The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions. Allen Grant

of the Father before all worlds, was yet, at the moment when we first catch a glimpse of him in the writings of his followers, a Man recently deceased, respected, reverenced, and perhaps worshipped by a little group of fellow-peasants who had once known him as Jesus, the son of the carpenter. On that unassailable Rock of solid historical fact we may well be content to found our argument in this volume. Here at least nobody can accuse us of “crude and gross Euhemerism.” Or rather the crude and gross Euhemerism is here known to represent the solid truth. Jesus and his saints—Dominic, Francis, Catherine of Siena—are no mere verbal myths, no allegorical concepts, no personifications of the Sun, the Dawn, the Storm-cloud. Leaving aside for the present from our purview of the Faith that one element of the older supreme God—the Hebrew Jahweh—whom Christianity borrowed from the earlier Jewish religion, we can say at least with perfect certainty that every single member of the Christian pantheon—Jesus, the Madonna, St. John Baptist, St. Peter, the Apostles, the Evangelists—were, just as much as San Carlo Borromeo or St. Thomas of Canterbury or St. Theresa, Dead Men or Women, worshipped after their death with divine or quasi-divine honours. In this the best-known of all human religions, the one that has grown up under the full eye of history, the one whose gods and saints are most distinctly traceable, every object of worship, save only the single early and as yet unresolved deity of the Hebrew cult, whose origin is lost for us in the mist of ages, turns out on enquiry to be indeed a purely Euhemeristic god or saint—in ultimate analysis, a Real Man or Woman.

      That point alone I hold to be of cardinal importance, and of immense or almost inestimable illustrative value, in seeking for the origin of the idea of a god in earlier epochs.

      In the second place, Christianity is thoroughly typical in all that concerns its subsequent course of evolution; the gradual elevation of its central Venerated Man into a God of the highest might and power; the multiplication of secondary deities or saints by worship or adoration of other Dead Men and Women; the growth of a graduated and duly subordinated hierarchy of divine personages; the rise of a legend, with its miracles and other supernatural adjuncts; the formation of a definite theology, philosophy, and systematic dogmatism; the development of special artistic forms, and the growth or adoption of appropriate symbolism; the production of sacred books, rituals, and formularies; the rise of ceremonies, mysteries, initiations, and sacraments; the reverence paid to relics, sacred sites, tombs, and dead bodies; and the close connexion of the religion as a whole with the ideas of death, the soul, the ghost, the spirit, the resurrection of the body, the last judgment, hell, heaven, the life everlasting, and all the other vast group of concepts which surround the simple fact of death in the primitive human mind generally.

      Now, in the second place, let us look wherein Christianity to a certain small extent fails to be typical, or at least to solve our fundamental problems.

      It fails to be typical because it borrows largely a whole ready-made theology, and above all a single supreme God, from a pre-existent religion. In so far as it takes certain minor features from other cults, we can hardly say with truth that it does not represent the average run of religious systems; for almost every particular new creed so bases itself upon elements of still earlier faiths; and it is perhaps impossible for us at the present day to get back to anything like a really primitive or original form of cult. But Christianity is very far removed indeed from all primitive cults in that it accepts ready-made the monotheistic conception, the high-water-mark, so to speak, of religious philosophising. While in the frankness with which it exhibits to us what is practically one half of its supreme deity as a Galilean peasant of undoubted humanity, subsequently deified and etherealised, it allows us to get down at a single step to the very origin of godhead; yet in the strength with which it asserts for the other half of its supreme deity (the Father, with his shadowy satellite the Holy Ghost) an immemorial antiquity and a complete severance from human life, it is the least anthropomorphic and the most abstract of creeds. In order to track the idea of God to its very source, then, we must apply in the last resort to this unresolved element of Christianity—the Hebrew Jahweh—the same sort of treatment which we apply to the conception of Jesus or Buddha;—we must show it to be also the immensely transfigured and magnified ghost of a Human Being; in the simple and forcible language of Swinburne, “The shade cast by the soul of man.”

      Furthermore, Christianity fails to be typical in that it borrows also from pre-existing religions to a great extent the ideas of priesthood, sacrifice, the temple, the altar, which, owing to the curious disappearance or at least un-recognisability of the body of its founder (or, rather, its central object of worship), have a less natural place in our Christian system than in any other known form of religious practice. It is quite true that magnificent churches, a highly-evolved sacerdotalism, the sacrifice of the mass, the altar, and the relics, have all been imported in their fullest shape into developed Christianity, especially in its central or Roman form. But every one of these things is partly borrowed, almost as a survival or even as an alien feature, from earlier religions, and partly grew up about the secondary worship of saints and martyrs, their bones, their tombs, their catacombs, and their reliquaries. Christianity itself, particularly when viewed as the worship of Christ (to which it has been largely reduced in Teutonic Europe), does not so naturally lend itself to these secondary ceremonies; and in those debased schismatic forms of the Church which confine themselves most strictly to the worship of Jesus and of the supreme God, sacerdotalism and sacramentalism have been brought down to a minimum, so that the temple and the altar have lost the greater part of their sacrificial importance.

      I propose, then, in subsequent chapters, to trace the growth of the idea of a God from the most primitive origins to the most highly evolved forms; beginning with the ghost, and the early undeveloped deity: continuing through polytheism to the rise of monotheism; and then returning at last once more to the full Christian conception, which we shall understand far better in detail after we have explained the nature of the yet unresolved or but provisionally resolved Jehovistic element. I shall try to show, in short, the evolution of God, by starting with the evolution of gods in general, and coming down by gradual stages through various races to the evolution of the Hebrew, Christian, and Moslem God in particular. ‘And the goal towards which I shall move will be the one already foreshadowed in this introductory chapter—the proof that in its origin the concept of a god is nothing more than that of a Dead Man, regarded as a still surviving ghost or spirit, and endowed with increased or supernatural powers, and qualities.

CHAPTER II.—RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY.

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      At the very outset of the profound enquiry on which we are now about to embark, we are met by a difficulty of considerable magnitude. In the opinion of most modern mythologists mythology is the result of “a disease of language.” We are assured by many eminent men that the origin of religion is to be sought, not in savage ideas about ghosts and spirits, the Dead Man and his body or his surviving double, but in primitive misconceptions of the meaning of words which had reference to the appearance of the Sun and the Clouds, the Wind and the Rain, the Dawn and the Dusk, the various phenomena of meteorology in general. If this be so, then our attempt to derive the evolution of gods from the crude ideas of early men about their dead is clearly incorrect; the analogy of Christianity which we have already alleged is a mere will o’ the wisp; and the historical Jesus himself may prove in the last resort to be an alias of the sun-god or an embodiment of the vine-spirit.

      I do not believe these suggestions are correct. It seems to me that the worship of the sun, moon, and stars, instead of being an element in primitive religion, is really a late and derivative type of adoration; and that mythology is mistaken in the claims it makes for its own importance in the genesis of the idea of a God or gods. In order, however, to clear the ground for a fair start in this direction, we ought, I think, to begin by enquiring into the relative positions of mythology and religion. I shall therefore devote a preliminary chapter to the consideration of this important subject.

      Religion, says another group of modern thinkers, of whom Mr. Edward Clodd is perhaps the most able English exponent, “grew out of fear.” It is born of man’s terror of the great and mysterious natural agencies by which he