Edwyn Bevan - Sibyls and Seers (Routledge Revivals): A Survey of Some Ancient Theories of Revelation and Inspiration

The ancient world as a whole believed in the existence of a world of spirits beyond, or alongside, the visible, tangible world. They believed also that communications between these two worlds frequently took place: everywhere we find diviners and prophets, oracles and visionaries.

First published in 1928, Sibyls and Seers investigates the various aspects of this superstition in the Ancient Near East, in Homer, the Greek tragedians, and the myriad religions of the Roman Empire. The theophanies of Yahweh in the Old Testament - Enoch, Jeremiah, Ezekiel are given some attention, as is the tradition in Christian theology and literature: St Paul, Pope Gregory the Great, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the Scholastics. These lectures are clearly written, broad in scope and full of insight for contemporary students of religion, theology and anthropology.

Edwyn Bevan

First published in 1928

by George Allen & Unwin Ltd

This edition first published in 2014 by Routledge

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1928 George Allen & Unwin Ltd

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A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 29001734

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-02381-9 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-315-77365-0 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781315773650

By

EDWYN BEVAN

LONDON

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD

MUSEUM STREET

First published in 1928

(All rights reserved)

Printed in Great Britain by

Unwin Brothers, Ltd., Woking

TO

WILLIAM LOCK, D.D.

CANON OF CHRIST CHURCH,

WITH GRATITUDE FOR HIS FRIENDLY ENCOURAGEMENT

ALL THROUGH THE PREPARATION OF

THIS LITTLE VOLUME

This volume embodies, with some additional matter, six lectures given in Oxford on the Speakers Foundation for Biblical Studies during Hilary term and Trinity term 1927. The form and dimensions of the work have been mainly determined by the circumstances of its origin. If it serves to make prominent certain points and aspects in a large subject of obvious concern to all interested in religion, it will have attained its purpose.

February 1928.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315773650-1

On the subject of inspiration, wrote Mr. Walter Scott, in his edition of the Hermetica, Egyptians, Hebrews and Greeks thought much alike, from the earliest times to which we can trace back their thoughts; and in the time of the Roman Empire, Pagans, Jews and Christians spoke of it in similar terms (Vol. III. p. 5). We have, in fact, a belief which goes back to primitive man all the world over, and persists in the various civilizations which have grown out of primitive society, not only in the three mentioned by Mr. Scott in the sentence just quoted, the Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek, but in all civilizations which have existed. Everywhere we find diviners and prophets carrying on the functions of the primitive medicine-man; everywhere there is the belief in the possession of certain men by spirits which have entered their bodies and use their tongues, a belief resting largely on the actual pathological peculiarities which mark the insane. Right through the history of all peoples, from their savage origins to the last attainments of civilization, this belief runs like a thread, which has, no doubt, at the savage level a cruder form than later on, but is nevertheless, in spite of modifications, essentially a continuous tradition.

One may see that this belief presupposes, as its background, a general view of reality which some people would reject in toto as a delusion. It presupposes, we may put it shortly, that a spirit-world exists beyond or behind or aboveor however one likes to put itthe every-day world which we see and handle, the material world governed by uniform natural law. From the way savage mentality is sometimes spoken of, one might suppose that savages have no notion of a world of uniform natural law at all, that everything for them is supernaturally animate and moves in a capricious incalculable way. That is certainly a mistake, as Lotze pointed out long ago in Mikrokosmus (Book I, Chapter I):

Only a dream-state, confined to vision without activity, could go on happily in the imagination of an animate life which penetrated all provinces of nature with free and arbitrary impulse. Active life is bound, for the satisfaction of its needs, for all practical ends, to build upon the regularity and calculability of what happens, upon a necessary connexion of things which can be known beforehand. Everyday phenomena are enough to convince us that things possess this real reliability from having no will of their own; such phenomena must at a quite early stage have accustomed the spirit of man to deal with the world in which human activity takes place, as a realm of usable objects, in which all give and take between things is bound to the inanimate regularity of general laws. The most common incidents of life inevitably taught men to know the operation of gravity; the rudest attempt to build a shelter called up conceptions of the balance of masses, of the distribution of pressure, of the use of leverageexperiences which, as a matter of fact, we see the peoples lowest in the scale apply to all manner of purposes. The earliest hunting which used arrow and bow had to calculate the propelling force of the taut string; indeed, it had silently to count on the regularity of the modifications which this property underwent under varying conditions. Even the simple knack of bringing down an animal with a stone flung by the hand would never have been acquired had there not been a kind of anticipation, like an immediate certainty living in the flesh and blood of the arm, that the direction and speed of the bit of matter thrown would be completely determined by the special manner and amount of this particular effort as distinguished by its feel from others.

It is quite certain that for savages too the world is largely a world of inanimate material objects governed by uniform law. Yet neither for them nor for us is this a complete account of the world seen and handled. For here, in the midst of the world of inanimate material objects, moved only by external force, there are certain lumps of matter moving about under a direction apparently of quite another kindanimate bodies. The explanation of such movements is to be found in peculiarities which belong to life, in the case of some of them in peculiarities which belong to conscious life, in the case of those like ourselves, in peculiarities which belong to the specifically human consciousnessdesires, emotions, values, thoughts, as they exist in the mind of man. The simplest view of the world therefore confronted primitive man with two disparate kinds of movement in material objects; it gave him, beside the material world, a world of souls and soul-lifeor if this statement seems to beg a great question, one may say, without possibility of controversy, that it gave him, beside the material world, a world of consciousness, a world to which immaterial things like desires and emotions and values belonged.