Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1. Томас Де Квинси

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СКАЧАТЬ the frauds, forgeries, and treacheries of philosophy; so much the more clearly you descry the odious truth—that man stood in the relation of a superior to his gods, as respected all moral qualities of any value, but in the relation of an inferior as respected physical power. This was a position of the two parties fatal, by itself, to all grandeur of moral aspirations. Whatever was good or corrigibly bad, man saw associated with weakness; and power was sealed and guaranteed to absolute wickedness. The evil disposition in man to worship success, was strengthened by this mode of superiority in the gods. Merit was disjoined from prosperity. Even merit of a lower class, merit in things morally indifferent, was not so decidedly on the side of the gods as to reconcile man to the reasonableness of their yoke. They were compelled to acquiesce in a government which they did not regard as just. The gods were stronger, but not much; they had the unfair advantage of standing over the heads of men, and of wings for flight or for manoeuvring. Yet even so, it was clearly the opinion of Homer's age, that, in a fair fight, the gods might have been found liable to defeat. The gods again were generally beautiful: but not more so than the elite of mankind; else why did these gods, both male and female, continually persecute our race with their odious love? which love, be it observed, uniformly brought ruin upon its objects. Intellectually the gods were undoubtedly below men. They pretended to no great works in philosophy, in legislation, or in the fine arts, except only that, as to one of these arts, viz. poetry, a single god vaunted himself greatly in simple ages. But he attempted neither a tragedy nor an epic poem. Even in what he did attempt, it is worth while to follow his career. His literary fate was what might have been expected. After the Persian war, the reputation of his verses rapidly decayed. Wits arose in Athens, who laughed so furiously at his style and his metre, in the Delphic oracles, that at length some echoes of their scoffing began to reach Delphi; upon which the god and his inspired ministers became sulky, and finally took refuge in prose, as the only shelter they could think of from the caustic venom of Athenian malice.

      These were the miserable relations of man to the Pagan gods. Every thing, which it is worth doing at all, man could do better. Now it is some feature of alleviation in a servile condition, if the lord appears by natural endowments superior to his slave; or at least it embitters the degradation of slavery, if he does not. Greatly, therefore, must human interests have suffered, had this jealous approximation of the two parties been the sole feature noticeable in the relations between them. But there was a worse. There was an original enmity between man and the Pantheon; not the sort of enmity which we Christians ascribe to our God; that is but a figure of speech: and even there is a derivative enmity; an enmity founded on something in man subsequent to his creation, and having a ransom annexed to it. But the enmity of the heathen gods was original—that is, to the very nature of man, and as though man had in some stage of his career been their rival; which indeed he was, if we adopt Milton's hypothesis of the gods as ruined angels, and of man as created to supply the vacancy thus arising in heaven.

      Now, from this dreadful scheme of relations, between the human and divine, under Paganism, turn to the relations under Christianity. It is remarkable that even here, according to a doctrine current amongst many of the elder divines, man was naturally superior to the race of beings immediately ranking above him. Jeremy Taylor notices the obscure tradition, that the angelic order was, by original constitution, inferior to man; but this original precedency had been reversed for the present, by the fact that man, in his higher nature, was morally ruined, whereas the angelic race had not forfeited the perfection of their nature, though otherwise an inferior nature. Waiving a question so inscrutable as this, we know, at least, that no allegiance or homage is required from man towards this doubtfully superior race. And when man first finds himself called upon to pay tributes of this nature as to a being inimitably his superior, he is at the same moment taught by a revelation that this awful superior is the same who created him, and that in a sense more than figurative, he himself is the child of God. There stand the two relations, as declared in Paganism and in Christianity,—both probably true. In the former, man is the essential enemy of the gods, though sheltered by some conventional arrangement; in the latter, he is the son of God. In his own image God made him; and the very central principle of his religion is, that God for a great purpose assumed his own human nature; a mode of incarnation which could not be conceivable, unless through some divine principle common to the two natures, and forming the nexus between them.

      With these materials it is, and others resembling these, that Christianity has carried forward the work of human progression. The ethics of Christianity it was,—new ethics and unintelligible, in a degree as yet but little understood, to the old pagan nations,—which furnished the rudder, or guidance, for a human revolution; but the mysteries of Christianity it was,—new Eleusinian shows, presenting God under a new form and aspect, presenting man under a new relation to God,—which furnished the oars and sails, the moving forces, for the advance of this revolution.

      It was my intention to have shown how this great idea of man's relation to God, connected with the previous idea of God, had first caused the state of slavery to be regarded as an evil. Next, I proposed to show how charitable institutions, not one of which existed in pagan ages, hospitals, and asylums of all classes, had arisen under the same idea brooding over man from age to age. Thirdly, I should have attempted to show, that from the same mighty influence had grown up a social influence of woman, which did not exist in pagan ages, and will hereafter be applied to greater purposes. But, for want of room, I confine myself to saying a few words on war, and the mode in which it will be extinguished by Christianity.

      WAR.—This is amongst the foremost of questions that concern human progress, and it is one which, of all great questions, (the question of slavery not excepted, nor even the question of the slave-trade,) has travelled forward the most rapidly into public favor. Thirty years ago, there was hardly a breath stirring against war, as the sole natural resource of national anger or national competition. Hardly did a wish rise, at intervals, in that direction, or even a protesting sigh, over the calamities of war. And if here and there a contemplative author uttered such a sigh, it was in the spirit of mere hopeless sorrow, that mourned over an evil apparently as inalienable from man as hunger, as death, as the frailty of human expectations. Cowper, about sixty years ago, had said,

      'War is a game which, were their subjects wise,

      Kings would not play at.'

      But Cowper would not have said this, had he not been nearly related to the Whig house of Panshanger. Every Whig thought it a duty occasionally to look fiercely at kings, saying—'D—, who's afraid?' pretty much as a regular John Bull, in the lower classes, expresses his independence by defying the peerage,—'A lord! do you say? what care I for a lord? I value a lord no more than a button top;' whilst, in fact, he secretly reveres a lord as being usually amongst the most ancient of landed proprietors, and, secondly, amongst the richest. The scourge of kingship was what Cowper glanced at, rather than the scourge of war; and in any case the condition which he annexed to his suggestion of relief, is too remote to furnish much consolation for cynics like myself, or the reader. If war is to cease only when subjects become wise, we need not contract the scale of our cannon-founderies until the millennium. Sixty years ago, therefore, the abolition of war looked as unprosperous a speculation as Dr. Darwin's scheme for improving our British climate by hauling out all the icebergs from the polar basin in seasons when the wind sate fair for the tropics; by which means these wretched annoyers of our peace would soon find themselves in quarters too hot to hold them, and would disappear as rapidly as sugar-candy in children's mouths. Others, however, inclined rather to the Ancient Mariner's scheme, by shooting an albatross:—

      'Twas right, said they, such birds to shoot,

      That bring the frost and snow.'

      Scarcely more hopeless than these crusades against frost, were any of the serious plans which had then been proposed for the extirpation of war. St. Pierre contributed 'son petite possible' to this desirable end, in the shape of an essay towards the idea of a perpetual peace; Kant, the great professor of Koenigsberg, subscribed to the same benevolent СКАЧАТЬ