Part 5 (2/2)
The Lahich represented not the ancient laws of the country, but Utopias, the factitious laws and pious frauds of the tis, had becoovern itself, an inexhaustible theme of subtle interpretations As to the Prophets and the Psalms, the popular persuasion was that almost all the somewhat mysterious traits that were in these books had reference to the Messiah, and it was sought to find there the type of him who should realize the hopes of the nation Jesus participated in the taste which every one had for these allegorical interpretations But the true poetry of the Bible, which escaped the puerile exegetists of Jerusaleenius The Law does not appear to have hadbetter But the religious lyrics of the Psalms were in marvellous accordance with his poetic soul; they were, all his life, his food and sustenance The prophets--Isaiah in particular, and his successor in the record of the time of the captivity,--with their brilliant dreams of the future, their iled with enchanting pictures, were his true teachers
He read also, no doubt, s somewhat modern, the authors of which, for the sake of an authority only granted to very ancient writings, had clothed themselves with the names of prophets and patriarchs One of these books especially struck him, namely, the Book of Daniel This book, composed by an enthusiastic Jew of the tie,[1] was the _resume_ of the spirit of those later times Its author, a true creator of the philosophy of history, had for the first time dared to see in the march of the world and the succession of empires, only a purpose subordinate to the destinies of the Jewish people Jesus was early penetrated by these high hopes
Perhaps, also, he had read the books of Enoch, then revered equally with the holy books,[2] and the other writings of the same class, which kept up so ination The advent of the Messiah, with his glories and his terrors--the nations falling down one after another, the cataclysination; and, as these revolutions were reputed near, and a great nuht to calculate the tis into which such visions transport us, appeared to him from the first perfectly natural and siend of Daniel existed as early as the seventh century BC (Ezekiel xiv 14 and following, xxviii 3) It was for the necessities of the legend that he was made to live at the time of the Babylonian captivity]
[Footnote 2: _Epist Jude_, 14 and following; 2 Peter ii 4, 11; _Testam of the Twelve Patriarchs_, Simeon, 5; Levi, 14, 16; Judah, 18; Zab, 3; Dan, 5; Naphtali, 4 The ”Book of Enoch” still forral part of the Ethiopian Bible Such as we know it from the Ethiopian version, it is composed of pieces of different dates, of which the most ancient are from the year 130 to 150 BC Soy with the discourses of Jesus Co]
That he had no knowledge of the general state of the world is apparent from each feature of his most authentic discourses The earth appeared to hi with one another; he seenore the ”Rourated He had no precise idea of the Roman power; the na, in Galilee or its environs, Tiberias, Julias, Diocaesarea, Caesarea, gorgeous works of the Herods, who sought, by these nificent structures, to prove their admiration for Roman civilization, and their devotion toward the ustus, structures whose naely altered, to designate miserable hamlets of Bedouins He also probably saw Sebaste, a work of Herod the Great, a showy city, whose ruins would lead to the belief that it had been carried there ready made, like a machine which had only to be put up in its place This ostentatious piece of architecture arrived in Judea by cargoes; these hundreds of columns, all of the same diameter, the ornament of some insipid ”_Rue de Rivoli_” these hat he called ”the kingdolory” But this luxury of power, this administrative and official art, displeased hies, confused mixtures of huts, of nests and holes cut in the rocks, of wells, of to close to Nature The courts of kings appeared to hi is kings and the e,[1] prove that he never conceived of aristocratic society but as a young villager who sees the world through the prism of his simplicity
[Footnote 1: See, for exa]
Still less was he acquainted with the new idea, created by Grecian science, which was the basis of all philosophy, and which reatly confirmed, to wit, the exclusion of capricious Gods, to whoovernment of the universe Almost a century before him, Lucretius had expressed, in an adeneral syste in the world happens by laws in which the personal intervention of superior beings has no share--was universally adreat schools of all the countries which had accepted Grecian science
Perhaps even Babylon and Persia were not strangers to it Jesus knew nothing of this progress Although born at a time when the principle of positive science was already proclaimed, he lived entirely in the supernatural Never, perhaps, had the Jews been more possessed with the thirst for the reat intellectual centre, and who had received a very complete education, possessed only a chie of science
Jesus, on this point, differed in no respect froarded as a kind of evil genius,[1]
and he iined, like all the world, that nervous maladies were produced by deitated him The marvellous was not the exceptional for him; it was his normal state
The notion of the supernatural, with its impossibilities, is coincident with the birth of experie to all ideas of physical laho believes that by praying he can change the path of the clouds, arrest disease, and even death, finds nothing extraordinary in s is to him the result of the free will of the Divinity This intellectual state was constantly that of Jesus But in his great soul such a belief produced effects quite opposed to those produced on the vulgar A the latter, the belief in the special action of God led to a foolish credulity, and the deceptions of charlatans With him it led to a profound idea of the faerated belief in the power of man--beautiful errors, which were the secret of his power; for if they were thehis deficiencies in the eyes of the physicist and the chee of which no individual had been possessed before his time, or has been since
[Footnote 1: Matt vi 13]
His distinctive character very early revealed itself Legend delights to show hiainst paternal authority, and departing from the common way to fulfill his vocation[1] It is certain, at least, that he cared little for the relations of kinshi+p His family do not seem to have loved him,[2]
and at times he seems to have been hard toward them[3] Jesus, like all men exclusively preoccupied by an idea, caht is the only one that natures of this kind recognize ”Beholdhis hand toward his disciples; ”he who does the will of my Father, he is my brother and my sister” The simple people did not understand thenear him cried out, ”Blessed is the woave thee suck!” But he said, ”Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it”[4] Soon, in his bold revolt against nature, he went still further, and we shall see hi that is hu soul and heart for the idea which presented itself to hioodness and truth
[Footnote 1: Luke ii 42 and following The Apocryphal Gospels are full of sirotesque]
[Footnote 2: Matt xiii 57; Mark vi 4; John vii 3, and following]
[Footnote 3: Matt xii 48; Mark iii 33; Luke viii 21; John ii 4; Gospel according to the Hebrews, in St Jero_, iii 2]
[Footnote 4: Luke xi 27, and following]
CHAPTER IV
THE ORDER OF THOUGHT WHICH SURROUNDED THE DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS
As the cooled earth no longer permits us to understand the phenomena of primitive creation, because the fire which penetrated it is extinct, so deliberate explanations have always appeared so our timid methods of induction to the revolutions of the creative epochs which have decided the fate of huame of public life is freely played, and when the stake of hureat part, then, entails death; for such movements suppose liberty and an absence of preventive measures, which could not exist without a terrible alternative In these days, ains little In heroic periods of huood and the wicked, or at least those who believe themselves and are believed to be such, form opposite armies The apotheosis is reached by the scaffold; characters have distinctive features, which engrave them as eternal types in the memory of men Except in the French Revolution, no historical centre was as suitable as that in which Jesus was formed, to develop those hidden forces which humanity holds as in reserve, and which are not seen except in days of exciteovernreatest philosopher were the ht to believe, it would be froions would proceed But it is not so If we except Cakya-Mouni, the great religious founders have not been ht, has conquered one-half of Asia, by ions, they are as little philosophical as possible Moses and Mahomet were not men of speculation; they wereaction to their fellow-countryoverned huian, or a philosopher, having a more or less well-composed system In order to be a disciple of Jesus, it was not necessary to sign any for only was necessary--to be attached to him, to love him He never disputed about God, for he felt Hiainst which Christianity broke from the third century, was in nowise created by the Founder Jesus had neither dogma nor syste in intensity every other created will, directs to this hour the destinies of hue, fro in a state of the greatest tension This is why the interpreters of the spirit of the nation during this long period seemed to write under the action of an intense fever, which placed them constantly either above or below reason, rarely in its middle path Never did man seize the problem of the future and of his destiny with a o to extre the lot of humanity from that of their little race, the Jewish thinkers were the first who sought for a general theory of the progress of our species Greece, always confined within itself, and solely attentive to petty quarrels, has had admirable historians; but before the Roeneral syste all humanity The Jew, on the contrary, thanks to a kind of prophetic sense which renders the Sereat lines of the future, has ion Perhaps he owes a little of this spirit to Persia Persia, from an ancient period, conceived the history of the world as a series of evolutions, over each of which a prophet presided Each prophet had his _hazar_, or reign of a thousand years (chiliasous to the Avatar of India, is con of Ormuzd At the end of the time when the cycle of chiliasms shall be exhausted, the complete paradise will come Men then will live happy; the earth will be as one plain; there will be only one language, one law, and one government for all But this advent will be preceded by terrible calamities
Dahak (the Satan of Persia) will break his chains and fall upon the world Two prophets will coreat advent[1] These ideas ran through the world, and penetrated even to Rome, where they inspired a cycle of prophetic poems, of which the fundamental ideas were the division of the history of humanity into periods, the succession of the Gods corresponding to these periods--a coolden age[2] The book of Daniel, the book of Enoch, and certain parts of the Sibylline books,[3] are the Jewish expression of the sa shared by all; they were only eination, ere inclined toward strange doctrines The dry and narrow author of the book of Esther never thought of the rest of the world except to despise it, and to wish it evil[4] The disabused epicurean rote Ecclesiastes, thought so little of the future, that he considered it even useless to labor for his children; in the eyes of this egotistical celibate, the highest stroke of wisdoreat achieveht by the otistical, scoffing, cruel, narrow, subtle, and sophistical, the Jewish people are the authors of the finest movement of disinterested enthusiaslory of a country The greatest men of a nation are those wholory of the Athenians, ould not suffer hireatest Jew of nolory of the people of Israel, who crucified him
[Footnote 1: _Yacna_, xiii 24: Theopompus, in Plut, _De Iside et Osiride_, sec 47; _Minokhired_, a passage published in the _Zeitschrift der deutschen enlandischen Gesellschaft_, i, p
263]
[Footnote 2: Virg, Ecl iv; Servius, at v 4 of this Eclogue; Nigidius, quoted by Servius, at v 10]