and the Pythagoreans, and the disciples of Mohammed, all alike experienced it, not with the senses, but primarily as a concept. Parshva, who about 600 B.C. founded the sect of the "Unfettered"[1] on the Ganges, taught, like the other Puritans of his time, that salvation came, not from sacrifices and rights, but only from knowledge of the identity of Atman and Brahman. In all Puritan poetry the place of the old Gothic visions is taken by an unbridled, yet withal jejune, spirit of allegory. In the waking-consciousness of these ascetics the concept is the only real power. Pascal's wrestlings were about concepts and not, like Meister Eckart's, about shapes. Witches were burnt because they were proved, and not because they were seen in the air o' nights; the Protestant jurists employed the witches' hammer of the Dominicans because it was built on concepts. The Madonnas of the early Gothic had appeared to their suppliants, but those of Bernini no man ever saw. They exist because they are proved — and there came to be a positive enthusiasm for existence of this sort. Milton, Cromwell's great secretary of state, clothed concepts with shapes, and Bunyan brings a whole mythology of concepts into ethical-allegorical activity. From that it is but a step to Kant, in whose conceptual ethics the Devil assumes his final shape as the Radically Evil.
We have to emancipate ourselves from the surfaces of history — and, especially, to thrust aside the artificial fences in which the methodology of Western sciences has paddocked it — before we can see that Pythagoras, Mohammed, and Cromwell embody one and the same movement in three Cultures.
Pythagoras was not a philosopher. According to all statements of the Pre-Socratics, he was a saint, prophet and founder of a fanatically religious society that forced its truths upon the people around it by every political and military means. The destruction of Sybaris by Croton — an event which, we may be sure, has survived in historical memory only because it was the climax of a wild religious war — was an explosion of the same hate that saw in Charles I and his gay Cavaliers not merely doctrinal error, but also worldly disposition as something that must be destroyed root and branch. A myth purified and conceptually fortified, combined with rigorous ethical precepts, imbued the Pythagoreans with the conviction that they would attain salvation before all other men. The gold tablets found in Thurii and Petelia, which were put into the hand of the dead initiate, carried the assurance of the god: "Happy and blessed one, thou shalt be no more a mortal, but a god." It is the same certainty that the Koran gave to all believers who fought in the holy war against the infidel — "The monasticism of Islam is the religious war," says a hadith of the Prophet — the same which filled Cromwell's Ironsides when they scattered the King's "Philistines" and "Amalekites" at Marston Moor and Naseby.
Islam was no more a religion of the desert in particular than Zwingli's
- ↑ Nigantha. See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article "Jains." — Tr.
