Jesus, the Christ, in the light of psychology

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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.

32 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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,"

34 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' PHYSICAL PERSONALITY 35

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

36 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

44 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

48 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

50 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 51

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

52 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 53

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

54 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 55

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

56 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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-

JESUS IN LITERATURE 57

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-

58 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 59

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

60 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 61

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.

62 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 63

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

64 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 65

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

66 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 67

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.

68 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 69

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."

70 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 71

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.

72 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 73

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.

74 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 75

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-

76 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 77

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.

78 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 79

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.

Bo JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 81

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

82 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

(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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 83

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.

84 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 85

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.

86 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 87

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.

88 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 89

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 91

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

92 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 93

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,

94 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 95

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.

96 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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."

JESUS IN LITERATURE 97

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.

98 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 99

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.

ioo JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 101

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?

io2 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

(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.

io4 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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-

no JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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;

JESUS IN LITERATURE 113

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

ii4 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 115

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. [

n6 JESUS m THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 117

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.

u8 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 119

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-

120 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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-

JESUS IN LITERATURE I2i

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.

i22 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 123

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

124 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 125

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.

126 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

(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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 127

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

128 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 129

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

i3o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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-

JESUS IN LITERATURE 131

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

i32 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 133

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

i34 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

"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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 135

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

136 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 137

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

138 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 141

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 143

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,

144 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 145

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.

i46 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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. .

JESUS IN LITERATURE 147

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

148 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS IN LITERATURE 149

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

i5o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS IN LITERATURE 151

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.

168 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

172 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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>

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 173

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 175

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 177

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-

178 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 179

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

i8o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 181

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

i82 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 183

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

i84 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 185

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.

186 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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-

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 187

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.

188 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 189

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

i9o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 191

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

i92 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 193

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

i94 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 195

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

196 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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-

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 197

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

198 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 199

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."

200 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 201

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

202 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 203

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

204 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 205

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.

206 JESUS "IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 207

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

208 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 209

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

210 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 211

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-

212 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY1

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 213

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

2i4 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 215

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;

2i6 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 217

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

2i8 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 219

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

220 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 221

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.

222 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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,

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 223

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

224 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 225

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

226 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 227

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

228 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 229

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

23o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 231

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

23 2 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 233

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

234 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 235

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

236 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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,

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 237

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-

238 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 239

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

JESUS' CHARACTER; NEGATIVE VIEWS 241

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-

242 JESUS IX THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

246

THE NATIVITY 247

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

248 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

THE NATIVITY 249

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

THE NATIVITY 251

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

252 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 253

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

254 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 255

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

256 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

THE NATIVITY 257

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

258 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 259

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-

THE NATIVITY 261

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

262 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

THE NATIVITY 263

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.

264 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 265

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.

266 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 267

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

268 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 269

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

270 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 271

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

272 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

THE NATIVITY 273

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)

274 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 275

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:

276 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

"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

THE NATIVITY 277

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

278 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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-

THE NATIVITY 279

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.

2So JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 281

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

282 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 283

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,

284 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 285

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

286 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

THE NATIVITY 287

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

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 289

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.

290 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 291

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

292 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 293

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

294 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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-

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 295

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

296 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 297

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

298 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 299

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

3oo JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 301

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

3o2 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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.

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 303

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

3o4 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 305

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

3o6 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 307

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.

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 309

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

3io JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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-

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 311

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

3i2 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OFJPSYCHOLOGY

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

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 313

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.

3i4 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 315

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

316 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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

BEGINNINGS OF THE SUPREME PEDAGOGY 317

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

3i8 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY

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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