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One hero, Kwoiam of Mabuiag, is said to have been a real man, and to have been almost deified; divinization of dead men is not unusual in Polynesia. +476+. New Guinea. In the eastern portion of British New Guinea the peculiarities of organization are that the people live in hamlets; that there is generally a combination of totems in a clan; and that special regard is paid to the father's totem.
As Browning said in his Christmas Eve and Easter Day, For the loving worm within its clod, Were diviner than a loveless God Amid his worlds, I will dare to say. The essence of the divine is Love, Will that personalizes and eternalizes, that feels the hunger for eternity and infinity. It is ourselves, it is our eternity that we seek in God, it is our divinization.
But when the Saviour-legend sprang up as indeed I think it must have sprung up, in tribe after tribe and people after people, independently then, whether it sprang from the divinization of some actual man who showed the way of light and deliverance to his fellows "sitting in darkness," or whether from the personification of the tribe itself as a god, in either case the question of the hero's parentage was bound to arise.
If, on the other hand, he was the divinization of some actual man, more or less known either personally or by tradition to his fellows, then in all probability the name of his mortal mother would be recognized and accepted; but as to his father, that side of parentage being, as we have said, generally very uncertain, it would be easy to suppose some heavenly Annunciation, the midnight visit of a God, and what is usually termed a Virgin-birth.
Harnack says of this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is essentially docetic that is, apparential because the process of the divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a myth or in a social atom?
No such custom is known to have existed among Semitic peoples, by whom a sharp distinction was made between the divine and the human. The Mazdean faith, like the Israelite, made it impossible to accept a deceased man as a god. +353+. Examples of the occasional divinization of deceased men in the Hellenic world are given below.
Popular feeling appears to have accepted this divinization without question and in sincerity; educated circles accepted it as an act of political policy. The elevation of Julius Cæsar and Augustus to the rank of gods established the rule, and deceased emperors received divine honors up to the triumph of Christianity.
If pneuma, in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification with the Word.
This divinization of a drink was no doubt mainly priestly it is a striking illustration of the power of the association of ideas, and belongs in the same general category with the deification of abstractions spoken of above.
The divinization of Babylonian kings, referred to above, seems not to have carried worship with it. The Semitic material of malefic spirits, while in general the same as that found elsewhere in the world, has a couple of special features.
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