practiced the healing art they got the name of Therapeutae (healers,
physicians). Josephus says that they lived in special settlements in the
country parts; Philo, that they lived in the hamlets, avoiding the
cities; Pliny the elder plants them on the western shore of the Dead
Sea, in settlements apart. Their number is stated at 4,000. Their
occupations were husbandry and handicraft, but they sternly refused to
have anything to do with whatever served the uses of warfare, as the
manufacture of arms; they also declined all trades engaged in for
individual profit, as traffic, seafaring, innkeeping. They had no
private property, but community of goods; among themselves they neither
bought nor sold, but each to each gave according to the need. They
repudiated not alone servitude, but mastery in general, and whatever in
anywise annuls the natural equality of mankind. Their food was such as
necessity required, and was prepared strictly according to the rules of
the order. On this point we know with certainty only that they held oil
in abomination, whether for anointing or for use with victuals. But from
the circumstance that they condemned bloody offerings and always
practiced great abstemiousness in food, we must infer that they
abstained totally from fleshmeat and intoxicating liquors. Sexual love
also they condemned, and a party among them (the leading party),
abstained from marriage and maintained its numerical strength by
adopting outside children; another faction, however, deeming this
strictness to be fatal to the sect, retained the institution of
marriage, though under severe restrictions. The members observed the
most scrupulous cleanliness, taking the bath daily in cold water, and
wearing white garments. Their daily tasks were minutely prescribed.
Before rise of sun they spoke no word, only the prayers, in which they
paid honor to the sun as symbol of God. Then they went about their work,
coming thence back to the common meal, first washing themselves and
putting on clean garments. No one tasted anything till the priest had
made prayer. The meal concluded, they offered prayer in unison, laid off
their clean garments, and went back to work. At the last meal of the day
the same customs were observed: at meat only one person spoke at a time.
They did nothing without orders from the superiors, practiced moderation
in all things, studied to control the passions, to be faithful to all
obligations, to be at peace among themselves and with all the world, and
to be helpful to the poor. There was a twelve-month term of probation
prior to admission into the order. During that time the postulant
conformed to the Essenian rule of life: he received a small hatchet
(borne by all Essenes, as an emblem of labor), a loincloth for the bath,
and a white gown. If the result of probation was satisfactory, a second
term of probation (two years) followed; if found worthy, the postulant
was admitted to membership. The rite of admission consisted of a meal in
common, preceded by the pronouncing of the vow by the new brother. The
tenor of the vow was that he obligated himself to be ever faithful to
the rules of the order and to lead a virtuous life; to observe secrecy
regarding the doings of the order and the names of members: this with
reference to the world without; but with regard to the society itself,
to keep nothing secret from the brethren. After admission, the Essenes
were classed in four degrees. Unworthy members were expelled—a terrible
punishment, indeed, for the outcasts were not released from their vow,
and yet could not in the world comply with it; and so were doomed to
perish.
Their religious views have been already stated in part. With Judaism
their only bond of union was in their practice of sending to the temple
at Jerusalem offerings; but by reason of their condemnation of bloody
sacrifices they were self-excluded from the temple. Nor was their belief
in immortality of Jewish origin, for they held that soul, formed of most
tenuous aether, is attracted and appropriated by a body, within which it
lives as a prisoner; but that after liberation through death it soars to
heaven, where it lives for evermore in a blest land, without rain, or
snow, or heat, while the wicked are tortured in a remote region of cold
and darkness. This recalls the views of the Pythagoreans. Less honorable
to the Essenes are the frauds practiced by many of them in pretending to
read the future, to interpret dreams, to conjure disease away, etc. Of
later Christian notions we are reminded by the Essenian nomenclature of
the angels, and the obligation imposed on new members to keep the names
secret. The Essenian order survived till the early days of Christianism:
it then died out, the Christian asceticism having made it superfluous.
3. CHRISTIANISM.
Essenism is one of those phenomena which make but a small figure in
general history, but which have mighty results, and which reconcile
contrarieties in human nature. For in Essenism we have the middle term
between the Grecian mysteries and Christianism, as also between the
Grecian philosophy and Judaism. As appears from what has gone before,
the Essenian society was a Judaic imitation of the Pythagorean league,
and that league, again, represented in philosophy what the Grecian
mysteries represented in religion, namely, humiliation of man by showing
him that there exist higher powers that far transcend humanity; and then
the elevation of man by inculcation of the thought of immortality and of
future union with the Creator. With this mysticism was associated, in
Greece, the lofty morality of a Socrates, a Plato, an Aristotle; and in
Judea the belief in One God. The combination of all these elements could
have but one result, to wit, to call forth that great power which
transformed the world—Christianism.
This new power was bound to arise, to reconcile contraries that
confronted each other in that time, after the Roman Empire had brought
under its universal sway the lands that had cradled all the diverse
religions and philosophies. Those religious and philosophical systems
were no longer, as before, separated: brisk inter-communication favored
by the commerce and the wars of the vast empire, brought them daily into
contact. The result was twofold: first, a certain indifference for
religious opinions, the diversity of which gave men occasion to judge
that in supersensual things no direct knowledge is possible; and the
mischief of it all was that nothing was done for the education or
enlightenment of the people, and, in fact, science existed only for the
higher orders, and the people found no substitute for their ancient
belief. But secondly, the result also was that people began to be
conscious of the feeling, implanted by the Grecian philosophers, and
particularly by the Stoics, that in spite of national and religious
differences, all men are brothers, and that mankind is one great whole.
However beautiful and noble this idea, it had to lie dormant so long as
no bond of spiritual kinship save that of political unity held together
the peoples who within the empire jointly obeyed one law and one will.
This missing bond of spiritual union could not be other than a religious
one; for so long as the sciences were so undeveloped no other spiritual
guidance but that Godward could lead all hearts, however educated, of
whatever nation, to the one end toward which men were being forced by
the consciousness that, above all, they were men. And if it be asked
what sort of a religion that must be which shall satisfy all nations at
once, first of all it is very clear that it could be no polytheistic
religion. That form of religion had outlived its usefulness. The various
national religions—Egyptian, Chaldaean, Syrian, Grecian, Roman—had
completely exhausted themselves in the production of deities: polytheism
could give forth no more new shoots, as was shown by the fact that the
Romans, all the forces of nature having been worked up, had gone and
made goddesses of the virtues, e. g., Pudicitia, Concordia, Pax,
Victoria, and the rest, had no recourse but to admit to their Pantheon
all the gods of the conquered nations, and paid now to Isis, Cybele,
Mithras, and Baal the same worship as before they had paid to Jupiter
and Juno. Into such disrepute had polytheism fallen in the estimation of
all educated men, who if they were persons of serious character despised
such gods; but if they were frivolous, ridiculed worship and sacrifice
and oracles and priests. The priests themselves smiled when they met,
and by their irregular lives and their superstitious practices forfeited
all respect. At last every honest man must have been transported with
indignation when the emperors in the paroxysms of their despotic frenzy
had themselves worshiped as gods and a race of hounds in human form
burned the incense of adulation before them.
Hence, the new religion for which mankind sought, to give true
expression to the sentiment of a common humanity, could not be any of
the heathen systems. Rather, by insisting on the oneness of Godhead, it
had to make an end of polytheism, of godmaking, and of Olympian
wantoning, and at the same time, of scorn and derision of the gods.
Thus, then, what was wanted was a god who should have vanquished all
other gods, and he a god of definite outline and fixed character—no
nebulous, lackadaisical, inert deity such as the Grecian philosophers
preached: no abstract “world-soul,” signifying nothing to the uneducated
people; but a god like unto man himself, and whom man should have “made
after his own likeness”; one with human feelings, sentiments, and
passions, with human wrath and human lovingness. And this god must stand
for a doctrine of personal immortality to the end the precious Ego of
every man might have infallible and trustworthy assurance that his title
to a Mansion in the Skies will stand unchallengeable for ever and for
ever. And again, this god must be no abstract entity, alleged to have
existed somewhere, somewhen, but a personality associated with definite
localities, and possessing very definite traits. And so the problem was
to find this one god, this doctrine of immortality, to find a
personality that would be the middle term between the two.
Nowhere was a monotheism to be found save in Judaism, and there it was
plain and open to view. We have already seen how the Jews were scattered
all over the world. Their synagogues were everywhere, and (noteworthy
fact) they had proselytes in every large city, especially in Rome. In
this we see the first steps in the dissemination of monotheism: but it
could not be propagated on the large scale by Jews. Few were the persons
who took a liking to the strictness of the Mosaic religion, and the God
of the Jews was too spiritual a being to be grasped; besides, very many
turned away from Judaism because of the indefiniteness of the Jewish
notions of immortality, or the strange rites and the peculiar usages of
the Jewish people.
From Judaism, then, the idea of monotheism was the only feature that
could be borrowed: what was demanded else was the mystic element; that
is to say, men wanted a system of religious conceptions that would
reflect back upon them their own sentiments as the infallible truth. But
the material best fitted for that end was to be found in the mysteries
and in the Pythagorean and Essenian doctrines. The diverse ideas of the
several secret leagues with regard to the separation of the divine from
the human and their reconciliation, must find their unity in the Jewish
God—a thing not difficult to accomplish in the times immediately
preceding the advent of Christ, because of the intermingling of Grecian
and Jewish ideas: and this unity had to be established by some personage
of imposing figure on the stage of history, who should impress his seal
upon it and surround it with the prestige of deity.
Now, at that time there was both among the heathen and the Jews an
expectation of some such divine intervention as this. Thus, in the early
years of the Roman Empire the belief was widespread that a new kingdom
was to be founded in the East, and that a new Golden Age was about to
begin. More definite was the expectation entertained by the Jews of a
Messiah to come, who would restore the kingdom of Israel, and the
worship of Jehova. This longing of the Jews coincided with the desire of
heathendom for a new religion to take the place of a dying and
degenerate polytheism.
4. JESUS.
At this juncture appeared Jesus. He lived and died in obscurity. Of his
career not one word of mention is found in contemporary Greek and Roman
writers, eagerly as they investigated everything. But this obscurity
wrought no detriment, for it left those who were longing for a new
religion free to make of him whatever they thought best for their cause;
that is to say, they made of him a personality very different from what
he really was. Out of a circumcised son of a Jewish carpenter, who rose,
indeed, above the bigotry of his people, and who suffered death for his
revolt against the rule of priests and scribes, was developed the longed
for Messiah. He was no longer merely human, but the Son of God, born of
a virgin; a thaumaturge; his death was formally and intentionally a
sacrifice for the “redemption” of mankind; after death he rose again,
and then ascended into heaven: in a word, Jesus the man had become a
god. And thus on the Jewish branch were grafted quite unjewish,
Graeco-mystical shoots till the branch was no longer recognizable.
We thus have in the life of the founder of the Christian Church, as
handed down to us, two elements, truth and fiction. The element of truth
is whatever is consistent with historical research and psychological
fact and nature’s laws; and the element of fiction comprises whatever is
in conflict with these. Jesus himself never pretended to be more than a
man. Virtue was the burden of his teaching, and he never propounded a
creed. To the many names of God he added that of “Father”—father of all
mankind. He was no dogmatist, but a moral reformer, and as such occupied
common ground with the Essenes and with John the Baptist, though he
differed from them, and particularly from the Essenes, with regard to
methods and measures: the Essenes would save men’s souls by withdrawing
them from human society; Jesus sought to save men living in the world—to
save human society itself.
Jesus taught the people in parables, enforcing his doctrine of virtuous
living by the use of similes that no hearer could fail to understand.
Those who afterward essayed to write the history of his life and work,
in like manner made a free use of figurative language, and the
personality of Jesus was glorified, and his “mission” magnified till the
world saw in him, indeed, “the desired of all the nations,” the Messiah
longed for by Israel, the reconciler of the divine and the human, toward
whom all the mysteries had pointed.
The miracles of Jesus, namely, acts and occurrences that contradict the
laws of nature, are not actual events; for as they are recorded in the
New Testament they show a needless abrogation of natural law—needless,
because the truths which Jesus preached could not be made more true by
miracles. And thus, as the rationalists of the 18th century explained
them as actual occurrences indeed, but yet as in accordance with the
natural law, so now they are held to be quite needless juggleries
altogether unworthy of Jesus. Hence the rational interpretation of the
miracles is, that they represent the effort of the evangelists to
portray the life and person of the Master in such colors as their
notions of his supereminent dignity required. We divide these miracles
into three classes—the miracles of the birth, the life, and the death of
Jesus.
The birth of Jesus, as narrated in the gospel story, is itself a
miracle. The legitimate son of Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, and of
Mary—for such he was, according to the genealogy found in Matthew and
Luke—had to be transformed into the Son of God, nay, made God himself,
if his doctrine was to appear as of divine origin. Of types of such
transformation there was no lack in heathendom. The first Christians, it
is true, knew nothing of the sun-god Buddha, born again of a woman, but
they were acquainted with Grecian and Roman mythology. Apollo, himself a
god, walked on earth as a shepherd. Herakles, son of Zeus, and Romulus,
son of Mars and of a virgin, were founders of states and cities, and
progenitors of nations; then why should not the founder of a religion
and of a church be also son of God and of a virgin? Nay, why might not
God himself walk on earth in human form? That such was the actual origin
of the story of the Divine Birth is not doubtful: all the rest is mere
embellishment—as when the angel announces to the virgin the coming birth
of the Son of God; when another angel, accompanied by the heavenly
hosts, tells the shepherds of his actual birth; when a star conducts the
“wise men of the East” to the wondrous babe, and they, with the
shepherds and Simeon and Anna, pay him homage; and when Herod, purposing
to take the life of the predestined Messiah, in order to compass that
end orders the slaughter of the innocents.
The miracles of the life of Jesus are either abrogations of natural
laws, or cures of diseases, or resuscitations from the dead, or
apparitions. All these different kinds of miracles are fictions with a
purpose. We have already seen how in the Grecian mysteries bread and
wine were employed as consecrated viands for the gods, and how at
Eleusis divine honors were paid to Demeter and Dionysos as givers of
bread and wine. Jesus, too, had to be made lord and giver of these two
sacred viands: hence the change of water into wine, and the
multiplication of the loaves; and later, in the last supper, bread and
wine were made the object of the Christian Mysteries. The walking on the
waters of the lake of Gennesareth, the stilling of the winds, the
blasting of the fig tree, the finding of the penny in the fish’s mouth,
and Peter’s draught of fishes are pictures of the imagination designed
to show the power of the Son of God over the waters, the air, the world
of plants and of animals. So, too, his power over bodily diseases is
made something real for the common understanding by such stories as the
healing of paralytics, lepers, the blind, the deaf and dumb; over mental
diseases by the freeing of the possessed, over death itself by the
raising of the dead. Among the apparitions we reckon those of the Holy
Spirit as a dove at the baptism of Jesus, of Satan at Jesus’ temptation,
and of Moses and Elias at the transfiguration: this is all allegory. The
“Holy Spirit” is an idea distinct from God only in thought; the dove is
the symbol of purity and gentleness. The Devil is a personification of
evil, and the failure of his attempt was the triumph of the good. As for
the transfiguration, that typifies the vast superiority of the new law
over the old: the old must do homage to the new.
The miracles of Jesus’ death, viz., the darkening of the sun, the
rending of the veil of the Holy of Holies in the Temple, the
resurrection of the dead, were occurrences quite inomissible at the
death of a god; they betoken the mourning of nature and of religion. But
the miracles that followed his death, the resurrection and the
ascension, together with the apparitions of the Crucified in the mean
time, were imagined purely and plainly to confirm the belief in an
everlasting redeemer and in the personal immortality of each individual
one of the faithful.
Of far greater importance than the miracles of Jesus are his teachings,
and in particular his fine discourse on the mountain, also his beautiful
parables. But his utterances contain nothing that is essentially new,
the same thoughts having been often expressed by religious teachers and
sages of other times and in other lands; and yet they possess a charm
all their own, by reason of their unassuming simplicity. It was not the
doctrine of the unity of God and of love for the neighbor that wrought
the propagation of his teachings—the Jews possessed that doctrine
already; nor was it his call to a higher life than that of sense—the
Grecian philosophers preceded him in that respect; nor his alleged
divinity, nor the miracles ascribed to him—his contemporaries in every
land had had experience of miracles in every shape: it was the
forcefulness, the grandeur, the simplicity of his discourse, speaking to
the heart of man and mastering it, and calming its unrest. Here he was
self-based and individual, supreme and irresistible. His teaching, and
in particular the sermon on the mount, is the most emphatic, blistering
condemnation of those who, for the last nineteen hundred years, have
called themselves not only Christians, but the only Christians; who,
nevertheless, in open contempt of their supposed Master, not only take
oaths, and require an eye for an eye, cherish mortal hate for their
enemies, trumpet their almsgiving abroad, offer their prayers aloud at
the street crossings, fast ostentatiously, lay up for themselves
treasures on earth, which are eaten by the moth and the rust; serve two
masters or more, see the mote, though blind to the beam, throw the holy
thing to the dogs, when one asks them for a loaf give him a stone, do
not unto others as they would that others should do unto them: who not
only do all this, but who even enact laws which oblige men to do all
this. He whom they hypocritically call Master, but whom they never have
understood, were he to appear among them, would anathematize them in the
noble words, I know you not. Depart from me, ye doers of evil! Such
language was unheard before his day; therefore wondered the people, for
he spake with power, and not like the scribes and pharisees.
5. THE EARLY CHRISTIANS
What, then, is the difference between the Christianism of Jesus and the
Christianism of Christians? The former, as seen in the discourses of the
New Testament, and above all in the ever beautiful sermon on the mount,
is a simple and unpretending, yet world-transforming doctrine of God,
Virtue, and Love of Man: a monotheism borrowed from the Jews for the
behoof of all men, but purified of ceremonialism, sabbatism, sacrifices,
high-priesthood: in short, the Christianism of Jesus meant the coming
“Kingdom of God,” in which the virtuous man would enjoy happiness and
peace. But the Christianism of Christians is a Mysticism ingrafted on
this monotheism, comprising the dogmas of the Incarnation, Atonement,
Redemption, Resurrection, and Second Coming, and the Miracles invented
to buttress these dogmas. The Christianism of Jesus fell when he and his
first disciples died: they had no hair-splitting theology, only a devout
heart: that system was too simple, too unadorned, too little flattering
to sense and to man’s vainglory to cut any figure in the world. But the
Christianism of Christians, which had for its mother the Grecian
mysteries, borrowed from Jesus, its father (without whose personality
and name it never could have lived at all), what little was known
concerning him, but swaddled it in a thick wrappage of mystic dogmatism.
Let us see how this dogmatic Christianism succeeded in erecting itself
upon the simple ethic-religious system of Jesus, and in making itself a
power in the world by evolving new mysteries.