Part 26 (1/2)
And let us not say that this is a benevolent interpretation, ireat master from the cruel contradiction inflicted on his dreado and priest; this kingdorain of mustard-seed, has become a tree which overshadows the world, and amidst whose branches the birds have their nests, was understood, wished for, and founded by Jesus By the side of the false, cold, and impossible idea of an ostentatious advent, he conceived the real city of God, the true ”palingenesis,” the Sermon on the Mount, the apotheosis of the weak, the love of the people, regard for the poor, and the re-establishment of all that is humble, true, and simple This re-establishment he has depicted as an incomparable artist, by features which will last eternally Each of us owes that which is best in himself to him Let us pardon hireat triumph upon the clouds of heaven Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he hieneral illusion, what ainst death, and sustained hiht otherwise have been unequal?
We s to the divine city conceived by Jesus If his only thought had been that the end of time was near, and that we must prepare for it, he would not have surpassed John the Baptist To renounce a world ready to crumble, to detach one's self little by little frodo The teaching of Jesus had always a er scope He proposed to himself to create a new state of humanity, and not merely to prepare the end of that which was in existence Elias or Jere in order to prepare men for the supreme crisis, would not have preached as he did This is so true that this morality, attributed to the latter days, is found to be the eternal morality, that which has saved humanity Jesus himself in many cases makes use of modes of speech which do not accord with the apocalyptic theory He often declares that the kingdom of God has already commenced; that every man bears it within himself; and can, if he be worthy, partake of it; that each one silently creates this kingdodoood[2] A better order of things than that which exists, the reign of justice, which the faithful, according to their ability, ought to help in establishi+ng; or, again, the liberty of the soul, soous to the Buddhist ”deliverance,” the fruit of the soul's separation from matter and absorption in the divine essence
These truths, which are purely abstract to us, were living realities to Jesus Everything in his mind was concrete and substantial Jesus, of all hly in the reality of the ideal
[Footnote 1: Matt vi 10, 33; Mark xii 34; Luke xi 2, xii 31, xvii 20, 21, and following]
[Footnote 2: See especially Mark xii 34]
In accepting the Utopias of his tih truths of them, thanks to the fruitful do apocalypse, which was about to be unfolded in the heavens But it was still, and probably above all the kingdom of the soul, founded on liberty and on the filial senti on the bosoion, without forated to the conscience of the just man, and to the arm of the people This is as destined to live; this is what has lived When, at the end of a century of vain expectation, the materialistic hope of a near end of the world was exhausted, the true kingdo explanations threw a veil over the dom, which was then seen to be incapable of realization The Apocalypse of John, the chief canonical book of the New Testa too formally tied to the idea of an immediate catastrophe, becaible, tortured in a thousand ways and almost rejected At least, its accomplishhted ones who, in a fully enlightened age, still preserved the hopes of the first disciples, became heretics (Ebionites, Millenarians), lost in the shallows of Christianity Mankind had passed to another kingdoht of Jesus had prevailed over the chimera which obscured it
[Footnote 1: Justin, _Dial cum Tryph_, 81]
Let us not, however, despise this chimera, which has been the thick rind of the sacred fruit on which we live This fantastic kingdom of heaven, this endless pursuit after a city of God, which has constantly preoccupied Christianity during its long career, has been the principle of that great instinct of futurity which has animated all reformers, persistent believers in the Apocalypse, from Joachim of Flora down to the Protestant sectary of our days This impotent effort to establish a perfect society has been the source of the extraordinary tension which has always ainst the existing order of things The idea of the ”kingdoe of it, are thus, in a sense, the highest and ress But they have necessarily given rise to great errors The end of the world, suspended as a perpetual menace overcenturies, a great hindrance to all secular developer certain of its existence, contracted therefroree of trepidation, and those habits of servile hues so inferior to ancient and e had also taken place in theof Christ When it was first announced to mankind that the end of the world was about to come, like the infant which receives death with a sreatest access of joy that it has ever felt But in growing old, the world beca expected by the sies a day of wrath: _Dies irae, dies illa!_ But, even in the dom of God continued fruitful In spite of the feudal church, of sects, and of religious orders, holy persons continued to protest, in the naainst the iniquity of the world Even in our days, troubled days, in which Jesus has no more authentic followers than those who seeanization of society, which have so y with the aspirations of the pri of the same idea They are one of the branches of that iht of a future, and of which the ”kingdom of God” will be eternally the root and sterafted on this phrase But, tainted by a coarseto the impossible, that is to say, to found universal happiness upon political and economical measures, the ”socialist” attempts of our time will remain unfruitful until they take as their rule the true spirit of Jesus, I mean absolute idealism--the principle that, in order to possess the world, we must renounce it
[Footnote 1: See, for exaory of Tours to his _Histoire Ecclesiastique des Francs_, and the nuinning by the forht of the world”]
The phrase, ”kingdom of God,” expresses also, very happily, the hich the soul experiences of a supplementary destiny, of a compensation for the present life Those who do not accept the definition of ard the Deistical dogma of the iy, love to fall back upon the hope of a final reparation, which under an unknown form shall satisfy the wants of the heart of ress after es may not evoke the absolute conscience of the universe, and in this conscience the awakening of all that has lived? A sleep of a er than the sleep of an hour St Paul, on this hypothesis, was right in saying, _In ictu oculi!_[1] It is certain that moral and virtuous humanity will have its reward, that one day the ideas of the poor but honest ure of Jesus will be the confusion of the frivolous who have not believed in virtue, and of the selfish who have not been able to attain to it The favorite phrase of Jesus continues, therefore, full of an eternal beauty A kind of exalted divination see at the same time various orders of truths
[Footnote 1: 1 _Cor_ xv 52]
CHAPTER XVIII
INStitUTIONS OF JESUS
That Jesus was never entirely absorbed in his apocalyptic ideas is proved, moreover, by the fact that at the very time he was ht the foundation of a church destined to endure It is scarcely possible to doubt that he hi his disciples those ere pre-eminently called the ”apostles,” or the ”twelve,” since on the day after his death we find the up by election the vacancies that had arisen in their midst[1] They were the two sons of Jonas; the two sons of Zebedee; James, son of Cleophas; Philip; Nathaniel bar-Tolmai; Thomas; Levi, or Matthew, the son of Alphaeus; Simon Zelotes; Thaddeus or Lebbaeus; and Judas of Kerioth[2]
It is probable that the idea of the twelve tribes of Israel had had some share in the choice of this nu; 1 _Cor_ xv 5; Gal i 10]
[Footnote 2: Matt x 2 and following; Mark iii 16, and following; Luke vi 14, and following; _Acts_ i 13; Papias, in Eusebius, _Hist
Eccl_, iii 39]
[Footnote 3: Matt xix 28; Luke xxii 30]
The ”twelve,” at all events, for whom Peter maintained a fraternal priority,[1] and to theation of his work There was nothing, however, which presented the appearance of a regularly organized sacerdotal school The lists of the ”twelve,” which have been preserved, contain many uncertainties and contradictions; two or three of those who figure in them have remained completely obscure Two, at least, Peter and Philip,[2] were married and had children
[Footnote 1: _Acts_ i 15, ii 14, v 2, 3, 29, viii 19, xv 7; Gal
i 18]
[Footnote 2: For Peter, see ante, p 174; for Philip, see Papias, Polycrates, and Clement of Alexandria, quoted by Eusebius, _Hist
Eccl_, iii 30, 31, 39, v 24]
Jesus evidently confided secrets to the twelve, which he forbade them to communicate to the world[1] It seeree ofhimself till after his death, and to reveal hi to the him afterward to the world[2] ”What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light; and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops” This spared him the necessity of too precise declarations, and created a kind of medium between the public and his confined to the apostles, and that he explained uous to the ree of oddness in connecting ideas were custos of the doctors, as may be seen in the sentences of the _Pirke Aboth_