Читать книгу The Next Step in Religion - Roy Wood Sellars - Страница 8

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In stories of creation we have the imagination of primitive man at work, trying to answer questions which it was no more prepared to answer than a child of seven is in a position to understand higher mathematics. The savage has an answer for every question because he has no idea of the difficulty of the problems involved. A name or a story will completely satisfy him because he is uncritical. Now the stories of creation, or cosmogonies, as they are technically called, are peculiarly interesting because they give us an insight into the concrete terms which the imagination was forced to use in its attempt to picture the past and the origin of things. Moreover, we can trace the changes these naïve stories underwent as man's experience broadened and he was able to think more abstractly. We can become acquainted with the materials with which the poet-priest of the pre-scientific past worked to build himself a marvelous and soul-satisfying tale; and we are able, as history unrolls, to watch myth gradually pass into theology.

The desire to explain how nature came to be and how man arose was well-nigh universal. Everywhere we find accounts of a distant past when the gods walked on earth. Egyptians, Hindoos, Greeks, Japanese, Polynesians, Hebrews and American Indians had tales of the origin of things to tell. This desire to account for origins is not hard to understand. The same psychological tendency is at work to-day and gives zest to the theory of evolution. Why did the Descent of Man awaken such a storm throughout the Western World if not because it shook the story of man's first coming, which had been handed down from generation to generation since the mists of antiquity? Man wants to know about himself, how he came here, and whither he is going. The vogue of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is in large measure due to the haunting sense of man's ignorance of his place in the world. Who set the stage and placed the puppets on it? Primitive man always answered his questions in terms of Beings like himself, although more powerful and longer lived. All agency was for him personal agency. And there are, even now, a surprisingly large number of people who can think in no other terms. The universe is for them the playground of spirits who work their will upon it. Matter and energy and the slow growth of years are ideas which strike them cold. Their view of the universe is dramatic and even melodramatic; it is personal, mythical.

Let us glance at some of these attempts to account for the world. We shall not find them very coherent or deep, but we shall always find them instructive for the light they throw upon man, himself, and the limits set to his theories about origins by the concrete agency to which he perforce appealed. We shall then realize how natural were the questions which man asked and which he sought to answer, and how impossible it was for him to offer any other solutions than those imaginative ones which grew up in folk-lore and which have been developed and re-cast in the various religions.

No early race had the idea of an absolute beginning. The attempt made was simply to carry things back to different conditions, to a less developed state of things, and then to trace the larger steps by means of which the later world, as they saw it, came about. Those races which had little power for abstract thinking and had achieved few impersonal ideas kept very near to concrete phenomena and explained their own origin in terms of a mythical ancestor, or animal magician, while they left the earth and the sky very much as it was. The Iroquois Indians, for instance, believed that their original female ancestress fell from heaven. There was no land to receive her, but it suddenly bubbled up under her feet and waxed bigger, so that ere long a whole country was visible. Other branches of the tribe held that otters and beavers hastened to dig up enough earth from beneath the water to provide her with an island on which to dwell. The Athapascans of Northwestern Canada asserted that a raven, whose eyes were fire, whose glances were lightning, and the clapping of whose wings was thunder, descended to the ocean. Instantly, the earth arose and remained floating on the surface of the waters. It was from this Being that the tribe traced its descent. We must remember how near akin are animals and men at this stage of human development. Once throw oneself into the atmosphere of myth and it is not difficult to comprehend how such stories grew up.

But we are more interested in tracing the development of stories of creation from primitive types to subtler and more abstract forms; and a collection of savage folk-lore on the subject would, therefore, be of little value. Let us pass, then, to the accounts given by races which have played a part in history.

The Egyptian account is as follows: In the beginning was the primitive ocean, a wild waste of waters. From this tossing chaos sprang land and sky, and it was from their embrace that other things arose. The general idea present in this account was probably derived from the Nile floods or from glimpses of the ocean. The lifting of the watery mists which are seen rising each morning from the Nile, the parting of them from the earth and the raising of them to the sky was a work variously attributed to Ra (the sun) or Shu (the atmosphere). Gradually the Egyptians developed ideas of various deities all of whom derive from objects and activities in nature. To these were then assigned the work of creation. At first this work was thought of as a shaping or fashioning in a literal sense. Ptah, the Great Artificer, shapes the sun and moon eggs on his potter's wheel; Osiris, the god of vegetation, formed with his hand the earth, its waters, its air, its plants, all its cattle, all its birds, all its winged fowl, all its reptiles, all its quadrupeds. Is this view very far different from the account given in the so-called second story of creation beginning with verse four of Genesis? There it is written: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

Somewhat later developed the more priestly, or theological, account; just as it did for the Hebrews. Creation was then conceived more mystically as an act of will issuing in a word of command. We should remember that, for primitive thought, words were not mere verbal signs, useful to man as means of communication, but were conceived, more realistically and naïvely, as essential parts of things, bound up with their existence. This same fact will explain much of the ritual of magic. When God says, "Let there be light," light is selected and, as it were, coerced into existence by the name. As time passed man became reflective and critical. He had nothing essentially new to offer, yet he felt dissatisfied with the crude imagery of tradition. Step by step with the growth of society, we always find the passage from creation myths built around the idea of spontaneous generation to the idea of a god who molds men as a potter does his clay, and thence to a fiat in which the creative will of a supernatural and transcendent deity finds expression. There is a remarkable similarity in creation stories, just as we would expect. The same few motives repeat themselves with local variations.

The oldest of the Greek myths of creation are to be found in Homer and Hesiod. For Homer, Oceanus is the father of the gods, while Tethys, called the suckling or nursing one, is the mother. Back of these august, generative powers, however, lies Night whom even Zeus is afraid to offend. We must remember that darkness is a presence for early man, as real as water or air, and that man feared it as mysterious and threatening. Always we must put aside the knowledge which science has given us and sink down into this vague world of the past, filled with tremendous shapes and forces. Hesiod's view is best given in his own words:

"From chaos were generated Erebos and black Night,

And from Night again were generated Ether and Day,

Whom she brought forth, having conceived from the embrace of Erebos."

Here we have the same sexual motive at work as among the Egyptians; a motive which, as we should expect, is well-nigh universal. During the sixth century there was an efflorescence of creation myths among the Greeks. These are associated with the name of Orpheus, and are commonly classed together as Orphic cosmogonies. Soon after, philosophic speculation began to come into its own and the Greeks "left off telling tales." Burnet, a famous student of Greek culture, asserts that "history teaches that science has never existed except among those peoples which the Greeks have influenced." But we shall leave the Greeks for the present; it may be that we shall meet them, and their influence again.

The Hindoos passed from crude views to more abstract and refined concepts just as the Egyptians and Greeks did. In the Vedic period, there are many contradictory statements about the creation of the world and of the gods. Heaven and earth are spoken of as the parents of the gods, and at the same time the gods are said to have built, or woven, the whole world. When we remember that there was little distinction at first between nature and the gods, we are not surprised at this contradiction. Moreover, as one writer suggests, this contradiction seems only to have enhanced the mystery of the conception. When religion enters, logic is not always desired.

Another conception which we find in Hindoo thought is that of a world-egg. This analogy is so natural that we are not surprised to discover it. Let us glance at one of the accounts given in the Satapatha Brahmana: "In the beginning this universe was water, nothing but water. The waters desired, 'How can we be reproduced?' So saying, they toiled, they performed austerity. While they were performing austerity, a golden egg came into existence. Being produced, it then became a year. Wherefore this golden egg floated about for the period of a year. From it in a year a male came into existence, who was Prajapati.... He divided this golden egg.... In a year he desired to speak. He uttered 'bhur,' which became this earth; 'bhuvah,' which became this firmament; and 'svar,' which became that sky.... Desiring progeny, he went on worshiping and toiling. He conceived progeny in himself; with his mouth he created the gods...."

This account of the creation is characteristic of Hindoo thought as it passes from the frank admiration of nature, which distinguishes the Vedic period, to what more nearly approaches theosophic speculation. Yet there is no genuine break with the animism of primitive times. The waters are thought of as desiring, that is, they are held to be alive and vaguely conscious. The belief that words are inseparable from things should again be noted. "Bhur" becomes the earth, and "svar" becomes the sky.

In the course of time, Hindoo thought became more abstract and sophisticated without having achieved any method which would lead to tested knowledge. An analogy may make clearer to the reader the vicious intellectual situation. Imagine the subtle minds of the Mediæval scholastics, without the material furnished them by the Greek philosophy, and obliged to exercise themselves upon magic, myth and legend. The very energy and subtlety of their intellects would lead them into all sorts of phantasmagoria. Theosophy—and a large share of what is called theology—is simply a refining and subtilizing of mythology. The more difficult and abstract the thought, the more significance it is assumed to possess. The penetrative and exploring power of mere untested speculation is taken for granted. Words throw a spell over the mind because nothing of a more positive character is before it to counteract their charm. Even to-day we all know of people who like to employ such terms as force, and unity, and spirit, and will. The very vagueness of the words exercises a fascination which smothers the slight demand for explanation. Just as the Jews of the Dispersion spoke of Wisdom as the first-born creature of God and gave this abstraction an objective existence, so the Hindoo poets and theosophists explained the world in terms which seem to the scientifically trained mind subjective and irrelevant. For all its apparent profundity, such an outlook represents a lower stage than that which science has reached. Subtlety is not enough; it must be a servant to the right methods of investigation. Dialectic and imaginative vividness cannot give truth to ideas not adapted to explain the sort of a world we live in.

Those creation stories developed by the Hebrews with the aid of the Babylonians have had most influence on Western thought and, therefore, deserve considerable attention. The motives and mental processes at work are, however, essentially those which we have already examined. Unfortunately, we have only hints here and there in the Old Testament of the more primitive traditions which were worked over and built upon by the priests and prophets. Moreover, the Yahweh religion seems to have been adopted quite late and to have made easy a break with the older tales. Probably few readers of the Bible, who have not made a systematic study of Semitic literature, are aware that ancient strands of folk-lore are scattered through it. In Psalm 74, for instance, there is a good instance of primitive views: "Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength; Thou breakest the head of Leviathan in pieces.... Thou didst cleave fountain and flood." In Job, likewise, there are references to these deeds of Yahweh in the far past. Very few casual readers ask themselves who Rahab and the Flying Serpent and Leviathan were. Now investigation has shown that we have, in these references to the deeds of Yahweh, fragments of the Babylonian myth of creation. These creatures are monsters whom Yahweh makes captive before he orders the original chaos into a cosmos. In doing this, he is a counterpart of Marduk, the Babylonian creator. These monsters, like the gods who conquer them, are only personified forms of phenomena in the heavens above and the earth beneath. Let us now consider the stories of creation given in Genesis. It is not widely enough known that there are two distinct accounts which, although they are externally combined, can easily be separated even in the English translation. The oldest version begins with chapter two, verse five. This version is called the prophetic account. It assumes that the world already exists and concerns itself only with man's appearance, the institution of marriage, and the general features of man's life. God forms man out of the dust of the ground, as a potter molds his clay, and breathes into him the breath of life. He places him in a garden to dress and keep it. But the incidents which follow are so familiar to every one that there is no need to repeat them. Scholars have pointed out that this account is very similar to that current in Babylonia. The motives are like those found in the Gilgamish and Adapa myths. The differences in general tone and in geographical details can readily be explained by the later date—about the eighth century—and the character of the Palestinian landscape. Those who read Hebrew will note the difference in vocabulary between the second chapter in Genesis and the first, while those who are confined to the English translation should especially note that the two words, Lord and God, are combined in the prophetic account. There are many naïve, and obviously primitive, touches in this creation story which give it a quaint charm. Only those, however, who are themselves naïve in their outlook upon the world can dream of taking it as other than folk-lore. I must confess that it is a mystery to me that so many fairly educated men can take it as anything but what it so obviously is, a creation myth.

The creation story, told in the first chapter, is called by scholars the priestly account. It is post-exilic and, so, relatively late. The foundation consists of mythical ideas which go back to the mists of antiquity. From these were derived certain terms which are scarcely translatable into English. The reader has been further confused by a poetic and inexact rendering of many Hebrew phrases. The "spirit of God" is literally the "wind of God," an idea which probably is historically connected with the Babylonian tale of how Marduk uses the wind as his instrument in his fight against Tiamat, the monster of the deep. Tiamat has become Tehom, translated as the "deep."

In spite of the lapse in verse 26, into the language of polytheism, the priestly account represents a late theological level in which creation is conceived as the passage of will and word into existence. The effect is majestic and intensely dramatic in its simplicity. Yet how else can critical thought portray creation? An omnipotent, personal God is necessarily conceived as one who has the power to call things into being. To ask how he does this is meaningless, for it ignores the stark power which is assumed. In accordance with the genius of the Semite, then, God was pictured as a monarch whose very will brought forth without effort. But a little reflection must convince us that this conception neither makes creation thinkable in any genuine sense nor proves its occurrence. We have merely attained the idealization of the creation myth, its most perfect form.