Brotherhood of Man

J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia

      Brotherhood of Man. No Christian claim is more firmly lodged in our literature, secular as well as clerical, than that Christianity, in declaring the Fatherhood of God, introduced into the world the doctrine of the brotherhood of man. A father who is supposed to doom the majority of the race to eternal torment is quaint enough, nor do men seem to have been any nearer brotherhood in the Christian Era than in Roman days, but few ought to be ignorant that divine fatherhood or motherhood was a commonplace of pre-Christian religions. Even Egyptian and Babylonian deities were frequently hailed as the benevolent fathers or mothers (Ishtar, etc.) of all men, while the chief god of the Greeks and Romans was actually named the "Father in Heaven" (as the word Jupiter means). It was emphatically taught by the Brahmans of India, in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., that men are "all children of one Father" (Prof. Hopkins, Ethics of India, 1924, p. 150), and to the Jews from an early age Jahveh was the father of his people.
      More important as a source of the doctrine of brotherhood was the Mother-Earth goddess of Asia Minor (the Ma of the Hittites, the Great Mother of the Phrygians, etc.). From Phrygia the cult passed to Lydia [see], where we find the brotherhood or friendliness of all men first emphatically taught, and realized, better than in any later age, by the seventh century B.C. From there the doctrine, one of the practical applications of which was the formation of Guilds [see] of the Workers, passed to the neighbouring Ionian cities, gave a high quality to the ethic of the Ionian thinkers [see], and reached Greece and Rome. Zeno and Epicurus, the first philosophers to make the brotherhood of man a cardinal doctrine, came from Asia Minor or the islands off its coast, and the Stoic and Epicurean schools which spread over the Greek-Roman world inspired benevolence everywhere, condemned torture, and in some cases attacked war and slavery. Cicero urged the caritas humani generis ("universal friendship" or brotherhood) in a fine chapter of his De Officiis (I, 14), and there was a remarkable development of philanthropy [see] under the so-called Stoic emperors. All these consequences of a genuine and practical doctrine of brotherhood were abandoned when Europe was compelled to embrace the new religion; yet the literature of our enlightened age abounds in assurances that Christianity introduced and enforced the idea of brotherhood. (For books see the articles to which reference is made.)

Return to Joseph McCabe Selection

Home Page

Scanning, HTML Rae West. First upload 2021-3-29