“Let love of the brethren continue.”—Heb. xiii: 1.
“And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and good works. Not forgetting our own assembling together as is the custom of some, but exhorting one another.”—Heb. x: 24–25.
We might say that the real transference taught in the Christian community is the condition absolutely necessary for the efficacy of the miracle of redemption; the first letter of John comes out frankly with this:
“He that loveth his brother abideth in the light.”—I John ii: 10.
“If we love one another, God abideth in us.”—I John iv: 12.
The Deity continues to be efficacious in the Christian religion only upon the foundation of brotherly love. Consequently, here too the mystery of redemption is the unresisting real transference.[[87]] One may properly ask one’s self, for what then is the Deity useful, if his efficacy consists only in the real transference? To this also the evangelical message has a striking answer:
“Men are all brothers in Christ.”
“So Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time apart from sin to them that wait for him unto salvation.”—Heb. ix: 28.
The condition of transference among brothers is to be such as between man and Christ, a spiritual one. As the history of ancient cults and certain Christian sects shows, this explanation of the Christian religion is an especially important one biologically, for the psychologic intimacy creates certain shortened ways between men which lead only too easily to that from which Christianity seeks to release them, namely to the sexual relation with all those consequences and necessities under which the really already highly civilized man had to suffer at the beginning of our Christian era. For just as the ancient religious experience was regarded distinctly as a bodily union with the Deity,[[88]] just so was worship permeated with sexuality of every kind. Sexuality lay only too close to the relations of people with each other. The moral degeneracy of the first Christian century produced a moral reaction arising out of the darkness of the lowest strata of society which was expressed in the second and third centuries at its purest in the two antagonistic religions, Christianity on the one side, and Mithracism on the other. These religions strove after precisely that higher form of social intercourse symbolic of a projected “become flesh” idea (logos), whereby all those strongest impulsive energies of the archaic man, formerly plunging him from one passion into another,[[89]] and which seemed to the ancients like the compulsion of the evil constellations, as εἱμαρμένη,[[90]] and which in the sense of later ages might be translated as the driving force of the libido,[[91]] the δύναμις κινητική[[92]] of Zeno, could be made use of for social preservation.[[93]]
It may be assumed most certainly that the domestication of humanity has cost the greatest sacrifices. An age which produced the stoical ideal must certainly have known why and against what it was created. The age of Nero serves to set off effectually the famous extracts from the forty-first letter of Seneca to Lucilius: