Part 7 (1/2)
M. Renan repeatedly declares that his great aim is to save religion by relieving it of the supernatural. He does not argue; but instead of the old familiar view of the Great History, he presents an opposite theory of his own, framed to suit that combination of the revolutionary and the sentimental which just now happens to be in favour in the unbelieving schools. And this is the result: a representation which boldly invests its ideal with the highest perfections of moral goodness, strength, and beauty, and yet does not shrink from a.s.sociating with it also--and that, too, as the necessary and inevitable condition of success--a deliberate and systematic willingness to delude and insensibility to untruth. This is the religion and this is the reason which appeals to Christ in order to condemn Christianity.
XII
RENAN'S ”LES APoTRES”[14]
[14]
_Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre II.--_Les Apotres_.
Par Ernest Renan. _Sat.u.r.day Review_, 14th July 1866.
In his recent volume, _Les Apotres_, M. Renan has undertaken two tasks of very unequal difficulty. He accounts for the origin of the Christian belief and religion, and he writes the history of its first propagation. These are very different things, and to do one of them is by no means to do the other. M. Renan's historical sketch of the first steps of the Christian movement is, whatever we may think of its completeness and soundness, a survey of characters and facts, based on our ordinary experience of the ways in which men act and are influenced. Of course it opens questions and provokes dissent at every turn; but, after all, the history of a religion once introduced into the world is the history of the men who give it shape and preach it, who accept or oppose it. The spread and development of all religions have certain broad features in common, which admit of philosophical treatment simply as phenomena, and receive light from being compared with parallel examples of the same kind; and whether a man's historical estimate is right, and his picture accurate and true, depends on his knowledge of the facts, and his power to understand them and to make them understood. No one can dispute M. Renan's qualifications for being the historian of a religious movement. The study of religion as a phenomenon of human nature and activity has paramount attractions for him. His interest in it has furnished him with ample and varied materials for comparison and generalisation. He is a scholar and a man of learning, quick and wide in his sympathies, and he commands attention by the singular charm of his graceful and lucid style. When, therefore, he undertakes to relate how, as a matter of fact, the Christian Church grew up amid the circ.u.mstances of its first appearance, he has simply to tell the story of the progress of a religious cause; and this is a comparatively light task for him. But he also lays before us what he appears to consider an adequate account of the origin of the Christian belief. The Christian belief, it must be remembered, means, not merely the belief that there was such a person as he has described in his former, volume, but the belief that one who was crucified rose again from the dead, and lives for evermore above.
It is in this belief that the Christian religion had its beginning; there is no connecting Christ and Christianity, except through the Resurrection. The origin, therefore, of the belief in the Resurrection, in the shape in which we have it, lies across M. Renan's path to account for; and neither the picture which he has drawn in his former volume, nor the history which he follows out in this, dispense him from the necessity of facing this essential and paramount element in the problem which he has to solve. He attempts to deal with this, the knot of the great question. But his attempt seems to us to disclose a more extraordinary insensibility to the real demands of the case, and to what we cannot help calling the pitiable inadequacy of his own explanation, than we could have conceived possible in so keen and practised a mind.
The Resurrection, we repeat, bars the way in M. Renan's scheme for making an intelligible transition, from the life and character which he has sought to reproduce from the Gospels, to the first beginnings and preaching of Christianity. The Teacher, he says, is unique in wisdom, in goodness, in the height of his own moral stature and the Divine elevation of his aims. The religion is, with all abatements and imperfections, the only one known which could be the religion of humanity. After his portraiture of the Teacher, follows, naturally enough, as the result of that Teacher's influence and life, a religion of corresponding elevation and promise. The pa.s.sage from a teaching such as M. Renan supposes to a religion such as he allows Christianity to be may be reasonably understood as a natural consequence of well-known causes, but for one thing--the interposition between the two of an alleged event which simply throws out all reasonings drawn from ordinary human experience. From the teaching and life of Socrates follow, naturally enough, schools of philosophy, and an impulse which has affected scientific thought ever since. From the preaching and life of Mahomet follows, equally naturally, the religion of Islam. In each case the result is seen to be directly and distinctly linked on to the influences which gave it birth, and nothing more than these influences is wanted, or makes any claim, to account for it. So M. Renan holds that all that is needed to account for Christianity is such a personality and such a career as he has described in his last volume.
But the facts will not bend to this. Christianity hangs on to Christ not merely as to a Person who lived and taught and died, but as to a Person who rose again from death. That is of the very essence of its alleged derivation from Christ. It knows Christ only as Christ risen; the only reason of its own existence that it recognises is the Resurrection. The only claim the Apostles set forth for preaching to the world is that their Master who was crucified was alive once more.
Every one knows that this was the burden of all their words, the corner-stone of all their work. We may believe them or not. We may take Christianity or leave it. But we cannot derive Christianity from Christ, without meeting, as the bond which connects the two, the Resurrection. But for the Resurrection, M. Renan's scheme might be intelligible. A Teacher unequalled for singleness of aim and n.o.bleness of purpose lives and dies, and leaves the memory and the leaven of His teaching to disciples, who by them, even though in an ill-understood shape, and with incomparably inferior qualities themselves, purify and elevate the religious ideas and feelings of mankind. If that were all, if there were nothing but the common halo of the miraculous which is apt to gather about great names, the interpretation might be said to be coherent. But a theory of Christianity cannot neglect the most prominent fact connected with its beginning. It is impossible to leave it out of the account, in judging both of the Founder and of those whom his influence moulded and inspired.
M. Renan has to account for the prominence given to the Resurrection in the earliest Christian teaching, without having recourse to the supposition of conscious imposture and a deliberate conspiracy to deceive; for such a supposition would not harmonise either with the portrait he has drawn of the Master, or with his judgment of the seriousness and moral elevation of the men who, immeasurably inferior as they were to Him, imbibed His spirit, and represented and transmitted to us His principles. And this is something much more than can be accounted for by the general disposition of the age to a.s.sume the supernatural and the miraculous. The way in which the Resurrection is circ.u.mstantially and unceasingly a.s.serted, and made on every occasion and from the first the foundation of everything, is something very different from the vague legends which float about of kings or saints whom death has spared, or from a readiness to see the direct agency of heaven in health or disease. It is too precise, too matter-of-fact, too prosaic in the way in which it is told, to be resolved into ill-understood dreams and imaginations. The various recitals show little care to satisfy our curiosity, or to avoid the appearance of inconsistency in detail; but nothing can be more removed from vagueness and hesitation than their definite positive statements.
It is with them that the writer on Christianity has to deal.
M. Renan's method is--whilst of course not believing them, yet not supposing conscious fraud--to treat these records as the description of natural, unsought visions on the part of people who meant no harm, but who believed what they wished to believe. They are the story of a great mistake, but a mistake proceeding simply, in the most natural way in the world, from excess of ”idealism” and attachment. Unaffected by the circ.u.mstance that there never were narratives less ideal, and more straightforwardly real--that they seem purposely framed to be a contrast to professed accounts of visions, and to exclude the possibility of their being confounded with such accounts; and that the alleged numbers who saw, the alleged frequency and repet.i.tion and variation of the instances, and the alleged time over which the appearances extended, and after which they absolutely ceased, make the hypothesis of involuntary and undesigned allusions of regret and pa.s.sion infinitely different from what it might be in the case of one or two persons, or for a transitory period of excitement and crisis--unaffected by such considerations, M. Renan proceeds to tell, in his own way, the story of what he supposes to have occurred, without, of course, admitting the smallest real foundation for what was so positively a.s.serted, but with very little reproach or discredit to the ardent and undoubting a.s.sertors. He begins with a statement which is meant to save the character of the Teacher. ”Jesus, though he spoke unceasingly of resurrection, of new life, had never said quite clearly that he should rise again in the flesh.” He says this with the texts before him, for he quotes them and cla.s.sifies them in a note. But this is his point of departure, laid down without qualification. Yet if there is anything which the existing records do say distinctly, it is that Jesus Christ said over and over again that He should rise again, and that He fixed the time within which He should rise. M. Renan is not bound to believe them. But he must take them as he finds them; and on this capital point either we know nothing at all, and have no evidence to go upon, or the evidence is simply inverted by M. Renan's a.s.sertion.
There may, of course, be reasons for believing one part of a man's evidence and disbelieving another; but there is nothing in this case but incompatibility with a theory to make this part of the evidence either more or less worthy of credit than any other part. What is certain is that it is in the last degree weak and uncritical to lay down, as the foundation and first pre-requisite of an historical view, a position which the records on which the view professes to be based emphatically and unambiguously contradict. Whatever we may think of it, the evidence undoubtedly is, if evidence there is at all, that Jesus Christ did say, though He could not get His disciples at the time to understand and believe Him, that He should rise again on the third day.
What M. Renan had to do, if he thought the contrary, was not to a.s.sume, but to prove, that in these repeated instances in which they report His announcements, the Evangelists mistook or misquoted the words of their Master.
He accepts, however, their statement that no one at first hoped that the words would be made good; and he proceeds to account for the extraordinary belief which, in spite of this original incredulity, grew up, and changed the course of things and the face of the world. We admire and respect many things in M. Renan; but it seems to us that his treatment of this matter is simply the _ne plus ultra_ of the degradation of the greatest of issues by the application to it of sentiment unworthy of a silly novel. In the first place, he lays down on general grounds that, though the disciples had confessedly given up all hope, it yet _was natural_ that they should expect to see their master alive again. ”Mais I'enthousiasme et l'amour ne connaissent pas les situations sans issue.” Do they not? Are death and separation such light things to triumph over that imagination finds it easy to cheat them? ”Ils se jouent de l'impossible et, plutot que d'abdiquer l'esperance, ils font violence a toute realite.” Is this an account of the world of fact or the world of romance? The disciples did not hope; but, says M. Renan, vague words about the future had dropped from their master, and these were enough to build upon, and to suggest that they would soon see him back. In vain it is said that in fact they did not expect it. ”Une telle croyance etait d'ailleurs si naturelle, que la foi des disciples aurait suffi pour la creer de toutes pieces.” Was it indeed--in spite of Enoch and Elias, cases of an entirely different kind--so natural to think that the ruined leader of a crushed cause, whose hopeless followers had seen the last of him amid the lowest miseries of torment and scorn, should burst the grave?
Il devait arriver [he proceeds] pour Jesus ce qui arrive pour tous les hommes qui ont captive l'attention de leurs semblables. Le monde, habitue a leur attribuer des vertus surhumaines, ne peut admettre qu'ils aient subi la loi injuste, revoltante, inique, du trepas commun.... La mort est chose si absurde quand elle frappe l'homme de genie ou l'homme d'un grand coeur, que le peuple ne croit pas a la possibilite d'une telle erreur de la nature. Les heros ne meurent pas.
The history of the world presents a large range of instances to test the singular a.s.sertion that death is so ”absurd” that ”the people”
cannot believe that great and good men literally die. But would it be easy to match the strangeness of a philosopher and a man of genius gravely writing this down as a reason--not why, at the interval of centuries, a delusion should grow up--but why, on the very morrow of a crucifixion and burial, the disciples should have believed that all the dreadful work they had seen a day or two before was in very fact and reality reversed? We confess we do not know what human experience is if it countenances such a supposition as this.
From this antecedent probability he proceeds to the facts. ”The Sabbath day which followed the burial was occupied with these thoughts....
Never was the rest of the Sabbath so fruitful.” They all, the women especially, thought of him all day long in his bed of spices, watched over by angels; and the a.s.surance grew that the wicked men who had killed him would not have their triumph, that he would not be left to decay, that he would be wafted on high to that Kingdom of the Father of which he had spoken. ”Nous le verrons encore; nous entendrons sa voix charmante; c'est en vain qu'ils l'auront tue.” And as, with the Jews, a future life implied a resurrection of the body, the shape which their hope took was settled. ”Reconnaitre que la mort pouvait etre victorieuse de Jesus, de celui qui venait de supprimer son empire, c'etait le comble de l'absurdite.” It is, we suppose, irrelevant to remark that we find not the faintest trace of this sense of absurdity.
The disciples, he says, had no choice between hopelessness and ”an heroic affirmation”; and he makes the bold surmise that ”un homme penetrant aurait pu annoncer _des le samedi_ que Jesus revivrait.” This may be history, or philosophy, or criticism; what it is _not_ is the inference naturally arising from the only records we have of the time spoken of. But the force of historical imagination dispenses with the necessity of extrinsic support. ”La pet.i.te societe chretienne, ce jour-la, opera le veritable miracle: elle ressuscita Jesus en son coeur par l'amour intense qu'elle lui porta. Elle decida que Jesus ne mourrait pas.” The Christian Church has done many remarkable things; but it never did anything so strange, or which so showed its power, as when it took that resolution.
How was the decision, involuntary and unconscious, and guiltless of intentional deception, if we can conceive of such an att.i.tude of mind, carried out? M. Renan might leave the matter in obscurity. But he sees his way, in spite of incoherent traditions and the contradictions which they present, to a ”sufficient degree of probability.” The belief in the Resurrection originated in an hallucination of the disordered fancy of Mary Magdalen, whose mind was thrown off its balance by her affection and sorrow; and, once suggested, the idea rapidly spread, and produced, through the Christian society, a series of corresponding visions, firmly believed to be real. But Mary Magdalen was the founder of it all:--
Elle eut, en ce moment solennel, une part d'action tout a fait hors ligne. C'est elle qu'il faut suivre pas a pas; car elle porta, ce jour-la, pendant une heure, tout le travail de la conscience chretienne; son temoignage decida la foi de l'avenir.... La vision legere s'ecarte et lui dit: ”Ne me touche pas!” Peu a peu l'ombre disparait. Mais le miracle de l'amour est accompli. Ce que Cephas n'a pu faire, Marie l'a faite; elle a su tirer la vie, la parole douce et penetrante, du tombeau vide. Il ne s'agit plus de consequences a deduire ni de conjectures a former. Marie a vu et entendu. La resurrection a son premier temoin immediat.
He proceeds to criticise the accounts which ascribe the first vision to others; but in reality Mary Magdalen, he says, has done most, after the great Teacher, for the foundation of Christianity. ”Queen and patroness of idealists,” she was able to ”impose upon all the sacred vision of her impa.s.sioned soul.” All rests upon her first burst of entbusiasm, which gave the signal and kindled the faith of others. ”Sa grande affirmation de femme, 'il est ressuscite,' a ete la base de la foi de l'humanite”:--
Paul ne parle pas de la vision de Marie et reporte tout l'honneur de la premiere apparition sur Pierre. Mais cette expression est tres~inexacte. Pierre ne vit que le caveau vide, le suaire et le linceul. Marie seule aima a.s.sez pour depa.s.ser la nature et faire revivre le fantome du maitre exquis. Dans ces sortes de crises merveilleuses, voir apres les autres n'est rien; tout le merite est de voir pour la premiere fois; car les autres modelent ensuite leur vision sur le type recu. C'est le propre des belles organisations de concevoir l'image promptement, avec justesse et par une sorte de sens intime du dessin. La gloire de la resurrection appartient donc a Marie de Magdala. Apres Jesus, c'est Marie qui a le plus fait pour la fondation du Christianisme.
L'ombre creee par les sens delicats de Madeleine plane encore sur le monde.... Loin d'ici, raison impuissante! Ne va pas appliquer une froide a.n.a.lyse a ce chef-d'oeuvre de l'idealisme et de l'amour. Si la sagesse renonce a consoler cette pauvre race humaine, trahie par le sort, laisse la folie tenter l'aventure. Ou est le sage qui a donne au monde autant de joie, que la possedee Marie de Magdala?
He proceeds to describe, on the same supposition, the other events of the day, which he accepts as having in a certain very important sense happened, though, of course, only in the sense which excludes their reality. No doubt, for a series of hallucinations, anything will do in the way of explanation. The scene of the evening was really believed to have taken place as described, though it was the mere product of chance noises and breaths of air on minds intently expectant; and we are bidden to remember ”that in these decisive hours a current of wind, a creaking window, an accidental rustle, settle the belief of nations for centuries.” But at any rate it was a decisive hour:--
Tels furent les incidents de ce jour qui a fixe le sort de l'humanite. L'opinion que Jesus etait ressuscite s'y fonda d'une maniere irrevocable. La secte, qu'on avait cru eteindre en tuant le maitre, fut des lors a.s.suree d'un immense avenir.