THE problem of the relation between civilizations and individuals has already engaged our attention in an earlier part of this Study, and we concluded that the institution which we call a society consists in the common ground between the respective fields of action of a number of individual souls; that the source of action is never the society itself but always an individual; that the action which is an act of creation is always performed by a soul which is in some sense a superhuman genius; that the genius expresses himself, like every living soul, through action upon his fellows; that in any society the creative personalities are always a small minority; and that the action of the genius upon souls of common clay operates occasionally through the perfect method of direct illumination but usually through the second-best expedient of a kind of social drill which enlists the faculty of mimesis (or imitation) in the souls of the uncreative rank and file and thereby enables them to perform ‘mechanically’ an evolution which they could not have performed on their own initiative. These conclusions were reached in the course of our analysis of growth, and in general they must clearly be true of the interaction of individuals and societies in all stages of a society’s history. What differences of detail are to be detected in these interactions when the society that we are considering has suffered its breakdown and is in process of disintegration?
The creative minority, out of which the creative individuals had emerged in the growth stage, has ceased to be creative and has sunk into being merely ‘dominant’, but the secession of the proletariat, which is the essential feature of disintegration, has itself been achieved under the leadership of creative personalities for whose activity there is now no scope except in the organization of opposition to the incubus of the uncreative ‘powers that be’. Thus the change from growth to disintegration is not accompanied by any extinction of the creative spark. Creative personalities continue to arise and to take the lead in virtue of their creative power, but they now find themselves compelled to do their old work from a new locus standi. In a growing civilization the creator is called upon to play the part of a conqueror who replies to a challenge with a victorious response; in a disintegrating civilization he is called upon to play the part of a saviour who comes to the rescue of a society that has failed to respond because the challenge has worsted a minority that has ceased to be creative.
Such saviours will be of diverse types, according to the nature of the remedy that they seek to apply to the social disease. There will be would-be saviours of a disintegrating society who will refuse to despair of the present and will lead forlorn hopes in an endeavour to convert the rout into a fresh advance. These would-be saviours will be men of the dominant minority, and their common characteristic will be their ultimate failure to save. But there will also be saviours from a disintegrating society who will seek salvation along one or other of the four alternative possible ways of escape which we have reconnoitred already. The saviours who belong to these other four schools will agree in ruling out the idea of trying to save the present situation. The saviour-archaist will try to reconstruct an imaginary past; the saviour-futurist will attempt a leap into an imagined future. The saviour who points the way to detachment will present himself as a philosopher taking cover behind the mask of a king; the saviour who points the way to transfiguration will appear as a god incarnate in a man.
The would-be saviour of a disintegrating society is necessarily a saviour with a sword, but the sword may be either drawn or sheathed. He may be laying about him with his naked weapon or he may be sitting in state with his blade out of sight in its scabbard as a victor who has ‘put all his enemies under his feet’. He may be a Heracles or a Zeus, a David or a Solomon; and though a David or a Heracles who never rests from his labours and dies in harness may be a more romantic figure than a Solomon in all his glory or a Zeus in all his majesty, the labours of Heracles and the wars of David would be aimless exertions if the serenity of Zeus and the prosperity of Solomon were not their objectives. The sword is only wielded in the hope that it may be used to such good purpose that eventually it will have no more work to do; but this hope is an illusion; ‘All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword’; and the verdict of a Saviour who proclaimed a kingdom not of This World received the rueful assent of one of the most cynical realists among nineteenth-century Western statesmen when, translating the Gospel into the idiom of his own time and place, he observed that ‘the one thing which you cannot do with bayonets is to sit on them’. The man of violence cannot both genuinely repent of his violence and permanently profit by it.
The classic saviours with the sword have been the captains and the princes who have striven to found, or succeeded in founding, or succeeded in rehabilitating, universal states; and although the passage from a time of troubles to a universal state is apt to bring with it so great an immediate relief that the successful founders of such states have often been worshipped as gods, universal states are at best ephemeral and if, by a tour de force, they obstinately outlive their normal span, they have to pay for this unnatural longevity by degenerating into social enormities which are as pernicious in their way as either the times of troubles which precede them or the interregna which follow their break-up.
The truth seems to be that a sword which has once drunk blood cannot be permanently restrained from drinking blood again any more than a tiger which has once tasted human flesh can be prevented from becoming a man-eater from that time onwards. The man-eating tiger is, no doubt, a tiger doomed to death; if he escapes the bullet he will die of the mange; yet, even if the tiger could foresee his doom, he would probably be unable to subdue his devouring appetite; and so it is with a society which has once sought salvation through the sword. Its leaders may repent of their butcher’s work; they may show mercy to their enemies, like Caesar, or demobilize their armies, like Augustus; and, as they ruefully hide the sword away, they may resolve in complete good faith that they will never draw it again except for the assuredly beneficent and therefore legitimate purpose of preserving peace against criminals still at large within their borders or against barbarians still recalcitrant in the outer darkness; yet, though their fair-seeming Pax Oecumenica may stand steady on its grim foundations of buried sword-blades for a hundred or two hundred years, time sooner or later will bring their work to naught.
Can the Jovian ruler of a universal state succeed in curbing that insatiable lust for more and more conquests which was fatal to Cyrus? And, if he cannot resist the temptation debellare superbos, can he at any rate bring himself to act on the Virgilian counsel parcere subjectis? When we apply this pair of tests to his performance we shall find that he seldom succeeds for long in living up to his own good resolutions.
If we choose to deal first with the conflict between the alternative policies of expansion and non-aggression in the relations of a universal state with the peoples beyond its pale, we may begin with the Sinic example, for there could be no more impressive declaration of a determination to sheathe the sword than Ts’in She Hwang-ti’s building of the Great Wall along the border line of the Eurasian Steppe. Yet his good resolution to refrain from stirring up the Eurasian hornets’ nest was broken less than a hundred years after his death by the ‘forward policy’ of his Han successor Wuti. In the history of the Hellenic universal state the policy of moderation laid down by Augustus was broken by Trajan’s attempt to conquer the Parthian Empire. The price of a momentary advance from the Euphrates to the foot of Zagros and the head of the Persian Gulf was the imposition of an intolerable strain upon the Roman Empire’s resources, and it took all the prudence and ability of Trajan’s successor Hadrian to liquidate the formidable legacy which Trajan’s sword had bequeathed to him. Hadrian promptly evacuated all his predecessor’s conquests; yet he was able to restore only the territorial, not the political, status quo ante bellum.
In the history of the Ottoman Empire Mehmed the Conqueror (A.D. 1451-81) deliberately limited his ambitions to the enterprise of making his Pax Ottomanica conterminous with the historic domain of Orthodox Christendom, exclusive of Russia, and resisted all temptations to encroach on the adjoining domains of Western Christendom and Iran. But his successor Sellm the Grim (A.D. 1512-20) broke Mehmed’s self-denying ordinance in Asia, while Sellm’s successor Suleyman (A.D. 1520-66) committed the further and more disastrous error of breaking the same self-denying ordinance in Europe as well. In consequence the Ottoman Power was henceforth worn down by the grinding friction of a perpetual warfare on two fronts against adversaries whom the ‘Osmanli could repeatedly defeat in the field but could never put out of action. And this perversity came to be so deeply ingrained in the statecraft of the Sublime Porte that even the collapse that followed Suleyman’s death did not produce any lasting revulsion in favour of Mehmed’s moderation. The squandered strength of the Ottoman Empire had no sooner been recruited by the statesmanship of the Kopriilus than it was expended by Qara Mustafa on a new war of aggression against the Franks which was intended to carry the Ottoman frontier to the Rhine. Though he never came within sight of this objective, Qara Mustafa did emulate Suleyman’s feat of laying siege to Vienna. But in A.D. 1682-3, as in A.D. 1529, the boss of the Danubian carapace of Western Christendom proved to be too hard a nut for Ottoman arms to crack; and on this second occasion the ‘Osmanlis did not fail before Vienna with impunity. The second Ottoman siege evoked a Western counter-attack which continued, with no serious check, from 1683 to 1922, by which date the ‘Osmanlis had been bereft of the whole of their empire and confined once more to their Anatolian homelands.
In thus wantonly stirring up a hornets’ nest in Western Christendom Qāra Mustafā, like Suleyman before him, was committing the classic error of Xerxes when the successor of Darius launched his war of aggression against Continental European Greece and thereby provoked the Hellenic counter-attack which immediately tore away from the Achaemenian Empire the Greek fringe of its dominions in Asia and which ultimately led to the destruction of the Empire itself, when the work begun by Themistocles the Athenian was completed by Alexander of Macedon. In the history of the Hindu World the Mughal Rāj produced its Xerxes in the person of Awrangz
b (A.D.
1659-1707), whose unsuccessful efforts to assert his authority over the Mahārāshtra by force of arms provoked a Marāthā counter-attack which ultimately destroyed the authority of Awrangz
b’s successors in their metropolitan provinces on the plains of Hindustan.
It will be seen that, on the first of our two tests of ability to sheathe the sword, the rulers of universal states do not make a very good showing; and, if we now pass from the test of non-aggression against people beyond the pale to our second test of toleration towards people within it, we shall find that such rulers fare hardly better in this second ordeal.
The Roman Imperial Government, for example, made up its mind to tolerate Judaism and abode by this resolution in the face of severe and repeated Jewish provocations; but its forbearance was not equal to the more difficult moral feat of extending this tolerance to the Jewish heresy that had set itself to convert the Hellenic World. The element in Christianity which was intolerable to the Imperial Government was the Christians’ refusal to accept the Government’s claim that it was entitled to compel its subjects to act against their consciences. The Christians disputed the sword’s prerogative, and the eventual victory of the Christian martyr’s spirit over the Roman ruler’s sword bore out Tertullian’s triumphantly defiant boast that Christian blood was Christian seed.
The Achaemenian Government, like the Roman, set itself in principle to rule with the consent of the governed and was likewise only partially successful in living up to this policy. It succeeded in winning the allegiance of the Phoenicians and the Jews, but it failed in the long run to conciliate either the Egyptians or the Babylonians. The ‘Osmanlis had no better success in conciliating their ra’iyeh, notwithstanding the wideness of the scope of the cultural, and even civil, autonomy that they conceded to them in the millet system. But the theoretical liberality of the system was marred by the high-handedness with which it was applied. The perilously practical fashion in which the ra’Iyeh displayed their disloyalty as soon as a series of Ottoman reverses afforded an opening for treachery gave the successors of Selim the Grim some reason to regret that this ruthless man of action had been deterred (if the tale be true) by the joint exertions of his Grand Vizier and his Sheykh-al-Islam from carrying out a plan to exterminate the Orthodox Christian majority of his subjects— as he did in fact exterminate an ImamI Shl’i minority. Again, in the history of the Mughal Raj in India, Awrangzib departed from the policy of toleration towards Hinduism which Akbar had bequeathed to his successors as the most important of their arcana imperii, and this departure was swiftly requited by the downfall of the Empire.
These examples may suffice to reinforce the conclusion that the Saviour with the Sword fails to save.
The Time Machine is the title of one of the early quasi-scientific romances of Mr. H. G. Wells. The conception of time as a fourth dimension was by then already familiar. The hero of Mr. Wells’s romance invents a kind of motor-car—these were also a novelty at the time—in which he can travel forwards and backwards through space-time at will, and he uses his invention to pay a succession of visits to far-distant stages of the world’s history, from all of which, except the last, he safely returns to tell his traveller’s tale. The Wellsian fairy-story is a parable of the historic tours de force of those archaist and futurist saviours who, regarding the present condition and prospects of their societies as irreparable, seek salvation in a return to an idealized past or in a plunge into an idealized future. We need not linger long over this spectacle, for we have already analysed and exposed the futility and destructiveness of both archaism and futurism. In a word, these time-machines—conceived not as Wellsian cars for solitary explorers but as ‘omnibuses ‘(in a sense more exact than the popular usage) for whole societies—invariably fail to work, and this failure goads the would-be saviour into casting aside his time-machine, taking to the sword, and thereby condemning himself to the frustration that lies in wait for the undisguised ‘saviour with the sword’ whose case we have already examined. This tragic transformation from an idealist into a man of violence overtakes both the saviour-archaist and the saviour-futurist.
In the Western World in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era the fundamental gospel of archaism was condensed into a sentence in the opening of Rousseau’s Le Contrat Social: ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.’ Rousseau’s most famous disciple was Robespierre, popularly accounted the principal author of the French ‘Reign of Terror’ of A.D. 1793-4. The harmless professorial cranks who spent the nineteenth century of the Christian Era in idealizing the primitive pagan ‘Nordic’ race cannot entirely disclaim responsibility for the Nazi terror of our own day. We have seen already how the pacific exponent of an archaizing movement may defeat his own intentions by preparing the way for an aggressive and violent successor, as Tiberius Gracchus proved the harbinger of his brother Gaius and thereby ushered in a century of revolution.
The difference between archaism and futurism might be expected to be as plain as the difference between yesterday and to-morrow, but it is often difficult to decide in which category a given movement or a given saviour should be placed, since it is in the nature of archaism to defeat itself by breaking down into futurism in pursuing its delusion that there can be an ‘as you were’ in history. There cannot, of course, be any such thing, for the mere fact that you had gone on and then returned would make the place to which you had returned—if you could return— a different place. The disciples of Rousseau might precipitate their revolution by idealizing the ‘state of nature’, admiring ‘the noble savage’ and deploring ‘the arts and sciences’, but the consciously futurist revolutionaries—a Condorcet, for example, who drew his inspiration from a doctrine of ‘progress’—were assuredly more clear-sighted. The outcome of a would-be archaist movement will always be a new departure. In all such movements the archaist element is merely the coating of an essentially futurist pill, whether it be laid on innocently by ‘wishful thinkers’ or artfully by adepts in propaganda. In any case the pill is more readily swallowed if the coating is there; for the naked future presents all the terrors of the unknown, whereas the past can be represented as a long-lost cosy home from which the disintegrating society has strayed into the wilderness of the present. Thus, in the inter-war years, the British advocates of a certain kind of socialism came forward as archaistically minded idealizers of the Middle Ages and presented their programme under the title of Guild Socialism, with the suggestion that what was required was a revival of something like the medieval guild system. Yet we may be sure that, if the programme had been carried out, the results would have astonished any time-machine traveller from the Western Christendom of the thirteenth century.
It is evident that the archaist-futurist saviours fail as signally as the saviours with the sword to ‘deliver the goods’. There is no more salvation in mundane revolutionary Utopias than there is in universal states.
A means of salvation that does not invoke the aid of either a ‘time machine’ or a sword was propounded in the first generation of the Hellenic time of troubles by the earliest and greatest of Hellenic adepts in the art of detachment.
‘There is no hope of a cessation of evils for the states [of Hellas]— and, in my opinion, none for mankind—except through a personal union between political power and philosophy and a forcible disqualification of those common natures that now follow one of these two pursuits to the exclusion of the other. The union may be achieved in either of two ways. Either the philosophers must become kings in our states or else the people who are now called kings and potentates must take—genuinely and thoroughly—to philosophy.’ 1
In suggesting this cure, Plato is at pains to disarm, by forestalling, the plain man’s criticism. He introduces his proposal as a paradox which is likely to provoke the ridicule of the unphilo-sophic. Yet if Plato’s prescription is a hard saying for laymen— be these kings or commoners—it is an even harder saying for philosophers. Is not the very aim of philosophy a detachment from life? and are not the pursuits of individual detachment and social salvation incompatible to the point of being mutually exclusive? How can one set oneself to salvage a City of Destruction from which one is rightly struggling to be free?
In the sight of the philosopher the incarnation of self-sacrifice— Christ Crucified—is a personification of folly. Yet few philosophers have had the courage to avow this conviction and fewer still to act upon it. For the adept in the art of detachment has to start as a man encumbered with the common human feelings. He cannot ignore in his neighbour a distress of which his own heart gives the measure, or pretend that a way of salvation which is commended by his own experience would not be equally valuable to his neighbour if only it were pointed out to him. Is our philosopher, then, to handicap himself by giving his neighbour a helping hand? In this moral dilemma it is vain for him to take refuge in the Indie doctrine that pity and love are vices or in the Plotinian doctrine that ‘action is a weakened form of contemplation’. Nor can he be content to stand convicted of the intellectual and moral inconsistencies of which the Stoic fathers are roundly accused by Plutarch, who quotes texts in which Chrysippus condemns the life of academic leisure in one sentence and recommends it in another within the limits of a single treatise. 1 Plato himself decreed that the adepts who had mastered the art of detachment should not be permitted to enjoy for ever afterwards the sunlight into which they had so hardly fought their way. With a heavy heart he condemned his philosophers to redescend into the Cave for the sake of helping their unfortunate fellow-men who were still sitting ‘fast bound in misery and iron’; and it is impressive to see this Platonic commandment being dutifully obeyed by Epicurus.
The Hellenic philosopher whose ideal was a state of unruffled imperturbability (oTa/>o£ia) was apparently the one and only private individual before Jesus of Nazareth to acquire the Greek title of Saviour (aarn/jp). That honour was normally a monopoly of princes and a reward for political and military services. Epi-curus’s unprecedented distinction was the unsought consequence of the cool-headed philosopher’s good-humoured obedience to an irresistible call of the heart, and the fervour of the gratitude and admiration with which Epicurus’s work of salvation is extolled in the poetry of Lucretius makes it clear that, in this case at least, the title was no empty formality but was the expression of a deep and lively feeling which must have been communicated to the Latin poet through a chain of tradition descending from Epicurus’s own contemporaries who had known him and adored him in the flesh.
The paradoxical history of Epicurus brings out the grievousness of the burden which the philosophers have to take upon their shoulders if, in setting themselves to carry out Plato’s prescription, they follow the alternative of themselves becoming kings; and it is therefore not surprising to find that Plato’s other alternative— of turning kings into philosophers—has proved highly attractive to every philosopher with a social conscience, beginning with Plato himself. No less than three times in his life Plato voluntarily, though reluctantly, emerged from his Attic retreat and crossed the sea to Syracuse in the hope of converting a Sicilian despot to an Athenian philosopher’s conception of a prince’s duty. The results composed a curious but, we must regretfully admit, entirely unimportant chapter in Hellenic history. There have been a variety of historic sovereigns who have occupied their spare time, more or less seriously, in taking counsel with philosophers, the examples most familiar to the Western student of history being the so-called ‘Enlightened Despots’ of an eighteenth-century Western World who amused themselves by alternately pampering and quarrelling with a miscellaneous company of French philosophes ranging from Voltaire downwards. But we shall hardly find a satisfactory saviour in Frederick II of Prussia or in Catherine II of Russia.
There are also cases of notable rulers who have acquired a very genuine philosophy from teachers who had died generations earlier. Marcus Aurelius proclaims his debt to his tutors Rusticus and Sextus, but there can be little doubt that these otherwise unknown schoolmasters were merely vehicles of the philosophy of the great Stoics of the past and more particularly of Panaetius, who lived in the second century B.C., three hundred years before Marcus’s day. The Indie Emperor Acoka was the disciple of the Buddha, who had died two hundred years before his accession. The state of the Indie World under Acoka and of the Hellenic World under Marcus might be held to bear out Plato’s contention that ‘social life is happiest and most harmonious when those who have to rule are the last people in the world who would choose to be rulers’. But their achievement perished with them. Marcus himself brought his philosophic labours to naught by selecting as his successor the son of his loins, in breach of a constitutional practice of adoption which Marcus’s predecessors had followed faithfully, with unfailing success, for almost a century. As for the personal holiness of Acoka, this did not save the Mauryan Empire in the next generation from collapsing at a blow from the fist of the usurper Pushyamitra.
Thus the philosopher-king turns out to be incapable of saving his fellow-men from the shipwreck of a disintegrating society. The facts speak for themselves; but we have still to ask whether they provide their own explanation. If we look a little farther, we shall find that they do.
The explanation is, indeed, implicit in the passage of The Republic in which Plato introduces the figure of the prince who is a born philosopher. After putting forward his postulate that, some time and somewhere, at any rate one such philosopher-prince will live to ascend his father’s throne and will there make it his business to translate his own philosophical principles into political practice, Plato eagerly jumps to the conclusion that ‘a single one such ruler would suffice—if he could count on the consent of the governed—to carry out in full a programme that looks quite impracticable under existing conditions’. And the conductor of the argument then goes on to explain the grounds of his optimism. ‘Supposing’, he continues, ‘that a ruler were to enact our ideal laws and introduce our ideal social conventions, it would assuredly not be beyond the bounds of possibility that his subjects should consent to act in accordance with their ruler’s wishes.’ 1
These final propositions are evidently essential to the success of Plato’s scheme, but they are no less manifestly dependent upon the enlistment of the faculty of mimesis; and we have already observed that this resort to a kind of social drill is a short cut which is apt to bring those who take it to destruction instead of expediting their journey towards their goal. The inclusion of any element of coercion—mental or physical—in the social strategy of the philosopher-king would therefore perhaps suffice of itself to account for his failure to bring to pass the salvation which he professes to offer; and, if we examine his strategy more closely from this standpoint, we shall find that his use of coercion is peculiarly gross. For, though Plato is at pains to give his philosopher-king’s government the benefit of the consent of the governed, it is evident that there would be no purpose in the philosopher’s surprising personal union with the potentate who is to be an absolute monarch unless the despot’s power of physical coercion is to be held in readiness for use in case of necessity; and the case in point is as likely to arise as it is obvious to foresee.
‘The nature of the peoples is inconstant, and it is easy to persuade them of a thing, but difficult to hold them to that persuasion. Accordingly it is expedient to be so equipped that, when their belief gives out, one will have it in one’s power to make them believe by force.’ 2
In these wholesomely brutal words Machiavelli brings out a sinister feature in the strategy of the philosopher-king which Plato discreetly keeps in the background. If the philosopher-king finds that he cannot get his way by charm, he will throw away his philosophy and take to the sword. Even Marcus Aurelius resorted to this weapon against the Christians. Once again we are presented with the shocking spectacle of Orpheus transformed into a drill-sergeant. In fact, the philosopher-king is doomed to fail because he is attempting to unite two contradictory natures in a single person. The philosopher stultifies himself by trespassing on the king’s field of coercion, while conversely the king stultifies himself by trespassing on the philosopher’s field of passionless contemplation. Like the saviour with the ‘time machine’, who in his pure form is likewise a political idealist, the philosopher-king is driven into proclaiming his own failure by drawing a weapon which convicts him too of being a ‘saviour with the sword’ in disguise.
We have now examined three different epiphanies of the creative genius who is born into a disintegrating society and who bends his powers and energies to the task of coping with the challenge of social disintegration, and we have found that in each case the supposed way of salvation leads only to disaster, immediate or ultimate. What conclusion are we to draw from this series of disillusionments? Do they signify that any and every attempt to bring salvation to a disintegrating society is doomed to end in destruction if the would-be saviour is merely a human being? Let us remind ourselves of the context of the classic statement of the truth that we have so far been empirically verifying. ‘All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword’ are the words of a saviour who gives this as his reason for commanding one of his followers to sheathe again a sword which this henchman has just drawn and used. Jesus of Nazareth first heals the wound which Peter’s sword has inflicted and then voluntarily delivers his own person up to suffer the last extremes of insult and torment. Moreover his motive for refusing to take the sword is not any practical calculation that, in the particular circumstances, his own force is no match for his adversaries’. He believes, as he afterwards tells his judge, that, if he did take the sword, he could be certain of winning, with ‘twelve legions of angels’, all the victory that swordsmanship can procure. Yet, believing this, he still refuses to use the weapon. Rather than conquer with the sword he will die on the Cross.
In choosing this alternative in the hour of crisis, Jesus is breaking right away from the conventional line of action taken by the other would-be saviours whose conduct we have studied. What inspires the Nazarene saviour to take this tremendous new departure? We may answer this question by asking, in turn, what distinguishes him from those other saviours who have refuted their own pretensions by turning swordsmen. The answer is that these others knew themselves to be no more than men, whereas Jesus was a man who believed himself to be the Son of God. Are we to conclude, with the psalmist, that ‘salvation belongeth unto the Lord’, and that, without being in some sense divine, a would-be saviour of mankind will always be impotent to execute his mission? Now that we have weighed and found wanting those soi-disant saviours who have avowedly been mere men, let us turn, as our last recourse, to the saviours who have presented themselves as gods.
To pass in review a procession of saviour-gods, with an eye to appraising their claims to be what they profess to be and to do what they profess to do, might seem an unprecedently presumptuous application of our habitual method of empirical study. That, however, will not prove to be our difficulty in practice. For we shall find that all but one of the figures in our procession, whatever their claims to godhead, can make only the most dubious claims to manhood. We shall move among shadows and abstractions, Berkleian unrealities whose only esse is percipi, ‘persons’ on whom must be passed the sentence which modern research has passed on that ‘Lycurgus, king of Sparta’ whom our ancestors deemed as solid and datable a reality as Solon of Athens —that he was ‘not a man; only a god’. However, let us proceed. Let us start at the lower end of the scale with the deus ex machina and try to ascend from this perhaps infra-human level towards the ineffable height of the deus crucifixus. If dying on the Cross is the utmost extreme to which it is possible for a man to go in testifying to the truth of his claim to divinity, appearing on the stage is perhaps the least trouble that an acknowledged god can take in support of his claim to be also a saviour.
On the Attic stage in the century which saw the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization the deus ex machina was a veritable godsend to embarrassed playwrights who, in an already enlightened age, were still constrained by convention to take their plots from the traditional corpus of Hellenic mythology. If the action of the play had in consequence become caught, before the natural close, in some insoluble tangle of moral enormities or practical improbabilities, the author could extricate himself from the toils in which he had become involved through one of the conventions of his art by resorting to another of them. He could produce a god ‘in a machine’, suspended aloft or wheeled upon the stage, to effect a denouement. This trick of the Attic dramatist’s trade has given scandal to scholars, for the solutions of human problems propounded by these Olympian interventionists neither convince the human mind nor appeal to the human heart. Euripides is a particularly gross offender in these respects, and it has been suggested by one modern Western scholar that Euripides never brings on a deus ex machina without having his tongue in his cheek. According to Verrall, Euripides ‘the Rationalist’ (as he calls him) has made this traditional convention serve his own purposes by using it as a screen for sallies of irony and blasphemy upon which he could hardly have ventured with impunity if he had come out into the open. This screen is ideal in texture, since it is impervious to the hostile shafts of the poet’s ‘low-brow’ adversaries, while it is transparent to the knowing eyes of his fellow-sceptics.
‘It is not too much to say that on the Euripidean stage whatever is said by a divinity is to be regarded, in general, as ipso facto discredited. It is in all cases objectionable from the author’s point of view, and almost always a lie. “By representing the deities he persuaded men that they did not exist.” 1
Less remote from the grandeur and misery of the human lot, and far more worthy of admiration, are the demigods born of human mothers by a superhuman sire—a Heracles, an Asklepios, an Orpheus, to mention only Greek examples. These half-divine beings in human flesh seek by their labours in various ways to lighten the lot of man, and in the punishments inflicted on them by jealous gods they share the sufferings of the mortals whom they serve. The demigod—and this is his glory—is subject, like man, to death, and behind the figure of the dying demigod there looms the greater figure of a very god who dies for different worlds under diverse names—for a Minoan World as Zagreus, for a Sumeric World as Tammuz, for a Hittite World as Attis, for a Scandinavian World as Balder, for a Syriac World as Adonis, for a Shi’I World as Husayn, for a Christian World as Christ.
Who is this god of many epiphanies but only one Passion? Though he makes his appearance on our mundane stage under a dozen different masks, his identity is invariably revealed in the last act of the tragedy by his suffering and death. And if we take up the anthropologist’s divining-rod we can trace this never varying drama back to its historical origins. ‘He shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of the dry ground.’ 2 The Dying God’s oldest appearance is in the role of the iviavros SalfAwv, the spirit of the vegetation that is born for man in the spring to die for man in the autumn. Man profits by the nature-god’s death and would perish if his benefactor did not die for him perpetually. 3 ‘He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him and with his stripes we are healed.’ 4 But an outward achievement, however imposing and however dearly paid for, cannot reveal the mystery at the heart of a tragedy. If we are to read the secret, we must look beyond the human beneficiary’s profit and the divine protagonist’s loss. The god’s death and the man’s gain are not the whole story. We cannot know the meaning of the play without also knowing the protagonist’s circumstances and feelings and motives. Does the Dying God die by compulsion or by choice? With generosity or with bitterness? Out of love or in despair? Till we have learnt the answers to these questions about the spirit of the saviour-god, we can hardly judge whether this salvation will be merely a profit for a man through a god’s equivalent loss or whether it will be a spiritual communion in which man will repay, by acquiring (‘like a light caught from a leaping flame’), 1 a divine love and pity that have been shown to man by God in an act of pure self-sacrifice.
In what spirit does the Dying God go to his death? If, with this question on our lips, we address ourselves once more to our array of tragic masks, we shall see the perfect separating itself from the imperfect sacrifice. Even in Calliope’s lovely lamentation for the death of Orpheus there is a jarring note of bitterness which strikes, and shocks, a Christian ear.
‘Why do we mortals make lament over the deaths of our sons, seeing that the Gods themselves have not power to keep Death from laying his hand upon their children?’ 2
What a moral to read into the Dying God’s story! So the goddess who was Orpheus’ mother would never have let Orpheus die if she could have helped it. Like a cloud that veils the Sun, the Hellenic poet’s admission takes the light out of Orpheus’ death. But Antipater’s poem is answered in another and greater masterpiece :
‘For God so loved the World that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.’
When the Gospel thus answers the elegy, it delivers an oracle. ‘The One remains, the many change and pass.’ 3 And this is in truth the final result of our survey of saviours. When we set out on this quest we found ourselves moving in the midst of a mighty host, but, as we have pressed forward, the marchers, company by company, have fallen out of the race. The first to fail were the swordsmen, the next the archaists and futurists, the next the philosophers, until only gods were left in the running. At the final ordeal of death, few, even of these would-be saviour gods, have dared to put their title to the test by plunging into the icy river. And now, as we stand and gaze with our eyes fixed upon the farther shore, a single figure rises from the flood and straightway fills the whole horizon. There is the Saviour; ‘and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand; he shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied.’ 4