M. Renan repeatedly declares that his great aim is to save religion by relieving it of the supernatural. He does not argue; but instead of the old familiar view of the Great History, he presents an opposite theory of his own, framed to suit that combination of the revolutionary and the sentimental which just now happens to be in favour in the unbelieving schools. And this is the result: a representation which boldly invests its ideal with the highest perfections of moral goodness, strength, and beauty, and yet does not shrink from a.s.sociating with it also--and that, too, as the necessary and inevitable condition of success--a deliberate and systematic willingness to delude and insensibility to untruth. This is the religion and this is the reason which appeals to Christ in order to condemn Christianity.
XII
RENAN"S "LES APoTRES"[14]
[14]
_Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre II.--_Les Apotres_.
Par Ernest Renan. _Sat.u.r.day Review_, 14th July 1866.
In his recent volume, _Les Apotres_, M. Renan has undertaken two tasks of very unequal difficulty. He accounts for the origin of the Christian belief and religion, and he writes the history of its first propagation. These are very different things, and to do one of them is by no means to do the other. M. Renan"s historical sketch of the first steps of the Christian movement is, whatever we may think of its completeness and soundness, a survey of characters and facts, based on our ordinary experience of the ways in which men act and are influenced. Of course it opens questions and provokes dissent at every turn; but, after all, the history of a religion once introduced into the world is the history of the men who give it shape and preach it, who accept or oppose it. The spread and development of all religions have certain broad features in common, which admit of philosophical treatment simply as phenomena, and receive light from being compared with parallel examples of the same kind; and whether a man"s historical estimate is right, and his picture accurate and true, depends on his knowledge of the facts, and his power to understand them and to make them understood. No one can dispute M. Renan"s qualifications for being the historian of a religious movement. The study of religion as a phenomenon of human nature and activity has paramount attractions for him. His interest in it has furnished him with ample and varied materials for comparison and generalisation. He is a scholar and a man of learning, quick and wide in his sympathies, and he commands attention by the singular charm of his graceful and lucid style. When, therefore, he undertakes to relate how, as a matter of fact, the Christian Church grew up amid the circ.u.mstances of its first appearance, he has simply to tell the story of the progress of a religious cause; and this is a comparatively light task for him. But he also lays before us what he appears to consider an adequate account of the origin of the Christian belief. The Christian belief, it must be remembered, means, not merely the belief that there was such a person as he has described in his former, volume, but the belief that one who was crucified rose again from the dead, and lives for evermore above.
It is in this belief that the Christian religion had its beginning; there is no connecting Christ and Christianity, except through the Resurrection. The origin, therefore, of the belief in the Resurrection, in the shape in which we have it, lies across M. Renan"s path to account for; and neither the picture which he has drawn in his former volume, nor the history which he follows out in this, dispense him from the necessity of facing this essential and paramount element in the problem which he has to solve. He attempts to deal with this, the knot of the great question. But his attempt seems to us to disclose a more extraordinary insensibility to the real demands of the case, and to what we cannot help calling the pitiable inadequacy of his own explanation, than we could have conceived possible in so keen and practised a mind.
The Resurrection, we repeat, bars the way in M. Renan"s scheme for making an intelligible transition, from the life and character which he has sought to reproduce from the Gospels, to the first beginnings and preaching of Christianity. The Teacher, he says, is unique in wisdom, in goodness, in the height of his own moral stature and the Divine elevation of his aims. The religion is, with all abatements and imperfections, the only one known which could be the religion of humanity. After his portraiture of the Teacher, follows, naturally enough, as the result of that Teacher"s influence and life, a religion of corresponding elevation and promise. The pa.s.sage from a teaching such as M. Renan supposes to a religion such as he allows Christianity to be may be reasonably understood as a natural consequence of well-known causes, but for one thing--the interposition between the two of an alleged event which simply throws out all reasonings drawn from ordinary human experience. From the teaching and life of Socrates follow, naturally enough, schools of philosophy, and an impulse which has affected scientific thought ever since. From the preaching and life of Mahomet follows, equally naturally, the religion of Islam. In each case the result is seen to be directly and distinctly linked on to the influences which gave it birth, and nothing more than these influences is wanted, or makes any claim, to account for it. So M. Renan holds that all that is needed to account for Christianity is such a personality and such a career as he has described in his last volume.
But the facts will not bend to this. Christianity hangs on to Christ not merely as to a Person who lived and taught and died, but as to a Person who rose again from death. That is of the very essence of its alleged derivation from Christ. It knows Christ only as Christ risen; the only reason of its own existence that it recognises is the Resurrection. The only claim the Apostles set forth for preaching to the world is that their Master who was crucified was alive once more.
Every one knows that this was the burden of all their words, the corner-stone of all their work. We may believe them or not. We may take Christianity or leave it. But we cannot derive Christianity from Christ, without meeting, as the bond which connects the two, the Resurrection. But for the Resurrection, M. Renan"s scheme might be intelligible. A Teacher unequalled for singleness of aim and n.o.bleness of purpose lives and dies, and leaves the memory and the leaven of His teaching to disciples, who by them, even though in an ill-understood shape, and with incomparably inferior qualities themselves, purify and elevate the religious ideas and feelings of mankind. If that were all, if there were nothing but the common halo of the miraculous which is apt to gather about great names, the interpretation might be said to be coherent. But a theory of Christianity cannot neglect the most prominent fact connected with its beginning. It is impossible to leave it out of the account, in judging both of the Founder and of those whom his influence moulded and inspired.
M. Renan has to account for the prominence given to the Resurrection in the earliest Christian teaching, without having recourse to the supposition of conscious imposture and a deliberate conspiracy to deceive; for such a supposition would not harmonise either with the portrait he has drawn of the Master, or with his judgment of the seriousness and moral elevation of the men who, immeasurably inferior as they were to Him, imbibed His spirit, and represented and transmitted to us His principles. And this is something much more than can be accounted for by the general disposition of the age to a.s.sume the supernatural and the miraculous. The way in which the Resurrection is circ.u.mstantially and unceasingly a.s.serted, and made on every occasion and from the first the foundation of everything, is something very different from the vague legends which float about of kings or saints whom death has spared, or from a readiness to see the direct agency of heaven in health or disease. It is too precise, too matter-of-fact, too prosaic in the way in which it is told, to be resolved into ill-understood dreams and imaginations. The various recitals show little care to satisfy our curiosity, or to avoid the appearance of inconsistency in detail; but nothing can be more removed from vagueness and hesitation than their definite positive statements.
It is with them that the writer on Christianity has to deal.
M. Renan"s method is--whilst of course not believing them, yet not supposing conscious fraud--to treat these records as the description of natural, unsought visions on the part of people who meant no harm, but who believed what they wished to believe. They are the story of a great mistake, but a mistake proceeding simply, in the most natural way in the world, from excess of "idealism" and attachment. Unaffected by the circ.u.mstance that there never were narratives less ideal, and more straightforwardly real--that they seem purposely framed to be a contrast to professed accounts of visions, and to exclude the possibility of their being confounded with such accounts; and that the alleged numbers who saw, the alleged frequency and repet.i.tion and variation of the instances, and the alleged time over which the appearances extended, and after which they absolutely ceased, make the hypothesis of involuntary and undesigned allusions of regret and pa.s.sion infinitely different from what it might be in the case of one or two persons, or for a transitory period of excitement and crisis--unaffected by such considerations, M. Renan proceeds to tell, in his own way, the story of what he supposes to have occurred, without, of course, admitting the smallest real foundation for what was so positively a.s.serted, but with very little reproach or discredit to the ardent and undoubting a.s.sertors. He begins with a statement which is meant to save the character of the Teacher. "Jesus, though he spoke unceasingly of resurrection, of new life, had never said quite clearly that he should rise again in the flesh." He says this with the texts before him, for he quotes them and cla.s.sifies them in a note. But this is his point of departure, laid down without qualification. Yet if there is anything which the existing records do say distinctly, it is that Jesus Christ said over and over again that He should rise again, and that He fixed the time within which He should rise. M. Renan is not bound to believe them. But he must take them as he finds them; and on this capital point either we know nothing at all, and have no evidence to go upon, or the evidence is simply inverted by M. Renan"s a.s.sertion.
There may, of course, be reasons for believing one part of a man"s evidence and disbelieving another; but there is nothing in this case but incompatibility with a theory to make this part of the evidence either more or less worthy of credit than any other part. What is certain is that it is in the last degree weak and uncritical to lay down, as the foundation and first pre-requisite of an historical view, a position which the records on which the view professes to be based emphatically and unambiguously contradict. Whatever we may think of it, the evidence undoubtedly is, if evidence there is at all, that Jesus Christ did say, though He could not get His disciples at the time to understand and believe Him, that He should rise again on the third day.
What M. Renan had to do, if he thought the contrary, was not to a.s.sume, but to prove, that in these repeated instances in which they report His announcements, the Evangelists mistook or misquoted the words of their Master.
He accepts, however, their statement that no one at first hoped that the words would be made good; and he proceeds to account for the extraordinary belief which, in spite of this original incredulity, grew up, and changed the course of things and the face of the world. We admire and respect many things in M. Renan; but it seems to us that his treatment of this matter is simply the _ne plus ultra_ of the degradation of the greatest of issues by the application to it of sentiment unworthy of a silly novel. In the first place, he lays down on general grounds that, though the disciples had confessedly given up all hope, it yet _was natural_ that they should expect to see their master alive again. "Mais I"enthousiasme et l"amour ne connaissent pas les situations sans issue." Do they not? Are death and separation such light things to triumph over that imagination finds it easy to cheat them? "Ils se jouent de l"impossible et, plutot que d"abdiquer l"esperance, ils font violence a toute realite." Is this an account of the world of fact or the world of romance? The disciples did not hope; but, says M. Renan, vague words about the future had dropped from their master, and these were enough to build upon, and to suggest that they would soon see him back. In vain it is said that in fact they did not expect it. "Une telle croyance etait d"ailleurs si naturelle, que la foi des disciples aurait suffi pour la creer de toutes pieces." Was it indeed--in spite of Enoch and Elias, cases of an entirely different kind--so natural to think that the ruined leader of a crushed cause, whose hopeless followers had seen the last of him amid the lowest miseries of torment and scorn, should burst the grave?
Il devait arriver [he proceeds] pour Jesus ce qui arrive pour tous les hommes qui ont captive l"attention de leurs semblables. Le monde, habitue a leur attribuer des vertus surhumaines, ne peut admettre qu"ils aient subi la loi injuste, revoltante, inique, du trepas commun.... La mort est chose si absurde quand elle frappe l"homme de genie ou l"homme d"un grand coeur, que le peuple ne croit pas a la possibilite d"une telle erreur de la nature. Les heros ne meurent pas.
The history of the world presents a large range of instances to test the singular a.s.sertion that death is so "absurd" that "the people"
cannot believe that great and good men literally die. But would it be easy to match the strangeness of a philosopher and a man of genius gravely writing this down as a reason--not why, at the interval of centuries, a delusion should grow up--but why, on the very morrow of a crucifixion and burial, the disciples should have believed that all the dreadful work they had seen a day or two before was in very fact and reality reversed? We confess we do not know what human experience is if it countenances such a supposition as this.
From this antecedent probability he proceeds to the facts. "The Sabbath day which followed the burial was occupied with these thoughts....
Never was the rest of the Sabbath so fruitful." They all, the women especially, thought of him all day long in his bed of spices, watched over by angels; and the a.s.surance grew that the wicked men who had killed him would not have their triumph, that he would not be left to decay, that he would be wafted on high to that Kingdom of the Father of which he had spoken. "Nous le verrons encore; nous entendrons sa voix charmante; c"est en vain qu"ils l"auront tue." And as, with the Jews, a future life implied a resurrection of the body, the shape which their hope took was settled. "Reconnaitre que la mort pouvait etre victorieuse de Jesus, de celui qui venait de supprimer son empire, c"etait le comble de l"absurdite." It is, we suppose, irrelevant to remark that we find not the faintest trace of this sense of absurdity.
The disciples, he says, had no choice between hopelessness and "an heroic affirmation"; and he makes the bold surmise that "un homme penetrant aurait pu annoncer _des le samedi_ que Jesus revivrait." This may be history, or philosophy, or criticism; what it is _not_ is the inference naturally arising from the only records we have of the time spoken of. But the force of historical imagination dispenses with the necessity of extrinsic support. "La pet.i.te societe chretienne, ce jour-la, opera le veritable miracle: elle ressuscita Jesus en son coeur par l"amour intense qu"elle lui porta. Elle decida que Jesus ne mourrait pas." The Christian Church has done many remarkable things; but it never did anything so strange, or which so showed its power, as when it took that resolution.
How was the decision, involuntary and unconscious, and guiltless of intentional deception, if we can conceive of such an att.i.tude of mind, carried out? M. Renan might leave the matter in obscurity. But he sees his way, in spite of incoherent traditions and the contradictions which they present, to a "sufficient degree of probability." The belief in the Resurrection originated in an hallucination of the disordered fancy of Mary Magdalen, whose mind was thrown off its balance by her affection and sorrow; and, once suggested, the idea rapidly spread, and produced, through the Christian society, a series of corresponding visions, firmly believed to be real. But Mary Magdalen was the founder of it all:--
Elle eut, en ce moment solennel, une part d"action tout a fait hors ligne. C"est elle qu"il faut suivre pas a pas; car elle porta, ce jour-la, pendant une heure, tout le travail de la conscience chretienne; son temoignage decida la foi de l"avenir.... La vision legere s"ecarte et lui dit: "Ne me touche pas!" Peu a peu l"ombre disparait. Mais le miracle de l"amour est accompli. Ce que Cephas n"a pu faire, Marie l"a faite; elle a su tirer la vie, la parole douce et penetrante, du tombeau vide. Il ne s"agit plus de consequences a deduire ni de conjectures a former. Marie a vu et entendu. La resurrection a son premier temoin immediat.
He proceeds to criticise the accounts which ascribe the first vision to others; but in reality Mary Magdalen, he says, has done most, after the great Teacher, for the foundation of Christianity. "Queen and patroness of idealists," she was able to "impose upon all the sacred vision of her impa.s.sioned soul." All rests upon her first burst of entbusiasm, which gave the signal and kindled the faith of others. "Sa grande affirmation de femme, "il est ressuscite," a ete la base de la foi de l"humanite":--
Paul ne parle pas de la vision de Marie et reporte tout l"honneur de la premiere apparition sur Pierre. Mais cette expression est tres~inexacte. Pierre ne vit que le caveau vide, le suaire et le linceul. Marie seule aima a.s.sez pour depa.s.ser la nature et faire revivre le fantome du maitre exquis. Dans ces sortes de crises merveilleuses, voir apres les autres n"est rien; tout le merite est de voir pour la premiere fois; car les autres modelent ensuite leur vision sur le type recu. C"est le propre des belles organisations de concevoir l"image promptement, avec justesse et par une sorte de sens intime du dessin. La gloire de la resurrection appartient donc a Marie de Magdala. Apres Jesus, c"est Marie qui a le plus fait pour la fondation du Christianisme.
L"ombre creee par les sens delicats de Madeleine plane encore sur le monde.... Loin d"ici, raison impuissante! Ne va pas appliquer une froide a.n.a.lyse a ce chef-d"oeuvre de l"idealisme et de l"amour. Si la sagesse renonce a consoler cette pauvre race humaine, trahie par le sort, laisse la folie tenter l"aventure. Ou est le sage qui a donne au monde autant de joie, que la possedee Marie de Magdala?
He proceeds to describe, on the same supposition, the other events of the day, which he accepts as having in a certain very important sense happened, though, of course, only in the sense which excludes their reality. No doubt, for a series of hallucinations, anything will do in the way of explanation. The scene of the evening was really believed to have taken place as described, though it was the mere product of chance noises and breaths of air on minds intently expectant; and we are bidden to remember "that in these decisive hours a current of wind, a creaking window, an accidental rustle, settle the belief of nations for centuries." But at any rate it was a decisive hour:--
Tels furent les incidents de ce jour qui a fixe le sort de l"humanite. L"opinion que Jesus etait ressuscite s"y fonda d"une maniere irrevocable. La secte, qu"on avait cru eteindre en tuant le maitre, fut des lors a.s.suree d"un immense avenir.
We are willing to admit that Christian writers have often spoken unreally and unsatisfactorily enough in their comments on this subject.
But what Christian comment, hard, rigid, and narrow in its view of possibilities, ever equalled this in its baselessness and supreme absence of all that makes a view look like the truth? It puts the most extravagant strain on doc.u.ments which, truly or falsely, but at any rate in the most consistent and uniform manner, a.s.sert something different. What they a.s.sert in every conceivable form, and with distinct detail, are facts; it is not criticism, but mere arbitrary license, to say that all these stand for visions. The issue of truth or falsehood is intelligible; the middle supposition of confusion and mistake in that which is the basis of everything, and is definitely and in such varied ways repeated, is trifling and incredible. We may disbelieve, if we please, St. Paul"s enumeration of the appearances after the Resurrection; but to resolve it into a series of visions is to take refuge in the most unlikely of guesses. And, when we take into view the whole of the case--not merely the life and teaching out of which everything grew, but the aim and character of the movement which ensued, and the consequences of it, long tested and still continuing, to the history and development of mankind--we find it hard to measure the estimate of probability which is satisfied with the supposition that the incidents of one day of folly and delusion irrevocably decided the belief of ages, and the life and destiny of millions. Without the belief in the Resurrection there would have been no Christianity; if anything may be laid down as certain, this may. We should probably never have even heard of the great Teacher; He would not have been believed in, He would not have been preached to the world; the impulse to conversion would have been wanting; and all that was without parallel good and true and fruitful in His life would have perished, and have been lost in Judaea. And the belief in the Resurrection M.
Renan thinks due to an hour of over-excited fancy in a woman agonized by sorrow and affection. When we are presented with an hypothesis on the basis of intrinsic probability, we cannot but remember that the power of delusion and self-deception, though undoubtedly shown in very remarkable instances, must yet be in a certain proportion to what it originates and produces, and that it is controlled by the numerous antagonistic influences of the world. Crazy women have founded superst.i.tions; but we cannot help thinking that it would be more difficult than M. Renan supposes for crazy women to found a world-wide religion for ages, branching forth into infinite forms, and tested by its application to all varieties of civilisation, and to national and personal character. M. Renan points to La Salette. But the a.s.sumption would be a bold one that the La Salette people could have invented a religion for Christendom which would stand the wear of eighteen centuries, and satisfy such different minds. Pious frauds, as he says, may have built cathedrals. But you must take Christianity for what it has proved itself to be in its hard and unexampled trial. To start an order, a sect, an inst.i.tution, even a local tradition or local set of miracles, on foundations already laid, is one thing; it is not the same to be the spring of the most serious and the deepest of moral movements for the improvement of the world, the most unpretending and the most careless of all outward form and show, the most severely searching and universal and lasting in its effects on mankind. To trace that back to the Teacher without the intervention of the belief in the Resurrection is manifestly impossible. We know what He is said to have taught; we know what has come of that teaching in the world at large; but if the link which connects the two be not a real one, it is vain to explain it by the dreams of affection. It was not a matter of a moment or an hour, but of days and weeks continually; not the a.s.sertion of one imaginative mourner or two, but of a numerous and variously const.i.tuted body of people. The story, if it was not true, was not delusion, but imposture.
We certainly cannot be said to know much of what happens in the genesis of religions. But that between such a teacher and such teaching there should intervene such a gigantic falsehood, whether imposture or delusion, is unquestionably one of the hardest violations of probability conceivable, as well as one of the most desperate conclusions as regards the capacity of mankind for truth. Few thoughts can be less endurable than that the wisest and best of our race, men of the soberest and most serious tempers, and most candid and judicial minds, should have been the victims and dupes of the mad affection of a crazy Magdalen, of "ces touchantes demoniaques, ces pecheresses converties, ces vraies fondatrices du Christianisme." M. Renan shrinks from solving such a question by the hypothesis of conscious fraud. To solve it by sentiment is hardly more respectful either to the world or to truth.
We have left ourselves no room to speak of the best part of M. Renan"s new volume, his historical comment on the first period of Christianity.
We do not pretend to go along with him in his general principles of judgment, or in many of his most important historical conclusions. But here he is, what he is not in the early chapters, on ground where his critical faculty comes fairly into play. He is, we think, continually paradoxical and reckless in his statements; and his book is more thickly strewn than almost any we know with half-truths, broad axioms which require much paring down to be of any use, but which are made by him to do duty for want of something stronger. But, from so keen and so deeply interested a writer, it is our own fault if we do not learn a good deal. And we may study in its full development that curious combination, of which M. Renan is the most conspicuous example, of profound veneration for Christianity and sympathy with its most characteristic aspects, with the scientific impulse to destroy in the public mind the belief in its truth.
XIII
M. RENAN"S HIBBERT LECTURES[15]
[15]
_Guardian_, 14th April 1880.
I
The object of M. Renan"s lectures at St. George"s Hall is, as we understand him, not merely to present a historical sketch of the influence of Rome on the early Church, but to reconcile the historical imagination with the results of his own and kindred speculations on the origin of Christianity. He has, with a good faith which we do not question, investigated the subject and formed his conclusions upon it.
He on the present occasion a.s.sumes these investigations, and that he, at any rate, is satisfied with their result. He hardly pretends to carry the mixed popular audience whom he addresses into any real inquiry into the grounds on which he has satisfied himself that the received account of Christianity is not the true one. But he is aware that all minds are more or less consciously impressed with the broad difficulty that, after all attempts to trace the origin of Christianity to agencies and influences of well-understood human character, the disproportion between causes and effects still continues to appear excessive. The great Christian tradition with its definite beliefs about the conditions of man"s existence, which has shaped the fortunes and determined the future of mankind on earth, is in possession of the world as much as the great tradition of right and wrong, or of the family, or of the State. How did it get there? It is most astonishing that it should have done so, what is the account of it? Of course people may inquire into this question as they may inquire into the basis of morality, or the origin of the family or the State. But here, as on those subjects, reason, and that imagination which is one of the forces of reason, by making the mind duly sensible of the magnitude of ideas and alternatives, are exacting. M. Renan"s task is to make the purely human origin of Christianity, its origin in the circ.u.mstances, the beliefs, the ideas, and the moral and political conditions of the first centuries, seem to us _natural_--as natural in the history of the world as other great and surprising events and changes--as natural as the growth and the fall of the Roman Empire, or as the Reformation, or the French Revolution. He is well qualified to sound the depths of his undertaking and to meet its heavy exigencies. With a fuller knowledge of books, and a closer familiarity than most men with the thoughts and the events of the early ages, with a serious value for the idea of religion as such, and certainly with no feeble powers of recalling the past and investing it with colour and life, he has to show how these things can be--how a religion with such attributes as he freely ascribes to the Gospel, so grand, so pure, so lasting, can have sprung up not merely _in_ but _from_ a most corrupt and immoral time, and can have its root in the most portentous and impossible of falsehoods. It must be said to be a bold undertaking.
M. Renan has always aimed at doing justice to what he a.s.sailed; Christians, who realise what they believe, will say that he patronises their religion, and naturally they resent such patronage. Such candour adds doubtless to the literary effect of his method; but it is only due to him to acknowledge the fairness of his admissions. He starts with the declaration that there never was a n.o.bler moment in human history than the beginnings of the Christian Church. It was the "most heroic episode in the annals of mankind." "Never did man draw forth from his bosom more devotion, more love of the ideal, than in the 150 years which elapsed between the sweet Galilean vision and the death of Marcus Aurelius." It was not only that the saints were admirable and beautiful in their lives; they had the secret of the future, and laid down the lines on which the goodness and hope of the coming world were to move."
Never was the religious conscience more eminently creative, never did it lay down with more authority the law of future ages."
Now, if this is not mere rhetoric, what does it come to? It means not merely that there was here a phenomenon, not only extraordinary but unique, in the development of human character, but that here was created or evolved what was to guide and form the religious ideas of mankind; here were the springs of what has reached through all the ages of expanding humanity to our own days, of what is best and truest and deepest and holiest. M. Renan, at any rate, does not think this an illusion of Christian prepossessions, a fancy picture of a mythic age of gold, of an unhistorical period of pure and primitive antiquity. Put this view of things by the side of any of the records or the literature of the time remaining to us; if not St. Paul"s Epistles nor Tacitus nor Lucian, then Virgil and Horace and Cicero, or Seneca or Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. Is it possible by any effort of imagination to body forth the links which can solidly connect the ideas which live and work and grow on one side, with the ideas which are represented by the facts and principles of the other side? Or is it any more possible to connect what we know of Christian ideas and convictions by a bond of natural and intelligible, if not necessary derivation, with what we know of Jewish ideas and Jewish habits of thought at the time in question? Yet that is the thing to be done, to be done rigorously, to be done clearly and distinctly, by those who are satisfied to find the impulses and faith which gave birth to Christianity amid the seething confusions of the time which saw its beginning; absolutely identical with those wild movements in origin and nature, and only by a strange, fortunate accident immeasurably superior to them.
This question M. Renan has not answered; as far as we can see he has not perceived that it is the first question for him to answer, in giving a philosophical account of the history of Christianity. Instead, he tells us, and he is going still further to tell us, how Rome and its wonderful influences acted on Christianity, and helped to a.s.sure its victories. But, first of all, what is that Christianity, and whence did it come, which Rome so helped? It came, he says, from Judaism; "it was Judaism under its Christian form which Rome propagated without wishing it, yet with such mighty energy that from a certain epoch Romanism and Christianity became synonymous words"; it was Jewish monotheism, the religion the Roman hated and despised, swallowing up by its contrast all that was local, legendary, and past belief, and presenting one religious law to the countless nationalities of the Empire, which like itself was one, and like itself above all nationalities.
This may all be true, and is partially true; but how did that hated and partial Judaism break through its trammels, and become a religion for all men, and a religion to which all men gathered? The Roman organisation was an admirable vehicle for Christianity; but the vehicle does not make that which it carries, or account for it. M. Renan"s picture of the Empire abounds with all those picturesque details which he knows so well where to find, and knows so well, too, how to place in an interesting light. There were then, of course, conditions of the time more favourable to the Christian Church than would have been the conditions of other times. There was a certain increased liberty of thought, though there were also some pretty strong obstacles to it. M.
Renan has Imperial proclivities, and reminds us truly enough that despotisms are sometimes more tolerant than democracies, and that political liberty is not the same as spiritual and mental freedom, and does not always favour it. It may be partially true, as he says, that "Virgil and Tibullus show that Roman harshness and cruelty were softening down"; that "equality and the rights of men were preached by the Stoics"; that "woman was more her own mistress, and slaves were better treated than in the days of Cato"; that "very humane and just laws were enacted under the very worst emperors; that Tiberius and Nero were able financiers"; that "after the terrible butcheries of the old centuries, mankind was crying with the voice of Virgil for peace and pity." A good many qualifications and abatements start up in our minds on reading these statements, and a good many formidable doubts suggest themselves, if we can at all believe what has come down to us of the history of these times. It is hard to accept quite literally the bold a.s.sertion that "love for the poor, sympathy with all men, almsgiving, were becoming virtues." But allow this as the fair and hopeful side of the Empire. Yet all this is a long way from accounting for the effects on the world of Christianity, even in the dim, vaporous form in which M. Renan imagines it, much more in the actual concrete reality in which, if we know anything, it appeared. "Christianity," he says, "responded to the cry for peace and pity of all weary and tender souls." No doubt it did; but what was it that responded, and what was its consolation, and whence was its power drawn? What was there in the known thoughts or hopes or motives of men at the time to furnish such a response? "Christianity," he says, "could only have been born and spread at a time when men had no longer a country"; "it was that explosion of social and religious ideas which became inevitable after Augustus had put an end to political struggles," after his policy had killed "patriotism." It is true enough that the first Christians, believing themselves subjects of an Eternal King and in view of an eternal world, felt themselves strangers and pilgrims in this; yet did the rest of the Roman world under the Caesars feel that they had no country, and was the idea of patriotism extinct in the age of Agricola?
But surely the real question worth asking is, What was it amid the increasing civilisation and prosperous peace of Rome under the first Emperors which made these Christians relinquish the idea of a country?
From whence did Christianity draw its power to set its followers in inflexible opposition to the intensest worship of the State that the world has ever known?
To tell us the conditions under which all this occurred is not to tell us the cause of it. We follow with interest the sketches which M. Renan gives of these conditions, though it must be said that his generalisations are often extravagantly loose and misleading. We do indeed want to know more of those wonderful but hidden days which intervene between the great Advent, with its subsequent Apostolic age, and the days when the Church appears fully const.i.tuted and recognised.
German research and French intelligence and constructiveness have done something to help us, but not much. But at the end of all such inquiries appears the question of questions, What was the beginning and root of it all? Christians have a reasonable answer to the question.
There is none, there is not really the suggestion of one, in M. Renan"s account of the connection of Christianity with the Roman world.
II[16]
[16]
_Guardian_, 21st April 1880.
M. Renan has pursued the line of thought indicated in his first lecture, and in his succeeding lectures has developed the idea that Christianity, as we know it, was born in Imperial Rome, and that in its visible form and active influence on the world it was the manifest product of Roman instincts and habits; it was the spirit of the Empire pa.s.sing into a new body and accepting in exchange for political power, as it slowly decayed and vanished, a spiritual supremacy as unrivalled and as astonishing. The "Legend of the Roman Church--Peter and Paul,"