The origin and development of the moral ideas

Holiness is a delicate quality which is easily destroyed if anything polluting is brought into contact with the holy object or person. The Moors believe that if anybody who is sexually unclean enters a granary the grain will lose its baraka, or holiness. A similar idea probably underlies the belief prevalent among various peoples that incontinence, and especially illicit love, injures the harvest.139 In Efate, namim, or uncleanness, supposed to be contracted in various emergencies, was especially avoided by the sacred men, because it was believed to destroy their sacredness.140 The priestly taboos, of which Sir J. G. Frazer has given such an exhaustive account in ‘The Golden Bough,’ have undoubtedly in a large measure a similar origin. Nay, it seems that pollution not only deprives the holy person of his holiness, but is also supposed to injure him in a more positive way. When the supreme pontiff in the kingdom of Congo left his residence to visit other places within his jurisdiction, all married people had to observe strict continence the whole time he was out, as it was believed that any act of incontinence would prove fatal to him.141 In self-defence, therefore, gods and holy persons try to prevent polluted individuals from approaching them, and their worshippers are naturally anxious to do the same. But apart from the resentment which the sacred being would feel against the defiler, it appears that holiness is supposed to react quite mechanically against pollution, to the destruction or discomfort of the polluted individual.

All Moors are convinced that anyone who in a state of sexual uncleanness dared to visit a saint’s tomb would be struck by the saint; but the Arabs of Dukkâla, in Southern Morocco, also believe that if an unclean person rides a horse some accident will happen to him on account of the baraka with which the horse is endowed. It should further be noticed that, owing to the injurious effect of pollution upon holiness, an act generally regarded as sacred would, if performed by an unclean individual, lack that magic efficacy which otherwise would be ascribed to it. Muhammed represented ceremonial cleanliness as “one-half of the faith and the key of prayer.”142 The Moors say that a scribe is afraid of evil spirits only when he is sexually unclean, because then his reciting of passages of the Koran—the most powerful weapon against such spirits—would be of no avail. The Syrian philosopher Jamblichus speaks of the belief that “the gods do not hear him who invokes them, if he is impure from venereal connections.”143 A similar notion prevailed among the early Christians; with reference to a passage in the First Epistle of the Corinthians,144 Tertullian remarks that the Apostle added the recommendation of a temporary abstinence for the sake of adding an efficacy to prayers.145 To the same class of beliefs belongs the notion that a sacrificial victim should be clean and without blemish.146 The Chibchas of Bogota considered that the most valuable sacrifice they could offer was that of a youth who had never had intercourse with a woman.147

If ceremonial cleanliness is required even of the ordinary worshipper it is all the more indispensable in the case of a priest;148 and of all kinds of uncleanness none is to be more carefully avoided than sexual pollution. Sometimes admission into the priesthood is to be preceded by a period of continence.149 In the Marquesas Islands no one could become a priest without having lived chastely for several years previously.150 Among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast men and women, in order to become members of the priesthood, have to pass through a long novitiate, generally from two to three years, during which they live in retirement and are instructed by the priests in the secrets of the craft; and “the people believe that, during this period of retirement and study, the novices must keep their bodies pure, and refrain from all commerce with the other sex.”151 The Huichols of Mexico, again, are of opinion that a man who wishes to become a shaman must be faithful to his wife for five years, and that, if he violates this rule, he is sure to be taken ill and will lose the power of healing.152 In ancient Mexico the priests, all the time that they were employed in the service of the temple, abstained from all other women but their wives, and “even affected so much modesty and reserve, that when they met a woman they fixed their eyes on the ground that they might not see her. Any incontinence amongst the priests was severely punished.

The priest who, at Teohuacan, was convicted of having violated his chastity, was delivered up by the priests to the people, who at night killed him by the bastinado.”153 Among the Kotas of the Neilgherry Hills the priests—who, unlike the “dairymen” of their Toda neighbours are not celibates—are at the great festival in honour of Kāmatarāya forbidden to live or hold intercourse with their wives for fear of pollution, and are then even obliged to cook their meals themselves.154 It seems that, according to the Anatolian religion, married hieroi had to separate from their wives during the period they were serving at the temple.155 The Hebrew priest should avoid all unchastity; he was not allowed to marry a harlot, or a profane, or a divorced wife,156 and the high-priest was also forbidden to marry a widow.157 Nay, even in a priest’s daughter unchastity was punished with excessive severity, because she had profaned her father; she was to be burned.158

Carried further, the idea underlying all these rules and practices led to the notions that celibacy is more pleasing to God than marriage,159 and that it is a religious duty for those members of the community whose special office is to attend to the sacred cult. For a nation like the Jews, whose ambition was to live and to multiply, celibacy could never become an ideal; whereas the Christians, who professed the most perfect indifference to all earthly matters, found no difficulty in glorifying a state which, however opposed it was to the interests of the race and the nation, made men pre-eminently fit to approach their god. Indeed, far from being a benefit to the kingdom of God by propagating the species, sexual intercourse was on the contrary detrimental to it by being the great transmitter of the sin of our first parents. This argument, however, was of a comparatively late origin. Pelagius himself almost rivalled St. Augustine in his praise of virginity, which he considered the great test of that strength of free-will which he asserted to be at most only weakened by the fall of Adam.160

Religious celibacy is, moreover, enjoined or commended as a means of self-mortification supposed to appease an angry god, or with a view to raising the spiritual nature of man by suppressing one of the strongest of all sensual appetites. Thus we find in various religions celibacy side by side with other ascetic observances practised for similar purposes. Among the early Christians those young women who took a vow of chastity “did not look upon virginity as any thing if it were not attended with great mortification, with silence, retirement, poverty, labour, fastings, watchings, and continual praying. They were not esteemed as virgins who would not deny themselves the common diversions of the world, even the most innocent.”161 Tertullian enumerates virginity, widowhood, and the modest restraint in secret on the marriage-bed among those fragrant offerings acceptable to God which the flesh performs to its own especial suffering.162 Finally, it was argued that marriage prevents a person from serving God perfectly, because it induces him to occupy himself too much with worldly things.163 Though not contrary to the act of charity or the love of God, says Thomas Aquinas, it is nevertheless an obstacle to it.164 This was one, but certainly not the only, cause of the obligatory celibacy which the Christian Church imposed upon her clergy.