Chapter VII: Problems of the Arabian Culture (2)

But this movement _came out of Mesopotamia alone_, and the spirit in it was the Apocalyptic and not the Talmudic. Jerusalem was occupied in creating yet more legal barriers against the unbeliever. It was not enough even to abandon the practice of making converts. A Pharisee permitted himself to summon the universally beloved King Hyrcanus (135-106) to lay down the office of High Priest because his mother had once been in the power of the infidels.[342] This is the same narrowness which in the primitive Christian brotherhood of Judea took the form of opposing the preaching of the Gospel to the heathen. In the East it would simply never have occurred to anyone to draw such barriers, which were contrary to the whole idea of the Magian nation. But in that very fact was based _the spiritual superiority_ of the wide East. The Synedrion in Jerusalem might possess unchallenged religious authority, but politically, and therefore historically, the power of the Resh Galutha was a very different matter. Christian and Jewish research alike have failed to perceive these things. So far as I am aware, no one has noticed the important fact that the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes was directed not against “Jewry” but against Judea. And this brings us to another fact, of still greater importance.

The destruction of Jerusalem hits only a very small part of the nation, one moreover that was spiritually and politically by far the least important. It is not true that the Jewish people has lived “in the Dispersion” since that day, for it had lived for centuries (and so too had the Persian and others) in a form which was independent of country. On the other hand, we realize equally little the impression made by this war upon the real Jewry which Judea thought of and treated as an adjunct. The victory of the heathen and the ruin of the Sanctuary was felt in the inmost soul,[343] and in the crusade of 115[344] a bitter revenge was taken for it; but the ideal outraged and vindicated was the ideal of Jewry and not that of Judaism. Zionism then, as in Cyrus’s day and in ours, was a reality only for a quite small and spiritually narrow minority. If the calamity had been really felt in the sense of a “loss of home” (as we figure it to ourselves with the Western mind), a hundred opportunities after Marcus Aurelius’s time could have been seized to win the city back. But that would have contradicted the Magian sense of the nation, whose ideal organic form was the synagogue, the pure _consensus_--like the early Catholic “visible Church” and like Islam--and it was precisely the annihilation of Judea and the clan spirit of Judea that _for the first time completely actualized this ideal_.

For Vespasian’s War, directed against Judea, was a liberation of Jewry. In the first place, it ended both the claim of the people of this petty district to be the genuine nation, and the pretensions of their bald spirituality to equivalence with the soul-life of the whole. The research, the scholasticism, and the mysticism of the Oriental academies entered into possession of their rights; so, for instance, the judge Karna--the contemporary, more or less, of Ulpian and Papinian--formulated at the academy of Nehardea the first code of civil law.[345] In the second place, it rescued this religion from the dangers of that pseudomorphosis to which Christianity in that same period was succumbing. Since 200 B.C. there had existed a half-Hellenistic Jewish literature. The “Preacher” (Ecclesiastes, Koheleth) contains Pyrrhonic ideas.[346] The Wisdom of Solomon, 2 Maccabees, Theodotion, the Aristeas Letter, etc., follow; there are things like the Menander collection of Maxims, as to which it is impossible to say whether they ought to be regarded as Jewish or as Greek. There were, about 160, high priests who were so Hellenistic in spirit that they combated the Jewish religion, and later there were rulers like Hyrcanus and Herod who did the same by political methods. This danger came to an end instantly and for good in A.D. 70.

In the time of Jesus there were in Jerusalem three tendencies which can be described as generally Aramæan, represented respectively by the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Although the connotations of these names varied, and although both in Christian and in Jewish research most diverse views are held about them, it may at any rate be said that the first of these tendencies is found in greatest purity in Judaism, the second in Chaldeanism, the third in Hellenism.[347] Essene is the rise of the cult (almost the Order) of Mithras in the east of Asia Minor. The Sadducees, although in Jerusalem they appear as a small and distinguished group--Josephus compares them with the Epicureans--are thoroughly Aramæan in their apocalyptic and eschatological views, in virtue of a certain element which makes them, so to say, the Dostoyevskis of this Early period. They stand to the Pharisees in the relation of mysticism to scholasticism, of John to Paul, of Bundahish to Vendidad[348] in the Persian world. The Apocalyptic is popular, and many of its traits are spiritually common property throughout the Aramæan world; the Talmudic and Avestan Pharisaism is exclusive and tries to rule out every other religion with uncompromising rigour.

The Essenes appear in Jerusalem as a monastic order like the Neopythagoreans. They possessed secret texts.[349] In the broad sense they are representative of the Pseudomorphosis, and in consequence they disappear from Jewry completely after A.D. 70, while precisely in this period Christian literature was becoming purely Greek--not in the least of the causes of this being that the Hellenized Western Jews left Judaism to retreat into its East, and gradually adopted Christianity.

But also Apocalyptic, which is an expression-form of townless and town-fearing mankind, soon came to an end within the Synagogue, after a last wonderful reaction to the stimulus of the great catastrophe.[350] When it had become evident that the teaching of Jesus would lead not to a reform of Judaism, but to a new religion, and when, about A.D. 100, the daily imprecation-formula against the Jew-Christians was introduced, Apocalyptic for the short remainder of its existence resided in the young Church.

VI

The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above all religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. In all the great creations of those years there is nothing which can be set beside it. Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of Mithras, Attis, and Osiris must have seemed to any man reading or listening to the still recent story of Jesus’s sufferings--the last journey to Jerusalem, the last anxious supper, the hours of despair in Gethsemane, and the death on the cross.

Here was no matter of philosophy. Jesus’s utterances, which stayed in the memory of many of the devoted, even in old age, are those of a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world. They are not sociological observations, problems, debatings. Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of these fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesareth in the midst of the age of the great Tiberius, far from all world-history and innocent of all the doings of actuality, while round them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples, their refined Western society, their noisy mob-diversions, their Roman cohorts, their Greek philosophy. When the friends and disciples of the sufferer had grown grey and his brother was president of their group in Jerusalem, they put together, from the sayings and narratives generally current in their small communities, a biography so arresting in its inward appeal that it evolved a presentation-form of its own, of which neither the Classical nor the Arabian Culture has any example--the Gospel. Christianity is the one religion in the history of the world in which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the emblem and the central point of the whole creation.

A strange excitement, like that which the Germanic world experienced about A.D. 1000, ran in those days through the whole Aramæan land. The Magian soul was awakened. That element which lay in the prophetic religions like a presentiment, and expressed itself in Alexander’s time in metaphysical outlines, came now to the state of fulfilment. And this fulfilment awakened, in indescribable strength, the primitive feeling of Fear. The birth of the Ego, and of the world-anxiety with which it is identical, is one of the final secrets of humanity and of mobile life generally. In front of the Microcosm there stands up a Macrocosm wide and overpowering, an abyss of alien, dazzling existence and activity that frightens the small lonely ego back into itself. Even in the blackest hours of life no adult experiences fear like the fear which sometimes overpowers a child in the crisis of awakening. Over the dawn of the new Culture likewise lay this deathly anxiety. In this early morning of Magian world-feeling, timorous and hesitant and ignorant of itself, young eyes saw the end of the world at hand--it is the first thought in which every Culture to this day has come to knowledge of itself. All but the shallower souls trembled before revelations, miracles, glimpses into the very fundament of things. Men now lived and thought only in apocalyptic images. Actuality became appearance. Strange and terrifying visions were told mysteriously by one to another, read out from fantastic veiled texts, and seized at once with an immediate inward certainty. These writings travelled from community to community, village to village, and it is quite impossible to assign them to any one particular religion.[351] Their colouring is Persian, Chaldean, Jewish, but they have absorbed all that was circulating in men’s minds. Whereas the canonical books are national, the apocalyptic literature is international in the literal sense of the word. It is there, and no one seems to have composed it. Its content is fluid--to-day it reads thus and to-morrow otherwise. But this does not mean that it is a “poetry”--it is not.[352] These creations resemble the terrible figures of the Romanesque cathedral-porches in France, which also are not “art,” but fear turned into stone. Everyone knows those angels and devils, the ascent to heaven and descent to hell of divine Essence, the Second Adam, the Envoy of God, the Redeemer of the last days, the Son of Man, the eternal city, and the last judgment.[353] In the alien cities and the high positions of strict Judaic and Persian priesthoods the different doctrines might be tangibly defined and argued about, but below in the mass of the people there was practically no specific religion, but a general Magian religiousness which filled all souls and attached itself to glimpses and visions of every conceivable origin. The Last Day was at hand. Men expected it and knew that on that day “He” of whom all these revelations spoke would appear. Prophets arose. More and more new communities and groups gathered, believing themselves to have found either a better understanding of the traditional religion, or the true religion itself. In this time of amazing, ever-increasing tension, and in the very years around Jesus’s birth-year, there arose, besides endless communities and sects, another redemption-religion, the Mandæan, as to which we know nothing of founder or origins. In spite of its hatred of the Judaism of Jerusalem and its definite preference for the Persian idea of redemption, the Mandæan religion seems to have stood very close to the popular beliefs of Syrian Jewry. One after another, pieces of its wonderful documents are becoming available, and they consistently show us a “Him,” a Son of Man, a Redeemer who is sent down into the depths, who himself must be redeemed and is the goal of man’s expectations. In the Book of John, the Father high upraised in the House of Fulfilment, bathed in light, says to his only begotten Son: “My Son, be to me an ambassador; go into the world of darkness, where no ray of light is.” And the Son calls up to him: “Father, in what have I sinned that thou hast sent me into the darkness?” And finally: “Without sin did I ascend and there was no sin and defect in me.”[354]

All the characters of the great prophetic religions and of the whole store of profound glimpses and visions later collected into apocalypses are seen here as foundations. Of Classical thought and feeling not a breath reached this Magian underworld. No doubt the beginnings of the new religion are lost irrevocably. But _one_ historical figure of Mandæanism stands forth with startling distinctness, as tragic in his purpose and his downfall as Jesus himself--John the Baptist.[355] He, almost emancipated from Judaism, and filled with as mighty a hatred of the Jerusalem spirit as that of primitive Russia for Petersburg, preached the end of the world and the coming of the Barnasha, the Son of Man, _who is no longer the longed-for national Messiah of the Jews_, but the bringer of the world-conflagration.[356] To him came Jesus and was his disciple.[357] He was thirty years old when the awakening came over him. Thenceforth the apocalyptic, and in particular the Mandæan, thought-world filled his whole being. The other world of historical actuality lying round him was to him as something sham, alien, void of significance. That “He” would now come and make an end of this unreal reality was his magnificent certainty, and like his master John, he stepped forth as its herald. Even now we can see, in the oldest Gospels that were embodied into the New Testament, gleams of this period in which he was, in his consciousness, nothing but a prophet.[358]

But there was a moment in his life when an inkling, and then high certainty, came over him--“Thou art thyself It!” It was a secret that he at first hardly admitted to himself, and only later imparted to his nearest friends and companions, who thereafter shared with him, in all stillness, the blessed mission, till finally they dared to reveal the truths before all the world by the momentous journey to Jerusalem. If there is anything at all that clouds the complete purity and honour of his thought, it is that doubt as to whether he has deceived himself which from time to time seizes him, and of which, later, his disciples told quite frankly. He comes to his home. The village crowds to him, recognizes the former carpenter who left his work, is angered. The family--mother and all the brothers and sisters--are ashamed of him and would have arrested him. And with all these familiar eyes upon him he was confused and felt the magic power depart from him (Mark vi). In Gethsemane doubts of his mission[359] mingled themselves in the terrible fear of coming things, and even on the cross men heard the anguished cry that God had forsaken him.

Even in these last hours he lived entirely in the form of his own apocalyptic world, which alone was ever real to him. What to the Roman sentries standing below him was reality was for him an object of helpless wonder, an illusion that might at any moment without warning vanish into nothingness. He possessed the pure and unadulterated soul of the townless land. The life of the cities and their spirit were to him utterly alien. Did he really see the semi-Classical Jerusalem, into which he rode as the Son of Man, and understand its historical nature? This is what thrills us in the last days--and the collision of facts with truths, of two worlds that will never understand one another, and his entire incomprehension of what was happening about him.

So he went, proclaiming his message without reservation, through his country. But this country was Palestine. He was born in the Classical Empire and lived under the eyes of the Judaism of Jerusalem, and when his soul, fresh from the awful revelation of its mission, looked about, it was confronted by the actuality of the Roman State and that of Pharisaism. His repugnance for the stiff and selfish ideal of the latter, which he shared with all Mandæanism and doubtless with the peasant Jewry of the wide East, is the hall-mark of all his discourses from first to last. It angered him that this wilderness of cold-hearted formulæ was reputed to be the only way to salvation. Still, thus far it was only another kind of piety that his conviction was asserting against Rabbinical logic. Thus far it is only the Law versus the Prophets.

But when Jesus was taken before Pilate, then _the world of facts and the world of truths were face to face in immediate and implacable hostility_. It is a scene appallingly distinct and overwhelming in its symbolism, such as the world’s history had never before and has never since looked at. The discord that lies at the root of all mobile life from its beginning, in virtue of its very _being_, of its having both existence _and_ awareness, took here the highest form that can possibly be conceived of human tragedy. In the famous question of the Roman Procurator: “What is truth?”--the one word that is race-pure in the whole Greek Testament--lies _the entire meaning of history_, the exclusive validity of the deed, the prestige of the State and war and blood, the all-powerfulness of success and the pride of eminent fitness. Not indeed the mouth, but the silent feeling of Jesus answers this question by that other which is decisive in all things of religion--_What is actuality?_ For Pilate actuality was all; for him nothing. Were it anything, indeed, pure religiousness could never stand up against history and the powers of history, or sit in judgment on active life; or if it does, it ceases to be religion and is subjected itself to the spirit of history.

_My kingdom is not of this world._ This is the final word which admits of no gloss and on which each must check the course wherein birth and nature have set him. A being that makes use of a waking-consciousness, or a waking-consciousness which subjects being to itself; pulsation or tension, blood or intellect, history or nature, politics or religion--here it is one or the other, there is no honest way of compromise. A statesman can be deeply religious, a pious man can die for his country--but they must, both, know on which side they are really standing. The born politician despises the inward thought-processes of the ideologue and ethical philosopher in a world of fact--and rightly. For the believer, all ambition and succession of the historical world are sinful and without lasting value--he, too, is right. A ruler who wishes to improve religion in the direction of political, practical purposes is a fool. A sociologist-preacher who tries to bring truth, righteousness, peace, and forgiveness into the world of actuality is a fool also. No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between directional Time and timeless Eternity, between the _course_ of history and the _existence_ of a divine world-order, in the structure of which the word “providence” or “dispensation” denotes the form of causality. _This is the final meaning of the moment in which Jesus and Pilate confronted one another._ In the one world, the historical, the Roman caused the Galilean to be crucified--that was his Destiny. In the other world, Rome was cast for perdition and the Cross became the pledge of Redemption--that was the “will of God.”[360]

_Religion is metaphysic and nothing else--“Credo quia absurdum”_--and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but _lived and experienced_ metaphysic--that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth-century Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus is a blasphemy. His occasional utterances of a social kind, so far as they are authentic and not merely attributed sayings, tend merely to edification. They contain nothing whatever of new doctrine, and they include proverbs of the sort then in general currency. His _teaching_ was the proclamation, nothing but the proclamation, of those Last Things with whose images he was constantly filled, the dawn of the New Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the last judgment, a new heaven and a new earth.[361] Any other conception of religion was never in Jesus, nor in any truly deep-feeling period of history. _Religion is, first and last, metaphysic_, other-worldliness (_Jenseitigkeit_), awareness in a world of which the evidence of the senses merely lights the foreground. It is life in and with the supersensible. And where the capacity for this awareness, or even the capacity for believing in its existence, is wanting, real religion is at an end. “My kingdom is _not_ of this world,” and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them. It is the Late, city periods that, no longer capable of seeing into depths, have turned the remnants of religiousness upon the external world and replaced religion by humanities, and metaphysic by moralization and social ethics.

In Jesus we have the direct opposite. “Give unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s” means: “Fit yourselves to the powers of the fact-world, be patient, suffer, and ask it not whether they are ‘just.’” What alone matters is the salvation of the soul. “Consider the lilies” means: “Give no heed to riches _and poverty_, for both fetter the soul to cares of this world.” “Man cannot serve both God and Mammon”--by Mammon is meant the _whole_ of actuality. It is shallow, and it is cowardly, to argue away the grand significance of this demand. Between working for the increase of one’s own riches, and working for the social ease of everyone, he would have felt no difference whatever. When wealth affrighted him, when the primitive community in Jerusalem--which was a strict Order and not a socialist club--rejected ownership, it was the most direct opposite of “social” sentiment that moved them. Their conviction was, not that the visible state of things was all, but that it was nothing: that it rested not on appreciation of comfort in this world, but on unreserved contempt of it. Something, it is true, must always exist to be set against and to nullify worldly fortune, and so we come back to the contrast of Tolstoi and Dostoyevski. Tolstoi, the townsman and Westerner, saw in Jesus only a social reformer, and in his metaphysical impotence--like the whole civilized West, which can only think about _distributing_, never _renouncing_--elevated primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. Dostoyevski, who was poor, but in certain hours almost a saint, never thought about social ameliorations--of what profit would it have been to a man’s _soul_ to abolish _property_?

VII

Amongst Jesus’s friends and disciples, stunned as they were by the appalling outcome of the journey to Jerusalem, there spread after a few days the news of his resurrection and reappearance. The impression of this news on such souls and in such a time can never be more than partially echoed in the sensibilities of a Late mankind. It meant the actual fulfilment of all the Apocalyptic of that Magian Springtime--the end of the present æon marked by the ascension of the redeemed Redeemer, the second Adam, the Saoshyant, Enosh, Barnasha, or whatever other name man attached to “Him,” into the light-realm of the Father. And therewith the foretold future, the new world-æon, “the Kingdom of Heaven,” became immediately present. They felt themselves at the decisive point in the history of redemption.

This certainty completely transformed the world-outlook of the little circles. “His” teachings, as they had flowed from his mild and noble nature--his inner feeling of the relation between God and man and of the high meaning of the times, and were exhaustively comprised in and defined by the word “love”--fell into the background, and their place was taken by the _teaching of Him_. As the Arisen he became for his disciples a new figure, in and of the Apocalyptic, and (what was more) its most important and final figure. But therewith their image of the future took form as an image of memory. Now, this was something of quite decisive importance, unheard-of in the world of Magian thought--the transference of an actuality, lived and experienced, on to the plane of the high story itself. The Jews (amongst them the young Paul) and the Mandæans (amongst them the disciples of John the Baptist) fought against it with passion and made of Jesus a “False Messiah” such as had been spoken of in the earliest Persian texts.[362] For them “He” was still to come from afar; for the little community “He” had already been--had they not seen him and lived with him? We have to enter into this conception unreservedly if we are to appreciate the enormous superiority it had in those times. Instead of an uncertain glimpse into the distance,[363] a compelling present; instead of fearful waiting for a liberating certainty, instead of a saga, a lived and shared human destiny--truly they were “glad tidings” that were proclaimed.

But to whom? Even in the first days the question arose which decided the whole Destiny of the new revelation. Jesus and his friends were Jews by birth, but they did not belong to the land of Judea. Here in Jerusalem men looked for the Messiah of their old sacred books, a Messiah who was to appear for the “Jewish people,” in the old tribal sense, and only for them. But all the rest of the Aramæan world waited upon the Saviour of the _world_, the Redeemer and Son of Man, the figure of all apocalyptic literature, whether written out in Jewish, Persian, Chaldean, or Mandæan terms.[364] In the one view the death and resurrection of Jesus were merely local events; in the other they betokened a world-change. For, while everywhere else the Jews were a Magian nation without home or unity of birth, Jerusalem held firmly to the tribal idea. The conflict was not one between “preaching to the Jews” and “preaching to the Gentiles”--it went far deeper. The word “mission” had essentially here a twofold meaning. In the Judaic view there was essentially no need for recruiting--quite the reverse, as it was a contradiction to the Messiah-idea. The words “tribe” and “mission” are reciprocally exclusive. The members of the Chosen People, and in particular the priesthood, had merely to convince _themselves_ that their longing was now fulfilled. But to the Magian nation, based on _consensus_ or community of feeling, what the Resurrection conveyed was a full and definitive truth, and consensus in the matter of this truth gave the _principle of the true nation_, which must necessarily expand till it had taken in all older and conceptually incomplete principles. “A Shepherd and his sheep” was the formula of the new world-nation. The nation of the Redeemer was identical with mankind. When, therefore, we survey the early history of this Culture, we see that the controversy in the Apostles’ Council[365] had been already decided, five hundred years before, by facts. Post-exilic Jewry (with the sole exception of self-contained Judea) had, like the Persians, Chaldeans, and others, recruited widely amongst the heathen, from Turkestan to inner Africa, regardless of home and origin. As to this there is now no controversy. It never at any time entered the heads of this community to be anything but what it really was. It was itself already the result of _a national existence in dispersion_. In utter contrast to the old-Jewish texts--which were a carefully preserved treasure, and of which the right interpretation, the Halakha, was reserved by the Rabbis to themselves--the apocalyptic literature was written so that it could reach all the souls to be wakened, and interpreted so that it might strike home in everyone.

It is easy to see which of these conceptions was that of Jesus’s oldest friends, for they established themselves as a community of the Last Days in Jerusalem and frequented the Temple. For these simple folk--amongst them his brothers, who erstwhile had openly rejected him, and his mother, who now believed in her executed Son[366]--the power of the Judaic tradition was even stronger than the spirit of Apocalypse. In their object of convincing the Jews they failed (although at first even Pharisees came over to them) and so they remained as one of the numerous sects within Judaism, and their product, the “Confession of Peter,” may fairly be characterized as an express assertion that they themselves were the true Jewry and the Synedrion the false.[367]

The final destiny of this circle[368] was to fall into oblivion when, as very soon happened, the whole world of Magian thought and feeling responded to the new apocalyptic teaching. Amongst the later disciples of Jesus were many who were definitely and purely Magian, and wholly free from the Pharisaic spirit. Long before Paul, they had tacitly settled the mission question. Not to preach, for them, was not to live at all, and presently they had assembled, everywhere from the Tigris to the Tiber, small circles in which the figure of Jesus, in every conceivable presentation, merged with the mass of prior visions.[369] Out of this, a new discord arose, as between mission to the heathen and mission to the Jews, and this was far more important than the conflict between Judea and the world on issues already decided. Jesus had lived in Galilee. Was his teaching to look west or east? Was it to be a Jesus-cult or an Order of the Saviour? Was it to seek intimacy with the Persian or with the Syncretic Church, both of which were in process of formation?

This was the question decided by Paul--the first great personality in the new movement, and the first who had the sense not only of truths, but of facts. As a young rabbi from the West, and a pupil of one of the most famous of the Tannaim, he had persecuted the Christians qua Jewish sectaries. Then, after an awakening of the sort that often happened in those days, he turned to the numerous small cult-communities of the West and forged out of them a Church of _his own_ modelling: so that thenceforward, the Pagan and the Christian cult-Churches evolved in parallel, and with constant reciprocal action, up to Iamblichus and Athanasius (about A.D. 330). In the presence of this great ideal, Paul had for the Jesus-communities of Jerusalem a scarcely veiled contempt. There is nothing in the New Testament more express and exact than the beginning of the Epistle to the Galatians; his activity is a self-assumed task; he has taught how it pleased him and he has built how it pleased him. Finally, after fourteen years, he goes to Jerusalem in order, by force of his superior mentality, his success, and his effective independence of the old comrades of Jesus, to compel them there to agree that his, Paul’s, creation contained the true doctrine. Peter and his people, alien to actualities, failed to seize and appreciate the far-reaching significance of the discussion. And from that moment the primitive community was superfluous.

Paul was a rabbi in intellect and an apocalyptic in feeling. He recognized Judaism, but as a _preliminary_ development. And thus there came to be two Magian religions with the same Scriptures (namely, the Old Testament), but a double Halakha, the one setting towards the Talmud--developed by the Tannaim at Jerusalem from 300 B.C. onwards--and the other, founded by Paul and completed by the Fathers, in the direction of the Gospel. But, further, Paul drew together the whole fullness of Apocalypse and salvation-yearning then circulating in these fields[370] into a salvation-_certainty_, the certainty immediately revealed to him and to him _alone_ near Damascus. “_Jesus is the Redeemer and Paul is his Prophet_”--this is the whole content of his message. The analogy with Mohammed could scarcely be closer. They differed neither in the nature of the awakening, nor in prophetic self-assuredness, nor in the consequent assertion of sole authority and unconditional truth for their respective expositions.

With Paul, urban man and his “intelligence” come on the scene. The others, though they might know Jerusalem or Antioch, never grasped the essence of these cities. They lived soil-bound, rural, wholly soul and feeling. But now there appeared a spirit that had grown up in the great cities of Classical cast, that could only live in cities, that neither understood nor respected the peasant’s countryside. An understanding was possible with Philo, but with Peter never. Paul was the first by whom the Resurrection-experience was _seen as a problem_; the ecstatic awe of the young countryman changed in his brain into a conflict of spiritual principles. For what a contrast!--the struggle of Gethsemane, and the hour of Damascus: Child and Man, soul-anguish and intellectual decision, self-devotion to death and resolve to change sides! Paul had begun by seeing in the new Jewish sect a danger to the Pharisaism of Jerusalem; now, suddenly, he comprehended that the Nazarenes “were right”--a phrase that is inconceivable on the lips of Jesus--and took up their cause against Judaism, thereby setting up as an _intellectual quantity_ that which had previously consisted in the knowledge of an experience. An intellectual quantity--but in making his cause into this he unwittingly drove it close to the other intellectual powers, _the cities of the West_. In the ambiance of pure Apocalyptic there is no “intellect.” For the old comrades it was simply not possible to understand him in the least--and mournfully and doubtfully they must have looked at him while he was addressing them. Their living image of Jesus (whom Paul had never seen) paled in this bright, hard light of concepts and propositions. Thenceforward the holy memory faded into a Scholastic system. But Paul had a perfectly exact feeling for the true home of his ideas. His missionary journeys were all directed westward, and the East he ignored. _He never left the domain of the Classical city._ Why did he go to Rome, to Corinth, and not to Edessa or Ctesiphon? And why was it that he worked _only in the cities, and never from village to village?_

That things developed thus was due to Paul _alone_. In the face of his practical energy the feelings of all the rest counted for nothing, and so the young Church took the urban and Western tendency decisively, so decisively that later it could describe the remaining heathen as “_pagani_,” country-folk. Thus arose an immense danger that only youth and vernal force enabled the growing Church to repel; the fellah-world of the Classical cities grasped at it with both hands, and the marks of that grasp are visible to-day. But--how remote already from the essence of Jesus, whose entire life had been bound to country and the country-folk! The Pseudomorphosis in which he was born he had simply not noticed; his soul contained not the smallest trace of its influence--and now, a generation after him, probably within the lifetime of his mother, that which had grown up out of his death had already become a centre of formative purpose for that Pseudomorphosis. The Classical City was soon the only theatre of ritual and dogmatic evolution. Eastward the community extended only furtively and unobtrusively.[371] About A.D. 100 there were already Christians beyond the Tigris, but as far as the development of the Church was concerned they and their beliefs might almost have been non-existent.

It was a second creation, then, that came out of Paul’s immediate entourage, and it was this creation that, essentially, defined the form of the new Church. The personality and the story of Jesus cried aloud to be put into poetic form, and yet it is due to one man alone, Mark, that Gospels came into existence at all.[372] What Paul and Mark had before them was a firm tradition in the community, _the_ “Gospel,” a continued and propagated hearsay, supported by formless and insignificant notes in Aramaic and Greek, but in no way set out. In any case, of course, serious documents would have come into existence some time or another, but their natural form as products of the spirit of those who had _lived_ with Jesus (and of the spirit of the East generally) would have been a canonical collection of his sayings, amplified, conclusively defined, and provided with an exegesis by the Councils and pivoting upon the Second Advent. But any tentatives in this direction were completely broken off by the Gospel of Mark, which was written down about A.D. 65, at the same time as the last Pauline Epistles, and, like them, in Greek. The writer had no suspicion, perhaps, of the significance of his little work, but it made him one of the supremely important personalities not only of Christianity, but of the Arabian Culture generally. All older attempts vanished, leaving writings in Gospel-form as the sole sources concerning Jesus. (So much so that “_Evangelium_,” from signifying the content of glad tidings, came to mean the form itself.) The work was the outcome of the wishes of Pauline, literate, circles that had never heard any one of Jesus’s companions discourse about him. It is _an apocalyptic life-picture from a distance_; lived experience is replaced by narrative, and narrative so plain and straightforward that the apocalyptic tendency passes quite unperceived.[373] And yet Apocalyptic is its condition precedent. It is not the words of Jesus, but the doctrine of Jesus in the Pauline form, that constitutes the substance of Mark. The first Christian book emanates from the Pauline creation. But very soon the latter itself becomes unthinkable without the book and its successors.

For presently there arose something which Paul, the born schoolman, had never intended, but which nevertheless had been made inevitable by the tendency of his work--the _cult-church of Christian nationality_. While the Syncretic creed-community, in proportion as it attained to consciousness of itself, drew the innumerable old city-cults and the new Magian together and by means of a supreme cult endowed the structure with henotheistic form, the Jesus-cult of the oldest Western communities was so long dissected and enriched that it also came to consist of just such another mass of cults.[374] Around the birth of Jesus, of which the Disciples knew nothing, grew up a story of his childhood. In the Mark Gospel it has not yet come into existence. Already in the old Persian apocalyptic, indeed, the Saoshyant as Saviour of the Last Day was said to be born of a virgin. But the new western myth was of quite other significance and had incalculable consequences. For within the Pseudomorphosis-region there arose presently beside Jesus a figure to which he was Son, which transcended his figure--that of the Mother of God. She, like her Son, was a simple human destiny of such arresting and attractive force that she towered above all the hundred and one Virgins and Mothers of Syncretism--Isis, Tanit, Cybele, Demeter--and all the mysteries of birth and pain, and finally drew them into herself. For Irenæus she is the Eve of a new mankind. Origen champions her continued virginity. By giving birth to Redeemer-God it is _she_ really who has redeemed the world. Mary the “Theotokos” (she who bare God) was the great stumbling-block for the Christians outside the Classical frontier, and it was the doctrinal developments of this idea that led Monophysites and Nestorians to break away and re-establish the pure Jesus-religion.[375] But the Faustian Culture, again, when it awoke and needed a symbol whereby to express its primary feeling for Infinity in time and to manifest its sense of the succession of generations, _set up the “Mater Dolorosa” and not the suffering Redeemer_ as the pivot of the German-Catholic Christianity of the Gothic age; and for whole centuries of bright fruitful inwardness this woman-figure was the very synthesis of Faustian world-feeling and the object of all art, poetry, and piety. Even to-day in the ritual and the prayers of the Roman Catholic Church, and above all in the thoughts of its people, Jesus takes second place after the Madonna.[376]

Along with the Mary-cult there arose the innumerable cults of the saints, which certainly exceeded in number those of the antique place-gods; when the Pagan Church finally expired, the Christian had been able to absorb the whole store of local cults in the form of the veneration of saints.

Paul and Mark were decisive in yet another matter of inestimably wide import. It was a result of Paul’s mission that, contrary to all the initial probabilities, Greek became the language of the Church and--following the lead of the first Gospel--of a sacred _Greek_ literature. Let the reader consider what this meant, in one way and another. The Jesus Church was artificially separated from its spiritual origins and attached to an alien and scholarly element. Touch with the folk-spirit of the Aramæan motherland was lost. Thenceforward both the cult-Churches possessed the same language, the same conceptual traditions, the same book-literature from the same schools. The far less sophisticated Aramaic literatures of the East--the truly Magian, written and thought in the language of Jesus and his companions--were cut off from cooperating in the life of the Church. They could not be read, they dropped out of sight, and finally they were forgotten altogether. After all, notwithstanding that the Persian Scriptures were set down in Avestan and the Jewish in Hebrew, the language of their authors and exegetes; the language of the whole Apocalyptic from which the teachings of Jesus, and secondarily the teachings about Jesus, sprang; the language, lastly, of the scholars of all the Mesopotamian universities--was Aramaic. All this vanished from the field of view, to be replaced by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom were taken up, worked upon in common, and misunderstood in common by the Schoolmen of the two cult-Churches.

A final step in this direction was attempted by a man who was the equal of Paul in organizing talent and greatly his superior in intellectual creativeness, but who was inferior to him in the feeling for possibilities and actualities, and consequently failed to achieve his grandly conceived schemes--Marcion.[377] He saw in Paul’s creation and its consequences only the basis on which to found the true religion of salvation. He was sensible of the absurdity of two religions that were unreservedly at war with one another possessing the same Holy Writ--namely, the _Jewish_ canon. To us to-day it seems almost inconceivable that this should have been, but in fact it was so, for a century--but we have to remember what a sacred text meant in every kind of Magian religiousness. In these texts Marcion saw the real “conspiracy against the truth” and the most urgent danger for the doctrines intended by Jesus and, in his view, not yet actualized. Paul the prophet had declared the Old Testament as fulfilled and concluded--Marcion the founder pronounced it defeated and cancelled. He strove to cut out everything Jewish, down to the last detail. From end to end he was fighting nothing but Judaism. Like every true founder, like every religiously creative period, like Zarathustra, the prophets of Israel, like the Homeric Greeks, and like the Germans converted to Christianity, he transformed the old gods into defeated powers.[378] Jehovah as the Creator-God, the Demiurge, is the “Just” _and therefore the Evil_: Jesus as the incarnation of the Saviour-God in this evil creation is the “alien”--that is, the good Principle.[379] The foundation of Magian, and in particular Persian, feeling is perfectly unmistakable here. Marcion came from Sinope, the old capital of that Mithradatic Empire whose religion is indicated in the very name of its kings. Here of old, too, the Mithras cult had originated.

But to the new doctrine properly belonged new Scriptures. The “Law and Prophets” which had hitherto been canonical for the whole of Christendom was the _Bible of the Jewish God_, and in fact it had just been given final shape as such by the Synedrion at Jabna. Thus, it was a Devil’s book that the Christian had in his hands, and Marcion, therefore, now set up against it the Bible of the Redeemer-God--likewise an assemblage and ordering of writings that had hitherto been current in the community[380] as simple edification-books without canonical claims. In place of the Torah he puts the--_one and true_--Gospel, which he builds up uniformly out of various separate, and, in his view, corrupted and falsified, Gospels. In place of the Israelite prophets he sets up the Epistles of the _one prophet of Jesus_, who was Paul.

Thus Marcion became the real creator of the New Testament. But for that reason it is impossible to ignore the mysterious personage, closely related to him, who not long before had written the Gospel “according to John.” The intention of this writer was neither to amplify nor to supersede the Gospels proper; what he did--and, unlike Mark, consciously did--was to create something quite new, _the first sacred book_ of Christianity, the Koran of the new religion.[381] The book proves that this religion was already conceived of as something complete and enduring. The idea of the immediately impending end of the world, with which Jesus was filled through and through and which even Paul and Mark in a measure shared, lies far behind “John” and Marcion. Apocalyptic is at an end, and Mysticism is beginning. Their content is not the teaching of Jesus, nor even the Pauline teaching about Jesus, but the enigma of the universe, the World-Cavern. There is here no question of a Gospel; not the figure of the Redeemer, but the principle of the Logos, is the meaning and the means of happening. The childhood story is rejected again; a god is not “born,” he is “there,” and wanders in human form over the earth. And this god is a Trinity--God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. This sacred book of earliest Christianity contains, for the first time, the Magian problem of “Substance,” which dominated the following centuries to the exclusion of everything else and finally led to the religion’s splitting up into three churches. And--what is significant in more respects than one--the solution of that problem to which “John” stands closest is that which the Nestorian East stood for as the true one. It is, in virtue of the Logos idea (Greek though the word happens to be) the “easternmost” of the Gospels, and presents Jesus, emphatically not as the bringer of the final and total revelation, but as the second envoy, who is to be _followed by a third_ (the Comforter, Paraclete, of John xiv, 16, 26; xv, 26). This is the astounding doctrine that Jesus himself proclaims, and the decisive note of this enigmatic book. Here is unveiled, quite suddenly, the faith of the Magian East. If the Logos does not go, the Paraclete[382] cannot come (John xvi, 7), but between them lies the last Æon, the rule of Ahriman (xiv, 30). The Church of the Pseudomorphosis, ruled by Pauline intellect, fought long against the John Gospel and gave it recognition only when the offensive, darkly hinted doctrine had been covered over by a Pauline interpretation. The real state of affairs is disclosed in the Montanist movement (Asia Minor, 160) which harked back to oral tradition and proclaimed in Montanus the manifested Paraclete and the end of the world. Its popularity was immense. Tertullian went over to it at Carthage in 207. About 245 Mani,[383] who was intimately in touch with the currents of Eastern Christianity,[384] cast out the Pauline, human Jesus as a demon and confessed the Johannine Logos as the true Jesus, but announced himself as the Paraclete of the fourth Gospel. In Carthage, Augustine became a Manichæan, and it is a highly suggestive fact that both movements finally fused with Marcionism.

To return to Marcion himself, it was he who carried through the idea of “John” and created a Christian Bible. And then, verging on old age, when the communities of the extreme west recoiled from him in horror,[385] he set out to build the masterly structure of his own Redeemer-Church.[386] From 156 to 190 this was a power, and it was only in the following century that the older Church succeeded in degrading the Marcionites to the rank of heretics. Even so, in the broad East and as far out as Turkestan, it was still important at a much later date, and it ended, in a way deeply significant of its essential feeling, by fusing with the Manichæans.[387]

Nevertheless, though in the fullness of his conscious superiority he had underestimated the _vis inertiæ_ of existing conditions, his grand effort was not in vain. He was, like Paul before him and Athanasius after him, the deliverer of Christianity at a moment when it threatened to break up, and the grandeur of his idea is in no wise diminished by the fact that union came about in opposition to, instead of through, him. The early Catholic Church--that is, the _Church of the Pseudomorphosis_--arose in its greatness only about 190, and then it was in self-defence against the Church of Marcion and with the aid of an organization taken from that Church. Further, it replaced Marcion’s Bible by another of similar structure--Gospels and apostolic Epistles--which it then proceeded to combine with the Law and the Prophets in one unit. And finally, this act of linking the two Testaments having in itself settled the Church’s attitude towards Judaism, it proceeded to combat Marcion’s third creation, his Redeemer-doctrine, by making a start with a theology of its own on the basis of _his_ enunciation of the problem.

This development, however, took place on Classical soil, and, therefore, even the Church that arose in opposition to Marcion and his anti-Judaism was looked upon by Talmudic Jewry (whose centre of gravity lay entirely in Mesopotamia and its universities) as a mere piece of Hellenistic paganism. The destruction of Jerusalem was a conclusive event that in the world of fact no spiritual power could nullify. Such is the intimacy of inward relationship between waking-consciousness, religion, and speech that the complete severance after 70 of the Greek Pseudomorphosis and the Aramaic (that is, the truly Arabian) region was bound to result in the formation of two distinct domains of Magian religious development. On the Western margin of the young Culture the Pagan cult-Church, the Jesus-Church (removed thither by Paul), and the Greek-speaking Judaism of the Philo stamp were in point of language and literature so interlocked that the last-named fell into Christianity even in the first century, and Christianity and Hellenism combined to form a _common_ early philosophy. In the Aramaic-speaking world from the Orontes to the Tigris, on the other hand, Judaism and Persism interacted constantly and intimately, each creating in this period its own strict theology and scholastic in the Talmud and the Avesta; and from the fourth century both these theologies exercised _the most potent influence upon the Aramaic-speaking Christendom that resisted the Pseudomorphosis_, so that finally it broke away in the form of the Nestorian Church.

Here in the East the difference, inherent in every human waking-consciousness, between sense-understanding and word-understanding--and, therefore between eye and letter--led up to purely Arabian methods of mysticism and scholasticism. The apocalyptic certainty, “Gnosis” in the first-century sense, that Jesus intended to confer,[388] the divining contemplation and emotion, is that of the Israelite prophets, the Gathas, Sufism, and we have it recognizable still in Spinoza, in the Polish Messiah Baal Shem[389] and in Mirza Ali Mohammed, the enthusiast-founder of Bahaism, who was executed in Teheran in 1850. The other way, “Paradosis,” is the characteristically Talmudic method of word-exegesis, of which Paul was a master;[390] it pervades all later Avestan works, the Nestorian dialectic,[391] the entire theology of Islam alike.

On the other side, the Pseudomorphosis is single and whole both in its Magian believing acceptance (Pistis) and its metaphysical introversion (Gnosis).[392] The Magian belief in its Westerly shape was formulated for the Christians by Irenæus and, above all, by Tertullian, whose famous aphorism “_Credo quia absurdum_” is the very summation of this certainty in belief. The Pagan counterpart is Plotinus in his Enneads and even more so Porphyry in his treatise _On the Return of the Soul to God_.[393] But for the great schoolmen of the Pagan Church too, there were Father (Nus), Son, and the middle Being, just as already for Philo the Logos had been first-born Son and second God. Doctrines concerning ecstasy, angels and demons, and the dual substance of soul were freely current amongst them, and we see in Plotinus and Origen, both pupils of the same master, that the scholasticism of the Pseudomorphosis consisted in the development of Magian concepts and thoughts, by systematic transvaluation of the texts of Plato and Aristotle.