Nom.ZeúsGen.DiosDat.DiiAcc.DiaVoc.Zeû
Nom.ZeúsGen.DiosDat.DiiAcc.DiaVoc.Zeû
Thus the young Athenians wrote the name of Zeus with an acute accent in the nominative, and a circumflex in the vocative.
At the same time the pupils of the Brahmans at Benares, when declining the name of their supreme deity, accented the syllables exactly in the same way as the Greeks, and they wrote:—
Nom.DyaúsGen.DyvasDat.DiviAcc.DivamVoc.Dyaûs
Nom.DyaúsGen.DyvasDat.DiviAcc.DivamVoc.Dyaûs
But there was this difference between the Grecian pupilsand the Hindoos, that the former were ignorant of the reason of these changes of accent, since the explanation was lacking in the Greek grammar, whereas the Sanscrit grammar explained to the latter the general principles of accentuation on which the changes rested.
The name of Dyaus was the source from which sprang an unique name, coined once and for ever, adopted by our entire family; the Greeks have no more borrowed it from the Hindoos, than the Romans and the Teutons from the Greeks; for it was pronounced before the separation of our ancestors with regard to language or religion; its meaning was Heaven-Father.
Our missionaries who go from one end of the earth to the other, reciting the Lord’s Prayer in all the dialects of the world, do not doubt the historical fact that this prayer was said one day at Jerusalem for the first time; we also may feel as profoundly convinced that under the name of Heaven-Father, the Supreme Being has been worshipped on the Himalayan mountains, under the oaks of Dodona, on the Capitol, and in the forests of Germany. It has required millions of men to fashion this name alone, which is the most ancient prayer of the Aryan race.
“Five thousand years have passed, perhaps more, since the Asiatic Aryans, speaking as yet neither Sanscrit, Greek, nor Latin, called upon the All-Father as Dyu-patar, Heaven-Father. Four thousand years ago, or it may be earlier, the Aryans who had travelled southwards to the rivers of the Punjaub called him Dyaush-pita, the Heaven-Father. Three thousand years ago, or it may be earlier, the Aryans on the shores of the Hellespont called him Zeus-pater, Heaven-Father. Two thousand years ago the Aryans of Italy looked up to that bright Heaven above and called it Ju-piter, the Heaven-Father. And a thousand years ago the same Heaven-Father was invoked in the dark forests of Germany, since the Teutonic Aryans sacrificed to the same Heaven-Father; and hisold name of Tyr, Tiu, or Zio resounded then perhaps for the last time.
“But no thought, no name, has ever been entirely lost.”[99]
Some thousands of years have elapsed since these families have spread abroad on all sides; each branch has formed its own language, its own nationality, its mode of viewing life, and its philosophies; temples have been built and razed to the ground; since then all have aged, all are wiser, perhaps better, but the name which they gave to the Invisible Power who enfolds them is still the same, “Our Father which art in Heaven.”
This name, whose unity has always been perfect, is a magical formula, which brings our ancestors, even the most remote, within touch, and enables us to see them as they were, as they spoke and felt, thousands of years before Homer and the Hindoo poets. Guided by the science of language and following the path in the Vedic hymns taken by the humanity preceding us, we see how the concept of God, in its germ in the name Deva, grew from the idea of light, to active light, the one who wakens, the giver of daily light, of warmth and new life.
It is easy to understand the difference between these two assertions—first of this one—that the early Aryans called the phenomena of nature themselves by the name of God; and the other—that the Aryan mind distilled from the concept of these phenomena the general idea of God.
“If I were asked,” said Max Müller, “which is the most wonderful discovery of the nineteenth century in the history of humanity, I should reply it is that of the etymological equation of the Sanscrit Dyaush-pitar, the Greek Zeus-pater, the Latin Ju-piter, and Tyr, Tiw, and Zio of the Germans.”
That the generality of people should be inconsequent is not a matter of surprise. He may well be pardonedwho does not at once, on the word of another, credit a number of facts of which no proofs are forthcoming, and who at the same time shows himself unwilling to accept the deductions of a science of which he knows nothing, that of etymology; but what does seem strange is that learned scholars who are perfectly capable of following the progress made by philology, refuse to recognise the identity of the different names given to the supreme deity of the Aryan race. Certain positivists are in this case; nothing irritates them more than to offer them grammatical proof that all the Aryan families had, before their separation, the same belief; and they try to demonstrate that the name of Dyaus at the first meant nothing more than the sky; and that only at a later period people had changed the name of sky and of firmament—physical phenomena only—into proper names which transformednominaintonumina.
It is worthy of note that this assertion is founded on a fact, but a fact not well understood. In the later literature of India which was known before the Veda became so much studied, the name of Dyaus was only known as a feminine; it was the recognised name for sky and day, and implied nothing divine. The ancient Aryan Dyaus after a time paled before Indra—a god of Indian soil; Indra, formerly the rain-giver—the ally of Rudra—ceased to reside exclusively in the more menacing phenomena of the atmosphere, and it is the pure light in which he is worshipped. He is now supreme.
“Before Indra the divine Dyu bowed, before Indra bowed the great Prithivi.”[100]
In order duly to celebrate Indra, the rishis did not content themselves with the praises they considered fitting for the other gods. They laboured hard to find the right expression and every hymn is a heroic feat.
“The other gods were sent away like shrivelled up old men; thou, O Indra, becamest the king. No one isbeyond thee, no one is better than thou art, no one is like unto thee. Keep silence well! we offer our praises to the great Indra in the house of the sacrificer. Does he find treasure for those who are like sleepers? Mean praise is not valued among the munificent.”[101]
It is strange that it is in connection with the great Indra, the most popular of all the gods of India, that indications of a struggle between faith and doubt are apparent in the praises addressed to him. The existence of the other divinities was as firmly established as the splendour of the sun and stars, as the appearances of fire, the movements of the winds, the impressions made by heat and cold; and the confidence they inspired was too firmly established to require stimulating; and then suddenly we find the rishis discoursing on and enumerating the reasons that exist for man’s belief in Indra.
“When the fiery Indra hurls down the thunder-bolt, then people put faith in him. Look at this his great and mighty work, and believe in his great power.”
Whence came this insistence to recall the great power of Indra? It almost suggests the thought that the rishis felt the approach of a change in their conception of the omnipotence of some of the gods of nature.
“Offer praise to Indra, if you desire booty; true praise, if he truly exists. One and the other says, There is no Indra, who has seen him? Whom shall we praise? The terrible one of whom they ask where he is.”[102]
But the poet at once introduces Indra on the scene, and makes him say:—
“Here I am, O worshipper! behold me here.In might I overcome all creatures.”—Id.
“Here I am, O worshipper! behold me here.In might I overcome all creatures.”—Id.
“Here I am, O worshipper! behold me here.In might I overcome all creatures.”—Id.
“Here I am, O worshipper! behold me here.
In might I overcome all creatures.”—Id.
In reading the Rig-Veda attentively, in spite of these efforts to revive the ancient faith, here and there can be discovered slight traces of scepticism, so slight as to bescarcely perceptible, and these apart from the incredulity exhibited concerning the powerful Indra. The Hindoo was by nature profoundly believing, but his intellect was subtle and scrutinising, and he considered it due to himself to give exact explanations of all; the rishis make the following true remarks.
“Fire is quenched by water, a cloud hides the sun, the sun also disappears behind the sea;” and from these observations they draw the following conclusions.
“Water must not be worshipped, since a cloud can carry it away; nor the cloud, since the wind can disperse it.”
The positivists have made too much of the fact that Dyaus, at one time in India, meant simply the sky and day; a rock is not more immovable than grammar, and it is moreover quite indifferent to all blows aimed at truths other than it holds.
Certain scholars in their researches after the origin of Aryan divinities, were surprised and somewhat disconcerted at a gap which confronted them and prevented further progress; nowhere in the later literature of India could any trace be found of Dyaus as a god who could correspond to the supreme divinity of the other branches of the family. However, the very rational conviction that this deity must have existed gradually strengthened in the minds of the learned. They were thus at a standstill, when the Veda appeared under the strong light of modern investigation and brought to view the name of Dyaus totally different from the feminine dyaus, a Dyaus presenting in itself, not merely the masculine substantive, but joined with pita—father. Amongst the Hindoos it had paled before Indra, who was a god of later date, but the other Aryan races had been uninfluenced by this. Dyaus, the chief god, had accompanied them in their migrations, and Zeus-pater, Ju-piter, Tyr, Tiw, and Zio,became the exact representative of him, each in a different country; this discovery of Dyaush-pita, was like finding at last a star in the very place of the heavens which had been fixed before by calculation, but where previously there had been a void.
This was not the only discovery due to the study of the Veda. No one could ignore the fact, that amongst the Hindoos dyaus was the name of the sky, since it bears in itself the root which attests this; but it would have been impossible to discover the radical or predicative meaning of Zeus by the help of Greek alone; it possesses no certificate of birth, and the Greeks had no traditions connected with it that could have taught us. With the help of comparative philology all is made plain; Zeus was born when Dyaus was recognised as masculine and called father, Dyaush-pitar, Ju-piter, Zeus-pater, and from the moment that we are made acquainted with the origin of Zeus, the rest of his career unrolls before us.
Our ancestors, however, had still a long time to wander in the wilderness of error, and lost themselves many times.
The Hindoos thought for a time that they had found in Dyaus the object of their search; but the supernatural light and the light of day became confounded; when the word Dyaus was pronounced, the many natural bright objects it might signify all vibrated in response and melted into one; they became—as a double star does—one object, and Dyu, the god of light, was eclipsed behind dyu the sky.
When the question was asked for the first time whence came the rain, the lightning, and the thunder, those who inhabited Italy replied that rain came from Jupiter Pluvius, the lightning from Jupiter fulminator and fulgurator, the thunder from Jupiter tonans. In Greece all that concerned the higher regions of the atmosphere was attributed to Zeus; it was Zeus who rained, whosnowed, thundered, gathered the clouds, let loose the tempests, held the rainbow in his hand; many legends were grouped around these divine names; the more incomprehensible they were, the more eagerly were they heard, until it is very doubtful whether any trace remains of that Being who at the first gave to the name of the sky its highest signification.
A characteristic trait of the Hindoos, which is noticeable in the hymns, is a tendency to praise all by which they are surrounded. Not satisfied with celebrating the virtues of the invisible beings, which they imagine to be behind the semi-tangible and intangible objects such as mountains, rivers, trees, fire, the sun, storms, etc., the rishis, carried away by the ardour of their feelings, glorify objects which are perfectly tangible, even those which they may have made with their own hands, or those which at least have nothing mysterious in them; these are termeddevatas, and the commentator explains that by this word is meant the person or thing addressed; thus the victims to be offered, or a sacrificial vessel, or a battle-axe or shield, all these are called devatas; in some dialogues found in the hymns whoever speaks is called the rishi, whoever is spoken to is the devata.
“The late Herbert Spencer relates that even in our days the Hindoo offers prayers to the objects which he uses; a woman adores the basket which she takes to the market and offers sacrifices to it, as well as to the other implements which assist her in her household labours. A carpenter pays the like homage to his hatchet, the mason to his trowel, and the Brahman to the style with which he is going to write. The question is, in what sense did the author ofPrinciples of Sociologyuse the word adore?”[103]
The desire to have an exact account of what is happening alternates with the prayers and adoration; thequestions and praises interlace like the threads of a web.
“Unsupported, not fastened, how does he (the sun) rising up, not fall down?”
The poet is also anxious to know how the dawn and the sun appear each morning; how there is so much rain, also such an abundance of rivers and streams.
“How many fires are there, how many dawns, how many suns, and how many waters? I do not say this, O fathers, to worry you; I ask you, O seers, that I may know.”
The explanation also is desired by these enquirers how it is that a red or brown cow can give white milk.[104]The rishis are rigorous logicians, and consider that the powerful divinities who made the world such as it is might have done better; and they do not scruple to communicate their opinion to whom it concerns. “If we were as rich as you we should not allow our worshippers to beg their bread.”
It has been asked whether humanity commenced by having a monotheistic or a polytheistic religion. This is not the first time that this question has been propounded; it has as an antecedent a very ancient opinion, developed in the schools of theology in the Middle Ages; the Fathers of the Church gave it as their opinion that a faith in one God, from the days of the greatest antiquity, had been the glorious heritage of the Semitic family, coming in a direct line from the first man. But these same theologians considered Hebrew to be the primitive language of thehuman race, an assertion now known to be erroneous.[105]We may therefore subject the first assertion to an examination.
The learned writers who dispute on the original form of religious thought forget that the ancient Aryans could not have been either monotheistic or polytheistic. The Vedic hymns show us that though there were many gods, and that they were equal, yet whilst the worshipper was addressing one, the rest were excluded from his mind, and were as though they did not exist; each god became in turn the Supreme Power, and received the highest praise; the rishis, who had represented the sun under the names of Vishnu, Varuna, Mitra, Savitar as the creator of the world, spoke of it immediately afterwards as the child of the waters, born of the dawn, a god among other gods, neither better nor worse; it is this characteristic of the Aryan religion, this worship offered alternately to different divinities to which Max Müller has given the name of Henotheism.
“Among you, O gods, there is none that is great, and none that is little—none old or young—you are all great indeed.”
The religion of humanity in its entirety at the beginning was this intuition of the divine, whose formula is that article of faith, at once the simplest and the most important—God is God—the want of definiteness in it making it the more applicable to the dawn of thought.This primitive intuition of God was in itself neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, though it might become either according to the expression which it took in the language of man; in no language does the plural exist before the singular; no human mind could have conceived the idea of gods without having previously conceived the idea of one God. “It would be, however, quite as great a mistake to imagine, because the idea of a god must exist previously to that of gods, that therefore a belief in one God preceded everywhere the belief in many gods. A belief in God, as exclusively One, involves a distinct negation of more than one God, and that negation is possible only after the conception, whether real or imaginary, of many gods.”[106]If therefore an expression had been given to this primitive intuition of the Deity, which is the mainspring of all later religion, it would have been, “There is a God,” but certainly not yet, “There is but one God.”
These fine distinctions require close attention to grasp them; the fact that in our modern tongues we have derived the singularTheosfrom the Greek pluralTheoihas caused confusion; from a historical point of view, no doubt Theos has come from Theoi; but putting this aside, the meaning of the word has gone through as complete a transformation as that of the acorn to the oak; the evidence of this change has been so deeply impressed even on our outward senses that as soon as our intellect has attained some measure of development the sound of the word God used in the plural jars on our ears as if we heard of two universes or one twin.
The Hindoo mind, however, oscillated between the representation of many gods and of one only God; and the rishis appear to have attempted to establish a sort of priority amongst their numerous deities.
“That which is one, the seers call in many ways; theyspeak of Indra, Mitra, Agni, and Varuna—they call it by various names—that which is, and is one.”
“In the evening Agni becomes Varuna—he becomes Mitra when rising in the mornings; having become Savitri, he passes through the sky—having become Indra he warms the heaven in the centre.”[107]
This attempt, which might have led to monotheism, came to nothing; on this point the Hindoos were behind the Greeks and Romans, who with their polytheism had a presiding deity, viz., Zeus and Jupiter.
“When we thus see the god Dyaus antiquated by Indra, and Indra himself almost denied, we might expect in India the same catastrophe which in Iceland the poets of the Edda always predicted—the twilight of the gods preceding the destruction of the world. We seem to have reached the stage when henotheism, after trying in vain to grow into an organised polytheism on the one side, or into an exclusive monotheism on the other, would by necessity end in atheism; yet atheism is not the last word of the Indian religion.”[108]
What is atheism?