The thoughtful dwellers in Farsistan also developed a religion close to man’s wants by dividing the gods into those who aid and those who harm him, subject the one class to Ahura-Mazda, the other to Anya-Mainyus. Early in their history this assumed almost a moral aspect, and there is little to be added to one of the most ancient precepts of their law—“Happiness be to the man who conduces to the happiness of all.”[184-1]
When this dual classification sought expression through natural contrasts, there was one which nigh everywhere offered itself as the most appropriate. The savage, the nomad, limited to the utmost in artificial contrivances, met nothing which more signally aided the accomplishment of his wishes than light; nothing which more certainly frustrated them than darkness. From these two sources flow numerous myths, symbols, and rites, as narratives or acts which convey religious thought to the eye or the ear of sense.
As the bringers of light, man adored the sun, the dawn, and fire; associated with warmth and spring, his further meditations saw in it the source of his own and of all life, and led him to connect with its worship that of the reproductive principle. As it comes from above, and seems to dwell in the far-off sky, he located there his good gods, and lifted his hands or his eyes when he prayed. As light is necessary to sight, and as to see is to know, the faculty of knowing was typified as enlightenment, an inward god-given light. The great and beneficent deities are always the gods of light. Their names often show this. Deva, Deus, means the shining one; Michabo, the great white one; the Mongols call Tien, the chief Turanian god, the bright one, the luminous one; the northern Buddhist prays to Amitabha, Infinite Light; and the Christian to the Light of the World.
On the other hand, darkness was connected with feelings of helplessness and terror. It exposed him to attacks of wild beasts and all accidents. It was the precursor of the storm. It was like to death and the grave. The realm of the departed was supposed to be a land of shadows, an underground region, an unseeing Hades or hell.
The task would be easy to show many strange corroborations of these early chosen symbols by the exacter studies of later ages. Light, as the indispensable condition of life, is no dream, but a fact; sight is the highest sentient faculty; and the luminous rays are real intellectual stimulants.[186-1] But such reflections will not escape the contemplative reader.
I hasten to an important consequence of this dual classification of divinities. It led to what I may call the quantification of the gods, that is, to conceiving divinity under notions of number or quantity, a step which has led to profound deterioration of the religious sentiment. I do not mean by this the distinction between polytheism and monotheism. The latter is as untrue and as injurious as the former, nor does it contain a whit the more the real elements of religious progress.
It is indeed singular that this subject has been so misunderstood. Much has been written by Christian theologians to show the superiority of monotheisms; and by their opponents much has been made of Comte’s loi des trois états, which defines religious progress to be first fetichism, secondly polytheism, finally monotheism. Of this Mr. Lewes says: “The theological system arrived at the highest perfection of which it is capable when it substituted the providential action of a single being, for the varied operations of the numerous divinities which had before been imagined.”[187-1] Nothing could be more erroneous than the spirit of this statement; nothing is more correct, if the ordinary talk of the superiority of monotheism in religion be admitted.
History and long experience show that monotheistic religions have no special good effect either on the morals or the religious sensibility of races.[187-2] Buddhism,[187-3] Mohammedanism and Judaism are, at least in theory, uncompromising monotheisms; modern Christianity is less so, as many Catholics pray to the Virgin and Saints, and many Protestants to Christ. So long as the mathematical conception of number, whether one or many, is applied to deity by a theological system, it has not yet “arrived at the highest perfection of which it is capable.”
For let us inquire what a monotheism is? It is a belief in one god as distinct from the belief in several gods. In other words, it applies to God the mathematical concept of unity, a concept which can only come into cognition by virtue of contrasts and determinations, and which forces therefore the believer either to Pantheism or anthropomorphism to reconcile his belief with his reason. No other resource is left him. With monotheism there must always be the idea of numerical separateness, which is incompatible with universal conceptions.
Let him, however, clear his mind of the current admiration for monotheisms, and impress upon himself that he who would form a conception of supreme intelligence must do so under the rules of pure thought, not numerical relation. The logical, not the mathematical, unity of the divine is the perfection of theological reasoning. Logical unity does not demand a determination by contrasts; it conveys only the idea of identity with self. As the logical attainment of truth is the recognition of identities in apparent diversity, thus leading from the logically many to the logically one, the assumption of the latter is eminently justified. Every act of reasoning is an additional proof of it.[188-1]