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HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN
The Foundations of the 19th Century
THIRD CHAPTER
THE REVELATION OF CHRIST
By the virtue of One all have been truly saved.
MAHÂBHÂRATA.
INTRODUCTORY
BEFORE our eyes there stands a vision, distinct, incomparable. This picture which we behold is the inheritance which we have received from our Fathers. Without an accurate appreciation of this vision, we cannot measure and rightly judge the historical significance of Christianity. The converse, on the other hand, does not hold good, for the figure of Jesus Christ has, by the historical development of the Churches, been dimmed and relegated to the background, rather than unveiled to the clear sight of our eyes. To look upon this Figure solely by the light of a church doctrine, narrowed both in respect of place and of time, is voluntarily to put on blinkers and to narrow our view of the eternally Divine. The vision of Christ, moreover, is hardly touched upon by the dogmas of the Church. They are all so abstract that they afford nothing upon which either our understanding or our feelings can lay hold. We may apply to them in general what an artless witness, St. Augustine, said of the Dogma of the Trinity: “But we speak of three Persons, not because we fancy that in so doing we have uttered something, but simply because we cannot be silent.“ (1) Surely we are guilty of no outrage upon due reverence if we say, it is not the Churches that constitute the might of Christianity, for that might is drawn solely from the fountain head from which the churches themselves derive all their power — the contemplation of the Son of Man upon the Cross.
Let us therefore separate the vision of Christ upon earth from the whole history of Christianity.
What after all are our nineteen centuries for the conscious acceptance of such an experience — for the transformation which forces itself through all the strata of humanity by the power of a fundamentally new aspect of life‘s problems? We should remember that more than two thousand years were needed before the structure of the Kosmos, capable as it is of mathematical proof and of demonstration to the senses, became the fixed, common possession of human knowledge. Is not the understanding with its gift of sight and its infallible formula of 2x2=4 easier to mould than the heart, blind and ever befooled by self-seeking?
Here is a man born into the world and living a life through which the conception of the moral significance of man, the whole philosophy of life, undergoes a complete transformation — through which the relation of the individual to himself, to the rest of mankind, and to the nature by which he is surrounded, is of necessity illuminated by a new and hitherto unsuspected light, so that all motives of action, all ideals, all heart‘s-desires and hopes must be remoulded and built up anew from their very foundations. Is it to be believed that this can be the work of a few centuries? Is it to be believed that this can be brought about by misunderstandings and lies, by politic intrigues and oecumenical councils, at the word of command of kings maddened by ambition, or of greedy priests, by three thousand volumes of scholastic disputations, by the fanatical faith of narrow-minded peasants and the noble zeal of a small number of superior persons, by war, murder and the stake, by civic codes of law and social intolerance? For my part I disclaim any such belief. I believe that we are still far, very far, from the moment when the transforming might of the vision of Christ will make itself felt to its utmost extent by civilised mankind. Even if our churches in their present form should come to an end, the idea of Christianity would only stand out with all the more force. In the ninth chapter I shall show how our new Teuton philosophy is pushing in that direction. Even now, Christianity is not yet firm upon its childish feet: its maturity is hardly dawning upon our dim vision. Who knows but a day may come when the bloody church-history of the first eighteen centuries of our era may be looked upon as the history of the infantile diseases of Christianity?
1. “Dictum est tamen tres personae, non ut aliquid diceretur, sed ne taceretur.“ — De Trinitate, V. chap. ix.
In considering the vision of Christ, then, let us not allow our judgment to be darkened by any historical delusions, or by the ephemeral views of our century. We may be sure that up to the present we have only entered upon the smallest portion of this same inheritance, and if we wish to know what is its significance for all of us, be we Christians or Jews, believers or unbelievers, whether we are conscious of our privilege or not — then must we in the first place stop our ears against the chaos of creeds and of blasphemies which beshame humanity, and in the next place raise our eyes up to the most incomparable vision of all times.
In this section I shall be forced critically to glance at much that forms the intellectual foundation of various religions. But just as I leave untouched that which is hidden in the Holy of Holies of my own heart, so I hope to steer clear of giving offence to any other sensible man. It is as easy to separate the historic vision of Christ from all the supernatural significance which dwells in it as it must be to treat Physics upon a purely material basis without imagining that in so doing we have dethroned Metaphysics.
Christ indeed can hardly be spoken of without now and again crossing the boundary; still belief, as such, need not be touched, and if I as historian proceed logically and convincingly, I can bear with any refutation which the reader may bring forward as a question of feeling, as apart from understanding. With this consciousness I shall speak as frankly in the following chapters as I have done in those which have gone before.
THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE
The religious faith of more than two-thirds of all the inhabitants of the earth to-day starts from the life on earth of two men, Christ and Buddha, men who lived only a few centuries ago. We have historical proofs of their having actually existed, and that the traditions regarding them, though containing much that is fabulous and uncertain, obscure and contradictory, nevertheless give us a faithful picture of the main features of their real lives. Even apart from this sure result of the scientific investigations of the nineteenth century, (1) men of acute and sound judgment will never have doubted the actual existence of these great moral heroes: for although the historical and chronological material regarding them is extremely scanty and imperfect, yet their moral and intellectual individuality stands out so clearly and brilliantly before our eyes, and this individuality is so incomparable, that it could not be an invention of the imagination. The imagination of man is very narrowly circumscribed; the creative mind can work only with given facts: it was men that Homer had to enthrone on Olympus, for even his imagination could not transcend the impassable boundary of what he saw and experienced; the very fact that he makes his gods so very human, that he does not permit his imagination to soar to the realm of the Extraordinary and Inconceivable (because never seen), that he rather keeps it in subjection, in order to employ its undivided force to create what will be poetical and visible, is one of a thousand proofs, and not the least important one, that intellectually he was a great man. We are not capable of inventing even a plant or animal form; when we try it, the most we do is to put together a monstrosity composed of fragments of all kinds of creatures known to us. Nature, however, the inexhaustibly inventive, shows us a new thing whenever it so pleases her; and this new thing is for our consciousness henceforth just as indestructible as it formerly was undiscoverable. The figure of Buddha, much less that of Jesus Christ, could not be invented by any human poetical power, neither that of an individual nor that of a whole people; nowhere can we discover even the slightest approach to such a thing. Neither poets, nor philosophers, nor prophets have been able even in their dreams to conceive such a phenomenon. Plato is certainly often mentioned in connection with Jesus Christ; there are whole books on the supposed relation between the two; it is said that the Greek philosopher was a forerunner who proclaimed the new gospel. In reality, however, the great Plato is a quite irreligious genius, a metaphysician and politician, an investigator and an aristocrat. And Socrates! The clever author of grammar and logic, the honest preacher of a morality for philistines, the noble gossip of the Athenian gymnasia, — is he not in every respect the direct contrast to the divine proclaimer of a Heaven of them “that are poor in spirit“? In India it was the same: the figure of a Buddha was not anticipated nor conjured up by the magic of men‘s longing. All such assertions belong to the wide province of that delusive historic philosophy which constructs after the event. If Christ and Christianity had been an historical necessity, as the neoscholastic Hegel asserts, and Pfleiderer and others would have us believe to-day, we should inevitably have seen not one Christ but a thousand Christs arise; I should really like to know in what century a Jesus would not have been just as “necessary“ as our daily bread? (2) Let us therefore discard these views that are tinged with the paleness of abstraction. The only effect they have is to obscure the one decisive and pregnant thing, namely, the importance of the living, individual, incomparable personality. One is ever and anon forced to quote Goethe‘s great saying:
1. The existence of Christ was denied even in the second century of our era, and Buddha till twenty-five years ago was regarded by many theologians as a mythical figure. See, for example, the books of Sénart and Kern.
2. Hegel in his Philosophie der Geschichte, Th. III., A. 3, chap. ii., says about Christ: “He was born as this one man, in abstract subjectivity, but so that conversely finiteness is only the form of his appearance, the essence and content of which is rather infiniteness and absolute being-for-self.... The nature of God, to be pure spirit, becomes in the Christian religion manifest to man. But what is the spirit? It is the One, the unchanging infinity, the pure identity, which in the second place separates itself from itself, as its second self, as the being-for-itself and being-in-itself in opposition to the Universal. But this separation is annulled by this, that the atomistic subjectivity, as the simple relativity to itself, is itself the Universal, Identical with itself.“ What will future centuries say to this clatter of words? For two-thirds of the nineteenth it was considered the highest wisdom.
Höchtes Glück der Erdenkinder
Ist nur die Persönlichkeit!
The circumstances in which the personality is placed — a knowledge of its general conditions in respect of time and space — will certainly contribute very much towards making it clearly understood. Such a knowledge will enable us to distinguish between the important and the unimportant, between the characteristically individual and the locally conventional. It will, in short, give us an increasingly clearer view of the personality. But to explain it, to try to show it as a logical necessity, is an idle, foolish task; every figure — even that of a beetle — is to the human understanding a “wonder“; the human personality is, however, the mysterium magnum of life, and the more a great personality is stripped by criticism of all legendary rags and tatters, and the more successful that criticism is in representing each step in its career as something fore-ordained in the nature of things, the more incomprehensible the mystery becomes. This indeed is the final result of the criticism to which the life of Jesus has been submitted in the nineteenth century. This century has been called an irreligious one; but never yet, since the first Christian centuries, has the interest of mankind concentrated so passionately around the person of Jesus Christ as in the last seventy years; the works of Darwin, however widespread they were, were not bought to one-tenth the extent of those of Strauss and Renan. And the result of it all is, that the actual earthly life of Jesus Christ has become more and more concrete, and we have been compelled to recognise more and more distinctly that the origin of the Christian religion is fundamentally to be traced to the absolutely unexampled impression which this one personality had made and left upon those who knew Him. So it is that to-day this revelation stands before our eyes more definite and for that very reason more unfathomable than ever.
This is the first point to be established. It is in accordance with the whole tendency of our times, that we can grow enthusiastic only in regard to what is concrete and living. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was different; the Romantic movement threw its shadows on all sides, and so it had become fashionable to explain everything “mythically.“ In the year 1835 David Strauss, following the example proffered on all sides, presented as a key to the gospels “the idea of the myth“! (1) Every one now recognises that this so-called key was nothing more than a new, mistily vague paraphrase of a still-unsolved problem, and that not an “idea,“ but only an actually lived existence, only the unique impression of a personality, whose like the world had never before known, supplies the “key“ to the origin of Christianity. The greater the amount of such useless ballast that was manifest on the one hand in the shape of pseudo-mythical (or rather pseudo-historical) legend-making, on the other in the form of philosophically dogmatic speculation, the greater is the power of life and resistance that must be attributed to the original impelling and creating force. The most modern, strictly philological criticism has proved the unexpected antiquity of the gospels and the extensive authenticity of the manuscripts which we possess; we have now succeeded in tracing, almost step for step, the very earliest records of Christianity in a strictly historical manner. (2) But all this when considered from the universal human standpoint is of much less importance than the one fact, that in consequence of these researches the figure of the one Divine Man has been brought into relief, so that the unbeliever as well as the believer is bound to recognise it as the centre and source of Christianity, taking the word in the most comprehensive sense possible.
BUDDHA AND CHRIST
A few pages back I placed Buddha and Christ in juxtaposition. The kernel of the religious conceptions of all the more gifted races of mankind (with the two exceptions of the small family of the Jews on the one hand and their antipodes the Brahman Indians on the other) has been for the past few thousand years not the need for an explanation of the world, nor mythological Nature-symbolism, nor meditative transcendentalism, but the experience of great characters. The delusion of a “rational religion“ still haunts us; occasionally too in recent years there has been talk of a “replacing of religion by something higher,“ and on the hilltops of certain German districts new “worshippers of Wotan“ have offered up sacrifice at the time of the solstice; but none of these movements have exercised the slightest influence upon the world. For ideas are immortal — I have said so already and shall have to repeat it constantly — and in such figures as Buddha and Christ an idea — that is, a definite conception of human existence — acquires such a living bodily form, becomes so thoroughly an experience of life, is placed so clearly before the eyes of all men, that it can never more disappear from their conscious-
1. Seefirst edition, i. 72 ff., and the popular edition (ninth) p. 191 ff. Strauss never had the least notion what a myth is, what mythology means, how it is produced by the confusion and mingling of popular myths, poetry and legends. That, however, is another story. Posterity will really not be able to understand the reception given to such dreary productions as those of Strauss: they are learned, but destitute of all deeper insight and of any trace of genius. Just as bees and ants require in their communities whole cohorts of sexless workers, so it seems as if we human beings could not get along without the industry and the widespread but ephemeral influence of such minds, marked with the stamp of sterility, as flourished in such profusion about the middle of the nineteenth century. The progress of historico-critical research on the one hand, and on the other the increasing tendency to direct attention not to the theological and subordinate, but to that which is living and decisive, causes one to look upon the mythological standpoint of Strauss as so unintelligent that one cannot turn over the leaves of this honest man‘s writings without yawning. And yet one must admit that such men as he and Renan (two concave mirrors which distort all lines, the one by lengthening, the other by broadening) have accomplished an important work — by drawing the attention of thousands to the great miracle of the fact of Christ and thus creating a public for profounder thinkers and wiser men.
2. Later there came a dark period upon which light has still to be thrown.
ness. Many a man may never have seen the Crucified One with his eyes; many a man may constantly have passed this revelation carelessly by; thousands of men, even among ourselves, lack what one might call the inner sense to perceive Christ at all; on the other hand, having once seen Jesus Christ — even if it be with half-veiled eyes — we cannot forget Him; it does not lie within our power to remove the object of experience from our minds. We are not Christians because we were brought up in this or in that Church, because we want to be Christians; if we are Christians, it is because we cannot help it, because neither the chaotic bustle of life nor the delirium of selfishness, nor artificial training of thought can dispel the vision of the Man of Sorrow when once it has been seen. On the evening before His death, when His Apostles were questioning Him as to the significance of one of His actions, He replied, “I have given you an example.“ That is the meaning not only of the one action but of His whole life and death. Even so strict an ecclesiastic as Martin Luther writes: “The example of our Lord Jesus Christ is at the same time a sacrament, it is strong in us, it does not, like the examples of the fathers, merely teach, no, it also effects what it teaches, it gives life, resurrection and redemption from death.“ The power of Buddha over the world rests on similar foundations. The true source of all religion is, I repeat, in the case of the great majority of living people not a doctrine but a life. It is a different question, of course, how far we, with our weak capability, can or cannot follow the example; the ideal is there, clear, unmistakable, and for centuries it has been moulding with incomparable power the thoughts and actions of men, even of unbelievers.
I shall return to this point later in another connection. If I have introduced Buddha here, where only the figure of Christ concerns me, I have done so for this reason, that nothing shows up a figure so well as comparison.
The comparison, however, must be an appropriate one, and I do not know any other than Buddha in the history of the world whom we could compare with Christ. Both are characterised by their divine earnestness; they have in common the longing to point out to all mankind the way of redemption; they have both incomparably magnetic personalities. And yet if one places these two figures side by side, it can only be to emphasise the contrast and not to draw a parallel between them. Christ and Buddha are opposites. What unites them is their sublimity of character. From that source have sprung lives of unsurpassed loveliness, lives which wielded an influence such as the world had never before experienced. Otherwise they differ almost in every point, and the neo-Buddhism which has been paraded during recent years in certain social circles in Europe — in the closest relation, it is said, to Christianity and even going beyond it — is but a new proof of the widespread superficiality of thought among us. For Buddha‘s life and thought present a direct contrast to the thought and life of Christ: they form what the logician calls the “antithesis,“ what to the natural scientist is the “opposite pole.“
BUDDHA
Buddha represents the senile decay of a culture which has reached the limit of its possibilities. A Prince, highly educated, gifted with a rich fulness of power, recognises the vanity of that education and that power. He professes what to the rest of the world seems to be the Highest, but with the vision of truth before him, this possession melts away to nothing. Indian culture, the outcome of the meditative contemplation incident to a pastoral life, had thrown itself with all the weight of its lofty gifts into the development of the one attribute peculiar to mankind — Reason with the power of combination: so it came to pass that connection with the surrounding world — childlike observation with its practical adaptation to business — languished, at any rate among the men of higher culture. Everything was systematically directed to the development of the power of thought: every educated youth knew by heart, word for word, a whole literature charged with matter so subtle that even to this day few Europeans are capable of following it: even geometry, the most abstract of all methods of representing the concrete world, was too obvious for the Indians, and so they came instead to revel in an arithmetic which goes beyond all possibility of presentation: the man who questioned himself as to his aim in life, the man who had been gifted by nature with the desire to strive for some highest goal, found on the one side a religious system in which symbolism had grown to such mad dimensions that it needed some thirty years to find oneself at home in it, and on the other side a philosophy leading up to heights so giddy that whoso wished to climb the last rungs of this heavenly ladder must take refuge from the world for ever in the deep silence of the primeval forest. Clearly here the eye and the heart had lost their rights. Like the scorching simoom of the desert, the spirit of abstraction had swept with withering force over all other gifts of this rich human nature. The senses indeed still lived — desires of tropical heat: but on the other side was the negation of the whole world of sense: between these nothing, no compromise, only war, war between human perception and human nature, between thought and being. And so Buddha must hate what he loved; children, parents, wife, all that is beautiful and joyous — for what were these but veils darkening perception, bonds chaining him to a dream-life of lies and desire? and what had he to do with all the wisdom of the Brahmans? Sacrificial ceremonies which no human being understood, and which the priests themselves explained as being purely symbolical and to the initiated futile: — beyond this a redemption by perception accessible to scarcely one man in a hundred thousand. Thus it was that Buddha not only cast away from him his kingdom and his knowledge, but tore from his heart all that bound him as man to man, all love, all hope: at one blow he destroyed the religion of his fathers, drove their gods from the temple of the world, and rejected as a vain phantom even that most sublime conception of Indian metaphysics, that of a one and only God, indescribable, unthinkable, having no part in space or time, and therefore inaccessible to thought, and yet by thought dimly imagined. There is nothing in life but suffering, this was Buddha‘s experience and consequently his teaching. The one object worth striving for is “redemption from suffering.“ This redemption is death, the entering into annihilation. But to every Indian the transmigration of souls, that is the eternal reincarnation of the same individual, was believed in as a manifest fact, not even to be called in question. Death then, in its ordinary shape, cannot give redemption: it is the gift of that death only upon which no reincarnation follows: and this redeeming death can only be attained in one way, namely, that man shall have died during his life and therefore of his own free will: that is to say, that he shall have cut off and annihilated all that ties him to life, all love, all hope, all desire, all possession: in short, as we should say with Schopenhauer, that he shall have denied the will to live. If man lives in this wise, if while yet alive he makes himself into a moving corpse, then can the reaper Death harvest no seed for a reincarnation. A living Death! that is the essence of Buddhism! We may describe Buddhism as the lived suicide. It is suicide in its highest potentiality: for Buddha lives solely and only to die, to be dead definitely and beyond recall, to enter into Nirvana — extinction. (1)
CHRIST
What greater contrast could there be to this figure than that of Christ, whose death signifies entrance into eternal life? Christ perceives divine Providence in the whole world; not a sparrow falls to the ground, not a hair on the head of a man can be injured, without the permission of the Heavenly Father. And far from hating this earthly existence, which is lived by the will and under the eye of God, Christ praises it as the entry into eternity, as the narrow gate through which we pass into the Kingdom of God. And this Kingdom of God, what is it? A Nirvana? a Dream-Paradise? a future reward for deeds done here below? Christ gives the answer in one word, which has undoubtedly been authentically handed down to us, for it had never been uttered before, and no one of His disciples evidently understood it, much less invented it; indeed, this eagle thought flashed so far in front of the slow unfolding of human knowledge that even to the present day few have seen the meaning of it — as I said before, Christianity is still in its infancy — Christ‘s answer was, “The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here or lo there. For behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.“ This is what Christ himself calls the “mystery“; it cannot be expressed in words, it cannot be defined; and ever and ever again the Saviour endeavours to bring home His great message of salvation by means of parables: the Kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed in the field, “the least of all seeds,“ but if it is tended by the husbandman, it grows to a tree, “so that the birds of the air come and lodge under its branches“; the Kingdom of God is like the leaven among the flour, if the housewife take but a little, it leavens the whole lump; but the following figure speaks most plainly: “the Kingdom of God is like unto a treasure hid in a field.“ (2) That the field means the world, Christ expressly says (see Matthew xiii. 38); in this world, that is, in this life, the treasure lies concealed; the Kingdom of God is buried within us! That is the “mystery of the Kingdom of God,“ as Christ says; at the same time it is the secret of His own life, the secret of His personality. An estrangement from life, as in the case of Buddha, is not to be found in Christ, there is, however, a “conversion“ of the direction of life, if I may so call it, as, for example, when Christ says to His disciples, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of God.“ (3) At a later period this so easily grasped “conversion“ received — perhaps from a strange hand — the more mystical expression, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.“ The words do not matter, what is important is the conception underlying them, and this conception stands out luminously clear, because it gives form to the whole life of Christ. Here we do not find a doctrine like that of Buddha with a logical arithmetical development; nor is there, as has so frequently been asserted by the superficial, any organic connection with Jewish wisdom: read the words of Jesus Sirach, who is most frequently compared with Christ, and ask yourselves whether that is “Spirit of the same Spirit“? Sirach speaks like a Jewish Marcus Aurelius and even his finest sayings, such as “Seek wisdom until death, and God will fight for you,“ or, “The heart of the fool lies upon his tongue, but the tongue of the wise man dwells within his heart,“ are as a sound from another world when put beside the sayings of Christ: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth; blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God; take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and you will find rest unto your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.“ No one had ever spoken like that before, and no one has spoken so since. These words of Christ have, however, as we can see, never the character of a doctrine, but just as the tone of a voice supplements by a mysterious inexpressible something — which is the most personal element in the personality — what we already know about a man from his features and his actions, so do we seem to hear in them his voice: what he exactly said we do not know, but an unmistakable, unforgettable tone strikes our ear and from our ear enters our heart. And then we open our eyes and see this figure, this life. Down through the ages we hear the words, “Learn of me,“ and we understand what they mean: to be as Christ was, to live as Christ lived, to die as Christ died, that is the Kingdom of God, that is eternal life.
1. I have translated das nichts by extinction, which is the rendering of Nirvana by Rhys Davids. He says: “What then is Nirvana, which means simply going out, extinction“; and then he goes on to say that it ought to be translated “Holiness.“ But that will not do here, nor is it altogether incapable of being argued. Extinction gives Chamberlain‘s meaning better than “nothingness,“ which is not quite satisfactory. Perhaps “Holy Extinction“ comes near to the Buddhist conception. The idea of Rhys Davids would thus not be lost. (Translator's Note.)
2. The expression Uranos or “Kingdom of Heaven“ occurs only in Matthew and is certainly not the right translation into Greek of any expression used by Christ. The other evangelists always say “Kingdom of God.“ (Cf. my collection of the Worte Christi, large edition, p. 260, small edition, p. 279, and for more learned and definite explanation see H. H. Wendt‘s Lehre Jesu, 1886, pp. 48 and 58.)
3. The emphasis clearly does not lie on the additional clause “and become as little children“; this is rather an explanation of the conversion. What is it that distinguishes children? Unalloyed joy in life and the unspoilt power of throwing a glamour over it by their temperaments.
In the nineteenth century, the ideas of pessimism and negation of the will, which have become so common, have been frequently applied to Christ; but though they fit Buddha and certain features of the Christian churches and their dogmas, Christ‘s life is their denial. If the Kingdom of God dwells in us, if it is embraced in this life like a hidden treasure, what becomes of the sense of pessimism? (1) How can man be a wretch born only for grief, if the divinity lies in his breast? How can this world be the worst of all possible worlds (see Schopenhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. ii. chap. xlvi.) if it contains Heaven? For Christ these were all delusive fallacies; woe to you, He said of the learned, “who shut up the Kingdom of God against men; for ye neither go in yourselves neither suffer ye them that would enter to go in,“ and He praised God that He had “revealed to babes and sucklings what He had hidden from the wise and prudent“; Christ, as one of the greatest men of the nineteenth century has said, was “not wise, but divine“; (2) that is a mighty difference; and because He was divine, Christ did not turn away from life, but to life. This is eloquently vouched for by the impression which Christ made and left upon those who knew Him; they call Him the tree of life, the bread of life, the water of life, the light of life, the light of the world, a light from above sent to lighten those that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death; Christ is for them the rock, the foundation upon which we are to build our lives, &c, &c. Everything is positive, constructive, affirmative. Whether Christ really brought the dead to life may be doubted by any one who will; but such a one must estimate all the more highly the life-giving impression which radiated from this figure, for wherever Christ went people believed that they saw the dead come to life and the sick rise healed from their beds. Everywhere He sought out the suffering, the poor, those laden with sorrow, and bidding them “weep not,“ consoled them with words of life. From inner Asia came the idea of flight from the world to the cloister. Buddhism had not in truth invented it, but gave it its greatest impulse. Christianity, too, imitated it later, closely following the Egyptian example. This idea had already advanced to the very neighbourhood of the Galilean; yet where does one find Christ preaching monastic doctrines of seclusion from the world? Many founders of religion have imposed penance in respect of food upon themselves and their disciples; not so Christ; He emphasises particularly that He had not fasted like John, but had so lived that men called Him a “glutton and a winebibber.“ All the following expressions which we know so well from the Bible — that the thoughts of men are vain, that the life of man is vanity, he passes away like a shadow, the work of man is vain, all is vanity — come from the Old, not from the New Testament. Indeed such words as those, for example, of the preacher Solomon, “One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever,“ are derived from a view of life which is directly contrary to that of Christ; because according to the latter Heaven and earth pass away, while the human breast conceals in its depths the only thing that is everlasting. It is true that Jesus Christ offers the example of an absolute renunciation of much that makes up the life of the greater proportion of mankind; but it is done for the sake of life; this renunciation is the “conversion“ which, we are told, leads to the Kingdom of Heaven, and it is not outward but purely inward. What Buddha teaches is, so to speak, a physical process, it is the actual extinction of the physical and intellectual being; whoever wishes to be redeemed must take the three vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. In the case of Christ we find nothing similar: He attends marriages, He declares wedlock to be a holy ordinance of God, and even the errors of the flesh he judges so leniently that He Himself has not a word of condemnation for the adulteress; He indeed speaks of wealth as rendering the “conversion“ of the will more difficult — as, for example, when He says that it is more difficult for a rich man to enter into that kingdom of God which lies within us than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but He immediately adds — and this is the characteristic and decisive part — “the things which are impossible with men are possible with God.“ This is again one of those passages which cannot be invention, for nowhere in the whole world do we find anything like it. There had been enough and to spare of diatribes against wealth before (one need only read the Jewish Prophets), they were repeated later (read, for instance, the Epistle of James, chap. ii.); according to Christ, however, wealth is a mere accessory, the possession of which may or may not be a hindrance, for the one thing which concerns Him is the inner and spiritual conversion. And this it was that, in dealing with this very case, by far the greatest of the Apostles amplified so beautifully; for while Christ had advised the rich young man, “Sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor,“ Paul completes the saying by the remark, “and though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and have not charity it profiteth me nothing.“ The Buddhist who is steering for death may be satisfied with poverty, chastity, and obedience; he who chooses life has other things to think of.
And here it is necessary to call attention to one more point, in which the living essence of Christ‘s personality and example manifests itself freshly and convincingly; I refer to His combativeness. The sayings of Christ on humility and patience, His exhortation that we should love our enemies and bless those that curse us, find almost exact parallels in the sayings of Buddha; but they spring from quite a different motive. For Buddha every injustice endured is an extinction, for Christ it is a means of advancing the new view of life: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness‘ sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of God“ (that kingdom which lies hidden like a treasure in the field of life). But if we pass to the inner being, if that one fundamental question of the direction of will is brought up, then we hear words of quite a different kind: “Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay, but rather division! For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, two against three, and three against two.... For I am come to stir up the son against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against the mother-in-law; and the man‘s enemies shall be they of his own household.“
1. I need scarcely say that I take the word pessimism, which is capable of such a variety of interpretations, in the popular, superficial sense of a moral frame of mind, not a philosophical cognition.
2. Diderot also, to whom one cannot attribute orthodox faith, says in the Encyclopédie: “Christ ne fut point un philosophe, ce fut un Dieu.“
Not peace but the sword: that is a voice to which we cannot shut our ears, if we wish to understand the revelation of Christ. The life of Jesus Christ is an open declaration of war, not against the forms of civilisation, culture and religion, which He found around Him — He observes the Jewish law of religion and teaches us to give to Caesar what is Caesar's — but certainly against the inner spirit of mankind, against the motives which underlie their actions, against the goal which they set for themselves in the future life and in the present. The coming of Christ signifies, from the point of view of the world‘s history, the coming of a new human species. Linnaeus distinguished as many human species as there are colours of skin; but a new colouring of the will goes really deeper into the organism than a difference in the pigment of the epidermis! And the Lord of this new human species, the “new Adam,“ as the Scripture so well describes Him, will have no compromise; He puts the choice: God or mammon. Whoever chooses conversion, whoever obeys the warning of Christ, “Follow me!“ must also when necessary leave father and mother, wife and child; but he does not leave them, like the disciples of Buddha, to find death, but to find life. Here is no room for pity: whom we have lost we have lost, and with the ancient hardness of the heroic spirit not a tear is shed over those who are gone: “Let the dead bury their dead.“ Not every one is capable of understanding the word of Christ, He in fact tells us, “Many are called but few are chosen,“ and here again Paul has given drastic expression to this fact: “The preaching of the Cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.“ So far as outward forms go Christ has no preferences, but where the direction of the will is concerned, whether it is directed to the Eternal or the Temporal, whether it advances or hinders the unfolding of that immeasurable power of life in the heart of man, whether it aims at the quickening of that “Kingdom of God within us“ or, on the other hand, scatters for ever the one treasure of “them that are chosen“ — there is with Him no question of tolerance and never can be. In this very connection much has been done since the eighteenth century to rob the sublime countenance of the Son of Man of all its mighty features. We have had represented to us as Christianity a strange delusive picture of boundless tolerance, of universally gentle passivity, a kind of milk-and-water religion; in the last few years we have actually witnessed “interconfessional religious congresses,“ where all the priests of the world shake hands as brothers, and many Christians welcome this as particularly “Christlike.“ It may be ecclesiastical, it may be right and good, but Christ would never have sent an apostle to such a congress. Either the word of the Cross is “foolishness“ or it is “a divine power“; between the two Christ himself has torn open the yawning gulf of “division,“ and, to prevent any possibility of its being bridged, has drawn the flaming “sword.“ Whoever understands the revelation of Christ cannot be surprised. The tolerance of Christ is that of a spirit which soars high as Heaven above all forms that divide the world; a combination of these forms could not have the slightest importance for Him — that would mean only the rise of a new form; He, on the other hand, considers only the “spirit and the truth.“ And when Christ teaches, “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other also, and if any man will take away thy coat let him have thy cloak also“ — a doctrine to which His example on the Cross gave everlasting significance — who does not understand that this is closely related to what follows, “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you,“ and that here that inner “conversion“ is expressed, not passively, but in the highest possible form of living action? If I offer the impudent striker my left cheek, I do not do so for his sake; if I love my enemy and show him kindness, it is not for his sake; after the conversion of the will it is simply inevitable and therefore I do it. The old law, an eye for an eye, hatred for hatred, is just as natural a reflex action as that which causes the legs of a dead frog to kick when the nerves are stimulated. In sooth it must be a “new Adam“ who has gained such complete mastery over his “old Adam“ that he does not obey this impulse. However, it is not merely self-control — for if Buddha forms the one opposite pole to Christ, the Stoic forms the other; but that conversion of the will, that entry into the hidden kingdom of God, that being born again, which makes up the sum of Christ‘s example, demands a complete conversion of the feelings. This, in fact, is the new thing. Till Christ blood-vengeance was the sacred law of all men of the most different races; but from the Cross there came the cry, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!“ Whoever takes the divine voice of pity for weak humanitarianism has not understood a single feature of the advent of Christ. The voice which here speaks comes from that Kingdom of God which is within us; pain and death have lost their power over it; they affect him who is born again just as little as the stroke on the cheek or the theft of the coat; everything that drives, constrains and compels the human half-ape — selfishness, superstition, prejudice, envy, hatred — breaks on such a will as this like sea-foam on a granite cliff; in face of death Christ scarcely notices His own pain and tribulation, He sees only that men are crucifying what is divine in them, and they are treading under foot the seed of the Kingdom of God and scattering the “treasure in the field,“ and thus it is that, full of pity, He calls out, “They know not what they do!“ Search the history of the world and you will not find a word to equal this for sublime pride. Here speaks a discernment that has penetrated farther than the Indian mind, here speaks at the same time the strongest will, the surest consciousness of self.
Just as we children of a modern age have discovered in the whole world a power which before only from time to time flashed forth in fleeting clouds as the lightning, a power hidden, invisible, perceived by no sense, to be explained by no hypothesis, but all-present and almighty, and in the same way as we are driven to trace the complete transformation of our outward conditions of life to this power — so Christ pointed to a hidden power in the unfathomed and unfathomable depths of the human heart, a power capable of completely transforming man, capable of making a sorrow-trodden wretch mighty and blessed. The lightning had hitherto been only a destroyer; the power which it taught us to discover is now the servant of peaceful work and comfort; in like manner the human will, from the beginning of time the seed of all the misfortune and misery that descended upon the human race, was henceforth to minister to the new birth of this race, to the rise of a new human species. Hence, as I have pointed out in the introduction to this book, the incomparable significance of the life of Christ for the world‘s history. No political revolution can compare with it.
From the point of view of universal history we have every reason to put the achievement of Christ on a parallel with the achievements of the Hellenes. In the first chapter I have described in how far Homer, Democritus, Plato, &c. &c. are to be considered as real “creators,“ and I added, “then and then only is a new creature born, then only does the macrocosm contain a microcosm. The only thing that deserves to be called culture is the daughter of such creative freedom.“ (1) What Greece did for the intellect, Christ did for the moral life: man had not a moral culture till He gave it. I should rather say, the possibility of a moral culture; for the motive power of culture is that inner, creative process, the voluntary masterful conversion of the will, and this very motive power was with rare exceptions quite overlooked; Christianity became an essentially historical religion, and at the altars of its churches all the superstitions of antiquity and of Judaism found a consecrated place of refuge. Yet we have in the revelation of Christ the one foundation of all moral culture, and the moral culture of our nations is greater or smaller in proportion to the extent to which his personality is able more or less clearly to prevail.
It is in this connection that we can with truth assert that the appearance of Christ upon earth has divided mankind into two classes. It created for the first time true nobility, and indeed true nobility of birth, for only he who is chosen can be a Christian. But at the same time it sowed in the hearts of the chosen the seed of new and bitter suffering: it separated them from father and mother, it made them lonely wanderers among men who did not understand them, it stamped them as martyrs. And who after all is really master? Who has entirely conquered his slavish instincts? Discord from now onward rent the individual soul. And now that the individual, who hitherto in the tumultuous struggle of life had scarcely attained to a consciousness of his “Ego,“ was awakened to an unexpectedly high conception of his dignity, inner significance and power, how often was his heart bound to fail him in the consciousness of his weakness and unworthiness? Now and now only did life become truly tragical. This was brought about by man‘s own free act in rising against his animal nature. “From a perfect pupil of nature man became an imperfect moral being, from a good instrument a bad artist,“ says Schiller. But man will no longer be an instrument; and as Homer had created gods such as he wished them, so now man rebelled against the moral tyranny of nature and created a sublime morality such as he desired; he would no longer obey blind impulses, beautifully constrained and restricted as they might be by legal paragraphs; his own law of morals would henceforth be his only standard. In Christ man awakens to consciousness of his moral calling, but thereby at the same time to the necessity of an inner struggle that is reckoned in tens of centuries. Under the heading Philosophy in the ninth chapter (vol. ii.), I shall show that after an anti-Christian reaction lasting for many centuries we have with Kant returned again to exactly the same path. The humanitarian Deists of the eighteenth century who turned away from Christ thought the pr