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Theological Essays and Other Papers v1

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Theological Essays and Other Papers v1




Yet, when it occurs to a man that, in this _Do ut des_, the
general _Do_ was either a temple or a sacrifice, naturally it
occurs to ask what _was_ a sacrifice? I am afraid that the dark
murderous nature of the pagan gods is here made apparent. Modern
readers, who have had no particular reason for reflecting on the
nature and management of a sacrifice, totally misconceive it. They
have a vague notion that the slaughtered animal was roasted, served
up on the altars as a banquet to the gods; that these gods by some
representative ceremony 'made believe' to eat it; and that finally,
(as dishes that had now become hallowed to divine use,) the several
joints were disposed of in some mysterious manner: burned, suppose,
or buried under the altars, or committed to the secret keeping
of rivers. Nothing of the sort: when a man made a sacrifice, the
meaning was, that he gave a dinner. And not only was every sacrifice
a dinner party, but every dinner party was a sacrifice. This was
strictly so in the good old ferocious times of paganism, as may be
seen in the Iliad: it was not said, 'Agamemnon has a dinner party
to-day,' but 'Agamemnon sacrifices to Apollo.' Even in Rome, to
the last days of paganism, it is probable that some slight memorial
continued to connect the dinner party [_cœna_] with a divine
sacrifice; and thence partly arose the sanctity of the hospitable
board; but to the east of the Mediterranean the full ritual of a
sacrifice must have been preserved in all banquets, long after it
had faded to a form in the less superstitious West. This we may
learn from that point of casuistry treated by St. Paul,--whether
a Christian might lawfully eat of things offered to idols. The
question was most urgent; because a Christian could not accept an
invitation to dine with a Grecian fellow-citizen who still adhered
to paganism, _without_ eating things offered to idols;--the
whole banquet was dedicated to an idol. If he would not take
_that_, he must continue _impransus_. Consequently, the
question virtually amounted to this: Were the Christians to separate
themselves altogether from those whose interests were in so many
ways entangled with their own, on the single consideration that these
persons were heathens? To refuse their hospitalities, _was_
to separate, and with a hostile expression of feeling. That would
be to throw hindrances in the way of Christianity: the religion could
not spread rapidly under such repulsive prejudices; and dangers,
that it became un-Christian to provoke, would thus multiply against
the infant faith. This being so, and as the gods were really the
only parties invited who got nothing at all of the banquet, it
becomes a question of some interest,--what _did_ they get?
They were merely mocked, if they had no compensatory interest in
the dinner! For surely it was an inconceivable mode of honoring
Jupiter, that you and I should eat a piece of roast beef, leaving
to the god's share only the mockery of a _Barmecide_ invitation,
assigning him a chair which every body knew that he would never
fill, and a plate which might as well have been filled with warm
water? Jupiter got _something_, be assured; and what _was_
it? This it was,--the luxury of inhaling the groans, the fleeting
breath, the palpitations, the agonies, of the dying victim. This
was the dark interest which the wretches of Olympus had in human
invitations to dinner: and it is too certain, upon comparing facts
and dates, that, when left to their own choice, the gods had a
preference for _man_ as the victim. All things concur to show,
that precisely as you ascend above civilization, which continually
increased the limitations upon the gods of Olympus, precisely as
you go back to that gloomy state in which their true propensities
had power to reveal themselves, was man the genuine victim for
_them_, and the dying anguish of man the best 'nidor' that
ascended from earthly banquets to _their_ nostrils. Their
stern eyes smiled darkly upon the throbbings of tortured flesh, as
in Moloch's ears dwelt like music the sound of infants' wailings.
Secondly, as to the birth of a new idea respecting the nature
of God:--It may not have occurred to every reader, but none will
perhaps object to it, when once suggested to his consideration,
that--as is the god of any nation, such will be that nation. God,
however falsely conceived of by man. even though splintered into
fragments by Polytheism, or disfigured by the darkest mythologies,
is still the greatest of all objects offered to human contemplation.
Man, when thrown upon his own delusions, may have raised himself,
or may have adopted from others, the very falsest of ideals, as
the true image and reflection of what he calls god. In his lowest
condition of darkness, terror may be the moulding principle for
spiritual conceptions; power, the engrossing attribute which he
ascribes to his deity; and this power may be hideously capricious,
or associated with vindictive cruelty. It may even happen, that
his standard of what is highest in the divinity should be capable
of falling greatly below what an enlightened mind would figure to
itself as lowest in man. A more shocking monument, indeed, there
cannot be than this, of the infinity by which man may descend
below his own capacities of grandeur: the gods, in some systems of
religion, have been such and so monstrous by excesses of wickedness,
as to insure, if annually one hour of periodical eclipse should
have left them at the mercy of man, a general rush from their own
worshippers for strangling them as mad dogs. Hypocrisy, the cringing
of sycophants, and the credulities of fear, united to conceal this
misotheism; but we may be sure that it was widely diffused through
the sincerities of the human heart. An intense desire for kicking
Jupiter, or for hanging him, if found convenient, must have lurked
in the honorable Koman heart, before the sincerity of human nature
could have extorted upon the Roman stage a public declaration,--that
their supreme gods were capable of enormities which a poor,
unpretending human creature [homuncio] would have disdained. Many
times the ideal of the divine nature, as adopted by pagan races,
fell under the contempt, not only of men superior to the national
superstition, but of men partaking in that superstition. Yet, with
all those drawbacks, an ideal _was_ an ideal. The being set
up for adoration as god, _was_ such upon the whole to the
worshipper; since, if there had been any higher mode of excellence
conceivable for _him_, that higher mode would have virtually
become his deity. It cannot be doubted, therefore, that the nature
of the national divinities indicated the qualities which ranked
highest in the national estimation; and that being contemplated
continually in the spirit of veneration, these qualities must have
worked an extensive conformity to their own standard. The mythology
sanctioned by the ritual of public worship, the features of moral
nature in the gods distributed through that mythology, and sometimes
commemorated by gleams in that ritual, domineered over the popular
heart, even in those cases where the religion had been a derivative
religion, and not originally moulded by impulses breathing from
the native disposition. So that, upon the whole, such as were the
gods of a nation, such was the nation: given the particular idolatry,
it became possible to decipher the character of the idolaters. Where
Moloch was worshipped, the people would naturally be found cruel;
where the Paphian Venus, it could not be expected that they should
escape the taint of a voluptuous effeminacy.

Against this principle, there could have been no room for demur,
were it not through that inveterate prejudice besieging the modern
mind,--as though all religion, however false, implied some scheme
of morals connected with it. However imperfectly discharged,
one function even of the pagan priest (it is supposed) must have
been--to guide, to counsel, to exhort, as a teacher of morals. And,
had _that_ been so, the practical precepts, and the moral
commentary coming after even the grossest forms of worship, or
the most revolting mythological legends, might have operated to
neutralize their horrors, or even to allegorize them into better
meanings. Lord Bacon, as a trial of skill, has attempted something of
that sort in his 'Wisdom of the Ancients.' But all this is modern
refinement, either in the spirit of playful ingenuity or of ignorance.
I have said sufficiently that there was no _doctrinal_ part in
the religion of the pagans. There was a _cultus_, or ceremonial
worship: _that_ constituted the sum total of religion, in the
idea of a pagan. There was a necessity, for the sake of guarding
its traditional usages, and upholding and supporting its pomp, that
official persons should preside in this _cultus_: _that_
constituted the duty of the priest. Beyond this ritual of public
worship, there was nothing at all; nothing to believe, nothing
to understand. A set of legendary tales undoubtedly there was,
connected with the mythologic history of each separate deity. But
in what sense you understood these, or whether you were at all
acquainted with them, was a matter of indifference to the priests;
since many of these legends were variously related, and some had
apparently been propagated in ridicule of the gods, rather than in
their honor.

With Christianity a new scene was opened. In this religion the
_cultus_, or form of worship, was not even the primary business,
far less was it the exclusive business. The worship flowed as a
direct consequence from the new idea exposed of the divine nature,
and from the new idea of man's relations to this nature. Here were
suddenly unmasked great doctrines, truths positive and directly
avowed: whereas, in Pagan forms of religion, any notices which then
were, or seemed to be, of circumstances surrounding the gods, related
only to matters of fact or accident, such as that a particular
god was the son or the nephew of some other god; a truth, if it
_were_ a truth, wholly impertinent to any interest of man.

As there are some important truths, dimly perceived or not at all,
lurking in the idea of God,--an idea too vast to be navigable as
yet by the human understanding, yet here and there to be coasted,--I
wish at this point to direct the reader's attention upon a passage
which he may happen to remember in Sir Isaac Newton: the passage
occurs at the end of the 'Optics;' and the exact expressions I do
not remember; but the sense is what I am going to state: Sir Isaac
is speaking of God; and he takes occasion to say, that God is not
good, but goodness; is not holy, but holiness; is not infinite,
but infinity. This, I apprehend, will have struck many readers as
merely a rhetorical _bravura_; sublime, perhaps, and fitted
to exalt the feeling of awe connected with so unapproachable a
mystery, but otherwise not throwing any new light upon the darkness
of the idea as a problem before the intellect. Yet indirectly
perhaps it _does_, when brought out into its latent sense by
placing it in juxtaposition with paganism. If a philosophic theist,
who is also a Christian, or who (_not_ being a Christian,)
has yet by his birth and breeding become saturated with Christian
ideas and feelings,[Footnote: this case is far from uncommon; and
undoubtedly, from having too much escaped observation, it has been
the cause of much error. Poets I could mention, if it were not
invidious to do so, who, whilst composing in a spirit of burning
enmity to the Christian faith, yet rested for the very sting of
their pathos upon ideas that but for Christianity could never have
existed. Translators there have been, English, French, German, of
Mahometan books, who have so colored the whole vein of thinking with
sentiments peculiar to Christianity, as to draw from a reflecting
reader the exclamation, 'If this can be indeed the product
of Islamism, wherefore should Christianity exist?' If thoughts so
divine can, indeed, belong to a false religion, what more could
we gain from a true one?] attempts to realize the idea of supreme
Deity, he becomes aware of a double and contradictory movement in
his own mind whilst striving towards that result. He demands, in
the first place, something in the highest degree generic; and yet
again in the opposite direction, something in the highest degree
individual; he demands on the one path, a vast ideality, and yet
on the other, in union with a determinate personality. He must not
surrender himself to the first impulse, else he is betrayed into a
mere _anima mundi_; he must not surrender himself to the second,
else he is betrayed into something merely human. This difficult
antagonism, of what is most and what is least generic, must be
maintained, otherwise the idea, the possible idea, of that august
unveiling which takes place in the Judaico-Christian God, is
absolutely in clouds. Now, this antagonism utterly collapses in
paganism. And to a philosophic apprehension, this peculiarity of
the heathen gods is more shocking and fearful than what at first
sight had seemed most so. When a man pauses for the purpose of
attentively reviewing the Pantheon of Greece and Rome, what strikes
him at the first with most depth of impression and with most horror
is, the _wickedness_ of this Pantheon. And he observes with
surprise, that this wickedness, which is at a furnace-heat in the
superior gods, becomes fainter and paler as you descend. Amongst
the semi-deities, such as the Oreads or Dryads, the Nereids or
Naiads, he feels not at all offended. The odor of corruption, the
_saeva mephitis_, has by this time exhaled. The uproar of
eternal outrage has ceased. And these gentle divinities, if too
human and too beset with infirmities, are not impure, and not vexed
with ugly appetites, nor instinct of quarrel: they are tranquil
as are the hills and the forests; passionless as are the seas and
the fountains which they tenant. But, when he ascends to the _dii
majorum gentium_, to those twelve gods of the supreme house,
who may be called in respect of rank, the Paladins of the classical
Pantheon, secret horror comes over him at the thought that demons,
reflecting the worst aspects of brutal races, ever _could_
have levied worship from his own. It is true they do so no longer
as regards _our_ planet. But what _has_ been apparently
_may_ be. God made the Greeks and Romans of one blood with
himself; he cannot deny that _intellectually_ the Greeks--he
cannot deny that _morally_ the Romans--were amongst the foremost
of human races; and he trembles in thinking that abominations, whose
smoke ascended through so many ages to the _supreme_ heavens,
may, or might, so far as human resistance is concerned, again
become the law for the noblest of his species. A deep feeling, it
is true, exists latently in human beings of something perishable
in evil. Whatsoever is founded in wickedness, according to a deep
misgiving dispersed amongst men, must be tainted with corruption.
_There_ might seem consolation; but a man who reflects is
not quite so sure of _that_. As a commonplace resounding in
schools, it may be justly current amongst us, that what is evil
by nature or by origin must be transient. But _that_ may be
because evil in all human things is partial, is heterogeneous; evil
mixed with good; and the two natures, by their mutual enmity, must
enter into a collision, which may possibly guarantee the final
destruction of the whole compound. Such a result may not threaten
a nature that is purely and totally evil, that is _homogeneously_
evil. Dark natures there may be, whose _essence_ is evil, that
may have an abiding root in the system of the universe not less
awfully exempt from change than the mysterious foundations of God.

This is dreadful. Wickedness that is immeasurable, in connection
with power that is superhuman, appals the imagination. Yet this is
a combination that might easily have been conceived; and a wicked
god still commands a mode of reverence. But that feature of the
pagan pantheon, which I am contrasting with this, viz., that no
pagan deity is an _abstraction_ but a vile _concrete_, impresses
myself with a subtler sense of horror; because it blends the
hateful with a mode of the ludicrous. For the sake of explaining
myself to the non-philosophic reader, I beg him to consider what
is the sort of feeling with which he regards an ancient river-god,
or the presiding nymph of a fountain. The impression which he
receives is pretty much like that from the monumental figure of some
allegoric being, such as Faith or Hope, Fame or Truth. He hardly
believes that the most superstitious Grecian seriously believed
in such a being as a distinct personality. He feels convinced that
the sort of personal existence ascribed to such an abstraction,
as well as the human shape, are merely modes of representing and
drawing into unity a variety of phenomena and agencies that seem
_one_, by means of their unintermitting continuity, and because
they tend to one common purpose. Now, from such a symbolic god as
this, let him pass to Jupiter or Mercury, and instantly he becomes
aware of a revolting individuality. He sees before him the opposite
pole of deity. The river-god had too little of a concrete character.
Jupiter has nothing else. In Jupiter you read no incarnation of
any abstract quality whatever: he represents nothing whatever in
the metaphysics of the universe. Except for the accident of his
power, he is merely a man. He has a _character_, that is,
a tendency or determination to this quality or that, in excess;
whereas a nature truly divine must be _in equilibrio_ as to all
qualities, and comprehend them all, in the way that a _genus_
comprehends the subordinate _species_. He has even a personal
history: he has passed through certain adventures, faced certain
dangers, and survived hostilities that, at one time, were doubtful
in their issue. No trace, in short, appears, in any Grecian god, of
the generic. Whereas we, in our Christian ideas of God, unconsciously,
and without thinking of Sir Isaac Newton, realize Sir Isaac's
conceptions. We think of him as having a sort of allegoric generality,
liberated from the bonds of the individual; and yet, also, as the
most awful among natures, having a conscious personality. He is
diffused through all things, present everywhere, and yet not the
less present locally. He is at a distance unapproachable by finite
creatures; and yet, without any contradiction, (as the profound St.
Paul observes,) 'not very far' from every one of us. And I will
venture to say, that many a poor old woman has, by virtue of her
Christian inoculation, Sir Isaac's great idea lurking in her mind;
as for instance, in relation to any of God's attributes; suppose
holiness or happiness, she feels, (though analytically she could
not explain,) that God is not holy or is not happy by way of
participation, after the manner of other beings: that is, he does
not draw happiness from a fountain separate and external to himself,
and common to other creatures, he drawing more and they drawing
less; but that he, himself _is_ the fountain; that no other
being can have the least proportion of either one or the other but
by drawing from that fountain; that as to all other good gifts, that
as to life itself, they are, in man, not on any separate tenure,
not primarily, but derivatively, and only in so far as God enters
into the nature of man; that 'we live and move' only so far and so
long as the incomprehensible union takes place between the human
spirit and the fontal abyss of the divine. In short, here, and here
only, is found the outermost expansion, the centrifugal, of the
TO catholic, united with the innermost centripetal of the personal
consciousness. Had, therefore, the pagan gods been less detestable,
neither impure nor malignant, they could not have won a salutary
veneration--being so merely concrete individuals.

Next, it must have degraded the gods, (and have made them instruments
of degradation for man,) that they were, one and all, incarnations;
not, as even the Christian God is, for a transitory moment and for
an eternal purpose; but essentially and by overruling necessity. The
Greeks could not conceive of spirituality. Neither can _we_,
metaphysically, assign the conditions of the spiritual; but,
practically, we all feel and represent to our own minds the agencies
of God, as liberated from bonds of space and time, of flesh and of
resistance. This the Greeks could _not_ feel, could _not_
represent. And the only advantage which the gods enjoyed over the
worm and the grub was, that they, (or at least the Paladins amongst
them--the twelve supreme gods,) could pass, fluently, from one
incarnation to another.

Thirdly. Out of that essential bondage to flesh arose a dreadful
suspicion of something worse: in what relation did the pagan gods
stand to the abominable phenomenon of death? It is not by uttering
pompous flatteries of ever-living and _ambrotos aei_, &c., that
a poet could intercept the searching jealousies of human penetration.
These are merely oriental forms of compliment. And here, by the
way, as elsewhere, we find Plato vehemently confuted: for it was
the undue exaltation of the gods, and not their degradation, which
must be ascribed to the frauds of poets. Tradition, and no poetic
tradition, absolutely pointed to the grave of more gods than one.
But waiving all _that_ as liable to dispute, one thing we
know, from the ancients themselves, as open to no question, that
all the gods were _born_; were born infants; passed through
the stages of helplessness and growth; from all which the inference
was but too fatally obvious. Besides, there were grandfathers,
and even great-grandfathers in the Pantheon: some of these were
confessedly superannuated; nay, some had disappeared. Even men,
who knew but little of Olympian records, knew this, at least,
for certain, that more than one dynasty of gods had passed over
the golden stage of Olympus, had made their _exit_, and were
hurrying onward to oblivion. It was matter of notoriety, also,
that all these gods were and had been liable to the taint of sorrow
for the death of their earthly children, (as the Homeric Jupiter
for Sarpedon, Thetis for Achilles, Calliope, in Euripides, for
her blooming Rhesus;) all were liable to fear; all to physical
pain; all to anxiety; all to the indefinite menaces of a danger
not measurable.[Footnote: it must not be forgotten that all the
superior gods passed through an infancy (as Jove, &c.) or even an
adolescence, (as Bacchus,) or even a maturity, (as the majority of
Olympus during the insurrection of the Titans,) surrounded by perils
that required not strength only, but artifice, and even abject
self-concealment to evade.] Looking backwards or looking forwards,
the gods beheld enemies that attacked their existence, or modes of
decay, (known and unknown,) which gnawed at their roots. All this
I take the trouble to insist upon: not as though it could be worth
any man's trouble, at this day, to expose (on its own account) the
frailty of the Pantheon, but with a view to the closer estimate of
the Divine idea amongst men; and by way of contrast to the power
of that idea under Christianity: since I contend that, such as is
the God of every people, such, in the corresponding features of
character, will be that people. If the god (like Moloch) is fierce,
the people will be cruel; if (like Typhon) a destroying energy,
the people will be gloomy; if (like the Paphian Venus) libidinous,
the people will be voluptuously effeminate. When the gods are
perishable, man cannot have the grandeurs of his nature developed:
when the shadow of death sits upon the highest of what man represents
to himself as celestial, essential blight will sit for ever upon
human aspirations. One thing only remains to be added on this
subject: Why were not the ancients more profoundly afflicted by
the treacherous gleams of mortality in their gods? How was it that
they could forget, for a moment, a revelation so full of misery?
Since not only the character of man partly depended upon the quality
of his god, but also and _a fortiori_, his destiny upon the
destiny of his god. But the reason of his indifference to the divine
mortality was--because, at any rate, the pagan man's connection
with the gods terminated at his own death. Even selfish men would
reconcile themselves to an earthquake, which should swallow up all
the world; and the most unreasonable man has professed his readiness,
at all times, to die with a dying universe--_mundo secum pereunte,
mori_.

But, _thirdly_, the gods being such, in what relation to them
did man stand? It is a fact hidden from the mass of the ancients
themselves, but sufficiently attested, that there was an ancient
and secret enmity between the whole family of the gods and the
human race. This is confessed by Herodotus as a persuasion spread
through some of the nations amongst which he travelled: there was
a sort of truce, indeed, between the parties; temples, with their
religious services, and their votive offerings, recorded this truce.
But below all these appearances lay deadly enmity, to be explained
only by one who should know the mysterious history of both parties
from the eldest times. It is extraordinary, however, that Herodotus
should rely, for this account, upon the belief of distant nations, when
the same belief was so deeply recorded amongst his own countrymen
in the sublime story of Prometheus. Much[Footnote: not all: for part
was due to the obstinate concealment from Jupiter, by Prometheus,
of the danger which threatened his throne in a coming generation.]
of the sufferings endured by Prometheus was on account of man,
whom he had befriended; and, _by_ befriending, had defeated
the malignity of Jove. According to some, man was even created by
Prometheus: but no accounts, until lying Platonic philophers arose,
in far later times, represented man as created by Jupiter.

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