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At the dawn of history, every father of a house is a priest or sacrificer, each son of the house is a warrior on an equal footing with all his fellows and owing obedience only to temporary chiefs. But as the unit of society is extended and organized, particular priests begin to collect into a single body forming a specifically religious fellowship, a clergy more or less concentrated in the person of a chief priest or pontiff; at the same time the active part of the population tends to establish and organize itself under the orders of a sovereign who is not only the military leader in time of war, but also the head of society in peace time in all the affairs and practical questions raised by a more complex social life. When society is no longer merely a family and its manifold interests are no longer directly harmonized by natural kinship and by the obvious necessity for a rigid solidarity, conflicts and struggles arise and some impartial authority becomes necessary for the establishment of social equilibrium. Thus the main function of the sovereign in peace time is that of judge, as we see in all primitive states. To lead the nation on the field of battle and to decide its disputes in time of peace are the two main needs which the original institution of monarchy had to fulfill.
While the disintegrated and scattered elements of the spiritual and natural body of humanity were thus re-assembling under the action of the historic Word into the partial unities of rudimentary churches and states, the soul of mankind, repeating at a higher level the stages of the cosmogonic process, was developing its efforts to enter into an ever more intimate union with the Spirit of the eternal Wisdom.
In India the soul of mankind, manifesting itself first through the intuitions of the saints and sages of orthodox Brahmanism, then through the teaching of the orthodox sage Kapila, founder of the Sankhia philosophy, and finally through the new religion of Buddha Sakyamuni, recognized and loved the Absolute primarily in its negative form as the opposite of existence outside the Godhead, or the nature of the world. For the first time the soul of mankind became profoundly aware of the vanity of material life and conceived an overwhelming disgust for this life of illusion, which is in fact death rather than life, in so far as it devours itself continually and never achieves stability or satisfaction.
But disgust with false life did not reveal the true. The human soul as manifested in India, while asserting with perfect certainty and admirable power that the Absolute is not to be found in material life, that it is not identical with Nature and the world, was unable to discover or to say where it is to be found or what it is. But instead of recognizing this inability and seeking its causes, the wisdom of India asserted its own impotence as the final word of truth and pronounced that the Absolute is to be found in Nothingness, that it is non-existence, Nirvana.
For a moment India, through its sages, had acted as a national organ of the universal soul of mankind, in perceiving the vanity of natural existence and freeing itself from the bonds of blind desire. The thought and feeling that possessed Buddha and his disciples when they affirmed that the Absolute is not anything, that it is none of all the things that exist in Nature, was in fact a universal act of the soul of mankind, which was bound to pass through this negative truth before conceiving the positive idea of the Absolute. But the wisdom, or rather the folly, of the East consists in taking a relative and provisional discovery for complete and final truth. The fault is not that of the human soul, but that of the soul of these sages and of the nations that adopted their teaching. In halting at a necessary but lower stage in the universal process, these nations did not check the progress of history, but remained themselves outside the progressive movement of humanity away from its immersion in a barbarous particularism. The universal soul forsook them and went to seek among other nations the spiritual organs for new modes of union with the Divine essence. Through the inspired sages, poets and artists of Hellas it perceived and loved the Absolute, not as the Nothingness of Buddhism, but as the Idea and the ideal world of Plato, an eternal system of intelligible truths reflected here below in the sensible forms of Beauty.
The idealism of Greece was a great truth, more positive and complete than the nihilism of India. Yet it was not the complete and final truth, so long as the ideal world was considered in its purely theoretic and æsthetic aspect, so long as it was simply contemplated apart from reality and life or realized exclusively in the superficial forms of plastic beauty. If the ideal world is truer than the material world, it cannot be powerless against it. It must penetrate it, subdue it from within and regenerate it. The intelligible light of the higher world must be transfused into the moral and practical life of the lower world; the divine will must be accomplished on Earth as it is in Heaven. The Word of God is not only the sun of truth, of which the reflection is seen in the troubled stream of natural life; it is also the beneficent angel who descends into the stream to purify its waters and to open up beneath the sand and slime of human passions and errors the well of living water springing up into eternity. The wisdom of the Greeks, like that of the Hindus, was content to call a final halt at the stage of truth which it had reached. The last utterance of the Hellenic wisdom, the Neo-Platonic philosophy, insisted even more than Plato himself on the purely theoretic or contemplative character of the practical life. The true sage, according to Plotinus, must be a stranger to any practical aim, any activity, any social interest. He must flee the world in order first to raise himself by abstract meditation to the intelligible world and then to be absorbed in ecstasy by the nameless abyss of absolute unity. The Proteus of human errors is fundamentally one identical being, and this identity reveals itself especially in the ultimate conclusions of systems which are to all appearance diverse in origin. Thus, the final absorption in the unnamable Absolute of NeoPlatonism is indistinguishable, except in words, from the Buddhist Nirvana.
If the two great Aryan nations confined themselves in the last resort to this negative revelation of the Absolute, the positive revelation created for itself a national organ in the Semitic people of the Hebrews. The religious life and history of mankind were concentrated in this unique people because it alone sought in the Absolute the living God, the God of history; the positive future of humanity was prepared and revealed in this people because it alone saw in God not only Him Who is, but also Him Who will be, Jahveh, the God of the Future. Salvation came of the Jews and could come only of them because they alone understood true salvation — not absorption in Nirvana by moral and physical suicide, not the abstraction of the mind into pure idea by a theoretic contemplation, but the sanctification and regeneration of the whole being and existence of Man by a living activity, both moral and religious, by faith and works, by prayer, labor and charity.
While the Hindus and the Greeks stopped at partial aspects of the Godhead which they were foolish enough to take for the whole, thus transforming truth into error, the Hebrews had received by means of their revealed religion the living germ of the divine Essence in its complete and final truth; not that this Essence was manifested to them in an instant in all its absolute perfection: on the contrary, its manifestations were gradual and very imperfect, but they were real and true. They were no distant reflections or scattered rays of the divine idea illuminating the mind of an isolated sage — they were substantial manifestations of Divine Wisdom itself, produced by the personal action of the Word and the Holy Spirit and addressed to the whole nation as a social entity. The Divine Wisdom did not only enter into the intelligence of the Israelites; it took possession of their hearts and souls, and at the same time appeared to them in sensible forms.
We see, in fact, in the Old Testament a twofold series of divine manifestations: the phenomena of the subjective consciousness by which God speaks to the soul of His righteous ones, the Patriarchs and Prophets, and the objective appearances by which the divine power or glory (shekhinah) manifests itself before all the people, concentrated upon material objects such as the Altar of Sacrifice or the Ark of the Covenant. This twofold process of moral regeneration and external theophany was bound to attain its goal; these two theogonic currents inevitably met and coincided in the creation of an individual being who, absolutely holy and pure in body and soul, could not only morally but also physically incarnate God in himself and could unite in one being Jacob and the Stone of Bethel, Moses and the Ark of the Covenant, Solomon and his Temple.
All peoples, or nearly all, have had in their religions the notion of a divine woman and a divine man, of a Virgin-Mother and a Son of God coming down to Earth to struggle against the forces of evil, to suffer and to conquer. But there can be no question that only in the womb of the Jewish people have these universal ideas taken bodily form and been actually hypostatized in the two historic persons of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. This unique phenomenon implies a unique history, a preparation or special education of this people. Even the rationalists should be forced to this conclusion. And indeed, apart from all miraculous facts in the proper sense of the term, there is in the social and political sphere a general fact which distinguishes the history of the people of Israel and gives it an essential preeminence over the two great nations which by their original and creative genius seemed called to play a leading part in the destinies of mankind. Whereas the national development both of the Hindus and of the Greeks followed the path of crisis and revolution and issued in purely negative results, the development of the Hebrew people was on the whole brought about along organic and evolutionary lines and issued in a positive result of immense and universal significance, namely, Christianity. On the one hand, we see only distorted and truncated adumbrations of trinitary Man or of the Messianic form; on the other, we find the three real elements of social Messianism in their normal and harmonious relationship, foreshadowing and preparing the appearance of the true personal Messiah.
In India, the priestly caste of the Brahmins, representative of the religious tradition, of the sacred and inviolable past, aimed at retaining its own exclusive supremacy and exerted in actual life the oppressive power of a ruthless legalism, suppressing all possibility of free spiritual movement or social progress. But when priests aspire to direct government of the world, they inevitably succumb to a fatal dilemma: either they govern in reality, entering into the material details of secular actuality, and thus compromise their religious prestige, lower their sacred dignity and in the end lose their authority in the eyes of the masses and with it all their power; or else, while retaining direct control of society, they desire to remain true priests, and accordingly their government loses its sense of reality and, being unable to meet the lawful needs of those whom they govern, they either ruin society if it remains loyal to them or are deprived and supplemented by the active part of the nation. In India the priestly caste was obliged to surrender a large part of its control to the warrior class, but what it retained was enough to arrest the free development of the national life. This struggle was complicated by the increasing activity of the third of the social orders,1 the sages, who were diverging more and more from the orthodox teaching and traditional discipline and finally came into open conflict with the Brahmins. The military or royal class was divided in the struggle, but ultimately sided with the representatives of tradition; and the Hindu prophets, the sages of Buddhism, were cruelly persecuted and eventually expelled from India. If, on the one hand, the negative wisdom of Buddhism, bitterly opposed to the present and to the past, was nothing but an empty and barren utopianism, the priesthood and the monarchy, on the other hand, by uniting against the new movement of thought and stamping it out with violence, robbed India of all freedom and deprived her of all possibility of historic progress. Despite the superiority of the Aryan race and the great qualities of her national genius, India has thenceforth remained an impotent slave, yielding without resistance to every master who has claimed her.
The rise of Indian culture is marked by the predominance of the priestly caste representative of the past and of the common tradition; the beginnings of the history of Greece, on the other hand, are characterized by the dominance of the active part of society, the warriors, the men of self-assertive, self-displaying and adventurous violence. Though the superiority of this element of society was at first eminently favorable to the progress of all human activities, the crystallization of the military class in cities or states did not fail subsequently to become a menace and a hindrance to the free movement of the national spirit, and in fact determined its revolutionary character. A society which is centered in a single purely political body inevitably degenerates into a condition of despotism, whatever its form of government may be. The men of the present, the practical men who govern absolute states, whether republics or monarchies, disbelieve in the past and fear the future. Moreover, though they are themselves devoid of true piety or true faith, they tolerate the representatives of religious tradition as harmless or even useful on condition that they remain inactive; they assign an honorable place to an official priesthood, not only as a means of controlling the blind mob, but also as an ornamental coping-stone to the structure of the omnipotent State. But they have an implacable hatred for any free and spontaneous movement of religion, for anything that opens new horizons to the soul of Man or tends to advance him in any way towards his ideal future. The Athenian government, for all its democratic character, could do nothing but banish Anaxagoras and poison Socrates in the name of the Fatherland, that is, of the absolute State. Under such circumstances, the progressive movement of religious and philosophic thought is inevitably brought to a rupture with the powers of the present and the tradition of the past, with the State and the State religion. Thought becomes cosmopolitan; while Socrates and Plato despised the Athenian democracy, Aristotle despised all the republican constitutions of the Greek cities and preferred the semi-barbarous monarchy of the Macedonians, until at last the Cynic and Stoic philosophers repudiated all idea of Fatherland or State, and declared themselves indifferent to all public concerns. The independence and political organization of Hellas were destroyed by a philosophy and a philosophical religion which raised nothing upon the ruins of the Fatherland.
This antagonism between the present existence of the nation, as represented by the Greek republics, and the higher thought, the future of the nation, as represented by the idealism of the Greeks, this struggle between Philosophy and the State was fatal to both. The State lost the reason for its existence, and the ideal of the philosophers failed to achieve any concrete or living realization. The State, content to rely solely upon violence, perished by violence; and Philosophy, too contemptuous of reality, remained an abstract and impotent ideal. Justice demanded that it should be so. Any more positive outcome of the national life was not only as impossible for the Greeks as for the Hindus; it would not have been desirable. Since the two highest conceptions which inspired the genius of these two nations — the Indian pessimism with its Nirvana, and the Greek idealism with its absorption in the Absolute — were neither of them the full and final truth, they had neither the power nor the right to achieve a permanent and harmonious realization. A nihilist pessimism creating a social organization, a contemplative idealism capable of modifying things as they are — these are contradictions in terms. And if, despite this intrinsic contradiction, these two imperfect national ideas had been given stability and permanence by an external equilibrium of social forces, mankind would not have profited in the least. There would merely have been three Chinas instead of one.
If the history of the Hebrews bore a different character and produced other fruits, it was because the national life of Israel was based upon a religious principle that was complete in itself and capable of organic development. This principle was manifest in the trinitary form of the Jewish theocracy in which the three social powers, ranging themselves in a normal and harmonious relationship, foreshadowed and prepared the Kingdom of the true Messiah. We are not forgetting the unfaithfulness of the Jewish people and their repeated efforts to shatter the trinitary form of the Mosaic theocracy. We know well that King Saul massacred the priests of Jahveh at Nob, and that succeeding kings, both at Samaria and in Jerusalem, persecuted and put to death the true prophets. But these facts, which are only too certain, must not prevent us from recognizing three undeniable truths of history: (1) that the idea of trinitary theocracy, that is of the organic cooperation and moral harmony between the three powers governing a complete society — that this idea, quite unknown to both Hindus and Greeks, was always present to the mind of Israel; (2) that this idea, at the most solemn crises of Jewish history, took form and was effectively realized; (3) that the representatives of national progress, the men of the future, the men who made history — in a word, the prophets — never entered upon the path of pure revolution; while they scourged with their inspired words the misdeeds of the priests and princes of the nation, they never repudiated in principle the priesthood of Aaron or the kingship of David.
Moses, the greatest of the prophets, did not assume the priestly power, which he left to Aaron, nor the military leadership, which he bestowed on Joshua. Nor did he claim any exclusive exercise of the prophetic power, which he imparted to the seventy representatives of the people, uttering the prayer that all the Israelites might receive the gift of prophecy. So, too, David, the supreme instance of the theocratic king, was the restorer and champion of the priesthood. He would do nothing without consulting the infallible oracle (the Urim and Thummim) which belonged to the office of the High Priest; and at the same time, though himself a prophet by a personal endowment, he bowed to the moral authority of public prophecy. The history of Old Testament theocracy reaches its culmination — the complete differentiation and perfect harmony of the three powers — when, towards the end of David’s reign, his son Solomon is raised to the throne and anointed king by the high priest Zadok and the prophet Nathan. And when, after the failures and downfall of the kings of Judah and their rivals of Ephraim, the cream of the people, punished by the fall of Samaria and Jerusalem and the captivity of Nineveh and Babylon, returned to the Holy Land to re-establish the society of Jahveh under the protection of Persia, we find the prophet Zechariah insisting upon the trinitary formula of the re-established theocracy, upon solidarity and harmony between the priesthood in the person of Joshua, son of Josedek, and the temporal princedom in the person of Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel — between the two powers to which he, the prophet, was the living bond of union and inspired peace-maker.
The children of Israel never forgot that Society is the body of the perfect Man, who is of necessity trinitary: priest of the Most High, king of the Earth and prophet of the union between the human and the Divine. This unique people anticipated and prepared the coming of the God-Man, not only by the insight of its seers, but by the constitution of its society, by the very fact of its trinitary theocracy.
It is well known that the sacred anointing of sovereigns was among the Hebrews the common prerogative of priests, kings and prophets. Thus the supreme Anointed One (the Messiah or Christ) was to unite in Himself the three powers. And in fact He did reveal Himself as the absolutely pure and holy Priest or sacrificer, by offering to the Heavenly Father the complete sacrifice of His manhood; as true King of the world and of material Nature which by His resurrection He rescued from the law of death and conquered for eternal life; and finally, as perfect Prophet, by showing to men, in His ascension into Heaven, the absolute end of their existence, and by giving them, in the sending of the Holy Spirit and the founding of the Church, the strength and means necessary for the attainment of that end.
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1. It goes without saying that the division into castes in India is a local phenomenon, not to be confused with the three governing classes found in every Society.
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