Comparative Religion

by J. Estlin Carpenter

Egypt, thought Herodotus, had been the teacher of immortality to Greece. The statement is at least interesting as a sign that in the traveller's view the Hellenic faith of his day possessed some analogies with the Egyptian. The ethical element in it, at any rate, was gaining more and more force. In Homer Hades, who is after all another form of Zeus in the underworld, is sovereign, but not judge, of the nether realm. The Erinnyes, who are originally ghosts of the dead, inflict their punishments mostly in the life of earth; only for broken oaths is penalty imposed below; and Tartarus, in the lowest deep, is reserved for the giant Titans who had challenged the majesty of heaven. In the stony asphodel meadow Achilles is but a shade among the rest; if Menelaus is admitted to the Elysian plain, it is no superior valour but aristocratic connection which wins him his place. Rare is the allusion to a judgment; the tribunal of Minos, son of Zeus, may be the moralising addition of some later bard.

But in the fifth century B.C. fresh influences are at work. Pythagoras has founded his communities, half philosophical, half religious. The higher thought has become markedly monotheistic, and Orphism with its rude sacrament (p. [147]) has helped to develop conceptions of fellowship with deity which made new hopes for the future possible. So Pindar, nearest of kin among Greek poets to the prophetio voices of Israel, emphasises the retributive government of God. Man may be nothing more than "a dream of a shadow," nevertheless he is not too insignificant to escape the dooms of heaven upon his guilt, and if there is requital for evil there are also happy islands for the blest. The ethical leaven is already powerfully at work. The language of Cebes and Simmias in Plato's dialogue of the Phædo shows, however, that the belief was by no means universal; and the beautiful sepulchral reliefs at Athens give no hint of that august tribunal of Minos, Rhadamanthus and Æacus, which Plato pictures as engaged in judging souls.

But the great mysteries of Eleusis certainly fostered the hope of immortality. The conviction grew stronger that the initiated would have a happier lot in the life to come, so that Diogenes sarcastically inquired whether an initiated robber would be better off than an uninitiated honest man. The inscriptions of the last centuries before our era show nothing like the consensus of feeling in an Egyptian cemetery or a modern English graveyard. The soul is piously committed to the ether, or, if there be rewards in the realm below, is confided to Persephonê; or it is reverently placed among the stars, in the councils of the immortals, or in the home of the gods. Such were the popular conventions. Philosophical speculation gathered round the idea of transmigration, or pleaded for at least a continuance of consciousness till the great conflagration which should end the world; while Orphic religion held out the hope that the soul, entangled in this earthly scene, might after long discipline rise once more to its home with God.

The theories of continuance all assume that the world will go upon its usual way. Generation will follow generation in this life, but the lower culture does not ask what will happen in the next. It cannot take big time-surveys, like the Egyptian "millions of years" or the Hebrew "ages of ages." The future will be like the present, as the present has been like the past. Imagination can conceive a beginning, it does not at first advance to an end. But the development of astronomy in Babylonia, with the discovery of regular periodicities in Nature, seems to have suggested the idea of a great World-Year, an immense period beginning with creation, which would be brought to an end by some great catastrophe such as flood or fire. The flood had already taken place. Traditions of it floated to India and Greece; they were incorporated in ancient Hebrew story. After another immense revolution of time would there be a similar close? There is some evidence that this was part of Babylonian teaching in the days of Berosus, in the middle of the third century B.C. (p. [39]), but it has not yet been discovered in the ancient cuneiform texts. The next agency of dissolution would be heat. It was part of early Buddhist speculation, and lodged itself in Indian thought; and from the days of Pythagoras, in the sixth century B.C., it formed part of the Greek philosophical outlook in different schools towards the "last things." When the next periodic destruction took place, what would happen? According to one answer the restoration of all things would set in, and the entire cycle would be repeated over again. Eudemus, a pupil of Aristotle, is said to have observed in one of his lectures that if the Pythagoreans were to be trusted, his audience would have the privilege of hearing him again: "You will be sitting there in the same way, and I shall be telling you my story, holding my little stick, and everything else will go on the same."

This mechanical reproduction of a whole previous age down to its minutest details did not, however, really engage the higher Greek thought. That was chiefly occupied with the abiding contrast between that which is and that which appears; how could the ultimate Unity present itself in such infinite diversity? what was the relation of the world of change and succession to the enduring substance that lay behind? In such questions man and his destiny had but a small share. Pindar might sing how "God accomplisheth all ends according to his wish; God who overtaketh the winged eagle and outstrippeth the dolphin of the sea, and layeth low many a mortal in his haughtiness, while to others he giveth glory unspeakable: if any man expect that in doing ought he shall be unseen of God, he erreth." The tragedians might wrestle with dark problems of crime and fate; and poetry and philosophy might agree in presenting the world as the scene of a divine thought, the manifestation of a divine energy. Regularities, fixities, invariable successions, pointed to a definite order, divinely maintained. But to what did it lead? What place was there in it for man? His future might be moralised; the unethical Hades of Homer might be replaced by the judgment-scenes of Plato; but no world-process is suggested for the elimination of evil or the fulfilment of any divine end. Plato might throw out the hint that Delphi should become the interpreter of religion to all mankind; the mysteries might be opened to slave as well as freeman, and might even admit those who were not of Hellenic race; but there were no prophet's glimpses of a purpose leading to some all-embracing goal. Zeus orders all as he wills. Individuals are punished, but the misdeeds, like the sufferings or sorrows of man, are lost in the harmonious majesty of the Whole.

Indian thought, as has been already indicated, worked out a complete identification of life with the moral order by means of the doctrine of the Deed (p. [217]). The scheme of transmigration took up the earlier ideas of the elder thinkers. The Vedic poets had told of the land of Yama, who was sometimes presented as the first man to die and enter the heavenly world. In one hymn he is associated with Varuna in the highest heaven, where the pious live from age to age, and are sometimes identified with the sun's rays or the stars. There kindred were gathered, and warriors and poets received their reward, and the devout realised the object of their prayers; and Yama sat under a tree of goodly leaves, drinking with the gods the life-giving soma-juice, father and master of the house, tending the heavenly sires. Deep below was the dark pit for those who would not sacrifice to Indra, or persecuted his worshippers. There were fiends of various kinds to torment the wicked, the untruthful, or the seducer. But there are no traces of any specific judgment, with definite awards of heaven and hell. In the later scheme of life founded on the conception of Karma such a tribunal might seem unnecessary: the product of the past works out its own result. But as Buddhist folklore shows, popular theology required the pronouncement of a judge, and Yama took his place as Lord of hell and King of Righteousness.

By what channels the doctrine of successive world-ages entered Hindu religion cannot be definitely determined. Early Buddhist teaching assumes it as familiar, though it is not included in the prior Brahmanical literature; and minutely describes the great conflagration which will consume the universe through the heat engendered by the appearance of seven suns. Karma, however, could not be destroyed. No fire could burn it, nor could the other agencies of dissolution, like water or wind, drown or disperse it. It must proceed unerringly to its results. These might be for a time suspended, they could not be frustrated for ever. Their energies lay latent, waiting their opportunity. So a new world would arise to provide the means and the field for their operation, and from age to age, through seasons of dissolution and restoration, with intervals of incalculable time, the endless process would fulfil its round. This would be no literal repetition. The history of a new world-age would be quite fresh, for the potencies of Karma were of infinite variety, and were for ever being re-shaped, cancelled, or extended by the action of the new personalities—divine, human, demonic—(reincarnation might also take place in animal or plant)—in which they were embodied. But the immense series led to nothing. Buddhist imagination filled the universe with worlds, each with its own systems of heaven and hell, and projected æons upon æons into immeasurable time, but the sequence pointed to no goal, for what could arrest the inexorable succession? Was there any escape from its law?

To that question different answers were returned by different teachers. The forest-sages had already pleaded for the recognition of the identity of the self within the heart with the Universal Self (p. [60]). There was the path by which the phenomenal scene could be transcended, and the soul brought into its true fellowship with the Infinite Being, Intelligence, and Joy. But inasmuch as this deliverance was only realised by a few, and could not be self-wrought, it must be the result of a divine election; they only could attain it whom the Self chose as his own. With its repudiation of all ontological ideas of soul, or substance, or universal Self, early Buddhism threw the whole task of achieving emancipation on the individual, who must himself win the higher insight and discipline his character with no aid but that of the Teacher and his example. The passion for the salvation of the world might generate an unexampled missionary activity, transcending all bounds of caste and race. It might express itself in singularly comprehensive vows such as these, which were carried from China to Japan in the seventh century A.D., and are still part of Buddhist devotion: "There are beings without limit, let me take the vow to take them all unto the further shore: there are depravities without number, let me take the vow to extinguish them all: there are truths without end, let me take the vow to know them all: there is the way of Buddha without comparison, let me make the vow to accomplish it." But only the wisdom of Amida, All-Merciful and All-Potent (p. [17]), could avail to harmonise the issues of Karma with the operations of grace, and carry the world-process to the goal of universal salvation.

The theologians and philosophers of India might devise various methods for the believer's escape from the round of re-births; but on the ecclesiastical side they never surmounted the practical limitation of nationality, or sought to address themselves to the world at large; while the mystics who more easily passed the bounds of race usually lacked the aggressive energy which demanded the conquest and suppression of evil and the assurance of the victory of good. It was reserved for the Persian thinkers, led by Zarathustra, to work out a scheme for the ultimate overthrow of the power of "the Lie" (p. [211]). Egyptian theology had impersonated the forces of evil in Set. There were the constant oppositions of darkness and light, of sickness and health, of the desert against fertility, of drought against the Nile, of foreign lands against Egypt. Mythically, the antagonism between Set and his brother Osiris was continued by Isis' son Horus. It was renewed again and again, and Set was for ever defeated, yet always returned afresh to the strife. But no demand was raised for his elimination. Osiris had passed into the land of Amenti, where Set could trouble him no more. And apparently the later identification of the deceased with Osiris meant that for him, too, the powers of death and evil were overcome. But this did not affect Set's activity in the existing scene, where the strife continued over the survivors day by day. The insight of the Iranian prophet could not admit this division of spheres, and demanded not only new heavens, but also a new earth, where evil should have no more power, and the Righteous Order, the Good Mind, the Bounteous Spirit, and the rest of the Immortals, should be the unchallenged ministers of Ahura's rule.

The history of the world, accordingly, was ultimately arranged in four periods of three thousand years each. The life of Zarathustra closed the third. At the end of the fourth the great era of the Frasho-kereti, the entry into a new age and a new scene, would arrive. It would be preceded at the close of each millennial series by the advent of a deliverer, wondrously born of Zarathustra's seed. During the third of these, the last of the whole twelve, the ancient serpent would be loosed to ravage Ahura Mazda's good creation. But the Saoshyant or "Saviour," the greatest of the three successors of the prophet, would bring about the general resurrection. From the Home of Song and from the hells of evil thought and word and deed the spirits of the dead would resume their bodies. Families would be reunited in preparation for the last purifying pain. For a mighty conflagration would take place; the mountains would be dissolved with fervent heat, and the whole multitude of the human race would be overflowed by the molten metal for three days. The righteous would pass through it like a bath of milk; the evil would be purged of the last impulses to sin. Saoshyant and his helpers would dispense the drink of immortality, and the final conflict with the powers of evil would begin. Añra Mainyu, the great Serpent, with all their satellites and the multitude of the demonic hosts, should be finally driven into hell and consumed in the cleansing flame; and hell itself should be "brought back for the enlargement of the world."