THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY
Let us now pass from the study of the general features of the ancient
outlook upon nature to a study of the Christian view of the world. Is
the Christian view of the world inseparably bound up with this ancient
outlook, or can it be purged of it? Is the moral fervor and idealism
of Christianity its essential and permanent contribution, a
contribution to a rational appreciation of human life? Probing still
deeper, let us not be afraid to ask ourselves whether the surgery which
this thesis implies does not involve the daring of a break with theism
as only a developed form of primitive animism? In ethical monotheism,
may not the _monotheism_ be the protecting envelope from which the
butterfly has already flown?
The part played by Christianity in the development of Western
civilization and its position as chief representative of the religious
interpretation of the universe makes our selection of it for study
natural. To identify traditional religion with a low stage of its
development, in which it is inextricably bound up with crude myth and
ritualistic magic, is not a fair procedure. We must take theology at
its best and place it over against science and philosophy before we can
rightly judge it. Only then can we be certain whether it stands for
anything vital, significant and true. For the Western {59} world, at
least, Christian theology is generally acknowledged to represent the
high-water mark of theology. If it is intrinsically inadequate and
untrue to modern experience, the only course open to a morally and
intellectually courageous man is to resign it as a view outgrown. No
matter how much pain may arise from a break with old associations and
from the relinquishment of false hopes, intellectual morality permits
only one course. It may be that social morality will gain new life
when the old forms are broken, for the letter killeth. I mean that
Christian ethics will operate more freely and creatively in the world
when it is given an entirely humanistic setting. In dreaming of a
super-mundane god, man has only too often forgotten his fellow man. In
yearning for the coming of the divine kingdom, he has allowed his hands
and feet to be idle, or has even stepped unheeding over the prostrate
forms of men and children broken in the mart. To remove theology from
Christianity is to make the kingdom of this world.
The content of Christianity cannot be separated from its origin. To do
so is to open the door to private interpretations of all sorts and to
facilitate duplicity and self-deception. Christianity is an historical
fact, and has meant various pretty definite things. If we have
outgrown certain of these things and re-interpreted others in a
fundamental way, we are not making for clearness of thought by trying
to read our own outlook into the past. Continuity of a spiritual kind
there has been, but there is also newness of a basic import. The
knowledge and atmosphere which confront it to-day are vastly different
from the theosophy in which it was born and nourished.
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I think we all feel that Christianity stood for an ethical stimulus of
a very fruitful sort whose effect can hardly be overestimated. Yet, if
we wish to gain a proper perspective, we must not neglect to put in the
other balance the tendency to dogmatism and the persecuting zeal which
accompanied it. There have been other than Christian martyrs.
Something was faulty with a movement which contained so much
obscurantism and bigotry. There was not enough of sweet reason in its
composition, and too much of the old terrors which accompanied
primitive ignorance and cruelty. It needed a saner and more wholesome
perspective and more trust in human reason. For instance, the
differences between the various sects, which have sprung up from period
to period with such clamor and death-defying energy, have been
differences of stress and of formulation whose importance was grossly
exaggerated. To the modern student nothing is more tragic and pitiful
than this zeal of ignorance. So much to be done in the world to make
it sweeter and more beautiful and more livable, so much need for sanity
and charity; and yet so much of human energy wasted and, more than
wasted, turned to evil results. The only way to overcome this
sectarian mal-adjustment is to know the past as it was and to cherish
no distorting and blinding illusions in regard to it. Man is so prone
to see the golden age in the past that it is necessary to have a
searchlight directed upon it. An historical approach is such a
searchlight.
There is another psychological advantage in an historical approach.
The reason is often unconsciously bound by the authority of a supposed
past. For the philosopher with his confidence in experimental reason,
{61} perhaps, this inhibition does not exist; but even people who have
every inclination to bring their total experience to bear, in a free
way, upon doctrines and beliefs are restrained by what they have been
taught, and lose audacity. The spirit of acquiescence is always at
work in the world, and nothing reenforces this spirit more powerfully
than a traditionally-accepted book of sacred writings. Confronted by
these with their unhesitating affirmations and claims, the minds of the
majority are intimidated, and such reflections as they allow themselves
work within the prescribed boundaries or wander little beyond them.
Nothing is better suited to unbind the mind and to lead it to think
boldly than a study of origins. The individual gains perspective as he
sees ideas and sentiments rise and fall and give way to others. He can
no longer be intimidated by the shadow of a compact and seemingly
impregnable tradition. We must remember, however, that such an
historical and comparative approach can, at its best, only break up the
mythical simplicity of a sentimentalized past and reveal the complexity
of the many-channeled forces at work; it cannot prove any particular
doctrine. The creation must come from the spirit of the present, as it
carries the stimulus of the past and adds to it its own energies.
All developed religions have their sacred books. Until the translation
of the Sacred Books of the East was undertaken in the latter part of
the nineteenth century, few people realized how many such books there
were. And we Americans have been the unwilling witnesses of the
appearance of two other collections of writings making the same claims,
_The Book of Mormon_ and _Science and Health_. Now such sacred books
are {62} regarded as revelations which could not be obtained except by
a mysterious contact with divine things. And the religious faith which
has been called forth and directed by a teaching founded on the
scripture turns back its own warmth upon its source. Nothing is more
natural than this interaction between a living faith and the writings
which are felt to be its guarantee. Religion is notoriously
conservative and retrospective. Especially is this true of religions
which impute to themselves a complete and final source of revelation in
the past. Faith and book are associated in the mind so intimately that
they lose their separateness. To doubt one is like doubting the other.
Thus faith forms an emotional envelope which protects the literature,
while the concrete detail of the literature reacts upon the mind to
strengthen the faith. It is not strange, therefore, that the cult of
the book is a phenomenon which is universal in the advanced religions.
The Mohammedan believes in the verbal inspiration of the Koran just as
fully as does the Jew in the divine origin of the Old Testament, and
the Christian in the inspiration of the accepted canon called the
Bible. Nor are these the only examples. But this psychological circle
is a vicious one. It involves the substitution of a subjective support
to claims and theories which require the test of human experience as a
whole. But just because science is this coordination of the whole
range of experience, there inevitably arises that conflict between
science and theology of which we have heard so much during the last few
decades. It is a conflict between a part of experience, interpreted
too hastily, and the rationalized whole.
Science arose at the time of the Renaissance as a {63} consequence of
man's awakened curiosity. Its first conquests were in the fields of
astronomy and physics. These were of such a striking character that
they gave this comparatively new movement a prestige which stood it in
good stead in time of trouble. Gradually, an assured technic was
developed, and inductive tests made of every hypothesis which suggested
itself. For a considerable time, science was confined pretty
definitely to the physical world; but it was inevitable that the mental
habits encouraged would sooner or later extend themselves to other
fields. While there were many tentative applications of the methods
and ideals of inductive science to the field of history in the
eighteenth century, it was not until the nineteenth century that the
science of history was fully developed. Our conception of the past has
become progressively deeper and truer. Romanticism has been replaced
by a realism which calls anthropology, archeology, and modern
psychology to its aid. We wish to see the men of the past as they
actually were; and we are quite aware that we know more about the world
than they did.
In the domain of biblical literature and comparative religions, the
method of science was slow of application. There was a tremendous
inertia to overcome, and a strong spirit of positive antagonism to
resist. The whole system of hopes and fears, sanctions and taboos,
which the ancient view of the world had fostered within the human
breast cried out against the sacrilege of rational investigation.
Humanity hugs illusion more fondly than it does truth because it is
more familiar with it. For a while, all that orthodoxy had to contend
with was a rationalism of a skeptical cast which had scarcely a better
historical outlook at its {64} command than had its opponent. It could
assert that these stories and beliefs handed down from the past could
not be true because they conflicted with our experience; but it could
not explain why people had originated these ideas and why they had
believed in them so implicitly. In other words, it could not let the
past explain itself in such a natural way that it would disprove its
own beliefs. It is this that modern research has done so thoroughly
that there is scarce need for the appeal to the constructive sciences
which skeptical rationalism makes. The battle is no longer a drawn one
so far as the intellect is concerned. It is merely a question of how
long it will take before the victory will be recognized and proclaimed
by all educated people.
As the evolutionary point of view forced its way into recognition,
scholars became aware of the real nature of myth and legend; they
realized that beliefs of this sort are products of a creative
group-consciousness saturated with a view of the world which we have
slowly outgrown; they sensed the mental complexity of the past and
became suspicious of the naive assumption that religions were formed in
a generation by the sheer authority of a single man or of a small group
of men. The first clear statement of this changed point of view was
the work of David Friedrich Strauss in his famous _Life of Jesus_.
Strauss developed the idea that much of religious literature consists
of myths and dogmas, not created out of whole cloth by would-be
deceivers, but woven by the stimulated fancy of groups working in the
atmosphere of traditions and attitudes which the most intense research,
alone, can make living {65} to the scholar. There can be little doubt
that this standpoint is essentially correct. Before it could be
applied satisfactorily, however, painstaking investigation of the
literature and recorded customs of the people of the Mediterranean
basin had to be carried through. Only by now has this task been so far
achieved that the main features of the
Graeco-Syrian-Palestinian-Egyptian world are open to a sympathetic
inspection. No one who has not done some work in this field at first
or second hand can realize the difficulties which confronted
investigators. Fragments found here and there in the writings of the
Church Fathers, the teachings of the Jews of Alexandria, the
apocalyptic literature discovered in remote places, inscriptions
unearthed here and there, all were carefully studied and compared and
forced to yield their quota of information.
It is a psychological principle which must always be reckoned with that
the less an untrained individual knows about the past, the more certain
of the correctness of his assumed knowledge he is prone to be. For
example, the American who has read one or more of the over-simplified
text-books dealing with the history of his country, which are used in
the schools, has a clear-cut picture of the various events, knows
exactly how they occurred and who was in the right. The university
teacher, on the other hand, has before him a wealth of conflicting data
from which he must painfully and tentatively construct a picture of the
tendencies at work at different periods. He must test the genuineness
of his sources, weigh the prejudices of the writer, and decide whether
he was in a position to know exactly {66} what was happening.
Consequently, he will speak in a qualified language where the average
citizen will deliver himself of emphatic assertions.
Yet the investigator of American history is possessed of an abundance
of material and deals with a time for which printing existed. The
language in which these documents are written is his own or else a
well-known one. The student of comparative religions has none of these
advantages. For the ancient world, the inscriptions are archaic and
condensed. In the case of the biblical literature, he may be dealing
with accounts edited from older manuscripts in other languages. These
narratives conflict among themselves and contain surprisingly little
information on important points. Hence, the investigator is almost
overwhelmed by the difficulty of his task and the fewness of his
certain results. The ordinary confessing Christian, on the contrary,
is blissfully unaware of these problems. He opens his English
translation and reads the familiar words in the light of inherited
dogmas which blind his eyes to all contradictions and discrepancies.
The truth is, that he is mentally unprepared to compare passages and to
see problems which stare the trained man in the face. He reads
subjectively for edification. The ecclesiastical atmosphere is such
that his spiritual advisors have either desired to keep modern critical
work from his notice, or have been afraid to arouse the bigotry of
their keepers, or have themselves lacked a modern education. The
consequence is that the average Christian has the most naive notions in
regard to the authorship and authenticity of the gospels and of the
real meaning of many of the verses. Palestine is conceived in terms of
the color-prints which illustrate his bible, while the mental {67}
atmosphere of the Year One is that of the present day in America with,
perhaps, an exotic touch here and there.
Let us glance over some of the facts which investigation is making ever
clearer and which are not as generally known as they deserve to be.
What is said here should be read with remembrance of the results of the
previous chapters. Such a bird's eye view of the forces at work in
later Hellenistic and Roman times will be the best preparation for a
sane conception of the origin and trend of Christianity.
In Tarsus, a Greek city of Cilicia, Paul, or Saul, was born and
educated. Now Tarsus was, after Alexandria, the chief seat of late
Greek philosophy in the near-orient. Many of the more noted Stoic
thinkers and teachers of the day came from Cilicia and had semitic
blood in their veins. Athenodorus, the teacher of Cicero and Augustus,
came from Tarsus, itself; and it is said that his grateful and admiring
fellow citizens made him a hero upon his death and annually celebrated
him in a memorial feast, a procedure very characteristic of the age.
There is the strongest evidence in Paul's epistles that he was well
acquainted with the doctrines of Stoicism. The larger intellectual
world of Philo of Alexandria and Seneca of the Imperial City lies
behind these epistles. The Hellenistic Jew of the Dispersion differed
widely from the Jew of Palestine, no matter how desirous he might be to
identify himself with the worship at the Temple.
But Greek philosophy was not the only element with which the inhabitant
of Tarsus would come in contact. When Paul speaks of mysteries, he is
referring to the various secret cults which permeated the Roman world.
How few Christians are aware that the ancient world {68} was, at this
time, in a religious ferment almost without parallel. _The Greek
civilization had lost its nerve_. It had shot its bolt and been
overwhelmed by autocratic powers and sheer barbarism. The conditions
of a progressive and broadly based civilization had not yet been
achieved. "Any one who turns from the great writers of classical
Athens, say Sophocles or Aristotle," writes Gilbert Murray, "to those
of the Christian era must be conscious of a great difference in tone.
There is a change in the whole relation of the writer to the world
about him. The new quality is not specifically Christian: it is just
as marked in the Gnostics and Mithra-worshipers as in the Gospels and
the Apocalypse, in Julian and Plotinus as in Gregory and Jerome. It is
hard to describe. It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a
sense, of pessimism; _a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life
and of faith in normal human effort_; a despair of patient inquiry, a
cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the
state; a conversion of the soul to God. It is an atmosphere in which
the aim of the good man is not so much to live justly, to help the
society to which he belongs and enjoy the esteem of his fellow
creatures; but rather, by means of a burning faith, by contempt for the
world and its standards, by ecstasy, suffering and martyrdom, to be
granted pardon for his unspeakable unworthiness, his immeasurable sins.
There is an intensifying of certain spiritual emotions; an increase of
sensitiveness, a failure of nerve." It was in such a state of the
social mind that Christianity had its birth. It was, as we have before
pointed out, one of many competing for dominance.
These competing religions had much in common, {69} though it was the
advantage of Christianity to have inherited the ethical monotheism of
the prophets. Upon Paul, the Hellenist and Jew of the dispersion, was
focussed this august tradition along with traditions of a more mystical
character. Syria had been the home of certain mysteries from an early
day, for we read in the Old Testament of women mourning the death of
Tammuz, the god of vegetation who dies and is born again. Now Adonis
or Attis was the corresponding god of Phrygia, and all people of Syria
were well acquainted with the cult which showed the mother-goddess
mourning for her son. But these more primitive rites were being
displaced by a more developed and ethical form called Mithraism. I
well remember my surprise when, visiting one of the older churches at
Rome, I was shown the earlier church beneath and told that, beneath
that again, a church dedicated to Mithra had been discovered. Now
Tarsus was one of the chief seats of Mithraism, and it is practically
certain that Paul was acquainted with its main rituals and beliefs.
Let us try to realize the importance of this fact.
Mithraism had an initiatory service in which the proselytes were
admitted into the faith. The liturgy of this service is still extant
and we know that it represented a mystical dying and rebirth in which
the guilt of the old life is removed and a new immortal life is created
through the spirit. The initiates spoke of themselves as reborn for
eternity. "So striking," writes Pfleiderer the German critic, "is the
connection of these ideas with Paul's teaching of Christian baptism as
a community of death and resurrection with Christ (Romans 6) that the
thought of historical relation between the two cannot be evaded....
Mithraism also {70} had a sacrament corresponding to the Christian
eucharist at which the sanctified bread and a cup of water or even wine
served as mystic symbols of the distribution of the divine life to
Mithra-believers."
When we bear in mind how little importance Paul attached to the actual
life and ethical teaching of Jesus, we are not surprised at the
frequent suggestion that Paul was the real founder of both liturgical
and theological Christianity. He did not create this liturgy but found
it to hand. The early church followed this natural impulse and added
to the simpler inherited rites. Into the psychology of Paul's
conception of the Christ it is difficult to enter. He was probably an
enthusiast with the tendency to exalted moods peculiar to epileptics
and yet with high mental ability. He felt himself inspired. He gives
us to understand that he was subject to visions, and it is well known
that religious excitement is capable of welding together the myriad
suggestions which play upon the self. We can comprehend the work of
Paul, one of the main founders of Christianity, only when we see him as
the mystical interpreter weaving the Jewish traditions of the soberer
type, the apocalyptic outlook of such books as Daniel and Ezra, the
mystery cults of the Hellenistic world and the theories of the Stoic
philosophy into one whole, dominantly supernaturalistic. Scholars will
continue to differ in regard to the comparative proportions of the
ingredients he fused together, but few will gainsay that Paul's
teaching is a product of many sources. In this connection a very
significant fact should be noted: although the Pauline epistles are the
earliest records of Christianity, "aside from the crucifixion, not a
single fact in the life of Jesus can be gleaned from these {71}
epistles, nor do they record a single saying of Jesus."
We shall next pass to a brief study of the Jesus of the synoptic
gospels, the figure which has become endeared to humanity and with
which the Western world has associated its noblest sentiments. But
even the present study of some of the more mystical elements in
Christianity must have persuaded the reader that we have in this
movement the focussing of the complex life of ancient times. The
circle of ideas passionately held by the members of the church was not
created by any one man or group of men. It was the flowering out of
primitive ideas and ethical aspirations. Moral idealism goes hand in
hand with cosmological myth. We who have regained the nerve which that
age had lost may have the gift and high adventure of separating moral
truth from theological illusion.
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