CHAPTER XIX.—SURVIVALS IN CHRISTENDOM.
WE have now travelled far, apparently, from that primitive stage of god-making where the only known gods are the corpses, mummies, skulls, ghosts, or spirits of dead chieftains or dead friends and relations. The God of Christianity, in his fully-evolved form, especially as known to thinkers and theologians, is a being so vast, so abstract, so ubiquitous, so eternal, that he seems to have hardly and points of contact at all with the simple ancestral spirit or sacred stone from which in the last resort he appears to be descended. Yet even here, we must beware of being misled by too personal an outlook. While the higher minds in Christendom undoubtedly conceive of the Christian God in terms of Mansel and Martineau, the lower minds even among ourselves conceive of him in far simpler and more material fashions. A good deal of enquiry among ordinary English people of various classes, not always the poorest, convinces me that to large numbers of them God is envisaged as possessing a material human form, more or less gaseous in composition; that, in spite of the Thirty-nine Articles, he has body, parts, and passions; that he is usually pictured to the mind’s eye as about ten or twelve feet high, with head, hands, eyes and mouth, used to see with and speak with in human fashion; and that he sits on a throne, like a king that he is, surrounded by a visible court of angels and archangels. Italian art so invariably represents him, with a frankness unknown to Protestant Christendom. Instead of being in all places at once, pervading and underlying nature, the Deity is conceived of by most of his worshippers as having merely the power of annihilating space, and finding himself wherever he likes at a given moment. His omniscience and omnipotence are readily granted; but his abstractness and immateriality are not really grasped by one out of a thousand of his believers in Britain.
The fact is, so abstract a conception as the highest theological conception of God cannot be realised except symbolically, and then for a few moments only, in complete isolation. The moment God is definitely thought of in connexion with any cosmic activity, still more in connexion with any human need, he is inevitably thought of on human analogies, and more or less completely anthropomorphised in the brain of the believer. Being by origin an offshoot of the mind of man, a great deified human being, he retains necessarily still, for all save a few very mystical or ontological souls, the obvious marks of his ultimate descent from a ghost or spirit. Indeed, on the mental as opposed to the bodily side, he does so for us all; since even theologians freely ascribe to him such human feelings as love, affection, a sense of justice, a spirit of mercy, of truth, of wisdom: knowledge, will, the powers of intellect, all the essential and fundamental human faculties and emotions.
Thus, far as we seem to have travelled from our base in the most exalted concepts of God, we are nearer to it still than most of us imagine. Moreover, in spite of this height to which the highest minds have raised their idea of the Deity, as the creator, sustainer, and mover of the universe, every religion, however monotheistic, still continues to make new minor gods for itself out of the dead as they die, and to worship these gods with even more assiduous worship than it bestows upon the great God of Christendom or the great gods of the central pantheon. And the Christian religion makes such minor deities no less than all others. The fact is, the religious emotion takes its origin from the affection and regard felt for the dead by survivors, mingled with the hope and belief that they may be of some use or advantage, temporal or spiritual, to those who call upon them; and these primitive faiths and feelings remain so ingrained in the very core of humanity that even the most abstract of all religions, like the Protestant schism, cannot wholly choke them, while recrudescences of the original creed and custom spring up from time to time in the form of spiritualism, theosophy, and other vague types of simple ghost-worship.
Most advanced religions, however, and especially Christianity in its central, true, and main form of Catholicism, have found it necessary to keep renewing from time to time the stock of minor gods—here arbitrarily known as saints—much as the older religions found it always necessary from year to year to renew the foundation-gods, the corn and wine gods, and the other special deities of the manufactured order, by a constant supply of theanthropic victims. What I wish more particularly to point out here, however, is that the vast majority of places of worship all the world over are still erected, as at the very beginning, above the body of a dead man or woman; that the chief objects of worship in every shrine are still, as always, such cherished bodies of dead men and women; and that the primitive connexion of Religion with Death has never for a moment been practically severed in the greater part of the world,—not even in Protestant England and America.
Mr. William Simpson was one of the first persons to point out this curious underlying connexion between churches, temples, mosques, or topes, and a tomb or monument. He has proved his point in a very full manner, and I would refer the reader who wishes to pursue this branch of the subject at length to his interesting monographs. In this work, I will confine my attention mainly to the continued presence of this death-element in Christianity; but by way of illustration, I will preface my remarks by a few stray instances picked up at random from the neighbouring and interesting field of Islam.
There is no religion in all the world which professes to be more purely monotheistic in character than Mohammedanism. The unity of God, in the very strictest sense, is the one dogma round which the entire creed of Islam centres. More than any other cult, it represents itself as a distinct reaction against the polytheism and superstition of surrounding faiths. The isolation of Allah is its one great dogma. If, therefore, we find even in this most monotheistic of existing religious systems a large element of practically polytheistic survival—if we find that even here the Worship of the Dead remains, as a chief component in religious practice, if not in religious theory, we shall be fairly entitled to conclude, I think, that such constituents are indeed of the very essence of religious thinking, and we shall be greatly strengthened in the conclusions at which we previously arrived as to a belief in immortality or continued life of the dead being in fact the core and basis of worship and of deity.
Some eight or ten years since, when I first came practically into connexion with Islam in Algeria and Egypt, I was immediately struck by the wide prevalence among the Mahommedan population of forms of worship for which I was little prepared by anything I had previously read or heard as to the nature and practice of that exclusive and ostentatiously monotheistic faith. Two points, indeed, forcibly strike any visitor who for the first time has the opportunity of observing a Mahommedan community in its native surroundings. The first is the universal habit on the part of the women of visiting the cemeteries and mourning or praying over the graves of their relations on Friday, the sacred day of Islam. The second is the frequency of Koubbas, or little whitewashed mosque-tombs erected over the remains of Marabouts, fakeers, or local saints, which form the real centres for the religion and worship of every village. Islam, in practice, is a religion of pilgrimages to the tombs of the dead. In Algeria, every hillside is dotted over with these picturesque little whitewashed domes, each overshadowed by its sacred date-palm, each surrounded by its small walled enclosure or temenos of prickly pear or agave, and each attended by its local ministrant, who takes charge of the tomb and of the alms of the faithful. Holy body, sacred stone, tree, well, and priest—not an element of the original cult of the dead is lacking. Numerous pilgrimages are made to these koubbas by the devout: and on Friday evenings the little courtyards are almost invariably thronged by a crowd of eager and devoted worshippers. Within, the bones of the holy man lie preserved in a frame hung about with rosaries, pictures, and other oblations of his ardent disciples, exactly as in the case of Roman Catholic chapels. The saint, in fact, is quite as much an institution of monotheistic Islam as of any other religion with which I am practically acquainted.
These two peculiarities of the cult of Islam strike a stranger immediately on the most casual visit. When he comes to look at the matter more closely, however, he finds also that most of the larger mosques in the principal towns are themselves similarly built to contain and enshrine the bones of saintly personages, more or less revered in their immediate neighbourhood. Some of these are indeed so holy that their bones have been duplicated exactly like the wood of the true cross, and two tombs have been built in separate places where the whole or a portion of the supposed remains are said to be buried. I will only specify as instances of such holy tombs the sacred city of Kerouan in Tunisia, which ranks second to Mecca and Medina alone in the opinion of all devout western Mohammedans. Here, the most revered building is the shrine of “The Companion of the Prophet,” who lies within a catafalque covered with palls of black velvet and silver—as funereal a monument as is known to me anywhere. Close by stands the catafalque of an Indian saint while other holy tomb-mosques abound in the city. In Algiers town, the holiest place is similarly the mosque-tomb of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman, which contains the shrine and body of that saint, who died in 1471. Around him, so as to share his sacred burial-place (like the Egyptians who wished to be interred with Osiris), lie the bodies of several Deys and Pashas. Lights are kept constantly burning at the saint’s tomb, which is hung with variously-coloured drapery, after the old Semitic fashion, while banners and ostrich-eggs, the gifts of the faithful, dangle ostentatiously round it from the decorated ceiling. Still more sacred in its way is the venerable shrine of Sidi Okba near Biskra, one of the most ancient places of worship in the Mahommedan world. The tomb of the great saint stands in a chantry, screened off from the noble mosque which forms the ante-chamber, and is hung round with silk and other dainty offerings. On the front an inscription in very early Cufic characters informs us that “This is the tomb of Okba, son of Nafa: May Allah have mercy upon him.” The mosque is a famous place of pilgrimage, and a belief obtains that when the Sidi is rightly invoked, a certain minaret in its front will nod in acceptance of the chosen worshipper. I could multiply instances indefinitely, but refrain on purpose. All the chief mosques at Tlemçen, Constantine, and the other leading North African towns similarly gather over the bodies of saints or marabouts, who are invoked in prayer, and to whom every act of worship is offered.