The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour

by F. Max Müller

At this point a glance at the development of the religion of the Hindus may be of great service to us. Nowhere is the idea of revelation worked out so carefully as in their literature. They have a voluminous literature, treating of religion and philosophy, and they draw a very sharp distinction between revealed and unrevealed works (Sruti and Smriti). Here much depends upon the name. Revealed meant [pg 161] originally nothing more than plain and clear, and when we speak of a revelation, in ordinary life, this is not much more than a communication. But erelong “reveal” was used in the special sense of a communication from a superhuman to a human being. The question of the possibility of such a communication raised little difficulty. But this possibility depends naturally on the prior conception of superhuman beings and of their relationship to human beings. So long as it was imagined that they occasionally assumed human form, and could mingle in very human affairs, a communication from a Not-man, I will not say a monster, presents no great difficulties. The Greeks went so far as to ascribe to men of earlier times a closer intercourse with the gods. But even with them the idea that man should not enter too closely into the presence of the gods breaks forth here and there, and Semele, who wished to be embraced by Zeus in all his glory, found her destruction in this ecstasy. As soon as the Deity was conceived in less human fashion, as in the Old Testament, intercourse between God and man became more and more difficult. In Genesis this intercourse is still represented very simply and familiarly, as when God walks about in the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve are ashamed of their nakedness before Him. Soon, however, a higher conception of God enters, so that Moses, for example (Exodus xxxiii. 23), may not see the face of Jehovah, but still ventures at least to look upon His back. The writer of the Fourth Gospel goes [pg 162] still farther and declares (i. 18), “No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared Him.” Here we clearly see that the possibility of intercourse between man and God, and a revelation of God to man, depends chiefly or exclusively on the conception which man has previously formed of God and man. In all theological researches we must carefully bear in mind that the idea of God is our idea, which we have formed in part through tradition, and in part by our own thinking; and we must not forget that existence formed an essential attribute of this idea, whatever opposition may have been raised against the ontological proof in later times. After what we have seen of the true relationship between thought and speech, it follows that the name, and with it the idea of a divine being, can only proceed from man. God is and remains our God. We can have a knowledge of Him only through our inner consciousness, not through our senses. God Himself has no more imparted His name to mankind than the fixed stars and planets to which we have given names, although we only see, but do not hear or touch them. This must be absolutely clear to us before we dare speak of the possibility or impossibility of a revelation.

Now it is very useful, before we treat of our own idea of a revelation emanating from God, to look round among other nations and see how they reached the idea of a revelation. We see in India that a [pg 163] number of hymns in an ancient dialect and in fixed metres were preserved by oral tradition—the method was wonderful, but is authenticated by history—before there could have been a thought of reducing them to writing. These hymns contain very little that would appear to be too high or too deep for an ordinary human poet. They are of great interest to us because they make known, as clearly as possible, the sound of the oldest Aryan language, and the nature of the oldest Aryan gods. As Professor Deussen, in his valuable History of Philosophy says, (I, 83), the Vedic religion, which he at the same time calls the oldest philosophy, is richer in disclosures than any other in the world. In this sense he very properly calls the study of the Rigveda the high school of the science of religion, so that as he says no one can discuss these matters without a knowledge of it. This unique distinction rests, as he truly remarks, on the fact, “That the process on which originally all gods depend, the personification of the phenomena of nature, while it is more or less obscured by all other religions, in the Rigveda still takes place, so to speak, before our eyes visibly and palpably.” I have long preached this in vain. All who have studied the Rigveda say this, and all who have not studied it say just the contrary, and lay especial stress upon the fact that these hymns contain ideas that once and for all they declare as modern. But no one has ever contended that this is not so. What is historically the oldest, may from a higher [pg 164] point of view be quite modern, and there are scholars who even look upon Adam as a reformer of mankind. Those who best know the Rigveda have often shown that it stands at a tolerably advanced stage, and here and there casts a distant glance into its own past. I myself have often said that I would give much if I could escape from my own proofs of the age of this collection of hymns, and could clearly show that at least some of these Vedic hymns had been added later.

These hymns, therefore, just because, judging from their language and metre, they are older than everything else in India, or even in the entire Aryan world, and because they are mainly concerned with the ancient gods of nature, appeared to the Hindus themselves as apaurusheya, that is, not wrought by man. They were called Sruti, (that which was heard), in distinction from other literature, which was designated as Smriti, or recollection.

All this is easily intelligible. There followed a period, however, during which the true understanding of the hymns became considerably obscured, and a new series of works, the so-called Brâhmanas, arose. These were very different from the hymns. They are composed in a younger language and in prose. They treat of the sacrifice, so full of significance in India, at which the hymns were employed, and which seems to me to have been originally designed for measuring time, and thus served to mark the progress of civilisation. They explain the meaning [pg 165] of the hymns, often quite erroneously; but they contain some interesting information upon the condition of India, long after the period when the hymns first appeared, and yet before the rise of Buddhism in the sixth century before Christ. It has been supposed that, as the Brâhmanas were composed in prose, they were originally written, according to the hypothesis of Wolf, that prose everywhere presupposes the knowledge of writing. I cannot admit this in the case of India; at any rate, there is no trace of any acquaintance with writing in the whole of this extensive mass of literature. It was throughout a mnemonic literature, and just because the art of writing was unknown, the memory was cultivated in a manner of which we have no idea. At all events, the Brahmans themselves knew nothing of the Brâhmanas in written form, and included them with the hymns under the names Veda and Sruti; that is, they regarded them, in our phraseology, as revealed, and not the work of men.

The remarkable thing, however, is that they did not assume, like the Romans in the case of Numa and Egeria, a communication from the Vedic gods of nature to ordinary men, but contented themselves with declaring that the Veda had been seen by the Rishis, whose name Rishi they explained etymologically as “seer.”

It is clear, therefore, that what the Brahmans understood under Sruti was nothing more than literature composed in an ancient language (for the Brâhmanas are also composed in an ancient language, though [pg 166] not as ancient as that of the hymns), and treating of matters on which apparently man alone can establish no authority. For how could ordinary man take on himself to speak about the gods or to give directions for the sacrifice, to make promises for the reward of pious works, or even to decide what is morally right or wrong? More than human authority was necessary for this, and so the Brâhmanas, as well as the hymns, were declared to be apaurusheya, that is, not human, though by no means divine, in the sense of having been imparted by one of the Devas.

We see, therefore, that the idea of the Sruti, while approaching to our idea of revelation as apaurusheya, that is, not human, does not quite coincide with it. What was ancient and incomprehensible, was called superhuman, and soon became infallible and beyond assault. If we look at other religions, we find that Buddhism denied the Veda every authority, and in conformity with its own character especially excluded every idea of superhuman revelation. In China, too, we look in vain for revelation. In Palestine, however, we find the idea that the Lord Himself spoke with Moses, who delivered His commands to Israel, and the tables of the commandments were even written by God's own fingers on both sides. But this must not be confounded with written literature. The idea that the entire Old Testament was written or revealed by Jehovah is absolutely not of ancient Jewish origin, whatever respect may have been shown to the holy books as recognised in the Synagogue.

As for Islam, the Koran is looked upon as communicated to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel, even as Zoroaster in the Avesta claims to have received certain communications in conversation with Ahuramazda.

In Christianity, in whose history the theory of revelation has played so great a part, there is in fact—and this is frequently overlooked—no declaration on the subject by Christ or the apostles themselves. That the Gospels, as they have come down to us, have been revealed, is nowhere stated in them, nor can it be gathered from the Acts of the Apostles or the Epistles. No one has ever maintained that any New Testament Scripture was known to Christ or even to the apostles.[51] On the contrary, if we take the titles of the Gospels in their natural meaning, they do not purport to have been written down by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John themselves: they are simply the sacred history as it was recorded by others according to each of these men. Attempts have indeed been made to reason away the meaning of κατά, “according to,” and interpret it as “by,” but it is more natural to take it in its ordinary sense. When Paul, in his second Epistle to Timothy (iii. 16), says, “Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching,” this is the usual mode of expression applied to the Scriptures of the Old, not of the New Testament (John v. 39), and would [pg 168] merely signify inspired, breathed in, not revealed in each word and letter.

In any case we learn this much from a comparative study of religions, that the majority of them have their holy books, which are usually the oldest remains of literature, oral or written, that they possess. They look upon the authors of these Scriptures as extraordinary, even superhuman beings; and the later theologians in order to remove from the minds of the people every doubt as to their truth, devised the most ingenious theories, to show how these books were not produced by men, but were merely seen by them, and how in the end even the words and letters of the original text were dictated to certain individuals. It is imagined, therefore, that the Deity condescended to speak Hebrew or Greek in the dialect of that period, and that therefore no letter or accent may be disturbed.