been to constitute the supernatural religion that was now needed,
appears very clearly from the case of Philo Judæus. Here was a man,
heir to all the piety and fervour of his race, who at the same time
was a Neo-Platonist three hundred years before Plotinus and, as it
were, the first Father of the Church. But his religion, being national,
was not communicable and, being positivistic, was at fundamental odds
with the spirit of his philosophy. It remained, therefore, as a merely
personal treasure and heirloom, the possession of his private life:
his disciples, had he had any, must either have been Jews themselves
or else must have been the followers merely of his philosophy. His
religion could not have passed to them; they would have regarded it, as
we might regard the Christianity of Kant or the wife-worship of Comte,
as a private circumstance, a detached trait, less damaging, perhaps, to
his philosophy than favourable to his loyal heart.
Philo, in his commentaries on the Bible, sought to envelop and
transform every detail in the light of Platonic metaphysics. His
interpretations are often violent, but the ingenuous artifice of them
would have delighted his contemporaries as much as himself, and was
adopted afterward by all the Fathers and theologians of the Church.
Philo's theology was thus a success, even a model; yet he failed,
because of the inadequacy of his religion. What interest, what
relevance, could it have for any Gentile to hear about the deliverance
of Israel out of Egypt or out of Babylon, or about circumcision and
prescribed meats, or about the sacrifices in the Temple? What charm or
credibility could he find in further promises of glorious kingdoms,
flowing with milk and honey? Such images might later appeal to the
imagination of New England Puritans and make a religion for them: but
what meaning could they have to the weary Pagan? No doubt the Jews
carried with them an ideal of righteousness, and prosperity; but the
Gentile was sick of heroes and high priests and founders of cities.
Stoic virtues were as vain in his eyes as Sybaritic joys. He did not
wish his passions to be flattered, not even his pride or the passion
for a social Utopia. He wished his passions to be mortified and his
soul to be redeemed. He would not look for a Messiah, unless he could
find him on a cross.
That is the essence of the matter. What overcame the world, because
it was what the world desired, was not a moral reform--for that was
preached by every sect; not an ascetic regimen--for that was practised
by heathen gymnosophists and Pagan philosophers; not brotherly love
within the Church--for the Jews had and have that at least in equal
measure; but what overcame the world was what Saint Paul said he
would always preach: Christ and him crucified. Therein was a new
poetry, a new ideal, a new God. Therein was the transcript of the
real experience of humanity, as men found it in their inmost souls
and as they were dimly aware of it in universal history. The moving
power was a fable--for who stopped to question whether its elements
were historical, if only its meaning were profound and its inspiration
contagious? This fable had points of attachment to real life in a
visible brotherhood and in an extant worship, as well as in the
religious past of a whole people. At the same time it carried the
imagination into a new sphere; it sanctified the poverty and sorrow at
which Paganism had shuddered; it awakened tenderer emotions, revealed
more human objects of adoration, and furnished subtler instruments of
grace. It was a whole world of poetry descended among men, like the
angels at the Nativity, doubling, as it were, their habitation, so that
they might move through supernatural realms in the spirit while they
walked the earth in the flesh. The consciousness of new loves, new
duties, fresh consolations, and luminous unutterable hopes accompanied
them wherever they went. They stopped willingly in the midst of their
business for recollection, like men in love; they sought to stimulate
their imaginations, to focus, as it were, the long vistas of an
invisible landscape.
If the importunity of affairs or of ill-subdued passions disturbed
that dream, they could still return to it at leisure in the solitude of
some shrine or under the spell of some canticle or of some sacramental
image; and meantime they could keep their faith in reserve as their
secret and their resource. The longer the vision lasted and the
steadier it became, the more closely, of course, was it intertwined
with daily acts and common affections; and as real life gradually
enriched that vision with its suggestions, so religion in turn
gradually coloured common life with its unearthly light. In the saint,
in the soul that had become already the perpetual citizen of that
higher sphere, nothing in this world remained without reference to the
other, nor was anything done save for a supernatural end. Thus the
redemption was actually accomplished and the soul was lifted above the
conditions of this life, so that death itself could bring but a slight
and unessential change of environment.
Morbid as this species of faith may seem, visionary as it certainly
was, it is not to be confused with an arbitrary madness or with
personal illusions. Two circumstances raised this imaginative piety
to a high dignity and made it compatible with great accomplishments,
both in thought and in action. In the first place the religious world
constituted a system complete and consistent within itself. There was
occasion within it for the exercise of reason, for the awakening and
discipline of emotion, for the exertion of effort. As music, for all
that it contains nothing of a material or practical nature, offers
a field for the development of human faculty and presents laws and
conditions which, within its sphere, must be obeyed and which reward
obedience with the keenest and purest pleasures; so a supernatural
religion, when it is traditional and systematic like Christianity,
offers another world, almost as vast and solid as the real one, in
which the soul may develop. In entering it we do not enter a sphere
of arbitrary dreams, but a sphere of law where learning, experience,
and happiness may be gained. There is more method, more reason, in
such madness than in the sanity of most people. The world of the
Christian imagination was eminently a field for moral experience; moral
ideas were there objectified into supernatural forces, and instead of
being obscured as in the real world by irrational accidents formed an
intelligible cosmos, vast, massive, and steadfast. For this reason the
believer in any adequate and mature supernatural religion clings to
it with such strange tenacity and regards it as his highest heritage,
while the outsider, whose imagination speaks another language or is
dumb altogether, wonders how so wild a fiction can take root in a
reasonable mind.
The other circumstance that ennobled the Christian system was that
all its parts had some significance and poetic truth, although they
contained, or needed to contain, nothing empirically real. The system
was a great poem which, besides being well constructed in itself, was
allegorical of actual experience, and contained, as in a hieroglyph,
a very deep knowledge of the world and of the human mind. For what
was the object that unfolded itself before the Christian imagination,
the vision that converted and regenerated the world? It was a picture
of human destiny. It was an epic, containing, as it were, the moral
autobiography of man. The object of Pagan religion and philosophy had
been a picture of the material cosmos, conceived as a vast animal and
inhabited by a multitude of individual spirits. Even the Neo-Platonists
thought of nothing else, much as they might multiply abstract names for
its principles and fancifully confuse them with the spheres. It was
always a vast, living, physical engine, a cosmos of life in which man
had a determinate province. His spirit, losing its personality, might
be absorbed into the ethereal element from which it came; but this
emanation and absorption was itself an unchanging process, the systole
and diastole of the universal heart. Practical religion consisted in
honouring the nearest gods and accepting from them man's apportioned
goods, not without looking, perhaps, with a reverence that needed
no ritual, to the enveloping whole that prescribed to gods and men
their respective functions. Thus even Neo-Platonism represented man as
a minor incident in the universe, supernatural though that universe
might be. The spiritual spheres were only the invisible repetitions of
the visible, as the Platonic ideas from the beginning had been only a
dialectic reduplication of the objects in this world. It was against
this allotment that the soul was rebelling. It was looking for a
deliverance that should be not so much the consciousness of something
higher as the hope of something better.
Now, the great characteristic of Christianity, inherited from Judaism,
was that its scheme was historical. Not existences but events were the
subject of its primary interest. It presented a story, not a cosmology.
It was an epic in which there was, of course, superhuman machinery,
but of which the subject was man, and, notable circumstance, the Hero
was a man as well. Like Buddhism, it gave the highest honour to a
man who could lead his fellow-men to perfection. What had previously
been the divine reality--the engine of Nature--now became a temporary
stage, built for the exigencies of a human drama. What had been before
a detail of the edifice--the life of man--now became the argument and
purpose of the whole creation. Notable transformation, on which the
philosopher cannot meditate too much.
Was Christianity right in saying that the world was made for man? Was
the account it adopted of the method and causes of Creation conceivably
correct? Was the garden of Eden a historical reality, and were the
Hebrew prophecies announcements of the advent of Jesus Christ? Did the
deluge come because of man's wickedness, and will the last day coincide
with the dramatic denouement of the Church's history? In other words,
is the spiritual experience of man the explanation of the universe?
Certainly not, if we are thinking of a scientific, not of a poetical
explanation. As a matter of fact, man is a product of laws which
must also destroy him, and which, as Spinoza would say, infinitely
exceed him in their scope and power. His welfare is indifferent to
the stars, but dependent on them. And yet that counter-Copernican
revolution accomplished by Christianity--a revolution which Kant should
hardly have attributed to himself--which put man in the centre of the
universe and made the stars circle about him, must have some kind of
justification. And indeed its justification (if we may be so brief on
so great a subject) is that what is false in the science of facts may
be true in the science of values. While the existence of things must
be understood by referring them to their causes, which are mechanical,
their functions can only be explained by what is interesting in their
results, in other words, by their relation to human nature and to
human happiness.
The Christian drama was a magnificent poetic rendering of this side
of the matter, a side which Socrates had envisaged by his admirable
method, but which now flooded the consciousness of mankind with
torrential emotions. Christianity was born under an eclipse, when the
light of Nature was obscured; but the star that intercepted that light
was itself luminous, and shed on succeeding ages a moonlike radiance,
paler and sadder than the other, but no less divine, and meriting no
less to be eternal. Man now studied his own destiny, as he had before
studied the sky, and the woods, and the sunny depths of water; and as
the earlier study produced in his soul--_anima naturaliter poeta_--the
images of Zeus, Pan, and Nereus, so the later study produced the
images of Jesus and of Mary, of Heaven and Hell, of miracles and
sacraments. The observation was no less exact, the translation into
poetic images no less wonderful here than there. To trace the endless
transfiguration, with all its unconscious ingenuity and harmony, might
be the theme of a fascinating science. Let not the reader fancy that in
Christianity everything was settled by records and traditions. The idea
of Christ himself had to be constructed by the imagination in response
to moral demands, tradition giving only the barest external points
of attachment. The facts were nothing until they became symbols; and
nothing could turn them into symbols except an eager imagination on the
watch for all that might embody its dreams.
The crucifixion, for example, would remain a tragic incident without
further significance, if we regard it merely as a historical fact; to
make it a religious mystery, an idea capable of converting the world,
the moral imagination must transform it into something that happens for
the sake of the soul, so that each believer may say to himself that
Christ so suffered for the love of him. And such a thought is surely
the objectification of an inner impulse; the idea of Christ becomes
something spiritual, something poetical. What literal meaning could
there be in saying that one man or one God died for the sake of each
and every other individual? By what effective causal principle could
their salvation be thought to necessitate his death, or his death to
make possible their salvation? By an [Greek: usteron proteron] natural
to the imagination; for in truth the matter is reversed. Christ's death
is a symbol of human life. Men could "believe in" his death, because
it was a figure and premonition of the burden of their experience.
That is why, when some Apostle told them the story, they could say to
him: "Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet: thou hast told me all
things whatsoever I have felt." Thus the central fact of all Christ's
history, narrated by every Evangelist, could still be nothing but a
painful incident, as unessential to the Christian religion as the death
of Socrates to the Socratic philosophy, were it not transformed by
the imagination of the believer into the counterpart of his own moral
need. Then, by ceasing to be viewed as a historical fact, the death of
Christ becomes a religious inspiration. The whole of Christian doctrine
is thus religious and efficacious only when it becomes poetry, because
only then is it the felt counterpart of personal experience and a
genuine expansion of human life.
Take, as another example, the doctrine of eternal rewards and
punishments. Many perplexed Christians of our day try to reconcile
this spirited fable with their modern horror of physical suffering and
their detestation of cruelty; and it must be admitted that the image
of men suffering unending tortures in retribution for a few ignorant
and sufficiently wretched sins is, even as poetry, somewhat repellent.
The idea of torments and vengeance is happily becoming alien to our
society and is therefore not a natural vehicle for our religion. Some
accordingly reject altogether the Christian doctrine on this point,
which is too strong for their nerves. Their objection, of course, is
not simply that there is no evidence of its truth. If they asked for
evidence, would they believe anything? Proofs are the last thing
looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginative
fitness of its faith and knows instinctively that, in such a matter,
imaginative fitness is all that can be required. The reason men reject
the doctrine of eternal punishment is that they find it distasteful
or unmeaning. They show, by the nature of their objections, that they
acknowledge poetic propriety or moral truth to be the sole criterion of
religious credibility.
But, passing over the change of sentiment which gives rise to
this change of doctrine, let us inquire of what reality Christian
eschatology was the imaginative rendering. What was it in the actual
life of men that made them think of themselves as hanging between
eternal bliss and eternal perdition? Was it not the diversity, the
momentousness, and the finality of their experience here? No doubt
the desire to make the reversal of the injustices of this world as
melodramatic and picturesque as possible contributed to the adoption
of this idea; the ideal values of life were thus contrasted with its
apparent values in the most absolute and graphic manner. But we may
say that beneath this motive, based on the exigences of exposition
and edification, there was a deeper intuition. There was the genuine
moralist's sympathy with a philosophic and logical view of immortality
rather than with a superstitious and sentimental one. Another life
exists and is infinitely more important than this life; but it is
reached by the intuition of ideals, not by the multiplication of
phenomena; it is an eternal state not an indefinite succession of
changes. Transitory life ends for the Christian when the balance-sheet
of his individual merits and demerits is made up, and the eternity that
ensues is the eternal reality of those values.
For the Oriental, who believed in transmigration, the individual
dissolved into an infinity of phases; he went on actually and
perpetually, as Nature does; his immortality was a long Purgatory
behind which a shadowy Hell and Heaven scarcely appeared in the form
of annihilation or absorption. This happened because the Oriental mind
has no middle; it oscillates between extremes and passes directly from
sense to mysticism, and back again; it lacks virile understanding and
intelligence creative of form. But Christianity, following in this
the Socratic philosophy, rose to the conception of eternal essences,
forms suspended above the flux of natural things and expressing the
ideal suggestions and rational goals of experience. Each man, for
Christianity, has an immortal soul; each life has the potentiality of
an eternal meaning, and as this potentiality is or is not actualized,
as this meaning is or is not expressed in the phenomena of this
life, the soul is eternally saved or lost. As the tree falleth, so
it lieth. The finality of this brief and personal experiment, the
consequent awful solemnity of the hour of death when all trial is over
and when the eternal sentence is passed, has always been duly felt
by the Christian. The Church, indeed, in answer to the demand for a
more refined and discriminating presentation of its dogma, introduced
the temporary discipline of Purgatory, in which the virtues already
stamped on the soul might be brought to greater clearness and rid of
the alloy of imperfection; but this purification allowed no essential
development, no change of character or fate; the soul in Purgatory was
already saved, already holy.
The harshness of the doctrine of eternal judgment is therefore a
consequence of its symbolic truth. The Church might have been less
absolute in the matter had she yielded more, as she did in the doctrine
of Purgatory, to the desire for merely imaginary extensions of human
experience. But her better instincts kept her, after all, to the
moral interpretation of reality; and the facts to be rendered were
uncompromising enough. Art is long, life brief. To have told men they
would have infinite opportunities to reform and to advance would have
been to feed them on gratuitous fictions without raising them, as it
was the function of Christianity to do, to a consciousness of the
spiritual meaning and upshot of existence. To have speculated about the
infinite extent of experience and its endless transformations, after
the manner of the barbarous religions, and never to have conceived
its moral essence, would have been to encourage a dream which may by
chance be prophetic, but which is as devoid of ideal meaning as of
empirical probability. Christian fictions were at least significant;
they beguiled the intellect, no doubt, and were mistaken for accounts
of external fact; but they enlightened the imagination; they made
man understand, as never before or since, the pathos and nobility of
his life, the necessity of discipline, the possibility of sanctity,
the transcendence and the humanity of the divine. For the divine
was reached by the idealization of the human. The supernatural was
an allegory of the natural, and rendered the values of transitory
things under the image of eternal existences. Thus the finality of
our activity in this world, together with the eternity of its ideal
meanings, was admirably rendered by the Christian dogma of a final
judgment.
But there was another moral truth which was impressed upon the believer
by that doctrine and which could not be enforced in any other way
without presupposing in him an unusual philosophic acumen and elevation
of mind. That is the truth that moral distinctions are absolute. A
cool philosophy suffices to show us that moral distinctions exist,
since men prefer some experiences to others and can by their action
bring these good and evil experiences upon themselves and upon their
fellows. But a survey of Nature may at the same time impress us with
the fact that these goods and evils are singularly mixed, that there
is hardly an advantage gained which is not bought by some loss, or any
loss which is not an opportunity for the attainment of some advantage.
While it would be chimerical to pretend that such compensation was
always adequate, and that, in consequence, no one condition was ever
really preferable to any other, yet the perplexities into which moral
aspiration is thrown by these contradictory vistas is often productive
of the desire to reach some other point of view, to escape into what
is irrationally thought to be a higher category than the moral. The
serious consideration of those things which are right according to
human reason and interest may then yield to a fanatical reliance on
some facile general notion.
It may be thought, for instance, that what is regular or necessary
or universal is therefore right and good; thus a dazed contemplation
of the actual may take the place of the determination of the ideal.
Mysticism in regard to the better and the worse, by which good and bad
are woven into a seamless garment of sorry magnificence in which the
whole universe is wrapped up, is like mysticism on other subjects; it
consists in the theoretic renunciation of a natural attitude, in this
case of the natural attitude of welcome and repulsion in the presence
of various things. But this category is the most fundamental of all
those that the human mind employs, and it cannot be surrendered so
long as life endures. It is indeed the conscious echo of those vital
instincts by whose operation we exist. Levity and mysticism may do all
they can--and they can do much--to make men think moral distinctions
unauthoritative, because moral distinctions may be either ignored or
transcended. Yet the essential assertion that one thing is really
better than another remains involved in every act of every living
being. It is involved even in the operation of abstract thinking, where
a cogent conclusion, being still coveted, is assumed to be a good, or
in that æsthetic and theoretic enthusiasm before cosmic laws, which is
the human foundation of this mysticism itself.