[1000]. Similar motives appear in the speculations of the Greek philosophers: Greek philosophy in seeking to discover the essential nature of the world moved definitely toward the conception of its unity—so, for example, as early as the sixth century, in Xenophanes and Parmenides. The conception of a supreme spiritual ruler of the world appears in Heraclitus and Anaxagoras (fifth century). To these and other Greek thinkers the unity of the world and the dominance of mind or spirit appeared to be necessary assumptions. The most definite expression of these conceptions is found in Plato and Aristotle. According to Plato (in the Timæus) God, the eternal Father, created the world (for nothing can be created without a cause), brought order out of disorder and made the universe to be most fair and good, so that it became a rational living soul, the one only-begotten universe, created the gods and the sons of the gods, and framed the soul to be the ruler of the body. Aristotle, in simpler phrase, represents the ground of the world as self-sufficient Mind, an eternal Power (δύναμις), from which all action or actuality (ἐνέργεια) proceeds.[1820]
[1001]. There are certain apparent limitations, it is true, to this conception of unity. Both Plato and Aristotle recognize the existence of a host of subordinate deities (created but immortal) to whom is assigned a share, by direction of the supreme God, in the creation of things; yet essentially these deities are nothing more than agents or intermediaries of the divine activity, and may be compared to the natural laws and agents of modern theism and, more exactly, to the Hebrew angels through whom, according to the Old Testament, God governed the world. Plato has also a somewhat vague notion of a something in the nature of the material of the world that limits or constrains the divine creative power—a "necessity" that forces the deity to do not the absolutely best but the best possible. Perhaps this is a philosophical formulation of the old "fate," perhaps Plato is merely trying to account for certain supposed inconcinnities and inadequacies in the world. He is not quite consistent with himself, since he represents the creation of the universe as resulting from the fact that necessity yielded to the persuasion of mind, which thus became supreme.[1821] In spite of this vagueness his view is unitary, and the unitary conception is continued by the Stoics, its best Stoic expression being found in the famous hymn of Cleanthes to Zeus: "Nothing occurs on earth apart from thee" and "We are thy offspring."[1822]
[1002]. In the last centuries before the beginning of our era the Jews, partly under Persian and Greek influence, clarified their theistic view, attaining a practically pure monotheism, only retaining their apparatus of angels and demons. This theistic scheme passed over in complete form to early Christianity, in which, however, greater prominence was given to the chief demon, the Satan; his larger rôle arose from the fact that he was brought into sharp antagonism with the Christ, the head of the kingdom of God. When Christianity was adopted by the Græco-Roman world, the doctrine of the Trinity was worked out and formulated in accordance with Greek and Roman philosophic thought, but was held not to impair the monotheistic view since the three Persons were regarded as being in substance one. Islam adopted the Jewish form of monotheism, with its Satan and angels, retaining also the old Arabian apparatus of demonic beings (the jinn).
[1003]. A certain tendency to a practically unitary view is discernible in the cults of Isis and Mithra, which were widely diffused in the Roman Empire.[1823] In both these cults the main interest of the worshipers was centered in a single deity, though other deities were recognized. The unifying impulse was devotional, not philosophic.
So far as a unitary conception of the divine government of the world existed it must be referred to the spirit of the age which had outgrown the old crude polytheism. Such modern monotheistic movements as the Brahma-Samaj and the Parsi in India, the Babist in Persia, and the reformed Shinto in Japan owe much to European influence, though doubtless some part of them is the outcome of natural progress in intellectual and moral conceptions.
Pantheistic and Nontheistic Systems
[1004]. The systems of theistic thought considered above all make a sharp separation between God and the world. Plato and Aristotle regarded mind or spirit as a force that dominated matter. The Persian, Hebrew, and Christian theologies conceive of the deity as transcendent, standing outside of and above the world and entering into communication with it either by direct revelation or through intermediaries. To certain thinkers of ancient times this dualistic conception presented difficulties—an absolute unity was held to be incompatible with such separation between the world and God. The precise nature of the reflections by which the earliest philosophers reached this conclusion is not clearly set forth, but it may be surmised that in general there were two lines of thought that led to this inference: first, a metaphysical conception of unity as something that was demanded by the sense of perfectness in the world; and, secondly, observation of facts that appeared to characterize the world as a unit. Among several different peoples, and apparently in each independently, the idea arose that the divine manifests itself in the world of phenomena and is recognizable only therein. Such a view appears in India in the Vedanta philosophy, and in Greece a little later it is more or less involved in Orphic theories and in the systems of several philosophers. The tendency to deify nature appears even in writers who do not wholly exclude gods from their schemes of the world—in the sayings of Heraclitus, for example: "All things are one," "From all comes one, and from one comes all." A similar view is attributed to Xenophanes by Aristotle,[1824] and traces of such a conception appear in Euripides.[1825] For the modern forms of pantheism, in Spinoza and other philosophers, reference must be made to the histories of philosophy.
[1005]. Pantheism has never commended itself to the masses of men. It is definitely theistic, but the view that the divine power is visible only in phenomena and is to be identified practically with the world is one that men in general find difficult to comprehend. The demand is for a deity with whom one may enter into personal relations—the simple conception of a god who dwells apart satisfies the religious instincts of the majority of men. The ethical questions arising from pantheism seem to them perplexing: how can man be morally responsible when it is the deity who thinks and acts in him? and how can he have any sense of loyalty to a deity whom he cannot distinguish from himself? Nor do men generally demand so absolute a unity as is represented by pantheism. Such questions as those relating to the eternity of matter, the possibility of the existence of an immaterial being, and the mode in which such a being, if it exists, could act on matter, have not seemed practical to the majority of men. Man demands a method of worship, and pantheism does not permit organized worship. For these reasons it has remained a sentiment of philosophers, though it has not been without effect in modifying popular conceptions of the deity: the conception of the immanence of God in the world (held in many Christian orthodox circles), when carried to its legitimate consequences, it is often hard to distinguish from pantheism.
[1006]. Nontheistic systems. A further attempt to secure a complete unity of the world appears in those systems of thought which regard the world as self-sufficient and, therefore, dispense with extramundane agency. These start either from the point of view of man and human life or from contemplation of the world. In China the sense of the sole importance of the moral life and the impossibility of knowing anything beyond mundane life led Confucius practically to ignore divine agency. He did not deny the existence of Powers outside of men, but he declined to speak of them, regarding them as of no practical importance. This sort of agnosticism appears in Greece as early as the fifth century B.C., when Protagoras's view that "man is the measure of all things" makes extrahuman Powers superfluous. Epicurus reached a similar practical atheism apparently from a scientific view of the construction of the world. According to him there are gods, but they are otiose—living a life of happy ease, they are to be thought of as a pleasant phenomenon in the world, but ineffective as regards human fortunes, and men may go their ways certain that if they obey the laws of the world the gods will not interfere with them.
[1007]. The Sankhya philosophy of India dispenses completely with gods, holding that the primordial stuff is eternal, but it also holds that souls have a separate existence and are eternal. Thus a species of dualism emerges. Buddhism goes a step further, ignoring the soul as well as gods. It is agnostic in that, admitting the world to have a cause, it holds that it is impossible to know this cause. Its practical aim—to get rid of suffering by getting rid of desire, and thus to pass into a blissful state of existence in which apparently there is to be no effort as there is to be no pain—has enabled it to establish a vigorous organization, a sort of church, in which the undefined universe takes the place of a personal god, and character takes the place of soul, this character (Karma) passing from one being to another without the assumption of identity in the beings thus united in destiny.[1826]