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.
 
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The original text in German: Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts
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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION BY LORD REDESDALE i v
AUTHOR‘S INTRODUCTION i lix

DIVISION I: THE LEGACY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
INTRODUCTORY i 3
FIRST CHAPTER: HELLENIC ART AND PHILOSOPHY i 14
SECOND CHAPTER: ROMAN LAW i 93
THIRD CHAPTER: THE REVELATION OF CHRIST i 174

DIVISION II: THE HEIRS
INTRODUCTORY i 251
FOURTH CHAPTER: THE CHAOS i 258
FIFTH CHAPTER: THE ENTRANCE OF THE JEWS INTO WESTERN HISTORY i 329
SIXTH CHAPTER: THE ENTRANCE OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLE INTO HISTORY i 494

DIVISION III: THE STRUGGLE
INTRODUCTORY ii 3
SEVENTH CHAPTER: RELIGION ii 13
EIGHTH CHAPTER: STATE ii 139
NINTH CHAPTER: FROM THE YEAR 1200 TO THE YEAR 1800
A. The Teutons as Creators of a New Culture
ii 187
B. Historical Survey ii 233
1. DISCOVERY ii 261
2. SCIENCE ii 293
3. INDUSTRY ii 329
4. POLITICAL ECONOMY ii 344
5. POLITICS AND CHURCH ii 365
6. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION ii 389
7. ART ii 495
INDEX ii 565

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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

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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.

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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

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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,

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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

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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!“

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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    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

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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!

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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.)

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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.

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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

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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

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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.

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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.).

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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).

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.,

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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.

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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

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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.“

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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.

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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

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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).

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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.

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man is a Jew; he is proud of his descent, * he is, as it were, saturated with Jewish conceptions, he is a m