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XV.
SEMITIC MONOTHEISM.¹⁰¹

A work such as M. Renan's 'Histoire Générale et Système Comparé des Langues Sémitiques' can only be reviewed chapter by chapter. It contains a survey not only, as its title would lead us to suppose, of the Semitic languages, but of the Semitic languages and nations; and, considering that the whole history of the civilised world has hitherto been acted by two races only, the Semitic and the Aryan, with occasional interruptions produced by the inroads of the Turanian race, M. Renan's work comprehends in reality half of the history of the ancient world. We have received as yet the first volume only of this important work, and before the author had time to finish the second, he was called upon to publish a second edition of the first, which appeared in 1858, with important additions and alterations.

In writing the history of the Semitic race it is necessary to lay down certain general characteristics common to all the members of that race, before we can speak of nations so widely separated from each other as the Jews, the Babylonians, Phenicians, Carthaginians, and Arabs, as one race or family. The most important bond which binds these scattered tribes together into one ideal whole is to be found in their language. There can be as little doubt that the dialects of all the Semitic nations are derived from one common type as there is about the derivation of French, Spanish, and Italian from Latin, or of Latin, Greek, German, Celtic, Slavonic, and Sanskrit from the primitive idiom of the ancestors of the Aryan race. The evidence of language would by itself be quite sufficient to establish the fact that the Semitic nations descended from common ancestors, and constitute what, in the science of language, may be called a distinct race. But M. Renan was not satisfied with this single criterion of the relationship of the Semitic tribes, and he has endeavoured to draw, partly from his own observations, partly from the suggestions of other scholars, such as Ewald and Lassen, a more complete portrait of the Semitic man. This was no easy task. It was like drawing the portrait of a whole family, omitting all that is peculiar to each individual member, and yet preserving the features which, constitute the general family likeness. The result has been what might be expected. Critics most familiar with one or the other branch of the Semitic family have each and all protested that they can see no likeness in the portrait. It seems to some to contain features which it ought not to contain, whereas others miss the very expression which appears to them most striking.

The following is a short abstract of what M. Renan considers the salient points in the Semitic character:

'Their character,' he says, 'is religious rather than political, and the mainspring of their religion is the conception of the unity of God. Their religious phraseology is simple, and free from mythological elements. Their religious feelings are strong, exclusive, intolerant, and sustained by a fervour which finds its peculiar expression in prophetic visions. Compared to the Aryan nations, they are found deficient in scientific and philosophical originality. Their poetry is chiefly subjective or lyrical, and we look in vain among their poets for excellence in epic and dramatic compositions. Painting and the plastic arts have never arrived at a higher than the decorative stage. Their political life has remained patriarchal and despotic, and their inability to organise on a large scale has deprived them of the means of military success. Perhaps the most general feature of their character is a negative one,—their inability to perceive the general and the abstract, whether in thought, language, religion, poetry, or politics; and, on the other hand, a strong attraction towards the individual and personal, which makes them monotheistic in religion, lyrical in poetry, monarchical in politics, abrupt in style, and impractical for speculation.'

One cannot look at this bold and rapid outline of the Semitic character without perceiving how many points it contains which are open to doubt and discussion. We shall confine our remarks to one point, which, in our mind, and, as far as we can see, in M. Renan's mind likewise, is the most important of all—namely, the supposed monotheistic tendency of the Semitic race. M. Renan asserts that this tendency belongs to the race by instinct,—that it forms the rule, not the exception; and he seems to imply that without it the human race would never have arrived at the knowledge or worship of the One God.

If such a remark had been made fifty years ago, it would have roused little or no opposition. 'Semitic' was then used in a more restricted sense, and hardly comprehended more than the Jews and Arabs. Of this small group of people it might well have been said, with such limitations as are tacitly implied in every general proposition on the character of individuals or nations, that the work set apart for them by a Divine Providence in the history of the world was the preaching of a belief in one God. Three religions have been founded by members of that more circumscribed Semitic family—the Jewish, the Christian, the Mohammedan; and all three proclaim, with the strongest accent, the doctrine that there is but one God.

Of late, however, not only have the limits of the Semitic family been considerably extended, so as to embrace several nations notorious for their idolatrous worship, but the history of the Jewish and Arab tribes has been explored so much more fully, that even there traces of a wide-spread tendency to polytheism have come to light.

The Semitic family is divided by M. Renan into two great branches, differing from each other in the form of their monotheistic belief, yet both, according to their historian, imbued from the beginning with the instinctive faith in one God:

1. The nomad branch, consisting of Arabs, Hebrews, and the neighbouring tribes of Palestine, commonly called the descendants of Terah; and

2. The political branch, including the nations of Phenicia, of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Yemen.

Can it be said that all these nations, comprising the worshippers of Elohim, Jehovah, Sabaoth, Moloch, Nisroch, Rimmon, Nebo, Dagon, Ashtaroth, Baal or Bel, Baal-peor, Baal-zebub, Chemosh, Milcom, Adrammelech, Annamelech, Nibhaz and Tartak, Ashima, Nergal, Succoth-benoth, the Sun, Moon, planets, and all the host of heaven, were endowed with a monotheistic instinct? M. Renan admits that monotheism has always had its principal bulwark in the nomadic branch, but he maintains that it has by no means been so unknown among the members of the political branch as is commonly supposed. But where are the criteria by which, in the same manner as their dialects, the religions of the Semitic races could be distinguished from the religions of the Aryan and Turanian races? We can recognise any Semitic dialect by the triliteral character of its roots. Is it possible to discover similar radical elements in all the forms of faith, primary or secondary, primitive or derivative, of the Semitic tribes? M. Renan thinks that it is. He imagines that he hears the key-note of a pure monotheism through all the wild shoutings of the priests of Baal and other Semitic idols, and he denies the presence of that key-note in any of the religious systems of the Aryan nations, whether Greeks or Romans, Germans or Celts, Hindus or Persians. Such an assertion could not but rouse considerable opposition, and so strong seems to have been the remonstrances addressed to M. Renan by several of his colleagues in the French Institute that, without awaiting the publication of the second volume of his great work, he has thought it right to publish part of it as a separate pamphlet. In his 'Nouvelles Considérations sur le Caractère Général des Peuples Sémitiques, et en particulier sur leur Tendance au Monothéisme,' he endeavours to silence the objections raised against the leading idea of his history of the Semitic race. It is an essay which exhibits not only the comprehensive knowledge of the scholar, but the warmth and alacrity of the advocate. With M. Renan the monotheistic character of the descendants of Shem is not only a scientific tenet, but a moral conviction. He wishes that his whole work should stand or fall with this thesis, and it becomes, therefore, all the more the duty of the critic, to inquire whether the arguments which he brings forward in support of his favourite idea are valid or not.

It is but fair to M. Renan that, in examining his statements, we should pay particular attention to any slight modifications which he may himself have adopted in his last memoir. In his history he asserts with great confidence, and somewhat broadly, that 'le monothéisme résume et explique tous les caractères de la race Sémitique.' In his later pamphlet he is more captious. As an experienced pleader he is ready to make many concessions in order to gain all the more readily our assent to his general proposition. He points out himself with great candour the weaker points of his argument, though, of course, only in order to return with unabated courage to his first position,—that of all the races of mankind the Semitic race alone was endowed with the instinct of monotheism. As it is impossible to deny the fact that the Semitic nations, in spite of this supposed monotheistic instinct, were frequently addicted to the most degraded forms of a polytheistic idolatry, and that even the Jews, the most monotheistic of all, frequently provoked the anger of the Lord by burning incense to other gods, M. Renan remarks that when he speaks of a nation in general he only speaks of the intellectual aristocracy of that nation. He appeals in self-defence to the manner in which historians lay down the character of modern nations. 'The French,' he says, 'are repeatedly called "une nation spirituelle," and yet no one would wish to assert either that every Frenchman is spirituel, or that no one could be spirituel who is not a Frenchman.' Now, here we may grant to M. Renan that if we speak of 'esprit' we naturally think of the intellectual minority only, and not of the whole bulk of a nation; but if we speak of religion, the case is different. If we say that the French believe in one God only, or that they are Christians, we speak not only of the intellectual aristocracy of France but of every man, woman, and child born and bred in France. Even if we say that the French are Roman Catholics, we do so only because we know that there is a decided majority in France in favour of the unreformed system of Christianity. But if, because some of the most distinguished writers of France have paraded their contempt for all religious dogmas, we were to say broadly that the French are a nation without religion, we should justly be called to order for abusing the legitimate privileges of generalization. The fact that Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and Jeremiah were firm believers in one God could not be considered sufficient to support the general proposition that the Jewish nation was monotheistic by instinct. And if we remember that among the other Semitic races we should look in vain for even four such names, the case would seem to be desperate to any one but M. Renan.

We cannot believe that M. Renan would be satisfied with the admission that there had been among the Jews a few leading men who believed in one God, or that the existence of but one God was an article of faith not quite unknown among the other Semitic races; yet he has hardly proved more. He has collected, with great learning and ingenuity, all traces of monotheism in the annals of the Semitic nations; but he has taken no pains to discover the traces of polytheism, whether faint or distinct, which are disclosed in the same annals. In acting the part of an advocate he has for a time divested himself of the nobler character of the historian.

If M. Renan had looked with equal zeal for the scattered vestiges both of a monotheistic and of a polytheistic worship, he would have drawn, perhaps, a less striking, but we believe a more faithful, portrait of the Semitic man. We may accept all the facts of M. Renan, for his facts are almost always to be trusted; but we cannot accept his conclusions, because they would be in contradiction to other facts which M. Renan places too much in the background, or ignores altogether. Besides, there is something in the very conclusions to which he is driven by his too partial evidence which jars on our ears, and betrays a want of harmony in the premises on which he builds. Taking his stand on the fact that the Jewish race was the first of all the nations of the world to arrive at the knowledge of one God, M. Renan proceeds to argue that, if their monotheism had been the result of a persevering mental effort—if it had been a discovery like the philosophical or scientific discoveries of the Greeks, it would be necessary to admit that the Jews surpassed all other nations of the world in intellect and vigour of speculation. This, he admits, is contrary to fact:

'Apart la supériorité de son culte, le peuple juif n'en a aucune autre; c'est un des peuples les moins doués pour la science et la philosophie parmi les peuples de l'antiquité; il n'a une grande position ni politique ni militaire. Ses institutions sont purement conservatrices; les prophètes, qui représentent excellemment son génie, sont des hommes essentiellement réactionnaires, se reportant toujours vers un idéal antérieur. Comment expliquer, au sein d'une société aussi étroite et aussi peu développée, une révolution d'idées qu'Athènes et Alexandrie n'ont pas réussi à accomplir?'

M. Renan then defines the monotheism of the Jews, and of the Semitic nations in general, as the result of a low, rather than of a high state of intellectual cultivation: 'Il s'en faut,' he writes (p. 40), 'que le monothéisme soit le produit d'une race qui a des idées exaltées en fait de religion; c'est en réalité le fruit d'une race qui a peu de besoins religieux. C'est comme minimum de religion, en fait de dogmes et en fait de pratiques extérieures, que le monothéisme est surtout accommodé aux besoins des populations nomades.'

But even this minimum of religious reflection which is required, according to M. Renan, for the perception of the unity of God, he grudges to the Semitic nations, and he is driven in the end (p. 73) to explain the Semitic Monotheism as the result of a religious instinct, analogous to the instinct which led each race to the formation of its own language.

Here we miss the usual clearness and precision which distinguish most of M. Renan's works. It is always dangerous to transfer expressions from one branch of knowledge to another. The word 'instinct' has its legitimate application in natural history, where it is used of the unconscious acts of unconscious beings. We say that birds build their nests by instinct, that fishes swim by instinct, that cats catch mice by instinct; and, though no natural philosopher has yet explained what instinct is, yet we accept the term as a conventional expression for an unknown power working in the animal world.

If we transfer this word to the unconscious acts of conscious beings, we must necessarily alter its definition. We may speak of an instinctive motion of the arm, but we only mean a motion which has become so habitual as to require no longer any special effort of the will.

If, however, we transfer the word to the conscious thoughts of conscious beings, we strain the word beyond its natural capacities, we use it in order to avoid other terms which would commit us to the admission either of innate ideas or inspired truths. We use a word in order to avoid a definition. It may sound more scientific to speak of a monotheistic instinct rather than of the inborn image or the revealed truth of the One living God; but is instinct less mysterious than revelation? Can there be an instinct without an instigation or an instigator? And whose hand was it that instigated the Semitic mind to the worship of one God? Could the same hand have instigated the Aryan mind to the worship of many gods? Could the monotheistic instinct of the Semitic race, if an instinct, have been so frequently obscured, or the polytheistic instinct of the Aryan race, if an instinct, so completely annihilated, as to allow the Jews to worship on all the high places round Jerusalem, and the Greeks and Romans to become believers in Christ? Fishes never fly, and cats never catch frogs. These are the difficulties into which we are led; and they arise simply and solely from our using words for their sound rather than for their meaning. We begin by playing with words, but in the end the words will play with us.

There are, in fact, various kinds of monotheism, and it becomes our duty to examine more carefully what they mean and how they arise. There is one kind of monotheism, though it would more properly be called theism, or henotheism, which forms the birthright of every human being. What distinguishes man from all other creatures, and not only raises him above the animal world, but removes him altogether from the confines of a merely natural existence, is the feeling of sonship inherent in and inseparable from human nature. That feeling may find expression in a thousand ways, but there breathes through all of them the inextinguishable conviction, 'It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.' That feeling of sonship may with some races manifest itself in fear and trembling, and it may drive whole generations into religious madness and devil worship. In other countries it may tempt the creature into a fatal familiarity with the Creator, and end in an apotheosis of man, or a headlong plunging of the human into the divine. It may take, as with the Jews, the form of a simple assertion that 'Adam was the son of God,' or it may be clothed in the mythological phraseology of the Hindus, that Manu, or man, was the descendant of Svayambhu, the Self-existing. But, in some form or other, the feeling of dependence on a higher Power breaks through in all the religions of the world, and explains to us the meaning of St. Paul, 'that God, though in times past He suffered all nations to walk in their own ways, nevertheless He left not Himself without witness, in that He did good and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.'

This primitive intuition of God and the ineradicable feeling of dependence on God, could only have been the result of a primitive revelation, in the truest sense of that word. Man, who owed his existence to God, and whose being centred and rested in God, saw and felt God as the only source of his own and of all other existence. By the very act of the creation, God had revealed Himself. There He was, manifested in His works, in all His majesty and power, before the face of those to whom He had given eyes to see and ears to hear, and into whose nostrils He had breathed the breath of life, even the Spirit of God.

This primitive intuition of God, however, was in itself neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, though it might become either, according to the expression which it took in the languages of man. It was this primitive intuition which supplied either the subject or the predicate in all the religions of the world, and without it no religion, whether true or false, whether revealed or natural, could have had even its first beginning. It is too often forgotten by those who believe that a polytheistic worship was the most natural unfolding of religious life, that polytheism must everywhere have been preceded by a more or less conscious theism. In no language does the plural exist before the singular. No human mind could have conceived the idea of gods without having previously conceived the idea of a god. It would be, however, quite as great a mistake to imagine, because the idea of a god must exist previously to that of gods, that therefore a belief in One God preceded everywhere the belief in many gods. A belief in God as exclusively One, involves a distinct negation of more than one God, and that negation is possible only after the conception, whether real or imaginary, of many gods.

The primitive intuition of the Godhead is neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, and it finds its most natural expression in the simplest and yet the most important article of faith—that God is God. This must have been the faith of the ancestors of mankind previously to any division of race or confusion of tongues. It might seem, indeed, as if in such a faith the oneness of God, though not expressly asserted, was implied, and that it existed, though latent, in the first revelation of God. History, however, proves that the question of oneness was yet undecided in that primitive faith, and that the intuition of God was not yet secured against the illusions of a double vision. There are, in reality, two kinds of oneness which, when we enter into metaphysical discussions, must be carefully distinguished, and which for practical purposes are well kept separate by the definite and indefinite articles. There is one kind of oneness which does not exclude the idea of plurality; there is another which does. When we say that Cromwell was a Protector of England, we do not assert that he was the only protector. But if we say that he was the Protector of England, it is understood that he was the only man who enjoyed that title. If, therefore, an expression had been given to that primitive intuition of the Deity, which is the mainspring of all later religion, it would have been—'There is a God,' but not yet 'There is but "One God."' The latter form of faith, the belief in One God, is properly called monotheism, whereas the term of henotheism would best express the faith in a single god.

We must bear in mind that we are here speaking of a period in the history of mankind when, together with the awakening of ideas, the first attempts only were being made at expressing the simplest conceptions by means of a language most simple, most sensuous, and most unwieldy. There was as yet no word sufficiently reduced by the wear and tear of thought to serve as an adequate expression for the abstract idea of an immaterial and supernatural Being. There were words for walking and shouting, for cutting and burning, for dog and cow, for house and wall, for sun and moon, for day and night. Every object was called by some quality which had struck the eye as most peculiar and characteristic. But what quality should be predicated of that Being of which man knew as yet nothing but its existence? Language possessed as yet no auxiliary verbs. The very idea of being without the attributes of quality or action, had never entered into the human mind. How then was that Being to be called which had revealed its existence, and continued to make itself felt by everything that most powerfully impressed the awakening mind, but which as yet was known only like a subterraneous spring by the waters which it poured forth with inexhaustible strength? When storm and lightning drove a father with his helpless family to seek refuge in the forests, and the fall of mighty trees crushed at his side those who were most dear to him, there were, no doubt, feelings of terror and awe, of helplessness and dependence, in the human heart which burst forth in a shriek for pity or help from the only Being that could command the storm. But there was no name by which He could be called. There might be names for the storm-wind and the thunderbolt, but these were not the names applicable to Him that rideth upon the heavens of heavens, which were of old. Again, when after a wild and tearful night the sun dawned in the morning, smiling on man—when after a dreary and deathlike winter spring came again with its sunshine and flowers, there were feelings of joy and gratitude, of love and adoration in the heart of every human being; but though there were names for the sun and the spring, for the bright sky and the brilliant dawn, there was no word by which to call the source of all this gladness, the giver of light and life.

At the time when we may suppose that the first attempts at finding a name for God were made, the divergence of the languages of mankind had commenced. We cannot dwell here on the causes which led to the multiplicity of human speech; but whether we look on the confusion of tongues as a natural or supernatural event, it was an event which the science of language has proved to have been inevitable. The ancestors of the Semitic and the Aryan nations had long become unintelligible to each other in their conversations on the most ordinary topics, when they each in their own way began to look for a proper name for God. Now one of the most striking differences between the Aryan and the Semitic forms of speech was this:—In the Semitic languages the roots expressive of the predicates which were to serve as the proper names of any subjects, remained so distinct within the body of a word, that those who used the word were unable to forget its predicative meaning, and retained in most cases a distinct consciousness of its appellative power. In the Aryan languages, on the contrary, the significative element, or the root of a word, was apt to become so completely absorbed by the derivative elements, whether prefixes or suffixes, that most substantives ceased almost immediately to be appellative, and were changed into mere names or proper names. What we mean can best be illustrated by the fact that the dictionaries of Semitic languages are mostly arranged according to their roots. When we wish to find the meaning of a word in Hebrew or Arabic we first look for its root, whether triliteral or biliteral, and then look in the dictionary for that root and its derivatives. In the Aryan languages, on the contrary, such an arrangement would be extremely inconvenient. In many words it is impossible to detect the radical element. In others, after the root is discovered, we find that it has not given birth to any other derivatives which would throw their converging rays of light on its radical meaning. In other cases, again, such seems to have been the boldness of the original name-giver that we can hardly enter into the idiosyncrasy which assigned such a name to such an object.

This peculiarity of the Semitic and Aryan languages must have had the greatest influence on the formation of their religious phraseology. The Semitic man would call on God in adjectives only, or in words which always conveyed a predicative meaning. Every one of his words was more or less predicative, and he was therefore restricted in his choice to such words as expressed some one or other of the abstract qualities of the Deity. The Aryan man was less fettered in his choice. Let us take an instance. Being startled by the sound of thunder, he would at first express his impression by the single phrase, It thunders,—βρουτᾶ. Here the idea of God is understood rather than expressed, very much in the same manner as the Semitic proper names Zabd (present), Abd (servant), Aus (present), are habitually used for Zabd-allah, Abd-allah, Aus-allah,—the servant of God, the gift of God. It would be more in accordance with the feelings and thoughts of those who first used these so-called impersonal verbs to translate them by He thunders, He rains, He snows. Afterwards, instead of the simple impersonal verb He thunders, another expression naturally suggested itself. The thunder came from the sky, the sky was frequently called Dyaus (the bright one), in Greek Ζεὑς; and though it was not the bright sky which thundered, but the dark, yet Dyaus had already ceased to be an expressive predicate, it had become a traditional name, and hence there was nothing to prevent an Aryan man from saying Dyaus, or the sky thunders, in Greek Ζεὑς βρουτᾶ. Let us here mark the almost irresistible influence of language on the mind. The word Dyaus, which at first meant bright, had lost its radical meaning, and now meant simply sky. It then entered into a new stage. The idea which had first been expressed by the pronoun or the termination of the third person, He thunders, was taken up into the word Dyaus, or sky. He thunders, and Dyaus thunders, became synonymous expressions, and by the mere habit of speech He became Dyaus, and Dyaus became He. Henceforth Dyaus remained as an appellative of that unseen though ever present Power, which had revealed its existence to man from the beginning, but which remained without a name long after every beast of the field and every fowl of the air had been named by Adam.

Now, what happened in this instance with the name of Dyaus, happened again and again with other names. When men felt the presence of God in the great and strong wind, in the earthquake, or the fire, they said at first, He storms, He shakes, He burns. But they likewise said, the storm (Marut) blows, the fire (Agni) burns, the subterraneous fire (Vulcanus) upheaves the earth. And after a time the result was the same as before, and the words meaning originally wind or fire were used, under certain restrictions, as names of the unknown God. As long as all these names were remembered as mere names or attributes of one and the same Divine Power, there was as yet no polytheism, though, no doubt, every new name threatened to obscure more and more the primitive intuition of God. At first, the names of God, like fetishes or statues, were honest attempts at expressing or representing an idea which could never find an adequate expression or representation. But the eidolon, or likeness, became an idol; the nomen, or name, lapsed into a numen, or demon, as soon as they were drawn away from their original intention. If the Greeks had remembered that Zeus was but a name or symbol of the Deity, there would have been no more harm in calling God by that name than by any other. If they had remembered that Kronos, and Uranos, and Apollon were all but so many attempts at naming the various sides, or manifestations, or aspects, or persons of the Deity, they might have used these names in the hours of their various needs, just as the Jews called on Jehovah, Elohim, and Sabaoth, or as Roman Catholics implore the help of Nunziata, Dolores, and Notre-Dame-de-Grace.