di là del mare; un saggio che seguiva la regola vegetariana dei neopitagorici non sembrava pensare che essa avrebbe universalmente prevalso escludendo i metodi di Epitteto o di Epicuro. Se vogliamo, possiamo chiamare tutto ciò liberalità; io non sto svolgendo un argomento, ma descrivendo un’atmosfera. Tutto questo, dico, è ammesso da tutti gli studiosi; ma ciò che né i dotti né gli indotti hanno forse pienamente compreso è che questa descrizione è in realtà una descrizione esatta di tutta la civiltà non cristiana odierna; e specialmente delle grandi civiltà dell’Oriente. Il paganesimo orientale è davvero assai più tutto d’un pezzo, proprio come il paganesimo antico era assai più tutto d’un pezzo, di quanto i critici moderni ammettano. È un multicolore tappeto persiano come l’altro era un vario e tessellato pavimento romano; ma l’unica vera crepa che attraversa da parte a parte quel pavimento venne dal terremoto della Crocifissione.
L’europeo moderno che cerca la sua religione in Asia sta leggendo la propria religione dentro l’Asia. Là la religione è qualcosa di diverso; è insieme di più e di meno. Egli è come un uomo che tracci una carta del mare come se fosse terra; segnando le onde come montagne; senza comprendere la natura della sua peculiare permanenza. È perfettamente vero che l’Asia ha una propria dignità, una propria poesia, un’alta civiltà. Ma non è affatto vero che l’Asia abbia i suoi precisi domini di governo morale, dove ogni fedeltà è concepita in termini di moralità; come quando diciamo che l’Irlanda è cattolica o che il New England era puritano. La carta non è ripartita in religioni, nel nostro senso di chiese. Lo stato d’animo è assai più sottile, più relativo, più segreto, più vario e mutevole, come i colori del serpente. Il musulmano è ciò che più si avvicina a un cristiano militante; e ciò appunto perché è ciò che più si avvicina a un inviato della civiltà occidentale. Il musulmano, nel cuore dell’Asia, quasi rappresenta l’anima dell’Europa. E come egli sta fra loro e l’Europa nella dimensione dello spazio, così sta fra loro e il Cristianesimo nella dimensione del tempo. In tal senso i musulmani in Asia non sono che come i nestoriani in Asia. L’Islam, storicamente parlando, è la più grande delle eresie orientali. Dovette qualcosa all’individualità del tutto isolata e unica di Israele; ma dovette di più a Bisanzio e all’entusiasmo teologico della Cristianità. Dovette qualcosa perfino alle Crociate. Non dovette proprio nulla all’Asia. Nulla dovette all’atmosfera del mondo antico e tradizionale dell’Asia, con la sua immemoriale etichetta e le sue insondabili o sconcertanti filosofie. Tutta quell’antica e reale Asia sentì l’ingresso dell’Islam come qualcosa di straniero, di occidentale e di bellicoso, che la trafiggeva come una lancia.
Even where we might trace in dotted lines the domains of Asiatic religions, we should probably be reading into them something dogmatic and ethical belonging to our own religion. It is as if a European ignorant of the American atmosphere were to suppose that each ‘state’ was a separate sovereign state as patriotic as France or Poland; or that when a Yankee referred fondly to his ‘home town’ he meant he had no other nation, like a citizen of ancient Athens or Rome. As he would be reading a particular sort of loyalty into America, so we are reading a particular sort of loyalty into Asia. There are loyalties of other kinds; but not what men in the West mean by being a believer, by trying to be a Christian, by being a good Protestant or a practising Catholic. In the intellectual world it means something far more vague and varied by doubts and speculations. In the moral world it means something far more loose and drifting. A professor of Persian at one of our great universities, so passionate a partisan of the East as practically to profess a contempt for the West, said to a friend of mine: ‘You will never understand oriental religions, because you always conceive religion as connected with ethics. This kind has really nothing to do with ethics.’ We have most of us known some Masters of the Higher Wisdom, some Pilgrims upon the Path to Power, some eastern esoteric saints and seers, who had really nothing to do with ethics. Something different, something detached and irresponsible, tinges the moral atmosphere of Asia and touches even that of Islam. It was very realistically caught in the atmosphere of Hassan; and a very horrible atmosphere too. It is even more vivid in such glimpses as we get of the genuine and ancient cults of Asia. Deeper than the depths of metaphysics, far down in the abysses of mystical meditations under all that solemn universe of spiritual things, is a secret, an intangible and a terrible levity. It does not really very much matter what one does. Either because they do not believe in a devil, or because they do believe in a destiny, or because experience here is everything and eternal life something totally different, but for some reason they are totally different. I have read somewhere that there were three great friends famous in medieval Persia for their unity of mind. One became the responsible and respected Vizier of the Great King; the second was the poet Omar, pessimist and epicurean, drinking wine in mockery of Mahomet; the third was the Old Man of the Mountain who maddened his people with hashish that they might murder other people with daggers. It does not really much matter what one does.
The Sultan in Hassan would have understood all those three men; indeed he was all those three men. But this sort of universalist cannot have what we call a character; it is what we call a chaos. He cannot choose; he cannot fight; he cannot repent; he cannot hope. He is not in the same sense creating something; for creation means rejection. He is not, in our religious phrase, making his soul. For our doctrine of salvation does really mean a labour like that of a man trying to make a statue beautiful; a victory with wings. For that there must be a final choice, for a man cannot make statues without rejecting stone. And there really is this ultimate unmorality behind the metaphysics of Asia. And the reason is that there has been nothing through all those unthinkable ages to bring the human mind sharply to the point; to tell it that the time has come to choose. The mind has lived too much in eternity. The soul has been too immortal, in the special sense that it ignores the idea of mortal sin. It has had too much of eternity, in the sense that it has not had enough of the hour of death and the day of judgement. It is not crucial enough; in the literal sense that it has not had enough of the cross. That is what we mean when we say that Asia is very old. But strictly speaking Europe is quite as old as Asia; indeed in a sense any place is as old as any other place. What we mean is that Europe has not merely gone on growing older. It has been born again.
Asia is all humanity; as it has worked out its human doom. Asia, in its vast territory, in its varied populations, in its heights of past achievement and its depths of dark speculation, is itself a world; and represents something of what we mean when we speak of the world. It is a cosmos rather than a continent. It is the world as man has made it; and contains many of the most wonderful things that man has made. Therefore Asia stands as the one representative of paganism and the one rival to Christendom. But everywhere else where we get glimpses of that mortal destiny, they suggest stages in the same story. Where Asia trails away into the southern archipelagoes of the savages, or where a darkness full of nameless shapes dwells in the heart of Africa, or where the last survivors of lost races linger in the cold volcano of prehistoric America, it is all the same story; sometimes perhaps later chapters of the same story. It is men entangled in the forest of their own mythology; it is men drowned in the sea of their own metaphysics. Polytheists have grown weary of the wildest of fictions. Monotheists have grown weary of the most wonderful of truths. Diabolists here and there have such a hatred of heaven and earth that they have tried to take refuge in hell. It is the Fall of Man; and it is exactly that fall that was being felt by our own fathers at the first moment of the Roman decline. We also were going down that side road; down that easy slope; following the magnificent procession of the high civilisations of the world.
If the Church had not entered the world then, it seems probable that Europe would be now very much what Asia is now. Something may be allowed for a real difference of race and environment, visible in the ancient as in the modern world. But after all we talk about the changeless East very largely because it has not suffered the great change. Paganism in its last phase showed considerable signs of becoming equally changeless. This would not mean that new schools or sects of philosophy would not arise; as new schools did arise in Antiquity and do arise in Asia. It does not mean that there would be no real mystics or visionaries; as there were mystics in Antiquity and are mystics in Asia. It does not mean that there would be no social codes, as there were codes in Antiquity and are codes in Asia. It does not mean that there could not be good men or happy lives, for God has given all men a conscience and conscience can give all men a kind of peace. But it does mean that the tone and proportion of all these things, and especially the proportion of good and evil things, would be in the unchanged West what they are in the changeless East. And nobody who looks at that changeless East honestly, and with a real sympathy, can believe that there is anything there remotely resembling the challenge and revolution of the Faith.
Persino là dove potremmo tracciare a linee punteggiate i domini delle religioni asiatiche, con ogni probabilità vi staremmo leggendo qualcosa di dogmatico e di etico che appartiene alla nostra religione. È come se un europeo ignaro dell’atmosfera americana supponesse che ogni «stato» fosse uno Stato sovrano a sé, patriottico quanto la Francia o la Polonia; oppure che, quando un yankee accenna con affetto alla sua «città natale», intenda dire che non ha altra patria, al modo di un cittadino dell’antica Atene o di Roma. Come costui leggerebbe nell’America una particolare specie di lealtà, così noi leggiamo nell’Asia una particolare specie di lealtà. Vi sono lealtà di altro genere; ma non quello che in Occidente s’intende con l’essere credente, con il tentare di essere cristiano, con l’essere un buon protestante o un cattolico praticante. Nel mondo intellettuale significa qualcosa di assai più vago, variato da dubbi e speculazioni. Nel mondo morale significa qualcosa di assai più sciolto e alla deriva. Un professore di persiano, in una delle nostre grandi università, così appassionato partigiano dell’Oriente da professare praticamente il disprezzo per l’Occidente, disse a un mio amico: «Non comprenderete mai le religioni orientali, perché concepite sempre la religione come legata all’etica. Questa specie di religione, in realtà, non ha nulla a che fare con l’etica». Quasi tutti noi abbiamo conosciuto qualche Maestro della Saggezza Superiore, qualche Pellegrino sul Sentiero della Potenza, qualche santo o veggente esoterico d’Oriente, che davvero non aveva nulla a che fare con l’etica. Qualcosa di diverso, qualcosa di distaccato e di irresponsabile, tinge l’atmosfera morale dell’Asia e tocca perfino quella dell’Islam. Fu colto con grande realismo nell’atmosfera di Hassan; e un’atmosfera oltremodo orribile, per giunta. È ancora più vivida in quegli scorci che ci è dato cogliere dei culti genuini e antichi dell’Asia. Più profonda degli abissi della metafisica, giù nelle voragini delle meditazioni mistiche, sotto tutto quel solenne universo di cose spirituali, giace una segreta, un’intangibile e terribile leggerezza. Non ha davvero molta importanza ciò che si fa. Vuoi perché non credono in un diavolo, vuoi perché credono in un destino, vuoi perché l’esperienza quaggiù è tutto e la vita eterna qualcosa di totalmente diverso, ma per una qualche ragione sono totalmente diversi. Ho letto da qualche parte che vi furono tre grandi amici, famosi nella Persia medievale per l’unità del loro spirito. Uno divenne il responsabile e rispettato Visir del Gran Re; il secondo fu il poeta Omar, pessimista ed epicureo, che beveva vino a scherno di Maometto; il terzo fu il Vecchio della Montagna, che faceva impazzire il suo popolo con l’hashish perché assassinasse altri uomini col pugnale. Non ha davvero molta importanza ciò che si fa.
Il Sultano di Hassan avrebbe compreso tutti e tre quegli uomini; anzi, era tutti e tre quegli uomini. Ma questa sorta di universalista non può avere ciò che noi chiamiamo un carattere; è ciò che noi chiamiamo un caos. Non può scegliere; non può combattere; non può pentirsi; non può sperare. Non sta, nel senso che intendiamo noi, creando qualcosa; poiché creare significa respingere. Non sta, secondo la nostra espressione religiosa, plasmando la propria anima. Perché la nostra dottrina della salvezza significa davvero una fatica pari a quella di chi cerca di rendere bella una statua; una vittoria alata. E per questo occorre una scelta ultima, giacché non si può fare una statua senza respingere della pietra. E davvero esiste questa amoralità ultima dietro la metafisica dell’Asia. E la ragione è che, per tutte quelle epoche impensabili, non vi è stato nulla che portasse la mente umana bruscamente al dunque; che le dicesse essere giunto il tempo di scegliere. La mente ha vissuto troppo nell’eternità. L’anima è stata troppo immortale, nel senso particolare che ignora l’idea del peccato mortale. Ha avuto troppa eternità, nel senso che non ha avuto abbastanza dell’ora della morte e del giorno del giudizio. Non è abbastanza cruciale, nel senso letterale che non ha avuto abbastanza della croce. È questo che intendiamo quando diciamo che l’Asia è molto antica. Ma, a rigore, l’Europa è antica quanto l’Asia; anzi, in un certo senso ogni luogo è antico quanto ogni altro luogo. Ciò che intendiamo è che l’Europa non si è limitata a continuare a invecchiare. È rinata.
L’Asia è tutta l’umanità, quale ha portato a compimento il proprio destino umano. L’Asia, nel suo territorio sterminato, nelle sue popolazioni variegate, nelle sue vette di conquiste passate e nei suoi abissi di oscura speculazione, è essa stessa un mondo; e rappresenta qualcosa di ciò che intendiamo quando parliamo del mondo. È un cosmo più che un continente. È il mondo quale l’uomo lo ha fatto; e racchiude molte fra le cose più meravigliose che l’uomo abbia fatto. Perciò l’Asia si erge come l’unica rappresentante del paganesimo e l’unica rivale della cristianità. Ma ovunque altrove, dove cogliamo scorci di quel destino mortale, essi suggeriscono tappe della medesima storia. Là dove l’Asia si perde negli arcipelaghi meridionali dei selvaggi, o dove una tenebra gremita di forme senza nome dimora nel cuore dell’Africa, o dove gli ultimi superstiti di stirpi perdute si attardano nel freddo vulcano dell’America preistorica, è sempre la medesima storia; talvolta, forse, capitoli più tardi della medesima storia. Sono uomini impigliati nella foresta della propria mitologia; sono uomini annegati nel mare della propria metafisica. I politeisti si sono stancati della più sfrenata delle finzioni. I monoteisti si sono stancati della più meravigliosa delle verità. Diabolisti, qua e là, nutrono un tale odio per il cielo e per la terra da aver tentato di rifugiarsi nell’inferno. È la Caduta dell’Uomo; ed è esattamente quella caduta che veniva avvertita dai nostri stessi padri nel primo istante del declino romano. Anche noi stavamo imboccando quella via secondaria; scendendo per quel facile pendio; seguendo la magnifica processione delle alte civiltà del mondo.
Se la Chiesa non fosse allora entrata nel mondo, sembra probabile che l’Europa sarebbe oggi press’a poco ciò che l’Asia è oggi. Qualcosa si può concedere a una reale differenza di razza e di ambiente, visibile nel mondo antico come nel moderno. Ma, dopo tutto, parliamo dell’immutabile Oriente in gran parte perché non ha subìto il grande mutamento. Il paganesimo, nella sua fase ultima, mostrava segni notevoli di divenire altrettanto immutabile. Ciò non significherebbe che non sorgerebbero nuove scuole o sette di filosofia; come nuove scuole sorsero nell’Antichità e sorgono in Asia. Non significa che non vi sarebbero veri mistici o visionari; come vi furono mistici nell’Antichità e ve ne sono in Asia. Non significa che non vi sarebbero codici sociali, come vi furono codici nell’Antichità e ve ne sono in Asia. Non significa che non potrebbero esserci uomini buoni o vite felici, poiché Dio ha dato a tutti gli uomini una coscienza, e la coscienza può dare a tutti gli uomini una sorta di pace. Ma significa bensì che il tono e la proporzione di tutte queste cose, e specialmente la proporzione delle cose buone e cattive, sarebbero nell’immutato Occidente ciò che sono nell’immutabile Oriente. E nessuno che guardi a quell’immutabile Oriente con onestà, e con reale simpatia, può credere che vi sia là qualcosa che rassomigli anche solo lontanamente alla sfida e alla rivoluzione della Fede.
In short, if classic paganism had lingered until now, a number of things might well have lingered with it; and they would look very like what we call the religions of the East. There would still be Pythagoreans teaching reincarnation, as there are still Hindus teaching reincarnation. There would still be Stoics making a religion out of reason and virtue, as there are still Confucians making a religion out of reason and virtue. There would still be Neo-Platonists studying transcendental truths, the meaning of which was mysterious to other people and disputed even amongst themselves; as the Buddhists still study a transcendentalism mysterious to others and disputed among themselves. There would still be intelligent Apollonians apparently worshipping the sun-god but explaining that they were worshipping the divine principle; just as there are still intelligent Parsees apparently worshipping the sun but explaining that they are worshipping the deity. There would still be wild Dionysians dancing on the mountain as there are still wild Dervishes dancing in the desert. There would still be crowds of people attending the popular feasts of the gods, in pagan Europe as in pagan Asia. There would still be crowds of gods, local and other, for them to worship. And there would still be a great many more people who worshipped them than people who believed in them. Finally there would still be a very large number of people who did worship gods and did believe in gods; and who believed in gods and worshipped gods simply because they were demons. There would still be Levantines secretly sacrificing to Moloch as there are still Thugs secretly sacrificing to Kalee. There would still be a great deal of magic; and a great deal of it would be black magic. There would still be a considerable admiration of Seneca and a considerable imitation of Nero; just as the exalted epigrams of Confucius could coexist with the tortures of China. And over all that tangled forest of traditions growing wild or withering would brood the broad silence of a singular and even nameless mood; but the nearest name of it is nothing. All these things, good and bad, would have an indescribable air of being too old to die.
None of these things occupying Europe in the absence of Christendom would bear the least likeness to Christendom. Since the Pythagorean Metempsychosis would still be there, we might call it the Pythagorean religion as we talk about the Buddhist religion. As the noble maxims of Socrates would still be there, we might call it the Socratic religion as we talk about the Confucian religion. As the popular holiday was still marked by a mythological hymn to Adonis, we might call it the religion of Adonis as we talk about the religion of Juggernaut. As literature would still be based on the Greek mythology, we might call that mythology a religion, as we call the Hindu mythology a religion. We might say that there were so many thousands or millions of people belonging to that religion, in the sense of frequenting such temples or merely living in a land full of such temples. But if we called the last tradition of Pythagoras or the lingering legend of Adonis by the name of a religion, then we must find some other name for the Church of Christ.
If anybody says that philosophic maxims presented through many ages, or mythological temples frequented by many people, are things of the same class and category as the Church, it is enough to answer quite simply that they are not. Nobody thinks they are the same when he sees them in the old civilisation of Greece and Rome; nobody would think they were the same if that civilisation had lasted two thousand years longer and existed at the present day; nobody can in reason think they are the same in the parallel pagan civilisation in the East, as it is at the present day. None of these philosophies or mythologies are anything like a Church; certainly nothing like a Church Militant. And, as I have shown elsewhere, even if this rule were not already proved, the exception would prove the rule. The rule is that pre-Christian or pagan history does not produce a Church Militant; and the exception, or what some would call the exception, is that Islam is at least militant if it is not Church. And that is precisely because Islam is the one religious rival that is not pre-Christian and therefore not in that sense pagan. Islam was a product of Christianity; even if it was a by-product; even if it was a bad product. It was a heresy or parody emulating and therefore imitating the Church. It is no more surprising that Mahomedanism had something of her fighting spirit than that Quakerism had something of her peaceful spirit. After Christianity there are any number of such emulations or extensions. Before it there are none.
The Church Militant is thus unique because it is an army marching to effect a universal deliverance. The bondage from which the world is thus to be delivered is something that is very well symbolised by the state of Asia as by the state of pagan Europe. I do not mean merely their moral or immoral state. The missionary, as a matter of fact, has much more to say for himself than the enlightened imagine even when he says that the heathen are idolatrous and immoral. A touch or two of realistic experience about Eastern religion, even about Moslem religion, will reveal some startling insensibilities in ethics; such as the practical indifference to the line between passion and perversion. It is not prejudice but practical experience which says that Asia is full of demons as well as gods. But the evil I mean is in the mind. And it is in the mind wherever the mind has worked for a long time alone. It is what happens when all dreaming and thinking have come to an end in an emptiness that is at once negation and necessity. It sounds like an anarchy, but it is also a slavery. It is what has been called already the wheel of Asia; all those recurrent arguments about cause and effect or things beginning and ending in the mind, which make it impossible for the soul really to strike out and go anywhere or do anything. And the point is that it is not necessarily peculiar to Asiatics; it would have been true in the end of Europeans— if something had not happened. If the Church Militant had not been a thing marching, all men would have been marking time. If the Church Militant had not endured a discipline, all men would have endured a slavery.
In breve, se il paganesimo classico fosse sopravvissuto fino a oggi, un certo numero di cose ben avrebbero potuto sopravvivere con esso; e assomiglierebbero moltissimo a ciò che chiamiamo le religioni dell’Oriente. Vi sarebbero ancora Pitagorici a insegnare la reincarnazione, come vi sono ancora Indù a insegnare la reincarnazione. Vi sarebbero ancora Stoici a fare una religione della ragione e della virtù, come vi sono ancora Confuciani a fare una religione della ragione e della virtù. Vi sarebbero ancora Neoplatonici a studiare verità trascendenti, il cui significato era misterioso agli altri e conteso perfino fra loro stessi; come i Buddhisti studiano ancora un trascendentalismo misterioso agli altri e conteso fra loro stessi. Vi sarebbero ancora intelligenti Apollinei che apparentemente adorano il dio-sole, ma spiegano di adorare il principio divino; proprio come vi sono ancora intelligenti Parsi che apparentemente adorano il sole, ma spiegano di adorare la divinità. Vi sarebbero ancora selvaggi Dionisiaci a danzare sulla montagna, come vi sono ancora selvaggi Dervisci a danzare nel deserto. Vi sarebbero ancora folle di gente ad accorrere alle feste popolari degli dèi, nell’Europa pagana come nell’Asia pagana. Vi sarebbero ancora folle di dèi, locali e non, da adorare. E vi sarebbe ancora un numero di persone che li adoravano assai maggiore di quelle che credevano in loro. Vi sarebbe infine ancora un numero grandissimo di persone che davvero adoravano gli dèi e davvero credevano negli dèi; e che negli dèi credevano e gli dèi adoravano semplicemente perché erano dèmoni. Vi sarebbero ancora Levantini a sacrificare di nascosto a Moloch, come vi sono ancora Thug a sacrificare di nascosto a Kalì. Vi sarebbe ancora una gran quantità di magia; e gran parte di essa sarebbe magia nera. Vi sarebbe ancora una considerevole ammirazione per Seneca e una considerevole imitazione di Nerone; proprio come gli epigrammi sublimi di Confucio potevano coesistere con le torture della Cina. E su tutta quella selva intricata di tradizioni che crescevano selvagge o appassivano si stenderebbe il vasto silenzio di uno stato d’animo singolare e persino senza nome; ma il nome che più gli si avvicina è: nulla. Tutte queste cose, buone e cattive, avrebbero un’aria indescrivibile di essere troppo vecchie per morire.
Nessuna di queste cose, che occupasse l’Europa in assenza della Cristianità, avrebbe la minima somiglianza con la Cristianità. Poiché la metempsicosi pitagorica sarebbe ancora là, potremmo chiamarla la religione pitagorica, come parliamo della religione buddhista. Poiché le nobili massime di Socrate sarebbero ancora là, potremmo chiamarla la religione socratica, come parliamo della religione confuciana. Poiché la festa popolare sarebbe ancora segnata da un inno mitologico ad Adone, potremmo chiamarla la religione di Adone, come parliamo della religione del Juggernaut. Poiché la letteratura sarebbe ancora fondata sulla mitologia greca, potremmo chiamare quella mitologia una religione, come chiamiamo religione la mitologia indù. Potremmo dire che vi erano tante migliaia o milioni di persone appartenenti a quella religione, nel senso di frequentare tali templi o semplicemente di vivere in una terra piena di tali templi. Ma se chiamassimo l’ultima tradizione di Pitagora o la persistente leggenda di Adone col nome di religione, allora dovremmo trovare qualche altro nome per la Chiesa di Cristo.
Se qualcuno dice che massime filosofiche tramandate attraverso molte età, o templi mitologici frequentati da molta gente, sono cose della stessa classe e categoria della Chiesa, basta rispondere assai semplicemente che non lo sono. Nessuno pensa che siano la stessa cosa quando le vede nell’antica civiltà della Grecia e di Roma; nessuno penserebbe che fossero la stessa cosa se quella civiltà fosse durata duemila anni di più ed esistesse ai giorni nostri; nessuno può ragionevolmente pensare che siano la stessa cosa nella parallela civiltà pagana dell’Oriente, così com’è ai giorni nostri. Nessuna di queste filosofie o mitologie assomiglia a una Chiesa; certo nulla assomiglia a una Chiesa Militante. E, come ho mostrato altrove, anche se questa regola non fosse già dimostrata, l’eccezione confermerebbe la regola. La regola è che la storia precristiana o pagana non produce una Chiesa Militante; e l’eccezione, o ciò che alcuni chiamerebbero l’eccezione, è che l’Islam è quantomeno militante, se non è Chiesa. E ciò appunto perché l’Islam è l’unico rivale religioso che non sia precristiano e perciò non sia, in quel senso, pagano. L’Islam fu un prodotto del Cristianesimo; anche se fu un sottoprodotto; anche se fu un cattivo prodotto. Fu un’eresia o una parodia che emulava e perciò imitava la Chiesa. Non è più sorprendente che il Maomettanesimo avesse qualcosa del suo spirito combattivo di quanto lo sia che il Quaccherismo avesse qualcosa del suo spirito pacifico. Dopo il Cristianesimo vi sono innumerevoli emulazioni o estensioni di tal genere. Prima di esso non ve n’è alcuna.
La Chiesa Militante è dunque unica, perché è un esercito in marcia per compiere una liberazione universale. La servitù da cui il mondo dev’essere così liberato è qualcosa di ben simboleggiato tanto dallo stato dell’Asia quanto dallo stato dell’Europa pagana. Non intendo soltanto il loro stato morale o immorale. Il missionario, di fatto, ha molto più da dire in propria difesa di quanto gli illuminati immaginino, anche quando afferma che i pagani sono idolatri e immorali. Un tocco o due di esperienza realistica della religione orientale, e persino della religione musulmana, rivelerà certe sconcertanti insensibilità nell’etica; come la pratica indifferenza al confine fra passione e perversione. Non è pregiudizio, ma esperienza pratica, ciò che afferma che l’Asia è piena di dèmoni non meno che di dèi. Ma il male di cui parlo è nella mente. Ed è nella mente ovunque la mente abbia a lungo lavorato in solitudine. È ciò che accade quando ogni sognare e ogni pensare sono giunti a fine in un vuoto che è insieme negazione e necessità. Suona come un’anarchia, ma è anche una schiavitù. È ciò che è stato già chiamato la ruota dell’Asia; tutti quei ricorrenti ragionamenti sulla causa e sull’effetto, o sulle cose che cominciano e finiscono nella mente, che rendono impossibile all’anima di slanciarsi davvero e andare in qualche luogo o fare qualcosa. E il punto è che ciò non è necessariamente proprio degli Asiatici; alla fine sarebbe stato vero anche per gli Europei… se non fosse accaduto qualcosa. Se la Chiesa Militante non fosse stata una cosa in marcia, tutti gli uomini avrebbero segnato il passo. Se la Chiesa Militante non avesse sopportato una disciplina, tutti gli uomini avrebbero sopportato una schiavitù.
What that universal yet fighting faith brought into the world was hope. Perhaps the one thing common to mythology and philosophy was that both were really sad; in the sense that they had not this hope even if they had touches of faith or charity. We may call Buddhism a faith; though to us it seems more like a doubt. We may call the Lord of Compassion a Lord of Charity, though it seems to us a very pessimist sort of pity. But those who insist most on the antiquity and size of such cults must agree that in all their ages they have not covered all their areas with that sort of practical and pugnacious hope. In Christendom hope has never been absent; rather it has been errant, extravagant, excessively fixed upon fugitive chances. Its perpetual revolution and reconstruction has at least been an evidence of people being in better spirits. Europe did very truly renew its youth like the eagles; just as the eagles of Rome rose again over the legions of Napoleon, or we have seen soaring but yesterday the silver eagle of Poland. But in the Polish case ever revolution always went with religion. Napoleon himself sought a reconciliation with religion. Religion could never be finally separated even from the most hostile of the hopes; simply because it was the very source of the hopefulness. And the cause of this is to be found simply in the religion itself. Those who quarrel about it seldom even consider it in itself. There is neither space nor place for such a full consideration here; but a word may be said to explain a reconciliation that always recurs and still seems to require explanation.
There will be no end to the weary debates about liberalising theology, until people face the fact that the only liberal part of it is really the dogmatic part. If dogma is incredible, it is because it is incredibly liberal. If it is irrational, it can only be in giving us more assurance of freedom than is justified by reason. The obvious example is that essential form of freedom which we call free-will. It is absurd to say that a man shows his liberality in denying his liberty. But it is tenable that he has to affirm a transcendental doctrine in order to affirm his liberty. There is a sense in which we might reasonably say that if man has a primary power of choice, he has in that fact a super-natural power of creation, as if he could raise the dead or give birth to the unbegotten. Possibly in that case a man must be a miracle; and certainly in that case he must be a miracle in order to be a man; and most certainly in order to be a free man. But it is absurd to forbid him to be a free man and do it in the name of a more free religion.
But it is true in twenty other matters. Anybody who believes at all in God must believe in the absolute supremacy of God. But in so far as that supremacy does allow of any degrees that can be called liberal or illiberal, it is self-evident that the illiberal power is the deity of the rationalists and the liberal power is the deity of the dogmatists. Exactly in proportion as you turn monotheism into monism you turn it into despotism. It is precisely the unknown God of the scientist, with his impenetrable purpose and his inevitable and unalterable law, that reminds us of a Prussian autocrat making rigid plans in a remote tent and moving mankind like machinery. It is precisely the God of miracles and of answered prayers who reminds us of a liberal and popular prince, receiving petitions, listening to parliaments and considering the cases of a whole people. I am not now arguing the rationality of this conception in other respects; as a matter of fact it is not, as some suppose, irrational; for there is nothing irrational in the wisest and most well-informed king acting differently according to the action of those he wishes to save. But I am here only noting the general nature of liberality, or of free or enlarged atmosphere of action. And in this respect it is certain that the king can only be what we call magnanimous if he is what some call capricious. It is the Catholic, who has the feeling that his prayers do make a difference, when offered for the living and the dead, who also has the feeling of living like a free citizen in something almost like a constitutional commonwealth. It is the monist who lives under a single iron law who must have the feeling of living like a slave under a sultan. Indeed I believe that the original use of the word suffragium, which we now use in politics for a vote, was that employed in theology about a prayer. The dead in Purgatory were said to have the suffrages of the living. And in this sense, of a sort of right of petition to the supreme ruler, we may truly say that the whole of the Communion of Saints, as well as the whole of the Church Militant, is founded on universal suffrage.
But above all, it is true of the most tremendous issue; of that tragedy which has created the divine comedy of our creed. Nothing short of the extreme and strong and startling doctrine of the divinity of Christ will give that particular effect that can truly stir the popular sense like a trumpet; the idea of the king himself serving in the ranks like a common soldier. By making that figure merely human we make that story much less human. We take away the point of the story which actually pierces humanity; the point of the story which was quite literally the point of a spear. It does not especially humanise the universe to say that good and wise men can die for their opinions; any more than it would be any sort of uproariously popular news in an army that good soldiers may easily get killed. It is no news that King Leonidas is dead any more than that Queen Anne is dead; and men did not wait for Christianity to be men, in the full sense of being heroes. But if we are describing, for the moment, the atmosphere of what is generous and popular and even picturesque, any knowledge of human nature will tell us that no sufferings of the sons of men, or even of the servants of God, strike the same note as the notion of the master suffering instead of his servants. And this is given by the theological and emphatically not by the scientific deity. No mysterious monarch, hidden in his starry pavilion at the base of the cosmic campaign, is in the least like that celestial chivalry of the Captain who carries his five wounds in the front of battle.
Ciò che quella fede universale e insieme battagliera portò nel mondo fu la speranza. Forse l’unica cosa che mitologia e filosofia avevano in comune era che entrambe erano, in fondo, tristi: nel senso che non possedevano questa speranza, pur avendo qualche tocco di fede o di carità. Possiamo chiamare fede il buddhismo, benché a noi somigli piuttosto a un dubbio. Possiamo chiamare il Signore della Compassione un Signore della Carità, benché ci appaia come una forma assai pessimistica di pietà. Ma quanti insistono maggiormente sull’antichità e sull’ampiezza di simili culti devono pur convenire che, in tutte le loro età, essi non hanno mai ricoperto tutte le loro contrade di quella sorta di speranza pratica e combattiva. Nella cristianità la speranza non è mai stata assente; semmai è stata errabonda, stravagante, eccessivamente fissata su occasioni fuggevoli. La sua perpetua rivoluzione e ricostruzione è stata quantomeno la prova che la gente era di animo più lieto. L’Europa rinnovò davvero la propria giovinezza come le aquile; proprio come le aquile di Roma si levarono di nuovo sulle legioni di Napoleone, o come non più tardi di ieri abbiamo visto librarsi l’aquila d’argento di Polonia. Ma nel caso polacco la rivoluzione andò sempre di pari passo con la religione. Lo stesso Napoleone cercò una riconciliazione con la religione. La religione non poté mai essere separata del tutto neppure dalle più ostili fra le speranze; semplicemente perché era essa stessa la fonte di quella speranza. E la causa di ciò va cercata semplicemente nella religione medesima. Coloro che ne fanno oggetto di disputa raramente la considerano in sé stessa. Qui non v’è spazio né luogo per una considerazione così piena; ma si può dire una parola per spiegare una riconciliazione che sempre ritorna e sempre par richiedere una spiegazione.
Non ci sarà fine agli estenuanti dibattiti sul liberalizzare la teologia, finché la gente non guarderà in faccia il fatto che la sola parte liberale di essa è, in realtà, proprio la parte dogmatica. Se il dogma è incredibile, è perché è incredibilmente liberale. Se è irrazionale, può esserlo soltanto perché ci offre della libertà maggiore assicurazione di quanta la ragione giustifichi. L’esempio più ovvio è quella forma essenziale di libertà che chiamiamo libero arbitrio. È assurdo dire che un uomo dimostri la propria liberalità negando la propria libertà. Ma è sostenibile che egli debba affermare una dottrina trascendentale per poter affermare la propria libertà. Vi è un senso in cui potremmo ragionevolmente dire che, se l’uomo possiede un potere primario di scelta, in ciò stesso possiede un potere sovrannaturale di creazione, come se potesse risuscitare i morti o dar vita a ciò che non è stato generato. Forse, in tal caso, un uomo dev’essere un miracolo; e certamente, in tal caso, dev’essere un miracolo per poter essere un uomo; e più che mai per poter essere un uomo libero. Ma è assurdo proibirgli di essere un uomo libero, e farlo in nome di una religione più libera.
Ma ciò è vero in venti altre questioni. Chiunque creda anche solo minimamente in Dio deve credere nell’assoluta supremazia di Dio. Ma nella misura in cui quella supremazia ammette gradi che si possano dire liberali o illiberali, è di per sé evidente che la potenza illiberale è la divinità dei razionalisti e la potenza liberale è la divinità dei dogmatici. Esattamente nella misura in cui trasformate il monoteismo in monismo, lo trasformate in dispotismo. È precisamente il Dio ignoto dello scienziato, con il suo scopo impenetrabile e la sua legge inevitabile e inalterabile, che ci fa pensare a un autocrate prussiano il quale traccia piani rigidi in una tenda remota e muove il genere umano come un ingranaggio. È precisamente il Dio dei miracoli e delle preghiere esaudite che ci fa pensare a un principe liberale e amato dal popolo, che riceve petizioni, ascolta i parlamenti e prende in esame le cause di un intero popolo. Non sto ora argomentando la razionalità di questa concezione sotto altri riguardi; per la verità essa non è, come alcuni suppongono, irrazionale; poiché nulla vi è di irrazionale nel fatto che il più saggio e il più informato dei re agisca diversamente a seconda dell’agire di coloro che desidera salvare. Ma qui sto soltanto notando la natura generale della liberalità, ossia di un’atmosfera d’azione libera e allargata. E sotto questo riguardo è certo che il re può essere ciò che chiamiamo magnanimo soltanto se è ciò che alcuni chiamano capriccioso. È il cattolico, che ha il sentimento che le sue preghiere facciano davvero differenza quando siano offerte per i vivi e per i morti, ad avere anche il sentimento di vivere come un libero cittadino in qualcosa di quasi simile a una repubblica costituzionale. È il monista, che vive sotto un’unica legge di ferro, a dover avere il sentimento di vivere come uno schiavo sotto un sultano. Anzi, credo che l’uso originario della parola suffragium, che oggi impieghiamo in politica per indicare un voto, fosse quello adoperato in teologia a proposito di una preghiera. Si diceva che i morti in Purgatorio avessero i suffragi dei vivi. E in questo senso, come di una sorta di diritto di petizione al sovrano supremo, possiamo dire in tutta verità che l’intera Comunione dei Santi, non meno che l’intera Chiesa Militante, è fondata sul suffragio universale.
Ma soprattutto ciò è vero per la questione più tremenda di tutte; per quella tragedia che ha creato la divina commedia del nostro credo. Nulla di meno che l’estrema, forte e sconvolgente dottrina della divinità di Cristo può produrre quel particolare effetto capace di scuotere davvero il sentimento popolare come una tromba; l’idea del re in persona che serve tra i ranghi come un soldato semplice. Facendo di quella figura un semplice uomo, rendiamo quella storia assai meno umana. Le togliamo il punto che davvero trafigge l’umanità; il punto della storia che era, in senso del tutto letterale, la punta di una lancia. Non umanizza particolarmente l’universo il dire che uomini buoni e saggi possono morire per le loro opinioni; non più di quanto sarebbe una notizia clamorosamente popolare, in un esercito, che i buoni soldati possono facilmente restare uccisi. Non è una novità che il re Leonida sia morto, non più di quanto lo sia che la regina Anna sia morta; e gli uomini non attesero il cristianesimo per essere uomini, nel senso pieno di essere eroi. Ma se stiamo descrivendo, per un momento, l’atmosfera di ciò che è generoso e popolare e persino pittoresco, ogni conoscenza della natura umana ci dirà che nessuna sofferenza dei figli degli uomini, e nemmeno dei servi di Dio, tocca la stessa corda dell’idea del padrone che soffre al posto dei suoi servi. E questo ce lo dà la divinità teologica, ed enfaticamente non la divinità scientifica. Nessun monarca misterioso, celato nel suo padiglione stellato alla base della campagna cosmica, somiglia minimamente a quella celeste cavalleria del Capitano che porta le sue cinque piaghe in prima linea nella battaglia.
What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma is bad; but rather that dogma is too good to be true. That is, he means that dogma is too liberal to be likely. Dogma gives man too much freedom when it permits him to fall. Dogma gives even God too much freedom when it permits him to die. That is what the intelligent sceptics ought to say; and it is not in the least my intention to deny that there is something to be said for it. They mean that the universe is itself a universal prison; that existence itself is a limitation and a control; and it is not for nothing that they call causation a chain. In a word, they mean quite simply that they cannot believe these things; not in the least that they are unworthy of belief. We say not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth. To them it is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom as we enjoy. It is like believing in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer. This is a manly and a rational negation for which I for one shall always show respect. But I decline to show any respect for those who first of all clip the wings and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought and a more liberal theology.
The moral of all this is an old one; that religion is revelation. In other words it is a vision, and a vision received by faith; but it is a vision of reality. The faith consists in a conviction of its reality. That, for example, is the difference between a vision and a day-dream. And that is the difference between religion and mythology. That is the difference between faith and all that fancy-work, quite human and more or less healthy, which we considered under the head of mythology. There is something in the reasonable use of the very word vision that implies two things about it; first that it comes very rarely, possibly that it comes only once; and secondly that it probably comes once and for all. A day-dream may come every day. A day-dream may be different every day. It is something more than the difference between telling ghost-stories and meeting a ghost.
But if it is not a mythology neither is it a philosophy. It is not a philosophy because, being a vision, it is not a pattern but a picture. It is not one of those simplifications which resolve everything into an abstract explanation; as that everything is recurrent; or everything is relative; or everything is inevitable; or everything is illusive. It is not a process but a story. It has proportions, of the sort seen in a picture or a story; it has not the regular repetitions of a pattern or a process; but it replaces them by being convincing as a picture or a story is convincing. In other words, it is exactly, as the phrase goes, like life. For indeed it is life. An example of what is meant here might well be found in the treatment of the problem of evil. It is easy enough to make a plan of life of which the background is black, as the pessimists do; and then admit a speck or two of star-dust more or less accidental, or at least in the literal sense insignificant. And it is easy enough to make another plan on white paper, as the Christian Scientists do, and explain or explain away somehow such dots or smudges as may be difficult to deny. Lastly it is easiest of all perhaps, to say as the dualists do, that life is like a chess-board in which the two are equal, and can as truly be said to consist of white squares on a black board or of black squares on a white board. But every man feels in his heart that none of these three paper plans is like life; that none of these worlds is one in which he can live. Something tells him that the ultimate idea of a world is not bad or even neutral; staring at the sky or the grass or the truths of mathematics or even a new-laid egg, he has a vague feeling like the shadow of that saying of the great Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘Every existence, as such, is good.’ On the other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly and debased and even diseased to minimise evil to a dot or even a blot. He realises that optimism is morbid. It is if possible even more morbid than pessimism. These vague but healthy feelings, if he followed them out, would result in the idea that evil is in some way an exception but an enormous exception; and ultimately that evil is an invasion or yet more truly a rebellion. He does not think that everything is right or that every thing is wrong, or that everything is equally right and wrong. But he does think that right has a right to be right and therefore a right to be there, and wrong has no right to be wrong and therefore no right to be there. It is the prince of the world; but it is also a usurper. So he will apprehend vaguely what the vision will give to him vividly; no less than all that strange story of treason in heaven and the great desertion by which evil damaged and tried to destroy a cosmos that it could not create. It is a very strange story and its proportions and its lines and colours are as arbitrary and absolute as the artistic composition of a picture. It is a vision which we do in fact symbolise in pictures by titanic limbs and passionate tints of plumage; all that abysmal vision of falling stars and the peacock panoplies of the night. But that strange story has one small advantage over the diagrams. It is like life.
Another example might be found, not in the problem of evil, but in what is called the problem of progress. One of the ablest agnostics of the age once asked me whether I thought mankind grew better or grew worse or remained the same. He was confident that the alternative covered all possibilities. He did not see that it only covered patterns and not pictures; processes and not stories. I asked him whether he thought that Mr. Smith of Golder’s Green got better or worse or remained exactly the same between the age of thirty and forty. It then seemed to dawn on him that it would rather depend on Mr. Smith; and how he chose to go on. It had never occurred to him that it might depend on how mankind chose to go on; and that its course was not a straight line or an upward or downward curve, but a track like that of a man across a valley, going where he liked and stopping where he chose, going into a church or falling down in a ditch. The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God.
Ciò che il denigratore del dogma intende davvero non è che il dogma sia cattivo, ma piuttosto che il dogma sia troppo bello per essere vero. Vuol dire, cioè, che il dogma è troppo liberale per essere verosimile. Il dogma concede all’uomo troppa libertà quando gli permette di cadere. Il dogma concede perfino a Dio troppa libertà quando gli permette di morire. Questo è ciò che gli scettici intelligenti dovrebbero dire; e non ho la minima intenzione di negare che qualcosa in loro favore si possa dire. Essi intendono che l’universo è in se stesso una prigione universale; che l’esistenza stessa è una limitazione e un vincolo; e non è senza ragione che chiamano catena la causalità. In una parola, essi intendono, semplicissimamente, che non riescono a credere a queste cose; non già che esse siano indegne di fede. Noi diciamo, non alla leggera ma alla lettera, che la verità ci ha resi liberi. Essi dicono che ci rende così liberi da non poter essere la verità. Per loro credere a una libertà simile a quella di cui godiamo è come credere al paese delle fate. È come credere a uomini con le ali il vagheggiare uomini dotati di volontà. È come accettare una favola su uno scoiattolo in conversazione con una montagna, credere a un uomo libero di domandare o a un Dio libero di rispondere. Questa è una negazione virile e razionale, alla quale io per primo mostrerò sempre rispetto. Ma mi rifiuto di mostrare rispetto alcuno a coloro che dapprima tarpano le ali e ingabbiano lo scoiattolo, ribadiscono le catene e negano la libertà, chiudono su di noi tutte le porte della prigione cosmica con un fragore di ferro eterno, ci dicono che la nostra emancipazione è un sogno e la nostra segreta una necessità; e poi si voltano tranquillamente per dirci che possiedono un pensiero più libero e una teologia più liberale.
La morale di tutto ciò è antica: che la religione è rivelazione. In altre parole, essa è una visione, e una visione ricevuta per fede; ma è una visione della realtà. La fede consiste nella convinzione della sua realtà. Questa, per esempio, è la differenza tra una visione e un sogno a occhi aperti. Ed è questa la differenza tra religione e mitologia. È questa la differenza tra la fede e tutto quel lavoro di fantasia, del tutto umano e più o meno sano, che abbiamo considerato sotto il titolo della mitologia. C’è qualcosa nell’uso ragionevole della parola stessa «visione» che implica due cose a suo riguardo: primo, che essa giunge assai di rado, forse che giunge una sola volta; e secondo, che probabilmente giunge una volta per tutte. Un sogno a occhi aperti può giungere ogni giorno. Un sogno a occhi aperti può essere diverso ogni giorno. È qualcosa di più della differenza tra il raccontare storie di fantasmi e l’incontrare un fantasma.
Ma se non è una mitologia, non è nemmeno una filosofia. Non è una filosofia perché, essendo una visione, non è uno schema ma un quadro. Non è una di quelle semplificazioni che risolvono ogni cosa in una spiegazione astratta; come che tutto sia ricorrente; o che tutto sia relativo; o che tutto sia inevitabile; o che tutto sia illusorio. Non è un processo ma una storia. Ha proporzioni, del genere che si vede in un quadro o in una storia; non ha le regolari ripetizioni di uno schema o di un processo; ma le sostituisce con l’essere convincente come sono convincenti un quadro o una storia. In altre parole, è esattamente, come suol dirsi, simile alla vita. Perché in verità è vita. Un esempio di ciò che qui si intende ben si potrebbe trovare nel trattamento del problema del male. È abbastanza facile tracciare un disegno della vita il cui sfondo sia nero, come fanno i pessimisti; e poi ammettere un granello o due di polvere di stelle, più o meno accidentali, o quanto meno, nel senso letterale, insignificanti. Ed è abbastanza facile tracciare un altro disegno su carta bianca, come fanno gli Scienziati Cristiani, e spiegare o dissolvere in qualche modo, spiegandoli, quei punti o quelle macchie che sia difficile negare. Infine, forse è ancora più facile dire, come fanno i dualisti, che la vita è come una scacchiera in cui i due sono pari, e della quale si può dire con eguale verità che consista di caselle bianche su fondo nero o di caselle nere su fondo bianco. Ma ogni uomo sente nel proprio cuore che nessuno di questi tre disegni di carta è simile alla vita; che nessuno di questi mondi è un mondo in cui egli possa vivere. Qualcosa gli dice che l’idea ultima di un mondo non è cattiva né tanto meno neutra; fissando il cielo o l’erba o le verità della matematica o perfino un uovo appena deposto, egli ha un vago sentimento, come l’ombra di quel detto del grande filosofo cristiano, san Tommaso d’Aquino: «Ogni esistenza, in quanto tale, è buona». D’altra parte, qualcos’altro gli dice che è cosa non virile, avvilente e persino morbosa il ridurre il male a un punto o anche a una macchia. Egli si rende conto che l’ottimismo è morboso. È, se possibile, ancora più morboso del pessimismo. Questi vaghi ma sani sentimenti, se li seguisse fino in fondo, sfocerebbero nell’idea che il male sia in qualche modo un’eccezione, ma un’eccezione enorme; e in ultimo che il male sia un’invasione o, più veramente ancora, una ribellione. Egli non pensa che tutto sia giusto o che ogni cosa sia sbagliata, o che tutto sia egualmente giusto e sbagliato. Ma pensa davvero che il giusto abbia il diritto di essere giusto e perciò il diritto di esserci, e che il male non abbia diritto di essere male e perciò non abbia diritto di esserci. Esso è il principe di questo mondo; ma è anche un usurpatore. Così egli coglierà vagamente ciò che la visione gli darà con vividezza: nientemeno che tutta quella strana storia di tradimento in cielo e di quella grande diserzione con cui il male danneggiò e tentò di distruggere un cosmo che esso non poteva creare. È una storia stranissima, e le sue proporzioni e le sue linee e i suoi colori sono arbitrari e assoluti quanto la composizione artistica di un quadro. È una visione che noi, di fatto, simboleggiamo in dipinti con membra titaniche e appassionate tinte di piumaggio; tutta quell’abissale visione di stelle cadenti e le sfarzose ruote di pavone della notte. Ma quella strana storia ha un piccolo vantaggio sui diagrammi. È simile alla vita.
Un altro esempio si potrebbe trovare, non nel problema del male, ma in ciò che si chiama il problema del progresso. Uno dei più abili agnostici dell’epoca mi domandò una volta se ritenevo che l’umanità migliorasse o peggiorasse o restasse la stessa. Era convinto che l’alternativa coprisse tutte le possibilità. Non vedeva che essa copriva soltanto schemi e non quadri; processi e non storie. Gli domandai se pensava che il signor Smith di Golder’s Green migliorasse o peggiorasse o restasse esattamente lo stesso tra i trenta e i quarant’anni. Allora parve albeggiargli l’idea che ciò dipendesse piuttosto dal signor Smith; e da come egli scegliesse di procedere. Non gli era mai venuto in mente che ciò potesse dipendere da come l’umanità scegliesse di procedere; e che il suo corso non fosse una linea retta o una curva ascendente o discendente, ma un tracciato simile a quello di un uomo attraverso una valle, che va dove gli piace e si ferma dove sceglie, entrando in una chiesa o cadendo in un fosso. La vita dell’uomo è una storia; una storia d’avventura; e nella nostra visione lo stesso vale perfino per la storia di Dio.
The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realisation both of mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life. But above all, it is a reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal narrative instinct which produced all the fairy tales is something that is neglected by all the philosophies—except one. The Faith is the justification of that popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both there is an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it. Now this deep and democratic and dramatic instinct is derided and dismissed in all the other philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin; and it is the definition of a story that it ends differently; that it begins in one place and ends in another. From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story. There is none of them that really grasps this human notion of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man. Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral consequences; or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgement.
And that is the reason why the myths and the philosophers were at war until Christ came. That is why the Athenian democracy killed Socrates out of respect for the gods; and why every strolling sophist gave himself the airs of a Socrates whenever he could talk in a superior fashion of the gods; and why the heretic Pharaoh wrecked his huge idols and temples for an abstraction and why the priests could return in triumph and trample his dynasty under foot; and why Buddhism had to divide itself from Brahminism, and why in every age and country outside Christendom there has been a feud for ever between the philosopher and the priest. It is easy enough to say that the philosopher is generally the more rational; it is easier still to forget that the priest is always the more popular. For the priest told the people stories; and the philosopher did not understand the philosophy of stories. It came into the world with the story of Christ.
And this is why it had to be a revelation or vision given from above. Any one who will think of the theory of stories or pictures will easily see the point. The true story of the world must be told by somebody to somebody else. By the very nature of a story it cannot be left to occur to anybody. A story has proportions, variations, surprises, particular dispositions, which cannot be worked out by rule in the abstract, like a sum. We could not deduce whether or no Achilles would give back the body of Hector from a Pythagorean theory of number or recurrence; and we could not infer for ourselves in what way the world would get back the body of Christ, merely from being told that all things go round and round upon the wheel of Buddha. A man might perhaps work out a proposition of Euclid without having heard of Euclid; but he would not work out the precise legend of Eurydice without having heard of Eurydice. At any rate he would not be certain how the story would end and whether Orpheus was ultimately defeated. Still less could he guess the end of our story; or the legend of our Orpheus rising, not defeated from, the dead.
To sum up; the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of man offered salvation by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring tendencies of the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most certainly never satisfied together. It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story. That is why the ideal figure had to be a historical character, as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical character. But that is also why the historical character had to be the ideal figure; and even fulfil many of the functions given to these other ideal figures; why he was at once the sacrifice and the feast, why he could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the rising sun. The more deeply we think of the matter the more we shall conclude that, if there be indeed a God, his creation could hardly have reached any other culmination than this granting of a real romance to the world. Otherwise the two sides of the human mind could never have touched at all; and the brain of man would have remained cloven and double; one lobe of it dreaming impossible dreams and the other repeating invariable calculations. The picture-makers would have remained forever painting the portrait of nobody. The sages would have remained for ever adding up numerals that came to nothing. It was that abyss that nothing but an incarnation could cover; a divine embodiment of our dreams; and he stands above that chasm whose name is more than priest and older even than Christendom; Pontifex Maximus, the mightiest maker of a bridge.
But even with that we return to the more specially Christian symbol in the same tradition; the perfect pattern of the keys. This is a historical and not a theological outline, and it is not my duty here to defend in detail that theology, but merely to point out that it could not even be justified in design without being justified in detail—like a key. Beyond the broad suggestion of this chapter I attempt no apologetic about why the creed should be accepted. But in answer to the historical query of why it was accepted and is accepted, I answer for millions of others in my reply; because it fits the lock, because it is like life. It is one among many stories; only it happens to be a true story. It is one among many philosophies; only it happens to be the truth. We accept it; and the ground is solid under our feet and the road is open before us. It does not imprison us in a dream of destiny or a consciousness of the universal delusion. It opens to us not only incredible heavens but what seems to some an equally incredible earth, and makes it credible. This is the sort of truth that is hard to explain because it is a fact; but it is a fact to which we can call witnesses. We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.
La fede cattolica è la riconciliazione perché è la realizzazione tanto della mitologia quanto della filosofia. È una storia, e in questo senso una delle cento storie; solo che è una storia vera. È una filosofia, e in questo senso una delle cento filosofie; solo che è una filosofia che somiglia alla vita. Ma soprattutto è una riconciliazione perché è qualcosa che si può chiamare soltanto la filosofia delle storie. Quell’istinto narrativo naturale che ha prodotto tutte le fiabe è qualcosa che tutte le filosofie trascurano, tranne una. La Fede è la giustificazione di quell’istinto popolare; il ritrovamento di una filosofia per esso, o l’analisi della filosofia in esso contenuta. Esattamente come un uomo in un racconto d’avventura deve superare varie prove per salvare la vita, così l’uomo in questa filosofia deve superare più prove e salvare l’anima. In entrambi c’è l’idea di un libero arbitrio che opera entro condizioni di disegno; in altre parole, c’è una meta, ed è compito dell’uomo mirare a essa; e noi perciò stiamo a guardare per vedere se la coglierà. Ora, questo istinto profondo, democratico e drammatico è deriso e respinto in tutte le altre filosofie. Poiché tutte le altre filosofie dichiaratamente finiscono dove cominciano; e la definizione stessa di una storia è che essa finisce diversamente; che comincia in un luogo e finisce in un altro. Da Buddha con la sua ruota ad Akhen Aten con il suo disco, da Pitagora con la sua astrazione del numero a Confucio con la sua religione della routine, non ce n’è una sola che non pecchi in qualche modo contro l’anima di una storia. Nessuna di esse coglie davvero questa nozione umana del racconto, della prova, dell’avventura; il cimento dell’uomo libero. Ciascuna di esse affama, per così dire, l’istinto del narrare, e fa qualcosa per guastare la vita umana considerata come romanzo: sia per fatalismo (pessimista od ottimista) e quel destino che è la morte dell’avventura; sia per indifferenza e quel distacco che è la morte del dramma; sia per uno scetticismo fondamentale che dissolve gli attori in atomi; sia per una limitazione materialistica che sbarra la prospettiva delle conseguenze morali; o per una ricorrenza meccanica che rende monotone perfino le prove morali; o per una relatività senza fondo che rende malsicure perfino le prove pratiche. Esiste una cosa come la storia umana; ed esiste una cosa come la storia divina che è anche una storia umana; ma non esiste una cosa come una storia hegeliana o una storia monista o una storia relativista o una storia determinista; perché ogni storia, sì, anche un romanzetto da quattro soldi o una dozzinale storiella d’appendice, ha in sé qualcosa che appartiene al nostro universo e non al loro. Ogni racconto, per breve che sia, comincia davvero con una creazione e finisce con un giudizio universale.
Ed è questa la ragione per cui i miti e i filosofi furono in guerra fino alla venuta di Cristo. È per questo che la democrazia ateniese uccise Socrate per rispetto verso gli dèi; ed è per questo che ogni sofista girovago si dava le arie di un Socrate ogniqualvolta poteva parlare in modo altezzoso degli dèi; ed è per questo che il faraone eretico mandò in rovina i suoi immensi idoli e templi in nome di un’astrazione, e per questo che i sacerdoti poterono tornare in trionfo e calpestare sotto i piedi la sua dinastia; ed è per questo che il buddhismo dovette separarsi dal brahmanesimo, e per questo che in ogni epoca e paese fuori della cristianità vi è stata da sempre una faida perenne tra il filosofo e il sacerdote. È abbastanza facile dire che il filosofo è in genere il più razionale; è ancora più facile dimenticare che il sacerdote è sempre il più popolare. Poiché il sacerdote raccontava al popolo delle storie; e il filosofo non comprendeva la filosofia delle storie. Essa venne al mondo con la storia di Cristo.
Ed è per questo che doveva essere una rivelazione o una visione data dall’alto. Chiunque voglia riflettere sulla teoria delle storie o dei quadri ne coglierà facilmente il punto. La vera storia del mondo deve essere raccontata da qualcuno a qualcun altro. Per la natura stessa di una storia, non la si può lasciare al caso perché venga in mente a chicchessia. Una storia ha proporzioni, variazioni, sorprese, disposizioni particolari, che non possono essere ricavate per regola in astratto, come una somma. Non potremmo dedurre se Achille avrebbe restituito o no il corpo di Ettore da una teoria pitagorica del numero o della ricorrenza; e non potremmo desumere da noi in qual modo il mondo avrebbe riavuto il corpo di Cristo, dal solo sentirci dire che tutte le cose girano e rigirano sulla ruota di Buddha. Un uomo potrebbe forse ricavare una proposizione di Euclide senza aver mai sentito parlare di Euclide; ma non ricaverebbe la precisa leggenda di Euridice senza aver sentito parlare di Euridice. In ogni caso non sarebbe certo di come la storia sarebbe finita e se Orfeo alla fine fosse stato sconfitto. Ancor meno potrebbe indovinare la fine della nostra storia; o la leggenda del nostro Orfeo che risorge, non sconfitto, dai morti.
Per riassumere: la sanità del mondo fu restaurata e all’anima dell’uomo fu offerta la salvezza da qualcosa che soddisfaceva davvero le due tendenze in guerra del passato; che non erano mai state soddisfatte pienamente e di certo mai soddisfatte insieme. Essa venne incontro alla ricerca mitologica del romanzo con l’essere una storia, e alla ricerca filosofica della verità con l’essere una storia vera. È per questo che la figura ideale doveva essere un personaggio storico, come nessuno aveva mai sentito che Adone o Pan fossero personaggi storici. Ma è anche per questo che il personaggio storico doveva essere la figura ideale; e adempiere persino molte delle funzioni attribuite a queste altre figure ideali; per questo egli era a un tempo il sacrificio e il banchetto, per questo poteva essere mostrato sotto gli emblemi della vite che cresce o del sole che sorge. Quanto più a fondo riflettiamo sulla questione, tanto più concluderemo che, se davvero vi è un Dio, la sua creazione difficilmente avrebbe potuto raggiungere altro culmine se non questo dono di un vero romanzo al mondo. Altrimenti i due lati della mente umana non si sarebbero mai potuti toccare affatto; e il cervello dell’uomo sarebbe rimasto scisso e doppio; un lobo a sognare sogni impossibili e l’altro a ripetere calcoli invariabili. I facitori di immagini sarebbero rimasti in eterno a dipingere il ritratto di nessuno. I sapienti sarebbero rimasti in eterno a sommare cifre che non davano nulla. Era quell’abisso che nulla, se non un’incarnazione, poteva colmare; un’incarnazione divina dei nostri sogni; ed egli sta sopra quella voragine, lui il cui nome è più che sacerdote e più antico persino della cristianità: Pontifex Maximus, il più possente costruttore di un ponte.
Ma anche con ciò torniamo al simbolo più specificamente cristiano nella stessa tradizione: il modello perfetto delle chiavi. Questo è un profilo storico e non teologico, e non è mio compito difendere qui nei particolari quella teologia, ma solo far notare che essa non potrebbe nemmeno essere giustificata nel disegno d’insieme senza essere giustificata nei dettagli, proprio come una chiave. Al di là della vasta suggestione di questo capitolo, non tento alcuna apologia sul perché il credo debba essere accettato. Ma in risposta alla domanda storica sul perché esso fu accettato e continua a essere accettato, io rispondo per milioni di altri nella mia replica: perché combacia con la serratura, perché è simile alla vita. È una storia fra molte; solo che si dà il caso che sia una storia vera. È una filosofia fra molte; solo che si dà il caso che sia la verità. La accettiamo; e il terreno è saldo sotto i nostri piedi e la strada si apre davanti a noi. Essa non ci imprigiona in un sogno di fatalità né nella coscienza dell’illusione universale. Ci schiude non soltanto cieli incredibili, ma quella che ad alcuni pare una terra altrettanto incredibile, e la rende credibile. È il genere di verità che è difficile spiegare perché è un fatto; ma è un fatto per il quale possiamo chiamare testimoni. Siamo cristiani e cattolici non perché adoriamo una chiave, ma perché abbiamo varcato una porta; e abbiamo sentito il vento che è la tromba della libertà soffiare sulla terra dei viventi.
VI
THE FIVE DEATHS OF THE FAITH
It is not the purpose of this book to trace the subsequent history of Christianity, especially the later history of Christianity; which involves controversies of which I hope to write more fully elsewhere. It is devoted only to the suggestion that Christianity, appearing amid heathen humanity, had all the character of a unique thing and even of a supernatural thing. It was not like any of the other things; and the more we study it the less it looks like any of them. But there is a certain rather peculiar character which marked it henceforward even down to the present moment, with a note on which this book may well conclude.
I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion. This truth is hidden from many by a convention that is too little noticed. Curiously enough, it is a convention of the sort which those who ignore it claim especially to detect and denounce. They are always telling us that priests and ceremonies are not religion and that religious organisation can be a hollow sham, but they hardly realise how true it is. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man in his heart expected its end. This fact is only masked in medieval and other times by that very official religion which such critics pride themselves on seeing through. Christianity remained the official religion of a Renaissance prince or the official religion of an eighteenth-century bishop, just as an ancient mythology remained the official religion of Julius Caesar or the Arian creed long remained the official religion of Julian the Apostate. But there was a difference between the cases of Julius and of Julian; because the Church had begun its strange career. There was no reason why men like Julius should not worship gods like Jupiter for ever in public and laugh at them for ever in private. But when Julian treated Christianity as dead, he found it had come to life again. He also found, incidentally, that there was not the faintest sign of Jupiter ever coming to life again. This case of Julian and the episode of Arianism is but the first of a series of examples that can only be roughly indicated here. Arianism, as has been said, had every human appearance of being the natural way in which that particular superstition of Constantine might be expected to peter out. All the ordinary stages had been passed through; the creed had become a respectable thing, had become a ritual thing, had then been modified into a rational thing; and the rationalists were ready to dissipate the last remains of it, just as they do to-day. When Christianity rose again suddenly and threw them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising from the dead. But there are many other examples of the same thing, even about the same time. The rush of missionaries from Ireland, for instance, has all the air of an unexpected onslaught of young men on an old world, and even on a Church that showed signs of growing old. Some of them were martyred on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief authority on Cornish antiquities told me that he did not believe for a moment that they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed it with some humour) ‘by rather slack Christians.’
Now if we were to dip below the surface of history, as it is not in the scope of this argument to do, I suspect that we should find several occasions when Christendom was thus to all appearance hollowed out from within by doubt and indifference, so that only the old Christian shell stood as the pagan shell had stood so long. But the difference is that in every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the fathers had been slack about it. This is obvious in the case of the transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. It is obvious in the case of a transition from the eighteenth century to the many Catholic revivals of our own time. But I suspect many other examples which would be worthy of separate studies.
The Faith is not a survival. It is not as if the Druids had managed somehow to survive somewhere for two thousand years. That is what might have happened in Asia or ancient Europe, in that indifference or tolerance in which mythologies and philosophies could live for ever side by side. It has not survived; it has returned again and again in this Western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing. Europe, in the tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution and reconstruction; rebuilding a universal republic. And it always began by rejecting this old stone and ended by making it the head of the corner; by bringing it back from the rubbish-heap to make it the crown of the capitol. Some stones of Stonehenge are standing and some are fallen; and as the stone falleth so shall it lie. There has not been a Druidic renaissance every century or two, with the young Druids crowned with fresh mistletoe, dancing in the sun on Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge has not been rebuilt in every style of architecture from the rude round Norman to the last rococo of the Baroque. The sacred place of the Druids is safe from the vandalism of restoration.
But the Church in the West was not in a world where things were too old to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed. The consequence was that superficially and externally it often did get killed; nay, it sometimes wore out even without getting killed. And there follows a fact I find it somewhat difficult to describe, yet which I believe to be very real and rather important. As a ghost is the shadow of a man, and in that sense the shadow of life, so at intervals there passed across this endless life a sort of shadow of death. It came at the moment when it would have perished had it been perishable. It withered away everything that was perishable. If such animal parallels were worthy of the occasion we might say that the snake shuddered and shed a skin and went on, or even that the cat went into convulsions as it lost only one of its nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lives. It is truer to say, in a more dignified image, that a clock struck and nothing happened; or that a bell tolled for an execution that was everlastingly postponed.
VI
LE CINQUE MORTI DELLA FEDE
Non è scopo di questo libro tracciare la storia successiva del cristianesimo, e in particolare la storia più tarda del cristianesimo; il che comporta controversie di cui spero di scrivere più diffusamente altrove. Esso è dedicato solo alla proposta che il cristianesimo, apparendo in mezzo all’umanità pagana, ebbe tutti i caratteri di una cosa unica e persino di una cosa soprannaturale. Non era simile a nessuna delle altre cose; e quanto più lo studiamo, tanto meno somiglia a una qualsiasi di esse. Ma vi è un certo carattere piuttosto singolare che lo contrassegnò d’allora in poi, fino al momento presente, e con una nota sulla quale questo libro può ben concludersi.
Ho detto che l’Asia e il mondo antico avevano l’aria di essere troppo vecchi per morire. La cristianità ha avuto la sorte esattamente opposta. La cristianità ha attraversato una serie di rivoluzioni e in ciascuna di esse il cristianesimo è morto. Il cristianesimo è morto molte volte ed è risorto; poiché aveva un Dio che conosceva la via d’uscita dal sepolcro. Ma il primo fatto straordinario che contrassegna questa storia è il seguente: che l’Europa è stata rivoltata da cima a fondo più e più volte; e che al termine di ciascuna di queste rivoluzioni la medesima religione si è ritrovata di nuovo in cima. La Fede converte sempre l’età in cui vive, non come una vecchia religione, ma come una religione nuova. Questa verità è nascosta a molti da una convenzione troppo poco osservata. Curiosamente, è una convenzione del genere di quelle che proprio coloro che la ignorano pretendono di individuare e denunciare. Costoro non fanno che ripeterci che i preti e le cerimonie non sono la religione e che l’organizzazione religiosa può essere un guscio vuoto, ma difficilmente si rendono conto di quanto ciò sia vero. È così vero che almeno tre o quattro volte nella storia della cristianità l’anima intera parve essere uscita dal cristianesimo; e quasi ogni uomo, in cuor suo, ne attese la fine. Questo fatto è mascherato, nel Medioevo e in altre epoche, proprio da quella religione ufficiale che simili critici si vantano di saper vedere in trasparenza. Il cristianesimo rimase la religione ufficiale di un principe del Rinascimento o la religione ufficiale di un vescovo del Settecento, così come un’antica mitologia rimase la religione ufficiale di Giulio Cesare o il credo ariano rimase a lungo la religione ufficiale di Giuliano l’Apostata. Ma vi era una differenza fra il caso di Giulio e quello di Giuliano; perché la Chiesa aveva ormai intrapreso la sua strana carriera. Non c’era ragione per cui uomini come Giulio non dovessero adorare per sempre in pubblico dèi come Giove e riderne per sempre in privato. Ma quando Giuliano trattò il cristianesimo come morto, lo trovò tornato in vita. Trovò anche, per inciso, che non c’era il minimo segno che Giove tornasse mai in vita. Questo caso di Giuliano e l’episodio dell’arianesimo non sono che il primo di una serie di esempi che qui si possono soltanto indicare a grandi linee. L’arianesimo, come si è detto, aveva ogni umana apparenza di essere il modo naturale in cui ci si poteva aspettare che quella particolare superstizione di Costantino andasse spegnendosi. Erano state percorse tutte le tappe consuete; il credo era divenuto una cosa rispettabile, era divenuto una cosa rituale, poi era stato modificato in una cosa razionale; e i razionalisti erano pronti a dissipare gli ultimi resti di esso, proprio come fanno oggi. Quando il cristianesimo risorse improvvisamente e li atterrò, fu quasi tanto inatteso quanto il Cristo che risorge dai morti. Ma vi sono molti altri esempi della medesima cosa, anche press’a poco nella stessa epoca. Lo slancio dei missionari dall’Irlanda, per esempio, ha tutta l’aria di un assalto inatteso di giovani a un vecchio mondo, e persino a una Chiesa che mostrava segni di invecchiamento. Alcuni di essi furono martirizzati sulla costa della Cornovaglia; e la massima autorità in fatto di antichità cornovagliesi mi disse che non credeva affatto che fossero stati martirizzati da pagani, ma (come si espresse con un certo umorismo) «da cristiani piuttosto tiepidi».
Ora, se dovessimo scendere sotto la superficie della storia, cosa che non rientra negli scopi di questo ragionamento, sospetto che troveremmo parecchie occasioni in cui la cristianità fu così, a ogni apparenza, svuotata dall’interno dal dubbio e dall’indifferenza, sicché non restava che il vecchio guscio cristiano, come tanto a lungo era rimasto in piedi il guscio pagano. Ma la differenza è che in ogni caso simile i figli furono fanatici per la fede là dove i padri erano stati tiepidi verso di essa. Ciò è evidente nel caso del passaggio dal Rinascimento alla Controriforma. È evidente nel caso di un passaggio dal Settecento ai molti risvegli cattolici del nostro tempo. Ma sospetto che vi siano molti altri esempi che meriterebbero studi a parte.
La Fede non è una sopravvivenza. Non è che i Druidi siano in qualche modo riusciti a sopravvivere in qualche luogo per duemila anni. Questo è ciò che avrebbe potuto accadere in Asia o nell’antica Europa, in quell’indifferenza o tolleranza in cui mitologie e filosofie potevano vivere in eterno fianco a fianco. Essa non è sopravvissuta; è ritornata più e più volte in questo mondo occidentale di rapido mutamento, dove le istituzioni continuamente periscono. L’Europa, nella tradizione di Roma, tentava sempre la rivoluzione e la ricostruzione; riedificava una repubblica universale. E cominciava sempre col rigettare questa vecchia pietra e finiva col farne la testata d’angolo; col riportarla dal mucchio dei rifiuti per farne il coronamento del Campidoglio. Alcune pietre di Stonehenge sono ancora erette e altre sono cadute; e come la pietra cade, così giacerà. Non c’è stato un rinascimento druidico ogni secolo o due, con i giovani Druidi incoronati di vischio fresco, danzanti al sole nella Piana di Salisbury. Stonehenge non è stata riedificata in ogni stile architettonico, dal rozzo tondeggiante normanno all’ultimo rococò del Barocco. Il luogo sacro dei Druidi è al sicuro dal vandalismo del restauro.
Ma la Chiesa in Occidente non si trovava in un mondo dove le cose erano troppo vecchie per morire; bensì in uno dove erano sempre abbastanza giovani per venire uccise. La conseguenza fu che, superficialmente ed esteriormente, essa spesso veniva uccisa davvero; anzi, talvolta si logorava perfino senza venire uccisa. E ne segue un fatto che trovo alquanto difficile da descrivere, eppure che credo assai reale e piuttosto importante. Come un fantasma è l’ombra di un uomo, e in tal senso l’ombra della vita, così a intervalli passava attraverso questa vita senza fine una sorta di ombra della morte. Essa veniva nel momento in cui la Chiesa sarebbe perita se fosse stata peritura. Faceva appassire tutto ciò che era peribile. Se tali paralleli animaleschi fossero degni dell’occasione, potremmo dire che il serpente rabbrividiva, mutava una pelle e proseguiva, o addirittura che il gatto entrava in convulsioni perdendo una sola delle sue novecentonovantanove vite. È più vero dire, con un’immagine più dignitosa, che un orologio batté l’ora e non accadde nulla; o che una campana suonò a morto per un’esecuzione eternamente rinviata.
What was the meaning of all that dim but vast unrest of the twelfth century; when, as it has been so finely said, Julian stirred in his sleep? Why did there appear so strangely early, in the twilight of dawn after the Dark Ages, so deep a scepticism as that involved in urging nominalism against realism? For realism against nominalism was really realism against rationalism, or something more destructive than what we call rationalism. The answer is that just as some might have thought the Church simply a part of the Roman Empire, so others later might have thought the Church only a part of the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages ended as the Empire had ended, and the Church should have departed with them, if she had been also one of the shades of night. It was another of those spectral deaths or simulations of death. I mean that if nominalism had succeeded, it would have been as if Arianism had succeeded, it would have been the beginning of a confession that Christianity had failed. For nominalism is a far more fundamental scepticism than mere atheism. Such was the question that was openly asked as the Dark Ages broadened into that daylight that we call the modern world. But what was the answer? The answer was Aquinas in the chair of Aristotle, taking all knowledge for his province; and tens of thousands of lads down to the lowest ranks of peasant and serf, living in rags and on crusts about the great colleges, to listen to the scholastic philosophy.
What was the meaning of all that whisper of fear that ran round the west under the shadow of Islam, and fills every old romance with incongruous images of Saracen knights swaggering in Norway or the Hebrides? Why were men in the extreme west, such as King John if I remember rightly, accused of being secretly Moslems, as men are accused of being secretly atheists? Why was there that fierce alarm among some of the authorities about the rationalistic Arab version of Aristotle? Authorities are seldom alarmed like that except when it is too late. The answer is that hundreds of people probably believed in their hearts that Islam would conquer Christendom; that Averroes was more rational than Anselm; that the Saracen Culture was really, as it was superficially, a superior culture. Here again we should probably find a whole generation, the older generation, serve doubtful and depressed and weary. The coming of Islam would only have been the coming of Unitarianism a thousand years before its time. To many it may have seemed quite reasonable and quite probable and quite likely to happen. If so, they would have been surprised at what did happen. What did happen was a roar like thunder from thousands and thousands of young men, throwing all their youth into one exultant counter-charge, the Crusades. It was the sons of St. Francis, the Jugglers of God, wandering singing over all the roads of the world; it was the Gothic going up like a flight of arrows; it was the waking of the world. In considering the war of the Albigensians, we come to the breach in the heart of Europe and the landslide of a new philosophy that nearly ended Christendom for ever. In that case the new philosophy was also a very new philosophy; it was pessimism. It was none the less like modern ideas because it was as old as Asia; most modern ideas are. It was the Gnostics returning; but why did the Gnostics return? Because it was the end of an epoch, like the end of the Empire; and should have been the end of the Church. It was Schopenhauer hovering over the future; but it was also Manichaeus rising from the dead; that men might have death and that they might have it more abundantly.
It is rather more obvious in the case of the Renaissance, simply because the period is so much nearer to us and people know so much more about it. But there is more even in that example than most people know. Apart from the particular controversies which I wish to reserve for a separate study, the period was far more chaotic that those controversies commonly imply. When Protestants call Latimer a martyr to Protestantism, and Catholics reply that Campion was a martyr to Catholicism, it is often forgotten that many who perished in such persecutions could only be described as martyrs to atheism or anarchism or even diabolism. That world was almost as wild as our own; the men wandering about in it included the sort of man who says there is no God, the sort of man who says he is himself God, the sort of man who says something that nobody can make head or tail of. If we could have the conversation of the age following the Renaissance, we should probably be shocked by its shameless negations. The remarks attributed to Marlowe are probably pretty typical of the talk in many intellectual taverns. The transition from Pre-Reformation to Post-Reformation Europe was through a void of very yawning questions; yet again in the long run the answer was the same. It was one of those moments when, as Christ walked on the water, so was Christianity walking in the air.
But all these cases are remote in date and could only be proved in detail. We can see the fact much more clearly in the case when the paganism of the Renaissance ended Christianity and Christianity unaccountably began all over again. But we can see it most clearly of all in the case which is close to us and full of manifest and minute evidence; the case of the great decline of religion that began about the time of Voltaire. For indeed it is our own case, and we ourselves have seen the decline of that decline. The two hundred years since Voltaire do not flash past us at a glance like the fourth and fifth centuries or the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In our own case we can see this oft-repeated process close at hand; we know how completely a society can lose its fundamental religion without abolishing its official religion; we know how men can all become agnostics long before they abolish bishops. And we know that also in this last ending, which really did look to us like the final ending, the incredible thing has happened again; the Faith has a better following among the young men than among the old. When Ibsen spoke of the new generation knocking at the door, he certainly never expected that it would be the church-door.
Quale fu il significato di tutta quella oscura ma vasta inquietudine del dodicesimo secolo, quando, come è stato detto così finemente, Giuliano si agitò nel sonno? Perché apparve così stranamente presto, nel crepuscolo dell’alba dopo i Secoli Bui, uno scetticismo tanto profondo quanto quello implicito nel sostenere il nominalismo contro il realismo? Poiché il realismo contro il nominalismo era in realtà il realismo contro il razionalismo, o contro qualcosa di ancor più distruttivo di ciò che chiamiamo razionalismo. La risposta è che, così come alcuni avrebbero potuto pensare la Chiesa semplicemente una parte dell’Impero Romano, così altri più tardi avrebbero potuto pensare la Chiesa soltanto una parte dei Secoli Bui. I Secoli Bui finirono come era finito l’Impero, e la Chiesa avrebbe dovuto dipartirsi con essi, se fosse stata anch’essa una delle ombre della notte. Fu un’altra di quelle morti spettrali o simulazioni di morte. Voglio dire che se il nominalismo avesse trionfato, sarebbe stato come se l’arianesimo avesse trionfato, sarebbe stato l’inizio di una confessione che il cristianesimo aveva fallito. Poiché il nominalismo è uno scetticismo assai più fondamentale del mero ateismo. Tale era la questione posta apertamente mentre i Secoli Bui si allargavano in quella luce del giorno che chiamiamo il mondo moderno. Ma quale fu la risposta? La risposta fu Tommaso d’Aquino sulla cattedra di Aristotele, che prendeva a suo dominio ogni sapere; e decine di migliaia di giovani, giù fino ai ranghi più bassi del contadino e del servo della gleba, viventi tra gli stracci e sui tozzi di pane presso i grandi collegi, per ascoltare la filosofia scolastica.
Quale fu il significato di tutto quel sussurro di paura che percorse l’Occidente sotto l’ombra dell’Islam, e riempie ogni antico romanzo di immagini incongrue di cavalieri saraceni che si pavoneggiano in Norvegia o nelle Ebridi? Perché uomini dell’estremo Occidente, come re Giovanni se ben ricordo, venivano accusati di essere segretamente musulmani, come si accusano gli uomini di essere segretamente atei? Perché regnò quel fiero allarme fra alcune delle autorità riguardo alla versione araba e razionalistica di Aristotele? Le autorità raramente si allarmano in tal modo, salvo quando è troppo tardi. La risposta è che centinaia di persone probabilmente credevano in cuor loro che l’Islam avrebbe conquistato la Cristianità; che Averroè fosse più razionale di Anselmo; che la cultura saracena fosse davvero, come lo era in apparenza, una cultura superiore. Anche qui probabilmente troveremmo un’intera generazione, la generazione più anziana, farsi dubbiosa, depressa e stanca. La venuta dell’Islam non sarebbe stata che la venuta dell’unitarianesimo mille anni prima del suo tempo. A molti poté sembrare del tutto ragionevole, del tutto probabile e del tutto verosimile che avvenisse. Se così fosse, sarebbero rimasti sorpresi da ciò che effettivamente avvenne. Ciò che avvenne fu un boato simile a tuono da parte di migliaia e migliaia di giovani, che gettarono tutta la loro giovinezza in un’unica esultante controcarica, le Crociate. Furono i figli di san Francesco, i Giullari di Dio, che vagavano cantando per tutte le strade del mondo; fu il gotico che si slanciava come un volo di frecce; fu il risveglio del mondo. Considerando la guerra contro gli Albigesi, giungiamo alla breccia nel cuore dell’Europa e alla frana di una nuova filosofia che quasi mise fine per sempre alla Cristianità. In quel caso la nuova filosofia era anche una filosofia assai nuova; era il pessimismo. Non era per questo meno simile alle idee moderne per il fatto d’essere antica quanto l’Asia; la maggior parte delle idee moderne lo è. Erano gli Gnostici che ritornavano; ma perché ritornavano gli Gnostici? Perché era la fine di un’epoca, come la fine dell’Impero; e avrebbe dovuto essere la fine della Chiesa. Era Schopenhauer che aleggiava sul futuro; ma era anche Manicheo che risorgeva dai morti; affinché gli uomini avessero la morte, e l’avessero in maggiore abbondanza.
È piuttosto più evidente nel caso del Rinascimento, semplicemente perché quel periodo è tanto più vicino a noi e la gente ne sa molto di più. Ma anche in quell’esempio c’è più di quanto la maggior parte della gente sappia. A parte le particolari controversie che desidero riservare a uno studio a sé, quel periodo fu assai più caotico di quanto tali controversie comunemente lascino intendere. Quando i protestanti chiamano Latimer un martire del protestantesimo, e i cattolici replicano che Campion fu un martire del cattolicesimo, si dimentica spesso che molti di coloro che perirono in tali persecuzioni potrebbero essere descritti soltanto come martiri dell’ateismo o dell’anarchismo o addirittura del diabolismo. Quel mondo era quasi tanto sfrenato quanto il nostro; gli uomini che vi vagavano comprendevano il tipo d’uomo che dice non esservi alcun Dio, il tipo d’uomo che dice d’essere egli stesso Dio, il tipo d’uomo che dice qualcosa di cui nessuno riesce a raccapezzarsi. Se potessimo udire la conversazione dell’età che seguì il Rinascimento, probabilmente ne saremmo scandalizzati per le sue sfrontate negazioni. Le osservazioni attribuite a Marlowe sono probabilmente assai tipiche dei discorsi che si facevano in molte taverne di intellettuali. Il passaggio dall’Europa pre-riforma a quella post-riforma avvenne attraverso un vuoto di questioni spalancate come abissi; eppure, ancora una volta, alla lunga la risposta fu la stessa. Fu uno di quei momenti in cui, come Cristo camminò sulle acque, così il cristianesimo camminava nell’aria.
Ma tutti questi casi sono lontani nel tempo e potrebbero essere dimostrati soltanto nei particolari. Vediamo il fatto assai più chiaramente nel caso in cui il paganesimo del Rinascimento pose fine al cristianesimo e il cristianesimo, inspiegabilmente, ricominciò tutto da capo. Ma lo vediamo con la massima chiarezza di tutte nel caso che ci è vicino ed è ricolmo di testimonianze manifeste e minute: il caso del grande declino della religione che ebbe inizio all’incirca al tempo di Voltaire. Perché è davvero il caso nostro, e noi stessi abbiamo visto il declino di quel declino. I duecento anni trascorsi da Voltaire non ci sfrecciano davanti in un lampo come il quarto e il quinto secolo, o il dodicesimo e il tredicesimo. Nel nostro proprio caso possiamo osservare da vicino questo processo tante volte ripetuto; sappiamo quanto compiutamente una società possa perdere la sua religione fondamentale senza abolire la sua religione ufficiale; sappiamo come gli uomini possano diventare tutti agnostici molto prima di abolire i vescovi. E sappiamo che anche in quest’ultima fine, che a noi parve davvero la fine definitiva, l’incredibile è accaduto di nuovo: la Fede ha maggior seguito tra i giovani che tra i vecchi. Quando Ibsen parlò della nuova generazione che bussava alla porta, di certo non si aspettava che sarebbe stata la porta della chiesa.
At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died. How complete was the collapse and how strange the reversal we can only see in detail in the case nearest to our own time.
A thousand things have been said about the Oxford Movement and the parallel French Catholic revival; but few have made us feel the simplest fact about it; that it was a surprise. It was a puzzle as well as a surprise; because it seemed to most people like a river turning backwards from the sea and trying to climb back into the mountains. To have read the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is to know that nearly everybody had come to take it for granted that religion was a thing that would continually broaden like a river, till it reached an infinite sea. Some of them expected it to go down in a cataract of catastrophe, most of them expected it to widen into an estuary of equality and moderation; but all of them thought its returning on itself a prodigy as incredible as witchcraft. In other words, most moderate people thought that faith like freedom would be slowly broadened down, and some advanced people thought that it would be very rapidly broadened down, not to say flattened out. All that world of Guizot and Macaulay and the commercial and scientific liberality was perhaps more certain than any men before or since about the direction in which the world is going. People were so certain about the direction that they only differed about the pace. Many anticipated with alarm, and a few with sympathy, a Jacobin revolt that should guillotine the Archbishop of Canterbury or a Chartist riot that should hang the parsons on the lampposts. But it seemed like a convulsion in nature that the Archbishop instead of losing his head should be looking for his mitre; and that instead of diminishing the respect due to parsons we should strengthen it to the respect due to priests. It revolutionised their very vision of revolution; and turned their very topsyturveydom topsyturvey.
In short, the whole world being divided about whether the stream was going slower or faster, became conscious of something vague but vast that was going against the stream. Both in fact and figure there is something deeply disturbing about this, and that for an essential reason. A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. A dead dog can be lifted on the leaping water with all the swiftness of a leaping hound; but only a live dog can swim backwards. A paper boat can ride the rising deluge with all the airy arrogance of a fairy ship, but if the fairy ship sails up stream it is really rowed by the fairies. And among the things that merely went with the tide of apparent progress and enlargement there was many a demagogue or sophist whose wild gestures were in truth as lifeless as the movement of a dead dog’s limbs wavering in the eddying water; and many a philosophy uncommonly like a paper boat, of the sort that it is not difficult to knock into a cocked hat. But even the truly living and even life-giving things that went with that stream did not thereby prove that they were living or life-giving. It was this other force that was unquestionably and unaccountably alive; the mysterious and unmeasured energy that was thrusting back the river. That was felt to be like the movement of some great monster; and it was none the less clearly a living monster because most people thought it a prehistoric monster. It was none the less an unnatural, an incongruous, and to some a comic upheaval; as if the Great Sea Serpent had suddenly risen out of the Round Pond—unless we consider the Sea Serpent as more likely to live in the Serpentine. This flippant element in the fantasy must not be missed, for it was one of the clearest testimonies to the unexpected nature of the reversal. That age did really feel that a preposterous quality in prehistoric animals belonged also to historic rituals; that mitres and tiaras were like the horns or crests of antediluvian creatures; and that appealing to a Primitive Church was like dressing up as a Primitive Man.
The world is still puzzled by that movement; but most of all because it still moves. I have said something elsewhere of the rather random sort of reproaches that are still directed against it and its much greater consequences; it is enough to say here that the more such critics reproach it the less they explain it. In a sense it is my concern here, if not to explain it, at least to suggest the direction of the explanation; but above all, it is my concern to point out one particular thing about it. And that is that it had all happened before; and even many times before.
To sum up, in so far as it is true that recent centuries have seen an attenuation of Christian doctrine, recent centuries have only seen what the most remote centuries have seen. And even the modern example has only ended as the medieval and pre-medieval examples ended. It is already clear, and grows clearer every day, that it is not going to end in the disappearance of the diminished creed; but rather in the return of those parts of it that had really disappeared. It is going to end as the Arian compromise ended, as the attempts at a compromise with Nominalism and even with Albigensianism ended. But the point to seize in the modern case, as in all the other cases is that what returns is not in that sense a simplified theology; not according to that view a purified theology; it is simply theology. It is that enthusiasm for theological studies that marked the most doctrinal ages; it is the divine science. An old Don with D. D. after his name may have become the typical figure of a bore; but that was because he was himself bored with his theology, not because he was excited about it. It was precisely because he was admittedly more interested in the Latin of Plautus than in the Latin of Augustine, in the Greek of Xenophon than in the Greek of Chrysostom. It was precisely because he was more interested in a dead tradition than in a decidedly living tradition. In short, it was precisely because he was himself a type of the time in which Christian faith was weak. It was not because men would not hail, if they could, the wonderful and almost wild vision of a Doctor of Divinity.
Almeno cinque volte, dunque, con l’ariano e con l’albigese, con lo scettico umanista, dopo Voltaire e dopo Darwin, la Fede è andata, a ogni apparenza, in malora. In ciascuno di questi cinque casi fu il cane a morire. Quanto completo fosse il crollo e quanto strano il rovesciamento, possiamo vederlo nei particolari soltanto nel caso più prossimo al nostro tempo.
Mille cose si sono dette sul Movimento di Oxford e sul parallelo risveglio cattolico francese; ma poche ci hanno fatto avvertire il fatto più semplice che lo riguarda: che fu una sorpresa. Fu un enigma non meno che una sorpresa; perché parve alla maggior parte della gente come un fiume che tornasse indietro dal mare e cercasse di risalire fra le montagne. Aver letto la letteratura del Settecento e dell’Ottocento significa sapere che quasi tutti erano giunti a dare per scontato che la religione fosse una cosa destinata ad allargarsi di continuo come un fiume, finché non raggiungesse un mare infinito. Alcuni si aspettavano che precipitasse in una cateratta di catastrofe, i più si aspettavano che si dilatasse in un estuario di uguaglianza e di moderazione; ma tutti quanti giudicavano il suo ripiegarsi su se stesso un prodigio incredibile quanto la stregoneria. In altre parole, la maggior parte delle persone moderate pensava che la fede, come la libertà, si sarebbe lentamente allargata verso il basso, e alcune persone avanzate pensavano che si sarebbe allargata verso il basso assai rapidamente, per non dire spianata del tutto. Tutto quel mondo di Guizot e di Macaulay e della liberalità commerciale e scientifica era forse più sicuro di qualunque uomo prima o dopo di esso riguardo alla direzione in cui il mondo sta andando. La gente era così certa della direzione che divergeva soltanto sull’andatura. Molti presagivano con allarme, e alcuni con simpatia, una rivolta giacobina che ghigliottinasse l’Arcivescovo di Canterbury, o un tumulto cartista che impiccasse i pastori ai lampioni. Ma parve come uno sconvolgimento della natura che l’Arcivescovo, invece di perdere la testa, fosse in cerca della sua mitra; e che, invece di diminuire il rispetto dovuto ai pastori, noi lo rafforzassimo fino al rispetto dovuto ai sacerdoti. Ciò rivoluzionò la loro stessa visione della rivoluzione; e rovesciò a rovescio il loro stesso mondo alla rovescia.
Insomma, mentre il mondo intero si divideva sul se la corrente andasse più adagio o più veloce, esso divenne consapevole di qualcosa di vago ma di immenso che risaliva contro la corrente. Tanto nel fatto quanto nella figura c’è in questo qualcosa di profondamente inquietante, e per una ragione essenziale. Una cosa morta può andare con la corrente, ma soltanto una cosa viva può andarle contro. Un cane morto può essere sollevato sull’acqua guizzante con tutta la rapidità di un segugio al balzo; ma soltanto un cane vivo può nuotare a ritroso. Una barchetta di carta può cavalcare il diluvio montante con tutta l’aerea arroganza di un vascello fatato, ma se il vascello fatato risale la corrente, allora è davvero remato dalle fate. E tra le cose che semplicemente andavano con la marea dell’apparente progresso e ingrandimento c’era più di un demagogo o sofista i cui gesti forsennati erano in verità inerti quanto il moto delle membra di un cane morto che ondeggiano nell’acqua vorticante; e più di una filosofia straordinariamente simile a una barchetta di carta, di quelle che non è difficile ridurre a un cappello a tricorno. Ma anche le cose veramente vive, e persino datrici di vita, che andavano con quella corrente non provavano con ciò di essere vive o datrici di vita. Era quest’altra forza a essere, indubbiamente e inspiegabilmente, viva; la misteriosa e smisurata energia che stava respingendo il fiume all’indietro. La si avvertiva come il movimento di qualche grande mostro; e non era per questo meno chiaramente un mostro vivente, sebbene i più lo credessero un mostro preistorico. Non era per questo meno un sommovimento innaturale, incongruo e, per taluni, comico; come se il Grande Serpente di Mare si fosse d’improvviso levato dal Round Pond — a meno di non ritenere il Serpente di Mare più propenso ad abitare nella Serpentine. Non si deve trascurare questo elemento frivolo nella fantasia, perché fu una delle più chiare testimonianze della natura inaspettata del rovesciamento. Quell’epoca sentiva davvero che una qualità grottesca degli animali preistorici apparteneva anche ai riti storici; che mitre e tiare erano come le corna o le creste di creature antidiluviane; e che appellarsi a una Chiesa Primitiva era come mascherarsi da Uomo Primitivo.
Il mondo è tuttora sconcertato da quel movimento; ma soprattutto perché esso si muove ancora. Ho detto qualcosa altrove sul genere piuttosto casuale di rimproveri che gli vengono ancora rivolti, e alle sue assai maggiori conseguenze; basti dire qui che quanto più simili critici lo rimproverano, tanto meno lo spiegano. In un certo senso è mia cura qui, se non spiegarlo, almeno suggerire la direzione della spiegazione; ma soprattutto è mia cura additare una cosa particolare che lo riguarda. Ed è che tutto era già accaduto prima; e anzi molte volte prima.
Per riassumere, nella misura in cui è vero che i secoli recenti hanno visto un’attenuazione della dottrina cristiana, i secoli recenti non hanno visto altro che ciò che i secoli più remoti avevano già visto. E persino l’esempio moderno non ha fatto che finire come erano finiti gli esempi medievali e premedievali. È già chiaro, e diventa più chiaro ogni giorno, che non finirà con la scomparsa del credo diminuito, ma piuttosto con il ritorno di quelle parti di esso che erano davvero scomparse. Finirà come finì il compromesso ariano, come finirono i tentativi di un compromesso con il Nominalismo e perfino con l’Albigismo. Ma il punto da cogliere nel caso moderno, come in tutti gli altri casi, è che ciò che ritorna non è, in quel senso, una teologia semplificata; non è, secondo quella prospettiva, una teologia purificata; è semplicemente teologia. È quell’entusiasmo per gli studi teologici che contrassegnò le epoche più dottrinali; è la scienza divina. Un vecchio Don con la sigla D. D. dopo il suo nome può essere diventato la figura tipica del seccatore; ma questo accadeva perché egli stesso era annoiato dalla propria teologia, non perché ne fosse entusiasta. Era precisamente perché, come tutti ammettevano, s’interessava più al latino di Plauto che al latino di Agostino, al greco di Senofonte che al greco di Crisostomo. Era precisamente perché s’interessava più a una tradizione morta che a una tradizione decisamente viva. In breve, era precisamente perché egli stesso era un tipo dell’epoca in cui la fede cristiana era debole. Non era perché gli uomini non avrebbero salutato con gioia, se avessero potuto, la meravigliosa e quasi selvaggia visione di un Dottore in Teologia.
There are people who say they wish Christianity to remain as a spirit. They mean, very literally, that they wish it to remain as a ghost. But it is not going to remain as a ghost. What follows this process of apparent death is not the lingerings of the shade; it is the resurrection of the body. These people are quite prepared to shed pious and reverential tears over the Sepulchre of the Son of Man; what they are not prepared for is the Son of God walking once more upon the hills of morning. These people, and indeed most people, were indeed by this time quite accustomed to the idea that the old Christian candle-light would fade into the light of common day. To many of them it did quite honestly appear like that pale yellow flame of a candle when it is left burning in daylight. It was all the more unexpected, and therefore all the more unmistakable, that the seven branched candle-stick suddenly towered to heaven like a miraculous tree and flamed until the sun turned pale. But other ages have seen the day conquer the candle-light and then the candle-light conquer the day. Again and again, before our time, men have grown content with a diluted doctrine. And again and again there has followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson cataract, the strength of the red original wine. And we only say once more to-day as has been said many times by our fathers: ‘Long years and centuries ago our fathers or the founders of our people drank, as they dreamed, of the blood of God. Long years and centuries have passed since the strength of that giant vintage has been anything but a legend of the age of giants. Centuries ago already is the dark time of the second fermentation, when the wine of Catholicism turned into the vinegar of Calvinism. Long since that bitter drink has been itself diluted; rinsed out and washed away by the waters of oblivion and the wave of the world. Never did we think to taste again even that bitter tang of sincerity and the spirit, still less the richer and the sweeter strength of the purple vineyards in our dreams of the age of gold. Day by day and year by year we have lowered our hopes and lessened our convictions; we have grown more and more used to seeing those vats and vineyards overwhelmed in the water-floods and the last savour and suggestion of that special element fading like a stain of purple upon a sea of grey. We have grown used to dilution, to dissolution, to a watering down that went on for ever. But ‘Thou hast kept the good wine until now.”
This is the final fact, and it is the most extraordinary of all. The faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age. It has not only been often killed but it has often died a natural death; in the sense of coming to a natural and necessary end. It is obvious that it has survived the most savage and the most universal persecutions from the shock of the Diocletian fury to the shock of the French Revolution. But it has a more strange and even a more weird tenacity; it has survived not only war but peace. It has not only died often but degenerated often and decayed often; it has survived its own weakness and even its own surrender. We need not repeat what is so obvious about the beauty of the end of Christ in its wedding of youth and death. But this is almost as if Christ had lived to the last possible span, had been a white-haired sage of a hundred and died of natural decay, and then had risen again rejuvenated, with trumpets and the rending of the sky. It was said truly enough that human Christianity in its recurrent weakness was sometimes too much wedded to the powers of the world; but if it was wedded it has very often been widowed. It is a strangely immortal sort of widow. An enemy may have said at one moment that it was but an aspect of the power of the Caesars; and it sounds as strange to-day as to call it an aspect of the Pharaohs. An enemy might say that it was the official faith of feudalism; and it sounds as convincing now as to say that it was bound to perish with the ancient Roman villa. All these things did indeed run their course to its normal end; and there seemed no course for the religion but to end with them. It ended and it began again.
‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ The civilisation of antiquity was the whole world: and men no more dreamed of its ending than of the ending of daylight. They could not imagine another order unless it were in another world. The civilisation of the world has passed away and those words have not passed away. In the long night of the Dark Ages feudalism was so familiar a thing that no man could imagine himself without a lord: and religion was so woven into that network that no man would have believed they could be torn asunder. Feudalism itself was torn to rags and rotted away in the popular life of the true Middle Ages; and the first and freshest power in that new freedom was the old religion. Feudalism had passed away, and the words did not pass away. The whole medieval order, in many ways so complete and almost cosmic a home for man, wore out gradually in its turn and here at least it was thought that the words would die. They went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty years were using all its light and learning for new religious foundations, new apologetics, new saints. It was supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of Revolution. Science explained it away; and it was still there. History disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future. To-day it stands once more in our path; and even as we watch it, it grows.
If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if men really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a story, it would seem that sooner or later even its enemies will learn from their incessant and interminable disappointments not to look for anything so simple as its death. They may continue to war with it, but it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as they war with the skies. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ They will watch for it to stumble; they will watch for it to err; they will no longer watch for it to end. Insensibly, even unconsciously, they will in their own silent anticipations fulfil the relative terms of that astounding prophecy; they will forget to watch for the mere extinction of what has so often been vainly extinguished; and will learn instinctively to look first for the coming of the comet or the freezing of the star.
Vi sono persone che dicono di desiderare che il Cristianesimo rimanga come uno spirito. Intendono, molto letteralmente, che desiderano che rimanga come un fantasma. Ma non rimarrà come un fantasma. Ciò che segue questo processo di morte apparente non sono gli indugi dell’ombra; è la resurrezione del corpo. Queste persone sono ben disposte a versare lacrime pie e reverenti sul Sepolcro del Figlio dell’uomo; ciò a cui non sono preparate è il Figlio di Dio che cammina ancora una volta sui colli del mattino. Queste persone, e in verità la maggior parte delle persone, erano ormai del tutto avvezze all’idea che l’antico lume della candela cristiana si sarebbe dissolto nella luce del giorno comune. A molte di esse appariva davvero, in tutta onestà, come quella pallida fiamma gialla di una candela lasciata a bruciare in pieno giorno. Fu tanto più inatteso, e perciò tanto più inconfondibile, che il candelabro a sette braccia d’improvviso s’innalzasse verso il cielo come un albero miracoloso e fiammeggiasse fino a far impallidire il sole. Ma altre epoche hanno visto il giorno vincere il lume della candela e poi il lume della candela vincere il giorno. Ancora e ancora, prima del nostro tempo, gli uomini si sono accontentati di una dottrina diluita. E ancora e ancora è seguita a quella diluizione, sopraggiungendo come dalle tenebre in una cateratta cremisi, la forza del rosso vino originario. E oggi non facciamo che dire ancora una volta ciò che è stato detto molte volte dai nostri padri: «Molti anni e secoli fa i nostri padri, o i fondatori del nostro popolo, bevvero, mentre sognavano, il sangue di Dio. Molti anni e secoli sono trascorsi da quando la forza di quella vendemmia gigantesca non è stata altro che una leggenda dell’età dei giganti. Secoli fa già è il tempo oscuro della seconda fermentazione, quando il vino del Cattolicesimo si mutò nell’aceto del Calvinismo. Da lungo tempo quella bevanda amara è stata essa stessa diluita; risciacquata e portata via dalle acque dell’oblio e dall’onda del mondo. Mai avremmo pensato di gustare di nuovo neppure quel sentore amaro di sincerità e di spirito, e ancor meno la forza più ricca e più dolce dei purpurei vigneti nei nostri sogni dell’età dell’oro. Giorno dopo giorno e anno dopo anno abbiamo abbassato le nostre speranze e attenuato le nostre convinzioni; ci siamo abituati sempre più a vedere quei tini e quei vigneti sommersi dai flutti d’acqua, e l’ultimo sapore e sentore di quell’elemento speciale sbiadire come una macchia di porpora su un mare di grigio. Ci siamo abituati alla diluizione, alla dissoluzione, a un annacquamento che continuava in eterno. Ma “tu hai serbato il vino buono fino ad ora”».
Questo è il fatto ultimo, ed è il più straordinario di tutti. La fede non solo è spesso morta, ma è spesso morta di vecchiaia. Non solo è stata spesso uccisa, ma è spesso morta di morte naturale; nel senso di giungere a una fine naturale e necessaria. È evidente che è sopravvissuta alle più feroci e alle più universali persecuzioni, dallo scossone del furore dioclezianeo allo scossone della Rivoluzione francese. Ma possiede una tenacia più strana e persino più inquietante: è sopravvissuta non solo alla guerra, ma alla pace. Non solo è morta spesso, ma spesso è degenerata e spesso è decaduta; è sopravvissuta alla propria debolezza e persino alla propria resa. Non occorre ripetere ciò che è tanto ovvio riguardo alla bellezza della fine di Christ nel suo connubio di giovinezza e morte. Ma è quasi come se Christ fosse vissuto fino all’estremo limite possibile, fosse stato un sapiente dai capelli bianchi di cent’anni e fosse morto di naturale declino, e poi fosse risorto ringiovanito, con squilli di tromba e lo squarciarsi del cielo. Fu detto con abbastanza verità che il Cristianesimo umano, nella sua ricorrente debolezza, era talvolta troppo unito ai poteri del mondo; ma se fu sposato, molto spesso è rimasto vedovo. È una vedova stranamente immortale. Un nemico può aver detto, in un dato momento, che non era altro che un aspetto del potere dei Cesari; e ciò suona oggi tanto strano quanto chiamarlo un aspetto dei Faraoni. Un nemico potrebbe dire che era la fede ufficiale del feudalesimo; e ciò suona oggi tanto convincente quanto dire che era destinato a perire con l’antica villa romana. Tutte queste cose seguirono davvero il loro corso fino alla loro fine normale; e sembrava non esservi per la religione altro corso che finire con esse. Finì e ricominciò.
«Il cielo e la terra passeranno, ma le mie parole non passeranno». La civiltà dell’antichità era il mondo intero: e gli uomini non sognavano la sua fine più di quanto sognassero la fine della luce del giorno. Non potevano immaginare un altro ordine se non in un altro mondo. La civiltà del mondo è passata e quelle parole non sono passate. Nella lunga notte dei Secoli Bui il feudalesimo era una cosa così familiare che nessun uomo poteva immaginarsi senza un signore: e la religione era così intessuta in quella trama che nessun uomo avrebbe creduto che potessero essere separati. Il feudalesimo stesso fu ridotto in brandelli e imputridì nella vita popolare del vero Medioevo; e la prima e più fresca forza in quella nuova libertà fu l’antica religione. Il feudalesimo era passato, e le parole non passarono. L’intero ordine medievale, per tanti versi una dimora così completa e quasi cosmica, una casa per l’uomo, si logorò gradualmente a sua volta, e qui almeno si pensò che le parole sarebbero morte. Esse varcarono il raggiante abisso del Rinascimento e in cinquant’anni ne stavano già usando tutta la luce e il sapere per nuove fondazioni religiose, nuove apologetiche, nuovi santi. Si supponeva che si fosse infine inaridita nella luce secca dell’Età della Ragione; si supponeva che fosse infine scomparsa nel terremoto dell’Età della Rivoluzione. La scienza la spiegava come illusione; ed essa era ancora lì. La Storia la dissotterrava nel passato; ed essa appariva d’improvviso nel futuro. Oggi si erge ancora una volta sul nostro cammino; e persino mentre la osserviamo, cresce.
Se le nostre relazioni e i nostri documenti sociali conserveranno la loro continuità, se gli uomini impareranno davvero ad applicare la ragione ai fatti che si accumulano di una storia tanto schiacciante, parrebbe che presto o tardi persino i suoi nemici imparino, dalle loro incessanti e interminabili delusioni, a non attendersi qualcosa di così semplice come la sua morte. Potranno continuare a farle guerra, ma sarà come fanno guerra alla natura; come fanno guerra al paesaggio, come fanno guerra ai cieli. «Il cielo e la terra passeranno, ma le mie parole non passeranno.» La spieranno per coglierla mentre inciampa; la spieranno per coglierla mentre erra; non la spieranno più per coglierla mentre finisce. Insensibilmente, e persino inconsciamente, essi, nelle loro stesse silenziose attese, adempiranno i termini relativi di quella sconvolgente profezia; dimenticheranno di spiare la mera estinzione di ciò che è stato tante volte invano estinto; e impareranno d’istinto ad attendersi anzitutto la venuta della cometa o il congelarsi della stella.
CONCLUSION
THE SUMMARY OF THIS BOOK
I have taken the liberty once or twice of borrowing the excellent phrase about an Outline of History; though this study of a special truth and a special error can of course claim no sort of comparison with the rich and many-sided encyclopedia of history, for which that name was chosen. And yet there is a certain reason in the reference: and a sense in which the one thing touches and even cuts across the other. For the story of the world as told by Mr. Wells could here only be criticised as an outline. And, strangely enough, it seems to me that it is only wrong as an outline. It is admirable as an accumulation of history; it is splendid as a store-house or treasure of history; it is a fascinating disquisition on history; it is most attractive as an amplification of history; but it is quite false as an outline of history. The one thing that seems to me quite wrong about it is the outline; the sort of outline that can really be a single line, like that which makes all the difference between a caricature of the profile of Mr. Winston Churchill and of Sir Alfred Mond. In simple and homely language, I mean the things that stick out; the things that make the simplicity of a silhouette. I think the proportions are wrong; the proportions of what is certain as compared with what is uncertain, of what played a great part as compared with what played a smaller part, of what is ordinary and what is extraordinary, of what really lies level with an average and what stands out as an exception.
I do not say it as a small criticism of a great writer, and I have no reason to do so; for in my own much smaller task I feel I have failed in very much the same way. I am very doubtful whether I have conveyed to the reader the main point I meant about the proportions of history, and why I have dwelt so much more on some things than others. I doubt whether I have clearly fulfilled the plan that I set out in the introductory chapter; and for that reason I add these lines as a sort of summary in a concluding chapter. I do believe that the things on which I have insisted are more essential to an outline of history than the things which I have subordinated or dismissed. I do not believe that the past is most truly pictured as a thing in which humanity merely fades away into nature, or civilisation merely fades away into barbarism, or religion fades away into mythology, or our own religion fades away into the religions of the world. In short I do not believe that the best way to produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines. I believe that, of the two, it would be far nearer the truth to tell the tale very simply, like a primitive myth about a man who made the sun and stars or a god who entered the body of a sacred monkey. I will therefore sum up all that has gone before in what seems to me a realistic and reasonably proportioned statement; the short story of mankind.
In the land lit by that neighbouring star, whose blaze is the broad daylight, there are many and very various things motionless and moving. There moves among them a race that is in its relation to others a race of gods. The fact is not lessened but emphasised because it can behave like a race of demons. Its distinction is not an individual illusion, like one bird pluming itself on its own plumes; it is a solid and a many-sided thing. It is demonstrated in the very speculations that have led to its being denied. That men, the gods of this lower world, are linked with it in various ways is true; but it is another aspect of the same truth. That they grow as the grass grows and walk as the beasts walk is a secondary necessity that sharpens the primary distinction. It is like saying that a magician must after all have the appearance of a man; or that even the fairies could not dance without feet. It has lately been the fashion to focus the mind entirely on these mild and subordinate resemblances and to forget the main fact altogether. It is customary to insist that man resembles the other creatures. Yes; and that very resemblance he alone can see. The fish does not trace the fish-bone pattern in the fowls of the air; or the elephant and the emu compare skeletons. Even in the sense in which man is at one with the universe it is an utterly lonely universality. The very sense that he is united with all things is enough to sunder him from all.
Looking around him by this unique light, as lonely as the literal flame that he alone has kindled, this demigod or demon of the visible world makes that world visible. He sees around him a world of a certain style or type. It seems to proceed by certain rules or at least repetitions. He sees a green architecture that builds itself without visible hands; but which builds itself into a very exact plan or pattern, like a design already drawn in the air by an invisible finger. It is not, as is now vaguely suggested, a vague thing. It is not a growth or a groping of blind life. Each seeks an end; a glorious and radiant end, even for every daisy or dandelion we see in looking across the level of a common field. In the very shape of things there is more than green growth; there is the finality of the flower. It is a world of crowns. This impression, whether or no it be an illusion, has so profoundly influenced this race of thinkers and masters of the material world, that the vast majority have been moved to take a certain view of that world. They have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the world had a plan as the tree seemed to have a plan; and an end and crown like the flower. But so long as the race of thinkers was able to think, it was obvious that the admission of this idea of a plan brought with it another thought more thrilling and even terrible. There was someone else, some strange and unseen being, who had designed these things, if indeed they were designed. There was a stranger who was also a friend; a mysterious benefactor who had been before them and built up the woods and hills for their coming, and had kindled the sunrise against their rising, as a servant kindles a fire. Now this idea of a mind that gives a meaning to the universe has received more and more confirmation within the minds of men, by meditations and experiences much more subtle and searching than any such argument about the external plan of the world. But I am concerned here with keeping the story in its most simple and even concrete terms; and it is enough to say here that most men, including the wisest men, have come to the conclusion that the world has such a final purpose and therefore such a first cause. But most men in some sense separated themselves from the wisest men, when it came to the treatment of that idea. There came into existence two ways of treating that idea, which between them made up most of the religious history of the world. The majority, like the minority, had this strong sense of a second meaning in things; of a strange master who knew the secret of the world. But the majority, the mob or mass of men, naturally tended to treat it rather in the spirit of gossip. The gossip, like all gossip, contained a great deal of truth and falsehood. The world began to tell itself tales about the unknown being or his sons or servants or messengers. Some of the tales may truly be called old wives’ tales; as professing only to be very remote memories of the morning of the world; myths about the baby moon or the half-baked mountains. Some of them might more truly be called travellers’ tales; as being curious but contemporary tales brought from certain borderlands of experience; such as miraculous cures or those that bring whispers of what has happened to the dead. Many of them are probably true tales; enough of them are probably true to keep a person of real commonsense more or less conscious that there really is something rather marvellous behind the cosmic curtain. But in a sense it is only going by appearances; even if the appearances are called apparitions. It is a matter of appearances—and disappearances. At the most these gods are ghosts; that is, they are glimpses. For most of us they are rather gossip about glimpses. And for the rest, the whole world is full of rumours, most of which are almost avowedly romances. The great majority of the tales about gods and ghosts and the invisible king are told, if not for the sake of the tale, at least for the sake of the topic. They are evidence of the eternal interest of the theme; they are not evidence of anything else, and they are not meant to be. They are mythology or the poetry that is not bound in books— or bound in any other way.
CONCLUSIONE
IL RIASSUNTO DI QUESTO LIBRO
Mi sono preso la libertà, una volta o due, di prendere a prestito l’eccellente formula relativa a un Compendio di Storia; benché questo studio di una particolare verità e di un particolare errore non possa naturalmente pretendere paragone alcuno con la ricca e multiforme enciclopedia della storia, per la quale quel nome fu scelto. Eppure vi è una certa ragione nel riferimento: e un senso in cui l’una cosa tocca e persino taglia trasversalmente l’altra. Poiché la storia del mondo quale la narra il signor Wells poteva qui essere criticata soltanto come compendio. E, per quanto strano, mi sembra che essa sia errata soltanto come compendio. È ammirevole come accumulo di storia; è splendida come magazzino o dimora-tesoro di storia; è un’affascinante dissertazione sulla storia; è oltremodo attraente come amplificazione della storia; ma è del tutto falsa come compendio della storia. L’unica cosa che mi sembra del tutto sbagliata in essa è il compendio; quella sorta di compendio che può davvero essere una linea sola, come quella che fa tutta la differenza tra una caricatura del profilo del signor Winston Churchill e quello di Sir Alfred Mond. In parole semplici e casalinghe, intendo le cose che sporgono; le cose che fanno la semplicità di una silhouette. Penso che le proporzioni siano sbagliate; le proporzioni di ciò che è certo in confronto a ciò che è incerto, di ciò che ha avuto una gran parte in confronto a ciò che ne ha avuta una minore, di ciò che è ordinario e di ciò che è straordinario, di ciò che sta davvero al livello di una media e di ciò che spicca come eccezione.
Non lo dico come piccola critica di un grande scrittore, e non ho ragione di farlo; poiché nel mio compito assai più modesto sento di aver fallito pressappoco nello stesso modo. Dubito assai di aver comunicato al lettore il punto principale che intendevo circa le proporzioni della storia, e il perché mi sia soffermato tanto di più su certe cose che su altre. Dubito di aver chiaramente adempiuto il disegno che avevo tracciato nel capitolo introduttivo; e per tale ragione aggiungo queste righe come una sorta di riassunto in un capitolo conclusivo. Credo davvero che le cose sulle quali ho insistito siano più essenziali a un compendio di storia che non le cose che ho subordinato o messo da parte. Non credo che il passato sia raffigurato con maggior verità come una cosa in cui l’umanità semplicemente sfuma nella natura, o la civiltà semplicemente sfuma nella barbarie, o la religione sfuma nella mitologia, o la nostra propria religione sfuma nelle religioni del mondo. In breve, non credo che il modo migliore per produrre un compendio di storia sia cancellarne le linee. Credo che, delle due, sarebbe assai più vicino alla verità narrare la vicenda in maniera semplicissima, come un mito primitivo su un uomo che fece il sole e le stelle o su un dio che entrò nel corpo di una scimmia sacra. Riassumerò dunque tutto ciò che è venuto prima in quella che mi pare un’affermazione realistica e ragionevolmente proporzionata; la breve storia del genere umano.
Nella terra illuminata da quella stella vicina, il cui bagliore è la piena luce del giorno, vi sono molte e assai varie cose immobili e in movimento. Fra esse si muove una stirpe che è, nella sua relazione con le altre, una stirpe di dèi. Il fatto non è attenuato ma accentuato dal poter essa comportarsi come una stirpe di demoni. La sua distinzione non è un’illusione individuale, come un uccello che si pavoneggia delle proprie piume; è una cosa solida e dai molti lati. È dimostrata nelle stesse speculazioni che hanno condotto a negarla. Che gli uomini, gli dèi di questo mondo inferiore, vi siano legati in vari modi è vero; ma è un altro aspetto della stessa verità. Che essi crescano come cresce l’erba e camminino come camminano le bestie è una necessità secondaria che affina la distinzione primaria. È come dire che un mago deve pur avere, in fin dei conti, l’aspetto di un uomo; o che persino le fate non potrebbero danzare senza piedi. Da qualche tempo è di moda concentrare la mente interamente su queste miti e subordinate somiglianze e dimenticare del tutto il fatto principale. È abitudine insistere che l’uomo somiglia alle altre creature. Sì; e proprio quella somiglianza egli solo può vederla. Il pesce non rintraccia il disegno della lisca negli uccelli dell’aria; né l’elefante e l’emù confrontano scheletri. Persino nel senso in cui l’uomo è tutt’uno con l’universo, si tratta di una universalità del tutto solitaria. Lo stesso senso di essere unito a tutte le cose basta a separarlo da tutte.
Guardandosi attorno per mezzo di questa luce unica, solitario come la fiamma letterale che egli solo ha acceso, questo semidio o demone del mondo visibile rende quel mondo visibile. Vede intorno a sé un mondo di un certo stile o tipo. Sembra procedere secondo certe regole o almeno certe ripetizioni. Vede una verde architettura che si costruisce senza mani visibili; ma che si costruisce secondo un piano o un disegno assai esatto, come un disegno già tracciato nell’aria da un dito invisibile. Non è, come ora vagamente si suggerisce, una cosa vaga. Non è una crescita o un brancolare di vita cieca. Ciascuno cerca un fine; un fine glorioso e radioso, persino per ogni margherita o dente di leone che vediamo guardando attraverso la distesa di un campo comune. Nella forma stessa delle cose vi è più che una verde crescita; vi è la finalità del fiore. È un mondo di corone. Questa impressione, sia essa o no un’illusione, ha così profondamente influenzato questa stirpe di pensatori e padroni del mondo materiale, che la stragrande maggioranza è stata indotta a prendere una certa visione di quel mondo. Hanno concluso, a torto o a ragione, che il mondo avesse un piano come l’albero sembrava avere un piano; e un fine e una corona come il fiore. Ma finché la stirpe dei pensatori fu in grado di pensare, fu evidente che l’ammissione di questa idea di un piano recava con sé un altro pensiero più elettrizzante e persino terribile. Vi era qualcun altro, un essere strano e invisibile, che aveva progettato queste cose, se davvero erano state progettate. Vi era uno straniero che era anche un amico; un misterioso benefattore che era stato prima di loro e aveva edificato i boschi e le colline per il loro venire, e aveva acceso l’aurora contro il loro levarsi, come un servo accende un fuoco. Ora, questa idea di una mente che dà un significato all’universo ha ricevuto sempre più conferma nelle menti degli uomini, per mezzo di meditazioni ed esperienze assai più sottili e penetranti di qualsiasi simile argomento intorno al piano esterno del mondo. Ma qui mi preme mantenere la storia nei suoi termini più semplici e persino concreti; e basti dire qui che la maggior parte degli uomini, compresi i più saggi, sono giunti alla conclusione che il mondo ha un tale fine ultimo e perciò una tale causa prima. Ma la maggior parte degli uomini si separarono in un certo senso dai più saggi, quando si giunse al trattamento di quell’idea. Vennero all’esistenza due modi di trattare quell’idea, i quali insieme costituirono la maggior parte della storia religiosa del mondo. La maggioranza, al pari della minoranza, aveva questo forte senso di un secondo significato nelle cose; di uno strano padrone che conosceva il segreto del mondo. Ma la maggioranza, la folla o massa degli uomini, tese naturalmente a trattarlo piuttosto nello spirito del pettegolezzo. Il pettegolezzo, come ogni pettegolezzo, conteneva una gran quantità di verità e di falsità. Il mondo cominciò a raccontarsi storie sull’essere ignoto o sui suoi figli o servi o messaggeri. Alcune di queste storie possono davvero dirsi ciance di comari; in quanto professano di essere soltanto ricordi assai remoti del mattino del mondo; miti sulla luna neonata o sulle montagne semicrude. Alcune di esse potrebbero più propriamente dirsi storie di viaggiatori; in quanto storie curiose ma contemporanee portate da certe terre di confine dell’esperienza; come guarigioni miracolose o come quelle che recano bisbigli di ciò che è accaduto ai morti. Molte di esse sono probabilmente storie vere; un numero sufficiente di esse è probabilmente vero da tenere una persona di vero buon senso più o meno consapevole che dietro il sipario cosmico vi è davvero qualcosa di piuttosto meraviglioso. Ma in un certo senso è solo un procedere per apparenze; anche se le apparenze si chiamano apparizioni. È una questione di apparizioni — e di sparizioni. Nel migliore dei casi questi dèi sono fantasmi; vale a dire, sono scorci. Per la maggior parte di noi sono piuttosto pettegolezzi su scorci. E per il resto, il mondo intero è pieno di dicerie, la maggior parte delle quali sono, quasi dichiaratamente, romanzi. La gran maggioranza delle storie sugli dèi e sui fantasmi e sul re invisibile è raccontata, se non per amore della storia, almeno per amore dell’argomento. Sono prova dell’eterno interesse del tema; non sono prova di alcunché d’altro, né sono intese a esserlo. Sono mitologia, ovvero la poesia che non è rilegata in libri — né rilegata in alcun altro modo.
Meanwhile the minority, the sages or thinkers, had withdrawn apart and had taken up an equally congenial trade. They were drawing up plans of the world; of the world which all believed to have a plan. They were trying to set forth the plan seriously and to scale. They were setting their minds directly to the mind that had made the mysterious world; considering what sort of a mind it might be and what its ultimate purpose might be. Some of them made that mind much more impersonal than mankind has generally made it; some simplified it almost to a blank; a few, a very few, doubted it altogether. One or two of the more morbid fancied that it might be evil and an enemy; just one or two of the more degraded in the other class worshipped demons instead of gods. But most of these theorists were theists: and they not only saw a moral plan in nature, but they generally laid down a moral plan for humanity. Most of them were good men who did good work: and they were remembered and reverenced in various ways. They were scribes; any their scriptures became more or less holy scriptures. They were law-givers; and their tradition became not only legal but ceremonial. We may say that they received divine honours, in the sense in which kings and great captains in certain countries often received divine honours. In a word, wherever the other popular spirit, the spirit of legend and gossip could come into play, it surrounded them with the more mystical atmosphere of the myths. Popular poetry turned the sages into saints. But that was all it did. They remained themselves; men never really forgot that they were men, only made into gods in the sense that they were made into heroes. Divine Plato, like Divus Ceasar, was a title and not a dogma. In Asia, where the atmosphere was more mythological, the man was made to look more like a myth, but he remained a man. He remained a man of a certain social class or school of men, receiving and deserving great honour from mankind. It is the order or school of the philosophers; the men who have set themselves seriously to trace the order across any apparent chaos in the vision of life. Instead of living on imaginative rumours and remote traditions and the tail-end of exceptional experiences about the mind and meaning behind the world, they have tried in a sense to project the primary purpose of that mind a priori. They have tried to put on paper a possible plan of the world; almost as if the world were not yet made.
Right in the middle of all these things stands up an enormous exception. It is quite unlike anything else. It is a thing final like the trump of doom, though it is also a piece of good news; or news that seems too good to be true. It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand down myths; the Man Who Made the World. That such a higher personality exists behind all things had indeed always been implied by all the best thinkers, as well as by all the most beautiful legends. But nothing of this sort had ever been implied in any of them. It is simply false to say that the other sages and heroes had claimed to be that mysterious master and maker, of whom the world had dreamed and disputed. Not one of them had ever claimed to be anything of the sort. Not one of their sects or schools had even claimed that they had claimed to be anything of the sort. The most that any religious prophet had said was that he was the true servant of such a being. The most that any visionary had ever said was that men might catch glimpses of the glory of that spiritual being; or much more often of lesser spiritual beings. The most that any primitive myth had even suggested was that the Creator was present at the Creation. But that the Creator was present at scenes a little subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with tax-collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted by the whole of that great civilisation for more than a thousand years— that is something utterly unlike anything else in nature. It is the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word, instead of barking like a dog. Its unique character can be used as an argument against it as well as for it. It would be easy to concentrate on it as a case of isolated insanity; but it makes nothing but dust and nonsense of comparative religion.
It came on the world with a wind and rush of running messengers proclaiming that apocalyptic portent, and it is not unduly fanciful to say that they are running still. What puzzles the world, and its wise philosophers and fanciful pagan poets, about the priests and people of the Catholic Church is that they still behave as if they were messengers. A messenger does not dream about what his message might be, or argue about what it probably would be; he delivers it as it is. It is not a theory or a fancy but a fact. It is not relevant to this intentionally rudimentary outline to prove in detail that it is a fact; but merely to point out that these messengers do deal with it as men deal with a fact. All that is condemned in Catholic tradition, authority, and dogmatism and the refusal to retract and modify, are but the natural human attributes of a man with a message relating to a fact. I desire to avoid in this last summary all the controversial complexities that may once more cloud the simple lines of that strange story; which I have already called, in words that are much too weak, the strangest story in the world. I desire merely to mark those main lines and specially to mark where the great line is really to be drawn. The religion of the world, in its right proportions, is not divided into fine shades of mysticism or more or less rational forms of mythology. It is divided by the line between the men who are bringing that message and the men who have not yet heard it, or cannot yet believe it.
Nel frattempo la minoranza, i saggi o pensatori, si era ritirata in disparte e aveva intrapreso un mestiere altrettanto congeniale. Andavano tracciando i piani del mondo; di quel mondo che tutti credevano avesse un piano. Si sforzavano di esporre il piano seriamente e in scala. Applicavano la loro mente direttamente alla mente che aveva foggiato il misterioso mondo; interrogandosi su che sorta di mente potesse essere e quale ne fosse lo scopo ultimo. Alcuni di loro rendevano quella mente assai più impersonale di quanto l’umanità l’abbia generalmente resa; alcuni la semplificavano quasi fino al nulla; pochi, pochissimi, ne dubitavano del tutto. Uno o due tra i più morbosi immaginavano che potesse essere malvagia e nemica; giusto uno o due tra i più degradati dell’altra classe adoravano demoni invece di dèi. Ma la maggior parte di questi teorici erano teisti: e non solo scorgevano un piano morale nella natura, ma per lo più stabilivano un piano morale per l’umanità. La maggior parte di loro erano uomini buoni che compivano opere buone: e vennero ricordati e riveriti in vari modi. Erano scribi; e le loro scritture divennero più o meno sacre scritture. Erano legislatori; e la loro tradizione divenne non solo legale ma cerimoniale. Possiamo dire che ricevettero onori divini, nel senso in cui i re e i grandi condottieri in certi paesi ricevettero spesso onori divini. In una parola, ovunque l’altro spirito popolare, lo spirito della leggenda e delle chiacchiere potesse entrare in gioco, li circondava con l’atmosfera più mistica dei miti. La poesia popolare mutò i saggi in santi. Ma non fece altro. Essi rimasero se stessi; gli uomini non dimenticarono mai davvero che erano uomini, solo tramutati in dèi nel senso in cui erano tramutati in eroi. Il divino Platone, come il Divus Caesar, era un titolo e non un dogma. In Asia, dove l’atmosfera era più mitologica, l’uomo veniva reso più simile a un mito, ma restava un uomo. Restava un uomo di una certa classe sociale o scuola di uomini, che riceveva e meritava grande onore dall’umanità. È l’ordine o scuola dei filosofi; gli uomini che si sono posti seriamente a rintracciare l’ordine attraverso ogni apparente caos nella visione della vita. Invece di vivere di dicerie immaginose e di remote tradizioni e della coda di esperienze eccezionali riguardo alla mente e al significato che stanno dietro il mondo, essi hanno tentato in un certo senso di proiettare a priori lo scopo primario di quella mente. Hanno tentato di mettere su carta un possibile piano del mondo; quasi come se il mondo non fosse ancora fatto.
Proprio nel bel mezzo di tutte queste cose si erge un’enorme eccezione. È del tutto diversa da qualunque altra cosa. È una cosa definitiva come la tromba del giudizio, benché sia anche una buona notizia; o una notizia che pare troppo bella per essere vera. Non è nulla di meno che la clamorosa asserzione che questo misterioso artefice del mondo ha visitato il suo mondo di persona. Dichiara che realmente e persino di recente, o proprio nel mezzo dei tempi storici, entrò davvero nel mondo questo originario essere invisibile; intorno al quale i pensatori costruiscono teorie e i mitologi tramandano miti; l’Uomo Che Fece il Mondo. Che una tale personalità superiore esistesse dietro tutte le cose era in verità sempre stato sottinteso tanto da tutti i migliori pensatori quanto da tutte le più belle leggende. Ma nulla di questo genere era mai stato sottinteso in nessuna di esse. È semplicemente falso dire che gli altri saggi ed eroi avessero preteso di essere quel misterioso signore e artefice, che il mondo aveva sognato e su cui aveva disputato. Non uno di loro aveva mai preteso di essere qualcosa del genere. Non una delle loro sette o scuole aveva mai neppure preteso che essi avessero preteso di essere qualcosa del genere. Il massimo che qualunque profeta religioso avesse detto era di essere il vero servo di un tale essere. Il massimo che qualunque visionario avesse mai detto era che gli uomini potessero cogliere barlumi della gloria di quell’essere spirituale; o assai più spesso di esseri spirituali minori. Il massimo che qualunque mito primitivo avesse persino suggerito era che il Creatore fosse presente alla Creazione. Ma che il Creatore fosse presente a scene un po’ successive alle cene di Orazio, e conversasse con esattori delle tasse e funzionari del governo nella dettagliata vita quotidiana dell’Impero Romano, e che questo fatto continuasse a essere fermamente asserito dall’intera compagine di quella grande civiltà per più di mille anni — questo è qualcosa di assolutamente diverso da qualunque altra cosa nella natura. È l’unica grande, sconcertante affermazione che l’uomo abbia fatto da quando pronunciò la sua prima parola articolata, invece di abbaiare come un cane. Il suo carattere unico può essere usato come argomento contro di essa non meno che a suo favore. Sarebbe facile concentrarsi su di essa come su un caso di follia isolata; ma essa riduce la religione comparata a nient’altro che polvere e insensatezza.
Piombò sul mondo con un vento e uno slancio di messaggeri in corsa che proclamavano quel portento apocalittico, e non è indebitamente fantasioso dire che sono ancora in corsa. Ciò che sconcerta il mondo, e i suoi saggi filosofi e i fantasiosi poeti pagani, riguardo ai sacerdoti e al popolo della Chiesa Cattolica è che essi si comportano ancora come se fossero messaggeri. Un messaggero non fantastica su quale il suo messaggio potrebbe essere, né disputa su quale probabilmente sarebbe; lo consegna così com’è. Non è una teoria o una fantasia, ma un fatto. Non è pertinente a questo profilo volutamente rudimentale provare in dettaglio che è un fatto; ma soltanto rilevare che questi messaggeri lo trattano come gli uomini trattano un fatto. Tutto ciò che è condannato nella tradizione, nell’autorità e nel dogmatismo cattolici e il rifiuto di ritrattare e modificare, non sono che i naturali attributi umani di un uomo con un messaggio relativo a un fatto. Desidero evitare in quest’ultima sintesi tutte le complessità controverse che potrebbero ancora una volta annebbiare le semplici linee di quella strana storia; che ho già chiamato, con parole troppo deboli, la storia più strana del mondo. Desidero soltanto marcare quelle linee principali e specialmente marcare dove la grande linea vada davvero tracciata. La religione del mondo, nelle sue giuste proporzioni, non è divisa in sottili sfumature di misticismo o in forme più o meno razionali di mitologia. È divisa dalla linea tra gli uomini che recano quel messaggio e gli uomini che non l’hanno ancora udito, o non riescono ancora a crederlo.
But when we translate the terms of that strange tale back into the more concrete and complicated terminology of our time, we find it covered by names and memories of which the very familiarity is a falsification. For instance, when we say that a country contains so many Moslems, we really mean that it contains so many monotheists; and we really mean, by that, that it contains so many men; men with the old average assumption of men—that the invisible ruler remains invisible. They hold it along with the customs of a certain culture and under the simpler laws of a certain law-giver; but so they would if their law-giver were Lycurgus or Solon. They testify to something which is a necessary and noble truth; but was never a new truth. Their creed is not a new colour; it is the neutral and normal tint that is the background of the many-coloured life of man. Mahomet did not, like the Magi, find a new star; he saw through his own particular window a glimpse of the great grey field of the ancient starlight. So when we say that the country contains so many Confucians or Buddhists, we mean it contains so many pagans whose prophets have given them another and rather vaguer version of the invisible power; making it not only invisible but almost impersonal. When we say that they also have temples and idols and priests and periodical festivals, we simply mean that this sort of heathen is enough of a human being to admit the popular element of pomp and pictures and feasts and fairy-tales. We only mean that Pagans have more sense than Puritans. But what the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.
Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.
For this is the last proof of the miracle; that something so supernatural should have become so natural. I mean that anything so unique when seen from the outside should only seem universal when seen from the inside. I have not minimised the scale of the miracle, as some of our wilder theologians think it wise to do. Rather have I deliberately dwelt on that incredible interruption, as a blow that broke the very backbone of history. I have great sympathy with the monotheists, the Moslems, or the Jews, to whom it seems a blasphemy; a blasphemy that might shake the world. But it did not shake the world; it steadied the world. That fact, the more we consider it, will seem more solid and more strange. I think it a piece of plain justice to all the unbelievers to insist upon the audacity of the act of faith that is demanded of them. I willingly and warmly agree that it is, in itself, a suggestion at which we might expect even the brain of the believer to reel, when he realised his own belief. But the brain of the believer does not reel; it is the brains of the unbelievers that reel. We can see their brains reeling on every side and into every extravagance of ethics and psychology; into pessimism and the denial of life; into pragmatism and the denial of logic; seeking their omens in nightmares and their canons in contradictions; shrieking for fear at the far-off sight of things beyond good and evil, or whispering of strange stars where two and two make five. Meanwhile this solitary thing that seems at first so outrageous in outline remains solid and sane in substance. It remains the moderator of all these manias; rescuing reason from the Pragmatists exactly as it rescued laughter from the Puritans. I repeat that I have deliberately emphasised its intrinsically defiant and dogmatic character. The mystery is how anything so startling should have remained defiant and dogmatic and yet become perfectly normal and natural. I have admitted freely that, considering the incident in itself, a man who says he is God may be classed with a man who says he is glass. But the man who says he is glass is not a glazier making windows for all the world. He does not remain for after ages as a shining and crystalline figure, in whose light everything is as clear as crystal.
But this madness has remained sane. The madness has remained sane when everything else went mad. The madhouse has been a house to which, age after age, men are continually coming back as to a home. That is the riddle that remains; that anything so abrupt and abnormal should still be found a habitable and hospitable thing. I care not if the sceptic says it is a tall story; I cannot see how so toppling a tower could stand so long without foundation. Still less can I see how it could become, as it has become, the home of man. Had it merely appeared and disappeared, it might possibly have been remembered or explained as the last leap of the rage of illusion, the ultimate myth of the ultimate mood, in which the mind struck the sky and broke. But the mind did not break. It is the one mind that remains unbroken in the break-up of the world. If it were an error, it seems as if the error could hardly have lasted a day. If it were a mere ecstasy, it would seem that such an ecstasy could not endure for an hour. It has endured for nearly two thousand years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more level-headed, more reasonable in its hopes, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of fate and death, than all the world outside. For it was the soul of Christendom that came forth from the incredible Christ; and the soul of it was common sense. Though we dared not look on His face we could look on His fruits; and by His fruits we should know Him. The fruits are solid and the fruitfulness is much more than a metaphor; and nowhere in this sad world are boys happier in apple-trees, or men in more equal chorus singing as they tread the vine, than under the fixed flash of this instant and intolerant enlightenment; the lightning made eternal as the light.
Ma quando ritraduciamo i termini di quella strana vicenda nella terminologia più concreta e complicata del nostro tempo, la troviamo ricoperta di nomi e di ricordi la cui stessa familiarità è una falsificazione. Per esempio, quando diciamo che un paese conta un tale numero di musulmani, intendiamo in realtà che conta un tale numero di monoteisti; e con ciò intendiamo, in realtà, che conta un tale numero di uomini; uomini con l’antico presupposto medio degli uomini: che il sovrano invisibile rimanga invisibile. Lo professano insieme alle usanze di una certa cultura e sotto le leggi più semplici di un certo legislatore; ma così farebbero anche se il loro legislatore fosse Licurgo o Solone. Essi testimoniano qualcosa che è una verità necessaria e nobile; ma che non fu mai una verità nuova. Il loro credo non è un colore nuovo; è la tinta neutra e normale che fa da sfondo alla vita multicolore dell’uomo. Maometto non trovò, come i Magi, una stella nuova; scorse attraverso la sua particolare finestra un barlume del grande campo grigio dell’antica luce stellare. Così, quando diciamo che quel paese conta un tale numero di confuciani o di buddisti, intendiamo che conta un tale numero di pagani i cui profeti hanno dato loro un’altra e piuttosto più vaga versione del potere invisibile, rendendolo non soltanto invisibile ma quasi impersonale. Quando diciamo che essi hanno anche templi e idoli e sacerdoti e feste periodiche, intendiamo semplicemente che questa specie di pagano è abbastanza uomo da ammettere l’elemento popolare della pompa e delle immagini e dei banchetti e delle fiabe. Intendiamo soltanto che i pagani hanno più buon senso dei puritani. Ma ciò che gli dèi si suppone che siano, ciò che i sacerdoti hanno l’incarico di dire, non è un segreto sensazionale come ciò che avevano da dire quei messaggeri correnti del Vangelo. Nessun altro all’infuori di quei messaggeri ha alcun Vangelo; nessun altro ha alcuna buona novella; per la semplice ragione che nessun altro ha alcuna novità.
Quei corridori raccolgono slancio mentre corrono. Secoli dopo, parlano ancora come se qualcosa fosse appena accaduto. Non hanno perduto la velocità e lo slancio dei messaggeri; non hanno quasi perduto, per così dire, gli occhi accesi dei testimoni. Nella Chiesa cattolica, che è la coorte del messaggio, ci sono ancora quegli atti impetuosi di santità che parlano di qualcosa di rapido e di recente; un sacrificio di sé che sbalordisce il mondo come un suicidio. Ma non è un suicidio; non è pessimistico; è ancora ottimistico come san Francesco dei fiori e degli uccelli. È più nuovo nello spirito delle più nuove scuole di pensiero; ed è quasi certamente alla vigilia di nuovi trionfi. Poiché questi uomini servono una madre che sembra farsi più bella man mano che nuove generazioni si levano e la proclamano beata. Potremmo talvolta immaginare che la Chiesa si faccia più giovane man mano che il mondo invecchia.
Poiché questa è l’ultima prova del miracolo: che qualcosa di così soprannaturale sia diventato così naturale. Voglio dire che qualcosa di così unico, visto dal di fuori, sembri universale soltanto visto dal di dentro. Non ho sminuito la portata del miracolo, come alcuni dei nostri teologi più sconsiderati ritengono saggio fare. Al contrario, mi sono deliberatamente soffermato su quella incredibile interruzione, come su un colpo che ha spezzato la spina dorsale stessa della storia. Ho grande simpatia per i monoteisti, i musulmani o gli ebrei, ai quali essa appare una bestemmia; una bestemmia capace di scuotere il mondo. Ma non scosse il mondo; lo rese saldo. Quel fatto, più lo consideriamo, tanto più ci apparirà solido e strano. Ritengo un atto di semplice giustizia verso tutti i miscredenti insistere sull’audacia dell’atto di fede che viene loro richiesto. Riconosco volentieri e calorosamente che esso è, in sé, una proposta di fronte alla quale potremmo aspettarci che vacilli persino il cervello del credente, quando prende coscienza della propria fede. Ma il cervello del credente non vacilla; sono i cervelli dei miscredenti a vacillare. Possiamo vedere i loro cervelli vacillare da ogni parte e in ogni stravaganza dell’etica e della psicologia; nel pessimismo e nella negazione della vita; nel pragmatismo e nella negazione della logica; a cercare i propri presagi negli incubi e i propri canoni nelle contraddizioni; a gridare per la paura alla vista lontana di cose al di là del bene e del male, o a bisbigliare di strane stelle dove due più due fa cinque. Intanto questa cosa solitaria, che a prima vista appare così scandalosa nel profilo, rimane solida e sana nella sostanza. Rimane il moderatore di tutte queste manie; salvando la ragione dai pragmatisti esattamente come salvò il riso dai puritani. Ripeto che ne ho deliberatamente sottolineato il carattere intrinsecamente sfidante e dogmatico. Il mistero è come qualcosa di così sconcertante abbia potuto rimanere sfidante e dogmatico e nondimeno diventare perfettamente normale e naturale. Ho ammesso francamente che, considerando l’episodio in sé, un uomo che dice di essere Dio può essere classificato insieme a un uomo che dice di essere di vetro. Ma l’uomo che dice di essere di vetro non è un vetraio che fabbrica finestre per il mondo intero. Egli non rimane per le età future come una figura splendente e cristallina, alla cui luce ogni cosa è limpida come cristallo.
Ma questa follia è rimasta sana. La follia è rimasta sana quando tutto il resto è impazzito. Il manicomio è stato una casa alla quale, età dopo età, gli uomini tornano di continuo come a un focolare. Questo è l’enigma che rimane: che qualcosa di così brusco e anormale possa ancora essere trovato una cosa abitabile e ospitale. Non m’importa se lo scettico dice che è una fandonia; non riesco a vedere come una torre così vacillante abbia potuto reggersi tanto a lungo senza fondamenta. Ancor meno riesco a vedere come abbia potuto diventare, come è diventata, il focolare dell’uomo. Se fosse semplicemente apparsa e scomparsa, forse la si sarebbe potuta ricordare o spiegare come l’ultimo balzo della furia dell’illusione, il mito estremo dell’umore estremo, in cui la mente urtò il cielo e si spezzò. Ma la mente non si spezzò. È l’unica mente che rimane integra nella disgregazione del mondo. Se fosse un errore, parrebbe che quell’errore avrebbe potuto a stento durare un giorno. Se fosse una semplice estasi, parrebbe che una simile estasi non avrebbe potuto durare un’ora. È durata per quasi duemila anni; e il mondo racchiuso in essa è stato più lucido, più assennato, più ragionevole nelle sue speranze, più sano nei suoi istinti, più arguto e più sereno di fronte al fato e alla morte, di tutto il mondo che le stava fuori. Poiché fu l’anima della cristianità a scaturire dall’incredibile Cristo; e l’anima di essa era il buon senso. Benché non osassimo guardare il Suo volto, potevamo guardarne i frutti; e dai Suoi frutti Lo avremmo riconosciuto. I frutti sono solidi e la fecondità è ben più di una metafora; e in nessun luogo di questo triste mondo i fanciulli sono più felici sui meli, o gli uomini in un più concorde coro mentre cantano pigiando l’uva, che sotto il balenio fisso di questa istantanea e intollerante illuminazione: il fulmine reso eterno come la luce.
APPENDIX I
ON PREHISTORIC MAN
On re-reading these pages I feel that I have tried in many places and with many words, to say something that might be said in one word. In a sense this study is meant to be superficial. That is, it is not meant as a study of the things that need to be studied. It is rather a reminder of the things that are seen so quickly that they are forgotten almost as quickly. Its moral, in a manner of speaking, is that first thoughts are best; so a flash might reveal a landscape; with the Eiffel Tower or the Matterhorn standing up in it as they would never stand up again in the light of common day. I ended the book with an image of everlasting lightning; in a very different sense, alas, this little flash has lasted only too long. But the method has also certain practical disadvantages upon which I think it well to add these two notes. It may seem to simplify too much and to ignore out of ignorance. I feel this especially in the passage about the prehistoric pictures; which is not concerned with all that the learned may learn from prehistoric pictures, but with the single point of what anyone could learn from there being any prehistoric pictures at all. I am conscious that this attempt to express it in terms of innocence may exaggerate even my own ignorance. Without any pretence of scientific research or information, I should be sorry to have it thought that I knew no more than what was needed, in that passage, of the states into which primitive humanity has been divided. I am aware, of course, that the story is elaborately stratified; and that there were many such stages before the Cro-Magnon or any peoples with whom we associate such pictures. Indeed recent studies about the Neanderthal and other races rather tend to repeat the moral that is here most relevant. The notion noted in these pages of something necessarily slow or late in the development of religion, will gain little indeed from these later revelations about the precursors of the reindeer picture-maker. The learned appear to hold that, whether the reindeer picture could be religious or not, the people that lived before it were religious already; burying their dead with the significant signs of mystery and hope. This obviously brings us back to the same argument; an argument that is not approached by any measurement of the earlier man’s skull. It is little use here to compare the head of the man with the head of the monkey, if it certainly never came into the head of the monkey to bury another monkey with nuts in his grave to help him towards a heavenly monkey house. Talking of skulls, I am also aware of the story of the Cro-Magnon skull that was much larger and finer than a modern skull. It is a very funny story; because an eminent evolutionist, awakening to a somewhat belated caution, protested against anything being inferred from one specimen. It is the duty of a solitary skull to prove that our fathers were our inferiors. Any solitary skull presuming to prove that they were superior is felt to be suffering from swelled head.
APPENDICE I
SULL’UOMO PREISTORICO
Rileggendo queste pagine sento di aver tentato in molti luoghi, e con molte parole, di dire qualcosa che potrebbe dirsi in una parola sola. In un certo senso questo studio vuol essere superficiale. Voglio dire che non è concepito come uno studio delle cose che meritano d’essere studiate. È piuttosto un richiamo alle cose che si vedono così in fretta da venire dimenticate quasi altrettanto in fretta. La sua morale, per così dire, è che i primi pensieri sono i migliori; così un lampo potrebbe rivelare un paesaggio, con la Torre Eiffel o il Cervino che vi si ergono come non si ergerebbero mai più alla luce del giorno comune. Ho chiuso il libro con l’immagine di un lampo eterno; in un senso assai diverso, ahimè, questo piccolo lampo è durato anche troppo. Ma il metodo comporta pure certi svantaggi pratici, sui quali credo bene aggiungere queste due note. Può sembrare che semplifichi troppo e che ignori per ignoranza. Lo avverto specialmente nel passo sulle pitture preistoriche; il quale non si occupa di tutto ciò che i dotti possono apprendere dalle pitture preistoriche, ma del solo punto di ciò che chiunque potrebbe apprendere dal fatto che esistano pitture preistoriche. Sono consapevole che questo tentativo di esprimerlo in termini di innocenza può esagerare perfino la mia stessa ignoranza. Senza alcuna pretesa di ricerca o di informazione scientifica, mi dispiacerebbe che si pensasse ch’io non sappia più di quanto occorreva, in quel passo, degli stadi in cui l’umanità primitiva è stata suddivisa. So bene, s’intende, che la storia è elaboratamente stratificata; e che vi furono molti di tali stadi prima dell’uomo di Cro-Magnon o di qualsiasi popolo cui associamo simili pitture. Anzi, studi recenti sull’uomo di Neanderthal e su altre razze tendono piuttosto a ripetere la morale qui più pertinente. La nozione, annotata in queste pagine, di qualcosa di necessariamente lento o tardivo nello sviluppo della religione ben poco guadagnerà, in verità, da queste più recenti rivelazioni sui precursori del pittore di renne. I dotti paiono sostenere che, potesse o no la pittura di renne essere religiosa, il popolo che visse prima di essa era già religioso; e seppelliva i suoi morti con i segni significativi del mistero e della speranza. Ciò evidentemente ci riporta al medesimo argomento; un argomento che nessuna misurazione del cranio dell’uomo più antico riesce ad avvicinare. Poco giova qui confrontare la testa dell’uomo con la testa della scimmia, se di sicuro non venne mai in testa alla scimmia di seppellire un’altra scimmia con delle noci nella tomba per aiutarla a raggiungere una celeste dimora di scimmie. A proposito di crani, conosco anche la storia del cranio di Cro-Magnon che era assai più grande e più bello di un cranio moderno. È una storia molto buffa; perché un eminente evoluzionista, ridestandosi a una cautela alquanto tardiva, protestò contro ogni deduzione tratta da un solo esemplare. È dovere di un cranio solitario provare che i nostri padri erano nostri inferiori. Ogni cranio solitario che pretenda di provare che essi erano superiori è ritenuto affetto da montatura della testa.
APPENDIX II
ON AUTHORITY AND ACCURACY
In this book which is merely meant as a popular criticism of popular fallacies, often indeed of very vulgar errors, I feel that I have sometimes given an impression of scoffing at serious scientific work. It was however the very reverse of my intentions. I am not arguing with the scientist who explains the elephant, but only with the sophist who explains it away. And as a matter of fact the sophist plays to the gallery, as he did in ancient Greece. He appeals to the ignorant, especially when he appeals to the learned. But I never meant my own criticism to be an impertinence to the truly learned. We all owe an infinite debt to the researches, especially the recent researches, of single minded students in these matters; and I have only professed to pick up things here and there from them. I have not loaded my abstract argument with quotations and references, which only make a man look more learned than he is; but in some cases I find that my own loose fashion of allusion is rather misleading about my own meaning. The passage about Chaucer and the Child Martyr is badly expressed; I only mean that the English poet probably had in mind the English saint; of whose story he gives a sort of foreign version. In the same way two statements in the chapter on Mythology follow each other in such a way that it may seem to be suggested that the second story about monotheism refers to the Southern Seas. I may explain that Atahocan belongs not to Australasian but to American savages. So in the chapter called “The Antiquity of Civilisation,” which I feel to be the most unsatisfactory, I have given my own impression of the meaning of the development of Egyptian monarchy too much, perhaps, as if it were identical with the facts on which it was formed as given in works like those of Professor J. L Myres. But the confusion was not intentional; still less was there any intention to imply, in the remainder of the chapter, that the anthropological speculations about races are less valuable than they undoubtedly are. My criticism is strictly relative; I may say that the pyramids are plainer than the tracks of the desert; without denying that wiser men than I may see tracks in what is to me the trackless sand.
APPENDICE II
SULL’AUTORITÀ E L’ESATTEZZA
In questo libro, che vuol essere soltanto una critica popolare di errori popolari, e spesso invero di errori assai volgari, sento di aver talvolta dato l’impressione di beffarmi del serio lavoro scientifico. Era però tutto il contrario delle mie intenzioni. Non discuto con lo scienziato che spiega l’elefante, ma soltanto con il sofista che lo spiega via. E di fatto il sofista recita per la galleria, come faceva nell’antica Grecia. Fa appello agli ignoranti, specialmente quando fa appello ai dotti. Ma non ho mai inteso che la mia critica fosse un’impertinenza verso i veri dotti. Tutti dobbiamo un debito infinito alle ricerche, e specialmente alle ricerche recenti, di studiosi di animo integro in queste materie; e io non ho fatto altro che professare di raccogliere qua e là qualcosa da loro. Non ho appesantito il mio argomento astratto con citazioni e rimandi, che servono solo a far apparire un uomo più dotto di quel che è; ma in taluni casi trovo che il mio stesso modo disinvolto di alludere è piuttosto fuorviante circa il mio proprio significato. Il passo su Chaucer e il Fanciullo Martire è mal espresso; voglio dire soltanto che il poeta inglese aveva probabilmente in mente il santo inglese, della cui storia egli dà una specie di versione straniera. Allo stesso modo due affermazioni nel capitolo sulla Mitologia si susseguono in maniera tale che può parere si suggerisca che la seconda storia sul monoteismo si riferisca ai Mari del Sud. Posso spiegare che Atahocan appartiene non ai selvaggi australasiatici ma a quelli americani. Così nel capitolo intitolato «L’antichità della civiltà», che sento essere il più insoddisfacente, ho reso la mia personale impressione del significato dello sviluppo della monarchia egizia troppo, forse, come se fosse identica ai fatti su cui essa era fondata, quali sono esposti in opere come quelle del professor J. L. Myres. Ma la confusione non era intenzionale; ancor meno vi era l’intenzione di sottintendere, nel resto del capitolo, che le speculazioni antropologiche sulle razze siano meno preziose di quanto indubbiamente sono. La mia critica è strettamente relativa; posso dire che le piramidi sono più chiare delle tracce del deserto, senza negare che uomini più saggi di me possano scorgere tracce in ciò che a me appare sabbia senza tracce.