Visionaries

by James Huneker

I

A DOUBTER

Brother Hyzlo sat in his cell and read. The gentle stillness of a rare spring morning enveloped him with its benison. And the clear light fell upon the large pages of a book in his hand,—the window through which it streamed was the one link between the young recluse and the life of the world. From it he could see the roofs of the city beneath him; when he so wished, he might, without straining his gaze, distinguish the Pantheon at the end of that triumphal avenue which spanned the Seine and had once evoked for him visions of antique splendour. But Brother Hyzlo no longer cared for mundane delights. His doubting soul was the battle-field over which he ranged day and night searching for diabolic opponents. Exterior existence had become for him a shadow; the only life worth living was that of the spirit.

In his book that fresh spring morning he read as if in the flare of a passing meteor these disquieting words:—

"How were it if, some day or night, a demon stole after thee into thy most solitary solitude, and said to thee: 'This life, as thou livest it now, and hast lived it, thou shalt have to live over again, and not once but innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh, and everything in thy life, the great and the unspeakably petty alike, must come again to thee, and all in the same series and succession; this spider, too, and this moonlight betwixt the trees and this moment likewise and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of time is always turned again, and thou with it, thou atom of dust'? Wouldst thou not cast thyself down and with gnashing of teeth curse the demon who thus spoke? Or, hast thou ever experienced the tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: 'Thou art a god and never heard I anything more divine'?"

The book slipped from his hands. "Why not?" he murmured, "why not? There is no such thing as chance. The law of probabilities is not a mere fancy, but an austere need. Matter is ever in evolution. Energy alone is indestructible. Radium has revealed this to us. In eternity when the Infinite throws the dice, double-sixes are sure to come up more than once. Miracles? But why miraculous? Infinity of necessity must repeat itself, and then I, sitting here now, will sit here again, sit and doubt the goodness of God, ay, doubt His existence.... How horrible!" He paused in the whirl of his thoughts.

"Yet how beautiful, for if the eternal recurrence be truth, then must the great drama of the Redemption be repeated. Then will our foes be convinced of Christianity and its reality. But shall we be conscious in that far-off time of our anterior existence? Ah! hideous, coiling doubt. What a demon is this Nietzsche to set whirring in the brains of poor, suffering humanity such torturing questions! Better, far better for the world to live and not to think. Thought is a disease, a morbid secretion of the brain-cells. Ah! materialist that I am, I can no longer think without remembering the ideas of Cabanis, that gross atheist. Why am I punished so? What crimes have I committed in a previous existence—Karma, again!—that I must perforce study the writings of impious men? Yet I submitted myself as a candidate for the task, to save my brethren in Christ from soiling their hearts. Heaven preserve me from the blight of spiritual pride, but I believe that I am now a scapegoat for the offences of my fellow-monks, and, thus, may redeem my own wretched soul. Ah! Nietzsche—Antichrist."

He arose and threw the volume across his cell. Then going to the window regarded with humid gaze the world that sprawled below him in the voluptuous sunshine. But so sternly was the inner eye fixed on the things of the spirit that he soon turned away from the delectable picture, and as he did so his glance rested upon a crucifix. He started, his perturbed imagination again touched.

"What if Nietzsche were right? The first Christian, the only Christian, died on the cross, he has said. What an arraignment of our precious faith, Jesus Christ, our Lord God! What sweet names are Thine! How could Nietzsche not feel the music of that Hebrew-Greek combination? Perhaps he did; perhaps he masked a profound love behind his hatred. Jesus our Lord! Hebrew-Greek. But why Greek? Why ...?" Another pause in this sequestered chamber where the buzzing of an insect could assume a thunderous roar. "The eternal return. Why should Christ return? Must the earth be saved again and again and a billion times again? Awful thought of a God descending to a horrible death to cleanse the nameless myriads from sins which they seek ever as flies treacle. More ghastly still is the thought that the atheist Scandinavian put into the mouth of his Julian the Apostate: When our Christ is not saving this earth from eternal damnation then he may be visiting remote planets or inaccessible stars, where coloured double suns of blinding brilliancy revolve terrifically in twin harness. There, too, are souls to be rescued. What a grand idea! It is Ibsen's, as is the interpretation of the Third Kingdom. It should have been Nietzsche's. Why this antinomianism? Why this eternal conflict of evil and good, of night and day, of sweet and sour, of God and devil, of Ormuzd and Ahriman?"

The exotic names transposed his thoughts to another avenue. If Christ is to come again, and the holy word explicitly states that He will, why not Buddha? Why not Brahma? Why not ...? Again a hiatus. This time something snapped in his head. He sank back in his chair. Buddha! Was there ever a Buddha? And if there was not, was there ever such a personality as Christ's? Scholar that he was he knew that myth-building was a pastime for the Asiatic imagination, great, impure, mysterious Asia—Asia the mother of all religions, the cradle of the human race. To deny the objective existence of Christ would set at rest all his doubts, one overwhelming doubt swallowing the minor doubts. He had never speculated at length upon the Christ legend, for did not Renan, yes, that silky heretic, believe in the personality of Jesus, believe and lovingly portray it? The Nietzsche doctrine of the eternal recurrence had so worked upon his sensitive mental apparatus that he could have almost denied the existence of Christ rather than deny that our universe repeats itself infinitely. Eternity is a wheel, earthly events are the spokes of this whirring wheel. It was the seeming waste of divine material that shocked his nerves. One crucifixion—yes; but two or two quintillions and infinitely more!

Brother Hyzlo stared at the crucifix. Was it only a symbol, as some learned blasphemers averred? The human figure so painfully extended upon it was a God, a God who descended from high heaven to become a shield between the wrath of His Father and humanity. Why? Why should the God who created us grow angry with our shortcomings? We are His handiwork. Are we then to blame for our imperfections? Is not Jesus, instead of a mediator, rather a votive offering to the wounded vanity of the great Jehovah? Was not Prometheus—a light broke in upon Hyzlo. Prometheus, a myth, Buddha a myth. All myths. There were other virgin-born saviours. Krishna, Mithra, Buddha. Vishnu had not one but nine incarnations. Christianity bears alarming resemblances to Mithraism. Mithra, too, was born in a cave. The dates of Christ's birth and death may be astronomical: the winter and vernal equinoxes. But the conflict of the authorities regarding these dates is mortifying. The four gospels are in reality four witnesses warring against each other. They were selected haphazard at a human council. They were not composed until the latter part of the second century, and the synoptic gospels are compilations from unknown writers, while the fourth gospel is a much later work. And how colourless, imitative, is the New when compared to the Old Testament,—echoing with the antiphonal thunders of Jehovah and his stern-mouthed Prophets! The passage in Josephus touching on Christ is now known to have been interpolated. Authentic history does not record the existence of Christ. Not one of His contemporaries mentions him. That tremendous drama in Galilee was not even commented upon by the Romans, a nation keen to notice any deviation from normal history. The Jewish records are doubtful, written centuries after His supposed death. And they are malicious. What cannot happen in two centuries? Hyzlo reflected sadly upon Moslemism, upon Mormonism, upon the vagaries of a strange American sect at whose head was said to be a female pope.

The similarity of circumstances in the lives of Buddha and Christ also annoyed him. Both were born of virgins, both renounced the world, both were saviours. There were the same temptations, the same happenings; prophecies, miracles, celestial rejoicings, a false disciple, the seven beatitudes—a reflection of the Oriental wisdom—an expiatory death and resurrection. The entire machinery of the Christian church, its saints, martyrs, festivals, ritual, and philosophies are borrowed from the mythologies of the pagans. Sun-worship is the beginning of all religions. To the genius of the epileptic Paul, or Saul,—founders of religions are always epilepts,—a half Greek and disciple of the Pharisee Gamaliel, who saw visions and put to the sword his enemies, to Paul, called a saint, a man of overwhelming personal force, to this cruel anarchist, relentless, half-mad fanatic and his theological doctrines we owe the preservation and power of the Christian Church. At first the Christians were the miserable offscourings of society, slaves, criminals, and lunatics. They burrowed in the Catacombs, they fastened themselves upon a decaying and magnificent civilization like the parasites they were. A series of political catastrophes, a popular uprising against the rotten emperors of decadent Rome, and the wide growth of the socialist idea—these things and an unscrupulous man, Constantine the Great, put the Christians firmly in the saddle. And soon came cataracts of blood. If the tales of the imperial persecutions are true, then hath Christianity been revenged a million fold; where her skirt has trailed there has been the cruel stain of slaughter. It must not be forgotten, too, that immorality of the grossest sort was promised the deluded sectarians, compared with which the Mahometan paradise is spiritual. And the end of the world was predicted at the end of every century, and finally relegated to the millennial celebration of Christianity's birth. When, in 1000 a.d., this catastrophe did not occur, the faith received its first great shock.

He summoned to his memory a cloud of witnesses, all contradictory. Josephus was barred. Philo Judæus, who was living near the centre of things, an observer on the scent of the spiritual, a man acquainted with the writings of Rabbi Hillel, and the father of Neoplatonism—never mentions Jesus, nor does he speak of any religious uprising in Judea. The passage in Virgil, which has through the doubtful testimony of monkish writers been construed into a prophecy of a forthcoming Messiah, Hyzlo, who was a scholar, knew to have been addressed to a son of Virgil's intimate friend. Tacitus, too, has been interpolated. Seneca's ideal man is not Jesus, for Jesus is Osiris, Horus, Krishna, Mithra, Hercules, Adonis,—think of this beautiful young god's death!—Buddha. Such a mock trial and death could not have taken place under the Roman or Jewish laws. The sacraments derive from the Greeks, from the Indians—the mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, from the Haoma sacrifice of the Persians, originally Brahmanic. The Trinity, was it not a relic of that ineradicable desire for polytheism implanted in the human bosom? Was the crucifixion but a memory of those darker cults and blood sacrifices of Asia, and also of the expiating goats sent out into the wilderness? What became of that Hosanna-shouting crowd which welcomed Christ on Palm Sunday? And there never were such places as Gethsemane and Calvary. Alas! the Son of Man had indeed no spot to lay his head. And why had He made no sign when on earth! Brother Hyzlo wept bitter tears.

But he wiped them away as he considered the similarity of the massacre of the Innocents in Judea and the massacre of the male children ordered by the wicked Indian Rajah of Madura, who feared the Krishna, just conceived by divine agency. Yes, the chronicles were full of these gods born of virgins, of crucifixions,—he could remember sixteen,—of these solar myths. He caught tripping in a thousand cases the translations of our holy books. The Ox and Ass legend at the Nativity he realized was the Pseudo-Matthew's description to Habakkuk of the literal presence: "In the midst of two animals thou shalt be known;" which is a mistranslated Hebrew text in the Prayer ascribed to Habakkuk. It got into the Greek Septuagint version of the Prophet made by Egyptian Jews before 150 b.c. It should read, "in the midst of the years," not "animals." "Ah!" cried Hyzlo, "in this as in important cardinal doctrines have the faithful been the slaves of the learned and unscrupulous pious forgers. Even the notorious Apollonius of Tyana imitated the miracles of Christ—all of them. And what of that wicked wizard, Simon Magus?"

The very repetition of these miracles in all races, at all epochs, pointed to the doctrine of recurrence. But back of all the negations, back of the inexpugnable proof that no such man or God as Christ existed, or was known to his contemporaries, Jewish and Roman, there must have been some legend which had crystallized into a mighty religion. Was He an agitator who preferred His obscurity that His glory might be all the greater? There must have been a beginning to the myth; behind the gospels—though they are obviously imitated from the older testaments, imitated and diluted—were unknown writings; previous to these there was word of mouth and—and ...?

The day had advanced, the sun was very warm. A shaft of light fell upon the cold stone floor, and in its fiery particles darted myriads of motes. Hyzlo followed their spiral flights, thinking all the while of humanity which flashes from out the dark void, plays madly in the light, only to vanish into the unknown night. His gaze was held by the smoothness of the flagging at his feet. Then it became transformed into marble, the walls of his cell widened, and he closed his eyes, so blinding were the long ladders of light....