Читать книгу: «The Lords of the Ghostland: A History of the Ideal», страница 6

VII
JUPITER

THE name of the national deity of Israel is unpronounceable. The name of the national divinity of Rome is unknown. To all but the hierophants it was a secret. For uttering it a senator was put to death. But Tullius Hostilius erected temples to Fear and to Pallor. It may have been Fright. The conjecture is supported by the fact that, as was usual, Rome had any number of deified epithets, as she had also a quantity of little bits of gods. These latter greatly amused the Christian Fathers. Among them was Alemona, who, in homely English, was Wet-nurse.

Tertullian, perhaps naïvely, remarked: "Superstition has invented these deities for whom we have substituted angels." In addition to the diva mater Alemona was the divus pater Vaticanus, the holy father Vatican, who assisted at a child's first cry. There was the equally holy father Fabulin, who attended him in his earliest efforts at speech. Neither of them had anything else to do.

Pavor had. At thunder, at lightning, at a meteor, at moisture on a wall, at no matter what, at silence even, the descendants of a she-wolf's nursling quailed. They lived in a panic. In panic the gods were born. It is but natural, perhaps, that Fright should have been held supreme. The other gods, mainly divinities of prey and of havoc, were lustreless as the imaginations that conceived them. Prosaic, unimaged, without poetry or myth, they dully persisted until pedlars appeared with Hellenic legends and wares. To their tales Rome listened. Then eidolons of the Olympians became naturalized there. Zeus was transformed into Jupiter, Aphrodite into Venus, Pallas into Minerva, Demeter into Ceres, and all of them – and with them all the others – into an irritable police. The Greek gods enchanted, those of Rome alarmed. Plutarch said that they were indignant if one presumed to so much as sneeze.

Worship, consequently, was a necessary precaution, an insurance against divine risks, a matter of business in which the devout bargained with the divine. Ovid represented Numa trying to elude the exigencies of Jove. The latter had demanded the sacrifice of a head. "You shall have a cabbage," said the king. "I mean something human." "Some hairs then." "No, I want something alive." "We will give you a pretty little fish." Jupiter laughed and yielded. That was much later, after Lucretius, in putting Epicurus into verse, had declared religion to be the mother of sin. By that time Fear and Pallor had struck terror into the very marrow of barbarian bones. Fright was a god more serviceable than Zeus. With him Rome conquered the world. Yet in the conquest Fright became Might and the latter an effulgence of Jove's.

Jove was magnificent. In the Capitol he throned so augustly that we swear by him still. Like Rome he is immortal. But Pavor, that had faded into him, was never invoked. The reason was not sacerdotal, it was political. Rome never imposed her gods on the quelled. With superior tact she lured their gods from them. At any siege, that was her first device. To it she believed her victories were due. It was to avoid possible reprisals and to remain invincible, that her own national divinity she so carefully concealed that the name still is a secret. With the gods, Rome gathered the creeds of the world, set them like fountains among her hills, and drank of their sacred waters. Her early deity is unknown. But the secret of her eternity is in the religions that she absorbed. It was these that made her immortal.

To that immortality the obscure god of an obscure people contributed largely, perhaps, but perhaps, too, not uniquely. Jahveh might have remained unperceived behind the veil of the sanctuary had not his altar been illuminated by lights from other shrines. In the early days of the empire, Rome was fully aware of the glamour of Amon, of the star of Ormuzd, Brahm's cerulean lotos and the rainbow heights of Bel-Marduk. But in the splendour of Jove all these were opaque.

Jupiter, always imposing, was grandiose then. His thoughts were vast as the sky. In a direct revelation to Vergil he said of his chosen people: "I have set no limits to their conquest or its duration. The empire I have given them shall be without end."⁴¹ Hebrew prophets had spoken similarly. Vergil must have been more truly inspired. The Roman empire, nominally holy, figuratively still exists. Yet fulfilment of the prophecy is due perhaps less to the God of the Gentiles than to the God of the Jews. Though perhaps also it may be permissible to discern in the latter a transfiguration of Jove, who originally Zeus, and primarily not Hellenic but Hindu, ultimately became supreme. After the terrific struggle which resulted in that final metamorphosis, Jerusalem, disinherited, saw Rome the spiritual capital of the globe.

Jerusalem was not a home of logic. Rome was the city of law. That law, cold, inflexible, passionless as a sword and quite as effective, Rome brandished at philosophy. It is said that the intellectual gymnastics of Greece were displeasing to her traditions. It is more probable that augurs had foreseen or oracles had foretold that philosophy would divest her of the sword, and with it of her sceptre and her might. Ideas cannot be decapitated. Only ridicule can demolish them. Philosophy, mistress of irony, resisted while nations fell. It was philosophy that first undermined established creeds and then led to the pursuit of new ones. Yet it may be that a contributing cause was a curious theory that the world was to end. Foretold in the Brahmanas, in the Avesta and in the Eddas, probably it was in the Sibylline Books. If not, the subsequent Church may have so assumed.

 
Dies iræ, dies illa,
Solvet sæclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.
 

Not alone David and the Sibyl but Etruscan seers had seen in the skies that the tenth and last astronomical cycle had begun.⁴² Plutarch, in his life of Sylla, testified to the general belief in an approaching cataclysm. Lucretius announced that at any moment it might occur.⁴³ That was in the latter days of the republic. In the early days of the empire the theory persisting may have induced the hope of a saviour. Suetonius said that nature in her parturitions was elaborating a king.⁴⁴ Afterward he added that such was Asia's archaic belief.⁴⁵ Recent discoveries have verified the assertion. In the Akkadian Epic of Dibbara a messiah was foretold.⁴⁶ That epic, anterior to a cognate Egyptian prophecy,⁴⁷ anterior also to the Sibylline Books, was anterior too to the Hebrew prophets and necessarily to those of Rome.

Among these was Vergil. In the fourth Eclogue he beheld an age of gold, preceded by the advent on earth of a son of Jove, under whose auspices the last traces of sin and sorrow were to disappear and a new race descend from heaven. "The serpent shall die," he declared, adding: "The time is at hand."

The Eclogue was written 40 B.C., during the consulate of Pallio, whom the poet wished perhaps to flatter. Then presently Ovid sang the deathless soul and Tibullus gave rendezvous hereafter. The atmosphere dripped with wonders. The air became charged with the miraculous. At stated intervals the doors of temples opened of themselves. Statues perspired visibly. There was a book that explained the mechanism of these marvels. It interested nobody. Prodigies were matters of course.

The people had a heaven, also a hell, both of them Greek, a purgatory that may have been Asiatic, and, pending the advent of the son of Jove, in Mithra they could have had a redeemer. Had it been desired, Buddhism could have supplied gospels, India the trinity, Persia the resurrection, Egypt the life. From Iran could have been obtained an Intelligence, sovereign, unimaged, and just. That was unnecessary. Long since Socrates had displayed it. In addition, Epicurus had told of an ascension of heavens, skies beyond the sky, worlds without number, the many mansions of a later faith.

Meanwhile, austerity was an appanage of the stoics, in whose faultless code the dominant note was contempt for whatever is base, respect for all that is noble. A doctrine of great beauty, purely Greek, as was everything else in Rome that was beautiful, its heights were too lofty for the vulgar. It appealed only to the lettered, that is to the few, to the infrequent disciples of Zeno and of Cicero, his prophet, who, Erasmus said, was inspired by God.

It may be that Cicero inspired a few of God's preachers. The latter were not yet in Rome. Christ had not come. At that period, unique in history, man alone existed. The temples were thronged, but the skies were bare. Cicero knew that. Elysium and Hades were as chimerical to him as the Epicurean heavens. "People," he said, "talk of these places as though they had been there." But that which was superstition to him he regarded as beneficial for others, who had to have something and who got it, in temples where a sin was a prayer.

There was once a play of which there has survived but the title: The Last Will and Testament of Defunct Jupiter. It appeared in the days of Diocletian, but it might have appealed when Cicero taught. Faith then had fainted. Fright had ceased to build. Worship remained, but religion had gone. The gods themselves were departing. The epoch itself was apoplectic. The tramp of legions was continuous. Not alone the skies but the world was in a ferment. It was not until a diadem, falling from Cleopatra's golden bed, rolled to the feet of Augustus, that the gods were stayed and faith revived.

In the interim, prisoners had been deported from Judea. At first they were slaves. Subsequently manumitted, they formed a colony that in the high-viced city resembled Esther in the seraglio of Ahasuerus. Rome, amateur of cults, always curious of foreign faiths, might have been interested in Judaism. It had many analogies with local beliefs. Its adherents awaited, as Rome did, a messiah. They awaited too a golden age. For those who were weary of philosophy, they had a religion in which there was none. For those to whom the marvellous appealed, they had a history in which miracles were a string of pearls. For those who were sceptic concerning the post-mortem, they offered blankness. In addition, their god, the enemy of all others, was adapted to an empire that recognized no sovereignty but its own. Readily might Rome have become Hebrew. But then, with equal ease, she might have become Egyptian.

For those who were perhaps afraid of going to hell and yet may have been equally afraid of not going anywhere, Egypt held passports to a land of light. Then too, the gods of Egypt were friendly and accessible. They mingled familiarly with those of Rome, complaisantly with the deified Cæsars, as already they had with the pharaohs, a condescension, parenthetically, that did not protect them from Tiberius, who, for reasons with which religion had nothing whatever to do, persecuted the Egyptians, as he persecuted also the Jews. None the less, Rome, weary of local fictions, might have become converted to foreign ideas. In default of Syrian or Copt, she might have become Persian as already she was Greek.

Augustus had other views. Divinities, made not merely after the image of man but in symbols of sin, he saluted. With a hand usually small, but in this instance tolerably large, he re-established them on their pedestals. A relapse to spiritual infancy resulted. It was what he sought. He wanted to be a god himself and he became one. His power and, after him, that of his successors, had no earthly limit, no restraint human or divine. It was the same omnipotence here that elsewhere Jupiter wielded.

Jupiter had flamens who told him the time of day. He had others that read to him. For his amusement there were mimes. For his delectation, matrons established themselves in the Capitol and affected to be his loves. But then he was superb. Made of ivory, painted vermillion, seated colossally on a colossal throne, a sceptre in one hand, a thunderbolt in the other, a radiating gold crown on his august head, and, about his limbs, a shawl of Tyrian purple, he looked every inch the god.

The Cæsars, if less imposing, were more potent. Their hands, in which there was nothing symbolic, held life and death, absolute dominion over everything, over every one. Jupiter was but a statue. They alone were real, alone divine. To them incense ascended. At their feet libations poured. The nectar fumes confused. Rome, mad as they, built them temples, raised them shrines, creating for them a worship that they accepted, as only their due perhaps, but in which their reason fled. In accounts of the epoch there is much mention of citizens, senators, patricians. Nominally there were such people. Actually there were but slaves. The slaves had a succession of masters. Among them was a lunatic, Caligula, and an imbecile, Claud. There were others. There was Terror, there was Hatred, there was Crime. These last, though several, were yet but one. Collectively, they were Nero.

If philosophy ever were needed it was in his monstrous day. To anyone, at any moment, there might be brought the laconic message: Die. In republican Rome, philosophy separated man from sin. At that period it was perhaps a luxury. In the imperial epoch it was a necessity. It separated man from life. The philosophy of the republic Cicero expounded. That of the empire Seneca produced.

The neo-stoicism of the latter sustained the weak, consoled the just. It was a support and a guide. It preached poverty. It condemned wealth. It deprecated honours and pleasure. It inculcated chastity, humility, and resignation. It detached man from earth. It inspired, or attempted to inspire, a desire for the ideal which it represented as the goal of the sage, who, true child of God,⁴⁸ prepared for any torture, even for the cross,⁴⁹ yet, essentially meek,⁵⁰ sorrowed for mankind,⁵¹ happy if he might die for it.⁵²

In iambics that caressed the ear like flutes, poets had told of Jupiter clothed in purple and glory. They had told of his celestial amours, of his human and of his inhuman vices. Seneca believed in Jupiter. But not in the Jove of the poets. That god dwelled in ivory and anapests. Seneca's deity, nowhere visible, was everywhere present.⁵³ Creator of heaven and earth,⁵⁴ without whom there is nothing,⁵⁵ from whom nothing is hidden,⁵⁶ and to whom all belongs,⁵⁷ our Father,⁵⁸ whose will shall be done.⁵⁹

"Life," said Seneca, "is a tribulation, death a release. In order not to fear death," he added, "think of it always. The day on which it comes judges all others."⁶⁰ Meanwhile comfort those that sorrow.⁶¹ Share your bread with them that hunger.⁶² Wherever there is a human being there is place for a good deed.⁶³ Sin is an ulcer. Deliverance from it is the beginning of health – salvation, salutem."⁶⁴

Words such as these suggest others. They are anterior to those which they recall. The latter are more beautiful, they are more ample, there is in them a poetry and a profundity that has rarely been excelled. Yet, it may be, that a germ of them is in Seneca, or, more exactly, in theories which, beginning in India, prophets, seers, and stoics variously interpreted and recalled.

However since they have charmed the world, their effect on Nero was curious. Seneca was his preceptor. But so too was Art. The lessons of these teachers, fusing in the demented mind of the monster, produced transcendental depravity, the apogee of the abnormal and the epileptically obscene. What is more important, they produced Christianity.

Christianity already existed in Rome, but obscurely, subterraneanly, among a class of poor people generally detested, particularly by the Jews. Christianity was not as yet a religion, it was but the belief of a sect that announced that the world was to be consumed. Presently Rome was. The conflagration, which was due to Nero, swept everything sacred away.

Even for a prince that, perhaps, was excessive. Nero may have felt that he had gone too far. An emperor was omnipotent, he was not inviolable. Tiberius was suffocated, Caligula was stabbed, Claud was poisoned. Nero, it may be, in feeling that he had gone too far, felt also that he needed a scapegoat. Christian pyromania suggested itself. But probably it suggested itself first to the Jews, who, Renan has intimated, denounced the Christians accordingly. Such may have been the case. In any event, then it was that Christianity received its baptism of blood.

All antiquity was cruel, but, barring perhaps the immense Asiatic butcheries, Nero contrived then to surpass anything that had been done. Bloated and hideous, his hair done up in a chignon, a concave emerald for monocle, in the crowded arena he assisted at the rape of Christian girls. Their lovers, their brothers and fathers were either eaten alive by beasts or, that night, dressed in tunics that had been soaked in oil, were fastened to posts and set on fire, in order that, as human torches, they might illuminate palace gardens, through which, costumed as a jockey, Nero raced.

The spectacle in the amphitheatre, which fifty thousand people beheld; the succeeding festival at which all Rome assembled, were two acts in the birthday of a faith.

Then, to the cradle, presently, Wise Men came with gifts – the gold, the frankincense, the myrrh, of creeds anterior though less divine.

VIII
THE NEC PLUS ULTRA

IT was after fastidious rites, the heart entirely devout and on his knees, that Angelico di Fiesole drew a picture of the Christ. The attitude is emulative. It is with brushes dipped in holy water that Jesus should be displayed, though more reverent still is the absence of any delineation.

Reverence of that high character history formerly observed. There is no mention of the Saviour in the chronicles of those who were blessed in being his contemporaries. One indiscreet remark of Josephus has been recognized as the interpolation of a later hand, well-intentioned perhaps, but misguided. Jesus glows in the Gospels. Ye t they that awaited the day when, in a great aurora borealis, the Son of man should appear, had passed from earth before one of the evangels was written.

It was a hundred years later before the texts that comprise the New Testament were complete. It was nearly two hundred before they were definitive. In the interim many gospels appeared. Attributed indifferently to each of the Twelve, one was ascribed to Judas. There was a Gospel to the Hebrews, a Gospel to the Egyptians. There were evangels of Childhood, of Perfection and of Mary.

These primitive memoirs were based on oral accounts of occurrences long anterior. Into them entered extraneous beauties, felicities of phrase and detail, which, with naïf effrontery, were put into the mouth of one apostle or another, even into that of Jesus. The ascription was regarded as highly commendable. It was but a way of glorifying the Lord. Besides, the scenarii of these pious evocations the prophets had traced in advance.

"Rejoice, daughter of Zion; shout, daughter of Jerusalem, behold thy King cometh unto thee; he is just and having salvation, lowly and riding upon an ass."

That king of the poor whom Zachariah had foreseen, the stumbling block of Israel that Isaiah had foretold, the Son, mentioned by Hosea, whom Jahveh had called out of Egypt, was the Saviour, ascending in glory as Elijah had done. A passage incorrectly rendered by the Septuagint indicated a virginal birth. That also was suggestive.

The little biographies in which these developments appeared were intended for circulation only among an author's narrow circle of immediate friends, at most to be read aloud in devout reunions. If, ultimately, of the entire collection, four only were retained, it is probably because these best expressed existing convictions. Though, irrespective of their beauties, Irenæus said that there had to be four and could be but four, for the reason that there are four seasons, four winds, four corners of the earth, and the four revelations of Adam, Noah, Moses, and Jesus.

It is not on that perhaps arbitrary deduction that their validity resides, but rather because the parables and miracles which they recite became the spiritual nourishment of a world. To their title of eternal verities they have other and stronger claims. They have consoled and they have ennobled. Elder creeds may have done likewise, but these lacked that of which Christianity was the unique possessor, the marvel of a crucified god.

Saviours there had been. Mithra was a redeemer. Zoroaster was born of a virgin. Persephone descended into hell. Osiris rose from the dead. Gotama was tempted by the devil. Moses was transfigured. Elijah ascended into heaven. But in no belief is there a parallel for the crucifixion, although in Hindu legend, Krishna, a divinity whose mythical infancy a mythical prototype of Herod troubled, died, nailed by arrows to a tree.

In Oriental lore Krishna is held to have been the eighth avatar of Vishnu, of whom Gotama was the ninth. Krishna was therefore anterior to the Buddha, at least in myth. But it would be a grave impropriety to infer that with the legend concerning him the narrative of the crucifixion has any other connection than the possible one of having suggested it. The Bhagavad-Purana, in which the legend occurs, is relatively modern, though the legend itself may, like the Tripitaka, have existed orally, for centuries, before it was finally committed to writing.

There can, however, be no impropriety in recalling analogies that exist between the Saviour and one whom the Orient holds also divine. These analogies, set forth in the first chapter of the present volume, are, it may be, wholly fortuitous, though Pliny stated that, centuries before his day, disciples of Gotama were established on the Dead Sea and, from a passage in Josephus, it seems probable that the Essenes were Buddhists, in the same degree perhaps that the Pharisees were Parsis. But the point is also obscure. It is immaterial as well. The Gospels were not written in Jerusalem but mainly in Rome, where crucifixions were common, as they were, for that matter, throughout the East, but where, too, all religions were acclimated and the supernatural was at home.

Rome had witnessed the tours de force of Apollonios of Tyana. Those of Simon the Magician had also been beheld. Rome had seen, or, it may be, thought she believed she had seen, Vespasian cure the halt and the blind with a touch. The atmosphere then was charged with the marvellous. The temples were filled with prodigies, with strange gods, beckoning chimeras, credulous crowds.

There was something superior. Rome was the depository of the legends and lore of the world. A haunt of the Muses, the sensual city was a hermitage of philosophy as well. These things collectively represented a great literary feast, of which not all the courses have descended to us, though, as is not impossible, a lost dish or two, transmuted, by the alchemy of faith, from dross into gold, the Gospels may perhaps contain.

In that case there is cause for great thankfulness. Moreover, assuming the transmutation, no impiety can be implied. It was as usual and as indicated as were papyrus and the stylus. It is common to-day for a poet, before spreading his own wings, to contemplate those of another. Inspiration is infectious.

A page of verse, whether Hindu, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, or Latin, was as useful then. Dante fed on the troubadours. They are lost and forgot. He divinely stands greater than the tallest of them all. In a measure the same may be true of those from whom the Gospels came. Yet with a very notable difference. The Divina Commedia was written for all time. So too were the Gospels. But not intentionally. They were written to prepare man for the immediate termination of the world. With the most perfect propriety, therefore, anything serviceable could have been utilized and probably was. The devout had but to lift their eyes. In the words of Isaiah, there, before them, were the treasures of nations; there were the camels and dromedaries bearing from every side incense and gold; there were the sons of strangers to build up their walls.

The sons were many, the treasures as great. Even otherwise there was the Law, there too were the Prophets. Moses fasted for forty days. Elisha performed a miracle of the loaves, if he did not that of the fishes. Job saw the Lord walking upon the sea. Jeremiah said: "Seek and ye shall find." Isaiah bid those that sorrowed come and be consoled. In the poem of that poet the servant of the Lord had vinegar when he thirsted, he was spat upon and for his garments lots were cast.

In an effort to fill in a picture of which the central figure had passed from the real to the ideal, these things may have been suggestive. So also, perhaps, was the Talmud. The redaction of that chaos began in the second century. But the Vedas, the Homeric poems, the Tripitaka as well, existed in memory long before they were committed to writing. The same is true of the Talmud. Orally it existed prior to the Christ. Considered as literature, if it may be so considered, it is the reverse of endearing. But of the many maxims that it contains there are some of singular charm. Among others is the Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.⁶⁵ The origin of that, as already indicated, is traceable to the Tripitaka, which, parenthetically, were so well known in Babylon that Gotama was there regarded as a Chaldean seer. That abridgement of the Law which is called the Golden Rule is also in the Talmud,⁶⁶ as also, before the Talmud was, it was in the Tripitaka. The injunction to love one's enemies is equally in both. So is the very excellent suggestion that one should consider one's own faults before admonishing a brother concerning his defects. But the perhaps subtle intimation that the desire to commit adultery is as reprehensible as the act, and the rather extravagant statement that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, these, originally, were perhaps uniquely Talmudic. Currently cited with multiple others they were all so many common sayings, which, strung together in the Gospels, became a rosary of most perfect pearls.

In a passage of Irenæus it is stated that the Gospel according to St. Matthew was arranged by the Church for the benefit of the Jews who awaited a Messiah descended from David. A Syro-Chaldaic evangel, known as the Gospel to the Hebrews, had then appeared. So also had the Gospel according to St. Mark. But these offered no evidence that Jesus was the one they sought. Another was then prepared. Written in Greek and bearing the authoritative name of Matthew, it traced from David, Joseph's descent.

The narrative continued: "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise. When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child by the Holy Ghost. Then Joseph her husband being a just man and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily. But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost."

The genealogy completed, though perhaps inadequately, since Jesus, not being a son of Joseph, could not have descended from David, the Church continued: "Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet saying, Behold a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a son and call his name Emmanuel."

The prophecy mentioned occurs in Isaiah vii, 14. In the King James version it is as follows: "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel." But the Aramaic reading is: "Behold an 'almâ shall conceive." 'Almâ means young woman. The Septuagint, in translating it, employed the term [Greek: parthenos], or maiden. In Matthew the term was retained.

Matthew, at the time, had long been dead. Even had he been living it is improbable that he could write in Greek. Unfortunately there were others who could not only write Greek but read Hebrew. In particular, there was a rabbi Aquila who retranslated Isaiah with no other purpose than the malign object of definitely re-establishing the exact expression which the old poet had used.⁶⁷

It was presumably in these circumstances that the Evangel of Mary was advanced. Among other elucidations, the work contained professional testimony of the immaculacy that was claimed. Additionally, in reparation of the earlier oversight, the Virgin was genealogically descended from the royal line.

That, however, is apocryphal, and if, regarding the other genealogy, exegesis has since obscured the luminousness of the method adapted by the Church, the latter's intention was none the less irreproachable, and that alone imports. Before it, before the miracle of the nativity and the divine episodes of the transfiguration, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, reverently the Occident has knelt. They are indeed divine. If they did not occur in Judea, they have occurred ever since. Continuously, in the hearts of the devout, they are repeated.

Unhappily there were heretics then as now. To the Gnostics, Jesus was an æon that had never been. To the Docetists, he was a phantasm. There are always brutes that can believe but in the reality of things. There are others to whom the symbolic is dumb. In the Gospels there is much that is figurative, there is more that is ineffable, there are suggestions sheerly ideal.