CHAPTER IV.

THE ORDER OF THOUGHT FROM WHOSE CENTRE JESUS WAS DEVELOPED.

As the cooled earth no longer permits us to comprehend the phenomena of primitive creation, because the fire which once penetrated it is extinct, so deliberate explanations contain always something insufficient, when the question is one of applying our timid methods of analysis to the revolutions of the creative epochs which have decided the fate of humanity. Jesus lived at one of those epochs when the game of public life is 27freely played, when the stake of human activity is increased a hundredfold. Every great part, then, entails death; for such movements suppose liberty and an absence of preventive measures, which could not exist without a terrible alternative. In the present day, man risks little and gains little. In the heroic periods of human activity, man risked all and gained all. The good and the wicked, or at least those who believe themselves and are believed to be such, form opposing armies. The apotheosis is attained 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 appropriate as that in which Jesus was formed, for developing those hidden forces which humanity holds as in reserve, and which are not seen except in days of excitement and peril.

If the government of the world were a speculative problem, and the greatest philosopher was the man best fitted to tell his fellow-men what they ought to believe, it would be from calmness and reflection that those great moral and dogmatic truths which we call religions would proceed. But it is nothing of the kind. If we except Sakya-Mouni, the great religious founders have not been metaphysicians. Buddhism itself, which is based on pure thought, has conquered one-half of Asia by motives wholly political and moral. As for the Semitic religions, they are as little philosophical as it is possible to be. Moses and Mahomet were not speculators: they were men of action. It was by proposing action to their fellow-countrymen, and to their contemporaries, that they governed humanity. Jesus, in like manner, was not a theologian or a philosopher, having a more or less well-constructed system. To be a disciple of Jesus, it was not necessary to sign any formulary, or to repeat any 28confession of faith; one thing only was necessary—to attach oneself to him, to love him. He never disputed about God, for he felt Him directly in himself. The rock of metaphysical subtleties, against which Christianity has dashed since the third century, was in no wise erected by the founder. Jesus had neither dogma nor system; he had a fixed personal resolution, which, exceeding in intensity every other created will, directs to this hour the destinies of humanity.

The Jewish people have had the advantage, from the Babylonian captivity up to the Middle Ages, of being always in a state of extreme tension. This is why the interpreters of the spirit of the nation, during this long period, seem to have written under the action of a violent fever, which placed them constantly either above or under reason, rarely in its middle pathway. Never did man seize the problem of the future and of his own destiny with a more desperate courage, or was more determined to go to extremes. Not separating the fate of humanity from that of their little race, the Jewish thinkers were the first who sought to discover a general theory of the progress of our species. Greece, always confined within itself, and only concerned with its petty provincial quarrels, has had admirable historians. Stoicism had enounced the highest maxims upon the duties of man considered as a citizen of the world and as a member of a great brotherhood; but previous to the Roman period it would be a vain attempt to discover in classic literature a general system of the philosophy of history, embracing all humanity. The Jew, on the contrary, thanks to a sort of prophetic sense, has made history enter into religion. Possibly he owes a little of this spirit to Persia, which, from an ancient date, conceived the history of the world as a series of evolutions, over which a prophet presided.

Each prophet had his reign of a thousand years, and out of those successive ages, analogous to the millions of ages devolved to each Buddha of India, was composed the train of events which prepared the reign of Ormuzd. At the end of the time when the circle of the revolutions shall be completed, the perfect Paradise will appear. Men will then live happily: the earth will be like a great plain; there will be only one language, one law, and one government for all men. But this advent is to be preceded by terrible calamities. Dahak (the Satan of Persia) will break his chains and fall upon the world. Two prophets will then come to comfort mankind, and to prepare for the great advent.

These ideas ran through the world, and penetrated even to Rome, where they inspired a cycle of prophetic poems, whose fundamental ideas were the division of the history of humanity into periods, the succession of the gods representing these epochs, a complete renewal of the world, and the final coming of a golden age. The book of Daniel, certain parts of the book of Enoch, and the Sibylline books are the Jewish expression of the same theory. It was certainly not the case that these thoughts were universal. They were, on the contrary, embraced at first only by some people of vivid imaginations and readily impressed by 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. The sated and undeceived Epicurean who writes Ecclesiastes thinks so little of the future that he considers it even useless to work for his children. In the eyes of this egotistical celibate, the highest advice of wisdom is to find one's chief good in mis-spent money. But great achievements made by any people are generally the work of the minority. In spite of all their defects, hard, egotistical, scoffing, cruel, narrow, subtle, sophistical, the Jews are nevertheless the authors of the finest movement of disinterested enthusiasm of which history speaks. Opposition always makes the glory of a country. In one sense, the greatest 30men of a nation are often those whom it puts to death. Socrates honoured the Athenians, who would not suffer him to live. Spinoza was the greatest modern Jew, and the synagogue expelled him with ignominy. Jesus was the glory of the people of Israel, and they crucified him.

A gigantic dream haunted for centuries the Jewish people, constantly renewing its youth in its decrepitude. A stranger to the theory of individual recompenses which Greece had spread under the name of immortality of the soul, Judæa concentrated on her national future all her power of love and longing. She believed herself to possess divine promises of a boundless future; and as the bitter reality which, from the ninth century before our era, gave the domination of the world more and more to physical force brutally crushed these aspirations, she took refuge in the union of the most impossible ideas, and attempted the strangest gyrations. Before the captivity, when all the earthly future of the nation disappeared in consequence of the separation of the northern tribes, they had dreamt of the restoration of the house of David, the reconciliation of the two divisions of the people, and the triumph of theocracy and the worship of Jehovah over idolatrous systems. At the time of the captivity, a poet full of harmony foresaw the splendour of a future Jerusalem, to which the nations and distant isles should be tributaries, under colours so charming that it teemed a glance from the eyes of Jesus had leached him from a distance of six centuries.

The victories of Cyrus at one time appeared to realise all that had been hoped for. The grave disciples of the Avesta and the adorers of Jehovah believed themselves brothers. Persia had begun by banishing the multiple dévas and by transforming them into demons (divs), to draw from the old 31Arian imagination, which was essentially naturalistic, a species of monotheism. The prophetic tone of many of the teachings of Iran resemble greatly certain compositions of Hosea and Isaiah. Israel reposed under the Achemenidæ, and under Xerxes (Ahasuerus) made itself feared by the Iranians themselves. But the triumphant and often cruel entrance of Greek and Roman civilisation into Asia, threw it back upon its dreams. More than ever it invoked the Messiah as the judge and avenger of the nations. In fact, there was a complete renovation—a revolution which should take hold of the world by its roots, and shake it from top to bottom—in order to satisfy the fearful longing for vengeance excited in Israel by the consciousness of its superiority and the sight of its humiliations.

If Israel had possessed the doctrine called spiritualism, which divides man into two parts—the body and the soul—and finds it quite natural that while the body decays the soul survives, this paroxysm of rage and of energetic protestation would have had no raison d'être. But such a doctrine, proceeding from the Grecian philosophy, was not in the traditions of the Jewish mind. The ancient Hebrew writings contain no trace of future rewards or punishments. Whilst the idea of the solidarity of the tribe existed, it was natural that a strict retribution according to individual merits should not be thought of. So much the worse for the pious man who happened to live in a time of impiety; he suffered like the rest the public misfortunes consequent on the general irreligion. This doctrine, bequeathed by the sages of the patriarchal era, produced day by day unsustainable contradictions. Already at the time of Job it was much shaken; the old men of Teman who professed it were considered behind the age, and the young Elihu, who intervened in order to combat them, dared to utter 32as his first thesis this essentially revolutionary sentiment, “Great men are not always wise; neither do the aged understand judgment.” With the complications which had taken place in the world since the time of Alexander, the old Temanite and Mosaic principle became still more intolerable. Never had Israel been more faithful to the Law, and yet it was subjected to the atrocious persecution of Antiochus. Only a declaimer, accustomed to repeat old phrases denuded of sense, would dare to assert that these evils proceeded from the unfaithfulness of the people. What! these victims who died for their faith, these heroic Maccabees, this mother with her seven sons, will Jehovah forget them eternally? Will he abandon them to the corruption of the grave? Worldly and incredulous Sadduceeism might possibly not recoil before such a consequence, and a consummate sage, like Antigonus of Soco, might indeed maintain that we must not practise virtue like a slave in expectation of a recompense—that we must be virtuous without hope. But the mass of the nation could not be contented with that. Some, attaching themselves to the principle of philosophical immortality, imagined the righteous living in the memory of God, glorious for ever in the remembrance of men, and judging the wicked who had persecuted them. “They live in the sight of God; . . . they are known of God.” That was their reward. Others, especially the Pharisees, had recourse to the doctrine of the resurrection. The righteous will live again in order to participate in the Messianic reign. They will live again in the flesh, and for a world of which they will be the kings and the judges; they will be present at the triumph of their ideas and at the humiliation of their enemies.

We find among the ancient people of Israel only very indecisive traces of this fundamental dogma. 33The Sadducee, who did not believe it, was in reality faithful to the old Jewish doctrine; it was the Pharisee, the believer in the resurrection, who was the innovator. But in religion it is always the zealous sect which innovates, which progresses, and which has influence. Besides this, the resurrection, an idea totally different from that of the immortality of the soul, proceeded very naturally from the anterior doctrines and from the position of the people. Perhaps Persia also furnished some of its elements. In any case, combining with the belief in the Messiah, and with the doctrine of a speedy renewal of all things, the dogma of the resurrection formed those apocalyptic theories which, without being articles of faith (the orthodox Sanhedrim of Jerusalem does not seem to have adopted them), pervaded all imaginations, and produced an extreme fermentation from one end of the Jewish world to the other. The total absence of dogmatic rigour caused very contradictory notions to be admitted at one time, even upon so primary a point. Sometimes the righteous were to await the resurrection; sometimes they were to be received at the moment of death into Abraham's bosom; sometimes the resurrection was to be general; sometimes it was to be reserved only for the faithful; sometimes it presupposed a new earth and a new Jerusalem; sometimes it implied a previous annihilation of the universe.

Jesus, from the moment he began to think, entered into the burning atmosphere which had been created in Palestine by the ideas we have just referred to. These ideas were taught in no school; but they were “in the air” around him, and his soul was early penetrated by them. Our hesitations and doubts never reached him. On this summit of the hill of Nazareth, where no man of the present day can sit without an uneasy, although frivolous, 34feeling as to his own destiny, Jesus sat habitually without a doubt. Free from selfishness, the source of our troubles, he thought of nothing but his work, his race, and humanity at large. Those mountains, that sea, that azure sky, those high plains in the horizon, were for him not the melancholy vision of a soul which interrogates nature upon her fate, but the certain symbol, the transparent shadow of an invisible world and a new heaven.

He never attached much importance to the political events of his time, and he was probably badly informed regarding them. The dynasty of the Herods lived in a world so different from his own that he doubtless only knew it by name. Herod the Great died about the year in which Jesus was born, leaving imperishable memories—monuments which must compel the most malevolent posterity to associate his name with that of Solomon; his woks, nevertheless, was incomplete, and could not be continued. Profanely ambitious, lost in a maze of religious controversies, this astute Idumean had the advantage which coolness and judgment, stripped of morality, give one in the midst of passionate fanatics. But his conception of a secular kingdom of Israel, even if it had not been an anachronism in the state of the world in which it was conceived, would have miscarried, like the similar project which Solomon formed, in consequence of the difficulties arising from the peculiar character of the nation. His three sons were nothing but lieutenants of the Romans, analogous to the rajahs of India under the English Government. Antipater, or Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Peræa, whose subject Jesus was all his life, was an idle and empty prince, a favourite and flatterer of Tiberius, and too often misled by the evil influence of his second wife Herodias. Philip, Tetrarch of Gaulonitis and Batanea, into whose territories Jesus made 35frequent journeys, was a much better sovereign. As to Archelaus, Ethnarch of Jerusalem, he could not have known him. Jesus was about ten years of age when this man, weak and characterless, although sometimes violent, was deposed by Augustus. The last trace of self-government was, in this way, lost to Jerusalem. United to Samaria and Idumea, Judæa formed a kind of dependency of the province of Syria, in which the senator Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, a well-known consular personage, was the imperial legate. A series of Roman procurators, subordinate in affairs of importance to the imperial legate of Syria—Coponius, Marcus Ambivius, Annius Rufus, Valerius Gratus, and lastly (in the 26th year of our era) Pontius Pilate—followed each other, and were incessantly occupied in extinguishing the volcano which was rumbling beneath their feet.

Continual seditions, excited by the zealots of Mosaism, were constantly during this period agitating Jerusalem. The death of the seditious was certain; but death, when the matter concerned the integrity of the Law, was sought for with avidity. To overturn the Roman eagles, to destroy the works of art raised by the Herods, in which the Mosaic regulations were not always respected, to rebel against the votive escutcheons raised by the procurators, and whose inscriptions seemed to them tainted by idolatry, were perpetual temptations to fanatics who had reached that degree of exaltation which removes all regard for life. Thus it was that Judas, son of Sariphea, and Matthias, son of Margaloth, two greatly celebrated doctors of the Law, formed against the established order a party of bold aggression, which continued after their execution. The Samaritans were agitated by movements of the same kind. The Law seems never to have counted more impassioned votaries than at this period, when there already lived that 36man who, by the full authority of his genius and of his great soul, was about to abrogate it. The “zelotes” (kanaïm) or “sicarii,” pious assassins, who imposed on themselves the task of killing whoever in their estimation broke the Law, began to appear. Representatives of a totally different spirit, the Thaumaturges, considered as in some measure divine, found credence in consequence of the imperious necessity which the age expressed for the supernatural and the divine.

A movement which had much more influence on Jesus was that of Judas, the Gaulonite or Galilean. Of all the constraints to which countries newly conquered by Rome were subjected, the census was the most unpopular. This measure, which always irritates nations little accustomed to the responsibilities of great central administrations, was specially odious to the Jews. Already, under David, we see how a numbering of the people provoked violent recriminations, and the threatenings of the prophets. The census, in fact, was the basis of taxation. Now, taxation, in the estimation of a pure theocracy, was almost an impiety. God being the sole Master whom man ought to recognise, to pay tithe to a secular sovereign was, in a manner, to put him in the place of God. Completely ignorant of the idea of the State, the Jewish theocracy only acted up to its logical induction — the negation of civil society and of all government. The money in the public treasury was regarded as stolen. The census ordered by Quirinius (in the sixth year of the Christian era) powerfully awakened these ideas, and caused a tremendous ferment. A disturbance broke out in the northern provinces. One Judas, of the town of Gamala, on the eastern shore of the lake of Tiberias, and a Pharisee named Sadoc, by denying the lawfulness of the impost, created a numerous 37party, which soon broke out into open revolt. The fundamental maxims of this school were that liberty was better than life, and that no man ought to be called “master,” this title belonging to God alone. Judas had, doubtless, many other principles, which Josephus, always careful not to compromise his co-religionists, designedly suppresses; for it is impossible to understand how, for so simple an idea, the Jewish historian should give him a place among the philosophers of his nation, and should regard him as the founder of a fourth school, equal to those of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Judas was evidently the chief of a Galilean sect, which was imbued with Messianic ideas, and became a political movement. The procurator, Coponius, crushed the sedition of the Gaulonite; but the party survived and preserved its chiefs. Under the leadership of Menahem, son of its founder, and of one Eleazar, his kinsman, we find it again very active in the last struggles of the Jews with the Romans. Jesus, it may be, saw this Judas, who had conceived a Jewish revolution of a kind so different from his own ideal; at all events, he knew the opinions of his school, and it was probably by a reaction against his mistake that he pronounced the axiom upon the “penny” of Cæsar. Wisely standing aloof from all sedition, Jesus profited by the fault of his predecessor, and dreamed of another kingdom and of another deliverance.

Galilee was thus a vast furnace, in which the most diverse elements were heaving to a boiling point. An extraordinary contempt for life, or, to speak more correctly, a kind of longing for death, was the result of these agitations. Experience counts for nothing in great fanatical movements. Algeria, in the first days of the French occupation, saw arise, each springtime, inspired men who 38declared that they were invulnerable and were sent by God to expel the infidels; the following year their death was forgotten, and their successors found an undiminished credence. Very stern on the one hand, the Roman power was not at all meddlesome, and permitted much liberty. These great brute-force despotisms, terrible in repression, were not so suspicious as powers which have some dogma to uphold. They allowed everything to be done up to the point at which they thought they ought to use vigorous measures. In his wandering career, Jesus does not appear to have been once annoyed by the civil authorities. Such a liberty, and above all the happiness which Galilee enjoyed in being much less restrained by the bonds of Pharisaic pedantry, gave to this province a real advantage over Jerusalem. The revolution, or, in other words, the Messianic expectations, caused a general mental fermentation here. Men believed that they were on the eve of beholding the great renovation; the Scriptures, tortured into a variety of meanings, became food for the most colossal hopes. In each line of the simple writings of the Old Testament they saw the assurance, and, in a certain sense, the programme of the future reign, which should bring peace to the righteous, and seal for ever the work of God.

From all time this division into two parties, opposed to each other in interest and spirit, had been for the Hebrew people a principle which had been fertile in moral growth. Every nation called to high destinies ought to form a complete little world, including within it the opposite poles. Greece presented, a few leagues apart, Sparta and Athens, the two antipodes to a superficial observer, but in reality rival sisters, each necessary to the other. It was the same with Judæa. Less brilliant in one sense than the development of Jerusalem, 39that of the north was on the whole much more fruitful; the noblest works of the Jewish people have always proceeded thence. A complete absence of the love of nature, almost amounting to something dry, narrow, and even ferocious, has stamped upon all purely Jerusalemitish works a character grand indeed, but sad, arid, and repulsive. With its solemn doctors, its insipid canonists, its hypocritical and atrabilious devotees, Jerusalem could not conquer humanity. The north has given to the world the simple Shulamite, the humble Canaanite, the passionate Magdalene, the good foster-father Joseph, and the Virgin Mary. It is the north alone which has made Christianity; Jerusalem, on the contrary, is the true home of that obstinate Judaism which, founded by the Pharisees and fixed by the Talmud, has traversed the Middle Ages and come down to us.

A beautiful aspect of nature contributed to the formation of this less austere, though less sharply monotheistic spirit, if I may venture so to call it, which impressed all the dreams of Galilee with a charming and idyllic character. The region round about Jerusalem is, perhaps, the gloomiest country in the world. Galilee, on the contrary, was exceedingly verdant, shady, smiling, the true home of the Song of Songs and the Canticles of the well-beloved. During the two months of March and April the country is a carpet of flowers, with an incomparable variety of colouring. The animals are small and extremely gentle,—delicate and lively turtle-doves, blue-birds so light that they rest on a blade of grass without bending it; crested larks which advance nearly under the very feet of the traveller; little river-tortoises with sweet and lively eyes, and also storks with grave and modest mien, which, dismissing all timidity, allow themselves to be approached quite closely, and seem 40almost to invite the companionship of men. In no country in the world do the mountains spread themselves out with more harmony, or inspire loftier thought. Jesus seems to have specially loved them. The most important acts of his career took place on mountains. It was there he was the most inspired; it was there he held secret communings with the ancient prophets; it was there he showed himself transfigured before the eyes of his disciples.

This lovely country, which at the present day has become (through the woful impoverishing influence which Islamism has wrought on human life) so sad and wretched, but where everything that man cannot destroy breathes still an air of freedom, sweetness, and tenderness, overflowed with happiness and joy at the time of Jesus. The Galileans were reckoned brave, energetic and laborious. If we except Tiberias, built by Antipas in the Roman style, in honour of Tiberius (about the year 15), Galilee had no large towns. The country was nevertheless covered with small towns and large villages well peopled, and cultivated with skill in every direction. From the ruins of its ancient splendour which survive we can trace an agricultural people in no way gifted in art, caring little for luxury, indifferent to the beauties of form, and exclusively idealistic. The country abounded in fresh streams and fruits; the large farms were shaded with vines and fig-trees; the gardens were a mass of apple and walnut trees, and pomegranates. The wine was excellent, if it may be judged from what the Jews still obtain at Safed, and they drank freely of it. This contented and easily satisfied life did not at all resemble the gross materialism of our peasantry, or the coarse happiness of agricultural Normandy, or the heavy mirth of the Flemings. It spiritualised itself in mysterious dreams, in a kind of poetical mysticism, 41blending heaven and earth. Leave the austere John Baptist in his desert of Judæa, to preach penitence, to inveigh unceasingly, and to live on locusts in the company of jackals! Why should the companions of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? Joy will be a part of the kingdom of God. Is she not the daughter of the humble in heart, of the men of goodwill?

The entire history of infant Christianity is in this sense a delightful pastoral. A Messiah at the marriage supper, the courtesan and the good Zaccheus called to his feasts, the founders of the kingdom of heaven like a bridal procession;—this is what Galilee has dared to offer, and what the world has really accepted. Greece has drawn admirable pictures of human life in sculpture and poetry, but always without backgrounds or receding perspectives. Here were wanting the marble, the practised workmen, the exquisite and refined language. But Galilee has created for the popular imagination the most sublime ideal; for behind its idyll the fate of humanity moves, and the light which illumines its picture is the sun of the kingdom of God.

Jesus lived and grew up amidst those elevating surroundings. From his infancy, he went almost every year to the feast at Jerusalem. The pilgrimage was for the provincial Jews a solemnity of sweet associations. Several entire series of psalms were consecrated to celebrate the happiness of thus journeying in family society during several days in springtime across the hills and valleys, all having in prospect the splendours of Jerusalem, the solemnities of the sacred courts, and the joy of brethren dwelling together. The route which Jesus usually followed in these journeys was that which is taken in the present day, through Ginæa and Shechem. From Shechem to Jerusalem travelling is very toilsome. 42But the neighbourhood of the old sanctuaries of Shiloh and Bethel, near which the pilgrim passes, keeps the mind awake with interest. Ain-el-Haramié, the last halting-place, is a melancholy and yet charming spot; and few impressions equal that which one feels when encamping there for the night. The valley is narrow and sombre, while a dark stream issues from the rocks full of tombs, which form its banks. It is, I believe, “the valley of tears,” or of dropping waters, which is sung of as one of the stations on the way in the delightful eighty-fourth Psalm; and it became, to the sweet and sad mysticism of the Middle Ages, the emblem of life. The next day, at an early hour, the travellers would be at Jerusalem; this expectation, even at the present day, sustains the caravan, rendering the night short and slumber light.

These journeys, during which the assembled nation exchanged its ideas, and which created annually in the capital centres of great excitement, placed Jesus in contact with the mind of his countrymen, and doubtless inspired him from his youth with a lively antipathy to the defects of the official representatives of Judaism. It is observable that very early the desert had been for him like a school, and to this he had made prolonged visits. But the God he found there was not his God. It was emphatically rather the God of Job, severe and terrible, and who is accountable to none. Sometimes Satan came to tempt him. He then returned from these sojourns into his beloved Galilee, and found again his heavenly Father, in the midst of the green hills and the clear fountains—among the crowds of women and children who, with joyous soul and the song of the angels in their hearts, waited for the salvation of Israel.