Introduction to the History of Religions / Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV

by Crawford Howell Toy

CHAPTER IX

THE HIGHER THEISTIC DEVELOPMENT

[943]. The preceding survey of early religious customs and institutions discloses a recognizable unity in diversity. Everywhere we find the same classes of sacred objects and the same methods of approaching them. Whether the supernatural Powers are conceived of as animals or as plants or as what we call inanimate things, or, in more advanced thought, as ghosts or spirits or gods, they are held to be factors in human life, are regarded with awe, are dreaded and avoided, or are welcomed as helpers, and in any case are propitiated by gifts and other marks of respect. The potency inherent in things is the object of observation, its laws are studied, and it is used for purposes of life. The diversities in the form of ceremonies, in the conception of the characters of the Powers, and in the general tone and coloring of worship arise from economic and cultural differences, and are as numerous as the tribes of men; the unity of cults is a result of the psychological unity of the human race—the religious needs of men in all stages of culture are the same; there is nothing in the highest religious systems that is not found in germ in the lowest.

[944]. The earliest expression of religious feeling, as is pointed out above,[1729] is in the form of ceremonies. But ceremonies tend to group themselves round the persons of divine beings. Gods, as the controllers of human fortunes here and hereafter, naturally become the centers of religious thought. Their characters and functions reflect the ideals of their worshipers, and all ritualistic and other usages and all doctrines concerning the relations between gods and men and, in general, all ideas concerning the physical and moral constitution of the world attach themselves perforce to the divine embodiments of these ideals. Thus, in one sense, the history of the gods is the history of religion. From the earliest times up to the present the efforts of men have been directed toward defining the divine Powers that have been supposed to stand behind all phenomena. The problem of harmonizing diverse divine activities has always been a serious one, and its solution has been sought in various ways. Gods have been locally limited, every one to his own human tribe, district, or nation; or, when they dwell together and their spheres of influence are larger, they have been given free scope of action, and the resulting contradictions in human affairs have been accepted as a part of the mysterious nature of things; or order has been sought in simplification—headship has been ascribed to some one deity, and the relation between him and the subordinate divinities has been somehow explained or has been left unexplained. The process of simplification has gone steadily on with the result that the great religious systems of the world fall into groups distinguished from one another by their conceptions of the divine government of the world, whether as pluralistic or as unitary. The development of these different conceptions may be traced here in outline, though the absence of exact data and the variety and complexity of the formative influences (economic, philosophical, political, and other) necessarily make it difficult or impossible to account satisfactorily for all details. The groups to be considered are polytheism, dualism, and monotheism, to which may be added brief mention of systems that do not recognize a personal divine ruler of the world.

Polytheism

[945]. The first stage in the final theistic history of the world up to the present day, polytheism, appears in all the great civilized nations. The great polytheistic systems have much in common: for example, protection of civil order and morality by a god; prominence of the god of a ruling tribe or family or of a great city; disposition to embody certain general facts, as war, love, learning, in divine figures; tendency to make some god universal. On the other hand, they differ among themselves in certain regards: in the degree of specialization and differentiation of divine functions, and in the stress that they lay on the various departments of human life. Their agreements and disagreements seem to be in some cases independent of racial relations and climatic conditions; their roots lie so far back in history that we have no means of tracing their genesis and development.

[946]. The Egyptian and the Semitic peoples were parts of the same original stock,[1730] and their systems of social and political organization were substantially identical—the government in its developed form was monarchical, but tribal and other locally isolated forms of organization maintained themselves to a certain extent—and their literary and artistic outputs do not differ materially. We might, then, expect their religions to be in the main identical. In fact they agree in having a relative meagerness of theistic differentiation, but in some important points they are far apart. The Semites were indifferent to the future life, the Egyptians constructed it elaborately (in this point taking precedence among the ancients); the Semites were averse to divinizing human beings, for the Egyptians kings were divine. In this last point Egypt resembles China, but in other respects is at a world-wide remove from it. Other peoples thought of their gods as having relations with beasts; the Egyptians alone, among civilized nations, worshiped the living animal.[1731] Some Greek writers regarded Egypt as the religious mother of Greece, but Hellenic cults show little resemblance to Egyptian.

[947]. The Hebrews had the general Semitic theistic and cultic scheme, but in their capacity (in their higher development) to content themselves with one deity, and in their elaboration of ritualistic forms and institutions, were more closely akin to the Aryan Persians than to any Semitic community, and borrowed freely from them. The resemblance between the two cults, however, was confined to these two points; in other respects they were very different.

[948]. The linguistic identity of the Indo-European peoples does not carry with it theologic identity. The theistic scheme of India is more nearly allied, in the disposition to grant equality of significance to all gods, to the Egyptian and Semitic than to the Persian and the Greek, yet the tone and color of the Hindu deities do not resemble the tone and color of the Egyptian and Babylonian divinities.

Even between Greece and Rome the religious differences are great. Greece stands alone in its artistic creation of divine forms. Rome rather resembles the Hebrews in its sobriety of theistic creations, and particularly is like the Chinese in the purpose to make religion subservient to the interests of the family and the State; Roman religion, like Chinese, might be described as a body of public and private ceremonies to which gods were attached.[1732] The Roman gods, however, are much more definite figures than the Chinese; the latter are either unimportant folk-gods or powers of nature.