(1866.)
“These hereditary enemies of the Truth... have even had the
heart to degrade this first preacher of the Mountain, the purest
hero of Liberty; for, unable to deny that he was earth’s
greatest man, they have made of him heaven’s smallest
god.”—Heine: Reisébilder.
The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus, which, in whatever relation
regarded, is full of self-contradictions and absurdities, is, above all,
pernicious in its moral and spiritual results. Most myths have a certain
justification in their beauty, in their symbolism of high truth. This
one distorts the beauty, degrades the sublimity, stultifies the meaning
of the facts and the character wherein it has been founded, taking away
all true grandeur from Jesus, benumbing our love and reverence.
Jesus, as a man, commands my heart’s best homage. His words, as reported
by the Evangelists, are ever-flowing fountains of spiritual
refreshments; and I feel that he was in himself even far more wise and
good than he appears in the gospel. What disciple could be expected to
report perfectly the words of a teacher so mystically sublime? The
disciple intends and endeavors to report faithfully; but when he hears
words which to him are without sense, because they express some truth
whose sphere is beyond the reach of his vision, he makes sense of them
by some slight change—slight as to the letter, immense as to the spirit;
for the sense is a truth or truism of his own lower sphere. And when the
reports are not put into writing until many years after the words were
first uttered, the changes will be important even as to the letter; for
a narrative from a man’s mouth always alters year after year as much as
the man himself alters, for he continues grafting his own sense (which
may be deplorable nonsense) upon words which have been spoken. When we
find sentences of the purest beauty and wisdom in the records of a man’s
conversation, we may safely proportion the whole philosophical character
of the speaker to such sentences. They mark the altitude at which his
spirit loved to dwell. We are but completing the circle from the
clearest fragment-arc left. Sentences of wisdom less exalted, or of
apparent unwisdom, have perhaps been degraded by the reporter, or have
been relative to circumstances which we cannot now learn thoroughly.
Jesus as a man, whose words have been recorded by fallible men, is not
lowered in my esteem by such contradictions as I find between his
various speeches. Every proverb has its antagonist proverb, each being
true to a certain extent, or in certain relations. Could we conceive an
abstract intellect, we might conceive it dwelling continually in the
sphere of abstract and absolute truth; but no man, however wise, dwells
continually in this sphere. As a man living in the world, his intellect
no less than his body lives in the relative and the conditioned, and
naturally reflects the character of this sphere. The wise man finds
himself surrounded and obstructed by certain concrete errors, and he
attacks these errors with relative truths. Were the errors of another
sort, the truths commonly in his mouth would be of another sort too.
Many wise men of different ages and countries are pitted against each
other as if their doctrines were fundamentally antagonistic, while, in
truth, their doctrines are essentially in unison, and either would have
spoken or written much the same as the other had he lived in the same
circumstances. For a wise man only attacks the errors that are in his
way; things which he never meets he can scarcely think of as
obstructions. Hannibal, whose business it is to get into Italy from
Gaul, sets about blasting the Alps. Stephenson, whose business it is to
get from Manchester to Liverpool, sets about filling up Chat Moss. The
same man, who muffles himself in as many furs as he can get in
Greenland, will strip himself to a linen robe in Jamaica. Luther said
that the human mind is like a drunken peasant on horseback: he is
rolling off on the right, you push him up, he then rolls over on the
left. Exactly so; and because one sage, seeing him roll down to the
right, has pushed him up on the right, while another sage, seeing him
roll down to the left, has pushed him up on the left, are the two sages
to be accounted antagonists? Now as a wise man in the course of his
existence meets errors of many sorts, some of a quite opposite tendency
to others, and as he proves his wisdom by applying to each error its
relative or pertinent truth, the rule is almost rigidly exact: that the
wiser the man the more of apparent contradictions can be found in his
writings or conversation treating of actual life.
But deity is beyond the sphere of the relative and conditioned. When
deity speaks and deity reports the speeches, all should be absolute
truth transparently self-consistent, else what advantage or gain have we
by the substitution of God for Man? Why bring in God to utter and record
what could have been as well uttered and recorded by man?
Everything for which we love and venerate the man Jesus becomes a bitter
and absurd mockery when attributed to the Lord Christ. The full heart is
praising the man; you turn him into God, a ruinous salvo is added to the
praise.
He went about doing good: if God, why did he not do all good at once? He
cured many sick: if God, why did he not give the whole world health? He
associated with publicans and sinners: if God, why did he make publicans
and sinners at all? He preached the kingdom of heaven: if God, why did
he not bring the kingdom with him and make all mankind fit for it? He
loved the poor, he taught the ignorant: if God, why did he let any
remain poor and ignorant? He rebuked the Pharisees and Sadducees: it
God, why did he not wholly purify them from formalism, hypocrisy, and
unbelief? He died for love of mankind: if God, why did he not restore
mankind to himself without dying? and what great thing was it to seem to
die for three days? He sent apostles to preach salvation to all men: if
God, why did he not reveal it at once to all men, and so reveal it that
doubt had been impossible? He lived an example of holiness to us all: if
God, how can our humanity imitate Deity? And finally, a question
trampling down every assertion in his favor: why did he ever let the
world get evil?
One is ashamed of repeating these things for the ten-thousandth time,
but they will have to be repeated occasionally, so long as a vast
ecclesiastical system continues to rest on the foundations of the
absurdities they oppugn. And while one is grinding such chaff in the
theological mill, he may as well have a turn at the Atonement, which is,
in fact, the essence of the dogma of the Incarnation. No wonder this
poor Atonement has been attacked on all sides; it invites attack; one
may say that in every aspect it piteously implores us to attack it and
relieve it from the misery of its spectral existence. It is so full of
breaches that one does not know where to storm.
I am content to note one aspect of this unfortunate mystery which, so
far as I am aware, has been seldom studied. The whole scheme of the
Atonement, as planned by God, is based upon a crime—a crime infinitely
atrocious, the crime of murder and deicide, is essential to its success:
if Judas had not betrayed, if the Jews had not insisted, if Pilate had
not surrendered, if all these turpitudes had not been secured, the
Atonement could not have been consummated. Need one say more? Sometimes,
when musing upon this doctrine, I have a vision of the God-man getting
old upon the earth, horribly anxious and wretched, because no one will
murder him. Judas has succeeded to a large property, and would not be
tempted to betray him by three hundred pieces of silver; the chief
priests and elders think him insane, and, therefore, as Orientals, hold
him in a certain reverence; Pilate is henpecked and superstitious,
accounts the wife’s dreams oracular, and will have nothing to do with
him; even Peter won’t deny him, although he has restored Peter’s
mother-in-law to life. The situation is desperate; he has again and
again prayed his Father to despatch a special murderer to despatch him,
yet none appears: shall he have to perish by old age or disease? may he
be compelled to commit suicide? must he go back to Heaven unsacrificed,
foiled for want of an assassin?
Benjamin Disraeli attained the cynical sublime when he suggested a
monument of gratitude to Judas. In fact, Christendom ought to have
erected hundreds of years ago three grand monuments to the sub-trinity
of Christianity, to the three men without whose devoted assistance the
heavenly trinity would not have triumphed in the scheme of Salvation by
Atonement; Judas, Caiaphas and Pilate; and as these three men could not
have done what they did in furtherance of the glorious work without a
well-known inspiration, a fourth memorial—the grandest of all—should
have been erected to the Devil. But the world, even the religious world,
has always been ungrateful to its most generous benefactors.
Is it not the worst of sacrilege, a foul profanation of our human
nature, which for us, at least, should be holy and awful, when the
heroic and saintly martyrdom of a true Man is thus falsified into the
self-schemed sham sacrifice, ineffectual, of a God? The people who
profess belief in this are shocked at the outrage offered to our
humanity by the Development Theory, while they themselves commit this
outrage more flagitious. Little matters whence we sprang; we are what we
are. But much matters to what we may attain. If the Development Theory
plants our feet in the slime, the Christian Theory bows our head to the
dust. It asserts that human nature could not possibly be so good as
Jesus, that human genius could not possibly write the books which tell
of him; it denies us our noblest prerogatives, and declares us bastards
when we claim a crown. It climbs to God by trampling on Man, it builds
Heaven in contempt of Earth, its soul is a phosphorescence from the
slain and rotting Body; its fervent faith vilifies us worse than the
coldest sneer of Mephistopheles. Yet the orthodox shudder and moan,
outraged in their pious sensibilities, when one dares to speak with
manly plainness of their doctrines, which commence by polluting our
common nature, continue by insulting our reason, and conclude by damning
the large majority of us!