As regards the liturgies of Egypt, so far as I have been able with very limited opportunities to examine them, the superstition of the spell lay so heavy on the Egyptian mind, that prayer does not seem able to extricate itself from its prepossession. Not only do the deities work by means of spells and the magic of their names, but the worshipper uses the same means to work upon them; and the prayer that accompanies the spell seems usually to savour of self-confidence and command. At least this is the impression one gathers from what is published concerning the Book of the Dead and the ritual practised to secure the happiness of the deceased. By utterance of words of enchantment over pictures, the soul of the dead becomes divine.[225.1] The magic word helps to transfer the power of the deity into the fetich, and this with the word written upon it is placed on the body of the dead: for instance, an amulet with the words, “May the blood of Isis… and the word of power of Isis be mighty to protect this mighty one”;[225.2] a terra-cotta lamp of the Greco-Roman period, carved with the symbol of the frog-headed goddess Heqt, and bearing the words, “I am the Resurrection.”[226.1] On an object placed under the head of the deceased to maintain the warmth of the body, we find the following words, supposed to be addressed by the spirit to Amen:[226.2] “I am a perfect spirit among the companions of Ra, and I have gone in and come forth among the perfect souls… grant thou unto me the things which my body needeth, and heaven for my soul and a hidden place for my mummy.” “May the god who himself is hidden and whose face is concealed, who shineth upon the world in his forms of existence and in the underworld, grant that my soul may live for ever.”[226.3] Here we have the statement of a conviction that gains its assurance from magic, followed by prayer. It seems that the Egyptian prayed to the gods, as if by such prayer he might gain immortality, but that he trusted equally to magical means, to pictures and words of power from the sacred texts, and employed at once the methods of religion and of enchantment.[227.1]
Looking at the Christian religion, we should find it hard to give a succinct and accurate account of these phenomena in the various stages of its history. We may be able to set forth the theories and ritual-practices of the various churches and compare them with what we find elsewhere; but it is more difficult to analyse accurately the religious psychology, the thought and feeling which accompanies the ritual: the quality of the mental state would depend partly on the ancestral conditions and the strength of the ancestral instincts of the individual. And the teaching of the most spiritual Christian philosophy has not been able to prevent some touches of the old-world magic from contaminating the worship. The theory of the leading thinkers among the early Christian fathers agreed, as we have seen, with the pronouncement of later Greek philosophy. Both for Clemens, who gives us the earliest theory of Christian prayer, without finding, however, a clear logical system, and for Origen, the final justification of prayer was communion with God, τὸ ἀνακραθῆναι τῷ πνεύματι,[228.1] ὁμιλία πρὸς τὸν θεὸν ἡ εὐχή.[228.2] And Clemens maintains that the true gnostic, he who has the true knowledge of God, “works himself with God in his prayer so as to attain perfection.”[228.3] The gnostic of Clemens, then, is not purely petitionary in his prayer; by his spontaneous self-projection he contributes something himself to the attainment of the end he prays for; and, as I have ventured to suggest above, we may discern in this theory the meeting-point of the more primitive and the more exalted religious views.
Meantime the actual heretic sect of the gnostics were applying much of the old magic under new names and new texts, and did not even care to discard wholly the old spell-nomenclature.[229.1] And even in the orthodox churches, as we have seen, the mystic power and liturgical use of the name has continued, being the inheritance of a different religious world from that with which we are familiar or of which we are conscious. We may also legitimately compare many of the ritual acts which accompany prayer, for instance in the earlier and later Roman Church, with the suggestive or mimetic religious actions of less advanced cults. One of the most interesting examples that may be quoted is the description of the blessing of the baptismal water on the eve of the Epiphany, a custom prevalent in the earlier Church of Rome:[229.2] the priest, while praying to God to sanctify the water, dipped a crucifix thrice into it, recalling in his prayer the miracle described in Exodus, the sweetening of the bitter water with wood; then followed antiphonal singing describing Christ’s baptism in Jordan, which sanctified the water. We appear to have here a combination of the great typical forms of the immemorial religious energy, prayer pure and simple, the potent use of the spiritually charged object, the fetich (in this case the crucifix), and an intoned or chanted narrative which has the spell-value of suggestion.[230.1]
What maintained the use of the spell-prayer in full vigour throughout the earlier and medieval epochs of Christendom, even in the orthodox ritual, was chiefly the practice of exorcism and the belief in demons and demoniac possession; and the legal institution of the ordeal contributed also to its maintenance. As modern society has abandoned such institutions, and the modern mind is no longer possessed with demonology, so in the modern worship prayer has become more and more purified from the associations of the spell; the traces that remain of the latter are faint and usually unintelligible to the modern worshipper. And on the other side there is a progressive tendency beginning to be felt, making for a reform of our liturgy in respect of the objects for which prayer should be proffered. But in this respect, as the comparison has shown, we cannot be said to have advanced as yet beyond many of the old-world religions.
The special subjects of these last two lectures, the history of purification and prayer, have only been presented in an inadequate sketch. The full and exhaustive treatment of either would serviceably fill a gap in the library of comparative religion. But they have served my present purpose, if they have been able to illustrate and to some extent test the value of the comparative study of the various theologies of mankind.
[The End]
INDEX
Anthropology, value of, [5]: occasional defects in its method of treating religious problems, [12]-[17]: suggested improvements in method, [17]-[23].