Chapter III: Progress Under Ancient Religions (3)

In the same way Lao-Tsze came to be worshipped as a God [313] under the religion called Taouism, a title sometimes mistranslated as rationalism, "a name admirably calculated to lead the mind astray as to what the religion is." [314] It would seem as if the older notion of the Tau, philosophically purified by Lao-Tsze, remained a popular basis for his school, and so wrought its degradation. The Taoists or Tao-sse "do their utmost to be as unreasonable as possible." [315] They soon reverted from the philosophic mysticism of Lao-Tsze, after a stage of indifferentism, [316] to a popular supernaturalism, [317] which "the cultivated Chinese now regard with unmixed contempt"; [318] the crystallized common-sense of Confucius, on the other hand, allied as it is with official ceremonialism, retaining its hold as an esoteric code for the learned. The evolution has thus closely resembled that which took place in India.

Nowhere, perhaps, is our sociological lesson more clearly to be read than in China. Centuries before our era it had a rationalistic literature, an ethic no less earnest and far more sane that that of the Hebrews, and a line of known teachers as remarkable in their way as those of ancient Greece who flourished about the same period. But where even Greece, wrought upon by all the other cultures of antiquity, ultimately retrograded, till under Christianity it stayed at a Chinese level of unprogressiveness for a thousand years, isolated China, helped by no neighbouring culture adequate to the need, has stagnated as regards the main mass of its life, despite some political and other fluctuations, till our own day. Its social problem, like that of India, is now more or less dependent, unfortunately, on the solutions that may be reached in Europe, where the problem is only relatively more mature, not fundamentally different.

§ 8. MEXICO AND PERU

In the religions of pre-Christian Mexico and Peru we have peculiarly interesting examples of "early" religious systems, flourishing at some such culture-level as the ancient Akkadian, in full play at the time of the European Renaissance. In Mexico a partly "high" ethical code, as the phrase goes, went concurrently with the most frightful indulgence in human sacrifice, sustained by the continuous practice of indecisive war for the securing of captives, and by the interest of a vast priesthood. In this system had been developed all the leading features of those of the Old World--the identification of all the Gods with the Sun; the worship of fire, and the annual renewal of it by special means; the conception of God-sacrifice and of communion with the God by the act of eating his slain representative; the belief in a Virgin-Mother-Goddess; the connection of humanitarian ethic with the divine command; the opinion that celibacy, as a state of superior virtue, is incumbent on most priests and on all would-be saints; the substitution of a sacramental bread for the "body and blood" of the God-Man; the idea of an interceding Mother-Goddess; the hope of a coming Saviour; the regular practice of prayer; exorcism, special indulgences, confession, absolution, fasting, and so on. [319] In Peru, also, many of those conceptions were in force; but the limitation of the power and numbers of the priesthood by the imperial system of the Incas, and the state of peace normal in their dominions, prevented the Mexican development of human sacrifice.

It seems probable that the Toltecs, who either fled before or were for the most part subdued or destroyed by the barbarian Chichimecs (in turn subdued by the Aztecs) a few centuries before Cortes, were on the whole a less warlike and more civilized people, with a less bloody worship. [320] Their God, Quetzalcoatl, retained through fear by the Aztecs, [321] was a comparatively benign deity opposed to human sacrifice, apparently rather a late purification or partial rationalization of an earlier God-type than a primitively harmless conception. [322] Insofar as they were sundered by quarrels between the sectaries of the God Quetzalcoatl and the God Votan, though their religious wars seem to have been as cruel as those of the early Christians of North Africa, there appears to have been at work among them a movement towards unbloody religion. In any case their overthrow seems to stand for the military inferiority of the higher and more rational civilization [323] to the lower and more religious, which in turn, however, was latterly being destroyed by its enormously burdensome military and priestly system, and may even be held to have been ruined by its own superstitious fears. [324]

Among the recognizable signs of normal progress in the ordinary Aztec religion were (1) the general recognition of the Sun as the God really worshipped in all the temples of the deities with special names; [325] (2) the substitution in some cults of baked bread-images for a crucified human victim. The question arises whether the Aztecs, but for their overwhelming priesthood, might conceivably have risen above their system of human sacrifices, as the Aryan Hindus had done in an earlier age. Their material civilization, which carried on that of the kindred Toltecs, was at several points superior to that which the Spaniards put in its place; and their priesthood, being a leisured and wealthy class, might have developed intellectually as did the Brahmans, [326] if its economic basis had been changed. But only a conquest or other great political convulsion could conceivably have overturned the vast cultus of human sacrifice, which overran all life, and cherished war as a means of procuring victims.

In the kindred State of Tezcuco, civilization seems to have gone further than in Aztec Anahuac; and about the middle of the fifteenth century one Tezcucan king, the conqueror Netzahualcoyotl, who has left writings in both prose and verse, is seen attaining to something like a philosophic creed, of a monotheistic stamp. [327] He is said to have rejected all idol-worship, and erected, as aforesaid, an altar "to the Unknown God," [328] forbidding all sacrifices of blood in that worship. But among the Tezcucans these never ceased; three hundred slaves were sacrificed at the obsequies of the conqueror's son, Netzahualpilli; and the Aztec influence over the superior civilization was finally complete.

In Peru, again, we find civilization advancing in respect of the innovation of substituting statuettes for wives and slaves in the tombs of the rich; and we have already noted [329] the remarkable records of the avowed unbelief of several Incas in the divinity of the nationally worshipped Sun. For the rest, there was the dubious quasi-monotheistic cult of the Creator-God, Pachacamac, concerning whom every fresh discussion raises fresh doubt. [330]

Mr. Lang, as usual, leans to the view that Pachacamac
stands for a primordial and "elevated" monotheism (Making of
Religion, pp. 263-70), while admitting the slightness of the
evidence. Garcilasso, the most eminent authority, who, however,
is contradicted by others, represents that the conception
of Pachacamac as Creator, needing no temple or sacrifice, was
"philosophically" reached by the Incas and their wise men (Lang,
p. 262). The historical fact seems to be that a race subdued
by the Incas, the Yuncas, had one temple to this deity; and
that the Incas adopted the cult. Garcilasso says the Yuncas had
human sacrifices and idols, which the Incas abolished, setting up
their monotheistic cult in that one temple. This is sufficiently
unlikely; and it may very well have been the fact that the Yuncas
had offered no sacrifices. But if they did not, it was because
their material conditions, like those of the Australians and
Fuegians, had not facilitated the practice; and in that case
their "monotheism" likewise would merely represent the ignorant
simplicity of a clan-cult. (Compare Tylor, Primitive Culture,
ii, 335 sq.; Brinton, Myths of the New World, p. 52.) On the
other hand, if the Incas had set up a cult without sacrifices
to a so-called One God, their idea would be philosophical, as
taking into account the multitude of clan-cults as well as their
own national worships, and transcending these.

But the outstanding sociological fact in Incarial Peru was the absolute subjection of the mass of the people; and though its material development and political organization were comparable to those of ancient Persia under the Akhamenidæ, so that the Spanish Conquest stood here for mere destruction, there is no reason to think that at the best its intellectual life could have risen higher than that of pre-Alexandrian Egypt, to which it offers so many resemblances. The Incas' schools were for the nobility only. [331] Rationalistic Incas and high priests might have ruled over a docile, unlettered multitude, gradually softening their moral code, in connection with their rather highly-developed doctrine (resembling the Egyptian) of a future state. But these seem the natural limits, in the absence of contact with another civilization not too disparate for a fruitful union.

In Mexico, on the other hand, an interaction of native cultures had already occurred to some purpose; and the strange humanitarianism of the man-slaying priests, who made free public hospitals of part of their blood-stained temples, [332] suggests a possibility of esoteric mental culture among them. They had certainly gone relatively far in their moral code, as apart from their atrocious creed of sacrifice, even if we discount the testimony of the benevolent priest Sahagun; [333] and they had the beginnings of a system of education for the middle classes. [334] But unless one of the States which habitually warred for captives should have conquered the others--in which case a strong ruler might have put an end to the wholesale religious slaughter of his own subjects, as appears to have been done anciently in Mesopotamia--the priests in all likelihood would never have transcended their hideous hallucination of sacrifice. Their murdered civilization is thus the "great perhaps" of sociology; organized religion being the most sinister factor in the problem.

§ 9. THE COMMON FORCES OF DEGENERATION

It is implied more or less in all the foregoing summaries that there is an inherent tendency in all systematized and instituted religion to degenerate intellectually and morally, save for the constant corrective activity of freethought. It may be well, however, to note specifically the forms or phases of the tendency.

1. Dogmatic and ritual religion being, to begin with, a more or less general veto on fresh thinking, it lies in its nature that the religious person is as such less intelligently alive to all problems of thought and conduct than he otherwise might be--a fact which at least outweighs, in a whole society, the gain from imposing a terrorized conformity on the less well-biassed types. Wherever conduct is a matter of sheer obedience to a superhuman code, it is ipso facto uncritical and unprogressive. Thus the history of most religions is a record of declines and reformations, each new affirmation of moral freethought ad hoc being in turn erected into a set of sheer commands. To set up the necessary ferment of corrective thought even for a time, there seems to be needed (a) a provocation to the intelligence, as in the spectacle of conflict of cults; and (b) a provocation to the moral sense and to self-interest through a burdensome pressure of rites or priestly exactions. An exceptional personality, of course, may count for much in the making of a movement; though the accident of the possession of kingly power by a reformer seems to count for much more than does genius.

2. The fortunes of such reactions are determined by socio-economic or political conditions. They are seen to be at a minimum, as to energy and social effect, in the conditions of greatest social invariability, as in ancient Egypt, where progress in thought, slow at best, was confined to the priestly and official class, and never affected popular culture.

3. In the absence of social conditions fitted to raise popular levels of life and thought, every religious system tends to worsen intellectually in the sense of adding to its range of superstition--that is, of ignorant and unreasoning belief. Credulity has its own momentum. Even the possession of limitary sacred books cannot check this tendency--e.g., Hinduism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Mazdeism, Christianity up till the age of doubt and science, and the systems of ancient Egypt, Babylon, and post-Confucian China. This worsening can take place alongside of a theoretic purification of belief within the sphere of the educated theological class.

Christian writers have undertaken to show that such deterioration
went on continuously in India from the beginning of the Vedic
period, popular religion sinking from Varuna to Indra, from Indra
to the deities of the Atharva Veda, and from these to the Puranas
(cp. Dr. J. Murray Mitchell, Hinduism Past and Present, 1885,
pp. 22, 25, 26, 54). The argument, being hostile in bias from the
beginning, ignores or denies the element of intellectual advance in
the Upanishads and other later literature; but it holds good of the
general phenomena. It holds good equally, however, of the history
of Christianity in the period of the supremacy of ignorant faith
and absence of doubt and science; and is relatively applicable
to the religion of the uneducated mass at any time and place.

On the other hand, it is not at all true that religious
history is from the beginning, in any case, a process of
mere degeneration from a pure ideal. Simple statements as to
primitive ideas are found to be misleading because of their
simplicity. They can connote only the ethic of the life conditions
of the worshipper. Now, we have seen (p. 28) that small primitive
peoples living at peace and in communism, or in some respects well
placed, may be on that account in certain moral respects superior
to the average or mass of more civilized and more intelligent
peoples. [As to the kindliness and unselfishness of some savages,
living an almost communal life, and as to the scrupulous honesty
of others, there is plenty of evidence--e.g., as to Andaman
islanders, Max Müller, Anthrop. Relig., citing Colonel Cadell,
p. 177; as to Malays and Papuans, Dr. Russel Wallace, Malay
Archipelago, p. 595 (but cp. pp. 585, 587, 589); as to Esquimaux,
Keane, Man, p. 374; Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 15, 37, 115 (but
cp. pp. 41-42). In these and other cases unselfishness within the
tribe is the concomitant of the communal life, and represents no
conscious ethical volition, being concurrent with phases of the
grossest tribal egoism, in some cases with cannibalism, and with
the perpetual oppression of women. In the case of the preaching
of unselfishness to the young by the old among the Australians,
where Lubbock and his authorities see "the tyranny of the old"
(Origin of Civilization, 5th ed. pp. 451-52) Mr. Lang sees a pure
primeval ethic. Obviously the other is the true explanation. The
closest and best qualified observers testify, as regards a number
of tribes: "So far as anything like moral precepts are concerned
in these tribes ... it appears to us to be most probable that
they have originated in the first instance in association with
the purely selfish ideas of the older men to keep all the best
things for themselves, and in no case whatever are they supposed
to have the sanction of a superior being" (Spencer and Gillen,
North. Tribes of Cent. Australia, 1904, p. 504).]

The transition from that state to one of war and individualism
would be in a sense degeneration; but on the other hand
the entirely communistic societies are unprogressive. Broadly
speaking, it is by the path of social individuation that progress
in civilization has been made, the early city States and the later
large military States ultimately securing within themselves some
of the conditions for special development of thought, arts, and
knowledge. The residual truth is that the simple religion of the
harmless tribe is pro tanto superior to the instituted religion
of the more civilized nation with greater heights and lower depths
of life, the popular religion in the latter case standing for the
worse conditions. But the simple religion did not spring from any
higher stage of knowledge. The old theorem revived by Mr. Lang
(Making of Religion), as to religion having originally been a
pure and highly ethical monotheism, from which it degenerated
into animism and non-moral polytheism, is at best a misreading of
the facts just stated. Mr. Lang never asks what "Supreme Being"
and "monotheism" mean for savages who know nothing of other men's
religions: he virtually takes all the connotations for granted. And
as regards the most closely studied of contemporary savages
our authorities come to an emphatic conclusion that they have
no notion whatever of anything like a Supreme Being (Spencer and
Gillen, North. Tribes of Cent. Austr. pp. 491-92. Cp. A. H. Keane,
Man, p. 395, as to the "Great Spirit" of the Redskins). For the
rest, Mr. Lang's theory is demonstrably wrong in its ethical
interpretation of many anthropological facts, and as it stands
is quite irreconcilable with the law of evolution, since it
assumes an abstract monotheism as primordial. In general it
approximates scientifically to the eighteenth-century doctrine of
the superiority of savagery to civilization. (See it criticized
in the author's Studies in Religious Fallacy, and Christianity
and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 37-43, 46 sq.)

4. Even primary conditions of material well-being, if not reacted upon by social science or a movement of freethought, may in a comparatively advanced civilization promote religious degeneration. Thus abundance of food is favourable to multiplication of sacrifice, and so to priestly predominance. [335] The possession of domesticated animals, so important to civilization, lends itself to sacrifice in a specially demoralizing degree. But abundant cereal food-supply, making abundant population, may greatly promote human sacrifice--e.g., Mexico.

The error of Mr. Lang's method is seen in the use he makes
(work cited, pp. 286-289, 292) of the fact that certain "low"
races--as the Australians, Andamanese, Bushmen, and Fuegians--offer
no animal sacrifice. He misses the obvious significance of the
facts that these unwarlike races have as a rule no domesticated
animals and no agriculture, and that their food supply is thus
in general precarious. The Andamanese, sometimes described
(Malthus, Essay on Population, ch. iii, and refs.; G. W. Earl,
Papuans, 1853, pp. 150-51) as very ill-fed, are sometimes said
to be well supplied with fish and game (Peschel, Races of Man,
Eng. tr. 1876, p. 147; Max Müller, Anthrop. Rel. citing Cadell,
p. 177); but in any case they have had no agriculture, and seem
to have only occasional animal food in the shape of a wild hog
(Colebrooke in Asiatic Researches, iv, 390). The Australians and
Fuegians, again, have often great difficulty in feeding themselves
(Peschel, pp. 148, 159, 334; Darwin, Voyage, ch. 10). It is argued
concerning the Australian aborigines that "as a rule they have an
abundance" (A. F. Calvert, The Aborigines of Western Australia,
1894, p. 24); but this abundance is made out by cataloguing the
whole edible fauna and flora of the coasts and the interior,
and ignores the fact that for all hunting peoples food supply
is precarious. For the Australian, "the difficulty of capturing
game with his primitive methods compels him to give his whole
time to the quest of food" (Keane, Man, p. 148). In the contrary
case of the primitive Vedic Aryans, well supplied with animals,
sacrifices were abundant, and tended to become more so (Müller,
Nat. Relig. pp. 136, 185; Physical Relig. p. 105; but cp. pp. 98,
101; Mitchell, Hinduism, p. 43; Lefmann, Geschichte des alten
Indiens, in Oncken's series, 1890, pp. 49, 430-31). Of these
sacrifices that of the horse seems to have been in Aryan use
in a most remote period (cp. M. Müller, Nat. Rel. pp. 524-25;
H. Böttger, Sonnencult der Indogermanen, Breslau, 1891, pp. 41-44;
Preller, Römische Mythologie, ed. Köhler, pp. 102, 299, 323;
Griechische Mythologie, 2te Aufg. i, 462; Frazer, Golden Bough,
ii, 315). Max Müller's remark (Physical Religion, p. 106), that
"the idea of sacrifice did not exist at a very early period,"
because there is no common Aryan term for it, counts for nothing,
as he admits (p. 107) that the Sanskrit word cannot be traced
back to any more general root; and he concedes the antiquity
of the practice. On this cp. Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 37-38; and
the author's Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 122. The reform in Hindu
sacrifice, consummated by Buddhism, has been noted above.

5. Even scientific knowledge, while enabling the thoughtful to correct their religious conceptions, in some forms lends itself easily to the promotion of popular superstition. Thus the astronomy of the Babylonians, while developing some skepticism, served in general to encourage divination and fortune-telling; and seems to have had the same effect when communicated to the Chinese, the Hindus, and the Hebrews, all of whom, however, practised divination previously on other bases.

6. Finally, the development of the arts of sculpture and painting, unaccompanied by due intellectual culture, tends to keep religion at a low anthropomorphic level, and worsens its psychology by inviting image-worship. [336] It is not that the earlier and non-artistic religions are not anthropomorphic, but that they give more play for intellectual imagination than does a cult of images. But where the arts have been developed, idolatry has always arisen save when resisted by a special activity or revival of freethought to that end; and even in Protestant Christendom, where image-worship is tabooed, religious pictures now promote popular credulity and ritualism as they did in the Italian Renaissance. [337] So manifold are the forces of intellectual degeneration--degeneration, that is, from an attained ideal or stage of development, not from any primordial knowledge.