Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and MeaningCarpenter, Edward
Religion
Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning
Carpenter, Edward
Christianity and other religions; Mythology; Paganism; Religion
From the consideration of the world-wide belief in a past Golden Age,
and the world-wide practice of the Eucharist, in the sense indicated
in the last chapter, to that of the equally widespread belief in a
human-divine Saviour, is a brief and easy step. Some thirty years ago,
dealing with this subject, (1) I wrote as follows:--"The true Self of
man consists in his organic relation with the whole body of his fellows;
and when the man abandons his true Self he abandons also his true
relation to his fellows. The mass-Man must rule in each unit-man, else
the unit-man will drop off and die. But when the outer man tries to
separate himself from the inner, the unit-man from the mass-Man, then
the reign of individuality begins--a false and impossible individuality
of course, but the only means of coming to the consciousness of the true
individuality." And further, "Thus this divinity in each creature,
being that which constitutes it and causes it to cohere together, was
conceived of as that creature's saviour, healer--healer of wounds of
body and wounds of heart--the Man within the man, whom it was not only
possible to know, but whom to know and be united with was the alone
salvation. This, I take it, was the law of health--and of holiness--as
accepted at some elder time of human history, and by us seen as through
a glass darkly."
(1) See Civilisation: its Cause and Cure, ch. i.
I think it is impossible not to see--however much in our pride of
Civilization (!) we like to jeer at the pettinesses of tribal
life--that these elder people perceived as a matter of fact and direct
consciousness the redeeming presence (within each unit-member of the
group) of the larger life to which he belonged. This larger life was a
reality--"a Presence to be felt and known"; and whether he called it by
the name of a Totem-animal, or by the name of a Nature-divinity, or
by the name of some gracious human-limbed God--some Hercules, Mithra,
Attis, Orpheus, or what-not--or even by the great name of Humanity
itself, it was still in any case the Saviour, the living incarnate Being
by the realization of whose presence the little mortal could be lifted
out of exile and error and death and suffering into splendor and life
eternal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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