In iambics that caressed the ear like flutes, poets had told of Jupiter clothed in purple and glory. They had told of his celestial amours, of his human and of his inhuman vices. Seneca believed in Jupiter. But not in the Jove of the poets. That G.o.d dwelled in ivory and anapests. Seneca"s deity, nowhere visible, was everywhere present.[53] Creator of heaven and earth,[54] without whom there is nothing,[55] from whom nothing is hidden,[56] and to whom all belongs,[57] our Father,[58] whose will shall be done.[59]
[Footnote 53: Nemo novit Deum. Epit. x.x.xi. Ubique Deus. Epit. xli.]
[Footnote 54: Mundum hujus operis dominum et artificem. Quaest. nat. i.]
[Footnote 55: Sine quo nihil est. Quaest. nat. vii. 31.]
[Footnote 56: Nil Deo Clausam. Ep. lx.x.xx.]
[Footnote 57: Omnia habentem. Ep. xcv.]
[Footnote 58: Parens noster. Ep. cx.]
[Footnote 59: Placeat homini quidquid Deo placuit. Ep. lxxv.]
"Life," said Seneca, "is a tribulation, death a release. In order not to fear death," he added, "think of it always. The day on which it comes judges all others."[60] Meanwhile comfort those that sorrow.[61]
Share your bread with them that hunger.[62] Wherever there is a human being there is place for a good deed.[63] Sin is an ulcer. Deliverance from it is the beginning of health--salvation, _salutem_."[64]
[Footnote 60: Ep. xxvi. 4.]
[Footnote 61: De Clem. ii. 6.]
[Footnote 62: Ep. xcv. 51.]
[Footnote 63: De Vita Beata, 14.]
[Footnote 64: Ep. xxviii. 9.]
Words such as these suggest others. They are anterior to those which they recall. The latter are more beautiful, they are more ample, there is in them a poetry and a profundity that has rarely been excelled.
Yet, it may be, that a germ of them is in Seneca, or, more exactly, in theories which, beginning in India, prophets, seers, and stoics variously interpreted and recalled.
However since they have charmed the world, their effect on Nero was curious. Seneca was his preceptor. But so too was Art. The lessons of these teachers, fusing in the demented mind of the monster, produced transcendental depravity, the apogee of the abnormal and the epileptically obscene. What is more important, they produced Christianity.
Christianity already existed in Rome, but obscurely, subterraneanly, among a cla.s.s of poor people generally detested, particularly by the Jews. Christianity was not as yet a religion, it was but the belief of a sect that announced that the world was to be consumed. Presently Rome was. The conflagration, which was due to Nero, swept everything sacred away.
Even for a prince that, perhaps, was excessive. Nero may have felt that he had gone too far. An emperor was omnipotent, he was not inviolable. Tiberius was suffocated, Caligula was stabbed, Claud was poisoned. Nero, it may be, in feeling that he had gone too far, felt also that he needed a scapegoat. Christian pyromania suggested itself.
But probably it suggested itself first to the Jews, who, Renan has intimated, denounced the Christians accordingly. Such may have been the case. In any event, then it was that Christianity received its baptism of blood.
All antiquity was cruel, but, barring perhaps the immense Asiatic butcheries, Nero contrived then to surpa.s.s anything that had been done. Bloated and hideous, his hair done up in a chignon, a concave emerald for monocle, in the crowded arena he a.s.sisted at the rape of Christian girls. Their lovers, their brothers and fathers were either eaten alive by beasts or, that night, dressed in tunics that had been soaked in oil, were fastened to posts and set on fire, in order that, as human torches, they might illuminate palace gardens, through which, costumed as a jockey, Nero raced.
The spectacle in the amphitheatre, which fifty thousand people beheld; the succeeding festival at which all Rome a.s.sembled, were two acts in the birthday of a faith.
Then, to the cradle, presently, Wise Men came with gifts--the gold, the frankincense, the myrrh, of creeds anterior though less divine.
VIII
THE NEC PLUS ULTRA
It was after fastidious rites, the heart entirely devout and on his knees, that Angelico di Fiesole drew a picture of the Christ. The att.i.tude is emulative. It is with brushes dipped in holy water that Jesus should be displayed, though more reverent still is the absence of any delineation.
Reverence of that high character history formerly observed. There is no mention of the Saviour in the chronicles of those who were blessed in being his contemporaries. One indiscreet remark of Josephus has been recognized as the interpolation of a later hand, well-intentioned perhaps, but misguided. Jesus glows in the Gospels. Yet they that awaited the day when, in a great aurora borealis, the Son of man should appear, had pa.s.sed from earth before one of the evangels was written.
It was a hundred years later before the texts that comprise the New Testament were complete. It was nearly two hundred before they were definitive. In the interim many gospels appeared. Attributed indifferently to each of the Twelve, one was ascribed to Judas. There was a Gospel to the Hebrews, a Gospel to the Egyptians. There were evangels of Childhood, of Perfection and of Mary.
These primitive memoirs were based on oral accounts of occurrences long anterior. Into them entered extraneous beauties, felicities of phrase and detail, which, with naf effrontery, were put into the mouth of one apostle or another, even into that of Jesus. The ascription was regarded as highly commendable. It was but a way of glorifying the Lord. Besides, the scenarii of these pious evocations the prophets had traced in advance.
"Rejoice, daughter of Zion; shout, daughter of Jerusalem, behold thy King cometh unto thee; he is just and having salvation, lowly and riding upon an a.s.s."
That king of the poor whom Zachariah had foreseen, the stumbling block of Israel that Isaiah had foretold, the Son, mentioned by Hosea, whom Jahveh had called out of Egypt, was the Saviour, ascending in glory as Elijah had done. A pa.s.sage incorrectly rendered by the Septuagint indicated a virginal birth. That also was suggestive.
The little biographies in which these developments appeared were intended for circulation only among an author"s narrow circle of immediate friends, at most to be read aloud in devout reunions. If, ultimately, of the entire collection, four only were retained, it is probably because these best expressed existing convictions. Though, irrespective of their beauties, Irenaeus said that there had to be four and could be but four, for the reason that there are four seasons, four winds, four corners of the earth, and the four revelations of Adam, Noah, Moses, and Jesus.
It is not on that perhaps arbitrary deduction that their validity resides, but rather because the parables and miracles which they recite became the spiritual nourishment of a world. To their t.i.tle of eternal verities they have other and stronger claims. They have consoled and they have enn.o.bled. Elder creeds may have done likewise, but these lacked that of which Christianity was the unique possessor, the marvel of a crucified G.o.d.
Saviours there had been. Mithra was a redeemer. Zoroaster was born of a virgin. Persephone descended into h.e.l.l. Osiris rose from the dead.
Gotama was tempted by the devil. Moses was transfigured. Elijah ascended into heaven. But in no belief is there a parallel for the crucifixion, although in Hindu legend, Krishna, a divinity whose mythical infancy a mythical prototype of Herod troubled, died, nailed by arrows to a tree.
In Oriental lore Krishna is held to have been the eighth avatar of Vishnu, of whom Gotama was the ninth. Krishna was therefore anterior to the Buddha, at least in myth. But it would be a grave impropriety to infer that with the legend concerning him the narrative of the crucifixion has any other connection than the possible one of having suggested it. The _Bhagavad-Purana_, in which the legend occurs, is relatively modern, though the legend itself may, like the _Tripitaka_, have existed orally, for centuries, before it was finally committed to writing.
There can, however, be no impropriety in recalling a.n.a.logies that exist between the Saviour and one whom the Orient holds also divine.
These a.n.a.logies, set forth in the first chapter of the present volume, are, it may be, wholly fortuitous, though Pliny stated that, centuries before his day, disciples of Gotama were established on the Dead Sea and, from a pa.s.sage in Josephus, it seems probable that the Essenes were Buddhists, in the same degree perhaps that the Pharisees were Parsis. But the point is also obscure. It is immaterial as well. The Gospels were not written in Jerusalem but mainly in Rome, where crucifixions were common, as they were, for that matter, throughout the East, but where, too, all religions were acclimated and the supernatural was at home.
Rome had witnessed the _tours de force_ of Apollonios of Tyana. Those of Simon the Magician had also been beheld. Rome had seen, or, it may be, thought she believed she had seen, Vespasian cure the halt and the blind with a touch. The atmosphere then was charged with the marvellous. The temples were filled with prodigies, with strange G.o.ds, beckoning chimeras, credulous crowds.
There was something superior. Rome was the depository of the legends and lore of the world. A haunt of the Muses, the sensual city was a hermitage of philosophy as well. These things collectively represented a great literary feast, of which not all the courses have descended to us, though, as is not impossible, a lost dish or two, trans.m.u.ted, by the alchemy of faith, from dross into gold, the Gospels may perhaps contain.
In that case there is cause for great thankfulness. Moreover, a.s.suming the trans.m.u.tation, no impiety can be implied. It was as usual and as indicated as were papyrus and the stylus. It is common to-day for a poet, before spreading his own wings, to contemplate those of another.
Inspiration is infectious.
A page of verse, whether Hindu, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, or Latin, was as useful then. Dante fed on the troubadours. They are lost and forgot. He divinely stands greater than the tallest of them all. In a measure the same may be true of those from whom the Gospels came. Yet with a very notable difference. The _Divina Commedia_ was written for all time. So too were the Gospels. But not intentionally. They were written to prepare man for the immediate termination of the world.
With the most perfect propriety, therefore, anything serviceable could have been utilized and probably was. The devout had but to lift their eyes. In the words of Isaiah, there, before them, were the treasures of nations; there were the camels and dromedaries bearing from every side incense and gold; there were the sons of strangers to build up their walls.
The sons were many, the treasures as great. Even otherwise there was the Law, there too were the Prophets. Moses fasted for forty days.
Elisha performed a miracle of the loaves, if he did not that of the fishes. Job saw the Lord walking upon the sea. Jeremiah said: "Seek and ye shall find." Isaiah bid those that sorrowed come and be consoled. In the poem of that poet the servant of the Lord had vinegar when he thirsted, he was spat upon and for his garments lots were cast.
In an effort to fill in a picture of which the central figure had pa.s.sed from the real to the ideal, these things may have been suggestive. So also, perhaps, was the _Talmud_. The redaction of that chaos began in the second century. But the Vedas, the Homeric poems, the Tripitaka as well, existed in memory long before they were committed to writing. The same is true of the _Talmud_. Orally it existed prior to the Christ. Considered as literature, if it may be so considered, it is the reverse of endearing. But of the many maxims that it contains there are some of singular charm. Among others is the Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.[65] The origin of that, as already indicated, is traceable to the _Tripitaka_, which, parenthetically, were so well known in Babylon that Gotama was there regarded as a Chaldean seer. That abridgement of the Law which is called the Golden Rule is also in the _Talmud_,[66] as also, before the _Talmud_ was, it was in the _Tripitaka_. The injunction to love one"s enemies is equally in both. So is the very excellent suggestion that one should consider one"s own faults before admonishing a brother concerning his defects. But the perhaps subtle intimation that the desire to commit adultery is as reprehensible as the act, and the rather extravagant statement that it is easier for a camel to pa.s.s through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, these, originally, were perhaps uniquely Talmudic.
Currently cited with multiple others they were all so many common sayings, which, strung together in the Gospels, became a rosary of most perfect pearls.
[Footnote 65: Talmud Babli: Baba bathra, 11 _a_.]
[Footnote 66: Schabbath, 37 _a_.]
In a pa.s.sage of Irenaeus it is stated that the _Gospel according to St.
Matthew_ was arranged by the Church for the benefit of the Jews who awaited a Messiah descended from David. A Syro-Chaldaic evangel, known as the _Gospel to the Hebrews_, had then appeared. So also had the _Gospel according to St. Mark_. But these offered no evidence that Jesus was the one they sought. Another was then prepared. Written in Greek and bearing the authoritative name of Matthew, it traced from David, Joseph"s descent.