The Teaching Needs and Mode of Teaching of the Primeval World

§. 1.

Fortunate1 the peoples of the ancient world, if any there were, who woke from the very beginning to clear reflection and walked on in that light ever after. Their needs in teaching must have been entirely different from those of the nations we intend to treat here. To them even the most spiritual matters could be imparted in plain prose, and for their lucid thinking the most literal designation must have been the most fitting. Whether such untroubled clarity of 2 life must be thought of as the original condition of the human race, so that all the later modes of thought can be explained only as a gradual darkening, is a question we here refrain from investigating altogether. We have to describe a more helpless state of our race, and a period far removed from that dominion of the spiritual in thought and expression. Of the slight and meagre beginning of religious knowledge among the Greeks, who are our first concern here, history gives us a substantial and definite account:

§. 2.

“The Pelasgians, as I learned at Dodona, at first offered every kind of sacrifice to the gods with prayers. But they gave none of them a surname or a name, since they had never yet heard of such things. They called them gods for this reason: that they had set all things in good order and brought everything into its proper distribution. Later, after a long time had passed, they learned the names of the other gods, and much later still that of Dionysus, which had been brought in from Egypt. Thereupon they consulted the oracle at Dodona about these names, for this oracle is held to be the oldest in Hellas, and was at that time the only one. When the Pelasgians asked at Dodona 3 whether they should adopt the names that came from the barbarians, the oracle answered that they should. From that time on they used these names of the gods when they sacrificed. And from the Pelasgians the Hellenes afterwards received them.”¹

This mute worship of a helpless people, which gives vent to the urge of the devout heart only in silent actions: how greatly it differs from the eloquent histories of the gods in which, as the same source² says, every god, first through Hesiod and Homer, had already received his genealogy, his honours and offices, his epithets, and his visible form! That perplexed condition of an almost speechless veneration, and this fable-rich, garrulous religion, necessarily presuppose an intermediate condition, a gradual passage from the one to the other. What this intermediate period was like we can infer from several reports of the same historian. One example is his welcome account of the form of the old Pelasgian images of Hermes³, and of the doctrine of the priesthood on Samothrace connected with them.

§. 3.

4 It was an intermediate period of priesthood. These priests, then, faced with a people so poor in language: with what demands could they approach it? Not by presupposing a great store of concepts and a corresponding agility of mind. Syllogism, and everything that dialectical practice requires, was so out of place here that even the simplest proposition of discursive thought was bound to miss its effect. People in that condition are not formed by direct communication, and the straight path of demonstration is not, here, the shortest.

The purest light of the clearest knowledge must first be refracted in a bodily object, so that it falls upon the untrained eye only in reflection, in a coloured if dimmer glow. Only what is imposing can rouse men from the slumber of half-animal torpor. And what is more imposing than the image? The truth of a salutary doctrine, which would be lost along the long road of the concept, reaches its goal at once in the image. The spiritual, compressed into the moment of a glance, into the focal point of what is instantaneous and visible, stirs rude minds more than the most thorough instruction.

§. 4.

5 That the oldest teachers of the Greek people understood well these fundamental laws of the human mind and these conditions of their office, and acted on that understanding, the most unambiguous testimonies declare. A writer who gave praiseworthy attention to the religious institutions of the Greek primeval world expresses himself thus⁴: “I came afterwards to see that the wisest among the Greeks of old set forth their thoughts not in plain words⁵ but in riddles. Therefore I regard what they say about Kronos, too, as the utterance of wise deliberation.”

The high antiquity and universality of this mode of teaching are attested no less by Clement of Alexandria⁶: “As I have shown,” he says, “the symbolic manner of expression is ancient, and not only our prophets made use of it, but also most of the teachers of the ancient Greeks, 6 and not a few of the various nations among the barbarians.” The first-named writer praises that mode of teaching as a fruit of prudence. Clement, in other passages, not only agrees with him but also draws attention to the necessity of this method, given the needs of learners in the earliest times⁷.

That imposing brevity in particular was the fundamental character of the oldest religious teaching, another passage of Pausanias leaves us in no doubt. There, in a very judicious verdict on the oldest Greek didactic poetry, he makes brevity the sure mark of it, and expressly adds that these poems lacked the charm of beautiful form⁸. This, then, was not yet that richer-furnished art of poetry in which, as Pindar⁹ 7 sings, “wisdom, alluring, enchants through myths.” It was a rougher, priestly tone. It stamped a weighty word into a stark image, commanded the memory and the will of the hearer alike, and disdained all the arts of flattery by which the poet who pays homage to the beautiful captivates the imagination of peoples.

§. 5.

If we look more closely at that ancient mode of teaching, guided by the historical hints just given, it appears that it was more a revelation than a thinking-out, with a definite separating and combining of the various marks of a concept. But the sense in which we take revealing needs closer discussion.

Among all peoples devoted to the worship of the elements, and above all among the Greeks, whose lively imagination ensouled everything, there arises early the presentiment, or if one prefers the belief, that the individual phenomena of nature are significant: that nature gives signs, and speaks to man, though intelligibly only to the knowing. This is still far from the philosopheme of the cosmos as one great living creature (ζῷον), and further still from the sublime doctrine of the world-8soul. But it is their germ, which lies even in raw humanity: the first stirrings, already active in many a popular belief.

First, negatively. To think of nothing, absolutely nothing, in the whole visible world of bodies as wholly dead, and to lend even the stone a kind of life, is the most characteristic habit of this mode of thought. But this pantheism of the imagination also expresses itself more definitely and positively. It peoples every body, every manifestation and force of the physical world, with its gods; or rather, those forces and manifestations are themselves its gods.

Later, a more cultivated pantheistic abstraction sums it up in the proposition: “Nothing can be thought that is not an image of the deity.” At bottom this is the old belief among such peoples, only conceived and expressed polytheistically. Later antiquity presents as a higher result of philosophical thought the view “that nature delights in stamping her invisible concepts, by means of symbols, into visible forms, just as the deity loves to signify the truth of ideas through sensuous images.” That view already stirs in the creative, childlike imagination of the vigorous peoples of the grey primeval world.

Thus there formed, under crushing fear and uplifting self-feeling at once, the old belief that among all 9 living things man alone enjoys the privilege of consorting with gods. By night through dreams, by day through birds, through the entrails of the sacrificial animal, through the vapour rising from the depths of the earth or in the hallowed oak, and through unlooked-for signs (σύμβολα) of every kind, these gods made present and future clear and intelligible to him.

§. 6.

To convictions such as these the oldest priestly teaching of the Greeks attached itself, and in this spirit it was delivered. What, then, was it, or rather what could it be? First of all, as we have seen, a giving of names to what had before been nameless, and hence a leading in prayer in short, compressed formulas. And if this first one to pray was himself, as cannot be doubted, filled with the conviction of the god’s nearness, then he spoke in that spirit too. His intercession, by which he stood for the people, carried the weight of a divine utterance, whose mark a prevailing belief placed precisely in that pregnant brevity.

Just as prayer, then, was a chief root of ancient doctrine, so interpreting and revealing were its original form. The priest taught when he set down a presentiment in a riddling saying. He also taught when he pointed to the gods who were mighty in the might of the elements, 10 when he directed the eye to the signs of the heavens and the figures of the stars, when he displayed the mark of the divine in the entrails of the victim, when he followed the invisible trail of a dream, and when, finally, he held the rare, unlooked-for event against an extraordinary situation.

This instruction for the senses, this pointing and showing, was the first help that the more insightful gave to the rude but instruction-hungry multitude. These lessons were not demonstrations, nor could they be. They were not doctrines of God in consistent articulation, but guidings toward the divine, revelations, directions, or, as the ancients themselves called them, δείξεις θεῶν [“showings of the gods”]¹⁰.

§. 7.

That the formation of doctrine among the Greeks took this course and no other is proved by the ancient usage of language itself. And language is the most faithful record a people has. We therefore question it in the present case as well. In every passage of the oldest poets and prose writers where teaching and instruction are spoken of, the 11 expressions used are taken from sight, from showing and pointing, or from the relations we have just discussed. First, Homer sings of a teaching that Hermes gave¹¹:

So spoke Hermeias, and handed me the healing herb,
Which he tore from the ground, and showed me its nature.

Euripides, faithful to Homeric language, uses the selfsame word in the Phoenician Women¹². Of the founding of the secret worship at Eleusis, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter says that the goddess showed¹³ to Eumolpus and the other kings of Attica

her holy rites of sacrifice and her hidden ceremonies.

The same Eumolpus, son of Musaeus, showed forth the Mysteries at Eleusis, so the Parian Chronicle says¹⁴. This is an expression Homer also uses of the seer Calchas: 12

— when to the Achaeans thou revealest the counsel of the gods¹⁵.

Herodotus likewise uses other terms of a teacher of the Greek primeval age, drawn from the same circle of imagery, alternating them with the expressions already fixed by Homeric usage. So he relates of Melampus, son of Amythaon, that he did indeed give guidance (ἐξηγησάμενος) for the naming and worship of Dionysus. Yet he did not show (ἔφηνε) the whole doctrine in its coherence; the sages who followed him showed it forth (ἐξέφηναν) more completely. For other parts of this festival, however, he gave good guidance (κατηγησάμενος)¹⁶.

The expressions already noted, φαίνειν, ἐκφαίνειν, ἀναφαίνειν [“to show, to show forth, to reveal”], belong entirely to the sense of sight. In the same way, these (ἐξηγεῖσθαι, καθηγεῖσθαι [“to lead out, to lead the way”]) denote the office of the sacred interpreters. Admittedly, the name 13 ἐξηγηταί [“exegetes”] was given first of all to those who showed the curious the outward sights of a city or a temple, and who to that extent were also called περιηγηταί [“guides”]. But it belonged especially to persons of a higher vocation, who set the layman in accord with the divine, who pointed out the signs of the heavens and the marks in the sacrificial victims, and who interpreted the oracles¹⁷.

The darkness natural to oracles, however, passes into the language of these exegetes. On the one hand they try to unriddle the sense of divine portents by comparison (εἰκάζουσι [“they make likenesses, conjecture”])¹⁸. On the other, they become dark themselves in the fullness of the revelation that has fallen to their share. Far, then, from the general intelligibility of a learned conceptual wisdom, such first teachers must rather be called seers, and riddlers (αἰνικταί)¹⁹, like the deity whose utterances they interpret.

§. 8.

14 The pious presentiment of those Pelasgians attached itself to a name, and as the names multiplied in prayer their religious thinking grew more and more ordered. In the same way, a universal urge of human nature very early demands definite, outward signs and images for indefinite feelings and dim presentiments. Do we not see even those peoples of the primeval world who are devoted to the worship of the stars falling into idolatry? How much more must this happen with a sensuous pantheism!

And when a universal stirring of physical nature seized a fresh and vigorous people with blind force, and that people recognized in it too, and in it above all, the hidden rule of a particular god, then it was urgently demanded that this god’s form and power become visible. In such a situation the priest, if he would authenticate his divine calling, had himself to become creative. He had to work and to form. And when he set forth the formerly invisible in visible shape, when he thus engendered the divine, then he also bore witness to two things: the power of the god and the truth of his own devotion. Then the exegete was a καταλαθιστής²⁰, as he was called in the dialect of the ancient Dorians. Of this teaching relation too, 15 Latin, like German, has preserved noteworthy traces in the inseparable connection between the concepts of one who witnesses and one who begets.^c Among those Pelasgians this urge had already been satisfied. A creative sculptor had already embodied for them, in a herm, the force of nature whose secret power they felt.

§. 9.

Interpreting symbols and forming and creating symbols therefore coincide in this preparatory school of the oldest religion. And just as the holiest images were founded by the gods themselves, so the immortals also appear in person as the first teachers. For this, too, the oldest Greece furnishes manifold proofs.

In almost every one of its most venerable temples a διοπετές [“fallen from Zeus”] was kept: a carved image or stone idol whose rude workmanship betrayed its great age. Because it was believed to have been sent down by Zeus from the heights of heaven, people clung to it with such firm confidence that they bound the welfare of the commonwealth to its possession, as to the surest pledge.

Several of the Greek deities, moreover, appear as the first teachers. Apollo is one example, at the founding of his worship at Delphi. Demeter is another: according to the Homerid’s verse cited above, she gave the Attic kings at Eleusis their first 16 instruction in the secret doctrine of her worship. She herself, grieving for her lost daughter, had also found on her wanderings the helpful use of the holy signs or symbols²¹.

So at the origin of the religious teaching office the divine and the human are wondrously joined. Not only among the Greeks, but among most peoples of high antiquity, the one who is first and above all worthy of adoration also becomes the first teacher of prayer, and the first to pray. Indeed, in religious legend even the content of prayer and doctrine often melts together with the one who prays and teaches.

To the ancient Egyptian, Hermes, the blessing-bringing source of highest wisdom, is also the teacher of wisdom and the first founder of sacred rites, and with his name the priesthood connected the idea of the Book of Books. Similar ideas converge in the elder Buddha of the Indians. The Hom of the Parsis, whom the Greeks call Homanes²², becomes in the Zend-Avesta not only the teacher of the eternally living Word, but also its earthly echo. He is 17 not merely the herald of salvation, but the very drink of salvation and the refreshing tree of life. These conceptions are still mirrored in the Greek myths of their Dodonaean oracle-tree, and of the divine descent and wonder-working power of their Orpheus, Melampus, Polyidus, and other ancient seers.

§. 10.

Such a teacher of the primeval world is in every respect one akin to God (διογενής [“Zeus-born”]). It is a chief business of his teaching office that he create images. He may set before the community the idol received from God (διιπετές [“fallen from Zeus”]) and interpret it for them, or he may himself become the maker of a visible god. Either way, it remains the vocation of his teaching to give forms.

All instruction is still a pointing, a showing, a forming for the senses, and that ancient mode of thought does not yet distinguish image-making for the ear from image-making for the eye. For the purposes of theory we must distinguish phonetic symbols from aphonic ones (σύμβολα φωνητικά [“spoken symbols”], as against σ. ἄφωνα [“voiceless symbols”] or παράσημα [“distinguishing marks”]). Here, however, that distinction would be a subtlety forced upon the primeval world.

That the oldest founders of religion first set forth their dogmas in actual works of imagery, the most definite testimonies declare. Thus, according to the account of 18 Eubulus in Porphyry²³, Zoroaster formed in a mountain bordering on Persis a cosmic grotto, in which the zones of the earth and the elements were represented symbolically to the senses. It was called the Cave of Mithras, and for a long time the people admired it as a sanctuary. That Brahmin grotto among the Indians, with the images of the gods worshipped in it, was without doubt likewise such an ancient religious teaching-architecture²⁴. This is to say nothing of the other works of the ancient Egyptians, who understood better than any other people how to use symbolic architecture as an organ of doctrine.

Everything indicates that in that high antiquity the image from skilled priestly hands and the image of priestly speech were one and the same in origin and purpose. It was stamped out for instruction, and whether spoken or moulded, it always belonged to the senses 19 and presented itself to the eye. In the one case it was a Sinnspruch, a pregnant saying; in the other a Sinnbild, an emblem.^d

The whole gnomic wisdom of the ancient Orient, and the didactic wisdom of the Greeks, which stayed true to the Oriental character: what are they but a constant stamping-out of images rich in content? The apologues of a Vishnu Sarma and of Pilpay, the sayings of the Hebrew prophets, the oracles of the Greeks, the symbola of Pythagoras all share one property: they dwell on what endures, and they paint for the eye. The circle of teaching they describe is the abiding order of nature and its visible appearances: the constant harmony of the heavenly bodies, the speaking colours and forms of the plant kingdom and its cycle, and the steadiness and vividness of animal characters. To these laws of the visible world they point, and on them they ground the hidden laws of our conduct.

Caught in the mirror of such teaching, the action of an animal, or the life, blossoming, and withering of a plant, becomes the instructive image of a moral truth. In this way the earnest word of doctrine gains a sensuous permanence, and compresses itself into the fruitful moment of a single appearance. That is also why old maxims and gnomes of this kind pass so easily into an image for the eye, without essential change to their content. Image and word, image-making and 20 speech, are not yet separated in this mode of thought; they support, and indeed permeate, one another.

Almost all languages, especially the ancient ones, have preserved traces of this too. Several scholars have already remarked that the Hebrew מָשַׁל means not only to stamp or to impress an image, but also to set down a likeness in speech, or to express in a saying, and finally to impress a word, the stamp of one’s will, and hence to rule. All these meanings, and a wealth of other concepts besides, are united in the pregnant σύμβολον of the Greeks, which in every respect demands a grammatical discussion of its own. Here I wished only to point out that in the symbolic priestly teaching of the primeval world the domain of speech is not separated from that of the visible image, and that the wisdom of this period rules and shapes the mind of the ruder multitude through the weight of its sayings and emblems.

§. 11.

All the teaching and all the worship of higher antiquity thus incline toward the symbolic. Several Greek writers support this observation with definite testimonies. They are not content to show how this mode of teaching differs from the demonstrative 21 or discursive teaching that later came to prevail. They also divide the figurative circle of teaching itself into several fields, or into different sections of one great domain. It is therefore worth the effort to examine the chief passages of this kind somewhat more closely. That shall be the subject of the next chapter.

For now we close with a remark. In a period for which we had only to show the natural occasions, the original compulsion, and so to speak the urge toward the symbolic, there could be no question yet of any more definite theory of it. Of what was already a work of freedom, we have touched only lightly on a little. The symbol had already made itself free in Egypt and the ancient Orient; it was first cultivated into form by the Greeks. The Greeks had learned in the school of the Egyptians to seek evidence, for many kinds of teaching, in the senses rather than in the understanding. But their own happy genius had moved them to unite the figurative expression of ideas with the beautiful, and in this art they became, and remained, unequalled models.