CHAPTER XXV

MONOTHEISM

If we accept the principle of evolution as applied to religion -and the many different forms of religion seem to be best accounted for by the theory of evolution-it seems to follow that monotheism was developed out of polytheism. The process of evolution is from the simple and homogeneous to the more complex and highly organised, from lower forms of life to the higher. The implements, the language, the science, the art, the social and political institutions of civilised man, have all been slowly evolved out of much simpler and more savage forms: our language has been traced back to the common speech out of which all Aryan tongues have been evolved; our institutions to the tribal customs of the wandering Teutons; we can see and handle the bronze and flint implements actually used by our own forefathers. Whether, therefore, we treat religion as an institution, and apply to it the same comparative method as to legal and political institutions; or examine it as belief, in the same way as we trace the slow growth of scientific conceptions of the universe; the presumption is that, here as everywhere else, the higher forms have been evolved out of lower forms, and that monotheism has been developed out of a previous polytheism. Religion is an organism which runs through its various stages, animism, totemism, polytheism, monotheism. The law of continuity links together the highest, lowest, and intermediate forms. The form of the religious idea is ever slowly changing, the content remains the same always.

The presumption thus raised by the general process of evolution, that monotheism is developed out of polytheism,

is greatly strengthened by a survey of the general course of religion. Wherever we can trace its course, we find that every people which has risen above the most rudimentary stages has become polytheistic. This statement holds true of peoples in all quarters of the globe, in all stages of culture, in all ages of time. Since, then, all the peoples whose development is matter of direct observation have been polytheists, and since in the vast majority of cases we can directly observe the facts, the presumption, when we come to a people whose annals do not record a period of polytheism, is that the annals are, for whatever reason, faulty-not that the people is an exception to general law. The essence of the argument from induction is that it is an inference from cases which we can observe to others which are beyond our power of direct observation. Now there is only one people in this exceptional case—the Jewish people.

But we are not confined to mere presumptions—whether drawn from the general process of evolution or from the course of religious development in particular-to show that monotheism was developed out of polytheism. We have more direct evidence, of two kinds. First, in polytheism we can see forces at work which in more than one recorded case have brought it to the verge of monotheism. Next, in the Jewish monotheism we can trace apparent survivals of a previous polytheism.

The first step towards monotheism is taken when one deity is, as not unusually happens, conceived to be supreme over all the others, and the rest are but his vassals, his ministers or angels. This is due to the transference of the relations which obtain in human society to the community of the gods: they, like men, are supposed to have a king over them. The next step is the result of the constant tendency of the ancients to identify one god with another: Herodotus had no difficulty in recognising the gods of Greece under the names which the Egyptians gave to their own deities; Cæsar and Tacitus did not hesitate to identify the gods of Gaul and Germany with those of Rome. And this was the more easy and reasonable, because in many cases the gods in question were really the deification of some one and the same natural phenomenon-sun, moon, etc. But

the most powerful impulse to the movement was given by metaphysical speculation: all real things are equally real, the reality of all is identical, there is only one reality-God. From this it followed that the various gods, believed by the vulgar to be different beings, were but different aspects or manifestation of one deity, in whom and in whose personality all met and were merged. As The Book of the Dead1 puts it: "Osiris came to Mendes; there he met the soul of Ra; they embraced and became as one soul in two souls." The various forms in which the one real existence manifests himself are his own creation, whether they be material, human, or divine. Thus he, according to an expression of the Egyptian theologians, perpetually "creates his own members, which are the gods," or says, "I am the maker of heaven and of the earth. . . . It is I who have given to all the gods the soul which is within them. . . . I am Chepera in the morning, Ra at noon, Tmu in the evening." But though maker of the earth, the one reality is "a spirit more spiritual than the gods; the holy soul which clothes itself with forms, but itself remains unknown." 4

2

The

But while, on the one hand, we thus see polytheism approaching monotheism, on the other, we find among the monotheistic Jews survivals from a time when they apparently, like other Semites, were polytheists. constant relapses of the mass of the people into idolatrous worship, as revealed by the denunciations in Scripture against such backsliding, seem to indicate a slow upward movement from polytheism, which was not yet complete, and so far as it was successful was due to the lifting power of a few great minds, striving to carry a reluctant people with them to the higher ground of monotheism. More conclusive, however, is the evidence afforded by the religious institutions of the Jews and by the ritual of Jehovah. Every god has some animal or other which and which alone it is proper to sacrifice to him. This close connection between a sacred animal and the god to whom it is sacred and is sacrificed points, as we have seen, to the ultimate identity of the god and the animal, and

1 Ch. xvii., lines 42, 43.

'D'Alviella, Hibbert Lecture, 214.

Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lecture, 221, 222.

• D'Alviella, loc. cit., quoting Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient,* 279.

to an original totemism. From the nature of the sacrifice, therefore, e.g. whether animal or vegetable, we can infer something as to the origin of the god, whether he is descended from a plant or an animal totem. Further, if several kinds of animal are sacrificed, e.g. to Apollo, we can infer something as to the history of the god, namely, that under the one name, Apollo, several different gods have somehow come to be worshipped. When, then, we find that not only were animals sacrificed to Jehovah, but at the agricultural feast of Unleavened Bread a sheaf of corn played a prominent part, as in the agricultural rites at Eleusis; when we find that the Levitical law prescribed that oxen, sheep, goats, bread and wine should be offered at the sanctuary, the inference plainly seems to be that at the one altar a plurality of deities was worshipped, and the plural name "Elohim used of the one God seems to add the evidence of language to that afforded by the comparative study of institutions.

Finally, the same causes which were at work elsewhere to evolve monotheism out of polytheism were in existence amongst the Jews. There was the same tendency to identify one god with another; and this tendency was considerably reinforced by the Semitic habit of applying general terms expressing lordship, e.g. Baal, to their gods; so that the difficulty would rather be to distinguish one Baal from another than to believe them the same god. Among the Jews, too, there would be the same tendency to project human relations on to things divine, to conceive the divine personality by what was known of the human, to imagine the community of the gods as reflecting the social relations of men. Hence the growth of the monarchy in the Jewish state would naturally be reflected by the development of the idea of one God, Lord and King of all. "In Greece and Rome the kingship fell before the aristocracy; in Asia the kingship held its own, till in the larger states it developed into despotism, or in the smaller ones it was crushed by a foreign despotism. This diversity of political fortune is reflected in the diversity of religious development. . . . The tendency of the West, where the kingship succumbed, was towards a divine aristocracy of many gods, only modified by

a weak reminiscence of the old kingship in the not very effective sovereignty of Zeus; while in the East the national god tended to acquire a really monarchic sway. What is often described as the natural tendency of Semitic religion towards ethical monotheism, is in the main nothing more than a consequence of the alliance of religion with monarchy." 1

Thus the hypothesis that monotheism was evolved out of polytheism has much to be said in its favour. There is the presumption afforded by the nature of evolution in general, and by the development of religion in particular; there is the improbability that the one doubtful case of the Jews should be an exception to a general law; there are the apparent survivals even in Jewish monotheism of a previous polytheism; there is the constant tendency of polytheisms to pass into monotheism, and the evidence for the existence of that tendency amongst the Jews themselves. But before we can accept the hypothesis, we must hear what, if anything, can be said against it.

We may, to begin with, admit that religion may advance from lower stages to higher; that Christianity is a higher form of religion than Judaism; that within the limits of the Old Testament itself a "progressive revelation" may be traced; and that, following the same line back, we may by the scientific use of the imagination conjecture in the unrecorded past a form of monotheism more rudimentary than any otherwise known to science. We may further admit the principle of evolution as applied to religion, but then we shall find that the argument from analogy tells rather against than for the hypothesis that monotheism is evolved from polytheism. If we are to treat religion as an organism and as subject to the same laws as govern the evolution of organisms, we must decline to take the two highest existing species and say that either is descended from the other; for that would be to repeat the vulgar error of imagining that men are supposed to be descended from apes. Indeed, if we base ourselves on evolutionary principles, we may safely say that, whatever be the genesis and history of monotheism, one thing is certain, namely, that it cannot have been developed 1 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 74.