Logical hollowness of the position of the liberal Protestants.
Let us speak first of the liberal Protestants. Liberal Protestantism, which resolves the very dogmas of its creed into mere symbols, stands no doubt in the scale of progress in about the same relation to orthodox Protestantism as the latter does in relation to Catholicism. But far as it seems in advance of them from the point of view of morals and society, it is inferior to them in logic. Catholicism has been irreverently called a perfectly embalmed corpse, a Christian mummy, in an admirable state of preservation beneath the cold embroidered chasubles and surplices which envelop it; Luther’s Protestantism tears the body to shreds, liberal Protestantism reduces it to dust. To preserve Christianity while suppressing Christ the son, or at least the messenger of God, is an undertaking of which they alone will be capable who are little disposed to make much of what is known as logic. Whoever does not believe in Revelation ought frankly to confess himself a philosopher, and to hold the Bible and the New Testament as little authoritative as the dialogues of Plato, or the treatises of Aristotle, or the Vedas, or the Talmud. Liberal Protestants, as Herr von Hartmann, one of their bitterest adversaries, remarks, seize upon the whole body of modern ideas and label them Christianity. The process is not very consistent. If you are absolutely determined to rally round a flag, let it at least be your own. But the liberal Protestants wish, and honestly, to be and to remain Protestants; in Germany, they obstinately remain in the United Evangelical Church of Prussia, where they about as truly belong as a sparrow does in the nest of a swallow. Herr von Hartmann, whose zeal against them is unflagging, compares them to a man whose house is riven in many places and going to ruin, and who perceives and does all that in him lies still further to shatter it, and continues, nevertheless, tranquilly to sleep in it and even to call in passers-by and offer them board and lodging. Or again—always according to Herr von Hartmann—they are like a man who should seat himself in perfect confidence upon a chair after having first sawed through all four legs of it. Strauss had already said: “The instant that Jesus is regarded as no more than a man, one has no longer any right to pray to him, to retain him as the centre of a cult, to preach the whole year through on him, on his actions, on his adventures and maxims; in especial, if the more important of his adventures and actions have been recognized as fabulous, and if his maxims are demonstrably incompatible with our present views on human life and the world.” To understand what is peculiar in the majority of liberal communions which always stop halfway, it is necessary to observe that they are generally the work of ecclesiastics who have broken with the dominant church, and that they preserve to the end some suggestion of their former belief; they can no more think, except in the terms of the formulæ of some dogma, than we can speak in the words of a language with which we are unacquainted; and even when they endeavour to acquire a new language they speak it always with an accent which betrays their nationality. For the rest they feel instinctively that the name of Christ lends them a certain authority, and they find it impossible to abandon their profession and its emoluments. In Germany, and even in France, over and above the liberal Protestants, who in the latter place are few in number, former Catholics have sought to abandon orthodox Catholicism, but they have not dared to abandon Christianity. The case of Father Hyacinthe[59] is sufficiently well known. It is in vain for those who are born Christians to try their hand at logic, and to make an effort to rid themselves of their faith. They make one think, in spite of one’s self, of a fly caught in a spider-web, who has freed one wing and one leg, and only one.
Neo-Christianity.
Let us endeavour, however, to enter more intimately into the thoughts of those who may be called the Neo-Christians, and let us seek for the element of truth, if such there be, that their much-criticised doctrine contains. If Jesus is only a man, they say, he is at least the most extraordinary of men; at one bound, by an intuition at once natural and divine, he discovered the supreme truth necessary to the life of humanity; he is in advance of all times, he spoke not only for his own people, nor for his own century, nor even for a score of centuries; his voice rolled beyond the restricted circle of his auditors, and the twelve apostles, beyond the people of Judea prostrate before him, to us in whose ears it sounds the eternal truth; and it finds us even still attentive, listening, trying to understand it, incapable of finding a substitute for it. “In Jesus,” writes Pastor Bost in his work on “Le Protestantisme libéral,” “the mingling of the human and the divine was accomplished in proportions not seen elsewhere. His relation to God is the normal and typical relation of humanity to the Creator.... Jesus stands forever as the model.” Professor Herman Schultz in a conference in Göttingen, some years ago, also expressed the same idea, that Jesus is really the Messiah, properly so called, in the sense that the Jews attached to that word. He did found the kingdom of God, not it is true by marvellous exploits like those of Moses or of Elias, but by an exploit surpassing theirs, by the sacrifice of love, by the voluntary gift of himself. The apostles and Christians in general did not believe in Jesus because of the miracles he performed: they accepted his miracles owing to their previous faith in him, a faith the true foundation of which lay in Christ’s moral superiority, and that subsists still even if one deny the miracles. Professor Schultz concludes, against Strauss and M. Renan, that “a belief in Christ is wholly independent of the results of a historical criticism of his life.” Every one of the actions attributed to Jesus may be mythical, but there remain to us his words and his thoughts, which find in us an eternal echo. There are things which one discovers once for all, and whosoever has found love has made a discovery that is not illusory nor of brief duration. Is it not just that men should group themselves about him, range themselves under his name? He himself loves to call himself the Son of Man; it is under this title that humanity should revere him. It is not destruction but reconstruction that is the outcome of contemporary biblical exegesis, one of the representatives of English Unitarianism, the Rev. A. Armstrong, said in 1883. It adds to our love of Jesus to recognize in him a brother and to see in the marvellous legends associated with him no more than the symbol of a love more naïve than ours, that namely of his disciples. Proof by miracle is but the ultimate form of a temptation from which humanity should escape. In the symbolic story of the temptation in the desert, Satan says: “Command that these stones be made bread;” he urged Christ to be guilty of a miracle, of the prestidigitation which the ancient prophets had employed so frequently to strike the imagination of the people. But Jesus refused. And on another occasion he said to the people indignantly: If you did not see prodigies and miracles you do not believe, and to the Pharisees: “Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, ... and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?” It is by the testimony of our own souls, say the Neo-Christians; it is by our own individual conscience, our own individual reason, that we shall find justice in the word of Christ, and that we shall revere it; and this word is not true because it is divine, it is divine because it is true.
Modern German historical criticism and liberal Protestantism.
Thus understood, liberal Protestantism is a doctrine that merits discussion; only it is sadly in lack of any distinguishing characteristic especially to mark it off from the numerous philosophical sects which, in the course of history, have gathered about the opinions of some man and endeavoured to identify his teachings with the truth and to lend to them an authority more than human. Pythagoras was for his disciples what Jesus is to the liberal Protestant. The traditional respect also of the Epicureans for their master is well known, the sort of worship they rendered him, the authority that they lent to his words.[60] Pythagoras brought to light a great idea, that of the harmony which governs the physical and moral universe; Epicurus, another, that of the happiness which is the true aim of rational conduct, the measure of goodness, and even of truth; and by their disciples these two great ideas came to be looked upon not as parts of the truth but as truth itself in its entirety; they saw no ground for further search. In the same way, in our own times, the Positivists see in Auguste Comte not a profound thinker simply, but one who has laid his finger, so to speak, on the definitive verity, one who has traversed at a dash the whole domain of intelligence and traced out once for all its limits. It is rigorously exact to say that Auguste Comte is a sort of Christ for bigoted Positivists—a Christ a trifle too recent, who did not have the happiness of dying on the cross. Each of these sects reposes on the following belief: Before Pythagoras, Epicurus, or Comte, nobody had seen the truth; after them nobody will ever see it more clearly. Such a creed implicitly denies: 1. Historical continuity, the inevitable result of which is that the man of genius is always more or less the expression of his century and that the honour of his discoveries is not due wholly to himself; 2. Human evolution, the inevitable result of which is that the man of genius cannot be the expression of all the centuries to come—that his point of view must necessarily be some day passed by—that the truth discovered by him is not the whole truth but simply a stage in the infinite progress of the human mind. A deus dixit is comprehensible, or if not comprehensible at least conceivable; but to resuscitate in favour of some mere human being, were it Jesus himself, the magister dixit of the Middle Ages, is a bit of an anachronism. Geometers have always held Euclid in the highest respect, but each of them has done his best to contribute some new theorem to the body of doctrine that he left behind; and is the rule for moral truth not the same as that for mathematical truth? Is it within the compass of one man’s powers to know and to utter all that there is to be known? Is an autocracy the only form of government in the sphere of mind? Liberal Protestants speak to us of the “secret of Jesus”; but there are many secrets in this world, and each of us carries his own; and who shall utter the secret of secrets, the last word, the supreme verity? Nobody in particular, probably; truth is the product of a prodigious co-operation, at which all peoples and all generations must work. The horizon of truth can neither be taken in at a single glance nor contracted; to perceive the whole of it one must move forward incessantly, and at every step a new perspective is laid bare. For humanity, to live is to learn; and before any individual human being can tell us the great secret, he must have lived the life of humanity, the lives of all existing beings and even of all existing things, which seem scarcely to deserve the name of beings; he must have concentrated in himself the universe. There can therefore properly be no religion centred about a man. A man, be he Jesus himself, cannot attach the human spirit to himself as to a fixed point. Liberal Protestants think that they have seen the last of the Strausses and Renans and their destructive criticism, because they have admitted once for all that Jesus was not a god, but criticism will object to them that the non-supernatural Messiah that they cherish is himself a pure figment of the imagination. According to the rationalistic exegesis, the doctrine of Christ, like his life, belongs more or less to the domain of legend. Jesus never so much as conceived an idea of the redemption—the very conception that is which lies at the root of Christianity; he never so much as conceived an idea of the Trinity. If one may rely upon works which stand perhaps shoulder to shoulder with that of Strauss—the works of F. A. Müller, of Professor Weiss, of M. Havet—Jesus was a Jew with the spiritual limitations of a Jew. His dominant idea was that the end of the world was at hand and that on a new-created earth would soon be realized the national kingdom looked for by the Jews in the form of an altogether terrestrial theocracy. The end of the world being near, it was naturally not worth while to set up an establishment on earth for the short time that it was still to exist; one’s entire business was properly with penitence and the amendment of one’s conduct, in order not to be devoured by fire at the day of judgment and excluded from the kingdom to be founded on the new-created earth. Moreover, Jesus preached neglect of the state, of the administration of justice, of the family, of labour and of property; in effect, of all the essential elements of social life. Evangelical morality itself presents to the critics of this school little more than a disorderly mixture of the precepts of Moses on disinterested love with the doctrine of Hillel more or less well founded on enlightened self-interest. The original element in the New Testament consisted less in the logical coherence of its teachings than in a certain unction in the language employed, in a persuasive eloquence which often took the place of reasoning. All that Christ said others had said before him, but not with the same accent. In effect, German historical criticism at once professes the greatest admiration for the numerous founders of Christianity and leads its followers a long way from the ideal man conceived by the Neo-Christians as being the man-God whom primitive Christians adored. There exists accordingly no more reason to attribute an element of revelation or of sacred authority to the New Testament than to the Vedas or to any other religious book. If Christianity is a symbolic faith, the myths of India may quite as well be adopted as a basis of symbolism as the myths of the Bible. And contemporary Brahmaists with their eclecticism, confused and mystic as it often is, must be regarded as even nearer to the truth than the liberal Protestants who still look for shelter and salvation nowhere but under the diminishing shadow of the cross.
Abandoning, then, all effort to attribute a sacred authority to the sacred books and to the Christian tradition, may one ascribe to them at least a superior moral authority? Do they lend themselves in any especial degree to such a purely æsthetic and moral symbolism as that suggested by Mr. Arnold?
Futility of Mr. Arnold’s method considered as an instrument of historical criticism.
A purely moral symbolism may be regarded from either of two points of view: the concrete, which is that of history; or the abstract, which is that of philosophy. Historically nothing could be more inexact than Mr. Arnold’s method, which essentially consists in making a present of the most refined conceptions of our epoch to primitive peoples. It gives us to understand, for example, that the Javeh of the Hebrews was not regarded as a perfectly definite person, a transcendent power altogether distinct and separate from the world and manifesting himself by acts of capricious volition, a king of the skies, a lord of battles, bestowing on his people victory or defeat, abundance or famine, sickness or health. It suffices to read one page of the Bible or the New Testament to convince one’s self that a doubt as to the personal existence of Javeh never for an instant crossed the Hebrew mind. So be it, Mr. Arnold will say, but Javeh was in their eyes no more, after all, than the personification of justice, because they believed powerfully in justice. It would be more exact to say that the Hebrews had not as yet a very philosophic notion of justice; that they conceived it as an order received from without, a command which it would be dangerous to disobey, a hostile will forcibly imposed upon one’s own. Nothing could be more natural in the sequel than to personify such a will. But is that precisely what we understand nowadays by justice; and does it not really seem to Mr. Arnold himself that he is playing on words, when he endeavours to make us believe all that? Fear of the Lord is not justice. There are matters that one cannot express in the form of legend when one has once really conceived them—matters the true poetry of which consists in their very purity, in their simplicity. To personify justice, to represent it as external to ourselves under the form of a menacing power, is not to possess a “high idea” of it; is not in the least, as Mr. Arnold phrases it, to be aglow with it, illuminated by it; it is, on the contrary, not yet really to have formed a conception of justice. What Mr. Arnold regards as the sublimest expression of an altogether modern moral sentiment is, on the contrary, a partial negation of it. Mr. Arnold’s aim, as he says, is a “literary” criticism; but the literary method consists in resetting the great works of human genius in the circumstances among which they were conceived; in discovering in them the spirit of the age in which they were written, and not of the present age. If we endeavour to interpret history by the light of modern ideas we shall never understand a jot of it. Mr. Arnold is pleasantly satirical at the expense of those who find in the Bible allusions to contemporary events, to such and such a modern custom, to such and such a dogma unknown to primitive times. A commentator, he says, finds a prediction of the flight to Egypt in the prophecy of Isaiah: “The Lord rideth upon a swift cloud and shall come into Egypt”; this light cloud being the body of Jesus born of a virgin. Another, more fantastic, perceives in the words: “Woe unto them that draw up iniquity with cords of vanity”—a malediction of God against church bells. That assuredly is a singular method of interpreting the sacred texts, but at bottom it is no more logical to look in the sacred texts for modern ideas, good or evil, than to search them for the announcement of such and such a distant event or for a commentary on such and such a trait of contemporary manners. Really to practise the literary method—and the scientific method at the same time—one must a little forget one’s self, one’s nation, one’s century; one must live the life of past times—must become a Greek when one reads Homer, a Hebrew when one reads the Bible, and not desire that Racine should be a Shakespeare, nor Boccaccio a St. Benedict, nor Jesus a free-thinker, nor Isaiah an Epictetus or a Kant. All things and all ideas are appropriate in their own times and circumstances. Gothic cathedrals are magnificent, our small houses to-day are very comfortable; there is no reason why we should not admire the one and inhabit the other; the only thing that is really inexcusable is to be absolutely unwilling that cathedrals should be what alone they are.