Читать книгу The Hearts of Men - Fielding Harold - Страница 11

Sitting on the hillside when the hot season was coming near its end he saw the thunderstorms come across the hills. From far away they came, black shadows in the distance, and the thunder like far off surf upon the shore. Nearer they would grow and nearer, passing from ridge to ridge, their long white skirts trailing upon the mountain sides, until they came right overhead and the lightning flashed blindingly, while the thunder roared in great trumpet tones that shuddered through the gorges. The man watched them and he saw how gods were born. It was Thor come back again – Thor with his hammer, Thor with his giant voice. Thus were born the gods, Thor and Odin, Balder God of the Summer Sun, Apollo and Vulcan, Ahriman and Ormuz, night and day.

So were born all the gods. You can read of it in Indian, in Greek, in Roman, in Norwegian mythology, in any mythology you like. You can see the belief living still among the Chins, the Shans, the Moopers; for them the storm-wind and earthquake, the great rivers and the giant hills, all these have causes, and they who cause them are gods. From these have grown all the ideas of God that the peoples hold now. They were originally local, local to the place, local to the people, and as the people progressed so did their ideas of God.

It seemed to the man lying on his hillside easy to follow how it all arose; for, indeed, was it not going on about him? Did not the forest people speak of a god in the great bare rock behind him? Were there not gods in the ravines, gods in the hidden places of the hills? It was so easy to realise as he watched the storm-cloud bursting before him, as the lightning flashed and the thunder trumpet sounded in the hills, that men should personify these. Nay, more, he saw the wild men about him actually personifying them. He could understand.

God was the answer to a question; as the question grew so did the reply.

The savage asks but little. He does not ask "Who am I?" "Who made the world, and why?" Such questioning comes but in later years. He fears the thunder; it is to him a great and wonderful and overpowering thing. It forces itself upon his notice, and he explains it as the voice of a greater man, a God. He lives in the heavens, for His voice comes from thence. The giant peaks that swathe themselves in clouds, the volcano and the earthquake, the great river flowing for ever to the sea, with its strange floods, its eddies, its deadly undertow, in these too must be gods. These are the first things that force themselves upon his dim observance. He wonders, and from his wonder is born a god. But as he grows in mental stature, in power of seeing, in power of feeling, he observes other forces. How is the heaven held up, the great heavy dome as he imagines it? It is Atlas who does so. There is a god of the Autumn and Spring, of the Summer and Winter. So he personifies all forces he perceives but does not understand. For he has no idea of force except as emanating from a Person, of life which is not embodied in some form like his own or that of some animal. Whenever anything is done it must be Some One who does it, and that Some One is like himself, only greater and stronger.

There is not in the savage god any conception differing from that of man. There is not in any god any realisable conception different from that of man. The savage god is hungry and thirsty, requires clothes and houses, has in all things passions and wants like a man. That makes the god near to the man. With later gods is it different? God can be realised only by means of the qualities He shares with man. Deduct from your idea of God all human passions, love and forgiveness, and mercy, and revenge, and punishment, and what is left? Only words and abstractions which appeal to no one, and are realisable by no one. Declare that God requires neither ears to hear nor eyes to see, nor legs to walk with, nor a body, and what is left? Nothing is left. When anyone, savage or Christian, realises God he does so by qualities God shares with man. God is the Big Man who causes things. That is all. To say that God is a spirit and then to declare that a spirit differs in essence from a man is playing with words. No realisable conception does or can differ.

The conception of force by itself is but a very late idea. As one by one the phenomena of nature attract man's observation he personifies them. It will be noticed that unless a force intrudes itself on him he does not personify it. What people ever personified gravity? And why not? Surely gravity is evident enough. Every time a savage dropped a stone on his toes he would recognise gravity. But no. That a stone falls to the ground because a force draws it is an idea very late to enter man's brain. It seems to him, as he would say, the nature of a stone to fall. And then gravity acts always in the same way. It is not intermittent – like lightning, for instance. Therefore he never conceives of gravity as a force at all. When men had come to perceive that it was a force, they had passed the personifying stage. But the savage personified each force as he perceived it. First the sun and storm, till at last he came to himself and began to study his own life. He had good and bad luck; that was Fortune. Evil deeds are done, and good; he is beginning to classify and generalise; there are gods of Good and Evil. He has come to Ormuz and Ahriman little by little; as his power of generalising progresses, he drops the smaller gods. They disappear, they are but attributes of greater gods. And as he grows in mental grasp and makes himself the centre of his world, so does the God of Man become the God of Nature too. The greater absorbs the lesser.

The God who cared for man, the God of his past, of his present, of his future, is become the great God. He rules all the gods until he alone is God.

So it seemed to the man that God arose, never out of reason, always out of instinct. There was no difference. It is all the same story. There is innate in all men a tendency to personify the forces they cannot understand. Because they want an explanation, and personality is the only one that offers at first. To attribute effects to persons is aboriginal science. To attribute them to natural laws is later science. Each is the answer to the same question. Men personify forces in different ways according to their mental and emotional stature, to their capacity for generalising. They express their ideas in different ways according to their race and their country. The Hindu began with a god in each force, to represent each idea, and so the lower people still remain, afraid of many gods. But those of mental stature gradually generalised, till at last they came to one God, Brahm, and the lesser gods as emanating from him. This was a hierarchy; and then finally the greatest thinkers came to one God only, and the idea that the lesser gods are but representatives of His manifold nature. You can see all the stages before you now. It is simply a question of brain power, and the sequence remains the same. First the lesser, then the greater. It is never the other way on.

So does Christian mythology personify three ideas of God, as a Trinity, as three Persons in One, and a Devil. The Hindu would express such a conception of God by a god with three heads. Christianity, rejecting such crude symbolism, does so by a mystical creed. The Devil is being dropped. But the Jew and the Mahommedan have only one God. All force emanates from Him. He is the Cause of all things. He is One.

And yet it is not a reasoned answer, but an instinctive one. The savage, no more than the Christian, does not reason out his God. The feeling, the understanding of God is innate, abiding – never the result of a mental process. The idea of God is a thing in itself; it grows with the brain, but it is not the result of any process of the brain; just as a forest tree grows the greater in richer soil.

As the idea of gods increased in majesty, as the numbers decreased and became merged in three, in two, or in one, so did their power increase. The gods were at first but local, local to the place, local to the tribe. So was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who was jealous of the other gods. And gradually their local god or gods grew into the God of the whole world. It was only a question of mental development, of the power of generalisation in conception. Man conceived a ruler of the world in the Roman Emperor before he conceived an all-powerful God. The man as he meditated, as he watched, would see the stages before his eyes. There was the savage, the Kurumba and Moopa with his many gods in the hills all about; there were the Hindus, the traders whose temples shewed white in the groves beneath, many steps higher in civilisation with their supreme Brahm and minor gods emanating from him; there was the Moslem with his "God is God." He had the stages before his eyes.