MODES OF CONSERVATIVE FALLACY
To all such reminders the present-day expert will reply, belike, that
he does not need them. He, profiting by the past, can commit no such
errors. And yet, however right the present members of the apostolic
succession of truth-monopolists may be, there is an astonishing
likeness in their tone and temper over the last heresy to that of their
predecessors, down to the twentieth generation. Anger and bluster,
boasting and scolding, snarl and sneer, come no less spontaneously
to the tongues of the professional defender of the present minimum of
creed than they did to those of the full-blooded breed of the ages of
the maximum, or of Calvin and Bonner. From the defence of the "real
presence" of the God to that of the bare personal existence of the
Man is a long descent; but there is a singular sameness in the manner
of the controversy. As their expert ancestors proved successively
the absolute truth of the corporal presence in the wafer, or the
humanity of the Son against those who dubbed him merely divine, or
his divinity against those who pronounced him merely human, or the
inerrancy of the Gospels against the blasphemers who pointed out
the contradictions, or the historic certainty of the miracles and
the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection and the Ascension against the
"materialists" who put such Christian myths on a level with Pagan,
so do the expert demonstrators of the bare historicity of the now
undeified God establish by vituperation and derision, declamation
and contempt, the supreme certainty of the minimum after all the
supernatural certainties are gone. Even as Swiss patriots undertook to
demonstrate "somebody" and "something" behind the legend of William
Tell when it had ceased to be possible to burn men at the stake for
exposing the apple-myth, so do the descendants of the demonstrators
of the real presence now go about to make clear the real existence.
I speak, of course, of the ruck of the vindicators, not of the
believers; and Professor Schmiedel and M. Loisy, I trust, will not
suspect me of classing them with men many of whom are as hostile to
them as to the thesis which those scholars seek by rational methods
to confute. Professor Schmiedel has even avowed that a proof of
the non-historicity of the Gospel Jesus would not affect his inner
religious opinions; and such high detachment has been attained to
by others. That civilized scholars credit, and might at a pinch
maintain in debate, the historicity of the Gospel Jesus as calmly as
they might the historicity of Lycurgus against its impugners, I am
well aware. And to such readers, if I have the honour to obtain any,
I address not a warning but an appeal. There is an attitude towards
the problem which incurs no reproach on the score of tone and temper,
and which will naturally recommend itself all the more to men of real
culture, but which yet, I think, only illustrates in another way the
immense difficulty of all-round intellectual vigilance. Let me give
an example in an extract from a rather noteworthy pronouncement upon
the question in hand:--
Of Paul's divine Master no biography can ever be written. We have
a vivid impression of an unique, effulgent personality. We have
a considerable body of sayings which must be genuine because
they are far too great to have been invented by His disciples,
and, for the rest, whatever royal robes and tributes of devotion
the Church of A.D. 70-100 thought most fitting for its king. The
Gospels are the creation of faith and love: faith and love hold
the key to their interpretation. (Canon Inge, art. "St. Paul"
in Quarterly Review, Jan., 1914, p. 45.)
I am not here concerned to ask whether the closing words are the
expression of an orthodox belief; or what orthodoxy makes of the
further proposition that "With St. Paul it is quite different. He is a
saint without a luminous halo." The idea seems to be that concerning
the saint without a nimbus we can get at the historical truth,
while in the other case we cannot--a proposition worth orthodox
attention. But what concerns the open-minded investigator is the
logic of the words I have italicized. It is obvious that they proceed
(1) on the assumption that what non-miraculous biography the Gospels
give is in the main absolutely trustworthy--that is to say, that the
accounts of the disciples and the teaching are historical; and (2)
on the assumption that we are historically held to the traditional
view that the Gospel sayings originated with the alleged Founder as
they purport. It is necessary to point out that this is not a licit
historical induction. Even Canon Inge by implication admits that
not all the Gospel sayings have the quality which he regards as
certifying authenticity; and on no reasonable ground can he claim
that the others must have been "invented by the disciples." The
alternative is spurious. No one is in a position to deny that any
given saying may have been invented by non-disciples. In point
of fact, many professional theologians are agreed in tracing to
outside sources some tolerably fine passages, such as the address to
Jerusalem (Mt. xxiii, 37; Lk. xiii, 34). The critics in question do
not ascribe that deliverance to inventive disciples; they infer it
to have been a non-Christian document. Many other critics, again,
now pronounce the whole Sermon on the Mount--regarded by Baur as
signally genuine--a compilation from earlier Hebrew literature,
Biblical and other. Which then are the "great" sayings that could not
be thus accounted for? Without specification there can be no rational
discussion of the problem; and even the proposition about the exegetic
function of "faith and love" affects to be in itself rational.
The plain truth would seem to be that Canon Inge has formed for himself
no tenable critical position. He has merely reiterated the fallacy
of Mill, who in his Three Essays on Religion (pp. 253-54) wrote:--
Whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism,
Christ is still left; a unique figure, not more unlike all his
precursors than all his followers, even those who had the direct
benefit of his personal teaching. It is of no use to say that
Christ as exhibited in the Gospels is not historical, and that
we know not how much of what is admirable has been superadded
by the tradition of his followers. The tradition of followers
suffices to insert any number of marvels, and may have inserted
all the miracles which he is reputed to have wrought. But who
among his disciples or among their proselytes was capable of
inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the
life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not
the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St. Paul, whose
character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort;
still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more
evident than that the good which was in them was all derived,
as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher
source. What could be added and interpolated by a disciple we
may see in the mystical parts of St. John, matter imported from
Philo and the Alexandrian Platonists and put into the mouth of
the Saviour in long speeches about himself such as the other
Gospels contain not the slightest vestige of, though pretended
to have been delivered on occasions of the deepest interest and
when his principal followers were all present; most prominently
at the last supper. The East was full of men who could have stolen
(!) any quantity of this poor stuff, as the multitudinous Oriental
sects of Gnostics afterwards did. But about the life and sayings
of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality combined with
profundity of insight which, if we abandon the idle expectation
of finding scientific precision where something very different
was aimed at, must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the
estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration,
in the very first rank of men of sublime genius of whom our
species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined
with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer, and
martyr to that mission, who ever existed on earth, religion [sic]
cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man
as the ideal representative and guide of humanity.... Add that,
to the conception of the rational sceptic, it remains a possibility
that Christ actually was what he supposed himself to be--not God,
for he never made the smallest pretension to that character, and
would probably have thought such a pretension as blasphemous as
it seemed to the men who condemned him--but a man charged with a
special, express, and unique commission from God to lead mankind
to truth and virtue....
Ein historischer Kopf hatte er nicht, is a German economist's criticism
of Mill which I fear will have to stand in other fields than that
of economics. The man who wrote this unmeasured dithyramb can never
have read the Gospels and the Hebrew books with critical attention;
and can never have reflected critically upon his own words in this
connection. The assumption that "the fishermen of Galilee" could not
have attained to thoughts which are expressly alleged to have been
put forth by an untaught carpenter of Galilee is on the face of it a
flight of thoughtless declamation. Had Mill ever critically read the
Old Testament and the Apocrypha, he must have been aware that the main
precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, which are presumably among the
unspecified objects of his panegyric, were all there beforehand. Had
he taken the trouble to investigate before writing, he could have
found in Hennell's Inquiry (1838), which popularized the old research
of Schoettgen; in Nork's Rabbinische Quellen und Parallelen (1839);
and in Les Origines du Sermon de la Montagne by Hippolyte Rodrigues
(1868), a copious demonstration of the Jewish currency of every moral
idea in the Christian document, often in saner forms. And he ought
to have known from his own reading that the doctrine of forgiveness
for injuries, which appears to be the main ground for the customary
panegyric of the Sermon, was common to Greeks and Romans before the
Gospels were compiled. From the duty of giving alms freely--which
is repeatedly laid down in the Old Testament--to that of the sin
of concupiscence and the wrongness of divorce for trivial causes,
every moral idea in the Sermon had been formulated alike by Jews and
Gentiles beforehand. [3] And if it be argued that the compilation
of such a set of precepts with a number of religious dicta (equally
current in non-Christian Jewry) is evidence of a special ethical or
religious gift in the compiler, the answer is that precisely the fact
of such a compilation is the disproof of the assertion in the Gospels
that the whole was delivered as a sermon on a mountain. A sermon it
never was and never could be; and if the compiler was a man of unique
character and qualification he was not the Gospel Jesus but the very
type of which Mill denied the possibility!
That the Gospel ethic is non-original becomes more and more clear with
every extension of relevant research. The Testaments of the Twelve
Patriarchs, written between 109 and 106 B.C. by a Quietist Pharisee,
is found to yield not only origins or anticipations for pseudo-historic
data in the Gospels but patterns for its moral doctrine. Thus the
notion that the Twelve Apostles are to rule over the tribes in the
Messianic kingdom is merely an adaptation of the teaching in the
Testaments that the twelve sons of Jacob are so to rule. [4] There
too appears for the first time in Jewish literature the formula
"on His right hand"; [5] and a multitude of close textual parallels
clearly testify to perusal of the book by the Gospel-framers and the
epistle-makers. But above all is the Jewish book the original for the
doctrines of forgiveness and brotherly love. Whereas the Old Testament
leaves standing the ethic of revenge alongside of the prescription to
forgive one's enemy, the Testaments give out what a highly competent
Christian editor pronounces to be "the most remarkable statement
on the subject of forgiveness in all ancient literature. They show
a wonderful insight into the true psychology of the question. So
perfect are the parallels in thought and diction between these
verses [Test. Gad, vi, 3-7] and Luke xvii, 3; Matt. xviii, 15, 35,
that we must assume our Lord's acquaintance with them. The meaning
of forgiveness in both cases is the highest and noblest known to
us--namely, the restoring the offender to communion with us, which
he had forfeited through his offence.... We now see the importance
of our text. It shows that pre-Christian Judaism possessed a noble
system of ethics on the subject of forgiveness." [6]
Here the tribute goes to a Pharisee; in another connection it redounds
to the other butt of Christian disparagement, the Scribes. As our
editor points out, the collocation of the commands to love God and
one's neighbour is even in Luke (x, 25-27) assigned not to Jesus but
to a Scribe. But this too is found in the Testaments. "That the two
great commandments were already conjoined in the teaching of the
Scribes at the time of our Lord we may reasonably infer from our
text, [7] which was written 140 years earlier, and from the account
in Luke." [8] And here too, a century before the Christian era,
we have a Jewish predication of the salvation of the Gentiles, [9]
in the patronizing Jewish sense.
It is only for men partly hypnotized by sectarian creed that there
can be anything surprising in these anticipations. The notion that
Sacred Books contain the highest and rarest thought of their respective
periods is a delusion that any critical examination of probabilities
will destroy. Relatively high and rare thought does not find its
way into Sacred Books; what these present is but the thought that
is perceptible and acceptable to the majority, or a strong minority,
of the better people; and it is never purified of grave imperfection,
precisely because these never are. Perfect ethic is the possession
of the perfect people, an extremely rare species. The ethic of the
Testaments, which is an obvious improvement on that of average Jewry,
is in turn imperfect enough; even as that of the Gospels remains
stamped with Jewish particularism, and is irretrievably blemished by
the grotesquely iniquitous doctrine of damnation for non-belief.
Such asseverations as Mill's, constantly repeated as they are by
educated men, are simply expressions of failure to comprehend
the nature and the possibilities of life, of civilization, of
history. The thesis is that in a world containing no one else capable
of elevated thought, moral or religious, there suddenly appeared a
marvellously inspired teacher, who chose a dozen disciples incapable
of comprehending his doctrine, and during the space of one or many
years--no one can settle whether one or two or three or four or ten or
twenty--went about alternately working miracles and delivering moral
and religious sayings (including a doctrine of eternal hell-fire for
the unrepentant wicked, among whom were included all who refused
to accept the new teaching); and that after the execution of the
teacher on a charge of blasphemy or sedition the world found itself in
possession of a supernormal moral and religious code, which constituted
the greatest "moral reform" in the world's history. The very conception
is a chimera. In a world in which no one could independently think the
teacher's moral thoughts there could be no acceptance of them. If the
code was pronounced good, it was so pronounced in terms of the moral
nature and moral convictions of those who made the pronouncement. The
very propagandists of the creed after a few generations were found
meeting gainsayers with the formula anima naturaliter Christiana.
Christianity made its way precisely because (1) it was a construction
from current moral and religious material; and because (2) it
adopted a system of economic organization already tested by Jews
and Gentiles; and (3) because its doctrines were ascribed to a God,
not to a man. Anything like a moral renovation of the world it never
effected; that conception is a chimera of chimeras. While Mill, the
amateur in matters of religious research, who "scarcely ever read a
theological book," [10] ascribed to Christian morality a unique and
original quality, Newman, the essentially religious man, deliberately
affirmed with the Rationalists that "There is little in the ethics of
Christianity which the human mind may not reach by its natural powers,
and which here or there ... has not in fact been anticipated." [11]
And Baur, who gave his life and his whole powers to the problem
which Mill assumed to dispose of by a dithyramb, put in a sentence
the historic truth which Mill so completely failed to grasp:--
How soon would everything true and important that was taught by
Christianity have been relegated to the order of the long-faded
sayings of the noble humanitarians and thinking sages of antiquity,
had not its teachings become words of eternal life in the mouth
of its Founder! [12]
And a distinguished Scottish theologian and scholar has laid it
down that
there is probably not a single moral precept in the Christian
Scriptures which is not substantially also in the Chinese
classics. There is certainly not an important principle in Bishop
Butler's ethical teachings which had not been explicitly set
forth by Mencius in the fourth century B.C. The Chinese thinker
of that date had anticipated the entire moral theory of man's
constitution expounded so long afterwards by the most famous of
English moral philosophers. [13]