PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

(C)

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL

I[463]

Religion may be described as the Waking-Being of a living creature in the moments when it overcomes, masters, denies, and even destroys Being. Race-life and the pulse of its drive dwindle as the eyes gaze into an extended, tense, and light-filled world, and _Time yields to Space_. The plantlike desire for fulfilment goes out, and from primary depths there wells up the animal fear of the fulfilment, of the ceasing of direction, of death. Not hate and love, but fear and love are the basic feelings of religion. Hate and fear differ as Time and Space, blood and eye, pulse and tension, heroism and saintliness. And love in the race-sense differs from love in the religious sense in the same way.

All religion is turned to light. The extended itself becomes religious as a world of the eye comprehended from the ego as centre of light. Hearing and touch are adjusted to what is seen and the _Invisible_, whose workings are sensed, becomes the sum of the dæmonic. All that we designate by the words “deity,” “revelation,” “salvation,” “dispensation,” is in one way and another an element of illumined actuality. Death, for man, is something that he sees, and knows by seeing, and in relation to death birth is _the other_ secret. They are the two visible limits of the sensible cosmic that is incarnate in a live body in lighted space.

There are two sorts of deeper fear--one is fear (known even to the animals) _in presence of_ microcosmic freedom in space, before space itself and its powers, before death; the other is fear _for_ the cosmic current of being, for life, for directional time. The first awakens a dark feeling that freedom in the extended is just a new and deeper sort of dependence than that which rules the vegetable world, and it leads the individual being, sensible of its weakness, to seek the propinquity and alliance of others. Anxiety produces speech, and our sort of speech is religion--every religion. Out of the fear of Space arise the numina of the _world-as-nature_ and the _cults of gods_; out of the fear for time arise the numina of _life_, of sex and breed, of the State, centring on _ancestor-worship_. That is the difference between Taboo and Totem[464]--for the totemistic, too, always appears in religious form, out of holy awe of that which passeth all understanding and is for ever alien.

The higher religion requires tense alertness against the powers of blood and being that ever lurk in the depths ready to recapture their primeval rights over the _younger_ side of life. “_Watch_ and pray, that ye fall not into temptation.” Nevertheless, “liberation” is a fundamental word in every religion and an eternal wish of every waking-being. In this general, almost prereligious, sense, it means the desire for freedom from the anxieties and anguishes of waking-consciousness; for relaxation of the tensions of fear-born thought and search; for the obliteration and removal of the consciousness of the Ego’s loneliness in the universe, the rigid conditionedness of nature, the prospect of the immovable boundary of all Being in eld and death.

Sleep, too, liberates--“Death and his brother Sleep.” And holy wine, intoxication, breaks the rigour of the spirit’s tension, and dancing, the Dionysus art, and every other form of stupefaction and ecstasy. These are modes of slipping out of awareness by the aid of being, the cosmic, the “it,” _the escape out of space into time_. But higher than all these stands the genuinely religious overcoming of fear _by means of the understanding itself_. The tension between microcosm and macrocosm becomes something that we can love, something in which we can wholly immerse ourselves.[465] We call this _faith_, and it is the beginning of all man’s intellectual life.

Understanding is causal only, whether deductive or inductive, whether derived from sensation or not. It is wholly impossible to distinguish being-understood from being-caused--both express the same thing. When something is “actual” for us, we see it and think it in causal (_ursächlich_) form, just as we feel and know ourselves and our activities as things originating, causes (_Ursache_). The assignment of causes is, however, different from case to case, not only in the religious, but also generally in the inorganic logic of man. A fact is thought of at one moment as having such-and-such, at another moment as having something else, as its cause. Every kind of thinking has for every one of its domains of application a proper “system.” In everyday life a causal connexion in thought is never exactly repeated. Even in modern physics working hypotheses--that is, causal systems--which partially exclude one another are in use side by side; for instance, the ideas of electrodynamics and those of thermodynamics. The significance of the thought is not thereby nullified, for during a continuous spell of waking-consciousness we “understand” always in the form of single acts of which each has its own causal inception. The viewing of the entire world-as-nature in relation to the individual consciousness as a single causally-ordered concatenation is something perfectly unrealizable by our thought, inasmuch as our thinking proceeds always by unit acts. It remains a belief. It is indeed Faith itself, for it is the basis of religious understanding of the world, which, wherever something is observed, postulates numina as a necessity of thought--ephemeral numina for incidental events which are not again thought of, and enduring numina as place-definite indwellers (of springs, trees, stones, hills, stars, and so forth) or as universals (like the gods of Heaven, of War, of Wisdom) which can be present anywhere. These numina are limited only in virtue of the individualness of each separate act of thought. That which to-day is a property of the god is to-morrow itself the god. Others are now a plurality, now a unity, now a vague Ent. There are invisibles (shapes) and incomprehensibles (principles), which, to those to whom it is vouchsafed, may become phenomenal or comprehensible. Fate[466] in the Classical (εἰμαρμένη) and in the Indian (_rta_) is something which stands as origin-thing (_Ur-Sache_) above the picturable divinities; Magian Destiny, on the contrary, is the operation of the one and formless supreme God. Religious thought ever lets itself graduate values and rank within the causal succession, and leads up to supreme beings or principles, as very first and “governing” causes; “dispensation” is the word used for the most comprehensive of all systems based upon valuation. Science, on the contrary, is a mode of understanding which fundamentally abhors distinctions of rank amongst causes; what it finds is not dispensation, but law.

The understanding of causes sets free. Belief in the linkages discovered compels the world-fear to retreat. God is man’s refuge from the Destiny which he can feel and livingly experience, but not think on, or figure, or name, and which sinks into abeyance for so long--only for so long--as the “critical” (literally, the _separating_) fear-born understanding can establish causes behind causes comprehensibly; that is, in order visible to the outer or inner eye. It is the desperate dilemma of the higher grade of man that his powerful will to understand is in constant contradiction with his being. It has ceased to serve his life, but is unable to rule it, and consequently in all important conjunctures there remains an insoluble element. “One has merely to declare oneself free, and one feels the moment to be conditioned. But if one has the courage to declare oneself conditioned, then one has the feeling of being free” (Goethe).

We name a causal linkage within the world-as-nature, as to which we are convinced that no further reflection can alter it--Truth. Truths are established, and they are timeless--“absolute” means detached from Destiny and history, but detached also from the facts of our own living and dying--and they are an inward liberation, consolation, and salvation, in that they disvalue and overcome the incalculable happenings of the world of facts. Or, as it mirrors itself in the mind, men may go, but truth remains.

In the world-around something is established--that is, fixed, spellbound. Understanding man has the secret in the hands, whether this be, as of old, some potent charm or, as nowadays, a mathematical formula. A feeling of triumph, even to-day, accompanies every experimental step in the realm of Nature which determines something--about the purposes and powers of the god of heaven or the storm-spirits of the ground-dæmons; or about the numina of natural science (atom-nuclei, the velocity of light, gravitation); or even about the abstract numina that thought conceives in contemplating its own image (concept, category, reason)--and, in determining, fixes it in the prison of an unalterable system of causal relations. Experience in this inorganic, killing, preserving sense, which is something quite different from life-experience and knowledge of men, takes place in two modes--_theory and technique_,[467] or, in religious language, _myth and cult_--according as the believer’s intention is to open up or to confine the secrets of the world-around. Both demand a high development of human understanding. _Both may be born of either fear or love._ There is a mythology of fear, like the Mosaic and the primitive generally, and a mythology of love, like that of early Christianity and Gothic mysticism. Similarly there is a technique of defensive, and another technique of postulant, magic, and this, no doubt the most fundamental, distinction between sacrifice and prayer[468] distinguishes also primitive and mature mankind. Religiousness is a trait of soul, but religion is a talent. “Theory” demands the gift of vision that few possess to the extent of luminous insight and many possess not at all. It is world-view, “_Weltanschauung_” in the most primary sense, whether what one sees in that world is the hand and the loom of powers, or (in a colder urban spirit, not fearing or loving, but inquisitive) the theatre of law-conform forces. The secrets of Taboo and Totem are beheld in god-faiths and soul-faiths, and calculated in theoretical physics and biology. “Technique” presupposes the intellectual gift of binding and conjuring. The theorist is the critical seer, the technician is the priest, the discoverer is the prophet.

The means, however, in which the whole force of intellect concentrates itself is the _form_ of the actual, which is abstracted from vision by speech, and of which not every waking-consciousness can discern the quintessence--the conceptual circumscription, the communicable law, name, number. Hence every conjuration of the deity is based on the knowledge of its real name and the use of rites and sacraments, known and available only to the initiated, of which the form must be exact and the words correct. This applies not merely to primitive magic, but just as much to our physical (and particularly our medical) technique. It is for this reason that mathematics have a character of sanctity and are regularly the product of a religious milieu (Pythagoras, Descartes, Pascal); that there is a mysticism of sacred numbers (3, 7, 12) in every religion,[469] and that Ornament (of which cult-architecture is the highest form) is essentially number felt as shape. It is rigid, compelling forms, expression-motives and communication-signs[470] that the microcosm employs in the world of waking-consciousness to get into touch with the macrocosm. In sacerdotal technique they are called precepts, and in scientific, laws--but both are really name and number, and primitive man would discover no difference between the magic wherewith the priests of his villages command the dæmons and that wherewith the civilized technician commands his machines.

The first, and perhaps the only, outcome of man’s will-to-understanding is _faith_. “I believe” is the great word against metaphysical fear, and at the same time it is an avowal of love. Even though one’s researches or accumulation of knowledge may culminate in sudden illumination or conclusive calculation, yet all one’s own sense and comprehension would be meaningless unless there were set up along with it an inward certainty of a “something” which as other and alien _is_--and is, moreover, exactly under the ascertained shape--in the concatenation of cause and effect. The highest intellectual possession, therefore, known to man as a being of speech-deduced thought, is the firm and hard-won belief in this something, withdrawn from the courses of time and destiny, which he has separated out by contemplation and labelled by name and number. But _what_ that something is remains in the last analysis obscure. Was it the something of secret logic of the universe that was touched, or only a silhouette? And all the struggle and passion starts afresh, and anxious investigation directs itself upon this new doubt, which may well turn to despair. He needs in his intellectual boring of belief a _final_ something attainable by thought, an end of dissection that leaves no remainder of mystery. The corners and pockets of his world of contemplation must all be illuminated--nothing less will give him his release.

Here belief passes over into the knowledge evoked by mistrust, or, more accurately, becomes belief in that knowledge. For the latter form of the understanding is radically dependent upon the former; it is posterior, more artificial, more questionable. Further, religious theory--that is, the contemplation of the believer--_leads to_ priestly practice, but scientific theory, on the contrary, _liberates itself_ by contemplation _from_ the technical knowledge of every day life.[471] The firm belief that is bred by illuminations, revelations, sudden deep glimpses, can dispense with critical work. But critical knowledge presupposes the belief that its methods will lead to just that which is desired--that is, not to fresh imaginings, but to the “actual.” History, however, teaches that doubt as to belief leads to knowledge, and doubt as to knowledge (after a period of critical optimism) back again to belief. As theoretical knowledge frees itself from confiding acceptance, it is marching to self-destruction, after which what remains is simply and solely technical experience.

Belief, in its primitive, unclear condition, acknowledges superior sources of wisdom by which things that man’s own subtlety could never unravel are more or less manifest--such as prophetic words, dreams, oracles, sacred scriptures, the voice of the deity. The critical spirit, on the contrary, wants, and believes itself able, to look into everything for itself. It not only mistrusts alien truths, but even denies their possibility. Truth, for it, is only knowledge that it has proved for itself. But if pure criticism creates its means out of itself solely, it did not long go unperceived that this position assumed the reality of the result. _De omnibus dubitandum_ is a proposition that is incapable of being actualized. It is apt to be forgotten that critical activity must rest upon a _method_, and the possibility of obtaining this method in turn by the way of criticism is only apparent. For, in reality, it follows from the momentary disposition of the thought.[472] That is, the results of criticism themselves are determined by the basic method, but this in turn is determined by the stream of being which carries and perfuses the waking-consciousness. The belief in a knowledge that needs no postulates is merely a mark of the immense naïveté of rationalist periods. A theory of natural science is nothing but a historically older dogma in another shape. And the only profit from it is that which life obtains, in the shape of a successful technique, to which theory has provided the key. It has already been said that the value of a working hypothesis resides not in its “correctness” but in its usableness. But discoveries of another sort, findings of insight, “Truths” in the optimistic sense, cannot be the outcome of purely scientific understanding, since this always presupposes an existing view upon which its critical, dissecting activity can operate; the natural science of the Baroque is one continuous dissection of the religious world-picture of the Gothic.

The aim of faith and science, fear and curiosity, is not to experience life, but to know the world-as-nature. Of world-as-history they are the express negation. But the secret of waking-consciousness is a twofold one; two fear-born, causally ordered pictures arise for the inner eye--the “outer world” and as its counter-image the “inner world.” In both are true problems, and the waking-consciousness is not only a look-out, but is very busy within its own domains as well. The Numen out there is called God; in here Soul. By the critical understanding the deities of the believer’s vision are transmuted in thought into mechanical magnitudes referable to its world, but their essence and kernel remain the same--Classical matter and form, Magian light and darkness, Faustian force and mass--and its mode is ever the same dissection of the primitive soul-belief, and its end is ever the same, a _predetermined_ result. The physics of the within is called systematic psychology and it discovers in man, if it is Classical science, thing-like soul-_parts_ (νοῦς, θυμός, ἐπιθυμία); if Magian, soul-substance (ruach, nephesh); if Faustian, soul-_forces_ (thinking, feeling, willing). These are the shapes that religious meditation, in fear and in love, then follows up in the causal relations of guilt, sin, pardon, conscience, reward, and punishment.

Being is a mystery that, as soon as faith and science turn their attention to it, illudes them into fateful error. Instead of the cosmic itself being reached (which is completely outside the possibilities of the active waking-consciousness) the sensible mobility of body in the field of the eye, and the conceptual image of a mechanical-causal chain abstracted therefrom, are subjected to analysis. But real life _is led_, not cognised. _Only the Timeless is true._ Truths lie beyond history and life, and vice versa life is something beyond all causes, effects, and truths. Criticism in both cases, critique of waking-consciousness and critique of being, are contrary to happening and alien to life. But in the first case the application of a critique is entirely justified by the critical intention and the inner logic of the object that is referred to; in the second case it is not. It follows that the distinction between faith and knowledge, or fear and curiosity, or revelation and criticism, is not, after all, the ultimate distinction. Knowledge is only a late form of belief. But _belief and life_, love springing from the secret fear of the world, and love springing from the secret hate of the sexes, knowledge of inorganic and sense of organic logic, Causes and Destinies--_this_ is the deepest opposition of all. And here we distinguish men, not according to what their modes of thinking are--religious or critical--nor according to the objects of their thought, but according to whether they are thinkers (no matter about what) _or doers_.

In the realm of doing the waking-consciousness takes charge only when it becomes _technique_. Religious knowledge, too, is power--man is not only ascertaining causations, but handling them. He who knows the secret relationship between microcosm and macrocosm commands it also, whether the knowledge has come to him by revelation or by eavesdropping. Thus the magician and conjuror is truly the Taboo-man. He compels the deity through sacrifice and prayer; he practises the true rites and sacraments because they are causes of inevitable results, and whosoever knows them, him they must serve. He reads in the stars and in the sacred books; in his power lies, timeless and immune from all accident, the _causal_ relation of sin and propitiation, repentance and absolutions, sacrifice and grace. His chain of sacred origins and results makes him himself a vessel of mysterious power and, therefore, a cause of new effects, in which one must have faith before one may have them imparted.

From this starting-point we can understand (what the European-American world of to-day has wellnigh forgotten) the ultimate meaning of religious ethics, _Moral_. It is, wherever true and strong, a relation that has the full import of _ritual act and practice_; it is (to use Loyola’s phrase) “_exercitium spirituale_,” performed before the deity,[473] who is to be softened and conjured thereby. “What shall I do to be saved?” This “what?” is the key to the understanding of all real moral. In its deeps there is ever a “wherefore” and a “why,” even in the case of those few sublimate philosophers who have imagined a moral that is “for its own sake”--confessing in the very phrase that deep down they feel a “wherefore,” even though but a sympathetic few of their own kind can appreciate it. _There is only causal moral_--that is, _ethical technique_--on the background of a convinced metaphysic.

Moral is a conscious and planned causality of the conduct, apart from all particulars of actual life and character, something eternal and universally valid, not only without time, but hostile to time and for that very reason “true.” Even if mankind did not exist, moral would be true and valid--this is no mere conceit, but an expression of the ethical inorganic logic of the world conceived as system that has actually been used. Never would the philosopher concede that it could have a historical evolution and fulfilment. Space denies Time; true moral is absolute, eternally complete and the same. In the depths of it there is ever a negation of life, a refraining and renunciation carried to the point of askesis and death itself. Negation is expressed in its very phrases--religious moral contains prohibitions, not precepts. Taboo, even where it ostensibly affirms, is a list of disclaimers. To liberate oneself from the world of fact, to evade the possibilities of Destiny, always to look upon the race in oneself as the lurking enemy--nothing but hard system, doctrine, and exercise will give that. No action must be causal or impulsive--that is, left to the blood--everything must be considered according to motives and results and “carried out” according to orders. Extreme tension of awareness is required lest we fall into sin. First of all things, continence in what pertains to the blood, love, marriage. Love and hate in mankind are cosmic and evil; the love of the sexes is the very polar opposite of timeless love and fear of God, and therefore it is the prime sin, for which Adam was cast forth from paradise and burdened man with the heritage of guilt. Conception and death define the life of the body in space, and the fact that it is the _body_ that is in question makes the former sin and the latter punishment. Σῶμα σῆμα (the Classical body a grave!) was the confession of the Orphic religion. Æschylus and Pindar comprehended Being as a reproach, and the saints of all Cultures feel it as an impiety that has to be killed off by askesis or (what is nearly related thereto) orgiastic squandering. Action, the field of history, the deed, heroism, delight in battle and victory and spoil, are evil. For in them the pulse of cosmic being knocks on the door too loudly and disturbingly for contemplativeness and thought. The whole world--meaning the world-as-history--is infamous. It fights instead of renouncing; it does not possess the idea of sacrifice. It prevails over truth by means of facts. As it follows impulse, it baffles thought about cause and effect. And therefore the highest sacrifice that intellectual man can offer is to make a personal present of it to the powers of nature. _Every moral action is a piece of this sacrifice_, and an ethical life-course is an unbroken chain of such sacrifices. Above all, the offering of sympathy, com-passion {sic}, in which the inwardly strong gives up his superiority to the powerless. The compassionate man kills something within himself. But we must not confuse this sympathy in the grand religious sense with the vague sentimentality of the everyday man, who cannot command himself, still less with the _race-feeling of chivalry_ that is not a moral of reasons and rules at all, but an upstanding and self-evident _custom_ bred of the unconscious pulsations of a keyed-up life. That which in civilized times is called social ethics has nothing to do with religion, and its presence only goes to show the weakness and emptiness of the religiousness of the day, which has lost that force of metaphysical sureness that is the condition precedent of strong, convinced, and self-denying moral. Think for instance of the difference between Pascal and Mill. Social ethic is nothing but practical politics. It is a very Late product of _the same_ historical world whose Springtime (in all Cultures alike) has witnessed the flowering of an ethic of high courage and knightliness in a strong stock that does not wince under the life of history and fate; an ethic of natural and acquired reactions that polite society to-day would call “the instincts of a gentleman”; an ethic of which vulgarity and not sin is the antithesis. Once again it is the Castle versus the Cathedral. The castle character does not ask about precepts and reasons. In fact, it does not ask questions at all. Its code lies in the blood--which is pulse--and its fear is not of punishment or requital, but of contempt and especially self-contempt. It is not selfless; on the contrary, it springs from the very fullness of a strong self. But Compassion likewise demands inward greatness of soul, and so it is those selfsame Springtimes that produce the most saintly servants of pity, the Francis of Assisi, the Bernard of Clairvaux, in whom renunciation was a pervading fragrance, to whom self-offering was bliss, whose _caritas_ was ethereal, bloodless, timeless, historyless, in whom fear of the universe had dissolved itself into pure, flawless love, a summit of causal moral of which Late periods are simply no longer capable.

To constrain one’s blood, one must have blood. Consequently it is only in knightly warrior-times that we find a monasticism of the great style, and the highest symbol for the complete victory of Space over Time is the warrior become ascetic--not the born dreamer and weakling, who belongs by nature to the cloister, nor again the scholar, who works at a moral system in the study. Putting cant aside, that which is called moral to-day--a proper affection for one’s nearest, or the exercise of worthy inclinations, or the practice of _caritas_ with an _arrière-pensée_ of acquiring political power by that means--is not honour-moral, or even a low grade of it, according to Springtime standards. To repeat: there is grand moral only with reference to death, and its sources are a fear, pervading the whole waking-consciousness, of metaphysical causes and consequences, a love that overcomes life, a consciousness that one is under the inexorable magic of a causal system of sacred laws and purposes, which are honoured as truths and which one must either wholly belong to or wholly renounce. Constant tension, self-watching, self-testing, accompany the exercise of this moral, which is an art, and in the presence of which the world-as-history sinks to nothingness. Let a man be either a hero or a saint. In between lies, not wisdom, but banality.