Part 7 (2/2)

We are willing to admit that Christian writers have often spoken unreally and unsatisfactorily enough in their comments on this subject.

But what Christian comment, hard, rigid, and narrow in its view of possibilities, ever equalled this in its baselessness and supreme absence of all that makes a view look like the truth? It puts the most extravagant strain on doc.u.ments which, truly or falsely, but at any rate in the most consistent and uniform manner, a.s.sert something different. What they a.s.sert in every conceivable form, and with distinct detail, are facts; it is not criticism, but mere arbitrary license, to say that all these stand for visions. The issue of truth or falsehood is intelligible; the middle supposition of confusion and mistake in that which is the basis of everything, and is definitely and in such varied ways repeated, is trifling and incredible. We may disbelieve, if we please, St. Paul's enumeration of the appearances after the Resurrection; but to resolve it into a series of visions is to take refuge in the most unlikely of guesses. And, when we take into view the whole of the case--not merely the life and teaching out of which everything grew, but the aim and character of the movement which ensued, and the consequences of it, long tested and still continuing, to the history and development of mankind--we find it hard to measure the estimate of probability which is satisfied with the supposition that the incidents of one day of folly and delusion irrevocably decided the belief of ages, and the life and destiny of millions. Without the belief in the Resurrection there would have been no Christianity; if anything may be laid down as certain, this may. We should probably never have even heard of the great Teacher; He would not have been believed in, He would not have been preached to the world; the impulse to conversion would have been wanting; and all that was without parallel good and true and fruitful in His life would have perished, and have been lost in Judaea. And the belief in the Resurrection M.

Renan thinks due to an hour of over-excited fancy in a woman agonized by sorrow and affection. When we are presented with an hypothesis on the basis of intrinsic probability, we cannot but remember that the power of delusion and self-deception, though undoubtedly shown in very remarkable instances, must yet be in a certain proportion to what it originates and produces, and that it is controlled by the numerous antagonistic influences of the world. Crazy women have founded superst.i.tions; but we cannot help thinking that it would be more difficult than M. Renan supposes for crazy women to found a world-wide religion for ages, branching forth into infinite forms, and tested by its application to all varieties of civilisation, and to national and personal character. M. Renan points to La Salette. But the a.s.sumption would be a bold one that the La Salette people could have invented a religion for Christendom which would stand the wear of eighteen centuries, and satisfy such different minds. Pious frauds, as he says, may have built cathedrals. But you must take Christianity for what it has proved itself to be in its hard and unexampled trial. To start an order, a sect, an inst.i.tution, even a local tradition or local set of miracles, on foundations already laid, is one thing; it is not the same to be the spring of the most serious and the deepest of moral movements for the improvement of the world, the most unpretending and the most careless of all outward form and show, the most severely searching and universal and lasting in its effects on mankind. To trace that back to the Teacher without the intervention of the belief in the Resurrection is manifestly impossible. We know what He is said to have taught; we know what has come of that teaching in the world at large; but if the link which connects the two be not a real one, it is vain to explain it by the dreams of affection. It was not a matter of a moment or an hour, but of days and weeks continually; not the a.s.sertion of one imaginative mourner or two, but of a numerous and variously const.i.tuted body of people. The story, if it was not true, was not delusion, but imposture.

We certainly cannot be said to know much of what happens in the genesis of religions. But that between such a teacher and such teaching there should intervene such a gigantic falsehood, whether imposture or delusion, is unquestionably one of the hardest violations of probability conceivable, as well as one of the most desperate conclusions as regards the capacity of mankind for truth. Few thoughts can be less endurable than that the wisest and best of our race, men of the soberest and most serious tempers, and most candid and judicial minds, should have been the victims and dupes of the mad affection of a crazy Magdalen, of ”ces touchantes demoniaques, ces pecheresses converties, ces vraies fondatrices du Christianisme.” M. Renan shrinks from solving such a question by the hypothesis of conscious fraud. To solve it by sentiment is hardly more respectful either to the world or to truth.

We have left ourselves no room to speak of the best part of M. Renan's new volume, his historical comment on the first period of Christianity.

We do not pretend to go along with him in his general principles of judgment, or in many of his most important historical conclusions. But here he is, what he is not in the early chapters, on ground where his critical faculty comes fairly into play. He is, we think, continually paradoxical and reckless in his statements; and his book is more thickly strewn than almost any we know with half-truths, broad axioms which require much paring down to be of any use, but which are made by him to do duty for want of something stronger. But, from so keen and so deeply interested a writer, it is our own fault if we do not learn a good deal. And we may study in its full development that curious combination, of which M. Renan is the most conspicuous example, of profound veneration for Christianity and sympathy with its most characteristic aspects, with the scientific impulse to destroy in the public mind the belief in its truth.

XIII

M. RENAN'S HIBBERT LECTURES[15]

[15]

_Guardian_, 14th April 1880.

I

The object of M. Renan's lectures at St. George's Hall is, as we understand him, not merely to present a historical sketch of the influence of Rome on the early Church, but to reconcile the historical imagination with the results of his own and kindred speculations on the origin of Christianity. He has, with a good faith which we do not question, investigated the subject and formed his conclusions upon it.

He on the present occasion a.s.sumes these investigations, and that he, at any rate, is satisfied with their result. He hardly pretends to carry the mixed popular audience whom he addresses into any real inquiry into the grounds on which he has satisfied himself that the received account of Christianity is not the true one. But he is aware that all minds are more or less consciously impressed with the broad difficulty that, after all attempts to trace the origin of Christianity to agencies and influences of well-understood human character, the disproportion between causes and effects still continues to appear excessive. The great Christian tradition with its definite beliefs about the conditions of man's existence, which has shaped the fortunes and determined the future of mankind on earth, is in possession of the world as much as the great tradition of right and wrong, or of the family, or of the State. How did it get there? It is most astonis.h.i.+ng that it should have done so, what is the account of it? Of course people may inquire into this question as they may inquire into the basis of morality, or the origin of the family or the State. But here, as on those subjects, reason, and that imagination which is one of the forces of reason, by making the mind duly sensible of the magnitude of ideas and alternatives, are exacting. M. Renan's task is to make the purely human origin of Christianity, its origin in the circ.u.mstances, the beliefs, the ideas, and the moral and political conditions of the first centuries, seem to us _natural_--as natural in the history of the world as other great and surprising events and changes--as natural as the growth and the fall of the Roman Empire, or as the Reformation, or the French Revolution. He is well qualified to sound the depths of his undertaking and to meet its heavy exigencies. With a fuller knowledge of books, and a closer familiarity than most men with the thoughts and the events of the early ages, with a serious value for the idea of religion as such, and certainly with no feeble powers of recalling the past and investing it with colour and life, he has to show how these things can be--how a religion with such attributes as he freely ascribes to the Gospel, so grand, so pure, so lasting, can have sprung up not merely _in_ but _from_ a most corrupt and immoral time, and can have its root in the most portentous and impossible of falsehoods. It must be said to be a bold undertaking.

M. Renan has always aimed at doing justice to what he a.s.sailed; Christians, who realise what they believe, will say that he patronises their religion, and naturally they resent such patronage. Such candour adds doubtless to the literary effect of his method; but it is only due to him to acknowledge the fairness of his admissions. He starts with the declaration that there never was a n.o.bler moment in human history than the beginnings of the Christian Church. It was the ”most heroic episode in the annals of mankind.” ”Never did man draw forth from his bosom more devotion, more love of the ideal, than in the 150 years which elapsed between the sweet Galilean vision and the death of Marcus Aurelius.” It was not only that the saints were admirable and beautiful in their lives; they had the secret of the future, and laid down the lines on which the goodness and hope of the coming world were to move.”

Never was the religious conscience more eminently creative, never did it lay down with more authority the law of future ages.”

Now, if this is not mere rhetoric, what does it come to? It means not merely that there was here a phenomenon, not only extraordinary but unique, in the development of human character, but that here was created or evolved what was to guide and form the religious ideas of mankind; here were the springs of what has reached through all the ages of expanding humanity to our own days, of what is best and truest and deepest and holiest. M. Renan, at any rate, does not think this an illusion of Christian prepossessions, a fancy picture of a mythic age of gold, of an unhistorical period of pure and primitive antiquity. Put this view of things by the side of any of the records or the literature of the time remaining to us; if not St. Paul's Epistles nor Tacitus nor Lucian, then Virgil and Horace and Cicero, or Seneca or Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. Is it possible by any effort of imagination to body forth the links which can solidly connect the ideas which live and work and grow on one side, with the ideas which are represented by the facts and principles of the other side? Or is it any more possible to connect what we know of Christian ideas and convictions by a bond of natural and intelligible, if not necessary derivation, with what we know of Jewish ideas and Jewish habits of thought at the time in question? Yet that is the thing to be done, to be done rigorously, to be done clearly and distinctly, by those who are satisfied to find the impulses and faith which gave birth to Christianity amid the seething confusions of the time which saw its beginning; absolutely identical with those wild movements in origin and nature, and only by a strange, fortunate accident immeasurably superior to them.

This question M. Renan has not answered; as far as we can see he has not perceived that it is the first question for him to answer, in giving a philosophical account of the history of Christianity. Instead, he tells us, and he is going still further to tell us, how Rome and its wonderful influences acted on Christianity, and helped to a.s.sure its victories. But, first of all, what is that Christianity, and whence did it come, which Rome so helped? It came, he says, from Judaism; ”it was Judaism under its Christian form which Rome propagated without wis.h.i.+ng it, yet with such mighty energy that from a certain epoch Romanism and Christianity became synonymous words”; it was Jewish monotheism, the religion the Roman hated and despised, swallowing up by its contrast all that was local, legendary, and past belief, and presenting one religious law to the countless nationalities of the Empire, which like itself was one, and like itself above all nationalities.

This may all be true, and is partially true; but how did that hated and partial Judaism break through its trammels, and become a religion for all men, and a religion to which all men gathered? The Roman organisation was an admirable vehicle for Christianity; but the vehicle does not make that which it carries, or account for it. M. Renan's picture of the Empire abounds with all those picturesque details which he knows so well where to find, and knows so well, too, how to place in an interesting light. There were then, of course, conditions of the time more favourable to the Christian Church than would have been the conditions of other times. There was a certain increased liberty of thought, though there were also some pretty strong obstacles to it. M.

Renan has Imperial proclivities, and reminds us truly enough that despotisms are sometimes more tolerant than democracies, and that political liberty is not the same as spiritual and mental freedom, and does not always favour it. It may be partially true, as he says, that ”Virgil and Tibullus show that Roman harshness and cruelty were softening down”; that ”equality and the rights of men were preached by the Stoics”; that ”woman was more her own mistress, and slaves were better treated than in the days of Cato”; that ”very humane and just laws were enacted under the very worst emperors; that Tiberius and Nero were able financiers”; that ”after the terrible butcheries of the old centuries, mankind was crying with the voice of Virgil for peace and pity.” A good many qualifications and abatements start up in our minds on reading these statements, and a good many formidable doubts suggest themselves, if we can at all believe what has come down to us of the history of these times. It is hard to accept quite literally the bold a.s.sertion that ”love for the poor, sympathy with all men, almsgiving, were becoming virtues.” But allow this as the fair and hopeful side of the Empire. Yet all this is a long way from accounting for the effects on the world of Christianity, even in the dim, vaporous form in which M. Renan imagines it, much more in the actual concrete reality in which, if we know anything, it appeared. ”Christianity,” he says, ”responded to the cry for peace and pity of all weary and tender souls.” No doubt it did; but what was it that responded, and what was its consolation, and whence was its power drawn? What was there in the known thoughts or hopes or motives of men at the time to furnish such a response? ”Christianity,” he says, ”could only have been born and spread at a time when men had no longer a country”; ”it was that explosion of social and religious ideas which became inevitable after Augustus had put an end to political struggles,” after his policy had killed ”patriotism.” It is true enough that the first Christians, believing themselves subjects of an Eternal King and in view of an eternal world, felt themselves strangers and pilgrims in this; yet did the rest of the Roman world under the Caesars feel that they had no country, and was the idea of patriotism extinct in the age of Agricola?

But surely the real question worth asking is, What was it amid the increasing civilisation and prosperous peace of Rome under the first Emperors which made these Christians relinquish the idea of a country?

From whence did Christianity draw its power to set its followers in inflexible opposition to the intensest wors.h.i.+p of the State that the world has ever known?

To tell us the conditions under which all this occurred is not to tell us the cause of it. We follow with interest the sketches which M. Renan gives of these conditions, though it must be said that his generalisations are often extravagantly loose and misleading. We do indeed want to know more of those wonderful but hidden days which intervene between the great Advent, with its subsequent Apostolic age, and the days when the Church appears fully const.i.tuted and recognised.

German research and French intelligence and constructiveness have done something to help us, but not much. But at the end of all such inquiries appears the question of questions, What was the beginning and root of it all? Christians have a reasonable answer to the question.

There is none, there is not really the suggestion of one, in M. Renan's account of the connection of Christianity with the Roman world.

II[16]

[16]

_Guardian_, 21st April 1880.

M. Renan has pursued the line of thought indicated in his first lecture, and in his succeeding lectures has developed the idea that Christianity, as we know it, was born in Imperial Rome, and that in its visible form and active influence on the world it was the manifest product of Roman instincts and habits; it was the spirit of the Empire pa.s.sing into a new body and accepting in exchange for political power, as it slowly decayed and vanished, a spiritual supremacy as unrivalled and as astonis.h.i.+ng. The ”Legend of the Roman Church--Peter and Paul,”

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