Uhc Q^cn Coutt
A MONTHLY MAGAZINE
H)evote^ to tbe Science ot iRellgfon, tbe iReUoton of Science, and tbe Bxtension ot tbe IRellflious parliament IDea
Editor: Dr. Paul Carus. Associates: {ma^y cSus^
VOL. XXIIL (No. II.) NOVEMBER, 1909. NO. 642.
CONTENTS:
Frontispiece. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy as a Young Man.
Astrology and Magic. Franz Cumont 641
The Religion of the Mendelssohns (Illustrated). Editor 663
Our Own Religion in Ancient Persia. Lawrence H. Mills. 675
Novalis. Bernhard Pick 690
Mohammedan Parallels to Christian Miracles. A. Kampmeier 698
Nazarenes and Sramanas. S. N. Deinard 704
Book Reviews and Notes 703
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Entered as Second-Class Matter Oct. lo, 1890, at the Post Oiiice at Chicago, 111., under Act of March 3,1879.. Copyright by The Open Court Publishing Company, 1909.
^be ©pen Court
A MONTHLY MAGAZINE
2)evote& to tbe Science ot IReltgion, tbe IReUoton ot Science, an^tbe Extension ot tbe IRetifllous parliament H^ea
Editor: Dr. Paul Carus. Associates: {maay cSuf*"
VOL. XXIIL (No. II.) NOVEMBER, 1909. NO. 642.
CONTENTS:
PAGB
Frontispiece. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy as a Young Man.
Astrology and Magic. Franz Cumont 641
The Religion of the Mendelssohns (Illustrated). Editor 663
Our Own Religion in Ancient Persia. Lawrence H. Mills 675
Novalis. Bernhard Pick 690
Mohammedan Parallels to Christian Miracles. A. Kampmeier 698
Nazarenes and Sramanas. S. N. Deinard 702
Book Reviews and Notes 703
CHICAGO
^be ©pen Court IpubUsbing Company?
LONDON : Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co., Ltd. Per copy, 10 cents (sixpence). Yearly, $1.00 (in the U.P.U., 5s. 6d.).
Entered as Second-Class Matter Oct. lo, 1890, at the Post Office at Chicago, 111., under Act of March 3,1879. Copyright by The Open Court Publishing Company, 1909.
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FELTX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY AS A YOUNG MAN.
A crayon drawing by Bendemann. Now in the possession of Frau Lili Wacli, iicc Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
Frontispiece to The Open Court.
The Open Court
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VOL. XXIII. (No. II.) NOVEMBER, 1909. NO. 642.
Copyright by The Open Court Publishing Company, 1909.
ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC*
BY FRANZ CUMONT.
WHEN we consider the absolute authority that astrology ex- ercised under the Roman empire, we find it hard to escape a feeling of surprise. It is difficult to think that people could ever consider astrology as the most valuable of all arts and the queen of sciences, and it is not easy for us to imagine the moral conditions that made such a phenomenon possible, because our state of mind to-day is very different. Little by little the conviction has gained ground, that all that can be known about the future, at least the future of man and of human society, is conjecture. The progress of knowledge has taught man to acquiesce in his ignorance.
In former ages it was different: Forebodings and predictions found universal credence. The ancient forms of divination, how- ever, had fallen somewhat into disrepute at the beginning of our era, like the rest of the Greco-Roman religion. It was no longer thought that the eagerness or reluctance with which the sacred hens ate their paste, or the direction of the flight of the birds indicated coming success or disaster. Abandoned, the Hellenic oracles were silent. Then appeared astrology, surrounded with all the pres- tige of an exact science, and based upon the experience of many centuries. It promised to ascertain the occurrences of any one's life with as much precision as the date of an eclipse. The world was drawn towards it by an irresistible attraction. Astrology did away with, and gradually relegated to oblivion, all the ancient methods that had been devised to solve the enigmas of the future. Haruspicy and the augural art were abandoned, and not even the an- cient fame of the oracles could save them from falling into irre- trievable desuetude. This great chimera changed religion as well
* Translated from the French by A. M. Thielen. .
642 THE OPEN COURT.
as divination ; its spirit penetrated everything. And truly, if, as some scholars still hold, the main feature of science is the ability to predict, no branch of learning could compare with this one, nor escape its influence.
The success of astrology was connected with that of the Ori- ental religions, which lent it their support, as it in turn helped them. We have seen how it forced itself upon Semitic paganism, how it transformed Persian A'lazdaism and even subdued the arrogance of the Egyptian sacerdotal caste. Certain mystical treatises ascribed to the old Pharaoh Nechepso and his confidant, the priest Petosiris, nebulous and abstruse works that became, one might say, the Bible of the new belief in the power of the stars, were translated into Greek, undoubtedly at Alexandria, about the year 150 before our era. About the same time the Chaldean genethlialogy began to spread in Italy, with regard to which Berosus, a priest of the god Baal, who came to Babylon from the island of Cos, had previously succeeded in arousing the curiosity of the Greeks. In 139 a pretor expelled the "Chaldaei" from Rome, together with the Jews. But all the adherents of the Syrian goddess, of whom there was quite a number in the Occident, were patrons and defenders of these Oriental prophets, and police measures were no more successful in stopping the diffusion of their doctrines, than in the case of the Asiatic mysteries. In the time of Pompey, the senator Nigidius Figulrs. Avho was an ardent occultist, expounded the barbarian uranography in Latin. But the scholar whose authority contributed mos\ to the final acceptance of sidereal divination was a Syrian philosopher of encyclopedic knowledge. Posidonius of Apamea, the teacher of Cicero. The works of that erudite and religious writer influenced the development of the entire Roman theology more than anything else.
Under the empire, while the Semitic Baals and Mithra were triumphing, astrology manifested its power everywhere. During that period everybody bowed to it. The Caesars became its fervent devotees, frequently at the expense of the ancient cults. Tiberius neglected the gods because he believed only in fatalism, and Otho, blindly confiding in the Oriental seer, marched against Vitellius in spite of the baneful presages that afifrighted his official clergy. The most earnest scholars, Ptolemy under the Antonines for instance, expounded the principles of that pseudo-science, and the very best minds received them. In fact, scarcely anybody made a distinction between astronomy and its illegitimate sister. Literature took up this new and difficult subject, and. as early as the time of Augustus
ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. 643
or Tiberius, Manilins, inspired by the sidereal fatalism, endeavored to make poetry of that dry "mathematics," as Lucretius, his fore- runner, had done with the Epicurean atomism. Even art looked there for inspiration and depicted the stellar deities. At Rome and in the provinces architects erected sumptuous septisonia in the like- ness' of the seven spheres in which the planets that rule our destinies move. This Asiatic divination was first aristocratic — because the obtaining of an exact horoscope w^as a complicated matter, and consultations were expensive — but it promptly became popular, espe- cially in the urban centers where Oriental slaves gathered in large numbers. The learned genethlialogers of the observatories had un- licensed colleagues, who told fortunes at street-crossings or in barn- yards. Even common epitaphs, which Rossi styles "the scum of inscriptions," have retained traces of that belief. The custom arose of stating in epitaphs the exact length of a life to the very hour, for the moment of birth determined that of death :
Nasccntes iiioriinur, Unisquc ab origine pcndct.
Soon neither important nor small matters were undertaken with- out consulting the astrologer. His previsions were sought not only in regard to great public events like the conduct of a war, the found- ing of a city, or the accession of a ruler, not only in case of a mar- riage, a journey, or a change of domicile ; but the most trifling acts of every-day life were gravely submitted to his sagacity. People would no longer take a bath, go to the barber, change their clothes or manicure their fingernails, without first awaiting the propitious moment. The collections of "initiatives" (Karapxai) that have come to us contain questions that make us smile: Will a son who is about to be born have a big nose? Will a girl just coming into this world have gallant adventures? And certain precepts sound almost like burlesques : he who gets his hair cut while the moon is in her increase will become bald — evidently by analogy.
The entire existence of states and individuals, down to the slightest incidents, was thought to depend on the stars. The absolute control they were supposed to exercise over everybody's daily con- dition, even modified the language in every-day use and left traces in almost all idioms derived from the Latin. If we speak of a martial, or a jovial character, or a lunatic, we are unconsciously admitting the existence, in these heavenly bodies (Mars, Jupiter, Luna) of their ancient qualities.
It must be acknowledged, however, that the Grecian spirit tried to combat the folly that was taking hold of the world, and from the
644 THE OPEN COURT.
time of its propagation astrology found opponents among the phi- losophers. The most subtle of these adversaries was the probabilist Carneades, in the second century before our era. The topical argu- ments which he advanced, were taken up, reproduced, and devel- oped in a thousand ways by later polemicists. For instance. Were all the men that perish together in a battle, born at the same moment, because they had the same fate? Or, on the other hand, do we not observe that twins, born at the same time, have the most unlike characters and the most dififerent fortunes?
But dialectics are an accomplishment in which the Greeks ever excelled, and the defenders of astrology found a reply to every ob- jection. They endeavored especially to establish firmly the truths of observation, upon which rested the entire learned structure of their art: the influence of the stars over the phenomena of nature and the characters of individuals. Can it be denied, they said, that the sun causes vegetation to appear and to perish, and that it puts animals eii rut or plunges them into lethargic sleep? Does not the movement of the tide depend on the course of the moon? Is not the rising of certain constellations accompanied every year by storms? And are not the physical and moral qualities of the different races manifestly determined by the climate in which they live? The action of the sky on the earth is undeniable, and, the sidereal influences once admitted, all previsions based on them are legitimate. As soon as the first principle is admitted, all corollaries are logically derived from it.
'Diis way of reasoning was universally considered irrefutable. Before the advent of Christianity, which especially opposed it because of its idolatrous character, astrology had scarcely any adversaries except those who denied the possibility of science altogether, namely, the neo-academicians. who held that man could not attain certainty, and such radical sceptics as Sextus Empiricus. Upheld by the stoics, however, who with very few exceptions were in favor of astrology, it can be maintained that it emerged triumphant from the first assaults directed against it. The only result of the objections raised to it was to modify some of its theories. Later, the general weak- ening of the spirit of criticism assured astrology an almost uncon- tested domination. Its adversaries did not renew their polemics ; they limited themselves to the repetition of arguments that had been opposed, if not refuted, a hundred times, and consequently seemed worn out. At the court of the Severi any one who would have de- nied the influence of the planets upon the events of this world would
ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. 645
have been considered more preposterous than he who would admit it to-day.
But, you will say, if the theorists did not succeed in proving the doctrinal falsity of astrology, experience should have shown its worthlessness. Errors must have occurred frequently and must have been followed by cruel disillusionment. Having lost a child at the age of four for whom a brilliant future had been predicted, the parents stigmatized in the epitaph the "lying mathematician whose great renown deluded both of them." But nobody thought of deny- ing the possibility of such errors. Manuscripts have been preserved, wherein the makers of horoscopes themselves candidly and learnedly explain how they were mistaken in such and such a case, because they had not taken into account some one of the data of the problem. Manilius, in spite of his unlimited confidence in the power of reason, hesitated at the complexity of an immense task, that seemed to exceed the capacity of human intelligence, and in the second century, Vettius Valens bitterly denounced the contemptible bunglers who claimed to be prophets, without having had the long training neces- sary, and who thereby cast odium and ridicule upon astrology, in the name of which they pretended to operate. It must be remembered that astrology, like medicine, was not only a science (l-maTrjiJirj) , but also an art (rexpr)). This comparison, which sounds irreverent to- day, was a flattering one in the eyes of the ancients. To observe the sky was as delicate a task as to observe the human body ; to cast the horoscope of a newly born child, just as perilous as to make a diag- nosis, and to interpret the cosmic symptoms just as hard as to interpret those of our organism. In both instances the elements were complex and the chances of error infinite. All the examples of patients dying in spite of the physician, or on account of him, will never keep a person who is tortured by physical pain from ap- pealing to him for help ; and similarly those whose souls were troubled with ambition or fear turned to the astrologer for some remedy for the moral fever tormenting them. The calculator, who claimed to determine the moment of death, and the medical prac- titioner who claimed to avert it received the anxious patronage of people worried by this formidable issue. Furthermore, just as mar- velous cures were reported, striking predictions were called to mind or, if need were, invented. The diviner had, as a rule, only a re- stricted number of possibilities to deal with, and the calculus of probabilities shows that he must have succeeded sometimes. Mathe- matics, which he invoked, was in his favor after all, and chance fre- quently corrected mischance. Moreover, did not the man, who had
646 THE OPEN COURT.
a well-frequented consulting-office, possess a thousand means, if he was clever, of placing all the chances on his side, in the hazardous profession he followed, and ■ of reading in the stars anything he thought expedient? He observed the earth rather than the sky, and took care not to fall into a well.
However, what helped most to make astrology invulnerable to the blows of reason and of common sense, was the fact that in reality, the apparent rigor of its calculus and its theorems notwith- standing, it was not a science but a faith. We mean not only that it implied belief in postulates that could not be proved — the same thing might be said of almost all of our poor human knowledge, and even our systems of physics and cosmology in the last analysis are based upon hypotheses — but that astrology was born and reared in the temples of Chaldea and Egypt. Even in the Occident it never forgot its sacerdotal origin and never more than half freed itself from religion, whose offspring it was. Here lies the connection between astrology and the Oriental religions, and I wish to draw the reader's special attention to this point.
The Greek works and treatises on astrology that have come down to us, reveal this essential feature only very imperfectly. The Byzantines stripped this pseudo-science, always regarded suspiciously by the Church, of everything that savored of paganism. Their pro- cess of purification can, in some instances, be traced from manu- script Ho manuscript. If they retained the name of some god or hero of mythology, the only way they dared to write it was by cryptography. They have especially preserved purely didactic treat- ises, the most perfect type of which is Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos which has been constantly quoted and commented upon ; and they have reproduced almost exclusively expurgated texts, in which the prin- ciples of the various doctrines are drily summarized. During the classic age works of a different character were commonly read. Many "Chaldeans" interspersed their cosmological calculations and theories with moral considerations and mystical speculations. In the first part of a work that he names "Vision" ("Opao-t?) Critod- emus, in prophetic language, represents the truths he reveals as a secure harbor of refuge from the storms of this world, and he prom- ises his readers to raise them to the rank of immortals. Vettius Valens. a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius, implored them in sol- emn terms, not to divulge to the ignorant and impious the arcana he was about to acquaint them with. The astrologers liked to as-
ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. 647
sume the appearance of incorruptible and holy priests and to con- sider their calHng a sacerdotal one. In fact, the two ministries sometimes combined : A dignitary of the Mithraic clergy called himself stiidiosiis astrologiae in his epitaph, and a member of a prominent family of Phrygian prelates celebrated in verse the science of divination which enabled him to issue a number of infallible predictions.
The sacred character of astrology revealed itself in some pas- sages that escaped the orthodox censure and in the tone some of its followers assumed, but we must go further and show that astrology was religious in its principles as well as in its conclusions, the debt it owed to mathematics and observation notwithstanding.
The fundamental dogma of astrology, as conceived by the Greeks, was that of universal solidarity. The world is a vast organ- ism, all the parts of which are connected through an unceasing ex- change of molecules or effluvia. The stars, inexhaustible generators of energy, constantly act upon the earth and man — upon man, the epitome of all nature, a "microcosm" whose every element cor- responds to som.e part of the starry sky. This was, in a few words, the theory formulated by the stoic disciples of the Chaldeans ; but if we divest it of all the philosophic garments with which it has been adorned, what do we find? The idea of sympathy, a belief as old as human society! The savage peoples also established mysterious relations between all bodies and all the beings that inhabit the earth and the heavens, and which to them were animated with a life of their own endowed with latent power, but we shall speak of this later on, when taking up the subject of magic. Even before the propagation of the Oriental religions, popular superstition in Italy and Greece attributed a number of odd actions to the sun. the moon, and the constellations as well.
The Chaldaei, however, claimed a predominant power for the stars. In fact, they were regarded as gods par excellence by the religion of the ancient Chaldeans in its beginnings. The sidereal religion of Babylon concentrated deity, one might say, in the lu- minous moving bodies at the expense of other natural objects, such as stones, plants, animals, which the primitive Semitic faith con- sidered equally divine. The stars always retained this character, even at Rome. They were not, as to us, infinitely distant bodies moving in space according to the inflexible laws of mechanics, and whose chemical composition may be determined. To the Latins as to the Orientals, they were propitious or baleful deities, whose ever-changing relations determined the events of this world.
648 THE OPEN COURT.
The sky, whose unfathomable depth had not yet been perceived, was peopled with heroes and monsters of contrary passions, and the struggle above had an immediate echo upon earth. By what principle have such a quality and so great an influence been attrib- uted to the stars? Is it for reasons derived from their apparent motion and known through observation or experience? Sometimes. Saturn made people apathetic and irresolute, because it moved most slowly of all the planets. But in most instances purely mythological reasons inspired the precepts of astrology. The seven planets were associated with certain deities. Mars, Venus, or Mercury, whose character and history are known to all. It is sufficient simply to pronounce their names to call to mind certain personalities that may be expected to act according to their natures, in every instance. It was natural for Venus to favor lovers, and for Mercury to assure the success of business transactions and dishonest deals. The same applies to the constellations, with which a number of legends are connected ; "catasterism" or translation into the stars, became the natural conclusion of a great many tales. The heroes of mythol- ogy, or even those of human society, continued to live in the sky in the form of brilliant stars. There Perseus again met Andromeda, and the centaur Chiron, who is none other than Sagittarius, was on terms of good fellowship with the Dioscuri.
These constellations, then, assumed to a certain extent the good and the bad qualities of the mythical or historical beings that had been transferred upon them. For instance, the serpent, which shines near the northern pole, was the author of medical cures, because it was the animal sacred to ^sculapius.
The religious foundation of the rules of astrology, however, can not always be recognized. Sometimes it is entirely forgotten, and in such cases the rules assume the appearance of axioms, or of laws based upon long observation of celestial phenomena. Here we have a simple aspect of science. The process of assimilation with the gods and catasterism were known in the Orient long before they were practiced in Greece.
The traditional outlines that we reproduce on our celestial maps are the fossil remains of a luxuriant mythological vegetation, and besides our classic sphere the ancients knew another, the "barbarian" sphere, peopled with a world of fantastic persons and animals. These sidereal monsters, to whom powerful qualities were ascribed, were likewise the remnants of a multitude of forgotten beliefs. Zoolatry was abandoned in the temples, but people continued to regard as divine the lion, the bull, the bear, and the fishes, which
ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. 649
the Oriental imagination had seen in the starry vault. Old totems of the Semitic tribes or of the Egyptian divisions lived again, trans- formed into constellations. Heterogeneous elements, taken from all the religions of the Orient, were combined in the uranography of the ancients, and in the power ascribed to the phantoms that it evoked, vibrates the indistinct echo of ancient devotions that arc often completely unknown to us.
Astrology, then, was religious in its origin and in its principles. It was religious also in its close relation to the Oriental religions, especially those of the Syrian Baals and of Mithra ; finally, it was religious in the effects that it produced. I do not mean the effects expected from a constellation in any particular instance : as for ex- ample the power to evoke the gods that were subject to their domi- nation. But I have in mind the general influence those doctrines exercised upon Roman paganism.
When the Olympian gods were incorporated among the stars, when Saturn and Jupiter became planets and the celestial virgin a sign of the zodiac, they assumed a character very different from the one they had originally possessed. It has been shown how, in Syria, the idea of an infinite repetition of cycles of years according to which the celestial revolutions took place, led to the conception of divine eternity, how the theory of a fatal domination of the stars over the earth brought about that of the omnipotence of the "lord of the heavens," and how the introduction of a universal religion was the necessary result of the belief that the stars exerted an in- fluence upon the peoples of every climate. The logic of all these consequences of the principles of astrology was plain to the Latin as well as to the Semitic races, and caused a rapid transformation of the ancient idolatry. As in Syria, the sun, which the astrologers called the leader of the planetary choir, "who is established as king and leader of the whole world," necessarily became the highest power of the Roman pantheon.
Astrology also modified theology, by introducing into this pan- theon a great number of new gods, some of whom were singularly abstract. Thereafter man worshiped the constellations of the firma- ment, particularly the twelve signs of the zodiac, every one of which had its mythologic legend; the sky (Caehis) itself, because it was considered the first cause, and was sometimes confused with the supreme being ; the four elements, the antithesis and perpetual trans- mutations of which produced all tangible phenomena, and which were often symbolized by a group of animals ready to devour each other; finally, time and its subdivisions.
650 THE OPEN COURT.
The calendars were religious before they were secular ; their purpose was not, primarily, to record fleeting time, but to observe the recurrence of propitious or inauspicious dates separated by pe- riodic intervals. It is a matter of experience that the return of cer- tain moments is associated with the appearance of certain phenomena ; they have, therefore, a special efficacy, and are endowed with a sacred character. By determining periods with mathematical exactness, as- trology continued to see in them "a divine power," to use Zeno's term. Time, that regulates the course of the stars and the transubstantiation of the elements, was conceived of as the master of the gods and the primordial principle, and was likened to destiny. Each part of its infinite duration brought with it some propitious or evil movement of the sky that was anxiously observed, and transformed the ever modified universe. The centuries, the years and the seasons, placed into relation with the four winds and the four cardinal points, the twelve months connected with the zodiac, the day and the night, the twelve hours, all were personified and deified, as the authors of every change in the universe. The allegorical figures contrived for these abstractions by astrological paganism did not even perish with it. The symbolism it had disseminated outlived it, and until the Middle Ages these pictures of fallen gods were reproduced in- definitely in sculpture, mosaics, and in Christian miniatures.
Thus astrology entered into all religious ideas, and the doc- trines of the destiny of the world and of man harmonized with its teachings. According to Berosus, who is the interpreter of ancient Chaldean -theories, the existence of the universe consisted of a series of "big years." each having its summer and its winter. Their sum- mer took place when all the planets were in conjunction at the same point of Cancer, and brought with it a general conflagration. On the other hand, their winter came when all the planets were joined in Capricorn, and its result was a universal flood. Each of these cosmic cycles, the duration of which was fixed at 432,000 years ac- cording to the most probable estimate, was an exact reproduction of those that had preceded it. In fact, when the stars resumed exactly the same position, they were forced to act in identically the same manner as before. This Babylonian theory, an anticipation of that of the "eternal return of things," which Nietzsche boasts of having discovered, enjoyed lasting popularity during antiquity, and in various forms came down to the Renaissance. The belief that the world would be destroyed by fire, a theory also spread abroad by the Stoics, found a new support in these cosmic speculations.
Astrology, however, revealed the future not only of the uni-
ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. 65 1
verse, but also of man. According to a Chaldeo-Persian doctrine, accepted by the pagan mystics, a bitter necessity compelled the souls that dwell in great numbers on the celestial heights, to descend upon this earth and to animate certain bodies that are to hold them in captivity. In descending to the earth they travel through the spheres of the planets and receive some quality from each of these wandering stars, according to its positions. Contrariwise, when death releases them from their carnal prison, they return to their first habitation, providing they have led a pious life, and if as they pass through the doors of the superposed heavens they divest themselves of the passions and inclinations acquired during their first journey, to ascend finally, as pure essence to the radiant abode of the gods. There they live forever among the eternal stars, freed from the tyranny of destiny and even from the limitations of time.
This alliance of the theorems of astronomy with their old be- liefs supplied the Chaldeans with answers to all the questions that men asked concerning the relation of heaven and earth, the nature of God, the existence of the world, and their own destiny. Astrol- ogy was really the first scientific theology. Hellenistic logic ar- ranged the Oriental doctrines properly, combined them with the stoic philosophy and built them up into a system of indisputable grandeur, an ideal reconstruction of the universe, the powerful assurance of which inspired Manilius to sublime language when he was not exhausted by his efforts to master an ill-adapted theme. The vague and irrational notion of "sympathy" is transformed into a deep sense of the relationship between the human soul, an igneous substance, and the divine stars, and this feeling is strength- ened by thought. The contemplation of the sky has become a com- munion. During the splendor of night the mind of man became intoxicated with the light streaming from above ; born on the wings of enthusiasm, he ascended into the sacred choir of the stars and took part in their harmonious movements. "He participates in their immortality, and, before his appointed hour, converses with the gods." In spite of the subtle precision the Greeks always main- tained in their speculations, the feeling that permeated astrology down to the end of paganism never belied its Oriental and religious origin.
The most essential principle of astrology was that of fatalism. As the poet says :
"Fata reguiit orhem, certa stant omnia lege." The Chaldeans were the first to conceive the idea of an in-
652 tHE OfEN COURt.
flexible necessity ruling the universe, instead of gods acting in the world according to their passions, like men in society. They noticed that an immutable law regulated the movements of the celestial bodies, and, in the first enthusiasm of their discovery they extended its efifects to all moral and social phenomena. The postulates of astrology imply an absolute determinism. Tyche, or deified fortune, became the irresistible mistress of mortals and immortals alike, and was even worshiped exclusively by some under the empire. Our deliberate will never plays more than a very limited part in our happiness and success, but, among the pronunciamentos and in the anarchy of the third century, blind chance seemed to play with the life of every one according to its fancy, and it can easily be under- stood that the ephemeral rulers of that period, like the masses, saw in chance the sovereign disposer of their fates.
The power of this fatalist conception during antiquity may be measured by its long persistence, at least, in the Orient, where it originated. Starting from Babylonia, it spread over the entire Hel- lenic world, as early as the Alexandrian period, and towards the end of paganism a considerable part of the efforts of the Christian apologists was directed against it. But it was destined to outlasi all attacks, and to impose itself even on Islam. In Latin Europe, in spite of the anathemas of the Church, the belief remained con- fusedly alive all through the Middle Ages that on this earth every- thing happens somewhat
"Per ovra delle rote magne, Che drizzan ciascun seme ad alcun fine Secondo che le Stella son campagne."
The weapons used by the ecclesiastic writers in contending against this sidereal fatalism were taken from the arsenal of the old Greek dialectics. In general, they were those that all defenders of free will had used for centuries: determinism destroys respon- sibility ; rewards and punishments are absurd if man acts under a necessity that compels him, if he is born a hero or a criminal. We shall not dwell on these metaphysical discussions, but there is one argument that is more closely connected with our subject, and there- fore should be mentioned. If we live under an immutable fate, no supplication can change its decisions ; religion is unavailing, it is useless to ask the oracles to reveal the secrets of a future which nothing can change, and prayers, to use one of Seneca's expressions, are nothing but "the solace of diseased minds.''
And, doubtless, some adepts of astrology, like the Emperor
ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. 653
Tiberius, neglected the practice of religion, because they were con- vinced that fate governed all things. Following the example set by the stoics, they made absolute submission to an almighty fate and joyful acceptance of the inevitable a moral duty, and were satisfied to worship the superior power that ruled the universe, without de- manding anything in return. They considered themselves at the mercy of eveli the most capricious fate, and were like the intelligent slave who guesses the desires of his master to satisfy them, and knows how to make the hardest servitude tolerable. The masses, however, never reached that height of resignation. They looked at astrology far more from a religious than from a logical standpoint. The planets and constellations were not only cosmic forces, whose favorable or inauspicious action grew weaker or stronger according to the turnings of a course established for eternity ; they were deities who saw and heard, who were glad or sad, who had a voice and sex, who were prolific or sterile, gentle or savage, obsequious or arrogant. Their anger could therefore be soothed and their favor obtained through rites and offerings ; even the adverse stars were not unrelenting and could be persuaded through sacrifices and suppli- cations. The narrow and pedantic Firmicus Maternus strongly as- serts the omnipotence of fate, but at the same time he invokes the gods and asks for their aid against the influence of the stars. As late as the fourth century the pagans of Rome who were about to marry, or to make a purchase, or to solicit a public office, went to the diviner for his prognostics, at the same time praying to Fate for prosperity in their undertaking. Thus a fundamental antinomy manifested itself all through the development of astrology, which pretended to be an exact science, but always remained a sacerdotal theology.
Of course, the more the idea of fatalism imposed itself and spread, the more the weight of this hopeless theory oppressed the consciousness. Man felt himself dominated and crushed by blind forces that dragged him on as irresistibly as they kept the celestial spheres in motion. His soul tried to escape the oppression of this cosmic mechanism, and to leave the slavery of Ananke. But he no longer had confidence in the ceremonies of his old religion. The new powers that had taken possession of heaven had to be propitiated by new means. The Oriental religions themselves offered a remedy against the evils they had created, and taught powerful and mys- terious processes for conjuring fate. And side by side with astrol- ogy we see magic, a more pernicious aberration, gaining ground.
654 '^'^E OPEN COURT.
If, from the reading of Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, we pass on to read a magic papyrus, our first impression is that we have stepped from one end of the intellectual world to the other. Here we find no trace of the systematic order or severe method that distinguish the work of the scholar of Alexandria. Of course, the doctrines of astrology are just as chimerical as those of magic, but they are deduced with an amount of logic, entirely wanting in works of sorcery, that compels reasoning intellects to accept them. Recipes borrowed from medicine and popular superstition, primitive prac- tices rejected or abandoned by the sacerdotal rituals, beliefs repu- diated by a progressive moral religion, plagiarisms and forgeries of literary or liturgic texts, incantations in which the gods of all barbarous nations are invoked in unintelligible gibberish, odd and disconcerting ceremonies, — all these form a chaos in which the im- agination loses itself, a potpourri in which an arbitrary syncretism seems to have attempted to create an inextricable confusion.
However, if we observe, more closely, how magic operates, we find that it starts out from the same principles and acts along the same line of reasoning as astrology. Born during the same period, in the primitive civilizations of the Orient, both were based on a number of common ideas. Magic, like astrology, proceeded from the principle of universal sympathy, yet it did not consider the relation existing between the stars, traversing the heavens, and physical or moral phenomena, but the relation between whatever bodies there are. It started out from the preconceived idea that an obscure but constant relatien exists between certain things, certain words, certain persons. This connection was established without hesitation be- tween dead material things and living beings, becai^se the primitive races ascribed a sorl and existence, similar to those of man. to every- thing surrounding them. The distinction between the three king- doms of nature was unknown to them ; they were "animists." The life of a person might, therefore, be linked to that of a thing, a tree, or an animal, in such a manner that one died if the other did, and that any damage suffered by one was also sustained by its inseparable associate. Sometimes the relation was founded on clearly intelligible grounds, like a resemblance between the thing and the being, as where, to kill an enemy, one pierced a waxen figure supposed to represent him. Or a contact, even merely passing by, was believed to have created indestructible affinities, for instance where the gar- ments of an absent person were operated upon. Often, also, these imaginary relations were founded on reasons that escape us : like the
ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. 655
qualities attributed by astrology to tbe stars, they may have been derived from old beliefs the memory of which is lost.
Like astrology, then, magic was a science in some respects. First, like the predictions of its sister, it was partly based on observation — observation frequently rudimentary, superficial, hasty, and erroneous, but nevertheless important. It was an experimental discipline. Among the great number of facts noted by the curiosity of the magicians, there were many that received scientific indorsement later on. The attraction of the magnet for iron was utilized by the thaumaturgi before it was interpreted by the natural philosophers. In the vast compilations that circulated under the venerable names of Zoroaster or Hostanes, many fertile remarks were scattered among puerile ideas and absurd teachings, just as in the Greek trea- tises on alchemy that have come down to us. The idea that knowl- edge of the power of certain agents enables one to stimulate the hidden forces of the universe into action and to obtain extraordinary results, inspires the researches of physics to-day, just as it inspired the claims of magic. And if astrology was a perverted astronomy, magic was physics gone astray.
Moreover, and again like astrology, magic was a science, be- cause it started from the fundamental conception that order and law exist in nature, and that the same cause always produces the same effect. An occult ceremony, performed with the same care as an experiment in the chemical laboratory, will always have the expected result. To know the mysterious affinities that connect all things is sufficient to set the mechanism of the universe into motion. But the error of the magicians consisted in establishing a connection between phenomena that do not depend on each other at all. The act of exposing to the light, for an instant, a sensitive plate in a camera, then immersing it, according to given recipes, in appropriate liquids, and oi making the picture of a relative or friend appear thereon is a magical operation, but based on real actions and reac- tions, instead of on arbitrarily assumed sympathies and antipathies. Magic, therefore, was a science groping in the dark, and later be- came "a bastard sister of science," as Frazer puts it.
But. like astrology, magic was religious in origin, and alwavs remained a bastard sister of religion. Both grew up together in the temples of the barbarian Orient. Their practices were, at first, part of the dubious knowledge of fetichists who claimed to have control over the spirits that peopled nature and animated everything, and who claimed that they communicated with these spirits by means of rites known to themselves alone. Magic has been cleverlv defined
656 THE OPEN COURT.
as "the strategy of animism." But, just as the growing power ascribed by the Chaldeans to the sidereal deities transformed the original astrology, so primitive sorcery assumed a different character when the world of the gods, conceived after the image of man, sep- arated itself more and more from the realm of physical forces and be- came a realm of its own. This gave the mystic element which al- ways entered the ceremonies, a new precision and development. By means of his charms, talismans, and exorcisms, the magician now communicated with the celestial or infernal "demons" and compelled them to obey him. But these spirits no longer opposed him with the blind resistance of matter animated with an uncertain kind of life ; they were active and subtle beings having intelligence and will- power. Sometimes they took revenge for the slavery the magician attempted to impose on them and punished the audacious operator, who feared them, although invoking their aid. Thus the incantation often assumed the shape of a prayer addressed to a power stronger than man, and magic became a religion. Its rites developed side by side with the canonical liturgies, and frequently encroached on them. The only barrier between them was the vague and constantly shifting borderline. that limits the neighboring domains of religion and superstition.
This half scientific, half religious magic, with its books and its professional adepts, is of Oriental origin. The old Grecian and Italian sorcery appears to have been rather mild. Conjurations to avert hail-storms, or formulas to draw rain, evil charms to render fields barren or to kill cattle, love philters and rejuvenating salves, old women's remedies, talismans against the evil eye,— all are based on popular superstition and kept in existence by folk-lore and char- latanism. Even the witches of Thessaly, whom people credited with the power of making the moon descend from the sky, were botanists more than anything else, acquainted with the marvelous virtues of medicinal plants. The terror that the necromancers inspired was due, to a considerable extent, to the use they made of the old belief in ghosts. They exploited the superstitious belief in ghost-power and slipped metal tablets covered with execrations into graves, to bring misfortune or death to some enemy. But neither in Greece nor in Italy is there any trace of a coherent system of doctrines, of an occult and learned discipline, nor of any sacerdotal instruction.
Originally the adepts in this dubious art were despised. As late as the period of Ansfustus they were generally equivocal beggar-
ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. 657
women who plied their miserable trade in the lowest quarters of the slums. But with the invasion of the Oriental religions the magician began to receive more consideration, and his condition improved. He was honored, and feared even more. During the second century scarcely anybody would have doubted his power to call up divine apparitions, converse with the superior spirits and even translate himself bodily into the heavens.
Here the victorious progress of the Oriental religions shows itself. The Egyptian ritual originally was nothing but a collection of magical practices, properly speaking. The religious community imposed its will upon the gods by means of prayers or even threats. The gods were compelled to obey the officiating priest, if the liturgy was correctly performed, and if the incantations and the magic words were pronounced with the right intonation. The well-in- formed p:;iest had an almost unlimited power over all supernatural beings on land, in the water, in the air, in heaven and in hell. No- where was the gulf between things human and things divine smaller, nowhere was the increasing differentiation that separated magic from religion less advanced. Until the end of paganism they re- mained so closely associated that.it is sometimes difficult to distin- guish the texts of one from those of the other.
The Chaldeans also were past masters of sorcery, well versed in the knowledge of presages and experts in conjuring the evils which the presages foretold. In Mesopotamia, where they were con- fidential advisers of the kings, the magicians belonged to the offi- cial clergy ; they invoked the aid of the state gods in their incanta- tions, and their sacred science was as highly esteemed as haruspicy in Etruria. The immense prestige that continued to surround it, assured its persistence after the fall of Nineveh and Babylon. Its tradition was still alive under the Caesars, and a number of enchanters rightly or wrongly claimed to possess the ancient wisdom of Chal- dea.
And the thaumaturgus, who was supposed to be the heir of the archaic priests, assumed a wholly sacerdotal appearance at Rome. Being an inspired sage who received confidential communications from heavenly spirits, he gave to his life and to his appearance a dignity almost equal to that of the philosopher. The common people soon confused the two, and the Orientalizing philosophy of the last period of paganism actually accepted and justified all the super- stitions of magic. Neo-Platonism, which concerned itself to a large extent with demonology, leaned more and more towards theurgy, ^nd was finally completely absorbed by it.
658 THE OPEN COURT.
But the ancients expressly distinguished "magic," which was always under suspicion and disapproved of, from the legitimate and honorable art for which the name "theurgy" was invented. The term "magician" (/^ayo?), which applied to all performers of miracles, properly means the priests of Mazdaism, and a well attested tra- dition makes the Persians the authors of the real magic, that called "black magic" by the Middle Ages. If they did not invent it — be- cause it is as old as humanity — they were at least the first to place it upon a doctrinal foundation and to assign to it a place in a clearly formulated theological system. The Mazdian dualism gave a new power to this pernicious knowledge by conferring upon it the char- acter that will distinguish it henceforth.
Under what influences did the Persian magic come into exist- ence? When and how did it spread? These are questions that are not well elucidated yet. The intimate fusion of the religious doc- trines of the Iranian conquerors with those of the native clergy, which took place at Babylon, occurred in this era of belief, and the magi- cians that were established in Mesopotamia combined their secret traditions with the rites and formulas codified by the Chaldean sorcerers. The universal curiosity of the Greeks soon took note of this marvelous science. Naturalist philosophers like Democritus, the great traveler, seem to have helped themselves more than once from the treasure of observations collected by the Oriental priests. Without a doubt they drew from these incongruous compilations, in which truth was mingled with the absurd and reality with the fantastical, the knowledge of some properties of plants and min- erals, or of some exi/eriments of physics. However, the limpid Hellenic genius always turned away from the misty speculations of magic, giving them but slight consideration. But towards the end of the Alexandrine period the books ascribed to the half-mythical masters of the Persian science, Zoroaster, Hostanes and Hystaspes. were translated into Greek, and until the end of paganism those names enjoyed a prodigious authority. At the same time the Jews, who were acquainted with the arcana of the Irano-Chaldean doc- trines and proceedings, made some of the recipes known wherever the dispersion brought them. Later, a more immediate influence was exercised upon the Roman world by the Persian colonies of Asia Minor, who retained an obstinate faith in their ancient national beliefs.
The particular importance attributed to magic by the Mazdians is a necessary consequence of their dualist system, which has been treated by us before. Ormuzd, residing in the heavens of light, is
ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. 659
opposed by his irreconcilable adversary, Ahriman, ruler of the under- world. The one stands for light, truth, and goodness, the other for darkness, falsehood, and perversity. The one commands the kind spirits which protect the pious believer, the other is master over demons whose malice causes all the evils that afflict humanity. These opposite principles fight for the domination , of the earth, and each creates favorable or noxious animals and plants. Everything on earth is either heavenly or infernal. Ahriman and his demons, who surround man to tempt or hurt him, are evil gods and entirely different from those of which Ormuzd's host consists. The magician sacrifices to them, either to avert evils they threaten, or to direct their ire against enemies of true belief, and the impure spirits re- joice in bloody immolations and delight in the fumes of flesh burn- ing on the altar. Terrible acts and words attended all immolations. Plutarch mentions an example of the dark sacrifices of the Mazdians. "In a mortar," he says, "they pound a certain herb called wild garlic, at the same time invoking Hades (Ahriman), and the powers of darkness, then stirring this herb in the blood of a slaughtered wolf, they take it away and drop it on a spot never reached by the rays of the sun." A necromantic performance indeed.
We can imagine the new strength which such a conception of the universe must have given to magic. It was no longer an in- congruous collection of popular superstitions and scientific observa- tions. It became a reversed religion : its nocturnal rites were the dreadful liturgy of the infernal powers. There was no miracle the experienced magician might not expect to perform with the aid of the demons, providing he knew how to master them ; he would in- vent any atrocity in his desire to gain the favor of the evil divinities whom crime gratified and sufifering pleased. Hence the number of impious practices performed in the dark, practices the horror of which is equaled only by their absurdity: preparing beverages that disturbed the senses and impaired the intellect ; mixing subtle poi- sons extracted from demoniac plants and corpses already in a state of putridity ; immolating children in order to read the future in their quivering entrails or to conjure up ghosts. All the satanic refine- ment that a perverted imagination in a state of insanity could con- ceive pleased the malicious evil spirits ; the more odious the mon- strosity, the more assured was its efficacy. These abominable prac- tices were sternly suppressed by the Roman government. Whereas, in the case of an astrologer who had committed an open trans- gression, the law was satisfied with expelling him from Rome — whither he generally soon returned. — the magician was put in the
66o THE OPEN COURT.
same class with murderers and poisoners, and was subjected to the very severest punishment. He was nailed to the cross or thrown to the wild beasts. Not only the practice of the profession, but even the simple fact of possesing works of sorcery made any one subject to prosecution.
However, there are ways of reaching an agreement with the police, and in this case custom was stronger than law. The inter- mittent rigor of imperial edicts had no more power to destroy an inveterate superstition than the Christian polemics had to cure it. It was a recognition of its strength when State and Church united to fight it. Neither reached the root of the evil, for they did not deny the reality of the power wielded by the sorcerers. As long as it was admitted that malicious spirits constantly interfered in human affairs, and that there were secret means enabling the operator to dominate those spirits or to share in their power, magic was in- destructible. It appealed to too many human passions to remain unheard. If, on the one hand, the desire of penetrating the mys- teries of the future, the fear of unknown misfortunes, and hope, always, reviving, led the anxious masses to seek a chimerical cer- tainty in astrology, on the other hand, in the case of magic, the blinding charm of the marvelous, the entreaties of love and ambition, the bitter desire for revenge, the fascination of crime, and the in- toxication of bloodshed, — all the instincts that are not avowable and that are satisfied in the dark, took turns in practicing their seduc- tions. During the entire life of the Roman empire its existence continued, and the very mystery that it was compelled to hide in increased its prestige and almost gave it the authority of a revela- tion.
A curious occurrence that took place towards the end of the fifth century at Beirut, in Syria, shows how deeply even the strongest intellects of that period believed in the most atrocious practices of magic. One night some students of the famous law-school of that city attempted to kill a slave in the circus, to aid the master in ob- taining the favor of a woman who scorned him. Being reported they had to deliver up their hidden volumes, of which those of Zoroaster and of Hostanes were found, -together with those written by the astrologer Manetho. The whole city was agitated, and searches proved that many young men preferred the study of the illicit science to that of Roman law. By order of the bishop a sol- emn auto-da-fe was made of all this literature, in the presence of the city officials and the clergy, and the most revolting passages wore roarl in public, "in order to acquaint evervbodv with the con-
ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. 66l
ceited and vain promises of the demons." as the pious writer of the story says.
Thus the ancient traditions of magic continued to Hve in the Christian Orient after the fall of paganism. They even outlived the domination of the Church. The rigorous principles of its mono- theism notwithstanding", Islam became infected with those Persian superstitions. In the Occident the evil art resisted persecution and anathemas with the same obstinacy as in the Orient. It remained alive in Rome all through the fifth century, and when scientific astrol- ogy in Europe went down with science itself, the old Mazdian dual- ism continued to manifest itself, during the entire Middle Ages in the ceremonies of the black mass and the worshiping of Satan, until the dawn of the modern era.
Twin sisters, born of the superstitions of the learned Orient, magic and astrology always remained the hybrid daughters of sacer- dotal culture. Their existence was governed by two contrary prin- ciples, reason and faith, and they never ceased to fluctuate between these two poles of thought. Both were inspired by a belief in uni- versal sympathy, according to which occult and powerful relations exist between human beings and dead objects, all of which possess a mysterious life. The doctrine of sidereal influences, combined with a knowledge of the immutability of the celestial revolutions, caused astrology to formulate the first theory of absolute fatalism, whose decrees might be knovv^n beforehand. But, besides this rig- orous determinism, it retained its childhood faith in the divine stars, whose favor could be secured and malignity avoided through wor- ship. In astrology the experimental method was reduced to the completing of prognostics based on the supposed character of the stellar gods.
Magic also remained half empirical and half religious. Like our physics, it was based on observation, it proclaimed the constancy of the laws of nature, and sought to conquer the latent energies of the material world in order to bring them under the dominion of man's will. But at the same time it recognized, in the powers that it claimed to conquer, spirits or demons whose protection might be obtained, whose ill-will might be appeased, or whose savage hostility might be unchained by means of immolations and incantations.
All their aberrations notwithstanding, astrology and magic were not entirely fruitless. Their counterfeit learning has been a genuine help to the progress of human knowledge. Because they awakened
662 THE OPEN COURT.
chimerical hopes and fallacious ambitions in the minds of their adepts, researches were undertaken which undoubtedly would never have been started or persisted in for the sake of a disinterested love of truth. The observations, collected with untiring patience by the Oriental priests, caused the first physical and astronomical discov- eries, and, as in the time of the scholastics, the occult sciences led to the exact ones. But when these understood the vanity of the astounding illusions on which astrology and magic had subsisted, they broke up the foundations of the arts to which they owed their birth.
THE RELIGION OF THE MENDELSSOHNS.
BY THE EDITOR.
FEBRUARY of the current year was a month of centennial birthdays. NaturaHsts celebrated Darwin, American patriots Lincoln, and lovers of music, Mendelssohn. However the two former, stars of first magnitude in science and politics, almost eclipsed the brilliant representative in the realm of tones, for science and statecraft possess a more absorbing and general interest than music. Nevertheless we do not wish to let the year pass without a tribute to that wonderful genius, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, whose compositions have become household possessions in every civilized home where music is known and cultivated.
Felix Mendelssohn, the great composer, is the scion of a re- markable family. It is said that the education of the child should begin with the grandfather. In the case of Felix Mendelssohn, it actually did begin with Moses Mendelssohn, the grandfather of the composer. We will better understand the success of his life, and the character of his work, if we see it in connection with his ancestral past.
Moses Mendelssohn, the grandfather of Felix, was a philosopher of no common power, who had made his way in the world in spite of many difficulties, and who had gained an unstinted recognition from the best minds of his contemporaries, and that at a time when the prejudice against Jews was still very strong.
Moses Mendelssohn was born September 6, 1729, at Dessau, where his father, Mendel, was a poorly paid instructor in a Jewish congregation. In those days the Jews had not as yet adopted the use of family names, and so Moses, the son of Mendel, was com- monly called "Mendelssohn." Even as a child, Moses was possessed of a burning thirst for knowledge. He induced his father to send him to Berlin where at an early age he became thoroughly familiar with the hardships of the struggle for existence. All odds were
664 THE OPEN COURT.
against him. In addition to poverty he had to bear the burden of an unattractive exterior. His pronounced Jewish features were certainly not improved by his being hunchbacked from the result of overwork and illness, and his awkward diffidence became more con-
MOSES MENDELSSOHN. From an engraving by J. G. Miiller, after a painting by Frisch.
spicuous because he stuttered. Yet with advancing years his face became transfigured by the expression of his thoughtful eye which rendered his personality both interesting and sympathetic.
THE RELIGION OF THE MENDELSSOHNS. 665
The poor Jewish lad considered himself fortunate when in 1750 he became tutor to the children of Mr. Bernhard, a wealthy Israelitish silk manufacturer who afterwards, on account of the reliability of his talented protege, kept him in his office as a bookkeeper and in his will made him a partner in the business.
Moses Mendelssohn developed an unusual literary talent in the line of popular philosophy, and it means much that he came into
FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY IN HIS CHILDHOOD.
A pencil drawing by Wilhelm Hensel.* (The original in the pos- session of Prof. Paul Hensel in Erlangen.)
friendly relation with the foremost thinkers of his age, among them Kant and Lessing. It is well known that Moses Mendelssohn fur- nished the main characteristics for the hero of Lessing's great re- ligious drama, "Nathan the Wise."
Moses was engaged in 1762 to Frommet, the daughter of a
* This famous artist was later married to Mendelssohn's sister Fanny.
666 THE OPEN COURT.
Jewish merchant, Abraham Guggenheim of Hamburg. She had become interested in him on account of his writings and was so charmed with his mental accompHshments that she overlooked the bodily shortcomings of the man.
Among the children of Moses Mendelssohn we must mention
FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY. After a painting by C. Begas.
the second son, Abraham, the father of Felix, the composer, who was born December ii, 1776, and it is interesting to note how the inheritance of genius appears to have skipped one link, for Abraham was distinguished by neither talents nor vices. He lived for some time in Paris where he was cashier in the bank of M. Fould, but
THE RELIGION OF THE MENDELSSOHNS. 667
his engagement with Fraulein Leah Solomon (also called "Lilla") induced him to change his beloved French home for Berlin where he became a partner in the banking business of his older brother, Joseph. He was an ordinary mortal of the average type without originality, and the only thing worth mentioning of him is the independence which he showed mainly in the education of his chil- dren. He took the bold step of cutting himself loose from the syna- gogue, which naturally alienated from him many of his Jewish cus- tomers. In honest recognition of his shortcomings Abraham Men- delssohn acknowledged the fact that he lacked the talents both of his father and his son, and the following bon mot is attributed to him in his later years when Felix had become famous. "In my youth I was the son of my father," he used to say, "and now I am the father of my son." In the same mood he spoke of himself as stand- ing between the two great Mendelssohns like a dash — or a blank — as the Germans call it, a Gedankenstrich, which is commonly used whenever thoughts pause.
The change of mind in Abraham which estranged him from Judaism and caused him to have his family join the Protestant Church, was prepared gradually. First we must know that his sister Dorothea had married Friedrich von Schlegel, the great poet of the romantic school. Further Jacob Salomon, his brother-in-law, exercised a great influence on his sister and her husband. He had renounced the faith of his fathers and in 1805 became a Christian assuming in baptism the name Bartholdy.
For a Jew this Jacob Bartholdy had a remarkable career. He served in the Austrian army as a lieutenant during the war of 1809 and afterwards became consul-general of Prussia at Rome. He was a lover of art and had his Italian villa ornamented with frescoes by Overbeck, Cornelius, Veit and Schadow. He died in 1825 and made his sister Leah Mendelssohn his heiress. It was he who induced Abraham Mendelssohn to have his children educated in the Christian religion and baptized. Abraham, himself, adopted Christianity also but not without some reluctance, for he was not baptized until 1822, and we will say here in explanation of this step that he was opposed to any religion which claimed to be of supernatural origin. He left the synagogue, because the rabbis in his days insisted on this feature of their faith, while Christianity under the influence of Schleier- macher and the rationalist movement had, at least in the large cities, broadened into a humanistic religion, and Abraham Mendelssohn stated explicitly that he was attracted by Christianity, not on account of dogmas but through its ethical significance.
668 fHE OPEN COURT.
The boldness of Abraham Mendelssohn in having his children brought up in the Christian Church will be better understood when we consider that the grandparents were never informed of the
FELIX MENDELSSOHN 1!AK llitiLlA . Formerly in possession of the famous violinist Paul Joachim, Berlm.
THE RELIGION OF THE MENDELSSOHNS. 669
event, because in spite of their broadened views they clung with great tenacity to their Jewish traditions. This was especially true of the parents of Felix Mendelssohn's mother, but Moses Mendels- sohn, too, was by no means inclined to renounce the religion of his
KARL FRIEDRICH ZELTER.
fathers. We must remember that in 1769 Lavater had made an attempt to convert him to Christianity, and Moses refused to accede to the proposition in a dignified and noble manner. His reply was
670 THE OPEN COURT.
published under the title, Schreiben an den Herrn Lavater in Zurich (1770). He was not as narrow as most of his co-religionists of that time, but instead of leaving the synagogue he did his best to broaden and develop it to a deeper and also more modern conception. He published not only a German translation of the Pentateuch but he also translated the Psalms and introduced new features into the Jewish service by having some psalms of Schubert's composition used in the style of hymns.
Abraham Mendelssohn assumed for himself and his children in baptism the name of his brother-in-law, Bartholdy, and when his son Felix, the composer, throughout his life clung to the double name, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, he thereby endorsed the step taken by his father. The additional name, Bartholdy, has since then re- mained a mark of distinction between the Christian and the Jewish Mendelssohns.*
Felix received his first instruction in music from his mother and later on was a disciple of Berger in piano, and of Zelter, the well-known composer and friend of Goethe, in counterpoint and composition. His first laurels he gained with his opera "The Mar- riage of Gammacho" (1827), and his overture to "Midsummer Night's Dream." Besides his overture to "The Hebrides," his "Night of Walpurgis," and his fairy tale, "The Beautiful Melusine," he wrote the "Songs Without Words" and a great deal of church music. After three visits to England he was appointed director of the city orchestra at Diisseldorf in 1833. In 1835 we find him in T.eipsic as a leader of the Gewandthaus Concerts. Here he com- pleted his oratorio "Paulus" which 'was first performed at Diisseldorf in 1836. The next year he married Cecilie Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a clergyman of the Reformed Church at Frankfort on the Main. In 1841 he went to Berlin on a special invitation of King Frederick William IV. and here he completed his music for Sophocles's An- tigone.
After a sojourn in Leipsic, 1842-43, he returned to Berlin as leader of the church nmsic at the Cathedral and director of the Royal orchestra on the special appointment of the King. In spite of the royal favor he left Berlin in 1845 and stayed successively in Frankfort on the Main, in Leipsic, and in Birmingham, where his "Elijah" was performed for the first time.
In 1847 li^ returned to Leipsic and in the same year to Baden Baden and Switzerland. Ffaving returned again to Leipsic in Sep-
* Following the usage of Felix, the double name "Mendelssohn Bartholdy" should not be hyphenated.
THE RELIGION OF THE MENDELSSOHNS.
671
tember, he fell sick and after a short illness died on November 4,
1847.
We barely enumerate these items of his life, for it is not our intention to enter into details, partly because they are well known
FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY. After a painting by Edward Magnus.
and partly becavse they have a special interest only for students of the history of music. At present we intend only to characterize in large outlines his religious attitude, and we will say that in spite of his reverence for the faith of his fathers, his music as well as the
672 THE OPEN COURT.
world-conception which his art expressed, was imbued with the spirit of Protestant Christianity which showed itself not only in his own composition but also in his reform of church music, especially in the revival of Bach — a movement which Mendelssohn started and which continues in force to the present day.
To-day we are all aware of the significance of Bach in the do-
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH.
main of music, but that Bach is now well known is one of the merits of Mendelssohn, and he accomplished this through a revival of Bach's great masterpiece "The Passion According to Matthew." This powerful composition had been written and performed about a century before, on April 15, 1729, and soon after its master's death had fallen into oblivion. Mendelssohn discovered by accident one
THE RELIGION OF THE MENDELSSOHNS.
673
of the few manuscripts which had been preserved by some good for- tune, and he was overcome with a desire to bring back to life this one of the grandest musical conceptions that ever existed. He was supported in his endeavor by the opera singer Devrient who pos-
sessed a clear and well-trained voice especially suited to take the part of Jesus. There was one difficulty which the young musician had to encounter in the person of his own master, Zelter, a man who
674 ^"HE OPEN COURT.
in spite of his many good qualities, was small enough to envy his own pupil the glory of performing a masterpiece which he himself felt incapable of undertaking, and our diffident young Felix by him- self would not have been able to turn the scales. But here his friend Devrient came to the rescue. He visited Zelter and personally pleaded with him. At first Zelter refused, and used the strongest terms in depreciation of young Mendelssohn who was present. Devrient was not to be refused and Zelter yielded at last in con- sideration of the fact that the man who undertook this great work was his disciple. Young Mendelssohn used to wonder at the strange fate of Christian music represented by Bach, which had to be rescued from perpetual oblivion by an actor and a Jew.*
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was of Jewish extraction but of Christian education and a cosmopolitan in art. Among his fellow composers he was distinguished by the breadth of his education. His artistic skill was not limited to music. He was talented also with brush and pencil, and we here reproduce one of his paintings which he sketched from nature. He had more general knowledge in the history of art and the sciences, and especially in philosophy and re- ligion, than any other musician of his time, and this is noticeable in his compositions.
All his compositions are permeated by a devout and deeply religious spirit. It is true he has not scaled the lofty heights of Beethoven's sonatas ; he is no Titan, no prophet of a new dispen- sation, nor a hero of gigantic stature ; but he is all through filled with harmony, and his melody is sweet, elevating and pure. There is a classical beauty in his tones which proves him to be a composer by God's grace. Whoever listens to his "Songs Without Words" will feel that the composer's soul is at peace with God and the world. His melodies breathe an unquestioning and pious belief in the good- ness of God and are calculated to fill the hearer's soul with a senti- ment of restful joy.
* Here Mendelssohn used the contemptuous expression Judenjunge, al- most equivalent in implication to the English slang "Sheeny."
OUR OWN RELIGION IN ANCIENT PERSIA/
BY PROF. LAWRENCE H. MILLS.
IN speaking of our religion as having existed at an early date in Middle Asia, I do not mean to antedate the Annus-mn Domini. Our religion at its then state of growth at the period to which I refer is naturally meant. Nor do I desire to assert that the catena of its external and more adventitious circumstances, whether ante- cedent or sequent, was extended there, in ancient Persia, for Chris- tianity undoubtedly belongs, as regards most of its external details, to Judea, Jesus the Christ having been born in Bethlehem and hav- ing suffered at Jerusalem. What I mean is that everything which makes up the real vahie of our Christianity was there, in ancient Persia.
Indeed, we may say that everything which constitutes the ele- ments of its actual existence as a sincere religion was to be found under the Achsemenian and Parthian dynasties, even to the details of its constitutive hopes and fears, and this with a completeness which filled up every crevice of receptivity in copious abundance. And I am quite confident that a large section of the Christian public is with me in not merely calling attention to this fact, but in sol-
^ The first instalment of this article appeared in the July Open Court. This one has been reprinted with the author's revision from the East and West of Bombay for October, 1908. The author hopes that his readers will see that they may yet with him, if only professionally, in accepting these views, utterly deny that the Persians ever had anything to do with the Jews before the Jews had accepted this Exilic eschatology. That the Jews did not originally acquire these ideas from the Persians. The indisputable and unanswerable fact which I am endeavoring to make clear is that the two systems existed in the two na- tions— and that they were approximately identical and this totally aside from all question as to reciprocal influence. It is the more necessary to make this point because some writers will endeavor to shuffle up the issues, if they have not already done so.
In their eagerness to disprove all Persian influence whatsoever upon the Exilic Jews, early or late, they will stop at nothing to muffle up the facts.
It is then at first solely a question of the e.vistence of the two systems in their approximate identity, and aside from all actual external connection, — and this no honest expert can deny.
676 THE OPEN COURT.
emnly appealing to all men to consider it as a part of our own spiritual history — for it bears upon the future of our present religion as well as upon our present study of the past. All that section of the baptized millions who are more passionately devoted to the truth are keen to recognize pre-Christian godliness, or even less early ex-Christian rectitude, wherever it can be discovered to have pre- vailed ; and this as well as post-Christjan superiority even up to the present day, and among peoples who had not (and who have not) yet outwardly embraced the tenets of the Church ; for they hold that godliness is Christianity in its essence. Unquestionably, for the aims, objects and tasks of our active pietism, the present is more important than the past (though this present instantly becomes a part of an ever-consummating posteriority) and the near future is more vital to us in our efforts to rescue human souls — that is, to save human char- acter— than the nearest past — in our earnest efforts. But then it is a part of our own salvation nozv for us to know what has happened with men's spiritual being! that is, with their manhood, in times gone by, as well as in times now present, for the present may well depend upon this knowledge, somewhat, as well as the future, while the far distance of that past might at times rather enhance than di- minish the value of the issues, because the farther back in the mat- ter of time any force existed, the wider is the circle of its present in- cidence. It has touched everything, and that is the reason why we so much value remote history ; all the future was there in embryonic power. To ignore the past because it is old is to ignore the source of our intellectual existence, and of the existence of all who surround us, — for a thing is one with its source. "
We have no right at all then to continue to exist in ignorance of any good thing which has ever transpired, or of any good men who have ever existed ; for their examples should influence us, as they have, in matter of fact, helped to make us what we are. We may be prepared to die perhaps without this knowledge, allowance being made for us upon the score of '"invincible ignorance," but we certainly are not so well prepared to U-c<e without it. A human being is perforce under obligations to admit those rays of information which reveal to him what God is doing now, and also as well what He has done in the past and even in the remote past — for Right- eousness is not a thing of time or place ; "God is at every now the same,"- — the future depends upon Him as it does also so plainly upon ourselves. So precisely here — even pragmatically — the ex- istence of our religion in ancient Persia may, if indeed we cannot
' Yasna xxxi.
OUR OWN RELIGION IN ANCIENT PERSIA. 677
say that it must, have exerted some influence perhaps even upon that signal poHcy of restoration toivard Israel which the Persian Government doubtless regarded as a trivial item in the working of its vast political machinery ever in full activity — but which was to be of such extreme interest, not only to the scanty Jews, but through them to later Europe, with one-third of the human race.
"Our ozvn Religion," then, beyond all things, asserts to itself this right to be called "spiritual," by which many of us understand that it is a religion of unfettered principles as of loyal truth, and of these certain external facts were but the outcome and expression. But principles are intellectual forces following laws within the hu- man cerebral tissues which are themselves as objectively real as the seas and the rivers ; they are in fact themselves, and as of course, a part of nature, and much more difficult to encounter than most of her other powers. You cannot arrest their activity, nor restrict them, granted that they now exist, or once existed — being also in- evitably future, as contained in beings now existing in the present, having themselves also issued from an unbroken past. Time and space have no application to them- — these principles — for they depend upon the everlasting laws of "balance," i. e., on the evenness of gravitation, thus intellectually, spiritually, upon truth. Periods, duration and locality have only reference to the human cerebral and cardiac fibres within which their subjects lodge. So long then as there have been human beings anywhere in whose consciousness those principles exist under a law even in germ, they — those principles — will in due course one day come to birth and to maturity ; they are as well eternal as immutable.
Our religion, therefore, in all that makes up its real existence, has been ever alive and effective wherever there has been an honest heart earnestly desiring to do right, however near to Israel or dis- tant from our own spiritual forebears its time and place may have been. The Church itself seemed to acknowledge this when she half canonized some of the early Greeks. Recall what Justin Mar- tyr (?) said of Socrates and Herakleitos. And this we are forced to look at — if we are honest men — for the reasons given. In fact we may plainly say that, at all phases of them, every religion has needed to be at times reformed, and our own is no exception at this moment. And no sane reformation of a religion can take place without the study of its past as well as of its present facts, and, as we may add, also of its forecasted futvire.
In ancient Persia then, as in less ancient Israel, these same per- vading principles worked themselves into realistic systematized doc-
678 THE OPEN COURT.
trines of expectation, out of which arose subordinate quasi-historical narrative, of alleged true, or imaginary circumstances, as a matter of course. These latter may, in large part, as is now agreed, be relegated to the domain of myth, and that in both branches of the religion. What concerns us chiefly is the doctrines of these laws in their regard to future destiny in view of them — and even here we are chiefly interested in them on account of their systematized group- ing in detail. For, as man, with his soul, is one — or at least is so supposed to be — all moral laws become to some extent of universal recognition, and, in full accordance with this view, the main features of our common Christian orthodoxy, as embodying universal hopes, are detailed in the Zend Avesta in a manner more full perhaps, when closely analyzed, than anywhere in our own earlier Bible.
Of course, the detail of our early Christian annals was predated both by the Exilic Bible and the Zend Avesta, so that no records of real, or supposed. Christian facts appear in either, though they are much anticipated in both. Specimens only of the chief passages which portray these doctrines of the Avesta, and of the Exilic Bible, were printed by me in an essay which had been previously or sub- sequently twice delivered as a lecture in Oxford, and before audien- ces distinguished for their fairness and sympathetic response. This discourse in its form of a magazine article was well known among the Parsis in Bombay, where it was translated into Gujarati by the orders of the trustees of the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy Translation Fund and published by them in a large edition ; it had already pre- viously appeared in the Nineteenth Century of January, 1894.^ To this article the reader is referred for the extracts, which were fairly copious. They fully expressed the faith of the North Persians of pre-Exilic times as to the chief constitutive articles of their creed, and ours: to wit, as to the nature and person of God, that He was one ; His name was superior in depth to that used by the Christians ; •He had an Holy Spirit, with six other attributes which were one with Him as with each other (they might well have been, and be now, reduced to "three") ; He had angels and archangels, originally the personification of the attributes, and never really losing their first significance ; He was the Universal Creator, and Sovereign, theo- logically; He was omniscient, just and merciful; He was a law- giver and a judge; He was theocratic; His kingdom was for the poor; He was a protector, strengthener and unchangeable. There was a Devil in antithesis to Him, the most pronoimced concept of the kind extant. He is, in fact, independent in origin, one of "the
' See this article as re-edited in the July number of this periodical.
OUR OWN RELIGION IN ANCIENT PERSIA. 679
two first Spirits," a very "God of this world," — a deep, if dis- guised, philosophical suggestion. He has his attributes like the other, he created the evil elements of the world, he has evil servants, the chief one a feminine concept, the Lie-Druj.
There are Edens after creation in a succession. Man has a conscience; he is to be judged by it; he is fallible. There is a temp- tation of Zarathushtra, as there was one of Hercules, of Buddha, and of Christ, each doubtless as representing his fellow-saints. There is an Immortality, and a Resurrection — a judgment both individual and general ; it is to be just, — the soul is to judge itself. There is to be a Restoration and a Millennium, a Heaven, and a Hell, — the last, as the first, being chiefiy made up of thoughts, words and deeds. This is perhaps the most astonishing feature in the whole system, though it is hard to choose between the items. Like the "attributes," this proves the absolutely unlimited penetration and exhaustiveness of the ideas. The main word for "righteousness," asha, equaling the Vedic rita, cannot possibly be restricted to the sphere of external ceremonies, though no authorized ceremony could be slighted. The soul is met by its own conscience on the Judge's Bridge. The very first step it takes into Heaven enters the Good Thought, the next, the Good Word, and the third, the Good Deed ; and so, if its dam- nation results, Hell is the soul's evil thoughts primarily, with its evil words and deeds, other torments supervening, as do other bles- sings for the righteous. The very primal distinction of the Godheads, Good and Evil, is "as to thought and word and deed," where all consideration of ceremonies is necessarily shut out.* These future states are to be eternal, as is the soul. There is, as said, a propaganda of these particulars, and a future agent of the Restoration is ex- pected. He is to be born of a virgin, but of the seed of Zoroaster, absorbed from the waters of a lake. He is, under God, to raise the dead, and bring on the beatific restoration which is to supervene. These points, as we see, embrace all the principal expectations of our religion ; they are a Christianity before Christ — and nothing else can approach them in their claims in this respect. The expectations, supreme as they are in interest, are here necessarily bereft of all that attraction which attaches to detailed narrative, so that I must refer the reader to the former article^ where they first appeared in their graphic display. But if he follows them I must beg of him
* The Deities are indeed responsible for the existence of the ceremonies, good and evil, which they permit; but merit in view of judgment consists in obedience. The Deities do not obey. Their good, or evil, thought, word and deed could not have concerned itself with ritual.
° See the July number of this periodical.
680 THE OPEN COURT.
likewise to remember that he has here spread out before him the then "future" aspirations of many milUons of his once Hving fellow- creatures — with convictions, hopes and fears which, like his own, cannot possibly have failed to have moulded vast throngs of human lives to better things — and this, not only as regards "sentiment" of itself considered, for the sentiment inflamed by these considerations became beyond all question a spring to action, as well as a curb of restraint, turning multitudes throughout generations from murder, rapine and arson to sober industry ; and that this is something solemn to contemplate, all agree.
Such then are the patent and obtrusive facts of vital interest, which no sane writer has ever yet proposed even to bring into question ; for these documents are here before us, and the texts are practically uncontested as to these particulars among capable experts who have given their attention to the subject. No less, then, than this are we here called upon to contemplate, namely, the fact that the essential elements of what we most passionately hold dear as the very primal concepts of revelation, — not even excepting the future coming of a Deliverer. — while long totally unnoticed in pre-Exilic Israel, upon its strip of sea-side territory, had been household law for ages in Iran over vast regions.
The religions were the same — this is what we are called to fix our attention upon. And let us pointedly recognize it, though they, these religions, appear in such widely separated places, and in such distantly successive periods — the Israelitish form of it being new, while the Iranian had been established in a system almost ecclesi- astical before a Jew ever seriously hoped for rewards ''beyond the grave — either subjective, or as if by compact; while as to this last subjective principle itself, by which I mean that of interior recom- pense, it stood long prior in Iran (see above), having had nothing early Semitic of the kind as a mate to it, or even as a successor ; while each of these two twin systems was of independent origin. And this all should be most solemnly considered by every person born a Christian, whose mind is still at all religiously inclined, for the reasons stated, above and below. Mark that I here say nothing whatsoever as regards any later effect of this widespread Iranian creed upon the settled or scattered Jewish tribes who were after- wards indeed re-gathered to their homes in Canaan, under this same Iranian influence, that of its adherents, Cyrus and Darius, and — as I say below — this influence must have been later overpowering; but I do not mention it here for an especial reason. I desire even to keep it forcibly, as it were, out of sight for a moment — if I might be
OUR OWN RELIGION IN ANCIENT PERSIA. 68l
allowed so to express myself — for the sake of putting into focus the fact of the independent first development of the Israelitish creed, in spite of the later great influence of the Persian ; because, for a certain valued purpose, it is of the utmost importance that we should regard these two identical faiths, if only for an instant, as being things origi- nally totally apart as regards their external history, without contact. That purpose is this, namely, that by so separating these two as to their origins, we can the more certainly recognize one still further instance of that truly wonderful thing called ''parallel development from only remotely connected origins," — and also the impressive fact that these faiths, with others like them, are still running their sublime course upon these parallel lines, these two also presenting the most striking and touching instance of this co-ordinate but inde- pendent growth which the world had till then, or which it has indeed since then, ever seen. And let us clearly understand this in every relation in which it stands to other elements. For it is in the interests of all scientiHc psychology, first of all — and let me emphasize this — that I make this vital point of the separate self-growth of each of the two identities, and not that I wish to base any especial authority for the Hebrew "immortality" upon it. And indeed, in a higher sense of it, and as regards the exhaustive study of the interior nature of the human soul, and of its individual idiosyncrasies, in their out- foldings — these latter being understood in the sense of the saner characteristics — all is. as it were, marred, if not indeed quite spoilt, the moment we trace all these identities in points of religious doc- trine to one and the self-same actual and particular external his- torical or tactual source, the one set of ideas having merely migrated, so to speak, and wath some suddenness, from Babylonian Persia to Babylonian Israel. We should, therefore, on the contrary, leave no device of any kind unattempted wherewith to convince ourselves, and others with us, of the totally separate and independent original growth of such views in the* feeble Semitic exiled tribes as well as in the great nation which was the earlier scene of their origin. To lose our case here is to lose one paramount proof the more of the separate and severally individual and exclusive personality of the human consciousness in the wide flood course of the great identities ; and this, though it be not everything, is yet much. To hold that all the later Jewish Immortality, Angelology, Soteriology, Resurrection, Judgment, Millennium. Heaven and Hell were merely transferred bodily, as it were "mechanically borrowed," from the Persian theol- ogy in the Persian province of Babylon — this, I say, would be for us just in so far to transfer this instance of a great coincidence found
682 THE OPEN COURT.
in our historical investigation in the psychic science, from the closer sphere of interior human mental vitality and universal individual spontaneity to that of mere exterior contact, and this in one of its most conspicuous, if not, in fact in one of its most splendid mani- festations— an enormous loss indeed to historical mental search would such a conclusion be. And it is therefore in the name of the higher intelligence and in the search for the elements of the pure psychic nature, — let me repeat it, — that I make this point of independent origin, and to such a degree incisively endeavor to put it into the closest focus,*' — and this not, as I fervently hope, in the interests of any superstitious anxiety as regards any loss of originality on the part of Israel. For indeed, even the question of the individuality of the psychical constitution, and of the spontaneity of the cerebral functions in the human body seems to be somewhat distantly or proximately involved, as also their unity of origin ; the actually dis- tinct and finer lines of demarcation between the bodily and psychic life in their essential elements seeming to be ever the more difficult for us to trace.
So far then from wishing to prove that all the God-unity, Angelology, Immortality, Resurrection, Judgment, Millennium, Heaven and Hell were merely the Persian eschatology taken over bodily in its actual form by the Jews of the great empire, together, with their Persian citizenship, I would, on the contrary, heartily desire to avoid this as the explanation of the original existence of these concepts among the Jews. The so-called and the really indi- vidual and separate, but parallel, development is far too wonderful and too valuable an asset to be so lightly given up in^such a con- spicuous instance of it. Our contention indeed elsewhere, and in the other widely divergent sphere of science, is for the corporeal and psychic unity of the entire human race, but not for such a unity as obliterates all distinctive and separate individuality, with personality. To regard these two different branches of the Asiatic religious na- tions, so contrasted as they were in their origin — as in their magni- tude, or littleness, — being Aryan and Semitic, as afifording, each of them, if the facts be such, so marvelous an instance of separate psychic growth, reaching also, in each of them, the very acme of all detailed spiritualistic conviction in the main points of our beliefs
* I acknowledge again that in the former edition of this lecture I seemed to take the other ground ; tliis was liowevcr through a well-meant endeavor to make the point of doctrinal identity more distinct: see my remark about the Zoroastrian system as "determining belief." that is to say, I held that it so en- couraged belief till that belief reached a degree of influence equal, or superior in volume, to that attained by the Sadducaic school ; see the July Open Court.
OUR OWN RELIGION IN ANCIENT PERSIA. 683
and hopes, seizes — if such a recognition truly represents the actual condition of the things — the one leading manifestation of the indi- viduality in unity of all the human psychic powers which has as yet come to light as being active in regard to these paramount convic- tions and conclusions in two previously widely separated nations. And this is also, to each of us, as it seems to me, a matter of great interior moment, entailing the most solemn and pointed of all obli- gations ; for, as said before, by way of preface, our own spiritual growth and soundness are to some degree dependent upon it.
We should, each one of us, personally think out, measure, and digest the lessons from it, if we still continue to be at all religiously susceptible ; for the completeness of our own personal and individual spiritual structure and equipment may well demand that we should endeavor individually and personally to appreciate such interior ca- pacity of self-development in each human nature, also in its indi- vidual responsibilities and with immediate application to our lives. If this particular monumental structure of evidence in the matter of psychic individuality with general identities, as shown in these startling co-equalities in sentiment and theory (see the citations), be then veritably real, as regards these essential matters, this obvi- ously tends to prove that this individuality within general identity may prevail as to other similar distinctions equally, or even more, important, and it also tends to prove more.
If human souls, owing to the quasi-identity in individuality of their psychic structure and continuous essential existence, reach the same religious conclusions even extending to details, through these subtle psychic forces ; and, if, though they may be seemingly so widely divided, far apart, as to place and time, they thus here reach identity, then we must consider this to be an approximating corrobo- ration of those views themselves, and not merely as adventitious proofs of the psychic unity of man in individuality. For here are large masses of human beings distributed into groups, provinces, nations or races, far distant to the one from the other, and who may never have had the slightest external means of intercommunication, having never even heard of one another's existence — and yet they are found to have come upon the very same detailed spiritual expec- tations as regards another world ; and this, as I affirm, most cer- tainly tends to prove that these formulas in opinion must have had some common origin which even the separate individuality of each such person or such people has not enabled him or it to avoid or to ignore, — and this presumably adds to our convictions that these doc-
684 THE OPEN COURT.
trines themselves must he the more indisputably true, at least in their interior significance.
For it was not until several decades at least — so we must re- member— after the Jews were first deported there, that Babylon became Persian, while we need not just here consider the case of that portion of the captives, who were distributed in the "cities of the Medes" ; and the interest here should therefore become intense. Here was Israel on the one side, for long pre-Exilic centuries without a pointed hope of any such an Immortality as most of us hold dear, without a Judgment, without a Resurrection, without a Heaven, a Millennium (or a Hell), yet suddenly at once awakened to these expectations, by a calamity which had brought swift ruin upon their remnant, while their status was at times much like that of slaves, or worse. And again, z'is a vis to them were Median multitudes, military, civil, priestly, princely, regal, with their illustrious Imperial figure at their head. — and these, only a few brief decades later on. swarming in the streets and roads of Persian Babylon, the city with its province now from that time on the Persian capital.
Aryans to a man. these Medo-Persians — as we might almost say of them — they had long since been possessed with the hope of that same future conscious life beyond the grave which the Jews had just acquired with much emotion, let us hope; and these are the obvious inefifaceable facts which the most ultra-conservative of all historical theologians will not, because he cannot, attempt to dispute. They are the A — B — C of all historical religious knowl- edge upon the points ; and they should be familiar, if not notorious, to every student of our Holy Faith ; that is to say, so long as we hold to this spontaneous growth of Immortality among the Jews. No Bible-class, nor indeed should any Sunday-school instructor be without this knowledge as to this most solemn circumstance. It zvas our own religion in a friendly race.
All ivho deny, as ivell as all ivho believe in, Persian influence, posterior or prior, are here, as perforce, agreed; this is the matter to be apprehended and held in mind. I refer, of course, to persons of clear intellect and sound candor in all my assertions as to the unanimity here.
The prophets first speak of the details of a systematized im- mortality and the other elements of eschatology in the Exilic period, — and this is a notorious matter of common certainty entirely aside from the question as to where they ultimately got their later fuller ideas upon it ; and no one who is educated in the preliminaries here inexorably involved, denies this. The Jewish scheme, as we
OUR OWN RELIGION IN ANCIENT PERSIA, 685
see from the earlier Bible, was utterly rudimental as regards these vital elements, in all previous time. Their immortality was for the most part a dim, shadowy, half-conscious state much like the classic Hades ; — with little Judgment, and Heaven or fiery Hell, with but transient flashes of vivacity.
[This is notorious, and it was preached in my pulpit close on forty years ago, the speaker not having been then thought particularly "broad." Let the reader take up his pre-Exilic Bible and read it backwards ; say, ten chapters at a time, — he will be profoundly struck with this marked negative peculiarity ; — the evil kings like the good ones, died, — and "slept with their fathers" — and their (varying) sons "reigned in their stead" — and where is there any Judgment for the evil as for the good — and where is there any Hell for the one, or Heaven for the other — the "Semitic future state" before the Exile ignored or merely guessed at them, as every scholar knows, and as has been long since popularly ceded. Look at the very Ten Commandments, where is there any Last Judgment, even there, — the place of all others where we should the most expect to find it, — where is there any reward or punshment? The future state is not even mentioned. It was during the horrors of the Exile that God's people began to doubt whether, indeed, the righteous "never was forsaken" ; — they, like ourselves, when, similarly situated, amidst financial ruin, turjied bitterly to God, and sang the finest, if, at the same time, the most terrific of their hymns (see Psalm cxxxvii, with its close — if indeed that close be genuine). Then soon after we be- gin to hear of "awaking from the dust," of a Judgment — rhetorically majestic beyond description (see Daniel — Revelations is its echo) ; then we first hear of a "golden age," culminating in the thousand years of Chiliasm (N. T.) ; then, first, the angels assume their names and forms, becoming "princes" (see Daniel) ; then a con- scious "Immortality" becomes defined ; then the Saviour was "prom- ised long" and "the Gentiles were to rejoice in His Light" ; and "the earth" — not alone Judea — "was to be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." It soon became a complete pre-Christianity — with the known results. (Extract from a speech delivered in London in March, 1909, and from articles elsewhere communicated.)]
To resume — that dull and dim futurity — as just said in the extract — suddenly took on for itself the fuller form of accountability in judgment, that is of conscience, and of retribution in a restored body and immortal soul, whereas in Persia these views had been elaborated for indefinitely previous ages ; and this last their books
686 THE OPEN COURT.
now prove, as does the sister Veda. For every such doctrine as that of the God-Unity, a developed Angelology, an ImmortaHty, Resurrection, Judgment, Heaven and Recompense, inexorably pre- supposes far distant antecedents, foreshadowing its coming on, and in the same Hterature, unless that literature itself distinctly repu- diates such antecedents ; in Avesta they do stand thus affirmed to overwhelming repletion ; but in pre-Exilic Israel they are denied by the conspicuous omission.
With what surprise, then, growing to astonishment, must the keen-witted Semites of the early Captivity have first discovered this circumstance! Here they were themselves just new-born novices, as it were, a handful of beginners in a full system of Immortality, doubtless also much affected by the impression that their views were a new discovery, and stirred to their utmost depths with all the emo- tional effects of regeneration in its train. But when they began to become acquainted with the Persian army, whose arrival, victory and continued presence they hailed as their temporal salvation, they discovered to their amazement that their own fresh ideas upon futurity were an ancient creed with their new-found friends ; and that it was held almost universally, not always of course with that personal fervor which the Jews then felt as neophytes, but that it was most certainly held with ponderous conviction by the very chief representatives of the new Babylonian life, who would be, of course, the so-called Magian priesthood.
One would indeed say that they — these tendencies — must have been long latent in the keen-witted Jewish intellect, awaiting only the first stir of impulse to burst them into bloom, andlat first, as I contend, with no immediate exterior or objective inculcation of them from their enormously distinguished liberators ; so that, all of a sudden, if we might so express it, an immortality, with all its corre- lated hopes and fears, sprang into life with them, and became defined, from spontaneous vital action. Since homes were lost on earth — such was the interior psychic process, then, just as so often with ourselves — Heaven was to "make amends,'"' while Hell was to heap its horrors upon oppressors — though even Hell itself, as it seems, was not quite quick enough for their keen just vengeance. Recall the chief Exilic Psalm of its date and creed. I mean the one hundred and thirty-seventh, the finest piece in literature — that literature, and of its kind, I think.
Such is then the phenomenon w^hich we are called upon to notice and to ponder, the originality and self-growth of immortality,
' See the extract just above.
OUR OWN RELIGION IN ANCIENT PERSIA. 687
with its fellow thoughts,^ among the first Exilic Jews of Babylon, not first learnt from their redeemers, but sprung into quick life within their own excited interior passions, that is, from grief and hate. This also proves as a fact, if indeed it be a fact, that the Jewish soul was fine in its susceptibilities, that its intellect was sagacious," — "architectonic" as we used to call it, in the philosophical sense, — and so ingenious, while the Persians, who suddenly came in upon, and over, the Israelites in their first fervent Jewish expres- sions of this faith, had inherited it all through an indefinitely pre- vious duration. Such then is our second essential point, next after the citation of the texts. Of course (and let me be here most care- fully understood, as I repeat what I have all along, as I hope, im- plied) I am here dealing with the filled-out and symmetrically ad- justed systems of the Persians and the Jews alone, as regards the particulars in point. Immortality, in a dimmer sense of it, could not be shut out from any branches of the human family who could still dream of the departed dead, or experience febrile ocular and auric- ular delusions, with their invariably accompanying apparitions. Re- call, too, the immortality of Egypt, so important in its application. Immortality, in many a varied view of it, is well-nigh universal. What I am here discussing is that zvcU-dcfined religious system elab- orated in all its main details in symmetry and practical effect, and] which we find thus extensively and pointedly established in ancient times only among these two nations zvhom I name. It is a thing also somewhat different, of course, from Plato's elaboration, precious as this last undoubtedly is, and was, as it is also different from that of wildest tribes. And it is that, as I contend, this zvell-ftlled out and elaborated scheme, which was of native growth in Babylonian Israel, — and this in spite of the almost immediately following arrival upon the scene of the Persian priests with the same detailed creed long since domesticated, and this but a few decades later on. So much for this, the all-important point.
Quite another question is it indeed, when we inquire whether this so widely extended Aryan creed, in which the Israelites were overwhelmed during their first Exilic centuries in Persian Babylon, had any later and supervening influence upon these already accepted but new found similar convictions of the Jews.
Here I am as decided in my positive assertions as I have just been in my negatives. Every conceivable item points to the reciprocal *I should except Chiliasm — the thousand years — that is pure Avesta.
688 ' THE OPEN COURT.
effects of the two systems, the one upon the other, — and in view of the doctrinal identities in point, with their groupings, — and, in view of the overwhelming superiority of the position of the recently successful Persians to that occupied by the handful of mourning captives, — everything, as regarded also from every reasonable point of view, looks rather towards this later influence of the great re- ligious patron nation upon their once suffering but now grateful proteges, while but few have suggested the other direction to the current. It would require of us indeed an hypothesis of an aggres- sive missionary ardor of no low degree, energized by irresistible interior and passionate vigor, if we should hold to the opinion that the crushed remnant of the Holy People attempted and actually suc- ceeded in converting the vast Perso-Median empire to a creed which they had themselves maintained well-nigh throughout their history.
To affirm that the Jews converted the Zoroastrians would ■simply be to assert that they re-converted the long since previously converted, or originally believing nation, once again to its own im- memorially inherited ancient creed, whereas everything indicates the surging course of a volume of influence the other way. "Affection." alone of itself, must have had something to do with the intricate psychic motions inevitably stirred within the one party or the other in the vivid situation. The signal Conqueror of their oppressors would be naturally the object of their enthusiasm, as would be indeed the leading personages in his garrisons. Think of the change which Cyrus occasioned in their circumstances at his advent, and see how they recalled it in Isaiah xliv-xlv. My claim in argu- ment is, therefore, for a very strong and completely surrounditig and enveloping later and supervening influence of the North-Persian One-Godism, Angelology, Immortality, Judgment, Resurrection, Millennium, Heaven and Recompense, upon the same slightly earlier developments in Israel during the Captivity.**
And let me also not be misunderstood here once again, and with regard to a principle which I hold to be crucial in all these dis- cussions— it is this. There are those, and many, who have indeed held and hold to the striking opinion, — so often here noticed to re- fute it, — that this entire scheme of Jewish God-unity, Angelology,
° The following remarks appeared under other wording in the July num- ber of this periodical, and they are repeated here to recall the previous pub- lication, and for the benefit of those who may not have dwelt upon them at their first appearance. They cannot be too emphatically impressed upon all well-meaning men. Readers will doubtless notice, as I trust they will also condone, the inevitable difference in the stylistic flow of the passage; another, but not necessarily "different," "spirit" animates them; many years have elapsed since the earlier essay was penned.
OUR OWN RELIGION IN ANCIENT PERSIA. 689
Immortality, Resurrection and Recompense, was not only subse- quently confirmed, defended and encouraged^ in a word "saved," by that of the North-Persian theology of the restorers, — a proposition which we may accept, — but that the Jews originally and first of all received it from the Persians in its full definite out-formed shape, that is to say, that they borrowed it as a whole, took it over bodily, either through dominant influence, or through charm.
Now I do not regard it as being at all a just or honorable thing to lay one illogical straw in the path of those many who have held, or still hold, to such a view, if they hold to it with honesty. And this fact affords me here at once the duty and the opportunity of stating what I believe to be an indispensable and necessary law of which I spoke, for that law regards just this point of mere mental initiative in the connection, with a supposed, or really, divinely inspired authority for any certain set of opinions either new, or on the other hand, long since cherished, and even hereditary. I hold that any so-called, or real, divine authority through inspiration, or the like, has little, if anything, to do zmth the fact that portions of the mental ideas themselves involved have been imparted through various sources wholly unconnected with the previous development of the faith concerned. This inspiration has, — as I contend, to the exact contrary of the opinion just refuted, — nothing whatever to do with the question of the mental channels through which the mere ideas themselves may have been imparted to the favored race of people, and much do I deplore the prevalence of a contrary impression. I would then not only concede, but urgently assert such an opinion as that just mentioned by me, and this as being essential to all thorough procedure in the searchings of comparative religion. I will not indeed here cite or repeat the passage to this effect from the original article. Let the reader who at all apprehends the truly solemn issues which may be here at stake, turn to the July number of The Open Court — with the statements there re-edited from the Nineteenth Century Review, — and let him re-study the whole lecture.
NOVALIS.
BY BERNHARD PICK.
r"*RTEDRICH von Hardenberg, better known by the name of Novalis, was born at Wiederstedt in Mansfeld territory, near Eisleben, May 2, 1772. His father, who had been a soldier in his youth, and still retained a liking for that profession, was at this time director of the Saxon Saltworks at Weissenfels. Tieck says, "He Avas a vigorous, r.nweariedly active man, of open, resolute character, a true German. His religiors feelings made him a member of the Herrnhut Communion, yet his disposition continued gay, frank, rugged and uncompromising." The mother also was distin- guished for her worth ; "a model of noble piety and Christian mild- ness,"virtues which her subsequent life gave ample opportunity for exercising. Friedrich, her second child and first son, was very delicate in childhood ; he was of a dreamy disposition and betrayed little spirit, and only the enthusiastic affection with which he loved his mother, distinguished him beyond his apparently more gifted brothers and sisters. In consequence of a violent bilious disease which befell him in his ninth year, his faculties seemed to awaken into proper life, and he became the readiest and most eager learner in all branches of his studies. In his eighteenth year, after a few months of preparation in the gymnasium at Eisleben, he repaired to Jena in 1790. Here he continued for three years, after which he spent one season in the Leipsic University, and another at Witten- berg. At Jena he studied philosophy under Reinhold, Fichte, and Schclling, who exerted a lasting influence upon his mind. At Leip- sic he became intimately connected with Friedrich Schlegel, one of the main leaders of the so-called Romantic school, while at Witten- berg, influenced by Friedrich von Schiller, who showed him the ideal side of practical activity, he studied chemistry, mathematics, history and jurisprudence, but especially Church history.
But the time had now arrived when studv must become sub-
NOVALIS.
691
ordinate to action, and what is called a profession had to be deter- mined upon. At the breaking out of the French Revolution, Novalis had been seized with a strong and altogether unexpected taste for military life ; however, the entreaties of his relatives ultimately prevailed, and it was settled that he should follow his father's Ime of occupation. In 1794 he gave up his studies at Wittenberg, and went to Tennstedt in Thuringia "to train himself in practical affairs under the Kreisamtmann Just."
Soon after his arrival at Tennstedt Novalis met Sophie von Kuehn in a country mansion of the neighborhood. She was then thirteen years of age, but the first glimpse of her fair and wonderfully lovely form was decisive for his whole life.
Tieck speaks of her in the following manner : "All persons that have known this wondrous loved one of our friend, agree in testifying that no description can express in what
692 THE OPEN COURT.
grace and celestial harmony this fair being moved, what beauty shone in her, what gentleness and majesty encircled her."
The same author says : ^ "The spring and summer of 1795 were the blooming time of Hardenberg's life ; every hour that he could spare from business he spent in Griiningen ; and in the fall of that same year he obtained the desired consent of Sophie's parents."
Unhappily, however, these halcyon days were of too short con- tinuance. Sophie fell dangerously sick, and the 19th of March, 1797, two days after her fifteenth birthday, she passed away. The death of his beloved became to Novalis the turning-point of his inner life. It reminded him that he also was no longer a citizen of this world, but of the other. To this period belong his Hymnen an die Nacht, or "Hymns to the Night," consisting of five prose poems interspersed, with verse, and a sixth entirely in verse. In these he wrote "of the vague longings or aspirations of the soul as higher and truer than all science and philosophy."
With reference to the "Hymns" Carlyle says of Novalis : "Nat- turally a deep, religious, contemplative spirit, purified also, as we have seen, by harsh affliction, and familiar in the 'sanctuary of sorrow,' he comes before us as the most ideal of all idealists."
Sophie von Hardenberg, the accomplished authoress of Fried- rich von Hardenberg, getiannt Novalis, eine Nachlese aus den Qnel- len des Familienarchivs (2d ed., Gotha, 1883), says: "Why do the 'Hymns to the Night' so peculiarly lay hold of the soul of the reader? It is because they show the transformation of the poet into a Christian. In these Hymns his deepest sorrow appears trans^ figured by a more than earthly splendor." And Haym, who has given an outline of the Life of Novalis in his important work on the Romantic School, says: "The 'Hymns to Night,' those profoundly sorrowful strains of rapturous lamentation and of fervent pain, can be compared with nothing that our classical poetry has produced."
These "Hymns to the Night" were written soon after the death of his sweetheart, in that period of deep sorrow, or rather of holy deliverance from sorrow, and Novalis himself regarded them as his most finished productions. They are of a strange, veiled, almost enigmatical character ; nevertheless, on closer examination, they appear to be in no wise lacking true poetic worth. There is a vastness, an immensity of idea ; a still solemnity reigns in them, a solitude almost as of extinct worlds. Here and there too some ray of light visits us in the deep void ; and we cast a glance, clear and wondrous, into the secrets of that mysterious soul. A full com-
NOVALIS. 693
mentary on the "Hymns to the Night" would be an exposition of Novalis's whole theological and moral creed ; for it lies recorded there, though symbolically, and in lyric, not in didactic language.
"Once when I was shedding bitter tears," these are the words of the third hymn, "when dissolved in pain my hope had melted quite away, and I stood solitary by the sun-parched mound that in its dark and narrow space concealed the form of my life ; solitary as none other had ever been ; pursued by unutterable anguish ; power- less ; with but one thought, and that of misery ; when looking around for help, forward I could not go, nor backward, but clung to a transient extinguished life with unutterable longing ; — lo, from the azure distance, down from the heights of my former blessedness, came a chill breath of dusk, and suddenly the bond of birth, the fetter of life was snapped asunder. Vanished the glory of earth and with it my lamenting; my infinite sadness melted into a new unfathomable world ; thou Inspiration of Night, Heaven's own Slumber, camest over me ; the scene rose gently aloft ; above it hovered my enfranchized new-born spirit. Into a cloud of dust had changed that grave ; through the cloud I beheld the transfigured features of my beloved one. In her eyes lay eternity ; I clasped her hand, and my tears flowed in a glittering stream. Millenniums passed into the distance, like thunder-clouds. On her neck I wept tears of rapture for this new life. — It was my first, mine only dream, and only since that time have I felt an everlasting changeless faith in the heaven of night, and in its sun, my beloved."
The sixth hymn, entitled Sehnsucht nach dem Tode (i. e., "Longing for Death"), begins:
"Hinunter in der Erde Schooss." It has been translated by Helen Lowe in her Prophecy of Balaam (1841) and reproduced in the Lyra Mystica (1864). With some alterations it reads thus :
"Into earth's bosom let me go, Far from light's realms descending! These stinging pains and this wild woe Portend a blissful ending. The narrow bark shall waft us o'er, Full soon to land on Heaven's calm shore.
"Praised be that everlasting night ; Praised, never-broken slumber; Day with its toils hath worn us quite, And cares too long encumber; Now vain desires and roamings cease, We seek our Father's House in peace.
694 THE OPEN COURT.
"What should we do in this cold world With Love and Truth so tender? Old things are in oblivion hurled, The new no gladness render : O sorrowful his heart and lone Who reverent loves the past and gone !
"Those ages past, whose purer race, High thoughts with ardor fired, When man beheld our Father's Face, And knew His Hand desired ; While many a simple mind sincere Resembled still His image clear.
"Those days of old, when spreading wide Ancestral trees were growing; When even children joyful died Their deep devotion showing; While though life laughed and pleasure spake, Yet many a heart for strong Love brake.
"Those times of yore when God revealed Himself in young life glowing; With early death His Passion sealed. His precious Blood bestowing; Nor turned aside the stings of pain Us nearer to Himself to gain.
"Through deepening mists how vainly gaze Our fond thoughts, backward turning; Nought in this dreary age allays The thirst within us burning : We must arrive our home within That ancient Holiness to win.
"What still delays our wished return? The Loved have long been sleeping ; Their graves our earthly journey's bourne- Enough of fear and weeping! With fruitless striving long annoyed The heart is weary, the world a void.
"Strange rapture ever new, unknown. Through the faint frame is thrilling: Hark ! the soft echo of our moan The hollow distance filling; Whence our loved ones toward us bend. Their breathings of desire ascend.
"Down to the loved bride we go. To Jesus, gone before us ;
NOVALIS. 695
Be of good comfort, mourners ; lo ! Grey twilight deepens o'er us ; A dream dissolves our chains unblest, Our Father, take us to His Rest."
A few months after writing his "Hymns to the Night," Novalis was cured of his morbid desire for death, and in the autumn of 1797 he went to Freiberg to enter the academy of mining, which flour- ished under the famous Werner, whom Novalis describes in his Lehrlinge zit Sais ("Pupils of Sais"), an unfinished philosophical romance. To this Freiberg period belong also his "Fragments," known as Bliithenstaiib (i. e.. Pollen of Flowers") ; Glauhen und Liebe ("Faith and Love"), together with some minor poetical pieces, which he called Bhinien (i. e., "Flowers") ; all of which were pub- lished in Schlegel's Athenaeum of 1798 and 1800, under the pseudo- nym "Novalis" then assumed by him.
About a year after the death of his first love, Novalis formed an acquaintance with Julie von Charpentier and became engaged to marry her, although his Sophie continued to be the center of his thoughts ; nay, as one departed, like Dante's Beatrice, she stood in higher reverence with him than when visible and near. Soon after this Novalis formed an acquaintance with the elder Schlegel, who, together with Tieck whom he first met in Jena, seems to have occa- sioned frequent interruptions in the young student's work. From Artern at the foot of the Kyffhauser Mountain, Novalis went very often to Jena to see his friends, and on one such occasion in the autumn of 1799, he read to them certain of his "Spiritual Songs," which were to form part of a Christian hymnbook, which he meant to accompany with a collection of sermons. About this time he composed the first volrme of his Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a sort of art-romance, intended as he himself said, to be an "Apotheosis of Poetry."
In 1800, Novalis, who for years had had a tendency to con- sumption, was taken with the disease in its most acute form : and in the days of his sickness he enjoyed communion with the writings of Lavater, Zinzendorf, and other mystical writers, as well as with the Biblical treasures. He died March 25, 1801, in the house of his parents, gently and to the music of the piano which he had asked his brother to play. "The expression of his face," says Tieck, "was very much like that of John the Evangelist, shown in Albert Diirer's
glorious engraving His friendliness, his geniality, made him
universally beloved He could be as happy as a child ; he jested
with cheerfulness, and permitted himself to become the object of
696 THE OPEN COURT.
jests for the company. Free from all vanity and pride of learning, a stranger to all affectation and hypocrisy, he was a genuine true man, the purest and most lovely embodiment of a noble immortal spirit."
In the second edition of his Reden uber Religion ("Discourses on Religion"), Schleiermacher speaks thus of Novalis: "I shall point you to a glorious example, which you all ought to know: to that divine youth who too early fell asleep, to whom all that his spirit touched became art, and whose whole perception of the world became immediately a great poem ; and whom although he has hardly done more in fact than utter his first strains, — you must associate with the richest poets, those few who are as profound as they are vital and clear. In him behold the power of the inspiration and reflective- ness of a pious soul ; and confess that when philosophers will be religious and seek God, like Spinoza, and artists will be pious and love Christ, like Novalis, then will the great resurrection be celebrated for both their worlds."
Novalis is best known in Protestant Germany by his "Spiritual Songs," which will always remain his lasting monument, since they are the key-note of his love for his Saviour ; and though they do not bear the stamp of church hymns, still they are adapted for singing in quiet solitude, even within the heart. Schlegel pronounced No- valis's songs "the divinest" things he ever wrote, and through the influence of Schleiermacher some have been included in the Berliner Gesangbuch. Schleiermacher quoted these hymns in the pulpit with deep emotion. Rothe, the greatest theologian since Schleiermacher, has written a sympathetic and appreciative essay on our poet in which he says : "Novalis is the type of a modern religious poet, and even of a Christian life that only in the future will attain its full realization." Pfleiderer — no friend of the Romantic School of piet- ism— says : "Nowhere is there any sweeter or more powerful ex- pression of that warm and hearty inwardness of Protestant mysti- cism which manifested itself in pietism, and exercised so precious and salutary an influence on the German people, then stiff and frozen from the hands of supernaturalists and rationalists alike, than in the "Spiritual Songs" of Novalis. They are the true Song of Songs of pious love for the Saviour, and express the whole gamut of its feelings from the deepest sorrow to the highest blessedness and joy. He who gave the Protestant Church these hymns, which belong to the most precious jewels of the religious poetry of all ages, he surely — Romanticism notwithstanding — was a good Evangelical Christian." {Philosophy of Religion, I, 274.)
NOVALIS. 697
Beyschlag, who has edited his "Spiritual Songs," dwells with deep admiration on "the charm of inward truth" and the spiritual elevation of these remarkable Christian hymns.
The publication of Carlyle's memorable essay on Novalis in 1829, contributed not a little to make "the chords of many an English heart thrill under the fascination and mysteriousness of his poetic thought," and as early as in 1841 we meet with an English translation of some of the poetical pieces of Novalis. "As a poet," says Carlyle, "Novalis is no less idealistic than as a philosopher. His poems are breathings of a high, devout soul, feeling always that here he has no home, but looking, as in clear vision to a 'city that hath foundations.' He loves external nature with a singular depth, nay, we might say, he reverences her, and holds unspeakable communings with her; for Nature is no longer dead, hostile matter, but the veil and mysterious garment of the Unseen ; as it were, the Voice with which the Deity proclaims to man. These two qualities, — his pure religious temper, and heartfelt love of nature, — bring him into true poetic relation both with the spiritual and the material world, and perhaps constitute his chief work as a poet."
It is to be regretted that the English essayist had so little to say of Novalis's "Spiritual Songs" which Schlegel and Tieck re- garded as his most important poetical productions. "They are Chris- tian hymns of great merit and deep fervent sincerity. They display the genius of the Romantic School in its purest and highest applica- tion, and are appropriately ranked with Schleiermacher's 'Discourses on Religion,' as regards their spiritual feeling and enduring worth."
MOHAMMEDAN PARALLELS TO CHRISTIAN
MIRACLES.
BY A. KAMPMEIER.
EDUARD MONTET, head professor of the Semitic department of Protestant theology in the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and author of an article on "Israel and Babylonian Civilization" in the October Open Court, has contributed to the July number of the Hibbert Journal under the title, "Les saints dans I'lslam," an im- portant French article which is very instructive not only for those who yet hold to the miracle idea in the old sense of the word, but also for those who absolutely deny that Jesus was a historical per- son, making him the concrete reflection or personification of some metaphysical or other speculation of which we hear so much these days, as also for those who hold that the miracle stories of the Bible (I especially refer here to those about Jesus) are products only of the imaginative mind of a later generation to glorify the master after he had gone. Professor Montet has not written his article at all with the tendency to give instruction in this respect, he simply states facts ; still, I think very valuable conclusions can be drawn from his article in the direction to which I refer. Just as the study of the modern Orient has thrown more light on some points of the literature of the Bible, as many a commentary has done, (for instance the knowledge of the wedding customs of the Syrian peasantry, the so-called "king's week," the wedding lasting seven days, has cleared up with one stroke all the remaining uncertainties regarding the com- position and meaning of Canticles,) so the article of Professor Mon- tet, based on studies and observations of certain aspects of modern Oriental life, seems to me to make clear to us why so much of the miraculous, sometimes of a very crass character, has crept into the Bible and especially into the Gospels. Of course the student of comparative religion can bring up parallels in other religions in
MOHAMMEDAN PARALLELS TO CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 699
many points to the miraculous in Judaism and Christianity, but in the study of Professor Montet, we have parallels from the same soil from which Christianity sprang, and parallels which completely cover the individual miraculous stories of the Bible and especially of the Gospels. Professor Montet, speaking of the saints of Islam, especially of the Marabouts of Morocco and Algiers, says that as in all religions that believe in the supernatural, so also in Islam the gift of miracles is not a matter belonging only to the saints of the past. Miracles belong to all times and living Marabouts perform them as well as those who have been dead for years or centuries. All kinds of miracles of any imaginable category are found in the legends about these saints of Islam. Professor Montet enumerates many such miracles and gives us examples in modern times of his- torical Marabouts about whom the strongest stories are told. He tells of the gift these men possess of being everywhere at the same hour on the same day; of the power of transporting themselves instantaneously to fabulous distances ; of walking on water ; of dry- ing up rivers ; of rendering themselves invisible ; of remaining a long time without drink and food ; of emitting rays and manifesting themselves under light or flames ; of healing diseases and awakening from the dead ; of driving out evil spirits ; of multiplying bread and other food to feed many persons ; of appearing after their death ; of speaking with departed saints who have been dead for centuries ; of transforming water into honey, etc. In reading this of Islamic saints, are we not reminded of the sudden disappearances of Jesus, of his being transported through the air by the Devil in the canonical Gospels and in the apocryphal Gospel to the Hebrews by the Holy Spirit, his mother (as he is called there) by means of one of his hairs; are we not reminded of Jesus walking on the water; of his power over the elements ; of his transfiguration and his conversation with the saints of the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah ; in short of every miraculous deed that is reported of him? And if Professor Montet informs rs that such things are told of living saints in Islam, will we continue to hold to the view that it was not until later Chris- tian generations and writers that these things were imagined and told of the glorified Lord? By this I do not mean to say that our Gospels were written very early or based on writings and notes col- lected during the life of Jesus or shortly after his death, but I wish to say that even in the lifetime of Jesus many of the wonderful stories concerning him may have become current, that were later taken up into our Gospels. If the modern fervent believer in Islam can believe in the wonderful powers of the living saint whom he actually adores.
700 THE OPEN COURT.
why was this not possible of the adorers of Jesus during his Hfetime? Montet tells us how dead and living saints in Islam are adored, though this seems inconsistent with rigid monotheism. The people kiss the edges of their dress, the stirrup where their foot has rested, the tracks of their steps, etc. The Gospels tell us how Jesus was adored during his lifetime, by those who believed in him, in such an Oriental fashion which we Occidentals sometimes thoroughly dis- like. But we Occidentals must try to put ourselves into the spirit and feelings of the Orientals, and then we shall have no difificulty in accepting Jesus as a historical personality and will give up the attempt to represent him as only a personification of the Logos-idea or a personification of the highest social ideal, drawn on the back- ground of the terrible social and economic conditions of his times, or any other personification. For all these procedures the Gospel writers surely do not show very much ability with the possible ex- ception of the writer of the Fourth Gospel, but who nevertheless as well as the Synoptics presupposed Jesus as an historical character. The Gospel writers did not have the material or the knowledge of modern scholars, who, after going through all the difficulties sur- rounding the Christ-problem, finally think it can only be solved by some elaborate theory, which shows that Jesus is only a shadowy personification. By this I do not at all deny that mythical characters can get into company with historical characters, for I know very well that the Sun-god, under the name of Siegfried, can get into com- pany with historical characters such as Attila, Theodoric the Great, and Burgundian kings in the German epic the Nibelungenlied. After reading Professor Montet's article I am more and more confirmed in my view that Jesus was a historical reality. When I hear what impossible miracles are ascribed to these saints of Islam and how they are adored, what enormous political, social, moral and religious influence they exert, how often they have played the eschatological role of the Mahdi, (the Mussulman Messiah), the personality of the end of the world who will preside at the Last Judgment — when I read all this, Jesus looms up to me more and more as one of those many Oriental saints who have played an influential part in the history not only of the Orient but of the world, ever since the times of the Old Testament under the Hebrew titles of Nabi (prophet). Roe (seer), or the Moslemic names of Dervish, Marabout and Mahdi ; though perhaps otherwise not very much was known of these men regarding their birth-place, their development, their parents, their common life and occupation, etc. If contemporaries of Jesus, as Philo, or other writers of the first century, as Josephus, do not mention Jesus,
MOHAMMEDAN PARALLELS TO CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 7OI
they have done no differently than other historians before and after them, who did not deign to make any mention of these strange men, who perhaps were too much of the commonplace and plebeian sort, though they gave the impetus to and were the nucleus of world-wide movements. These saints, as we see them in Montet's representa- tion, are realities, too often too real. The author classifies them into ascetical and non-ascetical, continent and incontinent, modest and lewd ones, but they are all realities, there is nothing shadowy about them ; they are of great influence, whether for good or evil. In general, the writer says, they are in North Africa the representatives of right against violence, of knowledge, or at least good sense, against ignorance.
MISCELLANEOUS.
NAZARENES AND SHRAMANAS.
BY DR. S. N. DEINARD.
The relation between Buddhism and the origin of Christianity, the in- fluence of the former upon the latter religion, their similarities and dissimilar- ities, are subjects that are receiving ever greater attention on the part of all earnest students interested in the two religions. The greater the advance made in these studies and investigations, the more clearly does it appear to unbiased minds how considerable a share Buddhism had in the origination of the new religion cradled in Palestine. Nay, some competent scholars and thinkers, among them Ernest de Bunsen, Arthur Lillie, and Rudolf Seydel, have in the last thirty years with great erudition and acumen elaborated learned theses to prove the Buddhist origin of Christianity.
I believe that a vast number of facts can be marshalled in support of the theory that Christianity in its origin was nothing else than Buddhism passed through the alembic of tlie Judeo-Essenic mind, and adapted to the Jewish Messianic expectations of that day. Jesus would then be no other than Buddha himself clothed in Jewish Messianic apparel.
The real personality and historical existence of Jesus are becoming more and more shadowy and matters of skeptical questionings when approached in a spirit of historical inquiry and with all theological preconceptions left behind. Contemporary history does not know him, and the Gospels are full of legend and m3'th. In his essay on "The Personality of Jesus and His Historical Re- lation to Christianity" {Monist, Vol. X, No. 4) Dr. Paul Carus says: "Jesus may in one respect rightly be regarded as a figure that is unknown to history." In the same essay he quotes Professor Cornill, who cannot be charged with destructive anti-Christian tendencies, as follows: "....The conclusion is un- avoidable that the date commonly assigned for the birth of Christ is wrong. The place of Jesus's birth is just as much a matter of uncertainty as the time; and so is the year of his death. ..." Dr. Chas F. Dole says in his recent book. What We Know About Jesus: "Moreover, thanks to an army of scholars and critics, dissecting every verse in the New Testament, we have arrived at such a point -of uncertainty as to the relative value of diflferent elements in the Synoptic Gospels, that every one practically may take what he likes, both of the narrative and teaching, and reject as unauthentic or improbable whatever seems to him incongruous or unworthy." And again : "How many clearly authentic utterances have we from Jesus? What can we rest upon? What exactly did he do? What did he say of himself and his mission? What com- mandments did he lay down, or what ordinances did he establish? What new ideas, if any, did he contribute? The answers to all these questions must be found, if at all, in the study of a few pages of the Synoptic Gospels. No one is sure or can possibly be sure, of these answers." (Pp. 9, 10.)
MISCELLANEOUS. 703
The problem that vexes the historian who must postulate a personality back of the mythical or legendary hero, viz. : If Jesus is altogether a myth, a fiction, who, then, is the hero who occupies the central place in the Christian traditions? is thus easily settled when Buddha is assigned the position.
The Essenic fraternities of Judea, the real founders of Christianity in its most primitive, ante-Pauline form were patterned after the Buddhist order of the Shramanas (ascetics) and Bhikshus (mendicant friars). The very names of these Esseno-Christian circles indicate that. For the earliest Christian societies or brotherhoods were the Nazarenes and Ebionites, known in Church history as the heretical sects of Judaizing tendencies. The very fact that they were all Jews and clung so tenaciously to Mosaic law and Jewish customs and traditions shows their priority.
What do the names Nazarenes and Ebionites signify? All recognize the connection of Ebionite with the Hebrew word "'"ZN. "Those who derive the name from the Hebrew word explain it in two ways : as applicable either to the poverty of the doctrines of the Ebionites, or to the poverty of their cir- cumsf^nces. Undoubtedly the name was applied to them with the former significance by their enemies, but it is more probable that they employed in a bad sense a name already existing, than that they coined it to suit their pur- pose. That the term was orioinally applied to the circumstances of the Ebion- ites seems the only probable supposition." {Enc. Brit., VH, 618.) Now, when we bear in mind that the Hebrew word "jVZN means not only "poor" but also "mendicant," "beggar," (comp. Deut. xv. 4, 7, 11), how can we fail to recognize in the Ebionites the Buddhist Bhikshus?
While the name Ebionite has thus from the beginning been quite correctly interpreted, the name of the Nazarenes has been wofully misunderstood and misinterpreted. Tt is supposed to mean the "followers of the man of Nazareth," i. e., Jesus. But there is absolutely no etymological connection between the name of that little town in Galilee, .Tli-, and Nazarene. Not only is the final ri of the name of the town not accounted for, but the ^ is in Greek versions of Hebrew words never represented by Z, but by S. Compare the names lo-aa/f, 4>a/)es, Ecrpw/i, ZaXf^uv, 'EaduK, all occurring in the genealogical list of Matthew, with their Hebrew originals. The Z in Grecianized Hebrew words always represents the T, as may be seen in the following names, Zapa, Bods, 'O^iav, "Axas, Efe/ctar, Zopo^d/SeX, Afwp, EXedfap, taken from the same list. Nazarenes, therefore, can be nothing else than the Hebrew """i**.;, or, with its Aramaic plural ending, "j^TTJ, Nazarites, Ascetics, or the Shramanas of the Buddhists.
That Paul, and after him other important factors and forces, gave the movement a new turn, and imprinted a new character upon it, so that the Nazarenes and Ebionites were degraded into mere heretical sects, and still later were entirely wiped out, does not in any way, I believe, militate against the theory of the Buddhist origin of Christianity.
BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES.
What Did the Lord Buddha Teach? By the Anagarika H. Dharmapala.
Calcutta, Maha-Bodhi Office, 1909 (2453). Pp. 50. Price, 4 annas.
This address was delivered at a convention of religions held in Calcutta
last April. The author is a Buddhist missionary, and is prominent among
Buddhists as the secretary of the Maha-Bodhi Society, and is known to all
704 THE OPEN COURT.
interested in comparative religion through the active part he took in the World's Parliament of Religions in 1893. The little pamphlet comprises a general summary of the tenets and characteristics of Buddhism. It is di- vided into nine chapters treating respectively of The Birth of Prince Sid- dhartha, The Great Renunciation of Nirvana by the Brahman Sumedha, The Attainment of Buddhahood, The Request of Brahma to Preach the Dharma, The Propagation of the Dharma, Buddhism and Caste, The God Idea in Buddhism, The Tolerant Spirit of Buddhism. A quotation from Max Miiller's Chips from a German Workshop, on "The Imperial Religion of Buddha," forms a pertinent appendix.
Revaluations: Historical and Ideal. By Alfred W. Benn. London: Watts, 1909. Pp. 320. Although Mr. Benn admits he has adapted his title from Nietzsche's term Umwertlmngen, and although he uses a dictum of the same author's as the motto of his book, he disclaims that he is a follower of "the great immoralist," to whom one of the later of his essays is devoted. In many cases these essays are protests against conventional judgments of men and times. "The Ethical Value of Hellenism" defends the morals of the ancient Greeks, and though the author is prepared to hear that his views are not new, he thinks it is true that they have never before been expressed in so many words. "The Alleged Socialism of the Prophets" is directed against what Mr. Benn considers se- rious misstatements made by Renan in his History of the People of Israel. In "What is Agnosticism?" the author does not expect to be able to correct the obscurity of the original meaning of the word which instead of gradual elucidation, has been the result of its constant popular use. But he will "at least have the satisfaction of putting on record in a somewhat more permanent form my protest against the misuse of what, whether it stands for truth or for error, serves at any rate to mark off in contradistinction from older forms of rationalism an interesting and, it may be, a permanent phase of specula- tion." Other subjects are "Pascal's Wager" and "Buckle and the Economics of Knowledge." What Mr. Benn' has to say he says in an attractive style which carries with it conviction and a general feeling that his views are the result of independent and judicious thought.
An Agnostic's Progress. By William Scott Palmer. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906. Pp. 169.
This book is based upon two articles which appeared under the same title in the Contemporary Review. The story of the author's progress as it was told in the articles is interrupted in the book by comments made in the light of present-day knowledege, because he considers that the later stages of a life go far to explain the earlier. His aim is avowedly "not literary, but friendly."
He says in his preface : "For me, the summing-up of the intellectual puzzle of life is that a reasonable and persevering man may open many locks with two keys. I label them for short, 'Evolution and Organic Unity,' and 'The City which hath Foundations.' They are very much alike ; but the first is of the iron of science and philosophy, and the other (which I have found a master key) is gold. Nearly the whole of the new matter in my book is concerned with the filing and using of these keys ; or, to drop metaphor, with my discovery and application of certain facts and principles which their labels represent."
Angelus Silesius
A Collection of Quaint Rhymes, translated in the Original Meter by
Dr. Paul Carus
Johannes Scheffler, a 17th Century German Mystic, better known as Angelus Silesius, deserves to be better known to English readers, as some of his verses though crudely written, possess beautiful sentiments, deeply religious and deeply philosophical. In the present edition, the German text accompanies the English translation.
Printed on Strathmore VeJJum. 170 Pages. Blue and Gold Edition, $1.00 net. {4 s. 6 d.)
Angelus Silesius anticipates Kantian idealism. Not only the center of the world and all its wealth lies within our- selves, but even time and space are de- clared to be functions of the soul. They are part of our "Weltbegrifl," i. e., our conception of the world.
The coincidence of the views of Angelus Silesius with those of Kant seems strange but both are apparently based on older traditions. Valentin Weigel propounded the same views before Angelus Silesius, and Swendenborg after him, yet before Kant. How far any one of these men has influenced his successors is a ques- tion that has caused much discussion.
It is interesting to note two passages in which Leibnitz speaks of Angelus Silesius, comparing his philosophical views to Spinoza's system, and this is perhaps natural, for we cannot doubt that a mystic poet would devote much thought to speculative philosophy.
"I have read Angelus Silesius with delight in, and admiration, alike for the matter and the cleverness of the translation. In the rendering. Dr. Carus has demon- strated, beyond the possibility of future denial, that, in addition to being a philos- opher, he is a poet. But, after all, I have always thought of a philosopher as a composite— scientist -|- poet."
C.J. Keyser, Department of J^athematics, Columbia Univ., J^eu/ York City. "
"Some of the world's choicest wisdom is hidden away in the sayings of forgotten seers and mystics. There is a strange leap of insight in some of these stanzas, and Dr. Carus has translated them into homely Anglo-Saxon that condenses the thought as the kernel is packed into a
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The Fragments of Empedocles
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Contains : ( i ) A philosophical, biographical, and historical in- troduction discussing Lao-Tze's system of metaphysics, its evolution, its relation to the philosophy of the world, Lao-Tze's life, and the literary history of his work; (2) Lao-Tze's Tao-Teh-King in the original Chinese; (3) An English translation; (4) The translitera- tion of the text, where every Chinese word with its English equiva- lent is given, with references in each case to a Chinese dictionary ; (5) Notes and Comments; (6) Index.
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WORKS OF PROFESSOR LAWRENCE H. MILLS
THE YASNA OF THE AVESTA
in continuous treatment upon the plan initiated in the FIVE ZARATHUSHTRIAN GATHAS, by L. H. Mills, Professor of Zend (Avesta) Philology in the University of Oxford, A STUDY OF YASNA I., with the Avesta, Pahlavi, Sanskrit, and Persian Texts. The Pahlavi is given in the original character and in transliteration, the Pahlavi and Sanskrit being translated into English here, the Avesta in S.B.E., XXXI, 1887; the Persian is itself an interlinear translation of the Pahlavi. The Avesta Text is re- constructional with copious notes. The Pahlavi is re-edited from the Journal of the German Oriental Society with all the MSS. collated, Bd. LVIL, Heft IV., 1903; the English translation is re-edited from the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for Oc- tober, 1904; Neryosangh's Sanskrit is re-edited from Spiegel with the additional colla- tion of five MSS., and for the first time translated. The Persian is from the Munich MSS. already partly edited in the Gathas. An Appendix contains the accented Sanskrit Equivalents of the Avesta Text by the Author, issued upon the plan adopted by him with Yasna XXVIII in Roth's Fcstgriiss, 1894, and with Yasna XLIV in the Acts of the Eleventh Congress of Orientalists held in Paris, 1897. Four photographic plates of MSS., with other illustrative matter are added, pp. 163, to be had of F. A. Brockhaus, in Leipsic, 12s. 6d., and of the Open Court Publishing Co., of Chicago ; Yasna I. is espe- cially valuable as it deals with the chief important questions of all the non-gathic Yasna. Also a Dictionary of the Gathic Language of the Zend Avesta, being Vol. III. of the Gathas, pp. 623-821, Leipsic, 1903, price 12s. 6d., with 120 additional pages soon ready, pp. 622+320, 994-fxlvii, 1909. £1. Forsale by Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago, $6.00.
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"Professor Mills's name stands foremost in the ranks of those who have explored the field of Avestic literature." The Rast Goftar, Bombay, April 18, 1909. — "Beyond question our leading authority now living, on the Gathas." The Nation, N. Y., Aug. 30, 1906. — (Mills (Earlier) of the Gathas) Das Ergebniss einer erstaunlichen Arbeit sehr mannig- faltiger Art — unser Verstandniss der Gathas machtig gefordert. Gott. Gelehr. An::. May 13, 1893. "Insbesondere von Mills, der diese schwierigen Gedichte in griindlichster Weise behandelt hat." Prcussisches Jahrbuch, 1897, Prof. Justi (Lexicographer). "Tons ceux qui s'occupent de I'interpretation des Gathas rendront hommage a I'immense labeur scientifique de M. Mills... son livre reste un instrument indispensable pour I'etude." Prof. James Darmesteter, Revue Critique, September 18, 1893.
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The Philosophical Review
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W. James, A Pluralistic Universe : by Professor James Seth. IV. Wundt, Volkerpsychologie : by Professor H. N. Gardiner. J. Clark Murray, A Handbook of Christian Ethics : by Professor Frank Thilly. G. S. Brett, The Philosophy of Gassendi : by Professor G. N. Dolson.
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IV. SUMMARIES OF PERIODICAL LITERATURE.
V. NOTES.
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Zarathushtra, Philo, the Achaemenids, and Israel
Being a Treatise upon the Antiquity and Influence of the Avesta, for the most part delivered as University Lectures.
By Dr. Lawrence H. Mills, Professor of Zend Philology in the University of Oxford, Translator of the Thirty-first Volume of the Sacred Books of the East, Author of the Five Zarathushtrian Gathas, etc. Part i. — Zarathushtra and the Greeks. Part II. — Zar- athushtra, THE AcHAEMENiDS AND IsRAEL. Composed at the re- quest of the Trustees of the Sir J. Jejeebhoy Translation Fund of Bombay. 8vo. Pp. xiii, 208; xiv, 252, two parts in one volume, cloth, gilt top, I4.00 net.
Shortly before the death of Professor Janves Darmesteter, of Paris, the great authority on the "Zend-Avesta," he surprised the general public by changing his views concerning the antiquity of the Zoroastrian literature, maintaining that the "Gathas" were largely influenced by the writings of Philo, and were written about the beginning of the Christian era. This change of view on his part led the Parsees of India to engage Dr. Mills to write a book upon the great antiquity of the *' A vesta." After several years of continuous devotion to the subject, the present volume is put forth as the result, and it amply meets all expectations. The antiquity of the Zoro- astrian literature is successfully maintained, and in such a manner that ordinary readers can appreciate the argument.
'*The Avesta in no sense depends upon the Jewish Greeks. On the con- trary, it was Philo who was in debt to it. He drank in his Iranian lore from the pages of his exilic Bible, or from the Bible-books which were then as yet detached, and which not only recorded Iranian edicts by Persian Kings, but were themselves half made up of Jewish- Persian history. Surely it is singular that so many of us who 'search the scriptures' should be unwilling to see the first facts which stare at us from its lines. The religion of those Persians, which saved our own from an absorption (in the Babylonian), is portrayed in full and brilliant colors in the Books of the Avesta, because the Avesta is only the expansion of the Religion of the sculptured edicts as modified. The very by-words, as we shall later see, are strikingly the same, and these inscriptions are those of the very men who wrote the Bible passages. This religion of the Restorers was beyond all question historically the first consistent form in which our own Eschatology appeared" (pt. i. pp. 206-207).
The conclusions come with great force in support of the genoineness and tuthenticity of the biblical references to Cyrus in the Old Testament, Students of the literature of the Captivity will find the volume invaluable. The facts now brought to li^t are such as the literary critics cannot afford to neglect.
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