Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 7 of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain's
The
Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane,
The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
13
SEVENTH CHAPTER
RELIGION
Rightly understand
the
driving power of religion, do what it behoves you to further it, and
seek
to fulfil your duty in this. — ZOROASTER.
CHRIST
AND CHRISTIANITY
ON a former
occasion
(vol. i. p. 249) I expressed
my personal conviction that the earthly life of Jesus Christ forms the
origin and source, the strength and — fundamentally — the significance
of everything that has ever called itself Christian religion. I shall
not
repeat myself, but refer once for all to the chapter on Christ. In that
chapter I completely separated the sublime figure of Christ from all
historical
Christianity, here I purpose to deal with the complementary aspect, and
to speak of the rise and growth of the Christian religion. It will be
my
endeavour to bring out certain leading ideas without even touching the
inviolable Figure on the Cross. This separation is not only possible
but
necessary; it would show a blasphemous lack of critical insight to try
to identify with the rock itself the strange structures that have been
built upon it by human profundity, acuteness, shortsightedness,
confusion,
stupidity, by tradition and piety, superstition, malice, senselessness,
convention, philosophic speculation and devotion to mysticism — amid
the
never-ceasing clatter of tongues and swords and the crackling of
flames.
The whole superstructure of the Christian Churches has hitherto been
outside
of the
14 RELIGION
personality of Christ. Jewish will,
united to Aryan mythical thought, has formed its principal part; much
was
derived from Syria, Egypt, &c.; the appearance of Christ upon earth
was, to begin with, only the incitement to the constitution of
religion,
its driving power — as when the lightning breaks through the clouds and
there follows a downpour of rain, or when sunbeams suddenly fall upon
certain
substances which have nothing in common, and they, at once transformed,
burst the boundaries that formerly separated them and unite to form a
new
compound. It would certainly be unwise to try to estimate the power of
the sunbeam and the lightning from these effects. All honour to those
who
built upon Christ, but we must not permit our vision or our judgment to
be dimmed. There is not only a past and a present, there is also a
future;
for it we must maintain our full freedom. I doubt whether we can
rightly
judge the past in its relation to the present unless a living
divination
of the needs of the future carries the mind aloft. Taking the
standpoint
of the present alone the eye is too much earthbound to be able to see
all
the possible sequences. It was a Christian, and a Christian in sympathy
with the Roman Church, who at the beginning of the nineteenth century
said:
“The New Testament is still a book with seven seals. Christianity must
be studied by man for eternities. In the gospels lie the outlines of
future
gospels.“ * Whoever studies carefully the history of Christianity sees
that it is always and everywhere in a state of flux, always and
everywhere
waging an inward struggle. Whoever, on the other hand, cherishes the
foolish
delusion that Christianity has now received its various final forms,
overlooks
the fact that even the Romish Church, which is considered particularly
conservative, has created new dogmas in every century, while older ones
(certainly with
*
Novalis:
Fragmente.
15 RELIGION
less noise) were being borne to their
grave; he forgets that, even in the nineteenth century, that firmly
established
church has experienced more movements,
struggles and schisms than almost any other. Such a man imagines that,
as the process of development is at an end, he now holds the sum of
Christianity
in his hands and from this monstrous supposition he constructs in the
piety
of his heart not only the present and the future but also the past.
Still
more monstrous is the supposition that Christianity is exhausted and
spent,
sustained in its boundless course only by the law of inertia; and yet
more
than one moral philosopher of recent times has written the obituary
notice
of Christianity, speaking of it as of an historical experiment now
over,
the beginning, middle and conclusion of which are capable of analytical
demonstration. The error of judgment, which lies at the bottom of these
opposite views is, it is obvious, practically the same, it leads
moreover
to equally false conclusions. This error we avoid when we distinguish
the
personality of Christ — that ever-gushing constant spring of the
loftiest
religiosity — from the structures which the changing religious needs,
the
changing mental claims of men, and — what is more important — the
fundamentally
different natures of dissimilar human races have erected as the law and
temple of their worship.
RELIGIOUS
DELIRIUM
The Christian
religion
took its rise at a very peculiar time, under as unfavourable
circumstances
as could be imagined for the establishment of a uniform, worthy and
solid
structure. In those very districts where its cradle stood, namely, in
Western
Asia, Northern Africa and Eastern Europe, there had been a peculiar
fusion
of the most diverse superstitions, myths, mysteries and philosophical
theorems,
whereby, as was inevitable, all had
16 RELIGION
lost something of their individuality
and value. Think for a moment of the political and social condition of
those countries at that time. What Alexander had begun, Rome had
completed
in a more thorough fashion: in those districts there prevailed an
internationalism
of which we can hardly form an idea to-day. In the leading cities on
the
Mediterranean and in Asia Minor there was absolutely no uniformity of
race.
There were to be found in heterogeneous groups Hellenes, Syrians, Jews,
Semites, Armenians, Egyptians, Persians, Roman military colonies,
&c.
&c., surrounded by countless hybrids, in whose veins all individual
characteristics had been confounded and lost. The feeling of patriotism
had quite disappeared, because it lacked all meaning; there existed
neither
nation nor race; Rome was for these men practically what the police are
for our mob. On this state of affairs, which I have characterised as
“the
chaos of peoples,“ I have endeavoured to throw some light in chapter
four of my book. From it resulted free interchange of ideas and
customs;
national custom and character were gone, and men sought to find a
substitute
in a capricious confusion of alien practices and alien views of life.
There
was now practically no real faith. Even in the case of the Jews —
otherwise
a splendid exception in the midst of this Witches‘ Sabbath — faith was
uncertain amid so many varying sects. And yet never before was there
such
an intoxication of religious feeling as spread at that time from the
banks
of the Euphrates to Rome. Indian mysticism, which in all manner of
corrupt
forms had penetrated as far as Asia Minor, Chaldaic star-worship,
Zoroastric
worship of Ormuzd and the fire-worship of the magicians, Egyptian
asceticism
and the doctrine of immortality, Syrian and Phoenician orgiasm and the
delusion of the sacrament, Samothracian, Eleusinian and all other kinds
of Hellenic mysteries, curiously disguised outcrops of Pythagorean,
17 RELIGION
Empedoclean and Platonic metaphysics,
Mosaic propaganda, Stoical ethics — were all circling in a mad whirl.
Men
no longer knew what religion meant, but they gave everything a trial,
in
the dim consciousness they had been robbed of something which was as
necessary
to them as the sun to the earth. * Into this world came the word of
Christ;
and it was by these fever-stricken men that the visible structure of
the
Christian religion was erected; no one could quite free it from the
traces
of delirium.
THE
TWO MAIN PILLARS
The history of the
rise of Christian theology is one of the most complicated and difficult
that exist. The man who approaches it earnestly and frankly will
receive
profound and stimulating instruction, but he will at the same time be
forced
to admit that very much is still exceedingly dark and uncertain, as
soon
as we leave theorising and try to demonstrate historically the real
origin
of an idea. A complete history, not of the dogmas within Christianity,
but of the way in which from the most diverse circles of ideas articles
of faith, conceptions, rules of life entered Christianity and made
their
home there, cannot yet be written; but enough has happened to convince
every one that here an alloy (as the chemists say) of the most diverse
metals has been formed. It is not within the scope of my work to submit
this complicated state of matters to a thorough analysis, even were I
competent
for the task; † in the meantime it
*
Herder
says regarding the man of this time: “He had strength for nothing but
believing.
Troubled about his wretched life, trembling for the future and in dread
of invisible powers, timid and powerless to investigate the course of
nature,
he lent his ear to stories and prophecies and let himself be inspired,
initiated, flattered, betrayed“ (Complete Works, Inghan‘s ed.
xix.
290).
† It
is scarcely right for me to name special works; the literature even in
as far as it is available to us laymen is extensive; the important
18 RELIGION
will be sufficient to consider the two
chief pillars — Judaism and Indo-Europeanism — on which almost the
whole
structure has been built and which explains the hybridism of the
Christian
religion from the beginning. Of course much that was Jewish and
Indo-European
was afterwards so falsified by the influence of the Chaos and
especially
of Egypt that it became no longer recognisable. Take, for example, the
introduction of the cult of Isis (mother of God) and the magic
transformation
of matter, though here, too, a knowledge of the fundamental structure
is
indispensable. Everything else is proportionately unimportant; thus —
to
give only one example — the official introduction into practical
Christianity
of Stoic doctrines of virtue and bliss by Ambrosius, whose book De
Officiis
Ministrorum was merely a pale imitation of Cicero‘s De Officiis,
which he in turn had compiled from the Greek Panaetius. * Such a thing
is certainly not without significance; Hatch shows, for example, in his
thing is to get
instruction
from various sources and not to be satisfied with a knowledge of
generalities.
Thus the short text-books of Harnack, Müller, Holtzmann, &c.,
in the Grundriss der theologischen Wissenschaften (Freiburg,
Mohr)
are invaluable, I have used them diligently; but the layman will get
much
more out of larger works, such as Neander‘s Kirchengeschichte
or
Renan‘s Origines du Christianisme, &c. Still more
instructive,
because more vivid and clear, are the works of the specialists, as
Ramsay:
The
Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170 (1895); Hatch: The
influence
of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church (1897);
Hergenröther‘s
great work: Photius, sein Leben, seine Schriften und das
griechische
Schisma, which begins with the founding of Constantinople and thus
traces in great detail the development of the Greek Church from the
beginning;
Hefele: Konziliengeschichte, &c. &c. We laymen can
naturally
acquire detailed knowledge of only a portion of this literature; but, I
repeat, it is only from detailed accounts and not from summaries that
we
can get vivid conceptions and knowledge. (An important new work is
Adolf
Harnack‘s Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten
drei
Jahrhunderten, 1902; 2nd ed. 1906.)
*
Ambrosius
admits this implicitly; see i. 24. Much is indeed an almost
literal
translation. How much more important, however, are his independent
writings,
as the speech on the death of the Emperor Theodosius with the beautiful
ever-recurring refrain: “Dilexi! I loved him!“
19
RELIGION
lecture on “Greek and Christian ethics,“
that the moral code which obtains to-day is made up of far more Stoical
than Christian elements. * But we have already seen that morality and
religion
may be independent of each other (see vol. i. pp. 215
and 489), at least
wherever
the “conversion“ taught by Christ has not taken place; and while it is
interesting to see a Church father recommending the practical and
cosmopolitan,
not to say legal, morality of a Cicero as model to the priests of his
diocese,
yet such a thing does not reach to the foundations of the religious
structure.
The same might be said of many another element which will occupy our
attention
later.
Now those two
principal
pillars, upon which the Christian theologists of the first centuries
erected
the new religion, are Jewish historical and chronological faith and
Indo-European
symbolical and metaphysical mythology. As I have already demonstrated
in
detail, we have here to deal with two fundamentally different “views of
life.“ † These two views now became amalgamated. Indo-Europeans — men
nurtured
on Hellenic poetry and philosophy thirsting after ideas — transformed
Jewish
historical religion according to the fancy of their richly imaginative
spirit; Jews, on the other hand, even before the rise of Christianity
seized
hold on the mythology and physics of the Greeks, saturated them with
the
historical superstition of their people and out of the whole spun an
abstract
dogmatical web which was just as incomprehensible as the most sublime
speculations
of a Plato, materialising into empirical forms everything that was
transcendental
and allegorical; on both sides therefore irremediable
* Influence
of Greek Ideas, pp. 139-170. In this lecture Hatch refers to
Ambrosius‘
work and is of opinion that it is essentially Stoical not only in
conception
but also in detail. The Christian element is indeed there, but merely
as
an adjunct. Its fundamental doctrine of wisdom, virtue, justice,
temperance,
is pure Graeco-Roman doctrine of pre-Christian times.
† See
especially vol. i. p. 213 f.
and p. 411 f.
20 RELIGION
misapprehension and non-comprehension
— the inevitable consequence of deviation from the natural course! It
was
the work of the first centuries to weld together in Christianity these
alien elements, and this work could naturally only succeed amid
unceasing
strife. Reduced to its simplest expression, this strife was a struggle
for mastery between Indo-European and Jewish religious instincts. It
broke
out immediately after the death of Christ between the Jewish Gentiles
and
the heathen Christians, for centuries it raged most violently between
gnosis
and antignosis, between Arians and Athanasians, it woke up again in the
Reformation and to-day it goes on as fiercely as ever, not indeed in
the
clouds of theory or on battlefields, but as an underground current in
our
life. We can make this process clear by a comparison. It is as though
we
were to take two trees of different genera, cut off their heads and
without
uprooting them bend them together and tie them in such a fashion that
each
should become a graft of the other. Upward growth would at once become
an impossibility for both; deterioration, not improvement, would be the
result, for, as every botanist knows, an organic union is in such a
case
impossible, and the trees, if they survived the operation, would
continue
to bear each its own leaves and flowers, and in the confusion of
foliage
alien would everywhere be driving against alien. * Exactly the same has
happened with the Christian structure of religion. Jewish religious
chronicle
and Jewish Messianic faith stand unreconciled beside the mystic
mythology
of the Hellenic decadence. Not only do they not fuse, in essential
points
they contradict each other. Take, for example, the conception of the
Godhead:
here Jehovah,
*
As
I afterwards found, Hamann has suggested this comparison: “Go into any
community of Christians you like, their language in the sacred
precincts,
their Fatherland and their genealogy betray the fact that they are
Gentile
branches, artificially grafted upon a Jewish stem.“ (Cf. Romans
xi. 24.)
21 RELIGION
there the old Aryan Trinity. Take again
the conception of the Messiah: here the expectation of a hero of the
tribe
of David, who will win for the Jews the empire of the world, there the
Logos become flesh, fastened on to metaphysical speculations, which had
occupied the Greek philosophers for five hundred years before the birth
of Christ. * Christ, the undeniably historical personality, is forced
into
both systems; for the Jewish historical myth he had to supply the
Messiah,
although no one was less suitable; in the neo-Platonic myth he is the
fleeting
incomprehensible manifestation of an abstract scheme of thought — he,
the
moral genius in its highest potentiality, the greatest religious
individuality
that ever lived!
Nevertheless even
admitting the necessary untrustworthiness and defects of such a hybrid
representation, we can hardly imagine how a universal religion could
have
arisen in that chaos of peoples without the cooperation of these two
elements.
Of course, if Christ had preached to Indian or Germanic peoples his
words
would have had quite a different influence. There has never been a less
Christian age — if I am allowed the paradox — than the centuries in
which
the Christian Church originated. A real understanding of Christ‘s words
was at that time out of the question. But when through him the stimulus
to religious elevation was given to that chaotic and deluded mass of
human
beings, how could a temple have been built for them without basing
everything
upon the Jewish chronicle and the Jewish tendency to view things from a
concrete historical standpoint? One could only keep these slavish
souls,
who had nothing to lean upon either in themselves or in the national
life
around them, by giving them something tangible, something material and
dogmatically certain; it was a religious law, not philosophical
speculations
about duty and
*
I
said five hundred years, for see Harnack on the identity of
Logos
and Nous: Dogmengeschichte, § 22.
22 RELIGION
virtue, that they required; for that
reason indeed many had already adopted Judaism. But Judaism —
invaluable
as a power of will — possesses only a very small and, being Semitic, a
very limited creative capacity; the architect had therefore to be
sought
elsewhere. Without the wealth of form and the creative power of the
Hellenic
spirit, or let us say simply, without Homer, Plato and Aristotle, and
in
the further background Persia and India — the outward cosmogonic and
mythological
structure of the Christian Church could never have become the temple of
a universal faith. The early teachers of the Church all link themselves
with Plato, the later ones with Aristotle as well. Any Church history
will
testify to the extensive literary poetical and philosophical culture of
the earliest, that is the Greek, fathers, and from that we may form a
high
estimate of the value of this culture for the fundamental dogmas of
Christianity.
The Indo-European mythology could not of course receive colour and life
under such strange auspices; it was Christian art which at a later time
helped as far as possible to make good this want; yet, thanks to the
influence
of the Hellenic eye, this mythology at least received a geometric and
in
so far visible shape: the ancient Aryan conception of the Trinity
supplied
the skilfully built cosmic temple, in which were erected the altars of
an entirely new religion.
We must now become
quite clear about the nature of these two most important constructive
elements
of the Christian religion, otherwise it will be impossible to
understand
the very complicated strife about articles of faith, which has been
raging
from the first century of our era to the present day — but especially
during
the first centuries. The various leading spirits confuse in the most
varying
proportions the most contradictory views, doctrines and instincts of
Jew
and Indo-European. Let us therefore consider first the mythologically
moulding
23
RELIGION
influence of the Indo-European
philosophy
upon the growing Christian religion, and afterwards the mighty impulse
which it received from the positive, materialistic spirit of Judaism.
In chapter five I
have given a detailed exposition of the difference between historical
and
mythical religion; * I assume it now to be known. Mythology is a
metaphysical
view of the world sub specie oculorum. Its peculiarity, its
special
character — its limitation also — consists in this, that what has not
been
seen is by it reduced to something seen. The myth explains nothing; it
is not a seeking after the whence and whither; nor is it a moral
doctrine;
least of all is it history. From this one reflection it is clear that
the
mythology of the Christian Church has primarily nothing to do with Old
Testament chronology and the historical advent of Christ; it is an old
Aryan legacy transformed in many respects for the worse by alien hands
and adapted well or badly to new conditions. † In order to form a clear
idea of the mythological portions of Christianity, we shall do well to
distinguish between inner and outer mythology, that is, between the
mythological
moulding of outer and of inner experience. Phoebus driving his car
through
the sky is the figurative expression of an outward phenomenon; the
Erinnyes
pursuing the criminal symbolise a fact of man's inner experience. In
both
spheres Christian and mythological symbolism have penetrated deep, and
as Wolfgang Menzel, a man of Catholic leanings, says, “Symbolism is not
merely the mirror, it is also the source of dogma.“ ‡ Symbolism as the
source of dogma is manifestly identical with mythology.
* See
vol. i. pp. 411 to 440.
† It
is easy to understand how the pious Tertullian, who grew up in
Heathenism,
could say of the conceptions of the Hellenic poets and philosophers,
that
they were tam consimilia to the Christian ones! (Apol.
xlvii).
‡ Christliche
Symbolik (1854), i, p. viii.
24
RELIGION
THE MYTHOLOGY
OF OUTER EXPERIENCE
As an excellent
example
of mythology which grows from external experience I should like to
mention
especially the conception of the Trinity. Thanks to the influence of
Hellenic
sentiment, the Christian Church (in spite of the violent opposition of
the Jewish Christians), had, in the moulding of its dogma, steered
successfully
past that most dangerous cliff, Semitic monotheism, and has preserved
in
her otherwise perilously Judaised conception of the Godhead the sacred
“Three in Number“ of the Aryans. * It is well known that we continually
come across the number Three among the Indo-Europeans: it is, as Goethe
says,
- ..... die ewig unveraltete,
- Dreinamig — Dreigestaltete.
We find it in the three groups of the
Indian
gods, at a later time (several centuries before Christ) developed into
the detailed and expressly stated doctrine of the Trinity, the
Trimûrti:
“He, who is Vishnu, is also Çiva, and he, who is Çiva, is
also Brahma: one being but three Gods.“ And the conception can be
traced
from the distant east to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, where
Patricius
found the clover leaf as the symbol of the Trinity among the Druids.
The
number Three was bound at an early time to impress itself upon races
that
were inclined to poetry and metaphysics, for it and it alone is not a
chance
number (like five or ten which are derived from the fingers) nor a
pedantically
calculated
*
That
the Indo-Europeans also were at bottom monotheists, I have at a much
earlier
point emphasised, in opposition to the widespread popular error (see
vol. i. pp. 218 and 424);
cf.
also Jac. Grimm in the preface to his Deutsche Mythologie (pp.
xliv.-xlv.)
and Max Müller in his lectures on the Science of Languages (ii.
385).
But this kind of monotheism must be distinguished from the Semitic.
25 RELIGION
number (like seven, which is derived
from the so-called seven wandering stars), it expresses a fundamental
phenomenon,
so that the conception of a Trinity might rather be called an
experience
than a symbol. The authors of the Upanishads had already recognised
that
all human knowledge rests on three fundamental forms — time, space,
causality
— and that not a triplicity but (to quote from Kant) a “unity of
apperception“
results therefrom; space and time also are inseparable unities, but
possess
three dimensions. In short, the threefoldness as unity surrounds us on
all sides as an original phenomenon of experience and is reflected in
all
individual cases. Thus, for example, the most modern science has proved
that without exception every element can take three — but only three —
forms: the solid, the fluid, the gaseous; and this only further shows,
what the people long ago knew, that our planet consists of earth, water
and air. As Homer says:
- Everything was divided into three.
If we search for such conceptions
intentionally,
the proceeding very soon degenerates (as in the case of Hegel) into
trifling;
* but there is no trifling in the spontaneous, intuitive development
into
a myth of a general, but not analytically divided, physical and at the
same time metaphysical cosmic experience. And from this example we
derive
the consoling certainty that in the Christian dogma too the
Indo-European
spirit has not become entirely untrue to its own nature, but that its
myth-creating
religion has still remained nature-symbolism, as was the case from time
immemorial with the Indo-Eranians and the Teutonic nations. But here
the
symbolism is very subtle indeed, because in the first
*
Thus,
for example, the so-called necessary progression of the thesis,
antithesis
and synthesis, or again the deity of the Absolute as father, the
different
existence as son, the return to itself as spirit.
26 RELIGION
Christian centuries philosophical
abstraction
flourished, while artistic creative power was dormant. * We must also
emphasise
the fact that the myth was not felt by the great mass of the Christians
as a symbol; but the same was true of the Indians and Teutonic peoples
with their deities of light, air and water; it is indeed no
mere
symbol: all nature testifies to the inner, transcendental truth of such
a dogma as well as to its power of vigorous progressive development. †
Now the structure
of Christian dogma contains a great deal of such external, or, if we
will,
cosmic mythology.
In the first place
nearly everything which as doctrine supplements the conception of the
Trinity:
the incarnation of the Word, the Paraclete, &c. More especially is
the myth of God becoming man an old Indian ancestral property. We see
it
in the idea of unity in the very first book of the Rigveda; it
meets
us in philosophical transformation in the doctrine of the identity of
Atma
and Brahma; and it assumed visible form in the God-man Krishna, a
figure
which the poet makes God explain in the Bhagavadgîtâ
as follows: “Again and again when virtue languishes and injustice
prevails
I create myself (in human form). For the protection of the good, the
destruction
of the evil and the confirmation of virtue am I born on earth.“ ‡ The
dogmatic
conception of the nature of Buddha is merely a modification of this
myth.
The conception, too, that the god who became man could
* See
the whole conclusion of the first chapter.
† The
Egyptian Triads were formerly allowed to have a greater influence upon
the moulding of Christian dogmas than was right. In truth the
conception
of the son of God in his relation to God the Father (the son “not made,
nor created but begotten,“ literally as in the Athanasian Creed) seems
specifically Egyptian: we find it in all the various Egyptian systems
of
gods; but the third person is the goddess (Cf. Maspero: Histoire
ancienne des peuples de l‘Orient classique, 1895 i. 151, and Budge:
The
Book of the Dead, p. xcvi.)
‡ Bhagavadgîtâ
Book IV. §§ 7 and 8.
27 RELIGION
only be born of a virgin is an old
mythical
feature and decidedly belongs to the class of nature-symbols. The
much-ridiculed
schoolmen who wished to find not only heaven and hell, but also the
Trinity,
the incarnation, the birth from a virgin, &c., suggested in Homer
and
expressed in Aristotle, were not quite wrong. The altar and the view of
the sacraments among the earliest Christians point likewise rather to
common
Aryan conceptions of a symbolic nature-cult than to the Jewish
peace-offering
to an angry God (see details concerning this at the end of the
chapter).
In short, no single feature of Christian mythology can lay claim to
originality.
Of course, all these conceptions received a very different meaning in
the
Christian doctrine — not that the mythical background had become
essentially
different, but rather because from now onwards the historical
personality
of Jesus Christ stood in the foreground, and because the metaphysics
and
the myths of the Indo-Europeans, when recast by the men of the chaos,
had
mostly been so disfigured as to be no longer recognisable. An attempt
has
been made in the nineteenth century to explain away the fact of Christ
as a myth; * the truth lies in the very reverse: Christ is the one
thing
in Christianity that is not mythical; through Jesus Christ, through the
cosmic greatness of his personality (and to this may be added the
historically
materialising influence of Jewish thought) myth has, so to speak,
become
history.
CORRUPTION
OF THE MYTHS
Before I pass on
to
the moulding of myths from inner experience, I must say a word about
those
alien, transforming influences that brought themselves to bear upon the
visible structure of religion, and so falsified our own inherited
mythical
conceptions.
* See
vol. i. p. 181.
28 RELIGION
For example, it is,
as I have said, an old idea that God becoming man was born of a virgin,
but the worship of the “mother of God“ was taken from Egypt, where for
about three centuries before Christ the rich plastically changeable
Pantheon
with its usual readiness to receive the alien had assimilated this idea
with particular zeal, transforming it, like everything Egyptian, to a
purely
empirical materialism. But it was long before the cult of Isis could
force
its way into the Christian religion. In the year 430, the term “mother
of God“ is described by Nestorius as a blasphemous innovation; it had
just
made its way into the Church! In the history of mythological dogma
nothing
can be so clearly proved as the direct, genetic connection of the
Christian
worship of the “mother of God“ with the worship of Isis. In the latest
times the religion of the chaos that dwelt in Egypt had limited itself
more and more to the worship of the “son of God“ — Horus and his mother
Isis. Concerning this the famous Egyptologist Flinders Petrie writes:
“This
religious custom had a profound influence upon the development of
Christianity.
We may even say that, but for the presence of Egypt we should never
have
seen a Madonna. Isis had obtained a great hold on the Romans under the
earlier Emperors; her worship was fashionable and widespread; and when
she found a place in the other great movement, that of the Galileans,
when
fashion and moral conviction could go hand in hand, then her triumph
was
assured, and, as the Mother Goddess, she has been the ruling figure of
the religion of Italy ever since.“ * The same author then shows also
* Religion
and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, ed. 1898, p. 46. Every year new
proofs
of the universal spread of the Isis cult in all places where the
influence
of the Roman chaos had penetrated are being discovered in all parts of
Europe. The belief in the resurrection of the body and the
communication
by sacrament of the manna of eternal life were elements of these
mysteries
long before the birth of Christ. One finds the greatest number of
evidences
in the Museum of Guimet, since Gaul and Italy were the chief seats of
the
Isis cult. (In the
29
RELIGION
how the worship of Horus as a child
of God was transferred to the conceptions of the Roman Church, so that
out of the profound and thoughtful, ripe and manly proclaimer of
salvation
of the earliest representations there grew finally the arrogant bambino
of Italian pictures. * Here we see the chaos of peoples as well as
Indo-Europeanism
and Judaism at work in the development of the structure of the
Christian
Church. We find the same in the conceptions of heaven and of hell, of
the
resurrection, of angels and evil spirits, &c., and at the same time
we find their mythological worth becoming less and less, till finally
almost
nothing is left but slavish superstition, which worships before the
fetish
of the putative nails of a saint. I attempted in the second half of the
first chapter to explain the difference between superstition and
religion;
at the same time I showed how the delusive conceptions of the
uneducated
mob, in league with the most subtle philosophy, successfully instituted
an attack upon genuine religion, as soon as Hellenic poetical power
began
to decline; what was said there is applicable here and need not be
repeated.
(See vol. i. pp. 70 to 80.)
Centuries before Christ the so-called mysteries were introduced into
Greece,
and into them men were initiated by purification (baptism), in order
that
by partaking together of the divine flesh and blood (Greek mysterion,
Latin sacramentum) they might then share in the divine nature
and
immortality; but these delusive doctrines were accepted
meantime
Flinders Petrie has made new discoveries, especially in Ehnasya, from
which
step by step it can be traced how the cult of Isis and of Horus were
transformed
into the would-be “Christian“ worship of the Madonna. See the
communications
of this scholar before the British Association, 1904.)
*
Interesting
in this connection is the demonstration by the same author that the
well-known
Christian monogram so frequent on old monuments and still employed
to-day
(supposed to be khi-rho from the Greek alphabet) is nothing
more
or less than the common Egyptian symbol of the God Horus!
30 RELIGION
exclusively by the ever-increasing
population
of “foreigners and slaves“ and inspired all genuine Hellenes with
horror
and contempt. * The more deep the religious and creative consciousness
sank, the more boldly did the chaos raise its head. A fusion of all
shades
of superstitions was brought about by the Roman Empire, and when
Constantine
II. at the end of the fourth century proclaimed the Christian religion
to be the religion of the State and so forced all those who were at
heart
non-Christians into the community of the Christians, all the chaotic
conceptions
of degenerate “heathendom“ flowed in at the same time and from those
days
onward formed — at least to a great extent — an essential element of
the
dogma.
This moment is the
turning-point in the development of the Christian religion.
Noble Christians,
especially the Greek Fathers, fought desperately against the
disfiguration
of their pure, simple faith, a struggle which found its most important
but its most violent and best known expression in the long conflict
about
image-worship. Already in this, Rome, prompted by race, culture and
tradition,
took the side of the chaos. At the end of the fourth century the great
Vigilantius, a Goth, raises his voice against the pseudo-mythological
Pantheon
of guardian angels and martyrs, the abuse of relics — and the monkshood
taken over from the Egyptian worship of Serapis; † but Hieronymus,
* See
especially the famous speech of Demosthenes De Corona, and for
a
summary of the facts Jevons: Introduction to the History of
Religion,
1896, chap. xxiii. For the tracing back of the Last Supper to Old
Babylon
see
Otto Pfleiderer‘s Christusbild, p. 84, and for its relation to
other
old mysteries see the same author‘s Entstehung des
Christentums,
1905, p. 154. For the fundamental facts see Albr. Dieterich‘s Eine
Mithrasliturgie, 1903.
†
Pachomius,
the founder of real monkhood, was an Egyptian like his predecessor, the
hermit Antonius. He was a native of Upper Egypt, and as a “national
attendant
on Serapis“ learned the practices which he afterwards transferred
almost
unchanged to Christianity. (Cf. Zöckler: Askese und
Mönchtum,
2nd ed. p. 193 f.)
31
RELIGION
who was educated in Rome, fights it
down and enriches the world and the calendar with new saints invented
by
his own imagination. The “pious lie“ was already at work. *
THE MYTHOLOGY
OF INNER EXPERIENCE
This may suffice
to
illustrate the manner in which the mythology derived from outer
experience
and handed down by the Indo-Europeans was unavoidably disfigured by the
Chaos of Peoples. If we now turn our attention to the forming of myths
from inner experience, we shall find the Indo-European legacy in purer
form.
The kernel of the
Christian religion, the focus in which all rays concentrate, is the
conception
of a “redemption of man“: this idea has always been and still is
strange
to the Jews; it absolutely contradicts their whole conception of
religion;
† for here we have not to do with a visible, historical fact, but with
an inexpressible, inner experience. It is, on the other hand, the
central
idea in all Indo-Eranian religious views; they all revolve, as it were,
round the longing for redemption, the hope of salvation; nor was this
idea
of redemption strange to the Hellenes; we find it in their mysteries:
it
forms the basis of many of their myths, and in Plato (e.g., in
the
seventh book of the Republic) it is clearly recognisable,
although,
for the reason stated in the first chapter, the Greeks of the Classical
epoch revealed to a very small extent the inner, moral, or, as we
should
say to-day, pessimistic side of these myths. They sought the kernel
elsewhere:
- What are treasures to me in
comparison with
life.
And yet alongside of this high estimate
of life as the
* Cf.
vol. i. p. 313. For the
“adoption
of heathendom,“ see also Müller. p. 204 f.
† Cf.
vol. i. p. 413, and also
the
passage on p. 337, quoted
from
Graetz.
32 RELIGION
most glorious of all possessions there
is the song of praise to the one who dies young:
- All things are fair in death,
whatever may
appear. *
But whoever notices
the
tragic basis of the proverbial “Greek cheerfulness“ will be inclined to
recognise this “redemption in beautiful manifestation“ as clearly
related
to those other conceptions of the redemption; it is the same theme in a
different key, Major instead of Minor.
The idea of
redemption
— or let us rather say the mythical conception of redemption † —
embraces
two others: that of a present imperfection and that of a possible
perfection
by some non-empirical, that is, in a certain sense supernatural or
transcendental
process: the one is symbolised by the myth of degeneration, the other
by
that of gracious help bestowed by a Higher Being. The myth of
degeneration
becomes particularly plastic where it is represented as the fall by
sin;
this is in consequence the most beautiful and imperishable page in
Christian
mythology; whereas the complementary conception of grace is so
pre-eminently
metaphysical that it can scarcely be presented in plastic form. The
story
of the fall is a fable, by which attention is drawn to a great
fundamental
fact of human life awakened to consciousness; it leads up to knowledge;
grace, on the other hand, is a conception which only follows after
knowledge,
and can only be acquired by personal experience. ‡ Hence a great and
interesting
difference in
* Iliad
ix. 401, and xxii. 73.
†
That
in the case of Homer the word muthos corresponds to the later logos,
that is, that all speech is viewed, so to speak, as poetry (which it
obviously
is), is one of those thing in which language reveals to us the
profoundest
facts concerning the organisation of our mind.
‡
Kluge
gives in his Etymologisches Wörterbuch the following as
etymology
and explanation of grace (Gnade). Root meaning, “to bend, bend
oneself“;
Gothic, “to support“; Old Saxon, “favour, help“; Old
33 RELIGION
the development of all genuine (that
is, non-Semitic) religions according to the predominant mental gifts of
the various races. Wherever the creative and figurative element
predominates
(in the case of the Eranians, the Europeans, and, as it seems, the
Sumero-Accadians)
degeneration is plastically presented as “fall by sin“ and made the
centre
of the complex of myths derived from inner experience: this complex of
myths groups itself around the conception of redemption; * whereas
where
this is not the case (for example among the Aryan Indians, who have
such
high talents for metaphysics but as plastic artists are more rich in
imagination
than skilful in form), we do not find the myth of degeneration clearly
and definitely formulated, but only all sorts of contradictory
conceptions.
On the other hand, grace — the weak point of our religion and for most
Christians a mere confused word — is the radiant sun of Indian faith;
it
represents not merely hope but the triumphant experience of the pious,
and therefore stands so very much in the forefront of all religious
thought
and feeling that the discussions of the Indian sages on grace,
especially
in its relation to good works, make the violent debates which have
always
divided the Christian Church appear relatively almost childish and to a
great extent ridiculous, if we
High German, “pity,
compassion,
condescension“; Middle High German, “bliss, support, favour.“
* The
myth of degeneration forms, as is well known, a fundamental component
of
the circle of conceptions of the Greeks, who nevertheless are so
persistently
called “cheerful.“
- “Would I had
sooner died,
or else had been later born!
- For now lives a
race of iron:
never by day
- Are they free of
misery and
care, and by night
- They suffer pain:
and the
burden of cares is the gift of the Gods!“
So speaks the “joyful“
Hesiod
(Works and Days, verse 175 f.). And he paints to us a past
“golden
age,“ which we have to thank for the little good that still exists
among
us degenerate men, for these great men of the past still move as
spirits
in our midst; cf. vol. i, p.
89.
34 RELIGION
except the case of a very few men —
an Apostle Paul and a Martin Luther. Should any one be inclined to
doubt
that here we are dealing with the mythical shaping of inexpressible
inner
experiences, I would refer him to the speech of Christ to Nicodemus, in
which the word “regeneration“ would be just as senseless as the story
in
Genesis
of the degeneration of the first beings by the eating of an apple, if
there
were not here as there, a case of making visible a perfectly actual and
present but at the same time invisible process which therefore the
understanding
cannot grasp. And in reference to the fall by sin I refer to Luther,
who
writes: “Original sin means the fall of all nature“; and again: “The
earth
is indeed innocent and would willingly bring forth the best; but it is
hindered by the curse that has fallen upon men by reason of sin.“ Here
natural affinity between man's innermost action and surrounding nature
is obviously postulated: that is Indo-European mythical religion in its
full development (see vol. i. pp. 214
and 412). I may also say
that
when this mythical religion reveals itself as the conception of reason
(as in the case of Schopenhauer) it forms Indo-European metaphysics. *
Reflection upon this
brings home to us the profound and very significant fact that our
Indo-European
view of “sin“ is altogether mythical, that is, it reaches beyond the
real
world. I have already pointed out (vol. i. p. 390)
how fundamentally distinct the Jewish view is, so that the same word
denotes
with them quite a different thing; I have, moreover, studied various
modern
Jewish handbooks of religious teaching without anywhere finding a
discussion
of the idea of “sin“: whoever does not break the law is righteous; on
the
other hand, the Jewish theologians expressly and energetically reject
the
dogma
*
Luther‘s
thoughts are vaguely anticipated in the 5th chapter of the Epistle
to
the Romans, but they are found quite fully expressed in the
writings
of Scotus Erigena, whom he valued so highly (see De Divisione
Naturae,
Book V. chap. 36).
35 RELIGION
of original sin which the Christians
derived from the Old Testament. * Now if we reflect on this position of
the Jews, which is perfectly justified by their history and religion,
we
shall soon come to see that from our different standpoint sin and
original
sin are synonyms. It is a question of an unavoidable condition of all
life.
Our conception of sinfulness is the first step towards the recognition
of a transcendental connection of things; it is evidence that our
direct
experience of this connection is beginning — an experience which
receives
its consummation in the words of Christ: “The Kingdom of Heaven is
within
you.“ (see vol. i. p.
187).
Augustine's definition: „Peccatum est dictum, factum vel concupitum
contra legem aeternam“, † is only a superficial extension of Jewish
conceptions; Paul goes to the root of the matter by calling sin itself
a “law“ — a law of the flesh, or, as we should say to-day, an empirical
law of nature — and by showing in a famous passage which has been
considered
obscure but is perfectly clear (Romans viii), that the Church
law,
that so-called lex aeterna of Augustine, has not the least
power
over sin, which is a fact of nature, over which grace alone can
prevail.
‡ The exact transcription of the Old Indian thought! The singer of the
Veda already “searches eagerly for his sin“ and finds it not in his
will
but in his condition, which even in his dreams holds evil up before his
eyes, and finally he turns to his God, “the God of grace,“ who
enlightens
the simple. §
*
Consult
as an example Philippson‘s Israelitische Religionslehre, ii. 89.
† Sin
is a breach of the everlasting law by word, deed or desire.
‡ Cf.
especially Pfleiderer: Der Paulinismus, 2nd ed. p. 50 f. This
purely
scientific theological exposition is naturally different from mine, but
nevertheless confirms it, especially by the proof (p. 59) that Paul
assumed
the presence of an impulse to sin before the Fall, which obviously
could
mean nothing but the removal of the myth beyond arbitrary historical
boundaries;
then also by the clear demonstration that Paul, in opposition to the
Augustinian
dogmatists, recognised in the flesh the common and unchanging source of
all sinful nature.
§
Rigveda
vii. 86.
36 RELIGION
And in the same way as later Origenes,
Erigena and Luther, the
Çârîraka-Mîmânsâ
considers all living beings as “in need of redemption, but only human
beings
as being capable of it.“ * It is only when we view sin as a condition,
not as the transgression of a law, that we can arrive at the two
conceptions
of redemption and of grace. Here we have to do with the inmost
experiences
of the individual soul, which, as far as is possible, are made visible
and communicable through mythical images.
How unavoidable the
struggle was in this whole range of myth-building becomes clear from
the
simple reflection that such conceptions are directly contradictory to
the
Jewish view of religion. Where does one find in the sacred books of the
Hebrews even the slightest hint of the conception of the divine
Trinity?
Nowhere. Note also with what fine instinct the first bearers of the
Christian
idea take precautions that the “redeemer“ should not be incorporated in
any way with the Jewish people: the house of David had been promised
everlasting
duration by the Priests (2 Samuel xxii, 5), hence the
expectation
of a King from this tribe; but Christ is not descended from the house
of
David; † neither is he a son of Jehovah, the God of the Jews; he is the
son of the cosmic God, that “holy ghost“ which was familiar to all
Aryans
under different names — the “breath of breath,“ as the
Brihadâranyaka
says, or, to quote the Greek Fathers of the Christian Church, the poietes
and plaster of the world, the “originator of the sublime work
of
creation.“ ‡ The idea of a redemption and with it of necessity the
conceptions
of degeneration and grace have always been and still are alien to the
Jews.
The surest proof is afforded by the fact that, although the Jews
themselves
relate the myth of the Fall at the
*
Çankara:
Die
Sûtra‘s des Vedânta, i, 3, 25.
† See
the fictitious genealogies in Matthew i. and Luke ii.,
both
of which go back to Joseph — not to Mary.
‡ See
Hergenröther: Photius iii. 428.
37 RELIGION
beginning of their sacred books, they
themselves have never known anything of original sin! I have already
pointed
to this fact, and we know of course that all the myths contained in the
Bible are without exception borrowed, reduced from mythological
ambiguity
to the narrow significance of an historical chronicle, by those who
composed
the Old Testament. * For this reason there grew up in regard to the
cycle
of myths of redemption a strife within the Christian Church which raged
wildly during the first centuries, and signified a life and death
struggle
for religion, which is not yet settled and never can be — never, so
long
as two contradictory views of existence are forced by obstinate want of
comprehension to exist side by side as one and the same religion. The
Jew,
as Professor Darmesteter assured us (vol. i. p.
421), “Has never troubled his brain about the story of the apple
and
the serpent“; for his unimaginative brain it had no meaning; † for the
Greek and the Teuton, on the other hand, it was the starting-point of
the
whole moral mythology of humanity laid down in the book of Genesis.
These therefore could not help “troubling their brains“ about the
question.
If like the Jews they rejected the Fall completely, they at the same
time
destroyed the belief in divine grace and therewith disappeared the
conception
of redemption, in short, religion in our Indo-European sense was
destroyed
and nothing but Jewish rationalism remained behind — without the
strength
and the ideal element of Jewish national tradition and blood
relationship.
That is what Augustine clearly recognised. But on the other hand: if we
were to accept this very ancient Sumero-Accadian fable, which was
meant,
as I said before, to awaken the perceptive faculty, if we fancied we
must
interpret it in that Jewish fashion
* See
vol. i pp. 230, 418,
and 433.
†
Professor
Graetz (i. 650] considers the doctrine of original sin to be a “new
doctrine,“
invented by Paul!
38 RELIGION
which views all things mythical as
materially
correct history, the result must be a monstrous and revolting doctrine,
or, as Bishop Julianus of Eclanum at the beginning of the fifth century
expresses it, “a stupid and profane dogma.“ It was this conviction that
decided the pious Briton Pelagius — and before him, as it seems, almost
the whole Hellenic Christendom. I have studied various histories of
dogma
and histories of the Church without ever finding this so very simple
cause
of the unavoidable Pelagian controversy even hinted at. Harnack, for
example,
in his History of Dogma, says of Augustine's doctrine of grace
and
sin: “As the expression of psychological religious experience it is
true;
but when projected into history it is false,“ and a little further on
he
says, “the letter of the Bible had a confusing influence“; here on two
occasions he is very near the explanation, without seeing it, and in
consequence
the rest of his exposition remains abstract and theological, leaving us
very uncertain on the matter. For here we have obviously an instance,
if
I may use a popular expression, of a knife that cuts both ways. By
scornfully
rejecting the low materialistic, concretely historical view of Adam's
Fall,
he proves his deeply religious feeling and maintains it in happy
protest
against shallow Semitism; at the same time — by proving death, for
example,
a universal and necessary law of nature having nothing to do with sin —
he is fighting for truth against superstition, for science against
obscurantism.
On the other hand, he and his comrades have had their sense for poetry
and myth so destroyed by Aristotelianism and Hebraism, that he himself
(like so many an Anti-Semite of the present day) has become half a Jew
and rejects the good with the bad: he will hear nothing of the Fall;
the
old, sacred image which points the way to the profoundest knowledge of
human nature he discards completely; but grace is hereby made to shrink
to a meaningless word and redemption becomes so shadowy
39 RELIGION
an abstraction that a follower of
Pelagius
could speak of an “emancipation of man from God by free will.“ This
path
would have led directly back to flatly rationalistic philosophy and
Stoicism,
with the never-failing complement of grossly sensual mystery-service
and
superstition, a movement which we can observe in the ethical and
theosophical
societies of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt, therefore, that
Augustine in that famous struggle, in which he originally had the
greatest
and most gifted portion of the Episcopate, and more than once the Pope
too, against him, saved religion as such; for he defended the myth. But
by what means only was that possible to him? It was only possible
because
he threw the narrow Nessus-shirt of acquired Jewish narrow-mindedness
over
the splendid creations of divining, intuitive, heavenward-soaring
wisdom,
and transformed Sumero-Accadian similes into Christian dogmas, in the
historical
truth of which every one must henceforth believe on penalty of death. *
I am not writing
a history of theology and cannot go deeper into this controversy, but I
hope that these fragmentary hints have thrown some light on the
inevitable
quarrel concerning the Fall, and characterised it in its essentiality.
Every educated man knows that the Pelagian controversy is still going
on.
The Catholic Church, by emphasising the importance of works as opposed
to faith, could not help diminishing the importance of grace; no
sophistry
can put aside this fact, which when further reflected has influenced
the
actions and thoughts of millions. But Fall and Grace are so closely
connected
parts of one single organism that the least touching of the one
influences
the other; thus it was that step by step the true significance of the
myth
*
This
may have been difficult enough for Augustine himself, for earlier, in
the
27th chapter of the 15th book of the De Civitate Dei, he bad
spoken
strongly against attempting to interpret the book of Genesis as
historical truth entirely free of allegory.
40
RELIGION
of the Fall became so weakened that
the Jesuits to-day are generally described as semi-Pelagians, and they
themselves even call their doctrine a scientia media. * As soon
as the myth is infringed, Judaism is inevitable.
It is clear that
the struggle must rage more fiercely concerning the conception of
grace;
for the Fall was at least found in the sacred books of the Israelites,
though only as uncomprehended myth, whereas grace is nowhere to be
found
there and is and remains quite meaningless to them. The storm had
already
burst among the Apostles, and it has not yet died away. Law or grace:
the
two could no more exist simultaneously than man could at once serve God
and Mammon. “I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness
come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain.“ (Paul to the Galatians
ii. 21). One such passage is decisive; to play off against it other
so-called
“canonical“ utterances (e.g., The Epistle of James, ii,
14,
24) is childish; for it is not a question of theological hair-splitting
but of one of the great facts of experience of inner life amongst us
Indo-Europeans.
“Only he receives redemption, whom redemption chooses,“ says the
Kâtha-Upanishad.
And what gift is it that this metaphysical myth lets us “receive by
grace“?
According to the Indo-Eranians knowledge; according to the European
Christians
faith: both guaranteeing a regeneration, that is, awakening man to the
consciousness of a different connection of things. † I quote again the
words of Christ, for they cannot too often be quoted: “The Kingdom of
Heaven
is within you.“ This is a discernment or a faith, obtained by divine
grace.
Redemption by knowledge, redemption by
*
I
shall only quote one witness whose judgment is moderate and correct,
Sainte-Beuve.
He writes (Port Royal, Book IV. chap. 1): „Les
Jésuites
n‘attestent pas moins par leur méthode d‘éducation qu‘ils
sont sémi-pélagiens tendant au Pélagianisme pur,
que
par leur doctrine directe.“
† Cf.
vol. i. pp. 193 and 437;
and the paragraph on “Philosophy
and
Religion“ in the ninth chapter (vol. ii.).
41 RELIGION
faith: two views which are not so very
different as people have thought; the Indian, and Buddha, put the
emphasis
on the intellect, the Graeco-Teuton, taught by Jesus Christ, upon the
will:
two interpretations of the same inner experience. But the second is of
more far-reaching importance, since redemption by knowledge, as India
shows,
signifies fundamentally a pure and simple negation and so affords no
positive,
creative principle; while redemption by faith takes hold of humanity by
its darkest roots and forces it to take a definite and a strongly
positive
direction:
- Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott!
To the Jewish
religion
both views are equally foreign.
JEWISH
CHRONICLE OF THE WORLD
So much for
information
and instruction concerning those mythological portions of the Christian
religion, which certainly were not borrowed from Judaism. Manifestly,
the
structure is essentially Indo-European, not a temple built solely in
honour
of the Jewish religion. This structure rests upon pillars, and these
pillars
upon foundations, which are not all Jewish. But now it remains to
appreciate
the importance of the impulse derived from Judaism, whereby at the same
time the nature of the struggle within the Christian religion will
appear
more and more manifest.
Nothing would be
falser than to regard the Jewish influence in the creation of the
Christian
religion as merely negative, destructive and pernicious. If we look at
the matter from the Semitic standpoint, which with the help of any
Jewish
religious doctrine we can easily do, we shall see things in exactly the
opposite light: the Helleno-Aryan element as the undoing, destroying
force
that is hostile to religion as we already observed in the
42 RELIGION
case of Pelagius. Without giving up
our natural point of view, an unprejudiced consideration will show us
that
the Jewish contribution is very important and almost indispensable. For
in this marriage the Jewish spirit was the masculine principle, the
generative
element, the will. Nothing entitles us to assume that Hellenic
speculation,
Egyptian asceticism and international mysticism, without the fervour of
the Jewish will to believe, would ever have given the world a new
religious
ideal and at the same time a new life. Neither the Roman Stoics with
their
noble but cold, impotent moral philosophy, nor the aimless, mystic
self-negation
of the theology introduced from India to Asia Minor, nor the opposite
solution
found in the neo-Platonic Philo, where the Israelite faith is viewed in
a mystical, symbolical fashion, and Hellenic thought, deformed by
senility,
must embrace this strangely adorned youngest daughter of Israel — none
of these, obviously, would have led to the goal. How could we otherwise
explain the fact that at the very time when Christ was born Judaism
itself,
so exclusive in its nature, so scornful of everything alien, so stern
and
joyless and devoid of beauty, had begun a genuine and most successful
propaganda?
The Jewish religion is disinclined to all conversion, but the Gentiles,
impelled by longing for faith, went over to it in crowds. And that too
although the Jew was hated. We speak of the Anti-Semitism of to-day.
Renan
assures us that horror of the Jewish character was even more intense in
the century before the birth of Christ. * What is it then that forms
the
secret attraction of Judaism? Its will. That will which, ruling in the
sphere of religion, created unconditional, blind faith. Poetry,
philosophy,
science, mysticism, mythology — all these are widely divergent and to a
certain extent paralyse the will; they testify to an unworldly,
speculative,
ideal tendency of
*
Histoire
du peuple d‘IsraëI v, 227.
43
RELIGION
mind, which produces in the case of
all noble men that proud contempt of life which makes it possible for
the
Indian sage to lay himself while still alive in his own grave, which
makes
the inimitable greatness of Homer's hero Achilles, which stamps the
German
Siegfried as a model of fearlessness and which received monumental
expression
in the nineteenth century in Schopenhauer's doctrine of the negation of
the will to live. The will is here in a way directed inwardly. This is
quite different in the case of the Jew. His will at all times took an
outward
direction; it was the unconditional will to live. This will to live was
the first thing that Judaism gave to Christianity: hence that
contradiction,
which even to-day seems to many an inexplicable riddle, between a
doctrine
of inner conversion, toleration and mercifulness, and a religion of
exclusive
self-assertion and fanatical intolerance.
Next to this general
tendency of will — and inseparably bound up with it — must be mentioned
the Jewish purely historical view of faith. In the third chapter I have
treated at length the relation between the Jewish faith of will and the
teaching of Christ, while I have in the fifth discussed its relation to
religion as a whole; I presuppose both passages to be known. * Here I
should
like merely to call attention to the fact, how great and decisive an
influence
the Jewish faith as a material unshakeable conviction concerning
definite
historical events was bound to exercise at that moment of history at
which
Christianity arose. On this point Hatch writes: “The young Christian
communities
were helped by the current reaction against pure speculation — the
longing
for certainty. The mass of men were sick of theories; they wanted
certainty.
The current teaching of the Christian teachers gave this certainty. It
appealed to definite facts of which their predecessors were eye-
* See
vol. i. pp. 238 f. and 415
f.
44
RELIGION
witnesses. Its simple tradition of the
life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was a necessary basis
for
the satisfaction of men's needs.“ * That was a beginning. The attention
was in the first place directed solely to Jesus Christ; the sacred
books
of the Jews were counted as very suspicious documents; Luther speaks in
anger of the small respect which men like Origenes and even Hieronymus
(as he tells us) paid to the Old Testament; most of the Gnostics
rejected
it in toto; Marcion actually regarded it as a work of the
Devil.
But as soon as the thin edge of Jewish historical religion had found
its
way into men's ideas, the whole wedge could not fail gradually to be
driven
in. It is believed that the so-called Jewish Christians suffered a
defeat
and that the heathen Christians with Paul carried off the victory? That
is only true in a very conditional and fragmentary manner. Outwardly,
indeed,
the Jewish law with its “sign of the Covenant“ suffered complete
shipwreck;
outwardly, too, the Indo-European with his Trinity and other mythology
and metaphysics prevailed; but inwardly, during the first centuries,
the
true backbone of Christianity came to be Jewish history — that history
which had been remodelled by fanatical priests according to certain
hieratic
theories and plans, which had been supplemented and constructed with
genius
but at the same time with caprice — that history which historically was
utterly untrue. † Christ's advent, which had been foretold to them by
authentic
witnesses, was to those poor men of the chaos like a light in the
darkness;
it was an historical phenomenon. Sublime spirits indeed placed this
historic
personality in a symbolical temple; but what signified logos and
demiurgos
and emanations of the divine principle to the common people? Its
* Influence
of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 6th ed. p. 312.
† See
vol. i, pp. 452 and 460.
45 RELIGION
healthy instinct impelled it to fasten
on to something which gave it a firm hold, and that was Jewish history.
The Messianic hope — although in Judaism it by no means played the part
which we Christians imagine * — formed the uniting link in the chain,
and
mankind possessed henceforth not only the teacher of the new sublime
religion,
not only the divine picture of the Sufferer on the Cross, but the whole
world-plan of the Creator from the time when he created heaven and
earth
to the moment when he should sit in judgment, “which was soon to be.“
The
longing for material certainty, the distinguishing mark of that epoch,
had, as we see, not rested, till every trace of uncertainty had been
destroyed.
That signifies a triumph of Jewish, and fundamentally of Semitic,
philosophy
and religion.
Closely allied to
this is the introduction of religious intolerance. Intolerance is
natural
to the Semite; in it an essential feature of his character expresses
itself.
To the Jew especially the unwavering belief in the history and
destination
of his people was a vital question; this belief was his only weapon in
the struggle for the existence of his nation; in it his particular
gifts
had been permanently expressed; in short, for him there was at stake
something
which had grown outward from within — something which was the gift of
the
history and character of the people. Even the negative qualities of the
Jews which are so prominent, for example the indifference and unbelief
which has been widespread from earliest times to the present day, had
contributed
to the rigidness of the compulsion to believe. But now this powerful
impulse
was applied to quite another world. Here there was no people, no
nation,
no tradition; that moral motive power of a fearful national trial,
which
lends consecration to the hard, narrow Jewish law, was
* See
vol. i, p. 235 note.
46
RELIGION
altogether lacking. The introduction,
therefore, of compulsory faith into the Chaos (and then among the
Germanic
nations) was in a way an effect without a cause, in other words the
rule
of caprice. What in the case of the Jews had been an objective result
became
here a subjective command. What there had moved in a very limited
sphere,
that of national tradition and national religious law, ruled here
without
any limitations. The Aryan tendency to establish dogmas (see
vol.
i. p. 429) entered into a
fatal
union with the historical narrowness and deliberate intolerance of the
Jews. Hence the wild struggle for the possession of the power to
proclaim
dogmas, lasting through all the first centuries of our era. Mild men
like
Irenaeus remained almost without influence; the more intolerant the
Christian
bishop was, the more power did he possess. But this Christian
intolerance
is distinguished from Jewish intolerance in the same way as Christian
dogma
is distinguished from Jewish dogma: for the Jews were hemmed in on all
sides, confined within definite narrow boundaries, whereas the whole
field
of the human intellect stood open to Christian dogma and Christian
intolerance;
moreover Jewish faith and Jewish intolerance have never possessed
far-reaching
power, whereas the Christians, with Rome, soon ruled the world. And
thus
we find such inconsistencies as that a heathen Emperor (Aurelian, in
the
year 272) forces upon Christianity the primateship of the Roman bishop,
and that a Christian Emperor, Theodosius, commands, as a purely
political
measure, that the Christian religion be believed on pain of death. I
say
nothing of other inconsistencies, e.g., that the nature of God,
the relation of the Father to the Son, the eternity of the punishments
of hell, &c., ad inf., were settled by majority by Bishops,
who frequently could neither read nor write, and became binding upon
all
men from a fixed day, in somewhat the same
47 RELIGION
way as our Parliament imposes taxes
upon us by the vote of the majority. Yet, however difficult it may be
for
us to watch this monstrous development of a Jewish thought on alien
soil
without uneasiness, we must admit that a Christian Church could never
have
been fully developed without dogma and intolerance. Here then we are
indebted
to Judaism for an element of strength and endurance.
But not only the
backbone of the growing Christian Church was borrowed from Judaism; the
whole skeleton was its product. Take first the establishment of faith
and
virtue: in ecclesiastical Christianity it is absolutely Jewish, for it
rests on fear and hope: on the one side eternal reward, on the other
eternal
punishment. In regard to this subject also I can refer to former
remarks,
in the course of which I pointed out the fundamental difference between
a religion which addresses itself to the purely selfish emotions of the
heart, i.e., to fear and desire, and a religion which, like
that
of Brahma, regards the renunciation of the enjoyment of all reward here
and in the other world as the first step towards initiation into true
piety.
* I will not repeat myself; but we are now in a position to extend our
former knowledge, and only by so doing shall we clearly recognise what
unceasing conflict must inevitably result from the forcible fusion of
two
contradictory views of life. For the least reflection will convince us
of the fact that the conception of redemption and of conversion of
will,
as it had hovered in many forms before the minds of the Indo-Europeans,
and as it found eternal expression in the words of the Saviour, is
quite
different from all those which represent earthly conduct as being
punished
or
* See
the excursus on Semitic religion in the fifth chapter (vol. i.) and
compare
especially p. 437 with p. 453.
Compare, too, the details concerning the Germanic view of the world in
the particular paragraph of chap. ix. (vol. ii. p.
423).
48
RELIGION
rewarded in an after-life. * Here it
is not a case of some trifling difference, but of two creations
standing
side by side, strange from the root to the crown. Though these two
trees
may have been firmly grafted the one upon the other they can never join
together and be one. And yet it was this fusion which early
Christianity
tried to effect and which still for faithful souls forms the stone of
Sisyphus.
At the beginning indeed, that is, before the whole national chaos and
with
it its religious conceptions had in the fourth century been forcibly
driven
into Christianity, this was not the case. In the very oldest writings
one
hardly finds any threats of punishment, and heaven is only the belief
in
an unspeakable happiness, † gained by the death of Christ. Where Jewish
influence prevails, we find even in the earliest Christian times the
so-called
Chilianism, that is, the belief in an approaching earthly millennium
(merely
one of the many forms of the theocratic world-empire of which the Jews
dreamt); wherever, on the other hand, philosophic thought kept the
upper
hand for a time, as in the case of Origenes, conceptions manifest
themselves
which can scarcely be distinguished from the transmigration
*
This
system is most perfectly developed among the old Egyptians, who
believed
that the heart of the dead was laid on scales and weighed against the
ideal
of right and uprightness; the idea of a conversion of the inner man by
divine grace was quite alien to them. The Jews have never risen to the
height of the Egyptian conceptions; formerly the reward for them was
simply
a very long life to the individual and future world-empire to the
nation
— the punishment, death and misery for future generations. In later
times,
however, they adopted all sorts of superstitions, from which there
resulted
a kingdom of God which was altogether secularly conceived (see
vol.
i. p. 481) and as
counterpart
to it a perfectly secular hell. From these and other conceptions which
arose from the lowest depths of human delusion and superstition the
Christian
hell was formed (of which Origenes knew nothing, except in the form of
qualms of conscience!), while neo-Platonism, Greek poetry and Egyptian
conceptions of the “Fields of the Blest“ (see the illustrations
in Budge‘s The Book of the Dead) provided the Christian heaven,
which, however, never attained to the clearness of hell.
†
Mostly
on the strength of a misinterpretation (Isaiah lxiv. 4).
49 RELIGION
of souls of the Indians and of Plato:
* the spirits of men are regarded as being created from eternity;
according
to their conduct they rise or sink, until finally all without exception
are transfigured, even the demons. † In such a system, it is plain that
neither the individual life itself, nor the promise of reward and the
threat
of punishment, has anything in common with the Judaeo-Christian
religion.
‡ But here too the Jewish spirit quickly prevailed, and that in exactly
the same way as did dogma and intolerance, by taking a development
which
hitherto had been undreamt of on the limited soil of Judea. The pains
of
hell and the bliss of heaven, the fear of the one and the hope of the
other,
are henceforth the only mainsprings which influence all Christendom.
What
redemption is, scarcely any one now knows, for even the preachers saw
in
it — and indeed still see in it at the present day — nothing more than
“redemption from the punishments of hell.“ § The men of the chaos
in fact understood no other arguments; a contemporary of Origenes, the
African Tertullian, declares frankly that only one thing can improve
men,
“the fear of eternal punishment and the hope of eternal reward. (Apol.
49). Naturally some chosen spirits rebelled constantly against this
materialising
and Judaising of religion; the importance of Christian mysticism, for
example,
could perhaps be said to lie in this, that it rejected all these
conceptions
and aimed
*
Concerning
the relation between these two, see vol. i. pp. 46
and 86.
† I
refer especially to chap. xxix. of the work On Prayer by
Origenes;
in the form of a commentary to the words “Lead us not into temptation“
this great man develops a purely Indian conception concerning the
importance
of sin as a means of salvation.
‡ As
a fact Origenes has expressly recognised the mythical element in
Christianity.
Only he thought that Christianity was “the only religion which even in
mythical form is truth“ (cf. Harnack: Dogmengeschichte,
Abriss,
2nd ed. p. 113).
§
Take up, for example, the Handbuch für Katholischen
Religionsunterricht
by the Prebendary Arthur König, and read the chapter on
redemption.
Nicodemus would not have found the slightest difficulty in
understanding
this doctrine.
50
RELIGION
solely at the transformation of the
inner man — that is, at redemption; but the two views could never be
made
to agree, and it is just this impossibility that was demanded of the
faithful
Christian. Either faith is to “improve“ men, as Tertullian asserts, or
it is to completely transform them by a conversion of the whole
soul-life,
as the gospel taught; either the world is a penitentiary, which we
should
hate, as Clemens of Rome taught in the second century * and after him
the
whole official Church, or else this world is the blessed soil, in which
the Kingdom of Heaven lies like a hidden treasure, according to the
teaching
of Christ. The one assertion contradicts the other.
In the further course
of this chapter I shall return to these contrasts; but I had first to
make
the reader feel their reality, and at the same time point out to him
the
measure of the triumph of Judaism as an eminently positive active
power.
With the proud independence of the genuine Indo-European aristocrat
Origenes
had expressed the opinion, “only for the common man it may suffice to
know
that the sinner is punished“; but now all these men of the chaos
were “common men“; sureness, fearlessness and conviction are the gift
only
of race and nationality; human nobility is a collective term; † the
noblest
individual man — for example an Augustine — cannot rise above the
conceptions
and sentiments of the common man and attain to perfect freedom. These
“common“
men needed a master who should speak to them as to slaves, after the
manner
of the Jewish Jehovah: a duty which the Church, endowed with the full
power
of the Roman Empire, accepted. Art, mythology and metaphysics in their
creative significance had become quite incomprehensible to the men of
that
time; the character of religion had in consequence to be lowered to
* See
his second letter, § 6.
† Cf.
vol. i, p. 318.
51 RELIGION
the level on which it had stood in
Judea.
These men required a purely historical, demonstrable religion, which
admitted
no doubt or uncertainty either in the past or in the future and least
of
all in the present: this was found only in the Bible of the Jews. The
motives
had to be taken from the world of sense: corporal punishments alone
could
deter these men from evil deeds, promises of a happiness, free of all
care,
alone could urge them to good works. That was of course the religious
system
of the Jewish hierocracy (cf. vol. i. p. 453).
From that time onward the system of ecclesiastical commands, taken from
Judaism and further developed, decided authoritatively in regard to all
matters, whether incomprehensible mysteries or obvious facts of history
(or it might be, historical lies). The intolerance which had been
foreshadowed
in Judaism but had never attained to its full development, * became the
fundamental principle of Christian conduct, and that as a logically
unavoidable
conclusion from the presuppositions just mentioned: if religion is a
chronicle
of the world, if its moral principle is legal and historical, if there
is an historically established precedent for the decision of every
doubt,
every question, then every deviation from the doctrine is an offence
against
truthfulness and endangers the salvation of man which is conceived as
purely
material; and so ecclesiastical justice steps in and exterminates the
unbeliever
or the heretic, just as the Jews had stoned every one who was not
strictly
orthodox.
I hope that these
hints will suffice to awaken the vivid conception and at the same time
the conviction that Christianity as a religious structure actually
rests
upon two fundamentally different and directly hostile “views of
existence“:
upon Jewish historical-chronistic faith and upon Indo-European
symbolical
and metaphysical
*
This
fancy has found its most complete expression in the novel Esther.
52 RELIGION
mythology (as I asserted upon p.
19). I cannot give more than indications, not even now, when I am
preparing
to cast a glance at the struggle which was bound to result from so
unnatural
a union. Real history is true only when it is apprehended as much as
possible
in detail; where that is not possible, a survey cannot be made too
general;
for only by this is it possible really to grasp completely a truth of
the
higher order, something living and unmutilated; the worst enemies of
historical
insight are the compendia. In this particular case the recognition of
the
connection of phenomena is simplified by the fact that we have here to
do with things which still live in our own hearts. For the discord
spoken
of in this chapter dwells, though he may not know it, in the heart of
every
Christian. Though in the first Christian centuries the struggle seemed,
outwardly, to rage more fiercely than it does to-day, there never was a
complete truce; it was just in the second half of the nineteenth
century
that the question here touched upon came to a more acute crisis,
chiefly
through the active energy of the Roman Church, which never grows weary
in the fight; neither is it thinkable that our growing culture can ever
attain to true ripeness, unless illuminated by the undimmed sun of a
pure,
uniform religion; only that could bring it out from the “Middle Ages“.
If it is now obvious that a clear knowledge of that early time of open,
unscrupulous strife must enable us to understand our own time, then
unquestionably
the spirit of our present age helps us in turn to comprehend that
earliest
epoch of growing, honestly and freely searching Christianity. I say
expressly
that it is only the very earliest epoch that the experiences of our own
heart teach us to comprehend; for at a later time the struggle grew
less
and less truly religious, more and more ecclesiastical and political.
When
Popery had attained to the summit of its power in the twelfth century
under
Innocent III.,
53 RELIGION
the real religious impulse which a short
time before had been so strong under Gregory VII. ceased, and the
Church
was henceforth, so to speak, secularised; no more can we even for a
moment
regard and judge the Reformation as a purely religious movement, it is
manifestly at least half political; and under such conditions there
soon
is nothing left but a mere matter of business in which the purely human
interest sinks to the lowest level. On the other hand, in the
nineteenth
century, in consequence of the almost complete separation in most
countries
of State and Religion (which is in no way influenced by the retention
of
one or more State churches) and in consequence of the altered,
henceforth
purely moral position of Popery, which outwardly has become powerless,
there has been a noticeable awakening of religious interest, and of all
forms of genuine as well as of superstitious religiosity. A symptom of
this ferment is the abundant formation of sects among ourselves. In
England,
for example, more than a hundred different and so-called Christian
unions
possess churches which are officially registered, or at any rate places
of meeting for common worship. In this connection it is striking that
even
the Catholics in England are divided into five different sects, only
one
of which is strictly orthodox Roman. Even among the Jews religious life
has awakened; three different sects have houses of prayer in London and
there are besides two different groups of Jewish Christians there. That
reminds us of the centuries before the religious degeneration; at the
end
of the second century, for example, Irenaeus tells of thirty-two sects,
Epiphanius, two centuries later, of eighty. Therefore we are justified
in the hope that the further back we go the better we shall understand
the spiritual conflict of genuine Christians.
54
RELIGION
PAUL AND AUGUSTINE
We get the most
vivid
idea of the double nature of Christianity when we see how it affects
individual
great men, as Paul and Augustine. In the case of Paul everything is
much
greater and clearer and more heroic, because spontaneous and free;
Augustine,
on the other hand, is sympathetic to all generations, is venerable,
awakening
pity at the same time that he commands admiration. Were we to place
Augustine
side by side with the victorious Apostle — perhaps the greatest man of
Christianity — he would not for a moment bear comparison; but when we
put
him on a line with those around him, his importance is brilliantly
manifest.
Augustine is the proper contrast to that other son of the Chaos,
Lucian,
of whom I spoke in chapter iv.: there the frivolity of a civilisation
hurrying
to its fall, here the look of pain raised to God from amid the ruins;
there
gold and fame as the goal in life, mockery and pleasantry the means;
here
wisdom and virtue, asceticism and solemn earnest working; there the
tearing
down of glorious ruins, here the toilsome building up of a firm
structure
of faith, even at the cost of his own convictions, even though the
architecture
should be very rude in comparison with the aspirations of the profound
spirit, no matter, if only poor, chaotic humanity may yet get something
sure to cling to, and wandering sheep gain a fold.
In two so different
personalities as Paul and Augustine the double nature of Christianity
naturally
reveals itself in very different ways. In the case of Paul everything
is
positive, everything affirmative; he has no unchanging theoretical
“theology,“
* but — a contemporary of Jesus
*
This
assertion will meet with many contradictions; all I mean by it,
however,
is that Paul rather uses his systematic ideas as a dialectical weapon
to
convince his hearers than endeavours to establish a connected, solely
valid
and new theological structure. Even Edouard
55 RELIGION
Christ — he is consumed, as if by living
flames, by the divine presence of the Saviour. As long as he was
against
Christ he knew no rest until he should have swept away the very last of
his disciples; as soon as he had recognised Christ as the redeemer, his
life was entirely given up to spreading the “good news“ over the whole
world that he could reach; in his life there was no period of groping
about,
of seeking, or irresolution. If he must discuss, then he paints his
theses
on the sky, visible from afar; if he must contradict, he does so with a
few blows of a club, as it were, but his love flashes up again
immediately,
and he is, as his own epigram says, “all things to all men,“ caring not
if he has to speak in one way to the Jew, in another to the Greek and
in
another to the Celt, if only he can “save some.“ * However profoundly
the
words of this one apostle flash into the darkest regions of the human
heart,
there is never a trace of painful constructing, of sophisticating in
them;
what he says is experienced and wells up spontaneously from his heart;
indeed his pen seems unable to keep pace with his thought; “not as
though
I had already attained, but I follow after ... forgetting those things
which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before“
(Phil. iii, 13). Here contradiction is openly placed side by
side
with contradiction. What matters it if only many believe in Christ the
Redeemer? Not so Augustine. No firm national religion surrounds his
path
as it did that of
Reuss, who, in his
immortal
work, Histoire de la Théologie Chrétienne au
siècle
apostolique (3e ed.), vindicates to the Apostle a definite, uniform
system, admits at the end (ii. 580) that real theology was for Paul a
subordinate
element, and on p. 73 he shows that Paul‘s aim was so completely
directed
to popular and practical work that wherever questions begin to be
theoretical
and theological, he leaves the metaphysical sphere for the ethical.
* We
must read the whole passage, I Cor. ix. 19 f., to see how
exactly
the apostle denies the later formula extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
Cf.,
too, the Epistle to the Philippians, i, 18: “What then?
notwithstanding,
every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached; and I
therein
do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.“
56 RELIGION
Paul; he is an atom among atoms in the
shoreless ocean of a fast decaying chaos. No matter where he puts his
foot,
he encounters sand or morass; no heroic figure — such as Paul saw —
appears
like a blinding sun on his horizon, but from a dreary writing of the
lawyer
Cicero he must draw the inspiration for his moral awakening of others,
and from sermons of the worthy Ambrosius his appreciation of the
significance
of Christianity. His whole life is a painful struggle; first against
and
with himself, until he has overcome the various phases of unbelief and
after trying various doctrines has accepted that of Ambrosius; then
against
what he had formerly believed, and against the many Christians whose
opinions
differed from his own. For while the living memory of the personality
of
Christ tinged all religion in the lifetime of the Apostle Paul, this
was
now effected by the superstition of dogma. Paul had been able proudly
to
say of himself that he did not fight like those who swing their arms
around
them in the air; Augustine, on the other hand, spent a good part of his
life in such fighting. Here, therefore, the contradiction which is
always
endeavouring to conceal itself from its own eye and that of others,
goes
much deeper; it rends the inner nature, mixes as it were “the corn with
chaff,“ and builds (in the intention of founding a firm orthodoxy) a
structure
which is so inconsistent, insecure, superstitious and in many points
actually
barbarous, that should the Christianity of the Chaos one day crumble to
pieces, Augustine more than any other man would be responsible for it.
Let us now study
these two men more closely. And first of all let us try to gain some
fundamental
ideas concerning Paul, for here we may hope to reveal the germ of the
development
which followed.
57
RELIGION
PAUL
In spite of all
assertions,
it remains very doubtful whether Paul was a pure Jew by race; I am
strongly
of opinion that the double nature of this remarkable man must be
explained
partly by his blood. There are no proofs. We only know the one fact,
that
he was not born in Judea or Phoenicia, but outside the Semitic
boundary,
in Cilicia, and that too in the city of Tarsus, which was founded by a
Dorian colony and was thoroughly Hellenic. When we consider on the one
hand how lax the Jews of that time outside of Judea were in regard to
mixed
marriages, * on the other hand that the Diaspora, in which Paul was
born,
was keenly propagandist and won a large number of women for the Jewish
faith, † the supposition appears not at all unwarrantable that Paul‘s
father
was indeed a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin (as he asserts, Romans
xi. 1; Philippians iii. 5), but that his mother was a Hellene
who
had gone over to Judaism. When historical proofs are lacking,
scientific
psychology may well have the right to put in its word; and the above
hypothesis
would explain the otherwise incomprehensible phenomenon, that an
absolutely
Jewish character (tenacity, pliancy, fanaticism, self-confidence) and a
Talmudic education accompany an absolutely un-Jewish intellect. ‡
However
* See,
for example, Acts of the Apostles xvi. 1.
† Cf.
vol. i. p. 119 note.
†
What
we know of the laws of heredity would speak very strongly for the
supposition
of a Jewish father and a Hellenic mother. The formerly popular saying:
A man inherits the character of his father and the intellect of his
mother,
has indeed shown itself to be much too dogmatic; if twins that have
grown
together with but one pair of legs can yet be absolutely different in
character
(cf. Höffding: Psychologie, 2nd ed. p. 480), we see
how cautious we must be with such assertions. Yet there are so many
striking
cases among the most important men (I will only mention Goethe and
Schopenhauer)
that we are entitled in the case of Paul, where a striking incongruence
stands before us as an inexplicable riddle, to put forward this
hypothesis
which is historically
58 RELIGION
that may be, Paul did not grow up, like
the rest of the Apostles, in a Jewish land, but in a busy centre of
Greek
science, and of philosophical and oratorical schools. From his youth
Paul
spoke and wrote Greek: his knowledge of Hebrew is said to have been
very
defective. * Though he may therefore have been educated as a strict
Jew,
the atmosphere in which he grew up was nevertheless not purely Jewish,
but the stimulating, rich, free-minded Hellenic atmosphere: a
circumstance
which deserves all the more attention in that the greater the genius,
the
greater is the influence of impressions received. And thus we see Paul
in the further course of his life after the short epoch of Pharisaical
errors in which he fervently persisted, avoiding as much as possible
the
society of genuine Hebrews. The fact that for fourteen years after his
conversion he avoided the city of Jerusalem, although he would have met
there the personal disciples of Christ, that be only stayed there of
necessity
and for a short time, limiting his intercourse as much as possible, has
given rise to a library of explanations and discussions; but the whole
life of Paul shows that Jerusalem and its inhabitants and their manner
of thought were simply so abhorrent to him as to be unbearable. His
first
act as an apostle is the doing away with the sacred “sign of the
covenant“
of all Hebrews. From the very beginning he finds himself at feud with
the
Jewish Christians. Where he has to undertake apostolic mission at their
side, he quarrels with them. † None of his few
quite probable. From
Harnack‘s
Mission,
&c., p. 40, I learn that even in earliest times the suggestion was
made that Paul was descended from Hellenic parents.
*
Graetz
asserts (Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden i, 646): “Paul
had but a scanty knowledge of Jewish writings and knew the sacred
writings
only from the Greek translation.“ On the other hand, quotations from
Epimenides,
Euripides and Aratus prove his familiarity with Hellenic literature.
† See,
for example, the two episodes with John “whose surname was Mark“ (Acts
of the Apostles xiii. 13, and xv. 38-39).
59 RELIGION
personal friends is a genuine Jew of
Palestine: Barnabas, for example, is, like himself, from the Diaspora,
and so anti-Jewish in sentiment that he (as pioneer of Marcion) denies
the old covenant, that is, the privileged position of the Israelite
people;
Luke, whom Paul calls “the beloved,“ is not a Jew (Col. iv.
11-14);
Titus, the one bosom-friend of Paul, his “partner and fellow-helper“ (2
Cor.
viii. 23), is a genuinely Hellenic Greek. In his mission work, too,
Paul
is always attracted to the “heathen,“ especially to places where
Hellenic
culture flourishes. Modern investigation has thrown valuable light on
this
matter. Till a short time ago the knowledge of the geographical and
economic
relations of Asia Minor during the first Christian century was very
defective;
it was thought that Paul (on his first journey especially) sought out
the
most uncivilised districts and anxiously avoided the towns; this
supposition
has now been proved erroneous: * rather did Paul preach almost
exclusively
in the great centres of Helleno-Roman civilisation and with preference
in districts where the Jewish communities were not large. Cities like
Lystra
and Derbe, which hitherto were spoken of in theological commentaries as
unimportant, scarcely civilised places, were on the contrary centres of
Hellenic culture and of Roman life. With this is connected a second
very
important discovery: Christianity did not spread first among the poor
and
uncultured, as was hitherto supposed, but among the educated and
well-to-do.
“Where Roman organisation and Greek thought have gone, Paul by
preference
goes,“ Ramsay tells us, † and Karl Müller adds: “The circles which
Paul had won had never really been Jewish.“ ‡ And yet, this
*
Especially
by the works of W. M. Ramsay: Historical Geography of Asia Minor,
The
Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170, St. Paul, the Traveller and
the Roman Citizen.
† The
Church, &c., 4th ed. p. 57.
‡ Kirchengeschichte
(1892) i. 26.
60 RELIGION
man is a Jew; he is proud of his
descent,
* he is, as it were, saturated with Jewish conceptions, he is a master
of Rabbinical dialectic, and it is he, more than any other, who stamps
the historical mode of thinking and the traditions of the Old Testament
as an essential, permanent part of Christianity.
Although religion
is my theme, I have intentionally emphasised in the case of Paul these
more exoteric considerations, because where I as a layman enter the
sphere
of theological religion, it is my duty to be extremely cautious and
reserved.
Gladly would I demonstrate sentence for sentence what in my opinion
should
be said about Paul, but how often does everything depend on the meaning
of one single probably ambiguous word; the layman can only be on sure
ground
when he goes deeper, to the source of the words themselves. Hence Paul
calls cheerfully to us: “According to the grace of God which is given
unto
me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation and another
buildeth
thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereon!“ (I Cor.
iii. 10). So let us now take heed — let us follow the admonition of
Paul,
not to leave this care to others — and we shall discover, even without
entering the domain of learned discussions, that the foundation of the
Christian religion laid by Paul is made up of incongruous elements. In
his deepest inner nature, in his view of the importance of religion in
the life of man, Paul is so un-Jewish that he deserves the epithet
anti-Jewish;
the Jew in him is merely the outer shell, he shows it only in the
ineradicable
habits of the intellectual mechanism. At heart Paul is not a
rationalist
but a mystic. Mysticism is mythology carried back from symbolical
images
to the inner experience of the Inexpressible, an experience which has
grown
in intensity and realised
* See
especially Galatians, ii. 15: “Although we are by nature Jews
and
not sinners of the Gentiles,“ and many other passages.
61 RELIGION
more clearly his own inner nature. The
true religion of Paul is not the belief in a so-called chronicle of the
history of the world, it is mythical-metaphysical discernment. Such
things
as the distinction between an outer and an inner man, between flesh and
spirit, “Miserable man that I am, who will redeem me from the body of
this
death?“ — the many expressions such as the following, “We are all one
body
in Christ,“ &c. — all these sayings point to a transcendental view
of things. But the Indo-European tendency of mind is still more
apparent
when we consider the great fundamental convictions. Then we find as
kernel
(see p. 31) the conception of redemption; the need of it is
produced
by the natural and quite general tendency to sin, not by transgressions
of law with consequent feeling of guilt; redemption is brought about by
divine grace which bestows faith, not by works and holy life. And what
is this redemption? It is “regeneration,“ or, as Christ expresses it,
“conversion.“
*
*
Let
me give the reader who is not well read in Scripture some quotations.
Redemption
forms the subject of all the Pauline Epistles. The universality of sin
is implicitly admitted by the adducing of the myth of the Fall of man
and
by its un-Jewish interpretation. So we find such passages as Rom.
xi. 32: “God has included all men in unbelief,“ and the still more
characteristic
Ephesians
ii. 3: “We all are by nature children of wrath.“ With regard to grace
perhaps
the most decisive passage is the following: “For it is God which
worketh
in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure“ (Philippians
ii. 13). With regard to the importance of faith in contrast to merit by
good works we find numerous passages, for this is the main pillar of
Paul‘s
religion, here — and here perhaps alone — there is no shadow of a
contradiction;
the apostle is teaching the purely Indian doctrine. We should note
especially
Rom.
iii. 27-28, v. 1, the whole of chaps. ix. and x., likewise the whole Epistle
to the Galatians, &c. &c. As examples: “Therefore we
conclude
that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law (Rom.
iii. 28); “We know that a man is not justified by the Works of the law,
but by the faith of Jesus Christ“ (Gal. ii. 16). But grace and
faith
are only two phases, two modes — the divine and the human — of the same
process; hence in the following passage faith is to be regarded as
included
in grace: “And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise
grace
is no more grace. But if it be of works, then is it no more grace:
otherwise
work is no more work“ (see the letter to Titus iii. 5).
Re-birth
is mentioned as “regeneration“ in a manner akin to the Indo-Platonic
view.
62 RELIGION
It would be impossible to hold a
religious
view which represented a sharper contrast to all Semitic and specially
to all Jewish religion. So true is this that not only was Paul during
his
lifetime opposed by the Jewish Christians, but this very kernel of his
religion for fifteen hundred years lay hidden within Christianity under
the over-luxuriant tangle of Jewish rationalism and heathen
superstitions
— anathematised, when it attempted to show its head in the case of men
like Origenes, rendered unrecognisable by the deeply religious
Augustine,
who was at heart genuinely Pauline, but was carried away by the
opposite
current. Here Teutons had to interfere; even to-day Paul has apart from
them no genuine disciples: a circumstance the full significance of
which
will be apparent to every one, when he learns that two centuries ago
the
Jesuits held a conference to discuss how the Epistles of Paul could be
removed from the sacred writings or corrected. * But Paul himself had
begun
the work of anti-Paulinism, by erecting around this core of belief,
which
was the product of an Indo-European soul, an absolutely Jewish
structure,
a kind of latticework, through which a congenial eye might indeed see,
but which for Christianity growing up amid the unhappy chaos became so
much the chief thing that the inner core was practically neglected. But
this outer work could naturally not possess the faultless consistency
of
a pure system like the Jewish or the Indian. In itself a contradiction
to the inner, creative religious thought, this pseudo-Jewish
theological
structure became entangled in one inconsistency after the other in the
endeavour to
*
Pierre
Bayle: Dictionnaire. See the last note to the statement
about
the Jesuit Jean Adam, who in the year 1650 caused much offence by his
public
sermons against Augustine. One may trust this report absolutely, since
Bayle was altogether sympathetic to the Jesuits and remained until his
death in close personal intercourse with them. The famous Père
de
la Chaise also declares that “Augustine can only be read with caution,“
and this refers naturally to the Pauline elements of his religion (cf.
Sainte-Beuve: Port Royal, 4th ed. ii. 134, and iv. 436).
63 RELIGION
be logically convincing and uniform.
We have already seen that it was Paul himself who made such a fine
attempt
to bring the Old Testament into organic connection with the new
doctrine
of salvation. This is particularly the case in the most Jewish of his
letters,
that to the Romans. In contrast to other passages the Fall of Man is
here
introduced as a purely historical event (v. 12), which then logically
postulates
the second historical event, the birth of the second Adam “from the
seed
of David“ (i. 3). Hence the whole history of the world runs in
accordance
with a very clear, humanly comprehensible, so to say “empirical“ divine
plan. Instead of the narrow Jewish view we here certainly find a
universal
plan of salvation, but the principle is the same. It is the same
Jehovah,
who is conceived quite humanly, who creates, commands, forbids, is
angry,
punishes, rewards; Israel is also the chosen people, the “good olive,“
upon which some twigs of the wild tree of Heathendom are henceforth
grafted
(Rom. xi. 17); and even this extension of Judaism Paul brings
about
solely by a new interpretation of the Messianic doctrine, “as it had
been
fully developed in the Jewish Apocalypse of that time.“ * Now
everything
is arranged in a finely logical and rationalistic manner: the creation,
the accidental fall of man, the punishment, the selection of the
special
race of priests, from whose midst the Messiah shall come, the death of
the Messiah as atonement (exactly in the old Jewish sense), the last
judgment,
which takes account of the works of men and distributes punishment and
reward accordingly. It is impossible to be more Jewish: a capricious
law
decides what is holiness and what sin, the transgression of the law is
punished, but the punishment can be expiated by the making of a
corresponding
sacrifice. Here there is no question of an inborn need of redemption in
the Indian sense, there is no room
*
Pfleiderer,
p. 113.
64
RELIGION
for rebirth, as Christ so urgently
impressed
it upon His disciples, the idea of grace possesses in such a system no
meaning, any more than does faith in the Pauline sense. *
*
My
space is so limited that I cannot help asking the reader to consult the
authorities on such an important point. The double process of thought
with
its inextricable antinomy is most clearly seen when we fix our
attention
upon the end, the judgment, and in this we are excellently assisted by
a small specialised work (in which all the literature is also given),
Ernst
Teichmann‘s Die paulinischen Vorstellungen von Auferstehung und
Gericht
und ihre Beziehungen zur jüdischen Apokalyptik (1896). Armed
with
an exact knowledge of the Jewish literature of that time, Teichmann
shows,
sentence for sentence, how literally all the New Testament, and
especially
the Pauline conceptions of the last judgment, are taken from the late
apocalyptic
doctrines of Judaism. That these in turn are not of Hebrew origin, but
borrowed from Egypt and Asia and saturated with Hellenic thoughts (see
pp. 2 f., 32, &c.), only shows from what a witches‘ cauldron the
Apostle
drew his material, and it matters little, since the powerful national
spirit
of the Jews made everything it took hold of “Jewish.“ Decisive, on the
other hand, is the detailed proof that Paul elsewhere (especially where
his real religion is making headway) expressly does away with the idea
of judgment. See especially the paragraph on Die Aufhebung
der
Gerichtsvorstellung, p. 100 f. Teichmann writes here: “The
doctrine
of justification by faith was diametrically opposed to all former
views.
Jews and Gentiles knew no better than that the deeds, the works of man
decided his destiny after death. But here religious conduct takes the
place
of moral conduct.“ And on p. 118 the author thus summarises his
statements:
“On the other hand the Apostle is quite independent when he, by the
consistent
development of his pneuma-doctrine, puts aside the conception of
judgment.
On the basis of faith, gracious reception of the πνεύμα [which Luther translates by
“Geist,“ spirit, but in Paul is called heavenly,
reborn, divine spirit, as for example, 2 Cor. iii. 17. ο κύριος το πνευμά εστιν:
God the Lord is the pneuma]: by the πνεύμα,
mystical union with Christ: in it is participation in the death of
Christ
and consequently in his δικαιοσυνη
(righteousness) and his resurrection, but thereby attainment of υιοθεσία
(adoption); these are the stages in the development of this idea. In
the
thus-formed doctrine of the πνεύμα
we have the real Christian creation of the Apostle.“ Teichmann seems,
like
most of the Christian theologists, not to know that the doctrine of πνεύμα is as old as Indo-Aryan
thought and that, as Prâna, it had long before
the birth of Paul passed through all possible forms from the purest
spirit
to the finest ether (cf. on p. 42 the different views concerning
Paul's Pneuma); nor does he know that the conception of religion as
faith
and regeneration, in contrast to ethical materialism, is an old
Indo-European
legacy, an organic tendency of mind; but his evidence is al the more
valuable,
because it shows that the most scrupulously detailed research from the
narrow standpoint of scientific Christian theology leads to exactly the
same result as the most daring generalisation.
65 RELIGION
Between the two
religious
views of Paul there is not a merely organic contrast, such as all life
furnishes, but a logical one, that is, a mathematical, mechanical,
indissoluble
contradiction. Such a contradiction leads necessarily to a conflict.
Not
necessarily in the heart of the one originator, for our human mind is
rich
in automatically working contrivances for adaptation to circumstances;
just as the lens of the eye accommodates itself to various distances,
whereby
the object which at one time is clearly seen is on the next occasion so
blurred as to be almost unrecognisable, so the inner image changes with
the point of vision, and hence on the various levels of our philosophy
there may stand things which are not in harmony without our ever
becoming
aware of the fact; for if we contemplate the one the details of the
other
disappear, and vice versa. We must therefore distinguish
between
those logical contradictions which the martyred spirit of compulsion
with
full consciousness presents — as for example those of Augustine, who is
always hesitating between his conviction and his acquired orthodoxy,
between
his intuition and his wish to serve the practical needs of the Church —
and the unconscious contradictions of a frank, perfectly simple mind
like
Paul. But this distinction serves only to make the particular
personality
better known to us; the contradiction as such remains. Indeed Paul
himself
confesses that he is “all things to all men,“ and that certainly
explains
some deviations; but the roots strike deeper. In this breast lodge two
souls: a Jewish and an un-Jewish, or rather an un-Jewish soul with
pinions
fettered to a Jewish thinking-machine. As long as the great personality
lived, it exercised influence as a unity through the uniformity of its
conduct, through its capacity for modulating its words. But after its
death
the letter remained behind, the letter, the fatal property of which is
to bring all and everything to the same level, the
66 RELIGION
letter, which destroys all perspective
moulding and knows but one plane — the superficial plane! Here
contradiction
stood side by side with contradiction, not as the colours of the
rainbow
which merge into each other, but as light and darkness which exclude
each
other. The conflict was unavoidable. Outwardly it found expression in
the
establishment of dogmas and sects; nowhere was it more powerfully
expressed
than in the great Reformation of the thirteenth century, which was
throughout
inspired by Paul, and might have chosen as its motto the words: “Stand
fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and
be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage“ (Gal. v. 1);
even
to-day the conflict between the Jewish and the non-Jewish religion of
Paul
goes on. Still more fatal almost was and is the inner struggle in the
bosom
of the individual Christian, from Origenes to Luther, and from him to
every
man of the present day who belongs to a Christian Church. Paul himself
had not been in the least bound down by any kind of dogma. It has been
proved that he knew very little of the life of Christ; * that he
received
counsel and instruction from no one, not even from the disciples of the
Saviour, nor from those who were “regarded as pillars“; he explicitly
states
this and makes it a boast (Gal. i. and ii.); he knows nothing of
the cosmic mythology of the Trinity; he will have nothing to do with
the
metaphysical hypostasis of the Logos, † nor is he in the painful
position
of having to reconcile himself with the utterances of other Christians.
He passes with a
smile many a superstition that was widespread in his time and that was
later transformed into a Christian dogma, saying, for example, of the
angels
that “no one hath seen them“ (Col. ii. 18), and that one should
not by such conceptions be “beguiled of one‘s
* See
especially Pfleiderer, p. iii. f.
†
Full
and remarkably precise information in Reuss, Book V. chap. viii.
67 RELIGION
reward“; he frankly admits that we “know
only in part; we see now through a glass darkly“ (1 Cor. xiii.
9,
12), and so it never occurs to him to fit his living faith into
dogmatic
piecework: in short, Paul still remained a free man. No one after him
was
free. For by his fastening on to the Old Testament, he had produced a
New
Testament: the old was revealed truth, the new consequently the same;
the
old was certified historical chronicle, the new could be nothing less.
But while the old at a late period had been put together and revised
with
a particular aim, it was not so with the new; here the one man stood
naturally
beside the other. If for example Paul, clinging firmly to the one great
fundamental principle of all ideal religion, teaches that it is faith
not
works that redeems us, then the pure Jew James immediately utters the
fundamental
dogma of all materialistic religion that not faith but works make us
blessed.
We find both in the New Testament, both are in consequence revealed
truth.
And now for the striking contradiction in Paul himself! Those learned
in
Scripture may say what they like — and amongst them we must in this
case
include even a Martin Luther — the Gordian knots that we have to deal
with
here (and there are several of them) can only be cut, not loosened:
either
we are for Paul or we are against him, either we are for the
dogmatically
chronistic pharisaical theology of the one Paul or we believe with the
other Paul in a transcendental truth behind the mysterious mirage of
empirical
appearance. And it is only in the latter case that we understand him
when
he speaks of the “mystery“ — not of a justification (like the Jews),
but
of the mystery of “transformation“ (1 Cor. xv. 51). And this
transformation
is not something future; it is independent of time altogether, i.e.,
something present: “ye are saved; he has made us sit together in
heavenly
places...“ (Eph. ii. 5, 6). And if we “must speak after the
manner
68 RELIGION
of men because of the infirmity of our
flesh“ (Rom. vi. 19), if we must speak with words of that
mystery
which is beyond words, that mystery which we indeed see in Jesus
Christ,
but cannot conceive and hence cannot express — then we do speak of
original
sin, of grace, of redemption by regeneration, and all this we embrace
with
Paul as “faith.“ Though therefore we put aside the different teachings
of other Apostles, neglect the later additions to the church doctrine
from
mythology, metaphysics and superstition, and hold to Paul alone, we
kindle
an inextinguishable fire of conflict in our own hearts, as soon as we
try
to force ourselves to look upon both religious doctrines of the Apostle
as equally justified.
This is the conflict
in which Christianity has from the very first been involved; this is
the
tragedy of Christianity, before which the divine and living personality
of Jesus Christ, the one source of everything in Christianity that
deserves
the name of religion, soon faded into the background. Though I named
Paul
especially, it must be clear from many a remark here and there, that I
am far from regarding him as the one source of all Christian theology;
very much in it has been added later, and great world-revolutionising
religious
struggles, such as that between Arians and Athanasians, are carried on
almost altogether outside of the Pauline conceptions. * In a book like
this I am compelled to simplify very much, otherwise the mass of
material
would reduce my pictures to mere shadows. Paul is beyond question the
mightiest
“architect“ (as he calls himself) of Christianity, and it has been my
object
to show, in the first place, that by introducing the Jewish chronistic
and material standpoint Paul establishes also the intolerantly
dogmatic,
causing thereby unspeakable evil in later times; and
*
I
do not overlook the fact that the Arians appeal to the somewhat vague
passage
in the Epistle to the Philippians, the authenticity of which is
very much doubted, chap. ii. 6.
69 RELIGION
secondly, that even when we go back
to pure unmixed Paulinism, we encounter inexplicable hostile
contradictions
— which are historically easy to explain in the soul of this one man,
but
which, when stamped into lasting articles of faith for all men, were
bound
to sow discord among them and to extend the conflict into the heart of
the individual. This unfortunate discordancy has from the first been a
characteristic of Christianity. All that is contradictory and
incomprehensible
in the never-ending strifes of the first Christian centuries, during
which
the new structure of religion was erected stone by stone with such
difficulty,
awkwardness, inconsistency, toil and (apart from some great minds)
indignity
— the later deviations of the human intellect in scholasticism, the
bloody
wars of confessions, the fearful confusion of the present day with its
Babel of Creeds, which the secular sword alone holds back from open
combat
with each other, the whole drowned by the shrill voice of blasphemy,
while
many of the noblest men shut their ears, preferring to hear no message
of salvation than such a cacophony — all this is really the result of
the
original hybrid or discordant nature of Christianity. From the day when
(about eighteen years after the death of Christ) the strife broke out
between
the congregations of Antioch and Jerusalem, as to whether the followers
of Christ need be circumcised or not, to the present day, when Peter
and
Paul are much more diametrically opposed than then (see Galatians
ii. 14), Christianity has been sick unto death because of this. And
that
all the more as from Paul to Pio Nono all seem to have been blind to
two
simple clear facts: the antagonism of races, and the irreconcilability
of the mutually exclusive religious ideals lying side by side. And thus
it came to pass that the first divine revelation of a religion of love
led to a religion of hatred, such as the world had never known before.
The followers of the Teacher who yielded without
70 RELIGION
a struggle and went unresistingly to
the Cross, within a few centuries murdered in cold blood, as “pious
work,“
more millions of human beings than fell in all the wars of antiquity;
the
consecrated priests of this religion became professional hangmen;
whoever
was not prepared to accept under oath an empty idea which no man
comprehended
but which had been stamped as dogma, an echo perhaps from the leisure
hour
of the intellectual acrobat Aristotle or the subtle Plotinus — that is,
all the more gifted, the more earnest, the nobler, the free men — had
to
die the most painful death; though the truth of religion lay not in the
word but in the spirit, for the first time in the history of the world
the Word entered upon that fearful tyranny which even to-day lies like
a nightmare upon our poor struggling “Middle Ages.“ But enough, every
one
understands me, every one knows the bloody history of Christianity, the
history of religious fanaticism. And what is at the root of this
history?
The figure of Jesus Christ? No, indeed! The union of the Aryan spirit
with
the Jewish and that of both with the madness of the Chaos that knew
neither
nation nor faith. The Jewish spirit, if it had been adopted in its
purity,
would never have caused so much mischief; for dogmatic uniformity would
then have rested on the basis of something quite comprehensible, and
the
Church would have become the enemy of superstition; but as it was the
stream
of the Jewish spirit was let loos upon the sublime world of
Indo-European
symbolism and freely creative, rich imaginative power; * like the
poison
of the arrow of the South American this spirit penetrated and benumbed
an organism to which only constant change and remodelling could give
life
and beauty. The dogmatic element, † the letter-creed, the
* See
vol. i. p. 216.
† In
vol. i. p. 428 f. I have
explained
at length what a different significance dogma had for the Jew.
71
RELIGION
fearful narrowness of religious
conceptions,
intolerance, fanaticism, extreme self-conceit — all this is a
consequence
of the linking on to the Old Testament of the Jewish historical belief:
it is that “will,“ of which I spoke before, which Judaism gave to
growing
Christianity; a blind, flaming, hard, cruel will, that will which
formerly
at the sacking of an enemy‘s city had given the order to dash the heads
of the babes against the stones. At the same time this dogmatic spirit
transformed as by a spell the most stupid and revolting superstition of
miserable slavish souls into essential components of religion; what had
hitherto been good enough for the “common man“ (as Origenes expressed
it)
or for the slaves (as Demosthenes scoffingly says), princes of
intellect
must now accept for the salvation of their souls. In a former chapter I
have already called attention to the childish superstitions of an
Augustine
(vol. i. p. 311); Paul
would
not for a moment have believed that a man could be changed into an ass
(we see how he speaks of the angels), Augustine on the other hand finds
it plausible. While therefore the highest religious intuitions are
dragged
to the ground and so distorted as to lose all their fine qualities,
long
obsolete delusive ideas of primitive men — magic, witchcraft, &c. —
were at the same time given an officially guaranteed right of abode in
praecinctu
ecclesiae.
AUGUSTINE
No human being
offers
such a fine but at the same time sad example as does Augustine of the
discord
caused in the heart by a Christianity thus organised. It is impossible
to open any work of his without being touched by the fervour of his
feeling,
and being held spellbound by the holy earnestness of his thoughts; we
cannot
read it long without being forced to regret that such a spirit, chosen
to be a disciple of the living Christ, capable as few
72 RELIGION
only were capable to carry on the work
of Paul and to assist the true religion of the Apostle to victory at
the
decisive moment, was yet unable to contend — without Fatherland, race
or
religion as he was — against the powers of the Chaos, from which he
himself
had arisen, so that finally in a kind of mad despair he clung to the
one
ideal only — to help to organise the Roman Church as the saving,
ordering,
uniting, world-ruling power — even though it should cost the better
part
of his own religion. But if we remember what Europe was like at the
beginning
of the fifth century (Augustine died in 430), if the Confessions
of this Father of the Church have thrown light on the social and moral
condition of the so-called civilised men of that horrible time, if we
realise
that this “Professor of Rhetoric,“ educated by his parents in the “spes
litterarum“ (Confessions, ii, 3), well acquainted with the
rounded
phrases of Cicero and the subtleties of neo-Platonism, had to live to
see
the rude Goths, truculentissimae et saevissimae mentes (De
Civitate
Dei i. 7), capturing Rome, and the wild Vandals laying waste his
African
birthplace, — if we remember, I say, what terror-inspiring surroundings
impressed themselves upon this lofty spirit from every side, we shall
cease
to wonder that a man, who at any other time would have fought for
freedom
and truth against tyranny of conscience and corruption, should in this
case have thrown the weight of his personality into the scale of
authority
and uncompromising hierocratic tyranny. Just as in the case of Paul, it
is not difficult for any one with knowledge to distinguish between the
true inner religion of Augustine and that which was forced upon him;
but
here, owing to the continued development of Christianity, the matter
has
become much more tragic, for the ingenuousness and thus the true
greatness
of the man is lost. This man does not contradict himself frankly,
freely
and carelessly; he is already enslaved, the contradiction is forced
upon
him by alien hands. It is not a question here, as in
73 RELIGION
the case of Paul, of two parallel views
of existence; nor of a third which is added to them in the mysteries,
sacraments
and ceremonies of the Chaos; but Augustine must to-day assert the
opposite
of what he said yesterday: he must do it in order to influence men who
would otherwise not understand him; he must do it because he has
sacrificed
his own judgment at the threshold of the Roman Church; he must do it in
order not to lack some one subtle dialectical sophistry in dispute with
would-be sectarians. It is a tragic spectacle. No one had seen more
clearly
than Augustine what pernicious consequences the forced conversion to
Christianity
entailed upon Christianity itself; even in his time there was in the
Church,
especially in Italy, a majority of men who stood in no inner relation
to
the Christian religion and who only adopted the new mystery cult in
place
of the old one, because the State demanded it. The one, as Augustine
informs
us, becomes Christian because his employer commands him, the other
because
he hopes to win a suit through the intervention of the bishop, * the
third
seeks a situation, a fourth wins by this means a rich wife. Augustine
gazes
sorrowfully upon this spectacle, which actually became the poison that
consumed the marrow of Christianity, and utters an urgent warning (as
Chrysostom
had done before him) against “conversion in masses.“ Yet it is this
same
Augustine who establishes the doctrine of “compelle intrare in
ecclesiam,“
who seeks sophistically to establish the grave principle that, by means
of the “scourge of temporal sufferings,“ we must endeavour to rescue
“evil
slaves“ — who demands the penalty of death for unbelief and the use of
the State power against heresy! The man who had said these beautiful
words
concerning religion, “By love we go to meet it, by love we seek it, it
is love that knocks, it is love that makes us
* See
below for the part played by bishops as judges in civil cases.
74
RELIGION
constant in what has been revealed“
* — this man becomes the moral originator of the inquisition! He did
not,
indeed, invent persecution and religious murder, for these were of the
essence of Christianity from the moment when it became the State
religion
of Rome, but he confirmed and consecrated them by the power of his
authority;
it was he who first made intolerance a religious, as well as a
political,
power. It is very characteristic of the true, free Augustine that he,
for
example, energetically rejects the assertion that Christ meant Peter
when
he said “upon this rock will I build my Church,“ and even denounces it
as something senseless and blasphemous, since Christ evidently meant
upon
the rock of this “faith,“ not of this man; Augustine consequently makes
a clear distinction between the visible Church, which is built partly
upon
sand, as he says, and the real Church: † and yet it is this very man
who,
more than any other, helps to establish the power of this visible Roman
Church which claims Peter as its founder, who praises it as directly
appointed
by God, “ab apostolica sede per successiones episcoporum,“ ‡ and
who supplements this purely religious claim to power by the more
decisive
claim of political continuity — the Roman Church the legitimate
continuation
of the Roman Empire. His chief work De Civitate Dei is inspired
to as great an extent by the Roman imperial idea as by the Revelation
of St. John.
Still more fateful
and cruel does this life in inconsistency, this building up from the
ruins
of his own heart, appear when we contemplate the inner life and the
inner
*
De
moribus eccl. i. § 31.
† In
his letters Augustine addresses the Bishop of Rome simply as “brother.“
He certainly employs also the expression “Thy Holiness,“ not, however,
to the Bishop of Rome alone, but to every priest, even when he is not a
bishop; every Christian belonged, according to the way of speaking at
that
time, to the “community of the Saints.“
‡ Ep.
93 ad Vincent (from Neander).
75
RELIGION
religion of Augustine. Augustine is
by nature a mystic. Who does not know his Confessions? Who has
not
read again and again that magnificent passage, the tenth chapter of the
seventh book, where he describes how he only found God when he sought
him
in his own heart? * Who could forget his conversation with his dying
mother
Monica, that wondrous blossom of mysticism which might have been culled
in the Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad: “If the stones of the senses
were
silent, and those shadowy figures of earth, of water and of air were
dumb,
if the vault of Heaven were silent and the soul too remained silent and
turned back upon itself, so that it should, self-forgotten, float out
beyond
itself; if dreams were silent and revelations that are dreamt, if every
tongue and every name were silent, if everything were silent that dying
passes away, if the universe were still — and He alone spoke, not
through
His creatures, but Himself, and we heard His words, not as though one
spoke
with tongue of man nor by voice of angels nor in thunder nor in the
riddle
of allegories — and this supreme and unique Being thrilled the one who
looked upon Him, consuming him completely and sinking him in mystic
bliss
(interiora gaudia) — would not eternal life be like this
conception
suggested by a brief moment conjured up by our sighs?“ (ix. 10). But
Augustine
is not merely a mystic in feeling
*
“Turning
away from books I inclined myself to my own heart; led by Thee I
entered
the deepest depths of my heart; Thou didst help me, that I was able to
do it. I entered in. However weak my eye, I yet saw clearly — far above
this the eye of my soul, raised beyond my reason — the unchanging
light.
It was not that common light with which the senses are familiar, nor
was
it distinguished from this merely by greater power, as though the
daylight
had become ever brighter and brighter, till it had filled all space.
No,
it was not that, but another, a quite different one. And it did not
hover
high above my reason, as oil floats upon water or the heaven above the
earth, but it was high above me, because it had created me myself, and
I was of small account as a creature. Whoever knows the truth knows
that
light, and whoever knows that light knows eternity. Love knows it. O
eternal
truth and true love and loved eternity! thou art my God! Day and night
I long for thee!“
76 RELIGION
(many such have been prominent in
Christianity),
he is a religious genius who strives after the inner “conversion“ which
Christ taught, and who through the Epistles of Paul became regenerated;
he tells us how it was Paul that caused light, peace, blessedness to
penetrate
his soul rent by passion and driven to complete despair by years of
inner
conflict and fruitless study (Conf. viii, 12). With the fullest
conviction, with profound understanding he grasps the fundamental
doctrine
of
grace, of gratia indeclinabilis, as he calls it; it is to him
so
absolutely the foundation of his religion that he rejects the
appellation
“doctrine“ for it (De gratia Christi, § 14); and as a
genuine
disciple of the Apostle he shows that the merit of works is excluded by
the conception of grace. His view of the importance of redemption and
of
original sin is more uncertain and not to be compared with those of the
Indian teachers; for the Jewish chronicle here dims his power of
judgment,
though that is almost of secondary importance, since he on the other
hand
establishes the idea of regeneration as the “immovable central point of
Christianity.“ * And now comes this same Augustine and denies almost
all
his inmost convictions! He who has told us how he had discovered God in
his own soul and how Paul had brought him to religion, writes
henceforth
(in the heat of combat against the Manichaeans): “I would not believe
the
gospel, if the authority of the Catholic Church did not compel me to do
so.“ † Here accordingly for Augustine the Church
*
Particularly
in the De peccato originali. Concerning grace Augustine
expresses
himself very clearly in his letter to Paulinus, § 6, where he is
arguing
against Pelagius: “Grace is not a fruit of works; if it were so, it
would
not be grace. Because for works there is given as much as they are
worth;
but grace is given without merit.“ In this connection he had had a good
teacher in Ambrosius, for the latter had taught: “Not by works but by
faith
is man justified.“ (See the beautiful Speech on the Death of
the Emperor Theodosius, § 9; Abraham is here quoted as an
example.)
† Contra
epistolam Manichaei, § 6 (from Neander].
77 RELIGION
— which, he
himself
testified, contained few true Christians — stands higher than the
gospel;
in other words, the Church is religion. In contrast to Paul, who had
exclaimed
“Let each man take heed how he build upon the foundation of Christ,“
Augustine
gives the explanation that it is not the soul but the bishop who has to
settle the creed; he refuses to the most earnest Christians something
which
even almost every Pope later granted, namely, the investigation of
varying
doctrines: “As soon as the bishops have spoken,“ he writes, “there is
nothing
more to investigate, the superior power shall put down heterodoxy by
force.“
* We must take up detailed histories of dogma to trace how the pure
doctrine
of grace is gradually weakened; he never could altogether give it up,
but
he so emphasised works that, although they remained (in Augustine's
view)
as “gift of God,“ components of grace — visible results of it — yet
this
relation was lost to the common eye. Thereby the door was thrown wide
open
to materialism — which is ever on the watch. As soon as Augustine
emphasised
this point, that no redemption was possible without the service of
works,
the previous clause was soon forgotten, viz., “that the capacity for
these
works was a gift of grace, and these accordingly blossom on the tree of
faith.“ Augustine himself goes so far as to speak of the relative merit
of various works and regards the death of Christ also from the
standpoint
of a value to be calculated. †
*
A
doctrine to which the Church at a later time appeals (thus, for
example,
the Roman synod of the year 680), in order to demand from the civil
power
that it should make orthodoxy “supreme, and see that the weeds be torn
out“ (Hefele, iii. 258).
†
More
details of Augustine‘s theory of grace will be found in Harnack‘s largeDogmengeschichte;
the abridged edition is too short for this exceedingly complicated
question.
But the layman must never forget that, however confused the shades may
be, the fundamental question remains always exceedingly simple. The
confusion
is simply a result of too subtle disputation, and its complication is
caused
by the possible complications of logical combinations; here we reach
the
sphere of intellectual mechanics. But the relation of the
78
RELIGION
That is Judaism
in place of Christianity. And naturally this changing and shifting of
the
fundamental views cause as much hesitation and doubt in regard to
subordinate
questions. I shall return later to the question of the sacrament, which
now began to be discussed; these few hints I shall close with a last
one,
a mere example, to show what far-reaching consequences these inner
contradictions
of this growing Church were to have in the course of centuries. In
various
places Augustine develops with acute dialectics the idea of the
transcendentality
of the conception of time (as we should say to-day); he does not find a
word for his idea, so that in a long discussion of this subject in the
eleventh book of the Confessions he at last confesses: “What is
time then? As long as no one asks me, I know it quite well, but when I
am called upon to explain it to a questioner, I know it no more“ (chap.
xiv). But we understand him quite well. He wishes to show that for God,
i.e.,
a conception no longer empirically limited, there is no time in our
sense
and thus demonstrates how meaningless are the many discussions
concerning
past and future eternity. Evidently he has grasped the essence of
genuine
religion; for his proof forces us irresistibly to the conclusion that
all
the chronicles of the past and prophecies for the future have only a
figurative
significance, and thereby punishment and reward are also done away
with.
And that is the man who later was not able to do enough to prove, and
to
impress upon the mind as certain, fundamental and concrete truth the
unconditional
literal eternity of the punishment of hell. If we are fully entitled to
recognise in Augustine a predecessor of Martin Luther, then he became
at
the same time a vigorous pioneer of that anti-Pauline tendency
religion
of grace to the religion of law and service is just the same as that of
+ to -; everybody is not able to understand the subtleties of the
mathematicians
and still less of the theologians, but every one should be able to
distinguish
between plus and minus.
79 RELIGION
which at a later
time found undisguised expression in Ignatius and his order and in
their
religion of hell. *
Harnack thus summarises his chapter on Augustine: “Through Augustine
the
Church doctrine became in extent and meaning more uncertain ... Around
the old dogma, which maintained its rigid form, there grew up a large
uncertain
circle of doctrines, in which the most important thoughts of faith were
contained, but which could not yet be fully surveyed and firmly
attached
to the old.“ Although he had worked so untiringly for the unity of the
Church, he left, as is evident, more material for conflict and discord
than he had found. The stormy conflict which even after his entry into
the Church had arisen in his own breast, perhaps in many ways
unconsciously,
lasted till his death; — no longer in the form of a struggle between
sensual
enjoyment and longing for noble purity, but as a conflict between a
grossly
materialistic, superstitious Church faith and the most daring idealism
of genuine religion.
* See vol. i. p. 569.
The abuse of indulgences which came into practice several centuries
later
could also appeal for support to Augustine in so far as from the
above-mentioned
relative valuation of works and especially of the death of Christ there
was derived the idea of opera supererogationis,
(works beyond the necessary measure), from which excessive fund,
through
the intervention of the Church, condignities are bestowed. Our whole
conception
of hell and of the pains of hell is, as is now known, taken from old
Egyptian
religion. Dante‘s Inferno is exactly represented on very early
Egyptian
monuments. Still more interesting is the fact that the conception of opera
supererogationis, the treasure of grace, by
which
souls are freed from purgatory (also an Egyptian idea), is likewise a
legacy
from ancient Egypt. Masses and prayers for the dead, which to-day play
so great a part in the Roman Church, existed in exactly the same form
some
thousands of years before Christ. On the gravestones too might be read
then as to-day: “O ye who are living upon earth, when ye pass by this
grave,
utter a pious prayer for the soul of the dead N. N.“ (Cf. Prof.
Leo Reinisch: Ursprung und Entwickelung des Ägyptischen
Priestertums).
80
RELIGION
THE
THREE CHIEF MOVEMENTS
I shall not be so bold as to sketch the history of religion here, any
more
than I undertook to write a history of law in the second chapter. If I
succeed in awakening a vivid and at the same time intimately correct
conception
of the nature of the conflict that has been bequeathed to us — the
conflict
of various religious ideals struggling for the mastery — then my end
will
be attained. The really essential thing is to perceive that historical
Christianity — a hybrid affair from the beginning — planted this
conflict
in the breast of the individual. With the two great figures of Paul and
Augustine I have tried to show this as briefly but as clearly as I
could.
I have thereby revealed the chief elements of the external conflict,
that
is, of the conflict in the Church. “The true basis is the human
heart,“ says Luther. And so I now hasten to the end, choosing from the
almost incalculable mass of facts relating to the “struggle in
religion“
a few which are especially suited to enlighten our views. I limit
myself
to what is absolutely necessary to supplement what has already been
indicated.
In this way we may hope to get a bird's-eye view as far as the
threshold
of the thirteenth century, where the external conflict begins in
earnest,
while the inner has practically ceased: henceforth divergent views,
principles,
powers — above all divergent races — opposed each other, but these are
relatively at harmony with themselves and know what they wish.
Considered in the commonest outlines, the conflict in the Church during
the first ten centuries consists first of a struggle between East and
West,
and later of one between South and North. These terms are not to be
taken
in the purely geographical sense: the “East“ was a last flickering of
the
flame of Hellenic spirit and Hellenic culture, the “North“ was the
beginning
of the awakening
81 RELIGION
of the Germanic
soul; there was no definite place, no definite centre for these two
powers:
the Teuton might be an Italian monk, the Greek an African presbyter.
Rome
was opposed to both. Its arms reached to the most distant East and to
the
remotest North; but here again this term “Rome“ is not to be understood
merely in a local sense, though in this case there was a fixed
immutable
centre, the sacred city of ancient Rome. There was no specific Roman
culture
to oppose to the Hellenic, for all culture in Rome had from the first
been
and still was Hellenic; still less could one speak of a distinctly
individual
Roman soul, like that of the Teuton, since the people of ancient Rome
had
disappeared from the face of the earth and Rome was merely the
administrative
centre of a nationless mixture; whoever speaks of Rome talks of the
chaos
of races. And yet Rome proved itself not the weaker but the stronger of
the opponents. Of course it did not completely prevail either in the
East
or in the North; the three great “movements“ are still more manifestly
opposed to each other than they were a thousand years ago; but the
Greek
Church of the schism is in relation to its religious ideal essentially
a Roman Catholic one, a daughter neither of the great Origenes nor of
the
Gnostics; nor did the Reformation of the North more than partially
throw
off what was specifically Roman, and it was so long before it produced
its Martin Luther that considerable parts of Europe, which some
centuries
before would have belonged to it, since the “North“ had reached the
heart
of Spain and the doors of Rome, were lost to it for ever — Romanised
beyond
all hope of salvation.
A glance at these three principal movements, in which an attempt was
made
to build up Christianity, will suffice to make clear the nature of the
struggle which has come down to us.
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RELIGION
THE
“EAST“
The first enchanting bloom of Christianity was Hellenic. Stephen, the
first
martyr, is a Greek, Paul — who so energetically commands us to “rid
ourselves
of Jewish fables and old wives' tales“ * — is a mind saturated with
Greek
thought, who clearly only feels at home when he is addressing those who
have acquired Hellenic culture. But soon there was added to the
Socratic
earnestness and the Platonic depth of conception another genuinely
Hellenic
trait, the tendency to abstraction. It was this Hellenic tendency of
mind
which furnished the basis for Christian dogmatics, and not merely the
basis,
but all those conceptions which I have termed “external mythology“ —
the
doctrine of the Trinity, of the relation of the Son to the Father, of
the
Word to the Incarnation, &c., indeed the whole dogma. Neo-Platonism
and what we might call neo-Aristotelianism were then in a flourishing
condition;
all who had acquired Hellenic culture, no matter to what nationality
they
belonged, occupied themselves with pseudo-metaphysical speculations.
Paul
indeed is very cautious in the employment of philosophical arguments;
he
uses them only as a weapon, to convince and to refute; on the other
hand,
the author of the Gospel of St. John calmly welds together the
life
of Jesus Christ and the mythical metaphysics of late Hellenism. This
was
a beginning, and from that time forth the history of Christian thought
and of the moulding of the Christian faith was for two centuries
exclusively
Greek; then it was about two hundred years more before, with the
subsequent
anathematising of the greatest Hellenic Christian, Origenes, at the
synod
of Constantinople in the year 543, Hellenic
* 1 Tim. iv. 7, and Tit. i. 14. (Added in the 4th ed.;
these
letters are supposed not to be by Paul.)
83 RELIGION
theology was
finally
silenced. The Judaising sects of that time, such as the Nazarenes, the
Ebionites, have no lasting importance. Rome, as the focus of the empire
and of all traffic, was naturally and necessarily the organic centre
for
the Christian sect as for everything else in the Roman Empire; but it
is
characteristic that no theological thoughts came from there; when
finally,
at the end of the third century, a “Latin theology“ arose, it was not
in
Italy but in Africa that it appeared, and it was a very stubborn Church
and theology that caused Rome great uneasiness, until the Vandals and
later
the Arabs destroyed it. The Africans, however, like all those Greeks,
who
— like Irenaeus — fell under the spell of this overwhelming power,
played
into the hands of Rome. Not only did they look upon the pre-eminence of
Rome as an understood thing, but they also resisted all those Hellenic
conceptions which Rome, with its political and administrative
ambitions,
was bound to regard as injurious, but above all the Hellenic spirit in
its whole individuality, which was opposed to every process of
crystallisation,
and in research, speculation and reorganisation always strove after the
Absolute.
Here we have really a conflict between Imperial Rome, now bereft of all
soul, but as an administrative power at its very highest perfection,
and
the old spirit of creative Hellenism which was flickering up for the
last
time; — a spirit so permeated and dimmed by other elements as to be
unrecognisable,
and lacking much of its former beauty and strength. The conflict was
waged
obstinately and mercilessly, not with arguments alone but with all the
means of cunning, violence, bribery, ignorance and especially with a
shrewd
manipulation of all political conjunctures. It is clear that in such a
conflict Rome was bound to be victorious; especially as in those early
days (till the death of Theodosius) the Emperor was the actual head of
the Church even in
84 RELIGION
matters of dogma,
and the Emperors — in spite of the influence which great and holy
archbishops
in Byzantium for a time exercised over them — with the unerring
instinct
of experienced politicians always felt that Rome alone was capable of
introducing
unity, organisation and discipline. How could metaphysical brooding and
mystical meditation ever have prevailed over practical and systematic
politics?
Thus, for example, it was Constantine * — the still unbaptised murderer
of wife and children, the man who by special edicts established the
position
of the heathen augurs in the Empire — it was Constantine who called
together
the first oecumenical council (at Nicaea, A.D. 325) and, in spite of
the
overwhelming majority of the bishops, established the doctrines of his
Egyptian favourite Athanasius. Thus originated the so-called Nicene
creed:
on the one side the shrewd calculation of a level-headed, unscrupulous
and un-Christian politician, who asked himself but the one question,
“How
can I most completely enslave my subjects?“ on the other side the
cowardly
pliancy of frightened prelates, who put their signature to something
which
they considered false, and as soon as they had returned to their
dioceses,
began to agitate against it. For us laymen, by far the most interesting
thing about this first and fundamental Church council is the fact that
the majority of the bishops, as genuine pupils of Origenes, were
altogether
opposed to all enclosing of the conscience in such intellectual
straitjackets
and had demanded a formula of faith, wide enough to leave free play to
the mind in things which transcend the human understanding, and thus to
ensure the right of existence to scientific theology and cosmology. †
* We can read in Bernouilli: Das Konzil von Nicäa, how
exclusively
Constantine was actuated by political and not religious motives, for
though
he was inclined owing to circumstances to favour Arius, he took the
opposite
side as soon as he noticed that this offered better sureties of more
vigorous
organisation, in short, more hope of political duration.
† Karl Müller: Kirchengeschichte i. 181.
85 RELIGION
What these
Hellenic
Christians therefore aimed at was a condition of freedom within
orthodoxy,
comparable to that which had prevailed in India. * But it was just this
that Rome and the Emperor wished to avoid: nothing was any longer to
remain
indefinite or uncertain; in religion, as in every other sphere,
absolute
uniformity was to be the law throughout the Roman Empire. How
unbearable
the limited and “limiting“ dogmatising was to the highly cultured
Hellenic
spirit becomes sufficiently clear from the one fact that Gregory of
Nazianz,
a man whom the Roman Church numbers among its saints because of his
orthodoxy,
even in the year 380 (long after the Nicaean Council) could write as
follows:
“Some of our theologians regard the Holy Ghost as God's method of
manifesting
His power, others regard it as a creation of God, others as God
Himself;
there are those again who say that they do not know which they should
accept,
because of reverence for the Holy Writ, which is not clear on the
point.“
† But the Roman Imperial principle could not yield to Holy Scripture;
one
tittle of freedom of thought and Rome's absolute authority would have
been
endangered. Hence in the second general synod at Constantinople in the
year 381, the confession of faith was supplemented with a view to
stopping
up the last loophole of escape, and at the third, held at Ephesus in
the
year 431, it was definitely decided that “nothing might be added and
nothing
taken from this confession on penalty of excommunication.“ ‡ Thus the
intellectual
movement of dying Hellenism, which had lasted more than three hundred
years,
was finally brought to an end. Detailed accounts of
* Cf. vol. i. p. 429 f.
† According to Neander: Kirchengeschichte iv. 109. According to
Hefele: Konziliengeschichte ii. 8, it appears also as if
Gregory
of Nazianz had not advised or signed along with the others the extended
symbolism of Constantinople (in the year 381).
‡ Hefele: Konziliengeschichte ii. 11 f. 372.
86 RELIGION
that are given
in histories; but the works of theologians (of all churches) are to be
taken with great caution, for a very natural feeling of shame causes
them
to pass hastily over the accompanying circumstances of the various
councils,
in which the dogmatic creed of Christianity was fixed, as it was
supposed,
for “all time.“ * In one council the proceedings were such that even in
Roman Catholic works it was described as the “Robber-synod“; but it
would
be difficult for the impartial to decide which synod most deserved this
title. Never were proceedings more undignified than at the famous third
oecumenical council at Ephesus, where the “orthodox“ party, that is,
the
party that wished to gag all further thought, brought into the city a
whole
army of armed peasants, slaves and monks, in order to intimidate, to
cry
down and, if need be, to murder all the hostile bishops. That indeed
was
very different from the Hellenic way of furthering theology and
cosmology!
Perhaps it was the right way for that wretched age and those wretched
human
beings. And there is another important consideration: in spite of my
repugnance
for that chaos of races incorporated in Rome, I firmly believe that
Rome
did religion a service by emphasising the concrete as opposed to the
abstract
and saving it from the danger of complete evaporation. And yet it would
be ridiculous to feel admiration for such narrow and common characters
as Cyrillus, the murderer of the noble Hypatia, and to hold in
reverence
councils like that over which he presided at Ephesus, which the Emperor
himself (Theodosius the younger) characterised as a “shameful and
mischievous
gathering,“ and which he had to break up on his own authority, in order
to put an end to the squabbles and rude violence of the holy shepherds.
* In spite of all new works I still should like to recommend to the
layman
chap. xlvii. of Gibbon‘s Roman Empire as being unsurpassed, at
least
as a preliminary survey of the subject.
87 RELIGION
Already at this second oecumenical council at Ephesos the special
Hellenic
theme, mythological mysticism, was no longer in the foreground; for now
the specifically Roman dogma-mongering had begun, and that, too, with
the
introduction of the worship of Mary and of the child Christ. I have
mentioned
above that this cult which was taken from Egypt had been for long
established
throughout the whole Roman Empire, but especially in Italy. * The term
“mother of God,“ instead of “mother of Christ,“ which first came into
use
in Christianity at the beginning of the fifth century, was opposed by
the
noble and almost fanatically orthodox Nestorius; he saw in this — and
rightly
too — the resurrection of heathendom. It was natural and consistent
that
it should be the Bishop of Egypt and the Egyptian monks, that is, the
direct
heirs of the cult of Isis and Horus, who with passion and rage, and
supported
by the rabble and the women, demanded the introduction of these
primeval
customs. Rome joined the Egyptian party; the Emperor, who loved
Nestorius,
was gradually stirred up against him. But here we have to deal not with
the Hellenic cause in the real sense of the word but rather with the
beginning
of a new period: that of the introduction of heathen mysteries into the
Christian Church. It was the business of the North to oppose them; for
the question was one less of metaphysics than of conscience and
morality;
thus the frequent assertion that Nestorius (who was born in the Roman
military
colony Germanicopolis) was by descent a Teuton, is exceedingly
plausible;
he was at any rate a Protestant.
One more word about the East, before we pass to the North.
In its zenith of prosperity Hellenic theology, as has been pointed out,
had occupied itself principally with those questions that hover on the
borderland between
* See p. 28.
88 RELIGION
myth, metaphysics
and mysticism. Hence it is almost impossible, in a popular work, to
enter
more fully into it. At the end of the first chapter, when discussing
our
Hellenic legacy, I pointed to the amount of abstract speculation of
Greek
origin that has passed over into our religious thought — though mostly
in an impure form. * So long as thought of this kind remained active,
as
was the case in Greece before Christian times, where the eager student
could by crossing the street pass from one “heresy,“ that is, from one
“school,“ to another, these abstractions formed a supplement to the
intellectual
life, which was perhaps all the more welcome, as Greek life was so
inclined
to busy itself wholly with artistic contemplation and scientific study
of the empiric world. The metaphysical inclination of men asserted
itself
by startlingly daring fantasies. But if one studies the words and life
of Jesus Christ, one cannot but feel that in comparison with them these
proud speculations evaporate into nothing. Metaphysics, in fact, are
merely
a kind of physics; Christ, on the other hand, is religion. To call Him
logos, nous, demiurgos, to teach with Sabellius that the Crucified one
was only a “transitory hypostatising of the word,“ or with Paul of
Samosata
that “He had gradually become God,“ is simply to change a living
personality
into an allegory, and that an allegory of the worst kind, namely, an
abstract
one. † And since it happened that this abstract allegory was compressed
into
* See vol. i. p. 69 f.
† When so acute a thinker and one so strong in intuition as
Schopenhauer
asserts, “Christianity is an allegory, which represents one true
thought,“
we cannot too energetically refute so manifest an error. We might throw
overboard all the allegorical elements of Christianity and the
Christian
religion would still stand. For the life of Christ and the conversion
of
will which he taught are reality, not figure of speech. It is none the
less real because reason cannot think out, nor contemplation interpret,
what is here present. Reason and understanding will always in the last
instance find themselves compelled to go allegorically to work, but
religion
is nothing if not a direct experience.
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RELIGION
a desolate Jewish
chronicle, amalgamated with grossly materialistic mysteries,
transformed
into the one and only dogma held to be necessary to salvation, we may
rejoice
when practical men after three centuries exclaimed: “Enough! henceforth
nothing more may be added!“ We can well understand how Ignatius, when
questioned
regarding the authenticity of this or that word in Scripture, could
answer
that for him the unfalsified documents concerning Jesus Christ were
Christ's
life and death. * We must admit that Hellenic theology, though
large-minded
and brilliant in its interpretation of Scripture though far removed
from
the slavish sentiments of Western theology, yet was inclined to lose
sight
of these “unfalsified documents,“ namely, the actual manifestation of
Jesus
Christ.
There is room for admiration as well as criticism, but we must at the
same
time regret that all that was greatest and truest in this theology at
its
best was rejected by Rome. I will not try the patience of the reader by
plunging into theological discussions; I will simply quote a sentence
of
Origenes; it will give us an idea of how much the Christian religion
lost
by this victory of the West over the East. †
In the twenty-ninth chapter of his book On Prayer, Origenes
speaks
of the myth of the Fall of Man, and makes the remark: “We cannot help
observing
that the credulity and inconstancy of Eve did not begin at the moment
when
she disregarded the word of God and listened to the serpent; they were
manifestly present before, and the serpent came to her, because in its
cunning
* Letter to the Philadelphians, § 8. Ignatius had sat at
the
feet of the Apostle John, indeed, according to tradition, he had as a
child
seen the Saviour.
† For more details I refer the reader to the small book of Hatch
already
quoted: The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the
Christian
Church. This book is unique, it is absolutely
scholarly, so that it is recognised by authorities and yet it is
readable
for every educated thinker, though he possess no theological training.
90 RELIGION
it had already
noticed her weakness.“ With this one sentence the myth — which the
Jews,
as Renan rightly remarked (see vol. i. p.
418), compressed into a dry historical fact — is once more awakened
to life. And with the myth nature steps into its rights. That which may
be called sin, as soon as we aim at something higher, belongs to us, as
Paul had already said, “by nature;“ with the fetters of the chronicle
we
throw off the fetters of credulous superstition; we no longer stand
opposed
to all nature as something strange, something that has been born higher
but that has fallen lower; we rather belong to nature, and we cast back
upon it the light of grace that fell into our human heart. By carrying
on the Pauline thought, Origenes here liberated science and at the same
time pushed back the bolt that shut the heart to true, direct religion.
Such was the Hellenic theology that was vanquished in the struggle. *
THE
“NORTH“
If we proceed to study the second anti-Roman movement, that movement
which
I summed up in the one word “North,“ we shall immediately observe that
it sprang from a quite different intellectual disposition and had to
vindicate
itself under entirely different temporal circumstances. In Hellenism
Rome
had contended against a culture higher and older than its own; here, on
the other hand, it was a question first and foremost not of speculative
doctrines, but of a tendency of minds, and the representatives of this
tendency were for the most part at a considerably lower stage of
culture
than the representatives of the Roman idea; it took centuries to remove
the difference. Then there was another
* I have already briefly alluded to the fact, and shall discuss it
later
in this and the ninth chapter, that in the ninth century this theology
awoke again to life in the person of the great Scotus Erigena, the real
pioneer of a genuinely Christian religion.
91 RELIGION
circumstance to
be considered. * While in the former struggle the still embryonic Roman
Church had to seek to win the authority of the Emperor for its cause,
it
now stood as a perfectly organised powerful hierarchy whose absolute
authority
no one could question without danger to himself. In short, the conflict
is different and it is being waged under different conditions. I say
“is“
and “is being“, because the struggle between East and West was ended a
thousand years ago — Mohammed crushed it out; the schism remained as a
cenotaph, but not as a living development, whereas on the other hand
the
conflict between North and South is still going on and is throwing
threatening
shadows over our immediate future.
I have already had an opportunity of mentioning, at least in general
outline,
at the end of the fourth chapter and at the beginning and end of the
sixth,
wherein this revolt of the North consisted. † Here in consequence I
merely
require to briefly supplement these remarks.
Let me first of all remark that I have used the expression “North“,
because
the word “Germanicism“ would not correspond to the phenomenon, or at
best
would be equivalent to a daring hypothesis. We find everywhere and at
all
times opponents of the civil and ecclesiastical ideals which were
incorporated
in Rome; if the movement assumes significance only when it approaches
from
the North, the reason is that here, in Celtic and Slavonic Germanicism,
whole nations thought and felt uniformly, whereas in the chaos of the
South
it was an accident of birth, when an individual came into the world with
* Naturally the individual from the barbarian North might be an
outstanding personality, and the citizen of the Empire was certainly in
most cases a very rude, uncultured individual; but culture is a
collective
term — we saw that especially in the case of Greece (vol. i. p.
34) — and so one can unquestionably assert that in Germanic
countries
a real culture scarcely began to show itself before the thirteenth
century.
† See vol. i. pp. 325,
511
f., 554 f.
92 RELIGION
the love of
freedom
and spiritual religion in his heart. But that which one might call
“Protestant“
sentiment has existed since earliest times: is this not the atmosphere
that the Gospel histories breathe in every line? Is it possible to
imagine
that apostle of freedom, the writer of the Epistle to the Galatians,
with his head bowed, because a Pontifex maximus on his curial
chair
has proclaimed some dogmatic decree? Do we not read in that rightly
famous
letter — belonging to the earliest Christian times — of the anonymous
writer
to Diognetus, that “invisible is the religion of the Christians?“ *
Renan
says: “Les Chrétiens primitifs sont les moins superstitieux
des
hommes ... chez eux, pas d'amulettes, pas d'images saintes, pas d'objet
de culte.“ † Hand in hand with this goes a great religious freedom.
In the second century Celsius testifies that the Christians varied very
much in their interpretations and theories, all united only by the one
confession: “through Jesus Christ the world is crucified for me and I
for
the world!“ ‡ Religion as spiritually profound as possible, its outward
manifestation absolutely simple, freedom of individual faith — such is
the character of early Christianity, it is not a later transfiguration
invented by the Germanic races. This freedom was so great that even in
the East, where Rome had always been predominant, every country, indeed
frequently every city with its congregation, for centuries possessed
its
own confession. § We men of the North were far too practically and
secularly inclined, too much occupied with civil organisation and
commercial
interests and sciences ever to go back to that absolutely genuine
Protestantism
of the pre-Roman period. More-
* § 6.
† Origines du Christianisme, 7th ed. vii, 629.
‡ Cf. Origenes: Against Celsus, v. 64.
§ Cf. Harnack: Das apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis,
27th ed. p. 9. The differences are not important. The present
so-called
“apostolic symbolism“ came into use only in the ninth century.
93 RELIGION
over these early
Christians were more fortunate than we: the shadow of the
theocratically
transformed Roman imperial idea had not yet fallen upon them. It was,
however,
a fatal feature of the northern movement that it always had to make
itself
felt as a reaction — that it had to tear down before it could think of
building up. But this very negative character permits us to unite an
almost
inestimable mass of heterogeneous historical facts under one single
term,
viz., the Revolt against Rome. From the opposition of Vigilantius, in
the
fourth century, against the scandal of monachism which was threatening
the prosperity of the nations, to Bismarck's conflict with the Jesuits,
there is a trait of relationship uniting all these movements; for,
however
different the impulse may be which drives them to revolt, Rome itself
represents
so uniform, so persistently logical and so strongly established an
idea,
that all opposition to it receives a peculiar and to a certain extent
similar
colouring.
In order therefore to be clear we must hold fast to this idea of a
Revolt
against Rome. But inside it we must note an important difference. Under
the uniform exterior the idea “Rome“ conceals two fundamentally
different
tendencies: the one flows from a Christian source, the other from a
heathen;
the one aims at an ecclesiastical, the other at a political ideal. Rome
is, as Byron says, “an hermaphrodite of empire.“ * Here again the
unfortunate
discord that we encounter in Christianity at every step! And in fact
not
only do two ideals — a political and an ecclesiastical — stand side by
side, but the political ideal of Rome, Jewish-heathen in foundation and
structure, contains a social dream so magnificent that it has at all
times
captivated even the greatest minds; whereas the religious ideal,
permeated
though it may be by the presence of Christ
* The Deformed Transformed i. 2.
94
RELIGION
(so that many
a sublime soul sees only Christ in this Church), has introduced into
Christianity
and brought to perfection there, conceptions and doctrines which are
directly
anti-Christian. Many a man of sound judgment has therefore thought the
political ideal of Rome more religious than its ecclesiastical one. If
then the revolt against Rome received a certain uniformity by the fact
that the fundamental principle of Rome in both spheres (the political
and
the religious) is absolute despotism, so that every contradiction means
sedition, then we can easily comprehend that in reality the reasons of
revolt were very different in the case of different men. Thus the
Germanic
Princes of the earlier age accepted without question the religious
doctrine,
just as Rome preached it, but they at the same time stood up for their
own political rights in opposition to the ideal that lay at the root of
all Roman religion — that political ideal with its splendid dream of a
“city of God“ upon earth — and it was only in the greatest extremity
that
they abandoned a few of their national claims; on the other hand, the
Byzantine
Emperor Leo, although there was no attempt to threaten his political
rights,
was moved by purely religious and Christian conviction when, in order
to
stem the inflowing tide of heathen superstition, he opposed the worship
of images and so came into conflict with Rome. * But how complicated
* Read in Bishop Hefele's Konziliengeschichte, vol. iii, the
detailed
and aggressively partial account of the dispute about images; it will
be
seen that Leo the Isaurian and his advisers simply attempted to stop
the
rapid decline of religious consciousness through the introduction of
superstitious
un-Christian customs. It is not a dogmatic quarrel, nor is there any
political
interest at stake; on the contrary, by his courageous conduct the
Emperor
incites against himself the whole people, led by a countless army of
ignorant
monks, and Hefele's explanation that the Emperor lacked aesthetic
feeling
is too childishly simple to deserve refutation. On the other hand, it
is
becoming clearer and clearer that he was right in his assertion that
image-worship
meant a step back into heathendom. In Asia Minor at the present day the
archaeologists trace from place to place the transformation of the
former
gods into members of the Christian
95
RELIGION
are these two
examples when we contemplate them carefully! For those Germanic
princes,
though questioning the secular claims of the Pope and the
ecclesiastical
conception of the Civitas Dei, used the Papal authority as
often
as it was to their advantage; and on the other hand such men as
Vigilantius
and Leo the Isaurian, who
Pantheon,
who remained as before local Gods to whom pilgrimages were, and still
are,
made. Thus, for example, the giant-slaying Athena of Seleucia became a
“Saint Thela of Seleucia“; the altars of the virgin Artemis were only
renamed
altars of the “virgin mother of God“; the God of Colossus was
henceforth
regarded as the Archangel Michael... for the populations the difference
was scarcely noticeable (see Ramsay: The Church in the Roman
Empire, p. 466 f.). The whole worship of images was connected with
these primeval popular and absolutely un-Christian and anti-Christian
superstitions;
the Church could introduce as many distinguos as it liked, the
image
remained, like the stone at Mecca, an object endowed with magic powers.
In view of such facts which have kept the belief in local
miracle-working
divinities alive in the present day not only in Asia Minor but in all
Europe
(wherever we find Romish influence) (cf. Renan: Marc-Aurèle,chap.
xxxiv), the “arguments“ for image-worship, which Gregory II. brings
forward
in his letters to Leo, seem exceedingly comical. There are two
especially
which he expects to have decisive weight. The fact that the woman
healed
by Christ (Matth. ix. 20) erected on the spot where she was
healed
an image of Christ, and God, far from being angry, caused a healing
plant
hitherto unknown to grow up at the foot of the image! That is the first
proof, the second is still finer. Abgar, Prince of Odessa, a
contemporary
of the Saviour, is said to have sent a letter to Christ, and the latter
in thanking him sent him his portrait!! (Hefele, pp. 383, 395.)
It is very noteworthy, and in judging the Roman standpoint very
instructive,
for us to know that the Pope reproaches the Emperor (see p. 400)
with having robbed men of images and given them instead “foolish
speeches
and musical farces.“ That means that Leo, like Charlemagne a few years
later, had reintroduced the sermon into the Church and provided music
to
elevate the minds. Both of these seemed to the Roman monk as
superfluous
as image-worship was indispensable. If we remember that Germanicia, the
home of Leo, on the borders of Isauria, was one of those veteran
colonies
planted by the late Emperors (Mommsen: Roman History, 3rd ed.
v.
310), if we remember that numerous Teutons served in the army, and
that,
further, Leo was a son of the people, who had so distinguished himself
from the genuine sons of Asia Minor, not by his culture but by his
character,
as to actually hate what they loved, then we may well begin to ask
whether
this attack upon Roman heathen materialism, although springing up in
the
South, was not in reality a product of northern soil? Many a hypothesis
rests on a weaker foundation.
96
RELIGION
from purely
religious
interests attacked things which they looked upon as a scandal to
Christianity,
fell likewise into a grave inconsistency, in that they did not question
the authority of Rome in principle and so logically submitted to it.
The
more closely we investigate the matter the greater becomes the
confusion
which is only indicated here. Any competent scholar who should devote
himself
to the exposition of this one subject — the revolt against Rome (from
about
the ninth to the nineteenth century) — would reveal the remarkable
results
that Rome has had the whole world against it, and is indebted for its
incomparable
power solely to the impelling force of a relentlessly logical idea. No
one ever proceeded logically against Rome; Rome was always recklessly
logical
in its own cause. Thereby it overcame not only open resistance but also
the numerous attempts from within to force it into other directions.
Not
only did Leo the Isaurian fail, who attacked it from without, the holy
Francis of Assisi failed just as signally in his endeavour to reform
the
ecclesia
carnalis, as he called it, from within; * that fiery apostolic
spirit,
Arnold of Brescia, failed to realise his fond hope of separating the
Church
from its secular aims; the Romans failed in their repeated and
desperate
revolts against the tyranny of the Popes; Abelard — a fanatic for the
Roman
religious ideal — failed in his endeavour to unite to it more rational
and higher thought; Abelard's opponent, Bernhard, the reformer of
monkdom,
who desired to force upon the Pope and the whole Church his mystical
conception
of religion and would gladly have forcibly closed the mouths of “the
incomparable
doctors of reason,“ as he called them in mockery, failed to do so; the
pious abbot Joachim failed in his struggle against
* It has lately been proved and should be kept in mind that the
intellectual
development of this remarkable man was most probably under the direct
influence
of the Waldensians. (Cf. Thode: Franz von Assisi, 1885,
p.
31 f.)
97 RELIGION
the “Apotheosis
of the Roman Church“ and the “carnal conceptions“ of the sacraments;
Spain,
which in spite of its Catholicism refused to adopt the decisions of the
Council of Trent, failed; the devout house of Austria and that of
Bavaria
as well, which as a reward for their characterless submissiveness were
still quarrelling in the seventeenth century about the refusal of the
cup
to the laity and the marriage of priests in their States, failed; *
Poland
failed in its daring attempts at reformations; † France, in spite of
all
its persistency, failed in the endeavour to maintain the shadow of a
half-independent
Gallic Church ... but especially signal was the failure of all those,
from
Augustine to Jansenius, who tried to introduce into the Roman system
the
apostolic doctrine of faith and of grace in its perfectly pure form,
likewise
of all those who, from Dante to Lamennais and Döllinger, demanded
the separation of Church and State, and the religious freedom of the
individual.
All these men and movements — and their number is in all centuries
legion
— proceeded, I repeat, illogically and inconsistently; for either they
wanted to reform the fundamental Roman idea, or they wished to obtain
for
themselves inside this idea a certain measure of personal or national
freedom:
both manifestly preposterous ideas. For the fundamental principle of
Rome
(not only since 1870 but since all time) is its divine origin and
consequent
infallibility; as opposed to it freedom of opinion can only be sinful
obstinacy;
and in regard to the question of reform, we must point to the fact that
the Roman idea, however complicated it appears on closer inspection, is
nevertheless an organic product, resting on the firm foundations of a
history
of several thousand years and further built up under careful
consideration
of the character and religious
* For this and the former assertion compare the episcopally approved
edition
of the Concilii Tridentini canones et decreta by Canon Smets,
with
an historical introduction, 1854, p. xxiii.
† See vol. i. p. 515.
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RELIGION
needs of all those
men who in any way belong to the chaos of races — and we know how far
the
sphere of the latter extends. * How could a man of Dante's intellectual
acumen regard himself as an orthodox Roman Catholic and yet demand the
separation of secular and ecclesiastical power, as well as the
subordination
of the latter to the former? Rome is, in fact, the heir of the highest
secular power; it is only as its agents that the Princes wield the
sword,
and Boniface VIII. astonished the world only by his frankness, not by
the
novelty of his standpoint, when he exclaimed: “Ego sum Caesar! ego
sum
Imperator!“ Let Rome relinquish this claim (no matter how
theoretical
it might be as regards actual facts), it would have meant putting the
knife
to its own throat. One must never forget that the Church derives all
its
authority from the supposition that it is the representative of God; as
Antonio Perez with real Spanish humour says: “El Dios del cielo es
delicado
mucho en suffrir compañero in niguna cosa“ (The God of
Heaven
is much too jealous to endure a rival in anything). † And in this
connection
we should not overlook the fact that all the claims of Rome, religious
as well as political, are historical; its apostolic episcopate too, is
derived from divine appointment — not from any mental superiority. ‡ If
Rome were at any point to surrender its flawless historical con-
* Cf. vol. i, pp. 287
and 328.
† Quoted by Humboldt in a letter to Varnhagen von Ense on September 26,
1845.
‡ Towards Peter, Christ used words such as he uttered to no other
apostle:
“Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me; for thou
savourest
not the things that be of God, but those that be of men“ (Matth.
xvi, 23). And not only his threefold denial of Christ but also his
conduct
in Antioch which Paul denounced as “hypocrisy“ (Gal. ii, 13) prove to
us
that Peter was a violent but weak character. Supposing that he did
actually
receive the primacy, it was not for his service or to secure the
natural
preponderance of his pre-eminent greatness, but in consequence of an
appointment
pleasing to God and ratified by history.
99 RELIGION
tinuity, the whole
structure could not fail to fall to pieces; and in fact the most
dangerous
point would be the point of connection with the supremacy of the Roman
secular Imperium, henceforth extended to a divine Imperium; for the
purely
religious institution is so forced that even Augustine questioned it, *
whereas the actual Empire is one of the most massive and fundamental
facts
of history, and the conception of it as of “divine origin“ (and
therefore
absolute) goes farther back and is more deeply rooted than any
evangelical
tradition or doctrine. Now none of the Protestants mentioned above —
for
they and not those who left the Roman Church deserve this negative
characterisation
— exercised lasting influence; within this firmly jointed frame it was
impossible. If we take up detailed Church histories, we are astonished
at the great number of pre-eminent Catholic men, who devoted their
whole
life to the spiritualising of religion, the struggle against
materialisation,
the spread of Augustinian doctrines and the abolition of priestly
misconduct,
&c.; but their efforts left not a trace behind. And in order to
have
a lasting influence in this Church, important personalities had either,
like Augustine, to contradict themselves, or, like Thomas Aquinas, to
grasp
the specifically Roman idea by the roots and resolutely from youth up
to
remodel their own individuality according to it. The only other
solution
was complete emancipation. Whoever exclaimed with Martin Luther: “It is
all over with the Roman stool“ † — gave up the hopeless inconsistent
struggle,
in which first of all the Hellenic East and then the whole North, as
far
as it continued it, were vanquished and broken: and yet it was he and
he
only who made national regeneration possible, since he who rebels
against
Rome at the same time throws off the yoke of the Imperial idea.
* See p. 74.
† Missive of the year 1520 to Pope Leo X.
100 RELIGION
In
the period with which we are here occupied matters did not go so far —
except in the case of the Waldensian movement. The struggle between
North
and South was and remained unequal, and was carried on within what was
regarded as the authoritative Church. There were countless sects, but
mostly
purely theological ones; Arianism could have provided a specifically
Germanic
Christianity, but the adherents of this faith lacked the cultural
equipment
needed to be vigorous in propaganda, or to be able to vindicate their
standpoint;
on the one hand the hapless Waldensians, although Rome on several
occasions
caused them all to be massacred (the last being in the year 1685) — so
far as it could lay hands on them — have maintained themselves to the
present
day and now possess a Church of their own in Rome itself: a proof that
whoever is just as consistent as Rome, endures, no matter how weak he
may
be.
Hitherto I have been compelled to sketch this struggle without regard
to
proper sequence, because of the disjointed efforts and inconsistency of
the men of the North as opposed to their uniform foe. Moreover, I have
confined myself to mere indications; facts are like gnats: as soon as a
light is struck, they fly in thousands in through the windows. Hence,
to
complete what has been indicated regarding the struggle between North
and
South I shall take two men as examples: a practical politician and an
ideal
politician, both zealous theologians in their leisure hours and
enthusiastic
sons of the Roman Church at all times; I refer to Charlemagne and
Dante.
*
* Dante was born in 1265, in the century that forms the great
turning-point;
apart from this formal justification for naming him here, there is a
further
one in the fact that the eye of this great poet looked back as well as
forward. Dante is at least just as much an end as a beginning. If a new
age begins with him, that is not least of all explained by the fact
that
he has closed an old one: especially as regards his attitude on the
relation
between Church and State he is quite biased by the views and visions of
the age of Charlemagne and of the Ottos, and really remains blind to
the
great political reformation of Europe which manifests itself so
stormily
around him.
101
RELIGION
CHARLEMAGNE
If ever a man had acquired a right to exercise influence upon Rome, it
was Charlemagne; he could have destroyed the Papacy, he saved it and
enthroned
it for a thousand years; he, as no one before or after him, would have
had the power to separate the Germans at least definitely from Rome; he
on the contrary did what the Empire at its period of greatest splendour
had not been able to do — incorporated them, all and sundry, in the
“Holy“
and “Roman“ Empire. This so fatally enthusiastic admirer of Rome was
nevertheless
a good German, and nothing lay nearer his heart than reforming from top
to bottom, and freeing from the clutches of heathenism this Church
which
he so passionately prized as an ideal. He writes pretty blunt letters
to
the Pope, in which he wars against everything possible and calls
ecclesiastically
recognised councils ineptissimae synodi; and not content with
criticising
the apostolic stool, his care extends so far as to inquire how many
concubines
the country priests maintain! He takes heed above all that the priests
or at least the bishops should once more become acquainted with the
Holy
Writ, which under the influence of Rome had become almost forgotten; he
sees carefully to it that the sermon is reintroduced and in such a way
that “the people can understand it“; he forbids the priests to sell the
consecrated oil as a charm; he ordains that in his empire no new saints
shall be invoked, &c. In short, Charlemagne proves himself a
Germanic
prince in two ways: in the first place, he and not the bishop, not even
the Bishop of Rome, is master in his Church; secondly, he aims at that
spirituality of religion which is peculiar to the Indo-European. That
manifests
itself most clearly in the quarrel about image-worship. In the famous libri
Carolini, addressed to the Pope, Charlemagne
102 RELIGION
indeed condemns
iconoclasm, but also iconolatry. He expresses the view that it is
permissible
and good to have images as ornaments and memorials, but they are a
matter
of absolute indifference, and in no case should they be honoured, much
less worshipped. In this he opposed the doctrine and practice of the
Roman
Church, and that with perfect consciousness, by expressly rejecting the
decisions of the synods and the authority of the Church Fathers. An
attempt
has been made and still is made in the most modern Church histories to
represent the matter as a misunderstanding: that the Greek word proskynesis
was falsely translated by adoratio, and that Charlemagne was
thus
misled, &c. But the important point is not the fine distinction
between
adorare,
venerari, colere, &c., which still plays such a large part in
theory
and so small a one in practice; it is a case of two views being opposed
to each other: Pope Gregory II. had taught the doctrine that certain
images
work miracles; * Charlemagne, on the other hand, asserts that all
images
possess only artistic worth, being in themselves of no account; the
opposite
assertion is blasphemous idolatry. The seventh general synod of Nicaea
had ordained in the year 787 at its seventh sitting, that “candles and
incense should be dedicated to the worship of images and other sacred
utensils“;
Charlemagne answers literally: “It is foolish to burn incense and
candles
in front of images.“ † And so the matter stands to-day. Gregory I.
(about
the year 600) had expressly ordered the missionaries to leave the
heathen
local gods, the miracle-working springs, and such things untouched, and
be satisfied with merely giving them a Christian name; ‡
* Cf. p. 94 note.
† See the documentary account in Hefele's Konziliengeschichte,
iii.
472 and 708. It requires audacity to attempt to persuade us laymen that
we have to do with an innocent misunderstanding; here, on the contrary,
two different views of life, two different races are opposed to each
other.
‡ Gregorii papae Epistularum xi, 71 (from Renan).
103 RELIGION
his advice is
still followed at the close of the nineteenth century; even to-day
noble
Catholic prelates contend desperately but without success against the
heathenism
systematically nurtured by Rome. * In every Roman “church of
pilgrimage“
there are particular images, particular statues, in fact, special works
of art, which have assigned to them a generally quite definite, limited
influence; or it is a fountain which springs up at the spot where the
mother
of God had appeared, &c.: this is primeval fetishism, which had
never
died out among the people but had been already quite abandoned by
Europeans
in the age of Homer. This fetishism has been newly strengthened and
nurtured
by Rome — perhaps rightly, perhaps because it felt that there was here
a true motive power capable of being idealised, something which those
men
who have not yet “entered the daylight of life“ cannot do without — and
Charlemagne opposed it. The contradiction is manifest.
Now what has Charlemagne achieved in his struggle against Rome?
Momentarily
a good deal, but nothing permanent. Rome obeyed where it had to,
resisted
where it could, and quietly pursued its way, as soon as the powerful
voice
became silent for ever. †
* One proof only from among the great number: in the year 1825 the
Archbishop
of Cologne, Graf Spiegel zum Desenberg, testifies that in his
archbishopric
“the real religion of Jesus has become gross image-worship“ (Letters
to Bunsen, 1897, page 76). What would the right reverend gentleman
say to-day?
† A thousand years after Charlemagne the sale of the “holy oil“ as a
domestic
charm was vigorously pursued; thus, for example, a newspaper published
by Abt in Munich, Der Armen-Seelen Freund, Monatsschrift zum Troste
der leidenden Seelen im Fegfeuer, in the 4th number of 1898,
advertises
“holy oil from the lamp of Mr. Dupont in Tours at 4d. per
bottle!
This oil is praised as particularly efficacious for inflammations!“
(The
editor of this paper is a Catholic city priest; the magazine is under
episcopal
censure. The high nobility are said to be Mr. Dupont's best customers.)
104
RELIGION
DANTE
Dante achieved less than nothing, if that be possible. His ideas of
reform
went further and of him his most modern and praiseworthy Roman Catholic
biographer says: “Dante did not after the manner of the heretic aim at
or hope for a reform against the Church but through the Church: he is a
Catholic, not a heretical or schismatic reformer.“ * But for this very
reason he has exercised upon the Church — in spite of his mighty genius
— not the slightest influence, either in life or in death. “Catholic
Reformer“
is a contradictio in adjecto, for the movement of the Roman
Church
can only consist, as it has actually consisted, in making its
principles
clearer, more logical and more unrelenting and in putting them into
practice
as such. I should like to know what curse of excommunication would be
hurled
at the man who, as a Catholic, would to-day venture to address the
followers
of Christ upon earth in the following words:
- E che altro
è
da voi all' idolatre,
- Se non ch'
egli uno,
e voi n'orate cento? †
and who, after
branding
and scorning the Roman priesthood as an un-Christian “unevangelical
brood,“
continued:
- Di questo
ingrassa
il porco, sant' Antonio,
- Ed altri
assai, che
son peggio che porci,
- Pagando di
moneta
senza conio. ‡
* Kraus: Dante, (1897), p. 736.
† Inferno, canto xix. “What then distinguishes you from
an
idolator except that he worships one and you a hundred idols?“
‡ Paradiso, canto xxix.: “From the gains (of the depicted
misleading
of the 'stupid people') the holy Antonius feeds his swine, and many
others
do likewise, who are worse than swine and pay with unstamped coin
[indulgences].“
The Italians never seem to have had any particular admiration for their
Roman priests. Boccaccio also calls them “swine which flee to where
they
can eat without working“ (Decamerone iii. 3).
105 RELIGION
The very fact
that no one would venture to-day to use such language shows us how
completely
all those northern men, * who had dreamt of a reform “not against the
Church
but through the Church,“ have been vanquished. † Also the emphasis
Dante
lays on faith as opposed to works,
- La
fé, senza
la qual ben far non basta
(see, for
example,
Purgatorio,
xxii, &c.), would scarcely be allowed to-day. But what I should
like
particularly to call attention to here is the fact that Dante's views
on
the purely spiritual office of the Church — which is subordinate to the
secular power — have been doubly anathematised by paragraphs 75 and 76
of the Syllabus of the Year 1864. And this is perfectly logical, since,
as I have shown above, the power of Rome lies in its consistency and
especially
in the fact that it under no circumstances gives up its temporal
claims.
It is a poor, short-sighted orthodoxy which tries to whitewash Dante
to-day,
instead of openly admitting that he belongs to the most dangerous class
of genuine protestors. For Dante went further than Charlemagne. The
latter
had had in his mind a kind of Caesaric papacy, in which he, the
Emperor,
like Constantine and Theodosius, should possess the double power in
contrast
to the Papal Caesarism, which the Roman pontifex rnaximus aimed
at; he did not therefore go beyond the genuine Roman idea of universal
empire. Dante, on the other hand, demanded the complete separation of
Church
and State; but that would be the ruin of Rome, as the Popes have
understood
better than Dante and his latest biographer. Dante reproaches
Constantine
as being the author of all evil, because he had founded the
ecclesiastical
State.
* See vol. i. p. 538
note.
† Dante would have shared the same fate as those “Church Fathers and
saints“
of whom Balzac in Louis Lambert writes: “To-day the Church
would
brand them as heretics and atheists.“
106
RELIGION
- Ahi,
Constantin! di
quanto mal fu matre,
- Non la tua
conversion,
ma quella dote
- Che da te
prese il
primo ricco patre! *
And according to
him
Constantine deserves double blame, first because he led the Church
astray,
secondly because he weakened his own Empire. In verse 55 of the
twentieth
canto of the Paradiso, he says that Constantine “destroyed the
world,“
by giving power to the Church. And if we trace this idea in Dante's
work
De
Monarchia, it is clear that we have here to deal with an absolutely
heathen-historical doctrine — the conception that universal power is
the
legitimate legacy of the Roman Empire! † How is it possible to approach
so close to the fundamental idea of Rome's ecclesiastical power and yet
not grasp it? For it is the Church itself that inherits that
world-power.
It was only by its taking possession of it that the Civitas Dei
came into being. Long ago Augustine had proved with a logic which we
should
have liked Dante and his apologists to have possessed, that the power
of
the State was based upon the power of sin; henceforth, since by
Christ's
death the power of sin was broken, the State must submit to the Church;
in other words, the Church stood at the head of the civic government.
The
Pope is, according to the orthodox doctrine, the representative of God,
vicarius
Dei in terris; ‡ if he were merely the “representative of Christ“
or
the “successor of Peter,“ his function could be regarded as exclusively
the care of souls, for Christ said: “My Kingdom is not of this world“;
but who would presume
* Inferno xix.: “O Constantine! How much evil has been caused
not
by your conversion but by the gift which the first rich father (= Pope)
received from you.“
† De Monarchia, the whole of the second book. But see
especially
chap. iii., in which the “divine predestination“ of the Roman people as
the world-ruling power is derived not from interpretations of Old
Testament
prophets or from the appointment of Peter but proved from the
genealogical
tree of Aeneas and Creusa! Race and not religion is the decisive thing
for Dante!
‡ Concilium Tridentinum, decretum de reformatione, chap. i.
107 RELIGION
to exercise
authority
over the representative on earth of the almighty Godhead? Who dare deny
that the Temporal is just as much subject to God as the Eternal? Who
would
venture in any sphere to refuse to recognise his supremacy? Though,
therefore,
in theological matters of faith, Dante may have been a strictly
orthodox
Catholic, who did not doubt the “infallible preceptorship of the
Church“
* — such dogmatic agreement is of little importance, the important
thing
is to know what a man, by the whole tendency of his nature, is and must
be, wills and must will; and this impelled Dante to attack in
passionate
words not only the inviolable person of the Pontifex maximus
and
almost continuously to scourge all the servants of the Church, but to
undermine
the foundations of the Roman religion.
This attack, too, was hurled back from the mighty walls of Rome, upon
which
it left not a single trace.
* Kraus, p. 703 f., seems to successfully establish his thesis, but to
have no idea how little such formal orthodoxy means and how dangerous
his
own standpoint is for the Roman Church. Moreover I cannot help calling
attention to the fact that Dante's famous confession of faith at the
end
of the 24th canto of the Paradiso is really grievously
abstract.
Kraus regards as final proof of Dante's orthodoxy a Credo, which does
not
mention the name of Jesus Christ! What, on the contrary, has struck me
is that Dante does not go beyond general mythology. And if I review in
my memory a series of other utterances, I get the impression that Dante
(like many other of his contemporaries) can hardly be called a
Christian
at all. The great cosmic God in Heaven and the Roman Church on earth:
everything
intellectual and political, or moral and abstract. There is an infinite
longing for religion, but religion itself, that Heaven which does not
come
with outward signs, had been stolen from the great and noble man in his
cradle. Dante's poetical greatness lies not least of all in the fearful
tragedy of the thirteenth century, the century of Innocent III. and
Thomas
Aquinas! His hope is content with the luce intellettual (Paradiso
xxx), and his true guide is not Beatrice nor the holy Bernhard, but the
author of the Summa theologiae, who sought to illuminate with
the
pure light of reason and to idealise the almost un-Christianised
Christendom
and the night of that age which hated all knowledge and beauty. Thomas
Aquinas signifies the nationalistic supplement of a materialistic
religion;
Dante threw himself into his arms. (See the interesting book —
which
in truth is written in support of quite a different thesis — of the
English
Catholic, E. G. Gardner, Dante's Ten Heavens, 1898.)
108 RELIGION
I have intentionally emphasised the struggle between North and South
only
as it manifested itself inside the Church of Rome, and that not merely
because I have already had occasion to speak of other manifestations,
or
because in point of time and historical sequence they belong only to
the
next epoch of culture, but because I think that this side of the matter
is usually neglected, and that it is of great significance for the
comprehension
of the present age. The Reformation strengthened the Catholic Church at
a later time; for it effected the elimination of elements that could
not
be assimilated, elements which, in the persons of submissive and yet
rebellious
sons — like Charlemagne and Dante — were much more dangerous than if
they
had been enemies, inasmuch as they inwardly hindered the logical
development
of the Roman ideal while outwardly they could further it little or
nothing.
A Charlemagne with Dante as his Chancellor would have wrecked the Roman
Church; but a Luther has made the Church so clear concerning itself
that
the Council of Trent has meant for it the dawn of a new day.
RELIGIOUS
INSTINCTS OF RACE
I need not return to the question of race-differences, although they
are
at the bottom of this struggle between North and South; what is evident
does not require proof. But I shall not break off this short discussion
of the northern power in the Christian religious struggle and pass to
“Rome,“
without first begging the reader to take up some good history, e.g.,
the first volume of Lamprecht‘s Deutsche Geschichte; * careful
study
will convince him how deeply rooted in the Germanic character are
certain
fundamental convictions; at the same time he will discover that though
* Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 2nd ed. pp. iv. and 550.
109 RELIGION
Jacob Grimm may
be right in his assertion that “Germanic strength decided the victory
of
Christianity,“ this Christianity is essentially and from the first
different
from that of the Chaos. It is a question, as it were, of brain
convolutions:
* whatever is put in must bend and yield according to their shapes.
Just
as a boat, entrusted to the apparently uniform element of the ocean,
will
be driven very different ways, according as the one current or the
other
seizes it, so the same ideas in different heads travel in widely
different
ways and reach regions that have very little in common. How infinitely
important, for example, is the old Germanic belief in a “universal,
unchangeable,
predestined and predestining fate!“ † Even in this one “brain
convolution,“
which is common to all Indo-Europeans, lies — perhaps along with much
superstition
— the guarantee of a rich intellectual development in entirely
different
directions and upon clearly defined paths. In the direction of idealism
faith in destiny will with the necessity of nature lead to a religion
of
grace, in the direction of empiricism to strictly inductive science.
For
strictly empiric science is not, as is often asserted, a born enemy of
religion, still less of the doctrine of Christ; it would have
harmonised
excellently, as we have seen, with Origenes, and in the ninth chapter I
shall show that mechanism and idealism are sisters; but science cannot
exist without the idea of flawless necessity, and hence, as even a
Renan
must admit, “all Semitic monotheism is essentially opposed to physical
science.“ ‡ Like Judaism, Christianity developed under Roman influence
postulates as its fundamental dogma absolute creative arbitrariness;
hence
the antagonism and never-ending struggle between Church and science; it
was non-existent among the Indians; it has been artificially forced
* Cf. vol. i. p. 481.
† 2nd ed. i. 191. Cf. my remarks in vol. i. chap. iii. p.
239.
‡ Origines du Christianisme, vii. 628.
110 RELIGION
upon the Germanic
races. * Just as important is the fact that for the old Teutons — in
the
same way as for the Indians and Greeks — moral speculation did not
narrow
off into a question of good and bad. † Out of this with the same
inevitableness
the religion of faith in contrast to the religion of works was bound to
develop, i.e., idealism in contrast to materialism, inner moral
conversion in contrast to Semitic sanctity of law and Roman sale of
indulgences.
Here we have moreover an excellent example of the importance of mere
direction,
that is, of feeling one‘s way correctly in the intellectual sphere. For
never has any man taught the doctrine that life could be good without
good
works, ‡ and on the other hand it is the unexpressed assumption of
Judaism
and a religious law of the followers of Rome, that good works without
faith
avail not: in itself therefore each view is noble and moral; but
according
as the one or the other is emphasised, we place the essence of religion
in the spiritual conversion of the man, his disposition, his whole
manner
of thinking and feeling, or on the other hand in outward observances,
redemption
outwardly brought about, reckoning up of good and evil deeds and the
calculation
of morality after the manner of a profit
* See vol. i. p. 431.
† Lamprecht, p. 193. Lamprecht himself, like most of our
contemporaries,
has no idea of the meaning of this phenomenon (which I discuss fully in
the ninth chapter). He is of the opinion that “moral individualism was
still slumbering.“
‡ It is incredible that even at the present day in scientific Roman
works
it is still taught (see, for example, Brück: Lehrbuch
der
Kirchengeschichte, 6th ed. p. 586) that Luther preached that
whoever
believed could sin as he pleased. The following quotation may suffice
to
refute such criminal stupidity: “As now the trees must be before the
fruits,
and the fruits do not make the trees good or bad, but the trees make
the
fruits, so too the man must be good or bad in person, before he does
good
or bad works. And his works do not make him good or bad, but he does
good
or bad works. We see the same in all handiwork: a good or bad house
does
not make a good or bad carpenter; but a good or bad carpenter makes a
good
or bad house; no work makes a master according as the work is, but as
the
master is, so is his work.“ (Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen).
111
RELIGION
and loss account.
* Such things are scarcely less remarkable than the fact that it was
impossible
to bring home to the Teutons the idea “devil“; Walfila rendered Mammon
as Viehgedräng (crowd of cattle), but he had to leave
Satan
and Beelzebub untranslated. † Happy beings! And how suggestive that is,
when one remembers the Jewish religion of terror and Loyola the
Basque‘s
constant references to devil and hell! ‡ Other things again are of
purely
historical interest, as for example the fact that the Teutons possessed
no professional priesthood, that in consequence theocracy was strange
to
them, a circumstance which, as Wietersheim shows, has much facilitated
the introduction of Roman Christianity. §
* Among the Israelites even in ancient times “the whole idea of right
and
wrong was reduced to a money standard“ (Robertson Smith: Prophets
of
Israel, p. 105), so that Hosea had to complain: “They eat up the
sin
of my people, and they set their heart on their iniquity“ (iv, 8). I
remember
once in Italy threatening a man who broke his word with the qualms of
his
own conscience: “Ah what! good sir,“ he said, “that was only a minor
lie;
seven years in purgatory and ten soldi is all it will cost me!“
Thinking
that he was making a fool of me, the next time that two Franciscan
monks
knocked at my door I asked the reverend gentlemen how Heaven punishes a
“minor“ lie, and their immediate answer was, “Seven years in purgatory!
But you are a benefactor of Assisi, much will be forgiven you.“ It is
interesting
to note that the West Goths already in the sixth century fight against
the “irregularity in the system of penitence, so that one sins as one
likes
and is always demanding reconciliation from the priest“ (Hefele, iii.
51):
these are again symptoms of the struggle of the Teutons against a
religion
spiritually alien. One finds in Gibbon's Roman Empire, chap.
lviii.,
details of the tariff of indulgences for money or scourgings shortly
before
the first Crusade.
† Lamprecht, p. 359.
‡ See vol. i. pp. 222
and 569. This timor
servilis
remained henceforth the foundation of all religion in Loyola's order.
Very
interesting in this connection is a letter of a Canadian Jesuit
(published
in Parkman's The Jesuits in North America, p. 148) who is
ordering
pictures for his congregation: one Christ, one âme
bienheureuse,
several holy virgins, a whole selection of condemned souls! One is here
reminded of the anecdote told by Tylor (Beginnings of Culture,
ii.
337). A missionary disputing with an Indian chief said to him: “My God
is good, but he punishes the godless“; to which the Indian replied: “My
God is also good, but he punishes no one, being content with doing good
to all.“
§ Völkerwanderung, 2nd ed. ii. 55.
112 RELIGION
But I shall leave
these inquiries concerning natural religious tendencies to the reader,
in order that I may have the necessary space left to bring forward some
facts concerning the third great force in the struggle, as a supplement
to what has already been indicated in connection with the discussion of
East and North.
ROME
The power of Rome lay in the continuance of the imperial idea, indeed,
originally in the actual continuance of the imperial power. It was a
heathen
Emperor, as we have seen (p. 46), who first settled
a quarrel between Christians by proclaiming the voice of the Roman
bishop
decisive, and the true founder of Roman Christianity as a world-power
is
not a Pope, Church Father, or concilium, but the Emperor Theodosius. It
was Theodosius who on his own authority, by his edict of January 10,
381,
did away with all sects except the one which he had elevated to the
dignity
of a State religion, and confiscated all churches in favour of Rome; it
was he who founded the office of “Imperial inquisitor“ and punished
with
death every deviation from the orthodoxy which he recommended. But the
whole conception of Theodosius was “imperial,“ not religious or
apostolic:
this is sufficiently clear from the fact that heterodoxy or heathenism
was characterised juristically as high treason. * We cannot understand
the full significance of this until we look back and find that two
centuries
earlier even so fiery a mind as Tertullian had demanded universal
tolerance,
because he was of the opinion that each one should worship God
according
to his own conviction, and that one religion cannot injure the other.
It
becomes further
* I mention Theodosius because he possessed the power as well as the
will,
but it was his predecessor Gratian who first established the idea of
“orthodoxy,“
and that too as a purely civil matter; any one who was not orthodox
lost
his right of citizenship.
113 RELIGION
clear when we
see that 150 years before Theodosius, Clemens of Alexandria used the
Greek
word hairesis in the old sense, namely, to denote a particular
school
in contrast to other schools, no blame being expressed in the word. *
To
view heresy as a crime is, one can see, a legacy of the Roman Imperial
system; the idea first occurred when the Emperors had become
Christians,
and it rests, I repeat, not upon religious assumptions, but upon the
notion
that it is high treason to hold a different creed from the Emperor.
This
respect for the Emperor was afterwards inherited by the Pontifex
maximus.
In the second chapter, to which I refer the reader, I have discussed in
detail the power of the genuine Roman idea of State as the history of
that
incomparable people that disappeared but too soon represents it, and
also
the revolutionary modifications which practically transformed this idea
into its opposite, as soon as its creator, the Roman people, no longer
existed. † The world was accustomed to receive laws from Rome, and from
Rome alone; it was so used to this that even the separated Byzantine
Empire
still called itself “Roman.“ Rome and ruling had become synonymous
expressions.
We must not forget that to the men of the Chaos, Rome was the one thing
that held them together, the one idea of organisation, the only
talisman
against the influx of the Barbarians. The world is not ruled by
interests
alone (as modern historians are apt to teach), but above all by ideas,
even when these ideas have become nothing but words; and thus we see
Rome,
even when bereft of its Emperor, retain a prestige such as no other
city
in Europe possessed. From time immemorial Rome had been called by the
Romans
“the holy city“: that we still call it so is no Christian custom, but a
heathen legacy;
* Tertullian: Ad Scapulum, 2; Clemens: Stromata, 7, 15
(both
quoted from Hatch, p. 329).
† See particularly vol. i. p.
121 f.
114 RELIGION
for to the old
Romans, as we have shown at an earlier point (vol. i. p.
110), the one sacred thing in life was the Fatherland and the
family.
Henceforth there were no Romans; yet Rome remained the holy city. Soon,
too, there was no Roman Emperor (except in name), but part of the
imperial
power had remained,
e.g., the Pontifex maximus. * Here, too,
something had taken place which originally had no connection with the
Christian
religion. Formerly, in pre-Christian times, the complete subjection of
the priesthood to the secular power had been a fundamental principle of
the Roman State; the priests had been honoured, but they had not been
permitted
to exert any influence on public life; only in matters of conscience
did
they possess jurisdiction, that is, they could impose upon any one who
accused himself (confession!) a punishment in expiation of his guilt
(penitence!),
exclude him from public worship, indeed lay upon him the curse of God
(excommunication!).
But when the Emperor had united in his own hands all the offices of the
Republic, it became more and more the custom to regard the Pontificate
as his highest dignity, whereby gradually the idea of Pontifex
received
a significance it had never before possessed. Caesar was of course not
a title but only an eponym; Pontifex maximus, on the other
hand,
designated the highest, and from time immemorial the only lifelong,
office;
as Pontifex the Emperor was now “a sacred majesty,“ and before
this
“representative of the divine upon earth“ every one had to kneel in
worship
— a relation in which nothing was changed by the conversion of the
Emperors
to Christianity. But there is a second consideration. There was — and
had
been since earliest times — another conception inseparably bound up
with
this heathen Pontifex maximus: though no longer
* We have seen above that this Roman formula dating from primeval
heathen
times was adopted by the Council of Trent for the Christian Pope.
115 RELIGION
influential
externally
he was absolutely supreme within the priesthood; it was the priests who
chose him, but in him they selected their dictator for life; he alone
nominated
the pontifices, he alone possessed in all questions of religion
the final right of decision. * If now the Emperor had usurped the
office
of Pontifex maximus, so the Pontifex maximus at a later
age
could with still greater right regard himself as Caesar et Imperator
(see p. 98), since he had in the meantime
actually
become the all-uniting head of Europe.
Such is the stool (the sella famous since Numa's time), which
the
Christian bishop had bequeathed to him in a Rome that had lost its
Emperor,
such the rich legacy of dignity, influence, privileges, firmly
established
for 1000 years, which he received. The poor apostle Peter has little
merit
in the matter. †
Rome possessed therefore, if not culture and national character, at
least
the immeasurable advantages of firm organisation and old sacred
tradition.
It is probably impossible to over-estimate the influence of form in
human
things. Such an apparent trifle, for example, as the laying-on of hands
to preserve the material, visible, historical continuity is of such
direct
influence upon the imagination that it has more weight with the people
than the profoundest speculations and the most sacred examples of life.
And all this is old Roman discipline,
* These details from Mommsen: Römisches Staatsrecht, and
from
Esmarch: Römische Rechtsgeschichte. How great, moreover,
the
authority of the Pontifex maximus was in old Rome is made
sufficiently
clear by a passage in Cicero (De Natura Deorum, lib. iii, chap.
ii.), where he says that in all things pertaining to religion he simply
referred to the Pontifex maximus and was guided by what he said.
† That the Popes actually ascended the Roman Imperial throne and owe to
it their claims to power has recently been testified by a Roman
Catholic
Church historian. Prof. Franz Xavier Kraus writes in the Wissenschaftliche
Beilage zur Münchener Allgemeinen Zeitung of February 1, 1900,
No. 26, p. 5: “Soon after the Caesars had left the palaces of the
Palatine,
the Popes established themselves firmly there, so as to put themselves
unnoticed into the position of Imperator in the eyes of the people.“
116 RELIGION
old Roman legacy
from the pre-Christian time. The ancient Romans — otherwise poor in
invention
— had been masters in the dramatic shaping of important symbolical
effects;
* the modern Romans maintained this tradition. And thus here, and here
alone, young Christianity found an already existing form, an already
existing
tradition, an already practised and experienced statesmanship, on which
it could support itself, in which it could crystallise itself into a
firm
and lasting form. It found not only the idea of statesmanship but also
the experienced statesman. Tertullian, for example, who struck the
first
fatal blow at freely speculative Hellenic Christianity, by introducing
Latin into the Church instead of Greek — Latin, in which all
metaphysics
and mysticism are impossible and which rob the Pauline Epistles of
their
deep significance — was a lawyer, and started “the tendency of western
dogmatics towards juristicism“; he did so by emphasising on the one
hand
the materially legal motive power in religious conceptions, on the
other
by introducing ideas with a legal colouring — suited to the practical
Latin
world — into the conceptions of God, of the “two substances“ of Christ
and the freedom of the human being, who was felt to be in the position
of a defendant, as at law. † Side by side with this theoretical
activity
of practical men there was also great activity in organisation.
Ambrosius,
for example, the right hand of Theodosius, was a civil official and was
made a bishop, before he had been baptised! He himself tells frankly
how
he was “carried off from the bench,“ because the Emperor wished to
employ
him elsewhere, namely, in the Church, for the work of organisation, and
how he thereby came into the painful position of having to teach others
Christianity
* See vol. i. p. 147.
† Cf. Harnack, p. 103. Concerning the inevitably retarding
effect
of the Latin tongue upon all speculation and science, see
Goethe's
remarks in his Geschichte der Farbenlehre.
117 RELIGION
before he knew
it himself. * It was men like these and not the successors of Peter in
Rome, whose names are scarcely known in the first centuries, who laid
the
foundations of the Roman Church. The influence of the bishops was
incalculably
enhanced, for example, by the ordinance of Constantine, according to
which,
in the old Roman legal arrangement of the receptum arbitrii
(court
of arbitration) it was enacted that when the bishop was arbiter, his
judgment
should be unconditionally final; for the Christians it was in many
cases
a religious duty to apply to the bishop; henceforth he was even in
civil
law their supreme judge. † From this same purely civil, and absolutely
non-religious source is derived the imposing idea of strictest
uniformity
in faith and worship. A State must manifestly possess a single,
universally
valid, logically perfected constitution; the individuals in the State
cannot
give legal decisions as they please, but must, whether they will or
not,
be subject to the law; this was all well understood by these Doctors of
the Church and legal bishops, and regarded by them as ruling the
religious
sphere as well. The close connection of the Roman Church with Roman law
was visibly expressed by the fact that for centuries the Church stood
under
the jurisdiction of this law and all priests in all lands were regarded
eo
ipso as Romans and enjoyed the many privileges which were attached
to this legal position. ‡ The conversion of the European world to this
political and juristical Christianity was not, as is so often asserted,
brought about by a divine miracle, but by the commonplace method of
compulsion.
Even the pious Eusebius (who lived long before Theodosius)
* Cf. the beginning of the De Officiis Ministrorum.
† This, too, was not a new Christian invention; even in antiquity there
had been in Rome a jus pontificium in contrast to the jus
civile;
but the sound sense of the free Roman people had never permitted it to
gain practical influence. (See Mommsen, p. 95.)
‡ Savigny: Römischen Rechtes im Mittelalter, vol. i. chap.
iii.
118 RELIGION
complained
of the “unspeakable hypocrisy and dissimulation of the so-called
Christians“; as soon as Christianity became the official religion of
the
Empire, there was no need for dissembling; men became Christians as
they
paid their taxes, and they became Roman Christians because they must
give
to the Emperor what is the Emperor's; religion had become, like the
soil,
the property of the Emperor.
Christianity as an obligatory world-religion is therefore demonstrably
a Roman imperial idea, not a religious one. When the secular Empire
declined
and disappeared, this idea remained behind; the religion ordained by
the
Emperors was to supply the cement for the world which had become
disjointed;
all men were hereby benefited and consequently the more sensible ever
gravitated
back towards Rome, for there alone was found not merely religious
enthusiasm,
but a practical organisation, which exercised an untiring activity in
all
directions, left nothing undone to resist every counter-movement,
possessed
knowledge of men, diplomatic skill and above all a central unchanging
axis
— not excluding movement, but guaranteeing security — namely, the
absolute
Primacy of Rome, that is, of the Pontifex maximus. Herein lay
first
and foremost the strength of Roman Christianity, against the East as
well
as the North. Then came the further fact that Rome, situated in the
geographical
centre of the Chaos, and moreover endowed almost exclusively with
secular
and political gifts, knew exactly the character and the needs of the
half-breed
population, and was hindered by no deep-rooted national tendencies and
conscientious objections from making advances all round — under the one
reservation that its supremacy remained unconditionally recognised and
maintained. Rome was accordingly not only the one firmly established
ecclesiastical
power during the first thousand years, but also that which professed
the
most elasticity.
119 RELIGION
Nothing is more
stiff-necked than religious fanaticism; even the noblest religious
enthusiasm
will not easily accommodate itself to a different view. Now Rome was
strict,
and cruel if need be, but never really fanatical, at least not in
religious
things nor in earlier times. The Popes were so tolerant, so anxious to
arrange matters, and to make the Church acceptable to all shades of
opinions,
that some of them long after their death had to be excommunicated in
their
graves, for the sake of uniformity of doctrine. * Augustine, for
example,
had considerable trouble with Pope Zosimas, who did not think the
doctrine
of peccatum originale important enough for him to conjure up on
its account the dangerous struggle with the Pelagians, especially as
the
latter were not anti-Roman, but, on the contrary, yielded more rights
to
the Pope than their opponents did. † And whoever follows the course of
Church history from this time down to the great dispute about grace
between
the Jesuits and the Dominicans in the seventeenth century (really the
same
thing again, but grasped at the other end and without an Augustine, to
hinder the development of materialism) and sees how the Pope sought to
settle it “by tolerating ‡ both systems and forbidding the adherents of
both to persecute each other“ — he who, I say, follows with a clear eye
this history will find that Rome without yielding an iota of its claims
to power was yet more tolerant than any other Church organisation. It
was
the religious Hotspurs in its midst, especially the numerous secret
Protestants,
as also the violent opposition from without, that gradually forced the
Papal stool to adopt a more and more definite and more and more
one-sided
dogmatic tendency, till finally a rash Pontifex maximus
* This has been finally proved of at least one Pope, Honorius (see
Hefele, Döllinger, &c.).
† See Hefele: Konziliengeschichte, 2nd ed. ii. 114 f.
and
120 f.
‡ Brück: Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte, 6th ed. p. 744
(orthodox
Roman Catholic).
120 RELIGION
of the nineteenth
century in his Syllabus declared war upon the whole European
culture.
* The Papacy was formerly wiser. The great Gregory complains bitterly
of
the theologians, who torture themselves and others with questions
regarding
the nature of the Godhead and other incomprehensible things, instead of
devoting themselves to practical and benevolent objects. Rome would
have
been glad if there never had been any theologians. As Herder rightly
remarks:
“A cross, a picture of Mary with the child, a Mass, a rosary, were more
to its purpose than much fine speculation.“ †
It is self-evident that this laxity went hand in hand with distinct
secularity.
And this too was an element of power. The Greek meditated and
“sublimated“
too much, the religious Teuton was too much in earnest; Rome, on the
other
hand, never departed from the golden mean, which the vast majority of
humanity
prefers to follow. One need only read the works of Origenes (as an
example
of what the East aimed at) and then in strong contrast Luther's Von
der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen (as a summary of what the North
understood by religion), to see at once how little the one or the other
was suited for the men of the Chaos — and not only for them but for all
who were at all infected with the poison of connubia promiscua.
A Luther presupposes men, who have a strong support in themselves, who
are capable of fighting spiritually as he himself has fought; an
Origenes
moves on the heights of knowledge, where the Indians might be at home,
but not the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, not even a man like
Augustine.
‡ Rome, on the other hand, thoroughly
* Since the assertion that “the Pope in his syllabus declared war on
the
whole European culture“ has met with contradiction, I quote the words
of
§ 80 of the document itself: Si quis dixit: Romanus pontifex
potest
ac debet cum progressu, cum liberalismo et cum recenti civilitate sese
reconciliare et componere; anathema sit.
† Ideen für Geschichte der Menschheit, xix, i. 1.
‡ Augustine was reproached by Hieronymus for not understanding
121
RELIGION
understood, as
I remarked above, the character and the needs of that parti-coloured
population
which for centuries furnished the bearers and mediators of civilisation
and culture. Rome demanded from its adherents neither greatness of
character
nor independent thought; the Church itself relieved them of that; for
talent
and imaginative enthusiasm it had indeed room — under the one condition
of obedience — but such gifted and visionary men were merely
auxiliaries;
the attention was directed continuously to the great masses, and for
them
religion was so completely transferred from head and heart to the
visible
Church, that it became accessible to every one, comprehensible to every
one, and as clear as daylight to all. * Never has an institution
displayed
so admirable and clear-sighted a knowledge of mediocre humanity as that
Church, which began at an early time to organise itself
Hellenic
thought. It is easy to see how true that was of the whole Roman Church
if we take the trouble to read in Hefele's Konziliengeschichte,
vol. ii. p. 255 f., the edict of the Emperor Justinian against Origenes
and the fifteen anathemas against him of the Synods of Constantinople
of
the year 543. What these people did not notice gives us as good an idea
of their mental qualities as what they found worthy of being
anathematised.
For example, the bigots did not notice that Origenes believes that the
peccatum
originale existed before the so-called fall, and yet that is, as I
have shown above, the central point of his absolutely anti-Roman
religion.
On the other hand, it was revolting to them that this clear Hellenic
mind
considered a plurality of inhabited worlds an understood thing and that
he taught the doctrine that the earth must have gradually grown by
process
of development. But they found it most fearful of all that he praised
the
destruction of the body in death as a liberation (whereas the people of
the Chaos who were led by Rome could not think of immortality as
anything
but the eternal life of their wretched bodies), &c., &c.
Many Popes, e.g., Coelestin, who crushed Nestorius, understood
not
a word of Greek and had in fact a very indifferent education, but this
will surprise no one who has learned from Hefele's Konziliengeschichte
that many of the bishops who by vote of majority founded the Christian
dogma could not read, write, nor even sign their name.
* The high-spirited African Church had given the Roman Church a good
example
in this as in so much else, by inserting in its confession of faith the
words: “I believe in forgiveness of sins, in the resurrection of the
body
and in eternal life through the holy church“ (see Harnack: Das
apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis, 27th ed. p. 9).
122 RELIGION
around the Pontifex
maximus as central point. From the Jews it
took
the hierocracy, the intolerance, the historical materialism — but
carefully
avoided the inexorably strict moral commands and the sublime simplicity
of Judaism, the sworn foe of all superstition (for this would have
scared
away the people, which is always more superstitious than religious); it
willingly adopted Germanic earnestness, as also mystical rapture — but
it took care that strict subjectivity did not make the path of
salvation
too full of thorns for weak souls and that mystical flights did not
emancipate
from the cult of the Church; it did not exactly reject the mystical
speculations
of the Hellenes — it understood their worth for the human imagination —
but it robbed the myth of its plastic, incalculable, developable and so
ever revolutionary significance, and condemned it to perpetual
immobility
like an idol to be worshipped. On the other hand, it adopted in the
most
large-hearted
manner the ceremonies and especially the sacraments of the
splendour-loving
Chaos which sought religion in magic. This is its own real element, the
one thing which the Imperium, that is, Rome, contributed independently
to the structure of Christianity; and so it was that while holy men did
not cease to reveal in Christianity the contrast to heathendom, the
great
masses passed from the one to the other without much noticing the
difference:
for they still found the splendidly robed priesthood, the processions,
the images, the miracle-working local sanctuaries, the mystical
transformation
of the sacrifice, the material communication of eternal life, the
confession,
the forgiveness of sins, the indulgences — all things to which they had
long been accustomed.
123
RELIGION
THE
VICTORY OF THE CHAOS
I must still say a few words in explanation of this open, ceremonious
entrance
of the spirit of the Chaos into Christianity; it gave Christianity a
peculiar
colouring, which has more or less tinged all confessions up to the
present
day (even those which are separated from Rome), and it reached its
culminating
point at the end of the period with which we are occupied. The
proclamation
of the dogma of transubstantiation, in the year 1215, betokens the
completion
of a 1000 years' development in this direction. *
The adoption of the objective religion of Paul (in opposition to the
subjective)
involved as was inevitable a view of expiation similar to that of the
Jews;
but what gives the Jew a special claim to our honest admiration is his
unceasing struggle against superstition and magic; his religion was
materialism,
but, as I pointed out in a former chapter, abstract, not concrete
materialism.
† Now towards the end of the second century of our era an absolutely
concrete
materialism, though tinged with mysticism, had spread like a plague
through
the whole Roman Empire. That this sudden resuscitation of old
superstitions
was brought about by the Semites, by those Semites, namely, who were
not
under the benevolent law of Jehovah, has been proved; ‡ for the Jewish
Prophets themselves had had trouble enough to suppress the belief
(which
was always asserting itself) in the magic efficacy of eaten sacrificial
flesh; §
* The final formal completion was reached some years later, first by
the
introduction of the obligatory adoration of the Host in the year 1264,
secondly by the universal introduction of the festival of the holy body
in the year 1311, to celebrate the wonderful transformation of the Host
into the body of God.
† See vol. i. p. 224 f.
‡ See especially Robert Smith: Religion of the Semites
(1894),
p. 358. For this whole question read lectures 8, 9, 10, 11.
§ See Smith, and as a supplement Cheyne: Isaiah,
p.
368.
124 RELIGION
and it was this
very faith, which was so widespread among born materialists, that now
spread
like
wildfire through all the countries of the strongly Semitised Chaos of
peoples.
It was everlasting life that was demanded by miserable creatures, who
might
well feel how little of eternity there was in their own existence. It
was
everlasting life that the Priests of the newly arranged mysteries
promised
them through the mediation of “Agapes,“ common, ceremonious meals, in
which
flesh and blood, magically transformed to divine substance, were
partaken
of, and in which by the direct communication of this substance of
eternity
which conferred immortality the body of the human being was likewise
transformed,
to rise after death to everlasting life. * Thus Apuleius, for example,
writes about his initiation into the mysteries of Isis, that he dare
not
betray what must be concealed, and can only say this: he had reached
the
borders of the realm of death, had crossed the threshold of Proserpina
and had returned from thence “reborn in all elements.“ † Those
initiated
into the cult of Mithras were also called in aeternam renati,
for
ever regenerate. ‡
There is no doubt that we must see in this a revival of the very
earliest,
most widespread, totemistic § delusions, conceptions against which
the noblest men of all countries have long and successfully contended.
It certainly seems
* Rohde: Psyche, 1st ed. p. 687.
† Der goldene Esel, Book XI.
‡ Rohde, as above, and Dieterich's Eine Mithrasliturgie.
§ The use of the word totemism in this passage has led to
misunderstandings
and it indeed betrays an almost too daring ellipsis of thought.
Totemism
means “animal-worship,“ a custom spread over the whole world; the
animal
in question is sacred and inviolate (the cow in India, the ape in
southern
India, the crocodile among certain African races, &c.). But if we
trace
the further development of this custom, we find that the sacred Totem
nevertheless
was sometimes sacrificed — thus, for example, in Mexico the youth
worshipped
as a God, the idea here being that by partaking of divine flesh and
blood
one receives a share of divinity: in view of this connection I have
characterised
these conceptions as totemistic.
125 RELIGION
to
me doubtful whether the conception in this particular Semitic form of
the
Egypto-Roman mysteries ever existed among the Indo-Europeans; but these
Indo-Europeans had in the meantime developed another idea, that of
substitution
sacrifices: in sacris simulata pro veris accipi.
* Thus we see the old Indians using baked cakes in the form of discs
(hosts)
as symbolical representatives of the animals to be slain. Now in the
Roman
chaos, where all thoughts are found jumbled confusedly together, that
Semitic
conception of the magic change of substance in the human being became
fused
with this Aryan symbolic conception of simulata pro veris,
which had really been meant only to show that the former literally
interpreted
thanks-offering was now a matter of the heart only. † Thus in the
sacrificial
meals of the pre-Christian Roman mystery-cults men partook not of flesh
and blood but of bread and wine — magically transformed. It is well
known
what a part these mysteries played. Every one will at least remember
having
read in Cicero, De Legibus ii. 14, that
it
was only these mysteries (then consisting of a “baptism“ and a
“love-feast“)
that gave men “understanding in life and hope in death.“ But no
one will fail to notice that we have here, in these renati, a
view
of regeneration absolutely contrary to that taught and lived by Christ.
Christ and Antichrist stand opposed. Absolute idealism, which aims at a
complete transformation of the inner man, his motives and purposes, is
here opposed by a materialism intensified to madness, for by partaking
of a mysterious food it hopes for a magical transformation of the
ephemeral
body into an immortal one. This conception means a moral atavism, such
as only a period of the most utter decay could produce.
* See Leist: Gräco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, p.
267
f.; Jhering: Vorgeschichte der Indoeuropäer, p. 313;
&c.
† Augustine in his happy hours has this view too: “Nos ipsi in
cordibus
nostris invisibile sacrificium esse debemus“ (De Civitate Dei
x. 19).
126 RELIGION
These mysteries, like everything else, were influenced by the genuine
Christianity
of the early days: it idealised them and used the forms of its time to
give them a new purport. In the oldest post-evangelical writing, the Doctrine
of the Twelve Apostles, found in 1883, and dating from the first
Christian
century, the mystic meal is merely a thanks-offering (Eucharist). When
taking the cup the congregation says: “We thank Thee, O Father, for the
sacred vine of Thy servant David, which Thou hast proclaimed by Thy
servant
Jesus; Thine be honour to all eternity.“ When taking the bread it says:
“We thank Thee, O Father, for life and knowledge, which Thou hast made
known to us by Thy servant Jesus; Thine be honour to all eternity.“ *
In
the somewhat later so-called Apostolic Constitutions the bread
and
wine are designated “gifts in honour of Christ.“ † Of a transformation
of the elements into body and blood of Christ no one at that time knows
anything. It is in fact characteristic of the earliest Christians to
avoid
the word “mysterion“ which was then so common (in Latin it was rendered
by sacramentum). It is only in the fourth century (that is,
after
Christianity became the official, obligatory religion of the absolutely
un-Christian Empire) that the word comes into use, unquestionably as
the
symptom of a new idea. ‡ But the best minds strove unceasingly against
this gradual introduction into religion of materialism and magic.
Origenes,
for example, is of the opinion that not only is it to be understood
merely
“figuratively,“ when we speak of the body of Christ at the Eucharist,
but
that this “figure“ is suited only to “the simple;“ in reality it is a
“spiritual
communion“ that takes place. Hence, too, according to Origenes it is a
matter of indifference who partakes of the Sacrament; the partaking in
itself
* According to the edition of the Roman Catholic Professor Narcissus
Liebert.
† Book VIII, chap. xii.
‡ Hatch, p. 302. Cf., too, what has been said on p.
29.
127 RELIGION
neither helps
nor harms, it depends solely on the state of mind. * Augustine was in a
much more difficult position, for he lived in a world so sensualised
that
he found the conception widespread that the mere partaking of bread and
wine makes one a member of the Church and secures immortality, whether
one lives as a criminal or not — a conception against which he
frequently
and vigorously contends. † Eminent Church teachers too, like
Chrysostom,
had even then made the assertion that the body of the recipient was
essentially
changed by the consecrated food. Yet Augustine firmly maintains that
sacraments
are always merely symbols: Sacrificia visibilia sunt signa
invisibilium,
sicut verba sonantia signa rerum. ‡ The host, according to
Augustine,
bears the same relation to the body of Christ as the word to the thing.
When he nevertheless in the case of the Sacrament teaches that the
Divine
is actually communicated, it is a question of communication to the mind
and by the mind. So clear an utterance leaves no room for
interpretations
and excludes the later Roman doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass.
§
These extremely sketchy remarks will suffice to show even the
uninitiated
reader that the Eucharist could be viewed in two ways: the one way was
opened up by the more ideal and more spiritual mysteries of the purer
Hellenes
(henceforth filled with concrete purport as “feast of remembrance“
through
the life of Christ); the other, which was connected with Egyptian and
Semitic
magic doctrines, tried to
* According to Neander: Kirchengeschichte, 4th ed. ii. 405.
† Cf., for example, Book XXI. chap. xxv. of the De Civitate
Dei.
‡ De Civitate Dei, Book X. chap. xix. This doctrine was later
adopted
almost literally by Wyclif — the real author of the Reformation; for he
writes regarding the host: “Non est corpus dominicum, sed efficax
ejus
signum.“
§ Gregory the Great (of about the year 600) was the first to teach
that the Mass was an actual repetition of the sacrifice of Christ on
the
Cross, and this gave the Sacrament a sacrificial (Jewish) as well as
Sacramental
(heathen) significance.
128
RELIGION
see in the bread
and wine the actual body of Christ and from that to prove that a magic
transformation was brought about in its recipients.
These two tendencies * existed side by side for centuries, without ever
coming to a decisive dogmatic struggle. The feeling of a mysterious
danger
may have contributed to prevent it; besides Rome, which at a very early
period had quietly chosen the second way, knew that it had against it
the
most eminent Church fathers, as well as the oldest tradition. Once more
it was the too conscientious North which threw the torch of war into
this
idyllic peace, where under the stole of a single universal and
infallible
Church the adherents of two different religions lived. In the ninth
century
the abbot Radbert, in his book Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini,
taught for the first time as an irrefutable dogma the doctrine of the
magical
transformation of the bread into the objectively present body of
Christ,
which exercised a magical and immortalising influence upon all who
partook
of it — even upon the ignorant and unbelieving. And who took up the
gauntlet?
In the most rapid survey such a fact cannot be passed over: it was the
King of the Franks, later supported by the King of England! As always,
the first instinct was correct; the Germanic princes immediately
divined
that their national in-
* In reality there are only two. Whoever has cast the most superficial
glance at the witches' cauldron of theological sophism, will be
grateful
to me for seeking to introduce by means of extreme simplification not
only
clearness but also truthfulness into this confused matter, which,
partly
owing to the cunning calculation of greedy priests, partly owing to the
religious delusion of honest but badly balanced minds, has become the
real
battlefield for all subtle follies and profound impossibilities. Here
in
particular lies the hereditary sin of all Protestant churches; for they
rebelled against the Roman doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass and of
transubstantiation but had not the courage to sweep out all the
superstitions
derived from the Chaos. Instead they took refuge in wretched
sophistries
and have ever since been flitting with characterless indecision hither
and thither on dialectical pin-points, without ever putting foot on
solid
ground.
129
RELIGION
dependence was
being attacked. * Commissioned by Charles the Bald first of all
Ratramnus
and then the great Scotus Erigena refuted this doctrine of Radbert.
That
it was not a question here of a theological dispute of little
consequence
is proved by the fact that this same Scotus Erigena produces a whole
system
inspired by Origenes — an ideal religion, in which the Holy Script with
its doctrines is viewed as “symbolism of the Inexpressible“ (res
ineffabilis,
incomprehensibilis) and the difference between good and bad proved
metaphysically indefensible, &c., and that exactly at the same
moment
the admirable Count Gottschalk, following in the footsteps of
Augustine,
develops the doctrines of divine grace and predestination. The quarrel
could no longer be settled diplomatically. The Germanic spirit began to
awaken; Rome could not let it have its way, otherwise its own power
would
soon be gone. Gottschalk was publicly scourged almost to death by the
ecclesiastics
in power and then condemned to lifelong misery in prison; Scotus, who
had
fled in time to his English home, was treacherously murdered by monks
commissioned
by Rome. And so, for centuries, men wrangled over the nature of the
Sacrament.
The Popes indeed maintained personally a very reserved, in fact
ambiguous,
attitude; they were more concerned about the keeping together of all
Christians
under their episcopal staff than about discussions which might shake
the
Church to its very foundations. But when in the eleventh century that
fiery
spirit Berengarius of Tours had once more begun to carry the religion
of
idealism through all France, the decision could no longer be postponed.
There now sat on the Papal throne Gregory VII., the author of the Dictatus
papae, † in which
* It is worth noting that in the case of the old mysteries, partaking
in
them removed all bonds of connection with the nation of one's birth.
The
initiated formed an international extra-national family.
† In recent times the authorship of the Pope has been doubted, but
Catholics
who are to be taken earnestly from a scientific point of view
130 RELIGION
for the first
time it was frankly declared that Emperors and Princes were
unconditionally
subject to the Pope: he was that Pontifex maximus who first
imposed
on all bishops of the Church the vassal oath of complete allegiance to
Rome, a man whose purity of heart increased tenfold his might which was
great in itself; now, too, Rome felt strong enough to enforce its view
in regard to the sacrament. Dragged from prison to prison, from council
to council, Berengarius had finally in the year 1059, in order to save
his life, to retract his doctrine before an assembly of 113 bishops in
Rome, and to confess to the faith that “the bread is not merely a
sacrament
but the true body of Christ that is chewed with the teeth.“ * However,
the conflict still went on, indeed it now became general. In the second
half of the thirteenth century there was in all countries into which
Germanic
blood had penetrated — from Spain to Poland, from Italy to England † —
an awakening of religious consciousness such
admit
that this representation of the supposed “rights“ of Rome, if not from
the Pope himself, yet originated from the circle of his most intimate
admirers
and thus in the main gives correctly the opinions of Gregory, and this
is confirmed by his actions and letters (see Hefele, 2nd ed. v.
75). Most amusing, on the other hand, is the twisting and turning of
the
historians who write under Jesuitical influence; they have taken much
from
the great Gregory but not his honesty and love of truth, and thus in
their
attempts at improvement they spoil the deeds and words of that very
Pope
under whom the Roman idea of State attained its noblest, purest and
most
unselfish form, and exerted its greatest moral influence. Note, for
example,
what trouble the Seminar-Professor Brück (as above, § 114)
takes
to prove that Gregory “wished no universal monarchy,“ and “did not
regard
the Princes as his vassals,“ &c., but Brück cannot at the same
time refrain from mentioning that Gregory has spoken of an imperium
Christi and admonished all Princes and peoples to recognise in the
Church “their superior and mistress.“ Such dissimulation in face of the
great fundamental facts of history is as unworthy as it is fruitless;
the
Roman hierocratic idea of a world-state is so great that one does not
need
to be ashamed of it.
* In a letter to the Pope he calls them wild animals who begin to roar
at the mere word “spiritual communion with Christ“ (see Neander,
vi. 317). At a later time Berengarius celled the Papal throne sedem
non apostolicam, sed sedem satanae.
† About the year 1200 there were Waldensian congregations “in
131 RELIGION
as has perhaps
never since been equalled; it signified the first dawn of a new day and
manifested itself as a reaction against the enforced unassimilable
religion
of the Chaos. Everywhere there arose Bible and other pious societies,
and
wherever the knowledge of the Holy Writ had spread among the people,
there
followed, as if with mathematical necessity, the rejection of the
secular
and intellectual claims of Rome and above all the rejection of
transubstantiation
and the Roman doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass. The situation
became
daily more critical. If the political situation had been more
favourable,
instead of being the most hopeless that Europe had ever known, an
energetic
and final severance from Rome would then have taken place even to the
South
of the Alps and the Pyrenees. There were reformers enough; in a way
there
was no need of them. The word Antichrist as a designation of the Roman
stool was on every one's lips. Even the peasants knew that many
ceremonies
and doctrines of the Church were borrowed from heathendom, for at that
time it had not yet been forgotten. Thus there was a widespread inner
revolt
against the externalising of religion, justification by works and
particularly
against the sale of indulgences. But Rome stood at that moment at the
zenith
of its political power, it conferred crowns, dethroned Kings and passed
through its hands the threads of all diplomatic intrigues. It was then
that that Pope ascended the Papal throne who used the memorable words,
“Ego
sum Caesar! ego sum Imperator.“ It became again, as in the time of
Theodosius, high treason to hold a different faith from him. The
defenceless
were cut down; those who had to be treated more considerately were
imprisoned,
intimidated, demoralised; those who were for sale were
France,
Aragon, Catalonia, Spain, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Bohemia,
Poland,
Lithuania, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, Italy, Sicily, &c.“
(See the excellent work of Ludwig Keller: Die Anfänge
der
Reformation und die Ketzerschulen, 1897.)
132
RELIGION
bought. Then began
the reign of Roman absolutism even in the sphere in which hitherto
comparative
tolerance had ruled, namely, in the sphere of the inmost religious
conviction.
It was introduced by two measures, whose connection is not at first
manifest,
but will become so from the above exposition: the translation of the
Bible
into the language of the people was forbidden (even the reading in the
Latin vulgate by educated laymen); the dogma of transubstantiation was
promulgated. *
This completed the structure, in an absolutely logical manner. The Apostolic
Constitutions had admonished the layman “when he sat at home to
study
the Gospel
* Innocent had already in the year 1198 forbidden the reading of the
Bible;
the synod of Toulouse in the year 1229 and other councils were
continually
emphasising the prohibition. The synod of Toulouse forbade most
strictly
that laymen should read a fragment of the Old or the New Testament,
except
the Psalms (chap. xiv.). If therefore the Bible was widespread
in
Germany before Luther's time, it is nevertheless throwing sand in our
eyes
to represent this fact, as Janssen and other Catholic writers do, as a
proof of the liberalism of the Roman stool. The invention of printing
had
had a quicker influence than the slowly moving curia could counteract,
moreover the German was at all times instinctively drawn to the Gospel,
and if he was earnest about anything, he did not pay overmuch heed to
prohibitions.
In any case the Council of Trent soon brought order into this matter,
and
in the year 1622 the Pope forbade all reading of the Bible unless in
the
Latin vulgate. It was only in the second half of the eighteenth century
that episcopally approved, carefully revised translations were
permitted,
and that only when they were provided with notes also approved of — a
forcible
measure against the spread of the Holy Script in the faithful editions
of Bible societies.
The Bible studies of the Roman clergy in the thirteenth century are
humorously
shown up by the fact that at the synod of Nympha, in the year 1234, at
which Roman and Greek Catholics met to pave the way to reunion, neither
among the one party nor the other, nor in the churches and cloisters of
the city and surroundings, was a copy of the Bible to be found, so that
the followers of the Apostles had to proceed to the order of the day in
regard to the wording of a doubtful quotation and have recourse once
more,
not to Holy Scripture, but to Church fathers and councils (see
Hefele,
v. 1048). At exactly the same time the Dominican Rainer, who had been
sent
to persecute the Waldensians, reports that all these heretics were very
well read in the Holy Writ and he had seen uneducated peasants who
could
repeat the whole New Testament by heart (quoted in Neander, viii. 414).
133 RELIGION
diligently,“ *
and in the Eucharist he was to see “an offering of gifts in honour of
Christ“;
but who at this time had preserved any knowledge of early, pure
Christianity?
Besides, as I have tried to show, Rome has never from the first adopted
a specifically religious or a specifically evangelical standpoint;
consequently
those who have for centuries reproached it for its lack of evangelic
spirit
are in the wrong. Rome, by banishing the Gospel from the house and the
heart of the Christian, and by taking as the official bases of religion
the magical materialism, upon which the dying chaos of races had
supported
itself, as well as the Jewish theory of sacrifice, by which the priest
became an indispensable mediator, has simply been consistent. At the
same
fourth Lateran synod, which in the year 1215 proclaimed the dogma of
magical
transformation, the Inquisition Court was organised as a standing
institution.
Not the doctrine alone, but the system as well was henceforth perfectly
frank. The synod of Narbonne established in the year 1227 the
principle:
“The persons and goods of heretics are given to any one who takes
possession
of them“; † heretici possunt non solum excommunicari, sed et juste
occidi,
was
taught soon after by the first really Roman Church doctor, Thomas
Aquinas.
These principles and doctrines have not been abolished; they are a
logical,
irrefutable consequence of the Roman premisses and are still valid
to-day;
in the last years of the nineteenth century a pre-eminent Roman
prelate,
Hergenröther, has confirmed this, adding: “There is no yielding
except
under compulsion.“ ‡
* First book, Von den Laien, division 5.
† Hefele, v. 944.
‡ Cf. Döllinger: Das Papsttum (1892), p. 527.
134
RELIGION
THE
POSITION TO-DAY
At the beginning of the thirteenth century therefore the struggle of
almost
a thousand years had ended with the apparently unconditional victory of
Rome and the complete defeat of the Germanic North. But what I have
called
the awakening of the Germanic spirit in the religious sphere was only
the
symptom of a general effort of men feeling their way, and making up
their
minds; soon it penetrated the civic, political and intellectual life;
it
was no longer merely a question of religion, it was an all-embracing
revolt
against the principles and methods of Rome. The struggle broke out
afresh,
but with different results. If Rome could venture to be tolerant, the
struggle
might be regarded to-day as at an end; but she cannot venture, for it
would
mean suicide; and thus the intellectual and material position which we
Northmen have won with such pains and so incompletely is continually
being
undermined and eaten away. Besides, Rome possesses, unsought and
without
any obligations, born allies in all enemies of Germanicism. What we
need
as a protection against this danger is an immediate and powerful
regeneration
of ideal sentiment, a regeneration that shall be specifically
religious:
we need to tear away the foreign rags and tatters that still hang upon
our Christianity as the trappings of slavish hypocrisy: we need the
creative
power to construct out of the words and the spectacle of the crucified
Son of Man a perfect religion fitting the truth of our nature, our
capacities,
and our present culture — a religion so directly convincing, so
enchantingly
beautiful, so present, so plastic, so eternally true, and yet so new,
that
we must give ourselves to it as a maid to her lover, without
questioning,
happy, enraptured — a religion so exactly suited to our highly gifted,
but
135 RELIGION
delicate, easily
injured, peculiar Teutonic nature, that it shall have the power to
master
our inmost souls, ennobling and strengthening us: if we do not succeed
in this, from the shadows of the future a second Innocent III. will
come
forth, another fourth Lateran synod will meet, and once more the flames
of the Inquisition will crackle and flare up to heaven. For the world —
and even the Teuton — will rather throw themselves into the arms of
Syro-Egyptian
mysteries than be edified by the threadbare twaddle of ethical
societies
and such-like. And the world will be right. On the other hand an
abstract,
casuistically dogmatic Protestantism, imbued with Roman superstition
such
as the Reformation has bequeathed to us in various different forms, is
no living power. It certainly conceals a power, a great one — the
Germanic
soul; but this kaleidoscope of manifold and inwardly inconsistent
intolerances
means hindrance to, not improvement of, this soul; hence the profound
indifference
of the majority of those who are of this confession, and the pitiful
absence
of cultivation of the greatest power of the heart, the religious power.
Romanism, on the other hand, may be weak as a dogmatic religion, but
its
dogmatism is at least consistent; moreover the Romish Church — provided
only certain concessions are made to it — is peculiarly tolerant and
generous;
it is so all-embracing that only Buddhism can compare with it,
providing
a home, a civitas Dei, for all characters, all tendencies of
mind
and heart, a home in which the sceptic (like many a Pope) can scarcely
be called Christian; * and it joins hands with the average
* In the posthumous process against Boniface VIII. many ecclesiastical
dignitaries asserted on oath that this mightiest of all Popes laughed
at
the conception of Heaven and Hell and said of Jesus Christ that he had
been a very clever man, nothing more. Hefele is inclined to regard
these
charges as not unfounded (see vi. 461 and the preceding
discussion
of the subject). And yet — or rather in this way — Boniface grasped the
central idea of the Roman thought more clearly than almost any one
before
or after him, and in his famous bull Unam
136 RELIGION
mind
still fettered to heathen superstition and with the fanatical
enthusiast,
like Bernard of Clairvaux, “whose soul is enraptured in the
fullness
of the house of God and drinks new wine with Christ in the kingdom of
his
Father.“ * In addition there is the seductive and captivating idea of
world
and State, which is of great influence; for as an organised system, as
a power of tradition, as a discerner of the human heart, Rome is great
and admirable, more so almost than one can express in words. Even a
Luther
is said to have declared (Tischreden): “As far as outward
government
is concerned, the Empire of the Pope is the best thing for the world.“
A single David — strong in the innocently pure revolt of a genuine
Indo-European
against the shame inflicted upon our race — could perhaps lay low such
a Goliath, but for a whole army of philosophising Lilliputians it would
have been impossible. Its death too would be in no case desirable; for
our Germanic Christianity will not and can not be the religion of the
Chaos;
the delusion of a world religion is rank chronistic and sacramental
materialism;
like a malady it clings to the Protestant Church out of its Roman past;
only in limitation can we grow to the full possession of our idealising
power.
A clear understanding of the momentous struggles in the sphere of
religion
in the nineteenth century and in the approaching future will be
impossible
if we have not before our minds an essentially correct and vividly
coloured
picture of the struggle in early Christianity, until the year 1215.
What
came later — the Reformation and the counter-Reformation — is much less
important from a purely religious point of view, much more saturated
with
politics and ruled by politics; besides it remains a
sanctam,
on which present Catholicism rests as on a foundation-stone, he has
given
expression to it. (More details of this bull in the next chapter.) In
his
Port
Royal (Book III. chap. iii.) Sainte-Beuve proves convincingly that
“one can be a very good Catholic and yet scarcely a Christian.“
† Helfferich: Christliche Mystik, 1842, ii. 231.
137 RELIGION
riddle, if we
have not a knowledge of the past. It is this need that I have tried to
meet in the present chapter. *
ORATIO
PRO DOMO
If in the above account I am accused of partiality, I would reply that
I do not possess the desirable gift of lying. What is the good of
“objective
phrases“? Even an enemy can appreciate honest frankness. When it is a
question
of the dearest possessions of the heart, I prefer, like the Teutons, to
rush naked to battle, with the sentiment that God has given me, rather
than to march to the field adorned in the artificial armour of a
science
which proves nothing, or in the toga of an empty rhetoric which
reconciles
everything.
Nothing is further from my intention than the identification of
individuals
with their Churches. Our Churches to-day unite and separate by
essentially
external characteristics. When I read the Memorials of Cardinal
Manning and see him calling the Jesuit Order the cancer of Catholicism,
when I hear him violently complaining of the development (so zealously
carried on at the present day) of the sacrament to downright idolatry,
and calling the church in consequence a “booth“ and an “exchange,“ when
I see him working so actively for the spreading of the Bible and openly
opposing the Roman tendency to suppress it (which he admits to be the
predominant
tendency), or when I take up such excellent, genuinely Germanic
writings
as Professor Schell's Der Katholizismus als Prinzip des
Fortschrittes,I
have a strong feeling that a single divine whirlwind would suffice to
sweep
away
* To any one who wishes to read an attempt at a systematic refutation
of
the opinions which I have expressed in this chapter and in other parts
of the book on the essence and history of the Roman Churches I
recommend
Prof. Dr. Albert Ehrhard's Kritische Würdigung of these
“Foundations,“
originally published in the periodical Kultur and now as No. 14
of the Vorträge und Abhandlungen, published by the
Leo-Gesellschaft
(1901, Mayer and Co., Vienna).
138 RELIGION
the fatal jugglery
of delusions inherited from the stone age, to scatter like a veil of
mist
the infatuations of the fallen empire of half-breeds and to unite in
blood
fraternity all Teutons — in religion and through religion.
Moreover in my account, as I promised, the centre of all Christianity —
the figure on the Cross — has remained untouched. And it is this figure
which binds us all together, no matter how we may be separated by mode
of thought and tendency of race. It is my good fortune to possess
several
good and true friends among the Catholic clergy and to the present day
I have not lost one. I remember moreover a very highly gifted
Dominican,
who liked to argue with me and to whom I am indebted for much
information
on theological matters, exclaiming in despair: “You are a terrible man!
Not even St. Thomas Aquinas could be a match for you!“ And yet the
reverend
gentleman did not withdraw from me his good graces, nor I from him my
admiration.
What united us was greater and mightier than all that separated us; it
was the figure of Jesus Christ. Though each may have believed the other
so fettered to false error, that, transferred to the arena of the
world,
he would not have hesitated for a moment to attack him, yet, in the
stillness
of the cloister, where I was wont to visit the father, we always felt
ourselves
drawn into that condition so beautifully described by Augustine (see
p. 75), in which everything — even the voice of the
angels — is silent and only the One speaks; then we knew that we were
united
and with equal conviction we both confessed: “Heaven and Earth shall
pass
away, but His words shall not pass away.“
End of page. Last
update: June 14th, 2004.
