—and finding in the cosmos no correspondence with his vision. Nor could Jesus, who had outgrown the notion of a heavenly despot, even find the satisfaction of the Prometheus of Æschylus:
“You see me fettered here, a god ill-starred,
The enemy of Zeus, abhorred of all
That tread the courts of his omnipotence,
Because of mine exceeding love for men.”
Yet in a sense the despair of Jesus was unwarranted. The universe had not forsaken him; it contained, on the contrary, the media for his eternal influence. On the physical plane, indeed, it could do nothing for him; crucifixion must kill or the cosmos must change to chaos. But on the spiritual plane he could neither be killed nor forsaken. Infinitely less tragic his death than that of Napoleon, of whom we might say, in the words of Sannazaro,
“Omnia vincebas, superabas omnia Cæsar,
Omnia deficiunt, incipis esse nihil.”
It was Moses who more voluntarily than Jesus offered his life that the equilibrium of this righteous universe should not be shaken. “Ye have sinned a great sin; and now I will go up unto the Lord; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin.” And the atonement offered ran: “Blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written.” Here, then, in the Old Testament, and not in the New, first appears the notion of vicarious atonement. But the Old Testament sternly rejects it; “Whoever hath sinned against Me, him will I blot out of My book.” Beside which trenchant repudiation the Christian reading of the Old Testament as a mere prolegomenon to the Crucifixion, an avenue to Calvary strewn with textual finger-posts, appears a more than usually futile word-play of the theological mind. One might, indeed, more easily discover the germ of the atonement idea in Iphigenia. And that the Greek mind had spiritualised itself—even before it contributed the logos to Christianity—is obvious not only from its literature and its Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries, but from its art. For the Hellenic art of Raphael was, after all, only the Renaissance view of Hellas, and the Greek myths in his hands were merely a charming Pagan poetry, no truer to the Hellenism of the great period than was the “Endymion” or “Hyperion” of Keats. How can I look at the statue of Apollo in this same Museum of Naples and not see that the very type of Christ had been pre-figured? I mean the Christ with the haunting eyes and the long ringlets, for this Apollo is a nobler figure by far than the Christ of the Byzantine mosaics. And I am not the first to remember that Apollo is the Son of Zeus the Father.
It is very strange. The Greeks, beginning with a Nature-religion, come in the course of the centuries to find it inadequate and to yearn for something beyond—