Lecture X. The Place Of Egyptian Religion
In The History Of Theology.
In the preceding lectures I have endeavoured to bring before you
the more salient points in the religion of the ancient Egyptians,
in so far as they illustrate their conception of the divine. But we
must remember that all such descriptions of ancient belief must
be approximate only. We cannot put ourselves in the position of
those who held it; our inherited experiences, our racial tendencies,
our education and religious ideas, all alike forbid it. If the
Egyptians of the Theban period found it difficult to understand
the ritual of their own earlier history, and misinterpreted the
expressions and allusions in it, how much more difficult must
it be for us to do so. The most ordinary religious terms do not
bear for us the same meaning that they bore for the Egyptians.
The name of God calls up other associations and ideas; the very
word“divine”has a different signification in the ancient and the
modern world among Eastern and Western peoples. In fact, the
more literal is our translation of an old religious text, the more
likely we are to misunderstand it.
And yet in one sense we are the religious heirs of the builders
and founders of the Egyptian temples. Many of the theories
of Egyptian religion, modified and transformed no doubt, have
penetrated into the theology of Christian Europe, and form, as it
were, part of the woof in the web of modern religious thought. [230]
Christian theology was largely organised and nurtured in the
schools of Alexandria, and Alexandria was not only the meeting-
place of East and West, it was also the place where the decrepit
theology of Egypt was revivified by contact with the speculative
philosophy of Greece. The Egyptian, the Greek, and the Jew met
there on equal terms, and the result was a theological system in
which each had his share. In Philo, we are told, we find Moses
Platonising; but the atmosphere in which he did so was that of