OJ7 J2S AUGURAL LECTURE OF .IE WILDE LECTURER IN NATURAL & COMPARATIVE RELIGION R. FARNELL, D.LiTT. EXETER COLLEGE < >:;: ORJ H, BLACKWELL, 50 & 51, BROAD STRK. : . ' i '. M 1 SIMPKIN, MAHSHAIJ. , ' ') UMITl D Price One Shilling net ; MIX INAUGURAL LECTURE OF THE WILDE LECTURER IN NATURAL & COMPARATIVE RELIGION BY L. R. FARNELL, D.Lirr. EXETER COLLEGE OXFORD B. H. BLACKWELL, 50 & 51, BROAD STREET LONDON SIMPKIN, MARSHALL & CO., LIMITED MCMIX INAUGURAL LECTURE OF THE WILDE LECTURER IN NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION THE newly-elected holder of a University professorship or lectureship, before embarking on the course of special discussion that he has selected, may be allowed or ex- pected to present some outlined account of the whole subject that he represents, and to state beforehand, if possible, the line that he proposes to pursue in regard to it. This is all the more incumbent on me, as I have the honour to be the first Wilde Lecturer in Natural and Comparative Religion the first, that is, who has been officially charged by the University to give public teach- ing in the most modern and one of the most difficult fields of study, one that has already borne copious fruit, and will bear more in the future. I appreciate highly the honour of such a charge, and I take this opportunity of expressing my deep sense of the indebtedness of our University and of all students of this subject to Dr. Wilde for his munificent endowment of this branch of research, which as yet has only found encouragement in a few Universities of Europe, America, and Japan. I feel also the responsibility of my charge. Years of study have shown me the magnitude of the subject, the pitfalls that here more, perhaps, than in other fields beset the unwary, and the multiplicity of aspects from 3 2( 15 4 NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION which it may be studied. Having no predecessor, I cannot follow, but may be called upon rather to set, a precedent. One guidance, at least, I have namely, the expressed wishes of the founder of this post, which I mean loyally to respect. He has formulated them in such a way that I feel precluded from what may be called the primitive anthropology of religion. I shall not, therefore, deal directly with the embryology of the subject, with merely savage religious psychology, ritual, or institutions. It is not that I do not myself feel the fascination of these sub- jects of inquiry, and their inevitableness for one who wishes wholly to understand the whole of any one of the higher world-religions. But we have already in the University two accom- plished exponents of these themes Professor Tylor and Mr. Marett and Dr. Wilde has made his wishes clear that his lecturer should mainly devote himself to the analysis, elucidation, and comparison of the higher forms and ideas in the more advanced religions. And I can cheerfully accept this limitation, as for years I have been occupied with the minute study of the religion of Greece, in which one finds much, indeed, that is primitive, even savage, but much also of religious thought and religious ethic, unsuspected by former generations of scholars, that has become a rich inheritance of our higher culture. He who wishes to succeed in this new field of arduous inquiry that I am discussing to-night should have studied at least one of the higher religions of the old civilization au fond, and he must have studied it by the comparative method. He may then make this religion the point of departure for wide excursions into outlying tracts of the NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION 5 more or less adjacent religious systems, and he will be the less likely to lose himself in the maze and tangle of facts if he can focus the varying light or doubtful glimmer they afford upon the complex set of phenomena with which he is already familiar. And the Greek religion serves better than any other than I know for such a point of departure, the influences being so numerous that radiated upon it. It had its own special inheritance which it fruitfully developed from the North, from its proto-Aryan past, and which we shall be able to define with greater clearness when comparative religion has done its work upon the religious records of the early Aryan peoples. Also, the Hellene had many intimate points of contact with earlier and alien peoples of the ancient Mediterranean culture whom he conquered and partly absorbed, or with whom he entered into intel- lectual or commercial relations. Therefore, the religions ^of the Minoan Age, of the Anatolian peoples, of Egypt, and finally of Babylon and Persia, come inevitably to attract the student of the Hellenic. As far, then, as I can see at present, I may have to limit my attention in the lecture-courses of these three years during which I fill this post to the phenomena of the Mediterranean area, and these are more than one man can thoroughly elucidate in a lifetime, as the mani- fold activity in various departments of this field attested by the Transactions of our recent Congress of the History of Religions will prove to those who read them. And I shall endeavour in the future to follow out one main problem through a short series of lectures, as this is the best method for a reasoned statement of consecutive thought . But I pro- pose in this lecture to sketch merely in outlines the salient 6 NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION features of some of the religions of the Mediterranean area, and hope thereby to indicate the main problems which the student of comparative religion must try to solve, or the leading questions he must ask, and thus, perhaps, to be able to suggest to others as well as to myself special lines of future research and discussion. What, then, are the questions which naturally arise when we approach the study of any religion that has advanced beyond the primitive stage ? We wish to discover with definiteness what is the idea of divinity that it has evolved, in what forms and with what con- cepts this idea is expressed whether, for instance, the godhead is conceived as a vague ' numen,' or as a definite personality with complex character and functions, and whether it is imagined or presented to sense in anthropo- morphic forms. The question whether the religion is monotheistic or polytheistic is usually answered at a glance, unless the record is unusually defective ; but in the case of poly- theism careful inquiry is often needed to answer the other morphological questions that press themselves upon us, whether the polytheism is an organized system of co- ordinated and subordinated powers or a mere medley of uncorrelated deities. If the former, whether the unifying tendency has developed in the direction of monotheism or pantheism. Again, the study of the attributes and functions ascribed and the titles attached to the deity will enable us to answer the questions concerning his relation to the world of Nature, to the social sphere of law, politics, and morality ; and irfthis quest we may hope to gain fruitful NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION 7 suggestions concerning the interaction of religion, social institution, and ethics. We shall also wish to know whether the religion is dogmatic or not that is to say, whether it lays stress on precise theological definitions ; whether it claims to possess sacred books or a revelation ; whether it contains the idea of faith as a cardinal virtue. Further, it is always interesting to consider whether it has engendered a cosmogony, a theory of the cosmos, its origin, maintenance, and possible dissolution ; and whether it is instinctively favourable or antagonistic to the growth of the scientific spirit, to the free activity of the intellect ; and, finally, whether it gives prominence to the belief in the immortality of the soul and to the doctrine of posthumous rewards and punishments. There are also certain special questions concerning the nature and powers of the divinity that are found to be of importance. The distinction of sex in the anthropo- morphic religions, the paramountcy of the god or the goddess, is observed to produce a singular effect in religious psychology, and may be associated with fundamental differences in social institutions, with the distinction, for instance, between a patrilinear and a matrilinear society. As regards the powers attributed to the divinity, we may endeavour to discern certain laws of progress or evolution in progressive societies an evolution, perhaps, from a more material to a more spiritual conception, or, again, from a belief in divinities finite and mortal to a dogma that infinity, omniscience, and immortality are their necessary attributes. On this line of inquiry we are often confronted with the phenomenon of the death of the god or goddess, and no single fact in the history of religions is of more interest and of more weight. Also, we occasionally find 8 NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION an antagonism between malevolent and benevolent powers, whence may arise a philosophic conception of dualism in Nature and the moral world. There are, further, the questions concerning ritual, often very minute, but of none the less significance. What are the forms of worship, sacrifice, prayer, adora- tion ? As regards sacrifice, is it deprecatory merely, a bribe to avert wrath, or is it a gift to secure favour, or is it a token of friendly trust and affection, or a mystic act of communion which effects between the deity and the worshipper a temporary union of body and soul ? In the study of ritual we may consider the position of the priest- hood, its power over the religion, and through the religion over the State, and the sources of that power. This enumeration of the problems is long, but I fear by no means exhaustive. I have not yet mentioned the question that may legitimately arise, and is the most perplexing of all that which is asked concerning the vital power and influence of a certain religion, its strength of appeal, its real control of the people's thoughts and acts. The question, as we know, is difficult enough when we apply it to modern societies ; it may be quite hopeless when applied to an ancient State. It is only worth raising when the record is unusually ample and varied, and of long continuity ; when we can believe that it enshrines the thoughts of the people, not merely of the priest or of the philosopher. We are more likely to believe this when the record is rich not only in literature, but in monuments. It may also be demanded that the history of religions should include a history of their decay, and in his brilliant NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION 9 address at the recent Congress, Professor Petrie has for- mulated this demand as one that Egyptology might fulfil. Certainly it belongs to the scientific treatment of our subject to note the circumstances and operative causes that induced a certain people to abandon their ancestral beliefs and cults ; but whether from the careful study of each special case certain general laws will emerge by process of induction may be doubted. It will depend partly on the completeness of our records and our skill in their interpretation. I will conclude this sketch of an ideal programme, which I, at least, can never hope to make actual, with one last query It is the main object of this comparative study to answer the inquiry as to the reciprocal influences of adjacent religions, to distinguish between the alien and the native elements in any particular system to estimate, for instance, what Greece owed to Babylon, to Egypt, to .India ? Certainly the problem is proper to our province, is attractive, and even hopeful, and I may even dare at a later stage to approach it myself. But I should hesitate to allow that it is the main one, and that the value of our study is to be measured by our success in solving it ; for, whatever answer we finally give to such questions, or if we abandon in despair the attempt to answer them precisely, it is none the less fruitful to compare the Baby- lonian, Indo-Iranian, Egyptian, and Hellenic systems of belief for instance, to consider the Orphic eschatology in relation to the Buddhistic, even if we reject the theory that Buddhistic influences could have penetrated into early Orphism. I will now sketch what I have perceived to be the higher elements or more developed features in Hellenic 2 io NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION religion, and will consider in regard to each of these how it contrasts with or resembles the cults of the other leading peoples of this area. The Hellenic high divinity is, in the first place, no mere shadowy ' numen,' no vague spirit-power or semi-personal divine force, such as the old Roman belief often seems to present us with, nor is he usually conceived as a divine element perceived as immanent in certain things ; but he appears as a concrete personal individual of definite physical traits and com- plex moral nature. Vaguer and cruder ideas no doubt survived right through the historic period, and the primi- tive Hellene may once have lived in the religious phase of thought in which the personal god has not yet emerged or not yet been detached from the phenomenon or the world of living matter. But I believe that the Greek of the historic, and even of the Homeric, period had left this phase far more remotely behind him than certain modern theorists have lightly supposed, and I am inclined to affirm that the proto-Hellenic tribes had already before the conquest of Greece developed the cult of certain per- sonal deities, and that some, at least, of these were the common heritage of several tribes. It is quite possible that before they crossed the northern frontier of Greece they found such divinities among their Aryan kinsfolk of Thrace, and it is certain that this was the type of religion that they would mainly find among the peoples of the Minoan-Mycenaean culture. We discern it also, where the record allows us to discern anything, among the nearer and remoter stocks of the Asiatic side of the Mediterranean area. In the Zend- Avesta, the sacred books of the Persian religion, Ahura- Mazda is presented as a noble ethical figure, a concrete personal god, like Jahwe of Israel, whatever his original NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION n physical significance may have been. Marduk of Baby- lon, whom Hammurabi, the consolidator of the Babylonian power, raised to the rank of the high god, may once have been a sun-god, but he transcended his elemental nature, and appears in the records of the third millennium as a political deity, the war-god, and leader of the people, as real a personality as Hammurabi himself. The same is true of Asshur, once the local deity of the aboriginal land of the Assyrians, but later raised by the imperial expansion of this people almost to the position of a universal god, the guardian of the land, the teacher and the father of the kings ; nor can we discern that he was ever an elemental god. Speaking generally, in spite of many important differ- ences, we may regard the religious structure to which the cults of Anatolia and Egypt belonged as morphologically the same as that which I am defining as Hellenic. Also, among all these peoples, by the side of the few higher avr](f)6po<; in Asia Minor cities, and in the later days of Sparta, as the recent excavations have shown, the ghost of Lykourgos was elected as the chief inspector of the education of the young. To the superficial observer, then, the Greek civic society might appear a theocracy. But such a view would imply ignorance of the average character of the ancient Greek world. There can be no theocracy where there is no theocrat. In Asia Minor the priest might be a great political power, but in Greece this was never so. Here the political, secular, utilitarian interest dominates the religion. The high divinities become politicians, and im- mersed in secular affairs, and even take sides in the party strife, as some of the religious titles attest. Thus Greek religion escaped morbidity and insanity, becoming genial and human, and compensating by its adaptability to the common needs of life for what it lost in respect to the sense of mystery and aloofness. Therefore, also, in Greek invocations and hymns we do not often hear the echo of that sublimity that resounds in the Iranian, Assyrian, and still more in the Hebrew liturgies. NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION 25 Another interesting point of comparison is the relation of religion to the arts and sciences. Their association may be said to have been more intimate in Hellenism than it has been found to be in any other creed. We can estimate what music and the drama owed to Apollo and Dionysos, and how the life of the philosopher, artist, and poet was considered consecrated to certain divinities. We hear of the Delphic oracle encouraging philosophic pursuits. The very name of our present building, the Museum, is a landmark in the religious history of educa- tion, and we know that the temple of Asklepios in Kos was the cradle of the school of modern medicine. The records of the other religions of this area show glimpses of the same association, and more extended research may throw further light on it. The Assyrian gods Nebo and Ea were divinities of wisdom and the arts, and to the former, who was the inventor of writing, the library of Aschurbanapal was consecrated. Chaldean astronomy was evolved from their astrology, which was itself a religious system. But demonology was stronger in Assyria, Persia, and Egypt than in Hellas, and demon- ology is the foe of science. In the Zend-Avesta the priestly medicine-man, who heals by spell and exorcism, is ranked higher than the scientific practitioner. A chapter might be written on the negative advantages of Greek religion, and none was of greater moment than this that it had no sacred books or authoritative religious cosmogony to oppose to the dawn and the development of scientific inquiry. Asclepios had been a practitioner in the method of thaumaturgic cures, but he accepted Hippokrates genially when the time came. As regards the relation between Greek philosophy and Greek religion, something may remain to be discovered 4 26 NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION by any scholar who is equally familiar with both. It would be absurd to attempt to summarize the facts in a few phrases here. I wish merely to indicate the absence in pure Hellenic speculation of any elaborated system of theosophy, such as the late Egpytian ' gnosis,' till we come to Neo-Platonism, when the Greek intellect is no longer pure. We discover also a vacuum in the religious mind and nomenclature of the earlier Greek: he had neither the concept nor any name to express the concept of what we call ' faith/ the intellectual acceptance and confes- sional affirmation of certain dogmas concerning the divinity ; and in this respect he differed essentially not only from the Christian, but also from the Iranian and Buddhistic votary. A great part of the study of ancient religion is a study of ritual, and it is interesting to survey the Mediterranean area, so as to discern similarities or divergences in the forms of religious service. Everywhere we observe the blood-sacrifice of animals, and very frequently the harm- less offering of fruits and cereals, and now one, now the other, in Greece as elsewhere, was regarded as the more pious. The former is of the higher interest, for certain ideas which have been constructive of higher religions our own, for example have grown out of it. At first sight the animal oblation seems everywhere much the same in character and significance. The sacrificial ritual of Leviticus does not differ in any essential trait from that which commended itself to the Greeks and the other peoples of these lands. Certain animals are everywhere offered, at times as a free and cheerful gift, at other times as an atonement to expiate sin and to deprecate wrath. Certain other animals are tabooed, for reasons that may repay searching out. NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION 27 In most regions we have evidence of the practice of human sacrifice, either as an established system or as an occasional expedient. The motives that prompted it present an important and intricate question to the modern inquirer. The two nations that grew to abhor it and to protest against it were the Hebrew and the Greek, though the latter did not wholly escape the taint of it ; for he had inherited the practice from his ancestral past, and he found it indigenous in the lands he conquered. Repellent as the rite may be, it much concerns the study of the religions of the cultured races. Now, an interesting theory concerning sacrifice has been expounded and brought into prominent discussion by Professor Robertson Smith in his ' Religion of the Semites,' and in a paper in the ' Encyclopaedia Britan- nica ' namely, that a certain type of ancient sacrifice was a mystic sacramental communion, the worshipper partaking of some sacred food or drink in which the spirit of the deity was temporarily lodged. This mystic act, of which there is no clear trace in the Old Testament, is reported from Egypt,* somewhat less clearly from Babylonia, f and it appears to have been part of the Attis ritual of Phrygia. We find doubtful traces of it in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries ; also a glimpse of it here and there in the public religion of Hellas. But it is best attested as a potent force in the Dionysiac worship, especially in a certain savage ritual that we may call Thracian, but also in the refined and Hellenized service as well. I cannot dwell here on the various aspects of this problem. The Hellenic statistics and their significance * Transactions of Congress of History of Religions, 1908, vol. i., P- 193- t Ibid., p. 254. 42 , 28 NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION I have partly collected and estimated in a paper pub- lished some years ago. The application of the sacra- mental idea to the explanation of the Eleusinian mysteries, ingeniously attempted by Dr. Jevons, I have discussed in the third volume of my " Cults " ; and the Dionysiac com- munion-service is considered at length in my forthcoming volume. The attractiveness of the mystic appeal of the Sacra- ment appears to have increased in the later days of paganism, especially in its period of struggle with Chris- tianity. That strangest rite of the expiring polytheism, the Tavpoj36\tov, or the baptism in bull's blood, in the worship of Kybele, has been successfully traced back by M. Cumont to the worship of the Babylonian Anaitis. The sacramental concept was the stronghold of Mithraism, but can hardly be regarded as part of its heritage from Persia, for it does not seem to have been familiar to the Iranian religion nor to the Vedic Indian. In fact, the religious history of no other Aryan race discloses it with clearness, save that of the Thraco-Phrygian and Hellenic. Was it, then, a special product of ancient ' Mediter- ranean ' religious thought ? It would be important to know, and Crete may one day be able to tell us whether King Minos took the Sacrament. Meantime, I would urge upon those who are studying this phenomenon in the various religions the necessity of precise definition, so as to distinguish the different grades of the sacra- mental concept, for loose statements are somewhat rife about it. Apart from the ritual of the altar, there is another mode of attaining mystic union with the divinity namely, by means of a sacred marriage or simulated corporeal union. NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION 29 This is suggested by the initiation formulae of the mysteries of Attis-Kybele. The cult of Kybele had descended from the Minoan period of Crete, and the strange legend of Pasiphae and the bull-god lends itself naturally to, this interpretation. The Hellenic religion also presents us with a few examples of the holy marriage of the human bride with the god, the most notable being the annual ceremony of the union of the ' Queen,' the wife of the King Archon, at Athens, with Dionysos. And in the mysteries of later paganism, as well as in certain forms and symbolism of early Christianity, Professor Dieterich has traced the surviving influence of this rite. Among all the phenomena of ritual, none are more interesting or in their effects more momentous than the rites that are associated with the dogma of the death of the divinity. That the high gods are naturally mortal and liable to death is an idea that is certainly rare, though it may be found in Egyptian and old Teutonic mythology ; but the dogma of the annual or periodic death and resurrection of the divinity has been, and is, enacted in much peasant ritual, and worked for the pur- poses of agrarian magic in Europe and elsewhere. More rarely we find the belief attached to the mystic forms and faith of some advanced religion, and it is specially in the Mediterranean area where it appears in a high stage of development. It is a salient feature of the Egyptian worship of Isis ; of the Sumerian-Babylonian ritual, in which the dead Thammuz was bewailed, and which penetrated Syria and other parts of Asia Minor ; of the worship of Attis and Adonis in Phrygia and the Lebanon ; and of certain shrines of the Oriental Aphro- dite. It is associated often with orgiastic sorrow and ecstatic joy, and with the belief in human immortality, 30 NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION of which the resurrection of the deity is the symbol and the efficacious means. This idea and this ritual appears to have been alien to the native Hellenic religion. The Hellenic gods and goddesses do not die and rise again. Only in one Aryan nation of antiquity, so far as I am aware, was the idea clear and operative the Thraco- Phrygian, in the religion of Dionysos-Sabazios. This alien cult, when transplanted into Greece, retained still some savagery in the rite that enacted the death of the god ; but in the Orphic sects the ritual idea was developed into a doctrine of posthumous salvation, from which the later pre-Christian world drew spiritual comfort and some fertile moral conceptions. This Thracian-Dionysiac in- fluence in Hellas, though chastened and sobered by the sanity of the national temperament, initiated the Hellene into a certain spiritual mood that was not naturally evoked by the native religion ; for it brought into his polytheism a higher measure of enthusiasm, a more ecstatic spirit of self-abandonment, than it possessed by its own traditional bent. Many civilized religions appear to have passed beyond the phase of orgiastic fervour. It emerges in the old Egyptian ritual, and most powerfully in the religion of Phrygia and of certain districts of Syria ; but it seems to have been alien to the higher Semitic and the Iranian religions, as it was to the native Hellenic. I have only been able to-day, without argument or detailed exposition, to present a short summary of the more striking phenomena in the religious systems of our spiritual ancestors. Many of the problems I have stated still invite further research, which may considerably modify our theories. I claim that the subject possesses a masterful interest both in its own right and for the NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION 31 light it sheds on ancient philosophy, ancient art, and ancient institutions. And it ought in the . future to attract more and more the devotion of some of our post- graduate students. Much remains to be done even for the Hellenic and Roman religions, still more for those of Egypt and Assyria. Here, in our University of Oxford, under whose auspices the Sacred Books were translated, and where the equipment for the study is at least equal to that of any other centre of learning, this appeal ought not to be made in vain. BI1.L1NU AND 8ON8, LTD., PRINTERS, OOILDPORD . A 000104282 9