Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 7 of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain's
The
Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane,
The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
13
SEVENTH CHAPTER
RELIGION
Rightly understand
the
driving power of religion, do what it behoves you to further it, and
seek
to fulfil your duty in this. — ZOROASTER.
CHRIST
AND CHRISTIANITY
ON a former
occasion
(vol. i. p. 249) I expressed
my personal conviction that the earthly life of Jesus Christ forms the
origin and source, the strength and — fundamentally — the significance
of everything that has ever called itself Christian religion. I shall
not
repeat myself, but refer once for all to the chapter on Christ. In that
chapter I completely separated the sublime figure of Christ from all
historical
Christianity, here I purpose to deal with the complementary aspect, and
to speak of the rise and growth of the Christian religion. It will be
my
endeavour to bring out certain leading ideas without even touching the
inviolable Figure on the Cross. This separation is not only possible
but
necessary; it would show a blasphemous lack of critical insight to try
to identify with the rock itself the strange structures that have been
built upon it by human profundity, acuteness, shortsightedness,
confusion,
stupidity, by tradition and piety, superstition, malice, senselessness,
convention, philosophic speculation and devotion to mysticism — amid
the
never-ceasing clatter of tongues and swords and the crackling of
flames.
The whole superstructure of the Christian Churches has hitherto been
outside
of the
14 RELIGION
personality of Christ. Jewish will,
united to Aryan mythical thought, has formed its principal part; much
was
derived from Syria, Egypt, &c.; the appearance of Christ upon earth
was, to begin with, only the incitement to the constitution of
religion,
its driving power — as when the lightning breaks through the clouds and
there follows a downpour of rain, or when sunbeams suddenly fall upon
certain
substances which have nothing in common, and they, at once transformed,
burst the boundaries that formerly separated them and unite to form a
new
compound. It would certainly be unwise to try to estimate the power of
the sunbeam and the lightning from these effects. All honour to those
who
built upon Christ, but we must not permit our vision or our judgment to
be dimmed. There is not only a past and a present, there is also a
future;
for it we must maintain our full freedom. I doubt whether we can
rightly
judge the past in its relation to the present unless a living
divination
of the needs of the future carries the mind aloft. Taking the
standpoint
of the present alone the eye is too much earthbound to be able to see
all
the possible sequences. It was a Christian, and a Christian in sympathy
with the Roman Church, who at the beginning of the nineteenth century
said:
“The New Testament is still a book with seven seals. Christianity must
be studied by man for eternities. In the gospels lie the outlines of
future
gospels.“ * Whoever studies carefully the history of Christianity sees
that it is always and everywhere in a state of flux, always and
everywhere
waging an inward struggle. Whoever, on the other hand, cherishes the
foolish
delusion that Christianity has now received its various final forms,
overlooks
the fact that even the Romish Church, which is considered particularly
conservative, has created new dogmas in every century, while older ones
(certainly with
*
Novalis:
Fragmente.
15 RELIGION
less noise) were being borne to their
grave; he forgets that, even in the nineteenth century, that firmly
established
church has experienced more movements,
struggles and schisms than almost any other. Such a man imagines that,
as the process of development is at an end, he now holds the sum of
Christianity
in his hands and from this monstrous supposition he constructs in the
piety
of his heart not only the present and the future but also the past.
Still
more monstrous is the supposition that Christianity is exhausted and
spent,
sustained in its boundless course only by the law of inertia; and yet
more
than one moral philosopher of recent times has written the obituary
notice
of Christianity, speaking of it as of an historical experiment now
over,
the beginning, middle and conclusion of which are capable of analytical
demonstration. The error of judgment, which lies at the bottom of these
opposite views is, it is obvious, practically the same, it leads
moreover
to equally false conclusions. This error we avoid when we distinguish
the
personality of Christ — that ever-gushing constant spring of the
loftiest
religiosity — from the structures which the changing religious needs,
the
changing mental claims of men, and — what is more important — the
fundamentally
different natures of dissimilar human races have erected as the law and
temple of their worship.
RELIGIOUS
DELIRIUM
The Christian
religion
took its rise at a very peculiar time, under as unfavourable
circumstances
as could be imagined for the establishment of a uniform, worthy and
solid
structure. In those very districts where its cradle stood, namely, in
Western
Asia, Northern Africa and Eastern Europe, there had been a peculiar
fusion
of the most diverse superstitions, myths, mysteries and philosophical
theorems,
whereby, as was inevitable, all had
16 RELIGION
lost something of their individuality
and value. Think for a moment of the political and social condition of
those countries at that time. What Alexander had begun, Rome had
completed
in a more thorough fashion: in those districts there prevailed an
internationalism
of which we can hardly form an idea to-day. In the leading cities on
the
Mediterranean and in Asia Minor there was absolutely no uniformity of
race.
There were to be found in heterogeneous groups Hellenes, Syrians, Jews,
Semites, Armenians, Egyptians, Persians, Roman military colonies,
&c.
&c., surrounded by countless hybrids, in whose veins all individual
characteristics had been confounded and lost. The feeling of patriotism
had quite disappeared, because it lacked all meaning; there existed
neither
nation nor race; Rome was for these men practically what the police are
for our mob. On this state of affairs, which I have characterised as
“the
chaos of peoples,“ I have endeavoured to throw some light in chapter
four of my book. From it resulted free interchange of ideas and
customs;
national custom and character were gone, and men sought to find a
substitute
in a capricious confusion of alien practices and alien views of life.
There
was now practically no real faith. Even in the case of the Jews —
otherwise
a splendid exception in the midst of this Witches‘ Sabbath — faith was
uncertain amid so many varying sects. And yet never before was there
such
an intoxication of religious feeling as spread at that time from the
banks
of the Euphrates to Rome. Indian mysticism, which in all manner of
corrupt
forms had penetrated as far as Asia Minor, Chaldaic star-worship,
Zoroastric
worship of Ormuzd and the fire-worship of the magicians, Egyptian
asceticism
and the doctrine of immortality, Syrian and Phoenician orgiasm and the
delusion of the sacrament, Samothracian, Eleusinian and all other kinds
of Hellenic mysteries, curiously disguised outcrops of Pythagorean,
17 RELIGION
Empedoclean and Platonic metaphysics,
Mosaic propaganda, Stoical ethics — were all circling in a mad whirl.
Men
no longer knew what religion meant, but they gave everything a trial,
in
the dim consciousness they had been robbed of something which was as
necessary
to them as the sun to the earth. * Into this world came the word of
Christ;
and it was by these fever-stricken men that the visible structure of
the
Christian religion was erected; no one could quite free it from the
traces
of delirium.
THE
TWO MAIN PILLARS
The history of the
rise of Christian theology is one of the most complicated and difficult
that exist. The man who approaches it earnestly and frankly will
receive
profound and stimulating instruction, but he will at the same time be
forced
to admit that very much is still exceedingly dark and uncertain, as
soon
as we leave theorising and try to demonstrate historically the real
origin
of an idea. A complete history, not of the dogmas within Christianity,
but of the way in which from the most diverse circles of ideas articles
of faith, conceptions, rules of life entered Christianity and made
their
home there, cannot yet be written; but enough has happened to convince
every one that here an alloy (as the chemists say) of the most diverse
metals has been formed. It is not within the scope of my work to submit
this complicated state of matters to a thorough analysis, even were I
competent
for the task; † in the meantime it
*
Herder
says regarding the man of this time: “He had strength for nothing but
believing.
Troubled about his wretched life, trembling for the future and in dread
of invisible powers, timid and powerless to investigate the course of
nature,
he lent his ear to stories and prophecies and let himself be inspired,
initiated, flattered, betrayed“ (Complete Works, Inghan‘s ed.
xix.
290).
† It
is scarcely right for me to name special works; the literature even in
as far as it is available to us laymen is extensive; the important
18 RELIGION
will be sufficient to consider the two
chief pillars — Judaism and Indo-Europeanism — on which almost the
whole
structure has been built and which explains the hybridism of the
Christian
religion from the beginning. Of course much that was Jewish and
Indo-European
was afterwards so falsified by the influence of the Chaos and
especially
of Egypt that it became no longer recognisable. Take, for example, the
introduction of the cult of Isis (mother of God) and the magic
transformation
of matter, though here, too, a knowledge of the fundamental structure
is
indispensable. Everything else is proportionately unimportant; thus —
to
give only one example — the official introduction into practical
Christianity
of Stoic doctrines of virtue and bliss by Ambrosius, whose book De
Officiis
Ministrorum was merely a pale imitation of Cicero‘s De Officiis,
which he in turn had compiled from the Greek Panaetius. * Such a thing
is certainly not without significance; Hatch shows, for example, in his
thing is to get
instruction
from various sources and not to be satisfied with a knowledge of
generalities.
Thus the short text-books of Harnack, Müller, Holtzmann, &c.,
in the Grundriss der theologischen Wissenschaften (Freiburg,
Mohr)
are invaluable, I have used them diligently; but the layman will get
much
more out of larger works, such as Neander‘s Kirchengeschichte
or
Renan‘s Origines du Christianisme, &c. Still more
instructive,
because more vivid and clear, are the works of the specialists, as
Ramsay:
The
Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170 (1895); Hatch: The
influence
of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church (1897);
Hergenröther‘s
great work: Photius, sein Leben, seine Schriften und das
griechische
Schisma, which begins with the founding of Constantinople and thus
traces in great detail the development of the Greek Church from the
beginning;
Hefele: Konziliengeschichte, &c. &c. We laymen can
naturally
acquire detailed knowledge of only a portion of this literature; but, I
repeat, it is only from detailed accounts and not from summaries that
we
can get vivid conceptions and knowledge. (An important new work is
Adolf
Harnack‘s Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten
drei
Jahrhunderten, 1902; 2nd ed. 1906.)
*
Ambrosius
admits this implicitly; see i. 24. Much is indeed an almost
literal
translation. How much more important, however, are his independent
writings,
as the speech on the death of the Emperor Theodosius with the beautiful
ever-recurring refrain: “Dilexi! I loved him!“
19
RELIGION
lecture on “Greek and Christian ethics,“
that the moral code which obtains to-day is made up of far more Stoical
than Christian elements. * But we have already seen that morality and
religion
may be independent of each other (see vol. i. pp. 215
and 489), at least
wherever
the “conversion“ taught by Christ has not taken place; and while it is
interesting to see a Church father recommending the practical and
cosmopolitan,
not to say legal, morality of a Cicero as model to the priests of his
diocese,
yet such a thing does not reach to the foundations of the religious
structure.
The same might be said of many another element which will occupy our
attention
later.
Now those two
principal
pillars, upon which the Christian theologists of the first centuries
erected
the new religion, are Jewish historical and chronological faith and
Indo-European
symbolical and metaphysical mythology. As I have already demonstrated
in
detail, we have here to deal with two fundamentally different “views of
life.“ † These two views now became amalgamated. Indo-Europeans — men
nurtured
on Hellenic poetry and philosophy thirsting after ideas — transformed
Jewish
historical religion according to the fancy of their richly imaginative
spirit; Jews, on the other hand, even before the rise of Christianity
seized
hold on the mythology and physics of the Greeks, saturated them with
the
historical superstition of their people and out of the whole spun an
abstract
dogmatical web which was just as incomprehensible as the most sublime
speculations
of a Plato, materialising into empirical forms everything that was
transcendental
and allegorical; on both sides therefore irremediable
* Influence
of Greek Ideas, pp. 139-170. In this lecture Hatch refers to
Ambrosius‘
work and is of opinion that it is essentially Stoical not only in
conception
but also in detail. The Christian element is indeed there, but merely
as
an adjunct. Its fundamental doctrine of wisdom, virtue, justice,
temperance,
is pure Graeco-Roman doctrine of pre-Christian times.
† See
especially vol. i. p. 213 f.
and p. 411 f.
20 RELIGION
misapprehension and non-comprehension
— the inevitable consequence of deviation from the natural course! It
was
the work of the first centuries to weld together in Christianity these
alien elements, and this work could naturally only succeed amid
unceasing
strife. Reduced to its simplest expression, this strife was a struggle
for mastery between Indo-European and Jewish religious instincts. It
broke
out immediately after the death of Christ between the Jewish Gentiles
and
the heathen Christians, for centuries it raged most violently between
gnosis
and antignosis, between Arians and Athanasians, it woke up again in the
Reformation and to-day it goes on as fiercely as ever, not indeed in
the
clouds of theory or on battlefields, but as an underground current in
our
life. We can make this process clear by a comparison. It is as though
we
were to take two trees of different genera, cut off their heads and
without
uprooting them bend them together and tie them in such a fashion that
each
should become a graft of the other. Upward growth would at once become
an impossibility for both; deterioration, not improvement, would be the
result, for, as every botanist knows, an organic union is in such a
case
impossible, and the trees, if they survived the operation, would
continue
to bear each its own leaves and flowers, and in the confusion of
foliage
alien would everywhere be driving against alien. * Exactly the same has
happened with the Christian structure of religion. Jewish religious
chronicle
and Jewish Messianic faith stand unreconciled beside the mystic
mythology
of the Hellenic decadence. Not only do they not fuse, in essential
points
they contradict each other. Take, for example, the conception of the
Godhead:
here Jehovah,
*
As
I afterwards found, Hamann has suggested this comparison: “Go into any
community of Christians you like, their language in the sacred
precincts,
their Fatherland and their genealogy betray the fact that they are
Gentile
branches, artificially grafted upon a Jewish stem.“ (Cf. Romans
xi. 24.)
21 RELIGION
there the old Aryan Trinity. Take again
the conception of the Messiah: here the expectation of a hero of the
tribe
of David, who will win for the Jews the empire of the world, there the
Logos become flesh, fastened on to metaphysical speculations, which had
occupied the Greek philosophers for five hundred years before the birth
of Christ. * Christ, the undeniably historical personality, is forced
into
both systems; for the Jewish historical myth he had to supply the
Messiah,
although no one was less suitable; in the neo-Platonic myth he is the
fleeting
incomprehensible manifestation of an abstract scheme of thought — he,
the
moral genius in its highest potentiality, the greatest religious
individuality
that ever lived!
Nevertheless even
admitting the necessary untrustworthiness and defects of such a hybrid
representation, we can hardly imagine how a universal religion could
have
arisen in that chaos of peoples without the cooperation of these two
elements.
Of course, if Christ had preached to Indian or Germanic peoples his
words
would have had quite a different influence. There has never been a less
Christian age — if I am allowed the paradox — than the centuries in
which
the Christian Church originated. A real understanding of Christ‘s words
was at that time out of the question. But when through him the stimulus
to religious elevation was given to that chaotic and deluded mass of
human
beings, how could a temple have been built for them without basing
everything
upon the Jewish chronicle and the Jewish tendency to view things from a
concrete historical standpoint? One could only keep these slavish
souls,
who had nothing to lean upon either in themselves or in the national
life
around them, by giving them something tangible, something material and
dogmatically certain; it was a religious law, not philosophical
speculations
about duty and
*
I
said five hundred years, for see Harnack on the identity of
Logos
and Nous: Dogmengeschichte, § 22.
22 RELIGION
virtue, that they required; for that
reason indeed many had already adopted Judaism. But Judaism —
invaluable
as a power of will — possesses only a very small and, being Semitic, a
very limited creative capacity; the architect had therefore to be
sought
elsewhere. Without the wealth of form and the creative power of the
Hellenic
spirit, or let us say simply, without Homer, Plato and Aristotle, and
in
the further background Persia and India — the outward cosmogonic and
mythological
structure of the Christian Church could never have become the temple of
a universal faith. The early teachers of the Church all link themselves
with Plato, the later ones with Aristotle as well. Any Church history
will
testify to the extensive literary poetical and philosophical culture of
the earliest, that is the Greek, fathers, and from that we may form a
high
estimate of the value of this culture for the fundamental dogmas of
Christianity.
The Indo-European mythology could not of course receive colour and life
under such strange auspices; it was Christian art which at a later time
helped as far as possible to make good this want; yet, thanks to the
influence
of the Hellenic eye, this mythology at least received a geometric and
in
so far visible shape: the ancient Aryan conception of the Trinity
supplied
the skilfully built cosmic temple, in which were erected the altars of
an entirely new religion.
We must now become
quite clear about the nature of these two most important constructive
elements
of the Christian religion, otherwise it will be impossible to
understand
the very complicated strife about articles of faith, which has been
raging
from the first century of our era to the present day — but especially
during
the first centuries. The various leading spirits confuse in the most
varying
proportions the most contradictory views, doctrines and instincts of
Jew
and Indo-European. Let us therefore consider first the mythologically
moulding
23
RELIGION
influence of the Indo-European
philosophy
upon the growing Christian religion, and afterwards the mighty impulse
which it received from the positive, materialistic spirit of Judaism.
In chapter five I
have given a detailed exposition of the difference between historical
and
mythical religion; * I assume it now to be known. Mythology is a
metaphysical
view of the world sub specie oculorum. Its peculiarity, its
special
character — its limitation also — consists in this, that what has not
been
seen is by it reduced to something seen. The myth explains nothing; it
is not a seeking after the whence and whither; nor is it a moral
doctrine;
least of all is it history. From this one reflection it is clear that
the
mythology of the Christian Church has primarily nothing to do with Old
Testament chronology and the historical advent of Christ; it is an old
Aryan legacy transformed in many respects for the worse by alien hands
and adapted well or badly to new conditions. † In order to form a clear
idea of the mythological portions of Christianity, we shall do well to
distinguish between inner and outer mythology, that is, between the
mythological
moulding of outer and of inner experience. Phoebus driving his car
through
the sky is the figurative expression of an outward phenomenon; the
Erinnyes
pursuing the criminal symbolise a fact of man's inner experience. In
both
spheres Christian and mythological symbolism have penetrated deep, and
as Wolfgang Menzel, a man of Catholic leanings, says, “Symbolism is not
merely the mirror, it is also the source of dogma.“ ‡ Symbolism as the
source of dogma is manifestly identical with mythology.
* See
vol. i. pp. 411 to 440.
† It
is easy to understand how the pious Tertullian, who grew up in
Heathenism,
could say of the conceptions of the Hellenic poets and philosophers,
that
they were tam consimilia to the Christian ones! (Apol.
xlvii).
‡ Christliche
Symbolik (1854), i, p. viii.
24
RELIGION
THE MYTHOLOGY
OF OUTER EXPERIENCE
As an excellent
example
of mythology which grows from external experience I should like to
mention
especially the conception of the Trinity. Thanks to the influence of
Hellenic
sentiment, the Christian Church (in spite of the violent opposition of
the Jewish Christians), had, in the moulding of its dogma, steered
successfully
past that most dangerous cliff, Semitic monotheism, and has preserved
in
her otherwise perilously Judaised conception of the Godhead the sacred
“Three in Number“ of the Aryans. * It is well known that we continually
come across the number Three among the Indo-Europeans: it is, as Goethe
says,
- ..... die ewig unveraltete,
- Dreinamig — Dreigestaltete.
We find it in the three groups of the
Indian
gods, at a later time (several centuries before Christ) developed into
the detailed and expressly stated doctrine of the Trinity, the
Trimûrti:
“He, who is Vishnu, is also Çiva, and he, who is Çiva, is
also Brahma: one being but three Gods.“ And the conception can be
traced
from the distant east to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, where
Patricius
found the clover leaf as the symbol of the Trinity among the Druids.
The
number Three was bound at an early time to impress itself upon races
that
were inclined to poetry and metaphysics, for it and it alone is not a
chance
number (like five or ten which are derived from the fingers) nor a
pedantically
calculated
*
That
the Indo-Europeans also were at bottom monotheists, I have at a much
earlier
point emphasised, in opposition to the widespread popular error (see
vol. i. pp. 218 and 424);
cf.
also Jac. Grimm in the preface to his Deutsche Mythologie (pp.
xliv.-xlv.)
and Max Müller in his lectures on the Science of Languages (ii.
385).
But this kind of monotheism must be distinguished from the Semitic.
25 RELIGION
number (like seven, which is derived
from the so-called seven wandering stars), it expresses a fundamental
phenomenon,
so that the conception of a Trinity might rather be called an
experience
than a symbol. The authors of the Upanishads had already recognised
that
all human knowledge rests on three fundamental forms — time, space,
causality
— and that not a triplicity but (to quote from Kant) a “unity of
apperception“
results therefrom; space and time also are inseparable unities, but
possess
three dimensions. In short, the threefoldness as unity surrounds us on
all sides as an original phenomenon of experience and is reflected in
all
individual cases. Thus, for example, the most modern science has proved
that without exception every element can take three — but only three —
forms: the solid, the fluid, the gaseous; and this only further shows,
what the people long ago knew, that our planet consists of earth, water
and air. As Homer says:
- Everything was divided into three.
If we search for such conceptions
intentionally,
the proceeding very soon degenerates (as in the case of Hegel) into
trifling;
* but there is no trifling in the spontaneous, intuitive development
into
a myth of a general, but not analytically divided, physical and at the
same time metaphysical cosmic experience. And from this example we
derive
the consoling certainty that in the Christian dogma too the
Indo-European
spirit has not become entirely untrue to its own nature, but that its
myth-creating
religion has still remained nature-symbolism, as was the case from time
immemorial with the Indo-Eranians and the Teutonic nations. But here
the
symbolism is very subtle indeed, because in the first
*
Thus,
for example, the so-called necessary progression of the thesis,
antithesis
and synthesis, or again the deity of the Absolute as father, the
different
existence as son, the return to itself as spirit.
26 RELIGION
Christian centuries philosophical
abstraction
flourished, while artistic creative power was dormant. * We must also
emphasise
the fact that the myth was not felt by the great mass of the Christians
as a symbol; but the same was true of the Indians and Teutonic peoples
with their deities of light, air and water; it is indeed no
mere
symbol: all nature testifies to the inner, transcendental truth of such
a dogma as well as to its power of vigorous progressive development. †
Now the structure
of Christian dogma contains a great deal of such external, or, if we
will,
cosmic mythology.
In the first place
nearly everything which as doctrine supplements the conception of the
Trinity:
the incarnation of the Word, the Paraclete, &c. More especially is
the myth of God becoming man an old Indian ancestral property. We see
it
in the idea of unity in the very first book of the Rigveda; it
meets
us in philosophical transformation in the doctrine of the identity of
Atma
and Brahma; and it assumed visible form in the God-man Krishna, a
figure
which the poet makes God explain in the Bhagavadgîtâ
as follows: “Again and again when virtue languishes and injustice
prevails
I create myself (in human form). For the protection of the good, the
destruction
of the evil and the confirmation of virtue am I born on earth.“ ‡ The
dogmatic
conception of the nature of Buddha is merely a modification of this
myth.
The conception, too, that the god who became man could
* See
the whole conclusion of the first chapter.
† The
Egyptian Triads were formerly allowed to have a greater influence upon
the moulding of Christian dogmas than was right. In truth the
conception
of the son of God in his relation to God the Father (the son “not made,
nor created but begotten,“ literally as in the Athanasian Creed) seems
specifically Egyptian: we find it in all the various Egyptian systems
of
gods; but the third person is the goddess (Cf. Maspero: Histoire
ancienne des peuples de l‘Orient classique, 1895 i. 151, and Budge:
The
Book of the Dead, p. xcvi.)
‡ Bhagavadgîtâ
Book IV. §§ 7 and 8.
27 RELIGION
only be born of a virgin is an old
mythical
feature and decidedly belongs to the class of nature-symbols. The
much-ridiculed
schoolmen who wished to find not only heaven and hell, but also the
Trinity,
the incarnation, the birth from a virgin, &c., suggested in Homer
and
expressed in Aristotle, were not quite wrong. The altar and the view of
the sacraments among the earliest Christians point likewise rather to
common
Aryan conceptions of a symbolic nature-cult than to the Jewish
peace-offering
to an angry God (see details concerning this at the end of the
chapter).
In short, no single feature of Christian mythology can lay claim to
originality.
Of course, all these conceptions received a very different meaning in
the
Christian doctrine — not that the mythical background had become
essentially
different, but rather because from now onwards the historical
personality
of Jesus Christ stood in the foreground, and because the metaphysics
and
the myths of the Indo-Europeans, when recast by the men of the chaos,
had
mostly been so disfigured as to be no longer recognisable. An attempt
has
been made in the nineteenth century to explain away the fact of Christ
as a myth; * the truth lies in the very reverse: Christ is the one
thing
in Christianity that is not mythical; through Jesus Christ, through the
cosmic greatness of his personality (and to this may be added the
historically
materialising influence of Jewish thought) myth has, so to speak,
become
history.
CORRUPTION
OF THE MYTHS
Before I pass on
to
the moulding of myths from inner experience, I must say a word about
those
alien, transforming influences that brought themselves to bear upon the
visible structure of religion, and so falsified our own inherited
mythical
conceptions.
* See
vol. i. p. 181.
28 RELIGION
For example, it is,
as I have said, an old idea that God becoming man was born of a virgin,
but the worship of the “mother of God“ was taken from Egypt, where for
about three centuries before Christ the rich plastically changeable
Pantheon
with its usual readiness to receive the alien had assimilated this idea
with particular zeal, transforming it, like everything Egyptian, to a
purely
empirical materialism. But it was long before the cult of Isis could
force
its way into the Christian religion. In the year 430, the term “mother
of God“ is described by Nestorius as a blasphemous innovation; it had
just
made its way into the Church! In the history of mythological dogma
nothing
can be so clearly proved as the direct, genetic connection of the
Christian
worship of the “mother of God“ with the worship of Isis. In the latest
times the religion of the chaos that dwelt in Egypt had limited itself
more and more to the worship of the “son of God“ — Horus and his mother
Isis. Concerning this the famous Egyptologist Flinders Petrie writes:
“This
religious custom had a profound influence upon the development of
Christianity.
We may even say that, but for the presence of Egypt we should never
have
seen a Madonna. Isis had obtained a great hold on the Romans under the
earlier Emperors; her worship was fashionable and widespread; and when
she found a place in the other great movement, that of the Galileans,
when
fashion and moral conviction could go hand in hand, then her triumph
was
assured, and, as the Mother Goddess, she has been the ruling figure of
the religion of Italy ever since.“ * The same author then shows also
* Religion
and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, ed. 1898, p. 46. Every year new
proofs
of the universal spread of the Isis cult in all places where the
influence
of the Roman chaos had penetrated are being discovered in all parts of
Europe. The belief in the resurrection of the body and the
communication
by sacrament of the manna of eternal life were elements of these
mysteries
long before the birth of Christ. One finds the greatest number of
evidences
in the Museum of Guimet, since Gaul and Italy were the chief seats of
the
Isis cult. (In the
29
RELIGION
how the worship of Horus as a child
of God was transferred to the conceptions of the Roman Church, so that
out of the profound and thoughtful, ripe and manly proclaimer of
salvation
of the earliest representations there grew finally the arrogant bambino
of Italian pictures. * Here we see the chaos of peoples as well as
Indo-Europeanism
and Judaism at work in the development of the structure of the
Christian
Church. We find the same in the conceptions of heaven and of hell, of
the
resurrection, of angels and evil spirits, &c., and at the same time
we find their mythological worth becoming less and less, till finally
almost
nothing is left but slavish superstition, which worships before the
fetish
of the putative nails of a saint. I attempted in the second half of the
first chapter to explain the difference between superstition and
religion;
at the same time I showed how the delusive conceptions of the
uneducated
mob, in league with the most subtle philosophy, successfully instituted
an attack upon genuine religion, as soon as Hellenic poetical power
began
to decline; what was said there is applicable here and need not be
repeated.
(See vol. i. pp. 70 to 80.)
Centuries before Christ the so-called mysteries were introduced into
Greece,
and into them men were initiated by purification (baptism), in order
that
by partaking together of the divine flesh and blood (Greek mysterion,
Latin sacramentum) they might then share in the divine nature
and
immortality; but these delusive doctrines were accepted
meantime
Flinders Petrie has made new discoveries, especially in Ehnasya, from
which
step by step it can be traced how the cult of Isis and of Horus were
transformed
into the would-be “Christian“ worship of the Madonna. See the
communications
of this scholar before the British Association, 1904.)
*
Interesting
in this connection is the demonstration by the same author that the
well-known
Christian monogram so frequent on old monuments and still employed
to-day
(supposed to be khi-rho from the Greek alphabet) is nothing
more
or less than the common Egyptian symbol of the God Horus!
30 RELIGION
exclusively by the ever-increasing
population
of “foreigners and slaves“ and inspired all genuine Hellenes with
horror
and contempt. * The more deep the religious and creative consciousness
sank, the more boldly did the chaos raise its head. A fusion of all
shades
of superstitions was brought about by the Roman Empire, and when
Constantine
II. at the end of the fourth century proclaimed the Christian religion
to be the religion of the State and so forced all those who were at
heart
non-Christians into the community of the Christians, all the chaotic
conceptions
of degenerate “heathendom“ flowed in at the same time and from those
days
onward formed — at least to a great extent — an essential element of
the
dogma.
This moment is the
turning-point in the development of the Christian religion.
Noble Christians,
especially the Greek Fathers, fought desperately against the
disfiguration
of their pure, simple faith, a struggle which found its most important
but its most violent and best known expression in the long conflict
about
image-worship. Already in this, Rome, prompted by race, culture and
tradition,
took the side of the chaos. At the end of the fourth century the great
Vigilantius, a Goth, raises his voice against the pseudo-mythological
Pantheon
of guardian angels and martyrs, the abuse of relics — and the monkshood
taken over from the Egyptian worship of Serapis; † but Hieronymus,
* See
especially the famous speech of Demosthenes De Corona, and for
a
summary of the facts Jevons: Introduction to the History of
Religion,
1896, chap. xxiii. For the tracing back of the Last Supper to Old
Babylon
see
Otto Pfleiderer‘s Christusbild, p. 84, and for its relation to
other
old mysteries see the same author‘s Entstehung des
Christentums,
1905, p. 154. For the fundamental facts see Albr. Dieterich‘s Eine
Mithrasliturgie, 1903.
†
Pachomius,
the founder of real monkhood, was an Egyptian like his predecessor, the
hermit Antonius. He was a native of Upper Egypt, and as a “national
attendant
on Serapis“ learned the practices which he afterwards transferred
almost
unchanged to Christianity. (Cf. Zöckler: Askese und
Mönchtum,
2nd ed. p. 193 f.)
31
RELIGION
who was educated in Rome, fights it
down and enriches the world and the calendar with new saints invented
by
his own imagination. The “pious lie“ was already at work. *
THE MYTHOLOGY
OF INNER EXPERIENCE
This may suffice
to
illustrate the manner in which the mythology derived from outer
experience
and handed down by the Indo-Europeans was unavoidably disfigured by the
Chaos of Peoples. If we now turn our attention to the forming of myths
from inner experience, we shall find the Indo-European legacy in purer
form.
The kernel of the
Christian religion, the focus in which all rays concentrate, is the
conception
of a “redemption of man“: this idea has always been and still is
strange
to the Jews; it absolutely contradicts their whole conception of
religion;
† for here we have not to do with a visible, historical fact, but with
an inexpressible, inner experience. It is, on the other hand, the
central
idea in all Indo-Eranian religious views; they all revolve, as it were,
round the longing for redemption, the hope of salvation; nor was this
idea
of redemption strange to the Hellenes; we find it in their mysteries:
it
forms the basis of many of their myths, and in Plato (e.g., in
the
seventh book of the Republic) it is clearly recognisable,
although,
for the reason stated in the first chapter, the Greeks of the Classical
epoch revealed to a very small extent the inner, moral, or, as we
should
say to-day, pessimistic side of these myths. They sought the kernel
elsewhere:
- What are treasures to me in
comparison with
life.
And yet alongside of this high estimate
of life as the
* Cf.
vol. i. p. 313. For the
“adoption
of heathendom,“ see also Müller. p. 204 f.
† Cf.
vol. i. p. 413, and also
the
passage on p. 337, quoted
from
Graetz.
32 RELIGION
most glorious of all possessions there
is the song of praise to the one who dies young:
- All things are fair in death,
whatever may
appear. *
But whoever notices
the
tragic basis of the proverbial “Greek cheerfulness“ will be inclined to
recognise this “redemption in beautiful manifestation“ as clearly
related
to those other conceptions of the redemption; it is the same theme in a
different key, Major instead of Minor.
The idea of
redemption
— or let us rather say the mythical conception of redemption † —
embraces
two others: that of a present imperfection and that of a possible
perfection
by some non-empirical, that is, in a certain sense supernatural or
transcendental
process: the one is symbolised by the myth of degeneration, the other
by
that of gracious help bestowed by a Higher Being. The myth of
degeneration
becomes particularly plastic where it is represented as the fall by
sin;
this is in consequence the most beautiful and imperishable page in
Christian
mythology; whereas the complementary conception of grace is so
pre-eminently
metaphysical that it can scarcely be presented in plastic form. The
story
of the fall is a fable, by which attention is drawn to a great
fundamental
fact of human life awakened to consciousness; it leads up to knowledge;
grace, on the other hand, is a conception which only follows after
knowledge,
and can only be acquired by personal experience. ‡ Hence a great and
interesting
difference in
* Iliad
ix. 401, and xxii. 73.
†
That
in the case of Homer the word muthos corresponds to the later logos,
that is, that all speech is viewed, so to speak, as poetry (which it
obviously
is), is one of those thing in which language reveals to us the
profoundest
facts concerning the organisation of our mind.
‡
Kluge
gives in his Etymologisches Wörterbuch the following as
etymology
and explanation of grace (Gnade). Root meaning, “to bend, bend
oneself“;
Gothic, “to support“; Old Saxon, “favour, help“; Old
33 RELIGION
the development of all genuine (that
is, non-Semitic) religions according to the predominant mental gifts of
the various races. Wherever the creative and figurative element
predominates
(in the case of the Eranians, the Europeans, and, as it seems, the
Sumero-Accadians)
degeneration is plastically presented as “fall by sin“ and made the
centre
of the complex of myths derived from inner experience: this complex of
myths groups itself around the conception of redemption; * whereas
where
this is not the case (for example among the Aryan Indians, who have
such
high talents for metaphysics but as plastic artists are more rich in
imagination
than skilful in form), we do not find the myth of degeneration clearly
and definitely formulated, but only all sorts of contradictory
conceptions.
On the other hand, grace — the weak point of our religion and for most
Christians a mere confused word — is the radiant sun of Indian faith;
it
represents not merely hope but the triumphant experience of the pious,
and therefore stands so very much in the forefront of all religious
thought
and feeling that the discussions of the Indian sages on grace,
especially
in its relation to good works, make the violent debates which have
always
divided the Christian Church appear relatively almost childish and to a
great extent ridiculous, if we
High German, “pity,
compassion,
condescension“; Middle High German, “bliss, support, favour.“
* The
myth of degeneration forms, as is well known, a fundamental component
of
the circle of conceptions of the Greeks, who nevertheless are so
persistently
called “cheerful.“
- “Would I had
sooner died,
or else had been later born!
- For now lives a
race of iron:
never by day
- Are they free of
misery and
care, and by night
- They suffer pain:
and the
burden of cares is the gift of the Gods!“
So speaks the “joyful“
Hesiod
(Works and Days, verse 175 f.). And he paints to us a past
“golden
age,“ which we have to thank for the little good that still exists
among
us degenerate men, for these great men of the past still move as
spirits
in our midst; cf. vol. i, p.
89.
34 RELIGION
except the case of a very few men —
an Apostle Paul and a Martin Luther. Should any one be inclined to
doubt
that here we are dealing with the mythical shaping of inexpressible
inner
experiences, I would refer him to the speech of Christ to Nicodemus, in
which the word “regeneration“ would be just as senseless as the story
in
Genesis
of the degeneration of the first beings by the eating of an apple, if
there
were not here as there, a case of making visible a perfectly actual and
present but at the same time invisible process which therefore the
understanding
cannot grasp. And in reference to the fall by sin I refer to Luther,
who
writes: “Original sin means the fall of all nature“; and again: “The
earth
is indeed innocent and would willingly bring forth the best; but it is
hindered by the curse that has fallen upon men by reason of sin.“ Here
natural affinity between man's innermost action and surrounding nature
is obviously postulated: that is Indo-European mythical religion in its
full development (see vol. i. pp. 214
and 412). I may also say
that
when this mythical religion reveals itself as the conception of reason
(as in the case of Schopenhauer) it forms Indo-European metaphysics. *
Reflection upon this
brings home to us the profound and very significant fact that our
Indo-European
view of “sin“ is altogether mythical, that is, it reaches beyond the
real
world. I have already pointed out (vol. i. p. 390)
how fundamentally distinct the Jewish view is, so that the same word
denotes
with them quite a different thing; I have, moreover, studied various
modern
Jewish handbooks of religious teaching without anywhere finding a
discussion
of the idea of “sin“: whoever does not break the law is righteous; on
the
other hand, the Jewish theologians expressly and energetically reject
the
dogma
*
Luther‘s
thoughts are vaguely anticipated in the 5th chapter of the Epistle
to
the Romans, but they are found quite fully expressed in the
writings
of Scotus Erigena, whom he valued so highly (see De Divisione
Naturae,
Book V. chap. 36).
35 RELIGION
of original sin which the Christians
derived from the Old Testament. * Now if we reflect on this position of
the Jews, which is perfectly justified by their history and religion,
we
shall soon come to see that from our different standpoint sin and
original
sin are synonyms. It is a question of an unavoidable condition of all
life.
Our conception of sinfulness is the first step towards the recognition
of a transcendental connection of things; it is evidence that our
direct
experience of this connection is beginning — an experience which
receives
its consummation in the words of Christ: “The Kingdom of Heaven is
within
you.“ (see vol. i. p.
187).
Augustine's definition: „Peccatum est dictum, factum vel concupitum
contra legem aeternam“, † is only a superficial extension of Jewish
conceptions; Paul goes to the root of the matter by calling sin itself
a “law“ — a law of the flesh, or, as we should say to-day, an empirical
law of nature — and by showing in a famous passage which has been
considered
obscure but is perfectly clear (Romans viii), that the Church
law,
that so-called lex aeterna of Augustine, has not the least
power
over sin, which is a fact of nature, over which grace alone can
prevail.
‡ The exact transcription of the Old Indian thought! The singer of the
Veda already “searches eagerly for his sin“ and finds it not in his
will
but in his condition, which even in his dreams holds evil up before his
eyes, and finally he turns to his God, “the God of grace,“ who
enlightens
the simple. §
*
Consult
as an example Philippson‘s Israelitische Religionslehre, ii. 89.
† Sin
is a breach of the everlasting law by word, deed or desire.
‡ Cf.
especially Pfleiderer: Der Paulinismus, 2nd ed. p. 50 f. This
purely
scientific theological exposition is naturally different from mine, but
nevertheless confirms it, especially by the proof (p. 59) that Paul
assumed
the presence of an impulse to sin before the Fall, which obviously
could
mean nothing but the removal of the myth beyond arbitrary historical
boundaries;
then also by the clear demonstration that Paul, in opposition to the
Augustinian
dogmatists, recognised in the flesh the common and unchanging source of
all sinful nature.
§
Rigveda
vii. 86.
36 RELIGION
And in the same way as later Origenes,
Erigena and Luther, the
Çârîraka-Mîmânsâ
considers all living beings as “in need of redemption, but only human
beings
as being capable of it.“ * It is only when we view sin as a condition,
not as the transgression of a law, that we can arrive at the two
conceptions
of redemption and of grace. Here we have to do with the inmost
experiences
of the individual soul, which, as far as is possible, are made visible
and communicable through mythical images.
How unavoidable the
struggle was in this whole range of myth-building becomes clear from
the
simple reflection that such conceptions are directly contradictory to
the
Jewish view of religion. Where does one find in the sacred books of the
Hebrews even the slightest hint of the conception of the divine
Trinity?
Nowhere. Note also with what fine instinct the first bearers of the
Christian
idea take precautions that the “redeemer“ should not be incorporated in
any way with the Jewish people: the house of David had been promised
everlasting
duration by the Priests (2 Samuel xxii, 5), hence the
expectation
of a King from this tribe; but Christ is not descended from the house
of
David; † neither is he a son of Jehovah, the God of the Jews; he is the
son of the cosmic God, that “holy ghost“ which was familiar to all
Aryans
under different names — the “breath of breath,“ as the
Brihadâranyaka
says, or, to quote the Greek Fathers of the Christian Church, the poietes
and plaster of the world, the “originator of the sublime work
of
creation.“ ‡ The idea of a redemption and with it of necessity the
conceptions
of degeneration and grace have always been and still are alien to the
Jews.
The surest proof is afforded by the fact that, although the Jews
themselves
relate the myth of the Fall at the
*
Çankara:
Die
Sûtra‘s des Vedânta, i, 3, 25.
† See
the fictitious genealogies in Matthew i. and Luke ii.,
both
of which go back to Joseph — not to Mary.
‡ See
Hergenröther: Photius iii. 428.
37 RELIGION
beginning of their sacred books, they
themselves have never known anything of original sin! I have already
pointed
to this fact, and we know of course that all the myths contained in the
Bible are without exception borrowed, reduced from mythological
ambiguity
to the narrow significance of an historical chronicle, by those who
composed
the Old Testament. * For this reason there grew up in regard to the
cycle
of myths of redemption a strife within the Christian Church which raged
wildly during the first centuries, and signified a life and death
struggle
for religion, which is not yet settled and never can be — never, so
long
as two contradictory views of existence are forced by obstinate want of
comprehension to exist side by side as one and the same religion. The
Jew,
as Professor Darmesteter assured us (vol. i. p.
421), “Has never troubled his brain about the story of the apple
and
the serpent“; for his unimaginative brain it had no meaning; † for the
Greek and the Teuton, on the other hand, it was the starting-point of
the
whole moral mythology of humanity laid down in the book of Genesis.
These therefore could not help “troubling their brains“ about the
question.
If like the Jews they rejected the Fall completely, they at the same
time
destroyed the belief in divine grace and therewith disappeared the
conception
of redemption, in short, religion in our Indo-European sense was
destroyed
and nothing but Jewish rationalism remained behind — without the
strength
and the ideal element of Jewish national tradition and blood
relationship.
That is what Augustine clearly recognised. But on the other hand: if we
were to accept this very ancient Sumero-Accadian fable, which was
meant,
as I said before, to awaken the perceptive faculty, if we fancied we
must
interpret it in that Jewish fashion
* See
vol. i pp. 230, 418,
and 433.
†
Professor
Graetz (i. 650] considers the doctrine of original sin to be a “new
doctrine,“
invented by Paul!
38 RELIGION
which views all things mythical as
materially
correct history, the result must be a monstrous and revolting doctrine,
or, as Bishop Julianus of Eclanum at the beginning of the fifth century
expresses it, “a stupid and profane dogma.“ It was this conviction that
decided the pious Briton Pelagius — and before him, as it seems, almost
the whole Hellenic Christendom. I have studied various histories of
dogma
and histories of the Church without ever finding this so very simple
cause
of the unavoidable Pelagian controversy even hinted at. Harnack, for
example,
in his History of Dogma, says of Augustine's doctrine of grace
and
sin: “As the expression of psychological religious experience it is
true;
but when projected into history it is false,“ and a little further on
he
says, “the letter of the Bible had a confusing influence“; here on two
occasions he is very near the explanation, without seeing it, and in
consequence
the rest of his exposition remains abstract and theological, leaving us
very uncertain on the matter. For here we have obviously an instance,
if
I may use a popular expression, of a knife that cuts both ways. By
scornfully
rejecting the low materialistic, concretely historical view of Adam's
Fall,
he proves his deeply religious feeling and maintains it in happy
protest
against shallow Semitism; at the same time — by proving death, for
example,
a universal and necessary law of nature having nothing to do with sin —
he is fighting for truth against superstition, for science against
obscurantism.
On the other hand, he and his comrades have had their sense for poetry
and myth so destroyed by Aristotelianism and Hebraism, that he himself
(like so many an Anti-Semite of the present day) has become half a Jew
and rejects the good with the bad: he will hear nothing of the Fall;
the
old, sacred image which points the way to the profoundest knowledge of
human nature he discards completely; but grace is hereby made to shrink
to a meaningless word and redemption becomes so shadowy
39 RELIGION
an abstraction that a follower of
Pelagius
could speak of an “emancipation of man from God by free will.“ This
path
would have led directly back to flatly rationalistic philosophy and
Stoicism,
with the never-failing complement of grossly sensual mystery-service
and
superstition, a movement which we can observe in the ethical and
theosophical
societies of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt, therefore, that
Augustine in that famous struggle, in which he originally had the
greatest
and most gifted portion of the Episcopate, and more than once the Pope
too, against him, saved religion as such; for he defended the myth. But
by what means only was that possible to him? It was only possible
because
he threw the narrow Nessus-shirt of acquired Jewish narrow-mindedness
over
the splendid creations of divining, intuitive, heavenward-soaring
wisdom,
and transformed Sumero-Accadian similes into Christian dogmas, in the
historical
truth of which every one must henceforth believe on penalty of death. *
I am not writing
a history of theology and cannot go deeper into this controversy, but I
hope that these fragmentary hints have thrown some light on the
inevitable
quarrel concerning the Fall, and characterised it in its essentiality.
Every educated man knows that the Pelagian controversy is still going
on.
The Catholic Church, by emphasising the importance of works as opposed
to faith, could not help diminishing the importance of grace; no
sophistry
can put aside this fact, which when further reflected has influenced
the
actions and thoughts of millions. But Fall and Grace are so closely
connected
parts of one single organism that the least touching of the one
influences
the other; thus it was that step by step the true significance of the
myth
*
This
may have been difficult enough for Augustine himself, for earlier, in
the
27th chapter of the 15th book of the De Civitate Dei, he bad
spoken
strongly against attempting to interpret the book of Genesis as
historical truth entirely free of allegory.
40
RELIGION
of the Fall became so weakened that
the Jesuits to-day are generally described as semi-Pelagians, and they
themselves even call their doctrine a scientia media. * As soon
as the myth is infringed, Judaism is inevitable.
It is clear that
the struggle must rage more fiercely concerning the conception of
grace;
for the Fall was at least found in the sacred books of the Israelites,
though only as uncomprehended myth, whereas grace is nowhere to be
found
there and is and remains quite meaningless to them. The storm had
already
burst among the Apostles, and it has not yet died away. Law or grace:
the
two could no more exist simultaneously than man could at once serve God
and Mammon. “I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness
come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain.“ (Paul to the Galatians
ii. 21). One such passage is decisive; to play off against it other
so-called
“canonical“ utterances (e.g., The Epistle of James, ii,
14,
24) is childish; for it is not a question of theological hair-splitting
but of one of the great facts of experience of inner life amongst us
Indo-Europeans.
“Only he receives redemption, whom redemption chooses,“ says the
Kâtha-Upanishad.
And what gift is it that this metaphysical myth lets us “receive by
grace“?
According to the Indo-Eranians knowledge; according to the European
Christians
faith: both guaranteeing a regeneration, that is, awakening man to the
consciousness of a different connection of things. † I quote again the
words of Christ, for they cannot too often be quoted: “The Kingdom of
Heaven
is within you.“ This is a discernment or a faith, obtained by divine
grace.
Redemption by knowledge, redemption by
*
I
shall only quote one witness whose judgment is moderate and correct,
Sainte-Beuve.
He writes (Port Royal, Book IV. chap. 1): „Les
Jésuites
n‘attestent pas moins par leur méthode d‘éducation qu‘ils
sont sémi-pélagiens tendant au Pélagianisme pur,
que
par leur doctrine directe.“
† Cf.
vol. i. pp. 193 and 437;
and the paragraph on “Philosophy
and
Religion“ in the ninth chapter (vol. ii.).
41 RELIGION
faith: two views which are not so very
different as people have thought; the Indian, and Buddha, put the
emphasis
on the intellect, the Graeco-Teuton, taught by Jesus Christ, upon the
will:
two interpretations of the same inner experience. But the second is of
more far-reaching importance, since redemption by knowledge, as India
shows,
signifies fundamentally a pure and simple negation and so affords no
positive,
creative principle; while redemption by faith takes hold of humanity by
its darkest roots and forces it to take a definite and a strongly
positive
direction:
- Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott!
To the Jewish
religion
both views are equally foreign.
JEWISH
CHRONICLE OF THE WORLD
So much for
information
and instruction concerning those mythological portions of the Christian
religion, which certainly were not borrowed from Judaism. Manifestly,
the
structure is essentially Indo-European, not a temple built solely in
honour
of the Jewish religion. This structure rests upon pillars, and these
pillars
upon foundations, which are not all Jewish. But now it remains to
appreciate
the importance of the impulse derived from Judaism, whereby at the same
time the nature of the struggle within the Christian religion will
appear
more and more manifest.
Nothing would be
falser than to regard the Jewish influence in the creation of the
Christian
religion as merely negative, destructive and pernicious. If we look at
the matter from the Semitic standpoint, which with the help of any
Jewish
religious doctrine we can easily do, we shall see things in exactly the
opposite light: the Helleno-Aryan element as the undoing, destroying
force
that is hostile to religion as we already observed in the
42 RELIGION
case of Pelagius. Without giving up
our natural point of view, an unprejudiced consideration will show us
that
the Jewish contribution is very important and almost indispensable. For
in this marriage the Jewish spirit was the masculine principle, the
generative
element, the will. Nothing entitles us to assume that Hellenic
speculation,
Egyptian asceticism and international mysticism, without the fervour of
the Jewish will to believe, would ever have given the world a new
religious
ideal and at the same time a new life. Neither the Roman Stoics with
their
noble but cold, impotent moral philosophy, nor the aimless, mystic
self-negation
of the theology introduced from India to Asia Minor, nor the opposite
solution
found in the neo-Platonic Philo, where the Israelite faith is viewed in
a mystical, symbolical fashion, and Hellenic thought, deformed by
senility,
must embrace this strangely adorned youngest daughter of Israel — none
of these, obviously, would have led to the goal. How could we otherwise
explain the fact that at the very time when Christ was born Judaism
itself,
so exclusive in its nature, so scornful of everything alien, so stern
and
joyless and devoid of beauty, had begun a genuine and most successful
propaganda?
The Jewish religion is disinclined to all conversion, but the Gentiles,
impelled by longing for faith, went over to it in crowds. And that too
although the Jew was hated. We speak of the Anti-Semitism of to-day.
Renan
assures us that horror of the Jewish character was even more intense in
the century before the birth of Christ. * What is it then that forms
the
secret attraction of Judaism? Its will. That will which, ruling in the
sphere of religion, created unconditional, blind faith. Poetry,
philosophy,
science, mysticism, mythology — all these are widely divergent and to a
certain extent paralyse the will; they testify to an unworldly,
speculative,
ideal tendency of
*
Histoire
du peuple d‘IsraëI v, 227.
43
RELIGION
mind, which produces in the case of
all noble men that proud contempt of life which makes it possible for
the
Indian sage to lay himself while still alive in his own grave, which
makes
the inimitable greatness of Homer's hero Achilles, which stamps the
German
Siegfried as a model of fearlessness and which received monumental
expression
in the nineteenth century in Schopenhauer's doctrine of the negation of
the will to live. The will is here in a way directed inwardly. This is
quite different in the case of the Jew. His will at all times took an
outward
direction; it was the unconditional will to live. This will to live was
the first thing that Judaism gave to Christianity: hence that
contradiction,
which even to-day seems to many an inexplicable riddle, between a
doctrine
of inner conversion, toleration and mercifulness, and a religion of
exclusive
self-assertion and fanatical intolerance.
Next to this general
tendency of will — and inseparably bound up with it — must be mentioned
the Jewish purely historical view of faith. In the third chapter I have
treated at length the relation between the Jewish faith of will and the
teaching of Christ, while I have in the fifth discussed its relation to
religion as a whole; I presuppose both passages to be known. * Here I
should
like merely to call attention to the fact, how great and decisive an
influence
the Jewish faith as a material unshakeable conviction concerning
definite
historical events was bound to exercise at that moment of history at
which
Christianity arose. On this point Hatch writes: “The young Christian
communities
were helped by the current reaction against pure speculation — the
longing
for certainty. The mass of men were sick of theories; they wanted
certainty.
The current teaching of the Christian teachers gave this certainty. It
appealed to definite facts of which their predecessors were eye-
* See
vol. i. pp. 238 f. and 415
f.
44
RELIGION
witnesses. Its simple tradition of the
life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was a necessary basis
for
the satisfaction of men's needs.“ * That was a beginning. The attention
was in the first place directed solely to Jesus Christ; the sacred
books
of the Jews were counted as very suspicious documents; Luther speaks in
anger of the small respect which men like Origenes and even Hieronymus
(as he tells us) paid to the Old Testament; most of the Gnostics
rejected
it in toto; Marcion actually regarded it as a work of the
Devil.
But as soon as the thin edge of Jewish historical religion had found
its
way into men's ideas, the whole wedge could not fail gradually to be
driven
in. It is believed that the so-called Jewish Christians suffered a
defeat
and that the heathen Christians with Paul carried off the victory? That
is only true in a very conditional and fragmentary manner. Outwardly,
indeed,
the Jewish law with its “sign of the Covenant“ suffered complete
shipwreck;
outwardly, too, the Indo-European with his Trinity and other mythology
and metaphysics prevailed; but inwardly, during the first centuries,
the
true backbone of Christianity came to be Jewish history — that history
which had been remodelled by fanatical priests according to certain
hieratic
theories and plans, which had been supplemented and constructed with
genius
but at the same time with caprice — that history which historically was
utterly untrue. † Christ's advent, which had been foretold to them by
authentic
witnesses, was to those poor men of the chaos like a light in the
darkness;
it was an historical phenomenon. Sublime spirits indeed placed this
historic
personality in a symbolical temple; but what signified logos and
demiurgos
and emanations of the divine principle to the common people? Its
* Influence
of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 6th ed. p. 312.
† See
vol. i, pp. 452 and 460.
45 RELIGION
healthy instinct impelled it to fasten
on to something which gave it a firm hold, and that was Jewish history.
The Messianic hope — although in Judaism it by no means played the part
which we Christians imagine * — formed the uniting link in the chain,
and
mankind possessed henceforth not only the teacher of the new sublime
religion,
not only the divine picture of the Sufferer on the Cross, but the whole
world-plan of the Creator from the time when he created heaven and
earth
to the moment when he should sit in judgment, “which was soon to be.“
The
longing for material certainty, the distinguishing mark of that epoch,
had, as we see, not rested, till every trace of uncertainty had been
destroyed.
That signifies a triumph of Jewish, and fundamentally of Semitic,
philosophy
and religion.
Closely allied to
this is the introduction of religious intolerance. Intolerance is
natural
to the Semite; in it an essential feature of his character expresses
itself.
To the Jew especially the unwavering belief in the history and
destination
of his people was a vital question; this belief was his only weapon in
the struggle for the existence of his nation; in it his particular
gifts
had been permanently expressed; in short, for him there was at stake
something
which had grown outward from within — something which was the gift of
the
history and character of the people. Even the negative qualities of the
Jews which are so prominent, for example the indifference and unbelief
which has been widespread from earliest times to the present day, had
contributed
to the rigidness of the compulsion to believe. But now this powerful
impulse
was applied to quite another world. Here there was no people, no
nation,
no tradition; that moral motive power of a fearful national trial,
which
lends consecration to the hard, narrow Jewish law, was
* See
vol. i, p. 235 note.
46
RELIGION
altogether lacking. The introduction,
therefore, of compulsory faith into the Chaos (and then among the
Germanic
nations) was in a way an effect without a cause, in other words the
rule
of caprice. What in the case of the Jews had been an objective result
became
here a subjective command. What there had moved in a very limited
sphere,
that of national tradition and national religious law, ruled here
without
any limitations. The Aryan tendency to establish dogmas (see
vol.
i. p. 429) entered into a
fatal
union with the historical narrowness and deliberate intolerance of the
Jews. Hence the wild struggle for the possession of the power to
proclaim
dogmas, lasting through all the first centuries of our era. Mild men
like
Irenaeus remained almost without influence; the more intolerant the
Christian
bishop was, the more power did he possess. But this Christian
intolerance
is distinguished from Jewish intolerance in the same way as Christian
dogma
is distinguished from Jewish dogma: for the Jews were hemmed in on all
sides, confined within definite narrow boundaries, whereas the whole
field
of the human intellect stood open to Christian dogma and Christian
intolerance;
moreover Jewish faith and Jewish intolerance have never possessed
far-reaching
power, whereas the Christians, with Rome, soon ruled the world. And
thus
we find such inconsistencies as that a heathen Emperor (Aurelian, in
the
year 272) forces upon Christianity the primateship of the Roman bishop,
and that a Christian Emperor, Theodosius, commands, as a purely
political
measure, that the Christian religion be believed on pain of death. I
say
nothing of other inconsistencies, e.g., that the nature of God,
the relation of the Father to the Son, the eternity of the punishments
of hell, &c., ad inf., were settled by majority by Bishops,
who frequently could neither read nor write, and became binding upon
all
men from a fixed day, in somewhat the same
47 RELIGION
way as our Parliament imposes taxes
upon us by the vote of the majority. Yet, however difficult it may be
for
us to watch this monstrous development of a Jewish thought on alien
soil
without uneasiness, we must admit that a Christian Church could never
have
been fully developed without dogma and intolerance. Here then we are
indebted
to Judaism for an element of strength and endurance.
But not only the
backbone of the growing Christian Church was borrowed from Judaism; the
whole skeleton was its product. Take first the establishment of faith
and
virtue: in ecclesiastical Christianity it is absolutely Jewish, for it
rests on fear and hope: on the one side eternal reward, on the other
eternal
punishment. In regard to this subject also I can refer to former
remarks,
in the course of which I pointed out the fundamental difference between
a religion which addresses itself to the purely selfish emotions of the
heart, i.e., to fear and desire, and a religion which, like
that
of Brahma, regards the renunciation of the enjoyment of all reward here
and in the other world as the first step towards initiation into true
piety.
* I will not repeat myself; but we are now in a position to extend our
former knowledge, and only by so doing shall we clearly recognise what
unceasing conflict must inevitably result from the forcible fusion of
two
contradictory views of life. For the least reflection will convince us
of the fact that the conception of redemption and of conversion of
will,
as it had hovered in many forms before the minds of the Indo-Europeans,
and as it found eternal expression in the words of the Saviour, is
quite
different from all those which represent earthly conduct as being
punished
or
* See
the excursus on Semitic religion in the fifth chapter (vol. i.) and
compare
especially p. 437 with p. 453.
Compare, too, the details concerning the Germanic view of the world in
the particular paragraph of chap. ix. (vol. ii. p.
423).
48
RELIGION
rewarded in an after-life. * Here it
is not a case of some trifling difference, but of two creations
standing
side by side, strange from the root to the crown. Though these two
trees
may have been firmly grafted the one upon the other they can never join
together and be one. And yet it was this fusion which early
Christianity
tried to effect and which still for faithful souls forms the stone of
Sisyphus.
At the beginning indeed, that is, before the whole national chaos and
with
it its religious conceptions had in the fourth century been forcibly
driven
into Christianity, this was not the case. In the very oldest writings
one
hardly finds any threats of punishment, and heaven is only the belief
in
an unspeakable happiness, † gained by the death of Christ. Where Jewish
influence prevails, we find even in the earliest Christian times the
so-called
Chilianism, that is, the belief in an approaching earthly millennium
(merely
one of the many forms of the theocratic world-empire of which the Jews
dreamt); wherever, on the other hand, philosophic thought kept the
upper
hand for a time, as in the case of Origenes, conceptions manifest
themselves
which can scarcely be distinguished from the transmigration
*
This
system is most perfectly developed among the old Egyptians, who
believed
that the heart of the dead was laid on scales and weighed against the
ideal
of right and uprightness; the idea of a conversion of the inner man by
divine grace was quite alien to them. The Jews have never risen to the
height of the Egyptian conceptions; formerly the reward for them was
simply
a very long life to the individual and future world-empire to the
nation
— the punishment, death and misery for future generations. In later
times,
however, they adopted all sorts of superstitions, from which there
resulted
a kingdom of God which was altogether secularly conceived (see
vol.
i. p. 481) and as
counterpart
to it a perfectly secular hell. From these and other conceptions which
arose from the lowest depths of human delusion and superstition the
Christian
hell was formed (of which Origenes knew nothing, except in the form of
qualms of conscience!), while neo-Platonism, Greek poetry and Egyptian
conceptions of the “Fields of the Blest“ (see the illustrations
in Budge‘s The Book of the Dead) provided the Christian heaven,
which, however, never attained to the clearness of hell.
†
Mostly
on the strength of a misinterpretation (Isaiah lxiv. 4).
49 RELIGION
of souls of the Indians and of Plato:
* the spirits of men are regarded as being created from eternity;
according
to their conduct they rise or sink, until finally all without exception
are transfigured, even the demons. † In such a system, it is plain that
neither the individual life itself, nor the promise of reward and the
threat
of punishment, has anything in common with the Judaeo-Christian
religion.
‡ But here too the Jewish spirit quickly prevailed, and that in exactly
the same way as did dogma and intolerance, by taking a development
which
hitherto had been undreamt of on the limited soil of Judea. The pains
of
hell and the bliss of heaven, the fear of the one and the hope of the
other,
are henceforth the only mainsprings which influence all Christendom.
What
redemption is, scarcely any one now knows, for even the preachers saw
in
it — and indeed still see in it at the present day — nothing more than
“redemption from the punishments of hell.“ § The men of the chaos
in fact understood no other arguments; a contemporary of Origenes, the
African Tertullian, declares frankly that only one thing can improve
men,
“the fear of eternal punishment and the hope of eternal reward. (Apol.
49). Naturally some chosen spirits rebelled constantly against this
materialising
and Judaising of religion; the importance of Christian mysticism, for
example,
could perhaps be said to lie in this, that it rejected all these
conceptions
and aimed
*
Concerning
the relation between these two, see vol. i. pp. 46
and 86.
† I
refer especially to chap. xxix. of the work On Prayer by
Origenes;
in the form of a commentary to the words “Lead us not into temptation“
this great man develops a purely Indian conception concerning the
importance
of sin as a means of salvation.
‡ As
a fact Origenes has expressly recognised the mythical element in
Christianity.
Only he thought that Christianity was “the only religion which even in
mythical form is truth“ (cf. Harnack: Dogmengeschichte,
Abriss,
2nd ed. p. 113).
§
Take up, for example, the Handbuch für Katholischen
Religionsunterricht
by the Prebendary Arthur König, and read the chapter on
redemption.
Nicodemus would not have found the slightest difficulty in
understanding
this doctrine.
50
RELIGION
solely at the transformation of the
inner man — that is, at redemption; but the two views could never be
made
to agree, and it is just this impossibility that was demanded of the
faithful
Christian. Either faith is to “improve“ men, as Tertullian asserts, or
it is to completely transform them by a conversion of the whole
soul-life,
as the gospel taught; either the world is a penitentiary, which we
should
hate, as Clemens of Rome taught in the second century * and after him
the
whole official Church, or else this world is the blessed soil, in which
the Kingdom of Heaven lies like a hidden treasure, according to the
teaching
of Christ. The one assertion contradicts the other.
In the further course
of this chapter I shall return to these contrasts; but I had first to
make
the reader feel their reality, and at the same time point out to him
the
measure of the triumph of Judaism as an eminently positive active
power.
With the proud independence of the genuine Indo-European aristocrat
Origenes
had expressed the opinion, “only for the common man it may suffice to
know
that the sinner is punished“; but now all these men of the chaos
were “common men“; sureness, fearlessness and conviction are the gift
only
of race and nationality; human nobility is a collective term; † the
noblest
individual man — for example an Augustine — cannot rise above the
conceptions
and sentiments of the common man and attain to perfect freedom. These
“common“
men needed a master who should speak to them as to slaves, after the
manner
of the Jewish Jehovah: a duty which the Church, endowed with the full
power
of the Roman Empire, accepted. Art, mythology and metaphysics in their
creative significance had become quite incomprehensible to the men of
that
time; the character of religion had in consequence to be lowered to
* See
his second letter, § 6.
† Cf.
vol. i, p. 318.
51 RELIGION
the level on which it had stood in
Judea.
These men required a purely historical, demonstrable religion, which
admitted
no doubt or uncertainty either in the past or in the future and least
of
all in the present: this was found only in the Bible of the Jews. The
motives
had to be taken from the world of sense: corporal punishments alone
could
deter these men from evil deeds, promises of a happiness, free of all
care,
alone could urge them to good works. That was of course the religious
system
of the Jewish hierocracy (cf. vol. i. p. 453).
From that time onward the system of ecclesiastical commands, taken from
Judaism and further developed, decided authoritatively in regard to all
matters, whether incomprehensible mysteries or obvious facts of history
(or it might be, historical lies). The intolerance which had been
foreshadowed
in Judaism but had never attained to its full development, * became the
fundamental principle of Christian conduct, and that as a logically
unavoidable
conclusion from the presuppositions just mentioned: if religion is a
chronicle
of the world, if its moral principle is legal and historical, if there
is an historically established precedent for the decision of every
doubt,
every question, then every deviation from the doctrine is an offence
against
truthfulness and endangers the salvation of man which is conceived as
purely
material; and so ecclesiastical justice steps in and exterminates the
unbeliever
or the heretic, just as the Jews had stoned every one who was not
strictly
orthodox.
I hope that these
hints will suffice to awaken the vivid conception and at the same time
the conviction that Christianity as a religious structure actually
rests
upon two fundamentally different and directly hostile “views of
existence“:
upon Jewish historical-chronistic faith and upon Indo-European
symbolical
and metaphysical
*
This
fancy has found its most complete expression in the novel Esther.
52 RELIGION
mythology (as I asserted upon p.
19). I cannot give more than indications, not even now, when I am
preparing
to cast a glance at the struggle which was bound to result from so
unnatural
a union. Real history is true only when it is apprehended as much as
possible
in detail; where that is not possible, a survey cannot be made too
general;
for only by this is it possible really to grasp completely a truth of
the
higher order, something living and unmutilated; the worst enemies of
historical
insight are the compendia. In this particular case the recognition of
the
connection of phenomena is simplified by the fact that we have here to
do with things which still live in our own hearts. For the discord
spoken
of in this chapter dwells, though he may not know it, in the heart of
every
Christian. Though in the first Christian centuries the struggle seemed,
outwardly, to rage more fiercely than it does to-day, there never was a
complete truce; it was just in the second half of the nineteenth
century
that the question here touched upon came to a more acute crisis,
chiefly
through the active energy of the Roman Church, which never grows weary
in the fight; neither is it thinkable that our growing culture can ever
attain to true ripeness, unless illuminated by the undimmed sun of a
pure,
uniform religion; only that could bring it out from the “Middle Ages“.
If it is now obvious that a clear knowledge of that early time of open,
unscrupulous strife must enable us to understand our own time, then
unquestionably
the spirit of our present age helps us in turn to comprehend that
earliest
epoch of growing, honestly and freely searching Christianity. I say
expressly
that it is only the very earliest epoch that the experiences of our own
heart teach us to comprehend; for at a later time the struggle grew
less
and less truly religious, more and more ecclesiastical and political.
When
Popery had attained to the summit of its power in the twelfth century
under
Innocent III.,
53 RELIGION
the real religious impulse which a short
time before had been so strong under Gregory VII. ceased, and the
Church
was henceforth, so to speak, secularised; no more can we even for a
moment
regard and judge the Reformation as a purely religious movement, it is
manifestly at least half political; and under such conditions there
soon
is nothing left but a mere matter of business in which the purely human
interest sinks to the lowest level. On the other hand, in the
nineteenth
century, in consequence of the almost complete separation in most
countries
of State and Religion (which is in no way influenced by the retention
of
one or more State churches) and in consequence of the altered,
henceforth
purely moral position of Popery, which outwardly has become powerless,
there has been a noticeable awakening of religious interest, and of all
forms of genuine as well as of superstitious religiosity. A symptom of
this ferment is the abundant formation of sects among ourselves. In
England,
for example, more than a hundred different and so-called Christian
unions
possess churches which are officially registered, or at any rate places
of meeting for common worship. In this connection it is striking that
even
the Catholics in England are divided into five different sects, only
one
of which is strictly orthodox Roman. Even among the Jews religious life
has awakened; three different sects have houses of prayer in London and
there are besides two different groups of Jewish Christians there. That
reminds us of the centuries before the religious degeneration; at the
end
of the second century, for example, Irenaeus tells of thirty-two sects,
Epiphanius, two centuries later, of eighty. Therefore we are justified
in the hope that the further back we go the better we shall understand
the spiritual conflict of genuine Christians.
54
RELIGION
PAUL AND AUGUSTINE
We get the most
vivid
idea of the double nature of Christianity when we see how it affects
individual
great men, as Paul and Augustine. In the case of Paul everything is
much
greater and clearer and more heroic, because spontaneous and free;
Augustine,
on the other hand, is sympathetic to all generations, is venerable,
awakening
pity at the same time that he commands admiration. Were we to place
Augustine
side by side with the victorious Apostle — perhaps the greatest man of
Christianity — he would not for a moment bear comparison; but when we
put
him on a line with those around him, his importance is brilliantly
manifest.
Augustine is the proper contrast to that other son of the Chaos,
Lucian,
of whom I spoke in chapter iv.: there the frivolity of a civilisation
hurrying
to its fall, here the look of pain raised to God from amid the ruins;
there
gold and fame as the goal in life, mockery and pleasantry the means;
here
wisdom and virtue, asceticism and solemn earnest working; there the
tearing
down of glorious ruins, here the toilsome building up of a firm
structure
of faith, even at the cost of his own convictions, even though the
architecture
should be very rude in comparison with the aspirations of the profound
spirit, no matter, if only poor, chaotic humanity may yet get something
sure to cling to, and wandering sheep gain a fold.
In two so different
personalities as Paul and Augustine the double nature of Christianity
naturally
reveals itself in very different ways. In the case of Paul everything
is
positive, everything affirmative; he has no unchanging theoretical
“theology,“
* but — a contemporary of Jesus
*
This
assertion will meet with many contradictions; all I mean by it,
however,
is that Paul rather uses his systematic ideas as a dialectical weapon
to
convince his hearers than endeavours to establish a connected, solely
valid
and new theological structure. Even Edouard
55 RELIGION
Christ — he is consumed, as if by living
flames, by the divine presence of the Saviour. As long as he was
against
Christ he knew no rest until he should have swept away the very last of
his disciples; as soon as he had recognised Christ as the redeemer, his
life was entirely given up to spreading the “good news“ over the whole
world that he could reach; in his life there was no period of groping
about,
of seeking, or irresolution. If he must discuss, then he paints his
theses
on the sky, visible from afar; if he must contradict, he does so with a
few blows of a club, as it were, but his love flashes up again
immediately,
and he is, as his own epigram says, “all things to all men,“ caring not
if he has to speak in one way to the Jew, in another to the Greek and
in
another to the Celt, if only he can “save some.“ * However profoundly
the
words of this one apostle flash into the darkest regions of the human
heart,
there is never a trace of painful constructing, of sophisticating in
them;
what he says is experienced and wells up spontaneously from his heart;
indeed his pen seems unable to keep pace with his thought; “not as
though
I had already attained, but I follow after ... forgetting those things
which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before“
(Phil. iii, 13). Here contradiction is openly placed side by
side
with contradiction. What matters it if only many believe in Christ the
Redeemer? Not so Augustine. No firm national religion surrounds his
path
as it did that of
Reuss, who, in his
immortal
work, Histoire de la Théologie Chrétienne au
siècle
apostolique (3e ed.), vindicates to the Apostle a definite, uniform
system, admits at the end (ii. 580) that real theology was for Paul a
subordinate
element, and on p. 73 he shows that Paul‘s aim was so completely
directed
to popular and practical work that wherever questions begin to be
theoretical
and theological, he leaves the metaphysical sphere for the ethical.
* We
must read the whole passage, I Cor. ix. 19 f., to see how
exactly
the apostle denies the later formula extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
Cf.,
too, the Epistle to the Philippians, i, 18: “What then?
notwithstanding,
every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached; and I
therein
do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.“
56 RELIGION
Paul; he is an atom among atoms in the
shoreless ocean of a fast decaying chaos. No matter where he puts his
foot,
he encounters sand or morass; no heroic figure — such as Paul saw —
appears
like a blinding sun on his horizon, but from a dreary writing of the
lawyer
Cicero he must draw the inspiration for his moral awakening of others,
and from sermons of the worthy Ambrosius his appreciation of the
significance
of Christianity. His whole life is a painful struggle; first against
and
with himself, until he has overcome the various phases of unbelief and
after trying various doctrines has accepted that of Ambrosius; then
against
what he had formerly believed, and against the many Christians whose
opinions
differed from his own. For while the living memory of the personality
of
Christ tinged all religion in the lifetime of the Apostle Paul, this
was
now effected by the superstition of dogma. Paul had been able proudly
to
say of himself that he did not fight like those who swing their arms
around
them in the air; Augustine, on the other hand, spent a good part of his
life in such fighting. Here, therefore, the contradiction which is
always
endeavouring to conceal itself from its own eye and that of others,
goes
much deeper; it rends the inner nature, mixes as it were “the corn with
chaff,“ and builds (in the intention of founding a firm orthodoxy) a
structure
which is so inconsistent, insecure, superstitious and in many points
actually
barbarous, that should the Christianity of the Chaos one day crumble to
pieces, Augustine more than any other man would be responsible for it.
Let us now study
these two men more closely. And first of all let us try to gain some
fundamental
ideas concerning Paul, for here we may hope to reveal the germ of the
development
which followed.
57
RELIGION
PAUL
In spite of all
assertions,
it remains very doubtful whether Paul was a pure Jew by race; I am
strongly
of opinion that the double nature of this remarkable man must be
explained
partly by his blood. There are no proofs. We only know the one fact,
that
he was not born in Judea or Phoenicia, but outside the Semitic
boundary,
in Cilicia, and that too in the city of Tarsus, which was founded by a
Dorian colony and was thoroughly Hellenic. When we consider on the one
hand how lax the Jews of that time outside of Judea were in regard to
mixed
marriages, * on the other hand that the Diaspora, in which Paul was
born,
was keenly propagandist and won a large number of women for the Jewish
faith, † the supposition appears not at all unwarrantable that Paul‘s
father
was indeed a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin (as he asserts, Romans
xi. 1; Philippians iii. 5), but that his mother was a Hellene
who
had gone over to Judaism. When historical proofs are lacking,
scientific
psychology may well have the right to put in its word; and the above
hypothesis
would explain the otherwise incomprehensible phenomenon, that an
absolutely
Jewish character (tenacity, pliancy, fanaticism, self-confidence) and a
Talmudic education accompany an absolutely un-Jewish intellect. ‡
However
* See,
for example, Acts of the Apostles xvi. 1.
† Cf.
vol. i. p. 119 note.
†
What
we know of the laws of heredity would speak very strongly for the
supposition
of a Jewish father and a Hellenic mother. The formerly popular saying:
A man inherits the character of his father and the intellect of his
mother,
has indeed shown itself to be much too dogmatic; if twins that have
grown
together with but one pair of legs can yet be absolutely different in
character
(cf. Höffding: Psychologie, 2nd ed. p. 480), we see
how cautious we must be with such assertions. Yet there are so many
striking
cases among the most important men (I will only mention Goethe and
Schopenhauer)
that we are entitled in the case of Paul, where a striking incongruence
stands before us as an inexplicable riddle, to put forward this
hypothesis
which is historically
58 RELIGION
that may be, Paul did not grow up, like
the rest of the Apostles, in a Jewish land, but in a busy centre of
Greek
science, and of philosophical and oratorical schools. From his youth
Paul
spoke and wrote Greek: his knowledge of Hebrew is said to have been
very
defective. * Though he may therefore have been educated as a strict
Jew,
the atmosphere in which he grew up was nevertheless not purely Jewish,
but the stimulating, rich, free-minded Hellenic atmosphere: a
circumstance
which deserves all the more attention in that the greater the genius,
the
greater is the influence of impressions received. And thus we see Paul
in the further course of his life after the short epoch of Pharisaical
errors in which he fervently persisted, avoiding as much as possible
the
society of genuine Hebrews. The fact that for fourteen years after his
conversion he avoided the city of Jerusalem, although he would have met
there the personal disciples of Christ, that be only stayed there of
necessity
and for a short time, limiting his intercourse as much as possible, has
given rise to a library of explanations and discussions; but the whole
life of Paul shows that Jerusalem and its inhabitants and their manner
of thought were simply so abhorrent to him as to be unbearable. His
first
act as an apostle is the doing away with the sacred “sign of the
covenant“
of all Hebrews. From the very beginning he finds himself at feud with
the
Jewish Christians. Where he has to undertake apostolic mission at their
side, he quarrels with them. † None of his few
quite probable. From
Harnack‘s
Mission,
&c., p. 40, I learn that even in earliest times the suggestion was
made that Paul was descended from Hellenic parents.
*
Graetz
asserts (Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden i, 646): “Paul
had but a scanty knowledge of Jewish writings and knew the sacred
writings
only from the Greek translation.“ On the other hand, quotations from
Epimenides,
Euripides and Aratus prove his familiarity with Hellenic literature.
† See,
for example, the two episodes with John “whose surname was Mark“ (Acts
of the Apostles xiii. 13, and xv. 38-39).
59 RELIGION
personal friends is a genuine Jew of
Palestine: Barnabas, for example, is, like himself, from the Diaspora,
and so anti-Jewish in sentiment that he (as pioneer of Marcion) denies
the old covenant, that is, the privileged position of the Israelite
people;
Luke, whom Paul calls “the beloved,“ is not a Jew (Col. iv.
11-14);
Titus, the one bosom-friend of Paul, his “partner and fellow-helper“ (2
Cor.
viii. 23), is a genuinely Hellenic Greek. In his mission work, too,
Paul
is always attracted to the “heathen,“ especially to places where
Hellenic
culture flourishes. Modern investigation has thrown valuable light on
this
matter. Till a short time ago the knowledge of the geographical and
economic
relations of Asia Minor during the first Christian century was very
defective;
it was thought that Paul (on his first journey especially) sought out
the
most uncivilised districts and anxiously avoided the towns; this
supposition
has now been proved erroneous: * rather did Paul preach almost
exclusively
in the great centres of Helleno-Roman civilisation and with preference
in districts where the Jewish communities were not large. Cities like
Lystra
and Derbe, which hitherto were spoken of in theological commentaries as
unimportant, scarcely civilised places, were on the contrary centres of
Hellenic culture and of Roman life. With this is connected a second
very
important discovery: Christianity did not spread first among the poor
and
uncultured, as was hitherto supposed, but among the educated and
well-to-do.
“Where Roman organisation and Greek thought have gone, Paul by
preference
goes,“ Ramsay tells us, † and Karl Müller adds: “The circles which
Paul had won had never really been Jewish.“ ‡ And yet, this
*
Especially
by the works of W. M. Ramsay: Historical Geography of Asia Minor,
The
Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170, St. Paul, the Traveller and
the Roman Citizen.
† The
Church, &c., 4th ed. p. 57.
‡ Kirchengeschichte
(1892) i. 26.
60 RELIGION
man is a Jew; he is proud of his
descent,
* he is, as it were, saturated with Jewish conceptions, he is a m
