CHAPTER XXVIII.

ESSENTIAL CHARACTER OF THE WORK OF JESUS.

Jesus, it is seen, never extended his action beyond the Jewish circle. Although his sympathy for outcasts of heterodoxy led him to admit Pagans into the kingdom of God, although he had more than once resided in a Pagan country, and although once or twice we surprise him in kindly relations with unbelievers, it may be said that his life was passed entirely in the small world in which he was born. In Greek or Roman countries he was never heard of; his name only appears in profane authors of a hundred years later, and then in an indirect manner, in connection with seditious movements provoked by his doctrine, or persecutions of which his disciples were the object. Even on the heart of Judaism Jesus made no very durable impression. Philo, who died about the year 50, knew nothing of him Josephus, born in the year 37, and writing at the close of the century, mentions his execution in a few lines, as an event of secondary importance, while in the enumeration of the sects of his time he omits the Christians altogether. Even the Mishna affords no trace of the new school. The passages in the two Gemaras in which the founder of Christianity is named, do not carry us back beyond the fourth or fifth century. The essential work of Jesus was to form around him a circle of disciples, whom he inspired with boundless affection, and in whose breasts he deposited the germ of his doctrine. To have made himself beloved, “to the extent that 255after his death they ceased not to love him,” was the great work of Jesus, and that which most struck his contemporaries. His doctrine was a thing so little dogmatic that he neither thought of writing it nor of having it written. Men did not become his disciples by believing this or that, but by attaching themselves to his person and by loving him. A few sentences easily revoked from the memory, and especially his type of character, and the impression it had left, were what remained of him. Jesus was not a founder of dogmas, or a deviser of symbols; he introduced into the world a new spirit. The least Christianised of men were, on the one hand, the doctors of the Greek Church, who, from the fourth century, began to entangle Christianity in a labyrinth of puerile metaphysical discussions, and, on the other, the scholastics of the Latin Middle Ages, who wished to draw from the Gospel the thousands of articles of a colossal system. To adhere to Jesus with the kingdom of God in prospect was what at first entitled one to be called a Christian.

It will now be understood why, by an exceptional destiny, pure Christianity still presents, after eighteen centuries, the character of a universal and eternal religion. In truth it is because the religion of Jesus is, in some respects, the final religion. The product of a perfectly spontaneous movement of souls, disengaged at its birth from all dogmatic restraints, having struggled three hundred years for liberty of conscience, Christianity, in spite of the catastrophes which have followed it, reaps still the fruits of its excellent origin. To renew itself it has only to return to the Gospel. The kingdom of God, such as we conceive it, differs materially from the supernatural apparition that early Christians hoped to see appear in the clouds. But the sentiment which Jesus introduced into the world is 256really ours. His perfect idealism is the highest rule of a pure and virtuous life. He created a heaven of pure souls, where are to be found what we seek in vain for on earth,—the perfect nobility of the children of God, absolute holiness, total abstraction from the pollutions of the world; in fine, liberty, which society eschews as an impossibility, and which can only find full scope in the domain of mind. The great Master of those who take refuge in this ideal kingdom of God is still Jesus. He was the first to proclaim the sovereignty of the mind; the first to say, at least through his acts, “My kingdom is not of this world.” The foundation of true religion is verily his work. Since him, it only remains to fructify and develop it.

“Christianity” has thus become almost synonymous with “religion.” All that one may attempt, outside this grand and noble Christian tradition, is futile. Jesus founded the religion of humanity, just as Socrates founded philosophy, and Aristotle science. There was philosophy before Socrates, and science before Aristotle. But since the times of Socrates and Aristotle philosophy and science have made immense progress; yet it has all been reared upon the foundations they laid down. Similarly, before Jesus religion had passed through many revolutions; since Jesus it has achieved great conquests; yet we have not advanced, and never will improve upon the essential principle Jesus created; he fixed for ever the idea of pure worship. The religion of Jesus in this sense is not limited. The Church has had its epochs and its phases; it has enveloped itself in creeds which have lasted and can only last for a time: Jesus, on the other hand, has founded absolute religion, which excludes nothing, determines nothing unless it be sentiment. His creeds are not fixed dogmas, but ideas susceptible of indefinite interpretations. We 257should seek in vain for a theological proposition in the Gospel. All professions of faith are travesties of the idea of Jesus, just as the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, in proclaiming Aristotle the only master of a completed science, perverted the teachings of Aristotle. Aristotle, if he had taken part in the debates of the schools, would have repudiated this narrow doctrine; he would have allied himself to the party of progressive science as against the routine which shielded itself under his authority; he would have applauded his opponents. Similarly, if Jesus were to return among us, he would recognise as disciples, not those who pretend to embody his teachings in a few catechismal phrases, but those who labour as he laboured. The eternal glory in all great things is to lay the first stone. It may be that in modern “Physics” and “Meteorology” we may not discover a word of the treatises of Aristotle which bear these titles; but Aristotle remains no less the founder of natural science. Whatever may be the transformations of dogma, Jesus will ever be the creator of the pure spirit of religion; the Sermon on the Mount will never be surpassed. No matter what revolution takes place, nothing will prevent us attaching ourselves in religion to the grand intellectual and moral line at the head of which is enshrined the name of Jesus. In this sense we are Christians, even when we separate ourselves on almost all points from the Christian tradition which has preceded us.

And this great foundation was indeed the personal work of Jesus. To make himself adored to this degree, he must have been adorable. Love is only kindled by an object worthy of it, and we should know nothing of Jesus if it were not for the passion he inspired in those around him, which obliges us still to affirm that he was great and 258pure. The faith, the enthusiasm, the constancy of the first Christian generation is only explicable on the supposition that at its inception there existed a man of transcendent greatness. In view of the marvellous creations of the ages of faith two equally fatal impressions to good historical criticism spring up in the mind. In one view we are led to regard these creations as too impersonal; we impute to collective action that which has often been the work of a single powerful will. In another, we refuse to see men like ourselves in the authors of these extraordinary movements which have decided the fate of humanity. Let us take a broader view of the powers which nature conceals in her bosom. Our civilisations, governed by minute restrictions, cannot give us any idea of the power of man at periods in which the originality of each one had a far freer development. Let us imagine a recluse, dwelling in the mountains near our capital, coming out from time to time in order to present himself at the palaces of sovereigns, brushing the sentinels aside, and, with an imperious tone, announcing to kings the approach of revolutions of which he had been the promoter. The bare idea provokes a smile. Yet such was Elisha; Elisha the Tishbite, in our days, would not be able to pass the gate of the Tuileries. The preaching of Jesus, and his free activity in Galilee, do not deviate less completely from the social conditions to which we are accustomed. Free from our polished conventionalities, exempt from the uniform education which refines us, but which so greatly dwarfs our individuality, these mighty souls carried a surprising energy into action. They appear to us like the giants of a heroic age, who could not have been real. This is a profound error! These men were our brothers; they were of our stature, felt and thought as we do. But the 259breath of God was free in them; with us, it is restrained by the iron bonds of a mean society, and condemned to an irremediable mediocrity.

Let us place, then, at the highest summit of human greatness the person of Jesus. Let us not be led astray by sneers in the presence of a legend which keeps us always in a superhuman world. The life of Francis d'Assisi is, too, only a tissue of miracles. Has any one ever doubted, though, of his existence, and of the part he played? Let us say no more that the glory of founding Christianity must be attributed to the multitude of the first Christians, and not to him whom legend has deified. The inequality of men is much more marked in the East than with us. It is no rarity to see spring up there, in the midst of a general atmosphere of wickedness, characters whose greatness astonishes us. So far from Jesus having been made by his disciples, he appeared in everything superior to them. The latter, St. Paul and St. John excepted, were men without invention or genius. St. Paul himself bears no comparison with Jesus, and as to St. John, he has done little more in his Apocalypse than to breathe the poetry of Jesus. Hence the immense superiority of the Gospels among the writings of the New Testament. Hence the painful lowering of sentiment we experience in passing from the history of Jesus to that of the apostles. The evangelists themselves, who have transmitted to us the image of Jesus, are so much beneath him of whom they speak that they constantly disfigure him, not being able to attain to his height. Their writings are full of errors and contradictions. We feel in each line a discourse of divine beauty, told by narrators who do not understand it, and who substitute their own ideas for those they have only half grasped. On the whole, the character of Jesus, far from having 260been embellished by his biographers, has been marred by them. Criticism, in order to find what he was, needs to discard a series of errors, which prove the mediocre minds of the disciples. The latter painted him as they understood him, and often, in thinking to exalt him, they have debased him.

I know that our modern ideas have been offended more than once in this legend, conceived by another race, under another sky, and in the midst of other social wants. There are virtues which, in some respects, are more conformable to our taste. The upright and gentle Marcus Aurelius, the humble and tender Spinoza, not having believed in miracles, were exempt from some errors that Jesus shared. Spinoza, in his profound obscurity, had an advantage which Jesus did not seek. By our extreme delicacy in the use of means of conviction, by our absolute sincerity and our disinterested love of the pure idea, we have founded—all we, who have devoted our lives to science—a new ideal of morality. But the judgment of general history ought not to be restricted to considerations of personal merit. Marcus Aurelius and his noble masters have left no durable impress on the world. Marcus Aurelius left behind him delightful books, an execrable son, and a decaying nation. Jesus remains an inexhaustible principle of moral regeneration for humanity. Philosophy does not suffice for the multitude. They must have sanctity. An Apollonius of Tyana with his miraculous legend, is therefore more successful than a Socrates with his cold reason. “Socrates,” it was said, “leaves men on the earth, Apollonius transports them to heaven; Socrates is but a sage, Apollonius is a god.” Religion, so far, has not existed without a share of asceticism, of piety, and of the marvellous. When it was wished, after the 261Antonines, to make a religion of philosophy, it was requisite to transform the philosophers into saints, to write the “Edifying Life” of Pythagoras and of Plotinus, to attribute to them a legend, virtues of abstinence, contemplation and supernatural powers, without which neither credence nor authority were found in that age.

Preserve us, then, from mutilating history in order to satisfy our petty susceptibilities! Which of us, pigmies as we are, could do what the extravagant Francis d'Assisi, or the hysterical Saint Theresa, has done? Let medicine have names to express these grand errors of human nature; let it maintain that genius is a disease of the brain; let it see in a certain delicacy of morality the commencement of consumption; let it class enthusiasm and love amongst the nervous accidents—it matters little. The terms healthy and diseased are entirely relative. Who would not prefer to be diseased like Pascal, rather than healthy like the common herd? The narrow ideas which are spread in our times respecting madness, mislead our historical judgments in the most serious manner in questions of this kind. A state in which a man says things of which he is not conscious, in which thought is produced without the summons and control of the will, exposes him to being confined as a lunatic. Formerly this was called prophecy and inspiration. The most beautiful things in the world are done in a state of fever; every great creation involves a breach of equilibrium; child-birth is, by a law of nature, a violent process.

We acknowledge, indeed, that Christianity is too complex to have been the work of a single man. In one sense, entire humanity has co-operated therein. There is no one so shut in as not to receive some influence from without. History is full of singular synchronisms, which cause, without 262any communication with each other, very remote portions of the human species to arrive at the same time at almost identical ideas and imaginations. In the thirteenth century, the Latins, the Greeks, the Syrians, the Jews, and the Mussulmans adopted scholasticism, and very nearly the same scholasticism prevailed from York to Samarcand; in the fourteenth century every one in Italy, Persia, and India yielded to the taste for mystical allegory; in the sixteenth, art was developed in a very similar manner in Italy, and at the court of the Great Moguls, without St. Thomas, Barhebræus, the Rabbis of Narbonne, or the Motécallémin of Bagdad having known each other, without Dante and Petrarch having seen any sofi, without any pupil of the schools of Perouse or of Florence having been at Delhi. We should say there are great moral influences running through the world like epidemics, without distinction of frontier and of race. The interchange of ideas in the human species does not take place only by books or by direct instruction. Jesus was ignorant of the very name of Buddha, of Zoroaster, and of Plato; he had read no Greek book, no Buddhist Soutra, nevertheless there was in him more than one element, which, without his suspecting it, came from Buddhism, Parseeism, or from the Greek wisdom. All this was done through secret channels and by that kind of sympathy which exists among the various portions of humanity. The great man, on the one hand, receives everything from his age; on the other, he governs his age. To show that the religion founded by Jesus was the natural consequence of that which had preceded does not diminish its excellence, but only proves that it had a reason for its existence, that it was legitimate—that is to say, conformable to the instinct and wants of the heart in a given age.

Is it more just to say that Jesus was wholly indebted to Judaism, and that his greatness is only that of the Jewish people? No one is more disposed than myself to place high this unrivalled people, whose particular heritage seems to have been to contain amongst them the extremes of good and evil. Jesus doubtless sprang from Judaism; but he proceeded from it as Socrates did from the schools of the Sophists, as Luther proceeded from the Middle Ages, as Lamennais from Catholicism, as Rousseau from the eighteenth century. A man belongs to his age and race even when he reacts against his age and race. Far from continuing Judaism, Jesus represents the rupture with the Jewish spirit. The supposition that his idea in this respect could lead to equivocation is disproved by the general direction of Christianity after him. The general tendency of Christianity has been to separate itself more and more from Judaism. Its perfection depends on its returning to Jesus, but certainly not in returning to Judaism. The great originality of the founder remains then unchallenged; his glory does not admit any legitimate sharer.

Doubtless, circumstances much aided the success of this marvellous revolution; but circumstances only second endeavours as to what is just and true. Each branch of the development of humanity, art, poetry, religion, encounters, in crossing the ages, a privileged epoch, in which it attains perfection by a sort of spontaneous instinct, and without effort. No labour of reflection would succeed in producing afterwards the masterpieces which nature creates at those moments by inspired geniuses. What the golden age of Greece was for art and profane literature, the age of Jesus was for religion. Jewish society exhibited the most extraordinary moral and intellectual state 264which the human species has ever passed through. It was truly one of those divine hours in which the sublime is produced by combinations of a thousand hidden forces, in which great souls find a flood of admiration and sympathy to sustain them. The world, delivered from the very narrow tyranny of small municipal republics, enjoyed great liberty. Roman despotism did not make itself felt in a disastrous manner until much later, and it was, moreover, always less oppressive in those distant provinces than in the centre of the empire. Our petty preventive interferences (far more destructive than death to spiritual things) did not exist. Jesus, during three years, could lead a life which, in our societies, would have brought him twenty times before the magistrates. Our laws upon the illegal exercise of medicine would alone have sufficed to cut short his career. The unbelieving dynasty of the Herods, on the other hand, occupied itself little with religious movements; under the Asmoneans, Jesus would probably have been arrested at his first step. An innovator, in such a state of society, only risked death, and death is a gain to those who labour for the future. Imagine Jesus reduced to bear the burden of his divinity until his sixtieth or seventieth year, losing his celestial fire, wearing out little by little under the burden of an unparalleled mission! Everything favours those who have a special destiny; they become glorious by a sort of invincible impulse and command of fate.

This sublime person, who each day still presides over the destiny of the world, may be called divine, not in the sense that Jesus has absorbed all the divine, but in the sense that Jesus is the person who has impelled his fellow-men to make the greatest step towards the divine. Humanity in its totality presents an assemblage of low beings, selfish, superior to the animal only in the single 265particular that its selfishness is more reflective. Still, from the midst of this uniform depravity, pillars rise towards the sky, and testify to a nobler destiny. Jesus is the highest of these pillars that show to man whence he comes, and whither he ought to tend. In him was concentrated all that is good and elevated in our nature. He was not without sin; he had to conquer the same passions that we have to combat; no angel of God comforted him, except it was his good conscience; no Satan tempted him, more than each one bears in his heart. In the same way that many of his great qualities are lost to us, in consequence of the lack of intelligence of his disciples, it is also probable that many of his faults have been concealed. But never has any one made the interests of humanity predominate to the same extent in his life over the littlenesses of self-love. Unreservedly devoted to his idea, he subordinated everything to it to such a degree that, towards the end of his life, the universe existed no longer for him. It was by this transport of heroic will that he conquered heaven. There never was a man—Sakya Mouni alone excepted—who so completely trampled under foot family, the pleasures of this world, and all temporal care. He lived only for his Father and the divine mission with which he believed himself charged.

As to us, eternal children, condemned to impotence, who labour without reaping, and who will never witness the fruit of that which we have sown, let us bow before these demi-gods. They did that which we cannot do—create, affirm, act. Will great originality be borne again, or will the world henceforth content itself by following the paths opened by the bold original minds of antiquity? We do not know. In any case, Jesus will pot be surpassed. His worship will constantly 266renew itself, his history will provoke endless pious tears, his sufferings will subdue the stoutest hearts; all ages will proclaim that, among the sons of men, no one has been born who is greater than Jesus.

END OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.