CHAPTER VI

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

Paper. Mystery. Idea. Analogy. Analysis. Logic.
Quantity. Heresy.

T

HE difference between Greek and Roman character, which is marked so plainly by the way in which Aryan myths developed among the two peoples and moulded the finer meanings of their languages, is evident in many other English words besides those which we can actually trace back to such myths. For instance, the Greek 'scandalizein' and the Latin 'offendere' both meant to 'cause to stumble', but for us there is a subtle difference between scandalize and offend; for while scandalize and scandal merely hint at the liveliness of an emotion, offend and offence convey a sober warning of its probable results. Discere' in Latin and 'mathein' in Greek both meant to learn'; but the substantives which are derived from these verbs have come down into our language, the one as discipline and the other as mathematics. Rome turned instinctively to the external, Greece to the inner world as a vehicle for the expression of her impulses. And just as 'learning for the Roman gradually came to mean 'learning to be a soldier', so the ordinary Latin word for teacher' (doctor) is now applied most commonly to a teacher of physical health. And these two are not the only Latin words which have hurried out of

school in this way. Magister', for instance, has exchanged the class-room for the police-court and left behind the Greek 'paidagógos' (pedagogue) to express the most schoolmasterish kind of schoolmaster that can be imagined. Perhaps the most significant of all is school itself. Words for 'teaching' and 'learning' among the Romans inevitably came to express unacademic ideas. When they did want a word for academic processes they had to borrow it, like schola', from Greece. Yet, curiously enough, the original meaning of 'schole' in Greek was not school at all. What the Roman felt about the whole business of book-learning and disputing and thinking and talking philosophy is indeed conveyed to us clearly enough by the meaning of the Latin schola', from which we have taken school. But to a Greek all this had been merely the natural way of spending his spare time. 'Schole' was the common Greek word for 'leisure.'

Now this insatiable appetite of the Greek mind for thinking and philosophy is a phenomenon in the history of the Western outlook as sudden and unaccountable as the appearance of the Aryan peoples on the stage of history. As far back as the seventh or eighth century B.C. we find, side by side with the popular Greek mythology, a developed and intricate system of philosophy—a kind of language and thought, in fact, which, as the labyrinthine history of our own tongue is enough to show us, could not possibly have sprung up in the night. And in their writings the Greek philosophers themselves allude to sources from which they may well have taken the seeds of abstract thought. References are made as early as Pythagoras and as late as Plato to the priestly wisdom of Egypt ; and when we remember that the time which elapsed between the rise of Egyptian civilization and the birth

of Homer is about as long as the period between Homer's day and our own, we need not be surprised. Moreover, we find some evidence of the debt to Egypt in our language. Two almost indispensable prerequisites for the development of philosophy are the art of writing and something to write upon. It is interesting, therefore, to observe that our word alphabet comes to us, through Latin, from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet-alpha' and 'beta '-which are themselves in the first place Phoenician words. Greek mythology looked back to Cadmus, a Phoenician, as the founder of the alphabet, and it is now believed that the Semitic Phoenicians did indeed bring writing into Greece, and that they themselves took it from the 'hieratic script' or priestly writing of Egypt. Jot, in the phrase 'jot or tittle', is an English form invented by the translators of the Authorised Version for the Greek letter 'iota', which is also of Phoenician origin. Bible, on the other hand, is from the Greek' biblos', which meant the inner bark of the papyrus', and so ‘a book'; and paper was borrowed by the Angles and Saxons from Latin 'papyrus', itself a transliteration of the Greek 'papuros', meaning an Egyptian rush or flag, of which writing material was made. Both these words are thought to be of Egyptian origin.

External evidence tells us that already, a thousand years before the Aryans began to move, Egypt had mapped out the stars in constellations and divided the zodiac into twelve signs, and we are told by Aristotle that the Egyptians “excelled in mathematics". But if there was among the priests a "philosophy" in our sense of the word, we know little of it—perhaps because truth, unadorned by myth, was regarded in those days as something dangerous, to be kept religiously secret from all save those who were specially prepared to

receive it. This idea of inner religious teachings, guarded carefully from the ignorant and impure, survived in great force among the Greeks themselves, and we come across references in their philosophy to institutions called Mysteries, which were evidently felt by them to lie at the core of their national and intellectual life. Thus that hard-worked little English trisyllable, without which minor poetry and sensational journalism could barely eke out a miserable existence, has a long and dignified history, into which we must pry a little farther if we wish to understand how Greek thought and feeling have passed over into our language.

We have adopted from Latin the word initiate, which meant to admit a person to these Mysteries', and the importance attached to secrecy is shown by the fact that 'muein', the Greek for 'to initiate', meant originally to keep silent'. From it the substantive 'mu-sterion' was developed, thence the Latin 'mysterium', and so the English word. The secrets of the Greek Mysteries were guarded so jealously and under such heavy penalties that we still know very little about them. All we can say is that the two principal ideas attaching to them in contemporary minds were, firstly, that they revealed in some way the inner meaning of external appearances, and secondly, that the " initiate" attained immortality in a sense different from that of the uninitiated. The ceremony he went through symbolized dying in order to be "born again", and when it was over, he believed that the mortal part of his soul had died, and that what had risen again was immortal and eternal. Such were the associations which St. Paul had in mind, and which he called to the imaginations of his hearers, when he made use of the impressive words: "Behold,

I tell you a mystery!" And it is the same whenever the word occurs elsewhere in the New Testament and in writings of that period, for it retained its technical meaning and associations well on into the Christian

era.I

The first man-as far as we know-to call himself a 'philosophos', or lover of wisdom, was Pythagoras, who applied the label to himself and his followers. Philosophy among the Pythagoreans, with its emphasis on astronomy, geometry, and number, was still decidedly Egyptian; but gradually, from these starry beginnings, the Greek mind built up a vast, independent edifice of thought and language. The words that have come into our language directly from Greek philosophy are numerous enough, but if we were to add those which have reached us in Latinized form, and finally those words which are actually Latin, but which take their whole meaning from the Greek thought they were used to translate, we should fill several pages with the mere enumeration of them. The list would spread itself all over the dictionary, varying from such highly technical terms as homonym and noumena to common ones like individual, method, and subject.

Perhaps a more accurate term than Greek philosophy would be "Greek thought ", for Greek thinkers took some time to arrive at the distinction, so familiar to us, between philosophy and other branches of study such as history. The Greek word 'historia' meant at first simply'knowledge gained by inquiry', and The Temple scenes in Mozart's Magic Flute are a Freemason's attempt to depict the proceedings within an Egyptian Mystery School, and the opera itself is plainly a fanciful treatment of the drama of initiation. (Incidentally, the noises made by Papageno when he attempts to sing with the padlock on his lips are an excellent illustration of the possibly natural origin of the root 'mu- ' in ' mu-ein '.)

1 P. 109.