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SUS/THECHRISI
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LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
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G.STANLEY HALL
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V.I
JESUS, THE CHRIST, IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
VOL. I
Books by the Same Author
Adolescence
Aspects op Child Lipe and Education
Aspects op German Culture
Educational Problems
Founders of Modern Psychology
Youth, Its Education, Regimen and Hygiene
JESUS, THE CHRIST,
IN THE LIGHT OF
PSYCHOLOGY
y
BY
G. STANLEY HALL, Ph. D., LL. D.
Professor of Psychology, President of Clark University
VOLUME I
Garden City New York
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1917
Copyright, J 917, by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian
CONTENTS
VOLUME I
CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction . vii
I. Jesus' Physical Personality 3
II. Jesus in Literature ., 39
III. Jesus' Character, Negative Views 157
IV. The Nativity 246
V. Beginnings of the Supreme Pedagogy 288
INTRODUCTION
From Paul down to the end of the Scholastic period, Christological problems were treated theologically. Scotists and Thomists alike es- pecially reserved most questions in this field from treatment by reason as themes of faith and mystic intuition alone. With the rise of Protestant- ism and the systems of modern philosophy, speculative thought began to deal freely with the person, work and words of Jesus, a movement that culminated in Hegel and his left-wing followers. In the ebb of this move- ment, and to no small extent made feasible and even stimulated by it, came the great historico-critical movement best marked by the Tubingen School. As a result of these studies which subjected the New Testament texts to a new treatment as free as that applied to other ancient documents, and which brought to bear the same methods that had given the world new histories of Greece and Rome, and by utilizing the copious newly unearthed archaeo- logical data, the synoptic Jesus became the centre of interest. He was, how-t ever, divested of his supernatural attributes and reduced to the dimensions of a great religious teacher and reformer and a purely human paragon of virtue, i These researches together constitute one of the greatest triumphs of modern scholarship and intellectual acumen and have shed a flood of new light along all the way of Jesus, from the manger to the entombment. The achieve- ments of these methods, great and enduring as they are, seem to be essen- tially finished, and only details and further syntheses of data already disclosed yet remain.
The inevitable next step with all this wealth of material must be psycho- logical. It is this step that the author attempts to take in this volume. Pro- foundly realizing his own incompetence to do justice to his theme, he regards himself nevertheless, as a pioneer in a new domain in which he is certain to be followed by many others, and is convinced that the psychological Jesus Christ is the true and living Christ of the present and of the future. He is^ the spiritual Christ of the Resurrection whom alone Paul knew and pro- claimed, although he is here described in modern terms, and it is this that now chiefly matters rather than what an historical person was or did in Palestine, two thousand years ago. Now that the old materialistic and fo- rensic views of the vicarious atonement are transcended, even the historicity of Jesus becomes somewhat less vitally significant than it was once thought to be. Modern psychology, which has of late grown by leaps and bounds, is
vii
viii INTRODUCTION
already competent to grapple with many of the questions hitherto hope- lessly insoluble by older methods. Indeed, some of its principles and in- sights have in recent years already been applied here by writers who are not expert psychologists, some of whom regard its application with apprehen- sion. One of the great tasks of the psychology of the future, in the opin- ion of the present writer, must be to reinterpret its Lord and Master to the Christian world.
Plastic art and literature have always, especially in recent years, at- tempted to do this in new ways and with new efficacy, as is set forth in Chapters I and II. The creative imagination has made Jesus the Christ live again. The plea here is that both these departments, which have al- ready done so much, have now a new responsibility and new incentives to reincarnate the risen Lord in the modern world. Some now conceive the aesthetic sanction as a higher criterion of reality than either truth or good- ness. The history of Puritanism, if not of Protestantism itself, shows that all forms of Jesus cult languish without artistic inspiration. The Jesus Christ ideal must be beautiful by every token, and he must be conceived as the one altogether lovely. Feeling, emotion, sentiment, constitute by far the largest, deepest and oldest parts of Mansoul, and the roots of religion are always pectoral or thumic. It implies no trend toward the Berkeleian conception of the material world that its esse is percipi to say of Christ that his esse is sentire. He is at bottom what we most profoundly feel him to be. Nor in invoking art to reinstate him need we imply that he is only the consummate artistic creation of the folk-soul in the past, although even if one held this, he might to-day be most radically Christian. One very essen- tial part, at least, of the psychological Jesus Christ that was, is, and is to be, is that which painting, sculpture, poetry, drama, and literature have made.
In Chapter III, I have tried to set forth with no reserve the chief nega- tive views of our day, which are of the greatest interest and significance. These I believe have on the whole done or at least will do the cause of Christ in the world more good than harm. They have tended to demolish false conceptions, both liberal and orthodox, and have been hard on the attenu- ated, synoptic Jesus that survived the processes of the higher criticism, as they have upon the literal God-man of the Church. I believe in the his- torical Jesus, but I have tried to show how even the Church can get on, if it should ever have to do so, without him, and that this might possibly ultimately make for greater spirituality. The true Christ is present in hu- man hearts to-day and not merely in the ancient and very imperfect annals of incompetent recorders.
The Nativity (Chapter IV) is one of the most pregnant symbols in all the history of culture. It stands for the process by which the divine, which
INTRODUCTION ix
is the projection into the sky and the organization into a supreme person- ality of the ideals of the best that is in human nature, was brought back from its objectivity and heterization, and resolved back again into the same hu- manity that had evolved it, and this in ways that Hegel glimpsed but which the mechanisms of modern psychoanalysis applied here enable us now to pretty well understand, although of course the psychic processes involved are of great altitude and of wide range. Without this mythopheme the sense of any complete at-one-ment of God and man which Christianity stands for could not have been set forth as complete. Thus the apologetics that seek confirmation of the birth stories in instances of parthenogenesis much as its range is widened by modern biology, lack psychological insight. If the affirmation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception seems on the one hand the acme of credulity, it is in fact clung to so persistently because it asserts under the ambivalent form of the crassest superstition the very deepest of all the affirmations of skepticism, viz., the rehumanization and resubjectivization of God, and because it makes Mansoul itself the only true divinity.
The early story of the ministry (Chapter V) began with the passionate/ quest of righteousness, a psycho-ethical phenomenon, the degree and kind of which the modern world knows little of, save in the intimate biographies or confessions of more or less pathological saints and anchorites. The tocsin call of the Baptist evoked a response in the soul of Jesus by which it awoKe to a higher life, as if in some erethic calenture that made him hence- forth almost an ecstatic, and kept him in a state of hyperexaltation, from which he rarely lapsed, until near the end of his life. After the temptations as a result of which he discarded the three false and dangerous conceptions of his mission, came (Chapter VI) his three great labours of achieving a sense of Messianity, of Sonship, and the Kingdom. So fully were these travails of his soul accomplished, that the early ministry was coloured throughout by triumphant joy and hope.
Then (Chapters VII and XI) came the more or less radical change of plan from that of a glorious Messianic reign to be established on earth, to the pagan programme of a dying god which had to be offered up like a He- brew sacrifice. This was a fate that Jesus never dreamed of at first, but to which he came in the end to submit with an abandon more utter than has ever yet been fully realized, even by his disciples or by Paul himself. Skep- tics have often urged that if Jesus died knowing that he would directly rise from the grave and come to glory, it involved little sacrifice but might rather be regarded only as an act of egoistic selfishness, since any courageous soul would accept a cross as the price of a crown. The new eschatology has opened the way for further compensating views here, and suggests that his
/
x INTRODUCTION
self-immolation must be vastly more complete than it has ever yet been con- ceived to be in order to bring about all the results that followed by way of reaction from his death. Supposing he died feeling not only that he was forsaken of God but doomed to go among the damned forever as one of them, rather than in order to conquer hell and release saints, as the earliest records represent. Nothing less than this, not even annihilation, which is far less, would make his self-sacrifice absolute. Otherwise his death would have been a role or spectacle rather than a real experience, and its atoning value would have involved a certain insincerity and deception of the God- Father, such as so commonly appears in the history of sacrifice. We have no record of how his friends felt during the days he lay in the tomb, or how far they went toward believing that nothing less than this had been his fate. Perhaps they felt betrayed, and that his truths were fatal lies, that death, not immortality, had been brought to light, or that Satan had really de- throned God or led him captive. Had Jesus lain longer in the tomb we do not know how far his erstwhile friends would have gone in accepting the grim logic of miserablism. It was hard, as it was, for them to accept the evidences of the Resurrection, and perhaps a few days, weeks or months later it would have been impossible. They very likely came to believe that only a mouldering corpse was left and that there was to be no sequel. Per- haps they had come to curse him in their hearts as a fool and fanatic, if not as a conscious deceiver, and to be ashamed of their own folly in following him as they scattered away, fearing perhaps that his fate threatened them. Before he died even Peter had thrice denied him, and all had left him to meet his fate alone. They might have gone on to detest his very memory, teachings, works, and person. Such may have been the ghastly, psycho- logical facts that were ignored, glozed over and perhaps forgotten by the Gospel writers, as indeed they would have the strongest motive to do when the Resurrection and the great exaltation of soul and reversal of judgment it caused had been established. Had they written a story of Jesus while he lay in the grave, we should have had a very different narrative.
As to Jesus' own state of mind during his last hours or moments, even if he had accepted death earlier in his career and entered upon an active quest for it, as eschatologists urge, he must have found it unprecedentedly and inconceivably bitter, so that in the very end it came to seem far more so to him than even he had been able to anticipate. Why else the agony of Gethsemane, the great drops of sweat, the prayer that the cup might pass, if his death were only the sine qua non of his inauguration into the head of either a heavenly or an earthly Kingdom? Was he neurotic and panic-stricken by the prospect of the physical pain involved? Did the sense of being forsaken on the cross mean that he had expected God would appear
INTRODUCTION xi
in a spectacular role to rescue him? What was "finished"? Merely his physical life or his personal consciousness? And why were seven successive proofs of the Resurrection necessary before it was accepted? Why was Sa- tan to be let loose on earth and the millennia of hell to come? Above all, where shall we find a sufficient psychological cause of the strength of the great affirmation which had to be incalculably great in order to evoke the belief in such stupendous marvels as the Resurrection and Ascension, if not in the power of rebound from the unparalleled depth of negation of the will to five, which the above view of his death provides? So far as the Resur- rection is a psychic and not merely a sarcous fact, it remains unexplained and therefore imperfectly believed save upon such a hypothesis of supreme psychalgia. Our problem is not the fact of the Resurrection but how it came to be believed, which, if left unexplained, is another miracle.
If he wished and willed death, he surely did not will the eternal tor- ments of hell for himself, nor accept it if it did come to seem to him to be his fate at last. To touch the nadir of despair for himself and to make his end the acme of pathos for others, he must find himself compelled at last to go distinctly beyond the utmost that even his consciousness could have an- ticipated. All hope of every object of desire must not only be extinguished but reversed. He must die feeling himself as bad as he had thought himself good, accursed as specifically and personally as he had believed himself loved by the Father. He must come to regard himself as God's fool and villain, and his true and proper place in the lowest hell with Satan instead of in the highest heaven at God's right hand. It was as if when he had con- secrated himself to death as an atoning sacrifice for sin he had not fully realized the cost or been certain that God would have to do his very worst with him to make the atonement complete. To have realized this would have been a renunciation compared with which that of Buddha would have paled into insignificance and made all other tragedies only foothills of Gol- gotha, the highest mount of sacrifice. His ideals of his Messianity, Sonship and of the Kingdom must have been abandoned as delusions of a mega- lomaniac. All his conceptions of righteousness and those of the prophets he appealed to would have to be exactly inverted, and he must feel himself given over utterly to the powers of hell which would concentrate upon him all their malignities. On this view we must conceive that no one ever began to die a death so ineffably ghastly or awful. The best of all beings suffered the worst of all pains. His death was a moral outrage without parallel and seemed for the moment to reverse all true scales of worth and value in the world. It brought the nadir of dysphoria and made the earth seem a City of Dreadful Night. Thus there are two keys to the secrets of the great sacrifice. The one for Jesus himself is the cross itself, while the second was
xii INTRODUCTION
forged in the souls of his surviving friends by which they were able to unlock his tomb.
What made this greatest of all oscillations that the psychic world has ever known or can know, from the deepest ebb tide of dysphoria to the high- est flood of euphoria? What brought the plenary conviction that man's great enemy, death, was conquered, and that this life was only a brief pro- bationary stage for another eternal one? The answers may be roughly indicated, as follows. First of all, the very depth of agony and despair in- volved in Jesus' fate, in which the thumic pendulum swung farther toward extreme negation than ever before or since, made it when released go farther in the opposite direction of exaltation, a phenomenon of which we give in the text many analogues from the soul of individuals and of the folk, both nor- mal and morbid. Again, the extreme of pathos is impossible as a permanent state. At the moment of greatest depression men may take sudden refuge in suicide as so many of the best Romans later did, when the good Otho died, feeling that the world and all worth while in it were about to be obliter- ated in barbarism. Again, pity is creative and its fetishes tend to be ex- alted in every conceivable way. Moreover, the inexpugnable sense of justice simply can not accept the punishment of the good or the permanent happiness of the bad, as Kant urged that it was just this instinct that cre- ated heaven and hell to even the scales of justice themselves, so that another world came to be held to because they did not swing true in this. Finally, the pagan cults of dying and rising gods bottoming upon the death of vege- tation in the autumn and its revival in the spring, had established a psychic rhythm or cadenced tendency which predisposed the soul to ebb and flow between the poles of pleasure and pain, the sovereign masters of life, so that each not only follows but tends to evoke the other, and it is this that gives greatest elasticity, power of rebound, and the highest of all guarantees of unity to the soul. At least these mechanisms were involved in the world tragedy and triumph which Christianity represents. They illumine its mystery in a way that historico-critical studies have not succeeded in doing, and have contributed to make the story of the cross seem not only normal but the truest of all revelations of the nature of the soul, although the analogies here dominant deploy only in the altitudes of both the individual and the social psyche.
If we have not realized the depths of depression involved in Jesus' death, we have, on the other hand, not fully realized the height of exaltation of spirit brought when faith in his Resurrection became plenary. There was henceforth no death, no mortal disease, no sorrow, no pain. These are for- ever impossible in the world because immortality is certain and so glorious that it eclipses them all. So the early Church abounded in pneumatophores
INTRODUCTION xiii
while men and tender maidens longed to die the crudest of deaths. Indeed, nothing here mattered, and the most glorious crown was that of the most horrid martyrdom. Death was wooed as a muse. It became a mere transi- tion, and the tomb was only a door to a glorious hereafter. Men became ecstatic and jabbered in unknown tongues, simply intoxicated with the joy of life eternal.
If we accept this view the historic Jesus is thrice dead, completely and forever. All he was, did and said is henceforth only a memory, as pallid and partial as it is splendid. His supreme achievement was his death. Death was his vocation. But his soul, the Resurrection Jesus, lives ever more abundantly in the world to-day. It was this that his death provoked the collective soul of man to evolve and to project. It was only this that Paul knew and preached and this is still the most vital culture power in the world. When Jesus first resolved upon death, he must have known that something like this would happen, and perhaps it was one and possibly the chief of the motivations of his great decision. He approached his doom of effacement because he knew the soul of man, what it could and would do, and what it would make of his memory. Perhaps it was thus and not in propria per- sona that this world's master psychologist knew that he would come again. But when he consecrated himself to his enemies and to death, he could not possibly realize all the agony of the last stages of surrender, or foresee how far he must go to make the great atonement or to cause the great compen- sating rebound of soul to be complete, and therefore his last disappointment may have been that so much was necessary in order to provoke the souls of his believers to reinstate him worthily. He did not realize the extremity or degree of sacrifice that was necessary to generate and release all the energy of reaction necessary for the complete rehabilitation he has had in the world. But for this provocation the soul of man, even on the basis of what Jesus actually did, said and was to his friends, would hardly have been able to achieve the greatest of all its creations, the spiritual, risen Christ.
As to miracles (Chapter X) genetic psychology can have no quarrel with those who cling to them as literally veridical, for this is a necessary stage. They are the baby talk of religious faith, not a disease but an in- fantile stadium of true belief. The truth of the ideal miracle is unassailable, but it is symbolic. Negation of them by crude rationalism is not progress but regression. All discussion of whether the nature miracles of the New Testament were literally performed or not represents a low plane of crass religious materialism. They are not even genuine myths but allegories of higher spiritual truths, precious because so charged with challenging mean- ings. They are surds injected into lower plexi of thought in order to disrupt them and make place for the higher insights and larger constellations of
xiv INTRODUCTION
intellect and feeling needful to explain and resolve them, and which with normal psychic development should come to take their place. To accept them ever so crassly implies, however, more richness of the psychic soil than to sweep them away by callow denials. Their moral or inner significance may be felt far down below consciousness and may give orientation and predispose the soul to docility, so that to feel ever so blindly their value in- volves a potency that, if it is ever activated, will make them blossom into solution. The mental attitude toward them in our psychological age is thus a test of psychogenetic insight and perspective. The psychology of faith which miracles tend to keep alive is to-day revealing it in a new sense as indeed the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Thus they save us from the fatal sense of finality and keep the soul young, curious, and growing, because they perpetually demand ever higher explana- tions, a challenge which the above chapter seeks, however feebly, to respond to.
The parables and teachings of Jesus (Chapters VIII and IX) inculcate, as the world knows by heart, an extreme subordination of the individual to sendee. They teach self-effacement almost to the point of self-evacuation, and their lesson is the diametrical opposite of the egoistic ethics of the super- man. Renounce, deny, give, suffer, serve, be least, not greatest, is the call. The ethics of Jesus and his Kingdom suggests the hive or formicary which goes on for ages, and to serve which constitutes the entire life of individuals for unnumbered generations. Insect society is far older and perhaps hence better organized than that of man, which is still in the raw, crude stage wherein individuality is rampant, unsubjected to the whole, and undomesti- cated to a life of service.
In fine, the kenosis involved nothing else than the death of the old ob- jective God, and his resorption and inwardization in man. So, too, the in- carnation stands for a great movement of pragmatism in the religious do- main. The day of the old transcendentalities of faith ended with the loud and clear call of the Baptist to realize everything here, now and within, to which Jesus added, "and in myself." Man must no longer eject, evict or extradite his ideal self and project it upon the clouds but factualize it within his own soul. Pentecost was meant to mark the end of heaven- gazing and the beginning of a new era of homecoming, and the focalization of effort and aspiration upon this world and upon man. Henceforth there must be no craven, supine or neurotic flight from present now and here reality, but it must be resolutely faced, understood and transformed. There must be no postponement of hopes and promises to a distant future but super- mundane currency must be cashed in the coin current in the earthly realm. Even our immortality is to be exactly and only that of the risen Christ and
INTRODUCTION xv
not that of volatilized ghosts, refined however much from animistic savagery. Leuba's comprehensive census seeks to show how to-day, just in proportion as intelligence and ability increase, the old God-idea has become unsubstan- tial and ineffective, while in about the same ratio the old idea of personal survival after death has also lapsed and become often even distasteful, and, indeed, may be and often is a positive hindrance to the true life of service ("The Belief in God and Immortality," 1916, 336 p.). The only valid im- mortality is of two kinds, influential and eugenic, and the true living God is the moral law within. If a belief in the higher secondary immortality as dis- tinct from the primary ghost theory of it arose late in history and was de- veloped in the ancient Hebrew world by a slowly supervening despair of realizing the collective ideal of a Messianic state, and was also reinforced by the Dionysic cult of ecstasy, in Greece, which potentialized individuality by reinforcing it from the racial soul, to which is now added as a third factor the democratic hypertrophy of individuality in general, and if this belief is now sustained not by the old arguments, the values of all of which are greatly depreciated, but only by an inner sense of the importance our own lives seem to have for us (somewhat like the Platonic argument that the soul is so beautiful a thing God could not have the heart to let it perish) , as Leuba seeks to show, then its nature at last stands revealed for it is only a sublimated form of Narcissism. The task of the genetic psychologist, however, is not to deny it but rather to find the next higher and more adequate expression of the imperishable instinct from which the old belief sprang. This will be found in the perpetuity of good works of sendee which all Buddhists are exhorted to think of on the moment of death and in living in and for the infinite perspective of generations who are to spring from our loins, or in other words in a reinterpretation of the Lord's covenant with Abraham.
We must constantly translate what the dramatis personae of the New Testament said and did into what was really meant by it all. Of this they knew but little but only dimly intuited and strongly felt it. It is the self- same faith that Paul rhapsodized about but which we conceive as the inner psychic evolutionary excelsior nisus of the racial soul in the individual. The New Testament writers spoke far more wisely than they knew and hence we well call them inspired. But nothing in our own age of science so cries out for explanations higher than they have yet received than do these records. Thus to us to-day Christianity is less and less a solution, and more and more a problem, which like the riddle of the sphinx we must solve or be devoured by the minotaur of selfishness and animality. The state of the real knowl- edge of and feeling for Christianity on the part of the world of modern cul- ture, and the complacency of the church in antiquated conceptions constitute to-day the one great blemish and the one great danger of our civilization.
xvi INTRODUCTION
The church is a cult and no longer stands for the highest culture. It has become an idolator of its symbols, and lost the holy passion to penetrate ever deeper into their significance. It has lost control of, and often all vital touch with the leaders of mankind, and makes only a falsetto, sporadic appeal to educated youth. Its mission is to save souls but its very semin- aries teach or care little about what the soul of man really is. It should take the psychology that deals with the deeper things of humanity to its very heart of hearts, instead of maintaining its attitude of suspicion and exclusion, and help to show forth the new sense in which our scriptures are being revealed as the world's chief text-book in psychology.
Thus true Christianity is of the present and future far more than it is of the past. Its great triumphs ought to be those yet to come. Even from the standpoint of the new anthropology, much as is now being done to clear things up and set them in a larger light, there yet remain in the New Testa- ment cryptic constellations of truth that are unresolved and which, to change the trope, are like foreign bodies in the system, or to use still another meta- phor, are like the sleeping, spell-bound heroes of myth, waiting to be set free and to start on great careers. The Bible is not a Pandora box which it is dangerous for psychic experts to open. Indeed, no small part of their mis- sion is to neutralize certain of the dangers incident to the noble work of the higher criticism which was a necessary stage to a true eclair cissement. How the canonical writers struggled to utter the great truths that seethed and burgeoned and yet for the most part remained bewusstseinsunfdhig in them, and which countless seers, mystics and theologians have since striven so earnestly yet so inadequately to express! Our attitude toward all, even Jesus himself, should be not unlike his sense of an hebamic mission toward the law and the prophets, viz., to declare them more perfectly, that is, to rein- terpret them in a way worthy of a new and greater age. They were great pioneers and discoverers, inaugurating a work which we are now called on to carry on beyond their wildest dream, and unless we can do so something not unlike religious dementia praecox will supervene. If we cannot show that the soul of man is essentially Christian to its very depths, when both it and Christianity are understood ; if science and faith cannot be made hence- forth one and inseparable, indispensable each to the other; and in fine if the Gospels, epistles and the Church cannot have'anew vitalr,radical, re-evolution and re-construction in the world, and that soon, our faith must soon resign itself to the slow fate that overwhelmed the great religions of the past and some new one will arise upon its ruins. Never in all its varied history has the Church of Christ faced so great a crisis as that which confronts it to-day.
But just as in the sad culture state of the Church, there is hope so far
INTRODUCTION xvii
as it is turning to the gospel of good deeds, so even in this war there is some hope that the religion of the soldier who risks his life for a superpersonal good, the fraternization with some scores of thousands of priests and clergymen in the trenches of each of the chief belligerents, and the tremendous rein- forcement of practical efficiency as war applies its acid test of practicability to every form of culture, so we may still hope to find in the end that despite its unprecedented evils it will have brought into the world a great revival of the true religion of deeds. Two millennia under the Prince of Peace have not prevented this colossal and atrocious war, and the Church of Christ can- not now fail to suffer a great increase of neglect and reproach unless it can have a radical reincarnation. Would that psychology, by re-revealing Jesus in a new light, and re-laying the very foundations of belief in him, might contribute to bring in a real third dispensation, so long predicted yet so long delayed, and thus help to a true epoch by installing in the world the type of religion that can do something to make such holocausts henceforth impossi- ble! Now Christianity simply stands by and looks on aimless, helpless, paralyzed, convicted of failure to a degree that all the heresies in its history could not have caused. It mitigates suffering by beneficent ministrations but did nothing to prevent the Christian nations from flying at each other's throats, and has been impotent in all its efforts to restore peace. Once it made and unmade wars. In this it has proven bankrupt, an almost negli- gible factor, and we have in it as at present understood very little guarantee that the world may not at any time again relapse to the barbarism and paganism of even worse wars. The only possible religious safeguard against another such catastrophe is nothing less than a new Christianity. We must go back to the first principles and elemental forces of human nature, realize in a deeper sense that Bibles and religion arose out of it, and thus we must build the latter up again from the very foundations, but these foundations will and must be the true psychological Jesus Christ, gross, material misinterpreta- tions of whom have made the Church to-day a body almost without a soul.
Finally and personally, reared in a home and community saturated with religious influences, which no less pervaded college, with interest in these subjects reinforced by a course leading to the B.D. degree later, followed by an intensive study of Schleiermacher under Dorner in Berlin, it was perhaps inevitable that I should revert to this field later. Nearly twenty years ago I began a course of lectures to graduate students of psychology upon these topics, and although somewhat aside from my chief lines of teaching and research, the material grew each year, as did the interest in clearing up my own ideas. The determination to publish, which came only two years ago, within which time everything has been recast,
xviii INTRODUCTION
rewritten and condensed, was because of the interest of young clergymen (some of whom have always been in attendance) and also that of other post- graduates, not a few of whom during these years have told me that they have been saved from indifference or extreme negation and found incentives to further study by the course. Nearly a score of them have written theses under my direction upon phases of the topics here dealt with, to some of which I am indebted.
Hence I dedicate this volume to my students, past and present, and to graduate students elsewhere who care for these themes.
My study of adolescence laid some of the foundations of this work, be- cause Jesus' spirit was in a sense the consummation of that of adolescence. Some of it is based on conceptions derived from the conditioned reflex studies of the school of PawloW, which open up the whole field of the trans- ference of incitations and of psychokinetic equivalents. I have also made use of some of the most important of the so-called Freudian mechanisms, especially Uebertragung and Verschiebung, and the doctrine of surrogates, projection, Objektwahl and inwardization, or extro- and intro-version; am- bivalence, or the doctrine of opposition and antitheses of affectivities, com- pensation (in Adler's sense); and retreat from reality; some of the psychol- ogy of symbolism. All these apply as well to fear, rage, hunger and other original impulsive powers of man, as they do to the erotic impulsions, as I have elsewhere tried to show.1 I of course owe much to Frazer's great work, and something to Bergson, Semon, the Vaihinger type of prag- matism, and perhaps most of all to a psychogenetic perspective or attitude of mind which my long interest in paidology has made almost a diathesis, while experimental, introspective and behaviouristic psychology have so far shed very little light upon the religious life or the activities of the folk- soul. Of contemporary Christological studies I am of course most indebted to the eschatologists, to whom we owe the newest and boldest conceptions in this field, from which, however, I have drawn conclusions that, while they seem to me psychologically inevitable, probably even Schweitzer would shrink from.
As a result of all this, I believe I can now repeat almost every clause of the Apostles' Creed with a fervent sentiment of conviction. My intel- lectual interpretation of the meaning of each item of it probably differs toto caelo from that of the average orthodox believer. To me not a clause of it is true in a crass, literal, material sense, but all of it is true in a sense
'Sec, e. g., my article, "The Freudian Methods Applied to Anger," in Am. Jour. Psy., 191 S, Vol. 26, p. 438-443. See also "A Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear," Chap. I., ibid., 1914, Vol. 25, p. 149-200; Chap. II., ibid., Vol. 25, p. 321-392. Also "Thanatophobia and Immor- tality," ibid., Vol. 26, p. 550-613.
INTRODUCTION xix
far higher, which is only symbolized on the literal plane. The change from my boyhood belief in it all has been to me all gain and no loss. Nothing has been dropped or denied, but only the mental imagery by which it is apprehended is changed. The same fundamental religious instincts are expressed in the new forms as in the old. What lay concealed in the old stands revealed in the new. I am still going in the same direction and in the same path in which my infant feet were first taught to walk. Senescent insights and adolescent sentiments meet and reinforce each other. How, thus, can I quarrel with those who are at any stage of this "grammar of assent"? I only insist that the way be kept open for all to escape arrest, as I have tried to do. Some will stop at each stage, and others will go far beyond any ranges I can attain, for the path not only goes on and up but ever broadens. Thus my own fondest hope and belief is that my best effort, here falteringly put forth, may very soon be transcended and super- seded not by one but by many studies that are better and more worthy of the theme.
Thus, I am indebted first of all to my students for the stimulus of their appreciation of the lectures here epitomized, and who have made me hope that the views herein set forth may meet the needs of graduates, especially young clergymen. To Librarian Louis N. Wilson I am under obligation for procuring literature from far and near, much of it hard to get, for these many years. I am indebted to Dr. Amy E. Tanner for a number of epi- tomes in Chapter II and for many suggestions as to forms of expression; and last but not least to my secretary, Miss M. Evelyn Fitzsimmons, who has typed the entire volume in its present form as well as much of the greatly expanded notes from which it was reduced, has read and corrected all galley- and page-proofs, and made constant and helpful suggestions.
G. Stanley Hall.
Clark University,
January, 19 17.
JESUS, THE CHRIST, IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
VOL. I
JESUS, THE CHRIST, IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
CHAPTER ONE
JESUS ' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY
Versus docetism he had a "meat" body — Was he ugly or beauti- ful?— The oldest representations, Gliickselig, Dobschiitz — Palladial images from heaven not made with hands — Have we anything approx- imating a portrait in the sense of Heaphy and Bayliss? — Ideographs — Jesus' relation to animals in art — Eastern and Western types — Sym- bols and accessories — The great painters of Jesus, mediaeval and con- temporary— What parts and incidents in his life have appealed most strongly to art? — His portraits are mental imagery, hence artists should idealize him — Doppelganger and imaginary companions — Rea- son why artists should make Jesus (a) large, (b) strong, (c) beautiful, (d) magnetic.
DO WE, shall we ever, do we really want, and ought we to know how Jesus looked? What manner of man was he physically? What were his stature, bodily proportions, strength, complex- ion, temperament, health, diathesis generally? Was he beautiful or ugly? Was his presence insignificant, like that of Paul, or impressive and magisterial? Was he choleric, sanguine, or nervous? What of his voice and gesticulation? What were the attributes of his person- ality generally; or, in scholastic terms, in what did Jesusissity consist? Some of these traits he must have had to the exclusion of their oppo- sites, like all of us; else the incarnation was incomplete or indeed un- real. Or was he made up bodily, like a composite photograph, of every human trait, with a maximum of generic and a minimum of specific qualities? Was he an embodied, generalized type, as in the evolutionary series we have the patrofelis which combines the common and lacks the special qualities of all the feUda; or was he, like Aristotle's ideal of the temperate man, midway between all extremes, striking an exact average of all human qualities, with every one of them present but none in excess? How the Christian world has longed to know!
4 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
How saints, seers, martyrs, and anchorites have striven for a vision of their Lord! How art has laboured to limn his features, and poetry and romance, as we shall see, to presentify him in his many characters and rdles, all the way from the manger to the Ascension !
The personal qualities by which Caesar and Cicero awed the Ro- man senate, by which great orators sway assemblages, by which Napoleon was enabled to bare his breast to hostile soldiers, almost daring them to shoot him; the courage and magnetism which made even those he had led to death salute him rapturously with their last breath; the personal beauty and grace by which Apollo ravished all beholders : — we do not know how much of all this was found in Jesus' personality. But it does not take many of these elements, even in our scientific and miracle-hating age, to provoke the folk-soul to exalt its hero or idol to the very pinnacle of greatness, however this be con- ceived, whether as superman or deity; to secure for him the mad acclaim with which great heroes who have staked all and won great causes for the people have been hailed, the disinterested adoration which sublime character evokes, the awe that the great prophets have struck into the hearts of kings on their thrones, the tribute of mundane immortality which genius gives its favourites, the piety and fidelity of great lovers to those they idealize, the reverence felt for all rescuers of great causes in desperate estate, the meed of praise paid military leaders who won battles that saved cities and nations, the instinctive and sudden servility of leaders to one still greater than themselves, in whom they recognize the supreme talent of leadership in those born to command. The reactions of the popular soul to each of these qualities in isolation to-day suggest that had they all been combined in one individual, he would have been exalted in a perfectly natural way to the highest conceivable position by their cumulative effects. Taken singly, these traits make great pages in history. If summated, the laws of human nature being what they are, we can only conjecture what inevitable consequences would result, even now, were the world called to react to an individual in whom were blended in one great personal constellation all the qualities that charm, subdue, and inspire. Perhaps the exaltation or hypostatization of Jesus, earth-born though he be, to very Godhood, is well within the possibilities of human nature and hero-worship; and this all the more so in the light of what we are now learning of the deeper strata of the individual and the collective
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 5
soul. Just as science explains many facts once thought to be physical miracles, such as eclipses and comets, so the advance of psychology is showing that many things once thought to be above man's normal psychic nature are really well within it. Already some of the healing miracles are reduced from the supernatural to almost commonplace effects of modern psychotherapy. Many think that the authors of our Gospels, realizing that they had to omit very much that Jesus was, said, and did, chose for presentation those features that were typical, stressed these, and thus invested what they gave with some of the traits of what they left unrecorded, to the end that greater justice be done to the whole. If so they were artists.
Perhaps it is a trace of ancient docetism that makes our concep- tions of Jesus' physique so vague and sublimated that some are almost shocked at the thought that he performed all normal physiological functions, made some kind of toilet, observed some kind of regimen, was exposed to indisposition if he violated common-sense precepts of diet, exercise, sleep, etc. ; that a photographer and perhaps a clinician might have left their record of him; or that if his corpse had been dissected all the organs in our bodies would have been found. His every dimension would have had some place in an anthropometric table of percentile grades.
In point of fact, in more than one hundred copies of pictures and statues which I have collected we may observe the greatest diversity, so that we know far more of the physical traits of many great personalities of antiquity. His has been left plastic to artistic imagination, and we have the greatest range from the extremes of ugliness to almost the highest type of beauty and majesty. He has been represented as very young and prematurely old, stout and slender, dark and light, with the racial features of every people in Christendom.1
•Eastern prelates have generally regarded Jesus as "without form or comeliness," and with no beauty that we should desire him. This was the view of Justin Martyr, Clement, Origen, and the Byzantine and Talmudic writers; while in the West he has more often been conceived "as fairer than the children of men," "chiefest among ten thousand," etc. Hence the Apollo conceptions and the classic ideal type favoured by Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and others.
Undoubtedly a forgery, of not earlier than the twelfth century, the following, purporting to be a letter of Lentulus, president of Jerusalem (although no such person or office ever existed), to the Roman Senate, may be appended:
"There fives at this time in Judea a man of singular character, whose name is Jesus Christ. The barbarians esteem bim a prophet, but his followers adore him as the immediate offspring of the Immortal God. He is endowed with such unparalleled virtue as to call back the dead from their graves, and to heal every kind of diseases with a word or a touch. His person is tall and elegantly shaped; his aspect amiable and reverend; his hair flows in beautiful shades, which no united colors can match, falling into graceful curls below his ears, agreeably couching on his shoulders, and parting on the crown of his head, like the head-dress of the sect of the Nazarites. His forehead is smooth, and his cheeks without a spot, save that of a lovely red. His nose and mouth are formed with exquisite symmetry; his beard is thick, and suitable to the hair of his head, reaching a little below his chin, and parted in the middle like a fork; his eyes are bright, clear, and serene. He rebukes with majesty, counsels with mildness, and invites with the most tender and persuasive language, his whole address, whether in word or deed, being elegant, brave, and strictly characteristic of so exalted a being. No man has seen him laugh, but the whole world has frequently beheld him weep; and so per- suasive are his tears, that the multitude cannot withhold theirs from joining in sympathy with him. He is very modest, temperate, and wise. In short, whatever this phenomenon may be in the end, he seems at present a man of excellent beauty and divine perfections, every way surpassing the children of men."
6 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
We can only glance at the story of the early representations of Jesus, first following Dobschutz. : Of old many cities had palladia. None which had one could be captured by siege or attack, but could be taken only by craft. So Pallas Athene's image was Zeus's gift to Dedalus in answer to the prayer of Ilos, and many widespread sagas told its story. Athens was protected by such an image of Artemis, and images of Serapis were also of heavenly origin. Meteoric stones, unlike the Kaaba, were often fancied to suggest human features or were more or less shaped by art ; and some of them came to be f etish- istically regarded. The popular mind of old clung closely to all diipati or images that descended from heaven; for if man can go up, why cannot divine forms come down? Dobschutz has actually brought together a vast body of ancient literature illustrating this theme and the many legends connected with it. His thesis is that in the time of Jesus there was widespread belief in marvellous pictures and images, which extended far back into antiquity and which were thought to have come down from the sky. The early Church at first scorned these stories, but gradually assimilated them, with later and more current ideas of pictures not made with hands, and so "die christliche Acheiro- poieten-Glaube ist die Fortsetzung der griechischen Glauben an Diipeten^ (p. 263). Possibly the prototype was the Phrygian mother-goddess, Ma. Here we have the background of the belief in miraculously originated pictures of Christ. But when Christianity took over the idea of heaven-descended representations, it was no longer assumed that the material itself came from the sky, but that its form was mi- raculously impressed upon it. Dobschutz gives priority to the group that centred about Kamuliana, a village in Cappadocia, from which in 574 a picture of Christ came to Constantinople. The oldest legend about it was that a pagan woman, Hypatia, would not believe in Christ unless she could see him. One day she found in a pond in the park a picture on linen, the marvellous character of which was shown by the fact that when it was taken out of the water it dried up and a true copy was left upon her clothing. The other story is that the wife of the prefect of this town was a Christian, at heart desiring baptism, but afraid to declare herself because her husband persecuted the Christians. A marvellous voice told her to prepare for baptism in her
l"Cbristus-Bilder. Untersuchungen zur christl. Legende." Leipzig, 1899. First half, 394 p., with 35 pages of Beilage; second half, 3S7 p., and Beilage.
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 7
own room. While she was bowing in adoration Christ appeared, washed his face, wiped it on a towel which she had prepared, and left the imprint of himself which was only discovered to the public when she died, when it began to cure those in distress. This picture was greatly honoured at Constantinople, and perhaps it was concerning this and its one and possibly two duplicates that the Christian idea of images not made with hands developed from that of images that had fallen from heaven, both of which gave strength and were Reichspalladia. At first the chief function of these pictures was that of protecting and healing. Byzantine legends stated that the pictures went over the seas ; but of this cult, which declined in the East, we know little. Other acheiropoietoi were common at this time and much later, e. g., at Memphis in the sixth century; and Roman churches had them in the Middle Ages. The linen face-cloth of the Frankish kingdom forms another group, and holy pictures of the God-mother also appear.
Another very sacred and ancient picture of Jesus, mentioned by Eusebius, has this legend: Abgarus, King of Edessa, having heard of the wondrous cures wrought by Jesus, sent a messenger, asking that he come and heal, and also reside with him. In reply Jesus wrote a letter saying it was impossible, but that, as a reward of his faith, after his own death he would send a messenger to him to cure and preach, and he did send Thaddeus. A little later protective power was assigned to the letter itself, and soon after a wondrous picture was shown (first mentioned in 593 A. d.). A later legend says the messenger himself painted the portrait and took it to the king.
The Veronica (Vera-icon) legend arose in the sixth century as a combination of the story of the statue of Paneas and that of Pilate. Tiberius was ill, and having heard of Jesus' healings, sent to Jerusalem to have him come and heal him, but Pilate had already allowed Jesus to be slain. On the way back, this messenger met Veronica, who pitied him for the failure of his errand, and showed him a picture which Jesus had given her, having impressed it upon a towel by wiping his face with it. Both Veronica and her handkerchief were taken to the emperor who was cured by looking at it.1
The Abgarus portrait, now restored in Genoa, represents the East-
lThe legend of the statue of Paneas states that there once used to be a metal image of Jesus, witifhis arm stretched out over a kneeling woman, and that by his side grew a plant of marvellous healing power. The statue was said to have been erected by Veronica in gratitude for the cure of the issue of blood which Jesus had wrought upon her, and the statue represents the act. The story of Pilate is that after he had allowed Christ's cruel death, efforts were made to stir up Tiberius against him, and the means used to this end was the cure of his disease by Jesus' power, to demon- strate his divinity.
8 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
ern ideal of help and cure, while the Veronica in St. Peter's represents the acme of Jesus' suffering, and thus stands for redemption and sacri- fice. The West has always emphasized Jesus' suffering and its efficacy for absolution. In the earliest form of both these famous legends there is no supernatural note, but this is developed under the influence of the old diipati idea. The material is mundane — only the likeness is marvellous; but the Kamuliana is both. Hence Dobschutz concludes : "This latter image, therefore, is the point of connection between the diipati and the acheiropoietoi, and therefore furnishes the proof that we have here the transmission of an antique faith to the sphere of Christian concepts" (p. 267). Thus the Christians made something very differ- ent out of the diipati belief which they adopted from antiquity. The image was not heaven-sent, but neither was there human inter- vention, thus symbolizing that Christianity was a revelation. In this way the eternal being of the logos could be stressed. What is wanted is the true historic portrait, and we are left to infer that these pictures were in a sense made by Jesus himself.
Quite common in ancient times was the idea of pictures made by contact, although moisture of blood, sweat, or water is generally given a place. Grimm, who first collected the legends of these pictures, thought them related, and that the Veronica legend, which in the begin- ning did not stress the suffering of Jesus, was first and most important. The above makes plain how the pictures came to be regarded as marvellous, as they certainly did, by association with the background conceptions of images from heaven. Certain it is that some of these early images and'portraits were held to do marvellous things. They weep, sweat, their eyes sparkle, and they often perform other far greater miracles. Hence it is not strange that some of them are adorned with gold and priceless jewels; that they are so sacred that even the Holy Father sees them only once a year; and that before some of them can- dles and incense are kept burning. Gnostic and Greek Christianity took very kindly to these representations per se facta. Some were mascots, carried by armies; others were miraculously duplicated. Greek christ- ophanies were compared with these pictures, and occasionally in mediaeval story Jesus became animated for a time and then stepped back and became a picture again.1
'Dr. Legis GlUckselig, after spending thirty years in studying ("Christus ArchKologie: Studien Uber Jesus Christus und sein wahres Ebenbild," Prag, 1863. 168 p.) from every then available source the data, developed the very plausible theory that while Jesus did not perhaps desire an authentic likeness of him to be transmitted any more than he desired
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 9
Are any of these old pictures in any sense portraits? Dean Farrar1 says, "it is absolutely certain that the world and Christianity have lost forever all vestiges of trustworthy tradition concerning the aspect of Jesus on earth." Something like this is the consensus of the competent now. Heaphy,2 however, who spent much of his life exploring southern Europe, especially Italian galleries, museums, and the catacombs, strongly dissents from this view, and his friend Bayliss,3 who after Heaphy's sudden and untimely death published his con- clusions, supports him with great enthusiasm. The Catholic Church, which is the heir and custodian of most of the old representations of Christ, holds them in the utmost reverence, and believes that some among them are more or less true representations of the founder of Christianity, although now one and now another has been thought to be the real likeness of his person. The two artists above urge that the early Christians, who lived under a sense of the impending judg- ment day, would need some representation that they might know Christ at his second coming, and think that some of the pictures of Jesus by the tombs in the catacombs were intended to serve this purpose. They urge, too, that a false idea of Jesus would react un- favourably upon Christianity, so closely is religion related to art. " To reject all pictures of Jesus is to reject him." "Those who fail to obey the injunction, 'Remember me' will, if they go a step further, be obliged to confess, 'We never knew you.'" The story of the cross was first given to art quite as much as, if not more than, to letters, and to it was given the task of reincarnating Jesus' image and bringing
an autobiography or wished to write down his teachings, nevertheless various memories grew into traditions, and these slowly consolidated into a type which was, to be sure, rather generalized, but which conformed far more to the Edessa image than to any other. This Sagra Effigie he reproduces impressively in colour and every detail of feature — a long, genial face, blue eyes, the whites conspicuously showing below the iris; long and sandy hair and beard, etc. A type is more or less generic, and by its very indenniteness is favourable to serve as a point of departure for variations, both secular and racial. See also W. H. Ingersoll: "Portraits of Our Saviour," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 73, P- 933. John P. Lenox: "The Supreme Face of the Christian Centuries," Biblical World, December, 1808, p. 380-309.
lFrederic Farrar: "Life of Christ and Its Representations in Art." London, 1804, 507 p.
!"The Likeness of Christ." London, 1885.
•Sir Wyke Bayliss: "Rex Regium: a painter's study of the likeness of Christ from the apostles to the present." Lon- don, 1898. 10a p. See also "Storia della Arte Cristiana nei primi otto secoli della chiesa." Scritta dal P. Raffaele Garrucd. D. C. D. G., e corredata della collegione di tutti i monumenti di pittura e scultura incisi in rome su cinque- sento tavole ed illustrati. Prato. Vol. i, 1881, 604 p.; Vol. a, 1873, 136 p.; Vol. 3, 1876, 300 p.; Vol. 4, 1877, 134 p.; Vol. 5, 1870, 164 p.; Vol. 6, 1880, 191 p. Garrucci, in this monumental work, gives engravings of every represen- tation of Christ that be could obtain, made East and West, for about eight hundred years. The Byzantine coins are from 355 to 1453. They often represent Christ on one side and the emperor on the other (See Sabatier: "Descrip- tion een£rale des Monnaies byzantine*." Paris, 1863.
The apothecaries' guild more than any other wrought Tesus into their trade, as illustrated by a number of mediaeval paintings. _ One is labelled "Well-appointed pharmacy of souls." and on a ribbon is the legend, "The blood of Jesus Christ, which cleanses from all sin." Sometimes we have a well-equipped dispensary. In one Jesus holds a balance in one hand and in another a banner inscribed, "Come and buy without money and without price." Jars are labelled, instead of with the names of drugs, with the words, "faith," "love," "hope," "long suffering, "constancy," and where there is materia medico, it is symbolic, e. g., Christ's flower (hellebore), Benedict root (bennett), crosswort (groundsell), etc.; or the drugs are supposed to have magic power, like mandrake, springwort, etc. Jesus is a physician dispensing remedies, and there are often alchemistic symbols. Glaube is the most precious ingredient, and so the receptacles for it are smallest. One copper engraving in the sixteenth century is labelled "panacea," and in another the flasks are ar- ranged in rows, labelled, e. g., "heart water," "eye water," power water," etc. (See E. Kremers: Open Court, Vol. 34, 1910, pp. 588-599O
io JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
the events of his life home to the people, even when the Bible was withheld from the laity. Thus the world has two records of Jesus, one his words and deeds as recorded in the evangelists, and the other in art. These are the Christian birthright. His image did not fall down from heaven, like that of Diana. High art and superstition cannot coexist. To no masterpiece was a supernal author ever ascribed, and no artist would confess to creating any of the miraculous images. It has often been assumed, too, that there must have been some common type; and various efforts have been made to derive this from earlier representations.
Perhaps few anchorites, yearning for a theophany, Grail-seekers, excavators of buried civilizations, or paleontologists on the trail of a missing link have worked with more ardour than did Heaphy, im- pelled by his enthusiastic belief that he could actually find and show to the world the lost lineaments of Our Lord. The obstacles he had to face were a strange mixture of indifference and reluctance on the part of the officials, high and low, of the Church, which has at once conserved and allowed to decay unrestored or uncopied so many price- less treasures of early Christian days (which are now, however, better cared for). Where access was grudgingly granted, he had to work under onerous restrictions. He explored one or two hundred of the seven hundred and fifty miles of the catacombs, once spending the entire night locked alone with the remains of the multitude of dead in this vast cemetery eighty feet below the ground, copying laboriously with his pencil, since photography was not permitted, scores of the most important eucharistic and other paterae, from the metallic base of which the glass crumbled at a touch, also icons, coins, mosaics, enamels, frescoes, linen napkins; comparing all to find types from which to measure departure; seeking data in patristic and other literature for dates (assigning the oldest to the beginning of the second century) ; striving to distinguish de novo creations from what he deemed copies of older and lost originals; and concluding that there was a continuous line, running back perhaps to pictures by the apostles themselves, crediting the legend that Luke made at least one such portrait. Pa- tristic expressions in the days of iconoclasm, disparaging portraits as violating the second commandment were, he thought, prompted by the haunting danger of idolatry and image-worship, and do not prove that such pictures did not exist.
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY n
Bayliss, who rigidly excluded all legends, and studied form, colour, and material alone, adopted a method of selecting four mosaics from the Basilica and tracing them back in quest of convergence to type. Of the reproductions in the catacombs he thinks the Callistine fresco, which represents a figure without vesture and void of every symbol, the best, and says, " I believe it was the work of a Roman artist, a portrait painter, who had himself seen Christ" (p. 42). Another, he thinks, bears unmistakable marks of portraiture, and thinks its author "an artist who had himself seen Our Lord or painted either from memory or from an authentic model." A second type he finds (and says there is no third) in the portrait of a Roman youth which, he thinks, was adopted conventionally for outsiders to conceal the identity of the real Jesus. As to the motive of these productions he says, "They were painted over the graves of the martyrs so that the face of the Redeemer might overshadow the place where they lay until once more they should see him as they had seen him before they fell asleep" (p. 47). Pleading for open-mindedness with regard to these early Italian pictures, he says, "Here, then, we find a people accustomed to commemorate their heroes by portraiture, banded together in the worship of a new hero, greater than any they had known before, and endeared to them by a stronger tie, that of love, one known personally to many of them, of whose likeness any of them could have obtained authentic information. We see this people, driven to the catacombs, proceed at once to cover the walls, to engrave upon their sacramental vessels, to bury with their martyrs, pictures representing the life, actions, and attributes of their hero. It is too much to ask us to believe that the likeness they painted on the walls, engraved on their chalices, and buried with their dead, was a sham" (p. 62). He holds that there is a sameness between the likenesses in the catacombs and the church mosaics, although many diverge widely from this ideal; and this he explains by their being executed by different hands, some of them unskilled and uninformed, and through great intervals of time. "What the words of Christ are, therefore, for literature, the likenesses of Christ are for art," and we have here a most precious birthright and heritage of art which, irradiating from these two types, as the eastern and western types changed, slowly acquired the rigid conventionality with which they went through the dark centuries.
12 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
The critical objections to these methods and conclusions Johnson1 has remorselessly pointed out. He finds no motive for selecting the four mosaics or the six or seven frescoes and the four gildings out of so many, although, of course, he admits that these influenced great artists later. Other selections might just as well be made, which could show that Jesus had either long or short hair, a beard or none, a round or long head. This method, too, can hardly take us back of the fourth century, etc. Some of the oldest originals also are so faded that two copies of the same one differ greatly: one, e. g., indicating a hard-headed and the other a spiritual man. He thinks that Bayliss felt, rather than argued, his way to his conclusion. Into the details of this discussion of the slowly developing symbolism that came to divert attention from form and features to accessories — the forelock, white below the iris, tufts of beard, baldness, the drooping of the brows, the form of the nose, and the symbols of fish, lamb, eagle, cross, nimbus, and other emblems, as art grew esoteric — we cannot enter. Celsus pronounced these pictures of Our Lord in his time as ugly as the Gospels were foolish, to which Origen replied, "Yes, they are ugly, but not to the inner eye." They did not appeal to the Greeks, who loved physical beauty, and Eusebius rebukes the emperor for ask- ing him to send a likeness, intimating that he should really have the true image in his heart.
Most of the earliest representations of Christ are ideographic; that is, he appears not in propria persona but by means of an emblem, just as, before metaphors faded, language itself was pictorial. The dove meant the Holy Spirit or the twelve apostles; the ark, the Church; the fish ichthus (ixGuq), was an anagram for Jesous Christos theou uios soter. The vine was a less common symbol ; but the cross, which had long had the most degrading connotations which meant hideous agony, exe- crations, shame, so that no more cynical blasphemy could be conceived than dying upon it — a torture, no doubt also, far worse than burning — was completely redeemed and made a sign of glory and of victory; and it is more widely known in the world to-day than the story of Jesus himself or even than his name. The shepherd, probably borrowed from the Old Testament, embodied an attribute of Jesus that was very widely and variously used. Among the pagan symbols the phoenix
'Franklin Johnson: "Have We a Likeness of Christ?" Decennial publications of the University of Chicago, Series i, Vol. 3.
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 13
and Orpheus charming the beasts were perhaps most common. The Church fathers, surrounded by pagan art, which was idolatrous or corrupt, or both, naturally shrank from representations of the human Christ. The early Christians were very spiritually inclined, and the Jesus they had adored was the risen, glorified one. Moreover, to con- ceive him as in agony, as was done later, would have been abhorrent during the first four centuries. He was to them, moreover, vividly present within. They thought that by coming to earth he was emptied of divine glory; and to make his humiliation complete his physique must have been at least unattractive, if not ugly, in order that we should not be distracted from his unseen incorporeal nature. His majesty must be completely hidden by the veil of flesh. But if this be so, how can we account for the enthusiastic rapture of the woman of Samaria after a brief talk, with him; the impression that a glimpse of him made upon the wife of Pilate; the impassioned devotion of the Magdalene, and the instant effect of his personal presence upon all? For the first four hundred years Jesus was most commonly represented as a happy, blooming, unbearded Roman youth, more boy than man; and this type persisted to the sad and epochful tenth century, when "a gloomy shadow fell on religion."1 He had been the good shepherd or the fair physician, but now he becomes the inexorable judge. In place of the Orpheus-like Roman youth we have the rex tremendae majestatis. Slowly, too, the Passion now for the first time came into prominence. The Council of A. d. 691 decreed (exactly the opposite to that of the pronouncement of the Council of Elvira, circa a. d. 300) that hence- forth Jesus must be represented as a man, and not under the symbol of a lamb. Thus the old reserve ended, and the agonistic period began. Before, although in an age of terror, joy and hope were the chief features which art (which preferred the early part of his career) stressed in Jesus' likeness. Now it became stereotyped and hieratic and so severely controlled that Byzantine art was a thing of tricks and mannerisms, benumbingly conventional and ascetic. Feature by feature, Jesus' lineaments became rigid, till the business of representing him became little more than a handicraft; for clericalism had checked all the spontaneity of genius and made art utterly servile.
Thus, with the exception of some of the restorations of the Ve- ronica type of face, particularly that in St. Peter's, most of these early
'Farrar. Op. Cit., p. 92 el scq.
i4 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
depictures, at least as judged from copies, are utterly void of any inter- est, save for the history of art; and the verdict of Celsus concerning them seems just. Some of them, though well meant, are as grotesque as the drawings of children which they often resemble. They utterly lack the salient individual traits of the oldest pictures of Paul and Peter as found on the glass paterce in the Vatican Museum. If Jesus really looked like the best of these antique simulacra, he was not beautiful or even impressive; and if he looked like the worst of them, he had a physical ugliness as great as, though different from, that of Socrates as Alcibiades described him. Asceticism contributed its tendency to con- ceive him as unattractive, perhaps to bring out the beauty of his soul by a contrast effect, as in the case of the great Attic master of the hebamic art. The absence of authentic portraiture in these early days, however, cannot be made to lend support to the Drews-Smith-Robinson con- tention that no such person ever lived. The ancient Jews were not artists in this field, and we have no portraits of his Hebrew contempo- raries. His friends expected the speedy end of the world, and so did not at first feel it necessary to commit their memory of him to art, for the same reason that they delayed to write the Gospels. Moreover, the great appreciation of Jesus as veritably divine doubtless came first from Paul, who knew and taught almost nothing of him save that he died, rose, and ascended, and it was this conception of him as death- killer and atoner that started the great tide of regressive interest in the early years of his ministry, and surged back even to his infancy. This meant that, save perhaps to his closest intimates and not completely to them, he was not deeply felt to be divine till at least after his death, and probably not till the Pauline movement began. During his life he did not seem to those he influenced to be a personage of import supreme enough to inspire portraiture, while, when a little later he came to be known first and foremost as divine, interest in his human personality faded beside that in his supernatural sonship and his func- tion of divine Saviour. Thus, first his great achievement in saving man by offering himself, and later his words and deeds, were chiefly focussed on. Again, the people to whom Jesus was first preached were without exception more or less accustomed to effigies and images of their deities, and were not used to faith without sight. A divinity whose likeness could not be hewn or graven was hard to conceive. The great prophets, however, had stripped deity of limiting attributes,
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 15
and made him a transcendent being; and their aversion to every form and degree of idolatry became sometimes almost a phobia. To claim even that the supreme Godhead could be or actually was embodied in a flesh-and-blood person seemed to them blasphemy. So strong, deep, and persistent was this anti-incarnation trend that it appeared not only in the mad iconoclastic sects which have robbed the modern world of so many ancient treasures of art and limited depictures to the flat, but was the psychological cause of the ever-insistent tendency to a diversion of artistic attention from the essentials of Jesus' form and features to accessories in the way of symbols, cross, crown, neckpiece, conventionalities of gesture and attitude, the crook, sceptre, lamb, dove, and the rest, to which often consummate care was given, and which were not infrequently gilded and bejewelled even, it may be, in the frame and setting. Myths and legendary histories of the pictures themselves grew up. All these tend to press their way into the centre of the field of the observer's consciousness, and widen the irradiation of his interest from the focal desire to know just how Jesus himself looked. It is because this diversion or Verschiebungs-Motif is still so strong, more or less unconscious though it be, that even to press the query just how the sarcous Jesus would have seemed to us to-day still appears to the modern Christian a trifle irrelevant, if not irreverent; while to some few in our questionnaire returns it seems indelicate, if not indecent. The reason of this vestige of the taboo instinct here is that it is vitally connected with the old and never-solved problem of how God can be man and man God. Excess of either divinity or hu- manity jeopardizes the integrity of the other, and in ancient times the two conceptions were disparate if not antithetical. If to the disciples during his life Jesus was very man of very man, to Paul and the early Church he was no less very God of very God, in whom divinity had eclipsed humanity, so that to make him too real to sense would be to make him less real to faith. This amphibole has not yet been over- come, and the recent so-called higher criticism that tends to rehuman- ize Christ has only strengthened the countervalent sensitiveness of orthodoxy on this point, which still wants only a touch, but not too much, of genuine humanity in portraitures of Christ.
In earlier days not only plants but animals often came to aid artists in their work, and it required a decree of a Church Council, as we saw, to permit artists to represent Jesus as a man instead of under the ex-
16 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
elusive form of a lamb; in the wake of this new permission the lion was no longer the sole symbol of Mark, and Saint John could have his own head instead of that of an eagle. This kind of animal symbolism cul- minated perhaps in the fifteenth century. Saint Francis, in striving to "preach the gospel to every creature," indited sermons and can- ticles to birds and fish, and every form of animal life was to be regen- erated. Hercules slew the lion, but Saint Jerome converted him. Perseus killed the dragon, but Saint Margaret changed his nature and led him at her girdle. The wolf, the terror of his country, was ex- horted till he became converted and domesticated, and a helpful house- dog, gentle as a lamb, whose death all mourned. In golden legends beasts delighted to serve holy men, and the herbal and bestiary were an important adjunct of sacred art. The ox, ass, or both, are found in every nativity, adoration, or flight to Egypt, and in the latter the ass often seems to press on without bit or bridle, animated by the same purpose as the Holy Family. The ox was a second emblem of Luke, suggestive also of Christ's priesthood and of sacrifice. The horse, though often on the side of God's enemies, as in the crucifixion and when ridden by Paul as a persecutor, is not always pagan. The dog is the emblem of obedience and fidelity, and often is represented as watching the interests of the Church; and in a Spanish picture three white dogs illustrate the effect which the descent of the Holy Ghost exerts on lower animals. Even the cat sometimes sits beside Judas at the last supper, suggesting treachery or the fiend incarnate; for the feline form is a favourite one of the devil, who may have batlike wings, and some- times accompanies the Holy Family in its journey. The dragon is a favourite image of sin. Professor Owen found one early picture in Italy very like the dinotherium, and says that King Arthur's pendragon may have been suggested by now-extinct monsters. The conquest of paganism by Christianity often suggests a revival of the old struggle of man against the formidable camivora, now mostly extinct. Shy creatures like the quail suggest solitude, and the divinity of Christ is often symbolized as the lion of the tribe of Judah. The fish was the earliest and most universal symbol of the Christian faith, once almost as much so as the cross. Saint Anthony converted swine, and preached to fish on the noble translucent element in which they live, with plenty of food, and refuge from storm. He congratulated them that in the deluge God kept them safe, that they saved Jonah, brought the tribute
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 17
money, and were food of the Lord Jesus before the Resurrection. The bird, especially the dove, symbol of the Holy Ghost, is often allegorized as the very spirit of life, and Dante calls angels the birds of God. The pelican, fabled to tear open her breast to feed her young with blood, is a symbol of Jesus, whom Dante calls "our pelican," so that these birds have often been sacred. The goldfinch, too, appears in many sacred pictures, as do the sheep and lamb, while many other species of birds and animals, too numerous to mention, to say nothing of the sphinx and unicorn, are important instruments of ecclesiastical art; for all of them are good or bad, wise or foolish.1
This method of indirection has great effectiveness. It is akin to synecdoche, especially to metonymy (where a part stands for the whole, one of its attributes for a substance, the sign for the thing signified, etc.) and to tropes, which play so important a role in the psychology of speech development. The Greek gods (particularly Zeus) had not only animals sacred to each, and also different epithets naming different attributes, but in fact as well as in art took widely divergent forms in embodying their different traits. Yahveh hid his face, and was re- luctant to reveal his true or secret name (for to do so gives those who know it power to conjure or work magic weal or woe) ; and so Jesus might be figured to shrink from revealing his countenance, not because it was horrid like that of the veiled prophet of Khorasan, or because it was too ravishingly beauteous for mortal eye to behold and not go mad, or because no man can see God and live; but rather because real divin- ity is inconceivable without more or less aloofness. Hence, as the centuries passed and accessory attributes and symbols multiplied, he withdrew behind them as their more or less unseen bearer, and thus they became invested with ever greater significance. His ipsissimal humanity also was too hard to represent, and so artists took refuge in items that association and dogma had hallowed. We shall see later what a resource this substitution or surrogate tendency has given to many modern novelists and dramatists who, venturing upon things near the heart of Christianity, either focus upon some person or event near to Jesus; or, if they represent him, do so under the guise of a rather common personage who, at a certain point in the narrative, does, says, or shows some one or more of the things so associated with Jesus that we suddenly feel the thrilling "it is He." All this
1"The Ark of the Painters," by Lucy M. Cooke. Ladies' College Magazine, Spring No., 1003.
i8 JESUS IX THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
shows again how Jesus' chief effect upon humanity was not made by posing at the focal point of conscious attention, but by making his presence felt in the larger subphenomenal regions of the soul. A re- cent writer1 would have us regard Christ, himself, as God's great work of art, and have aesthetics inspired to try its hand more seriously at some of the problems once assigned to dogmatic Christology, to see what can be done in re-recommending or re-accrediting Jesus to the heart and intuitions of man.
With the Renaissance most of the old infirmities and conventions began to be left behind, and we have a long series of bold, frank, free depictions of Christ's face, some of which are transporting and beyond praise. Artists were veritably inspired by their theme and gave rein to their genius, unhampered by tradition. Some of the earliest in this great series agonized for a vision or theophany of the supreme face, and painted metaphorically, if not literally, on their knees. The language of Christian art spoke with new eloquence. Not historic portraits but ideals were striven for, and with a freedom and originality almost suggestive of the German metaphysician who "proceeded to construct God." So those painters proceeded to re- construct the likeness of the God-man, and were unafraid either of the charge of impiety or of the danger that those who adored their creations were thereby trekking toward a new idolatry. Their license was virtually as unchallenged as that we concede to poets. In their theophanies there was, no doubt, always a man behind the face which they felt, if not saw, with the inner eye, but which they could not put on their canvas. Art, then, as well as theology, had its reformation. These pictures were creations, and not copies. Religion had found a new medium of expression. Their enthusiasm was typified in Fra Angelico, who would not lay down his palette and his imaginative renderings for an archbishopric. Thus it is not surprising that even fidelity to type was thrown to the winds, and we have Christs bearded and beardless, large and small, slender and stout, dark and light, dead and alive, in agony and in ecstasy, brachiocephalic, dolichocephalic, low- and high-browed, the ghostly post-resurrection Christ, the splen- didly nourished enfleshment by Rubens, Christ with children and judging the world, etc.
■Pfennigsdorf: "Christus im modemen Geistesleben," 1910, 343 p. Especially III "Christus und die KUnstler,"
QO-lOo.
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 19
Despite the mummifying traditions that long persisted, early- Italian art thus began to break away; and it is remarkable that it was to so great an extent the inspiration of the Virgin that inaugurated the great emancipation. Prescriptions concerning her were less rigid, and she could be so portrayed as to be admired as well as adored. The new naturalism which began with the Renaissance had its best expressions in the domain of religious art in the delineations of the Holy Mother, who was conceived in a truly aesthetic spirit, long before the child she held began to take on traits and aspects of real child- hood. Thus the right to think and feel freely was vindicating itself. Classical art did not generally favour the admission of suffering, but this was essential, if not central, in the Christian scheme. The Virgin stood both for beauty and for the new patheticism. Moreover, art at its best is always a passion for all-sided expression, and is as in- complete without shadows as without light.
Although the Gospels tell little of the Virgin, she came to occupy an immense space in Christian art. There is much about her in the apocryphal Gospels. Legends, and hymns, and panegyrics were written of her, churches dedicated to her, and for centuries preceding the Reformation her pictures, thousands in number, were more common and often more adored than those of her Divine Son. In her, painters strove to set forth humanity in its loveliest form. Ruskin says she usually appeared in one of three ways: (a) As the mater dolorosa, in which type, after the age of the dark Byzantine matrons had passed, loveliness and patheticism were chiefly striven for. She seemed more merciful than Jesus. She wept and interceded for man's sins; and though the child is often present, her looks and thoughts are rarely for it. Her aspect reflects the cruel times from the sixth to the eighth century, and later, the days of Savonarola, (b) The second type was the exalted crowned and enthroned queen of heaven and of virtue. She became the mother of compassion, overflowing with human pity and sympathy for man's frailty and receiving petitions, and the celestial advocate of fallen man. (c) In a third type, which is the chief characteristic of the Italian Renaissance, she is the ideal mother, holding, perhaps fondling, adoring, sometimes nursing her child. Not only her apparent age, but her social station differs widely. She appears as young girl or mature matron; in homespun, in peasant surroundings, or magnificently robed, in palaces. Often in this third
20 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
character she is engaged in various housewifely occupations. Joseph, John, perhaps Elizabeth, Anna, or others are present, and not in- frequently there is an atmosphere of real home-likeness and domesticity. The angels are usually adolescent youth or maidens, and there are sometimes urchin, cherubic heads with little supernatural about them, while the angels often play the violin and other instruments. In the so-called "Holy Conversations" saints are introduced.
In the annunciation scenes the angel usually carries a wand of some kind as a symbol of divine authority. A full-blown lily on a stalk often serves this purpose. Sometimes the holy Virgin is sur- prised reading, or at a prie-dieu, or apparently just awakened from sleep. Crivelli makes her indoors, while Gabriel kneels on the street outside the window. Michael Angelo's angel is menacing, and the Virgin seems repellent. Veronese makes him approach with terrify- ing suddenness. Diirer depicts the devil in the form of a hog looking on. Rossetti makes the angel pass her a lily. Burne- Jones makes him hover above, as if he came straight down from heaven, while she stands below in awe. The Virgin's attitude and face, while ex- tremely different, always express modest submission and holy joy, though sometimes not without astonishment. Very rarely is there anything that could offend the most scrupulous, and the general ef- fect is most wholesome and with enough sublimation. The role of the holy Virgin in Christian art might be compared to that of the Greek chorus in Attic tragedy. She certainly reflects in the most typical way the sentiments of humanity toward its Lord, but she has done far more. So great was her charm that artists strove, if all unconsciously, to invest Jesus himself with some of the compelling graces of her femininity. Both men and women need a goddess as much as they need a god, and it would be hard to say which has been most drawn to her. In the domain of art, at least, the Reformation did not succeed in destroying her hold upon the heart of Protestantism. The world has never had another so fond an incarnation of purity ' and maternity. In the passionate adoration of her as the embodied ideal of womanhood many, if not most, of the highest aspirations of Christendom have found their expression, and she is a standing in- citation to the world to keep alive the loftiest ideals of her sex. She should be perhaps especially the gorn of adolescent youth and maidens, so that there is a sense in which her worship expressed the highest
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 21
aesthetic achievement in the early Church in the field of sex pedagogy, which we are so crudely just beginning to enter. In the Nativity pictures, too, the Virgin is always the joyous mother. She is often represented as in prayer before or to her son, while shepherds, magi, angels, and perhaps cherubs are present and in adoration, as are sometimes animals; and there are symbols, symbols everywhere. Voluptuousness is very rare, and always, of course, a sign of decadence, for it is the diametrical opposite of all the creative impulses in this field. A few of the circumcisions are certainly too suggestive, but this theme is rarely depicted, nor is the murder of the Innocents, although Ruskin says that Holman Hunt's "Triumph of the Inno- cents," the souls of which attend Joseph and Mary fleeing from Herod, is "the greatest religious picture of our times." Diirer has depicted the stay in Egypt. There seem to be no attempts to realize the most idyllic possibilities of the return to Nazareth, although Millais has given us a striking picture of Joseph at work, in which the atten- tion of both parents is distraught because the boy Jesus has wounded his palm on a nail, and a drop of red blood has fallen on the top of his foot.
As to Jesus, Cimabue, a student of the Greek, introduced a some- what Italianized idea with the intensely poetic conception of angels weeping at the cross and tomb. Giotto in the fourteenth century clings to the Byzantine idea with a dark and perhaps rather heavy golden glory, his Christs being in profile. Orcagna gives us a very human face on an extremely elaborated nimbus background. An- gelico's conception shows the greatest refinement, and represents Jesus as tall, with a narrow and extremely delicate face. The early Dutch, Flemish, and German painters were trained in Italy, and show Eastern traces but rapidly developed national types, a freer treatment and a stronger appeal to popular feeling, as witness especially the home-like ideals of Memling. Van Dyck's Christs are old and strained in face, and Rubens' visages differ greatly. Da Vinci is said to have pondered half his life over the true conception, and his drawing of the beardless Jewish face of the Last Supper was in the highest degree original. Angelo's Christs differed, were symbolic, half pagan, and he wrought in a dies irae element, while Raphael, idealist that he was, preferred the transfiguration. Diirer is the best case of many whose Christ is himself idealized, for he could only copy with variations
22 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
a portrait he painted of himself at the age of twenty-eight. Correggio was more independent than original, and his technique is tender, but his face of Christ certainly suggests patheticism. Luini conceives the contour of Christ's face much as Da Vinci did, but gives him large but unexpressive eyes and nose. Cranach, the friend of Luther, depicts the thorn-crowned anguish, but brings in a company of cherub angels leaning forward to kiss him. Bellini and Matsys give us full, open-eyed front views, with long hair and a really expressionless face. Diverse as were the life and training of these two men, they were evidently dominated by the same ideal, which seems to have been derived from the mosaics of the Basilica. To our thinking, the face of Christ of Van Dyck gives us on the whole a higher ideal of physical and psychic greatness and power than any other. Rembrandt seems to stress all the depression motives. The thorn-crowned pictures of Reni and of Velasquez do not seem to be up to the artists' own high standards. One of the favourites is the French-Roman picture of Delaroche, and perhaps still more the pictures of Scheffer and Hoffmann, the latter of whom has painted more than a score of perfectly consistent and elevated faces of Jesus. Holman Hunt and Dobson are as dis- tinctly English as Merle is French or the adorable Carl Miiller is German. Farrar agrees with Ruskin in calling a sculptural figure of Le Bon Dieu, made in the thirteenth century, on the front of the Amiens Cathedral, the noblest of all representations of Christ. On his right the prophets look forward to him, and the vices are under his feet. Most pictures of Jesus during the last century give him a dis- tinctly feminine look. The brow, cheek, and nose, if all below were covered, would generally be taken for those of a refined and superior woman. Nor is this chiefly due to the long hair, parted in the middle, which an almost inflexible tradition has always assigned him. Some- times, as in Liska's "Gethsemane," his matted hair falls upon his shoulders, his face is turned upward, and his vestment also suggests feminine dishabille. The hair is usually wavy, and sometimes, as in Reni's " Ecce Homo," almost suggestive of an Addisonian wig. Again, as in the "Christ and the Fishermen," of Zimmermann, which is rather an extreme case, the front hair is already thin, suggesting bald- ness. Distinctly Jewish features are rare. They are usually in re- pose, even in an environment of great excitement, as in driving out the money-changers and suffering the kiss of Judas. This imper-
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 23
turbability suggests ideals drawn from the Stoic sage or possibly from the placidity of the Buddhistic statues. The brow is often so calm and the features are so regular as to suggest characterlessness. The beard is usually, though not always, light, exposing the upper part of the chin, and its scantiness, with the usually very copious hair of the scalp and the feminine features, sometimes almost suggests a bearded lady.
Perhaps next to the conventionalities of hair and beard in modern representations come the expressions of clear-eyed honesty, sincerity, guilelessness, and Parsifal-like naivete, suggesting impeccability. All these faces are serious, with no trace of mirth or happiness; but never even on the cross is the face expressive of supreme Laocoon anguish. This facial placidity is often in great contrast with the tense position of the hands or fingers, which latter are usually far too delicate to suggest any contact with labour. There is in most of them a pro- nounced absence of marked individuality, but the surroundings often suggest sentimentality of the highest order. Some artists have sought to maintain similarity between their representations of Jesus as youth- ful and adult, and sometimes where God the Father is shown, as above the cross in Fiirst's notable picture, a family resemblance is distinctly striven for. Of course the Christs with luscious flesh (e. g., Rubens' and Guercino's) are in striking contrast not only with the early but with some modern aesthetic representations which are re- pulsively lean and even squalid. Where Satan is represented near by, as in the temptation, he is usually much darker in hue and with less raiment, often with a far stronger and more Roman face, to contrast with the Greek physiognomy of Jesus.
The aureole, nimbus, or glory is often a disc in the background of a full profile, as in Hoffmann's " Gethsemane," but is more commonly a ring tipped up and back and never worn at the angle of a modern hat-rim. Often it is an aurora with light streaming outward or in all directions or especially in three points, up and to each side. In gen- eral its effect as a symbol suggests some mystic tension of brain forces which irradiate light. Very often we have points that ill comport with nature. The shepherd's crook is not large enough relatively to the lamb beside it; the men elevating the cross take postures and ply their strength in unpractical, futile ways which could not possibly bring it to position; the head after death is not bowed as it must be in the natural fresh cadaver; the tension of the arms and the anatomical
24 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
position of the body are often very wrong, even in recent pictures, while the crown of thorns might often be called a botanical impossibility.
The dozen or so pictures by American artists that are worthy of consideration are, for the most part, simple rather than heroic. They attempt little of the sorcery of interpretation, and lack the haunting power of some great works of art. Thus only that of Du Mond is dis- tinctly Jewish. Jesus stands at the entrance of the synagogue over the accused woman, in an attitude of protection and of defiance of the mob. In Low's painting she crouches in terror at his feet, while the Pharisee is seen in the background reading the law. La Farge's window- piece of Christ as a shepherd shows nothing whatever distinctive in his countenance. J. Laube gives him a sunset background with clouds, suggestive of his stormy career; the hands are lifted but in a conspicu- ously unsymmetrical position. T. S. Lamb's painting is highly sym- bolic; Jesus is on a mountain and his extended hands throw the shadow of a cross against the sky. Kenyon Cox's Christ is too insipid in countenance to be impressive. Curran has given Jesus a hatchet-face and a positively scrawny physique. Hitchcock is impressive only for his accessories, while Melcher's " Ecce Homo" reverts to the mediaeval. The artists of this country, like most in Europe, prefer highly dramatic moments or else revel in symbolisms of colour, surroundings, pose, etc. ; and yet there are hopeful signs of breaking away from traditions and of more freshness and originality which augur well for the future.
The apocryphal Gospels (which are not legends but inventions), as we shall see in the next chapter, are voluble about Jesus' boy- hood. He stretched a short board long, carried water in his robe, drew textures of many colours out of one dye-vat, killed with a curse an offending comrade, made a tree grow up and give fruit on the instant to himself and his mates, had the latter make him king, etc.; but all these prodigies art has entirely passed by. Luini painted him as a boy with very soulful eyes; Del Sarto painted a still more fault- lessly beautiful boy Christ; while in Reni's well-known picture of the two boys, John is splendidly virile, young as he is, and Jesus looks like a beautiful, delicate, and precocious girl. The boy Jesus confuting the rabbis has always been a favourite theme of art. He is often represented as over-assertive in confounding, or at least astounding them, and as more or less in revolt against his parents, as in Durer's engraving. Hunt's treatment of the theme is by far the best of all.
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 25
On the side is a lame beggar. Builders are at work on the temple. A boy is driving away doves, and there is a seller of animals, while in the centre seven rabbis sit on a divan and other lads look on. The rabbis are evidently impressed and friendly. Joseph and Mary are just seen by Jesus, who rises to salute them, and allows himself to be drawn from the seance, but with a far-away look in his eyes, while there is a natural aureole formed by the light on his golden hair. Da Vinci and Raphael were less impressive here. In another different water colour Hunt represents Jesus as half kneeling in peasant dress before the rabbis, who are historical (Gamaliel, Hillel, Zadok, and others), with their phylacteries, while Joseph of Arimathea and Nico- demus as boys stand by.
The Gospels present almost innumerable themes to art, not only in what the]/ expressly say but in what they imply, while perhaps their silences offer still stronger incitations to it to fill up the gaps and amplify incidents, so that but for its pageantry Christianity would have seemed both less real and less ideal. Art, indeed, never had such an inspiring galaxy of themes, and none of the great epics or ethnic Bibles have been so copiously illustrated. Rich as the Old Testament is in pictorial themes, the New has proven far more so. Not only has the whole story of Jesus from the annunciation to the judgment day been retold in the most diverse ways in pictures, but history has been vastly amplified by creative imagination, so that these scriptures of art have made a deeper and wider appeal to the masses than the written word, and for all of us have made our religion an incalculably more definite and even a different thing from what it would otherwise have been. The baptism was a favourite theme, even in the catacombs. The temptation was too solemn and subjective, and has been variously treated, although not at all until the Middle Ages. We have not a single great picture of the sermon on the mount or of the miracles save those of healing. That of Cana, the draught of fishes, the multiplication of loaves, which were early favourites, soon fell into neglect. The transfiguration was too difficult until Fra Angelico and Raphael. The parables were rarely illustrated in early art ; but in modern galleries we find many representations of the prodigal son, the sower, the wise and foolish virgins, the good Samaritan, the lost sheep, and the widow's mite. Miracles of healing and raising the dead have been often pic- tured. The woman taken in adultery has inspired many a canvas from
26 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
the sixth century, including Rembrandt and Poussin on to the power- ful modern representations of the Russian Poulyanov. The Magda- lene has evoked the most varied representations, and seems in recent decades an ever more alluring theme in many circles, not only of art but of literature. In the last supper interest is focussed either on the moment of instituting the Eucharist, or on the suspicion of Judas. Leonardo's great picture still dwarfs all others. The entrance into Jerusalem, the washing of the disciples' feet, the cleansing of the temple, the anointing by the woman, the agony in Gethsemane, the kiss, be- trayal, arrest, arraignment before Annas, Caiaphas, Pilate, and Herod, the buffeting, flagellation, crown of thorns, ecce homo, parting the gar- ments, Pilate washing his hands, the cross-bearing, the Veronica legend amplified into the fourteen stations, the nailing to the cross, its erec- tion to position, the vinegar, the spear thrust, the deposition, the body cared for by holy women, or the pietas, the seven sorrows of Mary, the entombment, the watch, the descent into hell, the Resurrection, the first appearance to Mary, "touch me not," the supper at Emmaus, Thomas's skepticism, the Ascension, the gift of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, and finally, the last judgment, so often attempted in the Middle Ages, till Michael Angelo's awful rendering in the Sistine Chapel, which is one of the very greatest of all the creations of art, and eclipsed all others, — these all have had more or less abundant representations in the history of art. To all this we should add the visioned theophanies with hallucinated minstrelsies and officinal ministrations of saints and anchorites, and finally the fancied representations of Christ in modern guise and circumstance, or more often of one or more Christlike at- tributes or suggestions of supermanhood which contemporary art, romance, and drama have offered us. All this constellation of themes, suggesting less a single muse than a chorus of them, appeals to artists of every type to present him in every sphere of life, and help on to make the good and true also beautiful. Art should have inspired the- ology to a freer and more humanistic treatment of Christology than dogma has ever permitted. That artistic liberty was ever tolerated through the great ages of exigeant orthodoxy is vastly to its credit. History is necessarily bound to actual recitals, and cannot transcend their limitations. Hence it is left to psychology to accept and profit by the liberty of art, and not only to construe, but to supplement known data by original attempts at reconstruction, by conscientious ampli-
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 27
fication of all new lights concerning the laws and processes of both the collective and the individual soul, and thus to do what in it lies to bring home to a world sadly in need of it a re-realization of the works, words, and character of the Supreme Life. The time must surely come when we can say bonus psychologus (not bonus grammaticus, as the old phrase ran), bonus theologus, and when the laws of the great biologos or spirit of life will explain something of the nature of the sacred Logos.
All portraits of Jesus are thus mental imagery, as much so as if no such person ever lived; as much so, indeed, as Zarathustra, Parsifal, Or- pheus, or Dionysus, the traditions and cults connected with the last two of which many scholars now think had a real individuality at their root. It follows that the liberty of artists who would portray Jesus has to-day no limit, for there are no standards save the canons of art, for which truth is beauty, which has innumerable varieties. Perhaps we might say that the work of incarnating the supreme ideal of hu- manity is the prime duty of the artist. He must put the divinity, what- ever it means, into human form and definite lineaments. If we are in danger of becoming skeptical of Jesus' flesh and blood historicity, the artist must see to it that the ideals of his actuality do not fade. They should feel a Christo-pneustic calling. Indeed, every cultured individual should seek to definitize an ideal of man that has for him a supreme personal appeal. Adonis was thought divine because his beauty ravished mankind. Hercules won divine honours because of his strength, etc. In its excessive interest for technique modern art must not lose its old magic power to produce a veritable hedonic narcosis on the part of the beholder. With its skill in depicting women it should not lose its power to represent virile men. Its virgins should not be superior to its Christs, nor the latter be more effeminate or bisexual in appearance than masculine. The lack of truly male Christs in art is now all the more significant, with the decline of dogma, religion is construed less in terms of intellect and more in those of conduct, and perhaps we might say that piety is now becoming more aesthetic even than ethical. We certainly feel it more than we act it, and forms of worship are more or less aesthetic and apart. Certainly religion has a strong pectoral root, and that is one reason why real ideals of human perfection are those that appeal so strongly to young men, who are by nature most susceptible to and most in need of it.
But whoever heard of a normal adolescent to-day who was really
28 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
impressed by artistic representations of Christ? Greek and Roman youth had ideals of physical perfection constantly before them, and it is these that still inspire our young men, and their effigies which we find in their gymnasia and clubs, while the Christian God-man is too often negligible if not repellent by comparison. Within the last dec- ade and a half I have often shown my collection of some fourscore representations of the theanthropos to academic youth, several hundred in all, and very common responses are, "Looks sick, unwashed, sissy, ugly, feeble, posing, needs a square meal and exercise," etc. True, my copies were very inadequate, and the originals with their environment and hallowed associations of churches and the glamour of art galleries, beauteous frames, hangings, etc., would have produced very different results. The Aufgabe, as I phrased it to these young men, was, "Re- member this is not He but the artist's ideal of Him. If you met such a man and did not know who He was or claimed to be, how would He strike you?" It is obvious that ideals of divinity should be exalting; and perhaps it is more disastrous than we realize that during the youthful years of storm and stress, when the flood-gates of emotionality are thrown open, art should not bring a genuine enthusiasm of human- ity. The long and wide belief in the plenary divinity of Jesus in the past, even in those souls that now regard it as a superstition, has left its indelible traces. The very idea of superstition is something that stands above us. The relics of it in the soul of even the skeptic often serve to magnetize incidents and traits that are psychic analogues with it, so that a hint of his person in a picture, or story, or on the stage electrifies all with a new zest, and absorbs attention to a degree that would be psycho-analytically impossible but for the long belief in his deity. It is this that in the past has thus laid up for us an aesthetic store of precious possibilities which we can now draw on in this artistic need to irrigate the life of sentiment, when the personality of Jesus is in some danger of paling into ineffectiveness. The better we understand such psycho-kinetic equivalents, the further we can go on the same road that the old homiletics strove to traverse, and translate old sym- bols into terms which modern life can supply in infinite number.
Expressions of buoyancy such as would make the fortunes of a physician and carry health to the sick, making his very presence cur- ative, we never find in the pictures, because artists, like Christians in general, take their cue from the latter part of Jesus' career when he
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 29
foresaw death, rather than from the confident spirit that must have shone from his countenance after he was well started on his career. In more than half of my collection the eyes are rolled upward or cast down or closed as if in prayer. Were many of the great artists' portraits copied from life, we should say the original was posing, per- haps in his official robes, like an actor before a camera in some striking moment of his favourite role; and, of course, suggestions of affectation are not attractive. I have often showed my collection of master- pieces to women, and while there are plenty of expressions of devout enthusiasm, those of indifference or even aversion seemed more honest. This certainly raises the question whether, as a whole, artists have done their duty to commend Jesus to women, who are his most devoted worshippers, making him conform to their ideal of what a manly man should be. From the standpoint of physiognomy alone some of the older representations would, according to Lombroso's canons, fit a criminal, weakling, or even idiot, if isolated from all hallowed associa- tions and accessories. Who has not seen faces more expressive, powerful, commanding, among his contemporaries? The reverence, therefore, given to most of these representations of Jesus is still far from resting upon their intrinsic merit as works of art. They are at least not as uplifting as they should and could be, while some are trivial. Surely it is religiously and morally as well as artistically wrong that a painter should be exempt from criticism and be assured an at least fictitious respect for his bad work, because he is sheltered by the sacredness that attaches to his theme. Let us hope that deep- souled and sagacious leaders will ever be ready to invoke another epoch of iconoclasm here. Is man to-day no more capable of approxi- mating the ideas of the over-man that is evolving out of modern humanity than the pigmies or troglodytes were to anticipate the mod- ern Caucasian? Until the spell of his portraiture intrinsically fas- cinates and thrills beholders with beauty, power, and sublimity, the divine is not yet incarnate, while so far as this is achieved, Jesus lives in the world to-day. Thus the message of psychology to the artist is to relegate to the second place all vestments, colours, symbols, etc., and focus endeavour on and invite attention to the figure, posture, contour of head, expressions of features, giving racial and national tastes the fullest latitude; not letting pain and grief predominate too much, and not being afraid to depart, if the scene requires wrath,
3o JESUS IxN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
ecstasy, or effort in the climaxes, from the old ideas of classical repose; representing Jesus not only in all the activities of the Gospel record but introducing him into every department and activity of modern life, to make the world more keenly conscious of how he would act and look in every contemporary condition if "he were to reappear at any time, place, or circumstance. I agree with an anonymous German authority that, perhaps every young artist should plan and make preliminary studies, with a view to attempting some time something original and culminative here, to the end that the still-too-narrow traditions be ever gradually widened, until all departments of life be pervaded and elevated by the highest ideals of humanity possible in them. Painters of the infancy should not make the holy bambino an accessory to the glorious beauty of the Virgin, and should not scorn to take suggestions from modern studies of norms and standards by which babies are judged to-day. The adolescence of Jesus must have been a magnificent processional of the highest human evolution, and is perhaps yet more amenable to artistic treatment. Sinkel, Mengel- berg, Hoffmann, Holman Hunt, and long ago Guido Reni, and now Winterstein, have given us inspiring pictures of Jesus during this age. Perhaps it never entered the mind of any artist to conceive how Jesus would look had he lived on to the later decades of life, a theme which, as we shall see, has had some slight treatment in romance. Specu- lative as it is, still less has it been conjectured what kind of husband or father he would have been. All such un«- and anti-historic dream- eries are, of course, worse than idle unless we conceive that Jesus might have fulfilled all his own precepts in the field of family, social, and even political life, and that every normative relation here would only have been an extension of the incarnation. Sociologists also have given us their ideals of Jesus as a citizen, fulfilling his political duties.
Waiving all this, however, the Christian world should think more tangibly of its God-man. It should refuse any longer to check, and should positively encourage, more theanthropic imagination, to bode him forth in every noble way creative art can devise. Up to date, liberal Christianity has produced no art in this field, but merely accepts that which sprang from the heart of the old saturated ortho- doxy which it rejects. But the religious eclair cissement will remain arid and ineffective with the masses till it has made good this defect by entering this field and bringing forth aesthetic fruits if it has vitality
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 31"
enough to do so. Is not its Jesus all too human and unideal to evoke aspiration? Still, if he had experienced to the uttermost all the es- sentials that make up human life, and not been a Pauline harmato- logical impossibility (tempted in all points but without sin, which would place him outside the greatest of all distinctions in the world, viz., that between good and evil), still further new possibilities are open to art by theoretical dedivinitization. Let us at any rate cling to the assumption that all art that exalts man is Christian just so far as it does so.
Paul had an apparently very real though unsought vision of Jesus which changed his life; and in the stories of the saints we find many apparitions of Jesus, while ascetic regimen was often motivated by an intense desire for some parousia which was, indeed, vouchsafed to men of exceptional sanctity, whose after lives were hallowed by this experience. The Lord has often shown himself to devout souls in dreams and ecstasies, perhaps in answer to prayers to see his face. As the adolescent American Indian goes into solitude, and fasts, perhaps denies himself sleep, until he sees a vision of his Good Spirit, and then gets his name and is fully initiated into the life of the tribe; as the East Indian struggles to attain his goru; as many men have had a Doppelgdnger1 which is always an hallucinated objectivization of themselves, although perhaps more often of their worse than their better selves; as religious fanatics have often been ravished in soul by spontaneous creations of their imagination wherein they seemed to see the Virgin or the Christ in transporting loveliness; as the fol- lowers of Zinzendorf2 in their trancoidal ecstasies objectified even his bleeding body and revelled in disgustingly realistic descriptions of fancied experiences with his festering wounds; as many have comfort in imaginary companions (women perhaps of ideal men and men of ideal women) that have become their guardian angels (see as a type a recent anonymous novel entitled "Whispering Dust"); so deep in the soul of every one, old or young, man or woman, lies the uncon- scious material for a more or less definite ideal of supreme attractive- ness. This is a modern form of the old idea that each person has a good genius guiding and watching him. Sometimes this takes the form of a goal which the individual must attain, or else it is an ideal to
^tto Rank: "Der Doppelganger," Imago, 1914, p. 97-164.
2Oskar Pfister: "Die Frommigkeit des Grafen Ludwig von Zinzendorf." Leipzig, 1910, 122 p.
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inspire, perhaps according to the laws of compensation that comple- ments one's own imperfections; or it may be an over-man representing finished humanity or what the race may be expected to attain when it is more developed. All these quite diverse functions should now focus in inciting us to evolve, perhaps each one of us, a normative Jesus figure. Without it man lacks orientation for the direction of growth and progress. Indeed, it may be this long, strong wish that has brought God down to earth in all his incarnations, and especially where it has given him human form, while in cruder ages it was this passion that made idolatry and image worship. We cannot adore the universe, but must have a specific if not a personified object. If religion is a feeling of dependence upon the absolute, the intellect must find or make some eidolon of what it is the heart depends upon. Here religious pedagogy confronts one of its supreme problems, viz., under what form can all of the highest wealth and worth which the heart feels and which man calls divine be best represented as human? This question can hardly be distinguished from that of how ideal beauty, virtue, and truth look when consummately anthropomorphized. These all seekers try to find just in proportion as the evolutionary nisus, which has made man what he is, is strong in them and attains a conception of its goal. It is a different thing from the ravishing beauty of one sex as it appeals to the other. Man's ideal of the holy Virgin and woman's idea of Jesus, to which artists have so much appealed and so much shaped, need to be supplemented at least by man's more virile conceptions of his own sex, if not by woman's more virginal and maternal ideas of her own. This kind of ideal must be different in each individual. We have lost the old parousia-mania which made the gods of all the faiths take on their diverse shapes and attributes. We ask our youths and maidens what calling they would like to enter, but never incite them to definitize what kind of man or woman they would like to be in order to satisfy all their highest ethical and develop- mental ideals and realize all their highest possibilities, or even needs. In the days of classic male friendship, as conceived by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, each youth had an adult male mentor or big brother, on and by whom his life was shaped and on whom he lavished all the hero- worshipping proclivities so strong in youth. The current mental imagery of Jesus is not such as to make him the hero of youth to-day. If the psychic humus in which the old religions grew so rank has become
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 33
too thin and poor for the modern folk-soul to evolve a superman that fits our age, cannot art or literature create a Christ image that shall be at least manly and have in it some vital appeal to the ideals and in- spirations of the rising generation? Cannot art free itself enough from the conventionalities and traditions of the past to give us a variety of types as diverse as youth now is? He should be modernized to do things in the higher life of Mansoul that represent its few sum- mital moments, that bode forth the phenomena of moral, mental, and emotional altitude, and that are far more common than we think at certain stages of the development of every truly ambitious youth and now go to waste unutilized and unrecognized. Surely we should study these ideals, unconscious though they be, and delineate a Jesus that truly embodies them. We should bring out in him every quality our age admires, so that he be no longer an anachronism, a ghost of the past. As Zeus or Jove took many diverse forms, each expressing some chief trait or attribute, so let Jesus be again incarnated in every domain of life where superlative excellence is possible, even though the old incidents of the Gospel record be used as mere symbols by which to identify him in his new and more manifold incarnations. Let him become a polymorphic category of the ideal. Though corporeal, Jesus has not even yet fully come to art or literature, and in these domains he needs a rehabilitation. Even his history should be written anew for every age. His soul is not in the old Gospels, nor is his life as given in the ancient records of prime psychological moment for us to-day. Only so far as he is a living force in contemporary men and women does he really exist, or is he truly divine, whatever hap- pened or did not happen in ancient Palestine, and whether he did or did not live in the flesh two thousand years ago in Western Asia. If the primitive Church made him, instead of his making the Church, the Church was then a mighty creative power. If he be conceived as the greatest projection that the folk-soul ever made, his figure and story are the most precious of all things, perhaps more potent as an ideal than as an antique reality. The Jesus of the Gospels died, but the idea of Jesus lives more truly now perhaps than he did then, and this is the true resurrection. The Jesus of history is crassly real. The Jesus of genetic psychology is the most precious and real thing ever made out of mind-stuff. If unconscious man-soul evolved him in the travail of ages, he becomes thus in a new sense the "son of man,"
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a Doppelgdnger of our inner, deeper, better nature. The believer's insight and conviction are small and faint representatives of the same power that created this masterpiece of the race-soul, and faith in him is a flaming up in us of the age-long and many-voiced collec- tivity and consensus that made it all. We stand in awe before this product of creative evolution because plenary conviction reinforces in the depths of our own soul the rapport with the submerged soul of the race, which slowly, without haste and without rest, by laws we are only just beginning to glimpse, wrought out its supreme master- piece. Whether we regard Jesus as myth or history, we all need him alike. If I hold him a better and purer psychological being than any other, although made warp and woof of human wishes, and needs, and ideals, I insist that on this basis I ought to be called an orthodox Christian, because thus to me he remains the highest, best, and most helpful of all who ever lived, whether that life be in Judea or in the soul of man.
We now have a small recent literature on the imaginary com- panions children invent, which may become very real and insistent. A recent, but as yet unpublished, study of a friend shows that many cultured girls in the later teens and early twenties evolve rather definite ideals of young men, and Lehmann thought all youths and maidens tended to and should do so of their counterparts, complement- ing all their own defects of body and soul. This instinct has never been utilized pedagogically. Perhaps none of the representations of Jesus' childhood and boyhood are fitted to be the modulus of this propensity, but should there not be something in this field for it? Mary's child- hood is rarely represented in art; but do not children, boys and es- pecially girls, need this? Youth, too, is incomplete without its vision, and the hero-worshipping instinct of this age is very strong. Has not Christian art, here, too, a field to occupy and a duty to perform which the best Sunday-schools, where photographs and sometimes gaudy pictures are used, need? Only the Catholic Church in Spain and Italy was ever bold enough to sanction Jesus dolls; but even these were not the best, and made no unique appeal. Has art ever made or tried to make an appeal to this unique propensity at this unique age, in which statistics show that Daniel among the lions, or Samson, is a greater favourite than Jesus or any other Bible character? Could wc not have Jesus as an athletic champion, illustrating perhaps the
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ideal of doing the prodigies that athletes so admire? Could Jesus be knight, priest, banker, sailor, landed proprietor, society man, manufacturer, actor, professor, editor, etc.? and if so, how? and if not, why not? Almost all these go to him, and not he to them. He might perhaps better be represented as insurer, builder, inventor, labourer, artist, legislator, agriculturist, if, and just so far as, these vocations were idealized.
In view of all this, there are four pertinent, if conjectural, infer- ences. First, there is some psychological, historical, and much aesthetic justification for conceiving Jesus as a large man. Large children are more likely to be treated as if they were older, to associate with those more mature, to be leaders, to attract attention and care, and thus to be brought to early and more complete maturity. Probably they are on the average intellectually superior to small children. Large men are certainly more frequently found among- natural, self-made pioneers; in savage life, chiefs; now, captains of industry. Si,ze has a great nat- ural advantage of prestige, favours dominating manners, inclines to the assumption of superiority and to the subordination of others, who have to look up to it, literally and symbolically. If we firid the leaders of a race which is on the march toward a higher plane of human de- velopment to be larger than the average, then the latter, as well as men below the average, according to Bayer, Gal ton, and others, in- stead of being the fittest to survive, only do so by virtue of the protec- tion offered them by the superior quality of the advance guard. If their contention that most of the present leaders of mankind are some- what above the average height and weight be true, it is the large people that are bearing the burden of the forward march of humanity, and those below the average size are followers, somewhat sheltered and protected, in the wake of the leaders. If this be so, then the race is slowly but surely tending upward in size, as we have other reasons to believe it is; and if the reverse be true, it is tending downward. As has been often noted, there is no inherent reason why man should stop growing at all or till near the end of his life, like the great saurians. While excessive size, then, has marked disadvantages, a prolonged period of growth to dimensions distinctly above the average would seem to be the natural concomitant of prolonging the golden period of development, and would suggest that the nascent period of adolescence in Jesus was exceptionally prolonged to a higher than average maturity
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of both mind and body, so that, as civilized man is slowly growing larger, he was even in this respect a superman. Commanding size, therefore, not only has great psychological advantages, but other things being equal, always gives a certain prestige, dignity, and moral weight and impressiveness, and also makes for poise, and works against the instinctive tendency to assert themselves ostensively, if not offensively, so often noted in small men. Not colossal, then, but superior develop- ment in this respect may be assumed if we wish. The mere size of the great image of Buddha or of the monumental figure of Christ that stands high on the Andes as keeper of eternal peace between Chile and Argentina is impressive.
Second, physical strength also has its own immediate advantage, and is an important factor in heroology. Samson, Hercules, and strong men generally, with mighty thews and sinews, have in many ages and races won divine honours from this quality alone. The strength of the instinct to worship muscular force is seen in every athletic contest, and muscular Christianity shows its inspiration in many a tale and incident of common life where weakness is sometimes almost contemptible. Jesus was the son of a carpenter, or, as Weinel explains, a builder working with heavy material, and according to tradition engaged in his avocation through all the period of maximal muscle development. No feats of strength are recorded, but such achievements as bearing the heavy cross until he fell, and the ex- pulsion of the money-changers with the whip of cords, seem more natural and less miraculous with the aid of some such assumption. Moreover, strong and tense muscles tend to close the chasm often so fatal between knowing and doing, and make willed action the language of complete men. In the thrilling story of Jahn and the Turner move- ment with its watchword that only strong muscles can make men great and nations free, which generated such a fervour of patriotism that the government feared its influence, and which had much to do with the regeneration of modern Germany after its threatened extinc- tion by Napoleon; and again, earlier in the enthusiasm of humanity which centred in the Greek festivals, the focus of which was the physical achievements of youth, where the victors were accorded almost divine honours, which Pindar devoted his ardent life to celebrate, declaring that no man could be truly great who was not in youth great with his hands and feet, and whose form has given us the standards of manly
JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 37
proportion and beauty — by these records there must be awakened in every enlightened soul that is at once scientific and Christian, at least the hope and, perhaps, we might say, the faith to believe, that Jesus was not a weakling.
Third, manly beauty has inspirations, and works wonders in the soul of man. Adonis and Balder ravished the heart so that the world seemed dull and mankind commonplace when they died. For the Greeks the good was incomplete unless it was also beautiful, and their reverence for the fair soul in the fair body and for the Kalokagathon shows us how mighty a reinforcement aesthetics can supply to morals. Some of the youth in Plato's "Dialogues," especially Alcibiades, were so beauteous as to stir the pulses of mature men and make them vie with each other to be near, serve, and teach them. The whole world perhaps affords nothing more provocative of natural love, reverence, and the passion to serve than a young man in the well-tempered glory of harmonious bodily beauty. Jesus was evidently attractive to women, who, from the biological standpoint, set the fashions and by their choices determine the standard of man's physical perfection. Nothing in the record suggests that his character was ever endangered by adulation, and when he was transfigured till his face shone with the glory of an angel, it is hard to believe that those present were not moved by some of the natural impulses by which man is stirred at the contemplation of the superior perfections of the human form divine. We must admit that the anaemic, sallow likeness of Christ does small credit to his divine Father in whose image he is made, or to the tradi- tional beauty of his mother, while the quality of the contemporary regard which he evoked has a more normal explanation if we conceive him as the fairest among men, who withstood all the temptations of blandishment and perversion, while he worked out the loftiest beauties of the soul.
A fourth element of personal impressiveness not unconnected with these is of a composite nature and might be designated as pres- ence, bearing, or what popular speech designates as personal magnet- ism. This sometimes arises from perfection of control or tension with poise, intensely motivated impulses bridled by inhibitory power, which makes the impression of abundant resources of energy. It often involves grace of bearing, gesture, movement and expression, well- cadenced rhythm of all bodily and mental functions, and the regulated
38 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
play of moods; a balance between familiarity and hauteur; an inner concentration of soul, whether upon person or object; the keenest Einfiihlung or responsiveness to others; the talent for friendship and all its sacred confidences; a gentleness that involves all that our term "gentleman" connotes; the fascinations of conversation upon noble themes in which perhaps personal relations culminate; a voice flexible, well-timbred, full of the old love charms which primitive courtship developed, but attuned to the song of ideas, often more potent than that of music, which reflects both the depths and the shallows of the heart and has wrought wonders in the history of oratory and song; an eye that can speak, languish, penetrate, hypnotize, melt, that can realize all that the poetry of love sees in it, and take in all the environment at a glance; together with the best gifts of temperament. To these factors of personal influence, the full comprehension of which is still beyond our psychology, might be added the irresistible charm of youth and joy, which should always go together. How men gravitate toward all those whose lives are a fountain of happiness, whom pain cannot overwhelm, who carry an atmosphere of euphoria that neutralizes the curse of labour and fatigue ! The very presence of youth, which must be served — its buoyancy and its elasticity — is a potent provoca- tion which puts men on their mettle to do, be, say, feel all the best that is in them; to help it on. How the world loves a real master, and how even cowards and recreants in the battles of life in his presence grow brave and ready to fight to the finish! Unpretentiousness or humility, good taste, unerring tact, ambition transfigured to achieve the greatest things possible to man — we surely cannot conceive very many of these modern elements of perfection to have been lacking, either as regulative or constitutive factors, if we would account for the wondrous impression which Jesus made.1
'J. Burns: "Christ Face in Art." London, 1907, 353 p. J. L. French: "Christ in Art." Mrs. A. B. Jameson: "History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art." New York, Longmans, 1893, 3 Vol. J. H. Larson: "Face of Christ in Art." J. H. Larson, Haileybury, Ont., 1909. C. Torr: "Portraits of Jesus in the British Museum." Putnam. I. P. Whitcomb and S. E. Grosvenor: "Christ-Child in Legend and Art." Dodd, 1910. I. S. Dodd: "Pictorial Life of Jesus." Dodd, 1913. J. La Farge: "Gospel Story in Art." New York, Macmillan, 1913. W't. Rothes: "Die Schonheit des menschlichen Antlitzes in der christlichen Kunst." Coin, 1914, 165 p., mit 165 Abbildgn. Hans Preuss: "Das Bild Christi im Wandel der Zeiten." Leipzig, 1915, 315 P- (All pictures.) "Maria im Rosenhag, Madonnen-Bilder alter Deutscher und Niederlandisch-Flamischcr Meister." Leipzig, 1915, 8p. 96 plates. "The Pictorial Life of Christ." 80 sculptural reliefs by Dominico Mastroianni. Text by I. S. Dodd, 1913, 202 p. Adolf lali: "Das Madonnen-Ideal in den alteren deutschen Schulen." Leipzig, 86 p. Wilhelm Tappenbeck: "Die Re- ligion der Schonheit." 1898, 96 p. Gerald Stanley Lee: "The Shadow Christ.' 1896, 150 p. Mrs. A. B. Jameson: "legends of the Madonna." 1860, 483 p. Grant Allen: "Evolution in Italian Art." London 1908, 372 p., 6s illustrations. See especially, J. J. Tissot: "La vie de Notre Seigneur TSsus-Christ." 1896, 3 v. Edition de grand luxe. Tissot spent a long time in Palestine in preparation for this work and his less elaborate but no less bold and original "Pictures of Old Testament Scenes." Such reconstructions for art have much psychological analogy with such idealizations as those of Paul Haupt's "Wo lag das Paradies" or B. Poertncr's "Das Biblische Paradies," 1001. "Madonnas." Introduction by Jane Weir, Maiden, 1916.
CHAPTER TWO
JESUS IN LITERATURE
(i) The life of Jesus as compiled from the scores of apocryphal writers of the early centuries from the annunciation to the events following the Ascension, with psychological inferences from these data — (2) Mediaeval representations of Jesus and his life in the miracle and mystery cycles, and the psychological implications — (3) Jesus in mod- ern literature — (a) Stories of his life that follow pretty closely scrip- tural records, with a little freedom — (b) Stories with more freedom in filling in gaps left by the synoptists and introducing new events and personages, bringing in adventitious story interest which is kept more or less subordinate to the Gospel message — (c) Novels and dramas of struggle, doubt, and faith, depicting the soul of modern man in its various attitudes to Christianity — (d) Literature which represents Jesus as masked at first under the form of the common man who stands forth revealed in the denouement for what he really is — (e) The various fives of Christ which assume that he was the tool of some mystic secret conclave or academy — (f) The superman, usually portrayed as the Antichrist, and his literary cult. Stories and plays that represent Jesus as a moron, epileptic, or otherwise defective, and contemporary presentations of Christ or characters like him, who are altruistic and devoted to service. The revival of Christianity among the intellec- tuals in the predominance under the influence of the war of the altruistic or Christ type over the selfish superman type of character — (4) Outline of the point of view and conclusions of twelve recent typical scientific lives of Christ by Paulus, Strauss, Renan, Keim; C. H. Weiss, B. Bauer, Sanday, Wrede, Wernle, Schweitzer, Petrie, Loisy.
A pocrypha. From his day to ours Jesus has appealed to the liter- /i ary imagination as no one else has ever begun to do. If the leg- ends spun about the facts have not been as extravagant, the line between fact and fiction is on the whole harder to draw for that very reason than in the case of Buddha. Vastly more labour has been directed toward determining it, and learned opinion ranges all the way from volatilizing Jesus and everything about him into myth and symbol till no vestige of history remains, to the Catholic scholarship,
39
4o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
which accepts many of even the extra-canonical narratives as vera- cious. No one competent to form any opinion to-day considers all of our New Testament as literally and exactly true, and all these paralipomena as certainly false. Fiction about Jesus began with the earliest apocryphal Gospels, and was continued through every century of the Christian era down to the epics, novels, dramas of our own day, dealing with various aspects and episodes of his life and work. Many of the early writings are certainly lost and some are known by name only in the early patristic writings. Some have made a strong claim for canonicity, and doubtless greatly influenced early thought and sentiment (especially the apocalypses), perhaps most especially concerning hell, the devil, and heaven, and to some extent concerning Jesus himself. The word apocrypha originally meant not as now, non-canonical, but merely esoteric or secret. Some were mere compilations, varying but little from the Gospels and other New Testament writings, while others chiefly aim to fill gaps and gratify curiosity. Donehoo,1 whom I follow here, lists no less than ninety-five Gospels, protevangelia, histories, acts, epis- tles, and other early documents as main sources, and adds forty- seven lost or fragmentary Gospels, and ninety-five early church writers, authentic, anonymous, pseudonymous, etc., that treat of the subject. Donehoo follows, though independently, Hoffmann's early method2 of mosaicking all these narratives into a continuous story. Reich's monumental work was followed by Nestle3 and Uhlhorn4 who concludes that of his 154 agraphia only ten have real value. Kostelmann treats eighty-eight agraphia. We may agree with B. Peck who says: "There is no doubt that throughout the first century and even in the early part of the second there was a living tradition of the life of Jesus which, apart from the Gospels, continued to hand down and to circulate the utterances of Jesus, some of which are not contained in the canonical Gospels." These sayings of Jesus are very numerous. While in general they seem to be in harmony with what we know of Jesus, their new matter is
'"Apocryphal and Legendary Life of Christ." N. Y., 1903, 531 p.
*"Das Lcben Jesu nach dem Apokryphen." Leipzig, 1851. Other important authorities on this subject are B. H. Cowper, "The Apocrypha! Gospels." London, 1870, translating Tischendorf's texts; C. Reich, " Agraphia aussere- vangelische Fragmente."4 Vols.. Leipzig, 1889; R.A. Lipsius, "Die Apokryphal Apostelgeschichten und Apostellegende," 3 Vols., 1883. "The Mythical Interpretation of the. Gospels." T. J. Thorburn, N. Y., 1916, 356 p.
3E. Nestle: "De Sancta Cruce; ein Beitrag zur christl. Legendengeschichte." Berlin, Rcuther, 1889.
♦Gerhard Uhlhorn: "The Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism." Ed. and tr. from 3d German ed. by E. C- Smyth and C J. H. Ropes. N. Y., 191a, 508 p.
JESUS IN LITERATURE 41
of little value, and modern studies in this field increase our con- fidence in the common sense with which our canon was selected. The apocalypse group of them, especially, has shed a flood of light not only on books like Daniel and Revelations, but upon the entire eschatology of Jesus, so that these books in our Scriptures, instead of being the most unintelligible, have become the best understood, perhaps, of all, and have, as we shall see in a later chapter, opened an entirely new point of view respecting Jesus. Most of the Gospels are more or less gnostic, and this system was very prolific in pseudep- igraphia like the Jewish Haggadoth or fictive or didactic ampli- fications of the sacred text. Synthetizing these apocryphal narratives we have a story somewhat as follows: Near Nazareth dwelt a rich shepherd-priest, Joachim, who gave away two thirds of his increase in charity, living on the other third. God prospered him. When he was twenty his parents took as a wife for him, Anna of the tribe of Levi; but for twenty years they had no offspring, despite their piety and their prayers. So they went to Jerusalem, where both were taunted for their childlessness. Joachim returned from the temple so humiliated that with his shepherds he withdrew into the mountains and fasted forty days. Anna retired to her home in great distress, where one night she had a vision of a white dove which sat on her hand and bosom and kissed her mouth. Joachim also had a vision of a white dove by a spring, which flew about and sat on his head. For five months Anna heard nothing of her husband, and mourned, fearing he was dead, and praying that like all beasts, fowls, plants, and fish, she might have offspring. Here an angel appeared saying she should bear a daughter called Mary who should be most blessed of all women, and commanding her to go to Jeru- salem where she would meet her husband. Joachim also was visited by an angel, who told him to return to his wife, reminding him how Isaac, Joseph, Samson, and Samuel were born of barren women by a miracle, and stating that Anna would in a few months bear a daughter by him who should bring forth the son of the Most High. While lying in a deep trance and in doubt, another angel repeated the message, making a rendezvous for each with the other in the temple. Carrying his offering up to the altar, he saw from the priest's plate that there was no sin in him. Joachim and Anna knew not each other, and there was great joy among all their relatives.
42 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
At the nativity of Mary, still celebrated by the Church, David appeared with his harp. Neighbours brought gifts. Zacharias, Joachim's brother, had a vision by an angel, and sent a greeting tell- ing Anna to nurse the child three years, and then to commit her to the temple. Washing her child, she saw its face so full of divine grace that she chanted a magnificat. When the child was six months old she walked seven steps, till her mother caught her to her breast saying she should walk no more till she was brought to the temple. On her first birthday was the weaning festival, but the mother would not consent, nor would she again when the child was two; but on her third birthday occurred the presentation, which the Church still celebrates, at which the child without looking back ran swiftly up the steps to the altar, where her face shone, full of grace, whereon Anna prophesied. One tradition says these steps were half an ell high, and that she danced on them and did not regret the parting from her parents. By a lot of reeds she was committed to Zacharias. She was mar- vellously mature and devout. She never painted her eyes or cheeks, plaited her hair or used perfume or ointment. She never looked out of doors, "lest she should see a strange man." Her raiment was never dyed, but remained marvellously the same that she wore on entering the temple to her death. She was fed by angels with heavenly food, and they often bore her fruit from the tree of life. The temple food given her she gave to the poor. She became a very skilful weaver of wool, also learned in the law of God. She spoke little, never laughed or was angry, was beautiful in form and feature. Her two ambitions were oblation and virginity.
Thus she grew to her fourteenth year, when by custom she should return home and think of marriage. But Mary refused, saying she was devoted to the Lord. In their perplexity the priests sent the heralds with a trumpet-call for a council, and among those who came was Joseph, an old man, many years a widower. All decided finally to consult the Lord by lot whether she should remain unmarried. All marriageable men should bring their rods to the altar, and that rod which produced a flower on the end of which God's Spirit settled as a dove was to marry the Virgin. Joseph's rod was made on the sixth day of creation, and graven with the inscrutable name. It was passed on from Adam to Jacob, Moses, etc., and was very short, but it was his rod last of all that blossomed. He protested being set
JESUS IN LITERATURE 43
over this maiden, younger than his grandsons, but the Lord had spoken and there was no escape. Mary was given five virgins to attend her, and was commissioned to make a costly veil for the temple. Meanwhile Zacharias himself had grown dumb and his wife had "con- ceived of his chaste kisses." Having conducted Mary and her virgins to his home Joseph departed, and Gabriel visited Mary in the annunci- ation, the mystery of which greatly perplexed her, but the anniversary of which is the same as that of the creation of Adam, the crossing of the Red Sea, the crucifixion, etc.
Now came the visit to Elizabeth. Joseph on his return was greatly alarmed and perplexed; he bitterly accused Mary of infidelity, and was not convinced by her protests. This situation is much amplified in the apocryphal writings, as if to compensate for the rather summary narrative of the Gospels. Here the five virgins were invoked, and testified for Mary. Joseph declared that the angel might have been a lover masquerading, as Celsus later taught that the father of Mary's child was Panthera. The Talmud has similar tales. Joseph feared the accusation of the priests for not watching the virgin committed to his care, and thought of fleeing, also of sending her away secretly. Only the vision of Gabriel convinced him, and Jesus himself spoke from his mother's body and reproached him, until he was at last con- vinced and vowed to repel calumnies. The report of Mary's condition caused consternation, and Joseph was accused of stealth and treachery by the high priests, who thought he had betrayed his charge. To determine the truth of Joseph's protestation he was given the water of the ordeal, after which he walked seven times around the altar and no harm came. When Mary did the same, the tragic trial of her virginity was ended, although there were still many who doubted.
Nine of the apocryphal writings describe the Nativity, which is generally represented as in a dark cave supernaturally illuminated. The babe was born while Joseph was seeking a midwife. At the moment, the world and everything in it stood still. Not a thing in nature moved, but the temple of Apollo at Rome fell down and the earth was cleft in many places, so those in Hades could see. A wheel- like star bearing a cross appeared, and all the stars sang a chorus. In the birth of the babe there was no pain or blood, and the mother was proven still a virgin. One midwife had a withered hand, and by touching the child's clothes was made well. This was the first miracle.
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The Emperor Augustus was most beautiful and fortunate, but a sibyl explained to him that the newborn child was yet more so. There are many details about the shepherds, the kneeling of animals to Jesus, the circumcision, Simeon and Anna. The visit of the Magi is greatly magnified. They came from Zoroaster, and had read of the coming one in their book of Seth. In the great Persian temple of Juno the king was told that this goddess had come to life and was renamed Mary. All the statues here greeted Juno-Mary as the fountain. Even the images of the animals began to chant. A star appeared before which the statues fell down crying out their adoration. Bacchus and his satyrs joined, and all confessed they had been deceivers and their oracles liars, and prophesied a new Lord and earth. Having made their presents, the Magi received from Mary a swaddling cloth which the hottest fire could not burn.
Herod, deceived by the Magi, issued his edict of slaughter. John and Elizabeth were saved by being taken into a great cleft in a moun- tain. Zaeharias, refusing to betray John's hiding-place, was slain at the altar. The trip to Egypt is greatly amplified. Here Jesus threw a handful of wheat on the road, and immediately it grew and became ripe. Dragons came out of a cave, but Jesus approached them, and they retired. All animals of the desert saluted and obeyed him. A tall palm bent at his command to give its fruit. Springs burst forth. In one day he accomplished miraculously thirty days' journey. A great medicine-tree bowed to salute him. A great idol in a temple, to which three hundred and fifty-five other idols sacrificed, fell down with all his satellites and was broken when Jesus entered. From a demoniac boy many devils were driven by putting upon his head a cloth Jesus had worn. By touching growing wheat Jesus greatly increased the harvest. Robbers were terrified and left their plunder; •'but in the desert the Holy Family was captured by the two who later hung on the cross with Jesus. He cured a dumb bride, also a possessed woman. Others, even lepers, were healed by contact with the water in which the babe had been washed. A newly married pair who had been bewitched were cured. Three sisters were found kissing, feeding, and bewailing a richly caparisoned mule which was their brother, and which Jesus restored to his natural shape. He delivered women in travail, discerned unspoken and disguised thoughts, in play put a dried fish in a basin and made it come to life and swim. He made
JESUS IN LITERATURE 45
salt and brackish water pure, and fountains gushed forth wherever Mary thrust her finger into the earth. The water in which his gar- ments had been washed had marvellous power to stimulate crops. Once Jesus stuck three seeds into the earth, and they immediately grew to trees and blossomed. An angel brought him food from heaven daily.
Jesus had a garment woven from top to bottom when he was a child, which grew with his own growth. Joseph having made two boards which should have been alike, unequal, Jesus stretched the shorter one to the requisite size, as he also did a very elaborate throne his father had made too narrow. Wanting playmates one day, he changed a group of kids into boys. In a dyer's shop he threw many pieces of cloth into a tub of indigo, and drew them out in any colour the owner wished. A sycamore opened and received him and his mother till robbers had passed; his sweat made magic balsam; when a pitcher broke, he carried water in his cloak; he bore fire in his lap scathe- less; he moulded images of many species of animals, and then made them alive; he entered a cave of lions who fawned on and obeyed him as if they knew him before man did. He made a venomous serpent suck out the poison from a corpse which he then revived; cured a mortal blow of an axe which had nearly severed the foot of a young man ; raised a boy from the dead ; sprang into a well and rescued another. I When a playmate fell from a high roof and died, and Jesus was accused of pushing him off, he leaped down, restored him to life, and made him tell who had pushed him; he rescued a neighbour's infant from death. ' Many who were blind and with eye diseases were cured by a lotion of water in which he had been bathed. A jealous woman threw her rival's son, Cleopas, into a well, but he only sat on the water, playing. She then shut him into a hot oven, which grew cold by Jesus' power. A dying boy was cured by being placed in Jesus' bed; a leprous bride was cured ; and so, too, was a girl whom Satan had oppressed as a dragon, this by means of Jesus' swaddling cloth; the boy Judas struck Jesus, who expelled Satan from him in the form of a mad dog (Judas' mother, Cyborea, had had an Oedipus dream in which her son killed his father, married his mother, and sold his God). On one occasion Jesus sent a kerchief which revived a dead man.
Many of Jesus' miracles as a boy were destructive. His curse, e. g., killed a boy who destroyed his mud dams and pools; but when the
46 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
boy's parents and many others protested, Jesus "kicked the hinder parts of the dead boy and said 'Rise, thou son of iniquity' and the dead rose up and went away." Jesus also made many mud sparrows, and when the Jews protested against such a play on Sunday Jesus said to the sparrows, "Fly," and they did so, "twittering the praise of God." Another boy who had destroyed his mud-puddles he cursed, and the boy withered up and died, but upon intercession Jesus restored him, all "save a certain little member which remained useless, to admonish him." Another rude boy who jostled and knocked him about fell down and died. Those who complained of Jesus' conduct to his par- ents were often struck blind. There are several more or less elaborate accounts of his breaking tiles and pottery and then restoring them miraculously, accelerating the workmen until they could do twelve days' work in one, or perhaps causing very beautiful ware to appear.
Six of the apocryphal Gospels record Jesus' experience with teach- ers. One called to exhort his parents to send him to his school, setting forth the advantages of learning, although Joseph doubted if his son could be taught anything. Thereupon Jesus told his father that he was not his son, but the son of God. At last, however, he was prevailed on to attend school to Master Levi, who repeated all the letters. When Jesus would not speak in answer, he struck him with the rod, whereupon Jesus reproached his teacher with ignorance, naming all the letters and explaining their hidden powers and the meaning of all the angles, "graduate, subacute, mediate, oblate," etc., till Levi was thunderstruck at the deep analogies and erudition, and said, "No man but only God can understand him," and was ashamed and besought his parents to take him away and that quickly; for he said, "I have found my master. He is either a wizard or a God." Again his parents de- sired to send him to school, and nearly the same incidents followed, save now he is taught Greek instead of Hebrew, and when the master flogged him for impertinence in trying to teach his teacher, his hand withered and he fell dead. The third time he was sent to school, he took the teacher's book and discoursed so marvellously on law that his master "fell to the ground and adored him," but implored his parents to take him away. Now come many amplifications of Jesus' visit to the temple at the age of twelve. Here a philosopher asked him if he knew astronomy, whereon he repeated the number, spheres, opposi- tions, of all the heavenly bodies, "their aspect, triangular, square,
JESUS IN LITERATURE 47
sextant; their course, direct, retrograde, twenty-fourth and sixtieth of twenty-fourth, and other things beyond the reach of reason." Asked if he had studied medicine, he explained "physics, meta- physics, hyperphysics and the humours of the body, numbers of bones, veins, arteries, etc.," whereupon the questioner vowed to be his dis- ciple and slave.
From this day he began to hide his mysteries and miracles and give attention to the law, till he had reached his thirtieth year, so that we have eighteen years of almost absolute silence on the part of even legend. We are told that "he did every work of mankind, sin only excepted." His family would never eat and drink until he had done so first and blessed the food. His whole being shone when he slept.
Joseph died of old age at 1 1 1 years, and this the apocrypha elabo- rate without stint. Joseph soliloquizes and makes long prayers. He died very slowly from the feet, where Mary sat, up to the head, where Jesus stood, who saw Death coming followed by Gehenna, as Joseph's soul had reached his throat in its preparations to leave the body. Jesus rebuked Death and his hosts, who fled; they had no power over Joseph, who wished cherubim and Michael sent for him as his numbness and panting increased, for his death was like labour pains. Finally Abaddon went in, took and brought forth Joseph's soul, which Michael and Gabriel wrapped in a shining silk napkin, and thus, singing and secure from plunderers, they took it up to heaven. Then follows mourning over the body when the relatives found he was dead. Jesus himself prepared it for burial, and angels wrapped the body of "the blessed old man" in their garments, and Jesus decreed that no evil smell of death or worm appear, and that even the shroud and every hair remain as they were for a thousand years. The shroud was miraculously fitted to his body, "with no entrance or ends to the linen." Finally, alone, Jesus stretched himself upon his father's body and wept, soliloquized and prayed, and then the body was placed in the tomb of Jacob.
At length, when Jesus had begun to show himself and teach, one of the twenty- two priests of the temple died, and after they had failed to agree upon any one else, Jesus was unanimously chosen as fittest although not of the tribe of Levi. It was necessary for Mary to ap- pear and testify as to his paternity, and this in a dramatic scene she did, declaring that he was conceived of the Holy Ghost. An official
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examination convinced them that she was still a virgin, and so her story was accepted and Jesus duly installed. He came to John's bap- tism unwillingly, at the intercession of his mother. When he came up from the baptism, the sun bent its rays, and all the stars and waters adored him.
In a controversy with the devil the latter threatens as king of earth, and Jesus denounces him till the devil is angry and sends myriads of demons which made Peter tremble; but Jesus changed himself to a more glorious form and suspended Satan in the sky till he begged for mercy, and his cohorts fled in terror, only to come back when Jesus resumed human form. Then Jesus opened the earth and threatened to seal Satan in its bowels after he had fallen for fifty years. In each encounter both change form. Jesus is always victorious, but the devil always returns to the encounter.
The conspiracy of Herod and the Jews against Jesus is much elab- orated. He is taunted with illegitimacy, and there are much plotting and many accusations. Judas now begins to play an important role. What each member of the council said pro and con concerning the contemplated arrest is reported as if verbatim. At the Last Supper Jesus chants a hymn as the disciples turn about him in a ring with joined hands and responses of "Amen" at the end of each line. The inquisition before Pilate is richly dight with incidents. The P.oman standard bowed before Jesus, so that twelve stalwart soldiers could not hold it up. The first part of the Gospel of Nicodemus exploits at great length the hearing before Pilate. There were many witnesses pro and con, a number being those whom Jesus had healed. At last, after many vicissitudes, Pilate drew up a sentence in the form of an elaborate legal document signed by nineteen witnesses. The cross was in four pieces, each of a different kind of wood, each of which had its history. The beam was given by an angel to Seth and grew in Eden. It had been removed to heaven, and also restored on earth from a branch. On it the brazen serpent had been reared. It had also been in Solomon's temple. The Queen of Sheba told Solomon some one would die on it whose death would destroy Judaism, and hence Solomon buried it in the bowels of the earth, where it lay till it was dug up later in excavating for the pool of Bethesda. The virtue of its wood healed. Some say it grew from a branch of the tree of life. As for Judas, after the betrayal his eyes were bleared; his body, full of worms and vermin,
JESUS IN LITERATURE 49
swelled so that he could not pass through a chariot gate till at last he burst asunder and died in a place which no man could approach for the smell of him. Again, as Jesus passed by bearing the cross, the cobbler Ahasuerus struck him and commanded him to go faster, and as a punishment was told by Jesus to remain on earth till his return. The world has since known him as the Wandering Jew, and as often as he becomes a hundred years old he is set back to thirty.
Golgotha or Calvary was so called because Adam's skull had been found there. As Jesus hung on the cross, the robber on his left taunted him and wished he had slain him ; but the thief on the right confessed his sin, and Jesus had a passport to heaven written out in due legal form, signed and sealed, for him. Jesus also executed a personal will (fifteenth century) bequeathing, in the quaint terminology of Roman law, his soul to God, his mother to John's care, his patience to all who suffer, etc. This will was attested by the four Evangelists, as notaries, and signed " Jesus of Paradise Street."
As to Jesus' burial, there was also much confabulation and great detail in the accounts, especially concerning the taking down of the body. Joseph, with hammer and pincers, with great effort succeeded in drawing out the nail of the right hand, carefully concealing it from Mary, yet preserving it, while Nicodemus did the same for the left hand, etc. Long sat the tearful mother with the head of her dead son in her lap, dolorously bewailing his death, kissing his face, washing away the blood and saliva with her tears, invoking alternately the Lord in heaven and her son, while the Magdalene embraced the feet at which she erstwhile had found pardon. With great difficulty could they be persuaded to permit the burial, but at last both helped to wind the shroud. Joseph preserved with great care every drop of blood which exuded from the body, the print of which was left on the linen where he lay. The sepulchre was in a rock out of which water had gushed at the touch of Moses' rod, and the tomb was in the exact centre of the world. A great stone was fastened with iron clamps and great seals, and guarded by five hundred soldiers.
Now Hades personified and the devil held a long converse respect- ing Jesus' impending advent into their realm. Into it he advanced five hundred paces at a time, calling upon the gates to lift and admit the King of Glory, bringing golden light to those who had never seen it since they had entered, including Abraham, Isaiah, Simeon, and the
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Baptist, who was still preaching there. In long discourse Satan, Prince of Tartarus, seeks to hearten Hades, who, however, finally expels him. David and Jeremiah appear, and at last the bolts of the brazen gates are destroyed, and they open and the King of Glory really does enter in triumph. Thereupon Death trembled on his throne, and legions of demons fled precipitately. Satan himself was seized, given a hun- dred wounds, and bound on his back with great chains. Taking Adam by the hand, adored by him and Eve, Jesus led out the elect, the cross was set up, psalms were sung, David leading, and the saints were gath- ered and brought safely over to Paradise, but some were attracted back to Palestine and were seen of many during the three days before Jesus arose. Nearly all the persons named speak briefly, or at length, and in character.
During the forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension Mary, by a special request, while the disciples and their friends lis- tened, gave a highly coloured and rather new version of the annunci- ation, till flame began to come out of her mouth, which would have consumed the world had not Jesus intervened. In an impressive scene the monster Bealiar, sixteen hundred cubits long and fastened by sixty- three fiery chains, is invoked by Bartholomew, trembling but supported by Jesus, to tell something of the mystery and the history of the nether- world, its great demons by name, with their achievements. He proceeds with his apocalypse of .hell till his questioner can bear no more, and all the apostles, who had longed with great curiosity to get some glimpse of the abyss of hell from which Jesus had just come, were satisfied. To Bartholomew, the chief interlocutor of Jesus after the Resurrection, Satan told how Adam was made, whom Michael then commanded him to worship as God's image, but he would not, since he himself was made of fire, but Adam only of a clod and water from the four rivers. For this, with his six hundred, he was expelled from heaven. He then plotted the seduction of Eve with a vial of his sweat, which would induce in her "a certain longing." Being asked to show to his followers the righteous who had left this earth, Jesus caused two men to appear, so dazzling in pink and white, and so beautiful, that none could behold them; and then Jesus showed them a wondrous country full of light, flowers, fruit, and hovering and singing angels. These were the blessed, and this was their eternal home. Over against this Peter saw the place of torment where blasphemers were hung by their
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tongues with fire under them; perverters of righteousness were in a fiery lake, tormented by demons; adulteresses hung by their hair over boiling mire; murderesses were in chasms full of serpents, evil beasts and worms; abortionists sat in a "straight place" up to their necks in gore and filth, beholding the children born out of time, from whom sparks smote the women in the eyes; certain perverts were burning up to their middle, beaten and their entrails eaten by worms; slanderers gnawed their own lips, and had red-hot irons thrust into their eyes; false witnesses gnawed their own tongues, and fire flamed from their mouths; the wicked rich rolled on sharp, hot pebbles, in tattered and filthy garments; usurers were knee-deep in bubbling pitch and blood; homosexuals were driven over a cliff and then forced to climb up and fall again forever; mockers of high ideals were in the fire and teat each other. These descriptions are bald and bold but with no Dan- tesque details. Jesus also uttered several prayers in a tongue which no man can identify.
After forty days, one Sabbath at early dawn, after parting in- junctions to his disciples, as he raised his hands in blessing, Jesus was taken up from the Mount of Olives. A cloud upbore him, and he was seen to sit down at God's right hand. Then all returned to Jerusalem rejoicing. Telling of this wondrous experience, they were called liars by the scribes and Pharisees, who made them swear to it, and then sent them back to Galilee lest they should proclaim it .in Jerusalem. The Sanhedrin behind locked doors decided to announce that Jesus' body had been stolen, although Nicodemus protested, citing Elijah and Elisha as prototypes. Finally they sent soldiers to Galilee who sought in every spot to find Jesus' body, but in vain. Joseph, how- ever, was found and brought back, and asked how he had escaped from the closed room in which he was confined, sealed, and guarded. Three witnesses from Galilee arrived and confirmed the Resurrection. Much testimony was taken at several hearings, and many appeared who had arisen with the Lord. Two men, Leucius and Charimus, came back from their tombs, and were placed in separate cells and made to write out the story of the Lord's descent to hell. This they did, and then retired to their graves. Their two papers were alike to the very form of every letter.
Pilate in his inquiries entered the temple, and in secret conclave asked the Jews to consult their books. He was told that the advent
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of Jesus as sent of God had been expected and foretold for fifty-five hundred years. But Pilate was told to keep it secret. He entered it, however, in the records of the praetorium and wrote to the Roman emperor, Tiberius, recounting at great length most of the miracles of Jesus; swearing by Hercules that he had done, as the prophets and the Roman sibyls had foretold, greater things than could be done by any of the gods the Romans worshipped; declaring that he yielded with reluctance to the envy and malice of the Jews. He described the cru- cifixion, when darkness fell and lamps were fit for three hours; the earth yawned with earthquakes; the stars and Orion lamented; Moses, Jove, Noah, and many others appeared; a light shone seven-fold that of day, with winter lightnings, and then Jesus arose. The Roman guards saw Jesus arise, but were given money by the Jews to conceal the fact, and say the body had been stolen. The earth had swallowed tnost of Jesus' enemies. Pilate said that against his will he allowed Christ to be crucified, because he called himself king. King Abgarus of Edessa also wrote Tiberius of the Resurrection, and begged to avenge Jesus' death by destroying Jerusalem. Tiberius had nine kinds of leprosy, and hearing of Jesus' cures, sent his friend, Volusianus, to bring this great physician to him. He sailed a year and seven days, and was shocked to find Jesus dead, and to be told by Pilate that he was a malefactor. He told Pilate he might have received Jesus, if not as a god, at least as a physician. Others testified of Jesus to Volusianus, who also met Veronica, and heard of and saw her marvellous portrait. He wrapped the portrait in silk and gold, and took Veronica and it back to Rome. Tiberius proposed to the senate to admit Jesus as one of their gods, and condemned it because it refused to deify him by its suffrages. The precious canvas or shawl was then unrolled, and Tiberius adored it on his knees, and instantly his flesh was cleansed like that of a child; whereupon Tiberius asked for baptism and was instructed in the articles of faith.
Titus, suffering from a cancer in his face that had eaten away the right nostril, had sought cure of every herb. Nathan told him of Jesus. Titus then wrote reproaching Tiberius for appointing rulers in Judea under whom such outrages could be committed against Jesus, and declaring that he would have slain the very carcasses of the Jews; whereupon, not only Titus's face, but all the ill who were present, were cured. He then sent to Vespasian to send five thousand men to
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destroy the enemies of Jesus. Pilate meanwhile wrote to Herod, con- firming the Resurrection, recounting the conversion of his wife, Procla, telling of his own anguish and remorse, and of the wonders which occurred when he approached the risen Jesus, how he saw his scarred body and fell on his face. Herod replied, telling how his daughter's head had been cut off by the ice, deploring his father's slaughter of the Innocents and his beheading of John, describing how his son was afflicted, and his wife half blind, declaring that worms were already issuing from his own mouth, and imploring Pilate to bury the members of his family decently as they died. The earth would not receive Herod's body, but spewed it out, and fowls took his flesh. The head of Longinus, who pierced Jesus, was brought to a cave where a lion consumed his body all day and it was restored at night; and this was to go on till the second coming of the Lord. Rahab took Pilate, Annas, Caiaphas, and all the chiefs of the Jews bound to Rome. On the way Caiaphas died, and the earth would not receive the whole of him, so the burial was completed with stones. Pilate put on the seamless tunic of Jesus; and so, though the emperor had been very wroth, when he appeared he was mild, and wroth again as soon as he was away, till the tunic was taken off. Then his wrath blazed forth, and Pilate was condemned. When Caesar spoke the name of Christ all the gods fell down before the senate and became as dust. Pilate was decapitated, although by reason of a very abject prayer of submission his soul was received by an angel, and his wife died with him. Some say Pilate was slain by Caesar himself. His body was sunk in the Tiber; but the vile spirit and filthy body made such a turmoil of tempests, thunder, and hail, that he was dug up and taken to the Rhone, where the same thing occurred by demons, until he was removed to a far land and sunk in a pit by mountains, where diabolical bubblings still occur. Annas was wrapped in the skin of an ox, which shrank as it dried until his bowels issued from his mouth. Others slew themselves, and there was great stench of the corpses of those who gave up Christ to death, but were now given up to death themselves. Titus and Vespasian stoned, hung, pierced others. Twelve thousand smote themselves. The rest were divided into four parts and dispersed, and thirty of the remnant were sold for one piece of silver, since "the Jews sold Our Lord for thirty, Amen."
Most of the many sources, the contents of which are so briefly
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listed above, are far later than our New Testament canon, although a few of them are coeval with or prior to its formation, and candidates for admission to it. Many of them, even those late in composition, probably embody traditions far older than can be traced; still others are pure fabrications composed for edification or to stop the mouths of critics, or else they arose in the stringencies of controversy with heresies. The oblivion to which they were consigned after the canon was estab- lished, and again the opprobrium into which they fell under the influ- ence of Protestantism, and the scorn in which they are now held by those engaged in the dry quest of literal historicity, are hard for the psychologist to understand. About all were written with devout intent, and they played an important role in early days in commending Jesus to the world. The very naivete of their credulity has a certain fascination. They are precious documents of a time when men be- lieved with the heart, and they still have a most unique charm for childhood. With wise and discriminating pedagogic treatment much of the material might be used to-day with the best effect in the Sunday- school. Of much of it Christian art has made use, so that the student of art must know something of it. The stories preserve for us the wishes and reveries of believers of many bygone generations. Re- garded as prose records of fact, they contain very little that is authentic and to the most Philistine of skeptics they seem but idle tales. From full childish belief in the truth of them, the way that had to be traversed to the rejection of them by Protestant orthodoxy is a far longer journey than from this latter position on to the most complete skepticism. In other words, the Christian Church as a whole stands far nearer to the disbelief in everything supernatural, if not historic, about Jesus than it does to the full acceptance of all these tales.
Despite his too-ready recourse to miracles, the boy Jesus is not without natural charm as a street urchin, ringleader, and mis- chief-maker, and most of his juvenile miracles are only the wishes every boy has, but which Jesus was unique in being able to realize. In anger, e. g., every child has had the death wish; but if Jesus felt it, his mates to whom it was directed really died. What child has not wanted to have his toy animals live? Those of Jesus did so. What boy is not prone to make himself important in his world by secret mis- chief, pranks, and tricks such as Jesus indulged in without stint? If the ordinary boy cannot turn kids into playmates, he can create
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kiddish imaginary companions. What schoolboy would not delight to "get back at" his teacher, scold and denounce him, confound him by a sudden outburst of wisdom, and make him suffer if he tried to inflict punishment? The father complex, too, has an exquisite il- lustration in these tales of alternate obedience and declarations of independence and defiance. Every boy would love to be a great animal trainer, and have them all fear and obey him as they did Jesus. Paidology shows a strange childish fascination in smashing pots, dishes, crockery. One of the great dreams of the normal boy is to have his parents do homage to him. Thus as a boy Jesus seems to have had no unrealized wishes and so suffered no repression. He was always ausgelassen, and acted, thought, felt, with abandon. Thus the Gospels of the infancy contain much that, if not true to fact, is very true to boy nature, which is a higher kind of truth. Those who wrote these Gospels certainly had a sympathetic insight into boyhood, which must have been less developed in those who would consign them all to oblivion. Above all they suggest a most alluring and fascinating theme for one who really knows boys and genetic psychology, viz., to write the biography of a boy all of whose wishes came true, whose dreams and reveries became realities, and who actu- ally did all he felt impelled to do, regardless of consequences and of all restraints, could lord it over everything and everybody with whom he came in contact.
Mariolatry rests chiefly on these legends rather than on the canon. Although she is chaste as a vestal or nun, she is all mother rather than wife. Of the four K's which Germans tell us mark wo- man's sphere (Kirche, Kinder, Kleide, Kiiche), she is devoted solely to the first two. She has no culinary needs, for she is fed from heaven. Of garments we are told that, like Jesus, she had but one which grew with her growth, from swaddling-cloth to shroud. Joseph's doubts and his fears of a clandestine or disguised lover, and the final silencing of these questionings, are greatly and repeatedly elaborated. Her chastity is triumphantly established by oaths, testimony, examinations, etc. Later, others catechized, and the Pharisees cross-examined and subjected her to other ordeals and tests, although a few remain un- convinced. Even after Jesus' death she must recount for a conclave of believers all she can tell of the annunciation, and again be tested. All this compensation shows how acute was the consciousness of
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believers on this vulnerable point, and how vituperative skeptics were. The apocryphal Mary did not marry again, and bore no other children but Jesus. She was committed to the special charge first of John, then of Peter. There is much parallelism between her concep- tion, birth, and infancy and those of Jesus. She was a prodigy of precocious piety, charity, and submission, serving and adoring her son, pained yet patient and indulgent to his boyish pranks, urging him to take John's baptism, etc. Yet more prominent is her figure as the mater dolorosa at Jesus' death, burial, Resurrection, and Ascen- sion. She follows subtly and pathetically all the tragic and sublime processional of events, and we feel all their pathos anew and deeper as it is reflected in her soul. We are not even told whether she was literate or illiterate. No great and wise sayings, almost no miracles are done directly by her, and even her affection for her son, all dominant as it is, is often dumb. She stands before the world as a paragon of passivity, resignation, self-effacement, with little trace of the aggressive will or intuitive intellect that shone forth so conspicuously in her son. Indeed, she seems an ideal totemic woman according to ancient notions of her sex. She has been through the Christian ages an object of contemplation, a mechanism of sex sublimation for all who adore her. She shows no vestige of earthly love, for this was from the first repressed and spiritualized; and she has always stood forth in doctrine and in art as the embodiment of the ideal of virginity, both of her own and for our sake, although modern feminism has departed almost as far from her type as men have from that of Jesus.
For the Resurrection, descent to Hades, and Ascension, the apoc- rypha seek to compensate for the all-too-brief uncircumstantial synoptic statements yet more copiously than they do in the case of the Nativity. Their method to this end is amplification and repetition. Over and over again the story of the Resurrection is rehearsed in many mouths. Every possible proof is circumstantially adduced — eye witnesses, visions, legal affidavits and letters— till many of Jesus' Jewish enemies and prominent characters in Roman history are con- vinced and testify. We are told little about the early spread of Chris- tianity, but very much about the vengeance with which those who still derided or were recalcitrant were visited, till, as the last act in the great drama, come the fall and sack of Jerusalem and the indiscriminate slaughter, suicide, leading to captivity. All who opposed, and es-
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pecially all responsible for Jesus' death, meet awful retribution, and thus the scales of justice are evened on this earth. Why is even legend, which is so voluble concerning Jesus' early years and the end of his career, so silent on the nearly eighteen years embracing the most interesting and significant period of adolescence? If the apocrypha were pure fiction and not based on tradition, with some admixture of fact or authenticity, we should expect to find those silent years filled out by the imagination. As it is, Jesus seems to have burst upon the world at the baptism out of utter obscurity. He emerges like an unknown prophet from the desert. Was he a common labourer during these years, with each day so like another that there is nothing to record? The legends represent him as a not very good or always very amiable boy, extraordinarily endowed with the futile learning of his time, and invested with no less limitless power to work wonders; but nevertheless he has very few salient traits of character save a certain waywardness and headstrongness and illimitable con- sciousness of his own powers. He is neither devout nor respectful to his elders, but somewhat prone to bully and swagger, so that such data as exist for prognosticating the kind of adult he will become are not very favourable. Indeed, one almost wonders if the infancy Gospels are not by some colossal blunder really concerned with an- other personage, so that the records of the childhood were only later attached to Jesus, or else are all a very inept and perverse fiction. If both concern the same person, there was certainly great need for him to grow in favour with God and man.
(2) Mediaeval Literature. The mediaeval Church, dimly mindful of the glories of antiquity, slowly gave birth to a poetry and art which came to be almost as expressive of the new religious life as the rites about the altar of Dionysus were of that of classical antiquity. The early Church fathers, however, bitterly condemned the theatre and spectacles, which had grossly degenerated. The Church long threat- ened to expel all who even attended the theatre, and was yet more bitter against actors. Still, even in the fourth century came the oldest Christian tragedy on the Passion, a third of its verses borrowed from different passages of Euripides, so as to celebrate the new "hero of tragedy" in familiar classic terms and also to imply that the Attic poets heralded Christ. There are faint analogies to Prometheus, the demigod bound to a rock, like Jesus to his cross, for the benefit of man-
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kind. In this first Christian tragedy most of the action is behind the scenes and only reported by messengers. It suggests many an early church built on the ruins of an ancient temple and adorned with its columns. It was meant only for schools and not for the stage, which, however, the Roman Christians loved. Actors, under the influence of the Church, fell into great disrepute and degenerated to jongleurs and mummers and perhaps bards. Even in the dark tenth century the comedies of Terence were presented in cloisters, and we have many dramatic dialogues in praise of chastity and illustrating its opposite. The new popular drama, however, grew from the very heart of the Church, from her altar, from her liturgy, and from the theme of redemp- tion. From the age of Gregory the mass became a dramatic celebra- tion of the great tragedy at Golgotha, presenting the whole range of human emotion from the miserere to the gloria in excelsis. During Passion Week rudimentary oratorios -developed as men tired of the Gregorian music, with Christ as tenor and Pilate as bass. There were picturesquely gowned processionals, often out of doors, not only of priests but of guilds and corporations. Adam and Eve carried between them the tree of knowledge; the Baptist a banner and a lamp; Judas a money-bag; the devil a gallows, etc. Elsewhere personations of the Virgin and Our Lord wandered on Advent evenings, admonishing chil- dren and giving Christmas gifts. Froissart, the last chronicler of chivalry, tells what he saw in 1389, in Paris, where God the Father sat on his throne with the Son and Holy Ghost, surrounded by chor- isters dressed as angels, while angels floated down suspended by wires, and placed a crown of gold on the head of the Queen. On Good Friday the cross was sometimes placed in a grave beneath the altar, and taken out and elevated on Easter Day with solemn singing. Sometimes the three Marys came to anoint the body of the Lord. Such simple Easter pageants seem to have been the first miracle plays, often containing the descent into hell, the conquest of Satan, release of the saints of the Old Testament, etc. Sometimes the Christ- story began with a preface, which included even Vergil, Eden, the tree of knowledge, the dying Adam; and later the beginnings of the play were put still farther back to the fall of Lucifer. Thus the Passion, with its annexes, was the core from which a new religious drama had already begun to arise.
The Christmas plays focus on the birth of the Divine Child. This
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was often elaborately celebrated in the Church, which had often a stock of properties in the form of pictures of the ox and the ass, images of small animals, costumes, admonitory ornaments, a mes- senger, trees. Sometimes real animals and peasant shepherds with their lusty, rustic songs were introduced. In these plays the shep- herds often brought cheese and eggs as offerings, and wealthier people made richer presents, particularly nobles, who represented, perhaps, the three kings and Herod. Often here, too, the play began with the Old Testament, with perhaps a glimpse of Eden and Eve. The birth was often very realistic. So were the flight to Egypt, and the slaughter of the Innocents. The results of the fall of man are often graphic — even patriarchs and prophets, after finishing their speeches, are carried off by the devil to hell or purgatory. There were musical accom- paniments introducing fragments of the liturgy, many words spoken by God himself, all as simple as the old script which in ancient pic- tures often seems to proceed from the mouths of the figures. The miracle play, which dates back to the eleventh century, was often attended by elaborate music in the form of chants and hymns, and a favourite theme of the Easter plays in the twelfth century was the rise and fall of Antichrist. Allegorical personages open these plays, representing, e. g., paganism and Judaism, mercy, justice, pope, king of earth. Antichrist personifies all the powers inimical to Christian- ity. He wears a mail shirt under his wings, and his companions are hy- pocrisy and heresy. Another favourite theme was that of the wise and foolish virgins, and here generally, although Mary and the other char- acters plead for the latter, who have really only been a little thought- less, Jesus is inexorable and represents a Calvinistic rigour hard to understand, which often prejudiced intelligent laymen against Chris- tianity. In Rome these plays in Passion Week were given with great magnificence in the arena of the Coliseum where so many martyrs had died. Often the whole town undertook a play in which all were called to join for the honour of Christ. The actors now became so many that the language had to be the vernacular; for often half the town were in the play and only the other half were spectators. This necessitated a very large stage with different places, towns, forests, etc., fenced off, perhaps labelled. As the miracle plays extended be- yond this world, the stage sometimes had three stories, the upper rep- resenting Paradise, in which the Trinity, saints, and angels sat, and
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which was carefuTy adorned and shaded. The middle was the earthly stage, made as large as possible, while below was hell, often personified with enormous jaws. If unity of place was preserved, that of time was defied; for sometimes in a single day we have the whole life of Jesus presented from birth to burial. In these plays women's parts were always enacted by men or boys, and Christ and the other char- acters were generally attired as bishops, while in hell all wore close- fitting shirts. There were many stage tricks. In one where the devil hangs Judas, he has to take out the fastenings and sit behind him on the bar of the gallows. Judas carried a concealed blackbird, also the entrails of some animal, in his coat, so that as he died both bird and entrails would escape when he and the devil slid down to hell on a rope. Sometimes Aaron's rod seemed really to blossom, and ladders led from hell to heaven.
The Moralities had no such hold upon the people. Their char- acters were allegories, Faith, Hope, Charity, Virtue, Vice; but the Passion of Christ was in one way or another generally the core, or at least, the point de repere of all. The English moral play, "Every- man," is supposed to show the lot of Man. God complains that he has degenerated, and summons Death; and in his terror Everyman turns successively to Relatives, Conviviality, Riches, who all fail him, and then he turns to Good Works, who sends him on to Wisdom, and he is finally taken to the sacraments. Overcome by Death, Strength, Beauty, Intellect, and Senses leave him, until in the end only Christ remains, and angels take him with a requiem. The plays of the Virgin, too, are classed by themselves. Her tears avail almost as much as the blood of her Divine Son. Another favourite theme is the cavalier who pledges his wife, whom he loves, to the devil, on condition that he has all he wants for seven years. Generally the devil is tricked in the end. The miseries of the lost are often described in much detail in the very many of these plays on which so much ingenuity was spent, and of which every great town had its own proud collection.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries humour and fun assumed a prominent place in all these sacred dramas, and the devil and hell became more prominent. There is much of this element in the many versions of Theophilus and Dame Jutta, who, tradition says, became Pope in 855. While some plays began in heaven, this begins in hell, where it is all planned in advance. "Eulenspiegel" marked a great
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increase of the comic element. Much of the fun was mere naivete, rusticity, or uncouthness. Births actually take place on the stage. In one God sleeps on his throne during the crucifixion, and is reproached by an angel therefor. The souls of the dying fly from their mouths in the forms of small images, as in the case of Judas. In instituting the Lord's Supper Jesus is made to sing the first mass. There was much jocose by-play and even horse-play. The hosts of hell, often a satyr- like masquerade, were often very weird, and hoofs, horns, tails, and methods for fetching souls were never lacking to the devil, who very strangely came to be more and more a comic personage, till in the fifteenth century he vacated the drama, and his place was taken by, or, in a sense, he changed into, the fool, who is often, by the way, an embodiment of good sense It is difficult to distinguish tragedy from comedy, so closely are they blended in these plays. Some of them follow the Gospels and others are based very largely upon apocryphal tradition, while invention is given considerable scope. Many relics of all this survive in Ober-Ammergau. In these ancient plays the crucifixion, which is the climax of the play, is usually closely followed by the Resurrection, and then comes the sepulture which is often very gross, with wrangling and fighting of the soldiers, who are to watch the grave, the gossip of the gardener who talks of the effects of herbs, the chatter of the ointment sellers, old wives' quarrels, and all in all a strange mixture of burlesque and solemnity. The fools' and asses' festivals began in jest, but became a more serious part of Christmas amusements. Plenty of travesty and parody was allowed; and perhaps the whole clerical staff appear as buffoons, cvs if these were more attractive characters than New Testament personages. In these celebrations the ass was often led to the high altar, and some- times interrupted the service; but the laugh seemed not to interfere with the very unique commingling of the comic and the tragic such as we see, for instance, in the dance of death, composed in the excite- ment of an awful pestilence. In these plays Mary Magdalene is very commonly identified with the Madonna, and she and Martha are generally the more prominent female roles. Some episodes are wrought out very much in the spirit of early romance.
In fine, the miracle play, with all its relations, was an almost inevitable product in a day when the Church contained nearly all the culture of the world and retained her empire over the minds of men.
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Thus she brought home the great truths of Christianity to the hearts of simple people, as indeed it was necessary for her to do; for to main- tain her supremacy she must satisfy every sentiment. These repre- sentations came to be great popular festivals full of edification for both old and young, which were long anticipated and remembered with joy. As in the case of the old Greek tragedy, we have here the great advantage that the people were generally familiar with the outlines of the plot, and therefore each character seemed already known, and thus gave pleasure; and it was a delight to see in life those persons whose words the spectators had often heard and whose images they had seen in the church. The sacredness, however, of the Bible narrative more or less impeded the free play of creative fancy, although this differed very much with different writers and in different places. There was more delusion, perhaps, than original creation. The scenes were generally panoramic with little to develop a deeper subjective side, but the pathos was strongly brought out. It was the great misfortune of Protestantism to rob faith of much of this material. It was too serious and inward to appreciate the light play of fancy about solemn topics. It did, however, give a new depth to Christianity, although all was changed when in the fifteenth century the Renaissance brought again into the world the immortal spirit of classical antiquity. Thus appeared a very noble secular culture rooted in the ideal, with a very different theme, but still a noble prototype. Hence the great strife between Christian and classic culture which followed.
Hell in these plays is the home of famine, pestilence, disease, war, earthquake, and storm; all of which may be impersonated, and which are sent forth to scourge mankind. Temptations, particularly to lasciviousness, are brought to man by their agents, who are seducers. This is the devil's chief bait in ensnaring souls, and hell tortures were no doubt most effective in stemming the tide of corruption and ob- scenity which caused the fall of the old civilizations and threatened to engulf the world. Many now hold with Forlong,1 Jennings,2 West- ropp,3 and Crawley,4 that in early prehistoric times there was a phallic age which sexed every neuter object, made sex the dominant apper- ceptive organ by which even cosmogony was explained, and left its in-
^'Rivers of Life." London, 1883, 2 vols.
*"The Indian Religions," London, 1800, 267 p.
»Hodder M. Westropp: "Ancient Symbol Worship," New York, 1874, 98 p.
4"The Mystic Rose," London, 1902, 485 p.
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delible marks upon all early religions. Modesty in later ages has sought with only partial success to score its traces away. They hold, too, that these propensities had a later recrudescence in the ancient empires; that Christianity did its greatest and hardest work in saving the world from this danger that threatened almost bestial degeneration ; and that hell was one of the most potent agents in this great work. But this is not the place to detail this antiscortatory function of hell.
Why did hell come to play such a prominent role, not only in these plays, but in the art, language, and imagination of so many Christian centuries? No ancient race or cult so amplified post-mortem torments. Are hell and the devil necessary antitheses of heaven and Christ, each vivifying the other by contrast? or is there a principle of ambivalence here? If this is all, then alas for either if the other fades! Many causes probably concurred to make vivid depictions of hell popular. They were in some sense a vicariate for war in that they served as a vent for the cruel animal propensities; for war and hell have deep psychological affinities. Hell, too, kept alive a sense of the hideousness of sin, because belief in it for the wicked expressed man's sense of justice as a basal cosmic principle; for it brought iniquity and pain together in the end, as must be if this is a moral universe. Hell is a standing expression of God's wrath at sin. To those powerless to punish evil themselves it gives a deep satisfaction to consign it to eternal flames by oaths and imprecations. To gloat over the imagi- nary tortures of others may express Sadistic inclinations unleashed all the more freely because cloaked by a sense that it is vengeance for merited sin. There is much nudity, also, in the mediaeval hell, and not only thermal but every conceivable physical torture was applied to raw flesh and to every part and organ. There are wails, shrieks, quivering muscles, despair, nameless filth, nausea, strangling fumes, ravening monsters, venomous snakes and serpentine coils, darkness, awful noises, imps that choke and lacerate, every conceivable fear, and prayers for death that can never come. All simply show the real na- ture of sin, what it deserves, and what God thinks of it. Hell is the negative motif of Jesus' eschatology and conceptions of judgment realized, perpetuated, and transcendentalized. Belief in it makes men suffer wrongs which they would otherwise have revolted against, because it both implanted and expressed a deep sense that doers of iniquity, although they escape penalty here, are reserved for an awful
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doom that some time will abundantly vindicate divine justice. Again, the worse hell is the more it magnifies Christ's work, because it sets forth the hideousness of the fate from which he has saved even the elect. All have deserved it. Even the saints of the old covenant have entered its purlieus, and all who escape its utmost horrors are redeemed by Jesus' superlative achievements, which culminated in harrowing it. Hell more than death is thus the great leveller and evener where the great, rich, or famous in this life meet full compen- sation, so that it has a democratizing function. To it Christian hate and rage now consign their objects. It brought a new morbid fear relatively unknown to antiquity into the world, and it implanted a new shudder in sensitive nerves. If this nightmare has any redeeming feature, it is that it served in some sense a moral end. Its very delir- ium is deterrent from evil; and, crude as it is, it may have been needed in an age of corruption such as had undermined the nations and races of antiquity. At the height of its obsession it was vastly more defined, real, and variegated than heaven ever was; and although modern culture claims to have outgrown it, still in times of panic, or revival- ism, as well as when we swear, it shows that we still feel it to be very real.
Rough and unkempt as the miracle plays were in form, they sounded the whole gamut of emotions as no art had ever done before. They played on every sentiment and passion of the human heart — love, hate, pity, terror, fear, and anger — ranging, as they did, from the zenith of pleasure to the nadir of pain. Hell, heaven, God, devil, birth, death, resurrection, immortality, beauty, ugliness, wis- dom, folly, wealth, poverty, disease, cruelty, murder, truth, lies — all were there, but not in the abstract form of allegory as human qualities came to be presented later in the Moralities. The human characters that represented these traits came to be so exclusively their embodi- ments that something like the purely abstract allegorical personages of the latter was inevitable. In the old animal epos each beast came to be more and more the incarnation of one characteristic; the lion of courage, the fox of cunning, the ass of stupidity, the wolf of cruelty, the lamb of peace and inoffensiveness, the serpent of slitheyness, the ant of industry and forethought, the turtle-dove of love, etc. In this way the role of each animal came to be more and more exclusively the expression of the trait it stood for. In the Mysteries each dramatis
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persona also tended more and more to become a personal embodiment of a single human trait. Judas was treachery; Pilate, shiftiness; Herod, cruelty; Peter, steadfastness; John, love and insight; Mary, ideal motherhood; Magdalene, the repentant sinner; Herodias, female malignity; the Pharisees and Sadducees, hypocrites and plotters; Thomas, the skeptic, and so on through the list. Indeed, animal symbolism was closely connected, not only with the four Evangelists, but with the personages and the incidents of many of the roles in the sacred drama. Thus it came that we have here the chief psychological traits of human nature and character, often in very extreme and typical form, and each playing his or her part in the great tragedy. This, I believe, goes far to explain what to most writers on the subject seems a mystery, viz., how the Morality plays could have arisen out of the Mysteries. On this view the transition from the latter into the former was long preformed and indeed inevitable; and although it was quite a step from the one to the other, the whole trend of the miracle plays was in that direction.
It is no wonder that the miracle plays, setting forth as they did in concrete objective form every essential interest, instinct, and desire of the human heart, should have had, as Jusserand says they did, an uninterrupted run of six centuries; and they were one of the chief forms of culture and amusement among the people of every Christian land. Often the populace, coming from great distances as they did to fairs, markets, and other festivities on holy days, would sit all day and sometimes several days, while their souls were not only undergoing an Aristotelian katharsis which is necessary to .give vent and exercise to the deeper emotions, but were cadenced and oriented in unison to the greatest things of life. Composite as was the authorship of many of these plays, despite their crudeness and their amazing anachronisms, their preposterous realism, and their occasional degeneration to horse- play, they had for the most part a dramatic unity hardly inferior to that of the antique or the Elizabethan drama. More yet, if the pop- ulace at last grew wonted and sometimes suffered ennui, it was these plays that prepared the psychic soil for the secular drama, so that be- fore the Reformation was able to frown them down they had given a range and freedom of movement, a zest and a kind of standard of in- terest which was later a great stimulus to the stage. There is a good deal of parallelism, both conscious and unconscious, between profane
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and sacred story in those days. Even Beowulf's adventures under-sea were only a secularized hell-harrowing; and when the Renaissance un- veiled antiquity again, the psychic acreage was already ploughed, ferti- lized, and made friable by the most propitious possible Vorfrucht, which had been sown for many generations at the three festivals of Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter, from the liturgy of which all the religious plays of the Middle Ages originated. Nearly all the great local types of mysteries, rich as some of them were in incident and es- pecially in variations so characteristic that the modern expert can pre- dict with some accuracy the locality in which any specimen of them was developed, made great use of the apocryphal Gospels and other Christian traditions. This gave great range, and richness, not to say raciness of treatment; for this material could be handled with more freedom than could the canon. The mysteries not only vastly aug- mented the dominion of the Church over the lives of men, but gave the humblest class a taste for the theatre, and its pageantry. So realistic was often this, divine tragedy that the very tension made relief in a touch of comedy here and there most grateful. But this never, es- pecially in England, was able to abate the reverence with which the divine personages were treated by the playwrights of the miracle cycles. The sublimity of the theme and the awe of the people toward the heavenly heroes that were introduced were so great that they could withstand the petty and clumsy treatment which was always sincere. Hence it was that, through these centuries of passion and of faith, the stupendous themes of sin, doomsday, hell-mouth, redemption, salva- tion, the awful fundamental conflict between the personified powers of light and darkness, good and evil, which raged not only through this but the upper and the nether world, thrilled and expanded Mansoul, and brought it into vital rapport with the master powers of life. Who shall say that beneath all our conscious beliefs or skepticisms we of to-day do not feel quintessential Christianity a little more than we should do but for the psychic attitudes which these spectacles helped to stamp upon the souls of our ruder forbears?1
(3) Jesus in Modern Literature, (a) Besides the setting in scene of incidents from Jesus' life inspired by ecclesiasticism and following the
■See, on the general subject of mysteries and moralities, J. L. Klein's great "Geschichte des Dramas," Bd. 12-13 K. Haase and H. Reidt have both written works entitled "Das geistliche Schauspiel des Mittelalters, the former being translated under the title, "Miracle Plays and Sacred Dramas," Boston, 1880, 273 p. See also two excellent works, "The English Religious Drama," by K. L. Bates, New York, 1909, 254 p., and "Plays of Our Forefathers and Some of the Traditions on Which They Are Founded," by C. M. Gayley, New York, 1907, 349 p. The University of California, Library Bulletin, No. 8, published in 1887 a 68-page pamphlet of titles on mysteries of the different countries in the different centuries. See too C. H. Gerould's "Saints'"Legencls, with its excellent bibliography, Boston, 1916. 39S p.
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Church calendar, there grew with the diffusion of printing a demand for a consecutive story of his life and the events antecedent to and sub- sequent upon it that could be read in quiet. This demand was largely met for centuries by "The Golden Legend." The craving for the miraculous was intense and widespread, and down almost to our own times the favourite literary setting for his life was transcendental and celestial events, personages, councils, etc. The rankest supernatural- ism abounded, even in Protestantism. The heavenly muse that in- spired the creative imagination in this field was given the utmost poetic license, and there was for a long time hardly a trace of the crit- ical spirit. All the best things that could be fancied must be true. Angels, demons, and even God and Satan not only appeared, but had much to say and do. Scenes were freely laid in heaven and hell, while pictorial art greatly reinforced this kind of creativeness, to compose and to read which aright the mind must pass into a kind of second, rapt, or ecstatic state. Indeed, the supernaturalism of the Gospels was increased rather than abated by many of these productions. In even non-Catholic countries this tendency is often highly developed, es- pecially in devotional literature.
"The Golden Legend"1 was compiled from many sources about 1275 by the Bishop of Genoa, who used for his purposes Saint Jerome's "Lives of the Saints," and Eusebius' "History," and when approach- ing his own age evidently compiled legends from many sources, oral and written. It seems to have fascinated Christendom; and the editor of the above edition tells us that "no other book was more frequently reprinted iDetween the years 1470 and 1520" than was one particular compilation of this legend, of which there were several. The first volume is mainly devoted to events of Jesus' life, and the other six to the fives of saints. It impressed the religious minds of the Middle Ages hardly less than the Gesta Romanorum did those in its field and age. Very likely the latter suggested it as it did the Acta Sanctorum of the Bolandists. It was a kind of vade mecnni of the Church, in which, however, everything takes its departure from some festal or sacred day.
It was a long step from "The Golden Legend" and its spirit to Klopstock's epic2 which begins just as Jesus retires from the multi- tude and ascends Mount Olivet. From here he sends Gabriel to offer his petitions to God, and the angel makes his way through all the suns
K)r "Lives of the Saints. As Englished by William Caxton." London, 1900, 7 Vol. »"The Messiah." 3d edition. London, 1778, a Vol.
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to the Most High and brings back a reassuring message. The argu- ment through all the ten books involves many characters, quite as many of them angelic as human, and much of the action occurs outside this earth. The tenth book closes when the angel of death flies down, bespeaks the Messiah and discovers to him the divine order. Only then does Jesus expire. It is a book of profound devotion and spir- ituality, and in it the imagination takes very lofty flights. Many Ger- mans regard it as an equal and perhaps a rival to Milton's "Paradise Lost. ' ' The author revived many obsolete incidents and the mechanisms of classical epics, although it is more superterrestrial than any of them.
Helle's "Jesus Messias," is a modern epic something like Klop- stock's, to which the writer devoted forty years. It was composed from a Catholic viewpoint. The customs, literature, scenery of Pal- estine, are very vividly reproduced. His volumes give us an exhaustive picture of Jesus from birth to death, stressing the celestial and infernal feature, however, less than does Klopstock.
"The Golden Legend" not only presentifies Jesus, but connects the items of the Gospels with Church days, establishing thus a closer unity between Jesus' life on the one hand and both hagiology and ecclesiasticism on the other. Klopstock sets forth the supermundane processes connected with the last two or three days of Jesus' life, end- ing with his death. All that is common between these is the rank supernaturalism in which the creative wish and imagination were given unlimited freedom. In this respect both are more closely related to the miracle cycles than to modern literary productions, to which they are also a link. It shows us here a precious domain of the soul long kept inviolate, in which the criterion of truth is impressiveness, and the things the heart craves are the truest of all.
Karl Weiser1 has written a dramatic poem. This was read at Weimar by the author before a collection of German literati who spoke in highest terms of it. He assumed that Protestants should have some- thing corresponding to the "Passion Play" of Ober-Ammergau, and hence brought all his characters upon the stage. The fourth part ends just after the crucifixion and burial, with a conversation in character between Judas, Peter, the Magdalene, John, and Thomas. In many words which the author puts into the mouth of Jesus he takes great liberty with the text, which he elsewhere carefully follows. His
•"Jesus: a drama in four parts, i. Herod, a. The Baptist, 3. The Saviour, 4. The Passion." Leipzig, 1905.
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theory is that the more emotional and dramatic an expression is, the more it can pass from prose into poetry. He admits that he has been inspired by Wagner. His great desire is to see his play staged in a large way, and he gives minute directions, even of the kind of persons to be chosen to play the leading parts. The dramatic quality of the play is high. It is reverent throughout, and nearly all the persons mentioned in the New Testament appear.
W. Nithack-Stahn1 has presented a five-act play following rather closely the Gospel narrative, and ending with the jubilant cry of the Magdalene, "He lives!" The play appears to be designed for actual production on the stage; but the circa fifty characters, the sacraments, and other sacred scenes will probably long prevent its actual presentation.
A Catholic writer2 makes Ahasuerus appear as the representative of the ancient Jewish faith, which expected the rule of the Messiah but rejected Jesus because he did not fulfil its ideals of him. The poem begins with the events of the last day of the kingdom of Antichrist and concludes with the return of Jesus as judge of the world. Some incidents, like the baptism of the hero, are very impres- sive. The vitality of Catholicism shows itself in many poems which indicate the profound impression which Jesus' life still makes upon believers. F. Bland, in an epic poem, celebrates Jesus as belonging to no time or race, but to the world, and is full of the inspiration caused by the contemplation of his character. His use of material is vig- orous and plastic, and many of his episodes are striking. H. Krep- lith's epic represents Jesus as not conscious of his power at first. It conceives him as impelled by a mystic but blind force from within. This suggests Spemann's "The Renaissance of Jesus," which is also in sharpest opposition to liberal studies. S. Lagerlof's "Christ Leg- ends" owe their charm to the skill with which the traditional material is animated and modernized by the author's vivid imagination. The same may be said in a very different way of Hugo Salus's "Christa," who was a beauty, the feminine counterpart of Jesus, who died on the other side of the world at the same time that Jesus died on the cross. But at the end of the great day those on the other hemisphere will migrate to this, and in the union of Christa and Christ the kingdom of beauty and love will be established forever. R. H. Benson's little
»"Das Christusdrama." Berlin, 1912, 15a p. a "The Eternal Jew."
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mystery play is very simple, and typical of many others. It was written in honour of the Nativity, and has been produced at convents with the design of reviving under modern conditions something of the effectiveness that attached to these plays centuries ago.
The anonymous author (probably J. Jacobs) of "As Others Saw Him" (Boston, 1895, 217 p.), invents one long letter that fills his book that purports to have been written by Ben Zadok, a Jewish scribe at Alexandria, scholar in Greek and Hebrew, and later a member of the Sanhedrin. His letter, addressed to a friend at Corinth, affects throughout the tone of an impartial observer. It opens on the court of the Gentiles just after Jesus had expelled the money-changers. He is described as a short, sturdy man in rustic garb, with broken finger- nails, who immediately after the expulsion talks tenderly to a little child while the crowd taunt him as "manzier" or bastard, which charge plays an important role. Jesus appears as a wheelwright, and homilist, surrounded by a strange train of people and heterae, and one who had no name save " dog of dogs." This scene so impressed Ben Zadok that he instituted an inquiry about his death, having himself seen the crosses at a distance. He criticizes his countrymen for allowing Jesus to be slain, because he was ' ' probably one of the best of our sages, ' ' nor can he under- stand why the Greeks condemned Socrates, who was just as much their idol, to the hemlock. Indeed, they were worse; for they condemned Socrates only after he had spoken his whole mind, whereas the Jews con- demned a greater one who had been arrogantly silent. " Oh, Jesus, why didst thou not show thyself to thy people in thy true character?"
W. Schuyler1 gives an ingenious and interesting story in the form of letters written by prominent Romans who were in personal contact with Christ. The hero is Claudius, pro-consul in Judea, a rich, wild, dissipated Roman nobleman and soldier who had been a lover of the Magdalene. In the first chapter he finds her changed, devoted to Jesus, cool to him. He at first deems her insane, and pursues her, but vainly. He is devoted to circuses, feasts, and dancing girls, but is constantly hearing of Jesus, to whom his favourite servant allies himself. He hears the Baptist preach, and is tempted by Herod's bewitching daughter, Salome, with whom he falls in love, to kill John for her; but she finds another way, and there is a ghastly scene when the head is brought in. Vast multitudes follow Jesus, and the air is full of rumours
i" Under Pontius Pilate." New York, 1906, 353 p.
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of his wonders. Claudius and his friend Lucius summon the Stoic philosophers to resist the influence of the Nazarene. The former conducts a military expedition against the robber band of Barabbas, and on his return finds himself a leper, and thus an outcast. He is piously nursed by the Magdalene, meets Paul when he is a persecutor, is finally healed by Jesus just after he had raised Lazarus, and his proud spirit is subdued. The last scenes in the life of Jesus are dra- matically described. In an epilogue Mary tells Claudius in ecstasy that the Master has risen, and in the end he resigns his office and is about to follow Mary and the rest to Galilee to meet the risen one.
Perley P. Sheehan: "The Seer." New York, 191 2, 324 p. A wan- dering evangelist, "professor" (of flute playing), Oath/commonly called "the prophet," a man of little education, with a sad love-story behind him which is also woven into the narrative, preached a kind of Christian Science gospel that there was no sin or pain and that God was all love. Wonderful success attended his work. He had great magnetic power and won wide fame as a healer of many diseases. After preaching in small places he goes to a large city, buys and fills a circus tent, charms money out of gamblers and saloonkeepers, develops antagonisms on the part of orthodoxy, becomes a rather active socialist, and at length be- lieves himself to be in a peculiar sense a reincarnation of Christ, and is finally shot in a great strike. Some of his traits and incidents in his career are strongly suggestive of Slatter and especially Dowie.1
(b) Another class of more or less free literary renderings of the Gospel story arose from the demand for a consecutive narrative of the chief events and perhaps teachings of Jesus' life, which unlike the Gospel harmony should (1) avoid all repetitions; (2) fill out gaps left by the synoptists and connect what was there often abruptly broken off and disconnected; (3) establish some kind of relation with events and persons, real or imaginary, who were contemporary with Jesus, many of these writers adding only such material as is necessary to close up the joints in the paraphrasing of the Scripture. This class of literature might be arranged on various gradients such as: (a) the
'Henry Van Dyke: "The Lost Boy." New York, Harper, 69 p. This is a rather trivial tale as if hastily whacked together for Sunday-school purposes. The atmosphere of the book is not antique in any scholarly sense and it is hard to see the raison d'Ure of such a book. John Masefield: "Good Friday." New York, Macmillan, 1016. A dramatic poem of 64 pages. It has little action, but consists mainly of dialogues with Pilate and discussions concerning the char- acter of Jesus; Rev. J. H. Ingraham: "The Prince of the House of David." Any good edition; S. C. Brad- ley: "Jesus of Nazareth." Boston, Sherman, French, igo8; Marie Corelli: "Barabbas." Any good edition; Mabel C. Birchenough: "Jesus the Carpenter of Nazareth"; Olive Schreiner: "Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland." New York, Little, 1912; William Ware: "Julian; or Scenes in Judea." New York, Warne, 1912; Bruce Barton: "A Young Man's Jesus." Boston, 1914, 233 p.; H. Begbie: "The Happy Christ." 1906, 104 p.
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degree in frequency with which Jesus appears, for he is sometimes the central figure about which everything revolves, and in other cases does not appear at all, but he is talked of, perhaps his voice is heard, or others on the stage see him, etc. ; (b) how far his teachings are given in Gospel language, or merely paraphrased or sedulously excluded save by implication, as they are by some; (c) how many extraneous events and persons are introduced, for here we find differences ranging all the way from nil to an adventitious story which comes in the end to attract chief interest; (d) how much history of that age, archaeology, ancient geography, customs, etc., are represented, and how truly; (e) how complete is the story from the beginning to the end of Jesus' career, or how much focalization upon special incidents; (/") how much of the narrative is meant to be fact, and how much of it is fanciful, doctrinal, devotional, psychological; (g) how much is the pure work of creative imagination, and how much real critical scholarship is brought to bear, so that the author's own contribution can be considered a legitimate scientific hypothesis. The many recent works in this field vary widely in all these directions, and it is sometimes, as we shall see, hard to conceive in what proportion the author mixes critical scholar- ship with purely literary imagination and assumption. The follow- ing illustrate these tendencies.
J. Sharts1 starts in splendid style with rich Oriental setting. Prince Hyrcanus, the central figure, is a pretender to the crown; a marvel of physical vigour; reckless, wild, debauched, seizing women, slaying men. He is attended by a Herculean supporter, Barabbas, and by the clever dwarfed camel-driver, Nadab. With the latter he visits in disguise Salome, to whom he reveals the secret of his hate against the Romans and his intended revolt, and she promises assistance. Incidentally there is reference to the multitude that follow the Nazarene dreamer who proclaims the Kingdom of God for poor captives. A beauty whom he had met and pursued recklessly, dropping down upon her in the midst of her companions from the roof, he is told is a common woman of the town. Shealtiel, his rich and powerful host, and his dissolute son, Phaleon, strive to induce him to marry their daughter and sister, Bernice, who will none of him, and when forced to dance in his presence distorts her face so that when she unmasks all are horrified. Mean- while Salome had transferred her affections to Aristobulus, who she
i"The King Who Came." IQ13, 298 p.
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thought had a better chance of winning, and had torn out Nadab's tongue and one of his eyes. Hyrcanus in desperation penetrates Salome's camp by night, slays her eunuch guardian, and takes her to Nadab to torture her as he pleases in revenge; but he finally decides to set her free, and Hyrcanus, who is entering on regeneration, con- sents. His chief supporter, Barabbas, is captured. Hyrcanus wit- nesses many of the events of the last days of Our Lord, such as his entrance to Jerusalem, and plans a release of Barabbas, which is otherwise effected. Finally, in the garden of Gethsemane, he meets again the little maid of Siloam whom he had pursued, who proves to be Bernice. They witness the trial of Jesus, listen to the parable of the householder who planted a vineyard and travelled far, and after Jesus' death they are converted and betrothed, and he learns that Jesus, his rival for the Kingdom, deliberately rejected the weapons of force and fear.
J. Breckenridge Ellis1 describes two Jewish families, neighbours, the one Sadducee and the other Pharisee, who have nothing to do with each other. But the former has a nephew, Adnah, and the latter a daughter, Miriam, who meet by the accident of a hole in the wall. Adnah's uncle, Iddo, leaves him in a cave with a leper, hoping he will die, but he escapes, aided by a messenger from Miriam. He finds his cruel uncle, Iddo, bound, and as he is about to slay him finds that the crimes he has been told his father committed were really com- mitted by Iddo, whom he resolves to starve to death. One day, how- ever, he hears Jesus preach, blessing the poor in spirit, mourners, etc. His anger melts and he releases Iddo, asking his pardon, blessing his name, and repeating the Lord's Prayer over him. Iddo, too, is melted, and they are reconciled. Later, however, his old evil spirit returns to Iddo and, accusing Adnah of stealing, he sells him to a slave shepherd for three hard years, until he is finally sold as a gladiator in Capernaum. In the arena he fights his father, whom he has thought dead, and who pretends to be overcome by his son; and when the crowd turn down their thumbs and demand Adnah to kill him, Iddo intervenes and is slain himself. While Pilate reads Iddo's confession, the gladiator is freed and weds Miriam. Iddo had conquered himself through the influence of Jesus.
M. G. Shine2 describes two Jewish children, Phineas and his
'"Adnah, a Tale of the Time of Christ." London, 1907. •"Jacob, a Lad of Nazareth." Chicago, 1915, 342 p.
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sister Ednah, and gives in popular wise a picture of their lives as chil- dren, associating with Jesus, who was of their own age, their instruc- tion under Rabbi Nathan, and the incipiency of a love relation be- tween Jacob and his cousin Julia. There is much talk about Jesus and his appearance in the temple, and later his stilling the tempests. He often appears, but ineffectively, doing and saying little. Jacob, however, is slowly won over to Jesus, and in his allegiance is followed by Julia, and both are greatly impressed by the sermon on the mount. Jacob falls down unconscious when he hears of Jesus' condemnation to be crucified, but revives on the third morning after the crucifixion, about the time Jesus does, and is taken to the disciples, who restore his sight. Full now of faith rather than despair, he goes to Galilee, and finally sees Jesus ascend.
Mrs. L. D. Avery-Stuttle1 has written a life of Jesus based ex- actly upon the Gospels, but with many incidents and characters of her own imagination to give a setting to the story. Jesus nowhere ap- pears, but his deeds and sayings are the theme of most of the con- versations of the book. Even other personages in the New Testament are rarely seen or heard, but the story is placed in the mouths of in- conspicuous or invented persons. Many of the conversations seem rather trivial, as do some of the letters, e. g., from Martha to Adah of Nain. The author deserves some credit for not magnifying the role of Magdalene beyond bounds. The description of some of the miracles, like walking on the sea and raising Lazarus, are given by those who see them with the utmost naivete and an almost convincing verisimilitude. The same is true of the Resurrection and the Ascension.
W. W. Cooley2 gives little more than a paraphrase of Scripture, using the apostle Thomas and his life as a thread on which to string the various incidents. His honest doubt is made the focus of all the development there is in the story. Cooley makes a virtue of putting into the mouth of the Saviour no word not recorded in the Scripture, but he does show new effects of these words upon the acts and lives of the people of whom he tells us. So thin is the thread of fiction run- ning through the book that it can hardly be called a novel. The au- thor's reverence for his subject prevents him from giving the story any romantic attractiveness. There is nothing that can be called a plot, and everything is subordinated to the central figure, Christ.
'"Shiloh; the Man of Sorrows." ioi<|, 377 p. 8 "Emmanuel; the Story of the Messiah." 1889.
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Max Ehrmann's drama1 sought to present a desupernaturalized Christianity. As the play opens, during the Passover a crowd is discussing the Messiah. Some think him possessed of a devil. He enters the city on an ass and goes to the temple, where his friends fight with and drive out the tradesmen. The priests seek to confound and discredit him before the crowd with their puzzles of the greatest commandment and taxes to Caesar. The great scene is when the adulteress is dragged before him. Jesus orders a pile of stones brought, declares under the protest of many that she must be stoned, but finally cries, "Halt, only the sinless must cast the stones." No one appears, and the people make great sport that even the high priest does not throw a stone. The third act is in Gethsemane, where the disciples gossip of the Kingdom and Jesus retires to pray. John sees a white figure, and hears a voice conversing with Jesus. Judas hopes his betrayal will force Jesus to reveal himself. Pilate refuses to con- demn Jesus because he is not proven to be a murderer, and takes him home privately for cross-examination. He tells the people he is only a dreamer, and if a king, only a king of fools; that many young men feel called of God. The putting on the crown of thorns and the purple robe are made very cruel, for all file past Jesus and strike him, demand- ing a sign. In the last act the body is removed lest it be stolen. Joseph reviews Jesus' life, and Mary and her lover, Terreno, enter, she refusing his costly presents, wanting no earthly love, tense, fancying that she hears voices, that she sees something in the tomb. She is given a handkerchief which she thinks has Jesus' blood on it, and will not be calmed by Terreno, but finally cries out that she sees Jesus, falls on her knees, and declares herself unworthy. Terreno says she is mad, and that there is nothing in sight, while she cries out, "Joanna, Peter, John, I have seen him; he has come out of the tomb."
Mary Austin2 has written a fantastic but original little sketch which begins with midnight on the morning of the Resurrection when the soul of Jesus begins to swing up from "point to point of conscious- ness on successive waves of pain." Now he is carried well on toward recovery, and anon dragged back by the clutch of the pit. But by degrees his state becomes more like that of waking. Memory begins to ply, and first he recalls the pang of losing all human support, the
'"Jesus; a Passion Play." New York, 1915.
2"The Green Bough; a Tale of the Resurrection." New York, 1013, 43 P-
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sleep of his disciples; and so, pain by pain, he picks out other mem- ories, the nails, cross, etc., though often his wounds cause him to drop back. At length he realizes the old trek toward God, and that he is not dead and was not forsaken. He sits up, touches the stones of the tomb, lays off the grave-clothes. He finds that the stone slides along its grooves under his pressure; he finds figs and water; he washes, dons the gardener's cloak, and lays hold of God as never before. He sees the women peering, hears the voice of Magdalene weeping, who finally knows him, and through her he appoints a rendezvous with his dis- ciples in Galilee. They break bread together and at last are led to believe him real. In the hills is an anchorite's hut which few know and which Jesus now makes his home, for rest and recovery, rarely seeing any and never but few, seeking to get close to nature and to rest. On the last interview, walking a little way with his friends, he passes "up a hill trail toward his chosen place and the mountain mists receive him." Expecting him long in vain, his friends said, after the manner of that country, that he had ascended, and finally it came to be re- ported that they had seen him do so. They looked for him every day and thought they saw him in every stranger.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and her husband, H. D. Ward1, make Lazarus and Zahara, daughter of the high priest, hero and heroine of a melodramatic love story. The former is the head workman whom the priest employs to make changes about the temple, and in this function he sees Zahara, and both love on the instant. Her seclusion and char- acter make her ready for any adventure, and they often meet in secret. Zahara's "shallop" is wrecked, and she is brought unconscious to land over leagues, by Jesus, who carries her, and walks on the water. He leaves her in the care of Lazarus, who has barely saved himself. On recovering she persists, against his protest, in regarding Lazarus as her saviour, and tells her father so, who in gratitude offers him the hospitality of his house, which the clandestine and guilty lovers abuse to the limit, excusing themselves for not marrying by a social dis- parity. In the last scene the priest causes the underground passages of the temple which the lovers must pass to be flooded. While they flounder the priest appears and saves her, but will not save Lazarus, whom she drags to land. He revives, but relapses later and dies, commending Zahara to his sisters, thus betraying their relation. After
•"Come Forth." New York, 1801, 318 p.
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four days we have a very scriptural account of his resurrection, and he and Zahara are united. He will not tell the secrets of the grave. They had disagreed about Jesus, and she had promised to believe only if she saw the dead raised as she saw Lazarus. In this tawdry story Jesus is made to save the heroine from death by a miracle twice, al- most as if the miracle was to bring the lovers together. There is no vestige of any scriptural Lazarus save the name.
Paul Heyse1 wrote a powerful drama showing the effect of Jesus' character upon different persons, although he does not appear. Judas came to Jesus as a patriot, hoping he would free the Jews from Rome. He, like Flavius, nephew of Pilate, is a lover of the wealthy dissolute beauty, Mary, whose life is notoriously given to luxury and pleasure. She comes to Flavius' house to hear the Nazarene preach in an adja- cent garden, and venturing too near the crowd, is recognized and stoned, but is saved by Jesus' saying, " Who is without sin," etc. This converts Mary. She renounces her lover Judas, who is enraged against his former master, Jesus, because he does not establish an earthly kingdom, and his betrayal is to force him to do so. Flavius, also now spurned by Mary, promises to have him freed if she will again accept him. She longs to save Jesus without this terrible sacrifice, and puts him off. Either she must sin again, or her new master must die. Judas, too, enters, tells of his betrayal, wishes her to flee with him or die at his hand. She decides to save Jesus at all costs. Flavius comes first for his answer and she starts to go with him, but sees over the door an image of Christ's face and hears his reproving voice. She falls fainting, but saved. In the last act we see the effects of Jesus' death. Judas is crazed. Haran calls the crucifixion butchery. Flavius chides the high priest because, when he heard his words of pardon, he knew Jesus was a God. "He was victor in this battle, and not you or your dark deity of wrath." Mary proclaims that she and Flavius caused the death of Christ, and is ordered home. Flavius protects her, declaring that they did not destroy Christ, but that it was his will to die and none could save him. Mary was rescued by Jesus from despair to hope, and the power of Jesus' personality is everywhere magnetic. The idea is not that Jesus died because Mary would not betray herself, but that her thought that she could rescue him was fantastic.
'"Mary of Magdala." Trans., New York, 1003.
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Maeterlinck1 develops a similar psychological situation. Mary comes to the villa of Silanus complaining that her jewels were stolen by vagrant Nazarenes, whose leader is a plunderer, but Silanus insists that he is a good man of peace. A man with rolling eyes passes who has just been cured of blindness, and hosts of sick and crippled throng about a house near Mary's to be healed. When Mary's group ap- proach too near they are identified by the Roman toga, mobbed, and saved by Jesus' magic voice. In the second act, Mary's lover, Verus, a friend of Pilate, notices that she has a new soul. Mary declares Jesus has taken possession of her life, and has to allay Verus' jealousy. A messenger tells of Jesus' resurrection of a dead man, and they infer that to do this he must be "stronger than our gods." Lazarus, just raised, goes by toward Jesus, and Mary seeks to follow him, but is held back. Verus doubts her protests that she still loves him. In the third act many testify of cures, Jesus passes bound and scourged, the sounds of the blows are heard. Mary enters dishevelled, having been rebuffed by Roman officials with whom she had pleaded for Jesus' life. She denounces the crowd as cowardly because they will not rescue him, nor will she believe that he wishes to die. She adjures Verus to lead the work of rescue, with the crowd, which he loathes. He can save the Nazarene, but if he does so he will lose Mary, who will neither sacrifice him nor her own new life. She refuses to give to Verus all that Jesus has given to her. The noise of Jesus falling is heard outside. Verus for the last time calls Mary to flee, and she refuses, while the multitude outside cry, " Crucify him! "
E. S. Brooks2 makes the central character of his story Bar-Asha, a proud prince whose retinue meets Roman soldiers, one of whom in a quarrel he stabs. He is brought to Pilate, and thence to Herod, who invites all to a great festival, seating Bar-Asha at his right. But at a certain point he throws his cup in his face; and then, when his victim retaliates, he is killed. But Jesus raises him from the dead. He then sets forth to find the Messiah, meets many travellers who tell of him, and among them Amina, the lustful but divorced wife of Herod, who seeks to woo him. He also meets Judas, who tells of his impatience at Jesus' delay, and also Adah, daughter of Jairus, who also, like him, had been raised from the dead, and is a foil to the seductive Amina. He also
^'Mary Maedalene." Trans., New York, ioio. '"A Son of Issachar." New York, 1890.
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meets Vettius, the victorious centurion, whom he tells of Judas' s plan of rousing a rebellion against the Romans, so that the Messiah's kingdom will be set up. He is therefore stabbed by Bar-Asha, who in the dis- guise of Judas goes to Cassarea, and for his treason is exposed to the lions, overcomes them, and so is freed by his knifemen. In the sequel the pure love of Adah for Bar-Asha triumphs over that of Amina.
Vergilius1 is a splendid Roman youth, favourite of the Emperor Augustus, in love with Arria, whom the dissolute Antipater, son of Herod, also loves. To his dismay, Vergilius is sent by the Emperor to Jerusalem for two years, to gather all he can concerning the rumours of the new king, and he and Arria part with grief. In Jerusalem he is magnificently received and attends the secret conclave in darkness where the new regime is discussed. He is tempted by Salome, daughter of the king, whom he flouts, and who therefore turns to Manius for vengeance. Plots thicken about Vergilius, and even the Emperor at home withdraws his consent to his marriage with Arria, till she and her brother flee to Jerusalem. We have plots, barbaric festivals, and gladiatorial combats between Antipater and Vergilius, in which the latter is wounded by accident, thrust into a lion's den, and kills the lion. A beautiful slave girl chants of the expected new king as she is torn by beasts. The aged Simeon sings of the fulfilment of prophecy, and just as Vergilius and Manius are about to fight a duel, there is a great glow in the sky, and a voice calls, " Where is he that is born King of the Jews? " A star appears and grows; the world seems on tiptoe of expectation. As they see in a cave " a beautiful young maiden, a child upon her breast," their hearts grow soft, and instead of fighting the two rivals clasp hands in friendship. All would pluck evil from their hearts. They realize that they have found the expected king, and set out for Rome to proclaim his advent. The story opens with much admirable archaeology, but grows somewhat clumsy and careless as it proceeds.
Stephen Phillips2 produced a play which had much success in London, and which has only allusions to the work and death of Jesus, the slaughter of the Innocents, etc. The plot describes the intense and fatuous love of Herod for Mariamne, his queen. His jealousy of the young and languid high priest, her brother, Aristobulus, is such that he has him secretly slain. When the wife discovers the agent of
'"Vergilius, a Tale of the Coming of Christ," by Irving Bacheller. New York, 1904. 2"Herod; a Tragedy." New York, 1900.
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her brother's death her love turns to hate and aversion, till finally by evil counsellors Herod is persuaded in a moment of resentment to allow her to be slain. In the last act her body is brought upon the stage, he is overwhelmed with grief, and the curtain falls upon him in a cataleptic daze, regarding her mummified corpse.
A. Wilbrandt's drama, "Hiran," centres about a Syrian prophet who appears at Antioch, in 24 b. c. Over against heathenism and its gorgeous ceremonial Diagoras proclaims knowledge of the way of sal- vation and curses his fallen daughter, Lysilla. Hiran, on the other hand, proclaims love of man, and loves the outcast daughter, who becomes his convert. He himself later becomes a fanatical devotee of heathenism.
In his "John" Sudermann presents the tragic death of the Bap- tist; and although Jesus does not appear, he is made the cause of a wondrous change in John, who is first a relentless judge of sin and the herald of the Messiah, whom he describes solely in the popular terms of a militant hero. Later, however, he changes his point of view under the influence of Jesus, and preaches a gospel of forgiveness and of love above the law. It is in this mood that John dies triumphantly, while halleluiahs to the Messiah entering Jerusalem are heard, and Herod with great apprehension ventures to look upon the scene of Jesus' triumph.
D. Greimer's dramatic poem, "Jesus," deals charade-wise with many incidents, selecting by preference those with lyric value, Judas having the most prominent place and Jesus being characterized in long recitations.
Sudermann's "Jesus," too, consists of a series of scenes and word pictures in plain prose, which are often preachy. Like Weiser he has Jesus meet a German, and together they draw up a parallel between Balder and Jesus. The chorus of children at the close seems tasteless and tawdry.
So in Baumann's drama, " Christus," the root idea is that accord- ing to the previous plan and decree of God the Father and of Wodin, Christ appeared again in this world in the person of Odin. Here, too, should be mentioned Longfellow's "Christus." In works like Kingsley's "Hypatia," Wallace's "Ben Hur," Ware's "Aurelian," and Pater's "Marius," Jesus is only felt as an influence.
For literature even more than for painting the Magdalene rivals the Holy Mother in attractiveness. The sins and repentance of the
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former are a hardly less fascinating theme for recent writers than was the virginity of the latter for the apocryphal authors. The one is the typical female convert. The other was born pure and sinless. The one loves Jesus as a woman loves a man, but with a passion that is sublimated and spiritualized, while the other loves him with a pure and fervent maternal affection. Jesus' love for his mother is never ar- dently filial, as if not only extra-canonical but even canonical writers had a deep instinctive dread of any intimation of an Oedipus complex, which, especially in view of the disparity in the ages of his parents, he might be suspected of. To the devotion of the Magdalene he is usually represented as cold and even oblivious, while if he shows a trace of any natural inclination it is only to the third Mary of the house- hold of Lazarus, but this is represented as purely Platonic.1
iDr. H. C. Grumbine, who has read this chapter, kindly allows me to print the following from his own exhaustive study of the subject of Jesus in literature, which is to appear later.
Browning's "Pippa Passes" tells of a poor silk weaving girl who tries to make the most of her one holiday in the year, and as she passes, singing, changes the inner life of four others, first of Ottima and her paramour, who just after their guilty hour hear her chanting "God's in his heaven — All's right with the world!" She then passes the house of the sculptor Jules whose one passion is to create a soul which he thought he had found in his model Phene, but after his marriage found she had none. He hears Pippa sing of the idealizing power of love and so is prompted to make a soul in Phene. To Luigi, whose heroic plan of a regicide to free Italy is drooping, she sings of a great and just king of long ago, and this reinforces his high resolve. Fourth, at night her pure song of flowers saves another offender. Of all the good she has done and all the evil she has barely escaped, she is naively ignorant. To-morrow she will work in the silkmill. The similarity between Pippa and the "Third Floor Back" is obvious. In H. S. Harrison's "V. V.'s Eyes" we have a physician with a self-sacrificing love of humanity, and with a hypnotic power in his eyes. Other poems of Browning have the same thing, viz., "The Death in the Desert," which portrays John at the moment of death in a cave after years of persecution. On account of his great age and his nearness, through the thinness of the physical veil, to divinity, where the future is as to-day, he anticipates and meets certain modern denials of Christ's existence and miraculous power. "The Epistle of Karshish" sets forth a half skeptical, half credulous mood in which an Arab physician journeys through Palestine soon after the resurrection of Lazarus, in the form of a letter to his former preceptor. Lazarus' resurrection is the central theme and is treated skeptically and yet in the end the author confesses to a mysterious feeling that the miracle-worker may after all be divine. "Mr. Sludge, the Medium," while severe on spiritism, also criticises the mental sleight of hand Christians use to create faith. His "Christmas-Eve" describes a shabby, dissenting meeting-house and half-cretinous congregation, and it shows the poet's disgust and flight in aesthetic panic into the wet night. Shelley's novel, "Frankenstein," is a picture of the superman before that word came into vogue. The Cambridge Library of English Literature, volume XII, page 977, cites the dreary succession of religious novels which were a result of the Oxford Movement, compiled by W. H. Hutton, B. D. Others were Newman's "Loss and Gain" and "Callista"; Wiseman's "Fabiola"; C. M. Yonge's "The Heir of Redcliffe"; and "The Little Duke." W. B. Yeats's "The Hour-Glass" dramatizes the thesis that in an age of doubting savants the saving faith in im- mortality remains only with fools and that at the hour of death only is vision into immortality clarified. H. A. Jones's "Michael and His Lost Angel" has a motif not unlike Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter." viz., that of the troubles of a clergyman. _ Here he develops a passion for a married woman, resigns his splendid living, immerses himself in Roman monasticism in Italy, but to no avail, for when she follows him and dies there in his arms, he vows himself hers, body and soul, forever. Perhaps the play is meant to oppose the claims of religion to the claims of naturalism. J. M. Synge's "The Well of the Saints" is full of Irish humour, tells of a blind couple restored to sight by the saints but who lapsed to blindness again and would not be cured a second time, preferring their pleasant dreams about reality to their crushing disappointment in the reality itself. It is a happy complement of Maeterlinck's "The Blind." The theme of both is faith. " Give me visions of blind faith rather than the sordid reality." W. V. Moody's "The Faith- Healer" is a drama not unlike that of B jornson's " Beyond Human Power." in that the hero is a miracle-worker. Shel- ley's "Prometheus Unbound" dramatized the proposition that a God of nate and vengeance must eventually be van- quished by a God of love. Mrs. Ward's "Robert Elsmere" and "The Case of Richard Meynell" suggest Frenssen's Holyland" in that both would effect a compromise between the old and the new. In Ibsen's "Brand," the hero's church is among the far north fisher-folk, steeped in convention and worldliness. To them religion is apart from life, while Brand desires to carry the spirit of Sunday into the rest of the week, and sets about it with indomitable wilL To him law is supreme and will must obey it. Christ is the embodiment of duty, the personation of the law. As his supreme act was sacrifice, so Brand will strip himself of everything and make the world imitate him. His motto is "Nothing or all" or fulfilment to the letter. In this spirit he will rebuild the church and refashion the world. Per- fection is the goal and sacrifice is the path. But he has often to encounter the spirit of compromise and is held up in the mist of snowy mountains. He struggles with a peasant over treacherous snows and crevices on an errand of mercy and at last, at the most dangerous point, the peasant demurs and can go no farther. He turns back. The girl may die but for him but Brand pushes on, glad to lose his life if need be. So it is when Brand encounters the devotees of beauty and pleasure, but here he wins a convert, Agnes, who follows him on a frail boat across a dangerous sea to succor one in need. There follows a series of similar situations, especially when Brand's mother, who had acquired a fortune, comes to him for his blessing and he requires her to put away her wealth, and so she dies without his ministra- tion. Agnes follows him to the sunless corner of his mountain parish. Here their son dies and Brand takes this sorrow as a means of grace to bring him nearer the heart of God. Agnes, however, clings to her earthly affection, and when a gypsy-beggar is driven to their house on Christmas. Agnes cannot give her the garments her child wore save by Brand's repeated commands. But when she at last gives the last memento, her heart affirms that her own son is in heaven and that she will soon go there. Brand pushes on his new church with its motto "All or nothing." The multitude comes to dedicate it, and the people wish a less rigorous law, but his eloquence persuades them. He calls them to follow
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(c) In a group of works somewhat distinct we have depictions of doubt and belief in the various aspects of their struggle, one with another, in which now the one and now the other triumphs. Not Jesus himself, but his cause and doctrine, are made the centre of in- terest. The leading character sometimes tries to live out, and in some cases to write out, the life of Jesus as he personally has come to con- ceive it in modern conditions, or else he reaches a negative attitude. Of both processes we are often given an account of the stages and moti- vations. These works are of very high significance because they show how earnest, able, cultivated, free minds to-day really regard Chris- tianity, and what they conceive its effects to be upon the community. They are not merely literary artists, but also seekers, and feel them- selves called as leaders in the field of literature to take and define for others a position upon the supremest of culture questions. They repeatedly say that every serious soul should develop his own inter- pretation of Jesus. Certainly no more profitable or stimulating read- ing could be suggested for young men whose minds are circumnutating to find support for a religious ethical view of the world, and who feel the necessity of taking an attitude toward Jesus. Among the best and most representative of these works are the following:
Tolstoi in his "Confessions" says that at the very height of his fame he was suddenly smitten with the question what life really means. Seeking an answer in science and then in the common faith of ortho- doxy in vain, he decided on suicide, but found by chance a peasant who revealed to him the true method of giving life meaning and ac- ceptability. From him he learned that it was not evil thoughts but an evil life that withheld men from knowledge of truth and God. This truth he found set forth in the Gospels, especially in the sermon on the mount, and so applied himself to their study and the realiza- tion of the life they taught. Tolstoi gives no plastic description of Jesus' personality, because this is less important than his precepts. The root of all is, "Resist not evil"; and in drawing the extreme con- sequences of this injunction he finds the basis for judging all of life, civil, political, cultural. In other works1 he describes his long quest
him to the peaks where one after another falters, and some call him a fool. He presses on till an avalanche buries him and the crowd denounce him as a fool but a voice from heaven cries " He is the god of love." Other more common references are Milton's "Paradise Lost" and "Regained"; Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress"; Taylor's "Holy Living and Dying"; Browning's "The Ring and the Book"; Tennyson's "In Memoriam," "The Idylls of the King"; Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger"; Lowell's "The Vision of Sir Launfal"; William Morris's "The Earthly Paradise"; Chur- chill's "The Inside of the Cup"; Harold Monro's "A Song at Dawn"; Lascelle Abercrombie's "The New God." l"The Resurrection," New York, 191 1, and "My Religion," New York, 1899, 202 p.
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for the right way, which cannot be found in the Church, but in living from within and filling the here and now with the maximum of life. Five precepts he now finds basal: "Be not angry; avoid adultery; take no oaths; do not resist violence, and make no war; and do not judge, and thus do not serve on juries." The Son of Man is reason and the inner life rather than a transcendental person. This is man's essence, and it was this that arose from the dead. All in the world that teaches this is a fragment of the true Gospel. Brahmins and prophets, Confucius, Epictetus, and other sages realized it, but less completely than Jesus. All good things in socialism and communism, charity, liberty, are broken lights of the eternal gospel of service, which is the only way by which one can feel unity with the world and with mankind. The quintessence of the sermon on the mount in Mat. v, 38-39, is directly in the teeth of Nietzsche's morality; indeed, most of the institutions of modern life are upon a principle directly opposed to that of Jesus. He wished peace and love of enemies. He would have all work and existing financial and social distinctions abolished. The existing order does not give true inner liberty, for nothing could be more unnatural than for men to believe they are bad through the sin of another, viz., Adam, and that they are made good through the merit of another, viz., Christ.
K. Gutzkow1 describes a skeptical, cultivated young woman, reared in Christianity, but who has come to doubt it and be very intent upon the problem of what life means, so that not only she but all about her are troubled by her importunity. She falls in love with a complacent optimist who strives to teach her the wisdom of giving way to one's desires. In her perplexity, at one stage she falls back on and takes great comfort in Christianity, but in the end comes to feel that there is no peace till the will to live has been completely denied, as Schopenhauer taught. At her death she leaves a confessional "Pilgrim's Progress" of this peregrination of her soul.
Paul Heyse2 sets forth a very vivid contrast between the simple Christian faith of an old artist, mentally and physically short-sighted or lacking in perspective, called from his work the "Zaunkonig," and two typical children of the world — his daughter Leah, by a Jewish mother, and a somewhat Hegelian student, Edwin. The latter re-
'"Wally die Zweiflerin." Jena, 1903. *"The Children of the World." 1894.
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volts at Christian superstition, which he regards as cultivated Greeks did the tales of Homer and Hesiod, and condemns theology as a foul stream in which the world's dirty linen has been washed for cen- turies. It is a dam built of crumbling ruins of an old civilization athwart the trend of modern life, which men are always having to patch and which needs to be supplanted by a new religion in the sense of Lessing's "Nathan the Wise." When Leah's father finds what Edwin is teaching his daughter and how her faith is crumbling, he discharges him, but is greatly impressed by discovering her diary in which she reveals all her doubts and how she has confessed for her father's sake to many things which her deeper nature denies. The tutor and his pupil still meet and talk, the chief theme of their dialogue being the unreality of the Christian life and the excessive stress it lays upon the future, which kills the life of the present, and thus, by anticipating and never realizing the here and now, saps the joy of life. When Edwin's brother, a real saint, though an unbeliever, dies and the pastor declares that he was not in the fold, his brother eloquently eulogizes him; and in the last scene the lovers pass a church and ask whether after all the simple and childlike faith which is being cele- brated in it may not be happiness for some. They still, however, declare that for themselves all life, truth, service, are in the present, and refuse to accept Christianity because it deals only in futures.
Peter Rosegger1 gives us one of the most powerful of modern stories showing how the religion of a community is its life. For ages the people in this German forest town have been fire-worshippers with their chief celebration in midsummer. A Christian priest, sent to convert them from paganism, is arrogant, coercive, and so hated that forty citizens meet in a weird place and choose by lot one WTahn- fred, a somewhat dreamy idealist, to kill him. The priest becomes ill, and so Wahnfred will not kill him at first, but aids in his recovery and then chooses as the moment for doing so the service of St. Barbara's day, when, having blessed the bread, the priest is praying for those in the house of death. In a very dramatic scene, Wahnfred strikes when all are present, and effects his escape. The government sends soldiers, and makes all the citizens march around the priest's body and draw lots and the eleven chosen must on pain of death produce the murderer. An awful curse is pronounced, from a picturesque rock, on the com-
J'The God-SMker." New York, iooi.
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munity and all its activities. Thus it becomes godless, criminal, and lazy. Everything Christian is annulled, and the community is isolated from the world. Wahnfred flees to a forest hut in which he finds a manuscript wherein another murderer confesses that he has lived long in this place to expiate his crime, till he decides to go back as a leader. Wahnfred thus rules for a time, directing the community by letters pasted on trees. He becomes a true God-seeker, wrestling in his soul to find peace. He is so emaciated that those who first see him think him his own ghost. The people lapse to their midsummer fire-worship, finding the perpetual fire conserved in one house. Every- thing degenerates. At last a great temple of logs is built by the com- munity, to celebrate the pagan orgies of fire-worship, under the guidance of Wahnfred. When the entire community is in this temple, it is locked and by an automatic lamp set on fire, and everything is burned, Wahnfred included. By this holocaust the sin of the community is expiated. Paganism is thus depicted as full of bale. The book shows what human nature tends to become when left to its elemental forces without religion.
G. Frenssen1 presents in some sense the obverse of the above picture. His hero, Kay Jans, is a dreamer and marvellous story-teller, who can charm even strikers. As a student in Berlin he passes rapidly through many stages of development, renouncing all established re- ligions, but yearning for purity and service. As a pastor's assistant near his old home he studies social questions, realizing how far from present efficiency and from its ancient moorings Christianity has drifted. He goes back again to study, reasoning about fundamental questions, and passes through a pessimistic stage, doubting whether there is any Holyland on earth. Finally on the advice of a friend, he seeks to write the inner history of Christianity, confiding his manu- script to a girl whom he vainly loves. This manuscript makes a large part of the book, and is a life of Jesus, the essentials of which have been illustrated in the developmental stages of Kay's own soul. Man, he says, is first bestial, then passes through a stage of subjection under superstitious powers of evil. Very slowly he realizes that good, and not might, should rule. Then comes the stage of the great religious founders. Jesus is a shy boy who went to the city, as Kay had done, striving to be pure in heart, repeating the inner struggles of all God-
1" Holyland." Trans. Boston, 1905.
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seekers. Illumination comes with the resolve to surrender everything to service, even life itself. It was Paul who transformed Jesus into a supernatural being. But what the world needs is that he shall cease to be a cold abstraction, and be resolved back again to pure humanity, fallible, mistaken, but ever seeking, and in the end finding, the one great thing. In thus writing his life of Jesus, Kay is at the same time giving his fatherland, which is a modern Holyland, a gospel. He is making himself the modern representative of Jesus to his little community, for he has indeed been through all the stages of the development of Jesus' life himself.
P. Rosegger1 tells of a prisoner condemned to die, who is in- duced by a priest to spend his time in writing a life of Christ from the beginning to the end as it has been lived out in him, the idea being that Jesus does very different things for different people, each having his own Jesus. While the prisoner in a general way follows the Gospels, it is with many amplifications. The star at Bethlehem, e. g., is a constellation, taking the form of the letters "I. N. R. I.," which is his own name, Inri. Jesus and his mother on the way to Egypt are captured by Barabbas, who is made to give with consider- able amplification the essential doctrines of Nietzsche; but it is from these that on the cross, where they next meet, he is converted. At ten Jesus is at Pharaoh's court, taught by the wise men of Egypt. The Baptist's head when brought in opens its mouth and says, " The Kingdom is at hand." The disciples argue, with very different inter- pretations of most that Jesus said. The scene of the sermon on the mount is a glowing one. There are many attempts to prevent Jesus from his severe criticism of the Jews. The Buddhistic doctrine of existence is criticised. One disciple declares that the views of Osiris, Zeus, Mithra, and others are about the same; to which Jesus replies that they are so if they teach service alike. Jesus is saddened to find that his followers have often deserted their callings for the Kingdom and become idle, also that those he permitted to work on the Sabbath have overworked. The cross-bearing by Simon is amplified; he would go on bearing it forever. On the cross the sign "I. N. R. I." is vari- ously interpreted: "In Nirvana Rest I," and "Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judaorum." At the close of the story the priest expresses his delight with the manuscript and declares it will help others.
'"I. N.R.I. A Prisoner's Story of the Cross." New York, 1005.
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Ibsen began his trilogy with "Caesar's Apostasy," which gives the story of Julian before he came to the throne, and when he is in converse with his friend Agathon, who is destined later to slay him. His apostasy is preluded. He is a student of philosophy, of Mithraic and other mysteries, as well as of Christianity. The Emperor is jealous of him, and poisons his wife. In the catacombs he is told that he is to be Emperor, if he so elects, instead of choosing to die in the Christian faith. "Emperor Julian" Ibsen regards as his greatest work. It describes Julian practising the rites of the old religion, sac- rificing to Fortuna, Apollo, Dionysus, and the rest. In the second act the Emperor's old friend Gregory goes over to Christianity, and we have a report that the temple of Venus will be destroyed. He meets others he once knew who have become Christians, and by argument and coercion he would bring them back to paganism. As he sacrifices in the temple of Apollo, he is cursed by Christian priests while an earthquake shakes down the fane, although Julian declares it is because of Apollo's wrath that it had been desecrated. When he is sacrificing to Cybele the crowd jest, and he tells of a treatise he is writing. A Christian whom he has tortured meets him, tears the flesh from his wounds, and throws it at the Emperor. The crowd, like a chorus, is intent on who shall conquer, Emperor or Galilean, while Ibsen is intent on bringing out the conception of a third kingdom which shall include the good in both paganism and Christianity, for there is no room for both in their extreme forms on the present earth. When the right man comes, both will be absorbed, as a child is swallowed up in the youth he becomes. Julian, however, is trying to reduce the youth to childhood. He is convinced that he is divine, and goes forth to conquer the world. There are dreams and portents. He is always meeting youthful friends who have turned Galileans. A traitor tells his army of a three days' short cut (instead of thirty) to the Persian capital, so Julian burns his ships, and the expedition comes to grief. Julian would gladly die if the world would only believe that Hermes had come for him. At last he rushes into battle without helmet or armour, in his delusion thinking the Persians are Galileans, and finally dies conquered, as he thinks, by them.
B. Bjornson in two plays1 gives us what might be called the psychology of a miracle. Sang, a country pastor, was rich but has given
»"Ueber unsere Kraft." MUnchen, 1903, 315 p.
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everything away. He lives in a beautiful village by the sea and moun- tains, but his wife is bedridden. The singer and the legends incite to faith. His wife always fears he will go beyond his power in some direction and so fall short in others. He has cured some of his flock, and there is a rumour that he has raised one from the dead; but his utmost power cannot restore his wife. His children come from afar to reinforce the father's prayer of faith by the mother's bed, but in vain. Sang seems the only Christian in the world. He believes everything literally, and wishes Christianity to assert itself, for nothing is im- possible to faith, which is itself a miracle. A church convention ar- rives in a ship and discusses miracles. The faces of those who have been healed shine, but no one seems to live up to Christ's ideal of faith. The world needs a miracle, but does not believe it can occur. With faith the world would be changed. Meanwhile, Sang goes into his church near by, prays, sings; the people flock about. He dreams, and is entranced. Finally bells ring; there is a mighty storm; the moun- tain slides as if to wipe out the village, but is turned aside as if by a miracle. The children rush in and say their mother is walking. Amid " Halleluiahs" the pastor comes out and embraces his cured wife, who falls dead in his arms. He murmurs, "But this was not the mean- ing of it — or" — and falls dead himself. What is the "or" that killed him? He had gone beyond his power. We have here an illustration of the Christian hubris or spiritual pride which, as in old Attic tragedy, the gods always punish.
S. Lagerlof1 deals with the relations of socialism to Christianity, giving an unusual conception of Antichrist and his works. In the prologue the Emperor Augustus, who is seeking an augury as to whether he shall grant the prayer of the senate to allow his deification, is shown by an old sibyl a vision of the birth of Christ, then occurring, and is told that on the height of the Capitol where they are standing this helpless babe shall be worshipped — "Christ or Antichrist — but no frail mortal." Centuries later on this height is a Christian church, reared to prevent the fulfilment of the sibyl's prophecy, in which the focus of all the worship is an image of the Christ-child, made from a piece of the true cross, clad in wonderful vestments, and adorned with a crown of pure gold and with costly jewels. This wonder-working image is the only comfort of the poor monks, who are beset with temp-
»" The Miracles of Antichrist." Trans. 1800.
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tations and overcome by fears that Antichrist will press in upon them. On rare occasions the image is shown to the public. It exerts a strange fascination upon an Englishwoman, who makes a false image, with tinsel crown and imitation jewels, which she manages to substitute for the true image. In the crown of this image she scratches the words, "My kingdom is only of this world," satisfying her conscience by the reflection that thus she is not deceiving any one. Then the false image set up in the church no longer comforts the monks or heals the sick, and the true image, who learns of the distress, escapes from the pedestal where the Englishwoman has put it, and by night goes through the sinful and wretched streets of the city, back to the church, where it is received with solemn thanksgiving, and the false image is thrown down the cliff. Thus, believe the monks, has the prophecy of the sibyl been fulfilled, that Antichrist has ruled on the Capitol, but her prophecy has also now been set at nought, and they may rest in peace and joy thereafter. When the Englishwoman misses her wonderful image she goes at once to the church, and on the way finds the false image. Knowing then that the substitution has been discovered, she returns home, but keeps the false image, which reminds her of the true. It induces in her, however, a strange restlessness. All her life she travels, and wherever she carries the image insurrections are likely to break out. At her death it falls to another Englishwoman, who likewise travels incessantly. After other vicissitudes the image is finally installed in an old church in Diamante, a little village in Sicily. Here the cen- tral characters are Gaetano, a pious young carver of holy images, and Donna Elisa, the young wife of an old man. The two plan to go to Argentina, but on the day when Donna Elisa is to meet Gaetano the church bell rings all day long, terrifying the people, who cannot explain it, and causing Donna Elisa to repent of her sin. She devotes herself to her husband and her father, and begins to plan changes and im- provements for the village, always praying to the image for help, and securing it by some surprising occurrence which she deems miraculous. Thus, she plans a railroad, and secures funds in amazing ways, and also the cooperation of an engineer whom the image cures of the curse of the "evil eye." The lover Gaetano returns, but is imprisoned on a false charge and is not released till much later, after the death of Elisa's husband. Thus the village prospers greatly. In the end it chances that a monk, who knew the story of the two images, discovers the false
go JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Christ in the church, denounces it to the people, and would burn it, but it is rescued. He appeals to the Pope to help him; but the Pope rebukes him for his hate, and says that the Church has always known that Antichrist would come in the guise of Christ and do Christlike works. It is the Church's mission not to destroy Antichrist but to lead him to Christ. Socialism is Antichrist, and "no one can save mankind from their sorrows, but much is forgiven to him who brings new courage to bear them."
Israel Zangwill1 describes an effort to establish a new religion larger than Christianity. Stephen, the minister, comes to feel that religion should affect cancer, tuberculosis, and eugenics, and that man should cease looking to "some gigantic genie in the clouds to do his dirty work" and should clean up the world himself. Despite his wife, he goes to London to found a new church. The second act shows him there in dire poverty with one convert to his new book. He tells the missionary that as he is bringing a higher religion to Africa so he is trying to do to England. A rich convert to Stephen builds a great cathedral, and ten years later we see it with stained windows in honour of secular heroes, and with processionals, vestments, and other sym- bols. He would organize his church as Christianity is organized. When his son is murdered by an enemy of the new religion, Stephen's wife insists that he lives on; but Stephen objects that if all who blunder into being do so, insanity is immortalized. Death, he says, should vitalize, not paralyze all. She tells him that if all the world accepted his belief, all the mothers would spurn it. He declares their son is dead, she that he lives, and as he enters his pulpit the choir sings, "The righteous cannot die." Stephen says it is Winf red's music; the wife says, "The resurrection and the life."
J. V. Widmann2 paraphrases Christ in the wilderness in a work of genius, with a prelude of two students in a forest, one holding with Nietzsche that God is dead; the other a believer. They come upon a hermit, Lux, an able artist, who has been excommunicated, and is living with animals. He is sore at heart because this is a world wherein his dog can kill a parturient mouse. His sister tries to lead him to Spinoza's views. Lux decides to act a play, and we are now trans- ported to the Dead Sea, where lions and jackals rove and, as in the
•"The Next Religion; a Play in Three Acts." London, 1913. *"Der Heilige und die Tiere." Frauenfeld, 1912, 187 p.
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old animal epos, converse and express their hate of man, their memory of Samson. A lion arrives without his prey because he has experienced a strange awe in the presence of an ascetic. Azaziel, an embodiment of nature without, and untamed instinct within, man, would mislead Christ by arousing his unconscious instincts, for he hates the anaemic crew. He orders Lilith to tempt Jesus, which she has tried in vain to do, for he only pities her. In an intermezzo a herd of goats are alarmed at the arrival of a scapegoat, which, when they identify, they welcoine. Jesus has marvellous power to sympathize with and understand ani- mals, and this gift opens to him what at first seems a world of horrors, cruelty, slaughter, rage. He learns their language. They protest at his tortures, which make even Satan pity him. He is strongly im- pelled to stay and redeem them, and his parting with them to save man is pathetic. Azaziel hopes he may thus be diverted from his in- tention of saving mankind; but Jesus realizes that animals are crea- tures of blind instinct and cannot be redeemed, and so decides to do his beneficent work for man. In a final scene a choir of angels glorifies his decision.
In Kierkegaard's "Stadien auf dem Lebenswege" (Leipzig, 1885), and in " Entweder — Oder" (Leipzig, 1886, 500 p.), he describes with great psychological insight the transition from a purely aesthetic to a religious view of life, which he deems vastly higher. This is the diametrical opposite of Oscar Wilde in his "De Profundis," written while he was in prison, and in which, besides attempting a spiritual portraiture of Jesus regarded as a poet and artist, he believes that his life and work should best be conceived from the standpoint of aesthetics (as J. M. Baldwin's philosophy seeks to put beauty in the place of reality), failing thus to realize either the ethical or the religious great- ness of Jesus. In other works — "Ein Ubung um Christentum/' and "Angriff an die Christen welt " — Kierkegaard points out with great exaltation and insight that the only resource left to man is flight to the grace of God. He attacks contemporary Christianity because it has cut loose from the stern behest to decide for Christ, so that the Church has really ceased to be Christian. To become so again, we must become "contemporaries" with Jesus, and not merely his admirers and followers. Schrempf, whose " Menschenloos " intro- duced Kierkegaard to Germany, makes Jesus to have been at first a sinful and broken man, but a striking instance of regeneration, like
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Paul, Augustine, etc., or one who passed from utter alienation from God over to harmony and peace with him.
In F. HebbeFs drama, "Christus," the religious side of Chris- tianity is shown as only a myth. Christ developed under the influence of the Baptist, and both at first thought only of the earthly kingdom. Only just before his death did Jesus come to conceive the Kingdom as of heaven. For G. F. Meyer the chief trait of primitive Christianity is the very sharp opposition brought out between the Pauline and the Christian or Petrine view of it. J. Schlaff, in his "Jesus and Miriam," represents the latter, and also Mary, as being almost frantically in love with Jesus, and indicates that he, too, on his side, was greatly affected by the beauty of Miriam; but in his "Christ and Sophia," a title borrowed from Novalis, he tries to describe the two guiding influences which have flowed from Jesus' lif e and doctrine, making the Christ cult, in the sharpest contrast to German skepticism, the best thing in the modern world, repudiating all monistic ethics, and es- pecially such racial characteristics as Chamberlain in his "Founda- tions of the Nineteenth Century" gives to Jesus. Ellen Key, in " Lebensglaube," is chiefly influenced by the opposition to liberal theology which she thinks has falsified and modernized the true world- renouncing character of Jesus, which places him close beside Buddha. Jesus cannot be the way to God, but only a model to us in the per- sistence with which he followed that way. Modern Christianity, she thinks, is declining. C. Loffler, in "Jesus Christ," presents him as a man, while Peter persists that he is a god. When in the denouement, Christ proclaims that his kingdom is not of this earth, Peter calls him insane, and the multitude fall away. Loffler is a glorifier of deeds and of men who waste little time in thinking about God or their souls, and he has nothing but condemnation for the Magdalene. The prophets are dreamers, liars, diplomats, because they preach mundane salvation. Each one should be the redeemer of his own sins.
De Regla's1 Jesus, a very beautiful child, was born out of wedlock, but magnanimously adopted by Joseph. Of eschatology he knew nothing. His miracles were all suggestion and hypnotism. The feeding of the multitude is explained by striking out ciphers in the figures.
In literature, as in art, Jesus is represented with feminine as well
l".Tesu von Nazarct." Leipsig, 1894.
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as with masculine traits of both body and soul. He is meek, passive, receptive, intuitive, a lover of children, and perhaps a little deficient in some of the attractions of virility according to the standards of every Christian age. Lecky thought he had slowly been given fem- inine traits by centuries of adoration by women, and that the strong tendency of celibate men to have before them a feminine ideal and to prevent the further emasculation of Jesus was one psychological root in the development of the Madonna ideal, which represented their highest sublimation of the other sex, so that but for her evolution the character of Jesus would have become yet more womanly. Many romancers, as we have seen, represent Jesus as appearing in modern life to bring out contrasts with it, but none that I know has ever rep- resented a similar advent of the Madonna. Diametrical in many respects as is the contrast between the ideals of Jesus and those of the superman, we have no attempt to develop a similar antithesis between the Madonna and the superwoman, whether as a moralist, scholar, society leader, or suffragette, etc. The differences between man and the superman are no less than those between Mary and the diverse types of superwoman. The Church conceptions of Mary are no more inconsistent with those of contemporary womanhood than are the conceptions of Jesus with those of the ideals of modern man- hood. To develop the former antithesis should be a tempting theme for poets, dramatists, and novelists. Are Catholic conceptions of womanhood truer than those of Protestants? and do the latter need the softening and refining influences that the cult of Mary has developed in the Mother Church?
(d) The recognition of greatness when disguised has always been a thrilling dramatic motif. Gods, fairies, kings, and wooing princes coming incognito, wander in common and even mean estate, till in the denouement they are known for what they really are. This is a theme of infinite variety and of unfailing charm. In cruder tales of this sort the masquerader may reveal himself suddenly in the crucial moment by a miracle or by a metamorphosis, confounding the enemies leagued against him. In somewhat more developed art he has some specific badge, insignia, bodily mark, or token by which he can make himself known at will. In still more refined stories he is slowly rec- ognized by an ensemble of words, deeds, features, accents. Rec- ognition passes slowly through all its stages, from faintest suggestion,
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perhaps of a deja-vu kind, up to complete certainty. The pathos of this motif comes out when the disguise is so effective that the hero cannot make himself known for what he really is, even to his friends, or, saddest of all, is punished as an impostor. In cases of opposite nature, the hero, or perhaps only his face, may appear, or his voice is heard and instantly recognized, and this at once changes the current of events for the better. The common element in all these cases is a kind of sense of presence or sensus numenis that may come slowly or suddenly, consciously or unconsciously, suffusing the present act or moment with a flood of new significance and affectivity. The feeling that a superpersonality may lurk within even the most commonplace individual, or appear in splendour at any place, time, or circumstance, enhances the worth of individuality, charges events with a new mean- ing, and tends to intensify life itself, as capable of being all of it raised to a higher potential. The legends of the Church in the past have utilized almost every possibility here that Jesus' life could suggest, to say nothing of those of many of the saints. Whatever is done to the least is done to him, and all must strive to live his life and thus reincarnate him. Thus many who were not Jesus have been mis- taken for him by the momentum of this apparition tendency. In literature Jesus still walks the earth in many a guise. The most salient illustrations of this tendency I can find are the following :
W. T. Stead,1 with several assistants, made a careful study of Chicago from a moral point of view, listing, with the owners' names, some one hundred and fifty houses of prostitution, mapping out grog- shops, characterizing corruption in city government, and ending each section with a few highly sensational sentences, repeating with vari- ations the query what Christ would do if he appeared in each of these "purlieus of destruction." We are never told in any case what he would do, and the effect is more yellow than dramatic.
Feeling that Stead's book implied that Jesus' plans had failed for the world, the implication he leaves on our minds being that "we are all going to hell," Edward Everett Hale,2 instead of taking Jesus to slums, dives, and grog-shops, all of which, he tells us, could have been seen in ancient Jerusalem, took him through Boston's charities and corrections. He is represented as a tall, dark Syrian, who is going
>"If Christ Came to Chicago." Chicago, 1893, 47a p.
:"If Jesus Came to Boston," 1895, 45 p. See also Charles M. Sheldon: " In His Steps." iS
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to America in quest of a lost brother whom he had never seen, and his children. The stranger, Jesus, did not seem surprised at modern in- ventions, and was piloted to many institutions and introduced to their heads by their true names, till at length he gave his guide the slip, telegraphing him later that he had gone to Chicago, but praising Boston for what it was doing for him by helping the least of his breth- ren. Hardly anything obviously well meant could have been con- ceived in a more commonplace, not to say vulgar and irreverent, way than in this booklet, wherein the mask of Jesus has no trace of impres- siveness of any kind.
H. Balzac1 describes a boat bound to Ostend, the prow of which is rilled with noblemen and women, and the stern with common people. Just as it is leaving port, a stranger of great personal nobility, but hat- less and dressed like a peasant, appears from nowhere. Although without purse, sword, or belt, he seems like a burgomaster, kindly, worthy, with an air of calmness and authority, so that the poor people give him a place and show him various petty courtesies. As a storm arises and grows severe, he encourages and comforts them. When they cry, "We shall perish," his heavy hair blows about a face that beams with love and courage. The rich and the proud think him stupid, not realizing the danger, when he calmly says, "The Virgin is in heaven; have faith and you will be saved." As the boat nears its destination it is swamped and sinks, and the stranger calls all who have faith to follow him, and many with him "walk with a firm step upon the sea to safety." Others he helps, while the rich and profligate are drowned. The monks long preserved as a precious relic the footprints which their Saviour left upon the shore. It was meant as an al- legory of Jesus' work for man during the voyage of life.
J. K. Jerome2 gives a brief tale which has been dramatized, de- scribing the advent of an English stranger at a London boarding-house. His presence has a unique effect upon the door-girl and the hard- hearted housekeeper. He is perfectly satisfied with his room, board, price, and when he says so, she, conscience-smitten, voluntarily reduces her fee. But he will not accept the reduction till she tells him: "If you are bent on paying more you can go elsewhere." One boarding-house young lady declares it makes her feel good to look at
'"Jesus Christ in Flanders." In "La Come'die Humaine." Trans, by K. P. Wonneley. Boston. 2"The Passing of the Third Floor Back." New York-, 1908.
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his tall form, fine face, old-fashioned clothes, slight hump. All talk of and some try to laugh at him, but he is too naive to recognize the ridicule. To a lady who confesses to thirty-nine years, he says it is a most beautiful age, whereupon she finds there are two of her, one as she seems to others, and the other as she knows herself to be. An old lady, proud and tedious, is told she cannot bore him, and when he speaks of her gentle face, voice, and breeding, she comes to feel that she is a vulgar snob and declares, "in your presence I cannot avoid insulting myself." A third lady is praised for her skill in music, and he sees in her face frankness and courage, while she expresses to him surprise that he cannot see her greed, vanity, sordidness, and hypocrisy; she confesses to him that her father and mother quarrel disgracefully, and thereafter she strives to be what he thinks she is. A father, glancing into the stranger's eyes, draws back without a word, feeling that he is a cad, and grows beautifully polite to his wife, whom he has treated coarsely. The latter he fascinates by reminding her of some sweet memory that she is unable to fix, and her love for her husband is warmed again. Another man, after meeting him, is unable to close a dishonest deal. Table manners improve; scandal ceases. The stranger sees all as born ladies and gentlemen, and prompts all to live up to his impressions of them, having an invet- erate belief in the innate goodness of all, till they tend to confess and forsake their worse selves. One is about to marry a rich brute for sordid motives, but desists. Finally he vanishes through the door into a fog, with no leave-taking except to the door-girl to whom he has given an impulse to a higher life.
S. E. Jerrold1 describes a wanderer, Offero, of great beauty and strength, whose motive in life is to give rather than to get joy. He wishes to serve something with all his time and strength, till nothing in him shall be unspent. First he offers himself to a king, who becomes suspicious that he may be an emissary of Satan. This shows Offero that the latter is greater than the king, and so he goes to Satan, offer- ing his service for no reward, but is told that he cannot live out his life by serving another. When as comrades they come to a crossroad, Satan refuses to go farther for fear of Christ. This shows the hero that there is one greater than Satan, whom he leaves to find him. When a hermit tells him the story of Christ, he realizes that he is the
*"A Play of Saint Christopher."
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one he longs to serve. Wishing an arduous task, he is told to ferry travellers across a river. In a raging storm at night a child asks to cross, and will not be denied; so Offero takes him and with the greatest effort, having never before carried such a burden, succeeds in landing on the other side. Then the child tells him that he is Christ, changes his name to Christopher, and charges him always to imagine in his task that he is carrying Christ. They then kiss in love. There is a procession of saints and a chant, much as in the old miracle plays.
Max Kretzer1 makes the face of Christ appear to people when thev least expect it, and especially in crises. A poor workman, Andorf, with a sick family and out of a job, curses bells and church, but his children cry out, "Lord Jesus," seeing his face, and he almost fancies that he hears a voice, "Believe and I will come." Finally he is able to see Jesus with his children. He meets a fallen woman, Johanna, who buys food for him, and as the two talk with a Salvation Army lass, again comes the apparition of Christ, just as a poor woman enters, leading hungry children. Reaching home, Andorf finds his child dead of hunger. He reads the New Testament, sees angels carrying away his child, prays; and then Jesus appears so vividly that as he departs Andorf rushes to the window, expecting to see him hurrying down the street, and comes back, kissing the spot where he seemed to stand. As he passes, his visions being known, others mistake him for Christ. He discusses charity, and reads Strauss, but finding no aid, again sees Christ. In another scene a score of men discuss the communion, which Andorf cannot believe in, but he again sees Christ and is thought crazed. When he declares his vision in church he is laughed to scorn. In a great storm Christ appears, passing the multitude and the clergy- man, but blessing Andorf. He appears to Andorf's daughter when she is tempted to lead the life of Johanna, and again when she is in- sulted and attacked by her employer and is about to kill him. The image seems to say, "Thou shalt not kill." The employer hears and is converted, although the shock of it kills him. When tempted to take money the daughter hears the voice saying, "Thou shalt not steal." Kretzer in a previous work, "Bergpredigt," emphasized the contrast between the religion of Jesus and the Church. A very similar idea has been worked out by Helen Mombart in her romance entitled, "The Stranger."
l"Das Gesicht Christi." Leipzig, 320 p.
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Mrs. R. G. Alden1 seeks to show how to-day would receive Christ, with many intentional anachronisms. She attempts to lift the figure of Jesus from the historic past, and make him meet modern people. In the home of the Holmans two daughters, Margaret and Frances, suggest Mary and Martha, the former tense and nervous, the latter poised. Their brother, David, has long been bedridden from dissipa- tion, and the father is bitterly opposed to the Nazarene, of whose cures there is incessant talk. The son David is marvellously restored to complete health by Jesus and becomes his ardent partisan, slowly bringing over his sisters, while the father is unconvinced despite the cure of his son. The antagonism between the latter, which is long drawn out, culminates in the father's declaration that if David openly espouses the cause of Jesus he shall never enter his house again. The extreme opposition is represented in the char- acter of Masters, in love with Margaret, distressed as he thinks her becoming infatuated with Jesus, in the trial and condemnation of whom he is the leader. Nelson, the lover of Frances, has gone over to complete discipleship. David is interested in Miriam Brownley, a beauty, who tells him he must give up either her or Jesus; but when he does the former, makes many vain advances to bring him back. Jesus rarely appears in the book, and only indirectly, but his effect is magical and he is incessantly talked about. A son of the Brownleys, John, actually dies and is raised, and a son of another family who dies and is buried is recalled to life in a manner very similar to that of Lazarus. A blind man is restored to sight. The town council disapproves of Jesus. The stranger, Christ, is entertained at a meal that is very symbolic, and his history is carried to the open grave, Masters declar- ing that the body was stolen and that the masses are duped. While David is leading in prayer, the guest slips away, writing a farewell let- ter later to Miriam. This story introduces various fictitious person- ages as well as those designed to be modernizations of Bible characters. Everything is motivated by the attitude toward Jesus. The reliance upon the magnetism of his name and personality is the author's only re- source against the glaring injection of facts from ancient into modern life.
In C. R. Kennedy's "The Servant in the House,"2 the chief char- acter, Manson, who appears at the very outset,and who has just ar-
l" Yesterday Framed in To-day." Boston, 1898, 336 p. 2London. 1908. 151 p.
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rived from India, is the butler in the family of a rector. His religion is, "I love God and all my brethren." Every one in England is agog with the great work of the Bishop of Benares in the East, whom, Man- son tells the vicar's daughter, he knows well. The common people in India almost worship him. The vicar comes to realize that, though a scholar and a gentleman, he has been a liar and a villain, and re- proaches his wife w th adoring him too much. A dreadful brother arrives, Robert, whom he has wronged, who hates all the vicar loves and loves all he hates. A business bishop of great dignity and finan- cial skill also makes his debut. In the second act Robert and Manson meet the Bishop, who is induced by Manson's good manners even to eat with Robert. A fraudulent scheme to renovate the Bishop's church is developed. In the third act Robert appears as a master of drainage as well as of slang, and finds that the drain from the vicarage leads to a cesspool under the church, which is full of not only nameless filth but corpses. The supreme wish of Mary, the adopted child of the vicar, is to find her father, and that of Robert is to find his child, who later is shown to be Mary. The vicar realizes his unfitness for his position, and does penance by inviting his brother to live with him. Manson by force of character openly takes possession of the vicar's household and turns out the Bishop, as it were, cleansing the temple. In the last act all are on tiptoe of expectation, awaiting the arrival of the great Bishop of Benares, whose good works and fame have filled the East. Robert describes in graphic details the horrors of the drain he has explored, and which yet needs to be cleansed. Mary realizes his noble qualities, disguised as they are. The vicar rolls up his sleeves and declares that he will help clean the drain, despite the mortal danger of fever, and in the last moment Manson declares him- self as the lost brother and the real Bishop of Benares.
W. B. Maxwell's charming novel1 created great discussion, es- pecially in England. It represents John Morton preaching a Christian doctrine of absolute equality in the London streets after he has been turned out of the various churches. He saves the life of a popular society lady, who has been thrown between two trains, and her father is distressed when she becomes interested in his plans of helping the poor. He is popular, and advocates equal distribution of wealth. He brings a fallen woman to the society lady, Sarah, to take in a
1"The Ragged Messenger." Indianapolis, 1Q15.
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sisterly way. Just then a messenger announces that Morton has been made the heir of millions, and the fallen woman consents to marry him. He has a hard time, even with a corps of assistants, in disposing of his wealth aright, and he is constantly interrupted, even in his sermons, by demands and accusations that he is hoarding his money. His two chief enterprises are a hospital for crippled children and a home for fallen women, in which he is helped by a popular physician, Doctor Colbeck, in love with Lady Sarah. The doctor admires Morton, but does not believe his doctrine of immortality, while Lady Sarah almost thinks him a divine incarnation, holding that there have been many Christs or messengers of God to man, some of whom pass un- noticed. Morton's wife fails to aid him, and lapses into a frivolous, self-indulgent life, till Morton has to limit his gifts to the poor to satisfy her. He magnanimously shields her from exposure of a liaison with his secretary, and demonstrates her innocence to the public, but privately denounces her as an instrument of the devil, who would wreck his life, and she then confesses that she has lied and been a harlot, and married him only for the luxury his wealth could give. When she leaves him he is depressed, and appears as an epileptic who has long tested himself as to whether he is a divine messenger, which the doctor thinks a special sign of masked epilepsy. Just as she is dying his wife comes back to him, and he pleads with her to believe that she is going to heaven. She says she cannot do so unless he pleads for her. To this he replies, " Then I will go with you; I will be there to plead. We are going hand in hand. Do you believe now?" She answers, "Yes." A pistol shot rings out, and "hand in hand the chaplain and his wife were dust now or had gone on their journey." Socialism looms large in this book, and the critic may well ask why it was necessary in order to preach the idealism of Christianity that its messenger should be a defective.
In all this class of representations there is usually a more or less mysterious vanishing and an afterglow of growing regard, and even awe, when the Christlike man has gone. He appears at appropriate moments with soteriological functions, as did the classic heroes and deities, and as a very present helper in time of need. The obvious moral is that the mere thought of him in any emergency will help. Heyse makes a vision of Jesus' face restrain the converted Magdalene from returning to her lover. In Frenssen's tale the hero Kay slowly
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emerges from commonplaceness into the r61e of the redeemer. On the eschatological view, as we shall see later, Jesus throughout his career was striving, although vainly, for recognition. The risen Jesus had to identify himself, etc. Novelists and dramatists here face a great opportunity which they have hardly yet shown themselves able to meet. They are still prone to appeal either to a physical miracle, to a kind of hypnotic charm, or some specific word or incident borrowed from the Gospels, while the disguise is often overdone — rags, horny- handedness, ignorance, naivete, perhaps almost foolishness. If the Gospels themselves were conceived as merely products of literary cre- ativeness, the art of the synoptists, judged solely by aesthetic canons, is far above that of these imitators. If the Jesus cult is to have full literary development along such lines, every modern vocation and in- terest of man, each station in life, especially the moral life, each typical emergency, must have its divinifying idealization. This requires a literary ability far above that needed to produce a good novel or drama of love, crime, adventure, or a problem play, social, economic, or industrial. Virtue is vastly harder to detect or depict than vice or crime. Again, love as represented in story and on the stage is a con- ventionalized, hackneyed thing compared with its sublimated form in religious fervour, and the same is true of ambition and the struggle for material success as compared with the supreme passion of each to make the most and best possible of his individual life. How Jesus, if only as the totemic or ideal man, would act, feel, think, and speak, in every walk and exigency of life to-day and by what infallible tokens he would be known under whatever name or guise, is a vast complex of problems which the world waits for the creative imagination to solve progres- sively. It will not be completed until there is again the same degree of consecration of every human talent to the work as occurred in the formative periods of the Church. What has already been begun in this field, however, does give us great hope that the vast possibilities here will be fully realized. Thus the higher psychology and pedagogy of Christianity should make an earnest and unprecedented appeal to playwrights and romancers to study this field and advance this great work. Does not the true cult of the superman, which so many of them now affect, really lie here, instead of in the examples in which modern literature abounds of titanic, hypertrophied egoism and re- morseless selfishness?
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(e) Another view with many variants is of psychoanalytic inter- est. The hypothesis of the secret academy, a reservoir of mystic, masonic, or perhaps Oriental wisdom, astute enough to plan and power- ful enough to carry out such a program, must be regarded in its psy- chological significance as in a sense between divine Providence on the one hand and the vaster folk-soul on the other, or a kind of pedagogic transition from the one to the other. In its form and functions it might be described as a compromise phenomenon between the extremes of orthodoxy and the modern views of historicity. Jesus is here little but a puppet in his obedience to the higher authority on which he is rather abjectly dependent, and to which he holds in some degree the relation he has been thought to sustain to the Father. Fictitious as it all is, it is ingenious in its conception and in the working out of details. It stimulates creative imagination, gives a sense of emancipation from critical details, and might perhaps be classed with the modern novels and dramas with Christological themes. Historically there seems to be no scintilla of evidence in favour of this view, and its weakest point is that it is not plain just what great purpose all this collective wisdom was seeking to accomplish. The unity it gives is factitious, and it is strange to find Schweitzer a century later commending it because it first taught Jesus' passivity to a higher power, so that it is only necessary later to substitute a divine eschatological plan for the wisdom of the conclave in order to have the right key to unlock all.
C. F. Bahrdt1 was a scholar, but in his biography of Jesus, in- stead of merely reproducing the Gospel narrative he felt the need of an inner connection not found in the canon, and somewhat crudely in- vented by him in the form of a theory of a secret society of which Jesus was the tool. Bahrdt introduces fictitious characters — Harlam, Avel, etc. — and has long dialogues paraphrasing the Scripture. Nico- demus and Joseph of Arimathea are the chief agents of the powerful secret order of the Essenes, which extends to Babylon and Egypt. Its purpose is to give a spiritual interpretation of the gross ideas of Mes- sianity which prevail among the Jews. Seeking a candidate for this office whom they can use, they discover Jesus as a child, expose him to the errors of the priests, fill him with horror of the blood and temple sacrifices, tell him of the death of Socrates, at which he weeps, and
i"Briefc Uber die Bibel in Volkston." 1789. Also, "AusfUhrung des Plans und Zwecks Jesus." Berlin, 1784,
3 Vol.
JESUS IN LITERATURE I03
whom he resolves to emulate. A Persian gives him two cure-alls, one for eye and another for nervous troubles. Carefully taught by his father and an Essene under the guise of a shepherd, at twelve he is taken to the temple, where he disproves miracles to the scribes, and later he and his cousin John plan their program. Luke coaches him in the art of healing. Jesus assumes the role of a Messiah some- what against his own will but at the behest of the order, and to conform to current superstition and attract attention. On being admitted to the lowest grade of the order he finds that he must face death, if necessary, but is told that he will be saved from it at the last moment by the brotherhood. Apostles are members only of the second degree of this order, but never dream what those of the higher third degree are doing. It is the latter that lead the former to write the Gospels as they do, in perfect good faith, not knowing the secrets of how the miracles are really done, for in fact there is nothing supernatural about them. The rulers, for example, have stores of wine, bread, etc., on which they can draw mysteriously. They provide a raft on which Jesus floating in twilight or fog seems to ride on the water. Luke gives him a specific that causes suspended animation that seems like death but from which one can be awakened. This explains the resurrection of Lazarus, although Jesus' conscience compels him to say that his patient is not really dead. He has two styles of teaching, one popular and the other esoteric, which must always be carefully distinguished. When Jesus goes apart to pray he really hies him to some of the many quarters or meeting places of the Essene order. To spiritualize the ideas of Messianity, its personator must seem to die and rise, and so Luke treats Jesus with a narcotic which makes him insensible to wounds on the cross, and indeed makes him appear to die. He is once nearly assassinated, and had this happened all the plans of the order would have failed. This danger makes his guides hasten their plans for the drama of his death. So he is made to provoke the authorities, and when convicted, the influence of the order causes the execution to take place at once, and also the body to be speedily removed from the cross. Jesus, however, is healthy, and Luke so restores him that he can walk on the third day, when, with the aid of the brethren, the Resurrection is very skilfully put in scene. From his subsequent place of conceal- ment Jesus several times appears, but finally bids his friends farewell and walks up a mountain side till he becomes invisible in a foe: or cloud.
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In fact, he is cloistered in an Essene retreat, and watches, unknown to others and at a distance, with great interest the work and fortune of his followers. He does, however, once appear to Paul on the way to Damascus, and dies at a good old age.
Venturini1 follows in much of the above, but assumes that it was impossible for Jesus to reach the hard-hearted Jews without miracles, and therefore a beneficent type of them, viz., healing, was adopted. His disciples have a portable medicine chest and by its content work cures that seem to others supernatural. He can restore people from a deathlike coma. The Cana miracle is a wedding jest; for Jesus secretly smuggles in jars of wine, substituting them for empty ones when the guests are too merry to notice. The Essenes accompany Joseph to Egypt, watching over Jesus there and introducing him and his cousin John to its ancient wisdom. By the age of thirty Jesus has really outgrown the order. At his baptism a sudden thunderstorm frightens a pigeon which flutters about him, and this he takes as an omen that his hour has come. The temptation is due to machinations of the Pharisee, Zadoch, who feigns discipleship, but is really the spy of the Sanhedrin. Jesus cannot eradicate the old earthly ideas of Mes- sianity, and despite all his precautions becomes more and more hated. A conclave of the mystic brotherhood decides that Jesus must go to Jerusalem and proclaim himself. At first he is joyfully received, but his personation of his role is so different from the ideas the people have of it that at last their clamour against him causes his execution. When Joseph, after great importunity, gets possession of the body, he takes it to an Essene retreat where it is watched for twenty-four hours, but with no sign of resuscitation. When the earthquake comes a member of the order is passing, and this frightens the watch, who flee. The next morning Jesus revives and is taken to a lodge, two brothers who are thought to be angels being left behind at the tomb. Several times during forty days Jesus appears from his retreat, but is greatly ex- hausted and soon withdraws into seclusion, "certain circumstances connected with his farewell suggesting the Ascension." On this view, of course, Jesus is not a free agent; but on the other hand his life is given a certain unity. These two works were the first of a long series of more or less fictitious lives of Jesus based on a similar plan, and indeed accounts of him on this scheme are still represented as emerging
^'Nattlrliche Geschichte des grosscn Propheten von Nazareth." 1800-03.
JESUS IN LITERATURE 105
from some ancient archives, e. g., "The Crucifixion," by an Eye-Wit- ness (Chicago, 1913, 200 p.).
Edwin Arnold in his "Light of Asia" attempts to portray the story of Buddha in such a way as to commend the great religious hero of some four hundred and seventy millions of our race to the Christian world, and therefore stresses those incidents in both the life and teach- ings of Gautama and his great renunciation which most clearly relate to the story of Jesus, from the time when his conception was heralded and all nature was in sympathetic awe to the time of his final resump- tion into the one and all, "as the dew drops into the shining sea." The analogies between Buddhism and Christianity have often been pointed out, especially by theosophists. Robertson, although almost baselessly, asserts that the Christ myth is a later recension of the Bud- dha myth. Renan and Havet long since pointed out the striking par- allels between the two, and Max Miiller was greatly impressed by them, but could find no trace of any historic connection. R. Seydel1 was so convinced that this relation was a close one that he even devel- oped the hypothesis of a "poetic-apocalyptic Gospel of very early date which fitted Christian material into Buddhistic patterns."
Nicholas Notovitch2 assumes this in a crass and naively told story of an adventuresome trip he made to Thibet and its monasteries, from which he gathered many fragments here put together for the first time of the life of Issa (Jesus), who, it is the thesis of this book, spent the unknown sixteen or seventeen years before his public ministry in learning and preaching in Buddhistic lands. These records, though scattered and incoherent, we are told, were written almost immediately after Jesus' death. The great Brahma chose this incarnation for himself. The pathetic sufferings of the Israelites brought God to earth in order to set them back again on the path of righteousness. The Holy Spirit did not procreate Jesus, but was incarnated in him after he was born. All our Scripture knows is that Jesus grew in spirit till the day of his showing to Israel (Luke i, 80). From fear of Herod Jesus was confined and guarded much of the time, and spent this time in studying Scripture. At the dawn of puberty youth in the East tend to leave the family and join the congregation. So many eligible maidens and mothers sought the honour of betrothal that, to escape
'"Das Evangeliurn von Jesus in seiner Verhaltnissen zu Buddha-Saga und Buddha-Lehre." Leipzig, 1882, 361 p. '"The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ from Buddhistic Records." Trans. New York, 1004, 238 p.
io6 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
them, this gifted youth stealthily joined a caravan going to India. Here he frequented the temple of the Djainites, a link between Bud- dhists and B rahminists . He studied prof oundly and was very sympathet- ic with Krishna (b. c. 1580), the editor of the Vedas. In six years he had mastered Sanskrit and its literature. He saw the limitations of all the faiths of India and sympathized profoundly with the lowest, or Sudra caste, holding that all are equal, and disputed the Vedic account of the divine origin of castes. The Vedic trinity is Brahma, creator and substance; Vishnu, preserver, space, and wisdom; and Siva, de- structive wrath, justice, annihilation. These are symbolized by space, water, fire; also by past, present, and future. Jesus denied all this, so monotheistic was he, and so the Brahmins resolved to kill him. Nor did he agree with the Buddhistic doctrine of the divine which represents it as sunk in eternal calm. Having discovered monism, Jesus travelled west, preaching, at the age of twenty-nine. Not the Pharisees, but Pilate, sought Jesus' life and bribed witnesses against him, including Judas, till Jesus unmasked him in a culminating tragic scene. He was really hung by Pilate lest he should tell. His following was so large and dangerous that his body had to be removed lest it be a rallying point. The doctrine of the Resurrection was a polemic master- piece of far greater value to Christ's party than was the loss of his body. Only Christianity can elevate "that feeble dwarf called man" to a state of sublime enthusiasm.
George Moore1 represents Jesus as only swooning on the cross, removed alive, and slowly regaining not only consciousness but sanity, which he had lost. His recovery to normality consisted in realizing that he was not the Messiah. The true crucifixion was finding himself mistaken and an outcast. This crisis in Jesus' life paralleled that of Paul, although the direction of the change it caused was directly op- posite. Being a sublime character, howrever, Jesus survived even this, and recuperated. During his ministry John had vacillated as to whether he was the Messiah or not, and now this sounder core of doubt came to dominate his later career. By nature Jesus was gentle, and his true soul is expressed in the sermon on the mount. But under the influence of John he became violent, preaching renunciation and the end of the world. After the crucifixion, however, which converted him, the harsh traits were lost, and the morals and the esoteric Essen-
2"The Brook Kerith." London. Macmillan, 1016, 486 p.
JESUS IN LITERATURE 107
ism with which he began were continued. In entering upon his public career Jesus was acting at the behest of his brotherhood but broke away from them for a time. The Christ of the story appears when, twenty years after the crucifixion, Jesus and Paul meet at the brook, which the author explored. Jesus recants much of his own teaching, says he was mistaken in thinking himself divine, did no miracles and of course did not arise from the dead, indignantly denounces the doctrines which Paul has preached in his name; for the one repre- sents instituted Christianity, and the other true inner religion. Jesus has lived during these post-crucifixion years with Essene shepherds, cut off from all knowledge of the fate of his Gospel, and is inexpressibly shocked to find what Paul has done and to hear him address his own brethren on one of his trips. Paul deems Jesus a madman and Jesus tells Paul he once held views not unlike his, but has outgrown them. The author admires Paul as a great organizer, tells his story, and would show us the true Paul apart from his spurious epistles. Jesus fails to stop the work of Paul, and tells him, "I understand thee, but thou dost not understand me." At last Jesus wanders to India and becomes a Buddhist. Thus Eastern and Western Christianity are contrasted.
The striking novelty in Moore's book is that instead of making Jesus a tool or minion of the secret order he makes him revolt from it by entering upon his public ministry and then to be again reconciled to it after he is supposed to have died. His ministry he came to regard as a period of insane delusions and when restored to sanity repudiated his former theomania, belief in his Messianity, sonship, Kingdom, and his eschatological teaching. His narrow escape from death restored him to sanity. The weakness both of Moore's romance and of his Jesus is that instead of merely trying to undeceive Paul, he did not go back to Jerusalem and actively seek to cure the mischief Paul had wrought and to obliterate the effect of his own crazy fa- naticism. Anatole France in his "Procurator of Judea" made Pilate seem to have quite forgotten about the young Jewish agitator who thought himself the son of God. For Moore Jesus at the age of fifty-five regards the synoptic Johannin and especially the Pauline conceptions of himself as a source of dangerous psychic infection. Why, then, did he make no effort to supply an antidote to the poison instead of feebly trying in a way that he saw was utterly vain to set
108 JESUS "IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Paul right? Instead of this he merely turned from the world, selfishly seeking only peace for his own soul, almost as if dazed by the evil of which he had been the occasion. To a bolder and more creative mind than Moore's this task of extinguishing the conflagration he had caused would have been a most challenging and inspiring theme. Moore's Jesus is a weakling, paralyzed into quietism by the realization of the appalling catastrophe he had brought upon the world. An- other larger finish to this story is possible, viz., Jesus might have proceeded to found a real "third kingdom." In failing to do either of these things, Moore's book has missed its greatest opportunity, even from the standpoint of the mere novelist, which is all he claims to be.
There have been attempts to construe the religion of Jesus as esoteric Judaism, of which De Jonge1 is typical. He makes Jesus a pupil of Hillel, a man of holy anger and calm melancholy; a master of dialectic; imperious; of great practical ability; inexorably consistent and logical. He has property inherited from his father, otherwise he could not have fled to Egypt so suddenly. He is forty or fifty years old, but looks younger because of his beauty. At the beginning of his ministry he is a widower with a little son. He is an aristocratic Jew, although in a workman's blouse.
Pierre Nahor2 makes Jesus appear at the Dead Sea with the dis- tinguished Brahmin with whom he has made a journey to Egypt as well as to India, and throughout he is much assisted by his fellow trav- eller. In Egypt he has gained a practical acquaintance with hyp- notism, and it is thus he heals the Magdalene whom he has met before at Alexandria. His food miracles are due to provisions of bread, fish, etc., made by rich and pious ladies. On the cross he puts himself into a cataleptic trance, but revives, appears, and finally retires to the house of his wealthy, mysterious, Indian teacher. After his last visit to his disciples he is exhausted, and falls down and dies near the home of his mentor.
Many fictitious lives of Jesus make him master of Oriental occult- ism. E. Bosc3 makes him not a Semite but an Aryan, basing all on the Fourth Gospel.
(f) The Superman. The cult of the superman, the chief and
l"Jeschuah, der klassische jlldische Mann." Berlin, 1504, 11a p.
•"Jesu." Trans. Berlin, 190a.
»"La Doctrine Esotfrique a travers les Ages." Paris, 1889-1000, 1 Vol.
JESUS IN LITERATURE 109
most extraordinary literary phenomenon of our time, by no means began with Nietzsche (who has since inspired so many younger writers in all lands, but especially in Germany), but goes far back of him, and had prelusions in Plato's philosophic tyrant, Aristotle's magnanimous man, the Stoic sage, etc. Indeed the impulse to define the ideal, unipersonal, consummate, complete man has always been in the world and has produced all gods and heroes and inspired all apotheoses, to say nothing of the many messiahs of primitive people. Along with the evolution of the objectivities of religion there has always gone the opposite mystic trend to make a man his own prophet, priest, king, saviour, god. The subjectivity of idealism which makes the man the creator, projector, bearer of the world, thrusts him back upon himself, and incalculably enhances his belief in the oracles within his own soul. It is not man as he is, however, who at his best is a rather wretched creature, but man as he is to be when fully evolved, who is the supreme object of love and service, to produce whom is the goal not merely of eugenics but of all human endeavour. The masses are pariahs between whom and the truly great there is an interval "greater than that be- tween man and animals." The middle class is hardly any better, whether its leaders come from Bohemia or Philistia. The effect of educating either of these classes is represented in Shakespeare's "Tempest" where Prospero finds Caliban a brute, lodges him in his own cell, and teaches him his own language, only to have Caliban attempt to violate his daughter Miranda, so that in the end he has to be reduced to subjection, according to the allegorical interpretation Renan was fond of putting upon this play. All the sympathy and pity of the devotees of the cult of the superman are directed upward, not downward, that is, toward the few great, superior, unique souls who have evolved their own ego to the uttermost or are striving to do so against difficulties that make them fit objects of pathos. They are the aristocrats of earth, who have let themselves go with abandon, perhaps have lived above morals, have been a law to themselves, have enforced their ideas, wills, and sentiments upon others, and have been opposed and hated by those they have coerced. They are altruistic only to those superior souls who wish to create something beyond and above themselves, to set new goals and establish new values; who are jealous of all gods; who break old tables of laws, and would take the kingdom of the future by storm; who are liberators and redeemers of individuali-
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ties. Nearly all writers of this school idealize above all in history Napoleon, although Frederick the Great, Luther, Goethe, Cromwell, Caesar Borgia, etc., and in fiction Faust and Zarathustra represent two ethnically evolved types. In literature the egoists are represented by writers as different as Ibsen, Hauptmann, Sudermann, D'Annunzio, Shaw, Baudelaire, Huysmann, Flaubert, and very many others who have either striven to be or else to portray supermen or both. Dosto- yefsky sought to create a superman in his hero Raskolnikow, who from boyhood feels above all others, whose motto is "Love and serve thy- self first," who murders coolly and deliberately as Bulwer's Eugene Aram did, and whose supreme end in life is to distend his own individ- uality. To the superman "all is allowed." In one of Ibsen's first plays, Skule, the Norse prince, is inordinately proud and must be the first in the land. In his Borkman the superman is a capitalist. In "Bishop Narseon" he is an immoralist and almost a diabolist. In Strindberg's " Borg " he is a scientist who ends himself by a sublime sui- cide, sailing out over the seas toward the constellation of Hercules, the deliverer of Prometheus, the fire-bringer. In Wilbrandt's "Easter Island" he is Doctor Adler, who climbs to supermanhood by trying to found an ideal Weimar in savage islands with a number of other characters who are designed to bring out in a most striking way the contrast between good, ordinary personages and the superman. In Heyse's "Uber alien Gipfeln," the superman, Friesen, is a society lion and a Machiavellian prime minister, who thinks himself the finest mind in Germany. In Hoffmann's " Der eiserne Rittmeister," he is a physician who achieves the superman's diploma. In Widmann's play, "Jenseits von Gut und Bose," Pfeil dreams himself into becoming really an ideal hero whom he has long admired, and doing his great deeds. In Conradi's "Phrase-Monger," Spalding, an ordinary man, evolves himself to supermanhood in three stages, as if to illustrate the " way." In Langbehn's " Rembrandt als Erzieher," we are told how the striver may become an artistically creative over-soul. This book did much to make individualism the goal of art. Several have attempted to delineate superwomanhood either by creating characters de novo or allegorizing historical personages. Some think Stendhal with his countless amours, his voluminous writings, bombast, and affectation, a typical superman. Max Stirner (H. Schmidt), who fairly apotheosized egoism and selfishness, scorned altruism. "The universe, it is I."
JESUS IN LITERATURE in
It is exciting almost to the point of mild delirium to read this literature continuously and intensively. The crowd of supermen repre- sent the most variegated ideals, and perhaps may be said to agree only in being intensely occupied with themselves, tingling with self-con- sciousness, with a phobia of every kind of mediocrity, in revolt against custom, belief, law, and perhaps all restraints whatever. The apos- tles of supermanhood could no more get together and organize any kind of "third kingdom" or dispensation, such as many of them have dreamed of, than the characters they have portrayed could do so. They know no friendship or love save of the sensuous type. To them the chief of human relations in the world is that of master and slave. Might is right, and to exercise it to the uttermost is the supreme duty. Their principles are a blend of those of Mephistopheles and Zarathustra, and none of their characters attains the sublimity of Milton's Satan. Their kingdom is of this earth and they know no other. They are essentially pagan and anti-Christian, but the best of them have a certain unique appeal. They make us realize that Christianity as currently interpreted lacks virile affirmation of the will to live, that it has given too much attention to the common man of the herd, has been too tender to weaklings, and has failed to sym- pathize with the sufferings and striving of leaders who know, but have not attained power, and are still struggling amid pain and obloquy upward toward the heights to create new values. These are they most worthy in all the world of sympathy, love, and service. The maxim of life is "the greatest good for the greatest men," and not for the greatest numbers. One of the former outweighs countless of the latter. We have forgotten that the natural instincts of man, while they can be indefinitely refined and sublimated, can never be eliminated or radically changed in their substance. We have not realized that many discarded gods and cults ought to be reestablished. We have thought far too meanly of heathendom.
The superman thus has become not only a new culture hero, but is well on the way to become a new god. Leo Berg1 says his cult is "destined to succeed Christianity" as the religion of humanity, of which Darwin and Schopenhauer, German philosophy, and especially the Greek sophists, who made man the measure of all, are prophetic.
'"The Superman." London, 1006. 344 p. See also J. Huneker, "Egoists; a Book of Supermen." New York, (. 372 p. Also his "Iconoclasts," 1005, and bis "Visionaries." Also bis 'Ivory, Apes and Peacocks."
1009. 372 p
ii2 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Modern triumphs in war, applied science, our sudden emancipation from past restraints upon both conduct and thought, have made every- thing which the individual in his most secret dreams and reveries has longed for seem to be realizable here and now. These ideals appeal to young men who are by nature, as Plato said, prone to psychic inebria- tion, everywhere, and perhaps most of all in cultivated Germany, which believes itself the super-race or nation. For a long time the soul of later adolescence has lacked the inspiration and enthusiasm and ideality which it needs and yearns for. In the superman cult this need is supplied so abundantly that the more susceptible are often exalted to states akin to ecstasy and megalomania as they con the gesta or the golden legends of the heroes, apostles, saints, and martyrs of the new faith in which they would be initiates. Never again, we are told, will the ephebic soul be fascinated by a gospel of renunciation, self- effacement, non-resistance, or asceticism. Any religion that over- stresses these and strives to develop an over-patheticism toward the weak and outcast or those who should and will perish under the law of selection, never can make a supreme appeal to young men. Lives modelled too exclusively upon this pattern are too tame and lacking in gamy flavour to do the world's work greatly. They do not appeal to the deeper instincts of women, who grow restless just in proportion as men lack vitality. Nor do they really inspire or dominate the masses, who also demand a great leader to coerce their souls and grow turbulent in democracies if there are no compellers of the mob-soul, creative and dominative of public opinion and sentiment, which makes tyrants for itself often out of very mediocre material, amercing itself without stint to exalt its ideal. The superman must have war as an inner psy- chological necessity, and languishes or dies in an atmosphere of passiv- ism. If there is no physical, he declares spiritual, war.
Thus, to regain its lost supremacy in the intellectual world, Christianity must be so reconstructed as to make a more arousing appeal to the souls of men. It must realize that if it cannot do so it must henceforth resign itself to work only with the vulgar masses or those whom nature is progressively disinheriting. As they are now conceived, Jesus and the superman are almost diametrically opposite. It is one of the chief purposes of this book to show that as Christ's life, character, and teachings are now being reinterpreted, and especially as they can and should be yet further constructed, he meets this need;
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that the cult that irradiates from him was calculated to give the greatest possible development of the individual and was not so one- sidedly social as the recent socialization of Christianity has proclaimed; that he developed himself by his own human efforts to a degree of completeness that no son of man ever yet achieved; that he did it alone in a solitariness that was nothing less than tragic, forging his way by psychic labour but with no pathological stigmata to the very goal of human development; that he deliberately chose a certain and a most painful and disgraceful form of death with a heroism that knows no parallel. Then, having fought and conquered death, hell, and the devil, he returned in glory in the last act, conferring the boon of im- mortality, than which nothing ever so exalted the dignity and worth of the individual. His epos has been so deeply graven upon the human soul, and has so cadenced the activities of its most unconscious depths, that it has become the modulus in accordance with which these con- ceptions of the superman so far outside the pale of the faith which he founded became possible. In fine, the modern conceptions of the superman, when psychoanalyzed from their patent to their latent meaning and motive, represent only partial impulsions, the origin of which is undreamed of by those who attempt his portrayal. The new egoism is only an attempt to re-represent one element in the now complex Christ motif. It is significant only if regarded as the wind- birth of a new messianism, born of the selfsame impulses which evolved the messiahs of savage races but which found their transcendent exemplification in Christianity, and which this type of literature is now trying to reproduce in modern guise. The cult of superhumanity is therefore really an amateurish first step by those who know little of the deeper psychology of religion, but who feel as their deepest, most social need the desire to find again the Christ which the Church has lost or so distorted that modern culture can no longer recognize him.
Can the new eschatological, psychological Jesus, as delineated in the following chapters, satisfy all the culture needs now only partially fed in the many constructions of superhumanity? Can he be shown as the real goal which all of them are blindly groping toward? That he can be, is the main thesis of this work. The author believes that we here face the supreme culture question of our day, and that the future ascendence or decadence of Christianity depends upon it. The appeal here thus is not to the current orthodoxy, which has failed to solve the
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problem and must be transcended in form, while its content is practi- cally preserved. It is not to liberal or critical scholarship, which has resolved Jesus to the dimensions of a good and perhaps great, but entirely comprehensible, reformer, and which needs essential psy- chological supplementation. The appeal here taken is to ingenuous, cultivated, serious, young men seeking to make the most and best of their lives, and to orient themselves to the supreme problem of human nature, needs, and ends, for of such is the hope of the world. History will be as they make it, and the real future of religion is in their hands.
A. Wilbrandt1 has given us in the above-mentioned powerful romance which owes an added zest to the fact that its chief character, Adler, is Nietzsche himself, supposed to be drawn true to life in features and traits. To transcend the present ape-man and work our way to a higher humanity he plans a eugenic settlement for a few carefully chosen associates on the Easter Island, where the natives will be dispossessed and a new humanity slowly evolved. No one ever reaches Easter Island, for Adler grows fanatical and insane about it. A disciple, Schweitzer, a giant doctor, marries his daughter, Malwine, however, and it is realized that only in their own souls is the Easter Island where a new humanity will evolve, to be found. The overman is the best of ourselves. Karl is a mercurial musician, some think a parody of Wagner. Adler is prompted to his ideals by the death of his wife and the resolution to be worthy of her. There will be no scruples about expelling or extermi- nating the beautiful Malay race on the island, and the old ant-hill of Europe will be left to die. Everything suggests a higher evolution, and we have even a superdog, Trias. Adler grows supersensitive, is told that a relative's son was made a scapegrace by his works, but nevertheless adopts and tries vainly to save him. He has a bridge over the bay where he spends much time, musing on the bridge to the higher humanity. Westenberger is the author's idea of a typical Christian, having suffered everything and living alone, making sacred images. In the discussions between him and Adler the opposite ideals which they represent are strongly brought out. In the end Adler becomes violent, and finally impossible, and dies, the implication being that his ideals cannot be realized.
l"A New Humanity, or The Easter Island." Trans. Phlla., 1905, 360 p.
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J. V. Widmann1 gives another literary presentation of Nietzschean- ism. Doctor Lossen, a collector, living with Professor Pfeil, charges a servant with having stolen some arsenic he wants for specimens. His sister, Joanna, Pfeil's wife, enters and reveals her unhappiness because her husband has drifted away from her to his scientific work, in which he has found another woman, Victorine, who is more sympathetic. Thus the wife is revealed as having taken the arsenic with suicidal intent. A masked ball is planned where Pfeil hopes to meet Victorine; but as he is dressed in costume and is about to leave, he is narcotized by Lossen with a cigarette. In his long dream under the influence of the drug, instead of the play he was to act in he lives out another life which is truly beyond good and evil, and is so distressing that, in the last act, when he is roused from his stupor, he is completely cured of his superhumanity by his frightful dream. He finds himself holding a dagger which belonged to his part, but with which he thinks he has slain his wife. Their affection is replighted just as day breaks.
Many German novelists, dramatists, and poets born not far from 1870 have been profoundly influenced by Nietzsche, and their passion is to introduce actual modern life and destroy the old "pretty-pretty" methods. Some of these have been prosecuted for their blasphemies and immoralities. Zola and Baudelaire inspired some, Hauptmann's " Vorn Sonnenaufgang" others. Perhaps the worst of all these writers is Wedekind, who began as a kind of music-hall performer and writer, and later developed things more medical and gross than were ever written before, for to him nothing is unprintable. His chief creation is the character of Lulu, with two sequels, "Das Erdgeist," and "Die Biichse der Pandora." For him she is the eternal woman in whom the world, the flesh, and the devil are supreme. She is as full of contradic- tions as Menken; her soul can soar or grovel in the mire of passion. She has the instincts of an animal, and everything is cultivated to the nth degree, that she may enjoy all the body's possibilities. In "Das Erdgeist," as a flower-girl she glories in conquests of the other sex, deceives one man, ruins another, murders a third, in the war of sex against sex; and in the last part she sinks from the heights of her voca- tion to the depths, till at last, as a London street-walker, she is mur- dered by a Jack the Ripper in one of the most appalling scenes ever
'"Jenseits von Gut und Bdse." 1893. 4 acts. [
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written. Wedekind says life is a toboggan slide, and morality is the most profitable business on earth.
Doctor Thoma's "Moral" (1909) is a three-act comedy illustrating this principle, but lower down even than Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession." The president of the Society for the Prevention of Vice is himself a whited sepulchre, and his talk with his friends is of the grossest. All estimable people are implicated. " It is the same with morals as with religion; one must always give the impression that there is such a thing." No one can hush up the woman, d'Hauteville, who dominates the whole situation because she knows the vicious side of everybody in the community. Such representations of superwoman- hood must implant the deepest feelings of distrust.
Upton Sinclair1 makes the superman a musician, shipwrecked and living alone for twenty years on an island, who when discovered by his brother can only with difficulty indicate to him the " tempests of emo- tion, the knocking on unseen doors" when all barriers suddenly break and a sense of life rushes in, and one comes to know personages of a transfigured earth who are the true overmen. The hero is strangely inarticulate, and his crude ideas of the superman smack of Swedenborg. The hero will not be rescued, and so is left to his fancies and to his fate.
Bernard Shaw, in "Man and Superman," has grappled with this problem in his brilliant but hyperaffected way. The very artificial plot of this play suggests that it may have been intended as a joke or a puzzle, challenging spectator or reader to find who is the superman. The joke is probably that it proves to be a woman. In his 127 page preface to "Androcles and the Lion," he says things so trite and cheap not to say maundering, that I have found it on the whole perhaps harder to read to the end than anything else noted in this chapter because more commonplace.
R. B. McCarthy2 harks back toward a mediaeval conception of the superman, and attempts to give in hexameters the story of the Anti- christ, following rather closely the Scriptural conception. He is in- tellectual and crafty, was king of Babylon, then Caesar; poses as the protector of the Jews; his hosts were expelled from heaven; he defies Jehovah, destroys Jerusalem, and is at the acme of his power when
'"The Overman." New York, 1907. go p. '"The Antichrist." New York, 1806.
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Christ dies. Later he is bound and the earth renovated. Now, ap- parently, he is loosed again for a season.
Professor Baumgarte, theologian at the University of Kiel says: "Christ's train of thought cannot be accepted as being applicable to Germans. His realm of peace and love is impossible as an historic development and has nothing whatever to do with political or public matters."
In German literature, and under its influence, we have many pres- entations of Christ or his mask which are degenerate or defective. The hero of " Beyond His Power," as we saw, is only a sublime fanatic, verging on lunacy. John Morton, in "The Ragged Messenger," is an epileptic and commits suicide. Wilbrandt's Westenberger is a solitary, has withdrawn from life, and ceased to influence people. Wagner's Parsifal is described as a pure fool because he was unconscious and naive, despite the fact that his soul was excessively charged with all good potentials. Perhaps the entrance of the fool in modern literature goes back to the idealizations of Caspar Hauser, and later to Peer Gynt, while we have a recent illustration of the same tendency in Dosto- yefsky's "Idiot." Hauptmann's Emanuel Quint1 is the story of an innocent, simple, feeble-minded wanderer with "something of the constraining power of the Saviour." Quint appears at the very start in the market-place crying "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!" He seems to be at least half a fool of a new sort. He wanders barefoot and hatless, Bible in pocket, never accepting money from any one, suspected by clergy. He is arrested, stoned, subjected to every indignity, but never resentful or resisting, proud that he is worthy to suffer. One of his few disciples is meant to resemble Peter, and many events are parallels of Gospel incidents. Quint does help certain types of sick people, and the folk-soul makes him a great healer and able even to raise the dead. One evangelist, the modern analogue of John, baptizes Quint. As the story goes on, the fool becomes completely convinced that he is Jesus come to earth, that he bears the same relation to God that Jesus did. A lady improves his manner and dress. His followers grow orgiastic and like Herrnhutters. He comes to hate churches and clergy, condemns his own followers; then goes to Breslau, as Jesus did to Jerusalem, where stirring events occur. He is even suspected of a murder, but is
»"The Fool in Christ." New York, ign, 474 P.
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cleared. He flatly declares, "I am Christ." He associates with the lowest, finally he loses his way in an Alpine storm, and six months later his body is found, his hand grasping a slip of paper on which is written: "The mystery of the kingdom." Did he die convinced or doubting? The author describes a case of progressive religious mania, but flies in the face of psychiatry7 by making Quint a master of inner psychic analysis and an exalted mystic. These traits do not go with progressive dementia. This parody of Jesus is rather contemptible. He is idle, vagrant, utterly tactless, screaming his prayers and shouts of joy amidst the woods and hills, his feelings ranging from ecstasy to despair. There is a sacramental meal to which a devoted woman enters. Is the author trying to make Jesus ridiculous as he conceives he would be if taken out of his antique setting and put in the modern world? Quint has the saving qualities of purity and self-abnegation, and a sometimes sublime insight into the union of divine and human. No insightful student of this literature can fail to see in the antithesis between Jesus and the superman the same contrast which the Middle Ages knew as that between Christ and Antichrist.1 Jesus is a paragon of altruism and self-abnegation, while the superman is a monster of egoism and selfishness. The one subordinates the individ- ual to the interests of the race and the world; the other maximizes and hypertrophies individuality. The ideal of the one is to serve, that of the other to rule. The one would develop the self as an instrument of service, while for the other it is an end in itself. The kingdom of the one is spiritual and eternal, and that of the other is all of this life and earth. The superman of to-day is the Satan of centuries ago, modernized, refined, and given every credential that literary art can supply. He is an apotheosis of pagan ideals. It can hardly be urged in defense of those who make the Christlike character a high-grade moron or deviate, that they are trying to show that one may be a Christian despite various stigmata of degeneration, or that they strive to set forth that the generic, typical, or totemic nature of man, although arrested or perverted, is naturally or can become Christian, because the core of humanity is by nature sound. On the contrary, the moral is that to be a Christian to-day is to revert or degenerate to a stand- point that is transcended and effete.
>H. Preuss: "Die Vorstellungen von Antichrist." Leipzig, 1006. *9S P- M. D. Conway: "Demonology and Devil Lore." New York, 1879. a vol. p. 428 and 47a. Paul Carus: "History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil." Chicago, rooo. iq6 p. \V. Fischer: "Satanwesen in Miitelalter." n. d. 113 p.
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Two recent trends of literary events shed a new and very signifi- cant light upon this problem. The first is certain expressions of the religious sentiment in Germany since the beginning of the war, and the other is the remarkable movement in the field of French letters just before. Man lives on an evolutionary ladder and war plunges him back into his basal nature and immerses him in primitive emotions.1 But retrogression may be either degenerative or regenerative. On the one hand it shows that ages of culture and religion have not much weakened man's instinct to kill, loot, and revive the old savage life of adventure, hardship, and danger. But it is a psychological necessity occasionally to escape from monotony and routine, the narrowness of specialization, and the tension of progress and civilization, all of which are hard because they do not comport with or satisfy the original nature of man. Along with this retrogression, and an essential part of it, is a revival of primitive religious instinct, as the field of conscious- ness is narrowed and intensified and man is thrust into the heart of the struggle between life and death. E. Bergmann2 says that the war has greatly deepened religious feeling among the Germans. Pragma- tism is tabooed, and there is a great movement from logos to bios. The beast in mankind broke out like that of the Apocalypse, as if two thousand years of Christianity had been in vain. Idealism is im- mensely reinforced, and student soldiers who began with Nietzsche find their interest passing to Fichte and thence to the New Testament. Both Testaments are read so that the Bible trade has developed enor- mously. In war men desert philosophy and become like children seeking the hand of their father in the dark. Nothing has been more remarkable than this spontaneous reversion to naive faith, the images and words of which, in the face of death, come back as of greatest value. F. Koehler ("Das sittliche religiose Leben,") in the same volume as the above says no one can be ready to lay down his life for his brother without being touched by the great love. Kriegesdienst and Goltesdienst were never so closely associated. Students, lay preachers, and officers hold religious services. Germany faces three fronts on the field and the fourth to heaven. The people reconsecrate themselves to the God of their youth, their father, and their homes, and thousands pray who never did so before. "Before all else, it is the person of
!See Pfister: "Zur Psychologie des Krieges und des Friedens. " Dec. 1014. And especially Freud: "Zeitge" masses viber Krieg und Tod. 1. Die EnttaUschung des Krieges." Imago, Vol. 4. No. i, 1915.
2"Philosophie und Krieg." In a volume entitled "Der Kampf des deutscben Geistes im Weltkrieg." 1915. aiSP-
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Christ that is the indescribable ideal of the fighter." At Christmas and Easter the lessons of death and resurrection are giving religion the central place it held of old. Ketzer, in " Zur Psychologie des Krieges," in Die Christliche Welt, Marburg, Jan. 7, 191 5, says what we see in the nations now embattled against one another is only the magnified picture of what is going on in the soul of each individual, in rising to a higher and more devout consciousness. G. LeBon (" Enseignements psy- chologiques de la guerre europeenne," Paris, 1915, 364 p.,) lays much stress upon the mysticism and high moral idealism which the war has developed. M. Hirschfield (" Kriegspsychologisches, " 1916, 32 p.) describes war as demonic, magnetic, an apparition of fate, dividing all history and every contemporary life into two parts, one before and one after. He especially stresses the fraternization due to marching and sleeping together, wearing the same uniform, sharing the same hopes and dangers, intoxicated alike with victory and depressed by defeat. This intensifies every social motive of religion. Men in war are super- stitious, as witness the "Angels of Mons," the many visions of saints and heroes in shining armour, the processions led by angelic children, and sometimes hallucinations of even the ancient gods of war. E. W. Dix ("Psychologische Beobachtungen liber die Eindriicke des Krieges auf Einzelne wie auf die Masse," 1915, 30 p., with literature) points out the great moral exaltation, childish naivete, credulity, and illusions of religious personages. In England, Admiral Beattie thinks the chief need is a recrudescence of religious faith, as in the days of Cromwell and the Puritans. Religion has been defined as having something that we are ready to die for.
French thought to-day shows a strong Christian trend, as it did a hundred years ago in the reaction against the skepticism of the eigh- teenth century. The way in which the innermost and best things in the soul of the Mother Catholic Church are now finding expression in literature is so remarkable that it might almost be called revivalistic. It is not a cry back to Rome, but a sudden spontaneous movement of the intellectuals, a class till lately generally indifferent, if not hostile, to Christianity. At the last Salon before the war, in 1913, the two pic- tures that attracted most attention were "The Annunciation" by Denis, and "The Good Thief on the Cross" by Desvallieres, while Rodin's book on cathedrals, by far the most characteristic expression this great artist has attempted, is a psalm of piety. Bergson's philoso-
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phy is in general anti-mechanistic and anti-material, and he has lately declared that his system requires a free creative god at its centre. The aged entomologist Fabre was honoured just before his death, in 191 5, by France in various ways because of his ardent theism. Pecher finds that the chief French epic, the "Chanson de Roland" and other an- cient legends are really songs of pilgrimages and allegories of the true faith. Whether this view be right or wrong, the singular thing is that it is so widely accepted. New and often monumental editions of re- ligious writers, De Maistre, Lamennais, Montalembert, Calvin's "Insti- tutes," Schure's great "Lexicon of Litanies," and De Sales' " Introduc- tion to the Devout Life," have been recently thus presented. Honataux in his "Jeanne d'Arc" who, he said, deserved to be called divine, illustrates the same tendency, and so do no fewer than four recent lives of Francis d'Assisi. Bertrand's " St. Augustine" was the chief book of three seasons ago, in which the great saint of sixteen centuries since is made to appeal even more profoundly to the religious instincts of the French than Pascal, who wrote only three hundred years ago. This work closes with the expression of a spirit of love and veneration to the great heart and great intellect of this unique servant of God. The final sentence in the book, from Augustine's first biographer, which the author devoutly adopts, is, "I beg most earnestly from the charity of those who read this book to unite with me in blessing and thanksgiving toward the Lord who inspired me to write down this life for those present and those absent, and who has given me the strength to com- plete it. Pray for me and with me that I may endeavour to follow in the steps of that most incomparable man in whose company God has allowed me to live for so long a time."
Among the many special books illustrating this tendency, nearly all of which appeared within two or three years of the outbreak of the war, as if anticipating it, and which are most eagerly read and have made a profound impression since the war broke out, I may enumerate the following1: Pierre Loti, who in his story of his pilgrimage to the marvellous temple ruins of Buddha, his devotion to whom has made him almost an apostle of despair, ends his "Pelerin d' Angkor" (191 1), translated under the title of "Siam," by saying: "There must be a Supreme Pity to which we can appeal, however we name it, for other-
•In this my reading has been guided by my former pupil, Professor Albert Schinz, of Smith College. See bis article in American Journal of Psychology, July, 1916.
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wise creation would be cruel, odious, and cowardly." Juliette Adam, one of the veteran leaders in the field of letters for many years, thirty years ago wrote a somewhat defiant novel entitled "La Paienne," but in 19 1 2 published another called "La Chretienne" which gives an account of the conversion of the heroine from paganism to militant Christianity. The significant fact is that the heroine of both tales is the authoress, and they are extremely confessional, the latter novel apparently having been written in the spirit of an apostle, as an act of duty. Barres in youth was radical and destructive, but in his "La Colline Inspiree" (191 2), he betrays a strong religious trend. The Church is to prevent men from going astray, as they are sure to do if they attempt to walk alone. His tale is of a religious movement of some thirty years ago. The hero has the sacred heart of religion in him but so grossly veiled as to be painful reading. The same story might a generation ago have been used against Christianity, but now the moral is all in its favour. The religion in it is made pure and vital enough to overcome the ugly cloak in which it is wrapped. The author is now an earnest advocate of the restoration of the Church and its sacraments, which he also regards as a key to the history of France. Thus we have in recent years not a few formerly antagonistic who have turned advocates of religion. The brothers Tharauld have lately sounded a strange religious note in their "La Tragedie de Ravaillac," a religious lunatic, the assassin of Henry IV, a book written much in the spirit though quite independently of the above work of Barres. Madman as their hero is, and submerged as his soul is in fanaticism and lunacy, he is nevertheless inspired with a pure Christian purpose which is sacred in itself, perverse and criminal though its expression is. That such a man could have a core of religion in his nature is indeed a strange thing. Binet Valmer, a physician, had written various secular things before his "La Creature" in 1913. This tells of a famous psychiatrist to whom is brought a girl who has been so neglected that only her baser animal nature in all its rank instincts has been developed. By great and prolonged labour he gives her intelligence while her beauty gains her admission to society. But when he has done his best, he realizes that his work has been a failure because he has not given her what would have made her really human, viz., the two ideas of duty and of God. A lyric poet, Jammes, whose "Georgiques Chre- tiennes" won the Grand Prix of the French Academy, prefaces his
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work by declaring that he is a Roman Catholic and humbly accepts all the decisions of his Pope, who speaks in the name of the true God; that he has nothing to do with any schism or modernism, and that on no pretext will he deviate from orthodox dogma which is truth itself from the mouth of Our Lord through the Church. Although some have accused him of mannerism and affectation, his sincerity is probably beyond question.
P. ClaudePs " L'Annonce faite a Marie " is a mystery drama, which is saturated with the spirit of mediaeval saint worship. The test of the best qualities of mankind is how they bear suffering. The true child of God rejoices in the severest trials, because only in them can he manifest divine loftiness. Violaine exposes herself to leprosy in the service of her fellow-men. There can be no greater contrast than between her spirit, which fairly longs for service and self-sacrifice, and that of the Christian women who are clamouring for rights and for- getting their duties. The scene is in France at the close of the Hun- dred Years' War just before the appearance of Jeanne d'Arc. The heroine's father has been marvellously spared. He ought to be happy, but he is not because he feels God has not tried him. He fears he is not worthy, but longs for a chance to show his fortitude by doing acts of courage and resignation, so he leaves all behind for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which is beset with manifold suffering.
C. Peguy, who died leading a charge on the Marne, tells us that the greatness of France was the inspiration of the mediaeval faith, of which we have stupidly hitherto seen only the defects. The criterion of moral superiority is suffering for a good cause in the service of man- kind and especially those nearest us, our own countrymen. This is justice. Instead of the pursuit of pleasure, which makes beasts and brings social anarchy, the soul of man craves justice, or paying for his imperfections, and the saints and the great cathedrals are the best things in God's fairest garden, France. The best saints are three, the Holy Virgin, St. Genevieve, the patroness of Paris who saved her from the Huns and Attila, and Jeanne d'Arc — all women because they impersonate charity, love, devotion, to which man so instinctively turns especially in times of trouble. Jeanne d'Arc is revered especially because the work is pervaded with the sense of impending war.
A grandson of Pasteur, R. Vallery-Radot's "L'Homme de Desir" is doubtless autobiographic. The author was trained a Christian; as
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a student, swung over to skepticism and indifference, but later strives to find again the divine life in the solitude of nature. Here he is sorely tempted by carnal love twice, but in the end finds celestial peace. The modulus of the whole work is the temptation of Saint Anthony in the desert. E. Psichari, the grandson of Renan, who died at the head of his artillery battery, in his "L'Appel des Armes" tells us of the inertia of his age and the cry of the soul for action, which leads him to become a soldier as a sacred mission. He says war is divine, and the soldier a representative of God's justice on earth. He must fight all who crush the weak; he must be the ideal knight of the Middle Ages in alliance with the Church to establish the kingdom of God. Before going into the war the hero utters a fervent prayer for courage and valour to the God of armies. He wants the faith of a soldier. He wants to kill many enemies and to die in a great victory. His posthu- mous tale, more effective but less polished than the above, which is autobiographic, is entitled "Voyage du Centurion." The centurion of the New Testament was a Roman having soldiers under him, who had such faith that Jesus could heal at a distance that he implored him to do so. Jesus, we are told, was profoundly impressed by his unprece- dented faith, and with no remonstrance healed him, though a gentile, the only case in which he did so, indicating that Jesus himself had exceptional reverence for a believing soldier. The hero leaves civiliza- tion in a long expedition to Mauretania, and in the solitude of the desert becomes converted. His errand seems a holy mission now, and he finds a new soul in enforcing the truth, beauty, and goodness of Christianity upon Moslems, the implication being that in the same way his country is finding regeneration in a war against the disciples of Thor. These are in fact only a few samples from many more that illustrate the same tendency.
In the above sections we have several score attempts by modern writers of very different calibres and degrees of learning, the majority of them since 1900, to subject the themes of the Christian story to literary treatment. In the handling of these incidents there is vastly more freedom and diversity than in the mediaeval miracle plays. To- day there is no censorship save occasionally by the civil authorities, impelled by public opinion, while some have the approval of the more liberal representatives of the Church. The uniqueness of the subject matter gives the best of these novels and dramas a peculiar zest which
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is greatly added to by the traditional and inbred sense of their sacred- ness. It is safe to predict a further development on these lines in the near future, which may contribute something to rescue the modern secular stage and romance from their present triviality and degrada- tion. Here we have a culture problem that should engage the best thought of religious leaders. The sacred canon is so rigid and exclusive that it has lost much of its pristine power by familiarity; so it was inevitable that the modern romancer should not only use but also should transcend even the apocrypha. Hence we find that other legends and traditions within and even without the pale of Christendom have been freely drawn upon, and that the artistic and creative imag- ination has attempted many new combinations, some of the best of such power as to suggest possibilities of yet greater effectiveness and wider range. Already we hear suggestions that the theatre with its amazing modern resources, which in every land is appealing to the popular mind as never before, may and ought again to be utilized by faith, which in our day profoundly needs nothing less than a regenera- tion by the creative imagination. Many of these works should be in every church and theological library for they make a very strong and wholesome appeal to ingenuous youth circumnutating to find true orientation in this field. The recent movement in France shows the remarkable phenomenon unpredecented in recent centuries of the intellectuals of this great nation spontaneously and concurrently reacting from skepticism toward the standpoint of Jesus in their view of the world. There has been in recent ages no other such demonstra- tion that Christianity and even the Church have not lost their power over cultivated men. Again, the rivalry between the superman, on the one hand, bent on his own aggrandizement, and on the other the Christian type of soul that would subordinate self to service, which is so strongly brought out in this literature, is psychologically identical with the long ancient struggle between Christ and Antichrist, altruism and diabolism, different as are the settings, incidents, character, and form in which this great antithesis is cast. Some acquaintance with the best of this literature cannot fail to impel toward a choice between these two ideals and rules of life, and give preachers, teachers, and readers, particularly of the literatures of France and Germany, an op- portunity to add the immense reinforcement of moral and religious interest to their work.
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(4). The Scientific Lives of Jesus. In approaching the following brief epitomes of a dozen standard lives of Jesus by leading experts of the past century, I by no means ignore the distinction between works of the imagination and those of critical scholarship, although the latter show almost as much diversity as the former, and most of them reduce rather than add to the story of Jesus. The account of primitive man is also told in two ways. Stanley Waterloo,1 Conan Doyle,2 Katherine Dopp, Lull, Rutot with his twelve plaster casts, Gabriel Max, H. F. Osborn3 have all attempted to bring before us our forbears of the Paleolithic Age. Here fact and fiction enter in very different propor- tions, neither being entirely excluded from any treatment and each helping the other as myth often supplements history. To science the moon is a planetary corpse suspended in the sky, as a prophecy of the ultimate fate of the earth, while in moon-lore and poetry Selene still charms lovers, provokes longing reveries, and is often an object of worship. To the genetic psychologist and pedagogue both have their place; and so, too, they venture to bring the Christological and the myth- opeic Jesus into juxtaposition, fully realizing the vast differences of method and the reliability of the results of the two procedures, but also realizing that bald historicity can never at this distance do full justice to the God-man without the aid of the religious imagination. True spirit- ual edification needs both.
Paulus (d. 185 1),4 reacting from his father's crude spiritism, came to represent a unique if jejune naturalism and rationalism. Living in the age and atmosphere of Goethe and Hegel, he was not only an orientalist and a professor of theology, but wrote on a great variety of topics. His pet aversion, greater even than that he cherished to- ward Schelling, was toward miracles. The Evangelists meant to nar- rate miracles, but nature cannot be divorced from God. Jesus' personal magnetism did have power to strengthen the nervous system, and he had secret cures, e. g., of blindness. Fasting, diet, and after-treatment were sometimes suggested. As to the nature-miracles, the calm that followed when Jesus came upon the ship was because just at that mo- ment it doubled a headland which protected it from the wind. The same coincidence explains another incident, which was interpreted as
»"The Story of Ab." Chicago, 1890. See also bis "A Son of the Ages," 1014. '"The Lost World." New York, 1912. 319 p. *" Men of the Old Stone Age." 1915. S'S P- «"Das Leben Jesu." 1826. 3 vol.
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his speaking peace to the waves when he was awakened. The feeding of the five thousand was the result of asking the rich who were present to share their supplies with those without, Jesus himself setting the example by doing so first. The transfiguration was due to the fact that Jesus was seen from below on a hill with two impressive strangers just as the sun was rising, which illuminated their garments. As to raising the dead, many sick people swoon, and since in Judea it was the custom to bury in three hours, Jesus really rescued such cases from premature burial, a most commendable work, although we do not know that he entered any form of protest against the custom. Jesus had an instant presentiment that detected trance or catalepsy. He insisted that Lazarus' grave be opened, whereupon there indeed he stood, self- resurrected, and Jesus called out to him, "Come forth!" The Jews loved miracles and were averse to recognizing secondary causes. This weakness Jesus played upon, and failed to disillusion them. Cruci- fixion is the slowest of all deaths. Jesus' loud cry just before he fainted showed that he still had much vitality. His trance, however, was a deep one. The lance thrust was only a surface wound, and may have helped like bleeding. Joseph was able to rescue him in this condition. In the grave the coolness and perfumes revived him. The storm and earthquake aroused him, and also rolled away the stone. He then put on a gardener's dress in place of the shroud, and stepped forth unseen until Mary met him, not recognizing him at first in this disguise. He was feeble and anaemic from all that he had undergone, but had strength enough to meet his friends occasionally for forty days. Finally he gathered them together on a hill, bade them farewell, and moved away with hands uplifted until a cloud hid him. His retirement from pub- licity was so complete that we do not know the date of his death. Judas betrayed him in order to force him to stand forth in his might, and was astonished and full of remorse at the failure of his plan. "The one thing needful" in the scene with Mary and Martha meant that he only wanted one staple course at the meal which was being prepared, etc. Paulus does not appeal to myth, but assumes that there was some real happening at the root of every miracle. But on this theory what about the sincerity of Jesus in allowing natural events to be interpreted supernaturally, or in condoning or conniving at their being thus regarded? The sincerity of Paulus is as sublime as naive, and caused him endless trouble. Hardly a writer since, orthodox or liberal, has
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not felt called upon to repudiate him; but if any one now felt the burden laid upon his soul to explain every wonder as it is narrated as a natural occurrence, it is hard to see how modern guesswork or baseless con- jecture could do much better. The task he sets before himself is impossible and so the solution of it has to be flimsy. His miracle phobia goes to the limit. Nothing more was possible in that direction so that it was easy for Strauss to give this method its coup de grace. Yet after all he remains an exquisite illustration of the first callow pinfeather pubescent stage of revolt against a still cruder and geneti- cally earlier stage of blind credulity. He inaugurated a new struggle between a revived Ebionitism and Docetism which has given us sometimes what might be called a parallel system of lives of Jesus, one in its human and one in its divine aspect.
Strauss (1874)1 had been an enthusiastic student of Hegel, and wrote many excellent things besides his "Life of Jesus," which was meant as an introduction to his perhaps really greater "Christian Theology in Its Historical Development." Into the former he put the ardour of his best years, and from a scientific or literary point of view it has well been called an almost perfect work. Because of his opinions, and chiefly because of this book, he was tabooed from any academic position and to a great extent by society, his social isolation aggravated by his separation from his wife. Despite the pathos in his history, he was philosopher enough to enjoy a simple life on his meagre inheritance and vigorous enough to write voluminously on many, including political, subjects.
He declares that Christendom is no longer Christian, and that the world has no religion save the unique feeling of dependence bred of pantheism. Myth, which no one before so well understood, had long been recognized as a very important ingredient of the Old Testament. The new light from this source was first applied to Jesus' entrance into and exit from the world, with no light shed upon what lay between. Two at least of the Evangelists used to be thought eye-witnesses, so there was little room for myth, but in the new view that the Gospels were composed a generation later and not by disciples, there was plenty of time for mythic infiltration. Strauss believes that his "Life of Jesus" better than all others exemplifies the philosophy of the true relations between reality and idea. He rejects immortality
i"Leben Jesu." 1835.
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save as designating the present inner sense of universality or infinitude in being able to rise to the idea. Truth does not depend on its external representation, and no true idea can completely realize itself histori- cally. Truth is rather history sublimated into idea. The idea of divine humanity is present in Christianity, and that is the main thing. The perfection of its embodiment in a sequence of outer events is less significant. Jesus evoked this idea that supplemented fact. There is first "a thesis (the supernatural), then the antithesis (the rational)" and these must bring a synthesis. The dynamic resultant in this case is a creative composition of dialectic forces and not mainly descriptive like Schleiermacher's whiprow of Ebionitic or Docetic. Strauss treats each item according to these Hegelian ideas first supernaturally, then rationally, in such a way that each is refuted by the other (see Schweitzer, p. 180). In this way all views of every subject can be conveniently brought under ordered review. Paulus's explanation of miracles is so banal that an orthodox reaction to supernaturalism seems impending. But Strauss's argument that miracles are myth is far more formidable than the attempt to resolve them into trickery and illusion. Strauss is so intent on distinguishing at every point between myth and history that he contributes far less than he should have done to the exaltation of the dignity of myth. He never realizes that at its best it is an expression of the folk-soul, which might have a culture value distinctly superior to fact itself as a pictorial expression of the very Hegelian idea he so reveres, or as a popular version of something as fundamental as the gnostic logos. To current orthodoxy myth is simply superstition, and only later does it come to its true evaluation. Legends intersect and are superposed in many strata. Jesus' nature- miracles Strauss calls "sea and fish stories." A common motive with many of the New Testament marvels is to improve on some corres- ponding miracle in the Old Testament. Everything before the bap- tism and after the burial is myth, and what lay between is infiltrated with it so that the historic Jesus can only be reached by a process of elimination. Strauss in his later and more popular "Life of Jesus," in which he sought, although vainly, to appeal to the German world as powerfully as Renan had done to the French in "La Vie de J£sus," gives us practically two lives, one the mythic and the other the human Jesus plucked of most of his glories. This figure has very little charm; for, as Schweitzer says, " The personality that emerged from the mist
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of myth was a Jewish claimant of Messianity whose world of thought is purely eschatological " ; so that Strauss's work, although it sought to put an end to supernaturalism, was not purely negative. Strauss says, " In the New Testament it almost looks as if no one among the Jews had ever thought of a suffering or dying Messiah." He should have added, but does not, that this idea is of gentile origin. While it is possible that Jesus foresaw his death, all he is said to have foretold about it and the reaction he hoped it would cause is vaticinia ex eventu. He probably grew into the conviction that he was the Messiah, and expected the Kingdom would be ushered in supernaturally, and that he was to come back in glory as its head. The parables are pre- served for us for the most part only in secondary forms. In general, Strauss's criticisms do not allow the reader to infer much as to what was behind the mythical curtain. We know nothing of the chronologi- cal order of events. All the discourses, including the Sermon, were gradually formed composites of sayings at different times and under different circumstances. Strauss denies the priority of Mark, but makes him a satellite of Matthew. He does not admit a primitive Mark or John or logia. The four Gospels to him are far more doctrinal than historic. He overstresses the importance of the myths of the Old Testament as compared with those of the gentile world, as is natural enough because the latter field was little opened up when he wrote. Not a few narratives, so diverse that they have been thought to describe different events, are in fact only different renderings of the same incidents.
No theological work ever raised such a storm, and probably no life in modern times was so dismalized as was that of Strauss by the odium theologicum he aroused. Indeed, so able were some of the attacks upon his views, particularly those by Tholuck and Neander, that Strauss himself vacillated and retracted some of his conclusions. But it is the young Strauss of the first edition of the first "Life" that has stood even against his own attacks later, and it is hardly too much to say that no one who has read and digested his first "Life" has ever after come forth as an apologist for crude or literal miraclism. Those who have given themselves the discipline of understanding it, anima Candida, and insist that they still believe in it, at best express only the will to believe (a psychic illusion of the als ob or pragmatic kind), and never the belief itself, for that was made forever after im-
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possible. Strauss's "Life" marks the chief epoch in the history of Christological studies since the Reformation. Such a wholesome ferment is it that post-Straussian literature, whether radical or con- servative, has all been richer in matter and broader in scope than what preceded.
Renan, born and bred a Catholic, wrote his "Vie de Jesus" in 1863 as the first part of his larger history and doctrine of the primitive Church. His "Les Apotres" and "Saint Paul," at least, were more valuable for scholars than the "Life," which appealed to the whole Latin world as nothing in its field had ever done. It was designed and partly written in Palestine, and is full of the subtle charm of atmos- phere. His imagination makes Jesus live before us with the rich land- scape and clear skies of Galilee as his background. It is a work of art quite as much as of scholarship, and in some places reeks with sentiment. It has throughout a magic charm of enthusiasm. There is hardly a trace of controversy in it. The author simply sets Jesus before us, as if there had never been a dispute or difference of interpre- tation in the records. The Fourth Gospel inspires him far more than the synoptics. Although it is the last, it is in a sense the most authen- tic, and the religious feeling and aesthetic intuition so strongly marked in John are Renan's guides when he is in doubt. Yet he tells us that he has a fifth or nobler Gospel in mind throughout. Everything is narrative and pictorial, and the author brings each event and saying in at whatever time and place it seems most natural in the pastoral play that he so effectively stages. He does not deny miracles, but merely says that none was ever yet satisfactorily proven. Jesus is described as an amiable and beautiful prophet who rode about on a " long-eyelashed, gentle mule." Four women attended and ministered to him, and his theology was the mild and gentle one of love. When he reached Jerusalem, however, he found for the first time people whom he could not charm. Hence he soon returned to Galilee, but de-Judaized and with grave revolutionary purposes. He saw that the Kingdom he had in mind could not be established by natural means. Instead of practising innocent arts, he now became a worker of miracles in earnest. He found that he had to allow people to believe some of his works supernatural, although this was against his will. But he must choose thaumaturgy or defeat. At Bethany something hap- pened, we know not just what, which was regarded as the raising of
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Lazarus from the dead. At this stage Jesus' teaching takes on a new quality of hardness. He offends some and mystifies others, e. g., by talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. His spiritual thoughts take on a material form, especially in some of the parables, and his Kingdom becomes apocalyptic. He had fortunately the sagac- ity to lay the foundations of the Church by appointing the twelve and by establishing a fellowship meal. For him earth slowly came to pass away, and he lived for martyrdom. He had assumed a role which could not possibly last save for a short time. Whether he faltered as the tragedy drew to its close is somewhat uncertain. When he is once dead, Renan apostrophizes and eulogizes him by the tomb. There has never been a greater, and he will never have a rival. All is over. But no; the devoted Mary was the first who thought she saw him, and told others who came to think that they, too, had seen him. Thus a de- voted woman gave the world its risen Lord.
Renan's book passed through eight editions in three months. Schweitzer says that whoever could wield a pen charged against him, "the bishops leading." One bitter enemy advocated imprisonment for the author, but in fact few noticed the chief defect of the book, which is that it lacks ethical force and content. There is little lofty moral inspiration in it. It is a somewhat loudly coloured idyll. The excitement it caused spread to all Christian lands, and there were countless refutations by Protestants and still more vehement ones by Catholics.
Renan's Jesus, however, seems a vastly more real, as well as loftier, personality than the Jesus of Strauss. If the author lacks sincerity and sometimes conscience, or if he thinks more often of his public than of scientific truth, it is perhaps because, trained as he was, he did not come into contact with the Gospels in the most susceptible years of his youth. This may account for what seem sometimes the artificiality and falsetto sentimentality of his tone. Serious German scholars can least understand the powerful appeal this book made to Gallic sentiment. Nor do Protestants realize the way in which Jesus is enshrined in the hearts of his Catholic followers. Renan's "Life" fascinates somewhat as the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play does by its crude realism, but despite its obvious defects it will remain a standing monument to teach us the impressive and greatly needed lesson that Jesus can remain an object of adoration although stripped of every
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supernatural trait. As although the vase be shattered, the scent of the roses remains, so a Jesus completely naturalized to earth and to hu- manity remains hallowed by old associations. As his faithful followers remained true to him through all his humiliations, sufferings, and even death, so believers to-day should not desert him although stripped of the glories with which superstition has invested him; for these, after all, are only adventitious. Of old it was held to be the crowning virtue of Jesus that he laid aside his heavenly dignity and crown and came down to earth as man. Renan seems to warn us not to repeat the mistake of Jesus' companions in not recognizing him for all he was in his humiliation. Now he is becoming again incarnate and humanized in a new sense, a sense which after all may be only the psychodynamic equivalent of his own act in divesting himself of the glory he once had with the Father.
Keim's "History of Jesus of Nazara," 6 vol., 1876-83, is still, in the present writer's judgment, on the whole the best as well as the most voluminous life of Jesus. The author's style is lucid, his treat- ment artistic. Many of his expressions have become classic. He holds to the priority of Matthew but does not think this a matter of prime importance. He makes no attempt to harmonize the Fourth Gospel with the synoptics, but by no means disparages it. He dis- tinguishes sharply between the early stage of success and the later one of apparent failure, which he thinks marked by Christ's repeated flights to escape his enemies, the cause of his many wanderings, although only Matthew betrays this. Jesus wanted to preserve him- self till his time was ripe. From the first he preached a material King- dom, although it was somewhat spiritualized in his later thought. To resolve discrepancies Keim stresses the stages of development in Jesus' thought, and represents him as growing into ever-deeper realizations. He expected the end of the existing order of things, and that very soon; and for this reason he did not spiritualize more his views of the King- dom. Keim's history is marked by no one or more salient features, but is an all-around and well-proportioned work; and it is remarkable, considering its size, to what a degree the author has succeeded in giving it throughout the charm of a romance. Had it been suddenly given to the Teutonic world, without the long line of preceding studies that had led up to it, it would doubtless have proved to fit the German temperament, and would have been as popular there as Renan's
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"Life" was in France. He presents and discusses every serious view of Jesus' life down to his own day, and anticipates most of the opinions of liberal writers since. Miracles and the Resurrection, while not material, historic facts, are full of precious meanings. The range of Keim's scholarship is remarkable, and he is much more a psychologist than he dreams. No one before had had the tact or disposition to repre- sent all the most liberal views and yet to give no offence to the conserva- tive camp. It is his life-work, and he has thought and felt himself into both the times and life of Jesus with a sympathetic insight which no one before or since has surpassed or perhaps even equalled. If he takes away all the supernatural elements with which tradition has invested Jesus, he gives us what more than compensates. In Keim's portrait of a character so lofty, striving to remove the obstacles hinder- ing man's upward path with such devotion and resource, Christ illus- trates as no one else does the higher possibilities of human life and destiny, organizing victory out of defeat. Contact with his life en- larges and elevates our own, because we realize that his is the noblest and most ideal embodiment of the idea of man. Certainly the other lives of Jesus in Keim's generation by Beyschlag, Haase, Schenkel, H. J. Holtzmann, Weissacker, B. Weiss, and Wendt's "Teachings of Jesus," while each has specific merits and sets forth many an item in a clearer light, really add little that a careful reader of Keim will find new or important.
As if the day of elaborate lives of Jesus were ending, there came a period of shorter sketches which sufficed to show the general conclu- sions of writers who felt that the study of sources had been pretty well exhausted, and that the larger problems of perspective and of combination of all the items into a personal portrait were chiefly needed. Bousset (" Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum, " 1892, 130 p.) had a strong conviction that the criticism of sources had done its work. All competent students have come to admit a primitive Mark, the logia, and the irreconcilability of the Fourth Gospel with the synoptics. What is now wanted is a vivid portrayal by a few bold strokes which will show forth Jesus' true greatness and originality. Bousset holds that too much eschatology has caused us to lose some- thing of the force and originality of Jesus' character. The views of the "last things" held by later Judaism were confused, but more realistic than transcendent or apocalyptic. The transfer of their hopes of the
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future to another transcendent realm is dualistic and of Persian origin. Jesus came as a vital man into the dead world of Judaism, and gave it a practical interpretation of a great life. His basal idea was the father- hood of God, and this idea must arouse stagnant Judaism. Jesus' chief trait was his joy in life, although it was the joy of one who was above this world. This joy was rooted in the new kind of psyche which he illustrated. Near as the Kingdom was, he remained simple and spontaneous, and was not repressed by its immanence. His preaching was to be perfect, and he sought to infect small groups of men with the enthusiasm of this ideal. He was antithetical to his times, but joyful because his purpose was to make the future present. He was the Messiah, and said so openly, and enjoyed the office. The Kingdom comes here and now, and is not all transcendental. The new spiritual relation this involved was symbolized by a fellowship meal which he inaugurated. He developed the deeper meaning of the Old Testament, but directed it against the Judaism of his own time. Thus, for Bousset, Jesus' teaching is not sombre or chiefly world-renouncing. His Jesus is not a futurist, but a man really great in his own time, though ani- mated by hope. Bousset's little book is perhaps the ablest protest against extreme eschatology, to which, however, he makes concessions that seem to him generous. His Jesus is not crippled or paralyzed by feeling that everything is transitory and provisional. The present to him is very real, and must not be overshadowed by the future. He does not disparage this world's goods but enjoys them. The parables teach that the Kingdom has actually come. The transcendental has entered and eudemonized the life of the present. Jesus' joy, then, is a protest against undue renunciation of the world.
The influence of the Bahrdt-Venturini method was seen in several fictive constructions of Jesus' life. HennelPs "Untersuchung," for which, strangely enough, Strauss wrote an introduction (1833) repro- duces the ideas of the above writers, and really does little more. Sal- vador's "Jesus-Christ et Sa Doctrine" (1828) makes Jesus the best representative of the Oriental mysticism that he thinks pervaded Judaism after the days of Solomon, and in Jesus fused with Messianism. Gfrorer ("Kritische Geschichte des Urchristentums," 1831, 2 vol.) says Christianity was born of the hope of a future kingdom and was sustained in the Middle Ages by the fear of the future. Jewish theology culminated in Philo, the Therapeutae, and the Essenes, and before
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Jesus there was a series of revolts animated by Messianic hopes. For a generation the story of Jesus was oral tradition. Much legend was absorbed, which Luke, as his preface shows, sought to sift out. The Gospels (a. d. i i 0-120) were Galilean legends with little Jewish tradi- tion in them. John, when divested of miracles, is the best source of our information of the true inwardness of the Essene order out of which Christianity arose. Jesus expected to die, but not to rise. He was, however, revived by the skill of the order, which was strong enough to bribe the Romans not to kill him and to let him be taken down from the cross soon, the thieves hanging on each side being crucified and left to hang upon the cross to divert attention. Gfrorer, after this outbreak of criticism, became a Catholic and died in 1861. Von der Aim (d. 1876), in " Theologische Briefe" (1863), holds that in Jesus we worship not transformed Judaism but Oriental faiths, especially Mithraism, which also had its virgin birth, star, wise men, cross, and resurrection. Were it not for Mithraism and its human sacrifice, the Lord's Supper would be unintelligible. The ancient world was per- vaded by gnosticism, of which Christianity is one form, yet Jesus' own teachings are chiefly rabbinical. The "order" diffused the idea that the Messiah had come, but was in concealment. When Jesus ap- peared in this role he "issued from passivity" to make atonement vicariously, so that God would bring in a better order of things. His vocation was to die so that the heavenly Messiah could come forth. There was great tension as to whether this consummation of the re- demption idea would satisfy Yahveh. The Resurrection was a vision born of the desire for a parousia. Gfrorer considers that the brother- hood who guided all that Jesus did sought to rid Judaism of its ritual- ism, and to save Christianity from the deification of Jesus and the idea of redemption through his blood. Now a new Church should be established with eight Sundays, two days each being devoted to four feasts, viz., of Deity, of the dignity of man, of the divine blessing in nature, and of immortality. This construction suggests Comte's "Politique Positive" with its new saint worship, in which each day of the week was named for some great man of the past, after the analogy of Catholic saints' days. Noack (d. 1885), a poetic and scholarly soul, in "Geschichte Jesu" (1856, 4 books), combines fiction and criticism. Despite Strauss he bases everything on the Fourth Gospel. The discrepancies between the Gospels are due, he thinks, to a series of
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redactions representing different tendencies, to which each was sub- jected. The sources of John are the points of departure for all of them. Had Jesus been a Jewish Messiah, rather than an embodiment of the logos doctrine, he would not have had to force the Jews to put him to death, as in fact he had to do. Jesus was an enthusiast living only for his own self-consciousness. The original Fourth Gospel, purged of miracles and of Judaism, took shape about a. d. 60. All Jesus did and said was self-realization. The problem is how his lofty views, faithfully translated by the beloved disciple, came to be accepted. Some ten years later, after the Pauline propaganda, Luke was written chiefly to repudiate the calumny that Jesus was possessed of a devil. This was done by making him cast out devils. Jesus lived and was crucified near the sources of the Jordan. By his fantastic transference to the north it was thought to harmonize John and the synoptists. These Gospels sufficed till Mark was composed, a. d. 130, and Matthew, A. d. 135. In these, Jewish ideas with which Jesus had nothing to do are put into his mouth, and he is made to fulfil the prophecy, and come to Jerusalem, and die there. Still later, John and Luke were given their final form. The Baptist did nothing but strive to make Jesus reveal who he really was. He was born out of wedlock, prone to ecstasy and to re very above the clouds. A vivid imagination lifted this solitary and fatherless man above his many troubles. By fasting, vigil, and prayer he always kept his way open to the Heavenly Father. He thought himself protected, and finally came to believe that he was preexistent and so developed a unique and original ego. To offer himself up became his ambition and his ruling passion. Death, indeed, was the vocation of the Son of Man, and he became even more familiar in his solitude with this thought than with that of the Father. It was a dramatic moment when the adulteress was brought to him in order to put him to shame by the thought of his own dishonourable birth. For a moment he was confused and stooped to write on the earth, but then came his overwhelming answer. He wished, since he considered him- self symbolized by the paschal lamb, to die on the day of the Passover. John helped him to hide and escape his enemies who would have slain him before, till the right moment, and then precipitated the last tragic step in his career by bringing about his arrest. For this act of supreme fidelity and devotion to Jesus' own wish the beloved disciple was branded as a traitor and renamed Judas. Although Noack's work
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seems to us fiction, he believed it to be the final discovery of the his- toric facts in Jesus' career.1
C. H. Weisse,2 a philosopher like Strauss, takes the next important step by bringing the old problem of the differences of the Gospels into the very forefront of discussion. This he does by establishing the priority of Mark, which, if it gives us the best thread of connection and the best standard by which to estimate the amount of myth, was based, Weisse thinks, on notes of spoken discourses by Peter. Mark gives us the best, and John the least, historic picture. Where the First and Third Gospels agree they follow Mark, and where they depart from him, they do agree in language but not in the order of events, and hence they must both have followed some older account of Jesus' sayings (the logia). John sought chiefly to portray Jesus' struggle against the Jews, and not to supplement the other Gospels. John seems to have striven very hard to rescue and restore from the mists of his memory everything possible, especially concerning the teachings of Jesus; and where there were gaps, or where we find him mistaken, he was doubtless "restoring" on the basis of vestiges of his recollection. These he left in the form of notes which others of his way of thinking later revised, retouched, and inserted here and there in the story of his life, in order to give them some localization in time and place, and thus a semblance of history. Much later Wendt takes the bold step of trying to reproduce not only the primitive Mark and the logia of Matthew, but the original John, and he even reproduces them in Greek as he supposes them to have originated.3 Weisse better, perhaps, than any ether, marks the ehmination of John as an historic authority. Weisse also strives to eliminate eschatology, and thus gives to Christo- logical studies a "liberal" turn which they followed for decades, assuming that the originality of Jesus must be vindicated at all costs. It was reserved for J. Weiss (Schweitzer, op. cit.y p. 130) to find again the right path. The Socrates of Xenophon and of Plato now seem
•See also "The Crucifixion," by an Eye-witness. 1913, 300 p. Also M. Zwemer: "The Moslem Christ." 1013, 188 p.; B. Pick: "Jesus in the Talmud." 101?. 100 p.; R. Garbe: "Indien und das Cbristen- thum." 1914. G. Hollmann: "Welche Religion hatten die Juden als Jesus auftrat? " 1905. 83 p- M. J. Olivier: "La vie cached de Jesus." 1008, 465 p.
There have been dozens of books and essays upon Buddhism. See, too, Bertholet: " Buddhismus und Christen- tum," ad edition (Tubingen, 1000); also E. Windisch: "Buddhas Geburt u. die Lehre von der Seelenwanderung." (Leipzig, 1008). Schroder, "Buddhismus und Christentum" in his "Aufsatze" (Leipzig, igi3>, thinks that the gentle- ness and toleration of Buddhism to other faiths show us a mortifying model, and that we are more liable to self-righteous- ness and religious pride. Here I am mainly following Schweitzer.
•" Die evangelische Geschichte." 1838, 3 vols. Trans.
'H. H. Wendt: "Die Lehre Jesu. ErsteTeil: Die evangelische Quellen-Berichte Uber die Lehre Jesu." Gfittin-
fen, 1886, 354 p. How he uses these data we see in his later "History of Jesus." Trans, iooi, 3 vol., 408 p. and 437 p. 'or an admirably succinct statement of the synoptic and sources problem, see F. C Burkitt: "The Earliest Sources for the Life of Jesus." 1910, 131 p., with a brief and select bibliography on the subject.
JESUS IN LITERATURE i39
hardly more different than the synoptic and the Johannin Jesus. The expectation of a post-resurrection parousia, fashioned after a Jewish apocalypse idea, did not come from Jesus, but was ascribed to him by the disciples after his death. The Resurrection was a purely psychic fact; and it is folly even to raise the question of "the empty tomb." The mythic hypothesis failed to explain or foretell this. Jesus had definitely and voluntarily resolved to die, and death was in no sense forced upon him. This choice was not motivated by any suggestion of pagan dying or rising gods. It was Jesus' own original conception. He died because he believed that the reaction would give his teaching and work a perpetual influence. All this the founder of the Markan hypothesis finds in the Second Gospel.
Bruno Bauer (d. 1882) did not write a life of Jesus, but was another great Hegelian whose chief work was the criticism of the Gospels and of early Christianity, and who suffered for his opinions. Instead, how- ever, of starting from Jewish Messianism and following the course of events downstream, he reverses this method and begins with the Fourth Gospel, in which Jesus had become completely fitted into the logos scheme, and works backward. Bauer regards John as Philo's pupil. His work is not history, but art; but we must be not only aesthetic but critical in order to judge this Gospel. He finds much repetition and bad art in John; as, e. g., in the parable of the good shepherd. Every- thing is largely coloured by the unknown author and his milieu. In this work Bauer uses the synoptics as if they were valid in order to discredit John; but when he considers them, he finds them, too, very unreliable, if in somewhat less degree. The originators of the theory of the priority and greater reliability of Mark in the main credit his narrative, and it is reserved for Bauer to urge that the Second Gospel is, like John, literary and not historical. The birth stories must be inventions, because, had they been only different versions of a common tradition, they might vary but would never be so inconsistent with each other. The same is true of both the discourses and the other narrative material. Therefore, the synoptic Gospels do not draw from a common source or tradition, but are all literary productions. All Christologists before had assumed what the synoptists agree in, viz., that there was a Messianic expectation, and thus one who claimed this title would be historically conceivable. But aside from the Gospels themselves there is no evidence of any such expectation among the
i4o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Jews in the days of Jesus. Mark and his imitators are the only wit- nesses to it. If the Jews had had any such idea, it would have been more definite and less hazy. The conception of the Messiah in fact only arose with the Christian community. Orthodox writers of lives of Jesus embodied Old Testament expectations of the Messiah in their portrayals of Jesus, and Strauss says that Messianity was a role that Jesus had to assume and with which legend later identified him. The core of the whole matter to Bauer's Hegelian mode of thought is that God and man had to be identified. This required a man in whose soul the great antithesis between human and divine should be overcome in a larger synthesis. Jesus felt called to infect men with his two-in-one consciousness, and so, in course of time, not only his mind but his person became sacred. He felt his vocation so important that he offered up his life in discharging it. When he attained the added glamour of being thought to have risen, he came to stand for the re- sumption of God by man; and this unity and the insight and the consciousness of it, brought a great peace. The vague prophecies began to be reinterpreted so as to focus in him as their fulfilment. Then only was there a clear idea of the Messiah in the world. Thus Bauer believes that Mark did not invent Jesus, but that he was a very real and great personality who inspired Mark to make him the goal of prophecy.
Only later Bauer begins to ask if Jesus himself was real. In seeking the solution of this question he takes up the chief Gospel inci- dents. The baptism was necessary, because John and Jesus had to be brought together. The temptations were the allegory of the early Church. The mission of the twelve is extremely improbable. Storms are persecutions. If Jesus wrought all the miracles ascribed to him, it would be a greater miracle yet that the disciples and all others who saw him did not believe on him. How did Mark know that miracles were the special signs and criteria of the Messiah? If Jesus really lived he not only reconciled the antithesis between God and man, an opposition which obsessed and threatened to disintegrate the further development of the soul, but he brought in a new principle which rescued man from his self-alienation. The self-consciousness of hu- manity is mirrored in the Gospels. Jesus reconciled man to himself, that is, to manhood. Man's self-realization is the death of nature. This Christianity brought. It made the world ready for a higher
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religion which will overcome nature by permeating and sublating it. Later in life, after a study of Paul, Bauer reaches and renders his final verdict, viz., there never was an historic Jesus. The self-alienated ego arose in its might and abolished God, Christ, and all its other quondam projects and ejects, and is now on the way to the complete atonement of all heterization, even that of the physical world itself. Spirit (or Geist in Hegel's sense) destroyed and will re-create the world. The ego having found its true self counts all else dross, and revels in its new- found God — its own larger, deeper self.
W. Sanday, the Oxford professor, as learned as he is modest, has given us a tentative psychology of Jesus,1 based largely on the views of the English Psychical Research Society. The locus of whatever is divine in man is subliminal. It is usually quiescent, but sends up impulses into consciousness. That which thus comes to expression is the divine, or some indication of its presence. This is the spirit that "helps our infirmities," "maketh intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered," etc. We know the sources, but cannot tell the cause of these abysmal motions. The saint and mystic seem like others outwardly, and we have to infer " the meat they have to eat that we know not of," for their life is "hid with Christ in God." Just as with us, whatever of the Divine Jesus had in him had to manifest itself through the medium of his human consciousness. Thus he was com- pletely man; but submerged in the depths of his soul was something that gave his life continuity with God. This abysmal life was in Jesus far larger relatively to what appeared than it was in others. His hu- man consciousness was " a narrow neck, a Jacob's ladder, by which the divine forces stored up below found an outlet" above the threshold. All of divinity cannot be expressed in human words, acts, or thoughts. Although Jesus was completely human, his continuity with deity was more than that of others, although all are God's offspring, and live, move, and have their being in him. The homoiousia meant that there was more of this transcendent element in him. If there was a self- determination in the Godhead prior to and which issued in the incarna- tion, this meant repression. Hence, all of God was not, as indeed it could not be, expressed in Christ, because he was human. It was as if his human consciousness was assumed by an act of will which limited or inhibited the pleroma of God from flowing out into Jesus.1 This is
i" Christologies, Ancient and Modern." iqio, 244 p. See also his "Inspiration." 1894,464?."
i42 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
why the Father is greater than he. Christ being merely man, there was a large part of the man unexpressed, otiose, or ineffective. His loftiest title was Messiah, which meant that he was God's vicegerent on earth and that God's Kingdom here was his. This meant restoration, redemption for the Jews through him, and for the race through the Jews. The Messiah must also be judge. Thus he forgives sins, lays down a second law, like a greater than Moses, etc. He is also greater than Solomon. All that is done for his disciples is done for him, and what is done for him is done for God. His Messianic consciousness was central, but not adequate, and whenever he used this title he strained it almost to bursting. He thought it contained the prophetic idea of the suffering servant of Yahveh, and also the idea of an unprecedented degree of intimacy with God so close that it had to be called filial. Enriched as the idea of personality was thus, it was still inadequate. Something higher "filtered through," because the threshold is "not impervious." As Wordsworth says, "We feel that we are greater than we know," and this means that the inner processes of cerebration are richer and more productive than consciousness is. We "move about in a world not realized," and with "blank" misgivings. The bottom of this "narrow-necked vessel" opens into infinity and God. God cannot fully come to human consciousness; can do so, in fact, only to a very limited extent in any man, although he did so in far greater degree in Jesus than in any other.
The upper consciousness, says Sanday, may be a " kind of dial-plate with an index needle turning." The deepest processes in the soul cannot move the needle much, and they do so only rarely. Jesus con- demned himself to this disability. In Our Lord the manifested life was, as it were, only an index of the total life of which the visible activities were relatively but a small part. His sense of his mission grew gradu- ally, and his development from infancy was like that of any other. The central thought of sonship evolved slowly, and only late did it es- tablish itself as cardinal in his self-consciousness. In the processes of his development, he naturally fell into and followed preexisting apocalyptic grooves according to which he was to be both king and judge; and there was to be a great outpouring of the spirit, which in fact came with Pentecost and with Paul. Jesus had an unprecedented
'This view, though different, is not inconsistent with that of P. Cams' suggestive work on "The Pleroma," 1909, 163 p., which he believes is constituted by all the combined expressions of Christianity since Jesus, taken together.
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reserve in the way of latent powers. This fed and found satisfying expression in his ideas of Messianity. The thought-forms of the apoc- alypse were inadequate, but there were no others at hand, and upon them we can, ought to, and must still further improve.
It is refreshing to find a scholar so characteristically English both in his piety and in his refusal to follow, although he has so carefully studied, the German authorities, with their insistence and definite attitudes toward the synoptic, Johannin, mythic, eschatological, and other questions, but who strives to use all sources, not excluding psy- chology, in order to attain a comprehensive, sympathetic insight into the mind and life of the central figure of the New Testament. Just how historic Jesus was, whether Sanday accepts the priority of Mark, just how much he thinks Jesus was determined by eschatology, we are nowhere told. Thus, no one can label this writer according to current rubrics. In a similar way Darwin transcended the biological special- ties, even of his own day, because he would neither confine himself in, nor exclude himself from, any school.
Sanday has, however, to our thinking, the following grave limita- tions, (a) He should have known more of the light thrown by modern psychoanalysis upon the subliminal soul and the unconscious; for we have in this domain a far better terminology and a far deeper insight into the relations between the conscious and the unconscious and the nature of the latter than the psychic researchers have given us. In his psychology Sanday is too provincial, (b) He is not only open to, but invites, the further inference that the divinity in which Jesus' soul was rooted is simply the soul of the race; that God is generic human nature, immanent in it and found nowhere else, somewhat in the sense of Feuerbach. (c) In place of the self-limitation of Jesus before his descent to earth and his incarnation, there is the more fundamentally genetic conception which only finds transferred expression in this doctrine, viz., that as the child is father of the man because nearer to and a more adequate expression of the race, so the kenosis doctrine is only a figurative expression of the fact that the growth to maturity of both the individual and the social soul involves progressive limitations. The child is father of the man because a more adequate, larger expres- sion of the race before specialization, which is an inevitable concomitant of development, has occurred. The development of the man out of the child, the world out of its background, civilization out of savagery,
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is in a sense a self-emptying, so that in the kenosis theory we have a hypostatized symbol of evolution. As the somatization of the im- mortal and all-conditioning germ plasm is specialization, and thus progress toward death, so Jesus had to die because the ewiger Mannliche in him was taking on such concrete and specific details that he was unable to continue longer to be the adequate medium of the divine. His humanity had to be sloughed off in the interests of the race-soul as this, which had been embodied in but had to be freed from him, entered the higher form of the spirit.
W. Wrede1 urges that the bald facts about Jesus' life were that he appeared in Galilee, chose disciples, taught and had favourites among them, attracted still more by his healing, especially of those thought possessed, associated with all classes, was very free in his interpretation of the law, offended the scribes and rulers, who plotted his fall. After he came to Jerusalem they succeeded, and he was put to death with the aid of the Romans. These essential historical data appear for the most part only incidentally as pale vestiges in the primitive Gospel, Mark. But superposed upon this, and having almost swallowed it up, we see in our Mark another higher worth given later to this simple life, which was all that Jesus' disciples knew while they were with him. Jesus' Messianity was a "dark lantern which occasionally leaked rays," and it is this we find referred to as "hidden" or esoteric, and which in fact some of the parables seem to conceal. Mark was written in order to knit together into one the actual man as he had been known and the very different divine being he came to be thought after belief in the Resurrection had been accepted. This made this worthy teacher and healer seem to be transcendent and divine. Mark seeks to graft this later, higher doctrine on the simple facts. His purpose was to make Jesus over into the Messiah. The carefully guarded secret of his Mes- sianity was really first betrayed to all and impressed most upon those who had known him by the Resurrection, and it is by its light that Mark strives to transfuse the somewhat ordinary events of the two or three preceding years of Jesus' life in such a way as to cause the historic man and the risen God to intussuscept. This took time. Memory had to become a little hazy and be transfused with the divine glory that burst forth at the Resurrection. This fusion of two elements was not all the work of the author of Mark, as Bruno Bauer had thought. Although
l"Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien." tool, a86 p.
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primarily a theologian, Mark had literary gifts; but he chiefly repre- sents a growing consensus of his circle in which tradition was slowly doing the same work. Although the divine element greatly prepon- derates, Wrede finds many traces of the simpler story. To maintain his thesis he has to reconstruct, or challenge as interpolations, those passages which indicate that Jesus knew and did proclaim himself to be Messiah, or was thought so by his disciples. The chief obstacle to this theory is Jesus' own eschatology. A god who was trying to mas- querade as a man would not speak so publicly or so often of the con- summation of all earthly affairs, of the judgment day, etc. On this view the disciples must have been very dull of understanding, and thus Mark represents them. Peter is made to reveal the secret of his nature to Jesus instead of Jesus to Peter. The self-betrayal of the secret, too, at Jerusalem, and on the cross, has to be explained away. In dealing with these matters Wrede is very ingenious; but while he fails to answer the scores of difficulties which Schweitzer challenges him to meet, in maintaining the theory that Jesus was not thought divine until after his death, Wrede's theory does bring out with needed boldness and relief the fact that the after-effects of the belief in the Resurrection must have profoundly transformed and elevated the estimation in which all Jesus' friends held him.
Wernle1 discards the Fourth Gospel and finds his source material solely in the synoptics. Mark is only a compiler of established tradi- tion, and so the writer of the oldest Gospel "fails us as an historian." Mark, too, was somewhat influenced by Paul, but his Gospel was really an argument to prove that Jesus was Messiah and Son of God, and to this end he used narratives and sayings long current orally, his confla- tion of which was very loosely made, as we should expect of a first at- tempt. He wished to apologize for Jesus' death and explain Jewish un- belief; and if we eliminate these dominant and warping motives, we can get nearer to Jesus than the First Gospel in its present form permits. If wrongly put together and out of perspective, Mark's material is nevertheless genuine and priceless. Matthew and Luke knew and chiefly followed Mark, but added new material, especially the discourses of Jesus, which perhaps they themselves put together. Both of them, however, must have drawn from some common older Greek source. This source, to which Matthew is nearest, had probably been current
'"Sources of the Knowledge of the Life of Jesus." London, 1007. 163 p.
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orally for at least three decades, and during this time had doubtless undergone changes. If these sayings had been collected and even written, the two later synoptists gave them a new turn, e. g., against the scribes and Pharisees. Though Matthew was nearest to this orig- inal, Luke seems to have known still other sources. Thus we have plenty of material; but the plan of the building is hopelessly lost, so that we can never expect anything like an authentic biography of Jesus. Prepossessions and the all-dominant needs of propagandism colour and distort all. The one thing, however, that we do know is how Jesus re- garded God and what mattered in his sight. Enigmatical as his character certainly was, we know there was something about it that touched the human soul more vitally than anything else had ever done. As we approach Jesus dogmatic theology recedes, and he gives us ideals of loyalty, justice, sympathy, humility, aspiration, and forgiveness. Per- haps he never thought himself the Messiah, or expected to rise from the dead; but belief that he did the latter exalted him and created the Church.
O. Schmiedel1 bases his work on the following canon: If we find documents which testify to the worship of a hero unknown from other sources, we should lay chief stress on those data that could not be de- duced from or coloured by the fact of his worship; for no author intent chiefly on justifying the latter, as the synoptists were, would use pass- ages that had no bearing upon the promulgation of their hero's cult, unless they were fixed data of tradition. Hence, passages used by only one synoptist and omitted by one or both the others, or perhaps repeated without change or sometimes even with change, where the above motive is obvious — such items and sayings would have historic reliability above everything else.
Examining the Gospels on this principle, Schmiedel finds nine chief passages of this order, as follows: (i) Why callest thou me good? (2) Blasphemy against the Son can be forgiven. (3) Jesus' relatives thought him beside himself. (4) Of that day and hour knoweth no man. (5) My God, why hast thou forsaken me? (6) There shall be no sign given to this generation. (7) He was able to do no mighty works save healing a few sick folk in Nazareth. (8) The warning against the leaven of the Pharisees. (9) The answer sent to the Bap- tist's inquiry whether he was the Messiah or not.
l"Encylopadia Biblica" article on Gospels, U 131. "Der Hauptprobleme der Leben-Jesu-Forschung." 1906. .
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These passages Schmiedel calls his foundation pillars, for they cannot be conceived to have originated in myth or to have gathered about a non-existent person. Hence we can be certain that we have here a nucleus of a real life of Jesus, a minimum credibile. From these data we can infer that Jesus was a real man who went about doing good. He gathered followers, pardoned calumnies, recognized the supreme goodness of his Father, God, was thought insane by his rela- tives. He sent a message to John that seemed to imply an affirmative answer to the question whether he was the Christ. He warned against the current orthodoxy of the Pharisees. He did not know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, wondered at the unbelief he met in his own land, was deserted of all, even God, and probably put to death. Concerning this there can be nothing legendary, and without these passages the historian would have to "remove the person of Jesus from the field of history." This seems little; but as it asserts Jesus' reality and assures us of a few significant things about him, it becomes possible to infer other things as probable. Further reconstructions must be cautious, but very slow, and can start only on this basis. The above minimum does not differ very much from the older one of Van Manen, who long ago assumed an older written Gospel, sketching the outlines of Jesus' life, beginning with his appearance at Capernaum, and then describing his casting out devils, the proclamation of the Kingdom, the transfiguration, the final trip to Jerusalem, the Passion, death and Res- urrection, but saying nothing of his origin, baptism, and temptation, or much about his work in Galilee.
Flinders Petrie1 would get rid of subjective elements and ignore the order of the synoptists by eliminating from each every item that does not occur in the same order in both the other Gospels. Thus he finds a nucleus or common basis, identical in all and in the same sequence. This we may compare to a primary Gospel, although it may have been composed out of earlier elements. He opines that it was used by the Church at Jerusalem as early as 40-50 a. d. and perhaps may be called apostolic. It seems to have been called "The Way." It begins with the mission of the Baptist, his meeting with Jesus, the withdrawal to the desert, the return to Galilee, the call to repentance, preaching the Kingdom, the call of the first disciples. It then describes the collision with the Pharisees, teaching the crowds on the lake, the parable of the
»"The Growth of the Gospels." ioio
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sower, the reports carried to Herod, the feeding of the five thousand, the confession of Peter, Jesus' prediction of his death, his doctrine of self-renunciation as a test, the transfiguration, the importance of the child-spirit in matters spiritual, the counsel of perfection, the entry to Jerusalem, the expulsion of the traders, the parable of the husbandman, the traps set for Jesus by his enemies, his prediction of the destruction of the temple, the betrayal by Judas, the scene in the garden, the trial, crucifixion, burial, and Resurrection, the latter only barely mentioned and with no record of any post-mortem appearance. Petrie thinks this may have been written testimony within ten or twenty years after Jesus' death, and that there is nothing mythic about it. Like many others, he believes that this nucleus was not long afterward supple- mented by another document ("Q") chiefly devoted to the sayings of Jesus and now represented chiefly by the block of verses in Matthew called the sermon on the mount. The latter has no reference to time or place, and seems to be an encheiridion. In all this Petrie thinks there is not an idea or an incident that takes us outside of the Church at Jerusalem, where Galilee was hardly known, when the compilation was made there. Mark and Luke worked on additions to the nucleus when in Jerusalem, 54-56 a. d. Luke had already collected material in Galilee and finished his Gospel elsewhere. Mark then obtained Matthew's Gospel as far as it was then accreted, and finished his, which remained long isolated, in Egypt. The story reduced to primi- tive form is lifelike, naive, and characteristic of the East. A magnetic man arouses attention, heals the sick, collides with vested interests, is suspected by the priests, and finally is slain. All is naively told. Much turns on the originality, intrinsic value, and arrangement of the logia in the sermon.1
A. Loisy's greatest work,2 the most radical, perhaps, which ever appeared within the pale of the Catholic Church, followed as it was by his excommunication under the influence of the anti-modernist move- ment, attracted great attention despite its size. It presents many unique and original conclusions concerning Jesus and his work, and at the same time makes havoc with certain growing tendencies among liberals and critics toward conformity, if not uniformity, of view. For him the oldest Gospel is Mark, " a work of faith far more than of his-
lSee, too, comments on this, mainly favourable, in J. T. Thorburn, "Jesus the Christ. History or Miracle." Edin- burgh, igi2, especially p. 55, et. seq.
*"Les Evangels Synoptiques." Paris, 1007-8. a vols. 1014 and 818 p.
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tory." It was composed about 75 a. d., and Matthew and Luke nearly a quarter of a century later. None of them was written by those whose names they bear, but each is an often forced composite a number of stages removed from the matter they set forth. As the result of his erudite and exhaustive criticism Loisy concludes that Jesus heard almost by accident of the Baptist, a prophet born of those very troubled times, and that under John's influence Jesus decided to follow an earlier impulse of his own and to preach the Kingdom just as John had done. This he began to do about the time of John's imprison- ment. His ideas of it were the traditional ones. The chief new feature that he stressed was its immanence. It could be entered only by re- pentance and would begin by a resurrection. It was not very spiritual, nor would it destroy the present world. He was to be its head, but was not so yet, and hence was reticent about his own relation to it. His ethics were not for permanent social life, but merely those requisite for entering it. His teaching was fresh, simple, original, metaphorical, and parabolic, so that it went home to the hearts of the people. He did not seek to conceal anything, but spoke in general with frankness and abandon. We have now only a few salient fragments of what he really taught, and these remains are distorted, or falsely associated or combined by doctrinnaire editors. He probably cured certain neu- rotics, especially those thought to be possessed, but did so rather un- willingly. Symbolism, however, has exaggerated and distorted all this. He retired to the north when he learned that the authorities had turned their attention to him; but encouraged by his disciples, and in the growing belief that he was the Messiah, he resolved to go to Jeru- salem and announce himself as such, dangerous though he knew this would be. He felt that God would intervene at the last moment and save him by a miracle. He went finally, though not without faltering. No intervention took place, despite his pathetic appeal to heaven at Gethsemane, and so he was arraigned and forced to admit that he wished to establish a kingdom, and hence was condemned and crucified. Of the details of his death we know nothing. He seems to have expired with some loud cry, and was buried by soldiers in a com- mon grave. " Thus ended the Gospel dream. The reality of the King- dom of God now had to begin." There was of course no Resurrection, and the great miracles are spurious. The Kingdom and Church came because a number of rare men of great power and genius like Paul came
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after Jesus. There were probably others (perhaps many of whom little is known) among this new Christian school of prophets, who were able to develop from these meagre and, indeed, unpromising facts the re- markable results which followed. Jesus, and especially his death, made a very strong impression as painted by his successors. The long- desired vision came first to Peter in Galilee in the morning twilight, and something of the kind perhaps happened to others; but of all this we have only garbled and snatchy reports. Very soon, however, a group of simple folk came to believe in a Resurrection, with sufficient intensity to stake everything on this faith. They tried to find the body but in vain; but their very failure to do so reinforced their belief that Christ had risen, and the final editor of Mark assumed this as a fact. Others found it foretold in prophecy. This credence once es- tablished, Paul pushed the development rapidly on, and our Gospels are saturated with Paulinism. Mark was especially partisan to Paul and so were the other synoptic versions of different groups of traditions. Jesus never dreamed that his death was to be a ransom for many. It was Paul who first interpreted it thus. It was Paul who introduced the idea of forgiveness, and wrote or inspired all that the Gospels have to say about the eucharist. The only basis of fact for this was a common meal at Bethany at which the disciples were promised a share in the Kingdom. Thus the person of Jesus grew in importance in every direction. He became Son of God, the incarnate Logos, who foreknew and planned his own death, and offered himself up as the price of salvation. Christ foresaw the future exactly. The disciples were obtuse and unworthy, and hence far below Paul, and the rejection of Christ by the Jews is especially reprehensible. This is particularly the purpose of the narratives of Jesus' trial and execution. He never proposed to organize a society, but the Church was already started when the Gospels took form. He never dreamed of successors to the apostles. Later views are constantly put in Jesus' mouth. The transfiguration was a "legend or a post-Resurrection vision." The baptism was not a sufficient consecration for the augmented Jesus, and so the birth legend arose. Most things in the Gospel story are the deliberate invention of picturesque symbols charged with varied meanings which the nascent Church wished to have authorized. Be- lief in the Resurrection was a psychological necessity, and developed in a few weeks or months. If Peter created faith in it, was he not in a
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sense even greater than Jesus? for it was he who brought life out of death, and gave the Church its conviction that Jesus' work would go on under his own superintendence from on high through the Holy Spirit. It was all because the impression made by his personality was so persistent.
But is Loisy's Jesus impressive enough to be the mainspring of such a movement? No modern Christologist who admits Jesus' historicity at all has on the whole left him so insignificant. His life was commonplace; his teaching consisted of little more than nota benes or directions as to how to get into the Kingdom; his death was little anticipated, and the result of the misjudged, adventuresome trip to Jerusalem. The end of all was when his body was thrown into a common trench, while the religion that bears his name was created later by others greater than he. Keim, to be sure, makes Jesus' life until the final visit to Jerusalem punctuated by repeated flights or fugues to the north to escape real or fancied dangers from enemies; and Schweitzer describes him as self-convicted of delusions, and in despair. But for both these writers he has on the whole far more significance than for Loisy. Why, then, does the latter so often express boundless admira- tion for a Jesus so denuded of all traits calculated to evoke reverence or affection? Does unconscious pity for a being so bereft of the dignity he so long enjoyed in Christendom move him to ardent eulogies, as if to compensate for the degradations he has felt himself impelled by his studies to bring upon Jesus? Most of his life is a mesh of symbols, quite as much as W. B. Smith thinks all of it is. But we cannot feel the personal quality of loyalty or love to a symbol. Does Loisy feel worshipful, amidst the ruins of a once-finished temple where worship was so long wont to be paid? or is it a new variety of relic worship? Is it that, although Loisy's intellect has learned better, his heart still remains that of a devotee? No one could say that in his case it is due to an intent to cover up from hostile critics the extent of his apostasy from the faith. His sentiments of devout loyalty are certainly not directed to the Jesus whom the early Church evolved from the historic Nazarene. It is hardly the outcrop of an unconsciously cherished wish that the results of his researches may after all prove mistaken, or the recrudescence of the old infantile faith asserting itself despite the fact that reason and scholarship know better. All these motivations, however, may have contributed, some more, some less. The soul acts
i52 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
in all these ways, and often largely without our knowledge. But the chief cause of Loisy's attitude is probably somewhat different from any of the above. All critics who stress the incompleteness or the perver- sion of the records feel that in the much that has been lost there is something very precious and significant, an undiscerned residuum that, were it restored, would account for the fact that Jesus' life was somehow the mainspring of all the great development that followed and that made the Church. Something with unique power had to be the centre of all the new myths and rites; something that impelled some believers to write the Gospels, others to preach and organize, and yet others to think, systematize, and find the right way; something vital enough to make parties without which on this view we should have no Gospels. It is to this unknown something that the expres- sions of adoration so common among negative critics and so extreme in Loisy are directed. These critics cannot define or even point to it; but they feel that it must be there, elusive though it is. Whatever it is, it was closely connected with Jesus' person, words, or both; a chord now lost must have been struck. Until it is found again even the critic has to regard Jesus somewhat magically. Such expressions of rever- ence of the residual Jesus by the higher critics are, psychologically interpreted, the betrayal of a deep sense of their own failure to reach the secret core of the matter, and indicate the need of further and deeper research. Their work is unfinished, their goal unattained, and until it is, the old devout attitude will continue to have at least its own partial justification.1
Finally, from all data sketched in this chapter the psychologist draws two inevitable conclusions, the one positive and the other nega- tive. The first is that no theme save, perhaps, the perennial theme of love, has ever made so strong an appeal to literary imagination as the story of Jesus. From the first apocryphal fabrication to the last re- ligious novel or drama the incidents of Jesus' life and the precepts of his teaching have suggested and provoked in minds of the highest order, as well as of lower orders, constructions that have brought home to the heart of Christendom the " things of Jesus" as of no other of the
»S. G. Ayres: "Jesus Christ Our Lord"; an English Bibliography of Christology of five thousand Titles, annotated and classified. New York, 1906, 503 p. G. PfannmUller: "Jesus irn Urteil der Jahrhunderte," 1008, 578 p. These two books present the most important views in theology, philosophy, literature, and art to the present time. 0. DSlhn- hardt: "Natursagen." 1007, Bd. 1, 376 p. "Sagas of the Old Testament." Bd. a, 316 p. " Sagas of the New Testa- ment." C. A. Dinsmore: "Atonement in Literature and Life." Boston, 1006. 250 p. F. Andres: " Die Engellehre der Griechischen Apologeten." 1914, 183 p. James Huneker: "Iconoclasts. 1905, 429 p. "Egoists." 1909, 37a p. F. Schenck: "The Oratory and Poetry of the Bible." 191s, 349 p.
JESUS IN LITERATURE i53
sons of man. This is no less true in the history of literary than of plastic art. Had authors adhered to the canon only, and had there been no apocrypha or tradition, the fortunes of Christianity at every stage of the development of the Church would have been very differ- ent, and its dominion over the souls of men would have been incalcul- ably less. This source, however, is not only far from exhausted, but its marvellous recent developments indicate that the future is to see im- measurable amplifications of this resource. The best possibilities here have not yet been developed, and the golden age of Jesus on the stage and in belles lettres is yet to come. The recent productions show that the tide is now setting against the conceptions of Antichrist or the Superman as the consummation of human ideals, and from disparage- ments toward ardent affirmations of the essentials of Christianity. These the Church should not suspect, but welcome. Protestant orthodoxy has been more timid and less tolerant in this field than Catholicism, and the latter in the domain of recent French literature is now having its reward, for the remarkable religious and literary re- vival there harks back to Rome more than to any form of Protestantism with its eliminations and disparagement of things not in the received text, and its too-exclusive regard for the bare results of scholarship and critical reason. The religious instinct will always warm toward realizations of its wishes, and Protestants have sadly underestimated the nature and needs of the aesthetic elements here. Many of these writers, like Tolstoi, Juliette Adam, Bertrand, Peguy, and others, have found their way to Christ alone, and, unaided by the Church, have groped from dissent to assent, so that their works are hardly less than modern variants of Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress." Such phenomena make us feel that the inmost soul of man is fundamentally Christian when, and only when, it achieves complete development, and when it is not held up in some of the many stages and phases of arrest. Thus we feel in reading these works that every normal and finished soul is at core Christian. It submits to faith and to the law of service, and has passed beyond the ideal of maximizing the selfish ego.
The other inference from it all is that there is a supremely precious psychological residue in Christianity that still transcends all artistic work, and even that of critical scholarship as sampled above. There is a height that none has explored, and a depth that none has sounded, just as in Moses' day there were miracles that the magicians could not
i54 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
do. This sacred core of meaning is found just where Paul found it, in the mystery of the death and Resurrection of Jesus. Neither experts who deal with texts and historical evidences, nor romancers, save in sporadic exceptions, have even attempted to deal with these things. Even the most realistic sense descriptions or scenic representations of the crucifixion and Resurrection which so thrill us have never revealed to analysis their latent content which lies back of their phenomenal impressiveness. This only a deeper genetic knowledge of the human soul will ever enable us to understand. Here lie the dynamic centre and secret of Christianity. Neither the license of fiction nor the most learned quest of factual occurrence has yet been able to clear up this most holy adytum of our faith. What motives would impel an ideal embodiment of humanity in his prime to voluntarily subject himself to every psychic and physical torture and finally to the most disgraceful death? What was the inner process by which this free resolve to die developed and become operative? Here both Christian art and learn- ing fail us. Our literature has not yet done for our Scripture what the Greek drama did for the heroes and events of Hesiod and Homer, and yet in this resolve of Jesus and its execution lies the key to the whole superstructure. Indeed the eschatological view has won such sudden and remarkable approval just because, and in so far as, it has taken us a little nearer to the solution of this cardinal problem. Although as yet unsolved, it is not beyond the range of "the higher psychology" which, as I hope to show later, sheds some additional light upon it. The mystery of the Resurrection itself is less fundamental and baffling, and its explanation is conditioned upon the problem why Jesus deter- mined to die. Paul thought that if he had not arisen our faith is vain. To this the psychologist assents, but adds that if we could fully under- stand why he resolved on self-immolation, belief in the Resurrection could be rescued from the domain of faith to that of knowledge. We are told that every one must in a pregnant sense die and then rise with Jesus. This, too, is true; but when we know what it means to die his death, all that resurrection was and means will follow. We can take the first psychopedagogic step to understand the wherefore of this great affirmation of Jesus only if we begin by asking ourselves solemnly and alone what there is in all this world we would now voluntarily die for. Tf nothing would motivate this supreme self-sacrifice the true life is not yet in us. Only when we have found some cause or end that so trans-
JESUS IN LITERATURE 155
cends self that love and loyalty to it would certainly prompt us upon emergency to face the Great Terror in his most hideous form, has the true life of the race begun consciously in us. Only then are we com- plete men and women. Only then have we attained the true majority of humanity, and are we rightly oriented in a moral universe. Thus alone we can take the first conscious step toward entering the Kingdom. This muse of death is not that of Stoic philosophic resignation to the inevitable, nor is it the blind, instinctive gregarious impulse that might prompt self-sacrifice in a sudden emergency. It is a higher, full-blown consciousness of what life means, of man's place in his world, and his duties to it. Although but a first step, it brings by itself, and at once, great enlargement and exaltation of soul. Here neither romance nor Christology has yet found the lost psychological cue.
From this chapter we may see how from the very beginning there have been two types of literature in this field. In the first are found some of the noblest products of the creative imagination. Even where these creations were trivial, they have been for edification. There was slight regard for objective facts and the justification sought was pragmatic. Lacunae in the Scriptures have been filled in the most diverse and ingenious ways in order to arouse the aesthetic sense and enhance the devotional spirit. Without these artistic creations of individuals and of the folk-soul Christianity would have been a bald, impoverished record.
The other class of literature began with the very motive that prompted the compilation of the Gospels and has continued to the critical, historical movement which began with the Wolfenbeutel fragments, animated the Tubingen School, and has sought to remove mythic and dogmatic accretions and reach the nuclear facts as to just what Jesus was, did, and said. It would emancipate our conceptions of him and his work not only from doctrine but from antique specula- tive philosophy and thus do a great work of restoration. This work, able, learned, and often brilliant as the best of it is, has hardly contrib- uted to, but rather detracted from, edification in the old sense in which the Church was wont to strive for it. It has tended rather to despoil Jesus of his celestial attributes, reduce him to the dimensions of humanity, and make him at best a great creative genius in the field of religion and at worst a fanatic, or has even denied to him every
156 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
vestige of historic reality. As even the inadequate epitomes in Sec- tion Four above illustrate, there is the utmost diversity of conception among experts concerning the work and teaching of Our Lord, and his person is confused rather than clarified. Critical studies, however, have done two things. They have emancipated Jesus from theology and mediaeval metaphysics, and they have also shown us that the problems of Christianity are at bottom psychological more than historical. They show us, too, that Christologists of the future must be psychologists not in the sense of speculative philosophy which began with Kant and has contributed so much of value, and not in the sense of laboratory psychology, that studies the senses, memory, attention, association, etc., but in the larger genetic sense that devotes itself to the study of the folk-soul or primitive faiths, development of the child, the youth and the race, and even utilizes the light shed by psychic aberrations.
Neither the New Testament critics nor the philosophers of re- ligion, and still less the theologians, have any adequate conception of the value or the volume of even special psychological fore-studies already made in this field upon such themes (to copy a few card- catalogue headings), as absolution, atonement, confession, conver- sion, celibacy, Church, creeds, dogma, death, ecstasy, growth, faith (including belief and doubt), holiness, immortality, inspiration, justi- fication, loyalty, miracles, the pathology of religion, prayer, penance, prophecy, rationalism, regeneration, revelation, ritualism, Sabbath, saints, sanctification, sects, vows, worship, and many others. In- deed, every fundamental theme connected with the contents of the New Testament (and, in fact, with that of the Old and all religions from the lowest up) is fundamentally one of psychology. The his- toric Jesus lived some two thousand years ago, but the psychological Jesus is eternal. The problem of the future is to delineate him more clearly and to establish his person and work in a realm where doubt cannot enter. We must first, however, consider a few of the typical products of modern negation.
CHAPTER THREE
jesus' character; negative views
History of the doctrine of Jesus' person — Views that Jesus was (A) morbid, (i) in general, (2) a paranoiac, (3) an epileptic, (4) an ecstatic, (5) fanatic, (6) generally abnormal, (7) converted from sin; (B) Nietzsche's criticisms; (C) Jesus was not historic but mythic — Views (1) of J. M. Robertson, (2) of W. B. Smith, (3) of Arthur Drews, (4) of Jensen — How important is it that Jesus remain historic and be not resolved into symbol or myth? — The value of these views in spiritualiz- ing Jesus by taking their departure from the death and Resurrection as contrasted with liberal and critical studies that reduce him to the di- mensions of a good man and teacher.
HOW can or did the omniscient, omnipotent Creator and Ruler of the world, the transcendent Deity of the prophets or of the gnostic aeons and syzygies, actually become man? This was the stupendous and pressing problem of early Christian thinkers. To the Semitic mind such a thought seemed blasphemy, and to the Hel- lenic mind, under the spell of gnosticism, sheer nonsense. Neverthe- less, despite all the balkings and cavillings, as expressed in the many heresies that were bound to occur, the Church after ages of controversy vindicated by careful phrase and formula that in Jesus the divine and the human were exactly equated and equipollent. Dorner/Hagenbach,2 and others have told with great learning the story of these dogmatic struggles. The former, my teacher, felt that the nature of Jesus' personality was the very core of Christianity, and his "mediation theology" had been so accepted that there was dismay when Harnack disparaged the importance of Christ's person. The focal problem was not, as in Abelard's day, why God became man, but how could he possi- bly do so? Still less was it a question of reducing theology into anthro- pology or psychology, as with Feuerbach, but of conceiving how the one Supreme Lord of Heaven could possibly embody all of himself,
_ i«
»J. A. Dorner: "History of the Doctrine of the Development of the Person of Christ." Edinboro, i8ga. 5 vol. *K. R. Hagenbach: "A History of Christian Doctrines." Edinboro, 188a. 3 vol.
157
i58 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
not in humanity in general, but in a single individual. This was still harder when the more impersonal Holy Spirit had to be added as a third and equipollent member of the Trinity. Hence it is not surprising that if the corporeity of Jesus is hard to conceive as a "meat body" (in the language of Sunday-school children, who often fancy him God to the waist and man below, or of cerulean hue, transparent or ghostly), the theological conceptions of his soul, which so eclipses his body, became a rank jungle which modern psychology, characterology, or anthropology (in any but the religious sense which makes the latter deal solely with sin), can make nothing of.
First came the controversies of the first century, with the Ebion- ites, who thought Jesus a mere man, and the gnostic sects that held him to be an embodiment of the Logos. In the second century came the Docetists, who thought all his acts and sufferings only apparent, and not real, while the Patripassianists thought his nature so intussus- cepted with that of God that the latter suffered with him. In the third, fourth, and later centuries there were many other theories. The Sabellians thought God himself was born of Mary, lived and died in Jesus, and then diffused himself into the Holy Ghost, his work being accomplished. The Arians thought Christ a creation of God, distinct from him, human in having flesh, and really intermediate between God and man, although some of them identified his soul with that of the Philonic Logos. The Eudoxians thought him created out of noth- ing, with a will distinct and different from that of God. The Apollinar- ians denied his proper humanity, gave him only a human sensory soul, but thought his rational spirit divine. The Nestorians gave him two natures and two souls, the union between which was only apparent. The Acacians thought the Son was not like, but similar to, God. The Monothelites gave him one will, partly human and partly divine. Other heresies gave him two, and, in the seventh century, three wills. The Monophysites thought the two natures were united but not mixed, and that without change or confusion. The Eutychians thought that he had two natures the union of which made him divine. The Neo- nomians gave him both a human and a divine nature. The Praxeans held him to be simultaneously God and man. The Xenians thought he became real man, but of his own free will. The Aphthartodocetae thought his body was incorruptible, and could not, and did not, really die. The Eunomians, a branch of the Arians, thought God did not use
JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 159
his substance in creating the Son, but only his will. The Adoptionists thought him divine, not by birth but by adoption. The Socinians thought Christ a man, denied personality to the Holy Spirit, and held that God's will was imputed to him. The Pelagians thought Christ only the first and greatest of God's creatures. Other sects discussed whether his preexistence was coetaneous with that of the Father. There were modalistic and dynamic interpretations of his nature, while some thought him a mere manifestation of God, or that the Holy Spirit was his soul. The kenosis problem of how far God had emptied him- self in becoming incarnate and how far there was a real homoousia or consubstantiality between the Father and the Son, whether the heavenly humanity of Christ was present in Adam, and what was the real nature of the Holy Spirit and its relations to the other divine per- sons of the Godhead — these and other problems of early Christology, some of which had a long history, issued in the theological doctrines which slowly gave shape and character to ecclesiastical orthodoxy.
Jesus was not a theanthropic hybrid in the sense that the pithe- canthropus was half man and half ape, and thus a link between them; nor was he a case of dual personality, with now the human and now the divine dominant; for there could be no schizophrenia, but only com- plete uni-personality. Heteronomy and autonomy must be at-oned, and God must become man exactly as man became God. Son of Man and Son of God must mean the same, and so Jesus must be at the same time complete God and complete man. One of these factors could not be identified with the conscious and the other with the unconscious elements, as Sanday's Christology suggests; for these distinctions were not then elaborated. If we interpret what the Church said into what it meant, the wonderful thing to us is that orthodoxy really was the best expression then possible of the right and true instinct that felt that the transcendent and the immanent were at bottom absolutely identical. Man had projected and objectified himself (that is, his generic human nature) into deity, and now this projection was reabsorbed and sub- jectified. The hypostasis was ended, and every heresy that stood in the way of this great resumption was anathema maranatha, and rightly so. No more glorious affirmation was ever made than that God and man simultaneously became each other. Inadequately as the great Councils understood what was really involved in their de- cisions and confessions, and quaint and outgrown as these old formulae
160 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
seem to modern culture and especially to psychology, they veritably cry out to us for new and higher interpretations. The great systems of German idealistic philosophy from Kant on, and the later psycholog- ical studies of the nature of personality, of the ego and the self, normal and morbid; also the new critical studies of Jesus' traits, have given us a vast wealth of new insights, concepts, and terms, with which to grapple with the problems embedded in these old theological formu- laries. Hence it was inevitable that studies from the standpoint of Dorner should have been superseded by others in the sense of Schweit- zer,1 who, summing up a century of investigation, says it has not only given us no rounded-out and consistent idea of Jesus' personality, but has left the learned world with conceptions of it which seem hopelessly diverse and discordant. Wrede2 says in substance that his character is one of the great secrets of the world, and WeideP says that " only a few solid rocks of fact crop out through the alluvium of popular thought," but as to what these facts are there is no agreement. J. Ninck4 thinks that the work of determining the chief traits of Jesus' soul from the Gospel is not unlike that of inferring the habits and life- histories of extinct animals from their few fossil remains; while most severer students of the original texts or codices deem all such restora- tions too hazardous. Not a few believe we never can know much about Jesus' inner personality, and therefore would focus attention chiefly on his words or teachings. F. Daab6 even argues that Jesus must not be regarded as the founder of a new religion or a new morality, but rather that he did away with both; and we must consider him chiefly as the first real man. He is no longer a chiefly metaphysical being or one who attempted a new or complete conjugation of the verb " to do." We must identify Christology with the higher anthropology, recogniz- ing that there is very little left of the apostolic views so that they must be entirely transcended and transformed. As an interesting illustra- tion of opposite views we may cite Wunsche, who, in his "Leiden des Messias," presented Jesus as suffering, solitary, misunderstood even by his mother after his temple discussion, and by his closest disciples as well as by his contemporaries generally. Six years later the same
»"Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung." a. Neu bearb. u. verm. Aufl. d«s Werkes "Von Reimarus zu Wrede." Tubingen, 1913, 659 p.
*" Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien." 1901, 391 p.
•"Jesu PersCnlichkeit; eine psychologische Studie." Halle, 1908, 47 p.
•"Jesus als Charakter." Leipzig, 1910, 396 p.
'"Jesus von Nazaret." 1907, 324 p.
JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 161
author, in his "Der lebensfreudige Jesus" (1876), presents him as jubilant, triumphant, his soul surcharged with euphoria, expansive, confident, with an instant insight of truth, and with an authoritative- ness that was as sublime as it was impressive.
The Jesus of Paul, who was mainly a divine sacrifice to God for us, legitimating himself by rising from the dead, can hardly be said to have a psychology. He had a mission rather, a predetermined function which he performed with fidelity through pain and death. To John he was a mystic, and consciously one with the Father, as he would have us be one with him, so that only the psychology of rapt seers and of intuitions of union with the divine applies to him. To most patristic writers and to the theology of the Church he was a member of the Trinity, whose right position there is precarious and hard to vindicate against manifold heresies. From their viewpoint all study of the traits of Jesus' human personality would be perilous to dogma, and might dim the glamour of the divinity of his nature. Thus many would regard all attempts to set forth Jesus' psychic traits somewhat as the iconoclasts did the work of artists in this field.
It is thus hardly more than a century since the need of some psychological portraiture of Jesus began to be felt; and now throughout cultured, thinking Christendom it has become a real and crying need. We want to know how to conceive his psychic type, his mental equip- ment, his pedagogical method, his range of moods, the secret of his influence over men, and his power in the world. How unitary was his soul? WTiat was his emotional, volitional, intellectual nature? Can he be conceived as absolutely sinless and infallible, and yet be truly human? Had he experienced anything like the regeneration and salvation he called others to achieve? Had he distinctively Oriental or Asiatic traits, and so would he be something of an anachronism now? Or would he realize or transcend all our highest ideals of him? Had he, like so many of the earth's greatest men, certain abnormal traits? Was he, too, introverted, ecstatic, fanatical? It should not shock, or even surprise, us to learn that questions have been raised on all these points, and that not only the best but the worst possible has been said of him. Let us begin with the latter, which is so bad that we can almost fancy Jesus thinking, in paraphrase of Plutarch, that he would rather men should say (like Drews) that no such man ever existed than to think so meanly of him as some of his most wanton assailants have done.
162 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Views that he was (A) morbid, in general: In view of the fact that we are told that Jesus' friends thought him beside himself (Mark iii: 21); the Pharisees that he was possessed; considering the voice and the vision of the dove at the baptism; the transfiguration, which might suggest collective hallucination; his indifference to his parents, to women, and to family ties; his conjuring the storm, and cursing the fig-tree; his ideal of emasculation for the Kingdom's sake; his seeing Satan fall from heaven; his contact with the angels; his outburst of temper in the temple; his idea of his own greatness and of coming on the clouds of heaven at the end of the world, etc., it was inevitable that as the age of freer psychological treatment of his life and character dawned, he should be thought insane by some, as so many of the world's greatest men from Socrates1 to Gerhardt Hauptmann2 have been adjudged. In a Jubilee pamphlet in 1640, Luther is made wahnsinnig. Goethe in his early life was thought to be so, and Ibsen was sometimes called "fit for the madhouse." In the sixties Bismarck was often referred to as toll, and a medical journal in 1886 pronounced him so; while in the Tagliche Rundschau (February 6, 1908), Roosevelt was pronounced insane by a nerve specialist who said he had paranoia reformatoria. Morton Prince3 has just diagnosed the Kaiser as suffering from hereditary psychoses, especially delusions of greatness. Espe- cially since Lombroso and Nordau, in an already great and growing literature, the stigmata of degeneration-psychoses, or other mental defect have been specifically pointed out in special treatises on Caesar, Mohammed (see Sparnger's "Life") , Dante, Tasso, Jeanne d' Arc, Luther, Bunyan, Cowper, Cromwell, Pascal, Poe, Swift, Lamb, Blake, Sweden- borg, Turner, Michael Angelo, the founder of Babism and Bahism, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Napoleon (see Cabne, and also Pelman's study), Tolstoi, Zola (Toulouse), Strindberg, Rousseau, Wagner (see Max Graf), Loyola (see Lomer), Zinzendorf (Pfister), Da Vinci (Freud), La Fontaine (Nayrac), De Maupassant, and many others.4 Taine's psychology long ago suggested that the best are sane only by happy and perhaps slowly developed rectification and balance of opposing insan-
■Li'lut: "Le Genie, la Raison et la Folie; le Demon de Socrate." Paris, 1855, 348 p. 'See E. Wulffen's analysis of Hauptmann. Leipzig, 1908, 208 p. •"Psychology of the Kaiser." Boston, Badger, 1915.
<P. Radestock: "Genie und Wahnsinn." Breslau, 1884, 78 p. L. S. F. Winslow; "Mad Humanity."' London, 16
"" >rk, 18
VI" ».%*., »y.«. J41 }j. maA .J. . hm uau. TUII X1UI131 UUU AvUnStluill. 1 -,1." 1 | P/. ! K , CfUBMld | 11. \1. ,}WU \J. flUg^lV O. X\ai, »
poport: "Mad Majesties." New York, Brentano's, 1910, 319 p. Hermann Turck: "Der geniale Mensch." 6lh ed. revised, Berlin, 1903, 422 p. Ceasre Lombroso: "L'homme de G6nie." Paris, 1889, 409 p. Colonel Biottot: "Les crands Inspires devant la Science; Jeanne d'Arc." Paris, 1907, 279 p. Henri Joly: "Psychologie des grands Hommes." Paris, 1883, 280 p.
-a . i^.i' n, >i ■ M_r. . utmc uiiu w .iiinsnni. nrcsiau, 1004, 70 p. l^.o.i. vvaiimuw; iviau 1 mi iliiui \ . i,u 1, loyo,
451 p. W. Hirsch: "Genius and Degeneration." New York, 1896, 333 p. J. F. Nisbet: "The Insanity of Genius." 6th ed., 1912. 341 p. Max S. Nordau: "Von Kunst und Kilnstlern." Leipzig, Elischer, n. d. 308 p. Angelo S. Rap-
JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 163
ities, while psychoanalysis has suggested that consciousness itself, if not a disease, is always a remedial or corrective agency. How closely religion is related to insanity has often been pointed out.1
(1) De Loosten2 (pseudonym for G. Lomer) represents Jesus as "probably" handicapped by heredity from birth. His self-conscious- ness was hypertrophied although his intellect was very keen, and it was this that enabled him to see the defects of the Pharisees and bring forward his novelties. Slowly, however, he developed a fixed form of delusions which were accepted by the intensely religious circle about him. He devoted himself too excessively to certain books of the Old Testament and was in fine a rare illustration of genius developed on a pathological basis. Binet-Sangle3 diagnoses paranoia, and in the appearance of Jesus at the age of twelve in the temple he finds the first hebephrenic crisis. He infers because Jesus rode an ass that he was of small stature; and he even thinks that the water and the blood from the spear wound indicated grave pleurisy, "caught probably by night exposure on the Mount of Olives." Seeming to regard apocryphal and Talmudic legends as of equal authority with the Gospels, he concludes that Jesus was the son of an aged carpenter and a devoted young mother, and counts among the thirteen known members of his family seven mystics. All were highly susceptible to suggestion, one from another, especially in the religious field, a quality that he calls " hier- osynchrotisme ieschouite" He thinks Jesus' intelligence irregular, uneven, and unreasoning. He says that he was vacillating, irresolute, indifferent to women, lacking energy save in a spurty way; and that "his delirium was dignified, chronic, systematized, polymorphic and suggests if not characterizes mental degeneracy." He was haunted by ideas of anarchism, Oedipism, and mutilation; was probably tuber- culous; and was an exquisite illustration of the syndrome of Cotard. He was analgesic; had great ideas of dominion, and hypochondriacal views of the non-existence or destruction of the body and the world. He was prone to melancholy and anxiety. Thus, while De Loosten ascribes high intellectuality to Jesus, Binet-Sangle does not; and thinks his megalomania was expressed in applying to himself so many phrases from the prophets.
»See a compendious thesis with literature by Josiah Moses: "Pathological Aspects of Religion." Clark University Press, igo6, 264 p.
s" Jesus Christus vom Standpunkte des Psychiaters." Bamberg, 190s, 104 p.
s"La Folie de J6sus." Paris, 1908, XIII, 294 P- This author has also published a diagnosis of the morbidity of the Hebrew prophets.
i64 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
E. Rasmussen1 and H. Werner,2 his chief critic, may be considered together with H. Schaefer.8 It was long ago said that Jesus was either what he claimed to be, or else was a lunatic. The latter was thought to be entirely out of the question, so that there was much force in this statement. It is only recently that the best Christologists have taken the impeachment of Jesus' normality seriously, and a few German theologians seem to think there may be slight truth in it. G. Frenssen, e.g., sums up his view by saying, "Jesus' soul spun monstrous thoughts and painted pictures of excessive magnificence, and thus went to the very limits of the human and even to the boundaries of exalted Wahn- sinn." Most progressive thinkers would now, with Werner, welcome all such discussions, because they cannot fail to shed new light on Jesus' character, although, of course, alienists as such are quite incompetent, and actual observation and investigation, which alone could establish conclusions, are forever impossible.
First comes the question whether Jesus bore a hereditary handicap such as is found in 30 to 40 per cent, of all the insane. The Evangelists certainly suggest no trace of psychic abnormality in either Mary or Joseph. Nor need we discuss the old Tendenz aspersion of Talmudic legends, long ago ignored, that Jesus was born out of wed- lock. Rasmussen thinks he may have been a hybrid of Jewish and Greek blood, and stresses the relationship between Jesus' mother and Elizabeth, the mother of John, some of whose contemporaries thought him more or less insane (Matt, xi: 18, Luke vii: 33). Upon these slenderest of all data, he concludes that " Jesus was probably regarded by a large number of his contemporaries as insane. " But here again we must remember that very many who have been thought unbalanced by those nearest them history has shown to be epoch-makers. Men are prone to condemn all that they cannot understand. Perhaps Jesus was highly suggestible in accepting the dominant thoughts of those about him in anticipating his own death, and in allowing himself to be regarded as the Messiah. He certainly spoke with intense personal authority, as if commissioned by God to declare his own ipse dixet, de hant en has. The milieu of Jesus certainly was tense with excitement, and proved a strain upon feeble minds. Some believe that in Galilee in particular there was in Jesus' day a large proportion of the population that suf-
l" Jesus; eine vergleichende psychologische Studie." Trans, from the Danish. 1905, 167 p.
•" Die psychische Gesundheit Jesu." 1008, 64 p.
•"Jesus In psychiatrische Beleuchtung." Berlin, igio, 178 p.
JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 165
fered from nervous and mental disturbance. The penitential attitude per se is somewhat suggestive of depression and delusions of persecu- tion. Perhaps the Baptist's habits show a cultural relapse toward wildness in those "sick days" of Israel. A materialist might easily think that an intense expectation of a new Kingdom of God on earth was morbid, nor could he understand asceticism as a revival of the old prophetic idea; but the mourning of the people for their sins and their resolve to reform is by no means a syndrome of any kind of morbidity, but rather indicates regeneration. When psychiatry held so strongly to partial insanity or manias, it was often thought these might coexist with sanity in general, but now all these symptom groups are known to involve a deep unsettlement of psychic individuality. Can a man with a world-cursing ethics, or who is dominated by eschatological expecta- tions that we deem illusory, asks Schweitzer, be thoroughly sound? If, then, Jesus was psychotic, he must have shown some particular type that alienists recognize; and while De Loosten evades this prob- lem, the inference is that he deems him chiefly a religious paranoiac, although there are symptoms of melancholia, mania, dementia praecox, etc.
(2) Paranoia indicates disturbance of the intellect rather than the feelings, but often involves illusions and sense disturbances. Its vic- tims may deem themselves reformers of the world, prophets related to God as sons, mothers, or favourites. Of this type both asylums and clinical literature have many illustrations. De Loosten thinks it was an insanely and perhaps suddenly exalted idea of self that prompted a boy of twelve to burst into the disputes of the savants; but we are told that he only heard and asked, not that he taught or disputed, although perhaps he may have felt some kind of heavenly calling as weak- minded youth often do. Kraepelin tells us that larvated paranoia erupts most often between twenty-five and forty years of age, and such cases often show weakness of judgment, based on lack of sensitiveness to environment. Such cases may develop a kind of deification for self or for others, but their claims are obviously ridiculous. If Jesus be- longed to this type, the chasm between his origin, his humble experi- ence, his powerlessness in the hands of fate, on the one hand, and his exorbitant estimate of himself, on the other, would have shown every one that he was a victim of delusions of greatness. Some have thought the experiences of his baptism marked another step in the same direc-
166 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
tion. Of course many visions are really the objectivization of deep previous impressions or tendencies. Rasmussen thinks Jesus was a mistrustful spier upon those near him for allusions to himself, and had developed the notion that there was a conspiracy against him, saying, "Why do you want to kill me?" as if it were a sudden outburst of delusions of persecution. Such things, however, are very sporadic. Yet he did have an air of self-content, loftiness, and infallibility, and was much busied with his own ego, its greatness, worth, and meaning, and these are essential traits of paranoia, which is very egotistic. But it was also a signature of Jesus' life that he could forget and deny, help others, and give up his own will. To De Loosten's reproach that Jesus was a "sexual revolutionary" and that his lack of family feeling was a stigma, we can say, with Werner, that, although he invited his followers to desert all their relatives for him, it was because he' saw things sub specie eternitatis, and believed moral and spiritual relation- ships something higher yet. In the lives of many great men the chord of sex has "passed in music out of sight," and Jesus was so absorbed in his own idealistic occupations that he was in a sense above sex. He said that in the Resurrection there would be no marriage, but all would be like the angels, and spoke of eunuchs born and made for the Kingdom of heaven's sake (Matt, xix: 12) and De Loosten discusses whether he belonged to the former class or made himself so with his own hands. Certainly such a type of morality has possibilities of danger for the State. Perhaps his entry into Jerusalem was "a mad act of courage," but surely it was not to astonish the natives. If he had a thought of destroying the temple (or of "making Triimmer out of Traume"), it was silly. Although he debated very cleverly with the Pharisees, he was really no match for them, for his feet were not on solid ground. He preached violence, hate of the rich; lacked foresight and common sense; was anarchistic; did not love his fellow-men, save children only; brought a sword, not peace. Now it is certain that Jesus cannot be entirely explained on the purely humanistic level of average mankind, so that if he is not a superman we may all readily grant that he was verruckt. As Werner well says, a crown prince has the right to act as if he were a king, but it would be insane in a beggar to do so. So here the yes-or-no theology has some place.
(3) Rasmussen conceived Jesus as epileptic, as he thinks were Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Paul, the Messiahs of the seventeenth century,
JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 167
the Mahdi, and others. Of course a complete attack is a fit with various groups of symptoms; but it is a peculiarity of epilepsy that it has many equivalents, especially psychic ones, in disturbances of apperception, anxiety, dizziness, illusions, loss of memory, twilight stages, absence of mind. But of such we certainly have little trace in the Gospels. It is difficult, if not impossible, to diagnose the epileptic diathesis from purely psychic symptoms. The petit mat type is very diverse. There is little in Jesus, at any rate, that conforms to any clini- cal type. Rasmussen thinks Jesus' struggle in Gethsemane belongs here. He cites his lust for solitude and prayer, and his expulsion of the money-changers. But all this has other sufficient normal motivation. No doubt Jesus' type of consciousness was prophetic, but to call him cruel because he may have swung his scourge violently is surely going too far. His exorbitant estimation of the therapeutic value of his sufferings, too, we are told is morbid. Wanderings or fugues and homelessness may fall under morbid categories and may go with char- acteristic progressive epileptic narrowing of the mental horizon down to a very one-sided preaching of God's Kingdom; but, as Werner again says, we must remember that "in der Beschrdnkung zeigt sich der Meister" although Jesus was no specialist, but took a broad view of things. So, too, his view of property and his high estimate of the value of faith may point in the same direction. Traits of Jesus' character suggestive of psychic epilepsy, such as irritability, moods, arbitrariness, and domineering disposition, only indicate superior range and breadth of the field of inner experience.
(4) The question whether Jesus was ecstatic is far greater and more serious. 0. Holtzmann1 makes this play an immense role, as does Bousset: "Jesus" (1904). Some think that much of his life was spent in a kind of supernormal inner exaltation, and some would identify this state with the Messianic consciousness; while others — B. Weiss, Soden, Kiigel — dispute this view. To this we shall return later. In its extremer form ecstasy involves some nervous unsoundness, but not necessarily insanity. The subject of it may be dominated by a very narrow religious circle of ideas, charged with intense affectivity. Im- pressions from without are weakened. Mantegazza makes excessive focalization of attention on something without or within characteristic. Perhaps there is an intense battle of opposing psychic trends, and there
1,1 War Jesus Ekstatiker?" Tubingen, 1903, 141 p.
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may be muteness and cataplexy, with fixed features. In its highest grade the enraptured soul is caught up as it were into the seventh heaven, or ascends through the Alexandrian enneads until, as in the case of Eckhart, the soul seems to fuse with God, or commune with the One and All, with self swallowed up. Christian ecstatics may be completely hypnotized by contemplating divine things, and there may be illusions or hallucinations. Some think there is a petit and a grand type of epilepsy, and that the soul may be abnormally potentialized or concentrated, or the mind be in a tonic cramp of fixation, possibly with a narrowed field of vision. This was common in schools of the prophets, in the biographies of saints, in the Crusades, in the dancing manias and devil epidemic in Savoy, in the preaching disease in Sweden and Wales. Jeanne d'Arc had it; Archimedes said to the Roman sol- dier who came to slay him, "Do not destroy my circles"; Newton forgot his meals; Socrates stood in the market in contemplation; Handel, in composing the "Hallelujah Chorus," forgot whether he was in the body or not; Wagner had to be left absolutely alone, replying to friends who knocked, "I am in heat." (See Werner for these and other illus- trations.) Saul, when possessed with the prophetic spirit, laid aside his garments and prophesied naked a whole day and night. Many thought prophets like Hosea mad, and perhaps this was an infantile disease in the development of prophetism. Rothe was often in Ver- zuckung as a culmination of his higher devotion. Jesus spent hours in a rapt state of prayer, wrestling with God, but we have no indication that he ever lost consciousness or memory. Those who hold this view think that much of Jesus' life, especially the baptism, temptation, transfiguration, penitential teaching, miracles, eschatological or parousia conceptions, can be explained in this way. A complete ecstatic may seem to be possessed by an alien power, as if the spirit gave or drove him to do or say specific things interjected into his mind with some rupture of associative continuity. But surely we cannot say that every new idea, discovery, or invention that bursts into the world is a product of ecstasy. Possession was part of the popular belief of Jesus' day. Perhaps the temptation would be the best para- digm if this be not regarded solely as an allegory, and we assume that Jesus was especially "in the spirit" during this experience. It is hard often to distinguish between the tropes so rich in Oriental thought and the true supernormal states. Job saw fire fall from heaven, as Satan
JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 169
did in Jesus' thought. Holtzmann thinks Jesus an aufbrausende, aufloderdende nature, and says that there are many points in his life where he acts as if in unexplained and confused Sturm and Drang. We must of course also consider the religious customs of his day. Even though he sweat drops of blood in the garden he still controlled himself, and the cause was sufficient to explain the effect. Ecstasy in some cases does seem to be more or less an inebriation and a habit deliber- ately cultivated. But it tends to break down the mind, and the night side of the soul tends to eclipse its day.
(5) Following Werner, was Jesus a Schwarmer or fanatic, as Strauss was the first to suggest? The evidence of this he found chiefly in his prediction of his return to earth, and others since have held the same view, Lipsius calling his life a " tragedy of fanaticism." A fanatic is one who abandons himself to his own illusion. It is not enough to have it, but he must live in it or make it the focus of his thought, even though he may not know that he does so. His delusion contradicts reality. He often loses the power to discriminate between what is possible and what is impossible. Fanaticism may appear in any domain of life, but perhaps is most common in religion. The inner light or feeling is usually its basis. The Holy Spirit, as he conceives it, comes suddenly and unaccountably. There are signs, dreams, visions, sudden access of power, etc.
If this charge against Jesus has any validity, it seems to be con- nected with his Messianic consciousness, so far especially as it harks back to Daniel. Perhaps this atmosphere is itself unsettling, and is also complicated with his negative attitude toward the State, marriage, and the Mosaic law, and his intolerance of earthly callings. Some of his demands and predictions and the immediateness of the parousia and the new Kingdom; the expansion of the judgment at Jerusalem to cosmic dimensions; and even the fact of his expecting to return to earth, and the notion that his entire life was oriented by eschatology — are these fanatic traits and did they permeate Jesus' soul, turning him away from reality in the sense of Janet or Freud? Or was his inner life absorbed with true ideals, of which the highest criterion is that they are pragmatic?
(6) As to abnormality in general, it is impossible to establish any criterion of normality, but we must not believe it necessarily identical with the point of view of the average man. We must give great range
i7o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
to idiosyncrasy and personal traits, so that there may be wide diver- gence from the average without abnormality, as in special gifts or training. Some are precocious; some are born with very special gifts, and abnormality may develop upon the basis of hereditary trends. It may be only quantitative; that is, the illusions may be known to be such, or they may lead us captive, and there is every degree of Minder- wertigkeit. A great religious founder certainly should not despise reason or renounce the world, but reason is of all sorts, and is both affirmative and negative. Bousset says, "Fearful and hyperpotent forces raged in his inner nature. The devil and his demons strove with the angels of God, despair of death alternated with transcendent con- fidence of victory, light strove with the night, fog-mists rolled, and yet in their midst shone the bright rays of the rising sun." Of course we know nothing of Jesus' struggles in solitude, nor even the theme that drove him into seclusion. Probably there was more struggle than appeared, and the conception of poise is not correct. Intense strag- gle, however, does not imply abnormality; it rather implies sanity to survive it, and we must always bear in mind, too, the adequacy of the stimulus. We can hardly say that his joy at the confession of Peter, his pity for the people of Jerusalem, his woe upon the Pharisees, his horror at the desecration of the temple, were extravagant. We must regard Jesus not so much as representing ideal man as he conceived him, as giving a moral and religious ideal for all future time, which should be perfection in its type. Harmonious co-action of all the pow- ers and faculties in due proportion with an equilibrium that will not be upset by a wide range of experience, that is not one-sided, that involves harmony of head and heart, that embraces both Stoic and sentimental energies together with great will and power of resolution and heroism — all this may be simply transfigured common sense and go with perfect poise and repose.
(7) Certainly we can hardly conceive Jesus with Schrempf,1 who describes him as a Job or Oedipus Redivivus, as a man with a tragedy behind him, a broken reed set up again. He urges that Jesus came to the baptism sinful and guilty, and that the intimation that he was the chosen of God was by no means received with the equanimity with which Socrates heard that the oracle had called him the wisest of men. Why, Schrempf asks, was Jesus thus roused to a high pitch of mental
'"Menscbenloos." Stuttgart, 1900, 148 p.
JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 171
perturbation, so that he rushed into the desert to find among angels, demons, and animals his lost self-possession? We must, he says, con- ceive that Jesus first found a way through sin, that he had himself been in its bonds, and perhaps this was figured by the descent to hell. He had conquered the ghosts of pain and guilt by breaking with his past, and from a full experience he realized that there was none good; no, not one. On this view his greatness was built on the ruins of an earlier dead self, and the Jesus we know during his public years was in this respect unlike the converted Paul, Augustine, Bunyan, etc., only in that we have no record of his earlier life. Thus he was a product of a more or less radical conversion, and the reticence of the Gospels about Jesus before he was touched by the appeal of John had only too good a cause. On this view Jesus was not sinless in the sense once standard- ized for Protestantism by Ullmann1 or by Julius Miiller,2 but was, to use the Newman- James phrase, a twice- and not merely a once-born man. He had felt the Pauline divided will. He was not like the animals Walt Whitman points us to because they never worry about their sins. He had had defects and struggled successfully toward a restitutio ad integrant. His soul was not naively and aboriginally "healthy-minded," but had been sick. He had felt the moral dualism of Bunyan, Tolstoi, and all the conspicuous achievers of regeneration, which if no more true is happily far better known and, let us hope, more common than the Jouffroy counter-conversion illustrated in recent decades by certain French Satanistic litterateurs of the decadent school. If Jesus had thus experienced conversion, whether of the aggressive, Sadistic type that laboriously achieves regeneration, or of the passive, surrendering, masochistic, mind-cure type that simply ceases to strive, because feeling that all is well as it is, he was certainly brought much nearer to us by this experience. If to be tempted, yet without sin, is a harmatological, psychological impossibility, then Jesus might have used the forgiveness petition in his prayer for himself.
Sin is the chief insanity, and if a touch, but not too much of it, is necessary for the psychological perfection of his humanity, as well as for his complete functioning as a redeeming physician to sin-sick souls (as Plato said a good doctor must have had some personal experience of sickness), it follows that it was no more necessary for Jesus to conform
•"The Sinlessness of Jesus." 1870.
2" Christian Doctrine of Sin." Edinburgh, 1885. 2 vols.
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to the narrow norms of sanity that modern psychiatry prescribes than to insist that he should always have been at the very acme of physical health. Without some freedom up and down the scales of both mental and physical hygiene, experience would be a shallow, falsetto thing. Strictly, no one is always well or sane. Just as Jesus suffered hunger, fatigue, and exposure, so it is no derogation, but rather an enhance- ment of him, to believe that he knew something at first hand of how every sort of psychic aberration felt in a world where these play so vast a role. As a sad mood often unfolds a wider mental horizon, so that poor Burton in his "Anatomy" of it praised melancholy, as ecstatic joy often unfolds a still wider purview, as all dreams and illusions may enrich life, as all great ideas are prone to be obsessive, as supernormal efforts summate all our powers, and as some have even loved and regretted to leave their insanities behind, why not frankly admit that Jesus may have experienced a wider range of all sub- and super-normali- ties, that he could realistically enter by sympathetic Einfuhlung into pathological states tabooed to most, and thus acquire more therapeutic power than others? Great or supernormally well and sane men who feel their way to this insight may indulge in syndromes that seem to ordinary onlookers epileptic, ecstatic, and the rest; not so much like those who feel themselves so fixed in truth that they can play with gracious lies, as like those who are so vital and well that ordinary hygienic precautions can be transcended with impunity, and thus greater emergencies can be met. Our own standards here may be as irrelevant as those of the modern hygienist investigating whether Jesus' diet, regimen, sleep, dress, etc., conform to their specifications. Diag- nostic studies like those above cited of great men should teach us that we know very little of the norms of sanity for superior souls, and that they often seem to need and to use with great advantage experiences that to weaklings, children, and the commonalty would be dangerous, but that in them are signs of life superabounding.
(B) The bitterest enemy that Jesus, and still more the Church, has had in modern times is Nietzsche. By implication in about all his writings, but especially in a posthumous essay,1 he vituperates every- thing Christian with characteristic brilliancy and abandon, and advo- cates a Weltanschauung which is almost the direct antipode of the teaching of Jesus. Nietzsche's influence has been incalculable, al-
l"Der Antichrist," in "Werke." Bd. 8., S. us-3i4>
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though it is a much mooted question how far he expresses the secret and perhaps unconscious tendency of many of his cultivated country- men. Jesus, he says in substance, was in every sense the very reverse of either a hero or a genius, and he vilipends Renan for calling him both. He gathered the weak, sickly, outcasts, and boors, whom it would need a Dostoyefsky to describe, made false promises that never were or could be fulfilled, and called them good tidings. He substituted puling faith for reason and science; taught his followers to hate the state, the rich, the powerful; brought the dregs of society to the top; destroyed all old and well-established tables of values, and substituted new and perverted standards; taught the immanence of a new kingdom that was to make an end of history; tried to do away with death and disease, which are in fact man's greatest teachers. "This gross thaumaturgist fable" was the beginning of the world's greatest decadence. True, Jesus may have been distorted and misrepresented by his followers. But he had an instinctive hatred of reality, and retreated from it to an inner subjec- tive life beside which all else paled or became only symbols; cultivated an exaggerated sense of sin, which is always paralyzing and revolting to really noble souls; was misanthropic, hating all humanity outside his pale; taught a world-cursing ethics, and that earth was fit only for destruction; thrilled men with superstitious terrors of judgment day and hell; proclaimed ideas utterly contradictory one of the other; had no use for either nature or history, save to furnish metaphors for his doctrine. He played upon the chronic solicitude of little people to save their petty souls in another world, and gave them squeamish, panicky, neurotic consciences. His religion is the best possible for slaves, cowards, and the vulgar herd, but is impossible for great or virile men. It is fundamentally enervating. To feel the need of salvation is itself a confession of degeneration, and hence Christianity is chiefly craved by the refuse of mankind. The millennium, like the Church, is a hospital for the sick, a refuge for those to whom every- thing else in life has become vain. Jesus did indeed choose the foolish things of the world to confound its wisdom and the weak to sap its strength. He brooded darkly on doom and destruction. The spec- tacle of him on the cross is a fit and eternal symbol of all races that have been Christianized, for they are crucified on the doctrines of the New Testament. Its idea of prayer makes God a domestic servant, a pur- veyor or postman; or prayer is simple beggary, the importuning
i74 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
alms, which is always the trick of weaklings too lazy to attain their ends by their own efforts, like men. Even if Christianity can ever be good for a degenerate, servile race as a kitchen religion, it is poison for a vigorous, young, sturdy stock like the Germans. It cannot be refuted because we cannot refute a disease. Some of Nietzsche's implications, as, e. g., in the Eseljest of "Zarathustra," are simple blasphemy (if there really is such a thing), and are certainly abhorrent even to good taste, which he says spurns Jesusism. The worst of all crimes is sympathy for the weak. This means that those whom Darwin's selec- tion or modern eugenics would leave to perish for the benefit of the race are just those that Christianity makes survive. Thus it is the most anti-eugenic and euthenic scheme the world has ever known. The kind of people to whom Jesus promised immortality makes it undesirable to men of high honour. The greatest depravity man has ever shown is in embracing, as he has done, a religion which has done him so much harm, for this indicates the deepest of all taints in his nature. Again, pity and sympathy are social diseases, for they multi- ply and conserve misery. Schopenhauer saw this, and Aristotle would purge them away. The noble man is hard and pitiless. Thus, Christianity is a fungus, a putrefaction, a virus injected into the veins of humanity. It has created distress in order to perpetuate itself. It has always levelled down.
Nietzsche's ideal man is worldly, selfish, cruel. He is like, e. g., Napoleon, who was "beyond good and evil," followed his own sense of worths, gave free vent to the universal ambition for power, and so was a true overman. Indeed, a race is a trick of nature to produce a very few such great men with great tragedies. They let the weak perish and like their own lives to be hard and bitter. They are the true elite, nature's aristocrats, leaders, pioneers, exploiting life to the uttermost, creating new values. They are greatly good, or perhaps greatly bad; but whether criminals or saints, they are so in grand style. They never regret, would be insulted by sympathy, live above our petty ideals of morality or law. To exterminate the evil of the world would weaken them, for they need revenge and enemies whom they can hate and be terrible to. They are rightly haughty and proud, and vastly prefer to be feared rather than loved. Moses, Caesar, Frederick the Great, Caesar Borgia, represented this new and better race. Such men can die for what they live for, face the dragon of want, covet
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temptation and hardship, seem fools for wisdom's sake, or abject from sheer pride. They can alienate every friend and make a friend of their dearest foe. They want to live the whole of human life in their own person, and construe all into the here and now. They consider it base to translate values into a transcendent hereafter. Such men can some- times do the most dreadful things, and be justified; for they would prefer to be immoral rather than effeminate. Things noble in magnanimous men would be vile in little ones. They have to fight the cosmic order, can perhaps even rid themselves of hereditary handicaps, and just as earthquakes make new springs, so colossal souls cause new powers to break forth. Such were perhaps the primitive Teutons in their treat- ment of the far more numerous swarthy Mediterranean races. The diametrical opposite of all these traits is what Christendom has sedu- lously cultivated.
Jesus was a Jew, and his triumph in the world is the product of the most consummate plot that his clever race ever devised. The Jews had been long subjected in Egypt and Babylon, and they had grown essentially servile and craven. It was a trick from the ghetto of this shrewd race to disown and even execute Jesus, so that he should be taken up by others, and in him their ethnic stock should pervade the world. His conquest is really theirs. They knew nothing of the above gentlemanly, lordly morality, and all that has been done against those who have successfully made might to be right is nothing compared to what the Jews have done. Never was there such a coup or master stroke which this vindictive, priestly race so successfully made as by crucifying Jesus, the man of love, a member of their own tribe, who, because rejected and tortured by them, became the idol of the base herd. By their treatment of him they made him seem to be not only their enemy but their destroyer; and hence the rest of the world, which hated them and all their small ways, adopted Jesus from sheer pity, as merci- ful families adopt infants who have been exposed. This strategy, which made Jesus seem hostile to them, and they to him, was in order that the gentiles might clasp him to their heart of hearts. Thus Christianity became the great revolt of slaves when the world adopted with Jesus the mean spirit and wretched patheticism that had been so characteristic of the Jews. This reversed everything, exalted the mean, and brought damnation to the world's elite. Thus Jewish morality came to be Christian, and though in fact fit only for pariahs,
i76 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
spread over the world, for in it only the weak are good and the true elite of nature are subdued. Even the blond beast, Germany, which should have represented the old pagan lordly supermorality, was tamed. Christians were, in fact, only Judaized by swallowing the bait so cleverly prepared for them in the person and suffering of Jesus. As a result of this their great achievement, however, the Jews have grown proud because their tribesman, Jesus, who is good enough for Christians, is not worthy of their fellowship. In rejecting him they exalt themselves above all who accept him. For this consummate mas- ter stroke of genius, the greatest thing their race ever did or will do, their supreme supermoral act, they do deserve some admiration.
Christianity, having thus been fastened upon the world, made it lose the rich harvest of culture from the Orient, from Greece, and from Rome, the most perfect political organization the world ever saw. It also made the world lose the science of Islam, and made it miss the humanity of the Renaissance. Just at the moment when Catholicism (which aped the Roman state in the spiritual domain), was approxi- mating the power and spirit of ancient Rome, and was about to adopt an heroic policy, Luther appeared, and under his influence the Teutons checked the splendid career the Church was just about to enter, as the Huns and Vandals plundered ancient Rome. The Reformation in large measure crushed the Renaissance, and since then "Christianity and alcohol have become the world's chief evils." Christianity dena- tionalizes. It brought the Dark Ages. Protestantism is a mongrel, half creed and half reason. Epicurus would have conquered the world but for Paul, the wandering Jew, who used the dogma of immortality to depreciate or destroy this world. Islam was about to do great things, and has a right to despise Christianity, which made us miss the harvest of antiquity and reduced the originally noble Germans to mere vikings and Swiss guards of the Church. The laws of Manu are vastly superior to Christianity, which has made the devil strong in order that people should not be ashamed of being overcome by sin.
Dionysianism embodies the very opposite idea, for it is full of life and procreation, and all the superfluous energy that tragedy de- mands. Buddhism is far superior to Christianity because it started after philosophy had killed God, and hence it had a clear field. It has, moreover, no categorical imperative, no prayer, and is distinctly for the highest classes. It does not try to make out that all are sick
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and decadent. It does not stress belief, or faith which is born of a broken will and prevents us from knowing the truth, which shows blindness and invalidism, which is indecent and a curtain behind which crude instincts play. Creeds bring self-estrangement and imprison the soul. It is better to posit self than to be used up for some end not self. Conviction is conceptual epilepsy. All believers are dependent. Belief has handicapped man with a sense of original sin, made him feel expelled from paradise, and robbed him of pleasures he ought to have enjoyed. It has made him work in order that he might not think, taught him a grovelling kind of self-pity, torn down the great temple of man's achievement called the Temple of Babel, by the dispersion, which also checked man just at the point of a great achievement. The flood came just in time to drown knowledge. Priests have done all this. They may once have been sincere, but now they He, and know that they lie; for in fact there is no such thing as sin, Saviour, free will, or moral order. These things are false coinage, devised by priests to depreciate natural values. The concept of another world to which they hold the keys, and which is the strength of their power, is an incu- bus on this, but it is precisely by this means that the Church has kept man servile and made this life mean by promises of post-mortem recom- pense. In fact, no one ever has been or could be a true Christian, for this is a psychological impossibility. Its God chose the dregs and dross of society as a revenge upon what was really noble; and, indeed, the secret of the spread of Christianity was the long-accumulated revenge of the lowest orders of society upon the best. The early Christians were anarchists inspired by the demons of destruction. They slew philosophy; degraded art and literature. We must not forget, how- ever, that it was Paul and not Jesus who really made Christianity, and without the former the latter would long since have been forgotten. It was Paul who made it a world-empire and corrupted what pristine purity there was in the world. His triumph was largely due to the flattery of man's vanity involved in the doctrine of immortality, by which each individual claims eternal importance and so is equal to the best. The offscourings of the world have always flocked to a creed that consoled them for their sense of failure, and encouraged a pitiful charity that kept alive and respectable the incapables and incurables, who ought to have been left to perish, body and soul, and least of all should have been given an eternal life. Thus again we see why Chris-
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tianity is the most noxious of all anti-selective influences, causing man to retrograde for centuries, developing the worst, and suppressing the best. Even Buddhism, so tender to the weak, struggles against suffer- ing, although it gives no promises, unlike Christianity, which gives every promise, but keeps none. The Old Testament treats of grand things in grand style; but to combine the New with the Old to form one book was "the most unpardonable sin the literary world has on its conscience." One does well to put on gloves when handling the New- Testament, for it contains nothing that is free, genuine, and upright. There are only bad instincts in it. Everything bad seems good to one who has just read the New Testament. If Jesus submitted to death, it only showed his contempt for concrete reality. Jesus, a preacher to petty folk, had no conception that a colossal crime may be a great virtue; still less that the devil may sometimes be God and do his work, and God take the devil's place. Nor did he ever, like Zarathustra, seek men more ungodly than himself for his teachers.
To the claim that Nietzsche had some respect for Jesus' work in the world, it is sufficient answer to quote the following from the " Antichrist " : " I am at the conclusion and pronounce my sentence. I condemn Christianity, and I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible of all accusations. . . . It is to me the greatest of all imaginable corruptions. . . . The Christian Church has left noth- ing untouched with its depravity, it has made a worthlessness of every value, a lie out of every truth, baseness of soul out of every straight- forwardness. . . . This eternal accusation of Christianity I shall write on all walls, wherever there are walls, — I have letters for making even the blind see. ... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, mean, — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind."1
What answer has geneticism to this terrific indictment, more thrilling than the curse of Rome or the excommunication formula of the synagogue as it was launched against Spinoza? To seek comfort in the fact that Nietzsche died in the madhouse is as craven as it is un- psychological, for his impeachment, his glorification of a splendid paganism, his apotheosis of the natural man and of chivalric honour as the extreme opposite of the Christian virtues, is his chief trend at
»Works. New York. Trans, by Thomas Common. Vol.Xl.pp.349-3s1.1896.
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the acme of his power. It would be only subtle dishonesty to dismiss his views as merely pathological. Nor in view of his great vogue is it true or fair to regard his as an isolated, exceptional, and therefore negli- gible influence. To brand him as the arch skeptic, heretic, and apos- tate (he descended from three generations of clergymen) is mere rhet- oric. Neither must his attempt to apply the principles of the struggle for existence and of natural selection in the social, moral, historic field discredit evolution, although we must recognize that genetics and eu- genics constitute in some sense a predisposition to the acceptance of some of his opinions. Nor must we go too far in conceiving him as the national philosopher of Germany, as Hegel once was, in the sense that his doctrine of force and that might makes right is that of German militarism, although it is not lacking rapport with Bernhardi. He has scorching words for the blond Teuton beast, and even boasted that he was not of its stock; yet despite his feud with Wagner, he was not out of sympathy with his " Das Deutschentum musst das Christentum siegen," or with his offering a Norse substitute for Jesus in the person of Parsifal. One cannot but raise the question of affinity between Nietzsche and the Machtpolitik, militarism and strategy which assume that nations are above morality and that the ethics of private life does not apply to them. He said the great need of Europe was a colossal war, and that nations, like men, supremely dread inferiority and chiefly love titanic aggressiveness. H. S. Chamberlain, in "Foundations of the Nine- teenth Century," more or less in Nietzsche's spirit urges that most of the great deeds and men of the world are German, and that Teutonism must now seize its inheritance and use every means to take and hold its rightful place in the centre of the world's stage and make past history only prolegomena. Some have even questioned whether Ger- many herself was in heart and core Christian, and whether the God the Kaiser worships is not a tribal deity like Yahveh or rather Thor, with a mailed fist instead of his hammer. The Teutons were converted only in the thirteenth century, and Luther soon threw off the yoke of Rome, while since Tubingen Jesus has been progressively stripped of his divinity till now his very historic existence is denied. It is also often asked whether modern business and competition are not in fact dominated more than is realized by the Nietzschean supermorals. Does the worship of success imply that good is what able, and bad what weak, men do? Is modern man, in fine, only a link which ought as soon
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as possible to be a missing link, between the primitive troglodytes and the superman whom Nietzsche puts in the place of God, whom he declared dead? Are Freud1 and Pfister2 right in insisting that the present war has stripped from man all the thin disguises of religion and morality, so that he now stands revealed as what he is, a beast whose chief passion is to kill and take all he can?
Nietzsche's idea of a Jewish plot to make the world worship one whom their race cast out and executed, is as fanciful as his pet theory of eternal recurrence, although more original, for there is no evidence that any Jew ever dreamed of such a scheme. Still the sense that the Christian world glorified one whom they rejected and despised must inevitably have given them some sense of exaltation, even if they were not fully conscious of it. At the same time it was perhaps an abase- ment of the Christians' pride before the Jews, and this may have in- tensified the animosity of the former toward the chosen race. We have records of convicts who, in the lands to which they were exiled, became leaders of savage tribes and perhaps were worshipped by them, and it rankled in Nietzsche's mind that a Semite might taunt us of deifying one whom his forefathers had branded as criminal and doomed to the most disgraceful form of death. A sense of this vulnerability reinforced Nietzsche's anti-Semitism as it has that of so many others since Jesusism began. If Nietzsche has any merit here, it lies in bring- ing this latent factor of the inveterate rancour between Christians and Jews into the foreground. But this situation is only the irony of history apparent later, not a purposed state of affairs, and his error is in assuming that any race could possibly perpetrate such a scheme. The Jews who accepted Christ could not have been in such a plot, nor is there a scintilla of evidence that the hatred of any Semite toward Jesus was feigned. Rather it tended to be concealed wherever it existed.
Every candid and cultivated man must in the depth of his soul admit some degree of truth in about all of Nietzsche's charges. Sense of sin may and often does become morbid; belief in another world may lessen zest for this; the Church has not been over-friendly to culture; morality easily becomes rigid and shallow, taking on forms that need to be transcended, and its ideals are not those of heroic paganism.
1 " Zeitgemitsses uber Krieg und Tod." Imago, 1915. Bd., 4, Heft, I. 2"Zur Psychologie des Krieges und Friedens," 1014.
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Jesus did appeal to the lower classes, as has the Church. Hell has often been a nightmare, and heaven an anodyne. Priests have been domineering, mercenary, and sometimes Machiavellian. Sympathy and charity do often cultivate instead of uprooting weeds in the human garden. Many Christians have been sentimentalists and looked within too much; the struggle to save one's own soul in the next world has often been only transcendental selfishness, and as against the world slogan, "One world at a time and this one now," we have often looked much to the past, until we have lost faith in human progress toward the superhumanity which Christians and Darwinists both hope for and strive toward. We have accepted beliefs from without, and we have been hampered by convictions which are more feeling than intellect. We have been restrained by outgrown ideals of right and wrong, good and evil, and have failed rightly to subordinate means to ends. To be told all this in the de-haut-en-bas, apodeictic way, as if by a new prophet appearing in the Vanity Fair of conventional religiosity, should be regarded as a wholesome tonic, and should prompt the Church to new, conscientious self-examination, confession, and soul- shriving. Nietzsche prescribes none of the confectionery of laudation, but bitter, un- sugared pills in large dosage for a purgation sorely needed. No book of devotion ever gave such a profitable theme for profound pious medi- tation as that of this enfant terrible, who has blurted out what so many unconsciously felt and what it is folly longer to ignore. He has not only pointed out the existence of these toxins in the system, but has, if ever so roughly, described not a few of them, and it is up to us to furnish the specific antitoxins.
Nietzsche always exaggerates, for he is a rhetorician rather than a logician, a Sophist in the best Attic sense rather than a philosopher, not a judge, but a special pleader with a penchant for overstatement and superlatives. Clearly as Nietzsche saw the night side, he was blind to the day side of religion. He has only collated and vividly set forth about all the charges ever made against, while ignoring all the good things of, Christianity. His spirit is only negative, and never con- structive. To completely refute him would be to refute every enemy the Church ever had; and if all the defects he pointed out were over- come the triumph of Christianity would be complete and final. Thus his Tabulations ought to appeal in a most challenging way, especially to all young students of religion. He is also the arch-egoist of modern
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times, and of what altruism means he never had a glimmer of compre- hension. His very diathesis is hyperindividuation. Of love in any sense he knew little, and of true or higher love nothing; and there is reason to believe that the little was perverted by his personal experience. It is as if the race soul that slumbers in us all in him had met some debacle so that all his energies of life went to the maximization of self. His heroes were those with an inordinate passion for self-aggrandize- ment.
Zarathustra (Zoroaster) was his boyish goru, dream or ideal, and was later made the incarnation of his views of life. Of his "Thus Spake Zarathustra" he said that in it, "I have given mankind the pro- foundest book it possesses." Elsewhere he says that it is the most perfect in form of anything in the German language. The best and the worst have been said of it as of few other books. It fairly cries out for a psychoanalysis, which unfortunately it has never yet had. What here concerns us is that in this character Nietzsche undertook the astounding task of giving to the world a rival to the figure of Christ, so that Zarathustra is at once Nietzsche himself, the overman, the Antichrist, and a something between the Miltonic and Faustian conceptions of Satan. After ten years as a mountain hermit he comes down at the age of forty with his eagle and serpent, to teach that God is dead, and that the superman that is to be must take God's place. He sermonizes on the creation of new values, tells his hearers that war is better than charity, that we should love and serve not our neighbour but the coming overman, and hate all mediocre people who are not links or bridges to supermanhood. We should spur the average man to the uttermost by pain to work out his higher possibilities or destiny. Every hero must be his own legislator and avenger. Men should marry only if they can produce better offspring than themselves. Nietzsche's disciples are they who can do so, and these, the chosen people, are told to create new and larger tables of virtues, to go on and surpass not only themselves but their teacher, who then retires to his cave to let the seed he has sown in the souls of his hearers germinate. After years, learning that his doctrine has been perverted, he comes again to men to tell them that the greatest saviours are all too human to truly save. Only fools condemn anger, and hope for a salvation by blood, or want reward for virtue here or hereafter, or praise meekness and unselfish- ness. All who teach these things are liars and poisoners of wells, and
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so are they who teach equality or innocence, or place knowledge above the will to power. He exults over life, and longs for all that is possible of it. In the fourth and last part he goes out and finds a fortune-teller, two kings, an ass and his worshippers, a conscientious one, a madman and the last Pope, a cow student, an ape, the shadow of himself, whom he sends one after another to his cave, where he meets them later in a kind of last supper of joy, telling them that they are not the coming race, but only bridges to it and to him, and that he has invited them to celebrate the fact that the super-race is on the way. Then Zarathustra hears his sign, and amidst many birds and beasts, and strong and reso- lute, in a cloud of love, he leaves his cave for still greater heights.
The burden of this prose poem is that we must choose between supermanhood and retrogression to the baser animals, which are symbols of what man has been declining toward since the Renaissance. Everywhere we see allusions both by similarity and contrast to the New Testament. In place of the Resurrection is the courageous push- up, excelsior motif of Zarathustra at the end. The call is not to repent, but to be ambitious, to be forever surpassing ourselves. The danger is not of falling into hell, but of backsliding to the apehood from which we sprang. Not personal immortality in heaven, but better offspring here, is our goal. Like Sterner's "Der Einzige," men must get and enjoy everything they can, and reck not of others. Pity, almsgiving, altruism to our petty fellow beings, would encourage them to cease to strive upward to the hyperanthropic state, which is at once man's entelechy and Nietzsche's millennium. This remorseless, ruthless, mighty man that is to be, and whom we must now love and serve with all the energy that we directed toward God while he was living, will be entirely a product of eugenic propagation, that is, will be a once- born as distinct from a twice-born being. His hypertrophied ego will be aggressive to an almost Sadistic degree, and his pride might seem megalomania to the commonalty, who are Lilliputians to him.
The only conclusion a psychologist can draw from the data is that the delusions of greatness which marked Nietzsche's insanity, seething in his soul before they took overt form, impelled him to attempt a work which should rival the New Testament, and which he here offers to the cultivated whose allegiance to Christ has begun to wane, as a fit sub- stitute for the latter. He felt it high time that the world gave birth to a new religion, and so undertook to be its midwife by revamping the
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central figure of ancient Parseeism, with covert and overt suggestions from the laws of Manu, which he admired beyond anything within his ken in the field of Oriental antiquities. This evangel the world did not accept, and so, with an affectivity still more unstable, in the "Anti- christ" he gave free vent to his envy and jealousy of his rival Jesus. In the former work his intellect, in the latter his sentiments, showed more deterioration. There is certainly much in " Zarathustra " that only an alienist could possibly appreciate and interpret. The subtle weird play for phonic effects suggests the decadent French instrument- alist poets, while the meshwork of symbols that pervades it shows a reversion to a prerational stage of psychic activity common in clever paranoiacs. The stilted, often bombastic, style surely indicates an impairment of the power of literary judgment. In the "Antichrist," on the other hand, the deterioration is not at all apparent in the in- tellectual keenness or literary sense; but the work is marked by a strange absence of judicial power to see the other side. As we said above, there is truth in much, if not most, that he says throughout; but it is all half truth, so that even Tolstoi, whom we might place over against him, is less extreme in his laudation of Christianity. Even skeptics admit that Jesus said and the Church has done many great and noble things, but those who know of both these only through Nietzsche would never suspect this. He envied and strove in "Zarathustra" to emulate Wagner's artistic triumphs, and took his theme over into the aesthetic domain, the better to do so, but as he failed the embitterment only increased. Moreover, the world, even the German world, is somewhat too pervaded -with practical democracy to take ever again to a religion for the few only, whether these be the elect by divine decree or by native endowment.
Finally, Nietzsche himself was at best only a link or bridge, or, in his phrase, a rope-dancer, and has already been surpassed, so that his views of the overman seem antiquated and clumsy even in phrase- ology. He never dreamed of a Burbank in the plant world, or of modern stirpiculturists, or of eugenics, which Galton calls the religion of the future; nor of the laws of heredity or sex hygiene or psychology, which mark such an advance in both theory and practice in the field of generating better men and better species of all the forms of life that have been domesticated. Countless studies have brought a world of insights and technical nomenclature, masses of observation and rules of
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practice, that have left Nietzscheanism far behind, and on all this work not only since, but during, his life he had little or no influence. True, Jesus did not teach eugenics, because he thought the end of all things near so he strove to save individuals as he found them; but the Old Testament abounds in eugenics which the Jews for centuries have best understood and illustrated.
(C) The first modern writers to urge that Jesus himself is a myth were C. F. Dupuis1 and C. F. Volney.2 Dupuis regards Jesus as we do Hercules, Osiris, and Bacchus. His first two volumes develop the principles of mythic interpretation for heathen and especially the mystery religions. The third volume deals with the apocalypse and the relation between the Jewish- Christian eschatology and Oriental thought. Volney uses the form of a vision at the ruins of Palmyra in which the devotees of various religions are gathered and taught suc- cessively how they have been betrayed, by their priests. All dogma, he teaches, is myth, and only true religion is spiritual. The Christian drama represents the course of the sun through the zodiac, the Virgin playing the chief role. Both these works are of great historic signifi- cance, although all this ground has been gone over far more thoroughly since. Both hold that not only Christianity, but all religions, are derived ultimately from natural phenomena, and are very largely astral and seasonal. Strauss, as we all know, thought Jesus historic, but the centre of very many accretions of myth and miracle. Bruno Bauer denied Jesus' historicity, and thought him the personification of ideas and ideals, a process which to his Hegelian mode of thought seemed not only natural but necessary for the development of a new religion. Dutch liberals denied the authenticity of the Pauline epistles, thought them products of the second century, placed the Gospels too late, and thus naturally magnified the mythic element without expressly denying a nucleus of historicity to Jesus.
Those who denied his existence had to explain the belief in him, and so naturally fell into two groups. The first were the symbolists, who thought him the product of social and religious forces and tenden- cies. Ideas must have imagery, and tend intrinsically to be embodied in individuals. Truth itself seeks allegorical form, gnostic-wise, some- what as Bacon thought the wisdom of the ancients was typified in their
1 di8og. "Origine de tous les cultes, ou religion universale." Paris, 1795, 7 vols. - di829. "Les mines ou meditation sur les revolutions des empires." 1791.
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myths. The other view, holding that myths are merely figurative descriptions of natural processes, developed the concept that these, and not ideas, are the primitive source-material, and that myths from both these sources tend to be developed into ever-increasing analogy to actual happenings.1 There are, of course, many combinations of these views, and not a few departures from them. Loman, e. g., sees in the death and Resurrection of Jesus the story of the destruction of the material and the revival of the spiritual Israel. Kulischer,2 basing probably upon the epoch-making series of studies of Mannhardt,3 construes Jesus' life as a story of primitive agriculture. His first visit to Jerusalem means bringing in the first fruits to the temple; his baptism is the irrigation of the soil by rain; he comes to Nazareth because this is the seat of a harvest god; the devil is unfruitfulness; the temptation in the desert is to show that grain cannot grow in arid soil; his burial is storing of the garnered fruit in cellars; tne husked and ground wheat and meal are the Resurrection "body. (Why is not the burial seed-sowing or planting, and the Resurrection the spring growth?)
As long as only the Old Testament and Greek myths were known, it was impossible to reduce all " the things of Jesus " to myth, but when the vast field of Oriental rites, cults, and lore was unearthed, great common themes and deeper genetic processes appeared beneath all religions and the old historic studies were transcended in both method and scope. New keys to old problems which unlocked new and deeper meanings, and also laws of mutation, on the basis of which comparative investigations could flourish, appeared. Even the old gnostic insights could not explain the redemption mysteries nor the new problems con- nected with eschatology, Paul, and the sacraments. It was more and more felt that primitive Christianity could only be accounted for by understanding the play of the general forces that underlie all religions, and hence many came to conceive that it really had two origins, one the historic Jesus and the other a personation of the mystic, syncretic trends that partly conserved and partly supplemented (the latter especially by adding the Resurrection) each other. One was at the root of the synoptic writings, and the other was dominant in Paul.
•See Schweitzer: "Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung." 1913, 659 p. 2 Aufl. des VVerkes "Von Reimarus zu Wrede." See p. 444 et seg.
'"Das Leben Jesu." Leipzig, 1876, 1J3 p.
'First gathered in his "Der Baumkultus." 1875, 646 p., and his later "Antike Wald- und Feld-kultc." 1S77, 359 P-
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One gave us the historic facts of the public ministry, the other gave new meanings to the death and Resurrection, which loomed up as of prime importance. The first three Gospels thus became the prologue to the higher Christianity made out of the general principles of religious evolution. Compared to the latter the plain Jesus of the ministry seemed all too prosaically common and human, so that it was a matter of not so very vital moment whether he had ever existed or not, for he had been at least outshone if not superseded. Indeed, Hegel conceived religion as a thoroughly organized plexus of ideas; and an actual Jesus as an independent authority was either suspicious, or, if he did not conform to the ideal schemata, he was distracting. Schleiermacher distinguished accordingly between an absolute and an historic religion, the one being for faith and the other for historic science. One Jesus lived, and the other was made by the folk-soul, slowly giving concrete form to wishes, ideals, feelings; working, perhaps, according to logical principles, but slowly and unconsciously. To orthodoxy this later Jesus seemed strange and lacking in both tangibility and moral author- ity, and it could not bear to see the person of Christ part company from his teachings. So the higher criticism became suspected, even when it sought to give more generic and more genetic conceptions of him. It did not relish being reminded that even if the passages in Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius relating to Jesus are authentic, they only testify to certain contemporary beliefs and have no value as the first-hand testimony of eye-witnesses.
Within the last decade all the great and deepening interest in this field which started with the Tubingen movement1 has focussed on four lay writers, in New Testament studies. Three of them, an English essayist, J. M. Robertson, an American professor of mathematics and philosophy, W. B. Smith of Tulane, and a professor in the Karlsruhe Technical School, A. Drews, seem to have reached similar conclusions at nearly the same time, but for the most part independently of each other and by fines of approach that, while related, are by no means identical. The fact that these views were so startling to even liberal Christianity, so misunderstood by orthodoxy, and were put forth by laymen, caused them to be at first ignored and then violently de- nounced. Now they are the storm centre of interest in this field, where
»For the most concise summary of which see E. Zeller's " Vortrage und Abhandlungen," Bd. i, which I epitomized in my "Founders of Modern Psychology," p. 5 «' seq.
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they have evoked a great and growing body of controversy. Over- subtle as some of the arguments are, they present together a body of evidence that has put apologists on their mettle, and the issues in- volved have already enriched scholarship, deepened thought, aroused new zest in Christianity, and evoked partial concessions even from those who are far from being convinced.
(i) In the following all too brief and rough characterization of the viewpoint of these three writers, we shall begin with Robertson, who was first in the field.1 He has made extensive studies of mythology, and nearly every page of his writings abounds in references to sources. He holds that all religions develop according to the same law, so that none can be said to be either original or peculiar. Their differences are only those due to environment, the importance of which he does not underestimate. Their chief line of evolution consists in the fact that gods grow and gain in reverence and then give place to others. Even in monotheistic Judea there arose a secondary god-idea, Messianism, showing a trend toward polytheism. The most common relation of the new and the old god and the most pedagogic is that of son, as Apollo, Athene, Dionysus had to be children of Zeus. In Egypt Osiris was made to meet the needs of a nearer god and to fit the age, for old gods are conservative. In the field of Aryan religions Apollo took the place of Zeus, as Zeus had of Kronos. Where new culture-contacts follow rapidly the new god is given a brother. These processes occur despite kings and often priests, who see only ruin in new cults. All heresy is only a toned-down phase of this process which of old evolved new gods. This conservatism enabled the Church to live down the vivid imaginations of gnosticism and nipped its gods in the bud. Gods survive according to their capacity to adapt to needs, otherwise they themselves cannot be saved. The Holy Ghost of orthodoxy is a trend toward a new god which aborted because for practical purposes it was superseded by the worship of the Virgin, and for philosophical purposes it merged in the Logos on the one hand and the Father-God on the other. According to the above rules Krishna succeeded Indra, as Serapis did Osiris, Jesus did Yahveh. Wild tribes often, however, have a highest god which plays no role in their cult, but has in a sense retired from history and the world and is no longer disturbed by
. r ]?■ M' R.0,?.er.t^)n: "£hri,?ti^?ity ^nd Mythology," London, ad ed., iqio, 47a P-, discusses (a) the progress of myth to .Christ and Krishna, (b) the Gospel myths. See also " A Short History o( Christianity. " 1902. 4a9 p.f also " Pagan cnnsts, 2a ed., 191 1 450 p., in which he discusses the rationale of religions, their comparisons and agreements, second- ary god-making, Mithraism, and the religions of ancient America.
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offerings or prayer. Religious interest in general strongly tends to concentrate on these later products.
There was a Jesus-cult in precanonical times, when Abraham, Joseph, and Moses were demigods and had not been reduced to human dimensions. Between Joshua, an Ephraimite sun-god, and Jesus, there is a relation almost as close as identity, as the two names are at root the same. Both were worshipped under the sign of the ram or lamb. Joshua was the son of Miriam or Mary, as Adonis, the slain Syrian lord, was of Myrrah. Joshua drove out the base Canaanites and estab- lished the Israelites in the promised land, as Jesus expelled devils and installed a new kingdom. All heresies are incident to making new or secondary gods that better meet the needs of their worshippers than did the old ones. Robertson compares Jesus with other pagan Christs, at greatest length with the Hindu Krishna. He then selects thirty items in the life of Jesus: the Virgin birth, the Marys, Joseph, the annunciation, the Nativity in the stable, its date, the massacre of the Innocents, the boy in the temple, the Nazareth home, the temptation, the water-wine miracle, the scourging of the money-changers, the walking on the water, healing the two blind men, other healings and resurrections, the feeding of the five thousand, the anointing, the riding on an ass and its foal, the myth of the twelve apostles, Peter's traits, the myth of Judas, the Last Supper, the transfiguration and agony, the Crucifixion, the cross-bearing by Simon, the mystic cross, the seamless tunic, the burial and Resurrection, the banquet of seven, and the Ascension. For each of these he points out parallels and analogues in Hebrew, and especially pagan, myth, which convince him that all are unhistoric. He also finds twelve myths of doctrine, as follows: Jesus as saviour, mediator and logos; the preaching of John the Baptist; Jesus as preacher of universalism; as Messiah; as preparing for the Kingdom; the sermon on the mount as compared with the Talmud; the Lord's Prayer; the beatitudes; the woman in adultery; the gnostic and cryptic parables; the late ethical parables in Luke; the discourses of the Fourth Gospel. Thus the Gospels are a congeries of myths, and the old orthodoxy that holds them to be veridical is a blasphemy of man, because it implies that the soul of humanity is impotent to en- gender such products. Paul, Peter, and others perhaps played a real role, but most of the New Testament story was the slow product of generations of minds unknown. The age of myth manipulation which
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evolved it was followed by a still less critical age, but one more fecund in fancy as the new faith fell into the hands of the barbarians, and from the mass of new legends the early Christian centuries in the Dark Ages made further pagan additions to the mythus receptus, such as the descent into Hades, the Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Mary, the Trinity, etc Robertson's Docetism rejects Miss Harrison's arguments that there was an historic personage behind the Orpheus myth and cult, as well as all views that there were remote actual men back of the rites that focussed in Osiris and Demeter. He doubts even the far more accredited personality of Buddha, as Davids and Stuart have sought to show that it was made up of older lore of Krishna, Rama, and Agni. As against Fraser, who thinks we might as well doubt Alexander or Charlemagne because legends have grown up about them, Robertson urges that, while a series of extraordinary minds may have cooperated in forming the Gospels, the Pauline epistles, and the literature of early Judaism, it is impossible at least to prove that both Jesus and Buddha were not wholly mythical. If we argue that myths are formed to ex- plain rites, we must deny a real person behind the Messianic mask. Jesus is thus not a man about whom myths have gathered, but an apocalyptic personification to whom certain human traits have been given, as the Greeks gave them to Demeter. So the gnomic sayings, conflated into the sermon on the mount, were not uttered by an historic person, but were ascribed to a pre-Christian Jesus-God. Again, to eliminate the miracles and accept the rest by the method of Strauss, Renan, Arnold and many others, is not enough. We must frankly admit that the teaching and wonder-working demigod Joshua- Jesus was himself unhistorical. Even Grant Allen, whose "Evolution of the Idea of God" shows how dying and rising deities grow out of an older vegetation cult, although he reaches the conclusion that the chief items in the Jesus-saga are but parts of once-universal rites of a God- man supposed to ensure the renewal of plant life in the spring, still holds to an historic core as a postulate of an Emersonian being "who found us children in religion and left us men." In fact, however, thinks Robertson, Jesus has been composed by the soul of humanity, which may in turn decompose him into his many elements. Every religion is beneficent (if it is so at all) only at the moment when it is taking shape as a reform of an older faith. Robertson finds all these principles illustrated in the religions of ancient America, particularly
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in that of the Incas of Peru. Thus religions have alternately made for progress and for paralysis, stagnation, or regression. Every one of them has frustrated in its later the higher motives of its earlier stage. Paul's Jesus is largely Talmudic, and therefore mythical. He is a sublimated human sacrifice. The best that can be said of Christianity is to agree with Crawley in "The Mystic Rose," that it has for the most part preserved the best elements of primitive faiths.
Robertson compiles a genealogical table of sacramental cere- monies, the first and lowest stage of which is where the victim (animal or man) is eaten by gods and the dead as a feast. Dead relatives, too, and parents filially slain are eaten to keep their qualities in the family. Then come sacrifices of human beings at funerals, which Spencer thought primal. From this evolve: (1) Offerings to the gods, from burnt sacrifices of flesh to fruits, libations, and incense; (a) totemic sacrifices, where the victim is eaten either as a god or as a mode of union with God or ancestors; (b) human sacrifices, of, e. g., captives eaten as thank-offerings, food for the slain dead or propitiatory for sin or for life and vegetation charms, or again, as buried in morsels to stimulate plant-life, or finally, to consecrate foundations. (2) The other class consists of ritual sacrifices blessed by priests and eaten as sacraments, including, (a) the quasi-totemic sacrifice in which the God eats himself as animal or as symbol in a sacramental communion with his worshippers; and (b) human sacrifices where the victim either represents the god or has special efficacy as being a king, or as a first- born or only son. Thus grows up from the barbaric beginning the general conception of a peculiarly efficacious eucharist or sacramental meal which consists in eating symbolically a sacrificed animal or man representing the god. Sometimes it is assumed that the animal sacrificed is an enemy of the god. The last stage of development is when, after public human sacrifices are abolished, there is a mystery drama (on which Robertson lays great stress), that symbolizes the act of human sacrifice wherein the victim is sympathetically regarded as an unjustly slain god. If these latter practices succeed in their competi- tion with the official public rites, they in turn develop a priesthood which exalts them to official ritual form, and thus arises (3) the euch- arist administered by the priest, of which the norm is not flesh but bread as symbolizing it, and not blood but wine as its token. Some- times we have a symbolic animal or a dough image of it, or perhaps a
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baked image of the god-man or child. This is still called, however, the hostia — victim — and both may be reduced to a single symbol as in the communion of one kind by the consecrated wafer of the Catholic Church. Thus back of this hallowed rite of the Church lies the awful fact that "thousands of millions" of human beings have been slaught- ered, as a sacrifice to the gods or to make atonement for sin. Robert- son even holds that the doctrine of immortality, which insists that this life is not all, has played a great role in this slaughter, because to rob of this life has meant to them the gift of another. Most of these in- numerable victims are innocent even by the code that sacrifices them. They offer themselves, usually unwillingly, as a sacrifice for others, and in so doing conform to the deepest motivation Christianity knows.
To this we might add that perhaps the race soul, could its processes and their motivations be psychoanalyzed, would be shown to have sought to make purgation of its own conscience for these holocausts in the past by evolving the story of a mystic God slain from the founda- tion of the world, or once and for all, so as to sublimate the idea of sacrifice into an eternal symbol by a final act which would never have to be repeated. On this view in the present form of the Christian sacrament, the flesh and blood of our slain and risen Lord are partaken of, partly as a penance for the ancestral sin of this blood-guiltiness, and partly as a token that we are henceforth free from the awful obsession that the slaughter of one can atone vicariously for the sin of another. If an historic or a fictive Jesus died to put an end to all this bloodshed, his death marked a great epoch in the world's history. To have veiled so awful a record by a new fable that diverted the mind from the truth of the vast body of summated blood-guilt, closed this dreadful vista of the past, and the new blood-covenant that took its place was given a more individual, futuristic, and spiritualized interpretation.
Many, if not most, of the pre-Christian religions had secret and solemn ritual dramas or pageants celebrating birth, death, resurrec- tion, and other incidents ascribed to more or less divine cult-gods. According to Robertson, these played a great r61e in helping to his- toricize myth. The very grotto, he tells us, thought to be the birth- place of Jesus in Bethlehem, was once the place where the Adonis- Tammuz cult was celebrated. From the ceremonials connected with Christmas and Easter developed our stories of the Nativity, Cruci- fixion, and Resurrection. The sacred meal which in the Gospels is
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already correlated with the Passion Play had an independent and earlier origin in the cults of Mithra, Dionysus, and others, and the fusion of these with the Passion group of incidents into the life of one quasi- divine person insured to this latter a very great future. He rapidly grew in power because he combined the best ideas of many cults. Thus Jesus became able not only to overcome the Jewish priesthood, which stood for monotheism and was jealous of the new deity (who, however, had in his favour the inveterate polytheistic proclivities of the Jews, as shown in their frequent lapses to the worship of Canaanitic deities, which had cropped out in the second century b. c. in the apoca- lypse of Enoch, in which "the anointed" is exalted to the rank of divinity), but the Jesus movement, because it was so comprehensive, effective, and syncretic a combination of elements, was able to over- come gnosticism and finally to take on universalistic dimensions under Paul, before whose day Christism had been anti-gentile and even anti- Samaritan. The new God- Jesus had of course to overcome Pharisee- ism, and could not become supreme in Jerusalem because he could not use the temple. But when Jerusalem was captured by the Romans, Christianity was set free and entered Rome, and after a struggle overcame its chief rival, Mithraism. Mythic events, if great and deemed vital, always tend to be translated into history. Mystery plays of birth and death have to be very plastic, and every detail tends to be wrought out elaborately into significant particulars, because such items as the betrayal by Judas, the anointing by women, the attempted substitution of Barabbas, the dream of Pilate's wife, the "being forsaken of God," etc., have a long previous history in myth. The turning water into wine is a psychic fossil or vestige of the once highly developed Dionysian cult as it was once celebrated at Andros. The idea of converting stone to bread is a hint at a more detailed inci- dent of the same transformation connected both with the life of Buddha and the cult of Mithra. Dionysus in his flight takes two asses, rides one, and takes the other along; and so when Jesus rides into Jerusalem there must be a second ass or foal. Peter's keys are partly Mithraic and partly from the Israelitic sun-god, Janus, who kept the door of the heavenly palace and led in the year at the head of the twelve months. Osiris castigates thieves as Jesus purges the temple. Posei- don often runs over the water. It is of such pericopes that the Gospel narrative is made up. Most interesting of all, perhaps, is Robertson's
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explanation of the episode of Simon of Cyrene. In ancient art he is represented with Hercules, holding two pillars under his arms like a cross. In the Jewish legend he dies on the spot where he set them up. Hercules performs this feat in Cyrene, and Simon is the nearest Greek name for Samson, who is a solar myth. What is, therefore, more nat- ural than that a solar hero, Simo or Simon, should become cross-bearer?
As to Jesus' sayings, they are too inconsistent one with another to have ever come from a single, actual, and unitary mind. They are rather formulae put by his later disciples into the mouth of their God. By careful computation Robertson thinks that "at least four fifths of them" are of mythic origin. Moreover, the Jewish Messiah had been generally conceived to be an active hero, leader, and national deliverer, while the Gospel Jesus is passive and impotent to save his people from their oppressors. The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven is not original, and was introduced late in rather secret parables. Jesus did not come from Nazareth, for there is no such place. The word means Nazarene, which was the name of a secret order to which Jesus belonged, and by a blunder was interpreted as a place. The transfiguration, the walk to Gethsemane, the scourging, the crown of thorns, and even the story of the twelve apostles, are not in the original narrative, but are later additions from pagan sources for didactic pur- poses. Thus the whole life and teaching of Jesus are made up, warp and woof, of traditions that developed layer upon layer, and as they spread and people mingled they slowly accreted into their present form. While we can distinguish many of the strata others are too felted together to be resolved as yet. Only the Baptist and his words, and Paul and some of his writings, seem now to remain and be essen- tially historic, but even they by further investigation may be resolved into myth.
(2) W. B. Smith,1 who is the most acute logician and polemist of all those who deny historicity, began his work in this field more than twenty years ago, by a series of detailed studies of the chief Pauline epistles to prove, chiefly by internal evidence or an analysis of their content, that they could never have been written by the apostle to the gentiles. Most of these studies, although we are told they were long since finished, are still unpublished, and Smith tells us of a long pro-
«His chief works are, "Dcr vorchristliche Jesus." K)o6. 246 p. and "Ecce Homo," io.n, 315 p.. and various papers in the Btonisl and elsew here.
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gram of work he plans yet to do. We infer that he regards the other epistles as he does the Romans, an epitome of which he has printed (Hibbert Journal, 1902-03, pp. 309-34), as without unity, or as concre- tions of teachings impossible for a single sound mind, which during the first silent Christian century were never ascribed to Paul. The material was preexistent and from many sources, and the compilation is patchwork and never even had a thorough redaction. Although not the first to draw such general conclusions, Smith is both more emphatic in his negation and more thorough in his method than his predecessors or his coadjutors. In the study of other epistles, the apocalypse and even Acts, he is struck by the almost entire absence of allusion to the human Jesus of the synoptists, but finds them chiefly concerned with dogma and "metempirical" theosophies. He also finds the New Testament permeated with gnostic ideas, many of them of pre- Christian origin, so that in 1904 he begins to collect traces of a pre- Christian Jesus-cult and concludes that the essence of primitive Chris- tianity consists in the union of the Jesus- and Christ-cults and ideas. Neither of these titles at first designated either an earthly or a human, but only a divine, being. The latter is partly Jewish and partly foreign, arising during the diaspora, and fusing with the Messianic idea. Thus the Hellenic and Semitic cults united. The origin of the Jesus idea is the theme of his first German book. In general he holds that no single person could ever have started a movement so sudden and so widespread, and he premises that if we had no evidence of a prehistoric Jesus we should have to assume one.
Smith, who is at his best as a textual expositor, begins with the four passages in the New Testament that speak of " the things concern- ing Jesus" and make various other references to the things of the King- dom, way, estate, etc. Such more or less stereotyped, if vague, phrases he thinks refer, not to an historic Jesus but to a pre-Christian Jesus-doctrine. These "things," we are told, were the theme of the zealous Apollos who knew only the baptism of John and nothing what- ever of the flesh-and-blood Jesus of the synoptists, so that his Jesus also was pre-Christian, although he may have acquired later an esoteric knowledge of the hero of the Gospels which he taught, e. g., to Aquila and Priscilla, "to whom he expounded the way of the Lord more per- fectly." He may also have written the Epistle to the Hebrews. At any rate, his Jesus-doctrine antedated his knowledge of the synoptists
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and -was perhaps taught in the form of a catechism, or was at least definite enough to be the basis of a fiery propaganda. At Ephesus Paul found disciples of John who had not even heard that there was a Holy Ghost. These twelve men were probably followers of Apollos. Again, Simon the Great, the magician, could not have been so suddenly converted by Philip if he had not already a doctrine that prepared the way. He really was a cosmogenic philosopher. So, too, Elymas, son of Jesus, wrongly called a sorcerer (Acts xii: 6-12), was a propagandist of an older, cruder cult of Jesus, and wrought miracles in his name. Once more, Luke's motive in writing his Gospel was to reduce the often remote foci from which the many Jesus-doctrines emanated, as well as the latter themselves, to unity. The great persecution against the Church when Stephen died (Acts viii : 1) must have been against some one or more pre-Christian organizations. In a hymn, too, quoted by Hip- polytus, which Smith thinks antedates Christianity, Jesus is " God's Son in heaven, yearning to^save men by the way called gnosis." Jesus' name had weird power to work miracles, and especially to exorcise demons. "Naassene" is only an ancient epithet, meaning watcher, and came to be the name of an heretical sect.
Again, the very important term anastasis is ambiguous, and is variously translated resurrection, awakening, sent (by God), etc. There are many Old Testament terms more or less cognate in meaning, which came to signify called, ordained, etc. These words came to designate modes of the breaking out of a new kingdom, and hence were peculiarly significant for apocalyptic minds. But no such kingdom ever came; and' so, by a process which myth describes in other terms, but which psychoanalysis would call Verschiebung, Jesus himself was made to rise from the dead as in some sense the psycho-kinetic surro- gate of the new Kingdom. The expectation of this latter as it aborted found also another vicarious expression by reinforcing the faith in miracles. As the decline and death of Jesus symbolize the bankruptcy of hopes for the realization of the Messianic kingdom on the one hand, so his Resurrection typifies the development of the spiritual kingdom within as a compensation for its loss. In other words, there never was the apocalyptic second coming (a later idea) or the parousia, and so the Gospels gave another expression to that unrealized expectation — viz., Resurrection. The fall of Jerusalem, especially, made the hopes of an earthly ^kingdom bankrupt, and as later the fall of Rome was com-
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pensated for by Augustine's " City of God " (a dream which became the Church), so the Resurrection became a palladium against despair when the Holy City fell. Jesus' interpretation of the new order of things was vastly different from the dynamic, catastrophic advent that Messianism had expected. The great discrepancies once held to have developed between the Petrine and Pauline or the Semitic and Hellenic tendencies in the early Church could never have existed even in germ in the self -consciousness of a single personal Jesus. These trends repre- sent only the transformations of propagandism which developed in dif- ferent directions. To prevent schism, there was a deliberate and radical redaction of tradition, which is represented in our Gospels, written in the interests of unity. The central theme of the New Testament is the new Kingdom, which is also the chief theme of the apocalypse, epistles, and Gospels, as also of the Baptist, Apollos, etc. Secondary to this in importance and derived from it are the ideas of the Resurrec- tion as applied to Jesus and saints, and also the very different ideas of the Kingdom as taught in miracles. The parable of the sower, e. g., stripped of what Smith thinks accessories, and reduced to what he conjectures is its original form, teaches that the seed is the spermatic Logos of the Stoics. It was perhaps originally a myth of creation, and the seed was the ordering germinative principle. A pre-Christian Naassene sect, perhaps, and they alone, held the unique view that God sowed the world in the three soils, physical, psychic, and pneumatic. Hence, as a member of this sect, Jesus is made to give a new turn to it and explain the parable. Smith's pared-down version of this parable, if a far more modest adventure in the way of reconstruction of lost or never-existing versions than those which have been attempted in the way of enucleating the primitive Mark or the logia, is certainly more speculative and a priori, ingenious and stimulating though it is. Paul, he thinks, must have died about A. d. 68, and the first mention of his Epistle to the Romans is A. d. 96. It was the fruit of nearly a century of conflict and the influence of Marcion is strong in it. It is without either integrity or genuineness. Its prologue and epilogue are alike misleading, and under Smith's use of inner evidence it dissolves into fragments which a single mind never could have produced.
In "Ecce Deus" Smith first combats the inveterate error that a world movement starting at so many places, impelled by so many people, appealing to such diverse degrees of culture, and above all
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containing views so at variance, ever could have been the result of one short life. The Renaissance, the French Revolution, the Reforma- tion even (all less significant than Christianity), were, like every other great movement of the human spirit, due to the combined works of many men and years. There were very many cults all about the eastern Mediterranean, many saviours under many names, which later that of Jesus slowly absorbed, as Aaron's rod swallowed the others. Jesus is the only bond of unity in this syncretism; in this function lies his chief significance and raison d'etre, and here are found the motives that created him. To posit him was the form taken by the wish and will that unity prevail. Very few indeed are the human traits in the oldest accounts of Jesus; and if he had really lived, and died, and arisen, it is inconceivable that the early characterizations of him should have ignored the incidents of his earthly life and left others than the apostles and later devotees to tell his story. It would seem as if the influence of his humanity increases directly and not inversely as the square of the distance from him in time and space. Why, too, are natural events transformed into miracles, so that it is left to modern critics to reduce Jesus to human dimensions as God was said to have done at the incarnation? Why, especially, does the general tenor of the accounts make him so vastly more God than man? Per- haps the oldest, certainly an early and typical formula, is that in I Timothy iii: 16, " God manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached to the gentiles, believed in the world, received up into glory." One does not speak thus of one's friends, nor are they so suddenly apotheosized. This, too, indicates that Jesus was a fixed idea, a monomania rather than a real person. Nothing but the procla- mation of his divinity could possibly fuse into any kind of harmony the many discrepant conceptions and cults; for no mere man could be the centre of this vast totalizing and unprecedentedly precious synthesis. All miracles are parables of esoteric, gnostic, theosophic, and very secret organizations. They are in fact their symbolic language or their very portative current imagery or system of symbols. The tendency to materialize the spiritual is like tuberculosis bacteria, which are in us all but normally kept down; but in these occult circles it shows its real strength and nature. We are told of twenty passages referring to the necessity of reticence. Monism had its crusading era at about the beginning of our own. This passion of the best part
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of the world was summated and launched against idolatry and poly- theism, and the demons which Jesus is said to have cast out were really false gods. The instructions to the first promulgators of the new faith are to be subtle and tactful in their advancement of the great cause of monotheism. They must be very clever in the means of inseminating minds with their doctrine so as not to give offence. This demand re- sulted in the device of a new method, viz., the parables, and this mode of propaganda necessitated a personal leader; and so Jesus, a word that means primarily healer, was made ever more real until on the one hand he came to seem historic, and on the other his function came to be conceived sub specie eternitatis. Thus our conception of Jesus owes its inception in large part to the fact that the worship of a plurality of gods was thought to be a disease needing a physician. Heresies were often outcrops of ancient or contemporary idolatrous tendencies, but the most dangerous of these were the efforts of now one and now an- other of the pagan faiths that had been syncretized into Christianity to become supreme over the other components of it. Our records of the beginning of Christendom and the more specific proofs of most of these theses are still imperfect, because the whole movement had to be even more cryptic and concealed than were the proceedings or even the existence of the learned societies of the Middle Ages. They were more like the mysteries of the old faiths of which we still, despite the excavations which have taught us so much, know very little. Only when Christianity arrived at Rome, got out of the catacombs, and came to power after the persecutions, was the taboo on publicity removed. Thus the active principle in Christianity was the monistic instinct for unity. The apostles and Church fathers were, like Spinoza, God- intoxicated. This was their chief theme, and of the life of an actual person, Jesus, they had very little to say. Alexander first suggested to the world the idea of a political unity of many nationalities, and Rome later tremendously intensified this ideal, while philosophy freed and universalized the human mind and made it somewhat familiar with cosmic ranges of thought. So the Gospels must be preached not only to heathen but to all creatures, and become world-wide. Free- dom from the tyranny of demons, in an age oppressed by every kind of superstition that had been brought to and tolerated in Rome, became a passion. Gospel truth makes free. Thus the essence of the teaching of the Evangelist is, "Fear and honour God."
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Negative evidence is secondary but important. It is true that myths tend to gather about great men like clouds about mountain peaks, but clouds also may gather no less densely over prairies and seas where there are no mountains. So many myths could not collect so soon, however, about Jesus had he lived as a man where and as he was said to have done. The accretion of them must have begun long before. Were he real it is true, as all, both believers and higher critics say, that he was unique and unparalleled, for he stood far above Paul, Peter, and either of the Johns. But just so far as his figure is unique it is extra-human. No real person could have been exalted to deity so soon after so disgraceful a death. Much as the liberal critics pan- egyrize the de-divinitized Jesus which results from their negative conclusions, he remains for them vague. He is made out of the same psychic stuff that rhetoric and poetry are, as if the momentum of the old belief in, and adoration of, him reinforced a sentimental regard for him in their own souls despite their negative conclusions. Parturient montes, nascitur ridiculus mus, but why make a totem of the mouse because of his origin? Outside the Gospels there are very few refer- ences to Christ's human personality, or to his life or teachings. Even in one of the earliest books of the New Testament he is described (Rev. i: 14-16) as girt with a golden girdle, with hair white like wool, his eyes a flame of fire, his feet burnished brass, his voice like the sound of many waters. He holds seven stars in his right hand, out of his mouth comes a two-edged sword, and his countenance is like the sun. He is alpha and omega. No less than twenty-eight times in this book he is called a lamb. In Hebrews, another of the earliest of the New Testament books, he is a self-offering high priest after the order of Melchisedec. He has no parents, no beginning or end of days, and will remain high priest forever. This, too, could not have been said of a friend. The more exalted he had become, the greater satisfaction his intimates would feel in speaking familiarly of him.
Now why were such things the first to be said about Jesus by his followers and before the Gospels were written if he had been a real man and acquaintance with whom they had sojourned? Why is there in all the New Testament not a single reminiscence in the first person of anything that any one had seen, heard, or known at first hand con- cerning him as a man? This is the query that Smith amplifies in detail for different parts of the New Testament, as critics have long
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called attention to the surprising paucity of allusions to Jesus in con- temporary Greek and Roman writers.
Smith would push the symbolic interpretation to its uttermost (p. 113). Not only are all the miracles symbols and not literal occur- rences, but the erring woman whom tradition has so persistently asso- ciated with Jesus is a symbol of a people alienated from God and de- bauched by idolatries. Deeper, older meanings lurk behind all the teachings of the New Testament. " That God be all in all" is an apoca- tastasis of Anaxagoras. Paul's wish to escape the body of death is from Epictetus, who said his soul always carried a corpse about with it. That it is adultery to lust after a woman harks back to Aristotle's Ethics. Humility is Stoic. In Paul's expression that he came last as one born out of due time (I Cor. xv: 8) the word ektroma, so puzzling to exegetes, really refers to the gnostic idea of primitive matter, Plato's hyle, and to the tohu vabohu of Genesis. The eucharistic bread and wine typify the new life, and this rite was meant to make Jesus seem more sarcous. Their (children's) "angels behold the Father's face" means that in them the meanest convert has access to the supreme sophia. The bewitched Galileans (Gal. iii : 1) before whom Jesus Christ had been plainly set forth crucified, and Paul's body-marks of the dying Lord (II Cor. iv: 40; Gal. vi: 7) refer to the pre-Christian mystery cults symbolizing death and resurrection. But as Smith says in sub- stance, the exposition of single passages has been a veritable Grubel- sucht (as Farrar well shows in his history of exegesis). It is at best fishing with a single short line in the ocean. It makes us lose perspec- tive so that we cannot see the woods for the trees. Smith hopes that if this detailed work is carried on far enough all intelligent and unbiassed minds will, some sooner, some later, reach a point where they will per- ceive that there is a far deeper original system of meanings now pretty well lost behind Scripture in general and all the integral parts of it in particular, than our present-day bibliolatry or the more liberal and aggressive higher criticism has yet dreamed of. Perhaps the latter is most perverse and blind of heart if Smith's conclusion (p. 126) is right, that even Mark contains not a single trait or mode of activity of Jesus that can be called human. Their quest for such a Jesus, who has been chiefly sought just here, is indeed a fool's errand. If the atmosphere of symbolism, allegory, and metaphor sometimes seems highly rarefied in Smith's pages, we must realize that the entire mentation of that age
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was of this type; and why should we treat the New Testament less spiritually than the New Testament does the Old, for even Abraham and his two sons are explicitly called only allegories of the two cove- nants (Gal. iv: 24)?
Paul's testimony concerning the eucharist (circa 58 a. d., I Cor. xi: 23 et seq.) differs from that of the three synoptists if we admit Holsten's interpolation theory in that it is more agapistic than euchar- istic, and more Mithraic than either, with vestiges even of primitive exorcism formulae. Paul's account, even more than that of the didache, was carefully revised and is correlated with eight passages from the epistles describing Christians as parts of Christ's body, union with which is symbolized by the communal bread, as wine typifies our union with his soul. Hence eucharistic passages are proofs of unhistoricity rather than the converse. Again, the Kingdom is mentioned circa one hundred times in the synoptists, and only rarely elsewhere. John calls God Father 118 times, or more often than all the other books of the New Testament combined. To enter God's King- dom the prime requisite is repentance or doing penance, forsaking sins or conversion; and these and other similar expressions in both Greek and Hebrew refer to turning away from false gods and their abomina- tions. A study of each of the prophets from Amos down, and of the chief books of the New Testament, confirms this view. Entrance to the Kingdom, then, involves a religious rather than an ethical change, save so far as the worship of idols implies all kinds of moral abomina- tions. This was the burden of the Baptist's preaching; and so Jesus, had there been such a person, would not have taken the same theme as the Gospels make him do after John was imprisoned, because it would have seemed an old story that had done its work. That he is said to have entered upon this type of preaching when John, who had already made the people familiar with it, was out of the way, is an- other indication of unhistoricity. In fine, heathenism and polytheism were the chief evils or sins in the world, and the worship of the one true God was the summum bonum, or an end which once achieved involved all other goods. We have long made a great mistake in thinking that the passages that inculcate repentance mean the neces- sity for personal betterment. To repent or to be converted is to turn away from the adoration of many and false gods. This is the sine qua non for entering the Kingdom which, by the way, tends to be called
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that of God in the older phraseologies while later it is called the King- dom of heaven, and direct mention of the holy name of God is avoided. Judas is simply and almost obviously a personification of the Jews as the Christians regarded them. There is no record that in Judea Jesus cast out devils or performed other healing miracles, save restoration of sight as he had done in Galilee. This was because the latter was a stronghold of idolatry, whereas Judea and Jerusalem only lacked spiritual sight. It is in the regions, therefore, of rankest idolatry and polytheism that he is made to do most of his mighty works, not only of exorcism but in curing all kinds of diseases, all of which are only symbols of false idolatries and pagan polytheism.
In fine, Smith meets New Testament exegetes on their own ground and with their own methods, even in their German stronghold, and is particularly severe with Harnack, Schmiedel, Wernle, and other liber- als. He feels that a great new movement is about to break through the crust of current critical Christology, and that the sacrifice of his- toricity in the man- Jesus will be more than compensated by the new spiritual interpretation of all the deeds, words, and traits ascribed to him as symbols of the great auto-soteriological processes of the folk- soul; that Christianity represents the greatest culture synthesis which Mansoul has yet made; and that the supreme motivation of it all is the inveterate passion for unity.
It is folly to ignore this wealth of new suggestions, even if we are not convinced of the soundness of all of them. Every critical student recognizes the lack of unity in the books of the New Testament; and the effort to get behind them is too strong, and has already been too fruitful, and is too full of promise of yet greater results, to be stayed. Smith's contributions are fresh and original, if also revolutionary, ranging all the way from mere conjectures, not a few of which are con- fessedly so, to great verisimilitude. He often seems to lack perspective and synthetizing power, although he doubtless feels that the time for the latter has not yet come. In the writer's view his chief defect is lack of what might be called the higher psychoanalysis, many of the terms and processes of which would not only greatly definitize his views but would enable him at many points to penetrate much further into his themes. By this I do not mean the specific technique of the new psychology of sex, although as so many of the old cults and idolatries were phallic (which Smith hardly ever mentions), this would
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be a vast gain. His chief need is familiarity with the processes by which what consciousness says is translated into the deeper uncon- scious things which it means. For this work Christology, to which psychoanalysis has hardly yet begun to be applied, is the greatest of all fields and symbolism, especially now that it is revealing itself as applicable to other fields than eroticism, is the magic open sesame. The Hebrews, from Abraham down, have been breeders of men, and eugenic considerations have been hardly less dominant among them than the monistic passion. To the new psychology, which Smith does not seem to know, religion is more and more revealing itself as a spir- itualization of Eros, correlated in many ways which we do not yet begin to understand with the vita sexualis. To our mind the time is at hand when we shall have to say baldly that no one can work successfully in the domain of myth, rites, cults, symbols, or deal with the folk-soul generally without some knowledge of the more and more accepted mechanisms by which conscious and unconscious processes act and react upon each other; of how latencies become patent, and vice versa-, of how secret wishes take on so many polymorphic forms that know not their origin; and of how complexes are formed and dissolve in the pro- cess. Thus the origin of both parables and miracles and how they came to be confused with each other, the meaning of idolatries and of demons and why they came to be so abhorred, the proliferations of the monistic passion itself, and even the darkest of all points in the writings of this school — just how the concept of a fictive Jesus arose and why it has been so strongly clung to, are already capable of further elucidation by these methods. All the more important problems here raised fairly cry out for the higher psychogenetic to supplement the exegetical interpretation Smith offers us. It is by these methods, if we are not mistaken, that a consensus of the competent will be reached if it is ever attained at all. Something like this is the inevitable next step, and when it is taken Smith more than any one else will be its prophet, for the best of his work already anticipates it in some degree. But even were it already finished so that we understood all of the chief psychic motivations that created Jesus, so that he would stand forth as a necessary product of the folk-soul, why should the process of pro- jecting him in the form of a flesh-and-blood person, which has been so strong and beneficent in the past, not go on perennially on the warrant of pragmatism? Just so far as his role becomes clearly defined, the
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possibilities that it may have an actual embodiment increase, and we ought even to posit this until the resolution of his figure into purely fictive traits is complete. But of this more later.
(3) Drews,1 a student of Hartmann and Nietzsche, and, like Smith and Robertson, an ardent monist, has given us the most coherent presentation of the above views, to which he has added much. He begins by premising that instead of being injected into the world from without, as was formerly thought, the exact opposite is true of Christianity, viz., that it is in a unique sense a product of its age and time, so that to understand it the first prerequisite is to understand the condition of the world of which it was the inevitable product. At the dawn of our era the world was, indeed, in a unique condition. Old states had crumbled under the rough hand of Rome, in which itself decay had begun. Philosophy had spent itself, and the many religions, all of which were tolerated in Rome, confused men's minds. Nature and spirit were opposed, and the universal sense of uncertainty made men's minds turn inward upon themselves for support against the loss of outer joy and stability. Augustus, who had brought temporary peace, was deified and seemed about to inaugurate a golden age, so that for a time men ceased to lament that they had been born. But there were boundless superstitions, and many minds grew apocalyptic, expecting the end of the world. Rome was a pantheon of cults, in none of which any superior mind believed. The unprecedented need felt for religion, however, stimulated the formation of many secret brotherhoods, which looked to the East for their inspiration. Judaism, under the long influence of Parseeism, had become increasingly dualis- tic, and in the struggle of the light and dark worlds with each other, Mithra seemed to satisfy human needs and almost became supreme. He was a virgin's son, protector, saviour of souls; so that the Hebrew Messiah-idea was attracted into his likeness, while the Philonic logos also was an agent in the passionately desired apotheosis of man. The therapeutic sects lived for contemplation; the Essenes for purity; the Ophites and the Naassenes believed in Manda, the heavenly word of fife coming down to save men, which they termed Jesus, Joshua, or Jason, and such deities were secretly worshipped also as health-bringers. All these sects came more and more to believe in a suffering, dying,
l"Der Christusmythe." 3d ed., 1010, 238 p. Trans, by C. D. Brown, 304 p. "The Christ Myth." London, iqio. This work is supplemented by his " Petruslegende." 55 p.
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and rising god, according to the deep conviction of all the peoples around the eastern parts of the Mediterranean. These widespread pagan rites of a mock king given great power and worship for a short time, and then slain as an offering for sin (as we see in the burning of the effigy of the evil Haman at Purim or Paschal festivals, identified later with Barabbas and with countless more modern ceremonials), all go back to spring sacrifices to ensure good crops. In his birth, baptism, offering, and symbols, the Messiah- Jesus in his evolution came to absorb and embody the most essential traits of the most im- portant and salutary of these many cults. This is the main thesis of Drews, which he seeks to make plausible by covering in a briefer and more general way, but with better perspective, much of the ground which some of his predecessors had gone over in greater detail. To all the ingenuity he has displayed no epitome can do justice, although his whole argument hangs very largely, though by no means wholly, upon details.
Faith in Jesus had existed "among innumerable Mandaic sects in Asia Minor before our era." Paul first formulated and unified these views. He himself, despite Jensen's skepticism on this point, no doubt existed, and probably wrote at least the four great didactic epistles, Galatians, Romans, and the two Corinthians, despite Smith, Kalthoff, etc. In no authentic passage does Paul ever quote Jesus, not even in his great polemic against the adherents of the law when many of the words ascribed to Jesus would have admirably served his purpose, so that we must conclude that Paul had never heard of them. Indeed, he seems never to have heard of any of Jesus' miracles, nor even of his Galilean ministry. Wernle says were all Paul's epistles lost, we should know not much less of Jesus than at present. The apparition of Jesus changed Paul's life and divided it into two parts. Although he insisted that Jesus was a man, he describes him chiefly as a divine being or as an ideal of the genus homo or as a Platonic metaphysical prototype of mankind, as the first-born of all creation, etc. Stoic and Orphic ideas also flourished at Tarsus, and Paul and Seneca have always been ru- moured associates. The myths and cults of mystic death and resur- rection connected with communion rituals were very highly developed there, in which consecrated bread and a victim's blood in a chalice had magic power to purge away sin. Nearer Asia was permeated with the idea of a young and beauteous deity who died and thus reanimated
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nature; whose end was violent, but whose resurrection was glorious. " Nowhere were these celebrations of Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, etc., more magnificent than at Antioch." Such ceremonies Paul had at first thought blasphemous, persecuting Christians whom he thought the law cursed because they worshipped him "who hung upon a tree." At length the thought occurred to him whether such an expiatory function might not be applied to all the Maccabean martyrs and even to Isaiah's " Suffering Servant of God." One may renew life in others by voluntary self-sacrifice. Had this Jesus-God not perhaps done just this? May not the sins of the people be atoned for by the voluntary sacrifice of their God? May not justification be attained thus, instead of by Pharisaic observance of the law? for his own right- eousness and that of all others was far below the ideal standard. Must not sanctification, despaired of under the law, come in another way by direct infusion of God? Had the Messiah already come, and had his voluntary shameful death and revival opened up a way of righteous- ness unattainable by any individual under the law? Paul as persecutor had been an ardent devotee, and so could appreciate what devotion unto death meant.
The moment such a thought as this flashed through his mind, Pauline Christianity was born. His concept of a redeemer is that of an incarnate God who, because he has come down from heaven and from God, can raise man to union with the divine. The victim represents at the same time both the people and a deity offering himself up for them. Thus Paul does not need to think of a concrete personality. His man Christ Jesus remains more or less intangible, a personification of humanity, though more definite, to be sure, than Philo's logos that descended into the world but was not of it. The death and revival of the Pauline Jesus is not so much a story in time as an eternal event. Man, too, is midway between the worlds of good and evil, and God takes on the likeness of sinful flesh in order to enter this sphere of man. Thus Paul's Christ is not unlike the Platonic idea of man personified. Any act that does, not proceed from faith, that is, from the deepest conviction of the divine in us, has no religious value. This Paul got from Stoicism. To it, however, must be added baptism or burial with Christ and the union sought by the old mysteries and symbolized, patterning from them, by eucharistic partaking of his body and blood. Paul's union of men with each other in Christ is Plato's elevation to the
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world of ideas by Eros, the double-natured son of riches and poverty, who is poor, homeless, weary, and dying, according to his mother's nature, but also vital and ascendent, like his father. Thus Paul's Christ takes on the form of a servant, yet contains all the fulness of the Godhead. In the Timseus, Eros is called the world-soul and given the form of an oblique cross. Thus the contradiction between the worlds of sense and of ideas, which philosophy has never been able to overcome, is destroyed and man is born again into the new life of the spirit and becomes a true Son of God. So we see Paul's Christ as an allegorical and syncretic personification. Knowledge of the historic Jesus would be an obstacle to this apotheosis.
Why did not those who had known a real Jesus, if there were any such, protest against this hypostasis? Drews answers that it was be- cause in the days of Paul's early ministry there was no Jesus, and Paul's Christ was all there was. The Jesus of the synoptists was a later creation, which Drews describes as a mighty hymn which enthusiastic devotees made history sing to super-historical ideas. Paul's man- Christ Jesus was just as real as Yahveh's suffering servant, and no more so. Thus Paul saved if he did not create the whole Christian move- ment, without knowing anything of an historic Jesus. Indeed, had Paul's writings stood first in the New Testament, as they should have done, instead of appearing to be based on the synoptists, insightful people would have seen that historicity was an afterthought. Starting in part from the apocalyptic Jewish expectations of a revolutionary Messiah, it was borne on by a mighty social agitation centring in the mysteries. The larger currents that tended to make Jesus an Aryan came originally not only from the old Indie fire-cult but from many sources, from near Asia and northern Africa, so that it had no definite local or personal point of departure.
What, then, about our Gospels? They are the best of many, all composed to awaken belief in Jesus as sent from God for man's re- demption. The oldest, ascribed to John Mark, a pupil of Peter and fellow traveller with Paul, Drews thinks was not written till just after the destruction of Jerusalem, A. d. 70. As both Wernle and Wrede have urged, Mark stood far from Jesus in both time and place. His Gospel is a defence of the thesis that Jesus is both Messiah and Son of God, and his chief proofs are miracles. Mark belongs thus to the historv of docjma, and the disciples in it are hardlv real figures. In the
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Epistle of Barnabas (96 ? a. d.) we read that Jesus chose "as his fol- lowers of all men the most evil," to show that he called sinners. Luke and Matthew, who came later, add much to Mark, showing that tradi- tion was growing. Those, however, who think that by going back to earliest records, even a primitive Mark, they will find a more human and less divine figure, are mistaken. On the contrary, we have a God becoming man instead of a man becoming God. From all sources, in fine, we have too little, too divergent, and too uncertain data for any real orthodox biography of Jesus. Small as the historic kernel has become under modern criticism, not only conservative but even radical writers often show a strange enthusiasm and pronounce extravagant eulogia upon it. Criticism has plucked Jesus more and more of the plumes of his former glory. In fact, he is rather a pathetic figure as the higher criticism has left him. Although no whit more historic than the Johannin Christ, the residual Jesus of synoptic criticism " has become an empty vessel into which Protestant theology pours the con- tents of its own medication."
Christianity was thus in fact almost complete before the beginning of our era, and there are many older parallels for about every item and every saying. The latter were not invented, but spontaneously evolved, some of their elements many times; and much of it was put together so clumsily that intussusception had hardly begun when the Gospels took form, while other elements are combined so clearly and effectively as to rival the most certain history. Many persons and cults for ages contributed traits. Most of the deeds and sayings are like pebbles worn down and polished by the waves of ages of tradition. Many are very like, while others are very dissimilar. Some are widely scattered and others aggregated as into a secondary formation like conglomerate rock, but with few traces to guide us as to what or where the primary formations were. Almost nothing can be referred with certainty to its original author, and the hero of the whole cult is as unhistoric as the seven wise men of Greece, David, Solomon, or William Tell.
The Lord's Prayer, like the sermon on the mount, is all in the Old Testament, while many of the moral precepts ascribed to Jesus are really trivial or commonplace, and would be so regarded but for their hallowed associations. With a few possible exceptions, Paul had no use for any of them. What is important in Jesus' teachings is far older than he. His use of rewards and punishments in the next world
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as motives for virtue in this is simple selfishness and egoism enlarged to include the next life, and is far inferior to the Stoic ethics. Mith- raism, which nearly conquered the West, had also a no more real per- sonality behind it than did Goethe's Faust or Werther, which have so stirred the literary world. Jesus is simply the expression of the inner and outer life of a community near the beginning of our era, which was given an historical garb (KalthofT) or a patron- or club- God like ^Esculapius, or perhaps in a sense like Jason, Achilles, Theseus, or Siegfried. Orientals have a strong proclivity to make history out of inner experience. Thus Jesus could not have been a deified man, but was a humanized God; and this, Drews claims, makes his view more spiritual than are the interpretations of the higher criticism or liberal Christianity generally. A group of twelve apostles who had seen Jesus and worked with him, a circle from which Paul was excluded, never existed. Not only had the celestial Christ to be attached to the man Jesus, but the composite personality had to be made as factual as possible, for historicity soon became the keystone of the arch that bore all the weight of dogmas and of the Church just in proportion as the latter developed. So, too, beside Paul's way of meeting the deep- felt need of redemption by a mediator was the gnostic Johannin way. Gnosticism held that man could not save himself, and so it was both pessimistic and dualistic. It taught that the soul comes from above and will ultimately return from the body in which it is imprisoned, and that this return is salvation. The gnostic God-Redeemer came down to manifest this insight, which really opens all the secrets of heaven and earth and ensures immortality. The Mandaic sect of the Naassenes, as well as other gnostic sects, called this mediator Jesus, the man to whom the preexistent God-Christ attached himself at the baptism, leaving him, however, finally, to die alone at the Passion. Thus gnostics were more or less Docetic and held to many redeemers, aspired to asceticism but often lapsed into vice; denied that the Resur- rection was physical, and defied both Jewish and Roman law. Hence they were for some time the greatest danger that threatened Chris- tianity; but this was obviated at one stroke by affirming the complete manhood and historicity of one Jesus who should be correlated with the Old Testament Messiah. This, too, checked the pluralistic excess of gnostic fancy by focussing on a single world-Redeemer whose life, death, and Resurrection were made the focus of history. The affirming of
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the human reality of Jesus henceforth became the chief expression of the Church's instinct of self-preservation. Thus the dogma of Jesus' historicity saved Christianity from many dangers at once.
The Fourth Gospel marks the close of this epoch. It is saturated with the best in gnosticism, exploiting its quest for mystic mediation to the uttermost, but also stressing the historical reality of Jesus' cor- poreal life. In its Parsee dualism man is intermediate between the kingdoms of health, light, life, spirit, on the one hand, and the Satanic kingdom of earth. From pure love God sends his Monogene (or only- born, a modification at once of the Philonic logos and the Alexandrian aeon) to earth, with a pleroma of his own power. He redeems by taking on flesh without thereby ceasing to be divine, and brings men to his life by revealing wisdom and love. He sacrifices his life for his follow- ers and thus resumes celestial glory which he also opens the way for others to receive. He also becomes the paraclete, another Platonic agent or aeon of the divine which is also his surrogate. John breaks with gnosticism chiefly in affirming that the word was made flesh, although he asserts more than he delineates a real man. Hence the Johannin Christ "wavers between a sublime truth and a ghastly mon- strosity." John does, however, fix the hazy uncertainty of both myth- ology and abstract speculation into a personality that came to be nearer to the heart of Christendom than any other, and therefore gave it an incalculable advantage over its competitors, Mithraism and the rest. Thus, in fine, Paul, John, and the Church community made Jesus and not he them. He was evolved to meet social and communal needs to which his figure still appeals more than it does to the individual soul. To think of religion as primarily personal would in the early Church have been a sin against the Holy Ghost.
Perhaps the fall of Jerusalem, a. d. 70, if it did not cause, marked the acme of the unique apocalyptic or catastrophic state of mind, and contributed most to make those who believed in one yet to come pass on to the belief that he had already come, that is, made Christians out of the Messianists by a change of tense. Jesus had too many and di- verse epithets as attributes of God to be a single person, and also how could one and the same individual inspire men so different as Paul, Mark, and John? This symbolic designation suggests that the cult that became the Church was at first very secret. Parables were used to hide esoteric truth from those outside. Of old every great new move-
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ment had to be secret, and especially would this be the case with one organized to destroy surrounding idolatries. There were long dis- cussions whether there should be an open policy or whether the new life should be hid. Gnosticism preceded Christianity instead of con- versely, as was once thought, and all things in the latter became sym- bols of the former. The literal interpretation of the Gospels was an after-thought. The need of organization crassified everything into literal fact, and the re-spiritualization of Christianity will again reveal God as the central figure of the New Testament. We recognize sym- bolism in the Fourth Gospel, in which miracles become parables, but the synoptists were no whit less symbolists. When we have insight, spirituality, and imagination enough to penetrate the veil, we shall see that the authors of the Gospels were intent not upon writing chronicles or annals, but had a far loftier and more truly religious purpose than we had supposed. Passion Week, especially, is now construed as a dramatized allegory, or a miracle or mystery play. The trial and exe- cution of Jesus were in most of their chief features impossible from the standpoint of both Roman and Jewish law, as Innes has shown; and neither could ever have occurred. The incubus of the historic method of interpretation is responsible for the denial by the higher criticism of the divinity of Jesus. The overrunning of Europe by the barbarians also helped the Church to crassify John's light, door, way, bread, lamb, etc., into a person on the lower level of history, and prevented the Hellenic tendency prevalent in the synagogues during the diaspora to allegorize the Old Testament from extending to the New.
What now is the reaction of the psychologist of religion to such mythic interpretation?
The root of the whole question whether Jesus was a myth or a man is a vital psychological and pedagogical one, which is rarely treated in the literature; viz., what real difference does it make from a pragmatic or any other point of view for us at this distance? Of course, on the old interpretation of Paul and the Church of the need of a vicarious atonement by a flesh-and-blood offering of an actual per- son, it makes all the difference between real salvation and none at all. On this theory, if a physical God-man did not really die, man is not redeemed from sin and death, for the price was not paid save in the spurious coinage of the imagination. The folk-soul has always sought to deceive God and evade the claims of justice by many a fictive
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chablone sacrifice instead of a genuine one. But God, who accepted a ram in place of Isaac, has, as the entire history of sin and other offer- ings shows, been increasingly lenient, prone to mitigate his old exaction of human victims and to accept countless more or less rigorous peni- tential sacrifices as substitutes. He demands not even bulls and lambs, but a contrite heart; and this suffices. If, then, drama, epic, or symbol be more effective than historic events or the doings of real persons in bringing about this state, the "psychology of God" indicates that he would not only accept but prefer the latter. Again, the psy- chology of historicity points in the same direction. Just how much does it affect the impression made by seeing the play of "Hamlet" to have been convinced by Simrock's "Quellen" that no such person ever existed? To be sure, Swiss peasants were shocked by being told on the highest authority that their national hero, William Tell, was a solar myth, and his arrows the sun's rays. Thus, too, orthodox be- lievers feel when told that the Jesus they have worshipped is a myth, and thus, too, children feel when undeceived about Santa Claus. The list of ancient worthies once believed real, but whose existence modern scholarship has challenged, is a long and growing one; and so, too, is the list of cult gods and heroes whom those who revere them have never deemed more real than are John Bull, Brother Jonathan, Saint Crispin, Ceres, Mars, Prometheus, Loki, the Muses and Fates, Faust, or Uncle Remus.
Again, in our pragmatic age we might ask which would do more to advance Buddhism, a genius who should be able to so set forth the gist of the founder's doctrine and fife in the most sympathetic and dramatic way to arouse the true hedonic narcosis in reader or specta- tor, or the savant who should contribute new and indubitable proofs of his historicity? Are we not in fact, and rightly so, more concerned with present effectiveness than with antiquarian truth? Surely there is much myth that is worth more to the world of culture than is much history. Many of the best things have not actually happened yet, at least purely, but may occur almost anywhere and at almost any time. We have too low ideas of what myth really is at its best; for, as Grote long ago showed the world, muthos, logos, ethos, and nomos are the four bases of culture, ancient and modern alike. If the Jesus-story grips my heart and moulds and may recast my life more than all else, it is the truest of all things for me by every pragmatic sanction, and if
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it does more to make me better than anything else, it is the most precious of all things, so that the present question is whether it will best stand this test and remain supreme over every competing cult. Those who are not timid concerning such a result will not be dismayed if they have some time to capitulate to these new views.
If this be true, it is ultimately a question of how far we have grasped the higher truths of our religion or, in a word, spiritualized it. Those who have done so most need have least fear. Perhaps these writers will come to be regarded as morning stars of a new dispensation of Christian faith. Languages, e. g., are now known not to have been made but to have grown by innumerable spontaneous creations of countless minds. Now suppose a higher universal language of lan- guages tended to evolve not as a conscious creation, like Volapuk or Esperanto, but as a composite photograph of the best etymological and grammatical elements, unifying all and supplementing the defects of each by drawing upon the excellencies of the rest, and in this product giving us a key for the understanding of all and furnishing a consum- mate product of the linguistic instinct. In this case we should have an analogue in the field of philosophy to what has occurred in the life, teachings, death, and Resurrection of Jesus, the supreme myth of myths. Such a mythopheme fits the nature and needs of the soul better than history ever can, because it arises out of the inmost nature of the soul itself. Outer events have extra-human elements, are ob- jectively conditioned, divert and even repress purely psychogenic motivation; but this story with its countless ramifications is made more purely and uniquely than anything else out of the soul-stuff of wishes and aspirations. In it conscience speaks with its clearest voice. In it, too, man sees most clearly the evil that is in him, and applies the best of moral therapies. It tells him that he and the God he has wor- shipped arise out of the depths of his own soul, and that he can thus reunite himself to him. The individual hears the voice of the race in him, affirming good and negating evil. He feels that the universe is moral to the core, realizes the hideousness of sin, and sees the way of escape from it. He also feels the beauty of virtue, and sees how to tri- umph eternally with it. This view may thus come to fit the better scheme of things now beginning to form, make the New Testament coherent, Christianity more acceptable, and even reunite liberals and conservatives. There is an increasing number of things which
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the old theories failed to explain, as was the case with the Ptolemaic system before Copernicus. In either case all the teachings remain the same. Criticism has taught us to reread with great zest the Old Testament by showing that its account of creation, the flood, patri- archs, exodus, and history are all products of the principles of the proph- ets and inspired by them. It has shown us that Israel's thoughts of God and man were a true development, and that the books of Moses sprang from the prophets as the Gospels did from Paul, instead of in the inverted relation in which they now stand in our canon. Even if the Gospel writers meant their annals to be taken historically, some- thing is wrong, and so a vague sense of unreality has stolen over the Church. The ignoring of the results of scholarship is on the con- science of orthodoxy, although it be not fully conscious of it. Schweit- zer, in " Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung," sums up his history of the lives of Jesus for a century as a "cemetery of discordant hypothe- ses." The theorem, " If Christ is a God he is not man, and if he is man he is not God," Anderson (Monist, July, 19 14), well compares to the long antithesis between matter and mind in philosophy. Now the one and now the other view predominates and expels its opposite, or else a higher union is sought by a mediatorial third principle, a misfortune which some think metaphysical monism obviates, for there can be no absolute contradiction in the nature of things. The acme of negation, therefore, is found not in the above denials of historicity but in the liberal repudiation of divine elements in Jesus by the higher criticism. It is impossible, without flying in the face of even the Ur-Markus, to reduce the central figure of the New Testament to merely human di- mensions. Hence the above attempts to reverse this process and consider him as a God from the starting point are opportune.
Non-historicity, however, is not unreality. What if Jesus entered history only as his logical predecessor, Yahveh, did, just as really but no more so? If there were prehistoric Christs why, as Anderson well asks, should they derogate from the importance of the Christ of the Gospels, any more than it is a disparagement of Yahveh that Moses got his very name from a Kenite tribe at Sinai? Indeed, the whole question of Jesus' historicity is a little like the problem of Kant's Ding-an-sich or of metaphysical or epistemological realism. From the schoolmen, and indeed from the dawn of philosophy to our own day, the problem of substance or being has been thought vital for theory;
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but it makes little difference for the practical conduct of life or for the pursuit of science whether one deems noumena or phenomena ulti- mate, and there are analogies between this and the problem of the ancient historicity of Jesus. Suppose we made the weird and fantastic assumption that an authentic portrait of Jesus were discovered, and even that we could have, if we desired, his entire public career and every incident in it reproduced in a series of moving pictures and his words restored by some phonographic process. Would devout Christians really wish this? Would they not fear disillusion? Would such a thing be a real desideratum? Would not the objective gain in certainty be more than offset by a loss of the inner ideal communion with his spirit? Too realistic Passion Plays are thought to be irrever- ent and materializing, however worshipfully presented. Renan called the Jesus-story " the category of the ideal." Would the Christ formed within, the eternal formula of regeneration and moral progress, not lose something of his power by being reduced to an accurately located and dated time and place in history? If Jesus were to come again in flesh and blood, filling all the needs of our time as he did of his own, would it not be a higher dispensation than the old one? and is it not this which the Christianity of our day really wants?
One thing is certain, viz., that these studies open far vaster fields than mere textual criticism or theology, whether liberal or conservative, Palestinian antiquities or former characterizations of Jesus or Church history ever dreamed of. They upset smug professional complacency and open a wider historic horizon, showing us that to grasp the full meaning of our religion we must know far more about the work of the folk-soul and go far deeper into the psyche of the individual. These laymen have propounded new and vital problems of which they have been able to answer only a few. If they abate some of the old forms of conviction, they increase the unformulated feeling that there is far greater worth and a wealth of deeper meaning in the New Testa- ment than the older scholarship has suspected. They stimulate new interest in study, and make the conventional reticence of orthodoxy, which has steadfastly ignored the results of scientific research in this field, ever harder and more intolerable, especially to ingenuous aca- demic youth, to whom these writers make very strong appeal. Many of these whom I know and who had grown cold toward the Church have been warmed again to the heart toward it by these views, which
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have made them more frisch, fret, frohlich, and fromm, and which by their very dash, novelty, and abandon to more or less uncritical aperqus, speak to the core of the soul of those in later adolescence, both the mer- its and defects of which views like this admirably typify. We should not forget, too, that as the age of most conversions, confirmations, etc., shows, it is this period of life that Jesus himself, whether he be man, myth, or symbol, best illustrates, and to which he has always made the strongest appeal, for the zests of this age are proverbially the best material for prophecy.
On this view the soul of the race has long sought a link between God and man, as science now seeks the missing link to bridge the gap between the higher fossil apes and man; and there is some psycholog- ical analogy between the formative tendencies that gave us the the- anthropos and those that have constructed the anthropopithecus, the differentia being that the first member of the God-man synthesis is a spiritual creation, while the middle term linking man with the anthro- poids is theoretically constructed out of sparse and fragmentary geo- logical remains. Jesus by the above writers is in a sense made a point de repere for many ritual and mythic partial expressions of this age-long quest for mediation. For the race he is what the hero of the anonymous but significant book, "WTiispering Dust," was for its writer, a slowly evolving but very satisfying complemental ideal which has come to dominate the lives of believers. Something like his figure tends to be formed in the heart, and the question is whether these tendencies could or did create him spontaneously and spiritually from within, or whether one or more historic personages were used as paradigms or models; that is, whether he was made or found. Did the revelation of him come from the inmost depths of human nature, or was it objectively given? Is the power to accept and appreciate such a personage only a less de- gree of the selfsame power which needs only to be raised to a higher potence in order to create him? Is he in fact made cf the same psychic material as were the prophecies and expectations of him, turning the souls that follow him, not like neurotics and psychasthenics, away from reality, but with a supreme and unique energy to it, modulating over from will be to is in the birthhour of our era and lapsing since to has been in the many conjugations of our complex grammar of assent, which has every conceivable mood and voice as well as tense, for the verb "to believe," like the verb "to love, " has not only every form of
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inflection but may have a vast number of both subjects and objects. Or will such studies, if confirmed, do for Jesus what Kant sought to do for God, soul, and immortality, by exalting them above the categories and making them postulates for conduct? and may we thus establish faith in Jesus by the practical rather than by the theoretical reason?
If so, and if historicity can add to the efficiency of the Jesus-idea, then we must by every principle of pragmatism hold that he lived a real life some time, according to the records and the faith of Christian centuries, obscure and uncertain in many points'thoughthat life must for- ever remain. If this be so, uncertainty concerning the details of his life is not a handicap but a boon to faith, just as the absence of all authentic portraitures of him has been to art, because it not only clears the way for but incites to make ever new and higher constructions. Some such life was lived by some one whom we call Jesus the Christ, just as in the formative period near the beginning of our era and in our canon that life was variously interpreted and drew to itself so much of the best in the rites, beliefs, and customs of different lands and peoples. Our Jesus is the historic nucleus about which was crystallized so much that is mythic and symbolic as well as historic, the whole being shaped to meet human needs. So we must continue the work of syncretism, idealization, and transformation if we can only rise to doing so with the same freedom that Jesus' co-fashioners of the New Testament exer- cised. Jesus' nature remains thus dual, for he is at once a real and an ideal person, a joint product of fact and need. He was a man glorified by the totalizing imagination, and the problem of psychology here is to seek out what kind of personality and life-history could have attracted and assimilated so early so much that happened in so many places and so much that never could have actually occurred anywhere. We need to ask, not how he came to embody so much divine glory, but how he came to be invested with such a pleroma of human ideals, how a person came to be also a totemic race-man, how an individual came to repre- sent humanity, or how the genus homo came to be embodied in a single specimen.
If proofs of his historicity grow weak, should we postulate it with- out objective evidence on the warrant of pragmatism? What are the meaning and the worth of historicity from the standpoint of psychology or of the higher pedagogy of the race, and of the individual? We an- swer that it is the inveterate ejective habit of thought that makes it
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necessary for complete reality. The anthropomorphization of the divine may be the last and most sublimated form of idolatry, and ob- jectivization is incomplete without historization. The incarnation is the resumption by man of God, who is his project, or the rehumaniza- tion of the divine. It is the construing of God's essential attributes into the terms of man's life. The Yahveh of the psalms and prophets had to moult his old absoluteness and transcendence as superfluities and recast his nature into the mould of man, not in imagination or theory but in fact, thereby also deifying man as well as making himself more real. In doing this Yahveh shrank and faded, and lives on per- sonally only in his Son, the man-God of the New Testament. His- toricity is clung to so tenaciously because it strengthens the feeling that God is really man. This conviction safeguards man against the tendency to again dehumanize the Supreme Worth and thus again subject himself to an alien, extra-human control. The tenacity with which we cling to the historical ideal, when analyzed, really expresses the horror of the soul against regression to either the old superstitious belief in nature or animal gods or to the purely Active superstitious orderers of human life. If we can only realize that a man embodying all the fulness of God once was actually born, lived, taught, and died, then we are safeguarded from the ever-haunting dangers of relapsing to the old and baser idolatries. Such a life means that the kingdom of man has actually come, and there is nothing higher. Without his- toricity this theorem lacks concrete demonstration.
Suppose, then, we regard historicity as an essential attribute of the Jesus-idea, which would be more or less mutilated without it, even though its proofs are not all that could be desired, so that we are a trifle less certain of it than we are, e. g., of Julius Caesar; should its pragmatic value not have weight in our decisions, and can we not allow it to do so without admitting the Jesuitic principle that the end justifies the means? We can at least plead the utter uniqueness of its supreme worth, and flout as impertinent the insistence of logic that to admit the pragmatic principle in one case would be to admit it in all, because of the differ- ence in degree, both in certainty and in value involved. No one ever saw an ion, atom, or id, yet they are basal and integral for science, and so is historicity for both Christianity and its ethics. Must not the prepotent will to believe, which may have been intense enough to create the Gospels themselves, also be reckoned with by all who know
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how rightly to evaluate the psychological forces which impel man to eternally reconstrue his history? The Jesus-idea had to be made a factual reality, as a psychological necessity of the folk-soul, because, if not thus conceived, so many trends that have their focus in his life would be more or less aborted. Deity would remain incompletely humanized, our conceptions of the Supreme would be superstitious, and the absolute still transcendent and not immanent. If the in- carnation be a psychological and not also an historical fact, we are not redeemed from the old credulities of faith and the intussusception and atonement of God and man fall short of complete identification. Thus, while critical scholarship may have made it almost certain that he lived, a categorical imperative which we call faith, made out of hopes, wishes, ideals, and their momentum is also necessary before cer- tainty can become cataleptic.
Why, then, do believers so intensely want Jesus to be historic? Partly because they cannot grasp him as the resultant of the play of psychic racial trends. The latter are too subtle and intangible, and the laws of their activity too little understood. In place of a spectrum cast by human experience whenever the conditions are met, they want a painted spectrum that can be shown at hand as in a text-book, other- wise Christ is as indefinite as thought without words or images. Again, Christianity from the start was social in a sense even more than it was individual, and this necessitated a system of objective symbols for sharing common thoughts, feelings, and actions, such as only a per- sonality can make; for the appeal must be not merely to the imagina- tion but to memory. Love, too, needs a real object, and the devotion of early Christians cannot be explained by myth or symbol, for such loyalty as theirs is impossible save toward a person. Had he been a fictive individual, too, it is inconceivable that the strength of the ten- dencies that created him would not have sought to complete the process by some image, effigy, or description of his person instead of ignoring every physical characterization and condemning likenesses of him. Whence came the great fear of idolatry of him if there were no real person in danger of being worshipped in portraiture, image, or in other material ways?
(4) Jensen, a professor of Semitic philology at Marburg, has with great ingenuity maintained the thesis that no such life as that which the Gospels ascribe to Jesus was ever actually lived by any one, and
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that not only Jesus but Paul, Moses, to some extent Peter and others, are later variants of an ancient Babylonian set of sagas. The original epos was inscribed in cuneiform on tablets, chiefly in Nineveh, some 700 b. c, although the story can be traced back perhaps two thousand years; and this Jensen has edited, paraphrased, and commented on voluminously and in great detail.1 This story he thinks is a com- posite of several yet earlier groups of myth, so that he calls it "the oldest in the world." Not only the various ancient story complexes, all indigenous to Babylonian culture, converge in it, but later from it diverge many offshoot stories, not only Hebraic but Greek (not Homer), and not only the Old but the New Testament is permeated by its influences. It or its Absenker spukt in or haunts the entire Bible, in many parts of which not only the episodes but the sequences, on which Jensen always lays great stress, are the same as or are recog- nizable variants from this one primal source. We find, therefore, many borrowings from this saga material, which gave many original patterns. Strauss believed there was a nuclear personality as a real historic centre which attracted much mythic material. Rich as his the- saurus mythicus was, and able and bold as he was, he shrank from the last step of making Jesus purely Active, so that now some regard Jensen, as more do Drews, as a second Strauss, completing his work. Drews does not tell us with any definiteness how the figure of Jesus arose, as Jensen seeks to do (who, by the way, has almost no disciples, feeling that he alone can dethrone a false God, while Drews has many) . This "Gilgamesh Epos" as we now know it, thanks largely to Jensen, is in twelve tables and poems, cantos or stations. Perhaps some are connected with the twelve signs of the zodiac, the months, etc. It is certainly a monumental treasure-house for saga and religion, al- though there are many gaps in it, and doubtless some are out of order. But Jensen has been indefatigable and most ingenious in deciphering, piecing, ordering, and has at least convinced the world that we have here a great monument. The fate of the two heroes, Gilgamesh and Eabani, is the basis of all, and has attracted a mass of details and mythic lore from far and wide, some of which distract us from the main course of events and appear somewhat as foreign bodies not yet
illis original work is "Das Gilgamesch Epos in der Weltliteratur." Bd. I, 1005. The original text is given in Bd. 6 of the " Keilinschrif tlichen Bibliothek," in connection with the Zeitschrift fUr Assyriologie, Bd. 24. See also Otto Weber's ''Literatur der Babylonier und Assyrer." Jensen has made a popular statement of his methods and results in "Moses, Jesus, Paulus: drei Varianten des Babylonischen Gottmenschen Gilgamesch." Frankfurt, 1910, 64 p.
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intussuscepted as in the case of the flood in Canto Eleven. Sometimes the connection of incidents is, despite Jensen's pains, loose and even unnatural, so that it still lacks unity, which some think astronomical considerations would give, although Jensen rejects these.
Jensen's thesis is that "the entire course of certain Babylonian sagas constitutes the main record in most of the Old Testament stories, and especially those of Jesus and Paul in the New, and that they repeat the events in these sagas in essentially the same sequence, so that a similar, or at least striking, parallelism occurs between the Old Testa- ment stories and those of the New." Thus his main reliance is on long systems or series of parallel episodes.
We can best illustrate Jensen's theory by a glance at the first part of his epos and the parallelisms which he seeks to establish between this record and the life of Moses. Gilgamesh is a mighty hero, two thirds god and one third man. His rule almost crushes the ancient city of Erech in southern Babylonia. The work he requires is probably the rebuilding of the city walls, and the people are so oppressed by their task that their groans ascend to heaven. There the goddess Arum, who made Gilgamesh, is commanded by the other gods to create an Ebenbild or rival, so that the city may breathe again; and accordingly Eabani is created, a wild-appearing, very strong man, whose entire body is covered with hair, who is clad in skins, who lives in the steppes and deserts with animals, whom he protects from hunters. He "does not know land or people, eats herbs and drinks with the cattle, and it is well with his heart." A hunter, antagonized by this protection of game, comes to Gilgamesh to complain, and it is finally proposed to lead Eabani astray as Parsifal was to have been seduced, by sending a joy- maiden from the city of Erech who gives herself to Eabani, in order to bring him to the city. The drinking potion they give him succeeds, and when he sees the maiden he approaches her and forgets his cattle; and when he is sated with her charms the cattle flee. This trait is poetically developed, showing that after na'ive man has known woman his close communion with nature is lost. Jensen does not tell us whether this is an episode, although Weiss thinks it rather essential. Depressed by the flight of the animals formerly his friends, he allows himself to be conducted by his mistress to Erech, where he meets Gil- gamesh, of whom he has heard that he was prepared for his advent by dreams and will become his friend and brother, share regal honours,
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and mitigate his rigour to the people. The joy-maiden tells Eabani also that he is beautiful and must no longer live in the fields like a beast, and that she will bring him to a house of joy, which is a temple, and to the home of Anas and Ishtar, etc., that he needs a friend for his hurt. On entering the city, maidens greet him with songs of praise and lead him to the king, who goes out to meet him and celebrates friendship with him. Here ends the first table of some three hundred lines, of which only two hundred and thirty are preserved; but in the gap Jensen infers that Eabani vanished into the desert full of anger, hunger, and misery, although the sun-god called him to go back to Erech.
Of the second table there are only eighty- two lines intact. Jensen infers that the city goddess Ishtar has been carried away from Erech by the Elamites. We find Gilgamesh weeping over his friend Eabani, Jensen thinks because he did not like the city. Yet they fight the Elamites, kill the dreadful Chumbaba, and bring the city goddess back. The goddess now turns eyes of desire to the returning victorious king, but he repels her and reminds her of the misfortunes of her previous lovers, the last of whom, like Gilgamesh, had spurned and insulted her and thereafter had been made a "weakling" by her. Angered by this, Ishtar goes to heaven and accuses Gilgamesh to her father, Anu. She says he has cursed her, and so a bull is sent to punish him, but after a hard battle Gilgamesh triumphs. The son of God asks Eabani why he cursed the joy-maiden, who had given him health, glory, love, and the friendship of the king. After another gap in the text, Eabani dies. Smitten with the fear of death, and anxious to know whether eternal life is possible, Gilgamesh undertakes a long journey in the desert to his ancester, Xisuthros, the deified Babylonian hero of the flood, who has been made immortal. Wandering through Syrian deserts to the mount of heaven, he finds two scorpion giants, that prevent his passage through a dark city gate, which he finally passes, and later meets the goddess Siduri, the maiden of the mount of heaven, goddess of wisdom, who first unbolts the door to him. Xisuthros, the sailor and servant of the lung, comes from his port in the far West, and at his command Gilgamesh cuts long trees and sails with him toward the setting sun. At first all goes well, but at last in the "waters of death" beyond Gibraltar the voyage becomes dangerous. The girdle of Gilgamesh is loose, ready for a leap into the sea (into which in many of the variant myths he does spring) , but he finally learns to ask concerning life and
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death. The answer is that all must die. How, then, he queries, had Xisuthros found eternal life, and in answer he is told the story of the flood. To escape this and reach his now divine lord, Eabani, and on the advice of this god, he builds a ship or ark and puts in it all his family and possessions, and all animals. In the great storm that turns the land into a sea, all else are drowned, but he lands on a mountain and makes his offerings. The god Bel does not want him or the others saved, but the god Eabani does, so that all are at last brought to the mouth of the stream where Eabani and other deities reside. Now pity- ing Gilgamesh, Xisuthros promises him immortality if he will go without sleep six days, but so hard is the journey that he falls asleep. Mystic loaves have been baked, and these are offered to atone for his sleeping; but he will no longer accept assurances of immortality, and laments that he must die, probably cursing the sailor for his misfortune and vowing never to return. After Gilgamesh has washed or regener- ated his children and himself, thereby winning back his own beauty, he dives, at Xisuthros' command, deep down into the water, and brings up a marvellous cure which seems the elixir of life. Then, departing from these shores, he is robbed of the magic girdle by the serpent and laments, knowing that now he must abandon all hope of eternal life, but arriving at last on foot at Erech. As he realizes now that all must die, the bold wish arises that his friend Eabani may appear and tell him what he is to expect under the earth. After he has appealed to several gods, at last one hears him and Eabani's ghost arises and tells him of things beneath the earth. Here this episode closes, and we know nothing of Gilgamesh's further fortunes. But his wish for im- mortality is fulfilled in some wise, for he is represented as directing as a god, or as a proxy of the sun-god, the kings of earth. As to the seven plagues, they are a lion, a dragon, both of which were subjected, a wild dog, two plagues of hunger or famine, one of fever, and then another of hunger. Finally we hear that a strangling pestilence god, Ira, ravaged the land. This very rough outline is richly dight with inci- dents, some closely, some loosely connected, with these central themes. To illustrate Jensen's method, let us glance at his use of par- allel columns to show the relations between the items connected with the above and those of the life of Moses, e. g.: (i) The hard labour of building the city walls to which Gilgamesh subjected his people is like that of the Israelites in Egypt. (2) Eabani is in the desert with the
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animals as Moses is as a shepherd of Midian. (3) To the former a girl comes to drink, as Zippora comes to Moses with the cattle at the fountain. (4) Eabani gives himself to the girl, as Moses marries Zippora. (5) Eabani goes with the girl to Erech as Moses does with Zippora to Egypt. (6) Gilgamesh's dreams are interpreted to mean Eabani and so Gilgamesh goes out to meet him, as God commands Aaron to meet Moses. (7) Eabani becomes a friend of Gilgamesh, as Moses does of Aaron. So in some twenty-five more main items Jensen finds coincident data which show the relation between the Babylonian saga and that of Moses, which he thinks nearly as close as the Baby- lonian story of the flood and that of Noah and with similar sequences of events. To be sure, there is much in the Moses-saga after his re- turn from the desert that has no pendant in Gilgamesh's story, so that these items, like the Red Sea and the Sinai incidents, may be thought to be Israelitic and perhaps historic. But the plagues are similar, and Jensen very ingeniously finds counterparts between those in each leg- end. In the one God draws with a staff on the heavens at his feet a great water-snake as Yahveh makes Moses throw down his staff and it becomes a serpent. As the Lord of Heaven commands Gilgamesh to kill the lion of the plague, so Yahveh orders Moses to free the people from the yoke of Pharaoh. The blood of the great lion flows three years, three months, and a day, as all the waters of Egypt became blood and the hero who frees the people from these plagues becomes hero of the world, as Moses does of his people. The white dog Jensen inter- prets as dog gnats in Moses' time and in place of drouth, famine, and disease the plagues of Moses were hail and grasshoppers. Here he finds some twenty other points of resemblance, including the motiva- tion of the law at Sinai, which came from Babylon. Yahveh's strife with Jacob and Elijah's flight to heaven, are connected with Jesus' Ascension, etc. From such items Jensen concludes that the part of Moses' history that remains isolated is slight and uncertain even if it does contain historical kernels, and he argues that what is true of the Aaron-Moses is "true of numberless other Israelitic sagas which go back to the Babylonian cycle as their prototype." He goes on to prove that we have very little that is historical of the patriarchs or of Joshua, Gideon, Samson, Saul, Samuel, David, Nathan, and Jonathan for these and their characteristic incidents are mostly from the Gilga- mesh saga, and even Elisha and Elijah do almost nothing outside its
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scheme, but are essentially marionette figurines transferred to the Israelitic stage. The glory of Solomon is probably a reflex of that of Assyria, and perhaps even the scheme of dynasty changes, so that the derivatives and branches of this old saga permeate the whole Israelitic soul. It is the Ursage of the most diverse culture elements in very different lands, and save the " Iliad" the whole Greek system of myths comes from it, and so is in a sense cousin to the Israelitic tales.
The incidents of Jesus' life are a sister saga; and here, too, we are given tables. In the Old Testament Elias appears first east of the Jordan, just as John does at the beginning of the Jesus-tale. The former is hairy, with a girdle of leather; ravens bring him food. So John wears camel's hair and a leathern girdle and eats locusts and wild honey. Elias anoints Elijah as John baptizes Jesus. Both go into the desert. Elias and Jesus both fast forty days and nights in the wilderness. Elias censures Ahab for killing Naboth, as John does Herod for his evil deeds. Isebel, Ahab's wife, hates Elias as Herodias does John. Elias becomes beside himself, and John dies. Elijah feeds one hundred men with twenty loaves and a residue, which parallels the feeding of five thousand with five loaves and two fishes with a resi- due. Elijah raises the son of a Shulamite after Elias cannot do it, and so Jesus heals the demoniac boy after his disciples fail. The rich Naaman comes to Elijah to be made well but does not fulfil the condi- tions, and this is like the rich youth who comes to Jesus but lacks the one thing needful. And so on through a series of incidents, until finally a dead man placed in Elisha's grave revives just as Jesus does. Here we have not a systemless scheme, but a long series with identical se- quences. Elisha goes to heaven and sends back his spirit, as Jesus does. Thus, says Jensen, " the greater part of the Jesus- John stories are sagenhaft," and as the sagas are of ancient origin so Jesus goes back to Babylon. Following the first three Gospels before the entry into Jerusalem, at the outset of the Gilgamesh saga the gods command Eabani to be made by a miracle, and so Jesus' birth is supernatural. Eabani lives in the wilderness with animals, is hairy, eats grass and herbs, as John does locusts and honey. Gilgamesh dreams of a star and a ruler of heaven stronger than he, and John prophesies of the com- ing of one greater. Eabani goes to the desert and is comforted by words from heaven, like Jesus. The great lion and snake are to be overcome, just as God's kingdom is to fill the earth and Jesus come in
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the clouds. The conjuring of the dragon is like the driving out of demons. The plague or fever and the prayer of Xisuthros for the suffering man are like Simon Peter's wife's mother, sick of a fever, whom Jesus cures. Xisuthros builds a ship for emergencies, as Jesus prepares a boat. The former goes with his friends, as Jesus does to the boat, a storm arises, and both land far from home. Sinful man and animals are drowned while in the Gospels two thousand swine perish in the sea. In the following items we have Jesus' ascent of the moun- tain; the Phoenician woman; the passage of the disciples across the sea, smooth at first, with the storm following, from which they are saved by Jesus; the first announcement of his death; the "Get thee behind me, Satan"; the command to catch fish; the incident of the rich man — these are other parallels. We have also indirect data to confirm and supplement this conclusion. The Last Supper of Jesus with his dis- ciples has a close counterfoil in the last sacrificial meal of Xisuthros, which before his removal he offers to the gods, although it is not certain that Jesus' Ascension is a correlate of Moses vanishing in the clouds or of Azariah vanishing in God according to the Tobit saga. Now the dif- ferences between the Fourth Gospel and the other three are sometimes even greater than those between the ancient incidents and those of Jesus, all being mythic. John, although departing a little further from the common basis in some respects, in others preserves the old saga material even better than the synoptists. The coin in the fish's mouth has its antique parallel in the fishing out of the water of the wondrous cure. Luke's story of the rich man and Lazarus plays upon that of Eabani's citation for Gilgamesh, although he departs so far from the model that Jesus himself is made to tell it as if it were a story without relation to himself, though it was originally a part of his legend.
Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem begins a part of the Jesus-saga that has a very old place in both the Israelitic and the Gilgamesh sagas and is a reflex of a part of the Chumbaba episode, that is, his trip to Jerusalem, his betrayal, his capture by armed men. Jesus' death, on the other hand, represents many fragments, often out of order. Jesus' saying before the high priest, the false witnesses, the accusation of blasphemy, the condemnation, as counterpart to the slandering of Naboth by false witnesses because he would not subject himself to the will of Ahab, the old stories indicating that he cursed
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God and the king: all this Jensen connects with the story that after Gilgamesh appeals to the conscience of the goddess Ishtar and scorns her love, that is, refuses to be subject to her will, he is falsely accused of having cursed her. Here, indeed, we have perhaps more Gilgamesh than Jesus. In Jerusalem Jesus heals a patient who has sinned. This draws on him the hate of the Jews, as does his breaking of the Sabbath, by which he offends God and yet he calls himself his Son, and so is thought a blasphemer. So Gilgamesh insults the goddess, becomes sick, is accused of blasphemy because he curses Ishtar. Thus we have counterparts.
Thus Jensen concludes that the whole Jesus story, not only in its general course but its episodes, is, for the most part at least, saga, built upon a very ancient pattern, and that we really know "as good as nothing" of the life of the founder of Christianity or "just as little as we do of the putative founder of the Mosaic religion." We must not mix the authorship of the sayings of Jesus with the life course assigned to him. Indeed, the sayings John ascribes to him have very little in common with those the synoptics put in his mouth. Perhaps there is more divergence as to sayings than as to the course of events. This inclines Jensen to believe that the sayings ascribed to Jesus did not originate from the man who is said to have lived his life, which indeed no one ever did anywhere. Perhaps the sayings pertaining to saving or losing life do go back to the "Gilgamesh Epos." But most of the great synoptic sayings of Jesus have nothing in common with the Gilgamesh saga and so cannot be speeches of an historic Jesus. Where, how, and when this Jesus lived we know not, and indeed it makes little difference. The very name is suspicious, since it designates the mythic bearer of the Jesus-saga. All goes back to this first Jesus, and may or may not be traced to him who said the words ascribed to Jesus. Their author must perhaps remain for us vox et praekrea nihil.
Jensen even makes the chief events in the life of Paul fit into his general scheme, and so infers that he, too, is at least largely mythic, being related to both the Gilgamesh and the Jesus- John sagas. He discusses whether the Jesus-story was first developed and then trans- ferred to Paul, or whether the latter was a Doppelgdngcr or doublet that grew up independently from the older source. He concludes that the Pauline epistles were written not by the Paul of Acts but by some gifted man who held the Pauline ideas, but whose very nationality is
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unknown. The parallels, based chiefly on Paul's early persecution of the Jews, his conversion and his missionary trips, while interesting and ingenious, are hardly convincing. There is little in common, e. g., between the flood, the voyages of Gilgamesh, Paul's missionary journey, and Jesus sailing in a boat, all of which he identifies. More- over, does a series of such similarities in the lives of different individuals indicate that the latter are not real?
Now, in evaluating Jensen's views, we should not forget that he has done a great work in collecting, editing, and bringing into more or less unity these antique inscriptions, thus restoring to the world a great epic of high cultural significance, which sheds much new light upon the Old Testament, in the composition of parts of which it must have had great influence. Of the value of this work only experts can speak, and even those who reject his mythic theories, as nearly all of them do, have high praise for this. I can, however, find no one of them who admits without very important reservations that Jensen has really succeeded in reducing the main events of Jesus' fife to the con- geries of incidents recorded on the Nineveh tablets.
On the other hand, to be just to Jensen we must realize that one chief function of a great epos, whether racial or national, when it be- comes a kind of ethnic Bible, is to provide a repertory of tropes, images, and thought-forms by which to apprehend the world of human events. Such an epos gives unity and sympathetic rapport between all the individuals of the social group, however large. Especially is this true if, as Jensen assures us is the case with the "Gilgamesh Epos," it was indigenous and grew up within the folk-soul, and was not itself either historic or imported from an alien race. The characters and their doings in such an epos would constitute a common core for both relig- ious rites and modes of apprehending the universe, and they would per- vade all of life, their unity, or lack of it, rather exactly reflecting that of the people within the sphere of their influence.
Under these conditions there would be an ineluctable tendency to use the chief features of the epos as apperception organs by means of which to grasp, and its very phrases as the readiest and most effective vehicles of describing, current incidents and contemporary leaders, which would thus seem to be attracted into a similarity with its stand- ards in speech, thought, and even sentiment, of each of which such a canon would furnish a convenient and ready-made collection. Thus
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ancient gods were the norms for the apotheosis of great men, and thus, too, in later times the Puritans of, e. g., Cromwell's day, used biblical and especially Old Testament events and passages to interpret occur- rences of their own time, almost as if the latter had been pre-written. Thus history in the making tends to be cast into old moulds, which may themselves be mythical although the events are real enough, and ancient story may come to be a kind of dictionary of thought-forms and patterns which it is most convenient to use to interpret later events. A French student of the drama has lately told us that there are only thirty-six fundamental dramatic situations and motifs, and that each of these has recurred over and over again, not only in com- parative literature but in life. But if I do however many things myth has symbolized or more exactly described, I do not thereby become myself a myth. Indeed, human life consists of diversified variations on a very few themes. Not only would the real deeds of heroes tend to fall into preexisting grooves, but those who describe them and their doers would be predisposed to push similarities with mythic and ideal personages to the uttermost, and this would be especially the case if their characterizations were poetic rather than bald chronicle, for poetry in its very nature is archaic, appealing to the oldest emotional strata of the soul. This tendency would be all the stronger the loftier the theme, or the greater the men and deeds, and the more sacred and current the canon it describes. Thus it is the apexes of human life and achievement which more strongly tend to conform, when con- served in folk-lore or literature, to old models, and indeed to conserve and reincarnate the past. If real persons really do the selfsame things that mythic beings did, they do not thereby themselves become mythic. To take an extreme case, Max Muller tells us that the germinal phrase "Selene loves Endymion" means etymologically that the moon loves the setting sun, and that this phrase is the point of departure of all the love tales amplified in ancient lore concerning these two. But it is con- ceivable that a real woman bearing the first might love a man bearing the second name without either of them thereby paling into myth. Indeed , no one can avoid saying and doing things, perhaps every day, that mythic characters are supposed to have said and done; and eulogists and bi- ographers in primitive time, with their paucity of tropes and images, could hardly help using these in characterizations and descriptions.
There have been in modern times two chief groups of theories for
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the explanation of myth. The first is that it originated in descriptions of the phenomena of nature, as many of them certainly did. But much that is historic can also be told in terms of solar phenomena. The sun rises, sets, determines light and darkness, storm or clearness, shoots rays afar, fights with cloud monsters, presides over rain, snow, hail, lightning, summer's heat and winter's cold. Many of the most typical things in any human life can be told in such terms. Stimu- lated, perhaps, by Whately's "Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte" (1819), who tries to turn a point of Hume and other critics for evidence of the existence of Jesus and of miracles, Peres (1861) attempted to expose a grand erratum in his "The Non-Existence of Napoleon Proved," which is a clever and effective satire on the mythic solar theory, then in its heyday. He reminds us that the word Apollo means exterminator, and the prefex " ne " or " n " is intensive. Napo- leon was the scourge of Europe as the arrows of the angry Apollo were of the army of Agamemnon. Apollo, who all agree is a solar hero, kills by heat. The word "Bonaparte" of course means the good or light part of the day, as opposed to the mala part, which would be the night, so both names are solar. Apollo was born at Delos, an island in every way related to Greece much as Corsica was to France. Pausanias says the Egyptians worshipped Apollo. This is confirmed because their descend- ants thought Napoleon supernatural. His mother's name was Letitia, and Apollo's mother's was Leto, both meaning "joy." The modern Apollo's four brothers were the four seasons that reigned by grace of the sun. Napoleon had two wives, evidently the moon and the earth, and like his classical paradigm he had a son by only one of his wives. He was born March twentieth, as we should expect, the period of the vernal equinox. Napoleon is said to have ended the scourge of the French revolution, that darkest of hours, precisely as Hercules slew the hydra and Apollo the python, the very word "revolution" sug- gesting snaky coils. Napoleon had twelve marshals like the twelve signs of the zodiac, heads of the celestial host. His armies triumphed in the South but were defeated in the cold North. Napoleon rose in the East, i. e., was born in Corsica, achieved his fame in Egypt, and when his day was done, he set in the Western isle of Elba in the sea. His battles were those of the sun with clouds, etc.
The other method of myth interpretation, just now in vogue in certain quarters, has a well-developed set of symbols by which it can
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resolve about all the phenomena of life into sex. As in the day of the solar theory everything straight was a sunbeam, so now it is male, and as then everything curved was the disc of the sun or moon, now all but straight lines are female. By other symbols any series of events in any life can be resolved into sex phenomena. Even the death and Resurrection of Jesus, it has been thought, could be explained as an elaborated and highly sublimated sex story.
It is chiefly the later incidents in his career, or the Jesus who died and rose (which appears to be about all Paul knew that Jesus did), which fails to fit into Jensen's antique pattern. It might be urged, too, that Jesus first brought the answer to Gilgamesh's quest for immortal- ity, and so supplements and completes rather than parallels it. Ad- mitting, as we may, many, if not most, of the parallels between Jesus' life and Old Testament incidents, and possibly some slight homogeneity of plan between the early part of Jesus' career and that of his putative prototype, such parallels become fewer and less significant as the Gos- pel narrative proceeds, and its finale is most of all without antique analogy, so that nearly all of Jensen's suggestions appear to be a tissue of over-clever fancies. I doubt whether any poised lay mind, comparing his version of the Babylonian epic with the Gospels, would be convinced that there is a single point in which the influence of the ancient tale upon the Jesus-story has more than a faint degree of probability. As to Jesus' life as a whole, Jensen admits that many Gospel events fall in the hiatuses in his epic. In others the correlation is strained or requires variation or supplementation of what is actually recorded in one or the other story or often in both. Again, he has little to say about the relative importance of the different incidents, to which he gives no perspective, and some of these happenings are trivial in them- selves and others non-essential to the record (e. g., both went up a hill into a boat, into a city, met a woman, etc.). There are many essen- tials in the one narrative that are either barely touched upon or else entirely omitted in the other. With the same ingenuity a system of correspondence, we believe even more striking, could be made out between the careers of Jesus and Hercules, Apollo, Mithra, and perhaps even ^Eneas, King Arthur, and others. It has been said that clever apologists can reason anything into or out of the Bible, in which even contemporary inventions are said to have been foreshown. Mythology is still more slippery, and its method of treatment has often been still
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more fantastic. Here almost anything on Jensen's view can be or mean anything else. Jesus must be something less spectral than the ghost of a hero, himself only fabled, stalking through Galilee at a period midway between the day of Gilgamesh and our own.
Yet more fatal to his theory is Jensen's failure to account for the sayings of Jesus. These he leaves impersonal and anonymous. In the mouth of his heroes they would be utterly out of character and im- possible, nor do they belong to a being made so much in the image of Gilgamesh as is Jensen's Jesus. Thus the problem of how the sayings came to be ascribed to the Gospel- Jesus is both new and unsolvable, and if the historic Jesus did not utter them, then who did? Whoever did must have been a remarkable personage and what has become of him? If the words assigned to our Gospel- Jesus were not spoken by him because there never was such a person, and if they are not words direct from heaven, might or should we now go to work to attempt a psychological or other reconstruction with a view to discover, or invent if we cannot discover, another personage fitter to say such things, in order to fill the vast gap made by the mythification of the one who has been supposed to have uttered them? If so, how must our new author differ from the old? Or shall we rest in the agnostic posi- tion concerning him, which seems to content Jensen? Could art per- haps give us the Jesus that the sayings require? Have we here a new and vaster problem like the Baconian authorship of the plays we thought written by the deer-poaching bard of Avon? The Christian world has always been impressed by the great disparity between the different sayings of Jesus on different occasions, which are sometimes hard to reconcile. If, therefore, we have to find or make a new author of them, might we not do well to devise either a dual personality or a Dioscurian pair of Jesuses, so that the aggressive teachings of the New Testament could be assigned to the one and the more passive utter- ances to the other? One of these might be made fitter to worship in war and the other in peace. Joint authorship, which is often alterna- tive, would clear up some difficulties, and the redundant duplication of the second person of the Trinity would surely be better than to accept the vacancy Jensen would make in it.
Finally, even where myths cross geographic or even ethnic bound- aries, names are very prone to persist, and are often, indeed, the chief means of identification, but from this large field of the etymology of
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persons or places there is nothing in Jensen. Again, many of the sim- ilarities that Jensen stresses are sufficiently accounted for by the bottom identity of human nature, the basal theme of which we are all varia- tions. Here, too, once more, history and saga do not necessarily exclude each other. Again, although great dissimilarities between two series of events do not always exclude intimate relationships, they certainly must be accounted for. This Jensen not only fails to do but confessedly disregards diversities and focusses solely on similarities.1
Suppose our Jesus should be really dissolved into symbol or vol- atilized into myth. Is Christianity thereby bankrupt? Would the Rock of Ages crumble into sand and faith be proven a delusion? By no means. It would signify rather that the Church and religion with all their treasures had completed their second cycle and were entering upon a third higher dispensation. It would mean a new era such as La Garde exhorted the world to strive for, when the artist should come to his rights as against scholars, theologians, philosophers, and even scientists; an era in which we must sensualize the intellectual and spiritual rather than the converse, on which latter, especially since the Renaissance, man has been so intent. Instead of making our thought processes abstract we must make them imaginal, as they surely were during the long ages before logic caught the teemingly exuberant crea- tive imagination in its net and made it a tame, domestic beast of bur- den to fetch and carry at its behest.
All we know of psychogenesis impels us to believe that there was a time near the dawn of history when psychic activity was vastly more intense and thought more vivid; when the soul let itself go with aban- don and with no regard to the awful repressions imposed by the ideal of consistency; when each individual had as many minds as he had moods; when mentation partook of many of the same traits we now see in the psychology of mobs; when individuals habitually thought, felt, and acted in masses ; when imagination was the dominant function of the soul and was creating language, myth, religion, rites, mysteries,
iS. J. Case: "The Historicity of Jesus." 1912. 332 P- F. E. Conybeare: "The Historical Christ." 1914. 335 P- D. M. Kahler: "Gehort Jesus in das Evangelium." 1901, 38 p. J. Weiss: "Jesus von Nazareth, My thus oder Ge- schicbte." 1910, 171 p. O. Holtzmann: "Lhristus." 1907, 118 p. J. Weiss and Geo. Gutzmacher: "Die Geschicbt- lichkeit Jesu. ipio, 30 p. Best of all, although he has little to say specifically about Jesus, see, as the most general survey of the subject, Wendt's three volumes on Mythus und Religion in his " VOlkerpsychologie." Bd. 1, 1005, 617 p.; II, 1006, 481 p.; Ill, 1909, 793 p., particularly the last volume, p. 593 to the end. The keenest intellect in this gen* eral field, and perhaps the most original and productive, is J. G. Frazer, especially in the eleven volumes of "The Golden Bough," particularly the volumes entitled "The Dying God," "Taboo," "The Scapegoat." A. Dieterich: "Hat Jesus gelebt?" 1910, 93 p. H. Weinel: "1st das liberate Jesusbild wiederlegt?" 1910, in p. F. Steudel: "Ira Kampf um die Christusmythe." 1910,119 p. Zimmern; "Zum Streit um die Christusmythe." 1910. G. R. S. Mead :" Did Jesus Live 100 years b. c?" 1903, 440 p. See also H. G. Voigt: "Die Geschichte Jesu und die Astrologie." 1911, 22s P- H. Weinel: "Jesus im i9ten Jahrhundert." 1904, 315 p. A. JUlicher: "Hat Jesus gelebt?" 1910, 37 p.
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and the cardinal social institutions; when man was evolving tools and weapons, was just subduing or even exterminating the great carnivora that disputed his dominion of the globe, was fashioning tribal deities, and creating the whole transcendent world of souls, heavens, hells, and gods. Thought was in pictures ; metaphors were as real as things. History, however, when its age came later, made man self-conscious, and then culture, laws, morals, industrialism, oppressed his spirit and he became afraid chiefly of what was within himself, until now he is so domesticated by civilization that there remain only vestiges of his original creativeness, and the old, gamy flavour of the wild can hardly be detected in his life. No wonder, therefore, that man has long felt himself fallen from a higher estate. He has come naturally to feel his present life dull, colourless, drab, without great incentives to great deeds, without supreme hopes or mortal fears.
In religion especially, man has grown passive, almost to the point of masochism. Dogma fetters his mind, convention his heart and life, and if he is saved it is done for him by an alien, outside power. Prot- estantism has stripped religion of all its beauty, while Puritanism robbed it of its joy. In secular life we seek to forget it, while science, its own child, is estranged from if not actively hostile toward it. Its cheerfulness is chipper and falsetto. Its creeds are clung to by an arbitrary will to believe, with penalties for failure to do so, and religious feeling, if cultivated at all, is as an exotic if not as an artifact. God and another life are a far cry. The clergy are rhapsodists and sentimental- ists, or else sophists. They are never abreast of scholarship in their own field, and hence are timid and half-hearted in their faith, or else they preach with paralyzing reservations. Their education is handi- capped with more limitations and inferiorities than that which quali- fies for any other calling.
But now comes a new tocsin. Religion and all that it has and is, its God, Bible, churches, creeds, are not from without but from within. All its commands are the exhortations from out of the depths of the soul of the race to the individual to better himself and his estate. All its interdictions are man's own self-restriction which he has imposed upon his impulses. The deities he worships are his own creation, not he theirs. His soul in its positive creative era was more fecund and originative than he has ever dared to dream. It had a dynamic, magic power that it has quite forgotten. The inspiration of the situation
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that, if these things are true, now supervenes, is that if faith has lost its objects, it can re-create them by resuming again the lost power it once had. If it made a great synthesis at the dawn of our era and then translated it into a drama so matchless, so moving, and with such compelling verity, it can revive this energy and exercise it again. If indeed Christianity is the aesthetic masterpiece of the individual and collective soul working together for generations, we can realize that it was the glory of that age that it could make history out of myth rather than vice versa. We must turn about and do what that age of great artists did in the highest of all fields. Original spontaneity must come again in the world. The essence of religion is active and con- structive, and not merely receptive. Painting, sculpture, poetry, statuary, architecture, story, pageantry, drama, have all been inspired by the Christian story. But the fact that it itself is simply a product of the work of geniuses of a higher order is only now being grasped. How well these great creators and fashioners of yore did their work we see in the manifold secondary inspirations that have during all these centuries emanated from it. All that went before converged to a focus in it and all since has diverged from this same point. Now it needs a new infusion of blood from the forces of modern paganism and secular- ly just as the latter in olden times were made to contribute the best that was in them to the faith of the Church. A cross-fertilization between religious and lay life is the tonic that both now sorely need. Each will have to save the other if there be salvation for either. To this end we need new masters of appeal to the imagination. Religion ought to supply not only energy, but inspiration and even pageantry, to social, civic, political, industrial reforms. It should teach us how to invest peace with some of the fascinating glories of war, and make great causes and movements for race betterment militant; give them slogans, ideals, escutcheons, music, processions, enthusiasms, and infect them with esprit de corps and ambitions to win the admiration of the world. It should consolidate all the powers that make for righteousness which in our communities are now too often detached from religion and from each other. Its rhythm should throb through them all, and the ideal of the superman should be definitized and made real again as the patron and inspirer of all. The ideal languishes if it is not fitly tenanted in forms of art, and the art of all arts is the apotheo- sis of true human nature; for this art really dominates ethics, education,
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hygiene, science itself, and indeed every form of culture and every type of service.
In the golden natal age of Christianity, Jews, Greeks, barbarians, and those of the most diverse ethnic stocks fell into cadenced step, and not only every nation but every cult — Mithra, Attis, Dionysus, and the rest — contributed their own partial components to a complex of sym- bols solemnly set forth in more and more impressive forms, celebrating the supreme themes of life, death, and revival. When nations fell, Christianity remained the tie that bound the most heterogeneous elements together. Our age supremely needs a new and revised version of the meaning of life, service, and death as a bond of solidarity, also to cadence the soul of man anew in its march onward to a new kingdom of man. We need a re-statement of the doctrine of human nature, destiny, good and evil, pleasure and pain; a new touch with the heart of the cosmos; a new loyalty to it; a transvaluation of worths, with a truer perspective. We need to feel again the sympathy of all religions with each other as well as with every form of culture. We need a re- vised Bible or Classic of classics, containing the best that the Divine has ever said to man or done through him, a grand synthesis of the countless, morselized spontaneities that have lost sight of each other; not only a science of sciences, as philosophy once aspired to be; not merely a synthesis of departments such as a university and academy have sought to be; not merely an association of all charities and cor- rections, or a clearing-house of civic, political, social reform, or bureaus of industry — yet all these may hearten us as steps toward the new age.
But to expect any such unity as the Church once aspired to, despite the many trends in this direction, is vain and can never occur again. The highest unity man can ever evolve, the most perfect synthesis of all the diverse elements of culture, always has and always will have to be the concept of a type personality, rightly oriented in all these fields, which, whether consciously or unconsciously, profoundly concerns and touches every life. Our superman must be eugenic, euthenic, an ideal socius, wise, free, intuitive, responding aright not only to all the emergencies of life, but to those experiences that are common to all. In a word, he illustrates how the genus homo enters life, learns, grows, acts, strives, feels, thinks, meets joy and sorrow and even death ideally; and his story will also show us how Mansoul would respond to the spectacle of such a life. Art, fiction, poetry, drama, edu-
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cation, morals, politics, social organizations, and every department of human culture and industry should idealize its processes and its prod- ucts. As ancient life had its deities and muses, and its games and fes- tivals were always forms of service to some god; as the Middle Ages had their patron saint for every age, each sex, each great crisis or typ- ical event in life, which presided over it, to which appeal could be made and from which help could be expected, so every step now toward idealizing each situation and vocation is a step toward the slow redin- tegration and regeneration of religion. The genus of which all these ideals are the species will be the Christ of the new age. How much this new incarnation of the human spirit will differ from the old we can only conjecture. Even if the forms of the symbols change, the funda- mental meaning can never be very different. That the true overman will be much on the same general pattern as the old is as certain as that the human soul is fundamentally the same in all times and places. It is certain, too, that such a reborn and regenerated God-man must be one personality and not, like Brahma, Zeus, Thor, etc., metamorphosed into different forms, each expressive of a different attribute. He must be at the same time more unified and more polymorphic in character, with a wide range of moods from sad to joyous, from tenderness and fear to anger. He must be active and passive, each to a high degree, and his soul will have to be a battle-ground between light and darkness, good and evil, with the former always triumphant. This will make him seem to be invested with the maximal degree of reality. He will appear more human than any individual man has ever yet been. He will be at all times intensely conscious, but for the most part will live by spontaneous unconscious impulsions which will seem like a higher, alien and parental power; and so, because each essential trait of man in him may break forth in turn with abandon in his life-history, he will seem generally half possessed or ecstatic, and to future generations he will come to seem a baffling paradox until it is understood that per- sonality means a synthesis of elements too manifold and diverse ever to be completely harmonized.
Thus, just as in the first chapter we suggested to the artist, in the absence of authentic portraits of Jesus, certain ideals that should al- ways be normative in the portrayal of his physical personality, so we can now suggest to the future Christologist certain specifications which in the growing uncertainty of Jesus' historic reality should characterize
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the inevitable reconstructions of the psyche of the totemic overman as follows:
(1) He must live from within outward, by autistic impulsion. He must express the species more than the individual, the generic or typical rather than the specific, and stand for the eternal nature of man. As Helmholtz was the first to show that we thrill most before a work of art that reveals the least trace of conscious purpose, which springs irresistibly from the subconscious depths of the soul, and thus makes us realize that basal humanity is sound to the core, so the new-old Jesus should represent the impulsion of the race that still drives us onward and upward by the same everlasting nisus that has made man out of the troglodyte or even the amphioxus.
(2) His life-history should typify at every essential point the eternal moral struggle in the soul between the excelsior motivations and the baser animal propensities that tend to arrest and regression, and should show forth representative phases of the conflicts of altruism with egoism. To make this completely objective the power of evil should also be personified, for without devils as their counterfoil the moral deities tend to fade. This antithesis is best described in the literature of the preceding chapter (2).
(3) Such a personality must be complex and composite to a degree which our present narrow conceptions of selfhood as a finished unity can never grasp. Every ego is a congeries or at best a symbiosis of many subordinate egoes, a system in which the constitutive elements always tend to break from their orbit, or a republic or monarchy in which the units ever tend to revolt and set up for themselves, as is illustrated all the way from henotheism to multiple personality. In an ideal person, however, this is at once with utter abandon to the exigencies of the present situation, mood, or idea, and also with a healthful power of ambivalent rebound or compensative response to the opposite incitement. Thus only are the inhibitions that repress our lives escaped. The heart and the unconscious are beyond logical consistency. Thus there must be extremes of pleasure alternating with those of pain, with immunity from the danger of being perma- nently dominated by either. There are boundless aggressiveness and self-assertion, as if the momentum of all creative evolution were behind and giving authority to acts and words; but this must freely alternate with a humility and utter passivity, no less unreserved, which may
24o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
take the form of a sense of inferiority, incompleteness, and limitation, and which make for docility and resignation to fate or the will of the universe. Thus there must be a unity of das ewige Mannliche and das ewige Weibliche, both a consenting unto death and a regal affirma- tion of the will to live. Such a unipersonal synthesis of opposites gives assurance that there is in us the power of resiliency from depression, of atonement or regeneration from every psychic trauma.
(4) Such a life must explore and illustrate in all directions the higher powers of man. It must always be and seem more or less im- passioned, erethic, inspired, and more intense, vital, potentialized, than ordinary levels of humanity know. Every appeal of the here and now incites the maximal response. Every occasion is met and its possibilities exhausted. Every object and event is sublimated to its highest symbolic meaning and stands forth, while the commonest things are interpreted on the highest plane and are made into parable or symbol of something behind and above, unseen save by the eye il- luminated by the spirit. Every typical experience is treated as if it were oracular and had a muse presiding over it. This means vision, a touch, but not too much, of ecstasy, a tiptoe attitude of expectation and growing hope which, though profiting by the past, is yet more intent upon a far vaster future. It means also hypnotic sensibility balanced with ineluctable certainty of conviction or a compulsion by dictates from within.
(5) A Jesus evolved by the artistic projection of the religious soul of man would be perennially in his prime. The mature world cares less for childhood or senescence than it does for human nature in the acme of its power, when the burden and the mystery of the great antos have been profoundly felt, and the age for grappling with its problems with plenitude of manly energy has fully come, before there is any trace of waning. There must be a balancing and overlapping of the best enthusiasms, intuitions, and energies of youth with the highest wis- dom of age, a unique fusion of adolescence and senescence. This is the glory of man's estate and the apex of the trajectory we call life, where past and future most typically celebrate their union.
(6) Such a life must realize as far as possible all ideals, so that in accepting it the wishes of man's childhood will be realized. The old formula for this is the union of the divine and human. When we say the transcendent became immanent we mean that old dreams of what
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occurred in the remote past or in the childhood of myth, which are its day-dreams, must and do come true in the palpitating here and now. It is an epoch to feel that what was thought above is in fact within us. As departure from the devoir present is often the chief characteristic of psychoneurosis, so the intensification of concentration on the present is the highest sanity. The resumption of gods back into the soul of man from which they, their cults and Bibles, sprang, and from which they have been alienated, is the central psychological fact of which all tales and doctrines of incarnation are only symbols, and of which the philosophy of idealism, which teaches the subjectivization of the objec- tive, and which has commonly but wrongly been thought since Berkeley to apply primarily to the outer physical world, is really valid. It is only in the realm of religion that we can truly say of all its objects that their esse est per dpi. But it is precisely this that the doctrine that the divine took the form of flesh and became man really means. If incarnation is not a kenosis, its work of resumption is unfinished; man- kind still lacks its goru, totem, or supreme culture-hero. In that case the Christology of the theanthropic soul is not yet fully understood, and the new Jesus is not yet accomplishing his saving work.
Ritschl proposed and Sabatier adopted the term "symbo-feidism," urging that all religious doctrines were figurative. RitschPs pupils, Kaftan and Hermann, went much further and almost reduced the- ology to epistemology, and thought that even science could not give us the highest knowledge. The latter is really and only moral, and is thus above history, being more true and real than any factual happen- ings. Thus here we must always distinguish form and content, nom- ina from noumena, the cosmic from the moral order. Piety, they said, is the cult of what ought to be. Wellshausen thought the first sin was forbidden knowledge or rather desiring a kind of knowledge that could subsist without doing. Hoffding conceives religion as concerned with the conservation of values, as science is a study of conservation of energies. For him we can never truly know these two "inseities" but must always feel them or else suffer "athumia." The fall was not an allegory but a working substitute for history, etc.
Whence comes this strange "feidism" to symbols, despite the fact that they are felt to be somewhat nominalistic and phenomenal (as, e. g., the Trinity and Incarnation), and in fact are so to the ex- tent that man may be religious without holding to them in any pre-
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scribed form? The answer to this question will be found in the further correlation of the results of archaeological excavations and critical and antiquarian research that have restored so much that had escaped his- tory with the psychic excavations that are now revealing the unconscious subsoil of the human soul. J. C. Todd, in " Politics and Religion of Ancient Israel" (1904), says suppose that by, e. g., 5000 a. d., all the literature and history of England were lost, and its very existence known only by Scottish allusions, the latter country being known. Suddenly England is unearthed and its literature restored. There would be parties, new insights, and a vast and larger perspective. Substitute now our Bible for Scotland and Assyria for England, and we have the rival claims of Bible and Babel, to use Delitzsch's catchy phrase. So, too, Sayce, e. g., in both his Gifford and Hibbert Lectures, shows in the same way that both Judaism and Christianity rest upon a vaster and older Egyptian background (first outlined by Maspero). He urges that centuries before Abraham both Assyria and Egypt were full of scribes, libraries, and teachers, and even calls the age of Abra- ham "almost as literary an age as our own." J. C. Oman ("Mystics, Ascetics and Saints of India," 1903) shows the prevalence and inten- sity of religious cults, asceticism, penance, the earliest and most uni- versal expression of true ethical religion, in India and Aryan lands. He tells us of gods who practised self-torture to exalt themselves, and how by self-immolation a man may rise to deity; of devotees who cut off, cook, and eat their own flesh in a frenzy inspired by the passion for greater purity. Thus, indeed, man may rise even above the gods, despite their jealousy.
Now psychogenesis postulates that as Scotland in Todd's simile above would be related to and explained by the rediscovery of lost England, so ancient Assyria, Egypt, and India, are related to the im- measurable prehistoric period that has lately been revealed to scholars. That is, back of these new vistas into antiquity we glimpse a far greater age almost as unknown to scholarship to-day as the days that preceded classical and biblical antiquity were a century ago. It is here that the keys of their cults are found. The records of this vast submerged probationary age of man are not material, save the lithic and skeletal remains, but psychoneural. They are found in interests, Einstellungen, attitudes, and affectivities which became objectified in myths, rites, and customs that were old when Nineveh and Memphis were fishing
JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 243
villages. They survive in us as ethnic determining tendencies that compel Stelhingsnahmen and make indifference to everything in this field impossible. It is vestiges of these sunken ages in us that still keep alive preposterous myths as if they were precious and veritable history. Some of them are old as the Glacial Age, are psychic petri- factions that go back to our forbears in the cave and perhaps the trees. No doubt woofs of fact were woven into the warp of fancy, but in the main only those factors of this submerged age were conserved that were so assimilated that they became integral parts of our own subjectivity. They were registered in the memory organs of our neu- rons as feeling patterns, emotional proclivities to belief, conduct norms and impulsions which predetermine association, facilitate the directions of attention, and predetermine even the interpretation of sensation. In evaluating these psychic antiquities from the hoary days of eld when they were being slowly laid down, stratum upon stratum, all the way from the time when our ancestors left brutehood and became man down to the first faint dawn of history, we must have a new criterion of what historicity is and means. The realest things in experience are those that are so vital that they are indelibly recorded in our psycho- physic organism, so assimilated that they are transmitted by heredity independently of any form of inculcation, so that they are in no sense carried by the ego but become part of its own spontaneity.
Next come those psychic inclinations which are in the form of Anlagen, which need some outer incitement to evoke their proper response. Primal myths are such reminders or stimuli, which make the soul remember its past, not so much in the form of events as by way of recapitulation of its general lessons, so that when rightly interpreted and understood myth may be truer than history. The same principle of course holds with religious rites, customs, litanies, and even dogma. These are truer than history if they really set forth what man ought to do, feel, and know.
But the power of responsive Einjiihlung may be inadequate or per- verted, and this is especially the case in the moral sphere. Through all these silent ages men have chiefly striven for purification. It is on this theme that rites and traditions most abound, and to their incite- ments man has most lost the power to react aright. From these long, dark days of psychogenesis man has therefore inherited a fateful pro- pensity to react more intensively and surely to the incitements of sin,
244 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
for these have often proven themselves stronger in their power to evoke response than have incitements to righteousness. To use a medical simile, man's organism has lost the power to generate the anti-bodies that give him immunity to the infection of evil, so that as, e. g., we have to have recourse to the horse to produce an anti-diphtheritic serum, so we have to seek immunity from sin by appealing to an alien and vicarious source outside our own personality. Following another medical metaphor, religion comes to man like hormones (Biedl, Sajous, S. Vincent, etc.), which have two functions, augmentory and inhibitory. The agent that stimulates good and checks bad tenden- cies in us lacks strength to perform its full function, as inner secretions are often deficient in quality or quantity. But to push further this crude figure, these agents can only be developed in the blood of the theanthropos and thence transfused into our own veins. As both these processes, viz., the pathogenic organisms that stimulate the formation of anti-bodies, and the exciting and depressing agency of hormones, are in the domain of physiological chemistry, and act independently of the nervous system, so man's moral therapy was supposed to be ac- complished, in RitschPs phrase, thymically, that is, the saving feidism might act autistically.
Thus Jesus incorporates all the good tendencies in man. He is the embodiment of all his resistances to evil through the ages. In the contemplation of his character, achievements, and teachings man re- members his better, unfallen self, and by seeing the true ideal of his race incarnated even the most formal recognition of this enfleshed ideal does something to evoke power to resist evil within and without and gives some incentive to reapproximate his unfallen self, and indeed may start subliminal agencies that will issue in a regenerate life, bring a new sense of duty, a new passion for service, and give man a new self -rever- ence, self-knowledge, and self-control. All these things together consti- tute the true psychological essence of Christianity. Here lie its depth, mystery, and wonder. If pragmatic is higher than either historic or theoretic certainty and reality, we have here the very truth of truth. There are incitations within us, as deep as the taxies and tropisms, which give us psychic orientation to Jesus, and even if his historical existence were disproven, we should have to postulate some such per- sonality at about this time, place, and circumstance. Thus, if even the Church should ever have to dispense with the historicity of its founder,
JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 245
which neither now is nor seems likely to be the case, it would make far less difference than either orthodoxy or those who deny him suppose. Why, indeed, should it make any more practical difference than it does to physics and chemistry whether atoms and ions are material bodies or immaterial centres of energy, or than it makes to the Swiss peasant whether William Tell was a person or a solar myth?1
'See E. Brenner: "Das Symbolische in der religiosen Erkenntnistheorie." 1914, 136 p. See, too, J. M. Tyler: "The Place of the Church in Evolution." 1914, 200 p. Also E. Troltsch: "Die Zukunftsmtfglichkeiten des Christen- turns." Logos, Bd. I, Heft 2, 1910, p. 165 et seq. The latter would reconstruct Christianity and unify all its branches, with (a) a great personality at the centre as against pantheism; (b) his teaching must harmonize with literature and culture, with a new synthesis representing every type of humanism in the large new sense of the movement that the journal Logos represents; (c) his teachings must square with science; and (d) must rally devotees of culture everywhere about an idealized development of the Hebrew Christian religion into its full flower. This new movement would be "a cult of the logos or personal reason concerning the cosmos," and the author invites all to unite and thinks the core of truth will be the postulates of Kant's pragmatic reason. MSrejkowsky, "Christ and Antichrist, a trilogy" (1907), thinks that the religion of the future will be a synthesis of Christianity with all faiths that preceded it from fetishism up. As now understood, Christianity is Buddhistic and tends to detach man from earth. Its God is not power, but love, and its devotees desire not freedom, but slavery. This interpretation of it, however, is an anachronism. The world has moved in the exact opposite direction and has become positivistic, material, and essentially irreligious, and under this influence society in Europe and America is fast becoming Mongolized, that is, for it there are no gods, higher powers than man, or future. Science, however, has meanwhile created an atmosphere and built a foundation for a great new dis- pensation of the religious sentiment, and when this comes it will be neither treasonable to earth nor forgetful of heaven. Our present divinization of the individual would give way to that of society. The true Church universal is humanity, and great ideas and inspiring ideals must replace sordid, mean, selfish interests. Cf . also Renan's ideas of a third dis- pensation to us, of the Spirit. Also Ibsen's third Kingdom in the dramas described in Chapter II.
"Die Zeitschrift fur Religionspsychologie," a monthly journal founded in 1907, edited by Dr. J. Bresler and W. G. Vorbrodt, sought to combine psychiatry and theology, and has published many articles, especially on pathological as- pects of religion, treating such subjects as psychology of occultism, sanctification, the relations between sin and disease, the sexual element in religion, psychology of guilt, conversion, doubt, transfiguration, the sense of reality, and the belief in the transcendental, possession, religion of criminals, etc. See also P. Kneib: "Moderne Leben-Jesu-Forschung unter dem Einflusse der Psychiatrie," Mainz, 1908. Also "Jesus Christus vom Standpunkte des Psychiaters," Hamburg, 1905; E. Horneneffer: "Religion und Deutschtum," 1009; "Siegfried oder Christus," Anon, 1910; J. Naumann: "Die verschiedenen Auffassungen Jesu in der evangelischen Kirche"; P. Pfluger: "Die Religion der Modernen"; F. Martius: " Eros und Christus," Leipzig, 1907; T. Kappstein; " Psychologie der Frommigkeit," 1908, 242 p.; G. Tyrrell: " Between Scylla and Charybdis, or the old and the new theology," 1909; E. Wacker: " Wiedergeburt und Bekehrung in ihrem gegen- seitigen VerhaltnisnachderheiligenSchrift"; G. Runze: "Religion und Geschlectsuebe"; G. Lomer: "Krankes Christen- tum," 1911, 109 p.; A. Lehmann: "Aberglaube und Zauberei," 1910; F. Moerchen: "Die Psychologie der Heiligkeit"; J. Bresler: "Religionshygiene"; T. Flournoy: "Le genie religieux," 1910; M. Guhlke: "Religion und Volksseele"; T. Achels: "Die Ekstasie."
My own Am. Journal of Religious Psychology founded in 1904, while it has reviewed or at least noticed most of the current literature on the subject, has dealt but little with pathological phenomena within the pale of Christianity.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NATIVITY
Discrepancies in the accounts of the annunciation — Virgin births among the pagans and their meaning — The phallic background — How low-born children come to think themselves of superior parentage — Relations between the Immaculate Conception and the doctrine of the Resurrection — Psychoanalysis of the belief in the divine parenthood — The psychogenesis of the belief in the transcendental or another higher world of which faith was the organ — The cause and effect of dual con- sciousness here — The psychology of pregnancy — Jesus as a first child, as a mother's child — The charges of illegitimacy — The virgin birth not a fact but a precious symbol.
IN ITS final canonical form the Gospel story opens with a marvel- lous revival of procreative energy in senescence. Like the Baptist, Isaac, Joseph, Samson, Samuel, and other Old Testament heroes had been born of one or both superannuated or else barren parents, whose reproductive energy seemed to be miraculously restored. Here Gabriel appears amidst the incense of the altar to an aged priest who is made aphasic before the people as a sign that his venerable and sterile wife shall bear a wondrous son. Nowhere was the passion for children, which Ploss1 has shown to be so strong and universal among lower races, more intense than among the ancient Hebrews. So here as in- credulity yielded to certainty there was joy in the souls of this decrepit pair. Deities participate in many ways and degrees in the parenthood of great men, as Rank2 has shown. John is only the herald, so that as a supernal reinforcement is given to his parents equal to the best in the Old Testament dispensation, it is already apparent that Jesus must be given a yet better one. Not to restore gerontic energy but to exercise this himself would be Yahveh's next step. There is a moving verisim- ilitude about the narrative of Luke, the physician-evangelist. Not only does modern psychoanalysis afford unnumbered cases of sex potency
>"Das Kind." 3d ed., Leipsic, igu. Bd. 1, S. 1-24.
»"Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden." Leipsic, 1009, 93 p. English translation by F. Robbins and S. E. Jelliffe, New York, 1914. This is here traced in some detail in eleven cases.
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lost and won at all ages by suggestion (religious impressions being most effective among believers), but the literature concerning senescence shows often an " Indian summer " of restoration of this function. The curve of decline, too, is normally broken by repeated rises and falls before extinction is final. From the call of Abraham on, Yahveh often appears in a eugenic role if not as a master stirpiculturist, and he exercises a unique control in this domain over his favourites. More- over, as has often been conjectured from Nietzsche to Metchnikoff, possibly the complete or ideal overman will, like animals, be generative until he dies, and senescence, the dark counterpart of adolescence, will be done away. Now, however, the partial paralysis (here dumbness) such as may befall other functions in cases of the recrudescence of sex activity in the old, precedes instead of follows it. Zacharias' speech- lessness, however, was only functional and temporary for this power was restored at the naming of the child. Perhaps the obnubilation of the linguistic faculty was symbolic or a counterpart of the hyperfunc- tion of his son's future work of proclamation, as if more of this power than of others in the parent went over to the child. We are distinctly told, however, that there was no asemia. All we know of John, too, is true to the law that precocity is often a characteristic trait of those born of post-mature parents. Though but six months older than Jesus, he preceded him by a much longer period in his ministry. Again, age of parents and precocity tend to monoideism and perfervid dogmatic and perhaps narrow affirmations. Third, this power is subject to early decay and although John heralded a new era, he realized before Jesus came on the scene that he could not effect its consummation, so that we have clear notes not only of subordination but of waning power and of anxiety lest his pioneering was to be left without an adequate sequel. Fourth, he was stern, uncompromising, and incapable of wielding the method of love, as Jesus could with his far greater strength of sentiment, which is characteristic of children of younger parents.
Thus the third synoptist makes here a real contribution, not only well befitting his theme but peculiarly consonant with the best ideas of his age and race. In this domain he may have known some of those rare facts such as often suggest still rarer and choicer fictions. Thus at the outset we must understand that there is a sense in which real art is always truer than history. We have here a worthy proem to the world's grandest epos. We see how always and especially in this
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circle and in these days of fervid Messianic hope, parents yearned often unutterably for offspring, and how religious ecstasy may unseal the closed springs of life. A child thus conceived was from the Lord and of course must be a prophet. If the angel was a vision, the question whether the account is all fact or fiction, natural or supernatural, is therefore in each item only one of degree.
Six months later the same angel appeared to the betrothed Virgin Mary, announcing that the Holy Spirit should come over her, that she should bear a son to be called the Son of God, calming her fear and felicitating her upon what Jesus was to be and do. Thereafter she was found with child. Joseph, finding her condition, was minded to put her away privately, but obeyed a dream-angel who commanded him to take her to wife and told him that the child was conceived of the Holy Ghost and would be Jesus, man's saviour from sins. He obeyed, but "knew her not." Even if the angelic visit was not a veiled ac- count of the conception itself, as the Church and art have always as- sumed it to be, but only preparatory to it, this by no means opens the way to such baseless conceptions as that of Storfer1 that Mary was or became a temple hetera or vestal, and was rescued by Joseph; for there is no scintilla of evidence that there was any such custom then and there. Nor is it meant to be a record of true parthenogenesis. The unequivocal meaning is that Yahveh himself for this one time became a father by an earthly bride, chosen out from among all women, as he had chosen the Hebrews from all races. As his only love she was the unique point of contact between heaven and earth; she was not only the crown of womanhood but the most sacrosanct of all human beings, the supreme embodiment of "das ewige Weibliche," combining like no other all the charms of virginity and maternity. Thus it was not strange that belief in the divine paternity of Jesus was generally cur- rent in the Church of Ignatius early in the second century down. Tra- dition, independent of Scripture, and more paramount over it in au- thority the farther back we go, soon came to regard it as a miracle in some sense complementing the Resurrection. It appeared in the bap- tismal formula from which the first creed developed. Apocryphal literature amplified it, and even ascribed to Mary herself a super- natural birth. Duns Scotus affirmed that she must have been es- pecially sanctified in the womb, and finally in 1854 Pope Pius IX
'"Marias jungfrauliche Mutterschafi.'' Berlin, 1914, 304 p.
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promulgated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary her- self, all this by a not only natural but inevitable psychogenetic se- quence. Thus the Holy Mother, although she bore children later to her human husband, was made semi-divine, and so Jesus' humanity was reduced from one half to one fourth.
Although we know nothing of Mary's line of descent, we are strangely given two pedigrees of Joseph, one ascendent and one descendent, in order to show that through him Jesus was a true son of David, as prophecy had declared the Messiah must be. Matthew gives three symmetrical series of fourteen generations each, back to Abraham. This was meant primarily for Jewish Christians. Luke's genealogy of Joseph contains five times fourteen plus seven generations and goes back to Adam, the "Son of God," the father of all men, and was calculated to appeal to gentiles. It agrees with Matthew in fifteen names, but departs from him in forty. The one register has fourteen generations more between Jesus and David than the other. The compiler of both these lists of forbears obviously held that Jesus was the son of Joseph. In both there are but few generations back to Adam the fiat son of God by creation, and the prototype of Jesus, God's Son by generation. The inclusion of these tables in the two Gospels that also record Jesus' divine paternity suggests that they took shape at a time when both the natural and the supernatural views of Jesus' origin were permissible.
Pagan legends more than Jewish abound in virgin births to divine fathers. Queen Maya, the mother of Buddha, was impregnated in a dream. Protagoras and Plato, and later Scipio and Augustus, were sons of Apollo, and Alexander the Great of Zeus. All the kings of Egypt, to the last of the Ptolemies, were divine incarnations, with at least one celestial parent, and throughout antiquity and among all primitive people legends of demigods abound.1 The folk-soul is always and everywhere disposed to ascribe supernatural parenthood to great men. Especially in pre-cultural times eminence was more readily conceived as born rather than made. Some great deities, like Demeter, bore not only children but grain, trees, and fruit. Fertilization may be caused by the sun or wind, by eating various things, by shadow, a
lSe« among the copious literature on this subject Pfleiderer: "Early Christian Conception of Jesus." London, 1905, p. 1-48. Also his fuller " Urchristentum, seine Schriften und Lehrer." 1902, ad ed. Also translated into English, London, 1006-11, by W. Montgomery. Also J. M. Robertson: " Christianity and Mythology," 1010, especially p. 393 el seq.
25© JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
breath or a wish, by standing on a holy spot, etc. Fatherlessness is sometimes suggestive of matriarchal ideas, a form of primitive fem- inism. Often, too, the father alone brought forth motherless Wunder- kinder. Of old it was not known that geniuses are nearly as liable to be born as sports in one stratum of society as in another. Thus the doctrine of Jesus' divine fatherhood was far more prepared for and more readily received among the gentiles than among the Jews. Luke's story is the most simple and chastened as well as the most clearly motivated, perhaps, of all the mass of mythological material upon this theme, and hence has most verisimilitude. Thus it is easier to accept his highly typified rendering of this theme than any other, and this itself means much.
Here it must be premised that the psychology of Jesus is not chiefly concerned with questions of historicity. Its prime problem is how man came to believe the things of Christianity. If we grant that all the facts occurred literally as reported, the problem of psychology is to explain why man accepted and clung so tenaciously to them, surds, though they seemed. If they did not occur, our problem is onlyfnow man came to invent as well as develop the will to believe and so fondly cherish them. In the latter case the psychic motiva- tion is the same as in the former, only stronger. No student of religion to-day would reject all not proven to be fact as worthless or as eo ipso of inferior value to history, as Strauss and his followers did before genetic and analytic psychology and the work and ways of the folk- soul were known. There is a sense in which, just as art improves on and brings out the inner meaning of nature and life, and is thus truer than they, so religion transfigures events by showing forth their moral soul. The effort to show this forth should therefore appeal to those of all creeds as well as of none. It is a characteristic of religious hap- penings that they have a higher symbolic value above and beyond the historic actuality with which criticism and diplomatology deal. It is therefore no sophistication of mysteries to say that there are many things so eternally true that sometimes the question whether they did occur here or there is a matter of relative indifference. This must constantly be borne in mind, in considering the entire story of Jesus from the psychological point of view, and thus its psychology is at all points constructive and not destructive.
If the annunciation was not a veiled account of the conception
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itself but only predictive of it, then the latter must have been a spir- itual and not a spermatic quickening of the ovum, and the act of fertili- zation was not by the ordinary channels. Thus its biological signifi- cance is lost and its historic value impaired. In the closest of all pagan parallels, the Mithraic ritual on the walls of the Temple of Luxor, the Isis-headed Toth, logos and messenger of the gods, first announces to the maiden queen, Mautmes, that she will bear a son. In the next scene the holy spirit or the Egyptian paraclete, Knopf, holds to her mouth the crux ansata, symbol of life, and thus she is spiritually impregnated by the god Amun-ra; then come the birth, the adoration, etc. On this view the actual infare or epithalamium in Mary's case is left to the imagination, perhaps as too secretly sacred for record, so that we have here a hiatus. To ask, as some have done, whether there were really spermatozoa, is idle as a medical (important though it be as a theolog- ical) question, for otherwise the divine paternity remains more or less symbolic with some impairment of the whole process of incarnation.
Back of and reinforcing all such cases of the mating of divine and human beings lies a deep and rank phallic stratum, bottoming on cosmogonies wherein Mother Earth or the primal abyss is impreg- nated by rain, lightning, wind, or heaven itself personified, for celestial powers are masculine. Unions of above and below often typify those of the transcendent and immanent, and sometimes later of the conscious and the unconscious or the soul of the race and the individual, all of which unions are often typified by conjugation. There was a time when sex fashioned the apperceptive organs for most of the phenomena of nature and when ritual copulation between pairs, one of which represented a high and the other a lower power,was thought to quicken all the fertilizing and germinant energies of nature and to be true sympathetic magic. Thus gods came to earth and left seed with the daughters of men, and rain, clouds, and wind had special inseminating efficiency. That psychic vestiges of this long but slowly suppressed cult and type of folk-thought persisted as unconscious attitudes and predispositions to believe the chastened story of Jesus' origin, no psy- chogeneticist or analyst can doubt, or that the often otherwise un- accountable rancour of modern skepticism against the "conceived by the Holy Ghost" phrase of the creed is reinforced by the momentum of efforts of ages to repress phallicism.
Children and pubescents very often, especially if they are of
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humble parentage and feel themselves gifted, wonder whether, with their amazing uprush of youthful insights and aspirations, they can really be the offspring of their prosaic parents. They at least daydream that they are supposititious and perhaps of Toyal descent. Sometimes this propensity prompts aversion to the real parents, and such children may leave home in quest of surroundings more befitting what they have conceived for themselves, or to find the social milieu to which their lineage entitles them. On this topic we have quite a literature of both morbid and normal cases. When Jesus, at the age of twelve, eluded his parents and was found by them in the temple, and reproached his mother for not wotting that he must be about his Father's business, he could not have meant carpentering. This response was tantamount to a disavowal of Joseph's parenthood. From a consciousness of his precocious insight into Scripture and the elation that would come from his discussion with the scholars of the temple he was already on the way to a sense of divine sonship. That this was not complete is indi- cated by the eighteen further years of subjection and obscurity. Nowhere, however, in all his ministry is there any scintilla of anything that indicates filial respect to Joseph such as the Jews insisted on to parents. From this the inference is clear to the psychologist that early in life Jesus was averse to his putative father, not because of any en- vious Freudian wish to take his place in the mother's affection, but because he felt the characteristic sense, so common in ephebes, of being superior to at least one parent. He already felt himself to have been sired by a more exalted personage. Reveries of this kind and the reflections which they also cause concerning mothers have in many a modern instance motivated coolness to and aloofness from them, such as Jesus repeatedly is said to have given signs of. The point here is that such an experience in his own soul may have contributed thus early one factor to the complex that had already begun its evolu- tion in his consciousness and that developed decades later among the early Christians, that no less than God himself was his father. Thus as a child he practically disowned Joseph. If the latter was not a myth, as many scholars now think (so numerous are the pagan par- allels to his function here), and if he was really an old man, as tradition makes him, stern and unsympathetic with Jesus' youthful aspirations, the latter's conviction that he was really apart from and above the other members of his family may have thus early begun to pervade
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Jesus' thought and conduct, and also to work suggestively in the minds of those who knew what was going on in his soul. This trend in the most intimate circle of the youthful Jesus helped to prepare the soil of tradition for the later full acceptance of the doctrine of complete son- ship to God. Certainly Joseph nowhere appears as the father such a child should have.
During his public ministry Jesus seems, as we shall later see, to have gradually attained an ineluctable conviction that he was the only begotten of God. He showed elation when Peter declared him to be the Son of the living God, told his disciples that he was from above and they from beneath, that he came from and would return to his heavenly Father. His supreme achievement of rising from the dead, which years before any of the Gospels were written Paul made the chief thing he did, and the centre of all his own preaching, was what chiefly documented him as infallibly the true Son of the true God. At first he was thought to have achieved sonship or to have been raised to it by adoption or possibly, a's among some of the heretical sects, by apotheosis. Another later more Alexandrian doctrine was that he preexisted as Logos with God from the beginning. These two views were, however, very happily combined in the Lucan conception of a literal, physical generation. This later view, therefore, sought to rec- oncile the other two. Hence the doctrine of Jesus' supernatural con- ception met a very urgent doctrinal need, for something like it in the decades immediately following Jesus' death became a logical necessity. It gave a completeness to the whole theory of Jesus' nature and work which it would otherwise have lacked. It did not merely supplement reasoned thought like Plato's myths, but was in some sense the com- bining capstone of the theanthropic system. It materialized not merely a metaphor but an idea, and extended the divine strain of heredity back from Jesus' later public years to the very beginning or the amphimixis stage of his life, thereby also incidentally fertilizing the imagination of those within the pale of its influence to seek to fill out the entire unknown period of his career, particularly his infancy and childhood, with very many apocryphal fabrications which, had he been thought to have achieved sonship only in his later years, would have remained as unknown and uninteresting as they had been before this belief prevailed.
Besides the exigencies of theory, Jesusism began with a belief
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in the death and Resurrection, the punctum saliens of all. Paul taught and seems to have known almost nothing of Jesus save that he died and rose, and has very little to say of his life or even his teach- ings. The conviction that he died as a propitiation for sin and rose and ascended, if it did not originate, chiefly promoted the interest in, his previous life and motivated the composition of the first three Gos- pels. AJ1 that was impressive in Jesus' personality, life, and doctrine thus came to supplement and increase the prime impressiveness of his ultimate fate. Together these two traits made a seiche or tidal wave that surged backward until it transfigured the very origin of his life. Belief in this marvel is a most eloquent monument of the impression which the Pauline plus the Petrine Jesus came to have in the early Christian consciousness. Belief in his supernal conception was a kind of summa cum laude degree which the Semitic folk-soul reserved for its supreme hero, a testimonial of what it thought and felt about him. So far as the Jews, breeders of flocks and herds as they were, realized the biological difficulties of such a belief, assent to it was a euphorious credo quia absurdum, a voluntary offering up of reason to faith, which is the assent of man's deeper, larger, and unconscious racial soul. What a hold it still has upon the heart, even in these days of science with its sense of the universality of law, is shown by the countless efforts of orthodoxy to conserve the vestiges of it whether by partial concessions to the Zeitgeist, by allegorical and symbolic explanations, or by affirming it as a postulate of practical reason pragmatically justifiable because it has worked so well, or by vociferating it as a mystery which the will must compel us to believe — all of which are far better than the smug complacency of religious half-culture which sees nothing in it but a worthless and outgrown superstition.
Again, Luke's story is an amazingly pure and sublimated account of the act of begetting, so prominent and often crass in the pentateuch. Still more is it in contrast with the gross phallic cults of the Canaanites and the sex corruption of the people among whom the new faith was first proclaimed. It was animated by the spirit of the then new celi- bacy at its best incipient moment, when chastity was beginning its great work of setting a back fire to the lewdness of the age. The salu- tation of hail, health, or wholeness invokes the condition precedent to all human achievement and is the universal form of greeting throughout the world. There is naturally virginal hesitation but no trace of the
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modern parturition phobia. If degradation of this function to an orgy marks man as a sinful fallen creature, we have here its progressive long- circuiting till in the place of marital rights exercised by gods or their representatives in the jus primae noctis, it is -exalted to a type of the union of the Church as the bride with the heavenly bridegroom. The erogenic impulse that serves the species is here spiritualized until instead of the hedonic narcosis there is only the desire to produce the type, totemic, heavenly man, the long-awaited Messiah, Redeemer, Saviour. If the ecstasy of love gives life a higher value because it first teaches what real pleasure is, and thus makes goodness under- stood, the passion for noble offspring makes it a sacrament in which each partner is in place of the divine to the other and every conception immaculate. But here there is no physical or even psychic ecstasy. Asceticism has suggested nothing colder, for the submission and con- sent are hardly more than mechanical. Some think, as we saw, that Luke designs in this scene to describe only a preparatory dream or trance, a kind of license to wedlock direct from heaven, superseding human ceremonials and certification, but perhaps justifiable by the prevailing Messianic expectation. It has been suggested that this hope pervaded the soul of every maiden in the circle from which Jesus sprang with a force inversely as her realization of the percentile number of chances that the lot of divine motherhood might fall to her, or directly as her sense of individual fitness for this function. Romantic love in any modern sense, deep and perennial though its well-springs have always been, had little literary development among the ancient He- brews save so far as in their minds it was always religious. No race so fused love and piety, as we see in the Song of Solomon. As the Greeks and Romans idealized it in pastoral life and amid sylvan scenes with perhaps Pan, satyrs; and fauns, so the Semitic mind was prone to give it a celestial interpretation coloured with reminiscences of the ancient promise to Abraham. Even if it was first a legend doomed to pass into the service of dogma, it may have been lived out in Mary's subjective experience. Belief in it, whether as fact or fiction, may have been more or less euhemeristic, and its use for purposes of race peda- gogy may have been at first with some consciousness of apocryphal fabrication. In any case the artist had a hard task. We do not know how much of the mythic material of his age was at his command, but especially among a race so pure the character of Mary must not only
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be preserved from all possible suspicion but exalted. A race of herds- men would not be predisposed to believe in a birth that eliminates human male parentage. Joseph, too, had to be made both content and continent, while Mary's consent would not only jeopardize her spouse's love but involve risks of aspersion and of humiliation.
Over against the above view that Jesus' life was so tremendously impressive that the inference of a supernatural birth was inevitable and irresistible, is the skeptic argument that his deeds and words were felt to be insufficient in themselves, and hence were in need of the glamour which this kind of accrediting gave; it was necessary to glorify a career that without it would have been more or Jess inglorious; it was an ah extra certification ad majorem gloriam vitae Jesu. This motive was involved in many of the pagan deifications, as in the case notori- ously of the weaker and baser later Roman emperors. Christian apologists have used it to confirm lapsing faith in Jesus, so that belief in it has in many cases been a product of defect and not of excess of faith. This, however, is a question of history, and that it was not the case with Luke or the early Christians has been abundantly shown.1
With them it was a tribute to a great life, a choice of the less of two miracles, divinitization at some later point of his life, or else at its very source. Conception by the spirit of truth was less miraculous than any other explanation of the wondrous light that broke forth from him in maturity. It had to be believed quite apart from its objective reality. Had the birth legend contravened a less universal law, its cogency as an argument and its value as a tribute to Jesus' greatness would have been less than as it now stands. If we can conceive it as an actual fact, proved or provable by all the tests that modern science could suggest, its significance is isolated and its worth impaired.
Again, had Jesus been, what he was by nurture rather than by nature, had he been made rather than born great, the developmental schema of his life would have been less spontaneous, aboriginal, in- digenous. By this token, his qualities were due to preformation rather than epigenesis. Had he been a great pundit or rabbi, his mind charged with the ideas of others instead of filled with his own (as Plato re-
... ?S^.blst ?[,*}\ A Jan Hoben s compilation of data and authorities of the anti-Nicene period. Lobstein "The Virgin birth ot Christ trans.. New York. 1003. only shows in a ponderously judicial way that this belief was "a myth created by popular devotion, that it "ceases to remain a real fact but stands out as a characteristic creation of the laitH ot the church, that it is a symbol we must lay bare, etc.
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proached Aristotle with getting his thoughts through reading rather than from inspiration by inner oracles), he would have been less divine; for acquired possessions are less assimilated, or less a part of ourselves, than those that are innate. His trust in his own originality was so great that he yielded to its suggestions with abandon, and this from- within-outward trait of supreme genius points to a hereditary source.
So, too, does the fact of his uniquely orthogenic life. Conversions involve drastic upheavals, storm and stress, a new direction, and there- fore loss of more or less of the original momentum, as we see in cases of the Paul or Augustine type. Regeneration involves some break with the past, the graft of a new stock upon an old one, a fresh start with abandonment of some lines or acquisitions. It is not a mere acceleration such as we see at normal adolescence, but there is more or less of a rupture that suggests the invasion of an alien principle or a sudden irruption of God into the soul. Saving though this be, it involves the loss of impulsion, for something old must be sloughed off and life must be built over again more or less and on a new plan. Had Jesus been a converted sinner, as Schrempf and others have urged, and especially had the change come over him just before his public ministry, his life would have lacked unity, his evolution would not have been rectilinear. Had he served a long apprenticeship to learn- ing, his birth and heredity would have tended to shrivel toward in- significance, because instead of his origin his regeneration by learning would have been the point of cardinal interest, and what had preceded might have been left to oblivion. God would thus have been in some sense the father of his subsequent life only. But for a type of life which all outer biographic incidents cannot explain, and where the primordial impulsion is all, the problem of its source becomes urgent just in proportion as the mature life and its effects unfold into ever greater significance. The record indicates that Jesus never referred to any early pivotal experience, nor did he contrast his early with his later life. His own reticence and that of those who knew him best concerning the first three decades of his life are singular. Perhaps he lacked autobiographic interest because he was so intent upon his Father's business here and now that he had not time or energy to be reminiscent, which would be flight from reality in the sense of Janet and Freud. Perhaps he had so completely digested his past that all its lessons had been made over into forms of impulsion to advance his
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mission. Perhaps he had grown so fast that he felt the past life far behind. His early experience had consisted in pressing rapidly upward through all the characteristic experiences of humanity, and only when he emerged above the common lot of man into Desjardin's "phe- nomena of altitude ' ' did his life have unique superhuman meaning. On this view the years of apprenticeship did not count but only those above the range of common humanity. Perhaps others had gone as far as he had before the advent of John, and he may have felt that had he died then he would have added nothing intrinsically new or valuable to the world. Many thus hold that at this point he transcended and became superman in a unique sense. He looked toward the future even more intensely than toward the past because what was to come would eclipse all that had gone before. His present personality had a value, and told. Had he attained old age he might have fallen into its habit of reminiscence. Thus, without touching here the mooted question whether Jesus passed through distinct developmental stages in his public ministry, his consciousness must have been penetrated to a unique degree with the sense of rapid development. The child does recapitulate the history of the race by leaps and bounds, living as it were millennia in hours and minutes. If we assume that Jesus' psychic development was exceptionally rapid in this sense, the inference to an exceptional divine initial momentum must have been inevitable.
There is no indication that Jesus was always consciously working over and interpreting on an ever higher plane the experiences of his childhood and youth, like Goethe; but the trajectory of his life was so steep, and he conserved so uniquely the naivete and rate of growth (rapidest in infants but which in others is progressively slowed down, as Minot has shown), that he never departed so far from the primitive nisus generativus as others do. This must have contributed its own quota of impulses to the construction and acceptance of the psycho- pedagogic masterpiece of the Lucan tale. If infancy is Wordsworthian, or if we accept Freud's conception of the all-dominance of childish wishes, and if these influences were less abated in Jesus, whether or not he was conscious of their source or date, then he was peculiarly heaven-born in all that this metaphor can mean.
Thus, in fine, if we could psychoanalyze the faith of those who at first or now affirm this belief, perhaps no Christian would be found to hold to it in the sense that orthodoxy assumes, and certainly belief
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in its literalness would not meet the criteria a modern psychology would test it by. Nevertheless, its truth so far transcends historicity that the psychologist of the folk-soul can say, summating all the above trends, with a fulness of conviction that criticism can never give, and that the old faith never knew, that Jesus was veritably "conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary."
This belief shows forth the dual nature of Jesus as God and man, and therefore as fit to be a mediator between the two. Even if with Feuerbach we interpret God as humanity generally, as over against the individual; or if we regard God as the phylogenetic and the in- dividual as the ontogenetic element in the human species; or God as the unconscious and man as the conscious component, all is not lost, but a new and pregnant suggestiveness is brought to light. This doctrine, too, when supplemented by the exaltation of Mary as "Mother of God," expressed the sinlessness ascribed to Jesus, rectify- ing the fall of man through Eve, and made him the founder of a new race higher than the sons of the first Adam. Even Sanday,1 obsessed as he is by the classic credal view, falteringly suggests that the divine element in Jesus' theanthropic soul may have been not unlike the sub- liminal self. Who that is intuitive, ingenuous, and spontaneous, in bringing himself to bear with all his resources upon some theme or cause, has not had the experience of feeling himself caught up or swept along (or occasionally restrained like Socrates) by a higher power which he felt to be not himself, but which we now interpret as the soul of the race breaking into that of the individual? This complex of submerged constellations, which man has always been prone to conceive as super- human, divine, or demonic possession, the afflatus or inspiration of a muse, or a revelation from on high, Jesus interpreted as his sonship. Holtzmann, Baumann, and other recent Christologists have empha- sized as a chief trait in Jesus' life and character that instead of being occasionally dominated by this higher self he was almost continuously so; that, in a word, he was nearly always a trifle ecstatic, exalted, ere- thic, or in a state of spiritual second breath. It was thus that he introduced a new, more normal type of consciousness, viz., one in which this generic, social, or racial element preponderated over and subordinated the ordinary hypertrophied selfish individuality. This it was that brought in a higher, saner unity of the soul, made it less
•"Christologies, Ancient and Modern." New Yortc, 1910. 344 p.
26o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
liable to bifurcation or discord and more immune from wasteful dis- harmonies and obsessions by the haunting sense of inferiority (Adler), which we now know to be so prolific of psychic disorders, so that the dangers of schizophrenia or the splitting up of the total soul of the individual into multiple personalities are vastly reduced. Every individual should be the organ, agent, manifestation, son of the species. He should incarnate it, come out from it, and having done his appointed work, return whence he came. Jesus alone did this ideally because he was the totemic man, and more than any other the typical embodiment of the race, the best unipersonal exemplar of the race idea, the true superman, the entelechy of what is best in the human phylum. Thus if we think of Jesus as race-man instead of God-man, the symbol-myth of his divine impregnation still has pneumatic meaning. If there were two wills in Jesus instead of one, as the Monothelites affirmed, the individual was completely subjected to the racial will, which was the core of his nature. The unique authoritativeness of Jesus' teaching ("It hath been said but verily I say unto you") and the breaks with current custom and opinion also mark the apartness, solitariness, loftiness of his genius, and suggest creative energy revealing itself in the depths of his nature from a source as primordial as the beginning of life. In the comment of his friends about his parents, in the re- proach that nothing good could come out of his early home, and in his remark that a prophet is not without honour save in his own country, is recognized the proneness to seek in heredity the causes of all un- wonted variations. His own saying also shows that he was on the way to a conviction (that Galton has shown to be false) that real greatness cannot have a humble origin.
Again, in the act of impregnation the race-soul evicts and takes possession of that of the individual, and that is why these experiences stand out with such a dazzling transcendent light that there is a rupture of continuity with the before and after of experience, and a sense that we have something here that can never be expressed in its terms. This explains the fact that the hedonic narcosis is really indescribable, so that amorists can only bode forth its raptures by inadequate tropes and symbols. It also explains why sometimes both man and woman, especially if neurotic, have often conceived that the partner's place was momentarily taken by some higher spiritual personage, be it angel, demon, or deity, or have been in a twilight stage of conscious-
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ness most favourable to idealization. For describing the processes of the race-soul or the superenergized life generally, we still have only crude phrases, metaphors, and allegories. Here man is paraphasic. Nearly all our thought-forms concerning it are still borrowed either from sex or religion, which are always in such sympathetic rapport with each other. Of old in the pinnacle moments of supreme affirmation of the will to live there often lurked in the background of the soul vestiges of the time when marital rights were thought to be exercised by the gods, as the reins of consciousness were handed over to the sympathetic system if not to the very biophores in the biological re- juvenation of fertilization. No individual editorship can thus ever adequately express the collective experience of man in any, and least of all in this, domain. It has suffused the world with a new joy, and is the eternal basis not only of optimism but of the entire ideal and transcendental worlds.
This brings us to the most fundamental of the many formative forces that shaped the Nativity concept and gave it such a hold upon Christendom. To understand this we must pause for a cursory glance at what might perhaps be called the psychogenesis of the transcendent, belief in which, though by no means identical with religion, is closely bound up with it. It springs from several roots; and the first of these, with which it really begins, is animism, that ascribes psychic states more or less like our own to inanimate things and processes. This, as all know, attributes rudimentary sentiency to stones, weapons, and every object, and postulates something that survives their destruction. More developed, it extends to forces of nature, streams, clouds, heavenly bodies. By its impulsion we assign souls to flowers, trees, and animals, and in a word become anthropomorphic. This is, of course, quite distinct from idolatry, which it always precedes, for this regards special objects as abodes or embodiments of spiritual beings. This propensity in the human soul prompts to nature worship and may issue in pan- theism, but the main point is that it made dualism.
A second root of the religious consciousness is found in the diffi- culty the soul feels in accepting the great fact of death. Primitive man saw his friends born, grow to maturity, and then in an instant become transformed into a decomposing corpse, so that the momentum of habit impelled to the belief that something invisible survived inde- pendently of the body. Of course these early concepts of self were
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fantastic. It was named breath, wind, echo, shadow, image, cloud, eye, heart, butterfly, etc. The first ghosts were very tenuous, pallid, weak, unreal, and led a flitting existence, perhaps under the earth amid tombs or battlefields, frequenting their old haunts by night or hovering about their relatives, occasionally seen and heard and in a limbo state, neither very sad nor joyous, neither very good nor bad, so that the life of the poorest man was preferable to theirs. Their number was sometimes pictured like that of the autumn leaves. They were per- haps herded by some stronger soul, living or dead, or drifted aimlessly, thickly populating some parts of space, seeking perhaps to revive their fading memories, or save themselves from being resolved back into nothingness by reincarnation. So strong is the impulse to believe in them that the opinion has been set forth with great learning that one of the chief objects of funeral rites was to bring home to the minds of survivors that their friends were really and completely dead, body and soul, that is, to lay their ghosts beyond the possibility of reveniance and free man from the bogs of crass spiritism and necromancing.1
It was of course a great epoch when the chaotic ghost world first began to be ordered and systematized. One of the most important stages in this development was the idea of associating pleasant post- humous states with previous merit, and painful ones with ill desert, thus giving man a universe in which virtue and happiness on the one hand, and wickedness and pain on the other, got together as they do not in the world we know. The growth of the conception of posthu- mous rewards and penalties was an immense gain for virtue, wherever the latter was rightly conceived. The transcendental ghost-world was idealized and was introduced as a great factor into human conduct, and then, of course, conceptions of hell and heaven were more and more elaborated.
When this transcendentalized motive is at its acme there are uncounted legions or cycles of archangels, heavenly hosts, or the great dead conversing on high themes at least in some boathouse on the Styx, or guardian spirits guiding their favourites, or others that inspire, heal, obsess, or blight man. There are embodied ideals of duty, wisdom, strength; gods become highly personified and heroes of mythopeic biographies, loaded down with symbolisms, always super- ior to man, but made on the same pattern, and so an immense culture
•See this point amplified in my article, "Thanatophobia and Immortality." Am. Jour. Psychol., Oct., 1915.
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power in the world. Especially the Hebrew, Greek, and Teutonic mind definitized these deities and demigods which more or less filled the orders of existence from man upward; but the Oriental mind, which is prone to revel in temporal rather than in spatial expansion, preferred the doctrine of transmigration and even karma, a law to which all the worlds and Brahma himself are subject, according to which the soul of each individual is living out a single stage in a series of many, per- haps an infinite, number of lives. The ethical element is of course effective, for each reincarnation is up or down the scale of being ac- cording as the previous life was lived. Thus each man, animal, or god has been his own creator, and souls do not choose their own lives freely beforehand, as in Platonic myth, but are subject to the iron judgment of desert.1
Now it is very hard for us to realize the immense significance of that great movement of the human spirit that at last culminated in the more evolved forms of polytheism or in monotheism. The latter particularly brought order into the chaos that had hitherto reigned in the domain of the Beyond and placed at the head of the uni- verse, not an Olympian who had won his throne by evicting an earlier dynasty of gods and was always in danger of attack, but one Supreme Being to whom all other powers and persons in the whole transcendental world were subordinated. This gave loftiness of soul and unity of mind, so that the noumenal world was never so real and its ethical power never so great.
In the above I have only sought to indicate in rough phrases the new standpoint of the genetic origin of the other-world concept as if in all its forms it is in fact a product, eject, projection of the racial soul, working slowly and in the main unconsciously. There is of course no assumption whatever concerning the objective reality of God, heaven, souls, etc., but there is only insistence that quite apart from the prob-
iBastian in his various works would correlate this trend with conceptions of temporal extension of the life of superior elect ones who led an existence extraordinarily prolonged but continuous and not broken by the links of generations, as in karma. The adept is more than a patriarch and must perfect his soul by labours, introversion, alchemy, or what-not till his life is more or less subtilized and rejuvenated, and he approaches the Mahatma stage in which he has gamed all knowledge can pass through space, leads a kind of charmed, magic, supernal existence, not longing for death like the wandering 'jew nor translated like Enoch, but residing in obscure places and teaching the few (lite who seek and are able to find him. Sometimes in these views, too, there are hints of both pre- and post-existence. This great concept has its penates and its euhemerism and, indeed, this point and those above described may borrow features from one
Again the transcendency motif in a more generic form but in the same sense may crop out in the philosophemes of successive cycles or epochs. At the end of the world here all things return as they were. Perhaps everything is obliter- ated and a new start made, and every item of the preceding era repeated, or, as other Stoics who were fond of this view thought nothing is repeated. While the conception of infinite past time requires that every possible combination of the cosmic elements should have been exhausted, the idea of an infinite number of parts requires that they should never be exhausted and that everything that happens every moment should be absolutely new. The transcendence here is in the mechanism which controls this eternal recurrence or makes it impossible.
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lem of their existence is another and very distinct one, viz., that of the genesis of the conceptions of them. No matter whether their esse is their percipi or not. It is only the latter that is here involved. It is even superfluous to raise the question whether back of this argu- ment lies a fond unconscious hope or belief that the folk-soul is so fecund that it would have engendered and extradited from itself this counter-world in just its present form, even if it had no existence save in human thought.
Now the organ with which this supernal world is known is called faith, the evidence of things not seen, if not their very substance and reality. Into such forms the mighty energy of man's soul unfolds through the ages, so that there will always be a sense in which the di- vine is the noblest creation of the soul of man, because to accept a be- lief and to make or to create it are only different degrees of the same energy. This idealization of another world and the development of a life here that consists of other-world conduct, such as forms of worship, are of a realm of existence that supplements and is the counterpart of this, especially if it is one of which all the ordinary content of experience seems a promise and potency. This explains why such beliefs He so close and warm about the human heart, and why they are often so clung to against evidence and even against interest. It is because they are necessary for the totalization of the soul and exactly fit the imagination that is the totalizing faculty by which man transcends his own limita- tions of time, space, and personality toward the dimensions of the race, thereby becoming a citizen of the universe which is henceforth no longer a chaos but a cosmos.
This objectivization of man's racial soul first makes possible the supreme human tragedy of the amphibole between faith and sight, idealism and positivism, the spiritual and the material views of the world. The true adjustment of the relations between the transcendent and the immanent subordinate neither to the other, and to use both aright is perhaps the supremest of all the problems of higher race pedagogy or statesmanship such as the Semitic mind so persis- tently ascribed to Yahveh. In both the race and the individual we see the reciprocal relations between these two elements, and each tends to be inversely as the other. When, for instance, the Jews were led captive or lost their fatherland, they remembered God, recalled the promises, gathered and studied their sacred literature; but in prosperity
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they forgot Yahveh. When Rome was declining it seemed that the hope of the world, that had centred for generations about its marvellous political organization, was failing, and men slew themselves from a de- spair which perhaps, but for Christianity, would have become absolute. Thus the rankest superstitions sprang up, were accepted, and cherished. Such excessive other-worldliness always prompts mystic cults of many kinds, a gasping longing for modes of higher knowledge, a theo- and parousia-m&ma,, ecstasy, trance, as we see in the Alexandrian phi- losophies, a longing for visions, revelations from on high. Or the sub- ordination may express itself in asceticism, self-abnegation, strenuous efforts at exiguous liturgical purity, and in every means of realizing and apprehending the supernal or penetrating the veil, everywhere, too, with the assumption that the other world is inversely as this, that the blessing is for the poor in spirit, and the suffering, and that all sorrows and even tortures will be compensated by heavenly joys. If the old Jerusalem is destroyed the new one comes down from heaven. When the Greco-Roman civilization collapsed the heavenly kingdom of the Church appears in Christendom in Augustine's City of God, which is the transfiguration of the antique state idea. Sacrifice is the way of salvation.
Thus man is at once a citizen of two countries of very different constitutions. The religious consciousness has generally worked apart from the secular by different categories and with other rubrics. There are everywhere dual characters in which religion is separated by a watertight compartment from daily fife. Their pathetic souls are torn by the conflict between faith and reason, or feel with Jacobi that there is a light in the heart that goes out when we carry it into the head. Among the English it was Hobbes who chiefly set the fashion, so con- spicuously followed in England, of keeping religion and rational activities entirely apart, and Newton and scores of more modern Eng- lish and American thinkers have thus partitioned their souls.
It is still more pathetic to unduly subject one to the other, and to force reason to capitulate to faith or to Rome by some immolating credo quia absurdum, positively bolting doctrines and cults as a way out of skepticism or postulating some extreme solipsistic idealism to escape agnosticism, putting documents where ideas should be, or conversely attempting to expel faith and idealism and to plant the feet solidly upon the earth of positivism or even materialism.
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Now, against one and all of these forms of double housekeeping the theanthropic consciousness, of which Jesus' conception symbolizes the beginning, is at once a standing protest and a way of deliverance. This great and new insight is nevertheless very simple. The quin- tessence of genius is to posit its own inmost thought as the truest thing in the world for all men. The great religious geniuses, like all the great- est reformers, have but two words in their vocabulary, now and here. So, too, science proclaims that all that ever was or vvdll be is now. Prophecy is fulfilled, ideals are realized, not merely in some remote time and place but in our day, land, and souls. That was the note struck by the preaching of the Baptist, which acted like an alarum, and it is also the key to all the work of Jesus. God, the Kingdom, judg- ment, are here and now. The transcendent is no longer to remain where Jewish formalism, tradition, or later patristic metaphysics tended to banish it, at some remote point. All promises are fulfilled now, so that human consciousness can again become homogeneous and unitary. The transcendent world never drifted so far from the immanent as in Jesus' day and to reunite them was his great achievement. The divine siring of a God-man could not have occurred in any such sense where pantheism prevailed, because then divine incarnations come to con- sciousness in all souls. Nor could it have occurred in the domain of polytheism, because heroes, leaders, and gods have others beside them. But in Jesus and his circle the Jewish monotheistic idea had culmi- nated, and his great work was the realization that the one Supreme God is also, in all we can ever hope to know of him, realized in the highest and most human of souls. Henceforth this reciprocal relation between transcendence and immanence is at an end, and in Jesus' nature, way back and down to his birth as well as in his adult consciousness, there was perfect harmony and atonement, and the plain and solid estab- lishment of both the basis and method of complete unity between all that the most romantic faith and the most rigorous science can ever attain.
Still further, as the Semitic and Hellenic cultures, independent at first, mingled later in the way Hatch, Zeller, and others have shown, fertilizing each other, from their union arose the new religious con- sciousness, which was so radically different from either of them but which later came to wield the accumulated resources of Christendom. It would be wrong to represent the Jewish mind with its theocratic
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principle as the full type of the transcendent, or the Greeks with their love of the sense world and their worship of beauty as a complete type of the immanent mind. It is sufficient to note in them the predomi- nance of these tendencies respectively. We must therefore postulate something like a native Greek element in the mind of Jesus, and realize that into his consciousness entered the best of each of these ethnic cultures.
Also, just as the fertilized ovum becomes not only quick and growing instead of inert as before, but is a more complex and complete unity, so the union of the hither and yonder world in the new sense of immanent deity, which Christianity brought, was the punctum saliens of all. It was not only mediation but atonement and salvation. Thus again we see that it was a sound and most genial instinct that placed the germ of this new standpoint in the impregnation itself, so that this consummate religious genius in whose life is found the vital node of the highest religion, is given by Luke a point de repere which places him and his wondrous postulate in just the right position between God and man at the start as more born than made. In him the Socratic sentiment that no evil could befall a good man, living or dead, which Leo Haas and Doctor Gompers have made the basis of a neo-Socratic ethics and even of an ideal community of paidia or free joyous activity, to be attained by three distinct paths, developed into a sense of trust in a heavenly parent. By just so many parts as Jesus felt himself divine the transcendent became immanent and the immanent became trans- cendent, so that the chasm yawning between things earthly and things extramundane was bridged and a new set of apperceptive centres given, around which were to be readjusted all the facts and interests of human life.
This union left two residual forms of ethnic consciousness behind, out of which it took the life, so that they were deciduous. As their later history shows, their ultimate fate was like that of the polar globules or chromosomes which, after the union of the sperm and germ cell, are extruded from the impregnated ovum. On the one hand the Jewish mind went on to ever greater refinements of literalism, textual symbolism, allegorical exegesis, extending to the numbers, forms, posi- tions of letters in Talmud, Targum, and Masoretic rules, and in liturgi- cal and ceremonial purity, the one as exiguous as the other was tortu- ous. On the other hand, Greek thought in Philo, Plotinus, and Proclus
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lost itself in striving to retrace the steps by which the soul emanated down through the triple triads from some supersensible source. The real world was felt to be in a low, almost dungy state of alienation, es- trangement, or heterization. Although nous was the very first emana- tion, an ectype of the divine, the lapse had gone so far that it was desperately hard to get from the world of common experience to a di- vine reality or from it to us. Thus the only mediation the Alexandri- ans knew was for the soul as product to turn again to its origin and seek mystic absorption as in trancoidal states or the navel-gazing in silenti- aries.
In view of all the above, have not both the Church and the higher critics laid too much stress upon the literal historicity of the divine sonship of Jesus? Suppose faith in it as a biological marvel wanes. We can conserve its essential truth by conceiving Luke as an inspired creative genius who felt the various trends and verities characterized above, and as the inspired oracle of them invented his narrative, which will forever remain a psychopedagogic marvel of the Men trouve. But for him there would have been a lost chord, an unfinished window in the Aladdin palace of the system of Jesusism.
In all times, places, and ranks, pregnancy has had special social and hygienic treatment and regard. Gravid women are prescient and often prophetesses, and their very whims and picae are perhaps com- mands. They are often isolated or subjected to perverted regimens, exempted from many usual duties. There are endless superstitions concerning the effects of diet and the susceptibility of both mother and unborn child. There are many magic rites as well as horoscopes, presents, visits, and predictions. In this field Luke ventures to give us only a brief sketch of the old and the young mother together in high converse in a hill country. The feature he stresses is exultation, and save for the possible interpolation of Elizabeth's query, "Why the mother of my Lord should come to me," and the phrase in Mary's magnificat, " Henceforth all generations shall call me blessed, " his sketch is artistically well tempered and proportioned. For the rest the seclu- sion is so effective as to reveal nothing even to the scholar. The deep hunger of soul of both expectant mothers is satisfied, and the loftiest possible conception of the future of both children is freely indulged in. It is all the work of the Lord, to whom praise and thanksgiving are rendered. The salutation of Mary brings the first "quickening" of
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the unborn in the senescent woman, an experience which is the focus of much folk-lore and custom, but is here prelusive of John's later rela- tion to Jesus. The heart of Mary overflows with a euphorious sense of triumph and gratitude for God's power and goodness as manifested in her condition. Although herself of low estate, she exults that she is chosen to bring boundless blessing to her people. Strange to say, we have even to-day no intensive study of the unique psychic state of normal women during the incubation period, but Luke's depiction of it as exultant and focussed on the career of the future child is an ideal paradigm of what it should be, as delicate as it is bold and creative. The prenatal stage of life is now recognized as too significant to be omitted from any complete biography. If there was none of Ferenczi's sense of AUmacht in the embryo, unless in the case of the leaping John, it finds ecstatic expression in Mary. The narrative of the poet physician- evangelist almost suggests the Hippocratic sentence, "Godlike is the physician who is also a philosopher." Genial as this is, there is noth- ing marvellous or impossible about it. Its perpetual moral to modern mothers is: "Retire with an older woman in the same condition into the country. Give your imagination free scope to abandon itself to day-dreams of what you hope your offspring will be and do in the world, for possibly your crudest wish will not be without prenatal influ- ence." We cannot be too thankful that our author did not indulge in any of the weird or monstrous fancies of the Oriental or even of the Greek polytheistic mind in treating this period of their heroes or demi- gods. Luke seems to have had no dogmatic purpose, but sought merely to show that Jesus' prenatal stage was passed under the most favourable conditions and perhaps, also, that his own clairvoyance later was presaged by the state of his mother, for Jesus' whole career was in a sense a magnificat of the Lord. At John's birth the relatives come with festive awe. The father ratified the mother's wish that the child should not bear his name, and having written this, on the eighth day at the circumcision, Zacharias' tongue was loosed. He was filled with the Spirit and glorified God who had accomplished his prophecies to Israel, and apostrophized the child as bringing light and salvation, all in eloquent rhapsodic terms. It was a fulfilment of the old cove- nant of redemption from enemies, a more complete service, and the promulgation from on high of a new way of peace. It was the beati- tude of a venerable priest wreaking his soul in expressing its sentiments
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at the moment of being suddenly freed by a great joy from the repres- sion of nine months of mutism, and all this was a most natural if exceptional ebullition. Primitive races prescribe jubilation, offerings, set speeches of recognition and welcome to the newcomer, and precau- tions against the evil eye, demons, and other malefic influences (Ploss: "Das Kind," Bd. i, S. 49-145). Here the dominant note, in which all others are merged, is grateful joy.
Six months later Joseph had to journey with his gravid wife to Bethlehem to be taxed, and there, because the inn was full, she bore her child and used a manger for its cradle. By night shepherds near by saw the glory of the Lord like that which appeared of old when the tabernacle was builded in the wilderness, and an angel announced the Saviour's birth and told them how to find him, and a gloria by a heav- enly choir followed. They ^came, adored, proclaimed the glad tidings, and glorified God. Jesus on the eighth day was named, circumcised, and brought to Jerusalem, where a poor man's sacrifice of turtle doves and pigeons was offered.
The Nativity, which has hallowed all the Christmas season, the association with which of the Resurrection at Easter is the chief other Christian festival, singularly barren of details as the record is, has been extravagantly amplified in apocryphal legend and has always been a favourite theme of art and pious meditation. Its setting is pastoral and bucolic, and makes Jesus in a sense homeless. Critics have thought that the journey is insufficiently motivated and even incon- siderate of Mary's condition, and have suspected its veracity because the note of fulfilling prophecy was too dominant. But if the symbol- ism of the place and circumstances of the birth itself is meagre (and Luke here falls far below the possibilities that his theme should inspire), he has not failed to stress the cardinal point that at the Nativity heaven and earth came together. This he represents in the apparition to the shepherds, to whom is first supernaturally revealed all the Gos- pel that there then was, viz., that at last a Divine Child was born. Not the great or the rulers even of the synagogue, but humble herdsmen, first heard this gladdest of all glad tidings, as if in token that the lowly should be exalted. It is idle to attempt to explain this vision upon natural or psychological grounds, for it was collective. It seems more like an individual invention of poetic license than a legend, is doubtless more allegory than history, and suggests that Luke may
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here have been touched by the old-fashioned afflatus of the prophets. Mary brought forth among the kine; the herdsmen first knew and ac- claimed the future Lord. There was no accoucheur or nurse save na- ture, and none was needed. There was no concourse of friends or relatives, as at John's birth. Its very simplicity and secrecy were perhaps meant to enhance the impression of its sacredness. Parents and child — they three were alone with God and his dumb, domesti- cated creatures; but the high heavens knew it and responded with a marvellous effulgence, celestial music, and angelic apparition, showing how the world above was now in new and sympathetic rapport with earth and its children. As Mary's psychophysic organism was the best nidus for the unique life that was to realize all the higher possibili- ties of humanity, so earth itself was beatified and crepitated with rap- ture as in the old days when heaven itself was procreative on Mother Earth, which here rejoices to receive its celestial Lord. To explain how the shepherds knew, expositors and apologists have evoked te- lepathy and kinship, secret but undiscovered sources of information, and tense expectancy ready to pass at a touch of fancy or of any fancied stimulation from a state of hope to one of belief. An aurora in the cold Christmas sky and a subjective aura involving optical and aural cen- tres with a flush of suffusing transport, have been conjectured, but the whole narrative is really more suggestive of dream-life or even of liter- ary imagination than of any well-known laws of meteorology. But the psychic atmosphere at least was tense to the discharging point.
Only Luke, the paidologist of the New Testament, gives us the idyll of Simeon, very aged, devout, expectant, waiting for some visible em- bodiment of the hope and promise of his heart, and dying content with the newborn infant. This embodied symbol of the great expectation is another cradle song of moving pathos. Greek and especially Platonic friendship at its best was between mature men and adolescent boys, but here extreme age and infancy are brought into contact, and death is given perhaps its most natural consolation by the sight of a new life with which it has just time to make contact and to which bless- ing may be transmitted. Thus souls full of grandparenthood normally wait with joy and expectancy for an object which the soul that strains with tension into the future can clasp. Thus, too, the infant is made to inherit the hope of a venerable saint in Israel who, facing death, rejoices at the glimpse of a new life in which all his own unfulfilled
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expectations as well as those of his forbears are to be realized, and all of which therefore seem much nearer. No crucifix, ceremonial, rite, song, or act of worship is more satisfying to dying eyes than that object which is more worthy of love, reverence, and service than any other in the world, a newborn child.
The prophetess Anna, at the age of eighty-four, who had fasted and prayed in the temple ever since she was left a young widow, saw the babe by chance in her ministrations and gave thanks and spoke of him to all who awaited consolation. The irradiation also widened toward the East and Oriental wisdom, impersonated by the Magi, followed a new star such as many a myth describes as appearing at the birth of those destined for greatness. Some think we have here in adumbrated form some hint of how Luke's story came to be attracted into so many points of resemblance to that of the early life of Buddha.1
Warned again by a dream, Joseph fled with mother and child to Egypt to escape the machinations of Herod, who soon after slew all the children of two and under in and near Bethlehem. This whole- sale slaughter destroyed those who would naturally have been Jesus' playmates had that been his boyhood home, and made him more soli- tary and unique, for his mates would be either older or younger than himself, or perhaps girls. The assumption that this cruel monarch was in a state of superstitious terror of an infant accomplished five things : viz., it represented the Messianic expectation as so prevalent and strong that this alien ruler shared it and trembled for his crown before a possible usurper; accepting the vaticination of sages, it gave a sense that Jesus was especially cared for by heaven; it gave Matthew the opportunity to apply prophecy to Jesus as he has such a passion for doing, although often as here without appositeness; it provided for Jesus a sojourn in Egypt, brief though it was, and thus brought his
lIn the LalJta Vistara the life of Buddha is said to have begun in heaven, where he is described as instructing the other gods and telling them he proposes to descend and be born of a virgin as a man. Despite the protests of his fellow deities, having appointed and installed a successor he proceeded to earth. In the Clementine Homilies the heavenly Jesus first became man in Adam, then in Enoch, Noah. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses; and other incarnations are to be expected. This gnostic view is very Oriental. So Buddha had experienced many incarnations, but his passion for this one was that it was to be the last. His mother, Queen Maya, withdrew from her husband to be, for a time, an ascetic, and when in a dream she saw a white elephant enter her body, she knew that she would bear a son who would be mighty, perfect, and a saviour. When he was born, he cried with the voice of a lion, "I am the noblest and best thing in the world. This is my last birth. I will put an end to birth, old age, sickness, and death." _ Then the earth Quaked, heavenly music was heard, supernal light filled all the worlds. All creation was in ecstasy, pain ceased, the poor became rich, the bond free, the sick well, etc. Then came hosts of heavenly deities and offered homage and gifts of spices, gar- ments, and song. There then lived a great seer, Asita, who saw the signs in heaven, and coming to the city, entered the palace and saw the infant Buddha with all the thirty-two signs of greatness. He then sighed and wept because he was old and feeble and therefore could not profit by the teachings of the new sage. A parallel is also found to Jesus' visit to the temple when he was twelve. When Buddha entered school he knew all the sixty-four Hindu writings, astonished and confused his teachers, fell into an ecstasy of pious meditation, and lingered a whole day until, at night, when his father discovered him, Buddha first blamed his lacK of spiritual insight, but returned home and dwelt with him accom- modating himself to the customs of the world, and busied with endeavours to become more pure and perfect.
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life into some analogy with the children of Israel who dwelt there from Jacob to Moses; it gave an added motive to the deep if repressed aver- sion of Jesus' circle and the Jews generally to the Romans who were the agents of Jesus' execution, although Pilate was more just than Herod. Dread of the latter's successor impelled Jesus' parents upon their return from Egypt to settle not in Judea but in Galilee, although by means of this fear Yahveh was at the same time accomplishing a prediction that Jesus was to be Nazarene and also "called out" of Egypt, for prophecy was inexorable like the Greek fates. To fulfil it is represented by the synoptics not as a conscious purpose of Jesus but as God's way of controlling the destiny of his son from first to last.
With this ends the meagre canonical record of the infancy which was to be so copiously amplified by tradition later. The latter made Jesus a wondrous infant, far more so than the holy bambino suggests. The light that streamed from his body and the halo about his head express the natural charm that attaches to infancy raised to its highest potency, for he was not only a Liebeskind but a Wunderkind, and although far more is said about his being adored than about his being loved, in the history of child study we have few times, places, and people wherein childhood has been even more worshipped than loved. The newborn child comes in a sense direct from God or out of the heart and soul of nature, and it is easy for parents to abandon themselves till they find a charm in every feature, contour, and act, and enmesh the infant in superstitions and credulities, some of which are cherished for each child only in the heart of its mother. In the case of Jesus the rudeness of the stable environment gives a good background for maternal tenderness, makes it more necessary, and brings it out in bolder relief by way of contrast. Even if supernal beings and happen- ings are not an integral part of the psychic furniture of parents' minds, what mother has not at least fittingly thought of some kinship of her offspring with deity? It is, however, a strange note that this convic- tion, despite all we are told, did not take deep or permanent possession of Mary's mind, as is apparent in the signs of her incredulity concerning her son's mission.
Jesus was a first-born child. Modern science inclines us to think that the endowments of heredity for the eldest child are at least in some slight degree inversely as in most ages his superior rights of in- heritance have been. The record distinctly eliminates (Matt. K25)
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the perfervour of the first stages of married life, to which some assign the cause for the inferiority which is often considered a handicap on the future life of eldest children. The record more directly seeks to intimate that there were no accidents of prima paru to cause any stigmata. Thus it seems as though nature and instinct did their per- fect work and that prenatal influences, which now in the ebb of the wave of Weismannism are being more and more credited, were, despite the journey and the untoward environment, on the whole ideally favourable to the best that nature could do, so that the child entered the world with the full and maximal momentum of a favourable heredity, the first-fruit of parents whose, average age might not have been very far from that which modern statistics of greatest viability in the offspring designate as the most favourable for parenthood. At least there is no reason to doubt that both were at the zenith of their mental and. physical development or near the apex of maturity, which gives greatest completeness of all reproductive energies.
We can at least conjecture that Jesus was especially a mother's child. Fatherhood, whatever we make of the record, is more in the background. Tradition makes Mary fairest among women, and her beauty may have been transmitted to her son, despite the ugliness of the earliest portraits of Jesus, whose form and figure do small credit to his mother's or father's good looks. The Holy Mother is most beloved, and is represented as devoted to her son to the end of his life, long after the death of Joseph. There is much reason to believe that sons tend to produce the psychic superiorities of their mother and girls of their father, while boys inherit from the latter chiefly their physical traits. At any rate, there are principles of cross inheritance. The closest association between mother and son is involved in the entire development of Mariolatry, and the trait of meekness and subjection to the divine will, a note first so strongly struck in Mary's attitude at the annunciation, is also cardinal in the teachings of Jesus, a point that Harnack has pointed out. Moreover, the beautiful soul of Jesus was very rarely endowed with intuitive powers, which also suggests maternal predominance or prepotency.
Fascinating, especially to celibacy, in all ages is the rare union in one person of the charms of virginity and maternity. Maidenhood has charms all its own, with its delicacy, unsullied purity, reserve, idealization, intuitive penetration, and these in many a chapter of
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history and literature have achieved great things for the individual and for the race. Motherhood beams with a very different light. The bud has blossomed and borne fruit. The tree of knowledge of good and evil, and also the tree of life, have been tasted. The intui- tions are larger, the quality of innocence loftier. These two sides of womanhood here blended have evoked love and adoration in the world second only to that which Jesus himself has called forth. Religious sentiment here idealizes woman as she is conceived to have come from the hand of God, and many a Protestant envies his Catholic friends their attitude toward the Blessed Virgin. No one has ever asked whether she knew Egyptian, Chaldean, or even could read or write her own tongue. She cannot be conceived as bemoaning fancied hmitationsof her sex or wishing to make sex a sect, but she triumphs and glories in her womanhood and has been adored all these ages as its supreme type, more generic, nearer to the race, richer in love, unselfish devotion, and intuition than man, so that the Madonna idea which teaches that it is more holy to be woman than to have achieved emi- nence in any kind of superiority, should teach our own sex a corres- ponding lesson. The worship of Mary has been of potent influence in safeguarding womanhood from the growing danger that it will decline from its orbit, lose just confidence and due pride in its sex as such, till in lapsing toward mannish ways its original divinity becomes clouded. But even if this occurred, we have another oracle most closely associated with "das ewige Weiblicke" and to which we can always turn, viz., das ewige Kindliche. The oracles of the latter will never fail. However distracted we are in the mazes of new knowledges, skills, ideals, conflicts between old and new; unable though we may be to thrid all the mazes of our manifold modern cultures; we do know that there is one supreme source to which we can look for guidance and which alone can tell us what is really best worth knowing and doing, save us from misfits, perversions, the wastage of premature and be- lated knowledge, and that is the child in our midst that still leads us because it holds all the keys of the future, so that service to it is the best criterion of all values. It epitomizes the developmental stages of the race, human and prehuman, is the goal of all evolution, the highest object of that strange new love of the naive, spontaneous, and un- sophisticated in human nature, so that we might freely paraphrase the old prayer of the most ardent of all the church fathers, Tertullian:
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"Stand forth, 0 heart and soul of childhood. Reveal thyself to us more fully. We want thee stark naked, unclothed of all disguises, false tastes, bad habits, partial theories, with the purity of that divinity in thee unshadowed just as thou earnest forth into the world, fresh from the hand of the Heavenly Father. The norm of thy development is our only sure guide, our pillar of cloud by day and fire by night."
Thus in the combined mother-child worship we have a new orientation of the world toward the ingenuous, germinant, unconscious, instinctive elements of life.
Joseph was a dreamer. Four times his chief decisions were moti- vated by an angel in a dream, perhaps the same one that appeared in the collocation with Mary, each intervention being in the interest of the child as if Gabriel were perhaps its special guardian. Jesus does not seem to have inherited his oneiromantic tendency, even if Joseph was his father, unless in the far more generalized and lofty propensity to commune with spiritual powers, although the Johannin is more suggestive of some such paternal propensity than the Petrine Jesus. Still, if, as tradition has it, Joseph was old and Mary young; if age in the one parent would tend to precocity, while the youth of Mary would tend to the conservation in the offspring of the best traits of childhood, we have in Jesus' premature wisdom, on the one hand, and his naivete and spontaneity on the other, traits that well comport with this combination of adolescence and senescence in the parents.
Finally, it would be cowardly to refuse to face certain ancient traditions and various heretics, skeptics, and schismatics since Cerin- thus such as have appeared adown the Christian centuries, and a few contemporary writers who have intimated that Jesus was the natural child of both his parents, some of whom have gone so far as to insist that his conception was the result of love without wedlock. This view has never had any very able or scholarly presentation, and has always been extremely repugnant to the Christian consciousness. Many if not most Christologists now really hold with Keim that the story was all a sublime afterthought, that the idea of divine parentage owed its origin to motives that arose later, that Jesus and his parents lived and died with no suspicion on the part of their neighbours and friends of anything exceptional in his birth, and that there was no taint of cal- umny in this respect from his enemies. Every candid mind will admit that from the biological standpoint alone considered it would be hard
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to demonstrate any necessary disadvantage in legal or technical ille- gitimacy per se. Not only have there been great and good bastards in history, but many authorities conclude that foundlings, who are usu- ally illegitimate, are not inferior in health, strength, beauty, or in- telligence, while some have even thought them superior to the average child, or at least to what the latter would be if reared under similar, usually disadvantageous, circumstances. They certainly excel ^ in viability orphans, one or both of whose parents are usually less vital than the average. To assume that affection strong enough to defy social restraints is associated with an unusual degree of fecund energy, or that in the classes where such restraints are really felt, as they were intensely among the Jews, there is more probability of real affinity according to the complemental theories of Schopenhauer or Weininger or any other, would indeed in the present state of our knowledge upon these themes be probably unwarranted. There may be, however, some degree of comfort in reflecting that in case the higher or lower criticism should ever compel us to falL back to this position, all would not be lost, and we might even find some unexplored sources of conso- lation, perhaps in the ancient and long-drawn-out Stoic distinction between nature and convention, or between life on the one hand and man-made law and institutions on the other, which would suggest where the line of the new apologetics as to this point could best be reformed. If there be in the record or in contemporary tradition any suggestion of a cruder moral or social state where paternity is more uncertain than maternity, there is no less evidently a somewhat compensating intimation of the pristine power of the mother to tame and domesticate the father, while, even if complete capitulation were ever made to these fears, we may hope it will not be until the world is sufficiently enlightened and democratized to deeply feel, as we do in modern instances of those who come into the world handicapped by such a stigma, that a man is really what he is for all that. The most superficial pericope will show that granting even the literal truth of the record, there would have been contemporary gossips who doubted as Joseph himself did when "minded to put her away." She was passing fair; but beauty sometimes provokes envy and stirs malicious tongues, and the record does not intimate that these were silenced by any vision such as that which quieted the mind of Joseph. Everything we know of those days indicates that irregularity in this respect, even
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in the humblest classes, would not escape censure, such was the rigour of the Hebrew conscience upon this point. Some have urged that if there was danger of a social taint or the suspicion of a lapsus, this would not ill comport with the prenatal trip to Bethlehem which might have had another cause than the desire to be honestly taxed, and with the nest-hiding intimation of birth in the stable, and even the foreign trip to Egypt just afterward. If this was in the slightest degree the case, detractors were met by the boldest of all possible poetic concep- tions which must have been at the very least no less effective than it is in the Church now. Many women since, too, some mothers of historic significance as well as others of enfeebled minds, have yielded to a superstitious interpretation of the natural exaltation that comes to all normal and right womanhood at the moment when the conscious- ness of prospective maternity is implanted. Many of them have yielded to the fond illusion of impregnation from supernal personages. Some superstitious mind- and faith-curists of our own day are sincere in the conviction that if faith is strong enough this can occur without male agency, as if by recrudescence of the long-lost power of parthe- nogenesis. We must admit that the narrative as it stands, although a masterpiece of what might be called the higher psychopedagogical engineering or politics, and although, as we have tried to show, it is a key to perhaps the greatest culture question of early Christianity, will continue in the future, as it has been in the past, to be a stumbling- block to morosophs and skeptics of the coarser type.
Save only the Resurrection, nothing in the New Testament puts such a strain on faith as does the demand to accept the conception of Jesus by the Holy Ghost literally as a biological fact. It is especially hard on educated young people who have been brought up within the pale of the Church, while the reticence that veils such subjects makes the problem which we now approach all the harder. Hence its peda- gogy presents one of the most difficult problems in the whole field of religious education. To merely protest that it is a physiological im- possibility is both banal and tends to obliviousness to its higher sym- bolic meanings, which are of greatest culture value. Such a course tends to obscure still more our sense of what the mythopeic folk-soul is and does, and is thus not only anti-aesthetic but anti-religious. To discuss frankly in detail, as we have tried to do, the psychic core behind belief in it as a fact and its implications, is, we freely admit, not with-
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out danger to the average lay believer (whom we are not addressing here) of encountering the resistance by which normal instinctive shame and modesty tend to veil sex, and also of arousing the old odium the- ologicum to the highest pitch now permitted to it. Analysis of this belief is the last thing the Church wants or that the clergy will permit or even undertake in their own souls. It is a holy mystery from which they as rigidly exclude reason and science as the Church of the past did where it felt its own precious values jeopardized.
For this attitude the modern geneticist has no longer censure, but seeks only to offer both appreciation and explanation. The middle way between both these extremes first recommended concerning this (and two or three other cardinal articles of ancient faith), is to ignore and allow it to lapse quietly to innocuous desuetude from the Chris- tian consciousness, which has now other and more pressing themes. Its ritual iteration has been called now a mere form, a vague invention, an auto da fe, a protestation of loyalty not so much to the particular fact as to what the founders used so vitally to believe, or an expres- sion of tenderness to the obsolete convictions of our forbears, a modern instance expressive of the old instinct that made Confucian ancestor- worship, etc. Another form of this tendency now appears in the call to all who are both cultured and Christian to strive to realize to the saturation point all the higher spiritual meanings of this dogma, till the inner conflict concerning its literal verisimilitude is forgotten, some- what as we have tried to do above. Intense and many as are the storms of controversy that have raged throughout every Christian century about this point, it is happily no longer a storm centre, save only at a certain stage of development during the storm-and-stress period of youth. Here, perhaps, experienced academic teachers of religious thinking best of all realize how often ephebic doubt, which may in the end sweep away all ecclesiastical influences, begins with this to it veritable caput mortuum.
Now the psychological fact is that each of the above trends exists in every one intelligently interested in Christianity. Those at the extreme of assent and dissent and all those between differ only in the degree of prepotency of the one or the other of these dispositions and in the rigour with which they seek to repress the non-preferred and submerged inclinations in their own souls of the deeper unconscious tendencies of which even the expert psychologist still knows so little.
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It is only a commonplace to note that many of the most vociferous denunciations of heresy in others are really often only attempts to exorcise the spectre of doubt in the minds of champions of the faith. What was it that inspired Omar, the friend and successor of Mo- hammed, just after seeing his master breathe his last, to go out of the tent and affirm with the most solemn oath that the founder of the Mos- lem faith still literally lived and to vow to decapitate any one who doubted or denied it? Why, when it was proven by every method of critical evidence, that William Tell was a solar hero and never really existed, did Swiss scholars who knew better deny it and excuse them- selves for so doing because of the fear of its effects upon Swiss patriotism as well as upon the local prestige of Uri, which abounds with historical monuments commemorative of incidents in TelTs career? It is easy to say that in all such cases, in the phrases of Kant, the founder of the pragmatism that James, Schiller, Dewey, and especially Vaihinger, have elaborated, the postulates of the practical may suspend the pure reason and assert their native predominance over the understanding, or that the will or wish to believe becomes supreme, or that feeling, particularly the sentiment of conviction, transcends the intellect. This fertile trend of thought helps us very much and is in the right direction, but further explanation is necessary and is now to some extent possible here.
Deep down in every individual slumbers a racial soul which acts autistically and comes into the consciousness of the individual only in the most imperfect and fragmentary way as the writhings of the giant Enceladus were fabled to cause the occasional eruptions of Etna. To grasp another halting metaphor (for truth here has as yet no language save symbols, and these are but faintly suggestive), all strata of man's soul abound in fossils representing many long-past stages of culture history, only they are not dead fossils but forces still very active below the threshold of consciousness. The fundamental mechanism here involved first crassifies into material form the truths too volatile to be otherwise held. Such varieties are materialized and cached in myths and rites, A strong propensity to inertia inclines us to escape from the attempts to realize them in the here and now, but nevertheless to sacredly conserve them for the future benefit of the self or the race-soul. They are mummies, penates, idols of an unknown but not unknowable divinity, which transcends them. In this form
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they are above fact and are a part of the larger history of the race which has not yet been written because it has not yet occurred. The affirmation of credence in this dogma, for such it is, in the face of mod- ern science, suggests an iceberg broken from some ancient glacier and full of frozen or fossil remains of life, long since extinct, moving sometimes with crushing momentum directly against a strong wind, a phenomenon which would seem paradoxical to one who did not know that it was impelled by a deeper, stronger, denser undercurrent. The wind which carries all surface flotage in its own direction can only re- duce the momentum of the iceberg since it is nine tenths under water, showing but one tenth of its bulk to the less dense element above. To those who do not know psychic undertows, there seems thus now a new miracle, viz., the fact that intelligent people protest belief in such a surd. Credence of Luke's story of the inception of Jesus' life itself is now a marvel, and indeed it would be so even had the conception actually occurred as recorded. We make it true because we want it to be so, and we wish it true because the feelings, which is a collective name for the blurred vestiges of ancestral experience in us, betone and animate it with their own creative vitality.
Thus at bottom man feels his own nature to be divine. He dimly senses, though he knows it not, that all deities are ejects, projects, ectypes, of his own being, objectified in the interests of his own better self-knowledge, self-reverence, and self-control. He does not venture to affirm all this of his own individuality, for he is too conscious of personal limitations and defects. He feels dimly vast and transcend- ing possibilities in himself as if the entire genus homo were trying to come to the birth in him. He responds and even aspires to all that is best and greatest in life, history, art, religion, and tends more or less faintly to realize all his wildest ideals and ambitions for the good, beautiful, and true; but on the other hand he feels his own "excelsior" impulsions thwarted, repressed, checked, and gradually finds that he must re- nounce the fulfilment of most of his wishes and youthful day-dreams. Hence he comes to have a sense of inferiority, incompleteness, sin, ignorance, weakness, if not insignificance. His fond longings do not materialize, but on the contrary they fade so that there is always pro- gressive disappointment, disillusion, a sense of shortage and unworthi- ness, which may culminate in despair. The experience is inevitable and universal, varying only in degree as we pass from the earlier
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and more generic on toward the later and more specific stages of life.
When to man, torn with these antagonistic experiences, comes the suggestion that there is or was a member of his own species, in all points like him, who actualized all his fond might-have-beens (even though he had to give them another and better interpretation), an exemplar embodying the higher man idea which was in danger of being lost, who not only lived and died but was even conceived without taint of man's gravest sin, who lived himself out fully and with abandon, with no repression, and nevertheless was faultless, who was a complete man and also at the same time all that there was of essential divinity — this suggestion men seized upon with an avidity unprecedented. It was the gladdest possible gospel, evangel, good tidings. It appealed to the oldest, deepest things in the soul, which had been long overlaid. It brought salvage by reversion to the oldest, deepest, soundest ele- mental forces in human nature, before it was fabled to have fallen to a stage of less vitality, a pristine experience which old oracles typified as eviction from paradise. Man found consolation for a sense of his own defects by falling in love with the highest redaction of his old ideals of humanity that he could make. If the individual was frail and sinful, the type-man that slumbered deep within him incarnated all the best things that man in all his history had ever imagined. There will thus forever be a sense in which the full deification of Jesus means the po- tential deification of man. Thus in the story of Jesus' conception the folk-soul completed the apotheosis of man. Jesus coming down to earth is only the ambivalent form of saying that man was exalted to divine sonship. Each is the necessary truth and complement of the other. Our belief in it is a revived wish of the infancy of our race and helps it on toward re-realization.
All religions, particularly the Hebrew-Christian, bottom in a sense of loss and restitution, or departure from a norm and return to it. Something archetypal was lost and is found. The psychogenetic problem is what is typified by the reminiscence of paradise to which we hark back. To this problem I find an answer new and true in the cycle of thought represented by Durkheim and his school, which so far as it applies here may be succinctly stated as follows: There was once a stage, through which all races passed, which was marked by tribal solidarity of a kind and degree we have so far lost that it is hard for
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us even to conceive it. The supreme, all-absorbing unity was the social group, clan, or tribe, in which the individual lived, moved, and had Ins being, or was as a cell in a large organism. All he was and did was in its service. Sometimes, as in corroborees, or in time of great public excitement or danger, all not only came together but acted, felt, thought, as one, and personal ends completely merged in those of the social group. Of this stage we have a survival, although a very aber- rant one, in the psychology of the mob. Each felt strong, was angry, fearful, good or bad, with the strength, etc., of the whole, and so each was exalted, ecstatic, enlarged, potentialized as the spirit of the com- munity entered, expanded, and swept through his soul, and all his always very strong gregarious instincts reached their acme upon such occasions. These experiences constituted inspiration, regeneration, for the incipient fragmentary isolated egoes that combined in them. Real life was experienced on these communal, festal occasions when each person's individuality was merged in the soul of his folk — at the same time swallowed up and vastated and reinforced. Perhaps, too, as this group of investigators opine, in this state the individual trans- cended even the species to which he belonged, and had an experience of unique unity and fusion between himself and the universe, becoming sympathetically one not only with his clan but with nature itself.
However that be, our point is that religious experiences to-day are reminiscent of this largely lost state of solidarity, and that our de- votion to the type-man, Jesus, is reinforced by this atavistic element that had its source as indicated above. The "saved" soul's attitude toward Jesus has thus as one of its survival components what our ancient tribesmen forbears felt in their joint celebrations toward the sippe, stirp, or social whole of which each was a member. The devotion and loyalty, and even their direction, when we analyze from patent to latent, are the same in both, although their object is given a more definite, personal, artistic, and morally more perfect as well as a more portative embodiment; for Jesus typifies the human race, and not merely one aggregation of its units. The Conception myth means not that one individual of it, but the genus man was God-made, how- ever we interpret God, even indeed if we identify him with nature.
When man slowly achieved the conquest of the great mammals between whom and himself the struggle for existence was so long and hard, glowed with the first flush of lordship over the brute creation,
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and realized that there was nothing higher in the world than he; and when capping all this he developed a few strong human groups, perhaps themselves isolated when the globe was sparsely populated, but often meeting and subduing other weaker groups and amalgamating them into an ever larger aggregate (meanwhile anthropomorphizing nature in all its aspects) ; it is no wonder that he felt his type or eidos to be the consummate thing in all the cosmos, at the same time its crown and its key, and so often came to project images of his collective folk-self as gods, always made, if always unconsciously, in his own image. His deities of old tell us what man really thought of himself and his species. His pride often made him excite even the envy of the gods he had made, and he was always bending them to his will, while their very nature and doings were simply the objectivization of his own inmost collective soul. They were made of his own traits and ideals, and their degree of objective reality was exactly the inverse of man's lack of knowledge of his larger, social self and its theo-thetic activities. To bring them back, to re-subjectify them, is the perennial endeavour of religion.
To ascribe to them the power to generate men, however, always marks an important step in their subordination and rehumanization. Having begotten, gods reenter the domain of man and take the first step toward their own dedivinization. After Christ became God we hear no more of the sublime Yahveh of the prophets, inhabiting eternity, filling space, etc., for his absoluteness was gone and his twilight had begun. Whatever theory of kenosis or the degree in which God went over to his human Son in the incarnation we proffer, the conception of the latter was the knell of the old prophetic magnification of God's in- finite attributes. He is no longer transcendental, independent, apart, or above, but is smalled down to the compass and dimensions of man from whom he sprang, on whom all ideas of the gods are first patterned. With Jesus' origin some virtue went out of Yahveh and certain of his more absolute traits were sloughed off, so that he and his Kingdom could be reidentified with man and his kingdom. We can thus already see that here, as everywhere, orthodoxy is only an effort to conserve the right intellectual conception of man's orthogenesis, and is always both truer and wiser than it knows.
Primitive Christianity thus meant race solipsism so far as per- tained to religion, all of which was resolved back into man, as Berkeley and idealism by his slogan, Esse est percipi, reduced all the world back
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into the individual, and as the idealism of Fichte resolved it back into an absolute will, as Hegel did into reason. These three thinkers were only doing over again, although far more consciously and methodically for nature, what Jesus, John, Paul, and the early Christians, had done more instinctively and unconsciously for God and all his entourage. In the first centuries of our era, in other words, theology began to be slowly resolved back to anthropology, as later epistemological idealism anthropomorphized nature in its way. Patristic literature was con- stantly applying the predicates of God not so much to man in general as to redeemed man, as mystics have always been fond of doing. Much that Feuerbach says along this line would have been truer had he not made the fatal mistake of relatively ignoring the difference between the redeemed and the wicked, because God and man become identical chiefly in the soul of saints and the elect. In them prayer is a dialogue between the individual and the racial or unconscious self within, mis- conceived as without, themselves. Thus there is a sense in which man's knowledge of God is progressive self-knowledge. Especially in becoming good man becomes God, participating more or less in his ipsissimal nature. This saving sense of kind was not absent from the souls of the wicked and vestiges of it were even in devils. It is thus man's better generic self outwardly projected that man has always and everywhere worshipped. Religion apotheosized man, purging away all individual sin and error. Than himself thus spiritualized there is no other God. Thus only a son of man can become son of God. First man strove so long and hard to exalt himself to deity that he overdid it, and so later had to struggle long and hard again to reduce Godhood back to humanity. Now universal man (as once it was only totemic, racial man) is the only criterion of truth as well as of all moral and other values. God is the soundest core and essence, the truest instinct of man. As known he is our own deepest self-knowledge and as unknown he is man's sub- or un-conscious nature, and hence his objectivity is always secondary and never primary. The antithesis between God and man is then really that between the individual and the genus homo, Comte's " Le grand etre" Hobbe's "Leviathan" at its best, purified, sublimated, made free and invested with all the worthy attributes of the race. His goodness, justice, love, etc., are really man's and valid only to and in man. He is the truth, virtue, beauty of man. The real atheist is only he who denies these attributes
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to man. To think meanly of one is to do so of the other. Thus man is not merely the measure of the religious world but the Jons et origo of it all. In the stage of heterization, or the diastole of the folk-soul, it ascribes to God all that it wishes but has had to renounce for itself, so that, as objective, he is our relinquished self or its complement. The Pelagians said man, the Augustinians said God, is good, wise, great, etc. Both are true, and the truth of each lies in the reciprocal ambivalent truth of the other. This is the only sense in which God is the creation of man. Having been thus evolved in the slow saecular process of psychogenesis, he becomes himself invested with personality, turns back, makes man his object, and is said to reveal to man again the stored-up wisdom, goodness, etc., with which humanity has grad- ually endowed him. Thus man became the object of the subject he had made and to whom he had given power over himself. Then comes a third and final stage in which man himself, having been the victim of the creation of his own soul, to which he had long subjected and even humiliated himself, began to realize that his gods and religion are really made by his own deeper and always creative soul. As this process of realization advances, man feels himself immeasurably ex- alted and even rejuvenated, and this process and result is the essence of Christianity. Thus we have a reciprocity; now objectivity is very real and crass, and then subjectivity in its turn may go too far. We might thus add to the motto vox populi, vox Dei, and say the soul of the people is the very soul of God. This republics and democracies should feel even more than monarchies, which are in fact always less theocratic. Now nothing in the culture history of the past has been so fecun- dating as these processes; especially when the analytic stage is passing into the synthetic, deities are slowly reducing themselves to human form and the bifurcation of Diesseits and Jenseits is being overcome. Thus some of the obiter dicta of Feuerbach may still be of service in bringing into clearer light a new philosophical appreciation of the birth story of Jesus. It might be called the return of the not so much prodi- gal as ostracized God to his father, man. He had wandered into a far country and lived there long in splendour, but the lure of the fairest of earth's daughters only typifies his home-sickness for his fatherland, Mansoul. So there is a sense in which generic man or humanity is truly God's father and is recognized as such by the title Son of God, which Jesus gave to himself. Thus God's home-coming
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commemorates man's coming to the glory and strength of his maturity, and Christianity is documented as the best and last of all religions, for it is all ad majorem gloriam hominis. Of this new d£but of God or of God's return into human life and of the prodigious advance which its ever deepening, widening processional down the Christian centuries caused, Luke's preluding galaxy of introductory incidents to this supreme human drama, is a fit and noble proem.
CHAPTER FIVE
BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY
Palestine in Jesus' day — Jesus' problem which began with a pas- sion for common morality and purity — The Baptist and Fichte — Jesus' relations to the former — John as a moral presentifier — His ethical katharsis — The effects of the Baptism on Jesus — The psychology of the three temptations — The choice and training of the disciples.
PALESTINE in Jesus' time was extremely different from what it is now. It was a fat and fertile land, and intensively culti- vated, for the ancient Hebrews had a passion for agriculture. Its diverse altitudes, which gave it a varied climate, also made it yield a vast variety of products. It was well watered and timbered and crossed by the great caravan routes between Africa and Asia. It was rather densely populated (one writer estimates five million inhabitants) although we have no reliable data on this point. It was indeed a land of' plenty, flowing with milk and honey. It was beautiful, and its people were very industrious. Of old it was the land promised to their fathers, and had been looked forward to through all the forty years in the wilderness. To see the Children of Israel established in it was the goal of Moses' endeavour, and under Joshua their blood had been poured out to take the land from the corrupt Canaanites. Throughout the diaspora and in all the captivities their soul had yearned for and idealized it. Here they had multiplied and prospered. It had been given them as a patrimony by their deity, and no fatherland has ever been more passionately loved. It had been hallowed by asso- ciations with the theocracy and the great prophets, and the memory of the splendid kingdom under David and Solomon. Thus few lands and races in history have been so closely mated.
Despite these great advantages the people at the dawn of our era were wretched, depressed, and miserable. Some three score years before, the Romans had feudalized the land and practically made the Hebrews captive in it. Liberty was gone. There were taxes on persons,
388
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income, cattle, roads, bridges, movable property, and market sales, and, worst of all, these taxes were farmed out to the highest bidders, who often sublet them and extorted more in the form of forced presents, if not by more aggressive means. These resources went to sustain the Roman courts and armies. Thus the people were kept in bitter poverty in their own land of abundance. They were in perpetual dread of their creditors and of venal judges who could enslave debtors, sell their wives and children, and even put them to death. There was thus great economic as well as political tension, and there were occa- sional outbreaks of revolt, while the strong and long-repressed hope of a great deliverer, which had flamed up in the days of Judas Maccabeus (he of the mailed fist, who after ages of exile and captivity had thrown off the foreign yoke and given his people an all too brief but welcome taste of independence), had in the two centuries since this event almost died out. Not only was their kingdom lost, but their religion had reached perhaps its lowest ebb. No prophet of note had appeared for three centuries; for piety had been almost lost in the petty rivalries of sects, and righteousness had become a lifeless thing of rigid forms and ceremonies, some of which must have made life a burden to those who tried to conform to them. At this hour, on the whole perhaps the darkest the chosen race had ever seen, the dim but majestic figure of John the Baptist appeared.
In their reports concerning him the discrepancies of the four Gos- pels almost reach their climax. Legends, which are very loquacious about him, differ widely, and so do modern scholars. The well- known paragraphs of Josephus suggest no relation between John's agitation and the work of Jesus. He has played a not insignificant role in pagan nature saga.1 On the other hand, those who deny the historicity of Jesus deny that of John.2 Thus divergencies, even in essentials, are far beyond the possibility of harmonization by the methods of critical scholarship. The Baptist's psychopheme, if we may thus call the collective rank and tangled mass of tradition and literature about him, however we interpret it, constitutes an integral element of Jesusism; for without it our conception of all the first part of Our Lord's career would have to be quite radically recast. It presents, however, a most challenging and stimulating problem to the
»Dahnhardt: "Natursagen." 190a. Bd. 2., passim.
«See, e. g., W. B. Smith: "Jesus and the Baptist." Open Court, 1914, P- 38 et stq.
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psychologist. His problem, however, is not insoluble, and his first task is to rescue the Baptist from the r61e which has, from the first, been assigned to him, of being a mere avant-coureur of Jesus. Subse- quent events made him this. The chief factors in his psychic diathesis may be characterized with much confidence somewhat as follows :
(i) The prime motivation of his life was a passion for common, everyday personal morality. He was an inflamed conscience, and he was also ahungered and athirst for righteousness. His vox clamantis in deserto was that of the categorical imperative, although, unlike Kant's formulation of it as pure oughtness, John applied its momentum to specific duties of individuals and vocations, telling publicans, sol- diers, etc., what to do. His prescriptions were not merely negative, like those of the decalogue, nor did they merely gently dissuade from wrong courses like the daimon of Socrates, but they were essentially positive as well as specific : " Share your food and raiment, do no vio- lence, accuse no one falsely, be content with your wages. Your boasted Abrahamic descent is of no avail. Your leaders are a genera- tion of vipers." Unlike many of the prophets of old, he had no word of commiseration for his countrymen because of their subjection to an alien power. He enumerated no formidable list of their sins, made no awful indictment of general depravity, did not attempt to hearten the people by any predictions of good times coming, nor did he inveigh against the temple or its services. His tocsin was addressed to each individual, assuming that he best knew his own sins, to change his life for the better. John was essentially an ethical revivalist, which is very different from being a cold ethical culturist. His appeal for moral reformation was direct, concise, and personal. His method, too, was contagious, because the soul of the ancient Hebrews was so soaked with an inveterate sense, deeply graven in it by all their laws and prophets and racial history as they interpreted them, that all outer hardships and calamities were sent as penalties for wrong-doing, and on the other hand, that prosperity was a reward of merit. Hence, their present low estate must be a measure of their sin and an index of Yahveh's displeasure. The eternal Jew gave the world the feeling which he to-day finds it hard to escape, that prosperity and happiness not only belong to but express virtue, although the obverse conviction that failure and pain are the outer expression of sin, as the Book of Job describes it, is hard to realize. This, Kant thought, proved a
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transcendental world where virtue and happiness and also sin and pain get together, as they must somewhere, or else the deep instinctive sense of justice in the human soul is a lie and this is not a moral world. Such, then, was the "Word" which came to John in the desert, and which he proclaimed, "Be good as you have never striven to be before; examine and reform your lives."
To this end he insisted it was necessary to envisage, objectify, and thus realize what is wrong in heart and conduct, and pass judg- ment upon it. The lips of the oracle in the soul, always present if often mute, which distinguishes between right and wrong, must be unsealed. The three great words are, repent, confess, forsake. The Nietzschean supermoralist never regrets, still less confesses, but psycho- analysis has abundantly shown the transcendent power of just this moral therapy and has even justified much in the theory and practice of the confessional. To bring a submerged complex up into conscious- ness is the essential first step toward evicting it from the soul. John demanded of each a moral autodiagnosis. Not only must faults of character and conduct be realized within as such, but they must be still further alienated by telling them to one or more others, partly because the act of doing so makes them less a part of our own selfhood, and partly because the knowledge that others know our defects con- stitutes a potent reinforcement of our own efforts for self-betterment.
Now this moulting of the bad is typified by the old rite of baptism, a washing of the body, symbolic of inner cleansing, as if sin were impurity that had accumulated from without, or an eruption or exuda- tion. Modern hygiene has shown many new associations between cleanliness and virtue; but John here struck a note that had been dominant through the whole of Hebrew story and cult, viz., that of purity. Ablutions almost without number; the fire of the altar, and even the motive itself of the sacrifice; the regimen of the home, camp, and temple; food prescriptions and taboos; permissible and non- permissible marriages — all these and many more were shot through with the distinctions between clean and unclean. Everything was motivated by the desire for purity, of which baptism was the outer sign and virtue the inner substance. To have revived these old echoes in the Semite soul, and to have interpreted all in a purely per- sonal and ethical sense; to have so profoundly impressed the masses that they came forward and publicly admitted their sin and committed
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themselves before others to reform, was a prodigious achievement, and has its own moving lessons for our present faltering endeavours toward moral education and reform. The movement John started was far- reaching, in every sense, and was of the highest and most intrinsic significance.1 Even in Paul's time we are told of John's disciples, ten in one group, who had never heard of Jesus and were preaching their master's protevangelicum. Just what dimensions the move- ment he inaugurated really did attain, and what it would have become had it not been superseded by Jesus, we can hardly hope to know, any more than we can what Socrates would have been without Plato. Socrates had his Xenophon, but John left us no spokesman; and we have no idea how much or little Jesus owed to him.2
(2) But this fanning of the flame of righteousness in the soul is always and everywhere the one and only sound psychopedagogic be- ginning of every genuine religious awakening. Without this basis piety is pathological. If religion be only morality touched with emo- tion, it adds to the former a sense of reinforcement from a higher power not ourselves, however we interpret it. This the popular conscious- ness needs in order to sustain its grail-quest for purity, which languishes without it. For the multitude, virtue for its own sake lacks and needs the sanctions which religion supplies. The individual needs to ex- perience an eruption of the deeper, greater, ethnic soul of his folk. By just so much as John felt this he thereby realized that he had made only a right beginning and that a higher transcendental consummation was needed if his work was to grow, or even to last. From some such inner
•O. Holtzmann: "Leben Jesu." Tubingen, 1001, 428 p. Ch. v, "Johannes der Taufer." JHarnack ("What is Christianity?" 2 ed. rev., New York, 1903., 322 p.) very briefly suggests a modern analogue to John in Fichte, which we must amplify. In 1806 the power of Prussia was shattered at a blow by the Battle of Jena. Its army, allies, industry, trade, were swept away, the country impoverished and exhausted, and its capital garrisoned by French soldiers. Its soil had never been fertile, nor its spirit practical, and its history showed more discord than unity. Its military situation, with strong nations on all sides, was the worst in history. The Teutonic stock had never known such humiliation, and its future had never seemed so dark; but the inspiration came in the "Addresses to the German Nation," given by Fichte in Berlin each Sunday evening through the winter to large crowds, with Napoleon's sentries at the door and his spies scattered through the hall. He said in substance: "We have still left our strong and healthy bodies, our language, all our own, not an agglomerate of many tongues like English, and a pure blood never mixed with other races. We have our grand traditions. We have wrought out the Reformation, one of the greatest tasks the hu- man spirit has ever achieved. Our ancestors from their tombs call to us not to let the work they died in doing be in vain. We carry the light and hope of the world. If we sink, freedom and humanity sink with us. There is one plain and only way for patriotic restoration. This is not primarily by armies or legislation, but by the slow process of national educa- tion we must begin at the bottom and rise like Bonal or in Pestalozzi's homely but most inspiring tale of the reconstruc- tion of a decadent Swiss village: 'How Gertrude Teaches Her Children.' We must live for our children and train their bodies and minds as never was done in the world before. This has been our chief excellence in the past; our great think- ers have set the human spirit free, and have lived for and in ideas and ideals. Thus our duty of duties is to realize the Platonic republic, wherein the wisest ruled and racial education was the chief problem of statesmanship. Our policy and destiny must be to clarify our minds; our leaders must be priests of truth and in her pay, investigating fear- lessly in all directions, and ready to do and suffer all in the world's holiest cause of science and learning. All classes must unite, else the real Fatherland long hoped for and long delayed can never come. If we can rise to this lofty duty men of a higher type than the world has yet known will appear." Thus Fichte, idealist and moral enthusiast, spoke and was heard, as no one else had spoken or been heard in nis race, at least since Luther. Education to him was a new dispensation of religion itself. In accordance with this appeal, the University of Berlin was founded by far more practical men; education was made cardinal, the central item of national policy; Scharenhorst reconstructed the military system, almost on its present basis; Stein re-edited the land laws and the status of peasants; Jahn founded everywhere the patriotic Turner societies, and preached again the gospel of ancient Greece, that only strong muscles can make men great and nations free. It is the soul of Teutonism thus regenerated that is yet marching on.
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sense in John's own soul may have originated the second note in his message, which the synoptists so stress, viz., that of subordination to a greater than he, who was soon to appear and finish what he had begun. Perhaps he felt that the very multitude of his followers, or at any rate the earnestness of their struggles to improve, must constitute an irre- sistible call to some mightier builder in the realm of soul to complete the structure, the foundations of which he had so well laid. Great men appear when they are greatly needed, and John had made this need a crying one. With the folk a new morality is liable to abort without a new religion. Individual impulses to reform need to be supplemented and reinforced by the energies that slumber in the depths of the un- conscious, generic soul of humanity, to work effectively on which is the specialty of religious genius. True, some passages in John's pro- nouncements may give a slight colour to the view that he really ex- pected the Lord himself to come to carry on his work; that his baptism of fire was an eschatalogical finale. But so far as his belief that he was only an inceptor of a greater movement focussed in any real or imagined personality, it was doubtless directed toward a human and not a divine being. John probably thus did share the Messianic expectations of those about him, although we do not know how definite they were and just how much his sense, if he had it, that he was only a herald, an- nunciator, or way-preparer, was an afterthought. If John was enact- ing a foreordained role which was only a prologue to the Jesus-drama, or if there was collusion between him and Jesus, then John's character loses something of its primordial inner moral spontaneity; for if he had known nothing of Jesus before he appeared as a stranger at the baptism, his own personality would seem enhanced. Unlike Jesus, John was uncouth, laconic, with a simpler and more incessantly repeated message. John did no healing, Jesus no baptizing. If both were independent as well as contemporary products of the Zeitgeist, especially as some of the disciples of John became those of Jesus, while others remained true to their master in prison, and even after his death, it follows that it was almost inevitable that the work of these two leaders must be correlated. The fact of John's early departure from the scene would naturally suggest that heaven ordained him as a fit messenger, and so by the time the Gospels were composed he had become only the morning star ushering in the Lord of Day. Mark, the earliest Gospel, has least, Matthew more, and Luke still more to say of subordination, while in
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the Fourth Gospel John does little save to designate Jesus as the Son of God, earth's Redeemer, who is fated to increase as he to decrease, so that he does little more than pronounce his moriturus saluto. Surely, too, those who heard him would not have been so moved if they had thought him merely an advance agent of another. They must have regarded him as a prophet in his own right, and their response was to his own appeal. But however great he was, his reduction to an intro- ducer was really inevitable with the growth of the greater influence of Jesus. It is, however, time that his dynamic moralism be more or less rescued from its twilight and restored to just appreciation. Again, conversely, if his cogent lesson was taught until all interested knew it by heart; if his bow was shot, his power exhausted, and his untimely taking-off invented to mask the waning of his power, it was also an ingenious device to lay his Active execution as another indictment against the weak and hated Herod, acting on the whim of a spiteful woman.
Very successfully launched on his career, Jesus was interviewed by a messenger from the imprisoned John, to ask if he were really the Christ. Perhaps John had not heard all that Jesus was doing, or he may have expected still greater things. Perhaps, too, there is inti- mation that even though Jesus be not the Christ, his faith that there must be some other somewhere was undaunted. John's question, which was characteristically direct, Jesus did not answer, as John probably wanted, by a specific yes or no. Perhaps he was not yet sufficiently sure of himself, or not yet ready to proclaim his Christhood openly. So his response was immediately to set about healing " many " sick, plague-stricken, possessed, and blind, and to tell John's messen- gers to report to their master that they had also seen the deaf and lepers cured, the dead raised, and the Gospel preached to the poor. Perhaps Jesus thought these therapeutic marvels would most impress John, who was not a healer, as John's specialty of baptism had most im- pressed Jesus, and that from this report he would infer the answer to his question. When the emissaries of John had gone, he catechized his circle as to why they had been drawn to John, pronounced him the greatest yet born of woman, although less than the least in the new Kingdom. While it is hard to find in this episode, as some have sought to do, any trace of pique on Jesus' part at John's uncertainty about him, there are phrases in the narrative and after-comments that sug-
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gest a perhaps studied ambiguity. It has been said that Jesus thought John would understand reports of cures as symbols of a healing of the soul more effective than John's cleansing baptism had been, although this acted answer hardly suggests a baptism of fire. There is certainly now a tendency to reverse the traditional view that John recognized the new therapeut as the one he had predicted, and died happy. Rather, the consensus of scholarly opinion stresses the probability that John died oppressed with doubt. Jesus is represented as being moved and seeking solitude when he heard of John's imprisonment and death. If he had regarded John as an important coadjutor, he realized now that he was alone. We are also told that he was perhaps in danger of John's fate, since Herod thought him John come back to life.
Our ignorance of John is increasingly baffling and almost exas- perating. Perhaps his mission, once thought to be very short, was far longer and his work far greater than has been supposed, and per- haps Jesus was far more influenced and inspired by John than we have known. Perhaps, had John not died, his disciples would never have gone over to Jesus. Perhaps, if one of John's disciples, who had never known Jesus, had written an account of the Baptist, Jesus would have been robbed of some of his chief superiorities, and the contrasts that the Gospels so subtly suggest would be lost. If we may infer from Luke's tale of John's birth that his parents were very old, he must have been early orphaned and had to nurse his fiery spirit alone in the wilderness. The few who doubt John's existence stress the fan- cied symbolism of his meeting death at the hands of the Roman soldiery, and regard it as a distinct prefiguring of the way Jesus was to die; while the ruggedness of John's person and method brings out other contrasting effects, so that he is an admirable counterfoil of Jesus. The main point, however, at this historic distance, to those of real spiritual culture, is that a composite portrait of all the records and tra- ditions concerning John has a most impressive verisimilitude. It is so good and true to human nature that we cannot help wishing it to be historically true, and because we do so it will, for all the intents and purposes of faith, always be so.
Finally, John is for us a classic paradigm of the moral presenti- fier. Everything worth while is or must be realized here and now, and also in the individual. What is afar in time, or place, and also what is racial, was outside his ken. The history, lineage, blood, rites, in
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which worths and values had come to centre, were decreed nugatory and bankrupt. Everything is true and real only in so far as it can be utilized for personal, inner betterment. All else is vanity, dross, ref- use, chaff. Modern biological ethics only reaffirms ; and, indeed, we can never get beyond or outside this. The energized will absorbs intellect and feeling in its intentness on the present duty, and the present sucks into itself the virtue of the past and the future, as in the Bergsonian duree reelle. Thus man is at his highest and his best. There is no other time and place, but the present is all in all. This is the universal formula of the potentialization of the individual, and one of its chief attainments is unification of soul against all dispersive and schizo- phrenic influences. Our scattered powers, attainments, and experi- ences are harmonized and consolidated, and all the partial components of selfhood are brought to bear for all they are worth, and focalized upon the end in view. Just as shocks of anger and fear may wake dormant powers, summate them, and dynamogenize us, leaving us better, stronger, and more safeguarded against every danger of fission of the ego, so a sudden sense of personal sin arouses every moral re- source of our nature to better our lives, and to bring a new diathesis of higher moral tension. This is self-salvation, moral autotherapy.
But if this is the greatest theme in the world, the personal duty of duties, it is also the hardest of them all, and human life is in no small part made up of devising ways of distraction or diversion from it. The passion to do the other thing is inveterate. The soul is full of schemes of procrastinations, of resolutions that abort, of truths that we put into the cold storage of symbols, of obligations that we seek to sat- isfy by ceremonies, of flabby reasonings and day-dreams that vicariate for achievement. Whenever the present is too hard for us, we fly for refuge to the past or to memory, or find reversion in amusement, which is abandonment to the impulsions of childhood. We place the form for the substance, the sign for the thing it means, easy convention for hard virtue. In our very research we are prone to accumulate notes and protocol data without the incessant mental Bearbeitung and inter- pretation which they need, and lacking which they become mere learned rubbish. The intensive resistance to moral self-knowledge, self-control, and improvement is the most inveterate of all. Things that ought to be done, instead of leaping to accomplishment, are stored up in the shadowy limbo of hopes deferred. The times or conditions
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are never fully ripe, and the psychological moment never strikes. Neither the self as a whole, nor any element in it, is trusted with aban- don. The god of things as they are is an unknown god. Wishes and imagination grow pale and falsetto instead of being installed into living actualities. Thus the present is emptied of all meaning and value, rather than filled with them to repletion. How readily all these coward refugees from reality may become pathological in all spheres of life, psychoanalysis has abundantly shown. All these above traits of degeneration John found rife all about him, and hence the Gospel that was needed and that he preached was that of presentification. Doctrines, traditions, punctilious ceremonies, are at best mere types and symbols of the one thing needful — righteousness. What is im- plicit in them must be made explicit. Though they seem bewusst- seinsunfahig, they are not. They must and can be made conscious, because consciousness is essentially remedial. Awareness is always and everywhere ancillary to activity, and is incomplete without it. It is thus reorientation in the interests of better adaptation or re- education, and this is the method of change and transformation.
Thus while John could ring up the dispersed components available for reform in the individual, he must have come to feel the need of another and greater presentifier who could summate the deeper and larger resources of the racial soul; for without the consummating work of the religious poet-artist, who is master in this field, the work of the best reformer of individual lives is prone to lapse. If John's more superficial work upon the personal consciousness consisted in taking the first step toward racializing the individual, the larger, converse work of individualizing the racial yet remained for Jesus. Self- consciousness, touched and inspired by the larger life of the race, is always expanded and swings into conformity with it in the moral life, and this is much. It needs, however, to be completely saturated and possessed by it, in order that the soul be definitively saved. Hence a greater presentifier of the racial soul must come, who can do in its do- main a work analogous to that which John did for the individuals whom he transformed. Personal life experience is too limited in its resources to fully convert itself, unless the larger reserves that slumber beneath the threshold in the life of the kind or species can be rung up and turned on to advance individual initiative to a higher potential or to bring its inceptions to completeness. The new self-improvement
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morality must feel itself caught up and borne on as if by a larger heter- onomous power. Self-reform is foetal and old conceptions actually make Jesus an accoucheur of John's endeavours, symbolizing the new birth of the individual into the larger life of humanity. This pre- sentification focusses the whole life of man into the transforming per- sonal and universalized here and now. This was typified by John's trope of the baptism of fire, which tests precious metal and resolves all that is worthless to ash, dross, or smoke.1
Some have conjectured that the great nabi of ethical katharsis or purgation developed a protensive, expectant anxiety as his ministry proceeded, as he came to realize that he could not complete what he had begun, and that he watched the crowds that flocked to him with growing dread lest a fit successor should not appear, realizing that otherwise his work would be doomed to oblivion, and perhaps derision, like that of many mad prophets that these sad times had produced. Again, some who, in the wake of Drews, doubt that Jesus ever lived, have gone so far as to urge that John's prediction was never fulfilled at all, and that no greater than he ever appeared, and tell us that this explains the problem, hitherto baffling, why John's ministry was so brief and his design so incomplete. On this view the earliest and best of those we have been wont to call Jesus' disciples were really those of John only, and after the latter had been disheartened, discredited, and perhaps imprisoned and slain as an agitator, charged with raising hopes that showed no signs of possible fulfilment in fact, they set to work, perhaps rather deliberately, either with or without collusion, to create a person and give him a career that had he appeared would have been their idea of a realization of John's hopes. On this view, the whole career and life of Jesus were, as it were, made to order, shortly before our Gospels took form, to fit John's specifications. Thus with the first appearance of Jesus at his baptism, we leave the solid ground of history and fact and pass over to that of mythopceic or more or less half - conscious creation of a vivid imagination, loftily and pragmatically motivated. Yet others have conceived John as an invention, perhaps to give Jesus a precursor, such as his ancestor David had in Samuel.
_ 'This fire-motif, so prominent later in Jesus' eschatology, is not for John the riyrophilic Heraclitic dement from which all things arose and into which the cosmos will ultimately be resolved. Nor is water-baptism merely a token of quenching the fire of either God's wrath or of man's lust. The fire-thought here means only a more drastic purification, as of precious metal from dross. Nor have we here an outcrop of the pyrophobic tendency of a keenly awakened sense of sin and guilt as now explained by the new psychology of hell. C.T. Sparkman: "Satan and His Ancestors from a Psychological Standpoint, Journal of Religious Psychology, 191J, vol. 5, p. 53-85, 163-104. Nor is there here any intimation of the scortatory motif of hypereroticism, of which Freudians make fire always and everywhere the infallible Symbol.
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Schleiermacher objected that John's message was a veiled challenge or appeal to Jesus to get him out of prison, and that John was chagrined that he would not or could not do so. Skeptics have often raised the ominous question why, if Jesus was all he claimed to be, he let John die in prison. Following the record, however, it is no wonder, brief though the sketches of him are, that this unique figure fired the imag- ination, and is still so suggestive of sublime dramatic situations that the figure of the great fore-preacher has ever since not only attracted and inspired the propagators of the religious doctrine everywhere, but has left many a record on the history of art, literature, folk-tale, and even plant-lore.
One day, near the close of his career, possibly on its last day, among the throng came a stranger in the prime of life and of such im- pressive personality that even the aggressive John himself is made to shrink back in awe and at first to refuse to baptize him, but to feel rather impelled himself to be baptized by the hand of one so manifestly his superior. He did at length consent to confer his rite upon this im- portant visitor, but only by way of submission to his command, and after him perhaps baptized no other. If so, his function here cul- minated, and his office was at an end. This event marks the advent of Jesus from an obscurity which scholarship may well despair of penetrating, into the very centre of the stage of history. There is almost no authentic knowledge, although tradition and conjecture are even more voluble concerning his antecedents than concerning those of John. John's baptism meant repentance for sins, so how could Jesus take it without the implication that he had been a sinner? Hence, many before and since Schrempf have held that he at this point had not been sinless, and needed and experienced repentance and remission, like others, even though in some different degree, or on a higher plane. Perhaps he came to John late because he had hesitated long. He would naturally want both to see John and to know at first hand the effects of his message and rite. His chroniclers must also have felt the need of some point of contact with John vital enough to make Jesus his heir. This dilemma was well met. The implication is clearly brought out that Jesus' natural personality was overwhelmingly im- pressive to John, or else the latter had wondrous discernment of inner character; or rather, both effects are secured along with another one, viz., the exhibition of Jesus in a most telling attitude of subordination
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and humility, and at the same time of authority, compelling John to perform the rite despite his remonstrance.
Jesus entered into his part of the ceremony with a sympathetic Einfuhliing, abandoning himself to the influence of the moment. To be a good experimental investigator of the work of John, he must be- come, for the moment at least, his proselyte, and this his genius enabled him to do, although it had to be to some degree as if by proxy, for how could a soul so pure sound the depths of the experience of the conviction of sin? Just this was, however, perhaps precisely what he wanted and did. It was at this point that his consciousness began the great work of bearing the sins of others in a vicarious way. Even if he had not sinned, he had to know how sin felt at its worst. Perhaps in his own soul here first arose something like the later theological dis- tinction between posse non peccare and non posse peccare. If so, his baptis- mal experience was for others' sins, which he was to bear, and of which he perhaps here made inner confession. It also marked in his own soul a crisis such that while before he had been able not to sin, he was henceforth unable to sin, because realizing more fully what sin meant. Or else, perhaps, like Parsifal, who before meeting Gundry had been naively innocent, but was afterward consciously so, Jesus may have here passed over from instinctive to reasoned virtue.
The effect of the baptism on Jesus' own susceptible soul was pro- found, and marked perhaps the greatest epoch in his career. He had at any rate heard much of this great soul-purgator, and desired to meet him and feel his spell. Perhaps he had heard that he proclaimed a greater, and wondered who it was. Possibly he thought he might announce himself as John was about to retire. When the sacred office of symbolic cleansing was over and Jesus came up out of the river, his tense, impressionable soul had a vision. For his entranced imagination surcharged with the vivid imagery of the prophets, the heavens seemed to open, and out of their azure depths something very like a dove ap- peared to descend upon him. Along with this visual came also a com- pelling auditory impression, like the voice of God, saying, "Thou art my own beloved son." The secret and perhaps all unconscious dream-wish his soul had nourished now sprang into consciousness, as if it were a veritable realization. Assuming that this occurred to him alone and only, i. e., that the dove was entoptic and the voice entaural, he must have imparted this experience in some confidential way and
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hour to some one, and have discussed its reality and meaning. If he had experienced one of those critical moments that the tame psychol- ogy of the modern toned-down mind calls illusory, it would be neither strange nor even abnormal; for imagination always, and especially in his age and land, made thought far more pictorial than now, and Oriental mentation, too, often works in great throbs and pulses when under great stresses. Whether it was all an objective miracle, an hallucination, a thought, or the revival of a long fondly and secretly cherished wish, the incident has great dramatic validity. The Ebio- nites thought that at this moment Jesus first became divine; the syn- optists thought that he then received the Holy Ghost, perhaps pre- figured by John's baptism of fire, and itself prefiguring Pentecost. The most psychological of modern Christologists, however, think it an endopsychic experience which consisted in Jesus' receiving his afflatus, or inspiration, or in being dowered with the enthusiasm of humanity that Renan, or in attaining the supernormal or erethic or ecstatic state that Holtzmann, makes such a leading trait of Jesus' life and character. On this view, from the rapt state into which his higher powers now deployed, he became always thereafter more predisposed toward, and at all moments nearer to, a more or less entranced state, which came to be habitual. In this experience his spirit assumed the erect posture which man's body did long ago, erecting himself above himself in a way no less epochal for the coming superman.
To meditate in solitude upon the stupendous problem thus sprung upon him, Jesus felt impelled to retire to the desert, whence John had come, to brood and think it out. Meditation and introversion of soul favoured by solitude, as the lives of hermits and anchorites show, has always been a great resource of great men, not recluses, on supreme occasions when they needed to orient themselves, to find poise after shock, or seek direction from within. When this exercise and discipline are combined with fasting, they tend to give a very peculiar and specific exaltation of mind. When alone, man abstracts from all the constraints of the outer world, and frees spontaneity and inner impulsion from inhibitions. This brings a state not without analogies to those that arise in the passivity that the pro- cedure of psychoanalysis cultivates. Perhaps the infantile reveries and the pubescent day-dreams and vague foregleams that Jesus felt at the time of his temple experience, such as the Mother Church still
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cultivates from the confirmation age on in the retreat, revived and came to the fore, throwing off the shades of the prison-house or the repres- sions of maturity with its prosaic realities, which often cause them to grow pale. Now the dual image of the dove and the voice revived the juvenile excelsior passion for supreme excellence in all its pristine force until it seemed indeed realizable. Jesus' tender years had been haunted by the Messianic ideals of his age, perhaps most potent in the little circle in which he grew up. These were uniquely fitted to give just the inspiration that fervid and pietistic youth craves and needs. All these experiences were both normal and typical in kind, but without precedent in degree. The Messianic idea was a hovering presence, marvellously calculated to appeal with tremendous energy to the inmost soul of ambitious and gifted young men. It had been Jesus' own most fondly cherished form of idealism, and from his earli- est fancies had lain secretly very warm and close about his heart. Its sudden vivid recurrence in this most exalted moment of his complete manhood and in broad daylight could seem nothing else than an appari- tion of fate. Could he, should he, accept, or rather, dare he refuse it, and what were all the implications involved? To accept it meant a life such as no other dared to live; and if he was true to its role and lived out the life that his race thought ideal, which the prophets had so cher- ished and which the ancient and ardent hope of his people had made more or less definite and tangible, it meant not only supreme service and glory but possible death in the end. The call seemed indubitable and straight from the All-Father of his own soul, and so to refuse it would be cowardice and treason to the Most High. To succeed would be joy and salvation to himself and all who would accept him. The summons was authentically divine, and so he could not fail. But stronger and deeper yet came the feeling that it was no role, but that he was in very truth and fact Yahveh's only son, not by appointment or commission, but in his very inmost nature. He was not merely sent upon this mission and following a prescribed course of life with no outer constraint. He was born in very truth the Messiah. In this thought, indeed, he merely learned his own true identity like the real son of a king who has been reared in ignorance of who he is, yearning for some noble career and finding in maturity that a throne is his by right. Thus in solitude he discovered his real self, and inner oracles that could not be gainsaid awoke and spoke.
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Other mortals galore had thought themselves divine, but with no such witness and with no such plenary assurance. Thus the great affirmation was made and sealed. Jesus knew himself for what he was, and accepted himself as veritable man-God. God did not merely come to consciousness in him but was his own ipsissimal noumenal self, and what a postulate! God is man and man is God. The transcen- dent is immanent. Jesus' own individual psychology is the true the- ology. God had been thought objective, but now is seen to be only the inmost subjectivity of man, individual and racial. The divine in nature as Father developed the divine in man as Son. Man is the only begotten son of the cosmos. Sounding all this profundity of insight, which a few mystics and seers before and since have dimly and par- tially intuited, Jesus reached that depth, or rather height, of insight beyond which religious psychologizing could not go. Eckhart, Boehme, Tauler, and in more rational ways, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others, to say nothing of Oriental seers, have glimpsed aspects of what this epoch-making concept of a theanthropos or an incarnation idea really implied; but none who has thought it ever grasped it so completely, or ever dared to live it out, or even ventured to express the great secret without reservations. If uttered too plainly, as in a peculiar sense Feuerbach found out, to the world, which has always cried out at it and has clung to the need of an external God, the seer has been silenced, or discredited, or burned as heretic or athe- ist because he had become too God-intoxicated. This was the aperqu supreme, above all others, which Jesus penetrated to with fasting and prayer, alone in the desert (an environment symbolic of the soul soli- tude of all who attain these high altitudes of human experience, where few or none can follow or understand). This was the conviction in which his soul, after we know not what struggle and agony, at last found rest, peace, and immovable anchorage as on the Rock of Ages. It was like the discovery of a new continent of faith, or worship at the shrine of a new deity, viz., the Holy Ghost. Amidst these waste places Jesus gradually grew familiar and at home with this thought as he communed with his own inmost soul.
But now his thought must turn to the world of other men. What could be done with this great new insight so hard to grasp, so impossible to teach directly? It was far above and vastly too esoteric for the world and perhaps even for a chosen few. To utter it abruptly and
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entirely would mean summary fiasco and ruination. Not one of all whom he knew or could think of could see or bear it. The faintest intimation that he thought himself divine would be deemed blasphemy or downright insanity. He knew his world, and best of all his imme- diate family and personal entourage. How the best type of Hebrew piety would be shocked by any abrupt avowal of his precious and unique insight! He knew how perilous it is to go too far toward the core of religion. He felt that all whom he knew stood or might be ranged, in varying degrees of remoteness from the great atonement that he had achieved of the spirit with the soul of the world. He became convinced that his only course was to inaugurate a campaign of educa- tion of a new and original type such as befitted the novelty of his teaching, and that he must be content if he could see in the hearts of those he could draw closest to himself a progressive approximation to his most precious newborn insight and conviction. He felt that perhaps his followers would never reach this true and ultimate goal of all religion which he had attained, but he saw that the degree in which they could be led to do so was measured on a scale of moral and religious values that reached from the nadir of blindness and sin up to the very zenith of true beatific knowledge and holiness. Thus he must probably always teach with reservations and with more or less veiled reticence, for to reveal all he had seen would spoil all. He must follow a program or curriculum, and must be a great teacher, for if others ever were to attain his state of mind or to get near it, and profit in proportion, it would never be by his method, viz., that of solitude, meditation, and prayer, but by objective demonstration. Those whom he approached would demand a sign. They could not be taught his supreme thought directly or at first, but must be shown what he could do which they could not, and thus he must arouse their curiosity as to whence his power was derived. A man conscious of his own es- sential divinity must give proof in object-lesson form of his superiority over others whose souls had not realized their own consubstantiality with God. There was, however, only one possible way in his day and age of documenting superhumanity, and that was by performing wonders or miracles, which were the standard criteria of superior power to control men and the world about us.
Just at this point a doubt arose in his own mind whether he could really do this. Just then, too, the pangs of hunger from his long
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fasting and absorption in his theme became acute, and a thought so distinct that it seemed to him the very voice of the tempter without seemed to say, " If you are God's Son surely you have power to convert something in this wide waste into food rather than to die here like a beast. With all your new-found divinity you cannot make bread out of stones, and so you are a fool or insane in deeming yourself divine, for perish you surely must if you cannot eat." This, some think, was a special popular touchstone of Messianity, and was deemed one of the simplest supernatural acts, as it was only an acceleration of natural processes; and if he could not meet it, not only the people but he him- self, might well doubt his call. Yahveh, who had fed the people with manna and quail, and later had fed Elijah, refused to feed him. But the countervalent thought was not long delayed, and the reply that formed itself, seemingly quite outside Jesus' soul but really in its un- conscious depths, was " I must accept sustenance by the ways nature has already provided. The nourishment I need, famishing though my body is coming to be, is answers to my problems. It is for these solutions that my soul is vastly more hungry than for bread. To solve these problems would be meat and drink, indeed, and it is this greater, higher, and more insistent hunger that has made and still makes me relatively oblivious of nutriment for the flesh. I will not be diverted from my pursuit of the bread of life for the race to mere lust for eating and drinking."
Feeding and teaching, eating and learning, appetite and curiosity, satiety and certainty, food and knowledge, digestion and assimilation of knowledge — these are closely related for genetic psychology, and Jesus' later miracles of feeding are symbols of his work as soul-feeder. Freudians teach that Wonnesaugen, or the rapturous condition in which certain nurslings fall, presages ecstatic states later, and that the first of each of these experiences may pass into the second, voracity being sublimated into desire for knowledge, etc., while the latter may be converted downward into the former, as Satan in the first tempta- tion sought to effect in Jesus. A faster, as many experiments, espe- cially since Luciani, show, after the first few days feels no hunger and tends to introverted exaltation, and Jesus' long fast was both effect and cause of a diathesis that predisposed him to the exaltation that some, as we saw above, regard as so important a trait of his life. The Eastern cult of navel-gazing in quest of Nirvana is a symbol of the
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fact that with detachment from the outer world always goes regression toward, or a revival of, juvenile or infantile states. So Jesus here resurrected his earlier reveries till, in his state of absorption he became henceforth completely dominated by them, and bodily needs, like ties of family and the vita sexualis, etc., paled before the new higher life that was henceforth to dominate all. From now on his life had one goal, sole, only and supreme. The ascetic Essene trend in his nature now asserted itself in the complete subjection of body to soul. Thus he here achieves immunity from every sarcous desire. In his Kingdom there must be no place for indulgence of sense. This was the first cardinal delimination and determination of his future life on earth as God-man.
In another day-dream, vivid perhaps to the point of hallucination, he seemed to be on the dizzy pinnacle of the temple and the tempter's voice challenged him to leap off into space and test Yahveh's fidelity by seeing whether he would suspend him in mid-air against the laws of gravity. Yahveh was aloft in the empyrean, above the mountains, and his angel messengers were unaffected by gravity. No nightmares are more common or painful than those of hovering and flying, and in hynagogic states we often fancy for some moments, while emerging into full wakefulness, that we can really float or fly, experiences that have various explanations which fall into three general groups, genetic, physiological, and symbolic. When children's fantasy dons the Tamkappe, the power to fly, the weird fascination of which is now seen in birdmen and in those who feel the charm of watching them, is one of the most universal of fascinations and even wishes. As this revery experience phosphoresced up in Jesus' brain, anaemic from want of nourishment in the blood that fed it, the all-dominant aperqu that possessed his mind seized upon it as a possible test, but that he thought it diabolically suggested shows that he instinctively regarded it as unfit and absurd. If angels keep heaven's favourites from stumbling, much more will they sustain from a fatal plunge the son of Yahveh himself. Nothing was more natural in this pre-scientific age than that Jesus himself could crave some miracle such as had been vouchsafed to the prophets of old, not only to credit himself to the world, but far more to give to him complete self-assurance, especially as he was himself uncertain whether the dove and the voice were real or only subjective. To leap off would be an immediate appeal for divine
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intervention, very unlike the slow process of starvation, and his inmost soul yearned for ineluctable certainty. In his eager quest of a yet more indubitable sign, he is true to the deepest instinct of humanity, which has always sought plenary certainty by the best tests that the age or race knew. Discretion, however, prevailed over impulse. He realized that gravity could not be suspended to save his life, and so came down from the pinnacle and took bread, wiser now by the great lesson that neither animate nor inanimate nature could be changed in his behalf, and that the laws of the physical universe are irreversible. Miracle-mongering, in the sense that these laws can be set aside, was to be no part of the program of the God-man. From this experi- ence he perhaps acquired the reluctance he so often showed to do what people thought to be mighty works. From the beginning folk-thought had instinctively associated superhumanity and miracle-working, priesthood and thaumaturgy; but here, according to liberal interpreta- tions, we have a new epoch-making stand. As before he had refused to recognize even hunger, save that of the soul, so now all the wonders he can legitimately perform are those in the domain of the soul. Here there are abundant powers waiting to be set free, and this master psychologist of the kingdom within would work his magic in this do- main only. Even all his healing should be psychotherapy alone, and should be done chiefly as a symbol of a more inner psychic regenera- tion from the obsession of sin. His followers might not observe this suggestion, the people might clamour for physical wonders, and his closest adherents might be so penetrated with the old conviction that a superman must freely conjure with nature that they would mis- report him; but his own conscience must be clear on that score and he would concede nothing to the superstition that he must be a magician to be divine. Thus his plan of life took further form.
It was indeed a great temptation that he here faced and defini- tively put aside, a temptation which the Church he founded never has been able to entirely escape in either practice or belief. He could use to the uttermost every superior insight, and work every miracle possible that was in fact only a natural phenomenon of a higher order. Here his already tried healing powers gave him assurance that he could produce all the awe and reverence which those greedy to see mighty works as credentials of his divinity would demand. But he would not and could not even try to make the sun stand still in the heavens, like
3o8 JESUS IN THE light of psychology
Joshua, or develop powers of levitation like Elijah or as his trans- figured and ascending personality was afterward said to have done. Moving mountains, save symbolically by faith, opening a path through the sea and really walking on the water, and above all, raising the dead — these were not in his domain. This was an immense step toward anti-supernaturalism, and placed him far beyond a mass of current superstitions. Yahveh might still conjure majestically with the cosmos, but Jesus would or could not. It marked a transition from the material to the psychological standpoint. If later he seemed to others, or even to himself, to control the course of outer events, or to try to do so, it was only in a residual or reversionary way, or else this temptation did not purge away quite all the vestiges of this ancient charm, which had always invested and also tempted priest- craft, and to resist the imputation of which by the people requires unremitting effort to be effective. It would not be at all surprising nor any derogation to Jesus' humanity to assume that he did at periods in his life feel this old desire to be thought a magician, but the true Christian must fondly hope that seeming lapses from this standard are more likely to be due to the wonder-loving and sign-seeking re- corders than to real infractions of his noble resolve on Jesus' own part. His break with magic, then, was here complete. If popular supersti- tion had fixed on some attestation in the form of a feat of strength within reach of his own power, as perhaps in the case, e. g., of Theseus, Siegfried, or King Arthur, he might have conformed, but to this he could not if he would. It was his Canossa, or the tempter was like the flatterers of Canute before the rising sea. If he was ever later tempted to forget this, the memory of this desert experience must have murmured deterrently like the daimon of Socrates in his ear. The tempter was thus unmasked for what he really was. "Thou shalt not seek to mislead one who is divine Lord over thee." Jesus would and could not control clouds, thunder, rain or drought, earth- quake or pestilence, though the Father, who called the universe into being, might do so. His field was man and his life and works, and his Kingdom was the city of Mansoul. Here he would fight and overcome the adversary and push on even to his own dominion and free his sub- jects from the might of Diabolus. Then even the physical world would bloom again like a new paradise, and the power of evil would be overthrown.
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But there was a third and final problem, in some sense the most difficult to face. The people, as we saw, had never been so oppressed in their own land, and since Maccabeus, the ideal of a military leader who was also high priest and head of the Sanhedrin and perhaps of a new theocracy, was warming up again in the hearts of the populace, although the strength of the Roman yoke and the futility and disaster of revolts had been most impressively taught. Still, were Jesus really divine, perhaps even this emancipation, so yearned for, might be within his reach. With David's blood in his veins he would be no mere pretender to the kingship, and the memory of all that Yahveh had wrought in the past in confounding the enemies of his children sug- gested that to turn away would be abdication and cowardice. All men lust for power and splendour, and rulers and kings are prone to be drunk with this passion. Ireland has described monarchs who were simply mad with the sense of their might, and insanely greedy for more; while since Max Stirner many have depicted the trend in the soul to magnify to the very uttermost the egoistic instinct, till hyper- individuation becomes not only morbid but may make its victim an enemy of the human race. Jesus' symbolic vision here was a mountain- top so high that from it the kingdoms of the whole earth could be seen, while the arch-enemy whispered in his ear: "As God-man you can rule over all these realms as sole and absolute Lord, and not be content to be supreme merely over your own race. To do so your motivation must be self-aggrandizement. You have the gifts if you have the will to reign. You will have to be ruthless, perhaps unpitying, place might above right, splendour and magnificence above inner clarity and richness of psychic life. Revere me as the god of self, and all other things befitting your universal dominion will be yours, and you will be the first among all the children of men or demigods. You shall not serve but command all. Your throne shall be the most exalted, your realm the largest and richest, your dignity the highest, your dynasty the most lasting the world has ever seen. The glories of imperial Rome and still more those of the age of Solomon will fade beside yours. World empire is within your grasp, and you may realize the wildest dreams of human ambition if you will dedicate yourself to the infernal precept of winning at any price, using any means for your ends, and letting selfishness in you do its perfect work." But this extravaganza, this siren song of egotism with abandon, while it would
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have more than realized the popular dream of political independence and a temporal kingdom to which so many Hebrew patriots, seers, and even fanatics had dedicated their lives, seemed impracticable to the sound common sense of Jesus, for the Roman hold on the country was too strong and the people were too weak. All these lower motiva- tions he felt keenly, as is shown by the extreme splendour of the domin- ion depicted to his imagination, arousing uncensored infantile reveries. How much of his decision was worldly prudence, accepting the inevit- able, making the best of a sad necessity, and how much was due to the insight of his religious genius, revealing a wealth of things still better, we do not know. Had temporal power been possible or his vision less, he might have listened to the political and military call. But probably any such program as this made no appeal to Jesus' temperament. He realized that when Hebrew nationality was at its best the people had fallen away from the true faith and such a grand installation of their dreams would rouse a fatal pride that would make them utterly forget Yahveh and his law, and exactly contravene and make nugatory all the teachings and even the spirit of all the prophets. A deeper insight thus impelled Jesus to the very opposite policy. Serve, not rule; be least, not greatest; last, not first; meek, not proud; poor, not rich; feel sinful, not righteous; weak, not strong; be pure in soul and not merely ceremonially correct; regard God who sees the heart, and not man who sees externals; found the Kingdom of God within and not without; let it develop secretly and slowly and not come suddenly with ostentation or by observation, and if need be let its citizens be recruited among gentiles and even outcasts. If you would see its tokens look into the souls of little children, whose naivete is rest in God and who are closer to the Divine than are adults. Its corner-stones are laid in the unconscious more than in the conscious nature of man, in the realm of aJffectivity rather than that of intellect. The simple life with pa- tience, and compassion, and brotherly love, which is broader and deeper even than the splendid old classic friendship, loyalty, and fidelity — these are the goals and aims.
Thus the mason-carpenter who went to John, eager, yet hesitant, and perhaps persuaded to do so by his friends at the last moment of opportunity, emerged from the desert a new being, conscious with a complete Stoic cataleptic certainty of his identity with God; devoted to the greatest cause ever undertaken by any son of man; with an orienta-
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tion and an outline of method of procedure; ineluctably self -dedicated to a work vastly greater even than himself, great though he had so suddenly become, and panoplied as he now was with a few cardinal, if as yet only generic, resolutions; feeling himself reinforced as if with the whole momentum of creative evolution of the universe behind him, and borne along on the central tide that ever flows irresistibly on toward the fulfilment of human destiny. Of each alternative he had chosen the higher. He was wiser by abandonments of what would, could, and should not be done. His field was narrowed and also greatly enriched by every refusal. He was now face to face with a definite future. If others had been inspired he was now inspiration itself personified. If revelation had been vouchsafed to others, he had achieved it in and of himself, and found it in a deeper self-knowledge than any one else had ever attained. He was divine as none before- or since has been because he had become the only complete and perfect man by the realization that man is God and that therefore God is man.
In attaining this Ultima Thule of self-knowledge he had, as it were, graduated from the school of life, and now he must become the first great and unique teacher in it, and must radically reconstruct its curriculum so as to guide all who were truly docile along the way that he had made to the truth he had found, and show to others the new world he had discovered. Perhaps the Christianity of the future will fittingly commemorate, as one of the greatest epochs not only in Jesus' career but in all Christendom with its 627 million adherents, this sojourn in and homecoming from the desert fully panoplied for his work. Had he not gone out to meet John ;.had he refused his baptism of water because he found no need of this symbol of cleansing from sin for himself; had the vision been withheld and his mentation been less imaginal; had he returned to his brick, mortar, stone and wood-work, this would have been a very different world. Perhaps this, and not even the events of Passion Week, was the crisis of the drama. But from now on all moved toward the denouement of the last act as if with fated propulsion.
That something like thisreally occurred on the stage of Jesus' own soul, if we pass from the brief, bizarre, fragmentary records of the synoptists, which are like the confused manifest or patent content of a dream, which seems rather incoherent and meaningless back and
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down to the underlying latent thought-content of it all, we must believe because in this deeper stratum below the symbols it is all so coherent, sequential, and true to the nature of man's higher psychic life. It must all have been historic in this inward sense, for no man or group of men, not even the great folk-soul, could devise anything with such compelling verisimilitude. We must believe, for the truest faith is belief, that all these many items which the religious consciousness has accepted so crassly and literally, although and sometimes actually because they seem absurd and preposterous, have a deeper and essentially real actuality behind and beneath the crude picture-writing of the syn- optists. We shall find in them, if we can only read their meaning aright, things far too great to be comprehended by those who recorded them; and so, despite their obvious efforts to be sedulously faithful to facts as they had found them, they give us really only a distorted, sketchy, and often misleading Zehrbild. If we can thus read back we can restore to the Gospels their true import and harmony. It shows a striking and most happy higher power in the soul of man that, sprinkled as the record is with inconsistencies, and insignificant and perhaps affronting to modern intelligence as some of it is, the race has always felt a strange fascination in it all, a profound sense of value concealed in it, as in some weird talisman. Our task is to penetrate to these precious happenings, so largely made of soul-stuff, as they really oc- curred in this Mansoul. This indeed is the task of the psychology of Christianity now, to gird itself to a work not unlike that of late so often and so brilliantly done in other fields, but here inspired by the new hope that we may really resurrect the Jesus so long buried in the Gospels. Not till then shall we fully realize how vain and fatuous are the current theories of all such scholars as now teach that no such man ever lived, but that his personality was a deliberate invention of the earliest founders of the Church; or that Jesus' person was only a new version of a mythic hero of ancient Babylon; or that he was a wretched degenerate, or again, a commonplace man about whom, for reasons which lay outside himself, a vast body of legendary lore has been gathered. To the newer, more positive view, on the other hand, Jesus was a wondrous flesh-and-blood man who had the deepest and truest insight into the fundamental problems of life and mind, who solved the greatest of all questions by finding the true relation of iden- tity between man and God, and who achieved by transcendent genius
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and incredible spiritual labour in the highest field and with devotion unto death a reconstruction of religious faith and practice so significant that it made the chief epoch in history, morals, and society, and all this by starting his followers toward the same insight he had achieved. Thus at the same time the Christ is teacher, example, and inspirer of each to realize the very best and greatest that is within himself, and to understand all that is implied in the conviction that, as Hegel said, no true man can possibly think too highly of himself. When, on his re- turn from the wilderness, he was waylaid by the sad intelligence that John was cast into prison, he realized all the more that henceforth the work must be his alone, and must begin at once.
Before following Jesus' public career, it should be noted that the Gospels give us for the most part only isolated incidents, often separated by we know not how great intervals of time from each other, and alto- gether accounting at the most for only a very few score of days; while of most of his ministry the text is silent. There is also the utmost diversity concerning the order of events. Some seem to be repetitions with varia- tions. As to the length of Jesus' ministry, Clement of Alexandria thought it lasted but one year, "the acceptable year of the Lord." Keim and others who adopt this view base it largely on the fact that the synoptics mention only one Passover. The other extreme view is that of Irenaeus, who thought Jesus taught ten years and lived to be at least more than forty (John viii: 57, makes the Jews say, "Thou art not yet forty years old"). There is a tradition also to this effect, which was long ago espoused by Delff.1 Gilbert2 figures two years and four months be- tween Jesus' baptism and his ascension, of which nearly twelve months were spent in Jerusalem and Judea.3 He holds that this brief public career was a complete unit, governed by a single purpose which did not change and with no stages of development — an old and well en- trenched view but transcended by critical studies, and utterly in the face of the many psychogenetic suggestions from the text.4 Thus harmonists and critics have always differed hopelessly, and in the sequences here adopted we shall frankly follow in some respects another
l"Di» Geschichte dee Rabbi Jesus von Nazareth." 1889, p. 951.
'"Students' Life of Jesus." 1856, Ch. 6.
'According to this scheme, there were two months from the baptism to the first Passover, eight from th« Utter to December, four to the next Passover, six to the Feast of Tabernacles, three to that of dedication, three to the resurrection of Lazarus, three weeks to the crucifixion, forty days from the Resurrection to the Ascension.
<Birckenstaedt, in "Die vier Temperamente in der erziehenden Hand des Herrn," Westphalen, 1885, 70 P-, charac- terizes Paul as choleric, Philip as phlegmatic, John as sanguine, Peter as nervous, and finds indications of these tempera- ments in other disciples from which he concludes that Jesus had great insight into practical ethology, chose his disciples with reference to these distinctions, and showed his power of both recognizing and controlling all types of men.
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norm, viz., that of psychological probability based on stages of genetic development.
One of the most deplorable gaps is the deletion of the beginning of the public ministry. We do not know what followed Jesus' return from the temptations and the desert. Some conjecture that he was silent awhile, as Paul probably was for years after his conversion, in order to get his bearings, plan his career, and prepare for it. In the three synoptists he first appears in Galilee, after an interval of we know not how long, preaching exactly the same doctrine of repentance and the immanence of the Kingdom that the Baptist had done. Few scholars follow the order of the Fourth Gospel that he first called dis- ciples, performed the Cana marriage miracle, and then went to Jerusa- lem and cleansed the temple. If we follow Luke, he did much healing and some preaching very early in his career at Capernaum, and it was during his mission here that we have the tale of his revisitation to the home of his boyhood. Nothing was truer to human nature than that he should be inclined to compare his new, higher life with that of his adolescent stages of fore-feeling, yearning, and germination. The tendency of great men often is to keep in closest contact with their youth, although we generally have an earlier stage, where fugue ten- dencies predominate. Thus the child seems to itself to have out- grown the narrow influences of home, and wishes to push into the life of grown-ups, sloughing off the stage of immaturity and moulting its memories — a trait exemplified in Jesus' temple visit at the age of twelve. Now this tide ebbs. The intolerableness of childish sur- roundings is past, and it is not wastrels, ne'er-do-wells, or failures that yield to this reversion impulse, to which Goethe said he owed much that was best in him. Such revivals of the child that is always in us and that constitutes the inmost core of our being, are themselves re- generative. Conformably to this Anlage, we have the idyllic scene of Jesus when his self-realization was near the point of consummation, returning to his boyhood home. The incident is itself an outcrop suf- ficiently dight with circumstance of the great law of progression by regression, or of the mutual rapport between genius and conserved childish attitudes, and shows us how the loftiest ideals of achievement are bound up with and reinforced by reawakening das ewige Kindlichc in us. Musing about these early haunts in a receptive frame of mind (the very opposite of the strenuous endeavouring of the desert), habit
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or inclination took him, on the Sabbath, to his place in the old syna- gogue, and just as, according to the Jewish custom of that day, he had done in his boyhood, he again stood up to take his turn, and from the scroll-book of Isaiah read: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, the recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that were bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord," and then sat down. As all gazed at him expectantly, he broke the silence merely to say, "Here to-day all that I have read is fulfilled to you." Then the hush grew greater. Not only the gracious words, but his personal charm, the magic of his voice, the impressiveness of his person, were enthral- ling. Then one or more recognized him as the grown-up boy they had known, son of the carpenter. They slowly understood that he was in a cryptic way posing to them as the One in whom the prophecy he had just read was realized, and it has even been suggested that some may have remembered youthful indiscretions on his part. The spell at least was broken. The impressive stranger, of whose great success at Capernaum they had probably heard, was discovered as a matured boy of their own disprized community, impressing the natives, af- fecting a great role, if not, indeed, masquerading as the coming De- liverer. Their very town was almost a byword of derision, and the old-time residents had not been unaffected, in this unconscious esti- mate of themselves, by the proverb that nothing good can come out of Nazareth. Knowing this revulsion of feeling, and anticipating its results, Jesus said in substance, "You think because I sprang from your degraded community that I need a great re-creation before I can be your teacher. Perhaps you want me to show my therapy, which you have heard of, and this might restore me to your favour. My cures of the body, however, are only symbols of those of sin-sick souls. The latter I chiefly care for, and only this will I offer you for here I am only a teacher." Doubtless he realized, being in this early stage of his career and so more in need of sympathy, that want of faith on their part, which was so essential a factor now, would lessen the chance of success. Healing, too, required great effort and took virtue out of him. He was here for rest and for inner edification, and not for mighty works. He certainly realized that no great man is accepted where he grew up and his family is known, but reminded his hearers
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that of all the poor widows in the great three and a half years of famine, Elijah was sent to only one, and she a gentile, and that of all the Jewish lepers the great prophet cured only a Syrian, implying that in his own return here he was only conforming to this precedent, and perhaps already implying that if rejected by the Jews, he might turn to the gentiles. By reason of his comparing himself to Elijah, and intimating that they were poor widows and lepers, the wrath of his hearers flamed forth with blind fury, so that Sabbath and the syna- gogue were forgotten, and Jesus was seized and rushed to a precipice off the hill, to be thrown down to his death. Here, however, one of his ecstatic spells seems to have come upon him, so that, partly perhaps on account of his asserting his prodigious strength, and partly on ac- count of the awe and majesty he inspired, capped, it may be, by an impressive dazed state, the crowd quailed, drew back, and he walked majestically through their midst and took his departure forever from his own home.
Thus with John in prison, himself celibate, abandoned by the friends and relatives of his youth, and in a peculiar sense homeless, a sense of the need of intimate companions of the new life, to carry on the great cause should anything happen to him, as had to John, must have arisen and grown strong. This was all the more the case because Jesus felt now so fully that he had a great mission and cause. The selection of a board of disciples as a device of propaganda is no less significant for his theme, plan, and race, than Plato's organization of the Academy, Aristotle's of the Lyceum, Zeno's of the Stoa, and Epicurus' of the Garden, the four great schools of antiquity, that per- sisted with more or less continuity for nearly a millennium. Founders of schools have a doctrine, and wish pupils with a certain gradation from novices to experts. Jesus not only had a doctrine, but, like Pythagoras and his circle, would regulate life in all its details on a new pattern and conformably to his own person, which since his attainment of the theanthropic consciousness was sacrosanct or twice consecrated, for it was this that constituted the transforming leaven of all. This God-likeness in his mind was now the cynosure of all his endeavour. He desired to make the consciousness of others as far as possible like his own. He needed a little band of devoted men, utterly abandoned to him and to his will, who should combine in themselves very diverse functions. They must be made so far and so fast as possible his own
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esoteric pupils and companions, whom he could instruct and with whom he could perhaps try out his methods of exposition for a wider exoteric circle. Simple men of the people they must be, by converse with whom he could learn the difficulties of comprehension to be over- come in preaching to the masses. He may have hoped to feel in an intensive way with them the unique stimulus that comes from conver- sation, dialogue, and dialectic, a form often chosen since Plato for the presentation of new truths, although if this was the case he must have been grievously disappointed, save, perhaps, with John, to whom a very persistent tradition reserves this function. He also needed advertisers or pre-announcers of his advent to new towns in his peripatetic routes, while at the same time in some slight sense they were also, after their novitiate, to be, as John had been, forepreachers of his Gospels. He must have, too, repositories of all he was and stood for, in case he should be imprisoned like John, or otherwise snatched away prematurely by violence, men who could preach and organize as Peter seems to have been best fitted to do. He never appears to have foreseen in any way the need of a scholar, systematist, and church-founder among the gentiles such as Paul became, without whom the whole form and fate of Christianity would have been so very different that it is quite beyond the range of our possible conjecture what Jesus would have thought of Paul, or Paul of Jesus, had each known the other in flesh and blood. Some think they would have confronted each other with mutual aghastness and perhaps repulsion. Jesus seems, too, with Semitic sagacity, and despite the unworldliness of his calling, to have felt the need of a business manager or fiscal agent, such as Judas be- came, although here as in so many lesser enterprises, the failure of this agent brought eventual disaster. For these coadjutors twelve was a convenient number, besides being hallowed by many associations, and also it meant one for each tribe. He must keep his coadjutors perpetually conscious that their novitiate might end by violence at any time, and this would spur them to more insight and independence.
Thus in another rift in the darkness, we see Jesus walking by the inland sea of Galilee, where he espied two brothers, Simon Peter and Andrew, fishermen. He said: "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men," and on the instant they dropped their nets and obeyed. A little farther on, he saw another pair of brothers, mending their nets. These, too, he called, and they straightway left all. Thus the first
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four disciples were recruited, apparently in a few moments, all, so far as we know, previously strangers to Jesus, and all apparently abandon- ing their callings with no other motive than Jesus' wish. In this bald narrative all four may have been very young, ready at the faintest suggestion of a passerby to desert all, as if on the sudden eruption of the old migratory instinct, so common in the early nubile age. The form of the narrative rather suggests hypnotization by the magisterial and staccato command, which they obeyed without full realization of what they did. Doubtless they had heard of Jesus, perhaps were fas- cinated by the phrase "fishers of men," for they were illiterate youth of the humblest class and most impressionable. Perhaps the immediate surrender of their lives at a word was the best available test of their quality of docility, and this may have been tried on others before with no response. Luke, writing later, doubtless felt some of these diffi- culties, and sought to obviate them in the slowly forming tradition and so says that Jesus had before stepped into Peter's boat to escape the pressure of the crowds, and had taught from it, thus giving token to the multitude and to the first four, before their summons, what manner of man he was. Fishers of men obviously meant captivating masses, as Jesus had just done in a figurative sense by the magic of his discourse, which prepared the way for deepening the effect his call was about to make upon them. As if to crassify still more the idea, Luke makes him indicate the place where the brothers netted such a draught of fishes that their own boat and that of the second pair of brothers nearly sank. Peter's impulsiveness is shown by the story of the first of various later ambivalent reversals of attitude. He at first hesitated to cast his net where Jesus commanded, and then when the nets nearly broke fell at Jesus' feet as a sinful man. The symbolic nature of this supposed miracle is obvious, but the chroniclers evidently mean to indicate another psychological miracle.
Jesus at first glance knew men and needed that none should testify of them. On first meeting Peter we are told that he saluted him, say- ing, "Thou art Simon, son of Jonah," as if, as Bengel well says, he had a supernatural acquaintance with a man previously unknown. Thus, too, he surprised the Samaritan woman by telling her how many hus- bands she had had. As Nathaniel first appeared, he said, " Behold an Israelite without guile," and when the latter asked with astonishment, "Whence knowest thou me?" he replied that he had seen him under the
BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 319
fig-tree, as if when he thought himself alone he had been caught doing something which was a key to his character. Thus Elijah (2 Kings vi : 8-1 2) knew telepathically all that the King of Syria said in his private chamber, and also that Joram had sent out men to kill him. Jesus must never fall short, but always excel every analogous achievement in the Old Testament.
The same is true of the responses to his call. When Elijah called Elisha from the plough he left the oxen and ran, yet was allowed to go home and say good-bye. But Jesus does not permit any return, even to bury a father. Such alternations from the humblest to the highest callings, history and story always love to describe and even to create, as many instances that will readily occur to all illustrate. Not one, but at least five of Jesus' companions thus followed him permanently (not merely accepting an invitation to take a walk, as Paulus urged) so that this miracle is of the coercion of others' wills at a beck or word. His knowledge of character is thus made to seem immediate, clair- voyant, and infallible, and thus we see again the all-determining tendency to interpret every possible incident in Jesus' life and words in a way to make it conform to preexisting Messianic tradition and ex- pectation, and at every step to cap some Old Testament climax.
Of the call of Levi Matthew, the tax-collector, we are only told that at a command he rose from his seat at customs and became the fifth or perhaps sixth disciple (some think the first who had not been a disciple of the Baptist). Whether some or all of these were Jesus' travelling companions during the whole Galilean period (often divided into three tours) until the Twelve were finally sent out, we do not know, nor have we any circumstances of the call of the others in the synop- tists. Among the seven disciples whom John names, several not mentioned by them occur. The synoptists agree except that in the place of Lebbeus Thaddeus, Luke names a second Judas, the brother of James. Simon was renamed Cephas or Peter; a second Simon was called Zelotes; James was renamed Boanerges; there was a second Canaanitic Simon and the two Jameses, one the son of Zebedee and the other of Alpheus. Peter's name is first in each list, and of him we hear most throughout the first three Gospels. Of several we know prac- tically nothing. They may have died or been replaced, or Jesus may have been disappointed in them as he was in Judas. His judgment in making selections may have been more at fault than appears.
32o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
It has been asked why Jesus had not chosen Nathaniel, and some think he did and renamed him Bartholomew. He was called an Is- raelite indeed without guile, had hailed Jesus as Rabbi, Son of God, and King of Israel, a confession both as emphatic, explicit, though perhaps not quite so gratefully received by Jesus as was Peter's. It has been said that had he developed into a disciple he might have shown talents of a Pauline order. So Nicodemus, a Pharisee ruler, who came seeking by night, confessing that Jesus came from God, and who was told of the new birth, has been suggested as a better disciple than some of those chosen. The only answer to this is that possibly both these interviews, if stated in their true historic position, came too late after the Twelve had already been ordained. Of others who ap- peared later and have been suggested by various writers as fit for the sacred college, the one most often named by expositors is the Phari- saic lawyer who asked Jesus which was the greatest commandment, and was told that it was to "love the Lord with all thy heart, soul, mind, and strength, and thy neighbour as thyself," that all the law and the prophets hang on these. He replied this was true, for such love was more than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices. Jesus com- mended this answer as discreet, and declared that he was not far from the Kingdom of God. Another candidate was a rich youth who had kept all the commandments from childhood, but could not on the in- stant quite bring himself to resign his great wealth for the poor. Yet another was the eager Zaccheus, the rich publican, whom Jesus chose in the tree as his host, who gave half his goods to the poor, restored four- fold to those whom he had unwittingly wronged, and to whose house Jesus said salvation had this day come. Only he was a son of Abra- ham and not one of the lost whom he now felt it his mission to seek and save. Even Levi, who made a great feast for Jesus, Lazarus, and the "certain Greeks" who would see Jesus, reported by John, have been suggested. The board of disciples, although all but one were Galileans, was composed of men of very diverse types, and of some we know noth- ing, and even their identity is in dispute. One was to be Jesus' Xen- ophon and another his Plato, or rather, to stand for a Platonic circle to be heard from later. The most unstable of them all was called the rock, the most treacherous was the fiduciary agent. Renan believes Salome, Joanna, Mary Magdalene, and Susanna usually sojourned with the disciples and assisted in ministering to and for Jesus. Two or
BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 321
three favourites constituted an inner coterie. All this would suggest great diversity of gifts, views, and character, and we should expect that in a group thus composed, there would be jealousies and rivalries, as well as very different degrees of comprehension. Still, they were loyal until the last scene, and his personality overtowered and domi- nated each and all. Volkmar sought to explain away Judas' treason as a fiction devised some time after Jesus' death, and intended to motivate the declaration of a vacancy in the apostolic college to make room for Paul and at the same time to create a character that should typify the treason of the Jews against Jesus, a view perhaps more ingenious than plausible. It is, of course, absurd to infer that some of the disciples were nonentities because we know so little about them. They were probably young (Keim thinks their average age not over twenty), chosen early in Jesus' ministry, the best of them coming over to him from an apprenticeship far longer and closer than his had been, to the Baptist, who some opine chose his followers with a more infallible sagacity than Jesus showed in those he added of his own selection. Realizing the necessity of extending his work by this proxy method, and perhaps planning brief periods of teaching alternating those of learning at his side, after a night of prayer, ordaining them to be his associates, he sent them out to heal and preach, realizing that the harvest was plenteous and the labourers few, and pitying the multitude, who were like sheep without a shepherd. Investing them with his therapeutic power, sending them not to the gentiles but to Israel, commissioning them to go provisionless, two by two, telling them what to wear, where to enter, when to withdraw with dignity, or with a threat to those who rejected them, he warned them of dangers, told them to be wise but harmless and what to do if persecuted and arrested. He told them to proclaim openly what he had taught them esoterically ; to be fearless of torture or death; to be ready to lose in order to find their lives; to love him more than they did parents or children. He as- sured them that a cup of cold water given a child would have its re- ward, etc. Meek though their demeanour, their doctrine would not bring peace but a sword, would divide families and test worthiness. The sermon on the mount, which some critics think an aggregation of passages from the logia redacted by Matthew, was a discourse of con- secration for their mission. Some hold that John never left Jesus, but that Peter was the chief propagandist. If all went there were six
322 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
circuits, while perhaps Jesus took another. They may have gone forth and returned several times at frequent intervals. Most place the death of John the Baptist and Jesus' peril from Herod during their absence, and these events doubtless accelerated his activity. Briggs1 places the Johannin ministry to Jerusalem and Luke's Piraean ministry here. But the very framework of events is uncertain. The disciples surely were with Jesus long enough before they were sent out to be well imbued with his spirit and method.
Why, beside this method of personal promulgation, Jesus never wrote, is a question asked from the earliest days to our own, but never fully answered. In his time and place the scribal function was well developed, and it is hard to say why, burdened with a message so im- portant, he should entrust it solely to novices of whose limitations he was often painfully reminded. Particularly toward the last, when his cause seemed waning and their faith faltering, why did he not appeal from the present to the future, from the Twelve or even the Seventy to his race, to say nothing of the larger gentile world? To remind us that print was not discovered, writing material costly, a book easily destroyed, the dialect he used limited in range, deeds more important than words, as has so often been done, is inadequate. Of course he should not have converted the disciples into a scribal college. Words printed and read are inferior to those spoken and heard. Still, why did he never suggest to any one the least secretarial function, or why did the making of a record apparently never occur to any of his followers for decades after his death? We surely cannot accept the hypothesis of illiteracy, although even were we driven to this, it should in no de- gree disparage our estimate of the value of the message, since there is a long line of great men, from Charlemagne down, who were not adept in the mere clerk's trick of writing. Socrates did not write, that we know of, perhaps could not, or even read. Especially we must remem- ber that books, while they preserve, also devitalize and desiccate words. It is a vastly higher art to put things so they will live from ear to mouth, than to trust them to the long circuit from eye to hand. The scribbling mania, which spawns half-fledged ideas upon the printed page, has caused the world to lose much spontaneous diction, proverbial and apothegmic wisdom, because to say things that will live gives more vitality and momentum than is involved in writing. Of course
»"New Light on the Life of Jesus," p. 43. New York, 1904.
BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 323
Jesus might have written, had he lived on to a reminiscent stage of life, but we really have no data for discussion.
Again, if those who knew him, including his parents, had the least intimation of his deity, why did they not treasure up some of the events, sayings, or miracles of his early life? The prophetic books, as well as the Psalms and the pentateuch, got themselves written; but now appears one greater, and yet we are left to infer that up to his thirtieth year he did or said nothing worthy of record, or else that he did so in an environment which contained no writer. That is, if plen- ary belief in his Messiahship and the ability, or at least the habit, of writing coexisted in any one person near him, it is strange that simple piety, or Jewish patriotism, or the love of mankind did not prompt to some kind of record. This is very different from the almost complete absence of any record concerning Jesus by non-believing contempo- raries. We shall consider elsewhere the hypotheses that account for the lateness of our authentic records, but neither preoccupation with practical matters, nor the expectation of a speedy return of the Lord with an impending end, are adequate explanations. Love, enthusi- asm, the pathos of a shameful death at the apex of his vitality, might suggest at least some threnody, in memoriam, or other vignette by the impulse that always prompts us, when our friends die, to say to our intimates how good, great, or dear the lost one was, to console the bereaved by eulogies, etc. It would seem that some of these motives, perhaps more Johannin than Pauline, would have evoked a method of keeping the recollection of him green, and ensuring its transmission from one generation to the next. The youth of the disciples may have obviated, for a time, the sense of any danger of oblivion. Some out- line of his life and teaching would have been serviceable as a missionary device among the gentiles and wherever else the Jesus-cause went where its founder was not personally known. When the Seventy were sent out, and especially when the apostles scattered after Pente- cost to preach to different races, it would seem as though some synopsis would have been necessary. That these motives did not operate is evidenced by such glimpses of reasons for the writing of our Gospels as we can divine. One of these was doubtless the fact of the accretion of legends, as we see in Luke's resolve to divide between fact and fiction; and the apocryphal Gospel shows us what a rank growth the mythic soil had produced. Another motive which prompted the writing of the
324 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Gospels may have been, as the Tubingen school asserts, to wipe out the bitter controversy between the Pauline and the Petrine factions, which these scholars think raged for a long time and almost threatened to wreck the early Church, but was finally thus compounded. Both these motives would suggest a plain, unvarnished, and from the standpoint of the writer, a critical narrative, and a sic-et-non style. So, too, would the impulse to address doubt, skepticism, and unbelief most effectively. The first records may have been the logia or sayings, with the aid of which one or more of our Gospels was written, but a biography that is written backward (in the sense that the authors were impelled to write up the early life of Jesus, because Paul had proven that his death and Resurrection were so important), must have been very un- trustworthy. Indeed, the historic sense of these writers was weak, and all genetic insight was absent, and hence they strongly tend to reverse the order of things, putting the late early, and conversely. Most critics think that the sermon on the mount was never given as a symmetrical discourse to an audience, as Matthew represents, but was composed out of scattered utterances. The general effect of it is to spring upon the mind of the reader a type of consciousness which was not developed but which was ready-made from the first, as if evolu- tionary stages were inconsistent with incarnation theories. Hence the silence about Jesus' early manhood, adolescence, childhood, friends, occupations, special experiences, studies, longings, etc. In fact, few great lives, not even that of Buddha or of Socrates, are so utterly void of every genetic hint. For orthodoxy, if Jesus seems to show traces of development, he does so only in a Docetic sense. It is exasperating to think of the kind of life that might now be written in these days of mothers' records, photographs, anthropometry, and all the countless measurements and tests, to say nothing of the best methods of modern biography. In fact, from every point of view we have to conclude that if Jesus was in any sense or degree what Christendom believes he was, the synoptic Gospels, precious as they are, are wretchedly in- adequate. In fact, the greater the man, the more valuable becomes the record of even a simple and Boswellian narrative. A great writer can make the humblest life throb with human interest.1 Heroes, however, do not need inspiration in those who describe their lives.
•One of the most striking examples of this we see in both the lives of the semi-idiotic Kaspar Hauser, who became a psychological problem principally because of his sudden and unprepared appearance at the Nuremberg gate, with no clue of anything previous in his life.
BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 325
The plainest, baldest, and most uninspired record is in fact the best. Possibly, therefore, we are on the whole rather better off than if Levi, Nathaniel, Philip, Bartholomew, or even Peter, had left us our best records. The more we realize, however, the stupendous sense in which the child is the father of the man, since childhood is the more general- ized type from which maturity involves decay; how the very highest object of civilization is to keep mankind young, to prolong infancy; or how in the early stages of life the individual is far more nearly co- extensive with the human race than he is later — the more we shall understand in what a pregnant sense Jesus, whatever else he be, is the consummate apotheosis and the world's type of adolescence, and the more hungry-hearted we become for the record of the lost stages of his development. Whether psychogenetic studies will ever be able, in any degree, to fill this gap by reconstructive work, antiquarian re- search, or historical criticism, which have together led to many in- genious restorations in art, literature, and architecture, to say nothing of hypothetical stages of ascent in animal evolution, we can hardly conjecture. But one thing is certain, and that is that the more we ponder and discern the faint lineaments and divine possibilities that loom up behind the entire Gospel record, the more absorbing become the intimations of a life vastly greater than the Gospels characterize or their writers could comprehend; the more we feel the poverty and superstition of their minds; and the more we are impelled to the con- clusion that this sublimest of all lives has been very unworthily written, so that its insufficiency prompts in us the desire, as strong as if not stronger than any other motive, to rescue it from the inexpressible pathos of undervaluation, by making at least some fragment of it live again as it really was in our own hearts, wills, and minds.
END OF VOLUME I
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
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