Exactly what we cannot say is that they are impossible for us. They are
rather notably marked by a mysticism which, if it be a sort of madness,
would always have struck the same sort of people as mad. Take, for
instance, the case of marriage and the relations of the sexes. It might
very well have been true that a Galilean teacher taught things natural
to a Galilean environment; but it is not. It might rationally be
expected that a man in the time of Tiberius would have advanced a view
conditioned by the time of Tiberius; but he did not. What he advanced
was something quite different; something very difficult; but something
no more difficult now than it was then. When, for instance, Mahomet made
his polygamous compromise we may reasonably say that it was conditioned
by a polygamous society. When he allowed a man four wives he was really
doing something suited to the circumstances, which might have been less
suited to other circumstances. Nobody will pretend that the four wives
were like the four winds, something seemingly a part of the order of
nature; nobody will say that the figure four was written for ever in
stars upon the sky. But neither will any one say that the figure four is
an inconceivable ideal; that it is beyond the power of the mind of man
to count up to four; or to count the number of his wives and see whether
it amounts to four. It is a practical compromise carrying with it the
character of a particular society. If Mahomet had been born in Acton in
the nineteenth century, we may well doubt whether he would instantly
have filled that suburb with harems of four wives apiece. As he was born
in Arabia in the sixth century, he did in his conjugal arrangements
suggest the conditions of Arabia in the sixth century. But Christ in his
view of marriage does not in the least suggest the conditions of
Palestine in the first century. He does not suggest anything at all,
except the sacramental view of marriage as developed long afterwards by
the Catholic Church. It was quite as difficult for people then as for
people now. It was much more puzzling to people then than to people now.
Jews and Romans and Greeks did not believe, and did not even understand
enough to disbelieve, the mystical idea that the man and the woman had
become one sacramental substance. We may think it an incredible or
impossible ideal; but we cannot think it any more incredible or
impossible than they would have thought it. In other words, whatever
else is true, it is not true that the controversy has been altered by
time. Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas
of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to his time, but are no longer
suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they were to his time is
perhaps suggested in the end of his story.
The same truth might be stated in another way by saying that if the
story be regarded as merely human and historical, it is extraordinary
how very little there is in the recorded words of Christ that ties him
at all to his own time. I do not mean the details of a period, which
even a man of the period knows to be passing. I mean the fundamentals
which even the wisest man often vaguely assumes to be eternal. For
instance, Aristotle was perhaps the wisest and most wide-minded man who
ever lived. He founded himself entirely upon fundamentals, which have
been generally found to remain rational and solid through all social and
historical changes. Still, he lived in a world in which it was thought
as natural to have slaves as to have children. And therefore he did
permit himself a serious recognition of a difference between slaves and
free men. Christ as much as Aristotle lived in a world that took slavery
for granted. He did not particularly denounce slavery. He started a
movement that could exist in a world with slavery. But he started a
movement that could exist in a world without slavery. He never used a
phrase that made his philosophy depend even upon the very existence of
the social order in which he lived. He spoke as one conscious that
everything was ephemeral, including the things that Aristotle thought
eternal. By that time the Roman Empire had come to be merely the _orbis
terrarum_, another name for the world. But he never made his morality
dependent on the existence of the Roman Empire or even on the existence
of the world. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not
pass away.’
The truth is that when critics have spoken of the local limitations of
the Galilean, it has always been a case of the local limitations of the
critics. He did undoubtedly believe in certain things that one
particular modern sect of materialists do not believe. But they were not
things particularly peculiar to his time. It would be nearer the truth
to say that the denial of them is quite peculiar to our time. Doubtless
it would be nearer still to the truth to say merely that a certain
solemn social importance, in the minority disbelieving them, is peculiar
to our time. He believed, for instance, in evil spirits or in the
psychic healing of bodily ills; but not because he was a Galilean born
under Augustus. It is absurd to say that a man believed things because
he was a Galilean under Augustus when he might have believed the same
things if he had been an Egyptian under Tuten-kamen or an Indian under
Gengis Khan. But with this general question of the philosophy of
diabolism or of divine miracles I deal elsewhere. It is enough to say
that the materialists have to prove the impossibility of miracles
against the testimony of all mankind, not against the prejudices of
provincials in North Palestine under the first Roman Emperors. What they
have to prove, for the present argument, is the presence in the Gospels
of those particular prejudices of those particular provincials. And,
humanly speaking, it is astonishing how little they can produce even to
make a beginning of proving it.
So it is in this case of the sacrament of marriage. We may not believe
in sacraments, as we may not believe in spirits, but it is quite clear
that Christ believed in this sacrament in his own way and not in any
current or contemporary way. He certainly did not get his argument
against divorce from the Mosaic law or the Roman law or the habits of
the Palestinian people. It would appear to his critics then exactly what
it appears to his critics now; an arbitrary and transcendental dogma
coming from nowhere save in the sense that it came from him. I am not at
all concerned here to defend that dogma; the point here is that it is
just as easy to defend it now as it was to defend it then. It is an
ideal altogether outside time; difficult at any period; impossible at no
period. In other words, if any one says it is what might be expected of
a man walking about in that place at that period, we can quite fairly
answer that it is much _more_ like what might be the mysterious
utterance of a being beyond man, if he walked alive among men.
I maintain therefore that a man reading the New Testament frankly and
freshly would _not_ get the impression of what is now often meant by a
human Christ. The merely human Christ is a made-up figure, a piece of
artificial selection, like the merely evolutionary man. Moreover there
have been too many of these human Christs found in the same story, just
as there have been too many keys to mythology found in the same stories.
Three or four separate schools of rationalism have worked over the
ground and produced three or four equally rational explanations of his
life. The first rational explanation of his life was that he never
lived. And this in turn gave an opportunity for three or four different
explanations; as that he was a sun-myth or a corn-myth, or any other
kind of myth that is also a monomania. Then the idea that he was a
divine being who did not exist gave place to the idea that he was a
human being who did exist. In my youth it was the fashion to say that he
was merely an ethical teacher in the manner of the Essenes, who had
apparently nothing very much to say that Hillel or a hundred other Jews
might not have said; as that it is a kindly thing to be kind and an
assistance to purification to be pure. Then somebody said he was a
madman with a Messianic delusion. Then others said he was indeed an
original teacher because he cared about nothing but Socialism; or (as
others said) about nothing but Pacifism. Then a more grimly scientific
character appeared who said that Jesus would never have been heard of at
all except for his prophecies of the end of the world. He was important
merely as a Millennarian like Dr. Cumming; and created a provincial
scare by announcing the exact date of the crack of doom. Among other
variants on the same theme was the theory that he was a spiritual healer
and nothing else; a view implied by Christian Science, which has really
to expound a Christianity without the Crucifixion in order to explain
the curing of Peter’s wife’s mother or the daughter of a centurion.
There is another theory that concentrates entirely on the business of
diabolism and what it would call the contemporary superstition about
demoniacs; as if Christ, like a young deacon taking his first orders,
had got as far as exorcism and never got any further. Now each of these
explanations in itself seems to me singularly inadequate; but taken
together they do suggest something of the very mystery which they miss.
There must surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided
about Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him. If the
Christian Scientist is satisfied with him as a spiritual healer and the
Christian Socialist is satisfied with him as a social reformer, so
satisfied that they do not even expect him to be anything else, it looks
as if he really covered rather more ground than they could be expected
to expect. And it does seem to suggest that there might be more than
they fancy in these other mysterious attributes of casting out devils or
prophesying doom.
Above all, would not such a new reader of the New Testament stumble over
something that would startle him much more than it startles us? I have
here more than once attempted the rather impossible task of reversing
time and the historic method; and in fancy looking forward to the facts,
instead of backward through the memories. So I have imagined the monster
that man might have seemed at first to the mere nature around him. We
should have a worse shock if we really imagined the nature of Christ
named for the first time. What should we feel at the first whisper of a
certain suggestion about a certain man? Certainly it is not for us to
blame anybody who should find that first wild whisper merely impious and
insane. On the contrary, stumbling on that rock of scandal is the first
step. Stark staring incredulity is a far more loyal tribute to that
truth than a modernist metaphysic that would make it out merely a matter
of degree. It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against
blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgment, or to lay hold of the man as a
maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than
to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of
so catastrophic a claim. There is more of the wisdom that is one with
surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity,
who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop dead out of
the air, when a strolling carpenter’s apprentice said calmly and almost
carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: ‘Before Abraham was, I
am.’
CHAPTER III
THE STRANGEST STORY IN THE WORLD
In the last chapter I have deliberately stressed what seems to be
nowadays a neglected side of the New Testament story, but nobody will
suppose, I imagine, that it is meant to obscure that side that may truly
be called human. That Christ was and is the most merciful of judges and
the most sympathetic of friends is a fact of considerably more
importance in our own private lives than in anybody’s historical
speculations. But the purpose of this book is to point out that
something unique has been swamped in cheap generalisations; and for that
purpose it is relevant to insist that even what was most universal was
also most original. For instance, we might take a topic which really is
sympathetic to the modern mood, as the ascetic vocations recently
referred to are not. The exaltation of childhood is something which we
do really understand; but it was by no means a thing that was then in
that sense understood. If we wanted an example of the originality of the
Gospel, we could hardly take a stronger or more startling one. Nearly
two thousand years afterwards we happen to find ourselves in a mood that
does really feel the mystical charm of the child; we express it in
romances and regrets about childhood, in _Peter Pan_ or _The Child’s
Garden of Verses_. And we can say of the words of Christ with so angry
an anti-Christian as Swinburne:--
‘No sign that ever was given
To faithful or faithless eyes
Showed ever beyond clouds riven
So clear a paradise.
Earth’s creeds may be seventy times seven
And blood have defiled each creed,
But if such be the kingdom of heaven
It must be heaven indeed.’
But that paradise was not clear until Christianity had gradually cleared
it. The pagan world, as such, would not have understood any such thing
as a serious suggestion that a child is higher or holier than a man. It
would have seemed like the suggestion that a tadpole is higher or holier
than a frog. To the merely rationalistic mind, it would sound like
saying that a bud must be more beautiful than a flower or that an unripe
apple must be better than a ripe one. In other words, this modern
feeling is an entirely mystical feeling. It is quite as mystical as the
cult of virginity; in fact it is the cult of virginity. But pagan
antiquity had much more idea of the holiness of the virgin than of the
holiness of the child. For various reasons we have come nowadays to
venerate children; perhaps partly because we envy children for still
doing what men used to do; such as play simple games and enjoy
fairy-tales. Over and above this, however, there is a great deal of real
and subtle psychology in our appreciation of childhood; but if we turn
it into a modern discovery, we must once more admit that the historical
Jesus of Nazareth had already discovered it two thousand years too soon.
There was certainly nothing in the world around him to help him to the
discovery. Here Christ was indeed human; but more human than a human
being was then likely to be. Peter Pan does not belong to the world of
Pan but the world of Peter.
Even in the matter of mere literary style, if we suppose ourselves thus
sufficiently detached to look at it in that light, there is a curious
quality to which no critic seems to have done justice. It had among
other things a singular air of piling tower upon tower by the use of the
_a fortiori_; making a pagoda of degrees like the seven heavens. I have
already noted that almost inverted imaginative vision which pictured
the impossible penance of the Cities of the Plain. There is perhaps
nothing so perfect in all language or literature as the use of these
three degrees in the parable of the lilies of the field; in which he
seems first to take one small flower in his hand and note its simplicity
and even its impotence; then suddenly expands it in flamboyant colours
into all the palaces and pavilions full of a great name in national
legend and national glory; and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels
it to nothing once more with a gesture as if flinging it away ’... and
if God so clothes the grass that to-day is and to-morrow is cast into
the oven--how much more....’ It is like the building of a good Babel
tower by white magic in a moment and in the movement of a hand; a tower
heaved suddenly up to heaven on the top of which can be seen afar off,
higher than we had fancied possible, the figure of man; lifted by three
infinities above all other things, on a starry ladder of light logic and
swift imagination. Merely in a literary sense it would be more of a
masterpiece than most of the masterpieces in the libraries; yet it seems
to have been uttered almost at random while a man might pull a flower.
But merely in a literary sense also, this use of the comparative in
several degrees has about it a quality which seems to me to hint of much
higher things than the modern suggestion of the simple teaching of
pastoral or communal ethics. There is nothing that really indicates a
subtle and in the true sense a superior mind so much as this power of
comparing a lower thing with a higher and yet that higher with a higher
still; of thinking on three planes at once. There is nothing that wants
the rarest sort of wisdom so much as to see, let us say, that the
citizen is higher than the slave and yet that the soul is infinitely
higher than the citizen or the city. It is not by any means a faculty
that commonly belongs to these simplifiers of the Gospel; those who
insist on what they call a simple morality and others call a sentimental
morality. It is not at all covered by those who are content to tell
everybody to remain at peace. On the contrary, there is a very striking
example of it in the apparent inconsistency between Christ’s sayings
about peace and about a sword. It is precisely this power which
perceives that while a good peace is better than a good war, even a good
war is better than a bad peace. These far-flung comparisons are nowhere
so common as in the Gospels; and to me they suggest something very vast.
So a thing solitary and solid, with the added dimension of depth or
height, might tower over the flat creatures living only on a plane.
This quality of something that can only be called subtle and superior,
something that is capable of long views and even of double meanings, is
not noted here merely as a counterblast to the commonplace exaggerations
of amiability and mild idealism. It is also to be noted in connection
with the more tremendous truth touched upon at the end of the last
chapter. For this is the very last character that commonly goes with
mere megalomania; especially such steep and staggering megalomania as
might be involved in that claim. This quality that can only be called
intellectual distinction is not, of course, an evidence of divinity. But
it is an evidence of a probable distaste for vulgar and vainglorious
claims to divinity. A man of that sort, if he were only a man, would be
the last man in the world to suffer from that intoxication by one notion
from nowhere in particular, which is the mark of the self-deluding
sensationalist in religion. Nor is it even avoided by denying that
Christ did make this claim. Of no such man as that, of no other prophet
or philosopher of the same intellectual order, would it be even possible
to pretend that he had made it. Even if the Church had mistaken his
meaning, it would still be true that no other historical tradition
except the Church had ever even made the same mistake. Mahomedans did
not misunderstand Mahomet and suppose he was Allah. Jews did not
misinterpret Moses and identify him with Jehovah. Why was this claim
alone exaggerated unless this alone was made? Even if Christianity was
one vast universal blunder, it is still a blunder as solitary as the
Incarnation.
The purpose of these pages is to fix the falsity of certain vague and
vulgar assumptions; and we have here one of the most false. There is a
sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal
because all the religious founders were rivals; that they are all
fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The claim to that
crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique.
Mahomet did not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did
not make it any more than Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he
was Bramah. Zoroaster no more claimed to be Ormuz than to be Ahriman.
The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just as we should
expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy.
It is exactly the other way. Normally speaking, the greater a man is,
the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim. Outside the
unique case we are considering, the only kind of man who ever does make
that kind of claim is a very small man; a secretive or self-centred
monomaniac. Nobody can imagine Aristotle claiming to be the father of
gods and men, come down from the sky; though we might imagine some
insane Roman Emperor like Caligula claiming it for him, or more probably
for himself. Nobody can imagine Shakespeare talking as if he were
literally divine; though we might imagine some crazy American crank
finding it as a cryptogram in Shakespeare’s works, or preferably in his
own works. It is possible to find here and there human beings who make
this supremely superhuman claim. It is possible to find them in lunatic
asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait waistcoats. But what is
much more important than their mere materialistic fate in our very
materialistic society, under very crude and clumsy laws about lunacy,
the type we know as tinged with this, or tending towards it, is a
diseased and disproportionate type; narrow yet swollen and morbid to
monstrosity. It is by rather an unlucky metaphor that we talk of a
madman as cracked; for in a sense he is not cracked enough. He is
cramped rather than cracked; there are not enough holes in his head to
ventilate it. This impossibility of letting in daylight on a delusion
does sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity. It can be
found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only
among a low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument
becomes intensely interesting; because the argument proves too much. For
nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was _that_ sort of person. No
modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on
the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling
stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the
author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad
idea like a cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical criticism
he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that. Yet by all
analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of
all.
In fact, those who can really take it (as I here hypothetically take it)
in a quite dry and detached spirit, have here a most curious and
interesting human problem. It is so intensely interesting, considered as
a human problem, that it is in a spirit quite disinterested, so to
speak, that I wish some of them had turned that intricate human problem
into something like an intelligible human portrait. If Christ was simply
a human character, he really was a highly complex and contradictory
human character. For he combined exactly the two things that lie at the
two extremes of human variation. He was exactly what the man with a
delusion never is: he was wise; he was a good judge. What he said was
always unexpected; but it was always unexpectedly magnanimous and often
unexpectedly moderate. Take a thing like the point of the parable of the
tares and the wheat. It has the quality that unites sanity and subtlety.
It has not the simplicity of a madman. It has not even the simplicity of
a fanatic. It might be uttered by a philosopher a hundred years old, at
the end of a century of Utopias. Nothing could be less like this quality
of seeing beyond and all round obvious things, than the condition of the
egomaniac with the one sensitive spot on his brain. I really do not see
how these two characters could be convincingly combined, except in the
astonishing way in which the creed combines them. For until we reach the
full acceptance of the fact as a fact, however marvellous, all mere
approximations to it are actually further and further away from it.
Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself
divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to
do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not
God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox;
everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding
from it. Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A
lunatic may think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were
omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only
knows, but knows that he knows.
Even on the purely human and sympathetic side, therefore, the Jesus of
the New Testament seems to me to have in a great many ways the note of
something superhuman; that is, of something human and more than human.
But there is another quality running through all his teachings which
seems to me neglected in most modern talk about them as teachings; and
that is the persistent suggestion that he has not really come to teach.
If there is one incident in the record which affects me personally as
grandly and gloriously human, it is the incident of giving wine for the
wedding-feast. That is really human in the sense in which a whole crowd
of prigs, having the appearance of human beings, can hardly be described
as human. It rises superior to all superior persons. It is as human as
Herrick and as democratic as Dickens. But even in that story there is
something else that has that note of things not fully explained; and in
a way here very relevant. I mean the first hesitation, not on any ground
touching the nature of the miracle, but on that of the propriety of
working any miracles at all, at least at that stage; ‘My time is not yet
come.’ What did that mean? At least it certainly meant a general plan or
purpose in the mind, with which certain things did or did not fit in.
And if we leave out that solitary strategic plan, we not only leave out
the point of the story, but the story.
We often hear of Jesus of Nazareth as a wandering teacher; and there is
a vital truth in that view in so far as it emphasises an attitude
towards luxury and convention which most respectable people would still
regard as that of a vagabond. It is expressed in his own great saying
about the holes of the foxes and the nests of the birds, and, like many
of his great sayings, it is felt as less powerful than it is, through
lack of appreciation of that great paradox by which he spoke of his own
humanity as in some way collectively and representatively human; calling
himself simply the Son of Man; that is, in effect, calling himself
simply Man. It is fitting that the New Man or the Second Adam should
repeat in so ringing a voice and with so arresting a gesture the great
fact which came first in the original story: that man differs from the
brutes by everything, even by deficiency; that he is in a sense less
normal and even less native; a stranger upon the earth. It is well to
speak of his wanderings in this sense and in the sense that he shared
the drifting life of the most homeless and hopeless of the poor. It is
assuredly well to remember that he would quite certainly have been moved
on by the police, and almost certainly arrested by the police, for
having no visible means of subsistence. For our law has in it a turn of
humour or touch of fancy which Nero and Herod never happened to think
of; that of actually punishing homeless people for not sleeping at home.
But in another sense the word ‘wandering’ as applied to his life is a
little misleading. As a matter of fact, a great many of the pagan sages
and not a few of the pagan sophists might truly be described as
wandering teachers. In some of them their rambling journeys were not
altogether without a parallel in their rambling remarks. Apollonius of
Tyana, who figured in some fashionable cults as a sort of ideal
philosopher, is represented as rambling as far as the Ganges and
Ethiopia, more or less talking all the time. There was actually a school
of philosophers called the Peripatetics; and most even of the great
philosophers give us a vague impression of having very little to do
except to walk and talk. The great conversations which give us our
glimpses of the great minds of Socrates or Buddha or even Confucius
often seem to be parts of a never-ending picnic; and especially, which
is the important point, to have neither beginning nor end. Socrates did
indeed find the conversation interrupted by the incident of his
execution. But it is the whole point, and the whole particular merit, of
the position of Socrates that death was only an interruption and an
incident. We miss the real moral importance of the great philosopher if
we miss that point; that he stares at the executioner with an innocent
surprise, and almost an innocent annoyance, at finding any one so
unreasonable as to cut short a little conversation for the elucidation
of truth. He is looking for truth and not looking for death. Death is
but a stone in the road which can trip him up. His work in life is to
wander on the roads of the world and talk about truth for ever. Buddha,
on the other hand, did arrest attention by one gesture; it was the
gesture of renunciation, and therefore in a sense of denial. But by one
dramatic negation he passed into a world of negation that was not
dramatic; which he would have been the first to insist was not dramatic.
Here again we miss the particular moral importance of the great mystic
if we do not see the distinction; that it was his whole point that he
had done with drama, which consists of desire and struggle and generally
of defeat and disappointment. He passes into peace and lives to instruct
others how to pass into it. Henceforth his life is that of the ideal
philosopher; certainly a far more really ideal philosopher than
Apollonius of Tyana; but still a philosopher in the sense that it is not
his business to do anything but rather to explain everything; in his
case, we might almost say, mildly and softly to explode everything. For
the messages are basically different. Christ said ‘Seek first the
kingdom, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ Buddha said
‘Seek first the kingdom, and then you will need none of these things.’
Now, compared to these wanderers the life of Jesus went as swift and
straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did
above all things consist in doing something that had to be done. It
emphatically would not have been done if Jesus had walked about the
world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth. And even the
external movement of it must not be described as a wandering in the
sense of forgetting that it was a journey. This is where it was a
fulfilment of the myths rather than of the philosophies; it is a
journey with a goal and an object, like Jason going to find the Golden
Fleece, or Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides. The gold that
he was seeking was death. The primary thing that he was going to do was
to die. He was going to do other things equally definite and objective;
we might almost say equally external and material. But from first to
last the most definite fact is that he is going to die. No two things
could possibly be more different than the death of Socrates and the
death of Christ. We are meant to feel that the death of Socrates was,
from the point of view of his friends at least, a stupid muddle and
miscarriage of justice interfering with the flow of a humane and lucid,
I had almost said a light philosophy. We are meant to feel that Death
was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are
meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with
death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice. From the
moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the moment when
the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on
wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond
words.
Therefore the story of Christ is the story of a journey, almost in the
manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a
hero moving to his achievement or his doom. It is a story that begins in
the paradise of Galilee, a pastoral and peaceful land having really some
hint of Eden, and gradually climbs the rising country into the mountains
that are nearer to the storm-clouds and the stars, as to a Mountain of
Purgatory. He may be met as if straying in strange places, or stopped on
the way for discussion or dispute; but his face is set towards the
mountain city. That is the meaning of that great culmination when he
crested the ridge and stood at the turning of the road and suddenly
cried aloud, lamenting over Jerusalem. Some light touch of that lament
is in every patriotic poem; or if it is absent, the patriotism stinks
with vulgarity. That is the meaning of the stirring and startling
incident at the gates of the Temple, when the tables were hurled like
lumber down the steps, and the rich merchants driven forth with bodily
blows; the incident that must be at least as much of a puzzle to the
pacifists as any paradox about non-resistance can be to any of the
militarists. I have compared the quest to the journey of Jason, but we
must never forget that in a deeper sense it is rather to be compared to
the journey of Ulysses. It was not only a romance of travel but a
romance of return; and of the end of a usurpation. No healthy boy
reading the story regards the rout of the Ithacan suitors as anything
but a happy ending. But there are doubtless some who regard the rout of
the Jewish merchants and moneychangers with that refined repugnance
which never fails to move them in the presence of violence, and
especially of violence against the well-to-do. The point here, however,
is that all these incidents have in them a character of mounting crisis.
In other words, these incidents are not incidental. When Apollonius the
ideal philosopher is brought before the judgment-seat of Domitian and
vanishes by magic, the miracle is entirely incidental. It might have
occurred at any time in the wandering life of the Tyanean; indeed, I
believe it is doubtful in date as well as in substance. The ideal
philosopher merely vanished, and resumed his ideal existence somewhere
else for an indefinite period. It is characteristic of the contrast
perhaps that Apollonius was supposed to have lived to an almost
miraculous old age. Jesus of Nazareth was less prudent in his miracles.
When Jesus was brought before the judgment-seat of Pontius Pilate, he
did not vanish. It was the crisis and the goal; it was the hour and the
power of darkness. It was the supremely supernatural act, of all his
miraculous life, that he did not vanish.
Every attempt to amplify that story has diminished it. The task has been
attempted by many men of real genius and eloquence as well as by only
too many vulgar sentimentalists and self-conscious rhetoricians. The
tale has been retold with patronising pathos by elegant sceptics and
with fluent enthusiasm by boisterous best-sellers. It will not be retold
here. The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is like
the power of mill-stones; and those who can read them simply enough will
feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them. Criticism is only words
about words; and of what use are words about such words as these? What
is the use of word-painting about the dark garden filled suddenly with
torchlight and furious faces? ‘Are you come out with swords and staves
as against a robber? All day I sat in your temple teaching, and you took
me not.’ Can anything be added to the massive and gathered restraint of
that irony; like a great wave lifted to the sky and refusing to fall?
‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and
for your children.’ As the High Priest asked what further need he had of
witnesses, we might well ask what further need we have of words. Peter
in a panic repudiated him: ‘and immediately the cock crew; and Jesus
looked upon Peter, and Peter went out and wept bitterly.’ Has any one
any further remarks to offer? Just before the murder he prayed for all
the murderous race of men, saying, ‘They know not what they do’; is
there anything to say to that, except that we know as little what we
say? Is there any need to repeat and spin out the story of how the
tragedy trailed up the Via Dolorosa and how they threw him in haphazard
with two thieves in one of the ordinary batches of execution; and how in
all that horror and howling wilderness of desertion one voice spoke in
homage, a startling voice from the very last place where it was looked
for, the gibbet of the criminal; and he said to that nameless ruffian,
‘This night shalt thou be with me in Paradise’? Is there anything to put
after that but a full-stop? Or is any one prepared to answer adequately
that farewell gesture to all flesh which created for his Mother a new
Son?
It is more within my powers, and here more immediately to my purpose, to
point out that in that scene were symbolically gathered all the human
forces that have been vaguely sketched in this story. As kings and
philosophers and the popular element had been symbolically present at
his birth, so they were more practically concerned in his death; and
with that we come face to face with the essential fact to be realised.
All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or
another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not
save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and
everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract.
Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is
always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to
understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than
once: that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was
emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness, and
the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.
In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are
at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It
was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of
an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen
Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which
was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended
the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa
and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning
flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going
downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the
confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to
say what is justice can only ask, ‘What is truth?’ So in that drama
which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is
fixed in what seems the reverse of his true rôle. Rome was almost
another name for responsibility. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of
rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the
practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of
his own judgment-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.
There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was
behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the
most important truth in the world; and even that could not save the
world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism;
like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring
face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some
intermediaries, divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far
away. Anyhow it could not save the world; it could not even convert the
world. There were philosophers who held it in its highest and noblest
form; but they not only could not convert the world, but they never
tried. You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a
private opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket-knife.
The Jewish priests had guarded it jealously in the good and the bad
sense. They had kept it as a gigantic secret. As savage heroes might
have kept the sun in a box, they kept the Everlasting in the tabernacle.
They were proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a
single deity; and they did not know that they had themselves gone blind.
Since that day their representatives have been like blind men in broad
daylight, striking to right and left with their staffs, and cursing the
darkness. But there has been that in their monumental monotheism that it
has at least remained like a monument, the last thing of its kind, and
in a sense motionless in the more restless world which it cannot
satisfy. For it is certain that for some reason it cannot satisfy. Since
that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is in his heaven
and all is right with the world; since the rumour that God had left his
heavens to set it right.
And as it was with these powers that were good, or at least had once
been good, so it was with the element which was perhaps the best, or
which Christ himself seems certainly to have felt as the best. The poor
to whom he preached the good news, the common people who heard him
gladly, the populace that had made so many popular heroes and demigods
in the old pagan world, showed also the weaknesses that were dissolving
the world. They suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city,
and especially the mob of the capital, during the decline of a society.
The same thing that makes the rural population live on tradition makes
the urban population live on rumour. Just as its myths at the best had
been irrational, so its likes and dislikes are easily changed by
baseless assertion that is arbitrary without being authoritative. Some
brigand or other was artificially turned into a picturesque and popular
figure and run as a kind of candidate against Christ. In all this we
recognise the urban population that we know, with its newspaper scares
and scoops. But there was present in this ancient population an evil
more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the
neglect of the individual, even of the individual voting the
condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was the soul
of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in
that hour, ‘It is well that one man die for the people.’ Yet this spirit
in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had also been in
itself and in its time a noble spirit. It had its poets and its
martyrs; men still to be honoured for ever. It was failing through its
weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all
mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The
mob went along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers
and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the
sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal
human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be
one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected
of men.
There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets
in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in
speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any
words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative
even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the
hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the
beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may
surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven
out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully
unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity
they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss
that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the
absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.
They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among
the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in
his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be
some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a natural
symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb should
be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture and guarded
by the authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole of
that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up
and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a
very great thing called human history; the history that was merely
human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods
and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived.
But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place
found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they
realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world
had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a
new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of
the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the
evening but the dawn.
CHAPTER IV
THE WITNESS OF THE HERETICS
Christ founded the Church with two great figures of speech; in the final
words to the Apostles who received authority to found it. The first was
the phrase about founding it on Peter as on a rock; the second was the
symbol of the keys. About the meaning of the former there is naturally
no doubt in my own case; but it does not directly affect the argument
here save in two more secondary aspects. It is yet another example of a
thing that could only fully expand and explain itself afterwards, and
even long afterwards. And it is yet another example of something the
very reverse of simple and self-evident even in the language, in so far
as it described a man as a rock when he had much more the appearance of
a reed.
But the other image of the keys has an exactitude that has hardly been
exactly noticed. The keys have been conspicuous enough in the art and
heraldry of Christendom; but not every one has noted the peculiar
aptness of the allegory. We have now reached the point in history where
something must be said of the first appearance and activities of the
Church in the Roman Empire; and for that brief description nothing could
be more perfect than that ancient metaphor. The Early Christian was very
precisely a person carrying about a key, or what he said was a key. The
whole Christian movement consisted in claiming to possess that key. It
was not merely a vague forward movement, which might be better
represented by a battering-ram. It was not something that swept along
with it similar and dissimilar things, as does a modern social movement.
As we shall see in a moment, it rather definitely refused to do so. It
definitely asserted that there was a key and that it possessed that key
and that no other key was like it; in that sense it was as narrow as you
please. Only it happened to be the key that could unlock the prison of
the whole world; and let in the white daylight of escape.
The creed was like a key in three respects; which can be most
conveniently summed up under this symbol. First, a key is above all
things a thing with a shape. It is a thing that depends entirely upon
keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the
philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness. That is where it
differs from all that formless infinity, Manichean or Buddhist, which
makes a sort of pool of night in the dark heart of Asia; the ideal of
uncreating all the creatures. That is where it differs also from the
analogous vagueness of mere evolutionism; the idea of creatures
constantly losing their shape. A man told that his solitary latchkey had
been melted down with a million others into a Buddhistic unity would be
annoyed. But a man told that his key was gradually growing and sprouting
in his pocket, and branching into new wards or complications, would not
be more gratified.
Second, the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape. A
savage who did not know it was a key would have the greatest difficulty
in guessing what it could possibly be. And it is fantastic because it is
in a sense arbitrary. A key is not a matter of abstractions; in that
sense a key is not a matter of argument. It either fits the lock or it
does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered
by itself; or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or
decorative art. It is senseless for a man to say he would like a simpler
key; it would be far more sensible to do his best with a crowbar. And
thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so this was
one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. When people complain
of the religion being so early complicated with theology and things of
the kind, they forget that the world had not only got into a hole, but
had got into a whole maze of holes and corners. The problem itself was a
complicated problem; it did not in the ordinary sense merely involve
anything so simple as sin. It was also full of secrets, of unexplored
and unfathomable fallacies, of unconscious mental diseases, of dangers
in all directions. If the faith had faced the world only with the
platitudes about peace and simplicity some moralists would confine it
to, it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious and
labyrinthine lunatic asylum. What it did do we must now roughly
describe; it is enough to say here that there was undoubtedly much about
the key that seemed complex; indeed there was only one thing about it
that was simple. It opened the door.
There are certain recognised and accepted statements in this matter
which may for brevity and convenience be described as lies. We have all
heard people say that Christianity arose in an age of barbarism. They
might just as well say that Christian Science arose in an age of
barbarism. They may think Christianity was a symptom of social decay, as
I think Christian Science a symptom of mental decay. They may think
Christianity a superstition that ultimately destroyed a civilisation, as
I think Christian Science a superstition capable (if taken seriously) of
destroying any number of civilisations. But to say that a Christian of
the fourth or fifth centuries was a barbarian living in a barbarous time
is exactly like saying that Mrs. Eddy was a Red Indian. And if I allowed
my constitutional impatience with Mrs. Eddy to impel me to call her a
Red Indian, I should incidentally be telling a lie. We may like or
dislike the imperial civilisation of Rome in the fourth century; we may
like or dislike the industrial civilisation of America in the nineteenth
century; but that they both were what we commonly mean by a civilisation
no person of common sense could deny if he wanted to. This is a very
obvious fact, but it is also a very fundamental one; and we must make it
the foundation of any further description of constructive Christianity
in the past. For good or evil, it was pre-eminently the product of a
civilised age, perhaps of an over-civilised age. This is the first fact
apart from all praise or blame; indeed I am so unfortunate as not to
feel that I praise a thing when I compare it to Christian Science. But
it is at least desirable to know something of the savour of a society in
which we are condemning or praising anything; and the science that
connects Mrs. Eddy with tomahawks or the Mater Dolorosa with totems may
for our general convenience be eliminated. The dominant fact, not merely
about the Christian religion, but about the whole pagan civilisation,
was that which has been more than once repeated in these pages. The
Mediterranean was a lake in the real sense of a pool; in which a number
of different cults or cultures were, as the phrase goes, pooled. Those
cities facing each other round the circle of the lake became more and
more one cosmopolitan culture. On its legal and military side it was the
Roman Empire; but it was very many-sided. It might be called
superstitious in the sense that it contained a great number of varied
superstitions; but by no possibility can any part of it be called
barbarous.
In this level of cosmopolitan culture arose the Christian religion and
the Catholic Church; and everything in the story suggests that it was
felt to be something new and strange. Those who have tried to suggest
that it evolved out of something much milder or more ordinary have found
that in this case their evolutionary method is very difficult to apply.
They may suggest that Essenes or Ebionites or such things were the
seed; but the seed is invisible; the tree appears very rapidly
full-grown; and the tree is something totally different. It is certainly
a Christmas tree in the sense that it keeps the kindliness and moral
beauty of the story of Bethlehem; but it was as ritualistic as the
seven-branched candlestick, and the candles it carried were considerably
more than were probably permitted by the first prayer-book of Edward the
Sixth. It might well be asked, indeed, why any one accepting the
Bethlehem tradition should object to golden or gilded ornament since the
Magi themselves brought gold; why he should dislike incense in the
church since incense was brought even to the stable. But these are
controversies that do not concern me here. I am concerned only with the
historical fact, more and more admitted by historians, that very early
in its history this thing became visible to the civilisation of
antiquity; and that already the Church appeared as a Church; with
everything that is implied in a Church and much that is disliked in a
Church. We will discuss in a moment how far it was like other
ritualistic or magical or ascetical mysteries in its own time. It was
certainly not in the least like merely ethical and idealistic movements
in our time. It had a doctrine; it had a discipline; it had sacraments;
it had degrees of initiation; it admitted people and expelled people; it
affirmed one dogma with authority and repudiated another with anathemas.
If all these things be the marks of Antichrist, the reign of Antichrist
followed very rapidly upon Christ.
Those who maintain that Christianity was not a Church but a moral
movement of idealists have been forced to push the period of its
perversion or disappearance further and further back. A bishop of Rome
writes claiming authority in the very lifetime of St. John the
Evangelist; and it is described as the first papal aggression. A friend
of the Apostles writes of them as men he knew, and says they taught him
the doctrine of the Sacrament; and Mr. Wells can only murmur that the
reaction towards barbaric blood-rites may have happened rather earlier
than might be expected. The date of the Fourth Gospel, which at one time
was steadily growing later and later, is now steadily growing earlier
and earlier; until critics are staggered at the dawning and dreadful
possibility that it might be something like what it professes to be. The
last limit of an early date for the extinction of true Christianity has
probably been found by the latest German professor whose authority is
invoked by Dean Inge. This learned scholar says that Pentecost was the
occasion for the first founding of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic and
despotic Church utterly alien to the simple ideals of Jesus of Nazareth.
This may be called, in a popular as well as a learned sense, the limit.
What do professors of this kind imagine that men are made of? Suppose it
were a matter of any merely human movement, let us say that of the
Conscientious Objectors. Some say the early Christians were Pacifists; I
do not believe it for a moment; but I am quite ready to accept the
parallel for the sake of the argument. Tolstoy or some great preacher of
peace among peasants has been shot as a mutineer for defying
conscription; and a month or so after his few followers meet together in
an upper room in remembrance of him. They never had any reason for
coming together except that common memory; they are men of many kinds
with nothing to bind them, except that the greatest event in all their
lives was this tragedy of the teacher of universal peace. They are
always repeating his words, revolving his problems, trying to imitate
his character. The Pacifists meet at their Pentecost and are possessed
of a sudden ecstasy of enthusiasm and wild rush of the whirlwind of
inspiration, in the course of which they proceed to establish universal
Conscription, to increase the Navy Estimates, to insist on everybody
going about armed to the teeth and on all the frontiers bristling with
artillery; the proceedings concluding with the singing of ‘Boys of the
Bulldog Breed’ and ‘Don’t let them scrap the British Navy.’ That is
something like a fair parallel to the theory of these critics; that the
transition from their idea of Jesus to their idea of Catholicism could
have been made in the little upper room at Pentecost. Surely anybody’s
common sense would tell him that enthusiasts, who only met through their
common enthusiasm for a leader whom they loved, would not instantly rush
away to establish everything that he hated. No, if the ‘ecclesiastical
and dogmatic system’ is as old as Pentecost it is as old as Christmas.
If we trace it back to such very early Christians we must trace it back
to Christ.
We may begin then with these two negations. It is nonsense to say that
the Christian faith appeared in a simple age; in the sense of an
unlettered and gullible age. It is equally nonsense to say that the
Christian faith was a simple thing; in the sense of a vague or childish
or merely instinctive thing. Perhaps the only point in which we could
possibly say that the Church fitted into the pagan world is the fact
that they were both not only highly civilised but rather complicated.
They were both emphatically many-sided; but antiquity was then a
many-sided hole, like a hexagonal hole waiting for an equally hexagonal
stopper. In that sense only the Church was many-sided enough to fit the
world. The six sides of the Mediterranean world faced each other across
the sea and waited for something that should look all ways at once. The
Church had to be both Roman and Greek and Jewish and African and
Asiatic. In the very words of the Apostle of the Gentiles, it was indeed
all things to all men. Christianity then was not merely crude and
simple, and was the very reverse of the growth of a barbaric time. But
when we come to the contrary charge, we come to a much more plausible
charge. It is very much more tenable that the Faith was but the final
phase of the decay of civilisation, in the sense of the excess of
civilisation; that this superstition was a sign that Rome was dying, and
dying of being much too civilised. That is an argument much better worth
considering; and we will proceed to consider it.
At the beginning of this book I ventured on a general summary of it, in
a parallel between the rise of humanity out of nature and the rise of
Christianity out of history. I pointed out that in both cases what had
gone before might imply something coming after; but did not in the least
imply what did come after. If a detached mind had seen certain apes it
might have deduced more anthropoids; it would not have deduced man or
anything within a thousand miles of what man has done. In short, it
might have seen Pithacanthropus or the Missing Link looming in the
future, if possible almost as dimly and doubtfully as we see him looming
in the past. But if it foresaw him appearing it would also foresee him
disappearing, and leaving a few faint traces just as he has left a few
faint traces; if they are traces. To foresee that Missing Link would not
be to foresee Man, or anything like Man. Now this earlier explanation
must be kept in mind; because it is an exact parallel to the true view
of the Church; and the suggestion of it having evolved naturally out of
the Empire in decay.
The truth is that in one sense a man might very well have predicted that
the imperial decadence would produce something like Christianity. That
is, something a little like and gigantically different. A man might very
well have said, for instance, ‘Pleasure has been pursued so
extravagantly that there will be a reaction into pessimism. Perhaps it
will take the form of asceticism; men will mutilate themselves instead
of merely hanging themselves.’ Or a man might very reasonably have said,
‘If we weary of our Greek and Latin gods we shall be hankering after
some eastern mystery or other; there will be a fashion in Persians or
Hindoos.’ Or a man of the world might well have been shrewd enough to
say, ‘Powerful people are picking up these fads; some day the court will
adopt one of them and it may become official.’ Or yet another and
gloomier prophet might be pardoned for saying, ‘The world is going
down-hill; dark and barbarous superstitions will return, it does not
matter much which. They will all be formless and fugitive like dreams of
the night.’
Now it is the intense interest of the case that all these prophecies
were really fulfilled; but it was not the Church that fulfilled them. It
was the Church that escaped from them, confounded them, and rose above
them in triumph. In so far as it was probable that the mere nature of
hedonism would produce a mere reaction of asceticism, it did produce a
mere reaction of asceticism. It was the movement called Manichean, and
the Church was its mortal enemy. In so far as it would have naturally
appeared at that point of history, it did appear; it did also disappear,
which was equally natural. The mere pessimist reaction did come with the
Manichees and did go with the Manichees. But the Church did not come
with them or go with them; and she had much more to do with their going
than with their coming. Or again, in so far as it was probable that even
the growth of scepticism would bring in a fashion of eastern religion,
it did bring it in; Mithras came from far beyond Palestine out of the
heart of Persia, bringing strange mysteries of the blood of bulls.
Certainly there was everything to show that some such fashion would have
come in any case. But certainly there is nothing in the world to show
that it would not have passed away in any case. Certainly an Oriental
fad was something eminently fitted to the fourth or fifth century; but
that hardly explains it having remained to the twentieth century, and
still going strong. In short, in so far as things of the kind might have
been expected then, things like Mithraism were experienced then; but it
scarcely explains our more recent experiences. And if we were still
Mithraists merely because Mithraic head-dresses and other Persian
apparatuses might be expected to be all the rage in the days of
Domitian, it would almost seem by this time that we must be a little
dowdy.
It is the same, as will be suggested in a moment, with the idea of
official favouritism. In so far as such favouritism shown towards a fad
was something that might have been looked for during the decline and
fall of the Roman Empire, it was something that did exist in that Empire
and did decline and fall with it. It throws no sort of light on the
thing that resolutely refused to decline and fall; that grew steadily
while the other was declining and falling; and which even at this moment
is going forward with fearless energy, when another aeon has completed
its cycle and another civilisation seems almost ready to fall or to
decline.
Now the curious fact is this; that the very heresies which the Early
Church is blamed for crushing testify to the unfairness for which she is
blamed. In so far as something deserved the blame, it was precisely the
things that she is blamed for blaming. In so far as something was merely
a superstition, she herself condemned that superstition. In so far as
something was a mere reaction into barbarism, she herself resisted it
because it was a reaction into barbarism. In so far as something was a
fad of the fading empire, that died and deserved to die, it was the
Church alone that killed it. The Church is reproached for being exactly
what the heresy was repressed for being. The explanations of the
evolutionary historians and higher critics do really explain why
Arianism and Gnosticism and Nestorianism were born--and also why they
died. They do not explain why the Church was born or why she has refused
to die. Above all, they do not explain why she should have made war on
the very evils she is supposed to share.
Let us take a few practical examples of the principle; the principle
that if there was anything that was really a superstition of the dying
empire, it did really die with the dying empire; and certainly was not
the same as the very thing that destroyed it. For this purpose we will
take in order two or three of the most ordinary explanations of
Christian origins among the modern critics of Christianity. Nothing is
more common, for instance, than to find such a modern critic writing
something like this: ‘Christianity was above all a movement of ascetics,
a rush into the desert, a refuge in the cloister, a renunciation of all
life and happiness; and this was a part of a gloomy and inhuman reaction
against nature itself, a hatred of the body, a horror of the material
universe, a sort of universal suicide of the senses and even of the
self. It came from an eastern fanaticism like that of the fakirs and was
ultimately founded on an eastern pessimism, which seems to feel
existence itself as an evil.’
Now the most extraordinary thing about this is that it is all quite
true; it is true in every detail except that it happens to be attributed
entirely to the wrong person. It is not true of the Church; but it is
true of the heretics condemned by the Church. It is as if one were to
write a most detailed analysis of the mistakes and misgovernment of the
ministers of George the Third, merely with the small inaccuracy that the
whole story was told about George Washington; or as if somebody made a
list of the crimes of the Bolshevists with no variation except that they
were all attributed to the Czar. The early Church was indeed very
ascetic, in connection with a totally different philosophy; but the
philosophy of a war on life and nature as such really did exist in the
world, if the critics only knew where to look for it.
What really happened was this. When the Faith first emerged into the
world, the very first thing that happened to it was that it was caught
in a sort of swarm of mystical and metaphysical sects, mostly out of the
East; like one lonely golden bee caught in a swarm of wasps. To the
ordinary onlooker, there did not seem to be much difference, or anything
beyond a general buzz; indeed in a sense there was not much difference,
so far as stinging and being stung were concerned. The difference was
that only one golden dot in all that whirring gold-dust had the power of
going forth to make hives for all humanity; to give the world honey and
wax or (as was so finely said in a context too easily forgotten) ‘the
two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.’ The wasps all died
that winter; and half the difficulty is that hardly any one knows
anything about them and most people do not know that they ever existed;
so that the whole story of that first phase of our religion is lost. Or,
to vary the metaphor, when this movement or some other movement pierced
the dyke between the east and west and brought more mystical ideas into
Europe, it brought with it a whole flood of other mystical ideas besides
its own, most of them ascetical and nearly all of them pessimistic. They
very nearly flooded and overwhelmed the purely Christian element. They
came mostly from that region that was a sort of dim borderland between
the eastern philosophies and the eastern mythologies, and which shared
with the wilder philosophers that curious craze for making fantastic
patterns of the cosmos in the shape of maps and genealogical trees.
Those that are supposed to derive from the mysterious Manes are called
Manichean; kindred cults are more generally known as Gnostic; they are
mostly of a labyrinthine complexity, but the point to insist on is the
pessimism; the fact that nearly all in one form or another regarded the
creation of the world as the work of an evil spirit. Some of them had
that Asiatic atmosphere that surrounds Buddhism; the suggestion that
life is a corruption of the purity of being. Some of them suggested a
purely spiritual order which had been betrayed by the coarse and clumsy
trick of making such toys as the sun and moon and stars. Anyhow all this
dark tide out of the metaphysical sea in the midst of Asia poured
through the dykes simultaneously with the creed of Christ; but it is the
whole point of the story that the two were not the same; that they
flowed like oil and water. That creed remained in the shape of a
miracle; a river still flowing through the sea. And the proof of the
miracle was practical once more; it was merely that while all that sea
was salt and bitter with the savour of death, of this one stream in the
midst of it a man could drink.
Now that purity was preserved by dogmatic definitions and exclusions. It
could not possibly have been preserved by anything else. If the Church
had not renounced the Manicheans it might have become merely Manichean.
If it had not renounced the Gnostics it might have become Gnostic. But
by the very fact that it did renounce them it proved that it was not
either Gnostic or Manichean. At any rate it proved that something was
not either Gnostic or Manichean; and what could it be that condemned
them, if it was not the original good news of the runners from Bethlehem
and the trumpet of the Resurrection? The early Church was ascetic, but
she proved that she was not pessimistic, simply by condemning the
pessimists. The creed declared that man was sinful, but it did not
declare that life was evil, and it proved it by damning those who did.
The condemnation of the early heretics is itself condemned as something
crabbed and narrow; but it was in truth the very proof that the Church
meant to be brotherly and broad. It proved that the primitive Catholics
were specially eager to explain that they did _not_ think man utterly
vile; that they did _not_ think life incurably miserable; that they did
_not_ think marriage a sin or procreation a tragedy. They were ascetic
because asceticism was the only possible purge of the sins of the world;
but in the very thunder of their anathemas they affirmed for ever that
their asceticism was not to be anti-human or anti-natural; that they did
wish to purge the world and not destroy it. And nothing else except
those anathemas could possibly have made it clear, amid a confusion
which still confuses them with their mortal enemies. Nothing else but
dogma could have resisted the riot of imaginative invention with which
the pessimists were waging their war against nature; with their Aeons
and their Demiurge, their strange Logos and their sinister Sophia. If
the Church had not insisted on theology, it would have melted into a mad
mythology of the mystics, yet further removed from reason or even from
rationalism; and, above all, yet further removed from life and from the
love of life. Remember that it would have been an inverted mythology,
one contradicting everything natural in paganism; a mythology in which
Pluto would be above Jupiter and Hades hang higher than Olympus; in
which Brahma and all that has the breath of life would be subject to
Siva, shining with the eye of death.
That the early Church was itself full of an ecstatic enthusiasm for
renunciation and virginity makes this distinction much more striking and
not less so. It makes all the more important the place where the dogma
drew the line. A man might crawl about on all fours like a beast because
he was an ascetic. He might stand night and day on the top of a pillar
and be adored for being an ascetic. But he could not say that the world
was a mistake or the marriage state a sin without being a heretic. What
was it that thus deliberately disengaged itself from eastern asceticism
by sharp definition and fierce refusal, if it was not something with an
individuality of its own; and one that was quite different? If the
Catholics are to be confused with the Gnostics, we can only say it was
not their fault if they are. And it is rather hard that the Catholics
should be blamed by the same critics for persecuting the heretics and
also for sympathising with the heresy.
The Church was not a Manichean movement, if only because it was not a
movement at all. It was not even merely an ascetical movement, because
it was not a movement at all. It would be nearer the truth to call it
the tamer of asceticism than the mere leader or loosener of it. It was a
thing having its own theory of asceticism, its own type of asceticism,
but most conspicuous at the moment as the moderator of other theories
and types. This is the only sense that can be made, for instance, of the
story of St. Augustine. As long as he was a mere man of the world, a
mere man drifting with his time, he actually was a Manichean. It really
was quite modern and fashionable to be a Manichean. But when he became a
Catholic, the people he instantly turned on and rent in pieces were the
Manicheans. The Catholic way of putting it is that he left off being a
pessimist to become an ascetic. But as the pessimists interpreted
asceticism, it might be said that he left off being an ascetic to become
a saint. The war upon life, the denial of nature, were exactly the
things he had already found in the heathen world outside the Church, and
had to renounce when he entered the Church. The very fact that St.
Augustine remains a somewhat sterner or sadder figure than St. Francis
or St. Teresa only accentuates the dilemma. Face to face with the
gravest or even grimmest of Catholics, we can still ask, ‘Why did
Catholicism make war on Manichees, if Catholicism was Manichean?’
Take another rationalistic explanation of the rise of Christendom. It is
common enough to find another critic saying, ‘Christianity did not
really rise at all; that is, it did not merely rise from below; it was
imposed from above. It is an example of the power of the executive,
especially in despotic states. The Empire was really an Empire; that is,
it was really ruled by the Emperor. One of the Emperors happened to
become a Christian. He might just as well have become a Mithraist or a
Jew or a Fire-Worshipper; it was common in the decline of the Empire for
eminent and educated people to adopt these eccentric eastern cults. But
when he adopted it, it became the official religion of the Roman Empire;
and when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it became
as strong, as universal, and as invincible as the Roman Empire. It has
only remained in the world as a relic of that Empire; or, as many have
put it, it is but the ghost of Caesar still hovering over Rome.’ This
also is a very ordinary line taken in the criticism of orthodoxy, to say
that it was only officialism that ever made it orthodoxy. And here again
we can call on the heretics to refute it.
The whole great history of the Arian heresy might have been invented to
explode this idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in
this connection; and the upshot of it is in that in so far as there ever
was a merely official religion, it actually died because it was a merely
official religion; and what destroyed it was the real religion. Arius
advanced a version of Christianity which moved, more or less vaguely, in
the direction of what we should call Unitarianism; though it was not the
same, for it gave to Christ a curious intermediary position between the
divine and human. The point is that it seemed to many more reasonable
and less fanatical; and among these were many of the educated class in a
sort of reaction against the first romance of conversion. Arians were a
sort of moderates and a sort of modernists. And it was felt that after
the first squabbles this was the final form of rationalised religion
into which civilisation might well settle down. It was accepted by Divus
Caesar himself and became the official orthodoxy; the generals and
military princes drawn from the new barbarian powers of the north, full
of the future, supported it strongly. But the sequel is still more
important. Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism to
complete agnosticism, so the greatest of the Arian emperors ultimately
shed the last and thinnest pretence of Christianity; he abandoned even
Arius and returned to Apollo. He was a Caesar of the Caesars; a soldier,
a scholar, a man of large ambitions and ideals; another of the
philosopher kings. It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose
again. The oracles began to speak like birds beginning to sing at dawn;
paganism was itself again; the gods returned. It seemed the end of that
strange interlude of an alien superstition. And indeed it was the end of
it, so far as there was a mere interlude of mere superstition. It was
the end of it, in so far as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion
of a generation. If there really was something that began with
Constantine, then it ended with Julian.
But there was something that did not end. There had arisen in that hour
of history, defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the
Church, Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at
issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this religious history,
and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put
it this way. If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal
have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of
barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian
question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if
there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of
pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is
the single sentence, ‘God is Love.’ Yet the two statements are almost
identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The
barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment.
For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things,
was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that
unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is
love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical
conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to
self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has
begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate
the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the moderns
really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the
Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity,
the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or
Christmas Day, never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in
the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was
emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God
of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the
agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child
against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was
fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and
intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our
hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be
not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.
That this purely Christian dogma actually for a second time rebelled
against the Empire, and actually for a second time refounded the Church
in spite of the Empire, is itself a proof that there was something
positive and personal working in the world, other than whatever official
faith the Empire chose to adopt. This power utterly destroyed the
official faith that the Empire did adopt. It went on its own way as it
is going on its own way still. There are any number of other examples in
which is repeated precisely the same process we have reviewed in the
case of the Manichean and the Arian. A few centuries afterwards, for
instance, the Church had to maintain the same Trinity, which is simply
the logical side of love, against another appearance of the isolated and
simplified deity in the religion of Islam. Yet there are some who cannot
see what the Crusaders were fighting for; and some even who talk as if
Christianity had never been anything but a form of what they call
Hebraism coming in with the decay of Hellenism. Those people must
certainly be very much puzzled by the war between the Crescent and the
Cross. If Christianity had never been anything but a simpler morality
sweeping away polytheism, there is no reason why Christendom should not
have been swept into Islam. The truth is that Islam itself was a
barbaric reaction against that very humane complexity that is really a
Christian character; that idea of balance in the deity, as of balance in
the family, that makes that creed a sort of sanity, and that sanity the
soul of civilisation. And that is why the Church is from the first a
thing holding its own position and point of view, quite apart from the
accidents and anarchies of its age. That is why it deals blows
impartially right and left, at the pessimism of the Manichean or the
optimism of the Pelagian. It was not a Manichean movement because it was
not a movement at all. It was not an official fashion because it was not
a fashion at all. It was something that could coincide with movements
and fashions, could control them and could survive them.
So might rise from their graves the great heresiarchs to confound their
comrades of to-day. There is nothing that the critics now affirm that we
cannot call on these great witnesses to deny. The modern critic will say
lightly enough that Christianity was but a reaction into asceticism and
anti-natural spirituality, a dance of fakirs furious against life and
love. But Manes the great mystic will answer them from his secret throne
and cry, ‘These Christians have no right to be called spiritual; these
Christians have no title to be called ascetics; they who compromised
with the curse of life and all the filth of the family. Through them the
earth is still foul with fruit and harvest and polluted with population.
Theirs was no movement against nature, or my children would have carried
it to triumph; but these fools renewed the world when I would have ended
it with a gesture.’ And another critic will write that the Church was
but the shadow of the Empire, the fad of a chance Emperor, and that it
remains in Europe only as the ghost of the power of Rome. And Arius the
deacon will answer out of the darkness of oblivion: ‘No, indeed, or the
world would have followed my more reasonable religion. For mine went
down before demagogues and men defying Caesar; and around my champion
was the purple cloak and mine was the glory of the eagles. It was not
for lack of these things that I failed.’ And yet a third modern will
maintain that the creed spread only as a sort of panic of hell-fire; men
everywhere attempting impossible things in fleeing from incredible
vengeance; a nightmare of imaginary remorse; and such an explanation
will satisfy many who see something dreadful in the doctrine of
orthodoxy. And then there will go up against it the terrible voice of
Tertullian, saying, ‘And why then was I cast out; and why did soft
hearts and heads decide against me when I proclaimed the perdition of
all sinners; and what was this power that thwarted me when I threatened
all backsliders with hell? For none ever went up that hard road so far
as I; and mine was the _Credo Quia Impossibile_.’ Then there is the
fourth suggestion that there was something of the Semitic secret society
in the whole matter; that it was a new invasion of the nomad spirit
shaking a kindlier and more comfortable paganism, its cities and its
household gods; whereby the jealous monotheistic races could after all
establish their jealous God. And Mahomet shall answer out of the
whirlwind, the red whirlwind of the desert, ‘Who ever served the
jealousy of God as I did or left him more lonely in the sky? Who ever
paid more honour to Moses and Abraham or won more victories over idols
and the images of paganism? And what was this thing that thrust me back
with the energy of a thing alive; whose fanaticism could drive me from
Sicily and tear up my deep roots out of the rock of Spain? What faith
was theirs who thronged in thousands of every class and country crying
out that my ruin was the will of God; and what hurled great Godfrey as
from a catapult over the wall of Jerusalem; and what brought great
Sobieski like a thunderbolt to the gates of Vienna? I think there was
more than you fancy in the religion that has so matched itself with
mine.’
Those who would suggest that the faith was a fanaticism are doomed to an
eternal perplexity. In their account it is bound to appear as fanatical
for nothing, and fanatical against everything. It is ascetical and at
war with ascetics, Roman and in revolt against Rome, monotheistic and
fighting furiously against monotheism; harsh in its condemnation of
harshness; a riddle not to be explained even as unreason. And what sort
of unreason is it that seems reasonable to millions of educated
Europeans through all the revolutions of some sixteen hundred years?
People are not amused with a puzzle or a paradox or a mere muddle in the
mind for all that time. I know of no explanation except that such a
thing is not unreason but reason; that if it is fanatical it is
fanatical for reason and fanatical against all the unreasonable things.
That is the only explanation I can find of a thing from the first so
detached and so confident, condemning things that looked so like itself,
refusing help from powers that seemed so essential to its existence,
sharing on its human side all the passions of the age, yet always at the
supreme moment suddenly rising superior to them, never saying exactly
what it was expected to say and never needing to unsay what it had said;
I can find no explanation except that, like Pallas from the brain of
Jove, it had indeed come forth out of the mind of God, mature and mighty
and armed for judgment and for war.
CHAPTER V
THE ESCAPE FROM PAGANISM
The modern missionary, with his palm-leaf hat and his umbrella, has
become rather a figure of fun. He is chaffed among men of the world for
the ease with which he can be eaten by cannibals and the narrow bigotry
which makes him regard the cannibal culture as lower than his own.
Perhaps the best part of the joke is that the men of the world do not
see that the joke is against themselves. It is rather ridiculous to ask
a man just about to be boiled in a pot and eaten, at a purely religious
feast, why he does not regard all religions as equally friendly and
fraternal. But there is a more subtle criticism uttered against the more
old-fashioned missionary; to the effect that he generalises too broadly
about the heathen and pays too little attention to the difference
between Mahomet and Mumbo-Jumbo. There was probably truth in this
complaint, especially in the past; but it is my main contention here
that the exaggeration is all the other way at present. It is the
temptation of the professors to treat mythologies too much as
theologies; as things thoroughly thought out and seriously held. It is
the temptation of the intellectuals to take much too seriously the fine
shades of various schools in the rather irresponsible metaphysics of
Asia. Above all, it is their temptation to miss the real truth implied
in the idea of Aquinas contra Gentiles or Athanasius contra mundum.
If the missionary says, in fact, that he is exceptional in being a
Christian, and that the rest of the races and religions can be
collectively classified as heathen, he is perfectly right. He may say
it in quite the wrong spirit, in which case he is spiritually wrong. But
in the cold light of philosophy and history, he is intellectually right.
He may not be right-minded, but he is right. He may not even have a
right to be right, but he is right. The outer world to which he brings
his creed really is something subject to certain generalisations
covering all its varieties, and is not merely a variety of similar
creeds. Perhaps it is in any case too much of a temptation to pride or
hypocrisy to call it heathenry. Perhaps it would be better simply to
call it humanity. But there are certain broad characteristics of what we
call humanity while it remains in what we call heathenry. They are not
necessarily bad characteristics; some of them are worthy of the respect
of Christendom; some of them have been absorbed and transfigured in the
substance of Christendom. But they existed before Christendom and they
still exist outside Christendom, as certainly as the sea existed before
a boat and all round a boat; and they have as strong and as universal
and as unmistakable a savour as the sea.
For instance, all real scholars who have studied the Greek and Roman
culture say one thing about it. They agree that in the ancient world
religion was one thing and philosophy quite another. There was very
little effort to rationalise and at the same time to realise a real
belief in the gods. There was very little pretence of any such real
belief among the philosophers. But neither had the passion or perhaps
the power to persecute the other, save in particular and peculiar cases;
and neither the philosopher in his school nor the priest in his temple
seems ever to have seriously contemplated his own concept as covering
the world. A priest sacrificing to Artemis in Calydon did not seem to
think that people would some day sacrifice to her instead of to Isis
beyond the sea; a sage following the vegetarian rule of the
Neo-Pythagoreans did not seem to think it would universally prevail and
exclude the methods of Epictetus or Epicurus. We may call this
liberality if we like; I am not dealing with an argument but describing
an atmosphere. All this, I say, is admitted by all scholars; but what
neither the learned nor the unlearned have fully realised, perhaps, is
that this description is really an exact description of all
non-Christian civilisation to-day; and especially of the great
civilisations of the East. Eastern paganism really is much more all of a
piece, just as ancient paganism was much more all of a piece, than the
modern critics admit. It is a many-coloured Persian carpet as the others
was a varied and tessellated Roman pavement; but the one real crack
right across that pavement came from the earthquake of the Crucifixion.