Chapter VII: This Unbelieving World (2)

“This Believing World” continues: “By the time Jesus reached the capital his fame had already preceded him. A great mob rushed out ... wildly throwing their cloaks to the ground beneath the feet of the colt on which he rode. They hailed him as their Messiah.... ‘Hosanna!’ they cried, ecstatically, ‘Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord!’”

Browne quotes the Gospels! But what makes him think that this triumphant entrance into Jerusalem is not a pious embellishment, or even a patent falsehood? He only tells us that “One wonders whether those poor wretches out of the alleys and dunghills of old Jerusalem understood who the man Jesus really was. One wonders whether even his own disciples understood--or whether even his most pious devotees today understand. To that frantic mob, at least, he was simply an arch-zealot, a martial hero who had come to lead them in bloody rebellion against Rome.”[172]

If this meant anything to the author it would mean that he himself was a believer in the divinity of Christ. He seems here to be chiding the Jerusalem mob, to say nothing of Christ’s pious devotees of today, for not being sufficiently aware of the spiritual nature of the miraculous Messiah’s mission. But no. Browne is thinking of a “gentle, loving, helpless youth”; of a spirit “innately puritanical,” a heretic who was outwardly “distinctly a conforming Jew” with an insistent pacificism, who adopted a tone that would have “sounded blasphemous even in a prince,” and surely was astonishing in a teacher of ethics.

“The priests,” Browne goes on, “... were afraid of Jesus ... not merely because his heresies endangered their own position.”[173] “Had he been stronger in body no doubt he would never have joined the school of John the Baptist and become a saver of souls. Instead, he would have joined the Zealots, fighting with the sword against Rome.... From the beginning his strength must have been not the strength of the body but of the soul; and towards the end even that strength must have ebbed low in him.”[174]

“And then he died. But he died only to come to life again, to come to a life more enduring, more wondrously potent than had ever been vouchsafed to him in the days before his shameful death. Indeed, he literally came to life again ... according to those who had most earnestly followed him.”[175]

“It was enormously difficult to prove that he had really been the Promised One. No doubt that was why the disciples began to piece together those genealogies we find in the Gospels. No doubt that, too, was why those extravagant legends concerning the conception, birth, childhood, and ministry of Jesus began to be devised. Uncharitable critics may say the disciples resorted to fraud in these matters--but it was all intensely pious and well-intentioned fraud. Before the ordinary Jew could be made to accept Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus simply had to be proved a descendant of David.... The disciples may not have been even remotely conscious that they were departing from the truth.”[176]

Thus Browne seeks to destroy all reason for admiring, and at the same time pretends to continue to admire. Such passages need no comment. Being no uncharitable critic myself, I will merely remark that the world now learns for the first time that the ordinary Jew can apparently be made to accept Jesus as the Messiah by means of the genealogies which are a part of the gospel story as it has come down to us. And what happened in Europe after this?

3. ST. PAUL AS SCAPEGOAT

“On a sudden--at least, so it seemed to those who had not marked the mounting of its steady ground swell,” Browne proceeds, “that little Nazarene sect,” the followers of Christ after the Crucifixion, “became a high sea that broke and rolled across the whole Roman Empire ... sweeping over one land after another until finally it had inundated the whole face of the West and half the face of the East.

“To explain how that could have happened, one must remember what was going on just then in the Roman Empire. A great hunger was gnawing at its vitals, a desperate hunger for salvation.”[177]

Now what does Browne mean by salvation in this instance? Ethical salvation? Salvation by law and order? Or salvation in the miraculous Christian sense, i.e., salvation from the macula of original sin? He is evidently writing from vague memories of what he has read and heard, from a host of facts, fancies and prejudices which he has uncritically allowed to find lodgment in his mind. It is not likely that he means anything in particular. But he tells us that--

“The whole Roman world seemed to be writhing in the throes of death, and the fear of that death drove it to a frantic and panicky clutching after any and every chance of life. As a result, the mysteries, those secret cults [of Greece and Rome] which whipped men into orgies of hopefulness, flourished everywhere.... Those mysteries ... in origin ... were largely Oriental, and in essence they grew out of the belief that by certain magic rites a man could take on the nature of an immortal god.... That same legend was told--with variations--concerning Dionysus, Osiris, Orpheus, Attis, Adonis, and heaven knows how many other such gods. Arising out of the common desire for an explanation of the annual death and rebirth of vegetation, that legend was common to many parts of the world.”[178]

It seems that what so agitated the Romans was a desire to explain the annual death and rebirth of vegetation--a phenomenon almost unknown in the climate of Rome. Anyway, they ran to these explanations in the midst of their panicky fear. But surely those mad pagan orgies which whipped men into hopefulness were not puritanical, ethical orgies.

Nor were early Christian orgies, according to Browne. For “By the first century of this era, the legend [of Christ] had spread to every civilized province of the Roman Empire ... and had everywhere made the people drunk with the heady liquor of its mystery salvation.”[179]

So Browne now admits that Christianity, even in the first century of its era, had ceased to be a mere ethic and become a “mystery salvation.” Granting for the sake of an argument which is no argument that, coming from One whose “all consuming passion” was the obsessive hope of His people that some day they would be “miraculously freed” by the Messiah it could ever have been anything else--granting this self-contradictory assumption, where are we to suppose the heady liquor came from? Answer, “From more learned folk.” For--

“Side by side with these religious cults flourishing among the lower elements ... different schools of philosophic thought flourished among the more learned folk. One of these was the philosophy developed in the city of Alexandria by an Egyptian Jew named Philo. According to this philosophy, God, the Father of All, manifested himself only through an intermediary called the Logos, the Word. This Logos, which was sometimes called the ‘Son of God,’ or the ‘Holy Ghost,’ had created the earth and was the sole mediator between it and heaven.”[180]

So--“If in later years the Nazarene faith began to take on the color and shape of those heathen cults and strange philosophies, these Palestinian Nazarenes were not in the least responsible. It was one from outside the original brotherhood, a Jew from beyond the borders of Palestine, who was responsible. It was Saul of Tarsus [later called Paul] who brought on that change.”[181]

You will note that St. Paul was responsible for coloring Christianity not only with the strange philosophy of learned folk but with the color of mystery cults which, originating in a desire to explain the annual death and rebirth of vegetation, whipped men among the lower elements of society into orgies of hopefulness. And he did this notwithstanding the fact that before his own conversion Christianity, originating with One who was a transcendant person who spoke in a tone “almost” that of God himself, and yet was but an ethical teacher, an insistent pacifist who but for bodily weakness would have taken up arms against the Roman Empire and perished by the sword--Christianity had already become drunk with the heady liquor of mystery salvation.

There seems to be some idea floating around in Browne’s head. He seems vaguely aware that since the Crucifixion there had come a change. Indeed, there had. But it was not a change from ethics to religion, nor a change from a belief in a non-miraculous Messiah to a belief in a Messiah who was miraculous. Nobody ever believed in a non-miraculous Messiah. A non-miraculous Messiah is a contradiction in terms. But since the Crucifixion it had become evident even to charlatans, madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools that Jesus was not to found a temporal, national kingdom of the Jews. Even the people were beginning to understand that Christ’s Kingdom was spiritual and at least as broad as the earth. And if the Palestinian Nazarenes were not responsible, it must have been because their own belief and their own preaching signally failed of effect.

But let us get back to this Saul of Tarsus, who “must have had rather more than a passing acquaintance with Greek and Alexandrian philosophy.”

“Most important of all, he must very early have learnt from slaves in the household or from Gentile playmates, of the mystery cults ... and of the savior-gods in whom the masses put their impassioned trust.”[182] And Christianity was already one of these mystery cults, a heady liquor that was to become a high sea and break over all the West and half of the East by the end of the first century--or as soon as the disciples, who were not in the least responsible, had invented a sufficiency of legends to make up a technic capable of fooling the people. Or are we to understand that St. Paul wrote the Gospels?

“Now Saul was a person of very violent likes and dislikes. He is said to have been an epileptic, and certainly he was a man of strange temperament. Whatever he did, he did with an intensity and extravagance that were distinctly abnormal.”[183] The Eugenics Society should take note of this, in case another St. Paul arises among us. “But on his way to Damascus [to persecute the Nazarenes] a queer thing happened.... He was suddenly overcome by a seizure of some sort.”

Browne does not attempt to name it, but a “seizure” in an epileptic subject is usually called an epileptic fit. Why does he not name it? Because he wants to help folks believe that they may continue to call themselves Christians while assuming that everything which marks Christianity is a disease. But the disease must be a polite one.

“And when, trembling and astonished, Saul came to himself, behold he was a changed man.... When he got to Damascus he ... had become a complete convert ... believing in the Messiahship of Jesus and in his resurrection.... He was but little interested in the gospel of the man Jesus,”--the ethics which cried, “Behold, the Kingdom of God is at Hand!”--he was interested only in the death and rebirth of the savior-god, Christ.... “Saul [under the name of Paul] became the great preacher of ‘Christ crucified.’”[184]

“Jesus ... was not the founder of Christianity, but its foundling.... Nor had his immediate disciples created the new faith.”[185] “The Messiah put forward by them had all along been the Jewish Messiah.” Thus once more Browne confuses the idea of a Jewish Messiah with non-miraculous morality. “Nor was it Saul, the studious young Pharisee, who founded the new faith, but his other self, Paul, the citizen of Rome.... It is unfair to compare Paul to Jesus, for the two belonged spiritually and intellectually to entirely different orders of men.... The one was a prophet and a dreamer of dreams; the other was an organizer and a builder of churches.”[186]

According to this, it was a prophet and a dreamer who inspired the early disciples with the idea that he was the Jewish Messiah--those same disciples who saw in him a teacher of ethics only, yet corrupted the Gospels in the attempt to prove that he was something more--those same disciples who were not in the least responsible for the belief in Christ as divine that afterward crept into the Church through the door of epilepsy. And this ethical teacher is the same Being who believed with all His soul in the Promised One and permitted Himself to be greeted as the Promised One!

This amazing series of contradictions does not come from confronting Browne with other authorities, but merely from confronting Browne with Browne and without going outside of one chapter of one single book. Strange indeed is the behavior of those who seek to eat their cake and at the same time to throw it away.

For Browne would have it that Jesus, the prophet, dreamer and inspirer of belief in His Messiahship, was made a foundling in his own spiritual house by His antithesis, Paul--who accomplished this feat of dispossession by winning general acceptance for the very belief in question. Or does Browne think that when the Jewish Messiah came to be understood as the Savior of the World, the idea was less dreamlike and prophetic?

Paul is evidently now drunk with the heady liquor of mystery-salvation. He has had a seizure. But Browne has been telling us how Paul’s other self, Saul, the studious young Pharisee, has been listening all his life to tales of mystery-cults and savior-gods from the lips of household slaves and Gentile playmates; how he has acquired more than a passing acquaintance with the Logos philosophy of a Jew residing in Alexandria. All this is heady liquor. Jew and Gentile, high and low, slaves and playmates--none of them are exactly Puritans or ethical rationalists. And the new religion, most heady of all, appeals--not to the youthful Saul, who might supposedly be the dreamer of the pair, but to the more mature Paul, the Roman citizen, organizer and man of affairs.

Of course it is historically correct to say that the new religion did appeal to Paul rather than to Saul. But what happened on the road to Damascus was not, even on Browne’s own showing, a change from a disbelief to belief in miracle religion, but a change from disbelief to belief in Jesus as the Son of God. An epileptic fit, we are about to be told, makes a common man over into a moral and intellectual giant. It transforms a listener to tales and mystical philosophies into a cold thinker. And this cold thinking leads to the acceptance of Christianity in its original form. I am not questioning that cold thinking might not lead to such a result; am not trying to intimate that there is anything antagonistic between a cold brain and a warm heart. Browne’s fallacy here is historical--the attempt to prove that Paul was a cold thinker and pretended to be nothing else.

As to a touching belief in the efficacy of disease, we may find it in minds much less confused than Browne’s. It runs through such books as “The Psychology of Religious Mysticism,” by James H. Leuba, professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr. According to Browne, mental unbalance produces indomitable courage and inflexible will. According to Professor Leuba, the hysterical saints lived lives of “joyful activity, broken only by transports of surpassing love and peaceful rest.”[187] Not a very comprehensive description of the lives of saints. But if there be such hysteria as this, such epilepsy as Browne describes, it is a pity that the germs cannot be isolated, propagated, and sown broadcast.

These authors are among those who ruin their hypotheses by inadvertently accounting for too much. Their hysteria and epilepsy, stretched to meet all demands, lose the quality of disease and take on the quality of genius. Would it not be well at least to distinguish two types of hysteria (some writers make even epilepsy hysterical), the malignant and the benign? Or if the word hysteria merely means emotion, why not recognize the fact that an emotion may indicate conditions as categorically opposite as those reflected in the sensations of pleasure and of pain? It is grossly irrational to narrow it down to a single sinister meaning if it is to be put forward as the “cause” and the “explanation” of such diverse effects as those which are clothed in the willing garb of a Sister of Charity and those which lead to the unwilling wearing of a straight-jacket.

Nor is it any less absurd to say that St. Paul, having partaken of heady salvation-liquor such as was drunken of aforetime only by charlatans, madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools, and adding to its potency by insisting upon its universal applicability--to say all this even by implication, and then to add as Browne does[188] that “in his own class, Paul was one of the stupendously great men of the earth.”

“He was,” the narrative continues, “a superb statesman. And he was possessed of an energy, a courage, and an indomitable will, the like of which have rarely been known in all the history of great men.... Again and again he was scourged and imprisoned.... And yet he persisted, never resting from his grueling labor of carrying his Christ to the Gentiles, incessantly running to and fro, preaching, writing, arguing and comforting, until at last, a tired and broken man, he died a martyr’s death in the city of Rome.... It was in the year 67, according to tradition, that Paul was beheaded.”

Once again Browne considers himself privileged to repudiate all that a man stands for, his sole claim to distinction, and yet to put him on a pedestal of insincere rhetoric. When he speaks of Paul’s “own class” does he mean the class of “charlatans, madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools”? Indeed, St. Paul himself is reported to have said, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”

But Browne has yet stranger things in store. He proceeds to write the history of the Church.

4. THE CHURCH AS SCAPEGOAT

Paul, says Browne, “had spent perhaps thirty years in the labor of spreading the idea of Christ, and by the time of his death that idea had already struck root far and wide in the Empire. It had divorced itself from Judaism, taking over the Sunday of the Mithraists in place of the Jewish Sabbath, and substituting Mithraist ritual for the Temple sacrifice.”[189] [The Mithraist ritual centered in the slaughter of a bull!]

“Through Judaism, the religion of Persia left its mark also on Christianity; and not merely through Judaism, but also through Mithraism.”[190] [Mithra is personified diffused sunshine!]

“In most of the cities there were already thriving christian brotherhoods, little secret societies much like those of the mysteries.... With the passing of the years, the pagan element grew.... The life-story of Jesus was embellished with a whole new array of marvels and miracles, and the man himself was made over into a veritable mystery savior-god. His character and nature fell into the maw of an alien philosophy, and then came drooling out in sodden and swollen distortion. He became the Lamb whose blood washed away all sin. He became the Son of God supernaturally conceived by the Virgin.... He became the Logos and the Avatar and the Savior.”[191]

Browne here is complaining of alleged corruptions from Persian and other sources, all largely Oriental; as were in their origin the Greek and Roman “mysteries,” of which he has complained hitherto. But he goes on to allege that “Although the religion of Jesus and of the first disciples was distinctly Oriental, although the whole Messiah idea was markedly a thing of the East, the religion about a Savior Christ was largely European.... Indeed, one gravely doubts whether Jesus, the simple peasant teacher in hilly Galilee, would have known who in the world that Savior Christ was.”

Geography is evidently too much for Browne. Persia has suddenly become European. And St. Paul, with his “more than passing acquaintance” with the Logos philosophy of Philo, the Alexandrian Jew, and his subsequent conversion to the “distinctly Oriental ... Messiah idea,” is of the West. Perhaps Alexandria was not in Africa in the early days of the Christian era, and maybe Persia was then in the extreme Occident.

“It was inevitable for that change to come about. Christianity ... was gaining too many converts too rapidly.... It would not have been so bad had they been converts from a world of ignorance.... But they were converts instead from a world of what we would call stupidity.”[192]

So preaching founded upon the epistles of St. Paul, a man “who was one of the stupendously great men of the earth,” and “a superb statesman,” appealed chiefly not to the ignorant but to the naturally stupid! “No such testaments [as the stupid epistles of St. Paul and the silly legends and pious frauds called the Gospels] could be offered by the priests of Mithra, Cybele or Attis. For their deities were after all mythical. Only the Christians had a real man to worship; a unique and divine man, it is true, but nevertheless a person who had known human woe and pain, who had suffered, and who had for at least three days been dead. That element of naturalism, of closeness to human reality, must have made Christianity a faith of extraordinary attractiveness.”[193]

Surely Browne does not believe that a simple teacher of ethics, who, with good health, would have been a soldier, was actually dead and rose again, for he has told us that such a legend arose from pious frauds suspiciously like the frauds practiced long before in the case of Zoroaster. He must be meaning to say that the stupid followers of St. Paul and later preachers of miracle religion _believed_ Christ to have been a Divine Man who was once dead. They must, then, have believed in the Resurrection. Is that to be regarded as an element of naturalism?

“There was a wondrous comfort in that religion”--of the stupid; “a mighty zeal that made it possible for the martyrs to go to their death actually with a smile on their lips. It took vile slaves out of the slums where they rotted, and somehow breathed supernal heroism into them. It told them that ... death for the truth would mean only life everlasting.”[194]

“Then came Constantine, and, in the year 313, an end to the persecutions.”[195] An end to the persecution of a corrupt yet wonder-working Christianity originated by the abnormal St. Paul, you will observe, which must have worked through the powers of hysteria, epilepsy and suggestion. One would think that there was little harm left for Constantine to do. Nevertheless, “It was a costly triumph for Christianity, as every other such triumph has been in all history. What happened to Buddhism when it set out to conquer the Far East, now happened also to Christianity in the West.” What, did it lose its power? No. “It became an official and successful institution--and so degenerate.”[196]

A Mithraist ritual, draped in the rags of dying pagan mysteries and Philo-Pauline doctrines from an European Africa, manages to degenerate! It staggers on its downward way, growing more and more drunken with the heady liquor of mystery salvation drawn from a Europe located in the Orient.

“A faith cannot be institutionalized,” Browne informs us, “for it is a thing of the spirit.”

An institution, then, is something which subsists in matter. Men with faith in anything cannot be drawn together into an institution. Only men who believe in nothing can belong to institutions.

“Even dogmas or rites, which are things almost of the flesh, cannot be organized beyond certain bounds.”[197]

What bounds? And within or without what bounds is it possible for a rite not to be organized? And to what extent is a dogma, like that of the Logos, for example, “almost of the flesh”? Anyway, “even after Christianity became primarily a thing of dogmas and rites, it nevertheless began to crack and crumble.”[198]

Why “nevertheless”? After what he has said of dogmas and rites he should have said “because of.” And does he say “began” to crack and crumble when it had already suffered the corruptions of St. Paul and Constantine?

Yes; and it begins to crack and crumble just as it is setting out as a tidal wave to overwhelm the West and half of the East! And as faith cannot be institutionalized, a sufficient lack of faith might have kept it from cracking and crumbling, also from “drooling out in sodden and swollen distortions.”

“Paul,” continues our author, “had used his theological terms rather loosely.”[199] His stupendous greatness, then, was not as a teacher of religion. “Paul [same page] had spoken of Jesus as a savior.”

Browne then tells of the controversies which arose over the doctrine of the Trinity and other matters, adding: “Scores of such questions arose.... Jesus had not been conscious of even the most ponderous of such questions. That dear, fervent young preacher, who had lived and died in the sublimity of a simple faith could never possibly have been conscious of them. Had he heard them posed, he would probably have shaken his head in mute bewilderment.... When one puts beside the Gospel accounts of the preaching of Jesus the official records of the wrangling and bickering of those church fathers, one feels that here is to be found the most tragic and sordid epic of frustration that the whole history of mankind can tell.”[200]

Browne omits to name the church fathers he has in mind. But why put beside records, which are at least official, the silly legendary gospels which unconscious zealots corrupted into drooling distortions to suit their fancy?

And if Jesus could not have been conscious of even the most ponderous of theological questions, what is he supposed to have thought of the multitudes who greeted his entrance into Jerusalem, shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord!” That would seem to pose a rather ponderous theological question.

Moreover, all histories of the Jews which are not stranger than fiction give the impression that the Scribes and Pharisees of Christ’s day were somewhat given to discussing theological questions, ponderous and other. One living in their midst and not being conscious of at least some of the questions that were to be debated later by the Church fathers must have been unconscious at all points.

“More than sixteen hundred years have passed since Christianity was made the state religion in the decadent Roman Empire. Throughout all those years [notwithstanding its cracking and its crumbling] it has been extending its borders.... It is estimated that at the present time about one third of the entire population of the world is Christian--approximately five hundred and sixty-five million souls. And of course, it is to the spirit of Paul regnant in Christendom that one must credit that enormous expansion.... It is because countless monks and healers and warriors and saints have felt Paul’s call [sic!] to go out and win the heathen to Christ, that today more souls are turned to Christ than to any other deity on earth.”

I do not know if Browne attributes the Pauline triumph to the Apostle’s loose handling of theological terms, but he says, “these wholesale increases in numbers were not made save at a high price.... Just as Buddha had to be idolized before he could conquer the East, so Jesus had to be idolized, too, for pagan Europe.”[201]

Yet--“despite all these compromises, the new religion remained always heavens above the old [paganism]. By assimilating pagan rites and myths ... Christianity became at last almost completely pagan in semblance; but it never became quite pagan in character. The Old Testament puritanism which had so marked the life of Jesus was never routed.... If the spirit of Paul insisted that Cybele be taken over as the Mother of Christ, the spirit of Jesus insisted that her wild Corybantes with their lustful rites, and her holy eunuchs with their revolting perversions, be left severely behind. If the spirit of Paul demanded that the wild Celtic goddess named Bridget be accepted into Christianity, the Spirit of Jesus demanded that first she be made lily-white and a saint.... It [the Spirit of Christ] set its face hard against sacred prostitution and against all those other loosenesses and obscenities which arose out of the pagan’s free attitude towards sex.”[202]

So it was the spirit of a man who was “in his own class” one of the “stupendously great men of the earth,” who favored prostitution, insisted upon taking Cybele into his loosely-worded theology, and--having failed to secure the lustful Corybantes and the holy eunuchs who still had a capacity for perversions--demanded and obtained the acceptance of a wild Celtic goddess named Bridget.

Browne describes this Spirit-of-Paul’s Bridget. She was, it appears, one of three deities who “had already [2000 years ago] been sufficiently detached from their physical bodies to be thought of as remote gods and goddesses.” The other two were Ogmius and Maponus.

At their festivals, “men and women lay together in the fields, and behaved as did all other primitive peoples in their religious festivals.... Not until the Christian idea of morality was brought to them did the Celts grow conscious of any wickedness in their old rites. And even then they did not give them up at once. Indeed, to this day their descendants have not given them up entirely.”[203]

“The difference between [the] Babylonian cult of Ishtar and the primitive Celtic cult of Bridget was entirely one of degree.... Both were inspired by dread of the same evil, sterility: and both sought to attain one end, fecundity. But one, the Babylonian, was far less primitive ... far less wildly promiscuous and bestial. The Babylonian rites were conducted within the confines of stone temples, not out in the furroughs of the torch-lit fields.”[204]

This undoubtedly gave the Babylonians the ethical advantage. And it seems that the Celtic gods and goddesses were not only primitive, but continually kept their followers alarmed lest they (the goddesses) should forget how to become fecund. The ritual in the furrows of the torch-lit fields, “to this day not given up entirely,” was for the purpose of overcoming the deities’ “bashfulness,” Browne tells us, and to set them an example of what was desired. And if the spirit of Paul could have had its way, such a ritual, though perhaps conducted within stone temples, would have been established in Rome! And there it would doubtless have been practiced today--as it is, I gather from Browne, in present-day Ireland!

“The spirit of Jesus flickering in Christianity made it at least nominally a religion of ethics,” Browne goes on. “For Jesus, one must remember, had not been in the least concerned with ritual. Like every other great Jewish prophet, he had preached only ethics. And despite all the compromises of the world-conquering Pauls, that ethical emphasis of the teaching of Jesus persisted as a mighty leaven in the church. It gave to the early Christians that gentle nobility which history tells us graced their faith.”[205]

When was this? Brown says that “of the life of the first Nazarenes we know exceedingly little.”[206] He gives the year 67 as the date of St. Paul’s martyrdom. Can it be that the early Christians were gentle and noble even after the loose sex ideas and loose theological terms of the great Apostle had been given a chance to begin their deadly work?

“The church itself, with its foul record of crusades and inquisitions and pogroms, cannot be said to have ever been really civilized. But that admission does not at all discredit the potency of the spirit of Jesus.... True, there were indeed Dark Ages in Europe when the power of the Church was at its height. But who knows how far darker they might have been, and how much longer they might have endured, had the Church not existed?”[207] “One must remember that Christianity came into a world that was sinking.... It alone sought to keep civilization going. It failed. It could not keep from failing. But be it said to its glory that at least it tried.”[208]

“The glory of trying to save the world from bestiality belongs primarily to but one element alone in Christianity; the original Nazerene element. And that element, one must remember, was never dominant in the faith save during those years before it was really Christian. Once Paul came on the scene, the light of the religion of Jesus began to fade, and the glare of the religion about Christ [that is, the doctrine that Christ was the Son of God and the Redeemer of the World] blazed over all.”[209]

“Yet though the light from Galilee [the light of One who ‘like every other great Jewish prophet’ taught only ethics, yet believed with all his soul in the Messianic idea] faded ... it never was quite snuffed out.... For long centuries it smouldered.... And then slowly that forgotten spark began to brighten once more. A devastating incursion of Huns and Saracens blew the spark to a flame. As never before in full six hundred years, the Christians began to think again of their suffering Savior.”[210]

This certainly is what Browne writes, incredible as it may seem. The Pauline doctrine “about Jesus” has been overshadowing the world, threatening to extinguish the spark of the merely ethical religion preached by Jesus himself. And now the spark blows into a flame--and lo! it, too, is a religion about Jesus! Men begin to think again of their suffering “_Savior_!” Moreover, Jesus was a pacifist, and all that was needed to fan the spirit of his teaching into a flame was a devastating incursion of Huns and Saracens. Was it the ethics of the invaders which did the trick?

“Like a mad fire the hope spread over Europe that the year 1000 would see the return of the Redeemer.” Yes, the word is “Redeemer.” So Brown does know what “Savior” means. And we were right in thinking that he intends to say that the spark so long all but quenched by a religion about Jesus proved, when it revived, to be itself a religion about Jesus, a belief in Him as a supernatural Being, able, if he liked, to return--in short, the Logos, as had been taught by the “abnormal” St. Paul. And Browne appears to be utterly unconscious that he has stultified his whole argument. The fact that he has in effect said that the world expected a helpless teacher of ethics to return after a thousand years; and has also said that belief in this helpless ethical teacher constituted a belief in a miraculous Savior and Redeemer, which belief had been for hundreds of years all but stifled by the doctrine that he was indeed a miraculous Savior and Redeemer--all this troubles the Browne mind not at all.

“The year 1000 passed, and no Redeemer came--but Europe was a little redeemed nevertheless.” By the ethical Huns and Saracens, apparently. “Men turned from what the Church of Christ insisted on offering them, and instead began to grope after the gospel of Jesus for themselves. They took to reading the Scriptures in their original tongues.” (The people did? Or does he mean in the vernacular? In either case it must have exposed them to what Browne gives us to understand is a mass of silly fables.) “And reading them they began to see at last how far the Church had wandered from the pristine truth.” (A truly wonderful feat of discriminating literary criticism. Were the people so familiar with Zoroastrian tales that they were able at once to discard all passages having a suspicious resemblance to them?) “They discovered at last how shamelessly the priests had substituted rite for right, how flagrantly they had ritualized all morality.... The clerical authorities took alarm. Despotically they issued proclamations prohibiting the laity from even glancing at the bible.”

Browne owes it to the world to publish those despotic proclamations, so that we may know their authors. I have myself seen the Bible in chains in Italian churches, and I understand that chains were much more common in the middle ages than now. But if the object was not to keep the books from being stolen but to keep them from being read, the riveters of the chains were indeed stupid people. For they chained the books by the backs and in a manner which permitted them always to lie open.

So--“the Bible was read nevertheless.... The flame of heresy burned on.” But why, if the Church was so opposed to it, did it gather the Bible together in the first place? Browne does not say. What he does say is that “In the fourteenth century, Wycliffe did godly mischief in England; in the fifteenth John Huss carried on in Bohemia; in the sixteenth Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin led the Protestant revolt.”[211]

“But one must not imagine that Protestantism was ever purely Nazarene in spirit--any more than Catholicism was ever unrelievedly Pauline.” (True enough. I have even heard it said that Catholicism is to a certain extent Petrine.) “Protestantism includes every type of religious thought. Only slowly and with many pangs, is even Protestantism shaking off the religion about Christ.” (Then that revival of belief in a supernatural Savior and Redeemer, instituted by the Saracens and Huns, was not a flash in the pan, but carried over to a certain extent into the godly mischief of Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin!) “Only slowly, very slowly is it [Protestantism] beating its way back to the religion of Jesus.”[212] That is, to ethics.

“Though the Church of Christ may stand guilty of untold and untellable evil, the religion of Jesus, ... has accomplished good sufficient to outweigh that evil tenfold.”

If the evil referred to expressed itself in facts, why is it untellable? Browne, I think, should tell it, and in detail. He ought not to emulate St. Paul in the loose use of words. As the page stands, we cannot be sure that he does not refer to the Church of England and the hanging, drawing and quartering of Catholic priests during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. But the “religion of Jesus,” i. e. ethics, “Has made life liveable for countless millions of harried souls. It has taken rich and poor, learned and ignorant, white, red, yellow, and black--it has taken them all and tried to show them a way to salvation. To all pain it has held out a balm; to all in distress it has offered peace. To every man without distinction it has said: Jesus died for you! To every human creature on earth it has said: You too can be saved! And therein lies Christianity’s highest virtue. It has helped make the weak strong and the dejected happy. It has stilled the fear that howls in man’s breast and crushed the unrest that gnaws at his soul. In a word it has worked--in a measure.”[213]

I wish I might let this eloquent passage stand without comment. Taken by itself, it sounds almost like the words of a sincere believer in Christ as the supernatural Savior of Men. But, taken in connection with what has gone before, it seems to me abominable. Here is a man who has denied the supernatural nature of Christ time after time in the preceding 300 pages. And now he is using words which imply such a miraculous nature, or else mean nothing at all. Yes, they mean something. They mean that this light, this balm, this peace, this salvation which is Christianity’s highest virtue, is an illusion. To every man this Christianity has said: Jesus died for you! Here the doctrine of the Vicarious Atonement is indicated. And St. Paul, in preaching that doctrine, that “religion about Jesus,” founded a new faith and made Christ the mere foundling of Christianity! True, Browne has also said a great deal on the other side. That is precisely the trouble. He thinks it is possible to stand both with the sheep and with the goats.

But the final chapter of “This Believing World” (for Christianity is not its climax) is consistent. It is entitled, “What Happened in Arabia.” And it thus concludes:

“Islam ... has been one of the most effective civilizing forces in the history of Africa and Asia, and in a measure also in that of Europe.... The supreme gift of Islam was the idea of unity which it somehow drilled into the heads of a hundred races--not merely the unity of God, but even more the unity of mankind.... Every other great religion taught more or less the same doctrine [in regard to submitting to Allah], but none with such fierceness and unrestraint.... Islam excluded no man from the army of Allah.... And that is why to this day Islam can still win converts with twice the ease of any other religion. That is why to this day Islam is one of the mightiest institutions on earth for the ordering and beautifying of life in at least the ‘backward’ lands.”

In the beginning there was fear. In the end there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet!

5. THE STORIES OF DURANT

It is with regret that I include Will Durant among the Misbehaviorists. He is no crude mechanist, and his popularity is so great that, like Sinclair Lewis, he has almost ceased to be a mere individual and become an institution. And in some respects his success is a most gratifying and hopeful sign of the times.

Almost an institution]

Some say that it was Durant who showed us that we were fond of serious reading and not of the light novels which the publishers for so many years fancied that we craved. But in reality it was “The Education of Henry Adams” which showed us that. And I am not so certain that a mere love of heavy reading is such a good sign. By the time reading becomes substantial it begins to make some difference what it is weighted with.

I like to think that “The Story of Philosophy” has been bought in such quantities because it is, to a very great and very charming extent, The Story of the Philosophers. Durant’s ability as a writer of biography amounts almost to genius. Nor are his accounts of the philosophers’ philosophies often other than good bits of skillful summing-up interspersed with apt quotations. My only misgivings revolve around the stories of Durant--those paragraphs of criticism and seemingly personal opinion with which he usually ends his chapters--around those and certain omissions. What have we here, the story of philosophy, or only the story of a certain bias purporting to be the story of philosophy?

As was to be expected of a born biographer, Durant follows the method of using environment to explain belief. The pessimism of Schopenhauer is due to the fact that he lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, the age of the Holy Alliance, when Waterloo had been fought, the Revolution was dead, and the Son of the Revolution rotting on a rock in a distant sea. “Something of [Schopenhauer’s] despair came from the pathetic distance of St. Helena.”[214] And when “Mme. Clotilde de Vaux (whose husband was spending his life in jail) took charge of Comte’s heart, his affection for her warmed and colored his intelligence.” So Comte’s later Religion of Humanity was due to the happiness of his illegitimate union, just as his earlier Positivism had been due to the marital infelicity which led him to attempt suicide in the Seine.

It is the method by which Taine years ago sought to explain all English literature. Durant is an environmentalist--which, after all, is better than being a mad hereditarian. One is tempted to enquire into his own environment, his college, his religious and philosophical surroundings, and to read dates and geography between his lines. But I cannot bring myself to apply either the environment or the heredity hypothesis to the exclusion of that entity which comes from neither, that ego which learns or does not learn from its contact with that which is not itself.

That Durant is not himself a philosopher, is evident--and in his favor. We really do not need another philosopher just now--of the sort we would be likely to get. He has no system of his own, no universal touch-stone, no central thesis giving unity to his several beliefs. In his mind Kant, Darwin and Bergson meet, but no more mingle than do oil and water. An emulsifying _tertium quid_ is lacking. This lack should have made him an ideal historian of other men’s theories. And it almost did.

But there is another lack. The complete historian should have a complete experience. He should have been submerged in the main stream of thought, even if he has failed to sound all its dead-waters to the bottom. And if environment and the accident of birth do not offer him such experience, he should have that thirst for knowledge which leads to exploration and discovery.

The Durant ego lacks precisely that. It was born in a lake, and it has no thirst for the sea. Like certain aquatic creatures, it takes what floats into its mouth, but makes no explorations. What Durant has given us is simply not the story of philosophy. It is merely a series of interesting comments upon the curriculum of a certain type of college which does not even belong to the University of World Thought. This provincialism is unfortunate, for it is certain to deceive provincial readers with the idea that they have listened to the whole story.

It is difficult, after the reading of a book which is an avowed recapitulation of many foreign opinions, to say what an author’s own opinions may be. It is evident that Durant is no Catholic; not quite so evident whether or no he is a believing Protestant. He seems to have little sympathy with Protestantism as a whole, and less yet with Fundamentalism. It may be safe to say that his personal bias takes the direction of a vague Humanism.

To quote, without taking the greatest precaution not to pass off some mere explanatory paraphrase as the author’s own, would be so unfair that I hesitate to quote at all in proof of anything. There are, however, certain passages which are clearly Durant, and not Plato, Aristotle or Nietzsche boiled down--though even here we must be on guard lest what we see is Durant under the momentary influence of his subject, not Durant in his daily habit. It is the wind which does not blow, the things which he does not say, that speak most eloquently and surely of the man.

Chapters, and most of them long chapters, are given to Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche; a chapter to three contemporary Europeans--Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce and Bertrand Russell; and a final chapter to the three American moderns, George Santayana, William James and John Dewey. There are adequate pages devoted to Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, and many a lesser light. Some, you will note, are pre-Christian; some are atheistic; some deistic, monistic, or agnostic. It is a chorus which is irreligious with a vast predominance, with here and there a tolerant voice for modernistic Protestantism. Bishop Berkeley, represented by a few paragraphs, stands practically alone as the exponent of a particular faith.

It will be said that this is the story of philosophy, not of theology. But I cannot see the force of the explanation. Theology is certainly philosophy; and why should one man be barred because he begins with the assumption that God has revealed Himself in an Incarnation, and another admitted who begins with the assumption that God has revealed himself in the human will of a super-man devoted satanically to selfish ends, or is in the process of revealing himself in an _élan vital_, or begins with the assumption that there is no God? Surely the historian is not bound to believe every philosophy he outlines. And surely the Christian assumption is no more of a foregone conclusion than are the others.

Nor even if it be granted that the story of philosophy, because of the current use of the word, is naturally a story of secular philosophy, does Durant come off any better. The Chinese philosophers and the Vedantic philosophers of India may be said to be so widely separated from us in time and space that they do not belong in a history of our culture. That was more true in the days when Durant was a boy than it is today. But let it pass. What about the Scholastics?

The Scholastics were not only theologians, but philosophers and scientists; they dominated the thought of Christendom for a thousand years, and still dominate a large section of Christendom, not counting their influence in quarters where it is felt rather than recognized.

Durant admits that his treatment of Scholasticism is “inadequate,” but excuses himself with the plea that the inadequacy was due to lack of space. But he finds space for ten and a half pages about Benedetto Croce--and no page at all for St. Augustine, Albertus Magnus, or St. Thomas Aquinas.

The Angelic Doctor’s name, however, is mentioned. It appears in a pictorial table of “philosophic affiliations,” constructed in the manner of a family tree. According to this table, Aquinas stems from Aristotle, who stems from Plato, who stems from Socrates, who stems from the Sophists. There is also a branch line of affiliation extending to the left like a bar sinister, connecting the great scholastic with Christian Theology followed by a question mark. I do not fathom the meaning of the question mark. But Christian Theology (?) itself stems from Zeno the Stoic, and he from Diogenes, and he from Antisthenes, and he from Heraclitus. There is yet another branch line leading from Antisthenes, touching Socrates, and ending in Aristippus, of the house of Democritus and Leucippus.

So Aquinas appears to be quite free from any unquestioned philosophic affiliation with St. Augustine, Albertus Magnus, St. Paul, or even Jesus Christ. We begin to be glad that Durant had no room for an “adequate” treatment of the Scholastics.

Unfortunately, he does not quite drop them with the chart. In a note “To the Reader” he refers to them as “half-legendary.” It is odd that a school which included the leading thinker, secular or sacred, of the Thirteenth Century, the age of Dante, should have become legendary in the New York of 1926, from which Durant dates his book.

Turning from legends, we come to Benedetto Croce, who, writes Durant[215] “is a sceptic with an almost German gift for obscurity ... an anti-clerical who writes like an American Hegelian ... an Italian Catholic who has kept nothing of his religion except its scholasticism and its devotion to beauty.” And lo, we are back to legend again! “Perhaps the comparative infertility of Italy in the philosophy of the last hundred years,” Durant goes on, “is due in some part to the retention of scholastic attitudes and methods even by thinkers who have abandoned the old theology.” Adding,[216] “He [Croce] is, after all, a product of the scholastic tradition ... he is a germanized Italian.”

Now it is quite true that, though Thomas Aquinas was a native of the Kingdom of Naples, he studied under Albertus Magnus at Cologne--probably during the year 1244; returned to Cologne in 1284; and perhaps visited it several times thereafter. But both he and his illustrious master were scholastics of the school of St. Augustine, who died in the year 430. The one German thing about St. Augustine is that Eucken, the German philosopher, says of him: “If our age wishes to take up and treat in an independent way the problems of religion, it is not so much to Schleiermacher or Kant or even Luther or St. Thomas that it must refer as to Augustine, and outside of religion, there are points upon which Augustine is more modern than Hegel or Schopenhauer.”

Durant surely cannot mean that a living Italian has been “Germanized” through having absorbed the teachings of a master who died in 1280 and was the follower of another master, in Hippo, who died in 430. As one of the chief tenets of Scholasticism is that the Christian creed can be proven by reason alone without recourse to Revelation, Croce of course had to repudiate his scholasticism, German or not, along with his religion. All that can remain to him, if anything remains, is a certain training of the mind. Whether he has shown the effects of such training, or made good use of it, is a matter of opinion. What Durant shows here is total unfamiliarity with his subject. He is merely applying certain notions which he picked up uncritically from unauthorative sources. But having mentioned this Scholasticism which he seems not to have read, he goes on, _re_ Croce, to ask: “How could an Italian be unkind to a Church that had brought all the world to Canossa, and had levied imperial tribute on every land to make Italy the art-gallery of the world?”