CHAPTER VII

PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

(A)

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES

I

In a rock-stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and

cracks occur, water filters in, and the crystals are gradually washed

out so that in due course only their hollow mould remains. Then come

volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain; molten masses pour in,

stiffen, and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not free to

do so in their own special forms. They must fill up the spaces that

they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose

inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind

presenting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists

call this phenomenon _Pseudomorphosis_.

By the term “historical pseudomorphosis” I propose to designate those

cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land

that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and

fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even

to develop fully its own self-consciousness. All that wells up from

the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings

stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own

creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that

grows to be monstrous.

This is the case of the Arabian Culture. Its pre-history lies entirely

within the ambit of the ancient Babylonian Civilization,[277] which

for two thousand years had been the prey of successive conquerors. Its

“Merovingian period” is marked by the dictatorship of a small[278]

Persian clan, primitive as the Ostrogoths, whose domination of two

hundred years, scarcely challenged, was founded on the infinite

weariness of a fellah-world. But from 300 B.C. onwards there begins

and spreads a great awakening in the young Aramaic-speaking[279]

peoples between Sinai and the Zagros range. As at the epoch of the

Trojan War and at that of the Saxon emperors, a new relation of

man to God, a wholly new world-feeling, penetrated all the current

religions, whether these bore the name of Ahuramazda, Baal, or Yahweh,

impelling everywhere to a great effort of creation. But precisely at

this juncture there came the Macedonians--so appositely that some

inner connexion is not altogether impossible, for the Persian power

had rested on spiritual postulates, and it was precisely these that

had disappeared. To Babylon these Macedonians appeared as yet another

swarm of adventurers like the rest. They laid down a thin sheet of

Classical Civilization over the lands as far as Turkestan and India.

The kingdoms of the Diadochi might indeed have become, insensibly,

states of pre-Arabian spirit--the Seleucid Empire, which actually

coincided geographically with the region of Aramaic speech, was in fact

such a state by 200 B.C. But from the battle of Pydna[280] onwards

it was, in its western part, more and more embodied in the Classical

Imperium and so subjected to the powerful workings of a spirit which

had its centre of gravity in a distant region. And thus was prepared

the Pseudomorphosis.

The Magian Culture, geographically and historically, is the midmost

of the group of higher Cultures--the only one which, in point both

of space and of time, was in touch with practically all others. The

structure of its history as a whole in our world-picture depends,

therefore, entirely on our recognizing the true inner form which the

outer moulds distorted. Unhappily, that is just what we do not yet

know, thanks to theological and philological prepossessions, and

even more to the modern tendency of over-specialization which has

unreasonably subdivided Western research into a number of separate

branches--each distinguished from the others not merely by its

materials and its methods, but by its very way of thinking--and so

prevented the big problems from being even seen. In this instance the

consequences of specialization have been graver perhaps than in any

other. The historians proper stayed within the domain of Classical

philology and made the Classical language-frontier their eastern

horizon; hence they entirely failed to perceive the deep unity of

development on both sides of their frontier, which spiritually had no

existence. The result is a perspective of “Ancient,” “Mediæval,” and

“Modern” history, ordered and defined by the use of the Greek and Latin

languages. For the experts of the old languages, with their “texts,”

Axum, Saba, and even the realm of the Sassanids were unattackable,

and the consequence is that in “history” these scarcely exist at all.

The literature-researcher (he also a philologist) confuses the spirit

of the language with the spirit of the work. Products of the Aramæan

region, if they happen to be written in Greek or even merely preserved

in Greek, he embodies in his “Late Greek literature” and proceeds to

classify as a special period of that literature. The cognate texts

in other languages are outside his department and have been brought

into other groups of literature in the same artificial way. And yet

here was the strongest of all proofs that the history of a literature

never coincides with the history of a language.[281] Here, in reality,

was a self-contained ensemble of Magian national literature, single

in spirit, but written in several languages--the Classical amongst

others. For a nation of Magian type has no mother tongue. There are

Talmudic, Manichæan, Nestorian, Jewish, or even Neopythagorean national

literatures, but _not_ Hellenistic or Hebrew.

Theological research, in its turn, broke up its domain into

subdivisions according to the different West-European confessions,

and so the “philological” frontier between West and East came into

force, and still is in force, for Christian theology also. The Persian

world fell to the student of Iranian philology, and as the Avesta

texts were disseminated, though not composed, in an Aryan dialect,

their immense problem[282] came to be regarded as a minor branch of

the Indologist’s work and so disappeared absolutely from the field

of vision of Christian theology. And lastly the history of Talmudic

Judaism, since Hebrew philology became bound up in one specialism with

Old Testament research, not only never obtained separate treatment, but

has been _completely forgotten_ by all the major histories of religions

with which I am acquainted, although these find room for every Indian

sect (since folk-lore, too, ranks as a specialism) and every primitive

Negro religion to boot. Such is the preparation of scholarship for the

greatest task that historical research has to face to-day.

II

The Roman world of the Imperial period had a good idea of its own

state. The later writers are full of complaints concerning the

depopulation and spiritual emptiness of Africa, Spain, Gaul, and, above

all, the mother countries Italy and Greece. But those provinces which

belong to the Magian world are consistently excepted in these mournful

surveys. Syria in particular is densely peopled and, like Parthian

Mesopotamia, flourishes in blood and spirit.

The preponderance of the young East, palpable to all, had sooner

or later to find political expression also. Viewing the scene from

this standpoint, we see behind the epic and pageant of Marius and

Sulla, Cæsar and Pompey, Antony and Octavian, this East striving ever

more intensely to free itself from the historically dying West, the

fellah-world waking up. The transfer of the capital to Byzantium was a

great symbol. Diocletian had selected Nicodemia; Cesar had had thoughts

of Alexandria or Troy. A better choice than any would have been

Antioch. But the act came too late by three centuries, and these had

been the decisive period of the Magian Springtime.

The Pseudomorphosis began with Actium; there _it should have been

Antony who won_. It was not the struggle of Rome and Greece that came

there to an issue--that struggle had been fought out at Cannæ and Zama,

where it was the tragic fate of Hannibal to stand as champion not for

his own land, but for Hellenism. At Actium it was the unborn Arabian

Culture that was opposed to iron-grey Classical Civilization; the

issue lay between Principate and Caliphate. Antony’s victory would have

freed the Magian soul; his defeat drew over its lands the hard sheet of

Roman _Imperium_. A comparable event in the history of the West is the

battle between Tours and Poitiers, A.D. 732. Had the Arabs won it and

made “Frankistan” into a caliphate of the North-east, Arabic speech,

religion, and customs would have become familiar to the ruling classes,

giant cities like Granada and Kairawan would have arisen on the Loire

and the Rhine, the Gothic feeling would have been forced to find

expression in the long-stiffened forms of Mosque and Arabesque, and

instead of the German mysticism we should have had a sort of Sufism.

That the equivalent of these things actually happened to the Arabian

world was due to the fact that the Syro-Persian peoples produced no

Charles Martel to battle along with Mithradates or Brutus and Cassius

or Antony (or for that matter without them) against Rome.

A second pseudomorphosis is presented to our eyes to-day in Russia. The

Russian hero-tales of the Bylini culminated in the epic cycle of Prince

Vladimir of Kiev (_c._ A.D. 1000), with his Round Table, and in the

popular hero Ilya Muromyets.[283] The whole immense difference between

the Russian and the Faustian soul is already revealed in the contrast

of these with the “contemporary” Arthur, Ermanarich, and Nibelungen

sagas of the Migration-period in the form of the _Hildebrandslied_

and the _Waltharilied_.[284] The Russian “Merovingian” period begins

with the overthrow of the Tatar domination by Ivan III (1480) and

passes, by the last princes of the House of Rurik and the first of the

Romanovs, to Peter the Great (1689-1725). It corresponds exactly to

the period between Clovis (481-511) and the battle of Testry (687),

which effectively gave the Carolingians their supremacy. I advise all

readers to read the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours (to 591)

in parallel with the corresponding parts of Karamzin’s patriarchal

narrative, especially those dealing with Ivan the Terrible, and with

Boris Godunov and Vassili Shuiski.[285] There could hardly be a closer

parallel. This Muscovite period of the great Boyar families and

Patriarchs, in which a constant element is the resistance of an Old

Russia party to the friends of Western Culture, is followed, from the

founding of Petersburg in 1703, by the pseudomorphosis which forced the

primitive Russian soul into the alien mould, first of full Baroque,

then of the Enlightenment, and then of the nineteenth century. The

fate-figure in Russian history is Peter the Great, with whom we may

compare the Charlemagne who deliberately and with all his might strove

to impose the very thing which Charles Martel had just prevented, the

rule of the Moorish-Byzantine spirit. The possibility was there of

treating the Russian world in the manner of a Carolingian or that of

Seleucid--that is, of choosing between Old Russian and “Western” ways,

and the Romanovs chose the latter. The Seleucids liked to see Hellenes

and not Aramæans about them. The primitive tsarism of Moscow is the

only form which is even to-day appropriate to the Russian world, but

in Petersburg it was distorted to the dynastic form of western Europe.

The pull of the sacred South--of Byzantium and Jerusalem--strong in

every Orthodox soul, was twisted by the worldly diplomacy which set

its face to the West. The burning of Moscow, that mighty symbolic act

of a primitive people, that expression of Maccabæan hatred of the

foreigner and heretic, was followed by the entry of Alexander I into

Paris, the Holy Alliance, and the concert of the Great Powers of the

West. And thus a nationality whose destiny should have been to live

without a history for some generations still was forced into a false

and artificial history that the soul of Old Russia was simply incapable

of understanding. Late-period arts and sciences, enlightenment, social

ethics, the materialism of world-cities, were introduced, although

in this pre-cultural time religion was the only language in which

man understood himself and the world. In the townless land with its

primitive peasantry, cities of alien type fixed themselves like

ulcers--false, unnatural, unconvincing. “Petersburg,” says Dostoyevski,

“is the most abstract and artificial city in the world.” Born in it

though he was, he had the feeling that one day it might vanish with

the morning mist. Just so ghostly, so incredible, were the Hellenistic

artifact-cities scattered in the Aramaic peasant-lands. Jesus in his

Galilee knew this. St. Peter must have felt it when he set eyes on

Imperial Rome.

After this everything that arose around it was felt by the true Russdom

as lies and poison. A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe,

and “Europe” was all that was not Russia, including Athens and Rome,

just as for the Magian world in its time Old Egypt and Babylon had

been antique, pagan, devilish. “The first condition of emancipation

for the Russian soul,” wrote Aksakov in 1863 to Dostoyevski, “is that

it should hate Petersburg with all its might and all its soul.” Moscow

is holy, Petersburg Satanic. A widespread popular legend presents

Peter the Great as Antichrist. Just so the Aramaic Pseudomorphosis

cries out in all the Apocalypses from Daniel and Enoch in Maccabæan

times to John, Baruch, and Ezra IV after the destruction of Jerusalem,

against Antiochus the Antichrist, against Rome the Whore of Babylon,

against the cities of the West with their refinement and their

splendour, against the whole Classical Culture. All its works are

untrue and unclean; the polite society, the clever artistry, the

classes, the alien state with its civilized diplomacy, justice, and

administration. The contrast between Russian and Western, Jew-Christian

and Late-Classical nihilisms is extreme--the one kind is hatred of the

alien that is poisoning the unborn Culture in the womb of the land, the

other a surfeited disgust of one’s own proper overgrowths. Depths of

religious feeling, flashes of revelation, shuddering fear of the great

awakening, metaphysical dreaming and yearning, belong to the beginning,

as the pain of spiritual clarity belongs to the end of a history. In

these pseudomorphoses they are mingled. Says Dostoyevski: “Everyone in

street and market-place now speculates about the nature of Faith.” So

might it have been said of Edessa or Jerusalem. Those young Russians

of the days before 1914--dirty, pale, exalted, moping in corners, ever

absorbed in metaphysics, seeing all things with an eye of faith even

when the ostensible topic is the franchise, chemistry, or women’s

education--are the Jews and early Christians of the Hellenistic cities,

whom the Romans regarded with a mixture of surly amusement and secret

fear. In Tsarist Russia there was no bourgeoisie and, in general, no

true class-system, but merely, as in the Frankish dominions, lord and

peasant. There were no Russian towns. Moscow consisted of a fortified

residency (the Kreml) round which was spread a gigantic market. The

imitation city that grew up and ringed it in, like every other city on

the soil of Mother Russia, is there for the satisfaction and utilities

of the Court, the administration, the traders, but that which lives in

it is, on the top, an embodiment of fiction, an Intelligentsia bent on

discovering problems and conflicts, and below, an uprooted peasantry,

with all the metaphysical gloom, anxiety, and misery of their own

Dostoyevski, perpetually homesick for the open land and bitterly hating

the stony grey world into which Antichrist has tempted them. Moscow had

no proper soul. The spirit of the upper classes was Western, and the

lower had brought in with them the soul of the countryside. Between the

two worlds there was no reciprocal comprehension, no communication,

no charity. To understand the two spokesmen and victims of the

pseudomorphosis, it is enough that Dostoyevski is the peasant, and

Tolstoi the man of Western society. The one could never in his soul get

away from the land; the other, in spite of his desperate efforts, could

never get near it.

_Tolstoi is the former Russia, Dostoyevski the coming Russia._ The

inner Tolstoi is tied to the West. He is the great spokesman of

Petrinism even when he is denying it. The West is never without a

negative--the guillotine, too, was a true daughter of Versailles--and

rage as he might against Europe, Tolstoi could never shake it off.

Hating it, he hates himself and so becomes the father of Bolshevism.

The utter powerlessness of this spirit, and “its” 1917 revolution,

stands confessed in his posthumously published _A Light Shines in the

Darkness_. This hatred Dostoyevski does not know. His passionate power

of living is comprehensive enough to embrace all things Western as

well--“I have two fatherlands, Russia and Europe.” He has passed beyond

both Petrinism and revolution, and from _his_ future he looks back over

them as from afar. His soul is apocalyptic, yearning, desperate, but of

this future _certain_. “I will go to Europe,” says Ivan Karamazov to

his brother, Alyosha; “I know well enough that I shall be going only to

a churchyard, but I know too that that churchyard is dear, very dear

to me. Beloved dead lie buried there, every stone over them tells of a

life so ardently lived, so passionate a belief in its own achievements,

its own truth, its own battle, its own knowledge, that I know--even

now I know--I shall fall down and kiss these stones and weep over

them.” Tolstoi, on the contrary, is essentially a great understanding,

“enlightened” and “socially minded.” All that he sees about him takes

the Late-period, megalopolitan, and Western form of a _problem_,

whereas Dostoyevski does not even know what a problem is. Tolstoi is

an event within and of Western Civilization. He stands midway between

Peter and Bolshevism, and neither he nor these managed to get within

sight of Russian earth. The thing they are fighting against reappears,

recognizable, in the very form in which they fight. Their kind of

opposition is not apocalyptic but intellectual. Tolstoi’s hatred of

property is an economist’s, his hatred of society a social reformer’s,

his hatred of the State a political theorist’s. Hence his immense

effect upon the West--he belongs, in one respect as in another, to the

band of Marx, Ibsen, and Zola.

Dostoyevski, on the contrary, belongs to no band, unless it be the band

of the Apostles of primitive Christianity. His “Dæmons” were denounced

by the Russian Intelligentsia as reactionaries. But he himself was

quite unconscious of such conflicts--“conservative” and “revolutionary”

were terms of the West that left him indifferent. Such a soul as his

can look beyond everything that we call social, for the things of

this world seem to it so unimportant as not to be worth improving. No

genuine religion aims at improving the world of facts, and Dostoyevski,

like every primitive Russian, is fundamentally unaware of that world

and lives in a second, metaphysical world beyond. What has the agony of

a soul to do with Communism? A religion that has got as far as taking

social problems in hand has ceased to be a religion. But the reality in

which Dostoyevski lives, even during this life, is a religious creation

directly present to him. His Alyosha has defied all literary criticism,

even Russian. His life of Christ, had he written it--as he always

intended to do--would have been a genuine gospel like the Gospels of

primitive Christianity, which stand completely outside Classical and

Jewish literary forms. Tolstoi, on the other hand, is a master of the

Western novel--_Anna Karenina_ distances every rival--and even in his

peasant’s garb remains a man of polite society.

Here we have beginning and end clashing together. Dostoyevski is a

saint, Tolstoi only a revolutionary. From Tolstoi, the true successor

of Peter, and from him only, proceeds Bolshevism, which is not the

contrary, but the final issue of Petrinism, the last dishonouring of

the metaphysical by the social, and _ipso facto_ a new form of the

Pseudomorphosis. If the building of Petersburg was the first act

of Antichrist, the self-destruction of the society formed of that

Petersburg is the second, and so the peasant soul must feel it. For the

Bolshevists are not the nation, or even a part of it, but the lowest

stratum of this Petrine society, alien and western like the other

strata, yet not recognized by these and consequently filled with the

hate of the downtrodden. It is all megalopolitan and “Civilized”--the

social politics, the Intelligentsia, the literature that first in

the romantic and then in the economic jargon champions freedoms and

reforms, before an audience that itself belongs to the society. The

real Russian is a disciple of Dostoyevski. Although he may not have

read Dostoyevski or anyone else, nay, perhaps _because_ he cannot read,

he is himself Dostoyevski in substance; and if the Bolshevists, who

see in Christ a mere social revolutionist like themselves, were not

intellectually so narrowed, it would be in Dostoyevski that they would

recognize their prime enemy. What gave this revolution its momentum

was not the intelligentsia’s hatred. It was the people itself, which,

_without hatred_, urged only by the need of throwing off a disease,

destroyed the old Westernism in one effort of upheaval, and will send

the new after it in another. For what this townless people yearns for

is its own life-form, its own religion, its own history. Tolstoi’s

Christianity was a misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant

Marx. But to Dostoyevski’s Christianity the next thousand years will

belong.

III

Outside the Pseudomorphosis, and the more vigorously in proportion

as the Classical influence is weaker over the country, there spring

up all the forms of a genuine feudal age. Scholasticism, mysticism,

feudal fealty, minstrelsy, the crusade spirit, all existed in the first

centuries of the Arabian Culture and will be found in it as soon as

we know how to look for them. The legion existed in name even after

Septimius Severus, but in the East, legions look for all the world like

ducal retinues. Officials are nominated, but what nomination amounts

to in reality is the investiture of a count with his fief. While in

the West the Cæsar-title fell into the hands of chieftains, the East

transformed itself into an early Caliphate amazingly like the feudal

state of mature Gothic. In the Sassanid Empire,[286] in Hauran,[287]

in southern Arabia, there dawned a pure feudal period. The exploits of

a king of Saba,[288] Shamir Juharish, are immortalized like those of

a Roland or an Arthur, in the Arabic saga which tells of his advance

through Persia as far as China.[289] The Kingdom of Ma’in[290] existed

side by side with the realm of Israel during the millennium before

Christ, and its remains (which suggest comparisons with Mycenæ and

Tiryns) extend deeply into Africa.[291] But now the feudal age flowered

throughout Arabia and even in the mountains of Abyssinia.[292] In Axum

there arose during early Christian times mighty castles and kings’

tombs with the largest monoliths in the world.[293] Behind the kings

stands a feudal nobility of counts (_kail_) and wardens (_kabir_),

vassals of often questionable loyalty whose great possessions more

and more narrowed the power of the king and his household. The

endless Christian-Jewish wars between south Arabia and the kingdom

of Axum[294] have essentially the character of chivalry-warfare,

frequently degenerating into baronial feuds based on the castles. In

Saba ruled the Hamdanids--who later became Christian. Behind them stood

the Christian realm of Axum, in alliance with Rome, which about A.D.

300 stretched from the White Nile to the Somali coast and the Persian

Gulf, and in 525 overthrew the Jewish-Himaryites.[295] In 542 there

was a diet of princes at Marib[296] to which both the Roman and the

Sassanid Empires sent ambassadors. Even to-day the country is full

of innumerable relics of mighty castles, which in Islamic times were

popularly attributed to supernatural builders. The stronghold of Gomdan

is a work of twenty tiers.[297]

In the Sassanid Empire ruled the Dikhans, or local lords, while the

brilliant court of these early-Eastern “Hohenstaufen” was in every

respect a model for that of the Byzantines who followed Diocletian.

Even much later the Abbassids in their new capital of Baghdad could

think of nothing better than to imitate, on a grand scale, the

Sassanid ideal of court life. In northern Arabia, at the courts of

the Ghassanids[298] and at those of the Lakhmids,[299] there sprang up

a genuine troubadour and _Minne_ poetry; and knightly poets, in the

days of the Early Fathers, fought out their duels with “word, lance,

and sword.” One of them was the Jew Samuel, lord of the castle of Al

Alblaq, who stood a famous siege by the King of Hira for the sake of

five precious suits of armour.[300] In relation to this lyric poetry,

the Late-Arabic which flourished, especially in Spain, from 800 stands

as Uhland and Eichendorff stand to Walter von der Vogelweide.

For this young world of the first centuries of our era our antiquarians

and theologians have had no eyes. Busied as they are with the state

of Late Republican and Imperial Rome, the conditions of the Middle

East seem to them merely primitive and void of all significance. But

the Parthian bands that again and again rode at the legions of Rome

were a chivalry exalted by Mazdaism; in their armies there was the

spirit of crusade. So, too, might it have been with Christianity if

it had not been wholly bound under the power of the pseudomorphosis.

The spirit was there--Tertullian spoke of the “_militia Christi_,”

and the sacrament was the soldier’s oath of fidelity.[301] But it was

only later that Christ became the hero for whom his vassals went out

against the heathen; for the time being, the hither side of the Roman

frontier knew not Christian lords and knights, but only Roman legates;

not the castle, but the _castra_; not tournaments, but executions. Yet

in spite of all this it was not, strictly speaking, a Parthian war, but

a true crusade of Jewry that blazed out in 115 when Trajan marched into

the East, and it was as a reprisal for the destruction of Jerusalem

that the whole infidel (“Greek”) population of Cyprus--traditionally

240,000 souls--was massacred.[302] Nisibis, defended by Jews, made an

illustrious resistance. Warlike Adiabene (the upper Tigris plain) was

a Jewish state. In all the Parthian and Persian wars against Rome the

gentry and peasantry, the feudal levy, of Jewish Mesopotamia fought in

the front line.

Byzantium, even, was not able entirely to evade the influence of the

Arabian feudal age, and, under a crust of Late Classical administrative

forms, the fief system (especially in the interior of Asia Minor)

came into existence. There there were powerful families whose loyalty

was doubtful and whose ambition was to possess the Imperial throne.

“Originally tied to the capital, which they were not allowed to leave

without the Emperor’s permission, this nobility settled down later on

its broad estates in the provinces. From the fourth century onwards

this provincial nobility was _de facto_ an ‘Estate of the realm,’

and in course of time it claimed a certain independence of Imperial

control.”[303]

The “Roman Army” in the East, meanwhile, was transformed in less than

two centuries from an army of modern type to one of the feudal order.

The Roman legion disappeared in the reorganization of the age of

Severus,[304] about A.D. 200. While in the West the army degenerated

into hordes, in the East there arose, in the fourth century a genuine,

if belated, knighthood--a fact that Mommsen long ago pointed out,

without, however, seeing the significance of it.[305] The young noble

received a thorough education in single combat, horsemanship, use

of bow and lance. About A.D. 260 the Emperor Gallienus--the friend

of Plotinus and the builder of the Porta Nigra of Trier, one of the

most striking and most unfortunate figures of the period of the

soldier-emperors--formed, from Germans and Moors, a new type of mounted

force, the personal military suite.[306] A significant light is thrown

upon the changes by the fact that the old city-gods give way, in the

religion of the army, to the German gods of personal heroism, under

the labels of Mars and Hercules.[307] Diocletian’s _palatini_ are not

a substitute for the prætorians abolished by Septimius Severus, but

a small, well-disciplined knight-army, while the _comitatenses_, the

general levy, are organized in “_numeri_” or companies. The tactics

are those of every Early period, with its pride of personal courage.

The attack takes the Germanic form of the so-called “boar’s head”--the

deep mass technically called the _Gevierthaufe_.[308] Under Justinian

we find, fully developed, a system corresponding precisely to the

_Landsknecht_ system of Charles V, in which condottieri[309] of the

Frundsberg type[310] raise professional forces on a territorial basis.

The expedition of Narses is described by Procopius[311] just as one

might describe the great recruiting-operations of Wallenstein.

But there appeared also in these early centuries a brilliant

Scholasticism and Mysticism of Magian type, domesticated in the

renowned schools of the Aramæan region--the Persian schools of

Ctesiphon, Resaina, Gundisapora, the Jewish of Sura, Nehardea,

Kinnesrin.[312] These are flourishing headquarters of astronomy,

philosophy, chemistry, medicine. But towards the west these grand

manifestations, too, become falsified by the Pseudomorphosis. The

characteristically Magian elements of this knowledge assume at

Alexandria the forms of Greek philosophy and at Beyrout those of

Roman jurisprudence; they are committed to writing in the Classical

languages, squeezed into alien and long-petrified literary forms,

and perverted by the hoary logic of a Civilization of quite other

structure. It is in this, and not in the Islamic, time that Arabian

science began. Yet, as our philologists only unearthed what had been

put in Late Classical dress at Alexandria and Antioch, and had not an

inkling either of the immense wealth of the Arabian spring or of the

real pivots of its researches and ideas, there arose the preposterous

notion that the Arabs were spiritual epigoni of the Classical. In

reality, practically everything that was produced on the “other”

side--from Edessa’s point of view--of the philologist’s frontier,

though seeming to the Western eye an offspring of a “Late Classical”

spirit, is nothing but a reflection of Early Arabian inwardness. And

so we come to consider what the Pseudomorphosis did for the Arabian

religion.

IV

The Classical religion lived in its vast number of _separate cults_,

which in this form were natural and self-evident to Apollinian man,

essentially inaccessible to any alien. As soon as cults of this kind

arise, we have a Classical Culture, and when their essence changes, in

later Roman times, then the soul of this Culture is at an end. Outside

the Classical landscape they have never been genuine and living.

The divinity is always _bound to and bounded by one locality_, in

conformity with the static and Euclidean world-feeling. Correspondingly

the relation of man to the divinity takes the shape of a local cult, in

which the significances lie in the _form_ of its ritual procedure and

not in a dogma underlying them. Just as the population was scattered

geographically in innumerable _points_, so spiritually its religion

was subdivided into these petty cults, each of which was entirely

independent of the rest. _Only their number, and not their scope, was

capable of increase._ Within the Classical religion multiplication

was the only form of growth, and missionary effort of any sort was

excluded, for men could practise these cults without _belonging_ to

them. There were no communities of fellow believers. Though the later

thought of Athens reached somewhat more general ideas of God and his

service, it was philosophy and not religion that it achieved; it

appealed to only a few thinkers and had not the slightest effect on the

feeling of the nation--that is, the Polis.

In the sharpest contrast to this stands the visible form of the Magian

religion--the Church, the brotherhood of the faithful, which has no

home and knows no earthly frontier, which believes the words of Jesus,

“when two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in

the midst of them.” It is self-evident that every such believer must

believe that only one good and true God can be, and that the gods of

the others are evil and false.[313] The relation between this God

and man rests, not in expression or profession, but in the secret

force, the magic, of certain symbolic performances, which if they are

to be effective must be exactly known in form and significance and

practised accordingly. The knowledge of this significance belongs to

the Church--in fact, it is the Church itself, qua community of the

instructed. And, therefore, the centre of gravity of every Magian

religion lies not in a cult, but in a doctrine, in _the creed_.

As long as the Classical remained spiritually strong, pseudomorphosis

of all the Churches of the East into the style of the West continued.

This is a most important aspect of Syncretism. The Persian religion

enters in the shape of the Mithras cult, the Chaldean-Syrian element as

the cults of the star-gods and Baals (Jupiter Dolichenus, Sabazius, Sol

Invictus, Atargatis), the Jewish religion in the form of a Yahweh-cult

(for no other name can be applied to the Egyptian communities of the

Ptolemaic period[314]), and primitive Early-Christianity too--as the

Pauline Epistles and the Catacombs of Rome clearly show--took substance

as a Jesus-cult. And however loudly each of these various religions

(which from about Hadrian’s time drove the genuine old Classical

deities completely into the background) might proclaim itself as

the revelation of the one true faith--Isis styled herself _deorum

dearumque facies uniformis_--in reality they carry, one and all, marks

of the Classical separatism--that is, they multiply to infinity; every

community stands for itself and is local; all the temples, catacombs,

Mithræa, house chapels, are holy places to which (in feeling, even

though not in formal expression) the deity is considered to be

attached.[315] Nevertheless, there is Magian feeling even in this

piety. Classical cults are _practised_, and one may practise as many

of them as one pleases, but of these newer, _a man belongs to one and

one alone_. In the old, propaganda is unthinkable; in the new it goes

without saying, and the purport of religious exercises tends more and

more to the doctrinal side.

From the second century onwards, with the fading of the Apollinian

and the flowering of the Magian soul, the relations are reversed. The

consequences of the Pseudomorphosis continue, _but it is now cults

of the West which tend to become a new Church of the East_--that is,

from the sum of separate cults there evolves a community of those

who believe in these gods and their rituals--and so there arises, by

processes like those of the Early Persian and the Early Judaic, a

Magian Greek nationality. Out of the rigorously established forms of

detail-procedure in sacrifices and mysteries grows a sort of dogma

concerning the inner significance of these acts. The cults can now

represent each other, and men no longer practise or perform them in

the old way, but become “adherents” of them. And the little god _of_

the place becomes--without the gravity of the change being noticed by

anyone--the great God really present in the place.

Carefully as Syncretism has been examined in recent years, the clue to

its development--the transformation of Eastern Churches into Western

cults, and then the reverse process of transformation of Western cults

into Eastern Churches--has been missed.[316] Yet without this key

it is quite impossible to understand the religious history of Early

Christianity. The battle that in Rome was between Christ and Mithras

as cult-deities took the form, east of Antioch, of a contest between

the Persian and the Christian Churches. But the heaviest battle that

Christianity had to fight, after it came itself under the influence

of the Pseudomorphosis and began to develop spiritually with its face

to the West, was not that against the true Classical deities. With

these it was never face to face, for the public city-cults had long

been inwardly dead and possessed no hold whatever on men’s souls. The

formidable enemy was Paganism, or Hellenism, emerging as _a powerful

new Church_ and born of the selfsame spirit as Christianity itself. In

the end there were in the east of the Roman Empire not one cult-Church,

but two, and if one of these comprised exclusively the followers of

Christ, the other, too, was made up of communities which, under a

thousand different labels, consciously worshipped one and the same

divine principle.

Much has been written on the Classical toleration. The nature of

a religion may perhaps be most clearly seen in the limits of its

tolerance, and there were such limits in Classical religions as in

others. It was, indeed, one essential character of these religions

that they were numerous, and another that they were religions of

pure performance; for them, therefore, the question of toleration,

as the word is usually understood, did not arise. But respect for

the cult-formalities as such was postulated and required, and many

a philosopher, even many an unwitting stranger, who infringed this

law by word or deed, was made to realize the limits of Classical

toleration. The reciprocal persecutions of the Magian Churches are

something different from this; there it was the duty of the henotheist

to his own faith that forbade him to recognize false tenets. Classical

_cults_ would have tolerated the Jesus-cult as one of their own number.

But the _cult-Church_ was bound to attack the Jesus-Church. All the

great persecutions of Christians (corresponding therein exactly to

the later persecutions of Paganism) came, not from the “Roman” State,

but from this cult-Church, and they were only political inasmuch as

the cult-Church was both nation and fatherland. It will be observed

that the mask of Cæsar-worship covered _two_ religious usages. In

the Classical cities of the West, Rome above all, the special cult

of the _Divus_ arose as a last expression of that Euclidean feeling

which required that there should be legal and therefore sacral means

of communication between the body-unit man and the body-unit God.

In the East, on the other hand, the product was a creed of Cæsar

as Saviour, God-man, Messiah of all Syncretists, which this Church

brought to expression in a supremely national form. The sacrifice for

the Emperor was the most important _sacrament_ of the Church--exactly

corresponding to the baptism of the Christians--and it is easy,

therefore, to understand the symbolic significance in the days of

persecution of the command and the refusal to do these acts. _All_

these Churches had their sacraments: holy meals like the Haoma-drinking

of the Persians,[317] the Passover of the Jews, the Lord’s Supper of

the Christians, similar rites for Attis and Mithras, and baptismal

ceremonies amongst the Mandæans, the Christians, and the worshippers of

Isis and Cybele. Indeed, the individual cults of the Pagan Church might

be regarded almost as sects and orders--a view which would lead to a

much better understanding of their reciprocal propaganda.

All true Classical mysteries, such as those of Eleusis and those

founded by the Pythagoreans in the South-Italian cities about 500

B.C., had been place-bound,[318] and had consisted in some symbolical

act or process. Within the field of the Pseudomorphosis these freed

themselves from their localities; they could be performed wherever

initiates were gathered, and had now as their object the Magian ecstasy

and the ascetic change of life. The visitors to the holy place had

transformed themselves into practising Orders. The community of the

Neopythagoreans, formed about 50 B.C. and closely related to the

Jewish Essenes, is anything but a Classical “school of philosophy”;

it is a pure monastic order, and it is not the only such order in

the Syncretic movement that anticipated the ideals of the Christian

hermits and the Mohammedan dervishes. These Pagan Churches had their

anchorites, saints, prophets, miraculous conversions, scriptures, and

revelations.[319] In the significance of images there came about a very

remarkable transformation, which still awaits research. The greatest of

Plotinus’s followers, Iamblichus, finally, about A.D. 300, evolved a

mighty system of orthodox theology, ordered hierarchy, and rigid ritual

for the Pagan Church, and his disciple Julian devoted, and finally

sacrificed, his life to the attempt to establish this Church for all

eternity.[320] He sought even to create cloisters for meditating men

and women and to introduce ecclesiastical penance. This great work was

supported by a great enthusiasm which rose to the height of martyrdom

and endured long after the Emperor’s death. Inscriptions exist which

can hardly be translated but by the formula: “There is but one god and

Julian is his Prophet.”[321] Ten years more, and this Church would have

become a historic, permanent fact. In the end not only its power, but

also in important details its very form and content were inherited by

Christianity. It is often stated that the Roman Church adapted itself

to the structure of the Roman State; this is not quite correct. The

latter structure was itself by hypothesis a Church. There was a period

when the two were in touch--Constantine the Great acted simultaneously

as convener of the Council of Nicæa and as Pontifex Maximus, and his

sons, zealous Christians as they were, made him _Divus_ and paid to

him the prescribed rites. St. Augustine dared to assert that the true

religion had existed before the coming of Christianity in the form of

the Classical.[322]

V

For the understanding of Judaism as a whole between Cyrus and

Titus it is necessary constantly to bear in mind three facts, of

which scholarship is quite aware, but which, owing to philological

and theological _parti pris_, it refuses to admit as factors in

its discussions. First, the Jews are a “nation without a land,” a

_consensus_, and in the midst, moreover, of a world of pure nations of

the same type. Secondly, Jerusalem is indeed a Mecca, a holy centre,

but it is neither the home nor the spiritual focus of the people.

Lastly, the Jews are a peculiar phenomenon in world-history only so

long as we insist on treating them as such.

It is true that the post-exilic Jews, in contradistinction to

the pre-exilic Israelites are--as Hugo Winckler was the first to

recognize--a people of quite new type. But they are not the only

representatives of the type. The Aramæan world began in those days to

arrange itself in a great number of such peoples, including Persians

and Chaldeans,[323] all living in the same district, yet in stringent

aloofness from each other, and even then practising the truly Arabian

way of life that we call the ghetto.

The first heralds of the new soul were the _prophetic religions_,

with their magnificent inwardness, which began to arise about 700

B.C. and challenged the primeval practices of the people and their

rulers. They, too, are an essentially Aramæan phenomenon. The more

I ponder Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah on the one hand, Zarathustra on

the other, the more closely related they appear to me to be. What

seems to separate them is not their new beliefs, but the objects of

their attack. The first battled with that savage old-Israel religion,

which in fact is a whole bundle of religious elements[324]--belief in

holy stones and trees, innumerable place-gods (Dan, Bethel, Hebron,

Shechem, Beersheba, Gilgal), a single Yahweh (or Elohim), whose name

covers a multitude of most heterogeneous numina, ancestor-worship and

human sacrifices, dervish-dancing and sacral prostitution--intermixed

with indistinct traditions of Moses and Abraham and many customs and

sagas of the Late Babylonian world, now after long establishment in

Canaan degenerated and hardened into peasant forms. The second combated

the old Vedic beliefs of heroes and Vikings, similarly coarsened,

no doubt, and certainly needing to be recalled to actuality, time

and again, by glorifications of the sacred cattle and of the care

thereof. Zarathustra lived about 600 B.C., often in want, persecuted

and misunderstood, and met his end as an old man in war against the

unbelievers[325]--a worthy contemporary of the unfortunate Jeremiah,

who for his prophesying was hated by his countrymen, imprisoned by his

king, and after the catastrophe carried off by the fugitives to Egypt

and there put to death. And it is my belief that this great epoch

brought forth yet a third prophet-religion, the Chaldean.

This, with its penetrating astronomy and its ever-amazing

inwardness, was, I venture to guess, evolved at that time and by

creative personalities of the Isaiah stature from relics of the old

Babylonian religion.[326] About 1000, the Chaldeans were a group of

Aramaic-speaking tribes like the Israelites, and lived in the south of

Sinear--the mother tongue of Jesus is still sometimes called Chaldean.

In Seleucid times the name was applied to a widespread religious

community, and especially to its priests. The Chaldean religion was

an astral religion, which before Hammurabi the Babylonian was _not_.

It is the deepest of all interpretations of the Magian universe, the

World-Cavern[327] and Kismet working therein, and consequently it

remained the fundamental of Islamic and Jewish speculation to their

very latest phases. It was by it, and not by the Babylonian Culture,

that after the seventh century there was formed an astronomy worthy

to be called an exact science--that is, a priestly technique of

observation of marvellous acuteness.[328] It replaced the Babylonian

moon-week by the planet-week. Ishtar, the most popular figure of the

old religion, the goddess of life and fruitfulness, now became a

planet, and Tammuz, the ever-dying and ever-revived god of vegetation,

a fixed star. Finally, the henotheistic feeling announced itself; for

Nebuchadnezzar the Great Marduk[329] was the one true god, the god of

mercy, and Nebo, the old god of Borsippa, was his son and envoy to

mankind. For a century (625-539) Chaldean kings were world-rulers,

but they were also the heralds of the new religion. When temples were

being built, they themselves carried bricks. The accession-prayer

of Nebuchadnezzar, the contemporary of Jeremiah, to Marduk is still

extant, and in depth and purity it is in nowise surpassed by the

finest passages of Israelite prophecy. The Chaldean penitential

psalms, closely related in rhythm and inner structure to those of the

Jews, know the sin of which man is unconscious and the suffering that

contrite avowal before the incensed god can avert. It is the same trust

in the mercy of the Deity that finds a truly Christian expression in

the inscriptions of the Bel temple of Palmyra.[330]

The kernel of the prophetic teachings is already Magian. There is

_one_ god--be he called Yahweh, Ahuramazda or Marduk-Baal--who is the

principle of good, and all other deities are either impotent or evil.

To this doctrine there attached itself the hope of a Messiah, very

clear in Isaiah, but also bursting out everywhere during the next

centuries, under pressure of an inner necessity. It is the basic idea

of Magian religion, for it contains implicitly the conception of the

world-historical struggle between Good and Evil, with the power of Evil

prevailing in the middle period, and the Good finally triumphant on the

Day of Judgment. This moralization of history is common to Persians,

Chaldees, and Jews. But with its coming, the idea of the localized

people _ipso facto_ vanished and the genesis of Magian nations without

earthly homes and boundaries was at hand. The idea of the Chosen People

emerged.[331] But it is easy to understand that men of strong blood,

and in particular the great families, found these too spiritual ideas

repugnant to their natures and harked back to the stout old tribal

faiths. According to Cumont’s researches the religion of the Persian

kings was polytheistic and did not possess the Haoma sacrament--that

is, it was not wholly Zoroastrian. The same is true of most of the

kings of Israel, and in all probability also of the last Chaldean

Nabu-Nabid (Nabonidus), whose overthrow by Cyrus and his own subjects

was in fact made possible by his rejection of the Marduk faith. And it

was in the Captivity that circumcision and the (Chaldean) Sabbath were

first acquired, as rites, by the Jews.

The Babylonian exile, however, did set up an important difference

between the Jews and the Persians, in respect, not of the ultimate

truths of conscious piety, but of all the facts of actuality and

consequently men’s inward attitude to these facts. It was the Yahweh

believers who _were permitted_ to go home and the adherents of

Ahuramazda who _allowed_ them to do so. Of two small tribes that two

hundred years before had probably possessed equal numbers of fighting

men, the one had taken possession of a world--while Darius crossed the

Danube in the north, his power extended in the south through eastern

Arabia to the island of Sokotra on the Somali coast[332]--and the other

had become an entirely unimportant pawn of alien policy.

This is what made one religion so lordly, the other so humble.

Let the student read, in contrast to Jeremiah, the great Behistun

inscription[333] of Darius--what a splendid pride of the King in his

victorious god! And how despairing are the arguments with which the

Israelite prophets sought to preserve intact the image of their god.

Here, in exile, with every Jewish eye turned by the Persian victory

to the Zoroastrian doctrine, the pure Judaic prophecy (Amos, Hosea,

Isaiah, Jeremiah) passes into _Apocalypse_ (Deutero-Isaiah,[334]

Ezekiel, Zechariah). All the new visions of the Son of Man, of Satan,

of archangels, of the seven heavens, of the last judgment, are _Persian

presentations of the common world-feeling_. In Isaiah xli appears Cyrus

himself, hailed as Messiah. Did the great composer of Deutero-Isaiah

draw his enlightenment from a Zoroastrian disciple? Is it possible

that the Persians released the Jews out of a feeling of the inward

relationship of their two teachings? It is certain at any rate that

both shared one popular idea as to last things, and felt and expressed

a common hatred of the old Babylonian and Classical religions, of

unbelievers generally, which they did not feel towards one another.

We must not, however, forget to look at the “return from captivity”

also from the point of view of Babylon. The great mass, strong in

race-force, was in reality far removed from these ideas, or regarded

them as mere visions and dreams; and the solid peasantry, the artisans,

and no doubt the nascent land-aristocracy quietly remained in its

holdings _under a prince of their own_, the Resh Galutha, whose

capital was Nehardea.[335] Those who returned “home” were the small

minority, the stubborn, the zealots. They numbered with their wives and

children forty thousand, a figure which cannot be one-tenth or even

one-twentieth of the total, and anyone who confuses these settlers

and their destiny with Jewry as a whole[336] must necessarily fail

to read the inner meaning of all following events. The _little world

of Judaism lived a spiritually separate life_, and the nation as a

whole, while regarding this life with respect, certainly did not share

in it. In the East apocalyptic literature, the heiress of prophecy,

blossomed richly. It was a genuine native poetry of the people, of

which we still have the masterpiece, the Book of Job--a work in

character Islamic and decidedly un-Jewish[337]--while a multitude of

its other tales and sagas, such as Judith, Tobit, Achikar,[338] are

spread as motives over all the literatures of the “Arabian” world. In

Judea only the Law flourished; the Talmudic spirit appears first in

Ezekiel (chs. xl, et seq.) and after 450 is made flesh in the scribes

(Sopherim) headed by Ezra. From 300 B.C. to A.D. 200 the Tannaim

(“Teachers”) expounded the Torah and developed the Mishnah. Neither

the coming of Jesus nor the destruction of the Temple interrupted

this abstract scholarship. Jerusalem became for the rigid believer

a Mecca, and his Koran was a Code of laws to which was gradually

added a whole primitive history compounded of Chaldeo-Persian motives

reset according to Pharisaic ideas.[339] But in this atmosphere there

was no room for a worldly art, poetry, or learning. All that the

Talmud contains of astronomical, medical, and juristic knowledge is

exclusively of Mesopotamian origin.[340] It is probable, too, that it

was in Mesopotamia, and _before_ the end of the Captivity, that there

began that Chaldean-Persian-Jewish formation of sects which developed

into the formation of great religions at the beginning of the Magian

Culture, and reached its climax in the teaching of Mani. “The Law and

the Prophets”--_these two nouns practically define the difference

between Judea and Mesopotamia_. In the late Persian and in every other

Magian theology both tendencies are united; it is only in the case

here considered that they were separated in space. The decisions of

Jerusalem were recognized everywhere, but it is a question how widely

they were obeyed. Even as near as Galilee the Pharisees were the object

of suspicion, while in Babylonia no Rabbi could be consecrated. For the

great Gamaliel, Paul’s teacher, it was a title to fame that his rulings

were followed by the Jews “even abroad.” How independent was the life

of the Jews in Egypt is shown by the recently discovered documents

of Elephantine and Assuan.[341] About 170, Onias asked the King for

permission to build a temple “according to the measurements of the

Temple in Jerusalem,” on the ground that the numerous non-conforming

temples that existed were the cause of eternal bickerings amongst the

communities.

One other subject must be considered. Jewry, like Persia, had since the

Exile increased enormously beyond the old small clan-limits; this was

owing to conversions and secessions--_the only form of conquest open

to a landless nation and, therefore, natural and obvious to the Magian

religions_. In the north it very early drove, through the Jew State of

Adiabene, to the Caucasus; in the south (probably along the Persian

Gulf) it penetrated to Saba; in the west it was dominant in Alexandria,

Cyrene, and Cyprus. The administration of Egypt and the policy of the

Parthian Empire were largely in Jewish hands.

But this movement _came out of Mesopotamia alone_, and the spirit in

it was the Apocalyptic and not the Talmudic. Jerusalem was occupied in

creating yet more legal barriers against the unbeliever. It was not

enough even to abandon the practice of making converts. A Pharisee

permitted himself to summon the universally beloved King Hyrcanus

(135-106) to lay down the office of High Priest because his mother

had once been in the power of the infidels.[342] This is the same

narrowness which in the primitive Christian brotherhood of Judea took

the form of opposing the preaching of the Gospel to the heathen. In

the East it would simply never have occurred to anyone to draw such

barriers, which were contrary to the whole idea of the Magian nation.

But in that very fact was based _the spiritual superiority_ of the wide

East. The Synedrion in Jerusalem might possess unchallenged religious

authority, but politically, and therefore historically, the power of

the Resh Galutha was a very different matter. Christian and Jewish

research alike have failed to perceive these things. So far as I am

aware, no one has noticed the important fact that the persecution of

Antiochus Epiphanes was directed not against “Jewry” but against Judea.

And this brings us to another fact, of still greater importance.

The destruction of Jerusalem hits only a very small part of the nation,

one moreover that was spiritually and politically by far the least

important. It is not true that the Jewish people has lived “in the

Dispersion” since that day, for it had lived for centuries (and so too

had the Persian and others) in a form which was independent of country.

On the other hand, we realize equally little the impression made by

this war upon the real Jewry which Judea thought of and treated as an

adjunct. The victory of the heathen and the ruin of the Sanctuary was

felt in the inmost soul,[343] and in the crusade of 115[344] a bitter

revenge was taken for it; but the ideal outraged and vindicated was the

ideal of Jewry and not that of Judaism. Zionism then, as in Cyrus’s

day and in ours, was a reality only for a quite small and spiritually

narrow minority. If the calamity had been really felt in the sense of

a “loss of home” (as we figure it to ourselves with the Western mind),

a hundred opportunities after Marcus Aurelius’s time could have been

seized to win the city back. But that would have contradicted the

Magian sense of the nation, whose ideal organic form was the synagogue,

the pure _consensus_--like the early Catholic “visible Church” and like

Islam--and it was precisely the annihilation of Judea and the clan

spirit of Judea that _for the first time completely actualized this

ideal_.

For Vespasian’s War, directed against Judea, was a liberation of

Jewry. In the first place, it ended both the claim of the people of

this petty district to be the genuine nation, and the pretensions

of their bald spirituality to equivalence with the soul-life of the

whole. The research, the scholasticism, and the mysticism of the

Oriental academies entered into possession of their rights; so, for

instance, the judge Karna--the contemporary, more or less, of Ulpian

and Papinian--formulated at the academy of Nehardea the first code

of civil law.[345] In the second place, it rescued this religion

from the dangers of that pseudomorphosis to which Christianity in

that same period was succumbing. Since 200 B.C. there had existed a

half-Hellenistic Jewish literature. The “Preacher” (Ecclesiastes,

Koheleth) contains Pyrrhonic ideas.[346] The Wisdom of Solomon, 2

Maccabees, Theodotion, the Aristeas Letter, etc., follow; there are

things like the Menander collection of Maxims, as to which it is

impossible to say whether they ought to be regarded as Jewish or as

Greek. There were, about 160, high priests who were so Hellenistic in

spirit that they combated the Jewish religion, and later there were

rulers like Hyrcanus and Herod who did the same by political methods.

This danger came to an end instantly and for good in A.D. 70.

In the time of Jesus there were in Jerusalem three tendencies which

can be described as generally Aramæan, represented respectively by the

Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Although the connotations

of these names varied, and although both in Christian and in Jewish

research most diverse views are held about them, it may at any rate be

said that the first of these tendencies is found in greatest purity

in Judaism, the second in Chaldeanism, the third in Hellenism.[347]

Essene is the rise of the cult (almost the Order) of Mithras in

the east of Asia Minor. The Sadducees, although in Jerusalem they

appear as a small and distinguished group--Josephus compares them

with the Epicureans--are thoroughly Aramæan in their apocalyptic and

eschatological views, in virtue of a certain element which makes

them, so to say, the Dostoyevskis of this Early period. They stand

to the Pharisees in the relation of mysticism to scholasticism, of

John to Paul, of Bundahish to Vendidad[348] in the Persian world.

The Apocalyptic is popular, and many of its traits are spiritually

common property throughout the Aramæan world; the Talmudic and Avestan

Pharisaism is exclusive and tries to rule out every other religion with

uncompromising rigour.

The Essenes appear in Jerusalem as a monastic order like the

Neopythagoreans. They possessed secret texts.[349] In the broad sense

they are representative of the Pseudomorphosis, and in consequence

they disappear from Jewry completely after A.D. 70, while precisely in

this period Christian literature was becoming purely Greek--not in the

least of the causes of this being that the Hellenized Western Jews left

Judaism to retreat into its East, and gradually adopted Christianity.

But also Apocalyptic, which is an expression-form of townless and

town-fearing mankind, soon came to an end within the Synagogue, after a

last wonderful reaction to the stimulus of the great catastrophe.[350]

When it had become evident that the teaching of Jesus would lead

not to a reform of Judaism, but to a new religion, and when, about

A.D. 100, the daily imprecation-formula against the Jew-Christians

was introduced, Apocalyptic for the short remainder of its existence

resided in the young Church.

VI

The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above

all religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. In all

the great creations of those years there is nothing which can be set

beside it. Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of

Mithras, Attis, and Osiris must have seemed to any man reading or

listening to the still recent story of Jesus’s sufferings--the last

journey to Jerusalem, the last anxious supper, the hours of despair in

Gethsemane, and the death on the cross.

Here was no matter of philosophy. Jesus’s utterances, which stayed

in the memory of many of the devoted, even in old age, are those of

a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world. They are not

sociological observations, problems, debatings. Like a quiet island

of bliss was the life of these fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of

Gennesareth in the midst of the age of the great Tiberius, far from all

world-history and innocent of all the doings of actuality, while round

them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples,

their refined Western society, their noisy mob-diversions, their Roman

cohorts, their Greek philosophy. When the friends and disciples of the

sufferer had grown grey and his brother was president of their group in

Jerusalem, they put together, from the sayings and narratives generally

current in their small communities, a biography so arresting in its

inward appeal that it evolved a presentation-form of its own, of which

neither the Classical nor the Arabian Culture has any example--the

Gospel. Christianity is the one religion in the history of the world in

which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the emblem

and the central point of the whole creation.

A strange excitement, like that which the Germanic world experienced

about A.D. 1000, ran in those days through the whole Aramæan land.

The Magian soul was awakened. That element which lay in the prophetic

religions like a presentiment, and expressed itself in Alexander’s

time in metaphysical outlines, came now to the state of fulfilment.

And this fulfilment awakened, in indescribable strength, the primitive

feeling of Fear. The birth of the Ego, and of the world-anxiety with

which it is identical, is one of the final secrets of humanity and of

mobile life generally. In front of the Microcosm there stands up a

Macrocosm wide and overpowering, an abyss of alien, dazzling existence

and activity that frightens the small lonely ego back into itself.

Even in the blackest hours of life no adult experiences fear like the

fear which sometimes overpowers a child in the crisis of awakening.

Over the dawn of the new Culture likewise lay this deathly anxiety. In

this early morning of Magian world-feeling, timorous and hesitant and

ignorant of itself, young eyes saw the end of the world at hand--it

is the first thought in which every Culture to this day has come to

knowledge of itself. All but the shallower souls trembled before

revelations, miracles, glimpses into the very fundament of things. Men

now lived and thought only in apocalyptic images. Actuality became

appearance. Strange and terrifying visions were told mysteriously by

one to another, read out from fantastic veiled texts, and seized at

once with an immediate inward certainty. These writings travelled from

community to community, village to village, and it is quite impossible

to assign them to any one particular religion.[351] Their colouring

is Persian, Chaldean, Jewish, but they have absorbed all that was

circulating in men’s minds. Whereas the canonical books are national,

the apocalyptic literature is international in the literal sense of the

word. It is there, and no one seems to have composed it. Its content

is fluid--to-day it reads thus and to-morrow otherwise. But this

does not mean that it is a “poetry”--it is not.[352] These creations

resemble the terrible figures of the Romanesque cathedral-porches

in France, which also are not “art,” but fear turned into stone.

Everyone knows those angels and devils, the ascent to heaven and

descent to hell of divine Essence, the Second Adam, the Envoy of God,

the Redeemer of the last days, the Son of Man, the eternal city, and

the last judgment.[353] In the alien cities and the high positions

of strict Judaic and Persian priesthoods the different doctrines

might be tangibly defined and argued about, but below in the mass of

the people there was practically no specific religion, but a general

Magian religiousness which filled all souls and attached itself to

glimpses and visions of every conceivable origin. The Last Day was

at hand. Men expected it and knew that on that day “He” of whom all

these revelations spoke would appear. Prophets arose. More and more

new communities and groups gathered, believing themselves to have

found either a better understanding of the traditional religion, or

the true religion itself. In this time of amazing, ever-increasing

tension, and in the very years around Jesus’s birth-year, there arose,

besides endless communities and sects, another redemption-religion, the

Mandæan, as to which we know nothing of founder or origins. In spite

of its hatred of the Judaism of Jerusalem and its definite preference

for the Persian idea of redemption, the Mandæan religion seems to have

stood very close to the popular beliefs of Syrian Jewry. One after

another, pieces of its wonderful documents are becoming available, and

they consistently show us a “Him,” a Son of Man, a Redeemer who is sent

down into the depths, who himself must be redeemed and is the goal of

man’s expectations. In the Book of John, the Father high upraised in

the House of Fulfilment, bathed in light, says to his only begotten

Son: “My Son, be to me an ambassador; go into the world of darkness,

where no ray of light is.” And the Son calls up to him: “Father, in

what have I sinned that thou hast sent me into the darkness?” And

finally: “Without sin did I ascend and there was no sin and defect in

me.”[354]

All the characters of the great prophetic religions and of the whole

store of profound glimpses and visions later collected into apocalypses

are seen here as foundations. Of Classical thought and feeling not

a breath reached this Magian underworld. No doubt the beginnings of

the new religion are lost irrevocably. But _one_ historical figure of

Mandæanism stands forth with startling distinctness, as tragic in his

purpose and his downfall as Jesus himself--John the Baptist.[355] He,

almost emancipated from Judaism, and filled with as mighty a hatred

of the Jerusalem spirit as that of primitive Russia for Petersburg,

preached the end of the world and the coming of the Barnasha, the Son

of Man, _who is no longer the longed-for national Messiah of the Jews_,

but the bringer of the world-conflagration.[356] To him came Jesus and

was his disciple.[357] He was thirty years old when the awakening came

over him. Thenceforth the apocalyptic, and in particular the Mandæan,

thought-world filled his whole being. The other world of historical

actuality lying round him was to him as something sham, alien, void of

significance. That “He” would now come and make an end of this unreal

reality was his magnificent certainty, and like his master John, he

stepped forth as its herald. Even now we can see, in the oldest Gospels

that were embodied into the New Testament, gleams of this period in

which he was, in his consciousness, nothing but a prophet.[358]

But there was a moment in his life when an inkling, and then high

certainty, came over him--“Thou art thyself It!” It was a secret that

he at first hardly admitted to himself, and only later imparted to his

nearest friends and companions, who thereafter shared with him, in all

stillness, the blessed mission, till finally they dared to reveal the

truths before all the world by the momentous journey to Jerusalem. If

there is anything at all that clouds the complete purity and honour of

his thought, it is that doubt as to whether he has deceived himself

which from time to time seizes him, and of which, later, his disciples

told quite frankly. He comes to his home. The village crowds to him,

recognizes the former carpenter who left his work, is angered. The

family--mother and all the brothers and sisters--are ashamed of him

and would have arrested him. And with all these familiar eyes upon him

he was confused and felt the magic power depart from him (Mark vi).

In Gethsemane doubts of his mission[359] mingled themselves in the

terrible fear of coming things, and even on the cross men heard the

anguished cry that God had forsaken him.

Even in these last hours he lived entirely in the form of his own

apocalyptic world, which alone was ever real to him. What to the Roman

sentries standing below him was reality was for him an object of

helpless wonder, an illusion that might at any moment without warning

vanish into nothingness. He possessed the pure and unadulterated soul

of the townless land. The life of the cities and their spirit were to

him utterly alien. Did he really see the semi-Classical Jerusalem, into

which he rode as the Son of Man, and understand its historical nature?

This is what thrills us in the last days--and the collision of facts

with truths, of two worlds that will never understand one another, and

his entire incomprehension of what was happening about him.

So he went, proclaiming his message without reservation, through his

country. But this country was Palestine. He was born in the Classical

Empire and lived under the eyes of the Judaism of Jerusalem, and when

his soul, fresh from the awful revelation of its mission, looked

about, it was confronted by the actuality of the Roman State and that

of Pharisaism. His repugnance for the stiff and selfish ideal of the

latter, which he shared with all Mandæanism and doubtless with the

peasant Jewry of the wide East, is the hall-mark of all his discourses

from first to last. It angered him that this wilderness of cold-hearted

formulæ was reputed to be the only way to salvation. Still, thus far

it was only another kind of piety that his conviction was asserting

against Rabbinical logic. Thus far it is only the Law versus the

Prophets.

But when Jesus was taken before Pilate, then _the world of facts and

the world of truths were face to face in immediate and implacable

hostility_. It is a scene appallingly distinct and overwhelming in

its symbolism, such as the world’s history had never before and has

never since looked at. The discord that lies at the root of all mobile

life from its beginning, in virtue of its very _being_, of its having

both existence _and_ awareness, took here the highest form that can

possibly be conceived of human tragedy. In the famous question of the

Roman Procurator: “What is truth?”--the one word that is race-pure

in the whole Greek Testament--lies _the entire meaning of history_,

the exclusive validity of the deed, the prestige of the State and war

and blood, the all-powerfulness of success and the pride of eminent

fitness. Not indeed the mouth, but the silent feeling of Jesus answers

this question by that other which is decisive in all things of

religion--_What is actuality?_ For Pilate actuality was all; for him

nothing. Were it anything, indeed, pure religiousness could never stand

up against history and the powers of history, or sit in judgment on

active life; or if it does, it ceases to be religion and is subjected

itself to the spirit of history.

_My kingdom is not of this world._ This is the final word which admits

of no gloss and on which each must check the course wherein birth and

nature have set him. A being that makes use of a waking-consciousness,

or a waking-consciousness which subjects being to itself; pulsation

or tension, blood or intellect, history or nature, politics or

religion--here it is one or the other, there is no honest way

of compromise. A statesman can be deeply religious, a pious man

can die for his country--but they must, both, know on which side

they are really standing. The born politician despises the inward

thought-processes of the ideologue and ethical philosopher in a world

of fact--and rightly. For the believer, all ambition and succession of

the historical world are sinful and without lasting value--he, too,

is right. A ruler who wishes to improve religion in the direction

of political, practical purposes is a fool. A sociologist-preacher

who tries to bring truth, righteousness, peace, and forgiveness into

the world of actuality is a fool also. No faith yet has altered the

world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between

directional Time and timeless Eternity, between the _course_ of history

and the _existence_ of a divine world-order, in the structure of which

the word “providence” or “dispensation” denotes the form of causality.

_This is the final meaning of the moment in which Jesus and Pilate

confronted one another._ In the one world, the historical, the Roman

caused the Galilean to be crucified--that was his Destiny. In the other

world, Rome was cast for perdition and the Cross became the pledge of

Redemption--that was the “will of God.”[360]

_Religion is metaphysic and nothing else--“Credo quia absurdum”_--and

this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof

(which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but _lived and experienced_

metaphysic--that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural

as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true.

Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no

moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to

be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth-century

Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus

is a blasphemy. His occasional utterances of a social kind, so far as

they are authentic and not merely attributed sayings, tend merely to

edification. They contain nothing whatever of new doctrine, and they

include proverbs of the sort then in general currency. His _teaching_

was the proclamation, nothing but the proclamation, of those Last

Things with whose images he was constantly filled, the dawn of the New

Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the last judgment, a new heaven

and a new earth.[361] Any other conception of religion was never in

Jesus, nor in any truly deep-feeling period of history. _Religion is,

first and last, metaphysic_, other-worldliness (_Jenseitigkeit_),

awareness in a world of which the evidence of the senses merely lights

the foreground. It is life in and with the supersensible. And where the

capacity for this awareness, or even the capacity for believing in its

existence, is wanting, real religion is at an end. “My kingdom is _not_

of this world,” and only he who can look into the depths that this

flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them. It is

the Late, city periods that, no longer capable of seeing into depths,

have turned the remnants of religiousness upon the external world and

replaced religion by humanities, and metaphysic by moralization and

social ethics.

In Jesus we have the direct opposite. “Give unto Cæsar the things that

are Cæsar’s” means: “Fit yourselves to the powers of the fact-world, be

patient, suffer, and ask it not whether they are ‘just.’” What alone

matters is the salvation of the soul. “Consider the lilies” means:

“Give no heed to riches _and poverty_, for both fetter the soul to

cares of this world.” “Man cannot serve both God and Mammon”--by Mammon

is meant the _whole_ of actuality. It is shallow, and it is cowardly,

to argue away the grand significance of this demand. Between working

for the increase of one’s own riches, and working for the social ease

of everyone, he would have felt no difference whatever. When wealth

affrighted him, when the primitive community in Jerusalem--which was

a strict Order and not a socialist club--rejected ownership, it was

the most direct opposite of “social” sentiment that moved them. Their

conviction was, not that the visible state of things was all, but that

it was nothing: that it rested not on appreciation of comfort in this

world, but on unreserved contempt of it. Something, it is true, must

always exist to be set against and to nullify worldly fortune, and so

we come back to the contrast of Tolstoi and Dostoyevski. Tolstoi, the

townsman and Westerner, saw in Jesus only a social reformer, and in

his metaphysical impotence--like the whole civilized West, which can

only think about _distributing_, never _renouncing_--elevated primitive

Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. Dostoyevski, who was

poor, but in certain hours almost a saint, never thought about social

ameliorations--of what profit would it have been to a man’s _soul_ to

abolish _property_?

VII

Amongst Jesus’s friends and disciples, stunned as they were by the

appalling outcome of the journey to Jerusalem, there spread after a

few days the news of his resurrection and reappearance. The impression

of this news on such souls and in such a time can never be more than

partially echoed in the sensibilities of a Late mankind. It meant the

actual fulfilment of all the Apocalyptic of that Magian Springtime--the

end of the present æon marked by the ascension of the redeemed

Redeemer, the second Adam, the Saoshyant, Enosh, Barnasha, or whatever

other name man attached to “Him,” into the light-realm of the Father.

And therewith the foretold future, the new world-æon, “the Kingdom

of Heaven,” became immediately present. They felt themselves at the

decisive point in the history of redemption.

This certainty completely transformed the world-outlook of the little

circles. “His” teachings, as they had flowed from his mild and noble

nature--his inner feeling of the relation between God and man and of

the high meaning of the times, and were exhaustively comprised in

and defined by the word “love”--fell into the background, and their

place was taken by the _teaching of Him_. As the Arisen he became for

his disciples a new figure, in and of the Apocalyptic, and (what was

more) its most important and final figure. But therewith their image

of the future took form as an image of memory. Now, this was something

of quite decisive importance, unheard-of in the world of Magian

thought--the transference of an actuality, lived and experienced, on to

the plane of the high story itself. The Jews (amongst them the young

Paul) and the Mandæans (amongst them the disciples of John the Baptist)

fought against it with passion and made of Jesus a “False Messiah” such

as had been spoken of in the earliest Persian texts.[362] For them “He”

was still to come from afar; for the little community “He” had already

been--had they not seen him and lived with him? We have to enter into

this conception unreservedly if we are to appreciate the enormous

superiority it had in those times. Instead of an uncertain glimpse into

the distance,[363] a compelling present; instead of fearful waiting for

a liberating certainty, instead of a saga, a lived and shared human

destiny--truly they were “glad tidings” that were proclaimed.

But to whom? Even in the first days the question arose which decided

the whole Destiny of the new revelation. Jesus and his friends were

Jews by birth, but they did not belong to the land of Judea. Here in

Jerusalem men looked for the Messiah of their old sacred books, a

Messiah who was to appear for the “Jewish people,” in the old tribal

sense, and only for them. But all the rest of the Aramæan world waited

upon the Saviour of the _world_, the Redeemer and Son of Man, the

figure of all apocalyptic literature, whether written out in Jewish,

Persian, Chaldean, or Mandæan terms.[364] In the one view the death

and resurrection of Jesus were merely local events; in the other they

betokened a world-change. For, while everywhere else the Jews were a

Magian nation without home or unity of birth, Jerusalem held firmly

to the tribal idea. The conflict was not one between “preaching to

the Jews” and “preaching to the Gentiles”--it went far deeper. The

word “mission” had essentially here a twofold meaning. In the Judaic

view there was essentially no need for recruiting--quite the reverse,

as it was a contradiction to the Messiah-idea. The words “tribe” and

“mission” are reciprocally exclusive. The members of the Chosen People,

and in particular the priesthood, had merely to convince _themselves_

that their longing was now fulfilled. But to the Magian nation, based

on _consensus_ or community of feeling, what the Resurrection conveyed

was a full and definitive truth, and consensus in the matter of this

truth gave the _principle of the true nation_, which must necessarily

expand till it had taken in all older and conceptually incomplete

principles. “A Shepherd and his sheep” was the formula of the new

world-nation. The nation of the Redeemer was identical with mankind.

When, therefore, we survey the early history of this Culture, we see

that the controversy in the Apostles’ Council[365] had been already

decided, five hundred years before, by facts. Post-exilic Jewry (with

the sole exception of self-contained Judea) had, like the Persians,

Chaldeans, and others, recruited widely amongst the heathen, from

Turkestan to inner Africa, regardless of home and origin. As to this

there is now no controversy. It never at any time entered the heads of

this community to be anything but what it really was. It was itself

already the result of _a national existence in dispersion_. In utter

contrast to the old-Jewish texts--which were a carefully preserved

treasure, and of which the right interpretation, the Halakha, was

reserved by the Rabbis to themselves--the apocalyptic literature

was written so that it could reach all the souls to be wakened, and

interpreted so that it might strike home in everyone.

It is easy to see which of these conceptions was that of Jesus’s

oldest friends, for they established themselves as a community of the

Last Days in Jerusalem and frequented the Temple. For these simple

folk--amongst them his brothers, who erstwhile had openly rejected him,

and his mother, who now believed in her executed Son[366]--the power of

the Judaic tradition was even stronger than the spirit of Apocalypse.

In their object of convincing the Jews they failed (although at first

even Pharisees came over to them) and so they remained as one of the

numerous sects within Judaism, and their product, the “Confession of

Peter,” may fairly be characterized as an express assertion that they

themselves were the true Jewry and the Synedrion the false.[367]

The final destiny of this circle[368] was to fall into oblivion when,

as very soon happened, the whole world of Magian thought and feeling

responded to the new apocalyptic teaching. Amongst the later disciples

of Jesus were many who were definitely and purely Magian, and wholly

free from the Pharisaic spirit. Long before Paul, they had tacitly

settled the mission question. Not to preach, for them, was not to live

at all, and presently they had assembled, everywhere from the Tigris

to the Tiber, small circles in which the figure of Jesus, in every

conceivable presentation, merged with the mass of prior visions.[369]

Out of this, a new discord arose, as between mission to the heathen and

mission to the Jews, and this was far more important than the conflict

between Judea and the world on issues already decided. Jesus had lived

in Galilee. Was his teaching to look west or east? Was it to be a

Jesus-cult or an Order of the Saviour? Was it to seek intimacy with the

Persian or with the Syncretic Church, both of which were in process of

formation?

This was the question decided by Paul--the first great personality

in the new movement, and the first who had the sense not only of

truths, but of facts. As a young rabbi from the West, and a pupil

of one of the most famous of the Tannaim, he had persecuted the

Christians qua Jewish sectaries. Then, after an awakening of the sort

that often happened in those days, he turned to the numerous small

cult-communities of the West and forged out of them a Church of _his

own_ modelling: so that thenceforward, the Pagan and the Christian

cult-Churches evolved in parallel, and with constant reciprocal action,

up to Iamblichus and Athanasius (about A.D. 330). In the presence of

this great ideal, Paul had for the Jesus-communities of Jerusalem a

scarcely veiled contempt. There is nothing in the New Testament more

express and exact than the beginning of the Epistle to the Galatians;

his activity is a self-assumed task; he has taught how it pleased him

and he has built how it pleased him. Finally, after fourteen years, he

goes to Jerusalem in order, by force of his superior mentality, his

success, and his effective independence of the old comrades of Jesus,

to compel them there to agree that his, Paul’s, creation contained the

true doctrine. Peter and his people, alien to actualities, failed to

seize and appreciate the far-reaching significance of the discussion.

And from that moment the primitive community was superfluous.

Paul was a rabbi in intellect and an apocalyptic in feeling. He

recognized Judaism, but as a _preliminary_ development. And thus there

came to be two Magian religions with the same Scriptures (namely,

the Old Testament), but a double Halakha, the one setting towards

the Talmud--developed by the Tannaim at Jerusalem from 300 B.C.

onwards--and the other, founded by Paul and completed by the Fathers,

in the direction of the Gospel. But, further, Paul drew together the

whole fullness of Apocalypse and salvation-yearning then circulating

in these fields[370] into a salvation-_certainty_, the certainty

immediately revealed to him and to him _alone_ near Damascus. “_Jesus

is the Redeemer and Paul is his Prophet_”--this is the whole content

of his message. The analogy with Mohammed could scarcely be closer.

They differed neither in the nature of the awakening, nor in prophetic

self-assuredness, nor in the consequent assertion of sole authority and

unconditional truth for their respective expositions.

With Paul, urban man and his “intelligence” come on the scene. The

others, though they might know Jerusalem or Antioch, never grasped the

essence of these cities. They lived soil-bound, rural, wholly soul and

feeling. But now there appeared a spirit that had grown up in the great

cities of Classical cast, that could only live in cities, that neither

understood nor respected the peasant’s countryside. An understanding

was possible with Philo, but with Peter never. Paul was the first by

whom the Resurrection-experience was _seen as a problem_; the ecstatic

awe of the young countryman changed in his brain into a conflict of

spiritual principles. For what a contrast!--the struggle of Gethsemane,

and the hour of Damascus: Child and Man, soul-anguish and intellectual

decision, self-devotion to death and resolve to change sides! Paul

had begun by seeing in the new Jewish sect a danger to the Pharisaism

of Jerusalem; now, suddenly, he comprehended that the Nazarenes “were

right”--a phrase that is inconceivable on the lips of Jesus--and took

up their cause against Judaism, thereby setting up as an _intellectual

quantity_ that which had previously consisted in the knowledge of an

experience. An intellectual quantity--but in making his cause into

this he unwittingly drove it close to the other intellectual powers,

_the cities of the West_. In the ambiance of pure Apocalyptic there

is no “intellect.” For the old comrades it was simply not possible to

understand him in the least--and mournfully and doubtfully they must

have looked at him while he was addressing them. Their living image

of Jesus (whom Paul had never seen) paled in this bright, hard light

of concepts and propositions. Thenceforward the holy memory faded

into a Scholastic system. But Paul had a perfectly exact feeling for

the true home of his ideas. His missionary journeys were all directed

westward, and the East he ignored. _He never left the domain of the

Classical city._ Why did he go to Rome, to Corinth, and not to Edessa

or Ctesiphon? And why was it that he worked _only in the cities, and

never from village to village?_

That things developed thus was due to Paul _alone_. In the face of his

practical energy the feelings of all the rest counted for nothing, and

so the young Church took the urban and Western tendency decisively,

so decisively that later it could describe the remaining heathen as

“_pagani_,” country-folk. Thus arose an immense danger that only youth

and vernal force enabled the growing Church to repel; the fellah-world

of the Classical cities grasped at it with both hands, and the marks

of that grasp are visible to-day. But--how remote already from the

essence of Jesus, whose entire life had been bound to country and

the country-folk! The Pseudomorphosis in which he was born he had

simply not noticed; his soul contained not the smallest trace of

its influence--and now, a generation after him, probably within the

lifetime of his mother, that which had grown up out of his death had

already become a centre of formative purpose for that Pseudomorphosis.

The Classical City was soon the only theatre of ritual and dogmatic

evolution. Eastward the community extended only furtively and

unobtrusively.[371] About A.D. 100 there were already Christians beyond

the Tigris, but as far as the development of the Church was concerned

they and their beliefs might almost have been non-existent.

It was a second creation, then, that came out of Paul’s immediate

entourage, and it was this creation that, essentially, defined the

form of the new Church. The personality and the story of Jesus cried

aloud to be put into poetic form, and yet it is due to one man alone,

Mark, that Gospels came into existence at all.[372] What Paul and

Mark had before them was a firm tradition in the community, _the_

“Gospel,” a continued and propagated hearsay, supported by formless and

insignificant notes in Aramaic and Greek, but in no way set out. In

any case, of course, serious documents would have come into existence

some time or another, but their natural form as products of the spirit

of those who had _lived_ with Jesus (and of the spirit of the East

generally) would have been a canonical collection of his sayings,

amplified, conclusively defined, and provided with an exegesis by the

Councils and pivoting upon the Second Advent. But any tentatives in

this direction were completely broken off by the Gospel of Mark, which

was written down about A.D. 65, at the same time as the last Pauline

Epistles, and, like them, in Greek. The writer had no suspicion,

perhaps, of the significance of his little work, but it made him one

of the supremely important personalities not only of Christianity, but

of the Arabian Culture generally. All older attempts vanished, leaving

writings in Gospel-form as the sole sources concerning Jesus. (So much

so that “_Evangelium_,” from signifying the content of glad tidings,

came to mean the form itself.) The work was the outcome of the wishes

of Pauline, literate, circles that had never heard any one of Jesus’s

companions discourse about him. It is _an apocalyptic life-picture from

a distance_; lived experience is replaced by narrative, and narrative

so plain and straightforward that the apocalyptic tendency passes quite

unperceived.[373] And yet Apocalyptic is its condition precedent. It

is not the words of Jesus, but the doctrine of Jesus in the Pauline

form, that constitutes the substance of Mark. The first Christian book

emanates from the Pauline creation. But very soon the latter itself

becomes unthinkable without the book and its successors.

For presently there arose something which Paul, the born schoolman,

had never intended, but which nevertheless had been made inevitable by

the tendency of his work--the _cult-church of Christian nationality_.

While the Syncretic creed-community, in proportion as it attained

to consciousness of itself, drew the innumerable old city-cults and

the new Magian together and by means of a supreme cult endowed the

structure with henotheistic form, the Jesus-cult of the oldest Western

communities was so long dissected and enriched that it also came to

consist of just such another mass of cults.[374] Around the birth of

Jesus, of which the Disciples knew nothing, grew up a story of his

childhood. In the Mark Gospel it has not yet come into existence.

Already in the old Persian apocalyptic, indeed, the Saoshyant as

Saviour of the Last Day was said to be born of a virgin. But the new

western myth was of quite other significance and had incalculable

consequences. For within the Pseudomorphosis-region there arose

presently beside Jesus a figure to which he was Son, which transcended

his figure--that of the Mother of God. She, like her Son, was a simple

human destiny of such arresting and attractive force that she towered

above all the hundred and one Virgins and Mothers of Syncretism--Isis,

Tanit, Cybele, Demeter--and all the mysteries of birth and pain, and

finally drew them into herself. For Irenæus she is the Eve of a new

mankind. Origen champions her continued virginity. By giving birth to

Redeemer-God it is _she_ really who has redeemed the world. Mary the

“Theotokos” (she who bare God) was the great stumbling-block for the

Christians outside the Classical frontier, and it was the doctrinal

developments of this idea that led Monophysites and Nestorians to break

away and re-establish the pure Jesus-religion.[375] But the Faustian

Culture, again, when it awoke and needed a symbol whereby to express

its primary feeling for Infinity in time and to manifest its sense of

the succession of generations, _set up the “Mater Dolorosa” and not the

suffering Redeemer_ as the pivot of the German-Catholic Christianity of

the Gothic age; and for whole centuries of bright fruitful inwardness

this woman-figure was the very synthesis of Faustian world-feeling and

the object of all art, poetry, and piety. Even to-day in the ritual and

the prayers of the Roman Catholic Church, and above all in the thoughts

of its people, Jesus takes second place after the Madonna.[376]

Along with the Mary-cult there arose the innumerable cults of the

saints, which certainly exceeded in number those of the antique

place-gods; when the Pagan Church finally expired, the Christian had

been able to absorb the whole store of local cults in the form of the

veneration of saints.

Paul and Mark were decisive in yet another matter of inestimably

wide import. It was a result of Paul’s mission that, contrary to all

the initial probabilities, Greek became the language of the Church

and--following the lead of the first Gospel--of a sacred _Greek_

literature. Let the reader consider what this meant, in one way and

another. The Jesus Church was artificially separated from its spiritual

origins and attached to an alien and scholarly element. Touch with the

folk-spirit of the Aramæan motherland was lost. Thenceforward both

the cult-Churches possessed the same language, the same conceptual

traditions, the same book-literature from the same schools. The far

less sophisticated Aramaic literatures of the East--the truly Magian,

written and thought in the language of Jesus and his companions--were

cut off from cooperating in the life of the Church. They could not

be read, they dropped out of sight, and finally they were forgotten

altogether. After all, notwithstanding that the Persian Scriptures were

set down in Avestan and the Jewish in Hebrew, the language of their

authors and exegetes; the language of the whole Apocalyptic from which

the teachings of Jesus, and secondarily the teachings about Jesus,

sprang; the language, lastly, of the scholars of all the Mesopotamian

universities--was Aramaic. All this vanished from the field of view, to

be replaced by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom were taken up, worked

upon in common, and misunderstood in common by the Schoolmen of the two

cult-Churches.

A final step in this direction was attempted by a man who was

the equal of Paul in organizing talent and greatly his superior

in intellectual creativeness, but who was inferior to him in the

feeling for possibilities and actualities, and consequently failed to

achieve his grandly conceived schemes--Marcion.[377] He saw in Paul’s

creation and its consequences only the basis on which to found the

true religion of salvation. He was sensible of the absurdity of two

religions that were unreservedly at war with one another possessing

the same Holy Writ--namely, the _Jewish_ canon. To us to-day it seems

almost inconceivable that this should have been, but in fact it was

so, for a century--but we have to remember what a sacred text meant

in every kind of Magian religiousness. In these texts Marcion saw the

real “conspiracy against the truth” and the most urgent danger for

the doctrines intended by Jesus and, in his view, not yet actualized.

Paul the prophet had declared the Old Testament as fulfilled and

concluded--Marcion the founder pronounced it defeated and cancelled. He

strove to cut out everything Jewish, down to the last detail. From end

to end he was fighting nothing but Judaism. Like every true founder,

like every religiously creative period, like Zarathustra, the prophets

of Israel, like the Homeric Greeks, and like the Germans converted to

Christianity, he transformed the old gods into defeated powers.[378]

Jehovah as the Creator-God, the Demiurge, is the “Just” _and therefore

the Evil_: Jesus as the incarnation of the Saviour-God in this evil

creation is the “alien”--that is, the good Principle.[379] The

foundation of Magian, and in particular Persian, feeling is perfectly

unmistakable here. Marcion came from Sinope, the old capital of that

Mithradatic Empire whose religion is indicated in the very name of its

kings. Here of old, too, the Mithras cult had originated.

But to the new doctrine properly belonged new Scriptures. The “Law

and Prophets” which had hitherto been canonical for the whole of

Christendom was the _Bible of the Jewish God_, and in fact it had

just been given final shape as such by the Synedrion at Jabna.

Thus, it was a Devil’s book that the Christian had in his hands,

and Marcion, therefore, now set up against it the Bible of the

Redeemer-God--likewise an assemblage and ordering of writings that had

hitherto been current in the community[380] as simple edification-books

without canonical claims. In place of the Torah he puts the--_one and

true_--Gospel, which he builds up uniformly out of various separate,

and, in his view, corrupted and falsified, Gospels. In place of the

Israelite prophets he sets up the Epistles of the _one prophet of

Jesus_, who was Paul.

Thus Marcion became the real creator of the New Testament. But for

that reason it is impossible to ignore the mysterious personage,

closely related to him, who not long before had written the Gospel

“according to John.” The intention of this writer was neither to

amplify nor to supersede the Gospels proper; what he did--and, unlike

Mark, consciously did--was to create something quite new, _the first

sacred book_ of Christianity, the Koran of the new religion.[381] The

book proves that this religion was already conceived of as something

complete and enduring. The idea of the immediately impending end of

the world, with which Jesus was filled through and through and which

even Paul and Mark in a measure shared, lies far behind “John” and

Marcion. Apocalyptic is at an end, and Mysticism is beginning. Their

content is not the teaching of Jesus, nor even the Pauline teaching

about Jesus, but the enigma of the universe, the World-Cavern. There

is here no question of a Gospel; not the figure of the Redeemer, but

the principle of the Logos, is the meaning and the means of happening.

The childhood story is rejected again; a god is not “born,” he is

“there,” and wanders in human form over the earth. And this god is a

Trinity--God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. This sacred book

of earliest Christianity contains, for the first time, the Magian

problem of “Substance,” which dominated the following centuries to

the exclusion of everything else and finally led to the religion’s

splitting up into three churches. And--what is significant in more

respects than one--the solution of that problem to which “John” stands

closest is that which the Nestorian East stood for as the true one. It

is, in virtue of the Logos idea (Greek though the word happens to be)

the “easternmost” of the Gospels, and presents Jesus, emphatically not

as the bringer of the final and total revelation, but as the second

envoy, who is to be _followed by a third_ (the Comforter, Paraclete, of

John xiv, 16, 26; xv, 26). This is the astounding doctrine that Jesus

himself proclaims, and the decisive note of this enigmatic book. Here

is unveiled, quite suddenly, the faith of the Magian East. If the Logos

does not go, the Paraclete[382] cannot come (John xvi, 7), but between

them lies the last Æon, the rule of Ahriman (xiv, 30). The Church of

the Pseudomorphosis, ruled by Pauline intellect, fought long against

the John Gospel and gave it recognition only when the offensive, darkly

hinted doctrine had been covered over by a Pauline interpretation.

The real state of affairs is disclosed in the Montanist movement

(Asia Minor, 160) which harked back to oral tradition and proclaimed

in Montanus the manifested Paraclete and the end of the world. Its

popularity was immense. Tertullian went over to it at Carthage in 207.

About 245 Mani,[383] who was intimately in touch with the currents of

Eastern Christianity,[384] cast out the Pauline, human Jesus as a demon

and confessed the Johannine Logos as the true Jesus, but announced

himself as the Paraclete of the fourth Gospel. In Carthage, Augustine

became a Manichæan, and it is a highly suggestive fact that both

movements finally fused with Marcionism.

To return to Marcion himself, it was he who carried through the idea

of “John” and created a Christian Bible. And then, verging on old

age, when the communities of the extreme west recoiled from him in

horror,[385] he set out to build the masterly structure of his own

Redeemer-Church.[386] From 156 to 190 this was a power, and it was only

in the following century that the older Church succeeded in degrading

the Marcionites to the rank of heretics. Even so, in the broad East and

as far out as Turkestan, it was still important at a much later date,

and it ended, in a way deeply significant of its essential feeling, by

fusing with the Manichæans.[387]

Nevertheless, though in the fullness of his conscious superiority

he had underestimated the _vis inertiæ_ of existing conditions,

his grand effort was not in vain. He was, like Paul before him and

Athanasius after him, the deliverer of Christianity at a moment when

it threatened to break up, and the grandeur of his idea is in no

wise diminished by the fact that union came about in opposition to,

instead of through, him. The early Catholic Church--that is, the

_Church of the Pseudomorphosis_--arose in its greatness only about

190, and then it was in self-defence against the Church of Marcion

and with the aid of an organization taken from that Church. Further,

it replaced Marcion’s Bible by another of similar structure--Gospels

and apostolic Epistles--which it then proceeded to combine with the

Law and the Prophets in one unit. And finally, this act of linking

the two Testaments having in itself settled the Church’s attitude

towards Judaism, it proceeded to combat Marcion’s third creation, his

Redeemer-doctrine, by making a start with a theology of its own on the

basis of _his_ enunciation of the problem.

This development, however, took place on Classical soil, and,

therefore, even the Church that arose in opposition to Marcion and his

anti-Judaism was looked upon by Talmudic Jewry (whose centre of gravity

lay entirely in Mesopotamia and its universities) as a mere piece of

Hellenistic paganism. The destruction of Jerusalem was a conclusive

event that in the world of fact no spiritual power could nullify. Such

is the intimacy of inward relationship between waking-consciousness,

religion, and speech that the complete severance after 70 of the Greek

Pseudomorphosis and the Aramaic (that is, the truly Arabian) region

was bound to result in the formation of two distinct domains of Magian

religious development. On the Western margin of the young Culture the

Pagan cult-Church, the Jesus-Church (removed thither by Paul), and the

Greek-speaking Judaism of the Philo stamp were in point of language and

literature so interlocked that the last-named fell into Christianity

even in the first century, and Christianity and Hellenism combined to

form a _common_ early philosophy. In the Aramaic-speaking world from

the Orontes to the Tigris, on the other hand, Judaism and Persism

interacted constantly and intimately, each creating in this period

its own strict theology and scholastic in the Talmud and the Avesta;

and from the fourth century both these theologies exercised _the most

potent influence upon the Aramaic-speaking Christendom that resisted

the Pseudomorphosis_, so that finally it broke away in the form of the

Nestorian Church.

Here in the East the difference, inherent in every human

waking-consciousness, between sense-understanding and

word-understanding--and, therefore between eye and letter--led up to

purely Arabian methods of mysticism and scholasticism. The apocalyptic

certainty, “Gnosis” in the first-century sense, that Jesus intended to

confer,[388] the divining contemplation and emotion, is that of the

Israelite prophets, the Gathas, Sufism, and we have it recognizable

still in Spinoza, in the Polish Messiah Baal Shem[389] and in Mirza

Ali Mohammed, the enthusiast-founder of Bahaism, who was executed in

Teheran in 1850. The other way, “Paradosis,” is the characteristically

Talmudic method of word-exegesis, of which Paul was a master;[390] it

pervades all later Avestan works, the Nestorian dialectic,[391] the

entire theology of Islam alike.

On the other side, the Pseudomorphosis is single and whole both in its

Magian believing acceptance (Pistis) and its metaphysical introversion

(Gnosis).[392] The Magian belief in its Westerly shape was formulated

for the Christians by Irenæus and, above all, by Tertullian, whose

famous aphorism “_Credo quia absurdum_” is the very summation of this

certainty in belief. The Pagan counterpart is Plotinus in his Enneads

and even more so Porphyry in his treatise _On the Return of the Soul to

God_.[393] But for the great schoolmen of the Pagan Church too, there

were Father (Nus), Son, and the middle Being, just as already for Philo

the Logos had been first-born Son and second God. Doctrines concerning

ecstasy, angels and demons, and the dual substance of soul were freely

current amongst them, and we see in Plotinus and Origen, both pupils

of the same master, that the scholasticism of the Pseudomorphosis

consisted in the development of Magian concepts and thoughts, by

systematic transvaluation of the texts of Plato and Aristotle.

The characteristic _central idea of the whole thought of the

Pseudomorphosis is the Logos_,[394] in use and development its faithful

image. There is no possibility here of any “Greek,” in the sense of

Classical, influence; there was not a man alive in those days whose

spiritual disposition could have accommodated the smallest trace of

the Logos of Heraclitus and the Stoa. But, equally, the theologies

that lived side by side in Alexandria were never able to develop in

full purity the Logos-notion as they meant it, whereas both in Persian

and Chaldean imaginings--as Spirit or Word of God--and in Jewish

doctrine--as Ruach and Memra--it played a decisive part. What the

Logos-teaching in the West did was to develop a Classical formula,

by way of Philo and the John Gospel (the enduring effect of which on

the West was its mark upon the schoolmen) not only into an element

of Christian mysticism, but, eventually, into a dogma.[395] This

was inevitable. This dogma which _both_ the Western Churches held,

corresponded, on the side of knowledge, to that which, on the side of

faith, was represented _both by_ the syncretic cults and the cults of

Mary and the Saints. And against the whole thing, dogma and cult, the

feeling of the East revolted from the 4th century on.

For the eye the history of these thoughts and feelings is repeated

in the history of Magian architecture.[396] _The basic form of the

Pseudomorphosis is the Basilica_, which was known to the Jews of the

West and to the Hellenistic sects of the Chaldeans even before the time

of Christ. As the Logos of the John Gospel is a Magian fundamental in

Classical shape, so the Basilica is a Magian room whose inner walls

correspond to the outer surfaces of the old Classical temple, the

cult-building introverted. The architectural form of the pure East is

the _cupola building, the Mosque_, which without doubt existed long

before the oldest Christian Churches in the temples of the Persians

and Chaldeans, the synagogues of Mesopotamia, and probably the temples

of Saba as well. The attempts to reconcile East and West in the

Church Councils of the Byzantine period were finally symbolized in

the mixed form of the domed basilica. For this item of the history of

ecclesiastical architecture is really another expression of the great

change that set in with Athanasius and Constantine, the last great

champions of Christianity. The one created the firm western dogma

and also Monasticism, into whose hands dogma gradually passed from

those of the ageing schools. The other founded the State of Christian

nationality, to which likewise the name of “Greek” passed in the end.

And of this transition the domed basilica is the symbol.