Mysteria

Hence, the new religion for which mankind sought, to give true expression to the sentiment of a common humanity, could not be any of the heathen systems. Rather, by insisting on the oneness of Godhead, it had to make an end of polytheism, of godmaking, and of Olympian wantoning, and at the same time, of scorn and derision of the gods.

Thus, then, what was wanted was a god who should have vanquished all other gods, and he a god of definite outline and fixed character—no nebulous, lackadaisical, inert deity such as the Grecian philosophers preached: no abstract “world-soul,” signifying nothing to the uneducated people; but a god like unto man himself, and whom man should have “made after his own likeness”; one with human feelings, sentiments, and passions, with human wrath and human lovingness. And this god must stand for a doctrine of personal immortality to the end the precious Ego of every man might have infallible and trustworthy assurance that his title to a Mansion in the Skies will stand unchallengeable for ever and for ever. And again, this god must be no abstract entity, alleged to have existed somewhere, somewhen, but a personality associated with definite localities, and possessing very definite traits. And so the problem was to find this one god, this doctrine of immortality, to find a personality that would be the middle term between the two.

Nowhere was a monotheism to be found save in Judaism, and there it was plain and open to view. We have already seen how the Jews were scattered all over the world. Their synagogues were everywhere, and (noteworthy fact) they had proselytes in every large city, especially in Rome. In this we see the first steps in the dissemination of monotheism: but it could not be propagated on the large scale by Jews. Few were the persons who took a liking to the strictness of the Mosaic religion, and the God of the Jews was too spiritual a being to be grasped; besides, very many turned away from Judaism because of the indefiniteness of the Jewish notions of immortality, or the strange rites and the peculiar usages of the Jewish people.

From Judaism, then, the idea of monotheism was the only feature that could be borrowed: what was demanded else was the mystic element; that is to say, men wanted a system of religious conceptions that would reflect back upon them their own sentiments as the infallible truth. But the material best fitted for that end was to be found in the mysteries and in the Pythagorean and Essenian doctrines. The diverse ideas of the several secret leagues with regard to the separation of the divine from the human and their reconciliation, must find their unity in the Jewish God—a thing not difficult to accomplish in the times immediately preceding the advent of Christ, because of the intermingling of Grecian and Jewish ideas: and this unity had to be established by some personage of imposing figure on the stage of history, who should impress his seal upon it and surround it with the prestige of deity.

Now, at that time there was both among the heathen and the Jews an expectation of some such divine intervention as this. Thus, in the early years of the Roman Empire the belief was widespread that a new kingdom was to be founded in the East, and that a new Golden Age was about to begin. More definite was the expectation entertained by the Jews of a Messiah to come, who would restore the kingdom of Israel, and the worship of Jehova. This longing of the Jews coincided with the desire of heathendom for a new religion to take the place of a dying and degenerate polytheism.

4. JESUS.

At this juncture appeared Jesus. He lived and died in obscurity. Of his career not one word of mention is found in contemporary Greek and Roman writers, eagerly as they investigated everything. But this obscurity wrought no detriment, for it left those who were longing for a new religion free to make of him whatever they thought best for their cause; that is to say, they made of him a personality very different from what he really was. Out of a circumcised son of a Jewish carpenter, who rose, indeed, above the bigotry of his people, and who suffered death for his revolt against the rule of priests and scribes, was developed the longed for Messiah. He was no longer merely human, but the Son of God, born of a virgin; a thaumaturge; his death was formally and intentionally a sacrifice for the “redemption” of mankind; after death he rose again, and then ascended into heaven: in a word, Jesus the man had become a god. And thus on the Jewish branch were grafted quite unjewish, Graeco-mystical shoots till the branch was no longer recognizable.

We thus have in the life of the founder of the Christian Church, as handed down to us, two elements, truth and fiction. The element of truth is whatever is consistent with historical research and psychological fact and nature’s laws; and the element of fiction comprises whatever is in conflict with these. Jesus himself never pretended to be more than a man. Virtue was the burden of his teaching, and he never propounded a creed. To the many names of God he added that of “Father”—father of all mankind. He was no dogmatist, but a moral reformer, and as such occupied common ground with the Essenes and with John the Baptist, though he differed from them, and particularly from the Essenes, with regard to methods and measures: the Essenes would save men’s souls by withdrawing them from human society; Jesus sought to save men living in the world—to save human society itself.

Jesus taught the people in parables, enforcing his doctrine of virtuous living by the use of similes that no hearer could fail to understand. Those who afterward essayed to write the history of his life and work, in like manner made a free use of figurative language, and the personality of Jesus was glorified, and his “mission” magnified till the world saw in him, indeed, “the desired of all the nations,” the Messiah longed for by Israel, the reconciler of the divine and the human, toward whom all the mysteries had pointed.

The miracles of Jesus, namely, acts and occurrences that contradict the laws of nature, are not actual events; for as they are recorded in the New Testament they show a needless abrogation of natural law—needless, because the truths which Jesus preached could not be made more true by miracles. And thus, as the rationalists of the 18th century explained them as actual occurrences indeed, but yet as in accordance with the natural law, so now they are held to be quite needless juggleries altogether unworthy of Jesus. Hence the rational interpretation of the miracles is, that they represent the effort of the evangelists to portray the life and person of the Master in such colors as their notions of his supereminent dignity required. We divide these miracles into three classes—the miracles of the birth, the life, and the death of Jesus.

The birth of Jesus, as narrated in the gospel story, is itself a miracle. The legitimate son of Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, and of Mary—for such he was, according to the genealogy found in Matthew and Luke—had to be transformed into the Son of God, nay, made God himself, if his doctrine was to appear as of divine origin. Of types of such transformation there was no lack in heathendom. The first Christians, it is true, knew nothing of the sun-god Buddha, born again of a woman, but they were acquainted with Grecian and Roman mythology. Apollo, himself a god, walked on earth as a shepherd. Herakles, son of Zeus, and Romulus, son of Mars and of a virgin, were founders of states and cities, and progenitors of nations; then why should not the founder of a religion and of a church be also son of God and of a virgin? Nay, why might not God himself walk on earth in human form? That such was the actual origin of the story of the Divine Birth is not doubtful: all the rest is mere embellishment—as when the angel announces to the virgin the coming birth of the Son of God; when another angel, accompanied by the heavenly hosts, tells the shepherds of his actual birth; when a star conducts the “wise men of the East” to the wondrous babe, and they, with the shepherds and Simeon and Anna, pay him homage; and when Herod, purposing to take the life of the predestined Messiah, in order to compass that end orders the slaughter of the innocents.

The miracles of the life of Jesus are either abrogations of natural laws, or cures of diseases, or resuscitations from the dead, or apparitions. All these different kinds of miracles are fictions with a purpose. We have already seen how in the Grecian mysteries bread and wine were employed as consecrated viands for the gods, and how at Eleusis divine honors were paid to Demeter and Dionysos as givers of bread and wine. Jesus, too, had to be made lord and giver of these two sacred viands: hence the change of water into wine, and the multiplication of the loaves; and later, in the last supper, bread and wine were made the object of the Christian Mysteries. The walking on the waters of the lake of Gennesareth, the stilling of the winds, the blasting of the fig tree, the finding of the penny in the fish’s mouth, and Peter’s draught of fishes are pictures of the imagination designed to show the power of the Son of God over the waters, the air, the world of plants and of animals. So, too, his power over bodily diseases is made something real for the common understanding by such stories as the healing of paralytics, lepers, the blind, the deaf and dumb; over mental diseases by the freeing of the possessed, over death itself by the raising of the dead. Among the apparitions we reckon those of the Holy Spirit as a dove at the baptism of Jesus, of Satan at Jesus’ temptation, and of Moses and Elias at the transfiguration: this is all allegory. The “Holy Spirit” is an idea distinct from God only in thought; the dove is the symbol of purity and gentleness. The Devil is a personification of evil, and the failure of his attempt was the triumph of the good. As for the transfiguration, that typifies the vast superiority of the new law over the old: the old must do homage to the new.

The miracles of Jesus’ death, viz., the darkening of the sun, the rending of the veil of the Holy of Holies in the Temple, the resurrection of the dead, were occurrences quite inomissible at the death of a god; they betoken the mourning of nature and of religion. But the miracles that followed his death, the resurrection and the ascension, together with the apparitions of the Crucified in the mean time, were imagined purely and plainly to confirm the belief in an everlasting redeemer and in the personal immortality of each individual one of the faithful.

Of far greater importance than the miracles of Jesus are his teachings, and in particular his fine discourse on the mountain, also his beautiful parables. But his utterances contain nothing that is essentially new, the same thoughts having been often expressed by religious teachers and sages of other times and in other lands; and yet they possess a charm all their own, by reason of their unassuming simplicity. It was not the doctrine of the unity of God and of love for the neighbor that wrought the propagation of his teachings—the Jews possessed that doctrine already; nor was it his call to a higher life than that of sense—the Grecian philosophers preceded him in that respect; nor his alleged divinity, nor the miracles ascribed to him—his contemporaries in every land had had experience of miracles in every shape: it was the forcefulness, the grandeur, the simplicity of his discourse, speaking to the heart of man and mastering it, and calming its unrest. Here he was self-based and individual, supreme and irresistible. His teaching, and in particular the sermon on the mount, is the most emphatic, blistering condemnation of those who, for the last nineteen hundred years, have called themselves not only Christians, but the only Christians; who, nevertheless, in open contempt of their supposed Master, not only take oaths, and require an eye for an eye, cherish mortal hate for their enemies, trumpet their almsgiving abroad, offer their prayers aloud at the street crossings, fast ostentatiously, lay up for themselves treasures on earth, which are eaten by the moth and the rust; serve two masters or more, see the mote, though blind to the beam, throw the holy thing to the dogs, when one asks them for a loaf give him a stone, do not unto others as they would that others should do unto them: who not only do all this, but who even enact laws which oblige men to do all this. He whom they hypocritically call Master, but whom they never have understood, were he to appear among them, would anathematize them in the noble words, I know you not. Depart from me, ye doers of evil! Such language was unheard before his day; therefore wondered the people, for he spake with power, and not like the scribes and pharisees.

5. THE EARLY CHRISTIANS

What, then, is the difference between the Christianism of Jesus and the Christianism of Christians? The former, as seen in the discourses of the New Testament, and above all in the ever beautiful sermon on the mount, is a simple and unpretending, yet world-transforming doctrine of God, Virtue, and Love of Man: a monotheism borrowed from the Jews for the behoof of all men, but purified of ceremonialism, sabbatism, sacrifices, high-priesthood: in short, the Christianism of Jesus meant the coming “Kingdom of God,” in which the virtuous man would enjoy happiness and peace. But the Christianism of Christians is a Mysticism ingrafted on this monotheism, comprising the dogmas of the Incarnation, Atonement, Redemption, Resurrection, and Second Coming, and the Miracles invented to buttress these dogmas. The Christianism of Jesus fell when he and his first disciples died: they had no hair-splitting theology, only a devout heart: that system was too simple, too unadorned, too little flattering to sense and to man’s vainglory to cut any figure in the world. But the Christianism of Christians, which had for its mother the Grecian mysteries, borrowed from Jesus, its father (without whose personality and name it never could have lived at all), what little was known concerning him, but swaddled it in a thick wrappage of mystic dogmatism. Let us see how this dogmatic Christianism succeeded in erecting itself upon the simple ethic-religious system of Jesus, and in making itself a power in the world by evolving new mysteries.

Were it not for the grafting on it of the Graeco-mystical elements, Christianism would never have grown to be even a church, to say nothing of its prospects of becoming a power in the world. Its adherents in the beginning were good, zealous, believing folk, but among them were no men of education or of commanding ability. The first congregation in Jerusalem, therefore, unable to comprehend the lofty views of the Crucified, took their stand on a narrow ground not essentially different from that of Judaism; for example, they held that no one was worthy to be baptized who would not first undergo circumcision, thus becoming by adoption a Jew. The Apostle James, a devout ascetic, was the head of this school, the adherents of which were called Jewish Christians. The first to demand repudiation of Judaism was Stephen, a man of Grecian education; but he paid the penalty of his ambitious plans by a martyr’s death. The congregation at Antioch adopted Stephen’s view, according to which the “Gentile Christians” and the “Jewish Christians” stood on an equality. The intellectual leader of the Gentile-Christian school was Paul, a man who, in talents and in force of character, stood high above all the original apostles of the Nazarene. Through Paul’s exertions Christianism overstepped the narrow limits of Palestine and Syria. Well schooled, both in Grecian philosophy and Jewish theology, he was at the first a fanatical persecutor of the Christians, but had a sudden conversion while journeying to Damascus on a persecuting raid, and thenceforth was a zealous apostle of the new religion. Being a victim of epilepsy, Paul had frequent fits and visions, and he spoke of them often, thus implanting in the minds of the Christians a firm belief in such occurrences. Of course, the way was thus made ready for the introduction of the legends of a resurrection, an ascension, etc. Furthermore, a foundation was in this way laid for a great theological superstructure, which very soon was seen to rise. As the foundation, so was the superstructure—mystical. Over against the first man, Adam, representing the sensuous life, sin, servitude, and death, Paul set up the God-man Christ, representing the spirit, grace, freedom, and life; man was to crucify the “old Adam,” and to be born anew in Christ, even to become one with him. By this union, he said, the law of Moses is done away, being superseded by “faith,” whereby alone the sinner is justified and made worthy of God’s grace. For true faith, he added, carries with it good works, and the true believer cannot be otherwise than righteous.

Paul thus stood, in a certain sense, on the Protestant ground as contradistinguished from the Judaeo-Christian (which is partly also the Catholic) ground of Peter, James, and John, who upheld the Mosaic law, and received into the Church only circumcised converts. Peter wavered, being a Jew among Jews, but often forgetting the Mosaic law in the company of Gentile Christians; but Paul would never consent that Gentile converts should be obliged to conform to the Jewish rites: hence Paul was the real founder of the Christian Church, which, had his opponents been victorious, would have remained a Jewish sect. The Church was split into two parties. To the Jewish-Christian party adhered the numerous converts from Essenism, with whom the tie of blood was stronger than the spiritual bond which united them with the school of Pythagoras. This party did not regard Jesus as God, but classed him with the angels.

Between the two parties, Judaeo-Christian and Gentile-Christian, arose a third party, that of the Alexandrine Christian Jews. Their leader was Apollos (properly Apollonius), of whom it is related in the Acts of the Apostles, that he recognized only the baptism of John, and not that of Jesus, but that he was converted to belief in the latter by certain of Paul’s disciples at Ephesus. He it was that imported into Christianism the Alexandrine doctrine of the Logos or Word.

6. THE NEW TESTAMENT.

With such a distribution of parties, the New Testament literature arose. It may now be affirmed without hesitation that not one piece of this literature was composed by any of the disciples of Jesus, who were all uneducated men. The early Christians had at first no Sacred Scripture other than the Old Testament; with regard to the doctrine of Jesus they depended on oral instruction. Even the language in which the New Testament was written, the Hellenistic (or literary dialect of the Alexandrines) is proof that it was the work of men of Greek education. As far as can be determined now the earliest New Testament writer was Paul. The Pauline epistles that are his indisputably, are those to the Romans, the Corinthians, and the Galatians; the most dubious among them are the epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. There are epistles of some of the other apostles, as James, Peter, John, and Jude, and these, of course, according to the party stand of their writers, represent views opposed to those of Paul. They are of later date than Paul’s epistles, and are hardly to be credited to the apostles whose names are prefixed to them. To the Alexandrine school is to be referred the epistle to the Hebrews, distinguished from the Pauline writings by the fact that it holds the Old and New Testaments to be, not opposites, but complements of each other.

Apart from the Epistles the Revelation of John (Apocalypse) is the oldest book of the New Testament. Written in the spirit of an Old Testament prophet, it expresses the indignation of a Jew against the Romans during the siege and shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem, A. D. 70; it contains the prediction that not Jerusalem, but the whore of Babylon (Rome), together with the entire heathen world, will perish amid fire, blood, and ruin; but that there will be let down from Heaven a new and glorious Jerusalem, abode of the blest, seat of the “bride of the lamb.” After the destruction of Jerusalem the Apocalypse was written anew by an unknown hand, in the Christian sense. As every one knows, the prophecies of the book did not come true; but its fantastic, morbid imaginings have ever since been interpreted by enthusiasts as infallible forewarnings of things to come; and many a searcher of its pages has lost what modicum of sense they ever had in working out its meaning.

The other historical writings of the New Testament consist of four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. It is now evident that, when in the course of time the oral traditions were committed to writing, Jesus’ discourses, which, with an admirable simplicity and admirable clearness, expressed a good deal in a few words, must have been handed down in far more authentic form than the history of his deeds; and that among his discourses, those which contained truths of general application were more faithfully remembered than those which expressed personal views—as, for example, those in which he claims to be Messiah. The oldest written accounts of his life and work are lost to us forever; they were, without doubt, written in the language which was used by Jesus and his disciples, Aramaic, a sister tongue of Hebrew. Of the existing Gospels, written in Greek, the first three, called “synoptics” (i. e., agreeing), are based on one older original gospel or account; the third Gospel, John’s, stands by itself. The new criticism regards Mark’s Gospel as the most ancient: it contains almost exclusively narratives of facts, written down from memory, with the accruing embellishments and modifications; but Mark gives little of the discourses of Jesus; he says nothing, knows nothing of any supernatural birth of Jesus, and regards him simply as man. Mark’s Gospel is the basis of the other two synoptics, which draw on him for narrative, while they both add the discourses. The Gospel according to Matthew gives the discourses a Judaeo-Christian tinge; that according to Luke (who also wrote the Acts) a Gentile-Christian coloring: but they both waver between the opinions that Jesus is God and man, and that he is only man. But the Gospel literature was lifted out of this state of hesitation by the fourth Gospel. This Gospel bears the name of the Judaeo-Christian apostle John, but erroneously, for it had its origin in the Alexandrine school, and was written probably A. D. 160 to 170. The Alexandrines, as we have seen, were wont to resolve all accounts of facts, whether real or fictitious, into mental concepts, and, therefore, lived in a cloudworld of ideas. Whereas, the first apostles regarded the Nazarene merely as man, and while for Paul and the evangelists Matthew and Luke he was a god-man, the Joannine Gospel makes him God, and represents his existence on earth in palpable human form, as a mere passing incident. Hence it proclaims him the “Word” (logos), which Philo Judaeus discovered; which Logos not only was “in the beginning” with God, but was God himself. For the author of the fourth Gospel the narrative of occurrences in the life of Jesus is a secondary matter, serving only as a setting for his own peculiar doctrines. Thus the doctrine of the godhead of Jesus is the result of Grecian influence.

Besides these four generally received Gospels several others, in one place or another, at one time or another, have passed for revealed writings. They are written, some in Aramaic, some in Greek, some in Latin, and, since their uncanonical character was decided, have been classed as Apocrypha. Their contents, barring a few passages that show some elevation of thought, are mostly in the jejune and tasteless vein of those trivial accounts of miracles which we find in the canonical Gospels, such as the changing of water into wine, the cursing of the figtree, Peter’s draught of fishes, etc.; or they are of a still more paltry sort, and tell of a number of miracles wrought by Jesus in his childhood. There are also apocryphal Acts of Apostles, apocryphal Apocalypses, and apocryphal Epistles, all of them what we should now call “pamphlets” composed in the interest of parties in the church.

But the “Word” of the Joannine Gospel became the password for the reunion of all parties. The influences that had brought thousands of Gentiles into the Church were all too strong for the resistance of the Judaeo-Christian party to overcome. The little Judaeo-Christian fold had no choice, therefore, but either to go back to Judaism or to become Gentile Christians—unless they were ready to suffer excommunication by the latter. Only small fractions of the Jewish-Christian body held out as sects apart, while the union of the ever-multiplying Gentile Christians, now styled the “Catholic” church, unchurched the “heretics,” and set up the “new law” in opposition to the old, as its own inviolable foundation. Thus came into being the present collection of New Testament books, the “Church Catholic” having, about the end of the second century, separated the apocryphal from the canonical Scriptures. But still for a long time the character of individual books was in dispute, and John’s “Revelation,” together with several of the Epistles, was till recent times regarded by different persons or parties as apocryphal. To the decrees of councils and popes alone is it owing that there exists to-day a canonical collection of Scriptures, and that the books of the Canon are held to be inspired.

7. THE ELEMENTS OF THE CHURCH.

In this wise was Christianism developed out of the secret associations of the ancient world. The early Christians themselves were, while under persecution, in a certain sense a secret society. Their worship possessed an essentially mystic character. It was not so from the beginning. In Jesus’ teachings there is not one word about divine service or cults; his surviving disciples knew of no other cult than the Jewish, and they assembled for “breaking bread” in their houses without any parade. Not until the Christians had been excluded from the synagogues were distinctive rites developed among them. There arose among them prophets whose inspired words were the principal feature of the religious service. Psalms were sung, not yet in the grand, impressive melodies of the Middle Age, but in “the long-drawn, partly nasal moaning tones, still usual in Eastern lands—tones that defy all musical harmony.” Besides, men then “spake tongues,” or at least uttered “heaven-storming words” pell-mell in the heat of enthusiasm, which no one, speaker or hearer, could well understand; and men “prophesied,” especially about the end of the world, the too slow oncoming of which caused much wonderment in those days. All these stupidities, by degrees, gave way before the efforts of strong-willed men like Paul. The “words in meeting” and the Lord’s Supper (or Love Feast), fell into the background, and the supper came to be simply a souvenir of the Saviour’s death, and at last was developed into a sacrament possessing the character of a “mystery;” i. e., a performance that must remain inscrutable to men, though it was men that contrived it. Baptism was associated as a sacrament with the supper, and the mysteries were multiplied. We have already seen how the mysteries of the Incarnation and Resurrection arose, namely, out of the necessity of giving to Jesus the stamp of deity, for without that Christianism never would have attained a commanding place in the world. How to these mysteries, by the purely human decrees of the Nicaean Synod, the supreme and most incomprehensible mystery of all was added, the mystery of the Trinity; how, because of the impossibility of coming to agreement regarding this, the Church Catholic was split into the Roman and Greek, or Western and Eastern churches; how in the Western Church the bishops of Rome achieved supremacy; all this belongs, not to the history of the mysteries, but to the history of the Church.