No period of man's earlier doubting can be more interesting than that of
the centuries just prior to the Christian era, when the peoples of the
Mediterranean contributed so much, directly and indirectly, to the
preparation for Christianity and to the discovery, or revelation, which
finally came and in due time changed the ancient to our modern world.
What the preparation was has already been indicated, at least partially,
in the references that have been made to the Sophists and to the
Pharisees. Christianity has been only the interest, the earned
increment, or rather should I not say the compounded principal, of the
scepticism, of the formalism and the utilitarianism which beset the
Greeks and the Hebrews, to mention no others, as their peculiar
civilizations were merging into the larger and deeper life of a great
empire. In their several lives the demand came, and came, too, from
within, not merely from without, as in all life [p.265] it must come,
for use of their gathered treasures, whether spiritual or material, and
the rise of Rome was but the result of that demand satisfied, of the use
realized. As for the scepticism, this with all its incidents made the
use possible, made it possible for the peoples to give or relinquish
what they had to the larger life to which they all belonged, while the
religion of Christianity spiritualized for them all the resulting
empire.
Those wonderful races of the Mediterranean, who achieved--at least some
of them--such great things in all that counts for civilization, became
at the last most extravagant sceptics, not only formulating, but also
very generally living up to, the conviction of ignorance and
forgetfulness of reality. Everything which their long past had gathered
for them they resigned--or let me say crucified--and themselves they
threw, as if with an investor's recklessness, upon a world of chance or
fate, upon a world seemingly of empty forms in all human relations, a
world of disguises for license and of mere conceits of moral power and
religious piety. Sensuous mysticism and pantheism, formalism of all
kinds, Stoicism, Epicureanism, legalism, and cosmopolitanism were
crosses upon which one people and another, one class and another, nailed
their long-cherished devotions, their love of God and man and nature, of
temple and family and country. A great doubting, then, was truly theirs.
A great sacrificial offering was their preparation for Christianity. In
a way, with a completeness that seems to have no parallel in history,
they put their talents to the bankers--despairing, of course, but hoping
also, [p.266] if only their doubting, when it came, may be supposed as
genuine as their earlier believing. From the North and from the East and
from the South their good men came, and their rich and their wise, and
laid what they had at the feet of the life that was new born.
People read their histories so differently. The pagan doubt, the
Christian revelation and belief, the conversion of the pagan world to
Christianity, the Renaissance, in which the conversion was in a sense
reversed, and the Reformation mean such different things to different
people. Some must still have it that paganism, or pre-Christianism,
ended in absolutely blind despair, in the avowal of complete failure--as
if such despair or failure could ever find words for its own utterance;
that Christianity came into a hopelessly pagan world wholly from
without, came into a world of nothing but unmixed doubt, and brought
with it nothing but unmixed belief; that the conversion was a sort of
conquest, by a power all its own capturing the pagans, so wholly
unnerved as to be quite incapable even of a futile resistance; that the
Renaissance, restoration as it was of the pagan life and thought, was at
best a great condescension on the part of Christendom and at worst an
unfortunate return to the pagan idols; and that in the Reformation the
Christian Religion Militant did but retreat upon the Bible as its
impregnable fortress. But such history can hardly be our history here.
For us the rise and the progress of Christianity have had quite a
different character. To strike at the foundation of that whole structure
the pagan doubting was too articulate. It was, also, too earnest. It was
too genuine. The races did indeed resign, as with [p.267] an investor's
recklessness, all that they had, but their recklessness was not unmixed.
Their doubting had hope in it as well as despair. It still loved the
spirit of what had been even when it betrayed the letter. It had its
martyrs, too, as well as its suicides; its sense of life as well as its
enervating fear of death. Say what you will, then, a great, warm,
yearning belief dwelt within it. And so, just because the pagan doubting
was too earnest and too genuine and too articulate, because it was, in
truth, a great sacrificial offering, the crucifixion on Calvary was also
too true to life at Athens and Alexandria, as well as to life at
Jerusalem, and the resurrection of the spirit was too true to life at
Rome; they were too true to mean anything but fulfilment and
achievement. Everywhere, in every place and in every department of life,
the letter had been rejected; but everywhere also--and this, nothing
else, was the true conversion to Christianity--the spirit was accepted.
Acceptance of the spirit, too, meant that in good time the letter would
be restored, as indeed at the Renaissance it surely was.
Christianity, therefore, came when the times were ripe for it. It came
not from without, but deeply from within the pagan life of the
Mediterranean. Moreover, if in this way, not in that other way, we must
read the rise of Christianity, then we must read both the Renaissance
and the Reformation under the same light. The Renaissance, as was just
said, brought a restoration of the letter; but, necessarily, of the
letter under the light of the spirit, of the letter transfigured. The
Renaissance, so dramatically manifested in the Crusades, was only
Christendom returning to its [p.268] birthplace. With its crusades to
Jerusalem, to all the old capitals, to the pagan ideas and institutions,
to the ancient languages and literatures, Christianity rediscovered
itself in the past, winning back in this way some of its childhood,
curing a homesickness that a worldly church had made it feel, securing
for itself such a deep experience as comes to a man who, after years of
wandering and forgetting, has returned to the home of his infancy. And
as for the Reformation--if indeed this was a retreat, shall we say, of a
defeated religion upon the Bible, its supposed impregnable fortress--we
need only to remember the pagan origin, the Hebrew and the Greek
inspiration, and the Roman atmosphere of that sacred book.
And of the relation of Christianity to paganism, just one thing more.
The Christian revelation, so wonderfully portrayed and enacted in the
life and character of Jesus, was only an idealization, a spiritual
interpretation, of the very present, the thoroughly actual life of the
time, of the life that the pagans, doubting but believing, despairing
but also trusting, resigning all but hoping for more, had already
brought upon themselves; a life of self-denial, of common, universal
humanity, all men being "members one of another," and of perfect faith.
Perhaps the self-denial was bravely concealed in an accepted subjection,
but it was not less real. Perhaps the common humanity was military and
imperial, yet it also was real. Perhaps, too, the faith was blind and
fatalistic, but it was nevertheless faith. Can faith go farther or do
more than fatalism? The pagans, then, had become Christians in fact or
status, and Christianity came, breathing [p.269] life into the bare
fact, into the self-denial, and the broad humanity and the faith, and
made these not the mere phases of bare fact or condition, but motives
and ideals, manifesting them heroically in a single human life, and so
in the form and with the power of a personal discovery of self.
Where genuine doubt is the God is always born.