Resheph Baal
Anath Astarte
Ashtoreth Hadad
Nebo Dagon
Melek Yau
Ahijah Amon-Re
Isis Osiris
Ptah Molech?
All these were once gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following:
Arianrod Nuada Argetlam
Morrigu Tagd
Govannon Goibniu
Gunfled Odin
Dagda Ogma
Ogyrvan Marzin
Dea Dia Mars
Iuno Lucina Diana of Ephesus
Saturn Robigus
Furrina Pluto
Cronos Vesta
Engurra Zer-panitu
Belus Merodach
Ubilulu Elum
U-dimmer-an-kia Marduk
U-sab-sib Nin
U-Mersi Persephone
Tammuz Istar
Venus Lagas
Beltis Nirig
Nusku Nebo
Aa En-Mersi
Sin Assur
Apsu Beltu
Elali Kuski-banda
Mami Nin-azu
Zaraqu Qarradu
Zagaga Ueras
Ask the rector to lend you any good book on comparative religion: you will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest dignity—gods of civilized peoples—worshipped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.
1 The reader fetched by this argument will find more to his taste in my Treatise on the Gods, second edition, 1946, pp. 286–89.
V. MORALS
The Origin of Morality
From TREATISE ON RIGHT AND WRONG, New York, 1934, pp. 1–8
CHILDREN come into the world without any visible understanding of the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, but some sense of it is forced upon them almost as soon as they learn the difference between light and dark, hot and cold, sweet and sour. It is a kind of knowledge that seems to be natural and essential to all creatures living in societies, and it shows itself in many of the lower animals quite as well as in human beings. To be sure, they do not appear to formulate a concept of evil per se, and certainly they know nothing about the highly metaphysical abstraction that mankind calls sin, but many species are well acquainted with concrete acts of wickedness, and punish them severely. Theft and adultery are familiar examples. A dog will pursue and, if it can, castigate another dog which steals its bone, and an ape will try to kill any bachelor intruder which makes too free with its wives. This sharp and often bloody discrimination between meum and tuum is to be observed not only in mammals, but also in animals of lower orders, including birds, insects and even fishes. Much of the uproar that goes on among sparrows and starlings is caused by conflicts over property rights, and everyone has seen two goldfishes in a globe fighting over a speck of food, with one claiming it and trying to gobble it and the other seeking to make off with it.
A German popular naturalist, Dr. Theodor Zell, has gone to the length of writing a treatise called “Moral in der Tierwelt” (Morality in the Animal World), in which he argues that many species, especially among the social insects, entertain not only the somewhat negative idea of vice but also the positive idea of virtue. The ants, he says, are better citizens than the members of any known human society, for they never go on strike. If the workers of a given colony should quit work their queen would starve, and each of them would enjoy thereby the democratic privilege of aspiring to her power and circumstance, but they never cease to feed her so long as any food is obtainable. Thus they are true patriots, and show a luxuriant development of that loyalty to the established order which is put so high among the virtues of human beings.
Here it may be argued that such acts and attitudes in the lower animals are purely instinctive, and that it would be irrational to dignify them by calling them moral. But to that it may be answered that the motives and impulses lying behind many of the moral concepts of human beings seem to be instinctive in exactly the same sense, and almost to the same extent. No teaching is required to induce a baby to recognize a given rattle as its own; all the power of pedagogy must be devoted to inducing it to surrender its property on demand. Nor is there any reason to believe that the various manifestations of sexual rivalry among men are any nobler in origin than those observed among apes or dogs; the whole tendency of an advancing culture is to obliterate them, not to nourish them. In the days when anthropology was a pseudo-science chiefly cultivated by missionaries there was a belief that the lower races of men had no morals at all—that they yielded to their impulses in a naïve and irrational manner, and had no conception whatever of property rights, whether in goods or in women, or of duties, whether to their gods or to their fellow men. But it is now known that savages are really rather more moral, if anything, than civilized men. Their ethical systems, in some ways, differ from ours, just as their grammatical systems differ, and their theological and governmental systems, but even the most primitive of them submit unquestioningly to complicated and onerous duties and taboos, and not only suffer punishment willingly when the Old Adam lures them into false steps, but also appear to be tortured by what, on higher levels, is called conscience—to the extent, at times, of falling into such vapors of remorse that they languish and die.
Primitive man, in this respect as in others, seems to have been much like the savages of today. At the time when we get our first vague glimpse of him, lurking in the dark of his spooky caves, he was already a family man, and hence had certain duties, rights and responsibilities. We know, of course, very little about him, but we are at least reasonably sure that he did not habitually share his wife with all comers, or kill and eat his children, or fail in what he conceived to be his duty to the gods. To that extent, at least, he was a moral agent, and as completely so as any Christian. Later on in human history, when men discovered the art of writing and began to record their thoughts and doings for posterity, they devoted almost as much time and energy to setting down their notions of right and wrong as they gave to recording their prodigies and glories. In the very first chapter of the collection of hoary documents which we call the Bible there are confident moral mandates, and similar ones are to be found in the ancient books of every other people. The earliest conquerors and despots of whom we have any news seem to have regarded themselves, precisely like their colleagues of today, as the heralds of an ethical enlightenment, and every one of them was apparently just as eager as the celebrated Hammurabi to be known as “the king of righteousness.”
In the world that we now live in the moral sense seems to be universally dispersed, at all events among normal persons beyond infancy. No traveler has ever discovered a tribe which failed to show it. There are peoples so primitive that their religion is hard to distinguish from a mere fear of the dark, but there is none so low that it lacks a moral system, elaborate and unyielding. Nor is that system often challenged, at least on the lower cultural levels, by those who lie under it. The rebellious individual may evade it on occasion, but he seldom denies its general validity. To find any such denial on a serious scale one must return to Christendom, where a bold and impatient re-examination of the traditional ethical dogma has followed the collapse of the old belief in revelation. But even in Christendom the most formidable critics of the orthodox system are still, as a rule, profoundly moral men, and the reform they propose is not at all an abandonment of moral imperatives, but simply a substitution of what they believe to be good ones for what they believe to be bad ones. This has been true of every important iconoclast from Hobbes to Lenin, and it was preeminently true of the arch-iconoclast Nietzsche. His furious attack upon the Christian ideal of humility and abnegation has caused Christian critics to denounce him as an advocate of the most brutal egoism, but in point of fact he proposed only the in
troduction of a new and more heroic from of renunciation, based upon abounding strength rather than upon hopeless weakness; and in his maxim “Be hard!” there was just as much sacrifice of immediate gratification to ultimate good as you will find in any of the principia of Jesus.
The difference between moral systems is thus very slight, and if it were not for the constant pressure from proponents of virtues that have no roots in ordinary human needs, and hence appeal only to narrow and abnormal classes of men, it would be slighter still. All of the really basic varieties of moral good have been esteemed as such since the memory of mankind runneth not to the contrary, and all of the basic wickednesses have been reprehended. The Second Commandment preached by Jesus (Mark XII, 31) was preached by the Gautama Buddha six centuries before Him, and it must have been hoary with age when the Gautama Buddha made it the center of his system. Similarly, the Ten Commandments of Exodus and Deuteronomy were probably thousands of years old when the Jewish scribes first reduced them to writing. Finally, and in the same way, the Greeks lifted their concept of wisdom as the supreme good out of the stream of time, and if we think of them today as its inventors, it is only because we are more familiar with their ethical speculations than we are with those of more ancient peoples.
The five fundamental prohibitions of the Decalogue—those leveled at murder, theft, trespass, adultery and false witness—are to be found in every moral system ever heard of, and seem to be almost universally supported by human opinion. This support, of course, does not mean that they are observed with anything properly describable as pedantic strictness; on the contrary, they are evaded on occasion, both by savages and by civilized men, and some of them are evaded very often. In the United States, for example, the situations in which killing a fellow human being is held to be innocent are considerably more numerous than those in which it is held to be criminal, and even in England, the most moral of great nations, there are probably almost as many. So with adultery. So, again, with theft, trespass and false witness. Theft and trespass shade by imperceptible gradations into transactions that could not be incommoded without imperiling the whole fabric of society, and bearing false witness is so easy to condone that bishops are sometimes among its most zealous practitioners. But despite this vagueness of moral outline and this tolerance of the erring the fact remains that all normal and well-disposed men, whether civilized or uncivilized, hold it to be axiomatic that murder, theft, trespass, adultery and false witness, in their cruder and plainer forms, are anti-social and immoral enterprises, and no one argues seriously, save maybe in time of war, when all the customary moral sanctions are abandoned, that they should be countenanced. When they are perpetrated in a naked manner, without any concession of the ancient and ineradicable feeling against them, they are viewed with abhorrence, and the guilty are severely punished.
The Good Citizen
From the same, pp. 19–27, with additions
SO far, the fundamentals: they are the same everywhere. But morality, like theology, is capable of accretion and growth, and new moral ideas are coming in all the time. In our time we have seen desperate efforts to give moral sanction to notions that were unheard of even a few hundred years ago—for example, the notion that it is sinful to use alcohol. And simultaneously, we have seen the rise of virtues that were rejected by the founders of the current Christian morality—for example, those which enter principally into the character of what we now call a good citizen. These virtues certainly do not come out of the Bible, for the Jews of the great days, despite what is observed in their descendants today, had a low view of industry and an even lower view of thrift, and were almost devoid of the banal sentimentalities which now pass under the name of patriotism. Their loyalty was to Yahweh rather than to the state or the community, and they were ever ready to defy and overthrow their rulers, and to make war upon their brethren. In brief, their moral system was that of separatists and individualists, impatient of every secular restraint and disdainful of all hard and continued social effort. They originated as a tribe of desert nomads, and their point of view remained that of nomads to the end of their bloody chapter.
Work, in their eyes, was not the glorious privilege it has come to be in our highly socialized society, but an unmitigated curse, laid upon Adam for his sins, as the pains of parturition were laid upon Eve for hers. “Because thou hast … eaten of the tree, … in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” This concept of work as expiation eventually made it more or less tolerable, but it never became anything properly describable as pleasant. The Jews always laid great stress—rare in their time and place—upon the Sabbath’s function as a day of rest: “in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates.” This rest was the righteous and highly appreciated reward of piety: by serving God assiduously they escaped at least a seventh part of the burden of work. Almost always, in the Old Testament, that burden is bracketed with sorrow, as in Psalms XC, 10. If “the sleep of a laboring man is sweet,” then it is only because his work is done. There is no subjective stimulation in it, and no durable good. “As he came forth of his mother’s womb, naked shall he return to go as he came, and shall take nothing of his labor.”
The idea that wealth can be a good in itself, that there is a mystic virtue in accumulating it by hard work and self-denial—this was as foreign to the thinking of the Jews as it was to that of the Greeks. A rich man, to them, was almost always a villain; in fact, he was the favorite villain, next to the idolator, of their moral homilies. Are there occasional friendly words, in Proverbs, for the “man diligent in his business”? Then Dr. James Henry Breasted tells us that they are only borrowings from an ancient Egyptian book, the Wisdom of Amenemope (c. 100 B.C.) – and that with them, and from the same source, came dire warnings that diligence might be easily carried too far. Did Solomon, to whom Proverbs is traditionally (but falsely) ascribed, counsel his son to emulate the laborious ant? Then Solomon himself was a money-grubber, and hence, by Jewish theory, a suspicious character. When we get into the New Testament we find him held up in contemptuous contrast to the lilies of the field, which “toil not, neither do they spin.” Jesus had two rich followers, Zaccheus of Jericho and Joseph of Arimathea, but the former was induced to give half of his goods to the poor and the latter did not appear until after the Crucifixion.
The general view of wealth that He entertained is too well known to need recalling. Preaching, as He did, the imminent end of the world, He could imagine no valid reason for piling up property, and in His system of ethics there was thus no room for the virtues of Babbitt. “Verily, I say unto you that a rich man shall hardly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” Many other familiar echoes of the Tenth Commandment will come to mind: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth.… The deceitfulness of riches … choke[s] the Word, and it becometh unfruitful.… Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” And even more plainly and uncompromisingly there is this:
Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.… Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?
As for Paul, he saw in opulence only a ticket to Hell. “They that will be rich,” he wrote to Timothy, “fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil.” Here the counsel of Jesus is supported, as is so often the case with Paul, by the dicta of the Greek philosophers and their Roman followers. Both Greeks and Romans—with the exception, perhaps, of a few Stoics—viewed work much as the Jews did: as no more, at its best, than an unpleasant sacrifice to the gods for their somewhat grudging mercies. In the Golden Age men knew nothi
ng of it, as Hesiod tells us. The Italian Kulturkritiker, Adriano Tilgher, in his “Homo Faber,” recalls the fact that the Greek word for work, ponos, came from the same root as the Latin word for sorrow, poena. He says that the failure of the Greeks to apply some of their scientific discoveries was largely due to their disdain of labor, worldly enterprise, and the accumulation of property. They even had a certain contempt for artists; cutting statues and raising buildings, they thought, were not vocations for free men, but for slaves. Aristotle, always seeking a golden mean, allowed that riches might be useful on occasion, if only as a stimulus to liberality and justice, but he saw no virtue in the bare act of accumulating them, and he thought that they were unnecessary to most of the higher enterprises of man. The seeker after wisdom (which to him, as to Confucius, was the highest good that could be imagined) “needs no external apparatus; on the contrary, worldly goods may almost be said to be a hindrance to contemplation.”
The Romans, being a far less idealistic people than the Greeks, with no great love of wisdom, took a rather more friendly view of wealth, but they had rigid views about the means of getting it. Work, in itself, was disgusting to them, and they resigned it to slaves whenever possible. The two really respectable ways of accumulating money among them were by cultivating the land and by engaging in what we now call Big Business, but the latter was esteemed only because, in Tilgher’s phrase, it led to “honorable retirement into rural peace as a country gentleman.” For ordinary thrift and diligence the Romans had only contempt. Shopkeepers and common traders were clowns to them, and workingmen were scarcely human.
The early Christian Fathers, when the hope of the Second Coming faded at last, had to fit their moral system to the realities of a disturbed and exigent world, and so the counsels of Jesus were delicately revised. In particular, some thought had to be given to the ever-approaching and always menacing morrow, and in consequence the accumulation of goods began to take on a certain respectability. But the notion that work could be a good in itself was still far off. To Augustine (354–430), as to the Jews, it remained a kind of sacrifice—if not an actual expiation for sin, then at least a device for reducing temptation. He believed that all monks should be compelled to work, for it wore them out and took their minds off lubricity and other evil concerns. But when it came to laymen he was somewhat vague: they were in duty bound to share their gains with the poor, but they were apparently not in duty bound to labor and save.
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