Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1

by Thomas De Quincey

With Christianity a new scene was opened. In this religion the cultus, or form of worship, was not even the primary business, far less was it the exclusive business. The worship flowed as a direct consequence from the new idea exposed of the divine nature, and from the new idea of man's relations to this nature. Here were suddenly unmasked great doctrines, truths positive and directly avowed: whereas, in Pagan forms of religion, any notices which then were, or seemed to be, of circumstances surrounding the gods, related only to matters of fact or accident, such as that a particular god was the son or the nephew of some other god; a truth, if it were a truth, wholly impertinent to any interest of man.

As there are some important truths, dimly perceived or not at all, lurking in the idea of God,—an idea too vast to be navigable as yet by the human understanding, yet here and there to be coasted,—I wish at this point to direct the reader's attention upon a passage which he may happen to remember in Sir Isaac Newton: the passage occurs at the end of the 'Optics;' and the exact expressions I do not remember; but the sense is what I am going to state: Sir Isaac is speaking of God; and he takes occasion to say, that God is not good, but goodness; is not holy, but holiness; is not infinite, but infinity. This, I apprehend, will have struck many readers as merely a rhetorical bravura; sublime, perhaps, and fitted to exalt the feeling of awe connected with so unapproachable a mystery, but otherwise not throwing any new light upon the darkness of the idea as a problem before the intellect. Yet indirectly perhaps it does, when brought out into its latent sense by placing it in juxtaposition with paganism. If a philosophic theist, who is also a Christian, or who (not being a Christian,) has yet by his birth and breeding become saturated with Christian ideas and feelings,[Footnote: this case is far from uncommon; and undoubtedly, from having too much escaped observation, it has been the cause of much error. Poets I could mention, if it were not invidious to do so, who, whilst composing in a spirit of burning enmity to the Christian faith, yet rested for the very sting of their pathos upon ideas that but for Christianity could never have existed. Translators there have been, English, French, German, of Mahometan books, who have so colored the whole vein of thinking with sentiments peculiar to Christianity, as to draw from a reflecting reader the exclamation, 'If this can be indeed the product of Islamism, wherefore should Christianity exist?' If thoughts so divine can, indeed, belong to a false religion, what more could we gain from a true one?] attempts to realize the idea of supreme Deity, he becomes aware of a double and contradictory movement in his own mind whilst striving towards that result. He demands, in the first place, something in the highest degree generic; and yet again in the opposite direction, something in the highest degree individual; he demands on the one path, a vast ideality, and yet on the other, in union with a determinate personality. He must not surrender himself to the first impulse, else he is betrayed into a mere anima mundi; he must not surrender himself to the second, else he is betrayed into something merely human. This difficult antagonism, of what is most and what is least generic, must be maintained, otherwise the idea, the possible idea, of that august unveiling which takes place in the Judaico-Christian God, is absolutely in clouds. Now, this antagonism utterly collapses in paganism. And to a philosophic apprehension, this peculiarity of the heathen gods is more shocking and fearful than what at first sight had seemed most so. When a man pauses for the purpose of attentively reviewing the Pantheon of Greece and Rome, what strikes him at the first with most depth of impression and with most horror is, the wickedness of this Pantheon. And he observes with surprise, that this wickedness, which is at a furnace-heat in the superior gods, becomes fainter and paler as you descend. Amongst the semi-deities, such as the Oreads or Dryads, the Nereids or Naiads, he feels not at all offended. The odor of corruption, the saeva mephitis, has by this time exhaled. The uproar of eternal outrage has ceased. And these gentle divinities, if too human and too beset with infirmities, are not impure, and not vexed with ugly appetites, nor instinct of quarrel: they are tranquil as are the hills and the forests; passionless as are the seas and the fountains which they tenant. But, when he ascends to the dii majorum gentium, to those twelve gods of the supreme house, who may be called in respect of rank, the Paladins of the classical Pantheon, secret horror comes over him at the thought that demons, reflecting the worst aspects of brutal races, ever could have levied worship from his own. It is true they do so no longer as regards our planet. But what has been apparently may be. God made the Greeks and Romans of one blood with himself; he cannot deny that intellectually the Greeks—he cannot deny that morally the Romans—were amongst the foremost of human races; and he trembles in thinking that abominations, whose smoke ascended through so many ages to the supreme heavens, may, or might, so far as human resistance is concerned, again become the law for the noblest of his species. A deep feeling, it is true, exists latently in human beings of something perishable in evil. Whatsoever is founded in wickedness, according to a deep misgiving dispersed amongst men, must be tainted with corruption. There might seem consolation; but a man who reflects is not quite so sure of that. As a commonplace resounding in schools, it may be justly current amongst us, that what is evil by nature or by origin must be transient. But that may be because evil in all human things is partial, is heterogeneous; evil mixed with good; and the two natures, by their mutual enmity, must enter into a collision, which may possibly guarantee the final destruction of the whole compound. Such a result may not threaten a nature that is purely and totally evil, that is homogeneously evil. Dark natures there may be, whose essence is evil, that may have an abiding root in the system of the universe not less awfully exempt from change than the mysterious foundations of God.

This is dreadful. Wickedness that is immeasurable, in connection with power that is superhuman, appals the imagination. Yet this is a combination that might easily have been conceived; and a wicked god still commands a mode of reverence. But that feature of the pagan pantheon, which I am contrasting with this, viz., that no pagan deity is an abstraction but a vile concrete, impresses myself with a subtler sense of horror; because it blends the hateful with a mode of the ludicrous. For the sake of explaining myself to the non-philosophic reader, I beg him to consider what is the sort of feeling with which he regards an ancient river-god, or the presiding nymph of a fountain. The impression which he receives is pretty much like that from the monumental figure of some allegoric being, such as Faith or Hope, Fame or Truth. He hardly believes that the most superstitious Grecian seriously believed in such a being as a distinct personality. He feels convinced that the sort of personal existence ascribed to such an abstraction, as well as the human shape, are merely modes of representing and drawing into unity a variety of phenomena and agencies that seem one, by means of their unintermitting continuity, and because they tend to one common purpose. Now, from such a symbolic god as this, let him pass to Jupiter or Mercury, and instantly he becomes aware of a revolting individuality. He sees before him the opposite pole of deity. The river-god had too little of a concrete character. Jupiter has nothing else. In Jupiter you read no incarnation of any abstract quality whatever: he represents nothing whatever in the metaphysics of the universe. Except for the accident of his power, he is merely a man. He has a character, that is, a tendency or determination to this quality or that, in excess; whereas a nature truly divine must be in equilibrio as to all qualities, and comprehend them all, in the way that a genus comprehends the subordinate species. He has even a personal history: he has passed through certain adventures, faced certain dangers, and survived hostilities that, at one time, were doubtful in their issue. No trace, in short, appears, in any Grecian god, of the generic. Whereas we, in our Christian ideas of God, unconsciously, and without thinking of Sir Isaac Newton, realize Sir Isaac's conceptions. We think of him as having a sort of allegoric generality, liberated from the bonds of the individual; and yet, also, as the most awful among natures, having a conscious personality. He is diffused through all things, present everywhere, and yet not the less present locally. He is at a distance unapproachable by finite creatures; and yet, without any contradiction, (as the profound St. Paul observes,) 'not very far' from every one of us. And I will venture to say, that many a poor old woman has, by virtue of her Christian inoculation, Sir Isaac's great idea lurking in her mind; as for instance, in relation to any of God's attributes; suppose holiness or happiness, she feels, (though analytically she could not explain,) that God is not holy or is not happy by way of participation, after the manner of other beings: that is, he does not draw happiness from a fountain separate and external to himself, and common to other creatures, he drawing more and they drawing less; but that he, himself is the fountain; that no other being can have the least proportion of either one or the other but by drawing from that fountain; that as to all other good gifts, that as to life itself, they are, in man, not on any separate tenure, not primarily, but derivatively, and only in so far as God enters into the nature of man; that 'we live and move' only so far and so long as the incomprehensible union takes place between the human spirit and the fontal abyss of the divine. In short, here, and here only, is found the outermost expansion, the centrifugal, of the TO catholic, united with the innermost centripetal of the personal consciousness. Had, therefore, the pagan gods been less detestable, neither impure nor malignant, they could not have won a salutary veneration—being so merely concrete individuals.

Next, it must have degraded the gods, (and have made them instruments of degradation for man,) that they were, one and all, incarnations; not, as even the Christian God is, for a transitory moment and for an eternal purpose; but essentially and by overruling necessity. The Greeks could not conceive of spirituality. Neither can we, metaphysically, assign the conditions of the spiritual; but, practically, we all feel and represent to our own minds the agencies of God, as liberated from bonds of space and time, of flesh and of resistance. This the Greeks could not feel, could not represent. And the only advantage which the gods enjoyed over the worm and the grub was, that they, (or at least the Paladins amongst them—the twelve supreme gods,) could pass, fluently, from one incarnation to another.

Thirdly. Out of that essential bondage to flesh arose a dreadful suspicion of something worse: in what relation did the pagan gods stand to the abominable phenomenon of death? It is not by uttering pompous flatteries of ever-living and ambrotos aei, &c., that a poet could intercept the searching jealousies of human penetration. These are merely oriental forms of compliment. And here, by the way, as elsewhere, we find Plato vehemently confuted: for it was the undue exaltation of the gods, and not their degradation, which must be ascribed to the frauds of poets. Tradition, and no poetic tradition, absolutely pointed to the grave of more gods than one. But waiving all that as liable to dispute, one thing we know, from the ancients themselves, as open to no question, that all the gods were born; were born infants; passed through the stages of helplessness and growth; from all which the inference was but too fatally obvious. Besides, there were grandfathers, and even great-grandfathers in the Pantheon: some of these were confessedly superannuated; nay, some had disappeared. Even men, who knew but little of Olympian records, knew this, at least, for certain, that more than one dynasty of gods had passed over the golden stage of Olympus, had made their exit, and were hurrying onward to oblivion. It was matter of notoriety, also, that all these gods were and had been liable to the taint of sorrow for the death of their earthly children, (as the Homeric Jupiter for Sarpedon, Thetis for Achilles, Calliope, in Euripides, for her blooming Rhesus;) all were liable to fear; all to physical pain; all to anxiety; all to the indefinite menaces of a danger not measurable.[Footnote: it must not be forgotten that all the superior gods passed through an infancy (as Jove, &c.) or even an adolescence, (as Bacchus,) or even a maturity, (as the majority of Olympus during the insurrection of the Titans,) surrounded by perils that required not strength only, but artifice, and even abject self-concealment to evade.] Looking backwards or looking forwards, the gods beheld enemies that attacked their existence, or modes of decay, (known and unknown,) which gnawed at their roots. All this I take the trouble to insist upon: not as though it could be worth any man's trouble, at this day, to expose (on its own account) the frailty of the Pantheon, but with a view to the closer estimate of the Divine idea amongst men; and by way of contrast to the power of that idea under Christianity: since I contend that, such as is the God of every people, such, in the corresponding features of character, will be that people. If the god (like Moloch) is fierce, the people will be cruel; if (like Typhon) a destroying energy, the people will be gloomy; if (like the Paphian Venus) libidinous, the people will be voluptuously effeminate. When the gods are perishable, man cannot have the grandeurs of his nature developed: when the shadow of death sits upon the highest of what man represents to himself as celestial, essential blight will sit for ever upon human aspirations. One thing only remains to be added on this subject: Why were not the ancients more profoundly afflicted by the treacherous gleams of mortality in their gods? How was it that they could forget, for a moment, a revelation so full of misery? Since not only the character of man partly depended upon the quality of his god, but also and a fortiori, his destiny upon the destiny of his god. But the reason of his indifference to the divine mortality was—because, at any rate, the pagan man's connection with the gods terminated at his own death. Even selfish men would reconcile themselves to an earthquake, which should swallow up all the world; and the most unreasonable man has professed his readiness, at all times, to die with a dying universe—mundo secum pereunte, mori.

But, thirdly, the gods being such, in what relation to them did man stand? It is a fact hidden from the mass of the ancients themselves, but sufficiently attested, that there was an ancient and secret enmity between the whole family of the gods and the human race. This is confessed by Herodotus as a persuasion spread through some of the nations amongst which he travelled: there was a sort of truce, indeed, between the parties; temples, with their religious services, and their votive offerings, recorded this truce. But below all these appearances lay deadly enmity, to be explained only by one who should know the mysterious history of both parties from the eldest times. It is extraordinary, however, that Herodotus should rely, for this account, upon the belief of distant nations, when the same belief was so deeply recorded amongst his own countrymen in the sublime story of Prometheus. Much[Footnote: not all: for part was due to the obstinate concealment from Jupiter, by Prometheus, of the danger which threatened his throne in a coming generation.] of the sufferings endured by Prometheus was on account of man, whom he had befriended; and, by befriending, had defeated the malignity of Jove. According to some, man was even created by Prometheus: but no accounts, until lying Platonic philophers arose, in far later times, represented man as created by Jupiter.

Now let us turn to Christianity; pursuing it through the functions which it exercises in common with Paganism, and also through those which it exercises separately and incommunicably.

I. As to the Idea of God,—how great was the chasm dividing the Hebrew God from all gods of idolatrous birth, and with what starry grandeur this revelation of Supreme deity must have wheeled upwards into the field of human contemplation, when first surmounting the steams of earth-born heathenism, I need not impress upon any Christian audience. To their knowledge little could be added. Yet to know is not always to feel: and without a correspondent depth of feeling, there is in moral cases no effectual knowledge. Not the understanding is sufficient upon such ground, but that which the Scriptures in their profound philosophy entitle the 'understanding heart.' And perhaps few readers will have adequately appreciated the prodigious change effected in the theatre of the human spirit, by the transition, sudden as the explosion of light, in the Hebrew cosmogony, when, from the caprice of a fleshly god, in one hour man mounted to a justice that knew no shadow of change; from cruelty, mounted to a love which was inexhaustible; from gleams of essential evil, to a holiness that could not be fathomed; from a power and a knowledge, under limitations so merely and obviously human,[Footnote: It is a natural thought, to any person who has not explored these recesses of human degradation, that surely the Pagans must have had it in their power to invest their gods with all conceivable perfections, quite as much as we that are not Pagans. The thing wanting to the Pagans, he will think, was the right: otherwise as regarded the power.] to the same agencies lying underneath creation, as a root below a plant. Not less awful in power was the transition from the limitations of space and time to ubiquity and eternity, from the familiar to the mysterious, from the incarnate to the spiritual. These enormous transitions were fitted to work changes of answering magnitude in the human spirit. The reader can hardly make any mistake as to this. He must concede the changes. What he will be likely to misconceive, unless he has reflected, is—the immensity of these changes. And another mistake, which he is even more likely to make, is this: he will imagine that a new idea, even though the idea of an object so vast as God, cannot become the ground of any revolution more than intellectual—cannot revolutionize the moral and active principles in man, consequently cannot lay the ground of any political movement. We shall see. But next, that is,—

II. Secondly, as to the idea of man's relation to God, this, were it capable of disjunction, would be even more of a revolutionary idea than the idea of God. But the one idea is enlinked with the other. In Paganism, as I have said, the higher you ascend towards the original fountains of the religion, the more you leave behind the frauds, forgeries, and treacheries of philosophy; so much the more clearly you descry the odious truth—that man stood in the relation of a superior to his gods, as respected all moral qualities of any value, but in the relation of an inferior as respected physical power. This was a position of the two parties fatal, by itself, to all grandeur of moral aspirations. Whatever was good or corrigibly bad, man saw associated with weakness; and power was sealed and guaranteed to absolute wickedness. The evil disposition in man to worship success, was strengthened by this mode of superiority in the gods. Merit was disjoined from prosperity. Even merit of a lower class, merit in things morally indifferent, was not so decidedly on the side of the gods as to reconcile man to the reasonableness of their yoke. They were compelled to acquiesce in a government which they did not regard as just. The gods were stronger, but not much; they had the unfair advantage of standing over the heads of men, and of wings for flight or for manoeuvring. Yet even so, it was clearly the opinion of Homer's age, that, in a fair fight, the gods might have been found liable to defeat. The gods again were generally beautiful: but not more so than the elite of mankind; else why did these gods, both male and female, continually persecute our race with their odious love? which love, be it observed, uniformly brought ruin upon its objects. Intellectually the gods were undoubtedly below men. They pretended to no great works in philosophy, in legislation, or in the fine arts, except only that, as to one of these arts, viz. poetry, a single god vaunted himself greatly in simple ages. But he attempted neither a tragedy nor an epic poem. Even in what he did attempt, it is worth while to follow his career. His literary fate was what might have been expected. After the Persian war, the reputation of his verses rapidly decayed. Wits arose in Athens, who laughed so furiously at his style and his metre, in the Delphic oracles, that at length some echoes of their scoffing began to reach Delphi; upon which the god and his inspired ministers became sulky, and finally took refuge in prose, as the only shelter they could think of from the caustic venom of Athenian malice.

These were the miserable relations of man to the Pagan gods. Every thing, which it is worth doing at all, man could do better. Now it is some feature of alleviation in a servile condition, if the lord appears by natural endowments superior to his slave; or at least it embitters the degradation of slavery, if he does not. Greatly, therefore, must human interests have suffered, had this jealous approximation of the two parties been the sole feature noticeable in the relations between them. But there was a worse. There was an original enmity between man and the Pantheon; not the sort of enmity which we Christians ascribe to our God; that is but a figure of speech: and even there is a derivative enmity; an enmity founded on something in man subsequent to his creation, and having a ransom annexed to it. But the enmity of the heathen gods was original—that is, to the very nature of man, and as though man had in some stage of his career been their rival; which indeed he was, if we adopt Milton's hypothesis of the gods as ruined angels, and of man as created to supply the vacancy thus arising in heaven.