I.—THEISM
In this view God is distinct from, and opposed to, the world as its creator, sustainer, and ruler. He is always conceived in a more or less human form, as an organism which thinks and acts like a man—only on a much higher scale. This anthropomorphic God, polyphyletically evolved by the different races, assumes an infinity of shapes in their imagination, from fetichism to the refined monotheistic religions of the present day. The chief forms of theism are polytheism, triplotheism, amphitheism, and monotheism.
The polytheist peoples the world with a variety of gods and goddesses, which enter into its machinery more or less independently. Fetichism sees such subordinate deities in the lifeless body of nature, in rocks, in water, in the air, in human productions of every kind (pictures, statues, etc.). Demonism sees gods in living organisms of every species—trees, animals, and men. This kind of polytheism is found in innumerable forms even in the lowest tribes. It reaches the highest stage in Hellenic polytheism, in the myths of ancient Greece, which still furnish the finest images to the modern poet and artist. At a much lower stage we have Catholic polytheism, in which innumerable “saints” (many of them of very equivocal repute) are venerated as subordinate divinities, and prayed to to exert their mediation with the supreme divinity.
The dogma of the “Trinity,” which still comprises three of the chief articles of faith in the creed of Christian peoples, culminates in the notion that the one God of Christianity is really made up of three different persons: (1) God the Father, the omnipotent creator of heaven and earth (this untenable myth was refuted long ago by scientific cosmogony, astronomy, and geology); (2) Jesus Christ; and (3) the Holy Ghost, a mystical being, over whose incomprehensible relation to the Father and the Son millions of Christian theologians have racked their brains in vain for the last nineteen hundred years. The Gospels, which are the only clear sources of this triplotheism, are very obscure as to the relation of these three persons to each other, and do not give a satisfactory answer to the question of their unity. On the other hand, it must be carefully noted what confusion this obscure and mystic dogma of the Trinity must necessarily cause in the minds of our children even in the earlier years of instruction. One morning they learn (in their religious instruction) that three times one are one, and the very next hour they are told in their arithmetic class that three times one are three. I remember well the reflection that this confusion led me to in my early school-days.
For the rest, the “Trinity” is not an original element in Christianity; like most of the other Christian dogmas, it has been borrowed from earlier religions. Out of the sun-worship of the Chaldean magi was evolved the Trinity of Ilu, the mysterious source of the world; its three manifestations were Anu, primeval chaos; Bel, the architect of the world; and Aa, the heavenly light, the all-enlightening wisdom. In the Brahmanic religion the Trimurti is also conceived as a “divine unity” made up of three persons—Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the sustainer), and Shiva (the destroyer). It would seem that in this and other ideas of a Trinity the “sacred number, three,” as such—as a “symbolical number”—has counted for something. The three first Christian virtues—Faith, Hope, and Charity—form a similar triad.
According to the amphitheists, the world is ruled by two different gods, a good and an evil principle, God and the Devil. They are engaged in a perpetual struggle, like rival emperors, or pope and anti-pope. The condition of the world is the result of this conflict. The loving God, or good principle, is the source of all that is good and beautiful, of joy and of peace. The world would be perfect if His work were not continually thwarted by the evil principle, the Devil; this being is the cause of all that is bad and hateful, of contradiction and of pain.
Amphitheism is undoubtedly the most rational of all forms of belief in God, and the one which is least incompatible with a scientific view of the world. Hence we find it elaborated in many ancient peoples thousands of years before Christ. In ancient India Vishnu, the preserver, struggles with Shiva, the destroyer. In ancient Egypt the good Osiris is opposed by the wicked Typhon. The early Hebrews had a similar dualism of Aschera (or Keturah), the fertile mother-earth, and Elion (Moloch or Sethos), the stern heavenly father. In the Zend religion of the ancient Persians, founded by Zoroaster two thousand years before Christ, there is a perpetual struggle between Ormuzd, the good god of light, and Ahriman, the wicked god of darkness.
In Christian mythology the Devil is scarcely less conspicuous as the adversary of the good deity, the tempter and seducer, the prince of hell, and lord of darkness. A personal devil was still an important element in the belief of most Christians at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Towards the middle of the century he was gradually eliminated by being progressively explained away, or he was restricted to the subordinate rôle he plays as Mephistopheles in Goethe’s great drama. To-day the majority of educated people look upon “belief in a personal devil” as a mediæval superstition, while “belief in God” (that is, the personal, good, and loving God) is retained as an indispensable element of religion. Yet the one belief is just as much (or as little) justified as the other. In any case, the much-lamented “imperfection of our earthly life,” the “struggle for existence,” and all that pertains to it, are explained much more simply and naturally by this struggle of a good and an evil god than by any other form of theism.
The dogma of the unity of God may in some respects be regarded as the simplest and most natural type of theism; it is popularly supposed to be the most widely accepted element of religion, and to predominate in the ecclesiastical systems of civilized countries. In reality, that is not the case, because this alleged “monotheism” usually turns out on closer inquiry to be one of the other forms of theism we have examined, a number of subordinate deities being generally introduced besides the supreme one. Most of the religions which took a purely monotheistic stand-point have become more or less polytheistic in the course of time. Modern statistics assure us that of the one billion five hundred million men who people the earth the great majority are monotheists; of these, nominally, about six hundred millions are Brahma-Buddhists, five hundred millions are called Christians, two hundred millions are heathens (of various types), one hundred and eighty millions are Mohammedans, ten millions are Jews, and ten millions have no religion at all. However, the vast majority of these nominal monotheists have very confused ideas about the deity, or believe in a number of gods and goddesses besides the chief god—angels, devils, etc.
The different forms which monotheism has assumed in the course of its polyphyletic development may be distributed in two groups—those of naturalistic and anthropistic monotheism. Naturalistic monotheism finds the embodiment of the deity in some lofty and dominating natural phenomenon. The sun, the deity of light and warmth, on whose influence all organic life insensibly and directly depends, was taken to be such a phenomenon many thousand years ago. Sun-worship (solarism, or heliotheism) seems to the modern scientist to be the best of all forms of theism, and the one which may be most easily reconciled with modern monism. For modern astrophysics and geogeny have taught us that the earth is a fragment detached from the sun, and that it will eventually return to the bosom of its parent. Modern physiology teaches us that the first source of organic life on the earth is the formation of protoplasm, and that this synthesis of simple inorganic substances, water, carbonic acid, and ammonia, only takes place under the influence of sunlight. On the primary evolution of the plasmodomous plants followed, secondarily, that of the plasmophagous animals, which directly or indirectly depend on them for nourishment; and the origin of the human race itself is only a later stage in the development of the animal kingdom. Indeed, the whole of our bodily and mental life depends, in the last resort, like all other organic life, on the light and heat rays of the sun. Hence in the light of pure reason, sun-worship, as a form of naturalistic monotheism, seems to have a much better foundation than the anthropistic worship of Christians and of other monotheists who conceive their god in human form. As a matter of fact, the sun-worshippers attained, thousands of years ago, a higher intellectual and moral standard than most of the other theists. When I was in Bombay, in 1881, I watched with the greatest sympathy the elevating rites of the pious Parsees, who, standing on the sea-shore, or kneeling on their prayer-rugs, offered their devotion to the sun at its rise and setting.[31]
Moon-worship (lunarism and selenotheism) is of much less importance than sun-worship. There are a few uncivilized races that have adored the moon as their only deity, but it has generally been associated with a worship of the stars and the sun.
The humanization of God, or the idea that the “Supreme Being” feels, thinks, and acts like man (though in a higher degree), has played a most important part, as anthropomorphic monotheism, in the history of civilization. The most prominent in this respect are the three great religions of the Mediterranean peoples—the old Mosaic religion, the intermediate Christian religion, and the younger Mohammedanism. These three great Mediterranean religions, all three arising on the east coast of the most interesting of all seas, and originating in an imaginative enthusiast of the Semitic race, are intimately connected, not only by this external circumstance of an analogous origin, but by many common features of their internal contents. Just as Christianity borrowed a good deal of its mythology directly from ancient Judaism, so Islam has inherited much from both its predecessors. All the three were originally monotheistic; all three were subsequently overlaid with a great variety of polytheistic features, in proportion as they extended, first along the coast of the Mediterranean with its heterogeneous population, and eventually into every part of the world.
The Hebrew monotheism, as it was founded by Moses (about 1600 B.C.), is usually regarded as the ancient faith which has been of the greatest importance in the ethical and religious development of humanity. This high historical appreciation is certainly valid in the sense that the two other world-conquering Mediterranean religions issued from it; Christ was just as truly a pupil of Moses as Mohammed was afterwards of Christ. So also the New Testament, which has become the foundation of the belief of the highest civilized nations in the short space of nineteen hundred years, rests on the venerable basis of the Old Testament. The Bible, which the two compose, has had a greater influence and a wider circulation than any other book in the world. Even to-day the Bible—in spite of its curious mingling of the best and the worst elements—is in a certain sense the “book of books.” Yet when we make an impartial and unprejudiced study of this notable historical source, we find it very different in several important respects from the popular impression. Here again modern criticism and history have come to certain conclusions which destroy the prevalent tradition in its very foundations.
The monotheism which Moses endeavored to establish in the worship of Jehovah, and which the prophets—the philosophers of the Hebrew race—afterwards developed with great success, had at first to sustain a long and severe struggle with the dominant polytheism which was in possession. Jehovah, or Yahveh, was originally derived from the heaven-god, which, under the title of Moloch or Baal, was one of the most popular of the Oriental deities (the Sethos or Typhon of the Egyptians, and the Saturn or Cronos of the Greeks). There were, however, other gods in great favor with the Jewish people, and so the struggle with “idolatry” continued. Still, Jehovah was, in principle, the only God, explicitly claiming, in the first precept of the decalogue: “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods beside me.”
Christian monotheism shared the fate of its mother, Mosaism; it was generally only monotheistic in theory, while it degenerated practically into every kind of polytheism. In point of fact, monotheism was logically abandoned in the very dogma of the Trinity, which was adopted as an indispensable foundation of the Christian religion. The three persons, which are distinguished as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are three distinct individuals (and, indeed, anthropomorphic persons), just as truly as the three Indian deities of the Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva) or the Trinity of the ancient Hebrews (Anu, Bel, and Aa). Moreover, in the most widely distributed form of Christianity the “virgin” mother of Christ plays an important part as a fourth deity; in many Catholic countries she is practically taken to be much more powerful and influential than the three male persons of the celestial administration. The cult of the madonna has been developed to such an extent in these countries that we may oppose it to the usual masculine form of monotheism as one of a feminine type. The “Queen of Heaven” becomes so prominent, as is seen in so many pictures and legends of the madonna, that the three male persons practically disappear.
In addition, the imagination of the pious Christian soon came to increase this celestial administration by a numerous company of “saints” of all kinds, and bands of musical angels, who should see that “eternal life” should not prove too dull. The popes—the greatest charlatans that any religion ever produced—have constantly studied to increase this band of celestial satellites by repeated canonizations. This curious company received its most interesting acquisition in 1870, when the Vatican Council pronounced the popes, as the vicars of Christ, to be infallible, and thus raised them to a divine dignity. When we add the “personal Devil” that they acknowledge, and the “bad angels” who form his court, we have in modern Catholicism, still the most extensive branch of Christianity, a rich and variegated polytheism that dwarfs the Olympic family of the Greeks.
Islam, or the Mohammedan monotheism, is the youngest and purest form of monotheism. When the young Mohammed (born 570) learned to despise the polytheistic idolatry of his Arabian compatriots, and became acquainted with Nestorian Christianity, he adopted its chief doctrines in a general way; but he could not bring himself to see anything more than a prophet in Christ, like Moses. He found in the dogma of the Trinity what every emancipated thinker finds on impartial reflection—an absurd legend which is neither reconcilable with the first principles of reason nor of any value whatever for our religious advancement. He justly regarded the worship of the immaculate mother of God as a piece of pure idolatry, like the veneration of pictures and images. The longer he reflected on it, and the more he strove after a purified idea of deity, the clearer did the certitude of his great maxim appear: “God is the only God”—there are no other gods beside him.
Yet Mohammed could not free himself from the anthropomorphism of the God-idea. His one only God was an idealized, almighty man, like the stern, vindictive God of Moses, and the gentle, loving God of Christ. Still, we must admit that the Mohammedan religion has preserved the character of pure monotheism throughout the course of its historical development and its inevitable division much more faithfully than the Mosaic and Christian religions. We see that to-day, even externally, in its forms of prayer and preaching, and in the architecture and adornment of its mosques. When I visited the East for the first time, in 1873, and admired the noble mosques of Cairo, Smyrna, Brussa, and Constantinople, I was inspired with a feeling of real devotion by the simple and tasteful decoration of the interior, and the lofty and beautiful architectural work of the exterior. How noble and inspiring do these mosques appear in comparison with the majority of Catholic churches, which are covered internally with gaudy pictures and gilt, and are outwardly disfigured by an immoderate crowd of human and animal figures! Not less elevated are the silent prayers and the simple devotional acts of the Koran when compared with the loud, unintelligible verbosity of the Catholic Mass and the blatant music of their theatrical processions.
Under the title of mixotheism we may embrace all the forms of theistic belief which contain mixtures of religious notions of different, sometimes contradictory, kinds. In theory this most widely diffused type of religion is not recognized at all; in the concrete it is the most important and most notable of all. The vast majority of men who have religious opinions have always been, and still are, mixotheists; their idea of God is picturesquely compounded from the impressions received in childhood from their own sect, and a number of other impressions which are received later on, from contact with members of other religions, and which modify the earlier notions. In educated people there is also sometimes the modifying influence of philosophic studies in maturer years, and especially the unprejudiced study of natural phenomena, which reveals the futility of the theistic idea. The conflict of these contradictory impressions, which is very painful to a sensitive soul, and which often remains undecided throughout life, clearly shows the immense power of the heredity of ancient myths on the one hand and the early adaptation to erroneous dogmas on the other. The particular faith in which the child has been brought up generally remains in power, unless a “conversion” takes place subsequently, owing to the stronger influence of some other religion. But even in this supersession of one faith by another the new name, like the old one, proves to be merely an outward label covering a mixture of the most diverse opinions and errors. The greater part of those who call themselves Christians are not monotheists (as they think), but amphitheists, triplotheists, or polytheists. And the same must be said of Islam and Mosaism, and other monotheistic religions. Everywhere we find associated with the original idea of a “sole and triune God” later beliefs in a number of subordinate deities—angels, devils, saints, etc.—a picturesque assortment of the most diverse theistic forms.
All the above forms of theism, in the proper sense of the word—whether the belief assumes a naturalistic or an anthropistic form—represent God to be an extramundane or a supernatural being. He is always opposed to the world, or nature, as an independent being; generally as its creator, sustainer, and ruler. In most religions he has the additional character of personality, or, to put it more definitely still, God as a person is likened to man. “In his gods man paints himself.” This anthropomorphic conception of God as one who thinks, feels, and acts like man prevails with the great majority of theists, sometimes in a cruder and more naïve form, sometimes in a more refined and abstract degree. In any case the form of theosophy we have described is sure to affirm that God, the supreme being, is infinite in perfection, and therefore far removed from the imperfection of humanity. Yet, when we examine closely, we always find the same psychic or mental activity in the two. God feels, thinks, and acts as man does, although it be in an infinitely more perfect form.
The personal anthropism of God has become so natural to the majority of believers that they experience no shock when they find God personified in human form in pictures and statues, and in the varied images of the poet, in which God takes human form—that is, is changed into a vertebrate. In some myths, even, God takes the form of other mammals (an ape, lion, bull, etc.), and more rarely of a bird (eagle, dove, or stork), or of some lower vertebrate (serpent, crocodile, dragon, etc.).
In the higher and more abstract forms of religion this idea of bodily appearance is entirely abandoned, and God is adored as a “pure spirit” without a body. “God is a spirit, and they who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” Nevertheless, the psychic activity of this “pure spirit” remains just the same as that of the anthropomorphic God. In reality, even this immaterial spirit is not conceived to be incorporeal, but merely invisible, gaseous. We thus arrive at the paradoxical conception of God as a gaseous vertebrate.