Meantime the philosophers from Socrates onwards were insisting on the more spiritual view of prayer, preaching that, in the first place, there was no need to particularise one’s needs in one’s petitions to God, for there was danger lest one should pray for what is injurious; in the second place, that prayer should look only to the spiritual, not the material life. And we owe to this theory some striking utterances that must rank high in the literature of ethical religion: such as the prayer of Socrates, δοίητέ μοι καλῷ γενέσθαι τἄνδοθεν, “Grant me to become noble of heart”[204.3]; of Apollonius of Tyana, ὦ θεοὶ δοίητέ μοι τὰ ὀφειλόμενα, “Oh gods, grant me that which I deserve”[204.4]; the longer poetic formula quoted by Plato, “King Zeus, grant us the good whether we pray for it or not, but evil keep from us though we pray for it”[205.1]: and with these we may compare the dictum of Epictetus[205.2]: “In praying to the divine powers ask for divine things, things free from fleshly or earthly circumstance.” Other expressions of the Stoic sect are equally striking for the spirit of fervent acquiescence and resignation that inspires them. Here is the prayer of Epictetus: “Do with me what thou wilt: my will is thy will: I appeal not against thy judgments”[205.3]; and a poetic version of this has come down to us from earlier stoicism—“Lead me, O God, and I will follow, willingly if I am wise, but if not willingly I still must follow.” A prayer recorded in the apocryphal Acts of St Thomas[205.4] seems almost an echo of these: “I go whither Thou wilt, oh Jesus: Thy will be done.”
When the best thought of the age had reached to such a point of spiritual abstraction, it was natural that the same question should arise as arose among the more philosophic adherents of early Christianity, whether special prayers were justifiable at all. It seems that at some period the Pythagorean school were inclined to forbid prayer altogether,[206.1] for the reason that God knew better how to give than man knew how to ask; but the later Neo-Platonism discovered an ideal raison-d’être for the practice, on the ground that it raised the mind to direct communion and converse with God; and this view is developed at great length by Proclus.[206.2]
This sketch of the Greek phenomena that belong to our subject may close with an example of that perfervid mysticism that marks the liturgies of latest paganism: the following is the close of a long address to Asclepios—an Hellenic deity attracted here into the Egyptian circle—found in the treatise called Asclepios, attributed to Apuleius:[207.1] “We rejoice in thy divine salvation, because thou hast shown thyself wholly to us: we rejoice that thou hast deigned to consecrate us to eternity, while we are still in these mortal bodies. We have known thee, oh true life of the life of man.… Adoring thy goodness, we make this our only prayer… that thou wouldst be willing to keep us all our lives in the love of thy knowledge.” Portions at least of this prayer, which was the prelude to a communion supper, would not surprise us if we found it in a Christian liturgy.[207.2]
It will be convenient next to glance at the records of the other great branches of the ancient Aryan world, the Vedic Indians and the Iranians. One does not read long in the sacred books of India without attaining the conviction that the highest religion of the Vedas was deeply penetrated with sacerdotal magic; which was so far from losing its hold in the later period that it imprisoned the religious thought, and the later Brahmanism was capable of the belief that without the spell of the sacrifice the sun could not run his course in heaven. And the recital of spells forms a great part of the Vedic ritual. Thus the hymns say of the fire-god Agni, “The thoughtful men find Agni when they have recited the spells”; and the gods themselves, like the Norse divinities, work by spells: “Agni upholds the sky by his efficacious spells.”[208.1] Yet the early record gives us also copious illustration of real prayer, and occasionally of a very exalted tone. It is true, as we should expect, that material and temporal advantages are by far the predominant objects of the petition: the head of the household prays for wealth, offspring, victory in battle or the races; with rare exceptions, the prayers are personal and private rather than political, and are thus in marked contrast to the Hellenic; yet we have a few that are evidently proffered for the community,[209.1] and at times the deity is petitioned to grant an abundant supply of valiant men. But even in the few prayers that reflect the political life of the State, the individualistic spirit is apt to appear. We have a curious example of a petition to Indra to make a man powerful in the political assembly: “In this entire gathering render, O Indra, me successful,” and this is combined with a naïve spell whereby the politician endeavours to mesmerise the whole meeting: he names the assembly—as our Speaker might name a recalcitrant member—“We know thy name, oh assembly.… Of them that are sitting together I take to myself the power and the understanding”: and again, “With my mind do I seize your minds.”[210.1] But even when the prayer is personal and materialistic a real fervour and a genial poetic freshness is often to be found. Here is a beautiful prelude to a prayer for long life proffered to the ancient heaven-god: “Many dawns have not yet dawned: grant me to live in them, O Varuna.” And often the worshipper rises above mere material aspirations, as in such appeals to Agni as the following: “May we be well-doers before the gods.”[210.2] “Give us not up, oh Agni, to want of thought.”[210.3] “Mayest thou bestow splendour, renown, and (wise) mind upon such mortals as satisfy thee with refreshment, oh Agni.”[210.4] “Drive far from us senselessness and anguish: drive far all ill-will from whom thou attendest.”[210.5] At times also the hymns reveal a deep consciousness of sin and a desire for divine forgiveness. “Through want of strength, thou strong and bright god, have I gone astray. Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy!”[211.1] “Agni, drive away from us sin, which leads us astray.”[211.2] “By the earth’s greatness, oh Agni, forgive us even committed sin, that we may be great.”[211.3] “Whatever sin we have committed against thee in thoughtlessness, men as we are, make thou us sinless before Aditi.”[211.4] Yet we may suspect that the term sin is not always used in these prayers in its modern ethical sense, not for instance in the prayer, “From the sins which knowingly or unknowingly we have committed, do ye, all gods, of one accord release us”;[211.5] and the primitive concept on which the old magic of sin-transference was based survives in such passages as the following: “Pass far away, oh sin of the mind: why dost thou utter things not to be uttered? Pass away, I love thee not: to the trees and the forests go on!”[212.1] “Enter into the rays, into smoke, oh sin; go into the vapours, and into the fog.”[212.2] The context discloses only an indirect appeal to a personal deity, though the term sin in the former passage is clearly applied to what we should call moral offences.
In the Vedic ritual, then, we find a pure and spiritual form of prayer; yet a certain spell-power may attach even to the highest types, for we find not infrequently the conception that not only the power of the worshipper but the power of the deity also is nourished and strengthened by prayer;[212.3] and the prayer itself is usually accompanied by a potent act. With this aspect of Vedic prayers we may associate the fact that Agni, the fire-god, appears as the chief divinity to whom they are addressed; for his ritual is purificatory, and the prayers are thus based on a liturgy of purification which stimulates the mental or spiritual force of the worshipper.
We may now turn to another great Aryan stock, the Iranian, whose earlier religion culminated in the Zarathustrian system. The relation of spell to prayer is, on the whole, the same in the Zend-Avesta as we find it in the Vedic hymns, a real spell can accompany a real prayer, and the text of the prayer itself becomes a most potent charm. The “sacerdotal” physician, who, as we have seen, occupied a higher rank in the Zarathustrian estimate than the scientific practitioner, offers first a genuine prayer to Ahura-Mazda for spiritual strength to deal with the disease—“Give us, Ahura, that powerful sovereignty by the strength of which we may smite down the drug (the demon).” Fraught with this mesmeric power he then directs his spell against the sickness-demon: “To thee, oh Sickness, I say—Avaunt! To thee, oh Death, I say—Avaunt!”[214.1] And in the ritual of purification, which closely resembles the system of therapeutics, the formulæ of prayers of the most exalted type in the sacred books are used, not as prayers, but as cathartic spells.[214.2] It is not hard to discern the steps that lead from this grade of thought to the highest at which the religious speculation of the Zarathustrian arrived. The uttered Word of God is given a supernatural cosmic force; and the prophet pronounces that this utterance of the “Holy Word is of such a nature that if all the corporeal and living world should learn it, and learning hold fast to it, they should be redeemed from their mortality.”[214.3] And we can understand why a large part of the Zarathustrian liturgy should be devoted to the recital of formulæ which are statements of the Mazdean faith. Before rising in the morning and retiring at night, the pious Persian was recommended to say, “All good thoughts, all good words, all good deeds I do willingly: all evil thoughts, all evil words, all evil deeds I do unwillingly.”[215.1] It is interesting to compare with our own creed the following Mazdean confession: “I confess myself a Mazdayasnian of Zarathustra’s order: I celebrate my praises for good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.… With chanting praises I present all good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, and with rejection I repudiate all evil thoughts and words and deeds. Here I give to you, oh ye Bountiful Immortals, sacrifice and homage with the mind,[215.2] with words, deeds, and my entire person, yea, I offer to you the flesh of my very body.”[215.3] The formulæ of confession, as well as other parts of this liturgy, are penetrated with the idea of a moral-theological dualism to which our Christian theology has been indirectly deeply indebted. The Mazdean proclaims his detestation of the Daevas, and of Angra-Mainyu, the evil god. “Taught by Ahura, I drive away Angra-Mainyu from this house, this borough”; such words are “victorious, most healing,”[216.1] and could be used as the recitation of our creed and paternoster have been used, as veritable spells against the evil power or demon. But in comparing the spell-prayers of the Persian with the Vedic, we are struck with the superiority of the former liturgy in one respect, that here the spell is only brought to bear on the demon, not on the highest god; the prayer increases the spiritual force of the worshipper but does not constrain Ahura.
And the Iranian prayers appear to rise above the Vedic in the enthusiasm of the idea of righteousness that pervades them, and in the conviction that the believer can aid Ahura-Mazda in the continual struggle against the power of evil and in helping towards the final establishment of the righteous kingdom. He prays that, “Through the good thought and the holiness of him who offers thee the due meed of praise thou mayest, oh Lord, make the world of Resurrection appear at thy will, under thy sovereign rule.”[217.1] “May we be such as those who bring on this great Renovation.”[217.2] “May we help to bring on the good government of Ahura, which is the best for us at every present hour.”[217.3] “Be righteousness life-strong and clothed with body. In that realm which shines with splendour as the sun, let piety be present, and may she, through the indwelling of thy good mind, give us blessings in reward for deeds.”[217.4] In fact the greater number of the prayers are strikingly spiritual, and for spiritual, not material blessings. The prophet asks Ahura, “How man may become most like unto thee?”[217.5] and prays for “aids of grace, beseeching what in accordance with thy wished-for aim is best.”[218.1] And the prayer is sometimes directed to abstract moral powers, emanations of Ahura: “If the Mazda-Ahura and Righteousness and Pious Concord be invokable, I implore through the good mind a kingdom for myself, through whose increase we may conquer the Lie.” The kingdom is here the “Desirable Kingdom of Righteousness.”[218.2] Certainly the Mazdean kingdom was not of this world, and the Zarathustrian religion is one of the least materialistic that the world has known; its chief moral weakness being, as we have seen, its bondage to ritualistic purity. We may note in conclusion, as showing the continuity of the national spirit, the pronouncement of a Persian Christian, Bishop Aphrahat of East Syria, that the only valid object of prayer was purity of heart.[218.3]
Many of the phenomena that we have been noting among the Aryan races confront us again when we turn to the Chaldæan-Babylonian liturgies. Here also there appears no real antagonism between spell and prayer, magic and religion.[219.1] Spell-formulæ are used and accompanied with a ritual of purification to drive out the evil spirits of sickness; and the highest hymns containing real prayers can be employed as texts for magic purposes; even the gods themselves work by magic, and Marduk himself is invoked as the arch-magician.[219.2] And the idea that the prayer could in some sense exercise compulsion on the god appears in an anecdote told by Porphyry about a Chaldæan who was an expert in “purifications of the soul: but found his efforts thwarted because another man who was powerful in the same art had, by means of mystic prayers, bound over the powers he had invoked not to grant his demands.”[219.3] Yet by the side of all this we find often an exalted type of prayer, with spiritual and fervent expressions of homage; and the religious law that “prayer absolves from sin” is given as part of Marduk’s revelation to man.[220.1] A large number of the records contain the liturgies used by the kings, and while victory, health, and long life, the permanence of the dynasty are the more usual objects of the petition, the deeper ethical tone is often heard. The following are a few examples of the higher aspirations of the Babylonian religion. The founder of the new Babylonian kingdom has recorded his convictions for the guidance of his successor: “Marduk sees through the lips, sees the heart: he who keeps true to Bel and the son of Bel will last for ever.”[220.2] One of the greatest prayers in this or any other liturgical collection is that which Nebukadnezar made to Marduk on his accession:[220.3] “Oh Eternal Ruler, Lord of All… lead the King by the right way… I am… the work of thy hand: after thy great mercy which thou showest to all, oh Lord, grant that thy high majesty may show compassion upon me: set in my heart the fear of thy Godhead: grant me what thou deemest best: for thou it is that hast created my life.” This is scarcely the Nebukadnezar whom we once thought we knew. There is also a pathetic interest attaching to the prayer of Nabonnedos to the god Schamasch for his son Belsazar:[221.1] “Prolong the days of Belsazar, my first-born son—may he commit no sin.” The king Nabonnedos prays also to Marduk: “May I rule as king according to thy wish… let me not in my pride lose knowledge of thee, for it is thou that hast chosen me out.”[221.2] The following phrases in a prayer to Marduk of an unknown ruler are still more striking: “Oh Marduk, great Lord… let me behold thy Godhead, let me attain my heart’s desire: set righteousness on my lips and grace in my heart.”[221.3] Among the attributes of the gods there is a fervent recognition of their mercy and compassionateness: Marduk is “the god full of mercy, who loves to quicken that which is dead”;[222.1] and Ischtar, the goddess, is invoked as “the helper of the oppressed, oh thou endowed with majesty; thou who raisest the fallen and exaltest the trodden under foot.”[222.2] And the same idea reappears in a hymn to another goddess of like character with Ischtar, in which we catch the tones of a high religious poetry of homage:[222.3] “Oh strong and majestic, highest of the goddesses, radiant star… strongest of the goddesses whose robe is the light: thou who dost course through heaven and engirdle the earth… dealing punishment and pleading for men, rewarding the just, leading the wanderer, overthrowing the enemy who feareth not thy Godhead, protecting the captive, taking the weak by the hand—be gracious unto thy servant, who calls upon thy name with grace.”
This brief illustrative selection may close with the quotation of a prayer or hymn of praise to Marduk, perhaps the most remarkable among those that have as yet been translated:[223.1] “The Lord, peerless in might, the King of grace, the Ruler of the lands, that bringeth peace in heaven, that through his glance overthroweth the mighty. Lord, thy seat is Babylon, thy crown Borsippa. Thy thought, oh Lord, passeth over the wide heavens, and with thine eyes thou beholdest the affliction of men, through the anger of thy countenance thou spreadest lamentation, and thou takest him captive who regardeth thee not and setteth himself up against thee. Through thy gracious countenance thou showest men favour, thou lettest them see the light and they proclaim thy Righteousness. Oh Lord of the lands, Light of Izizi, thou who proclaimest grace, who is it whose mouth doth not tell of thy Righteousness, who doth not praise thy majesty, and glorify thy lordship?… Look down upon the hands raised in prayer to thee. Grant favour to thy city Babylon… and turn thy countenance upon thy house, and give help to the sons of Babylon and all thy people.”
With all their spells and their magic, the higher minds of the Babylonians knew how to pray, and the fervent and exalted tones of such liturgies remind us of the religious poetry of Israel. And it is interesting to note that among the few deities of Babylon whose ideal reached to such a point of ethical development, the moon-god Sin appears, who gave his name to Sinai, and who has been thought by some to have had some original affinity with the God of Israel.[224.1]