Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

"What, then," it will be said, "did not the Christ set His disciples free at the outset from all the errors and superstitions of the past? Did He not at once give them perfect dogmas, a completed form of worship, an immutable and completed system of ethics?" No; Jesus did nothing of the kind. So far from formally and systematically criticising the traditional religion of His people, so far from making ex cathedra that selection which the vulgar looked for, Jesus expressly refused it, as a method essentially false and irreligious. He did not wish to abolish anything by mere authority; He preferred rather to confirm the tradition in its totality, of which He was the heir and not the executioner. "Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the Prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil" (Matt. v. 17).

His method was quite different. It was the method of the sower to whom He loved to compare Himself. In the furrow made by His word in the ancient soil of Judaism, He quietly and gently deposited new germs. In the traditional and theocratic notions of His race He placed contents altogether different drawn from His own religious experience, and from the sense of His filial relation to the Father. He then left time to do its work, to develop one after another the consequences of the principles He had planted in human souls. He sowed, and He and others reap from age to age the harvest He has sown.

Consider His attitude towards the Law of Moses. Not a jot or tittle of it is to fail or be neglected. He strengthens it rather than relaxes its claims; He deepens it, carries it inward, makes it infinitely more spiritual and searching. He gathers it up into two great commandments, and constrains the Law itself, if I may so speak, to surpass itself and transform itself into pure evangelical morality. That is what He meant by declaring that His work would be the fulfilment of the Law. Nothing was less violent; but nothing, at bottom, was more revolutionary.... It is easy now to see the consequences of this method; history has revealed them. But those who heard the words of Jesus could not perceive these consequences. They had no idea probably that the day would come when to be faithful to the Master they would be obliged to break with Moses. They did not suddenly break with Judaism. Indeed, they had found in their new faith new motives for fervour and exactitude in their Mosaic piety. The first Christians in Jerusalem were honoured of all the people because of their assiduity in the Temple worship and for their exemplary devotion. They are therefore not enfranchised yet; they will have to free themselves from Judaism in the school of events into which they will be led by the Spirit of Jesus that is with them and dwells in them. The Christian principle will have to reconquer its independence of the Judaism which dominates and hems them in on every side. This will be the work of more than a century of conflict and controversy. All Christians will not enter into the movement with the same decision; they will not march abreast on the path of liberty. Many will be stupid and turn back. Progress would not have been made if the Divine Spirit that had raised up Jesus had not raised up valiant men like Stephen, Saul of Tarsus, Barnabas, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and that of the Fourth Gospel, to carry on the struggle against the bondage of Judaism and carry it to complete victory. When you pass from the one to the other, from the discourse of Stephen to the Epistle to the Galatians, from the Epistle to the Romans to the Johannean theology, you clearly see the march of progress. At the end of the first century Christianity is so independent of national and traditional Judaism that the one treats the other, without any further scruple, as an alien and hostile religion.

More adhesive still to the Christian principle, less easy to strip off, was the second Jewish wrappage, apocalyptic Messianism. Jesus had so thoroughly consecrated it by calling Himself the Messiah and by inaugurating the kingdom of God, that His Gospel might be named a "Christian Messianism." In His discourses He seems to have confirmed it still more expressly than the Law of Moses. No doubt He proceeded in both cases alike. In all the theocratic notions which constituted this popular Messianism, He lodged a new content, a religious and moral element which must, in the long run, make them burst their trammels and elevate Messianism above itself. But He did not bring to it any negative and abstract criticism, any more than He did to the divers parts of the Mosaic tradition; He never said either that it must be abandoned or that it must be retained; He deposited in it the new principle; but He left in it many obscurities, abandoning to time and to the force of things the care of drawing forth the consequences and clearing up confusions.

For His own part He wished simply to maintain intact beneath these apocalyptic forms the principle and the inspiration of His inward piety. It was in accordance with these that He interpreted the popular beliefs, adapting them with a perfect sovereignty to the moral aim and nature of His work. As with the Mosaic Law, so with Messianism; He is its Master, not its slave. He uses it, but does not abandon Himself to it. These hopes never trouble the clearness of His religious vision; they do not take away His self-possession, or alter the direction, always exclusively moral, of His acts. He accepts the title of Messiah, but only after substituting the idea of the suffering and humiliated for the national and triumphant Messiah. If He preaches the kingdom of God, He takes care to explain the conditions and the true goods of the kingdom—humility, repentance, childlike confidence, righteousness, disinterested love, the joy of serving God and man. He leaves to men of the flesh the pomp and splendour which dazzle the eyes of the flesh. He admires the grandeur of John the Baptist more than that of Herod. The kingdom of God will not come with ostentation. It will begin like an unseen seed that a man puts into the ground.

At the outset of His work Jesus encountered a mysterious temptation. This was the conflict of His consciousness with the seductions of the popular Messianism. He triumphed over it with difficulty; but thenceforth He was always on His guard in that direction. Is it not remarkable that this very temptation returned to Him through the mouth of Peter? Jesus treats as Satan the first of His apostles, and refers to the devil in person and the prince of darkness suggestions of this nature which tend to make Him deviate from the road marked out by the inspiration of His heart. He avoids the title Messiah until the day when He is able to join with it the image of the Cross. He disdains the title, "Son of David," preferring to all others that of "Son of Man," a title that was not open to the same mistakes. On this road of renunciation He must sacrifice not only His ease, His joys, and His repose, but also, at each step, some of the beliefs of Israel, and some of the glories of the Messiah. He never hesitates. His people reject Him, and He turns to His Father and says to Him: "Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight." He agonises in Gethsemane, the Messiah agonises in Him, and He prays thus: "Father, not My will, but Thine be done."

Hence comes His freedom of spirit, the elevation of His view in the interpretation of events, as also His pious and trustful reserve in face of the enigmas and obscurities that His glance cannot penetrate. John the Baptist is beheaded in prison: singular destiny for that formidable Elijah who was to inaugurate by thunder and lightning the Messianic era, the dream of all patriots! Is Jesus offended by it? Does He hesitate to declare that John at that very moment is "the Elias which was for to come"? What a defiance to the oracles of the popular Messianism! When the sons of Zebedee desire Him to reserve for them the foremost places in His future kingdom, He merely speaks to them of the baptism of martyrdom, and teaches them that they must leave such things at the disposal of the Father. No doubt, He never contradicts apocalyptic predictions; on the contrary He applies to Himself all the promises of glory and of triumph; but always in subjection to the Father's will. Asked as to the date of the Messiah's advent, He answers that He does not know, that they must observe the blossoms on the fig-tree and the signs of the times around Himself; that they must watch and pray, possess their souls in patience, and abandon to the Father the decisions of which He keeps the impenetrable secret.

I speak of freedom of interpretation and of pious reserve, not of hypocritical and sceptical accommodation. We cannot doubt that Jesus accepted at the outset, and shared, at bottom, the Messianic beliefs in which He had been trained like all the children of His race. That His disciples, in reporting His discourses on this point, exaggerated and materialised them, need not be denied. But, on the other hand you can hardly explain the unanimity of the earliest Christian tradition in expecting His return upon the clouds if Jesus had professed entirely opposite ideas. After all, is there anything more astonishing in His sharing on this matter the hopes of His time than in the fact of His having explained certain mysterious maladies as His contemporaries did by demoniacal possession, or of His attributing Psalm cx., as did certain of the rabbis, to King David; to the first Isaiah the work of the second, and to Moses the redaction of the Pentateuch? These current and traditional ideas, however, which came to Him, not from heaven, but from His race and His environment, never succeeded in corrupting the immutable purity of His inner piety or in falsifying the divine inspirations of His heart. Whenever there was contradiction between the Messianic beliefs or the Law of Moses, on the one hand, and the consciousness of Jesus, on the other, it was not the latter but the former that gave way and were transformed.

The disciples were not so free as the Master. Their faith remained a long time bound to these hopes of the future. Why had they left all and followed Him but because He had appeared to them to be the bearer and the depository of the divine promises? His death, which seemed to belie their beliefs, only served to give them another turn. They corrected prophecy. Instead of one Advent of the Messiah they imagined two, the first in humiliation, the second in glory. The one having been realised, they expected the other with a more ardent confidence. No one doubted it was near. The apostle Paul lived in this hope as well as the author of the Apocalypse, the compilers of the synoptic gospels, and the editors of "The Teaching of the Apostles." The time is short: the Master comes: Maranatha. This was the watchword of all the early Christians. This faith in the imminent return of Christ and of the end of the world dominates all the thoughts as well as the feelings of the apostles: it determines and colours their Christology, their theory of Redemption, their ethics, their idea of salvation, so that to expound their writings and estimate the worth of their reasonings, the historian must always read them and explain them in this light. It is for this reason that their Christianity merits the name of Messianic, and could not be, in this Jewish form, an absolute norm for all the ages.

The disciples of Jesus, however, found themselves in a school in which they could not perpetually mistake the lessons. The Christian principle had appeared to be at one with Messianism; it was something altogether different and could not continue for ever to be mixed up with it. Under the contradiction of events and the action of the spirit of Jesus, they soon began to see the dawn of a process of spiritualisation in their apocalyptic beliefs. This progress is manifest in the letters of St. Paul when read in their order and with attention. In the first, he hopes before he dies to witness the advent of the Lord. But, from the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, the image of death and martyrdom begins to interpose itself between his faith and that glorious ideal, which evermore seems to recede into the future. It never entirely disappears, but this preoccupation with the return of Jesus diminishes and occupies a smaller space in his later epistles. On the contrary, the work of Jesus, considered in the past and in its redemptive efficacy, the Christian life conceived as a life of faith and love, as an imitation of Jesus Christ and an inheriting of His Spirit, receive ever-increasing developments. Insensibly, the centre of gravity of apostolic Christianity changes; from the hypnotising contemplation of the Messianic future, it passes to the sanctifying meditation on the passion of Christ, on His teaching, and redeeming work. This is best seen in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in the Fourth Gospel, in which the Jewish Messiah is transformed into the eternal Logos, the light of all men here below, and the principle of the universal religion.