Chapter VIII: Problems of the Arabian Culture (1)

(B)

THE MAGIAN SOUL

I

The world, as spread out for the Magian waking-consciousness, possesses a kind of extension that may be called cavern-like,[397] though it is difficult for Western man to pick upon any word in his vocabulary that can convey anything more than a hint of the meaning of Magian “space.” For “space” has essentially unlike meanings for the perceptions of the two Cultures. The world-as-cavern is just as different from the world-as-extent of the passionate, far-thrusting Faustian as it is from the Classical world-as-sum-of-bodily-things. The Copernican system, in which the earth, as it were, loses itself, must necessarily seem crazy and frivolous to Arabian thought. The Church of the West was perfectly right when it resisted an idea so incompatible with the world-feeling of Jesus, and the Chaldean _cavern-astronomy_, which was wholly natural and convincing for Persians, Jews, peoples of the Pseudomorphosis, and Islam, became accessible to the few genuine Greeks who knew of it at all only after a process of transvaluing its basic notions of space.

The tension between Macrocosm and Microcosm (which is identical with the waking-consciousness) leads, in the world-picture of every Culture, to further oppositions of symbolic importance. All a man’s sensations or understanding, faith or knowledge, receive their shape from a primary opposition which makes them not only activities of the individual, but also expressions of the totality. In the Classical the opposition that universally dominates the waking-consciousness is the opposition of matter and form; in the West it is that of force and mass. In the former the tension loses itself in the small and particular, and in the latter it discharges itself in the character of work. In the World-Cavern, on the other hand, it persists in traversing and swaying to and fro in unsure strugglings, and so becomes that “Semitic” primary-dualism which, ever the same under its thousand forms, fills the Magian world. The light shines through the cavern and battles against the darkness (John i, 5). Both are Magian substances. Up and down, heaven and earth become powers that have entity and contend with one another. But these polarities in the most primary sensations mingle with those of the refined and critical understanding, like good and evil, God and Satan. Death, for the author of the John Gospel as for the strict Moslem, is not the end of life, but a Something, a death-force, that contends with a life-force for the possession of man.

But still more important than all this is the opposition of Spirit and Soul (Hebrew _Ruach_ and _nephesh_, Persian _ahu_ and _urvan_, Mandæan _monuhmed_ and _gyan_, Greek _pneuma_ and _psyche_) which first comes out in the basic feeling of the prophetic religions, then pervades the whole of Apocalyptic, and finally forms and guides the world-contemplations of the awakened Culture--Philo, Paul and Plotinus, Gnostics and Mandæans, Augustine and the Avesta, Islam and the Kabbalah. _Ruach_ means originally “wind” and _nephesh_ “breath.”[398] The _nephesh_ is always in one way or another related to the bodily and earthly, to the below, the evil, the darkness. Its effort is the “upward.” The _ruach_ belongs to the divine, to the above, to the light. Its effects in man when it descends are the heroism of a Samson, the holy wrath of an Elijah, the enlightenment of the judge (the Solomon passing judgment,[399]) and all kinds of divination and ecstasy. It is poured out.[400] From Isaiah xi, 2, the Messiah becomes the incarnation of the _ruach_. Philo and the Islamic theology divide mankind into born Psychics and born Pneumatics (the “elect,” a concept thoroughly proper to the world-cavern and Kismet). All the sons of Jacob are pneumatics. For Paul (1 Cor. xv) the meaning of the Resurrection lies in the opposition of a psychic and a pneumatic body, which alike for him and Philo and the author of the Baruch apocalypse coincides with the opposition of heaven and earth, light and darkness.[401] For Paul, the Saviour is the heavenly Pneuma.[402] In the John Gospel he fuses as Logos with the Light; in Neoplatonism he appears as _Nus_ or, in the Classical terminology, the All-One opposed to _Physis_.[403] Paul and Philo, with their “Classical” (that is, western) conceptual criteria, equated soul and body with good and bad respectively, Augustine, as a Manichæan[404] with Persian-Eastern bases of distinction, lumps soul and body together as the naturally bad, in contrast to God as the sole Good, and finds in this opposition the source of his doctrine of Grace, which developed also, in the same form (though quite independently of him) in Islam.

But souls are at bottom discrete entities, whereas the Pneuma is one and ever the same. The man _possesses_ a soul, but he only _participates_ in the spirit of the Light and the Good; the divine descends into him, thus binding all the individuals of the Below together with the one in the Above. This primary feeling, which dominates the beliefs and opinions of all Magian men, is something perfectly singular, and not only characterizes their world-view, but marks off the essence and kernel of their religiousness in all its forms from that of every other kind of man. This Culture, as has been shown, was characteristically the Culture of the middle. It could have borrowed forms and ideas from most of the others, and the fact that it did not do so, that in the face of all pressure and temptation it remained so profoundly mistress of its own inward form, attests an unbridgeable gulf of difference. Of all the wealth of Babylonian and Egyptian religion it admitted hardly more than a few names; the Classical and the Indian Cultures, or rather the Civilizations heir to them--Hellenism and Buddhism--distorted its expression to the point of pseudomorphosis, but its essence they never touched. All religions of the Magian Culture, from the creations of Isaiah and Zarathustra to Islam, constitute a complete inward unit of world-feeling; and, just as in the Avestan beliefs there is not to be found one trait of Brahmanism nor in early Christianity one breath of Classical feeling, but merely names and figures and outward forms, so also not a trace of this Jesus-religion could be absorbed by the Germanic-Catholic Christianity of the West, even though the stock of tenets and observances was taken over in its entirety.

Whereas the Faustian man is an “I” that in the last resort draws its own conclusions about the Infinite; whereas the Apollinian man, as one _soma_ among many, represents only himself; the Magian man, with his spiritual kind of being, is only a _part of a pneumatic “We”_ that, descending from above, is one and the same in all believers. As body and soul he belongs to himself alone, but something else, something alien and higher, dwells in him, making him with all his glimpses and convictions just a member of a consensus which, as the emanation of God, excludes error, but excludes also all possibility of the self-asserting Ego. Truth is for him something other than for us. All our epistemological methods, resting upon the _individual_ judgment, are for him madness and infatuation, and its scientific results a work of the Evil One, who has confused and deceived the spirit as to its true dispositions and purposes. Herein lies the ultimate, for us unapproachable, secret of Magian thought in its cavern-world--the impossibility of a thinking, believing, and knowing Ego is the presupposition inherent in all the fundamentals of all these religions. While Classical man stood before his gods as one body before another; whereas the Faustian willing “I” in its wide world feels itself confronted by deity, also Faustian, also willing, effective everywhere; the Magian deity is the indefinite, enigmatic Power on high that pours out its Wrath or its Grace, descends itself into the dark or raises the soul into the light as it sees fit. The idea of individual wills is simply meaningless, for “will” and “thought” in man are not prime, but already effects of the deity upon him. Out of this unshakable root-feeling, which is merely re-expressed, never essentially altered, by any conversions, illumination or subtilizing in the world--there emerges of necessity the idea of the Divine Mediator, of one who transforms this state from a torment into a bliss. All Magian religions are by this idea bound together, and separated from those of all other Cultures.

The Logos-idea in its broadest sense, an abstraction of the Magian light-sensation of the Cavern, is the exact correlative of this sensation in Magian thought. It meant that from the unattainable Godhead its Spirit, its “Word,” is released as carrier of the light and bringer of the good, and enters into relation with human being to uplift, pervade, and redeem it. This distinctness of three substances, which does not contradict their oneness in religious thought, was known already to the prophetic religions. Ahuramazda’s light-gleaming soul is the Word (Yasht 13, 31), and in one of the earliest Gathas his Holy Spirit (_spenta mainyu_) converses with the Evil Spirit (_angra mainyu_, Yasna 45, 2). The same idea penetrates the whole of the old Jewish literature. The thought which the Chaldeans built up on the separation of God and His Word and the opposition of Marduk and Nabu, which breaks forth with power in the whole Aramæan Apocalyptic remained permanently active and creative; by Philo and John, Marcion and Mani, it entered into the Talmudic teachings and thence into the Kabbalistic books Yesirah and Sohar, into the Church Councils and the works of the Fathers, into the later Avesta, and finally into Islam, in which a Mohammed gradually became the Logos and, as the mystically respent, _living_ Mohammed of the popular religion, fused into the figure of Christ.[405] This conception is for Magian man so self-evident that it was able to break through even the strictly monotheistic structure of the original Islam and to appear with Allah as the Word of God (_kalimah_), the Holy Spirit (_ruh_), and the “light of Mohammed.”

For, for the popular religion, the first light that comes forth from the world-creation is that of Mohammed, in the shape of a peacock[406] “formed of white pearls” and walled about by veilings. But the peacock is the Envoy of God and the prime soul[407] as early as the Mandæans, and it is the emblem of immortality on Early Christian sarcophagi. The light-diffusing pearl that illumines the dark house of the body is the Spirit entered into man, and thought of as substance, for the Mandæans as in the Acts of Thomas.[408] The Jezidi[409] reverence the Logos as peacock and light; next to the Druses they have preserved most purely the old Persian conception of the substantial Trinity.

Thus again and again we find the Logos-idea getting back to the light-sensation from which the Magian understanding derived it. _The world of Magian mankind is filled with a fairy-tale feeling._[410] Devils and evil spirits threaten man; angels and fairies protect him. There are amulets and talismans, mysterious lands, cities, buildings, and beings, secret letters, Solomon’s Seal, the Philosophers’ Stone. And over all this is poured the quivering cavern-light that the spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up. If this profusion of figures astonishes the reader, let him remember that Jesus lived in it, and Jesus’s teachings are only to be understood from it. Apocalyptic is only a vision of fable intensified to an extreme of tragic power. Already in the Book of Enoch we have the crystal palace of God, the mountains of precious stone, and the imprisonment of the apostate stars. Fantastic, too, are the whole overpowering idea-world of the Mandæans, that of the Gnostics and the Manichæans, the system of Origen, and the figures of the Persian “Bundahish”; and when the time of the great visions was over, these ideas passed into a legend-poesy and into the innumerable religious romances of which we have Christian specimens in the gospels concerning Jesus’s childhood, the Acts of Thomas and the anti-Pauline Pseudo-Clementines. One such story is that of Abraham’s having minted the thirty pieces of silver of Judas. Another is the tale of the “treasure-cave” in which, deep under the hill of Golgotha, are stored the golden treasure of paradise and the bones of Adam.[411] Dante’s poetic material was after all poetic, but this was sheer actuality, the only world in which these people lived continuously. Such sensations are unapproachably remote from men who live in and with a dynamical world-picture. If we would obtain some inkling of how alien to us all the inner life of Jesus is--a painful realization for the Christian of the West, who would be glad indeed if he could make that inner life the point of contact for his own inward piety--if we would discover why nowadays only a pious Moslem has the capacity livingly to experience it, we should sink ourselves in this wonder-element of a world-image that was Jesus’s world-image. And then, and only then, shall we perceive how little Faustian Christianity has taken over from the wealth of the Church of the Pseudomorphosis--of its world-feeling nothing, of its inward form little, and of its concepts and figures much.

II

The When, for the Magian Soul, issues from the Where. Here too, is no Apollinian clinging to pointlike Present, nor Faustian thrust and drive towards an infinitely distant goal. Here Being has a different pulse, and consequently Waking-being has another sense of time, which is the counter-concept to Magian space. The prime thing that the humanity of this Culture, from poor slaves and porters to the prophets and the caliphs themselves, feels as the Kismet above him is not a limitless flight of the ages that never lets a lost moment recur, but a Beginning and an End of “This Day,” which is irrevocably ordained and in which the human existence takes the place assigned to it from creation itself. Not only world-space, but world-time also is cavern-like. Hence comes the thoroughly Magian certainty that _everything has “a” time_, from the origins of the Saviour, whose hour stood written in ancient texts, to the smallest detail of the everyday, in which Faustian hurry would be meaningless and unimaginable. Here, too, is the basis of the Early Magian (and in particular the Chaldean) astrology, which likewise presupposes that all things are written down in the stars and that the scientifically calculable course of the planets authorized conclusions as to the course of earthly things.[412] The Classical oracle answered the only question that could perturb Apollinian man--the form, the “How?” of coming things. But the question of the Cavern is “When?” The whole of Apocalyptic, the spiritual life of Jesus, the agony of Gethsemane, and the grand movement that arose out of his death are unintelligible if we have not grasped this primary question of Magian being and the presuppositions lying behind it. It is an infallible sign of the extinction of the Classical Soul that astrology in its westward advance drove the oracle step by step before it. Nowhere is the stage of transition more clearly visible than in Tacitus, whose entire history is dominated by the confusion and dislocation of his world-picture. First of all, as a true Roman, he brings in the power of the old city-deities; then, as an intelligent cosmopolitan, he regards this very belief in their intervention as a superstition; and finally, as a Stoic (by that time the spiritual outlook of the Stoa had become _Magian_), he speaks of the power of the seven planets that rule the fortunes of men. And thus it comes about that in the following centuries Time itself as vessel of fate--namely, the Vault of Time, limited each way and therefore capable of being grasped as an entity by the inner eye--is by Persian mysticism set above the light of God as Zrvan, and rules the world-conflict of Good and Evil. Zrvanism was the State religion of Persia in 438-457.

Fundamentally, too, it is this belief that all stands written in the stars, that makes the Arabian Culture characteristically that of “eras”--that is, of time-reckonings that begin at some event felt as a peculiarly significant act of Providence. The first and most important is the generic Aramæan era, which begins about 300 B.C. with the growth of apocalyptic tension and is the “Seleucid era.” It was followed by many others, amongst them the Sabæan (about 115 B.C.), the starting-point of which is not exactly known to us; that of Diocletian; the Jewish era, beginning with the Creation, which was introduced by the Synedrion in 346;[413] the Persian, from the accession of the last Sassanid Jezdegerd in 632; and the Hijra, by which at last the Seleucid was displaced in Syria and Mesopotamia. Outside this land-field there is mere imitation for practical ends, like Varro’s “_ab urbe condita_”; that of the Marcionites, beginning with Marcion’s breach with the Church in 144; and that of the Christians, introduced shortly after 500 and beginning with the birth of Jesus.

World-history is the picture of the living world into which man sees himself woven by birth, ancestry, and progeny, and which he strives to comprehend from out of his world-feeling. The historical picture of Classical man concentrates itself upon the pure Present. Its content is no true Becoming, but a foreground Being with a conclusive background of timeless myth, rationalized as “the Golden Age.” This Being, however, was a variegated swarming of ups and downs, good and ill fortune, a blind “thereabouts,” an eternal alteration, yet ever in its changes the same, without direction, goal, or “Time.” The cavern-feeling, on the contrary, requires a surveyable history consisting in a beginning and an end to the world _that is also the beginning and the end of man_--acts of God of mighty magic--and between these turns, spellbound to the limits of the Cavern and the ordained period, the battle of light and darkness, of the angels and Jazatas with Ahriman, Satan, and Eblis, in which Man, his Soul, and his Spirit are involved. The present Cavern God can destroy and replace by a new creation. The Persian-Chaldean apocalyptic offers to the gaze a whole series of such æons, and Jesus, along with his time, stood in expectation of the end of the existing one.[414] The consequence of this is a historic outlook like that which is natural to Islam even to-day--the view over a given time. “The world-view of the people falls naturally into three major parts--world-beginning, world-development, and world-catastrophe. For the Moslem who feels so deeply ethically, the chief essentials in world-development are the salvation-story and the ethical way of life, knit into one as the ‘life’ of man. This debouches into the world-catastrophe, which contains the sanction of the moral history of humanity.”[415]

But, further, for the Magian human-existence, the issue of the feeling of _this_ sort of Time and the view of _this_ sort of space is a quite peculiar type of piety, which likewise we may put under the sign of the Cavern--a _will-less_ resignation, to which the spiritual “I” is unknown, and which feels the spiritual “We” that has entered into the quickened body as simply a reflection of the divine Light. The Arab word for this is Islam (= submission) but this Islam was equally Jesus’s normal mode of feeling and that of every other personality of religious genius that appeared in this Culture. Classical piety is something perfectly different,[416] while, as for that of our own Culture, if we could mentally abstract from the piety of St. Theresa and Luther and Pascal their Ego--that Ego which wills to maintain itself against, to submit to, or even to be extinguished by the Divine Infinite--there would be nothing left. The Faustian prime-sacrament of Contrition presupposes the strong and free will that can overcome itself. But it is precisely the _impossibility of an Ego as a free power_ in the face of the divine that constitutes “Islam.” Every attempt to meet the operations of God with a personal purpose or even a personal opinion is “_masiga_,”--that is, not an evil willing, but an evidence that the powers of darkness and evil have taken possession of a man and expelled the divine from him. The Magian waking-consciousness is merely the _theatre_ of a battle between these two powers and not, so to say, a power in itself. Moreover, in this kind of world-happening there is no place for individual causes and effects, let alone any universally effective dynamic concatenation thereof, and consequently there is no _necessary_ connexion between sin and punishment, no _claim_ to reward, no old-Israelitish “righteousness.” Things of this order the true piety of this Culture regards as far beneath it. The laws of nature are not something settled for ever that God can alter only by the method of miracle--they are (so to put it) the ordinary state of an autocratic divine will, not possessing in themselves anything of the logical necessity that they have for Faustian souls. In the entire world-cavern there is but _one_ Cause, which lies _immediately_ behind all visible workings, and this is the Godhead, which, as itself, acts without causes. Even to speculate upon causes in connexion with God is sinful.

From this basic feeling proceeds the Magian idea of Grace. This underlies all sacraments of this Culture (especially the Magian proto-sacrament of Baptism) and forms a contrast of the deepest intensity with the Faustian idea of Contrition. Contrition presupposes the will of an Ego, but Grace knows of no such thing. It was Augustine’s high achievement to develop this essentially Islamic thought with an inexorable logic, and with a penetration so thorough that since Pelagius the Faustian Soul has tried by any and every route to circumvent this certainty--which for _it_ constitutes an imminent danger of self-destruction--and in using Augustinian propositions to express its own proper consciousness of God has ever misunderstood and transvalued them. Actually, Augustine was the last great thinker of Early Arabian Scholasticism, anything but a Western intellect.[417] Not only was he at times a Manichæan, but he remained so even as a Christian in some important characteristics, and his closest relations are to be found amongst the Persian theologians of the later Avesta, with their doctrines of the Store of Grace of the Holy and of absolute guilt. For him grace is the substantial inflowing of something divine into the human Pneuma, itself also substantial.[418] The Godhead radiates it; man receives it, but does not acquire it. From Augustine, as from Spinoza so many centuries later,[419] the notion of force is absent, and for both the problem of freedom refers not to the Ego and its Will, but to the part of the universal Pneuma that is infused into a man and its relation to the rest of him. Magian waking-being is the _theatre_ of a conflict between the two world-substances of light and darkness. The Early Faustian thinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam, on the contrary, see a contest inherent in dynamic waking-consciousness _itself_, a contest of the two forces of the Ego--namely, will and reason,[420] and so imperceptibly the question posed by Augustine changes into another, which he himself would have been incapable of understanding--are willing and thinking free forces, or are they not? Answer this question as we may, one thing at any rate is certain, that the individual ego has _to wage_ this war and not to suffer it. The Faustian Grace refers to the success of the Will and not to the species of a substance. Says the Westminster Confession of the Presbyterians (1646): “The rest of Mankind, God was pleased, according to the unsearchable Counsel of his own Will, whereby he extendeth, or withholdeth Mercy, as he pleaseth, for the Glory of his Sovereign Power over his Creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to Dishonour and Wrath, for their Sin, to the Praise of his glorious Justice.” The other conception, that the idea of Grace excludes every individual will and every cause but the One, that it is sinful even to question why man suffers, finds an expression in one of the most powerful poems known to world-history, a poem that came into being in the midst of the Arabian pre-Culture and is in inward grandeur unparalleled by any product of that Culture itself--the Book of Job.[421] It is not Job, but his friends who look for a sin as the cause of his troubles. They--like the bulk of mankind in this and every other Culture, present-day readers and critics of the work, therefore, included--lack the metaphysical depth to get near the ultimate meaning of suffering within the world-cavern. Only the Hero himself fights through the fulfilment, to pure Islam, and he becomes thereby the only possible figure of tragedy that Magian feeling can set up by the side of our Faust.[422]

III

The waking-consciousness of every Culture allows of two ways of inwardness, that in which contemplative feeling spreads into understanding, and that in which the reverse takes place. The Magian contemplation is called by Spinoza “intellectual love of God,” and by his Sufist contemporaries in Asia “extinction in God” (_mahw_); it may be intensified to the Magian ecstasy that was vouchsafed to Plotinus several times, and to his pupil Porphyry once in old age. The other side, the rabbinical dialectic, appears in Spinoza as geometrical method and in the Arabian-Jewish “Late” philosophy in general as Kalaam. Both, however, rest upon the fact that there in Magian there is no individual-ego, but a single Pneuma present simultaneously in each and all of the elect, which is likewise Truth. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the resultant root-idea of the _ijma_ is much more than a concept or notion, that it can be a lived experience of even overwhelming force, and that all community of the Magian kind rests upon it and, as doing so, is removed from community in any other Culture. “The mystic Community of Islam extends from the here into the beyond; it reaches beyond the grave, in that it comprises the dead Moslems of earlier generations, nay, even the righteous of the times before Islam. The Moslem feels himself bound up in one unity with them all. They help him, and he, too, can in turn increase their beatitude by the application of his own merit.”[423] The same, precisely, was what the Christians and the Syncretists of the Pseudomorphosis meant when they used the words _Polis_ and _Civitas_--these words, which had formerly implied a sum of bodies, now denoted a consensus of fellow believers. Augustine’s famous _Civitas Dei_ was neither a Classical Polis nor a Western Church, but a unity of believers, blessed, and angels, exactly as were the communes of Mithras, of Islam, of Manichæism, and of Persia. As the community was based upon consensus, it was in spiritual things infallible. “My people,” said Mohammed, “can never agree in an error,” and the same is premised in Augustine’s State of God. With him there was not and could not be any question of an infallible Papal ego or of any other sort of authority to settle dogmatic truths; that would completely destroy the Magian concept of the Consensus. And the same applied in this Culture generally--not only to dogma, but also to law[424] and to the State. The Islamic community, like that of Porphyry and that of Augustine, embraces the _whole_ of the world-cavern, the here and the beyond, the orthodox and the good angels and spirits, and within this community the State only formed a _smaller unit of the visible side_, a unit, therefore, of which the operations were governed by the major whole. In the Magian world, consequently, the separation of politics and religion is theoretically impossible and nonsensical, whereas in the Faustian Culture the battle of Church and State is inherent in the very conceptions--logical, necessary, unending. In the Magian, civil and ecclesiastical law are simply identical. Side by side with the Emperor of Constantinople stood the Patriarch, by the Shah was the Zarathustratema, by the Exilarch the Gaon, by the Caliph the Sheikh-ul-Islam, at once superiors and subjects. There is not in this the slightest affinity to the Gothic relation of Emperor and Pope; equally, all such ideas were alien to the Classical world. In the constitution of Diocletian this Magian embedding of the State in the community of the faithful was for the first time actualized, and by Constantine it was carried into full effect. It has been shown already that State, Church, and Nation formed a spiritual unit--namely, that part of the orthodox consensus which manifested itself in the living man. And hence for the Emperor, as ruler of the Faithful--that is, of that portion of the Magian community which God had entrusted to him--it was a self-evident duty to conduct the Councils so as to bring about the consensus of the elect.

IV

But besides the consensus there is another sort of revelation of Truth--namely, the “Word of God,” in a perfectly definite and purely Magian sense of the phrase, which is equally remote from Classical and from Western thought, and has, in consequence, been the source of innumerable misunderstandings. The sacred book in which it has become visibly evident, in which it has been captured by the spell of a sacred script, is part of the stock of every Magian religion.[425] In this conception three Magian notions are interwoven each of which, even by itself, presents extreme difficulties for us, while their simultaneous separateness and oneness is simply inaccessible to our religious thought, often though that thought has managed to persuade itself to the contrary. These ideas are: God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. That which is written in the prologue of the John Gospel--“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”--had long before come to perfectly natural expression as something self-evident in the Persian ideas of Spenta Mainyu,[426] and Vohu Mano,[427] and in corresponding Jewish and Chaldean conceptions. And it was the kernel for which the conflicts of the fourth and fifth centuries concerning the substance of Christ were fought. But, for Magian thought, truth is itself a substance,[428] and lie (or error) second substance--again the same dualism that opposes light and darkness, life and death, good and evil. As substance, truth is identical now with God, now with the Spirit of God, now with the Word. Only in the light of this can we comprehend sayings like “I am the truth and the life” and “My word is the truth,” sayings to be understood, as they were meant, with reference to substance. Only so, too, can we realize with what eyes the religious man of this Culture looked upon his sacred book: in it the invisible truth has entered into a visible kind of existence, or, in the words of John i, 14: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” According to the Yasna the Avesta was sent down from heaven, and according to the Talmud Moses received the Torah volume by volume from God. A Magian revelation is a mystical process in which the eternal and unformed word of God--or the Godhead as Word--enters into a man in order to assume through him the manifest, sensible form of sounds and especially of letters. _“Koran” means “reading.”_ Mohammed in a vision saw in the heaven treasured rolls of scripture that he (although he had never learned how to read) was able to decipher “in the name of the Lord.”[429] This is a form of revelation that in the Magian Culture is the rule and in other Cultures is not even the exception,[430] but it was only from the time of Cyrus that it began to take shape. The old Israelitish prophets, and no doubt Zarathustra also, see and hear in ecstasy things that afterwards they spread abroad. The Deuteronomic code (621) was given out as having been “found in the Temple,” which meant that it was to be taken as the wisdom of the Father. The first (and a very deliberate) example of a “Koran” is the book of Ezekiel, which the author received in a thought-out vision from God and “swallowed” (iii, 1-3). Here, expressed in the crudest imaginable form, is the basis on which later the idea and shape of all apocalyptic writing was founded. But by degrees this _substantial_ form of reception came to be one of the requisites for any book to be canonical. It was in post-Exilic times that the idea arose of the Tables of the Law received by Moses on Sinai; later such an origin came to be assumed for the whole Torah, and about the Maccabæan period for the bulk of the Old Testament. From the Council of Jabna (about 90 B.C.) the whole word was regarded as inspired and delivered in the most literal sense. But the same evolution took place in the Persian religion up to the sanctification of the Avesta in the third century, and the same idea of a literal delivery appears in the second vision of Hermas, in the Apocalypses, and in the Chaldean and Gnostic and Mandæan writings; lastly, it underlies, as a tacit natural basis, all the ideas that the Neo-Pythagoreans and the Neo-Platonists formed of the writings of their old masters. “Canon” is the technical expression for the totality of writings that are accepted by a religion as delivered. It was as canons in this sense that the Hermetic collection and the corpus of Chaldean oracles came into being from 200--the latter a sacred book of the Neoplatonists which alone was admitted by Proclus, the “Father” of this Church, to stand with Plato’s _Timæus_.

Originally, the young Jesus-religion, like Jesus himself, recognized the Jewish canon. The first Gospels set up no sort of claim to be the Word made visible. _The John Gospel is the first Christian writing of which the evident purpose is that of a Koran_, and its unknown author is the originator of the idea that there could be and must be a Christian Koran. The grave and difficult decision whether the new religion should break with that which Jesus had believed in clothed itself of deep necessity in the question whether the Jewish scriptures might still be regarded as incarnations of the one truth. The answer of the John Gospel was tacitly, and that of Marcion openly, no, but that of the Fathers was, quite illogically, yes.

It followed from this metaphysical conception of the essence of a sacred book that the expressions “God speaks” and “the Scripture says” were, in a manner wholly alien to our thought, completely identical. To us it is suggestive of the Arabian Nights that God himself should be spellbound in these words and letters and could be unsealed and compelled to reveal the truth by the adepts of this magic. Exegesis no less than inspiration and delivery is a process of mystical under-meaning (Mark i, 22). Hence the reverence--in diametrical opposition to the Classical feeling--with which these precious manuscripts were cared for, their ornamentation by every means known to the young Magian art, and the appearance again and again of new scripts which, in the eyes of their users, alone possessed the power of capturing the truth sent down.

But such a Koran is by its very nature unconditionally right, and therefore unalterable and incapable of improvement.[431] There arose, in consequence, the habit of secret interpretations meant to bring the text into harmony with the convictions of the time. A masterpiece of this kind is Justinian’s Digests, but the same applies not only to every book of the Bible, but also (we need not doubt) to the Gathas of the Avesta and even to the then current manuscripts of Plato, Aristotle, and other authorities of the Pagan theology. More important still is the assumption, traceable in every Magian religion, of a secret revelation, or a secret meaning of the Scriptures, preserved not by being written down, but in the memory of adepts and propagated orally. According to Jewish notions, Moses received at Sinai not only the written, but _also a secret oral Torah_,[432] which it was forbidden to commit to writing. “God foresaw,” says the Talmud, “that one day a time would come when the Heathen would possess themselves of the Torah and would say to Israel: ‘We, too, are sons of God.’ Then will the Lord say: ‘Only he who knows my secrets is my son.’ And what are the secrets of God? The oral teachings.”[433] The Talmud, then, in the form in which it is generally accessible, contains only a part of the religious material, and it is the same with Christian texts of the early period. It has often been observed[434] that Mark speaks of the Visitation and of the Resurrection only in hints, and that John only touches upon the doctrine of the Paraclete and omits the institution of the Lord’s Supper entirely. The initiates understood what was meant, and the unbeliever ought not to know it. Later there was a whole “secret discipline” which bound Christians to observe silence in the presence of unbelievers concerning the baptismal confession and other matters. With the Chaldeans, Neopythagoreans, Cynics, Gnostics, and especially the sects from Jewish to Islamic, this tendency went to such lengths that the greater part of their secret doctrines is unknown to us. Concerning the Word thus preserved only in the minds there was a _consensus of silence_, the more so as each believer was certain that the other “knew.” We ourselves, as it is upon the most important things that we are most emphatic and forthright, run the risk of misinterpreting Magian doctrines through taking the part that was expressed for the whole that existed, and the profane literal meaning of words for their real significance. Gothic Christianity had no secrets and hence it doubly mistrusted the Talmud, which it rightly regarded as being only the foreground of Jewish doctrine.

Pure Magian, too, is the Kabbalah, which out of numbers, letter-forms, points, and strokes, unfolds secret significances, and therefore cannot but be as old as the Word itself that was sent down as Substance. The secret dogma of the creation of the world out of the two-and-twenty letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and that of the throne-chariot of Ezekiel’s Vision, are already traceable in Maccabæan times. Closely related to this is the allegorical exegesis of the sacred texts. All the tractates of the Mishnah, all the Fathers, all the Alexandrian philosophers are full of it; in Alexandria the whole Classical mythology and even Plato were treated in this way and brought into analogy (Moses = Musæus) with the Jewish prophets.

The only strictly _scientific_ method that an unalterable Koran leaves open for progressive opinion is that of commentary. As by hypothesis the “word” of an authority cannot be improved upon, the only resource is reinterpretation. No one in Alexandria would ever have asserted that Plato was in “error”; instead, he was glossed upon. It was done in the strictly constructed forms of the Halakha, and the fixation of this exegesis in writing takes the commentary shape that dominates all religious, philosophical, and savant literatures of this Culture. Following the procedure of the Gnostics, the Fathers compiled written commentaries upon the Bible, and similarly the Pehlevi commentary of the Zend appeared by the side of the Avesta, and the Midrash by the side of the Jewish canon. But the “Roman” jurists of about A.D. 200 and the “Late Classical” philosophers--that is, the Schoolmen of the growing cult-Church--went just the same way; the Apocalypse of this Church, commented over and over again after Posidonius, was the _Timæus_ of Plato. The Mishnah is one vast commentary upon the Torah. And when the oldest exegetes had become themselves authorities and their writings Korans, commentaries were written upon commentaries, as by Simplicius, the last Platonist, in the West, by the Amoraim, who added the Gemara to the Mishnah in the East, and by the jurists who compiled the Imperial Constitutions into the Digests at Byzantium.

This method, which fictitiously refers back every saying to an immediate inspired delivery, was brought to its keenest edge in the Talmudic and the Islamic theologies. A new Halakha or a Hadith is only valid when it can be referred through an unbroken chain of guarantors back to Moses or Mohammed.[435] The solemn formula for this in Jerusalem was “Let it come over me! So have I heard it from my teacher.”[436] In the Zend the citation of the chain of warranty is the rule, and Irenæus justifies his theology by the fact that a chain goes back from him through Polycarp to the primitive Community. Into the Early Christian literature this Halakha-form entered so self-evidently that no one remarked it for what it was. Apart altogether from the constant references to the Law and the Prophets, it appears in the superscription of the four Gospels (“_according to_” Mark), each of which had thus to present its warrant if authority was to be claimed for the words of the Lord that it presented.[437] This established the chain back to the Truth that was incarnate in Jesus, and it is impossible to exaggerate the intense reality of this in the world-idea of an Augustine or a Jerome. This is the basis of the practice, which spread even more widely from the time of Alexander onwards, of providing religious and philosophical writings with names,[438] like Enoch, Solomon, Ezra, Hermes, Pythagoras--guarantors and vessels of divine wisdom, in whom, therefore, the Word had been made Flesh of old. We still possess a number of Apocalypses bearing the name of Baruch, who was then compared with Zarathustra, and we can scarcely form an idea of what in the way of literature circulated under the names of Aristotle and Pythagoras. The “Theology of Aristotle” was one of the most influential works of Neoplatonism. And, lastly, this the metaphysical presupposition for the style and the deeper meaning of _citation_, which was employed by Fathers, Rabbis, “Greek” philosophers, and “Roman” jurists, and eventuated on the one hand in the Law of Valentinian III,[439] and on the other in the elimination from the Jewish and Christian canons of apocryphal writings--a fundamental notion, which differentiated the literary stock according to difference of _substance_.

V

With such researches to build upon, it will become possible in the future to write a history of the _Magian group of religions_. It forms an inseparable unit of spirit and evolution, and let no one imagine that any individual one of them can be really comprehended without reference to the rest. Their birth, unfolding, and inward confirmation occupy the period 0-500. It corresponds exactly to the rise of the Western religion from the Cluniac movement to the Reformation. A mutual give-and-take, a confusingly rich blossoming, ripening, transformation--overlayings, migrations, adaptations, rejections--fill these centuries, without any sort of dependence of one system upon the others being demonstrable. But only the forms and the structures change; in the depths it is one and the same spirituality, and in all the languages of this world of religions it is always itself that it brings to expression.

In the wide realm of old-Babylonian fellahdom young peoples lived. There everything was making ready. The first premonitions of the future awoke about 700 B.C. in the prophetic religions of the Persians, Jews, and Chaldeans. An image of creation of the same kind that later was to be the preface of the Torah showed itself in clear outlines, and with that an orientation, a direction, a goal of desire, was set. Something was descried in the far future, indefinitely and darkly still, but with a profound certainty that it would come. From that time on men lived with the vision of this, with the feeling of a mission.

The second wave swelled up steeply in the Apocalyptic currents after 300. Here it was the Magian waking-consciousness that arose and built itself a metaphysic of Last Things, based already upon the prime-symbol of the coming Culture, the Cavern. Ideas of an awful End of the World, of the Last Judgment, of Resurrection, Paradise, and Hell, and with them the grand thought of a process of salvation in which earth’s destiny and man’s were one, burst forth everywhere--we cannot say what land or people it was that created them--mantled in wondrous scenes and figures and names. The Messiah-figure presents itself, complete at one stroke. Satan’s temptation of the Saviour[440] is told as a tale. But simultaneously there welled up a deep and ever-increasing fear before this certainty of an implacable--and imminent--limit of all happening, before the moment in which there would be only Past. Magian Time, the “hour,” directedness under the Cavern, imparted a new pulse to life and a new import to the word “Destiny.” Man’s attitude before the Deity suddenly became completely different. In the dedicatory inscription of the great basilica of Palmyra (which was long thought to be Christian) Baal was called the good, the compassionate, the mild; and this feeling penetrated, with the worship of Rahman, right to southern Arabia. It fills the psalms of the Chaldeans and the teachings _about_ the God-sent Zarathustra that took the place of his teachings. And it stirred the Jewry of Maccabæan time--most of the psalms were written then--and all the other communities, long forgotten now, that lay between the Classical and the Indian worlds.

The third upheaval came in the time of Cæsar and brought to birth the great religions of Salvation. And with this the Culture rose to bright day, and what followed continuously throughout one or two centuries was an intensity of religious experience, both unsurpassable and at long last unbearable. Such a tension bordering upon the breaking point the Gothic, the Vedic, and every other Culture-soul has known, once and once only, in its young morning.

Now arose in the Persian, the Mandæan, the Jewish, the Christian, circles of belief, and in that of the Western Pseudomorphosis as well--just as in the Indian, the Classical, and the Western ages of Chivalry--the Grand Myth. In this Arabian Culture religious and national heroism are no more distinctly separable than nation, church, and state, or sacred and secular law. The prophet merges with the fighter, and the story of a great Sufferer rises to the rank of a national epic. The powers of light and darkness, fabulous beings, angels and devils, Satan and the good spirits wrestle together; all nature is a battle-ground from the beginning of the world to its annihilation. Down below in the world of mankind are enacted the adventures and sufferings of the heralds, the heroes, and the martyrs of religion. Every nation, in the sense of the word attaching to this Culture, possessed its heroic saga. In the East the life of the Persian prophet inspired an epic poetry of grand outlines. At his birth the Zarathustra-laughter pealed through the heavens, and all nature echoed it. In the West the suffering of Jesus, ever broadening and developing, became _the veritable epic of the Christian nation_, and by its side there grew up a chain of legends of his childhood which in the end fructified a whole genre of poetry. The figure of the Mother of God and the deeds of the Apostles became, like the stories of the Western Crusade-heroes, the centre of extended romances (Acts of Thomas, Pseudo-Clementines) which in the second century sprang up everywhere from the Nile to the Tigris. In the Jewish Haggada and in the Targums is brought together a rich measure of legends about Saul, David, the Patriarchs, and the great Tannaim, like Schuda and Akiba,[441] and the insatiable fancy of the age seized also upon what it could reach of the Late-Classical cult-legends and founder-stories (lives of Pythagoras, Hermes, Apollonius of Tyana).

With the end of the second century the sounds of this exaltation die away. The flowering of epic poetry is past, and the mystical penetration and dogmatic analysis of the religious material begin. The doctrines of the new Churches are brought into theological systems. Heroism yields to Scholastism, poetry to thought, the seer and seeker to the priest. The early Scholasticism which ends about 200 (as the Western about 1200) comprises the whole Gnosis--in the very broadest sense, the great Contemplation--the author of the John Gospel, Valentinus, Bardesanes, and Marcion, the Apologists and the early Fathers, up to Irenæus and Tertullian, the last Tannaim up to Rabbi Jehuda, the completer of the Mishna, the Neopythagoreans and Hermetics of Alexandria. All this corresponds with, in the West, the School of Chartres, Anselm, Joachim of Floris, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugo de St. Victor. Full Scholasticism begins with Neoplatonism, with Clement and Origen, the first Amoraim, and the creators of the newer Avesta under Ardeshir (226-241) and Sapor I, the Mazdaist high-priest Tanvasar above all. Simultaneously a higher religiousness begins to separate from the peasant’s piety of the countryside, which still lingered in the apocalyptic disposition, and thenceforth maintained itself almost unaltered under various names right into the fellahdom of the Turkish age, while in the urban and more intellectual upper world the Persian, Jewish, and Christian community was absorbed by that of Islam.

Slowly and steadily now the great Churches moved to fulfilment. It had been decided--the most important religious result of the second century--that the outcome of the teaching of Jesus was not to be a transformation of Judaism, but a new Church, which took its way westward while Judaism, without loss of inward strength, turned itself to the East. To the third century belong the great mental structures of theology. A _modus vivendi_ with historical actuality had been reached, the end of the world had receded into the distance, and a new dogmatic grew up to explain the new world-picture. The arrival of mature Scholasticism presupposes faith in the duration of the doctrines that it sets itself to establish.

Viewing the results of their efforts, we find that the Aramæan motherland developed its forms in three directions. In the East, out of the Zoroastrian religion of Achæmenid times and the remains of its sacred literature, there formed itself the Mazdaist Church, with a strict hierarchy and laborious ritual, with sacraments, mass, and confession (_patet_). As mentioned above, Tanvasar made a beginning with the collection and ordering of the _new_ Avesta; under Sapor I (as contemporaneously in the Talmud) the profane texts of medicine, law, and astronomy were added; and the rounding-off was the work of the Church magnate Mahraspand under Sapor II (309-379). The immediate accretion of a commentary in Pehlevi was only what was to be expected in the Magian Culture. The new Avesta, like the Jewish and the Christian Bibles, was a canon of separate writings, and we learn that amongst the Nasks (originally twenty-one) now lost there was a gospel of Zarathustra, the conversion-story of Vishtaspa, a Genesis, a law-book, and a genealogical book with trees from the Creation to the Persian kings, while the Vendidad, which Geldner calls the Leviticus of the Persians, was--most significantly--preserved complete.

A new religious founder appeared in 242, in the reign of Sapor I. This was Mani, who, rejecting “redeemerless” Judaism and Hellenism, knit together the whole mass of Magian religions in one of the most powerful theological creations of all times--for which in 276 the Mazdaist priesthood crucified him. Equipped by his father (who quite late in life abandoned his family to enter a Mandæan order) with all the knowledge of the period, he unified the basic ideas of the Chaldeans and Persians with those of Johannine, Eastern, Christianity--a task which had been attempted before in the Christian-Persian Gnosis of Bardesanes, but without any idea of founding a new church.[442] He conceived of the mystical figures of the Johannine Logos (for him identical with the Persian Vohu Mano), the Zarathustra of the Avesta legends, and the Buddha of the late texts as divine Emanations, and himself he proclaimed to be the Paraclete of the John Gospel and the Saoshyant of the Persians. As we now know, thanks to the Turfan discoveries which included parts of Mani’s works (till then completely lost), the Church-language of the Mazdaists, Manichæans, and Nestorians was--independently of the current languages--Pehlevi.

In the West the two cult-Churches developed (in Greek[443]) a theology that was not only cognate with this, but to a great extent identical with it. In the time of Mani began the theological fusion of the Aramæan-Chaldean sun-religion and the Aramæan-Persian Mithras cult into one system, whose first great “Father” was Iamblichus (_c._ 300)--the contemporary of Athanasius, but also of Diocletian, the Emperor who in 295 made Mithras the God of a henotheistic State-religion. Spiritually, at any rate, its priests were in nowise distinguishable from those of Christianity. Proclus (he, too, a true “Father”) received in dreams elucidations of a difficult text-passage; to him the _Timæus_ and the Chaldean oracles were canonical, and he would gladly have seen all other writings of the philosophers destroyed. His hymns, tokens of the lacerations of a true eremite, implore Helios and other helpers to protect him against evil spirits. Hierocles wrote a moral breviary for the believers of the Neopythagorean community, which it needs a keen eye to distinguish from Christian work. Bishop Synesius was a prince-prelate of Neoplatonism before becoming one of Christianity--and the change did not involve an act of conversion; he kept his theology and only altered its names. It was possible for the Neoplatonist Asclepiades to write a great work on the likeness of all theologies. We possess Pagan gospels and hagiologies as well as Christian. Apollonius wrote the life of Pythagoras, Marinus that of Proclus, Damascius that of Isidore; and there is not the slightest difference between these works, which begin and end with prayers, and the Christian Acts of the Martyrs. Porphyry describes faith, love, hope, and truth as the four divine elements.