LET us take several examples of ways in which Indo-European religiosity did not assert itself, so as to recognise later how in fact it did express itself with the greatest purity and freedom. I shall attempt, wherever possible, to look away from the religion of the individual Indo-European peoples and to describe only the common characteristic feelings with which the Indo-Europeans face the divine, no matter in what shape they imagine this divinity. If it must be described with words, then I would say: not the religion, nor the religions, but the religiosity of the Indo-Europeans is what I attempt to distinguish.
In the first place, it is unmistakeably evident that Indo-European religiosity is not rooted in any kind of fear, neither in fear of the deity nor in fear of death. The words of the latter-day Roman poet, that fear first created the Gods (Statius: Thebais, III, 661: primus in orbe fecit deos timor), cannot be applied to the true forms of Indo-European religiosity, for wherever it has unfolded freely, the “fear of the Lord” (Proverbs, ix. 10; Psalms, cxi. 10) has proved neither the beginning of belief nor of wisdom.
Fear could not arise because the Indo-European does not consider that he is the creature of a deity; he neither regarded himself as a “creature” nor did he comprehend the world as a creation — the work of a creative God with a beginning in time. To him the world was far more a timeless order, within which both Gods as well as men had their time, their place and their office. The idea of creation is Oriental, above all Babylonic, like the idea — coming from Iran, but not from the Indo-Aryan spirit — of the world’s end, culminating in a judgment and the intercession of a kingdom of God, in which everything will be completely transformed.
After the ageing Plato had taken over, in Timaeus, certain features of the oriental theory of creation, legends for the explanation of the origin of the world, his pupil Aristotle (Concerning the Heavens, edited by Paul Gohlke, 1958, pp. 26-27) re-established the Indo-European outlook: the world totality is “without becoming, it is intransitory, eternal, without alteration, without growth or diminution”.
The Indo-Europeans believed — revealing a premonition of the knowledge and hypotheses of physics and astronomy of our present day — in a succession without end or beginning, of world origins and world endings, in repeated twilights of the Gods and in renewals of the world and of the Gods in a grandiose display, exactly as is described in the Völuspa of the Edda. They believed in repeated cataclysms, such as the Hellenes described, upon which new worlds with new Gods would follow.13 A succession of world creations and world endings was taught by Anaximandros, Heraclitus, Empedocles and other Hellenic thinkers, and later by the Roman poet and thinker Lucretius. The latter (de rerum natura, V, 95 et seq.) expected the world to end in this fashion:
| And yet a single day suffices to o’erthrow A thousand ages built, this world we know. |
According to Andreas Heusler (Germanentum, 1934, pp. 95, 106 et seq.) “destruction of existence was a firm expectancy for the Teutons, renewal of life an uncertain premonition”. As Erik Therman said (op. cit., pp. 64, 213) to them the world was a destiny — a superpowerful causal connection.
The belief in the end, the eschatology of the East Iranian Spitama Zarathustra, which was linked with the belief in a coming world saviour, has been described by H. S. Nyberg (Die Religionen des Alten Orients, Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatisch-Ägyptischen Gesellschaft, Vol. 34, 1938, pp. 266 et seq., 231 et seq.). It subsequently penetrated into Judaism shortly before the time of Jesus and fully determined his message (Heinrich Ackermann: Jesus, Seine Botschaft und deren Aufnahme im Abendland, 1952, pp. 42 et seq.; Entstellung und Klärung der Botschaft Jesu, 1961, pp. 225 et seq.).
In Iran, the influence of Hither-Asiatic beliefs had resulted in the idea of the repeated rise and fall being converted into a belief in the approaching end of the world, an end of the world which a saviour (saoshyant) will precede and upon which judgment of the world will follow. Yet despite this, Indo-European thought revived to the extent that the Iranians did not conceive of the world as a creation, nor of God as a creator, and thus the feeling of being a creature enchained by the will of the creator, could not find expression.
Still less was a religious attitude possible here, which saw in man a slave under an all-powerful Lord God. The submissive and slavish relation of man to God is especially characteristic of the religiosity of the Semitic peoples. The names Baal, Moloch, Rabbat and others, all stress the omnipotence of the Lord God over enslaved men, his creatures, who crawl on their faces before him. For the Indo-Europeans the worship of God meant the adoration of a deity, the encouragement and cultivation of all impulses to worship, it meant colere with the Romans and therapeuein with the Hellenes. In the Semitic language the word worship comes from its root abad, which means to be a slave. Hannah (I Samuel, i. 11) begs Jahve, the Hebrew tribal God, to give her, his slave, a son. David (II Samuel, vii. 20) calls himself a slave of his God, and so does Solomon (I Kings, iii. 7). The essence of Jahve is terror (Exodus, xxiii. 27; Isaiah, viii. 13), but this has never been true of the Indo-Europeans’ Gods. The Hymn to Zeus of the stoic Kleanthes of Assos (331-233 — Max Pohlenz: Die Stoa, 1948, pp. 108 et seq., and G. Verbeke: Kleanthos van Assos, Verhandelingen van den koninklijke Academie vor Wetenschapen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie, Klasse der Letteren, Year XI, Nr. 9, 1949, p. 235), from which Paul (Acts, xvii. 28) took words to adjust himself to the Hellenic religious outlook, completely contradicts for example, the religiosity of the 90th Psalm.
In Christianity the conduct of the faithful before God is freely interpreted by the term humilis, and hence humility, meaning literally slave mind or serving the tribe, is demanded as the essence of religiosity. But this is non-Indo-European in outlook, an after-effect of oriental religiosity. Because he is not a slave before an omnipotent God, the Indo-European mostly prays not kneeling nor prostrated to earth, but standing with his eyes gazing upward and his arms stretched out before him.
As a complete man with his honour unsullied, the honest Indo-European stands upright before his God or Gods. No religiosity which takes something away from man, to make him appear smaller before a deity who has become all-powerful and oppressive, is Indo-European. No religiosity which declares the world and man to be valueless, low and unclean, and which wishes to redeem man to over-earthly or superhuman sacred values, is truly Indo-European. Where “this world” is dropped, and in its place the “other world” is raised to eternal good, there the realm of Indo-European religiosity is abandoned. For Indo-European religiosity is of this world, and this fact determines its essential forms of expression. As a result it is sometimes difficult for us to comprehend its greatness today, because we are accustomed to measuring religiosity in terms of values taken from decidedly non-Indo-European and mainly oriental religious life, and especially from Mediaeval and early modern Christianity. It follows therefore that our view of Indo-European religiosity must suffer in the same way as would one’s view of the structure of the Indo-European languages if they were described in terms of characteristics appropriate to the Semite languages. We are today accustomed to seek true religiosity only in terms of the other world and to regard religiosity of this world as undeveloped or lacking in some aspect — a preliminary stage on the way to something more valuable. Thus the Jewish-Christian religious ideas transmitted to us prevent us from recognising the greatness of the Indo-European religiosity, so that in comparative religious studies Indo-European religious values are again and again represented purely scientifically as being less important, since the proponents of these views have unconsciously accepted the ideal of Oriental spiritual values as a yardstick for every religious value. This criticism is also applicable to Rudolf Otto’s study called The Sacred (1948). Thus the greatness and fullness of the Indo-European world is never recognised.
Whoever wishes to measure religiosity by the degree of man’s abasement before the divine, or by how questionable, valueless or even tainted “this world” appears to man when faced with that “other world”, and whoever wishes to measure religiosity by the degree to which man feels a cleft between a transitory body and an indestructible soul, between flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma) — whosoever seeks to do this will have to declare that the religiosity of the Indo-Europeans is truly impoverished and paltry.
Gods and men are not, in the eyes of the Indo-Europeans, incomparable beings remote from one another, least of all to the Hellenes, to whom Gods appeared as immortal men with great souls (cf. Aristotle: Metaphysics, III, 2, 997b), while they believed that men, as well-formed shoots of noble genus, also possessed something divine, and as such could claim to approximate to divine stature — the “Godlike Agamemnon”. In the nature of man himself, just as the deity wishes, lie possibilities, seemingly divine in origin, diogenes, and thus it is that every Indo-European people has readily tended to assume the incarnation of all aristocratic national values in human families, the kalok’agathia.14
Indo-European religiosity is not slavery, it contains none of the implorings of a downtrodden slave to his all-powerful lord, but comprises rather the confiding fulfilment of a community comprising Gods and men. Plato speaks in his Banquet (188c) of a “mutual community (philia) between Gods and men”. The Teuton was certain of the friendship of his God, of the astvin or the fulltrui whom he fully trusted, and with the Hellenes in the Odyssey (XXIV, 514) the same certainty is found expressed in the words “friends of the Gods” (theoi philoi). In the Bhagavad Gita of the Indians (IV, 3) the God Krishna calls the man Arjuna his friend. The highest deity such as Zeus is honoured as “Father of the Gods and of men” — as a family father, as Zeus Herkeios, not as a despot. This idea is also expressed in the names of the Gods: Djaus pitar with the Indians and Jupiter with the Romans. The name of the Indian God Mitra, which corresponded to Mithra in Iran, means “friend”. Mazdaism, founded by Zoroaster, called the morally acting man a friend of Ahura Mazda, the One Universal God, who in the era of Achaemenides became the God of the Persian empire. According to Plato (Laws, IV, 716) the man of moderation and self-control is above all “a friend of God”.
To the belief in the Gods as friends there thus corresponds the Indo-European idea of kinship between the high-minded and morally acting man and the Gods, which is already found in the 9th Nemean Ode of the Theban, Pindar. This kinship rests above all on the view that Gods and men are bound through the same values, through truth and virtue (Plato: Laws, X, 899). This is also proclaimed in the aforementioned Hymn to Zeus of Kleanthes of Assos, in which Zeus is called the God “of many names”, the God of Logos (Reason), Physis (Nature), Heimarmene (Destiny), and the source of all Becoming (Growth). Marcus Tullius Cicero, a pupil of Hellenic wisdom (de legibus, I, 25), also took over these ideas. From the same ideas Plato deduced (Letters, VII, 344a) that: “Whoever does not feel inwardly bound to the just and morally beautiful . . . will never fully understand the true nature of virtue and vice”.
In the Indo-European realm God is again and again regarded as Reason ruling through world phenomena. Thus before Kleanthes of Assos, Euripides (Troades, 884) in Hecabe’s prayer equated Zeus to the natural law and reason. The Stoics were convinced that the same law of destiny bound both Gods and men, that therefore freedom for man was only possible as the moral freedom of the wise man who had overcome his desires through rational insight. Here Stoics have again expressed, what Buddha had already taught in India centuries before, although both Stoics and Buddhists fell short of pure Indo-European religiosity by rejecting and condemning the world. Such reason (sapientia) was also regarded by Cicero (de legibus, I, 58) as the connecting link between Gods and men; to him it was the “Mother of all Good”, the priceless gift of the immortals to mortals. An equation of God with reason was expressed by Goethe towards the end of his life in a conversation with Eckermann on 23rd February 1831, in which he described “the highest Being” as “reason itself”.
Paul distinguishes the religiosity of the Indo-Europeans from that of the Semites, when he asserts (I Corinthians, i. 22) that while the Hellenes strove for knowledge (sophia), the Jews desired revelations (semaia), and Aurelius Augustinus, the Bishop of Hippo (Patrologiae cursus completus, Vol. XXXVII, edited by J. P. Migne, 1845, Sp. 1586; Vol. XXVIII, 1845, Sp. 1132) attempts by citing Bible passages, to disparage the wisdom (sapientia) of the Hellenes, alien to him as a Christian, as a folly before God and to find the highest wisdom only in the obedient humility (humilitas obedentiae) of the faithful.
The Indo-European belief in a coming together, almost a union, of God and man in reason which is common to both, can be called, in a derogatory manner, rationalism; but the Indo-Europeans have always tended to logos and ratio — to a logos and ratio which through fullness of knowledge is elevated far above the realm of arid good sense or dull hair-splitting. Indo-European thought has recognised and acknowledged a primacy of practical reason (Kant) which Marcus Tullius Cicero (de legibus, I, 45) introduced by Posidonius to Hellenic philosophy — signified with the words: “The natural law undoubtedly states that the perfection of reason is virtue” (est enim virtus perfecta ratio, quod certe in natura est). Since Plato, Indo-European thinkers have taught that man could share or participate in the Good, the True and the Beautiful as partners of the divine. Indo-European thinkers (Duns Scotus, Schelling, Schopenhauer) are, each in his own way, driven through a voluntarianism beyond every rationalism.
But human intelligence and comprehension has its limits, while that of the deity is boundless, hence the Indo-Europeans, and particularly the Hellenes, have felt deeply their dependency on the Gods. The admonition “Know thyself!” which was inscribed in the vestibule of the temple of Apollo, reminded men of their limitations when faced with the deity. In his 5th Isthmean Ode Pindar warned: “Do not strive to become Zeus!” The same experience of life and religion is found again with Goethe:
| Denn mit Göttern soll sich nicht messen irgendein Mensch. For with the Gods Shall no man measure himself. (Grenzen der Menschheit) |
The enticement to and danger of human self-presumption was apparently familiar to the Indo-Europeans, perhaps for the very reason that they felt close to their Gods, and that when facing men of other races, they were conscious of their own superiority, and of their hereditary aristocratic qualities acquired by strict selection in the post Ice Age millenia in central Europe. The fear of human hubris, of self over-reaching, comes from the depths of the Hellenic soul, and in the face of all hubris the limited man is admonished to keep to his ordained position in the timeless ordering of the world, into which the Gods also had to fit themselves. It is the Indo-European’s destiny to stand proudly, and with an aristocratic confidence and resolution, but always aware of his own limitations, face to face with the boundlessness of the Gods — and no human species has felt this sense of destiny more deeply than the Indo-Europeans: the great element of tragedy in the poetry of the Indo-European peoples stems from the tension resulting from this sense of destiny.
Nevertheless it is completely impossible to conclude as W. Baetke has done, that tragic destiny signified for the Indo-Europeans a ban or spell and brought about an anxiety of destiny, which made them ripe for a redemption. Not the God of Destiny, he claims, but the redeemer God brought the Teutons to the fulfilment of their religious longings.15 Thus one can pass judgment concerning the Teutonic and Indo-European only externally, never from within outwards. The conversion of the Teutons to Christianity can only be explained by assuming that amongst them many men of softer heart could not withstand the gaze from the eyes of a merciless destiny and — against all reality — took their refuge in the dream image of a merciful God. Indo-European men of stronger heart have always been, like Frederick the Great, born stoics, who standing upright like the devout Vergil, have recognised a merciless fate (inexorabile fatum).
H. R. Ellis Davidson (Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, 1964, p. 218) has strikingly described the religiosity of the Scandinavians, whose Gods like men were subject to destiny:
“Men knew that the gods whom they served could not give them freedom from danger and calamity, and they did not demand that they should. We find in the myths no sense of bitterness at the harshness and unfairness of life, but rather a spirit of heroic resignation: humanity is born to trouble, but courage, adventure, and the wonders of life are matters for thankfulness, to be enjoyed while life is still granted to us. The great gifts of the gods were readiness to face the world as it was, the luck that sustains men in tight places, and the opportunity to win that glory which alone can survive death.”