2. ATON THE TENDER FATHER OF ALL CREATION.
Amon-Ra and the old gods of Egypt were, for the most part, but deified mortals, endued with monstrous, though limited, powers, and still having around them traditions of aggrandised human deeds. Others, we have seen, had their origin in natural phenomena: the wind, the Nile, the starry heavens, and the like. All were terrific or revengeful, if so they had a mind to be, and all were able to be moved by human emotions. But to Akhnaton, although he had absolutely no precedent upon which to launch his thoughts, God was the intangible and yet ever-present Father of mankind, made manifest in sunshine. The youthful high priest called upon his subjects to search for their God not in the confusion of battle or behind the smoke of human sacrifices, but amidst the flowers and the trees, amidst the wild duck and the fishes. He preached an enlightened nature-study: in some respects he was, perhaps, the first apostle of the Simple Life.
He strove to break down conventional thought, and ceaselessly he urged his people to worship “in truth,” simply, without an excess of ceremonial. While the elder gods had been apparent in natural convulsions and in the more awful incidents of life, Akhnaton’s kindly father could be seen in the little details of existence, in the growing poppies, in the soft wind which filled the sails of the ships, in the fish which leapt from the river. Like a greater than he, Akhnaton taught his disciples to address their maker as their “Father which art in Heaven.” The Aton was the joy which caused the young sheep “to dance upon their legs,” and the birds “to flutter in their marshes.” He was the god of the simple pleasures of life; and although Akhnaton himself was indeed a man of sorrows, plenteously acquainted with grief, happiness was the watchword which he gave to his followers.
Akhnaton did not permit any graven image to be made of the Aton. The True God, said the king, had no form; and he held to this opinion throughout his life. The symbol of the religion was the sun’s disk, from which there extended numerous rays, each ray ending in a hand; but this symbol was not worshipped. To Christians, in the same way, the cross is the symbol of their creed; but the cross itself is not worshipped. Never before had man conceived a formless deity, a god who was not endowed with the five human senses. The Hebrew patriarchs believed God to be capable of walking in a garden in the cool of the evening, to have made man in his own image, to be possessed of face, form, and hinder parts. But Akhnaton, stemming with his hand the flood of tradition, boldly proclaimed God to be a life-giving, intangible essence: the heat which is in the sun. He was “the living Aton,”—that is to say, the power which produced and sustained the energy and movement of the sun. Although he was so often called “the Aton,” he was more closely defined as “the Master of the Aton.”[46] The flaming glory of the sun was the most practical symbol of the godhead, and the warm rays of sunshine constituted the most obvious connection between heaven and earth; but always Akhnaton attempted to raise the eyes of the thinkers beyond this visible or understandable expression of divinity, to strain them upwards in the effort to discern that which was “behind the veil.” In lighting on a motive power more remote than the sun, and acting through the sun, the young Pharaoh may be said to have penetrated as far behind the eternal barrier as one may ever hope to penetrate this side the churchyard. But though so remote, the Aton was the tender, loving Father of all men, ever-present and ever-mindful of his creatures. There dropped not a sigh from the lips of a babe that the intangible Aton did not hear; no lamb bleated for its mother but the remote Aton hastened to soothe it. He was the loving “Father and Mother of all that He had made,” who “brought up millions by His bounty.”
The destructive qualities of the sun were never referred to, and that pitiless orb under which Egypt sweats and groans for the summer months each year had nothing in common with the gentle Father conceived by Akhnaton. The Aton was “the Lord of Love.” He was the tender nurse who “creates the man-child in woman, and soothes him that he may not weep”; whose love, to use an Egyptian phrase of exquisite tenderness, “makes the hands to faint.” His beams were “beauteous with love” as they fell upon His people and upon His city, “very rich in love.” “Thy love is great and large,” says one of Akhnaton’s psalms. “Thou fillest the two lands of Egypt with Thy love;” and another passage runs: “Thy rays encompass the lands.... Thou bindest them with Thy love.”
Surely never in the history of the world had man conceived a god who “so loved the world.” One may search the inscriptions in vain for any reference to a malignant power, to vengeance, to jealousy, or to hatred. The Hebrew psalmist said of God, “Like as a father pitieth his children, even so is the Lord merciful”; and Akhnaton, many a century before those words were written, attributed just such a nature to the Aton. The Aton was compassionate, was merciful, was gentle, was tender; He knew not anger, and there was no wrath in Him. His overflowing love reached down the paths of life from mankind to the beasts of the field and to the little flowers themselves. “All flowers blow,” says one of Akhnaton’s hymns, “and that which grows on the soil thrives at Thy dawning, O Aton. They drink their fill [of warmth] before Thy face. All cattle leap upon their feet; the birds that were in the nest fly forth with joy; their wings which were closed move quickly with praise to the living Aton.”
One stands amazed as one reads in pompous Egypt of a god who listens “when the chicken crieth in the egg-shell,” and gives him life, delighting that he should “chirp with all his might” when he is hatched forth; who finds pleasure in causing “the birds to flutter in their marshes, and the sheep to dance upon their feet.” For the first time in the history of man the real meaning of God, as we now understand it, had been comprehended; and the idea of a beneficent Creator who, though remote, spiritual, and impersonal, could love each one of His creatures, great or small, had been grasped by this young Pharaoh. God’s unspeakable goodness and loving-kindness were as clearly interpreted by Akhnaton as ever they have been by mortal man; and the wonder of it lies in this, that Akhnaton had absolutely nothing to base his theories upon. He was, so far as we know, the first man to whom God revealed Himself as the passionless, all-loving essence of unqualified goodness.