earthly events appear as already inscribed in the heavenly books (vii.
10), and the events which have still really to come consist in the
complete and speedy triumph of the Church-State Israel against King
Antiochus Epiphanes. But here we get the earliest clear proclamation of
a heightened life beyond death--though not yet for all (xii. 2). The
noble vision of the four great beasts that came up from the sea, and of
one like unto a Son of Man that came with the clouds of heaven (chap.
vii), doubtless here figures the earthly kingdoms, Babel, Media, Persia,
Greece (Alexander), and God's kingdom Israel. The Psalter appears to
have been closed as late as 140 B.C.; some Psalms doubtless date back to
701--a few perhaps to David himself, about 1000 B.C. The comminatory
Psalms, even if spoken as by representatives of God's Church and people,
we cannot now echo within our own spiritual life; any heightened
consciousness after death is frequently denied (e.g. vi. 5: 'in the
grave who shall give thee thanks?' and cxv. 17: 'the dead praise not the
Lord')--we have seen the impressive reason of this; and perhaps a
quarter of the Psalms are doubles, or pale imitations of others. But,
for the rest, the Psalter remains as magnificently fresh and powerful as
ever: culminating in the glorious self-commitment (Ps. lxxiii), 'I was
as a beast before Thee. Nevertheless I am continually with Thee. Whom
have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire
beside Thee.' The keen sense, present throughout this amazingly rich
collection, of the reality, prevenience, presence, protection--of the
central importance for man, of God, the All-Abiding, finds thus its
full, deathless articulation.
Religiously slighter, yet interesting as a preparation for Christian
theology, are the writings of Philo, a devout, Greek-trained Jew of
Alexandria, who in A.D. 40 appeared before the Emperor Caligula in Rome.
Philo does not feel his daringly allegorical sublimations as any
departures from the devoutest Biblical faith. Thus 'God never ceases
from action; as to burn is special to fire, so is action to God'--this
in spite of God's rest on the seventh day (Gen. ii. 2). 'There exist two
kinds of men: the heavenly man and the earthly man.'[42] The long Life
of Moses[43] represents him as the King, Lawgiver, High Priest, Prophet,
Mediator. The Word, the Logos (which here everywhere hovers near, but
never reaches, personality) is 'the firstborn son of God', 'the image of
God'[44]; its types are 'the Rock', the Manna, the High Priest's Coat;
it is 'the Wine Pourer and Master of the Drinking Feast of God'.[45] The
majority of the Jews, who did not accept Jesus as the Christ, soon felt
they had no need for so much allegory, and dropped it, with advantage
upon the whole, to the Jewish faith. But already St. Paul and the Fourth
Gospel find here noble mental raiment for the great new facts revealed
by Jesus Christ.
2. The Christian Religion we will take, as to our points, at four stages
of its development--Synoptic, Johannine, Augustinian, Thomistic.
The Synoptic material here specially concerned we shall find especially
in Mark i. 1 to xv. 47; but also in Matt. iii. 1 to xxvii. 56, and in
Luke iii. 1 to xxiii. 56. Within the material thus marked off, there is
no greater or lesser authenticity conferred by treble, or double, or
only single attestation; for this material springs from two original
sources--a collection primarily of doings and sufferings, which our Mark
incorporates with some expansions; and a collection primarily of
discourses, utilized especially by Matthew and Luke in addition to the
original Mark. Both these sources contain the records of eyewitnesses,
probably Saints Peter and Matthew.
The chronological order and the special occasions of the growths in our
Lord's self-manifestation, or in the self-consciousness of His human
soul, are most carefully given by Mark and next by Luke. Matthew largely
ignores the stages and occasions of both these growths, and assumes, as
fully explicit from the beginning of the Ministry, what was manifested
only later on or at the last; and he already introduces ecclesiastical
and Christological terms and discriminations which, however really
implicit as to their substance in Jesus's teaching, or inevitable (as to
their particular form) for the maintenance and propagation of
Christianity in the near future, are nevertheless still absent from the
accounts of Mark and Luke.
The chief rules for the understanding of the specific character of our
Lord's revelation appear to be the following. The life and teaching must
be taken entire; and, within this entirety, each stage must be
apprehended in its own special peculiarities. The thirty years in the
home, the school, the synagogue, the workshop at Nazareth, form a
profoundly important constituent of His life and teaching--impressively
contrasted, as they are, with the probably not full year of the Public
Ministry, even though we are almost completely bereft of all details for
those years of silent preparation.
The Public Ministry, again, consists of two strongly contrasted stages,
divided by the great scene of Jesus with the Apostles alone at Caesarea
Philippi (Mark viii. 27-33; Luke ix. 18-22; Matt. xvi. 13-23). The stage
before is predominantly expansive, hopeful, peacefully growing; the
stage after, is concentrated, sad, in conflict, and in storm. To the
first stage belong the plant parables, full of exquisite sympathy with
the unfolding of natural beauty and of slow fruitfulness; to the second
stage belong the parables of keen watchfulness and of the proximate,
sudden second coming. Both movements are essential to the physiognomy of
our Lord. And they are not simply differences in self-manifestation;
they represent a growth, a relatively new element, in His human soul's
experience and outlook.
The central doctrine in the teaching is throughout the Kingdom of God.
But in the first stage this central doctrine appears as especially
upheld by Jesus's fundamental experience--the Fatherhood of God. In the
second stage the central doctrine appears as especially coloured by
Jesus's other great experience--of Himself as the Son of Man. In the
earlier stage the Kingdom is presented more in the spirit of the ancient
prophets, as predominantly ethical, as already come in its beginnings,
and as subject to laws analogous to those obtaining in the natural
world. In the second stage the coming of the Kingdom is presented more
with the form of the apocalyptic writers, in a purely religious,
intensely transcendent, and dualistic outlook--especially this also in
the Parables of Immediate Expectation--as not present but future (Matt.
xix. 28); not distant but imminent (Matt. xvi. 28; xxiv. 33; xxvi. 64);
not gradual but sudden (Matt. xxiv. 27, 39, 43); not at all achieved by
man but purely given by God (so still in Rev. xxi. 10).
To the earlier stage belongs the great Rejoicing of Jesus (Matt. xi.
25-30; Luke x. 21, 22). The splendid opening, 'I thank Thee, Father--for
so it hath seemed good in Thy sight', and the exquisite close, special
to Matthew, 'Come unto Me--and my burthen is light', raise no grave
difficulty. But the intermediate majestic declaration, 'All things are
delivered unto Me by the Father--neither knoweth any man the Father save
the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him', causes critical
perplexities.
I take this declaration to be modelled upon actual words of Jesus, which
genuinely implied rather than clearly proclaimed a unique relation
between the Father and Himself. Numerous other words and acts involve
such a relation and Jesus's full consciousness of it. His first public
act, His baptism, is clearly described by Mark as a personal experience,
'He saw the heavens opened' and heard a heavenly voice 'Thou art my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased' (i. 10, 11). Already in the
first stage Jesus declares the Baptist to be 'more than a prophet'
(Matt. xi. 9), yet claims superiority over him and over Solomon (xi. 11;
xii. 42). His doctrine is new wine requiring new bottles (Mark ii. 22);
indeed His whole attitude towards the law is that of a superior, who
most really exhorts all, 'Learn of Me'. And soon after Caesarea Philippi
He insists to the people: 'Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me in this
generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed, when He cometh
in the glory of the Father' (Mark viii. 38). The most numerous cures,
physical, psychical, moral, certainly performed by Him, appear as the
spontaneous effect of a unique degree and kind of spiritual authority;
and the sinlessness attributed to Him throughout by the apostolic
community (2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. iv. 15; John viii. 46; 1 John ii. 29)
entirely corresponds to the absence, in the records of Him, of all
traits indicating troubles of conscience and the corresponding fear of
God. And this His unique Sonship is conjoined, in the earliest picture
of Him, with an endless variety and combination of all the joys,
admirations, affections, disappointments, desolations, temptations
possible to such a stainless human soul and will. We thus find here a
comprehensiveness unlike the attitude of the Baptist or St. Paul, and
like, although far exceeding, the joy in nature and the peace in
suffering of St. Francis of Assisi.
The Second Stage opens with the great scene at Caesarea Philippi and its
sequel (given with specially marked successiveness in Mark viii. 27-x.
45), when, for the first time in a manner beyond all dispute, Mark
represents Jesus as adopting the designation 'the Son of Man' in a
Messianic and eschatological sense. For our Lord here promptly corrects
Peter's conception of 'Messiah' by repeated insistence upon 'the Son of
Man'--His glory yet also His sufferings. Thus Jesus adopts the term of
Daniel vii. 13 (which already the Apocalypse of Enoch had understood of
a personal Messiah) as a succinct description of His specific
vocation--its heavenly origin and difference from all earthly
Messianism; its combination of the depths of human weakness,
dereliction, sufferings with the highest elevation in joy, power and
glory; and its connexion of that pain with this triumph as strictly
interrelated--only with and through the Cross, was there here the offer
and acceptance of the Crown.
As to the Passion and Death, and the Risen Life, four points appear to
be central and secured. Neither the Old Testament nor Jewish Theology
really knew of a Suffering Messiah. Jesus Himself clearly perceived,
accepted, and carried out this profound new revelation. This suffering
and death were conceived by Him as the final act and crown of His
service--so in Mark x. 44, 45 and Luke xxii. 24-7. (All this remains
previous to, and independent of, St. Paul's elaborated doctrine as to
the strictly vicarious and juridical character of the whole.) And the
Risen Life is an objectively real, profoundly operative life--the
visions of the Risen One were effects of the truly living Jesus, the
Christ.
The Second Christian Stage, the Johannine writings, are fully
understandable only as posterior to St. Paul--the most enthusiastic and
influential, indeed, of all our Lord's early disciples, but a convert,
from the activity of a strict persecuting Pharisee, not to the earthly
Jesus, of soul and body, whom he never knew, but to the heavenly
Spirit-Christ, whom he had so suddenly experienced. Saul, the man of
violent passions and acute interior conflicts, thus abruptly changed in
a substantially _pneumatic_ manner, is henceforth absorbed, not in the
past Jewish Messiah, but in the present universal Christ; not in the
Kingdom of God, but in Pneuma, the Spirit. Christ, the second Adam, is
here a life-giving Spirit, an element that surrounds and penetrates the
human spirit; we are baptized, dipped, into Christ, Spirit; we can drink
Christ, the Spirit. And this Christ-Spirit effects and maintains the
universal brotherhood of mankind, and articulates in particular posts
and functions the several human spirits, as variously necessary members
of the one Christian society and Church.
Now the Johannine Gospel indeed utilizes considerable Synoptic
materials, and does not, as St. Paul, restrict itself to the Passion and
Resurrection. Yet it gives us, substantially, the Spirit-Christ, the
Heavenly Man; and the growth, prayer, temptation, appeal for sympathy,
dereliction, agony, which, in the Synoptists, are still so real for the
human soul of Jesus Himself, appear here as sheer condescensions, in
time and space, of Him who, as all things good, descends from the
Eternal Above, so that we men here below may ascend thither with Him.
On the other hand, the Church and the Sacraments, still predominantly
implicit in the Synoptists, and the subjects of costly conflict and
organization in the Pauline writings, here underlie, as already fully
operative facts, practically the entire profound work. The great
dialogue with Nicodemus concerns Baptism; the great discourse in the
synagogue at Capernaum, the Holy Eucharist--in both cases, the strict
need of these Sacraments. And from the side of the dead Jesus flow blood
and water, as those two great Sacraments flow from the everliving
Christ; whilst at the Cross's foot He leaves His seamless coat, symbol
of the Church's indivisible unity. The Universalism of this Gospel is
not merely apparent: 'God so loved the world' (iii. 16), 'the Saviour of
the world' (iv. 42)--this glorious teaching is traceable in many a
passage. Yet Christ here condemns the Jews--in the Synoptists only the
Pharisees; He is from above, they are from below; all those that came
before Him were thieves and robbers; He will not pray for the world--'ye
shall die in your sins' (xvii. 9; viii. 24); and the commandment,
designated here by Jesus as His own and as new, to 'love one another',
is for and within the community to which He gives His 'example' (xv. 12;
xiii. 34)--in contrast with the great double commandment of love
proclaimed by Him, in the Synoptists, as already formulated in the
Mosaic Law (Mark xii. 28-34), and as directly applicable to every
fellow-man--indeed, a schismatic Samaritan is given as the pattern of
such perfect love (Luke x. 25-37).
Deuteronomy gained its full articulation in conflict with Canaanite
impurity; the Johannine writings take shape during the earlier battles
of the long war with Gnosticism--the most terrible foe ever, so far,
encountered by the Catholic Church, and conquered by her in open and
fair fight. Also these writings lay much stress upon Knowing and the
Truth: 'this is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God and Jesus
Christ whom Thou hast sent' (xvii. 3); symbolism and mysticism prevail
very largely; and, in so far as they are not absorbed in an Eternal
Present, the reception of truth and experience is not limited to
Christ's earthly sojourn--'the Father will give you another Helper, the
spirit of truth who will abide with you forever' (xiv. 16). Yet here the
knowing and the truth are also deeply ethical and social: 'he who doeth
the truth cometh to the light' (iii. 21); and Christ has a fold, and
other sheep not of this fold--them also He must bring, there will be one
fold, one Shepherd; indeed, ministerial gradations exist in this one
Church (so in xiii. 5-10; xx. 3-8; xxi. 7-19). And the Mysticism here is
but an emotional intuitive apprehension of the great historical figure
of Jesus, and of the most specifically religious of all facts--of the
already overflowing operative existence, previous to all our action, of
God, the Prevenient Love. 'Not we loved God (first), but He (first)
loved us,' 'let us love Him, because He first loved us,' 'no man can
come to Me, unless the Father draw him'--a drawing which awakens a
hunger and thirst for Christ and God (1 John iv. 10, 19; John vi. 44;
iv. 14; vi. 35).
The Third Stage we can find in St. Augustine, who, born a North African
Roman (A.D. 354) and a convert from an impure life and Manichaeism, with
its spatially extended God (A.D. 386), wrote his _Confessions_ in 397,
lived to experience the capture and sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth,
410, composed his great work, _The City of God_, amidst the clear
dissolution of a mighty past and the dim presage of a problematical
future, and died at Hippo, his episcopal city, in 430, whilst the
Vandals were besieging it. St. Augustine is more largely a convert and a
rigorist even than St. Paul when St. Paul is most incisive. But here he
shall testify only to the natures of Eternity and of real time, a matter
in which he remains unequalled in the delicate vividness and balance of
his psychological analysis and religious perception. 'Thou, O God,
precedest all past times by the height of Thine ever-present Eternity;
and Thou exceedest all future times, since they _are_ future, and, once
they have come, will be past times. All thy years abide together,
because they abide; but these our years will all be, only when they all
will have ceased to be. Thy years are but One Day--not every day, but
To-Day. This Thy To-Day is Eternity'.[46] The human soul, even in this
life, has moments of a vivid apprehension of Eternity, as in the great
scene of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia.[47] And this our
sense of Eternity, Beatitude, God, proceeds at bottom from Himself,
immediately present in our lives; the succession, duration of man is
sustained by the Simultaneity, the Eternity of God: 'this day of ours
_does_ pass within Thee, since all these things' of our deeper
experience 'have no means of passing unless, somehow, Thou dost contain
them all'. 'Behold, Thou wast within, and I was without ... Thou wast
with me, but I was not with Thee.' 'Is not the blessed life precisely
_that_ life which all men desire? Even those who only hope to be blessed
would not, unless they in some manner already possessed the blessed
life, desire to be blessed, as, in reality, it is most certain that they
desire to be.'[48] Especially satisfactory is the insistence upon the
futility of the question as to what God was doing in Time before He
created. Time is only a quality inherent in all creatures; it never
existed of itself.[49]
And our fourth, last Christian Stage shall be represented by St. Thomas
Aquinas (A.D. 1225-74), in the one great question where this
Norman-Italian Friar Noble, a soul apparently so largely derivative and
abstractive, is more complete and balanced, and penetrates to the
specific genius of Christianity more deeply, than Saints Paul and
Augustine with all their greater directness and intensity. We saw how
the deepest originality of our Lord's teaching and temper consisted in
His non-rigoristic earnestness, in His non-Gnostic detachment from
things temporal and spatial. The absorbing expectation of the Second
Coming, indeed the old, largely effete Graeco-Roman world, had first to
go, the great Germanic migrations had to be fully completed, the first
Crusades had to pass, before--some twelve centuries after Nazareth and
Calvary--Christianity attained in Aquinas a systematic and promptly
authoritative expression of this its root-peculiarity and power. No one
has put the point better than Professor E. Troeltsch: 'The decisive
point here is the conception, peculiar to the Middle Ages, of what is
Christian as Supernatural, or rather the full elaboration of the
consequences involved in the conception of the Supernatural. The
Supernatural is now recognized not only in the great complicated miracle
of man's redemption from out of the world corrupted by original sin. But
the Supernatural now unfolds itself as an autonomous principle of a
logical, religious and ethical kind. The creature, even the perfect
creature, is only Natural--is possessed of only natural laws and ends;
God alone is Supernatural. Hence the essence of Christian
Supernaturalism consists in the elevation of the creature, above this
creature's co-natural limitations, to God's own Supernature'. The
distinction is no longer, as in the Ancient Church, between two kinds
(respectively perfect and relative) of the one sole Natural Law; the
distinction here is between Natural Law in general and Supernature
generally. 'The Decalogue, in strictness, is not yet the Christian
Ethic. "Biblical" now means revealed, but not necessarily Christian; for
the Bible represents, according to Aquinas, a process of development
which moves through universal history and possesses various stages. The
Decalogue is indeed present in the legislation of Christ, but as a stage
preliminary to the specifically Christian Ethic. The formula, on the
contrary, for the specifically Christian Moral Law is here the
Augustinian definition of the love of God as the highest and absolute,
the entirely simple, Moral end--an end which contains the demand of the
love of God in the stricter sense (self-sanctification, self-denial,
contemplation) and the demand of the love of our neighbour (the active
relating of all to God, the active interrelating of all in God, and the
most penetrating, mutual self-sacrifice for God). This Ethic, a mystical
interpretation of the Evangelical Preaching, forms indeed a strong
contrast to the This-World Ethic of the Natural Law, Aristotle, the
Decalogue and Natural Prosperity; but then this cannot fail to be the
case, given the entire fundamental character of the Christian
Ethic'.[50]
Thus the widest and most primitive contrasts here are, not Sin and
Redemption (though these, of course, remain) but Nature (however good in
its kind) and Supernature. The State becomes the complex of that
essentially good thing, Nature; the Church the complex of that
different, higher good, Supernature; roughly speaking, where the State
leaves off, the Church begins.
It lasted not long, before the Canonists and certain ruling Churchmen
helped to break up, in the consciousness of men at large, this noble
perception of the two-step ladder from God to man and from man to God.
And the Protestant Reformers, as a whole, went even beyond Saints Paul
and Augustine in exclusive preoccupation with Sin and Redemption.
Henceforth the single-step character of man's call now more than ever
predominates. The Protestant Reformation, like the French Revolution,
marks the existence of grave abuses, the need of large reforms, and,
especially on this point, the all but inevitable excessiveness of man
once he is aroused to such 'reforming' action. Certainly, to this hour,
Protestantism as such has produced, within and for religion
specifically, nothing that can seriously compare, in massive, balanced
completeness, with the work of the short-lived golden Middle Ages of
Aquinas and Dante. Hence, for our precise present purpose, we can
conclude our Jewish and Christian survey here.
3. Only a few words about Confucianism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, as
these, in some of their main outlines, illustrate the points especially
brought out by the Jewish Christian development.
Confucianism admittedly consists, at least as we have it, in a greatly
complicated system of the direct worship of Nature (Sun, Moon, Stars
especially) and of Ancestors, and of a finely simple system of ethical
rules for man's ordinary social intercourse. That Nature-worship closely
resembles what the Deuteronomic reform fought so fiercely in Israel; and
the immemorial antiquity and still vigorous life of such a worship in
China indicates impressively how little such Nature-worship tends, of
itself, to its own supersession by a definite Theism. And the Ethical
Rules, and their very large observance, illustrate well how real can be
the existence, and the goodness in its own kind, of Natural, This-World
morality, even where it stands all but entirely unpenetrated or
supplemented by any clear and strong supernatural attraction or
conviction.