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THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY -- VOLUMES 1 & 2 |
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SEVENTH CHAPTER: RELIGION
ON a former occasion (vol. i. p. 249) I expressed my personal conviction that the earthly life of Jesus Christ forms the origin and Source, the strength and -- fundamentally -- the significance of everything that has ever called itself Christian religion. I shall not repeat myself, but refer once for all to the chapter on Christ. In that chapter I completely separated the sublime figure of Christ from all historical Christianity, here I purpose to deal with the complementary aspect, and to speak of the rise and growth of the Christian religion. It will be my endeavour to bring out certain leading ideas without even touching the inviolable Figure on the Cross. This separation is not only possible but necessary; it would show a blasphemous lack of critical insight to try to identify with the rock itself the strange structures that have been built upon it by human profundity, acuteness, shortsightedness, confusion, stupidity, by tradition and piety, superstition, malice, senselessness, convention, philosophic speculation and devotion to mysticism -- amid the never-ceasing clatter of tongues and swords and the crackling of flames. The whole superstructure of the Christian Churches has hitherto been outside of the personality of Christ. Jewish will, united to Aryan mythical thought, has formed its principal part; much was derived from Syria, Egypt, &c.; the appearance of Christ upon earth was, to begin with, only the incitement to the constitution of religion, its driving power -- as when the lightning breaks through the clouds and there follows a downpour of rain, or when sunbeams suddenly fall upon certain substances which have nothing in common, and they, at once transformed, burst the boundaries that formerly separated them and unite to form a new compound. It would certainly be unwise to try to estimate the power of the sunbeam and the lightning from these effects. All honour to those who built upon Christ, but we must not permit our vision or our judgment to be dimmed. There is not only a past and a present, there is also a future; for it we must maintain our full freedom. I doubt whether we can rightly judge the past in its relation to the present unless a living divination of the needs of the future carries the mind aloft. Taking the standpoint of the present alone the eye is too much earthbound to be able to see all the possible sequences. It was a Christian, and a Christian in sympathy with the Roman Church, who at the beginning of the nineteenth century said: "The New Testament is still a book with seven seals. Christianity must be studied by man for eternities. In the gospels lie the outlines of future gospels." [1] Whoever studies carefully the history of Christianity sees that it is always and everywhere in a state of flux, always and everywhere waging an inward struggle. Whoever, on the other hand, cherishes the foolish delusion that Christianity has now received its various final forms, overlooks the fact that even the Romish Church, which is considered particularly conservative, has created new dogmas in every century, while older ones (certainly with less noise) were being borne to their grave; he forgets that, even in the nineteenth century, that firmly established Church has experienced more movements, struggles and schisms than almost any other. Such a man imagines that, as the process of development is at an end, he now holds the sum of Christianity in his hands and from this monstrous supposition he constructs in the piety of his heart not only the present and the future but also the past. Still more monstrous is the supposition that Christianity is exhausted and spent, sustained in its boundless course only by the law of inertia; and yet more than one moral philosopher of recent times has written the obituary notice of Christianity, speaking of it as of an historical experiment now over, the beginning, middle and conclusion of which are capable of analytical demonstration. The error of judgment, which lies at the bottom of these opposite views is, it is obvious, practically the same, it leads moreover to equally false conclusions. This error we avoid when We distinguish the personality of Christ -- that ever- gushing constant spring of the loftiest religiosity -- from the structures which the changing religious needs, the changing mental claims of men, and -- what is more important -- the fundamentally different natures of dissimilar human races have erected as the law and temple of their worship. The Christian religion took its rise at a very peculiar time, under as unfavourable circumstances as could be imagined for the establishment of a uniform, worthy and solid structure. In those very districts where its cradle stood, namely, in Western Asia, Northern Africa and Eastern Europe, there had been a peculiar fusion of the most diverse superstitions, myths, mysteries and philosophical theorems, whereby, as was inevitable, all had lost something of their individuality and value. Think for a moment of the political and social condition of those countries at that time. What Alexander had begun, Rome had completed in a more thorough fashion: in those districts there prevailed an internationalism of which we can hardly form an idea to-day. In the leading cities on the Mediterranean and in Asia Minor there was absolutely no uniformity of race. There were to be found in heterogeneous groups Hellenes, Syrians, Jews, Semites, Armenians, Egyptians, Persians, Roman military colonies, &c. &c., surrounded by countless hybrids, in whose veins all individual characteristics had been confounded and lost. The feeling of patriotism had quite disappeared, because it lacked all meaning; there existed neither nation nor race; Rome was for these men practically what the police are for our mob. On this state of affairs, which I have characterised as "the chaos of peoples," I have endeavoured to throw some light in chapter four of my book. From it resulted free interchange of ideas and customs; national custom and character were gone, and men sought to find a substitute in a capricious confusion of alien practices and alien views of life. There was now practically no real faith. Even in the case of the Jews -- otherwise a splendid exception in the midst of this Witches' Sabbath -- faith was uncertain amid so many varying sects. And yet never before was there such an intoxication of religious feeling as spread at that time from the banks of the Euphrates to Rome. Indian mysticism, which ill all manner of corrupt forms had penetrated as far as Asia Minor, Chaidaic star-worship, Zoroastric worship of Ormuzd and the fire- worship of the magicians, Egyptian asceticism and the doctrine of immortality, Syrian and Phoenician orgiasm and the delusion of the sacrament, Samothracian, Eleusinian and all other kinds of Hellenic mysteries, curiously disguised outcrops of Pythagorean, Empedoclean and Platonic metaphysics, Mosaic propaganda, Stoical ethics -- were all circling in a mad whirl. Men no longer knew what religion meant, but they gave everything a trial, in the dim consciousness that they had been robbed of something which was as necessary to them as the sun to the earth. [2] Into this world came the word of Christ; and it was by these fever-stricken men that the visible structure of the Christian religion was erected; no one could quite free it from the traces of delirium. The history of the rise of Christian theology is one of the most complicated and difficult that exist. The man who approaches it earnestly and frankly will receive profound and stimulating instruction, but he will at the same time be forced to admit that very much is still exceedingly dark and uncertain, as soon as we leave theorising and try to demonstrate historically the real origin of an idea. A complete history, not of the dogmas within Christianity, but of the way in which from the most diverse circles of ideas articles of faith, conceptions, rules of life entered Christianity and made their home there, cannot yet be written; but enough has happened to convince every one that here an alloy (as the chemists say) of the most diverse metals has been formed. It is not within the scope of my work to submit this complicated state of matters to a thorough analysis, even were I competent for the task; [3] in the meantime it will be sufficient to consider the two chief pillars -- Judaism and Indo-Europeanism -- on which almost the whole structure has been built and which explains the hybridism of the Christian religion from the beginning. Of course much that was Jewish and Indo-European was afterwards so falsified by the influence of the Chaos and especially of Egypt that it became no longer recognisable. Take, for example, the introduction of the cult of Isis (mother of God) and the magic transformation of matter, though here, too, a knowledge of the fundamental structure is indispensable. Everything else is proportionately unimportant; thus -- to give only one example -- the official introduction into practical Christianity of Stoic doctrines of virtue and bliss by Ambrosius, whose book De Officiis Ministrorum was merely a pale imitation of Cicero's De Officiis, which he in turn had compiled from the Greek Panaetius. [4] Such a thing is certainly not without significance; Hatch shows, for example, in his lecture on "Greek and Christian ethics," that the moral code which obtains to-day is made up of far more Stoical than Christian elements. [5] But we have already seen that morality and religion may be independent of each other (see vol. i. pp. 215 and 489), at least wherever the "conversion" taught by Christ has not taken place; and while it is interesting to see a Church father recommending the practical and cosmopolitan, not to say legal, morality of a Cicero as model to the priests of his diocese, yet such a thing does not reach to the foundations of the religious structure. The same might be said of many another element which will occupy our attention later. Now those two principal pillars, upon which the Christian theologists of the first centuries erected the new religion, are Jewish historical and chronological faith and Indo-European symbolical and metaphysical mythology. As I have already demonstrated in detail, we have here to deal with two fundamentally different" views of life." [6] These two views now became amalgamated. Indo-Europeans -- men nurtured on Hellenic poetry and philosophy thirsting after ideas -- transformed Jewish historical religion according to the fancy of their richly imaginative spirit; Jews. on the other hand, even before the rise of Christianity seized hold on the mythology and physics of the Greeks, saturated them with the historical superstition of their people and out of the whole spun an abstract dogmatical web which was just as incomprehensible as the most sublime speculations of a Plato, materialising into empirical forms everything that was transcendental and allegorical; on both sides therefore irremediable misapprehension and non-comprehension -- the inevitable consequence of deviation from the natural course! It was the work of the first centuries to weld together in Christianity these alien elements, and this work could naturally only succeed amid unceasing strife. Reduced to its simplest expression, this strife was a struggle for mastery between Indo-European and Jewish religious in stincts. It broke out immediately after the death of Christ between the Jewish Gentiles and the heathen Christians, for centuries it raged most Violently between gnosis and antignosis, between Arians and Athanasians, it woke up again in the Reformation and to-day it goes on as fiercely as ever, not indeed in the clouds of theory or on battlefields, but as an underground current in Our life. We can make this process clear by a comparison. It is as though we were to take two trees of different genera, cut off their heads and without uprooting them bend them together and tie them in such a fashion that each should become a graft of the other. Upward growth would at once become an impossibility for both; deterioration, not improvement, would be the result, for, as every botanist knows, an organic union is in such a case impossible, and the trees, if they survived the operation, would continue to bear each its own leaves and flowers, and in the confusion of foliage alien would every where be driving against alien. [7] Exactly the same has happened with the Christian structure of religion. Jewish religious chronicle and Jewish Messianic faith stand unreconciled beside the mystic mythology of the Hellenic decadence. Not only do they not fuse, in essential points they contradict each other. Take, for example, the conception of the Godhead: here Jehovah, there the old Aryan Trinity. Take again the conception of the Messiah: here the expectation of a hero of the tribe of David, who will win for the Jews the empire of the world, there the Logos become flesh, fastened on to metaphysical speculations, which had occupied the Greek philosophers for five hundred years before the birth of Christ. [8] Christ, the undeniably historical personality, is forced into both systems; for the Jewish historical myth he had to supply the Messiah, although no one was less suitable; in the neo-Platonic myth he is the fleeting incomprehensible manifestation of an abstract scheme of thought -- he, the moral genius in its highest potentiality, the greatest religious individuality that ever lived! Nevertheless even admitting the necessary untrustworthiness and defects of such a hybrid representation, we can hardly imagine how a universal religion could have arisen in that chaos of peoples without the cooperation of these two elements. Of course, if Christ had preached to Indian or Germanic peoples his words would have had quite a different influence. There has never been a less Christian age -- if I am allowed the paradox -- than the centuries in which the Christian Church originated. A real understanding of Christ's words was at that time out of the question. But when through him the stimulus to religious elevation was given to that chaotic and deluded mass of human beings, how could a temple have been built for them without basing everything upon the Jewish chronicle and the Jewish tendency to view things from a concrete historical standpoint? One could only keep these slavish souls, who had nothing to lean upon either in themselves or in the national life around them, by giving them something tangible, something material and dogmatically certain; it was a religious law, not philosophical speculations about duty and virtue, that they required; for that reason indeed many had already adopted Judaism. But Judaism -- invaluable as a power of will -- possesses only a very small and, being Semitic, a very limited creative capacity; the architect had therefore to be sought elsewhere. Without the wealth of form and the creative power of the Hellenic spirit, or let us say simply, without Homer, Plato and Aristotle, and in the further background Persia and India -- the outward cosmogonic and mythological structure of the Christian Church could never have become the temple of a universal faith. The early teachers of the Church all link themselves with Plato, the later ones with Aristotle as well. Any Church history will testify to the extensive literary poetical and philosophical culture of the earliest, that is the Greek, fathers, and from that we may form a high estimate of the value of this culture for the fundamental dogmas of Christianity, The Indo-European mythology could not of course receive colour and life under such strange auspices; it was Christian art which at a later time helped as far as possible to make good this want; yet, thanks to the influence of the Hellenic eye, this mythology at least received a geometric and in so far visible shape: the ancient Aryan conception of the Trinity supplied the skilfully built cosmic temple, in which were erected the altars of an entirely new religion. We must now become quite clear about the nature of these two most important constructive elements of the Christian religion, otherwise it will be impossible to understand the very complicated strife about articles of faith, which has been raging from the first century of our era to the present day -- but especially during the first centuries. The various leading spirits confuse in the most varying proportions the most contradictory views, doctrines and instincts of Jew and Indo- European, Let us therefore consider first the mythologically moulding influence of the Indo-European philosophy upon the growing Christian religion, and afterwards the mighty impulse which it received from the positive, materialistic spirit of Judaism. In chapter five I have given a detailed exposition of the difference between historical and mythical religion; [9] I assume it now to be known. Mythology is a metaphysical view of the world sub specie oculorum. Its peculiarity, its special character -- its limitation also -- consists in this, that what has not been seen is by it reduced to something seen. The myth explains nothing, it is not a seeking after the whence and whither; nor is it a moral doctrine; least of all is it history. From this one reflection it is clear that the mythology of the Christian Church has primarily nothing to do with Old Testament chronology and the historical advent of Christ; it is an old Aryan legacy transformed in many respects for the worse by alien hands and adapted well or badly to new conditions. [10] In order to form a clear idea of the mythological portions of Christianity, we shall do well to distinguish between inner and outer mythology, that is, between the mythological moulding of outer and of inner experience. Phoebus driving his car through the sky is the figurative expression of an outward phenomenon; the Erinnyes pursuing the criminal symbolise a fact of man's inner'experience. In both spheres Christian and mythological symbolism have penetrated deep, and as Wolfgang Menzel, a man of Catholic leanings, says, "Symbolism is not merely the mirror, it is also the source of dogma." [11] Symbolism as the source of dogma is manifestly identical with mythology. THE MYTHOLOGY OF OUTER EXPERIENCE As an excellent example of mythology which grows from external experience I should like to mention especially the conception of the Trinity. Thanks to the influence of Hellenic sentiment, the Christian Church (in spite of the violent opposition of the Jewish Christians), had, in the moulding of its dogma, steered successfully past that most dangerous cliff, Semitic monotheism, and has preserved in her otherwise perilously Judaised conception of the Godhead the sacred "Three in Number" of the Aryans. [12] It is well known that We continually come iatcriso,ssas tGheoenthuemsbaeyrs, Three among the Indo-Europeans: it is, as Goethe says,
We find it in the three groups of the Indian gods, at a later time (several centuries before Christ) developed into the detailed and expressly stated doctrine of the Trinity, the Trimurti: "He, who is Vishnu, is also Civa, and he, who is Civa, is also Brahma; one being but three Gods." And the conception can be traced from the distant east to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, Where Patricius found the clover leaf as the symbol of the Trinity among the Druids. The number Three was bound at an early time to impress itself upon races that were inclined to poetry and metaphysics, for it and it alone is not a chance number (like five or ten which are derived from the fingers) nor a pedantically calculated number (like seven, which is derived from the so-called seven wandering stars), it expresses a fundamental phenomenon, so that the conception of a Trinity might rather be called an experience than a symbol. The authors of the Upanishads had already recognised that all human knowledge rests on three fundamental forms -- time, space, causality -- and that not a triplicity but (to quote from Kant) a "unity of apperception" results therefrom; space and time also are inseparable unities, but possess three dimensions. In short, the threefoldness as unity surrounds us on all sides as an original phenomenon of experience and is reflected in all individual cases. Thus, for example, the most modern science has proved that without exception every element tan take three -- but only three -- forms: the solid, the fluid, the gaseous; and this only further shows, what the people long ago knew, that our planet consists of earth, water and air. As Homer says
If we search for such conceptions intentionally, the proceeding very soon degenerates (as in the case of Hegel) into trifling; [13] but there is no trifling in the spontaneous, intuitive development into a myth of a general, but not analytically divided, physical and at the same time metaphysical cosmic experience. And from this example we derive the consoling certainty that in the Christian dogma too the Indo-European spirit has not become entirely untrue to its own nature, but that its myth-creating religion has still remained nature-symbolism, as was the case from time immemorial with the Indo- Eranians and the Teutonic nations. But here the symbolism is very subtle indeed, because in the first Christian centuries philosophical abstraction flourished, while artistic creative power was dormant. [14] We must also emphasise the fact that the myth was not felt by the great mass of the Christians as a symbol; but the same was true of the Indians and Teutonic peoples with their deities of light, air and water; it is indeed no mere symbol, all nature testifies to the inner, transcendental truth of such a dogma as well as to its power of vigorous progressive development. [15] Now the structure of Christian dogma contains a great deal of such external, or, if we will, cosmic mythology. In the first place nearly everything which as doctrine supplements the conception of the Trinity: the incarnation of the Word, the Paraclete, &c. More especially is the myth of God becoming man an old Indian ancestral property. We see it in the idea of unity in the very first book of the Rigveda; it meets us in philosophical transformation in the doctrine of the identity of Atma and Brahma; and it assumed visible form in the God-man Krishna, a figure which the poet makes God explain in the Bhagavadgita as follows: "Again and again when virtue languishes and injustice prevails I create myself (in human form). For the protection of the good, the destruction of the evil and the confirmation of virtue I am born on earth." [16] The dogmatic conception of the nature of Buddha is merely a modification of this myth. The conception, too, that the god who became man could only be born of a virgin is an old mythical feature and decidedly belongs to the class of nature-symbols. The much-ridiculed schoolmen who wished to find not only heaven and hell, but also the Trinity, the incarnation, the birth from a virgin, &c., suggested in Homer and expressed in Aristotle, were not quite wrong. The altar and the view of the sacraments among the earliest Christians point likewise rather to common Aryan conceptions of a symbolic nature-cult than to the Jewish peace-offering to an angry God (see details concerning this at the end of the chapter). In short, no single feature of Christian mythology can lay claim to originality. Of course, all these conceptions received a very different meaning in the Christian doctrine -- not that the mythical background had become essentially different but rather because from now onwards the historical personality of Jesus Christ stood in the foreground, and because the metaphysics and the myths of the Indo-Europeans, when recast by the men of the chaos, had mostly been so disfigured as to be no longer recognisable. An attempt has been made in the nineteenth century to explain away the fact of Christ as a myth; [17] the truth lies in the very reverse: Christ is the one thing in Christianity that is not mythical; through Jesus Christ, through the cosmic greatness of his personality (and to this may be added the historically materialising influence of Jewish thought) myth has, so to speak, become history. Before I pass on to the moulding of myths from inner experience, I must say a word about those alien, transforming influences that brought themselves to bear upon the visible structure of religion, and so falsified Our own inherited mythical conceptions. For example, it is, as I have said, an old idea that God becoming man was born of a virgin, but the worship of the "mother of God" was taken from Egypt, where for about three centuries before Christ the rich plastically changeable Pantheon with its usual readiness to receive the alien had assimilated this idea with particular zeal, transforming it, like everything Egyptian, to a purely empirical materialism. But it was long before the cult of Isis could force its way into the Christian religion. In the year 430, the term mother of God" is described by Nestorius as a blasphemous innovation; it had just made its way into the Church! In the history of mythological dogma nothing can be so clearly proved as the direct, genetic connection of the Christian worship of the "mother of God" with the worship of Isis. In the latest times the religion of the chaos that dwelt in Egypt had limited itself more and more to the worship of the "son of God" -- Horus and his mother Isis. Concerning this the famous Egyptologist Flinders Petrie writes: " This religious custom had a profound influence upon the development of Christianity. We may even say that, but for the presence of Egypt we should never have seen a Madonna. Isis had obtained a great hold on the Romans under the earlier Emperors, her worship was fashionable and widespread; and when she found a place in the other great movement, that of the Galileans, when fashion and moral conviction could go hand in hand then her triumph was assured, and, as the Mother Goddess, she has been the ruling figure of the religion of Italy ever since." [18] The same author then shows also how the worship of Horus as a child of God was transferred to the conceptions of the Roman Church, so that out of the profound and thoughtful, ripe and manly proclaimer of salvation of the earliest representations there grew finally the arrogant bambino of Italian pictures. [19] Here we see the chaos of peoples as well as Indo-Europeanism and Judaism at work in the development of the structure of the Christian Church. We find the same in the conceptions of heaven and of hell, of the resurrection, of angels and evil spirits, &c., and at the same time we find their mythological worth becoming less and less, till finally almost nothing is left but slavish superstition, which worships before the fetish of the putative nails of a saint. I attempted in the second half of the first chapter to explain the difference between superstition and religion; at the same time I showed how the delusive conceptions of the uneducated mob, in league with the most subtle philosophy, successfully instituted an attack upon genuine religion, as soon as Hellenic poetical power began to decline; what was said there is applicable here and need not be repeated. (See vol. i. pp. 70 to 80.) Centuries before Christ the so-called mysteries were introduced into Greece, and into them men were initiated by purification (baptism), in order that by, partaking together of the divine flesh and blood (Greek mysterion, Latin sacramentum) they might then share in the divine nature and immortality; but these delusive doctrines were accepted exclusively by the ever-increasing population of" foreigners and slaves" and inspired all genuine Hellenes with horror and contempt. [20] The more deep the religious and creative consciousness sank, the more boldly did the chaos raise its head. A fusion of all shades of superstitions was brought about by the Roman Empire, and when Constantine II. at the end of the fourth century proclaimed the Christian religion to be the religion of the State and so forced all those who were at heart non-Christians into the community of the Christians, all the chaotic conceptions of degenerate "heathendom" flowed in at the same time and from those days onward formed -- at least to a great extent -- an essential element of the dogma. This moment is the turning-point in the development of the Christian religion. Noble Christians, especially the Greek fathers, fought desperately against the disfiguration of their pure, simple faith, a struggle which found its most important but its most violent and best known expression in the long conflict about image- worship. Already in this, Rome, prompted by race, culture and tradition, took the side of the chaos. At the end of the fourth century the great Vigilantius, a Goth, raises his voice against the pseudo-mythological Pantheon of guardian angels and martyrs, the abuse of relics-and the monkhood taken over from the Egyptian worship of Serapis; [21] but Hieronymus, who was educated in Rome, fights it down and enriches the world and the calendar with new saints invented by his own imagination. The "pious lie" was already at work. [22] THE MYTHOLOGY OF INNER EXPERIENCE This may suffice to illustrate the manner in which the mythology derived from outer experience and handed down by the Indo-Europeans was unavoidably disfigured by the Chaos of Peoples. If we now turn our attention to the forming of myths from inner experience we shall find the Indo-European legacy in purer form. The kernel of the Christian religion, the locus in which all rays concentrate, is the conception of a "redemption of man": this idea has always been and still is strange to the Jews; it absolutely contradicts their whole conception of religion; [23] for here we have not to do with a visible, historical fact, but with an inexpressible, inner experience. It is, on the other hand, the central idea in all Indo-Eranian religious views; they all revolve, at it were, round the longing for redemption, the hope of salvation; nor was this idea of redemption strange to the Hellenes; we find it in their mysteries: it forms the basis of many of their myths, and in Plato (e.g., in the seventh book of the Republic) it is clearly recognisable, although, for the reason stated in the first chapter, the Greeks of the Classical epoch revealed to a very small extent the inner, moral, or, as we should say to-day, pessimistic side of these myths. They sought the kernel elsewhere:
And yet alongside of this high estimate of life as the most glorious of all possessions there is the song of praise to the one who dies young:
But whoever notices the tragic basis of the proverbial "Greek cheerfulness" will be inclined to recognise this "redemption in beautiful manifestation" as clearly related to those other conceptions of the redemption; it is the same theme in a different key, Major instead of Minor. The idea of redemption -- or let us rather say the mythical conception of redemption [25] -- embraces two others: that of a present imperfection and that of a possible perfection by some non-empirical, that is, in a certain sense supernatural or transcendental process: the one is symbolised by the myth of degeneration, the other by that of gracious help bestowed by a Higher Being. The myth of degeneration becomes particularly plastic where it is represented as the fall by sin; this is in consequence the most beautiful and imperishable page in Christian mythology; whereas the complementary conception of grace is so pre-eminently metaphysical that it can scarcely be presented in plastic form. The story of the fall is a fable, by which attention is drawn to a great fundamental fact of human life awakened to consciousness; it leads up to knowledge; grace, on the other hand, is a conception which only follows after knowledge, and can only be acquired by personal experience [26] Hence a great and interesting difference in the development of all genuine (that is, non-Semitic) religions according to the predominant mental gifts of the various races. Wherever the creative and figurative element predominates (in the case of the Eranians, the Europeans, and, as it seems, the Sumero-Accadians) degeneration is plastically presented as "fall by sin" and made the centre of the complex of myths derived from inner experience: this complex of myths groups itself around the conception of redemption; [27] whereas where this is not the case (for example among the Aryan Indians, who have such high talents for metaphysics but as plastic artists are more rich in imagination than skilful in form), we do not find the myth of degeneration clearly and definitely formulated, but only all sorts of contradictory conceptions. On the other hand, grace -- the weak point of our religion and for most Christians a mere confused word -- is the radiant sun of Indian faith; it represents not merely hope but the triumphant experience of the pious, and therefore stands so very much in the forefront of all religious thought and feeling that the discussions of the Indian sages on grace, especially in its relation to good works, make the violent debates which have always divided the Christian Church appear relatively almost childish and to a great extent ridiculous, if we except the case of a very few men -- an Apostle Paul and a Martin Luther. Should anyone be inclined to doubt that here we are dealing with the mythical shaping of inexpressible inner experiences, I would refer him to the speech of Christ to Nicodemus, in which the word "regeneration" would be just as senseless as the story in Genesis of the degeneration of the first beings by the eating of an apple, if there were not here as there, a case of making visible a perfectly actual and present but at the same time invisible process which therefore the understanding cannot grasp. And in reference to the fall by sin I refer to Luther, who writes: "Original sin means the fail of all nature"; and again: "The earth is indeed innocent and would willingly bring forth the best; but it is hindered by the curse that has fallen upon men by reason of sin." Here natural affinity between man's innermost action and surrounding nature is obviously postulated: that is Indo-European mythical religion in its full development (see vol. i. pp. 214 and 412). I may also say that when this mythical religion reveals itself as the conception of reason (as in the case of Schopenhauer) it forms Indo-European metaphysics. [28] Reflection upon this brings home to us the profound and very significant fact that our Indo-European view of "sin" is altogether mythical, that is, it reaches beyond the real world. I have already pointed out (vol. i. p. 390 ) how fundamentally distinct the Jewish view is; so that the same word denotes with them quite a different thing; I have, moreover, studied various modern Jewish handbooks of religious teaching without anywhere finding a discussion of the idea of "sin": whoever does not break the law is righteous; on the other hand, the Jewish theologians expressly and energetically reject the dogma of original sin which the Christians derived from the Old Testament. [29] Now if we reflect on this position of the Jews, which is perfectly justified by their history and religion, we shall soon come to see that from our different standpoint sin and original sin are synonyms. It is a question of an unavoidable condition of all life. Our conception of sinfulness is the first step towards the recognition of a transcendental connection of things; it is evidence that our direct experience of this connection is beginning -- an experience which receives its consummation in the words of Christ; "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you" (see vol. i. p. 187). Augustine's definition: "Peccatum est dictum, factum vel concupitum contra legem aeternam" [30] is only a superficial extension of Jewish conceptions; Paul goes to the root of the matter by calling sin itself a "law" -- a law of the flesh, or, as we should say to-day, an empirical law of nature -- and by showing in a famous passage which has been considered obscure but is perfectly clear (Romans viii.). that the Church law, that so-called lex aeterna of Augustine, has not the least power over sin, which is a fact of nature, over which grace alone can prevail. [31] The exact transcription of the Old Indian thought! The singer of the Veda already "searches eagerly for his sin" and finds it not in his will but in his condition, which even in his dreams holds evil up before his eyes, and finally he turns to his God, "the God of grace," who enlightens the simple. [32] And in the same way as later Origenes, Erigena and Luther, the Cariraka-Mimansa considers all living beings as "in need of redemption, but only human beings as being capable of it." [33] It is only when we view sin as a condition, not as the transgression of a law, that we can arrive at the two conceptions of redemption and of grace. Here we have to do with the inmost experiences of the individual soul, which, as far as is possible, are made visible and communicable through mythical images. How unavoidable the struggle was in this whole range of myth-building becomes clear from the simple reflection that such conceptions are directly contradictory to the Jewish view of religion. Where does one find in the sacred books of the Hebrews even the slightest hint of the conception of the divine Trinity? Nowhere. Note also with what fine instinct the first bearers of the Christian idea take precautions that the "redeemer" should not be incorporated in any way with the Jewish people: the house of David had been promised everlasting duration by the Priests (2 Samuel xxii. 5), hence the expectation of a King from this tribe; but Christ is not descended from the house of David; [34] neither is he a son of Jehovah, the God of the Jews; he is the son of the cosmic God, that "holy ghost" which was familiar to all Aryans under different names -- the "breath of breath," as the Brihadaranyaka says, or, to quote the Greek fathers of the Christian Church, the poietes and plaster of the world, the "originator of the sublime work of creation." [35] The idea of a redemption and with it of necessity the conceptions of degeneration and grace have always been and still are alien to the Jews. The surest proof is afforded by the fact that, although the Jews themselves relate the myth of the Fall at the beginning of their sacred books, they themselves have never known anything of original sin! I have already pointed to this fact and we know of course that all the myths contained in the Bible are without exception borrowed, reduced from mythological ambiguity to the narrow significance of an historical chronicle by those who composed the Old Testament. [36] For this reason there grew up in regard to the cycle of myths of redemption a strife within the Christian Church which raged wildly during the first centuries, and signified a life and death struggle for religion, which is not yet settled and never can be -- never, so long as two contradictory views of existence are forced by obstinate want of comprehension to exist side by side as one and the same religion. The Jew, as Professor Darmesteter assured us (vol. 1. p. 421), " has never troubled his brain about the story of the apple and the serpent"; for his unimaginative brain it had no meaning; [37] for the Greek and the Teuton, on the other hand, it was the starting-point of the whole moral mythology of humanity laid down in the book of Genesis. These therefore could not help" troubling their brains" about the question. If like the Jews they rejected the Fall completely, they at the same time destroyed the belief in divine grace and therewith disappeared the conception of redemption, in short, religion in our Indo-European sense was destroyed and nothing but Jewish rationalism remained behind -- without the strength and the ideal element of Jewish national tradition and blood relationship. That is what Augustine clearly recognised. But on the other hand, if we were to accept this very ancient Sumero-Accadian fable, which was meant, as I said before, to awaken the perceptive faculty, if we fancied we must interpret it in that Jewish fashion which views all things mythical as materially correct history, the result must be a monstrous and revolting doctrine, or, as Bishop Julianus of Eclanum at the beginning of the fifth century expresses it, "a stupid and profane dogma." It was this conviction that decided the pious Briton Pelagius -- and before him, as it seems, almost the whole Hellenic Christendom. I have studied various histories of dogma and histories of the Church without ever finding this so very simple cause of the unavoidable Pelagian controversy even hinted at. Harnack, for example, in his History at Dogma, says of Augustine's doctrine of grace and sin: "As the expression of psychological religious experience it is true; but when projected into history it is false," and a little further on he says, "the letter of the Bible had a confusing influence"; here on two occasions he is very near the explanation, without seeing it, and in consequence the rest of his exposition remains abstract and theological, leaving us very uncertain on. the matter. For here we have obviously an instance, if I may use a popular expression, of a knife that cuts both ways. By scornfully rejecting the low materialistic, concretely historical view of Adam's Fall, he proves his deeply religious feeling and maintains it in happy protest against shallow Semitism, at the same time -- by proving death, for example, a universal and necessary law of nature having nothing to do with sin -- he is fighting for truth against superstition, for science against obscurantism. On the other hand, he and his comrades have had their sense for poetry and myth so destroyed by Aristotelianism and Hebraism, that he himself (like so many an Anti-Semite of the present day) has become half a Jew and rejects the good with the bad: he will hear nothing of the Fall; the old, sacred image which points the way to the profoundest knowledge of human nature he discards completely; but grace is hereby made to shrink to a meaningless word and redemption becomes so shadowy an abstraction that a follower of Pelagius could speak of an "emancipation of man from God by free will." This path would have led directly back to flatly rationalistic philosophy and Stoicism, with the never-failing complement of grossly sensual mystery-service and superstition, a movement which we can observe in the ethical and theosophic societies of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt, therefore, that Augustine in that famous struggle, in which he originally had the greatest and most gifted portion of the Episcopate, and more than once the Pope too, against him, saved religion as such, for he defended the myth. But by what means only was that possible to him? It was only possible because he threw the narrow Nessus-shirt of acquired Jewish narrow-mindedness over the splendid creations of divining, intuitive, heavenward-soaring wisdom, and transformed Sumero-Accadian similes into Christian dogmas, in the historical truth of which every one must henceforth believe on penalty of death. [38] I am not writing a history of theology and cannot go deeper into this controversy, but I hope that these fragmentary hints have thrown some light on the inevitable quarrel concerning the Fall, and characterised it in its essentiality. Every educated man knows that the Pelagian controversy is still going on. The Catholic Church, by emphasising the importance of works as opposed to faith, could not help diminishing the importance of grace; no sophistry can put aside this fact, which when further reflected has influenced the actions and thoughts of millions. But Fall and Grace are so closely connected parts of one single organism that the least touching of the one influences the other; thus it was that step by step the true significance of the myth of the Fall became so weakened that the Jesuits to-day are generally described as semi- Pelagians, and they themselves even call their doctrine a scientia media. [39] As soon as the myth is infringed, Judaism is inevitable. It is clear that the struggle must rage more fiercely concerning the conception of grace; for the Fall was at least found in the sacred books of the Israelites, though only as uncomprehended myth, whereas grace is nowhere to be found there and is and remains quite meaningless to them. The storm had already burst among the Apostles, and it has not yet died away. Law or grace: the two could no more exist simultaneously than man could at once serve God and mammon. "I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain" (Paul to the Galatians ii. 21). One such passage is decisive; to play off against it other so-called "canonical" utterances (e.g., The Epistle of James ii. 14, 24) is childish; for it is not a question of theological hair-splitting but of one of the great facts of experience of inner life amongst us Indo-Europeans. "Only he receives redemption, whom redemption chooses," says the Katha-Upanishad. And what gift is it that this metaphysical myth lets us "receive by grace"? According to the Indo-Eranians knowledge, according to the European Christians faith: both guaranteeing a regeneration, that is, awakening man to the consciousness of a different connection of things. [40] I quote again the words of Christ, for they cannot too often be quoted: "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." This is a discernment or a faith, obtained by divine grace. Redemption by knowledge, redemption by faith: two views which are not so very different as people have thought; the Indian, and Buddha, put the emphasis on the intellect, the Graeco-Teuton, taught by Jesus Christ, upon the will: two interpretations of the same inner experience. But the second is of more far-reaching importance, since redemption by knowledge, as India shows, signifies fundamentally a pure and simple negation and so affords no positive, creative principle; while redemption by faith takes hold of humanity by its darkest roots and forces it to take a definite and a strongly positive direction:
To the Jewish religion both views are equally foreign. So much for information and instruction concerning those mythological portions of the Christian religion. which certainly were not borrowed from Judaism. Manifestly, the structure is essentially Indo-European, not a temple built solely in honour of the Jewish religion. This structure rests upon pillars and these pillars upon foundations, which are not all Jewish. But now it remains to appreciate the importance of the impulse derived from Judaism, whereby at the same time the nature of the struggle within the Christian religion will appear more and more manifest. Nothing would be falser than to regard the Jewish influence in the creation of the Christian religion as merely negative, destructive and pernicious. If we look at the matter from the Semitic standpoint. which with the help of any Jewish religious doctrine we can easily do. we shall see things in exactly the opposite light: the Helleno-Aryan element as the undoing. destroying force that is hostile to religion as we already observed in the case of Pelagius. Without giving up our natural point of view, an unprejudiced consideration will show us that the Jewish contribution is very important and almost indispensable. For in this marriage the Jewish spirit was the masculine principle, the generative element, the will. Nothing entitles us to assume that Hellenic speculation, Egyptian asceticism and international mysticism, without the fervour of the Jewish will to believe, would ever have given the world a new religious ideal and at the same time a new life. Neither the Roman Stoics with their noble but cold, impotent moral philosophy, nor the aimless, mystic self-negation of the theology introduced from India to Asia Minor, nor the opposite solution found in the neo-Platonic Philo, where the Israelite faith is viewed in a mystical, symbolical fashion, and Hellenic thought, deformed by senility, must embrace this strangely adorned youngest daughter of Israel -- none of these, obviously, would have led to the goal. How could we otherwise explain the fact that at the very time when Christ was born Judaism itself, so exclusive in its nature, so scornful of everything alien, so stern and joyless and devoid of beauty, had begun a genuine and most successful propaganda? The Jewish religion is disinclined to all conversion, but the Gentiles, impelled by longing for faith, went over to it in crowds. And that too although the Jew was hated. We speak of the Anti-Semitism of to-day. Renan assures us that horror of the Jewish character was even more intense in the century before the birth of Christ [41]* What is it then that forms the secret attraction of Judaism? Its will. That will which, ruling in the sphere of religion, created unconditional, blind faith. Poetry, philosophy, science, mysticism, mythology -- all these are widely divergent and to a certain extent paralyse the will; they testify to an unworldly, speculative, ideal tendency of mind, which produces in the case of all noble men that proud contempt of life which makes it possible for the Indian sage to lay himself while still alive in his own grave, which makes the inimitable greatness of Homer's hero Achilles, which stamps the German Siegfried as a model of fearlessness and which received monumental expression in the nineteenth century in Schopenhauer's doctrine of the negation of the will to live. The will is here in a way directed inwardly. This is quite different in the case of the Jew. His will at all times took an outward direction; it was the unconditional will to live. This will to live was the first thing that Judaism gave to Christianity: hence that contradiction, which even to-day seems to many an inexplicable riddle, between a doctrine of inner conversion, toleration and mercifulness, and a religion of exclusive self-assertion and fanatical intolerance. Next to this general tendency of will -- and inseparably bound up with it -- must be mentioned the Jewish purely historical view of faith. In the third chapter I have treated at length the relation between the Jewish faith of will and the teaching of Christ, while I have in the fifth discussed its relation to religion as a whole; I presuppose both passages to be known. [42] Here I should like merely to call attention to the fact, how great and decisive an influence the Jewish faith as a material unshakable conviction concerning definite historical events was bound to exercise at that moment of history at which Christianity arose. On this point Hatch writes: "The young Christian communities were helped by the current reaction against pure speculation-the longing for certainty. The mass of men were sick of theories; they wanted certainty. The current teaching of the Christian teachers gave this certainty. It appealed to definite facts of which their predecessors were eye-witnesses. Its simple tradition of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was a necessary basis for the satisfaction of men's needs." [43] That was a beginning. The attention was in the first place directed solely to Jesus Christ; the sacred books of the Jews were counted as very suspicious documents: Luther speaks in anger of the small respect which men like Origenes and even Hieronymus (as he tells us) paid to the Old Testament; most of the gnostics rejected it in toto; Marcion actually regarded it as a work of the Devil. But as soon as the thin edge of Jewish historical religion had found its way into men's ideas, the whole wedge could not fail gradually to be driven in. It is believed that the so-called Jewish Christians suffered a defeat and that the heathen Christians with Paul carried off the victory? That is only true in a very conditional and fragmentary manner. Outwardly, indeed, the Jewish law with its "sign of the Covenant" suffered complete shipwreck, outwardly, too, the Indo-European with his Trinity and other mythology and metaphysics prevailed; but inwardly, during the first centuries, the true backbone of Christianity came to be Jewish history -- that history which had been remodelled by fanatical priests according to certain hieratic theories and plans, which had been supplemented and constructed with genius but at the same time with caprice -- that history which historically was utterly untrue. [43] Christ's advent, which had been foretold to them by authentic witnesses, was to those poor men of the chaos like a light in the darkness: it was an historical phenomenon. Sublime spirits indeed placed this historic personality in a symbolical temple; but what signified logos and demiurgos and emanations of the divine principle to the common people? Its healthy instinct impelled it to fasten on to something which gave it a firm hold, and that was Jewish history. The Messianic hope -- although in Judaism it by no means played the part which we Christians imagine [45] -- formed the uniting link in the chain, and mankind possessed henceforth not only the teacher of the new sublime religion, not only the divine picture of the Sufferer on the Cross, but the whole world-plan of the Creator from the time when he created heaven and earth to the moment when he should sit in judgment, "which was soon to be." The longing for material certainty, the distinguishing mark of that epoch, had, as we see, not rested, till every trace of uncertainty had been destroyed. That signifies a triumph of Jewish, and fundamentally of Semitic, philosophy and religion. Closely allied to this is the introduction of religious intolerance. Intolerance is natural to the Semite; in it an essential feature of his character expresses itself. To the Jew especially the unwavering belief in the history and destination of his people was a vital question; this belief was his only weapon in the struggle for the existence of his nation; in it his particular gifts had been permanently expressed; in short, for him there was at stake something which had grown outward from within -- something which was the gift of the history and character of the people. Even the negative qualities of the Jews which are so prominent, for example the indifference and unbelief which has been widespread from earliest times to the present day, had contributed to the rigidness of the compulsion to believe. But now this powerful impulse was applied to quite another world. Here there was no people, no nation, no tradition; that moral motive power of a fearful national trial, which lends consecration to the hard, narrow Jewish law, was altogether lacking. The introduction, therefore, of compulsory faith into the Chaos (and then among the Germanic nations) was in a way an effect without a cause, in other words the rule of caprice. What in the case of the Jews had been an objective result became here a subjective command. What there had moved in a very limited sphere, that of national tradition and national religious law, ruled here without any limitations. The Aryan tendency to establish dogmas (see vol. i. p. 429) entered into a fatal union with the historical narrowness and deliberate intolerance of the Jews. Hence the wild struggle for the possession of the power to proclaim dogmas, lasting through all the first centuries of our era. Mild men like Irenaeus remained almost without influence; the more intolerant the Christian bishop was, the more power did he possess. But this Christian intolerance is distinguished from Jewish intolerance in the same way as Christian dogma is distinguished from Jewish dogma: for the Jews were hemmed in on all sides, confined within definite narrow boundaries, whereas the whole field of the human intellect stood open to Christian dogma and Christian intolerance; moreover Jewish faith and Jewish intolerance have never possessed far-reaching power, whereas the Christians, with Rome, soon ruled the world. And thus we find such inconsistencies as that a heathen Emperor (Aurelian, in the year 272) forces upon Christianity the primateship of the Roman bishop, and that a Christian Emperor, Theodosius, commands, as a purely political measure, that the Christian religion be believed on pain of death. I say nothing of other inconsistencies, e.g., that the nature of God, the relation of the Father to the Son, the eternity of the punishments of hell, &c., ad inf., were settled by majority by Bishops, who frequently could neither read nor write, and became binding upon all men from a fixed day, in somewhat the same way as our Parliament imposes taxes upon us by the vote of the majority. Yet, however difficult it may be for us to watch this monstrous development of a Jewish thought on alien soil without uneasiness, We must admit that a Christian Church could never have been fully developed without dogma and intolerance. Here then we are indebted to Judaism for an element of strength and endurance. But not only the backbone of the growing Christian Church was borrowed from Judaism; the whole skeleton was its product. Take first the establishment of faith and virtue: in ecclesiastical Christianity it is absolutely Jewish, for it rests on fear and hope: on the one side eternal reward, on the other eternal punishment. In regard to this subject also I Can refer to former remarks, in the course of which I pointed out the fundamental difference between a religion which addresses itself to the purely selfish emotions of the heart, i.e., to fear and desire, and a religion which, like that of Brahma, regards the renunciation of the enjoyment of all reward here and in the other world as the first step towards initiation into true piety. [46] I will not repeat myself; but we are now in a position to extend our former knowledge, and only by so doing shall we clearly recognise what unceasing conflict must inevitably result from the forcible fusion of two contradictory views of life. For the least reflection will convince us of the fact that the conception of redemption and of conversion of Will, as it had hovered in many forms before the minds of the Indo-Europeans, and as it found eternal expression in the words of the Saviour, is quite different from all those which represent earthly conduct as being punished or rewarded in an after-life. [47] Here it is not a case of some trifling difference, but of two creations standing side by side, strange from the root to the crown. Though these two trees may have been firmly grafted the one upon the other they can never join together and be one. And yet it was this fusion which early Christianity tried to effect and which still for faithful souls forms the stone of Sisyphus. At the beginning indeed, that is, before the whole national chaos and with it its religious conceptions had in the fourth century been forcibly driven into Christianity, this was not the case. In the very oldest writings one hardly finds any threats of punishment, and heaven is only the belief in an unspeakable happiness, [48] gained by the death of Christ. Where Jewish influence prevails, we find even in the earliest Christian times the so-called Chilianism, that is, the belief in an approaching earthly millennium (merely one of the many forms of the theocratic world-empire of which the Jews dreamt); wherever, on the other hand, philosophic thought kept the upper hand for a time, as in the case of Origenes, conceptions manifest themselves which can scarcely be distinguished from the transmigration of souls of the Indians and of Plato: [49] the spirits of men are regarded as being created from eternity; according to their conduct they rise or sink, until finally all without exception are transfigured, even the demons. [50] In such a system, it is plain that neither the individual life itself, nor the promise of reward and the threat of punishment, has anything in common with the Judaeo-Christian religion. [51] But here too the Jewish spirit quickly prevailed, and that in exactly the same way as did dogma and intolerance, by taking a development which hitherto had been undreamt of on the limited soil of Judea. The pains of hell and the bliss of heaven, the fear of the one and the hope of the other are henceforth the only mainsprings which influence all Christendom. What redemption is, scarcely anyone now knows, for even the preachers saw in it -- and indeed still see in it at the present day -- nothing more than " redemption from the punishments of hell." [52] The men of the chaos in fact understood no other arguments; a contemporary of Origenes, the African Tertullian, declares frankly that only one thing can improve men, " the fear of eternal punishment and the hope of eternal reward" (Apol. 49). Naturally some chosen spirits rebelled constantly against this materialising and Judaising of religion; the importance of Christian mysticism, for example, could perhaps be said to lie in this, that it rejected all these conceptions and aimed solely at the transformation of the inner man -- that is, at redemption; but the two views could never be made to agree, and it is just this impossibility that was demanded of the faithful Christian. Either faith is to "improve" men, as Tertullian asserts, or it is to completely transform them by a conversion of the whole soul-life, as the gospel taught; either the world is a penitentiary, which we should hate, as Clemens of Rome taught in the second century [53] and after him the whole official Church, or else this world is the blessed soil, in which the Kingdom of Heaven lies like a hidden treasure, according to the teaching of Christ. The one assertion contradicts the other. In the further course of this chapter I shall return to these contrasts; but I had first to make the reader feel their reality, and at the same time point out to him the measure of the triumph of Judaism as an eminently positive active power. With the proud independence of the genuine Indo-European aristocrat Origenes had expressed the opinion, "only for the common man it may suffice to know that the sinner is punished"; but now all these men of the chaos were "common men"; sureness, fearlessness and conviction are the gift only of race and nationality; human nobility is a collective term; [54] the noblest individual man -- for example an Augustine -- cannot rise above the conceptions and sentiments of the common man and attain to perfect freedom. These "common" men needed a master who should speak to them as to slaves, after the manner of the Jewish Jehovah : a duty which the Church, endowed with the full power of the Roman Empire, accepted. Art, mythology and metaphysics in their creative significance had become quite incomprehensible to the men of that time; the character of religion had in consequence to be lowered to the level on which it had stood in Judea. These men required a purely historical, demonstrable religion. which admitted no doubt or uncertainty either in the past or in the future and least of all in the present: this was found only in the Bible of the Jews. The motives had to be taken from the world of sense: corporal punishment s alone could deter these men from evil deeds. promises of. happiness. free of all care, alone could urge them to good works. That was of course the religious system of the Jewish hierocracy (cf. vol. i. p. 453). From that time onward the system of ecclesiastical commands, taken from Judaism and further developed, decided authoritatively in regard to all matters, whether incomprehensible mysteries or obvious facts of history (or it might be, historical lies). The intolerance which had been foreshadowed in Judaism but had never attained to its full development, [55] became the fundamental principle of Christian conduct, and that as a logically unavoidable conclusion from the presuppositions just mentioned: if religion is a chronicle of the world, if its moral principle is legal and historical, if there is an historically established precedent for the decision of every doubt, every question, then every deviation from the doctrine is an offence against truthfulness and endangers the salvation of man which is conceived as purely material; and so ecclesiastical justice steps in and exterminates the unbeliever or the heretic, just as the Jews had stoned everyone who was not strictly orthodox. I hope that these hints will suffice to awaken the vivid conception and at the same time the conviction that Christianity as a religious structure actually rests upon two fundamentally different and directly hostile "views of existence": upon Jewish historical-chronistic faith and upon Indo-European symbolical and metaphysic mythology (as I asserted upon p. 19). I cannot give more than indications, not even now, when I am preparing to cast a glance at the struggle which was bound to result from so unnatural a union. Real history is true only when it is apprehended as much as possible in detail; where that is not possible, a survey cannot be made too general; for only by this is it possible really to grasp completely a truth of the higher order, something living and unmutilated; the worst enemies of historical insight are the compendia. In this particular case the recognition of the connection of phenomena is simplified by the fact that we have here to do with things which still live in our own hearts. For the discord spoken of in this chapter dwells, though he may not know it, in the heart of every Christian. Though in the first Christian centuries the struggle seemed, outwardly, to rage more fiercely than it does to-day, there never was a complete truce; it was just in the second half of the nineteenth century that the question here touched upon came to a more acute crisis, chiefly through the active energy of the Roman Church, which never grows weary in the fight; neither is it thinkable that our growing culture can ever attain to true ripeness, unless illuminated by the undimmed sun of a pure, uniform religion; only that could bring it from out the "Middle Ages." If it is now obvious that a clear knowledge of that early time of open, unscrupulous strife must enable us to understand our own time, then unquestionably the spirit of our present age helps us in turn to comprehend that earliest epoch of growing, honestly and freely searching Christianity. I say expressly that it is only the very earliest epoch that the experiences of our own heart teach us to comprehend; for at a later time the struggle grew less and less truly religious, more and more ecclesiastical and political. When Popery had attained to the summit of its power in the twelfth century under Innocent III., the real religious impulse which a short time before had been so strong under Gregory VII. ceased, and the Church was henceforth, so to speak, secularised; no more can we even for a moment regard and judge the Reformation as a purely religious movement, it is manifestly at least half political; and under such conditions there soon is nothing left but a mere matter of business in which the purely human interest sinks to the lowest level. On the other hand, in the nineteenth century, in consequence of the almost complete separation in most countries of State and Religion (which is in no way influenced by the retention of one or more State churches) and in consequence of the altered, henceforth purely moral position of Popery, which outwardly has become powerless, there has been a noticeable awakening of religious interest, and of all forms of genuine as well as of superstitious religiosity. A symptom of this ferment is the abundant formation of sects among ourselves. In England, for example, more than a hundred different and so-called Christian unions possess churches which are officially registered, or at any rate places of meeting for common worship. In this connection it is striking that even the Catholics in England are divided into five different sects, only one of which is strictly orthodox Roman. Even among the Jews religious life has awakened; three different sects have houses of prayer in London and there are besides two different groups of Jewish Christians there. That reminds us of the centuries before the religious degeneration; at the end of the second century, for example, Irenaeus tells of thirty-two sects, Epiphanius, two centuries later, of eighty. Therefore we are justified in the hope that the further back we go the better we shall understand the spiritual conflict of genuine Christians. We get the most vivid idea of the double nature of Christianity when we see how it affects individual great men, as Paul and Augustine. In the case of Paul everything is much greater and clearer and more heroic, because spontaneous and free; Augustine, on the other hand, is sympathetic to all generations, is venerable, awakening pity at the same time that he commands admiration. Were we to place Augustine side by side with the victorious Apostle -- perhaps the greatest man of Christianity -- he would not for a moment bear comparison; but when we put him on a line with those around him, his importance is brilliantly manifest. Augustine is the proper contrast to that other son of the Chaos, Lucian, of whom I spoke in chap. iv.: there the frivolity of a civilisation hurrying to its fall. here the look of pain raised to God from amid the ruins; there gold and fame as the goal in life. mockery and pleasantry the means, here wisdom and virtue, asceticism and solemn earnest working; there the tearing down of glorious ruins, here the toilsome building up of a firm structure of faith, even at the cost of his own convictions, even though the architecture should be very rude in comparison with the aspirations of the profound spirit, no matter, if only poor, chaotic humanity may yet get something sure to cling to, and wandering sheep gain a fold. In two so different personalities as Paul and Augustine the double nature of Christianity naturally reveals itself in very different ways. In the case of Paul everything is positive, everything affirmative; he has no unchanging theoretical "theology," [56] but -- a contemporary of Jesus Christ -- he is consumed, as if by living flames, by the divine presence of the Saviour. As long as he was against Christ he knew no rest until he should have swept away the very last of his disciples; as Soon as he had recognised Christ as the redeemer, his life was entirely given up to spreading the "good news" over the whole world that he could reach; in his life there was no period of groping about, of seeking, or irresolution. If he must discuss, then he paints his theses on the sky, visible from afar; if he must contradict, he does so with a few blows of a club, as it were, but his love flashes up again immediately, and he is, as his own epigram says, "all things to all men," caring not if he has to speak in one way to the Jew, in another to the Greek and in another to the Celt, if only he can "save some." [57] However profoundly the words of this one apostle flash into the darkest regions of the human heart, there is never a trace of painful constructing, of sophisticating in them; what he says is experienced and wells up spontaneously from his heart; indeed his pen seems unable to keep pace with his thought; "not as though I had already attained, but I follow after ... forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before" (Phil. iii. 13). Here contradiction is openly placed side by side with contradiction. What matters it if only many believe in Christ the Redeemer? Not so Augustine. No firm national religion "surrounds his path as it did that of Paul; he is an atom among atoms in the shoreless ocean of a fast decaying chaos. No matter where he puts his foot, he encounters sand or morass; no heroic figure -- such as Paul saw -- appears like a blinding sun on his horizon, but from a dreary writing of the lawyer Cicero he must draw the inspiration for his moral awakening of others, and from sermons of the worthy Ambrosius his appreciation of the significance of Christianity. His whole life is a painful struggle; first against and with himself, until he has overcome the various phases of unbelief and after trying various doctrines has accepted that of Ambrosius; then against what he had formerly believed, and against the many Christians whose opinions differed from his own. For while the living memory of the personality of Christ tinged all religion in the lifetime of the Apostle Paul, this was now effected by the superstition of dogma. Paul had been able proudly to say of himself that he did not fight like those who swing their arms around them in the air; Augustine, on the other hand, spent a good part of his life in such fighting. Here, therefore, the contradiction which is always endeavouring to conceal itself from its own eye and that of others, goes much deeper; it rends the inner nature, mixes as it were" the corn with chaff," and builds (in the intention of founding a firm orthodoxy) a structure which is so inconsistent, insecure, superstitious and in many points actually barbarous, that should the Christianity of the Chaos one day crumble to pieces, Augustine more than any other man would be responsible for it. Let us now study these two men more closely. And first of all let us try to gain some fundamental ideas concerning Paul, for here we may hope to reveal the germ of the development which followed. In spite of all assertions, it remains very doubtful whether Paul was a pure Jew by race; I am strongly of opinion that the double nature of this remarkable man must be explained partly by his blood. There are no proofs. We only know the one fact, that he was not born in Judea or Phoenicia, but outside the Semitic boundary, in Cilicia, and that too in the city of Tarsus, which was founded by a Dorian colony and was thoroughly Hellenic. When we consider on the one hand how lax the Jews of that time outside of Judea were in regard to mixed marriages, [58] on the other hand that the Diaspora, in which Paul was born, was keenly propagandist and won a large number of women for the Jewish faith, [59] the supposition appears not at all un. warrantable that Paul's father was indeed a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin (as he asserts, Romans xi. I; Philippians iii. 5), but that his mother was a Hellene who had gone over to Judaism. When historical proofs are lacking, scientific psychology may well have the right to put in its word; and the above hypothesis would explain the otherwise incomprehensible phenomenon, that an absolutely Jewish character (tenacity, pliancy, fanaticism, self- confidence) and a Talmudic education accompany an absolutely un-Jewish intellect. [60] However that may be, Paul did not grow up, like the rest of the Apostles, in a Jewish land, but in a busy centre of Greek science, and of philosophical and oratorical schools. From his youth Paul spoke and wrote Greek: his knowledge of Hebrew is said to have been very defective. [61] Though he may therefore have been educated as a strict Jew, the atmosphere in which he grew up was nevertheless not purely Jewish, but the stimulating, rich, free-minded Hellenic atmosphere: a circumstance which deserves all the more attention in that the greater the genius, the greater is the influence of impressions received. And thus we see Paul in the further course of his life after the short epoch of Pharisaical errors in which he fervently persisted, avoiding as much as possible the society of genuine Hebrews. The fact that for fourteen years after his conversion he avoided the city of Jerusalem, although he would have met there the personal disciples of Christ, that he only stayed there of necessity and for a short time, limiting his intercourse as much as possible, has given rise to a library of explanations and discussions; but the whole life of Paul shows that Jerusalem and its inhabitants and their manner of thought were simply so abhorrent to him as to be unbearable. His first act as an apostle is the doing away with the sacred "sign of the covenant" of all Hebrews. From the very beginning he finds himself at feud with the Jewish Christians. Where he has to undertake apostolic missions at their side, he quarrels with them. [62] None of his few personal friends is a genuine Jew of Palestine: Barnabas, for example, is, like himself, from the Diaspora, and so anti-Jewish in sentiment that he (as pioneer of Marcion) denies the old covenant, that is, the privileged position of the Israelite people; Luke, whom Paul calls "the beloved," is not a Jew (Col. iv. 11-14); Titus, the one bosom-friend of Paul, his "partner and fellow-helper" (2 Cor. viii. 23), is a genuinely Hellenic Greek. In his mission work, too, Paul is always attracted to the "heathen," especially to places where Hellenic culture flourishes. Modern investigation has thrown valuable light on this matter. Till a short time ago the knowledge of the geographical and economic relations of Asia Minor during the first Christian century was very defective; it was thought that Paul (on his first journey especially) sought out the most uncivilised districts and anxiously avoided the towns; this supposition has now been proved erroneous: [63] rather did Paul preach almost exclusively in the great centres of Helleno-Roman civilisation and with preference in districts where the Jewish communities were not large. Cities like Lystra and Derbe, which hitherto were spoken of in theological commentaries as unimportant, scarcely civilised places, were on the contrary centres of Hellenic culture and of Roman life. With this is connected a second very important discovery: Christianity did not spread first among the poor and uncultured, as was hitherto supposed, but among the educated and well-to-do. "Where Roman organisation and Greek thought have gone, Paul by preference goes," Ramsay tells us, [64] and Karl Muller adds: "The circles which Paul had won had never really been Jewish." [65] And yet, this man is a Jew; he is proud of his descent, [66] he is, as it were, saturated with Jewish conceptions, he is a master of Rabbinical dialectic, and it is he, more than any other, who stamps the historical mode of thinking and the traditions of the Old Testament as an essential, permanent part of Christianity. Although religion is my theme, I have intentionally emphasised in the case of Paul these more exoteric considerations, because where I as a layman enter the sphere of theological religion, it is my duty to be extremely cautious and reserved. Gladly would I demonstrate sentence for sentence what in my opinion should be said about Paul, but how often does everything depend on the meaning of one single probably ambiguous word; the layman can only be on sure ground when he goes deeper, to the source of the words themselves. Hence Paul calls cheerfully to us: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereon!" (I Cor. iii. 10). So let us now take heed -- let us follow the admonition of Paul, not to leave this care to others -- and we shall discover, even without entering the domain of learned discussions, that the foundation of the Christian religion laid by Paul is made up of incongruous elements. In his deepest inner nature, in his view of the importance of religion in the life of man, Paul is so un-Jewish that he deserves the epithet anti-Jewish; the Jew in him is merely the outer shell, he shows it only in the ineradicable habits of the intellectual mechanism. At heart Paul is not a rationalist but a mystic. Mysticism is mythology carried back from symbolical images to the inner experience of the Inexpressible, an experience which has grown in intensity and realised more clearly his own inner nature. The true religion of Paul is not the belief in a so-called chronicle of the history of the world, it is mythical-metaphysical discernment. Such things as the distinction between an outer and an inner man, between flesh and spirit, "Miserable man that I am, who will redeem me from the body of this death?" -- the many expressions such as the following, "We are all one body in Christ," &c. -- all these sayings point to a transcendental view of things. But the Indo-European tendency of mind is still more apparent when we consider the great fundamental convictions. Then we find as kernel (see p. 31) the conception of redemption; the need of it is produced by the natural and quite general tendency to sin, not by transgressions of law with consequent feeling of guilt; redemption is brought about by divine grace which bestows faith, not by works and holy life. And what is this redemption? It is "regeneration," or, as Christ expresses it, "conversion." [67] It would be impossible to hold a religious view which represented a sharper contrast to all Semitic and specially to all Jewish religion. So true is this that not only wall Paul during his lifetime opposed by the Jewish Christians, but this very kernel of his religion for fifteen hundred years lay hidden within Christianity under the over-luxuriant tangle of Jewish rationalism and heathen superstitions -- anathematised, when it attempted to show its head in the case of men like Origenes, rendered unrecognisable by the deeply religious Augustine, who was at heart genuinely Pauline, but was carried away by the opposite current. Here Teutons had to interfere; even to-day Paul has apart from them no genuine disciples: a circumstance the full significance of which will be apparent to everyone, when he learns that two centuries ago the Jesuits held a conference to discuss how the Epistles of Paul could be removed from the sacred writings or corrected. [68] But Paul himself had begun the work of anti-Paulinism, by erecting around this core of belief, which was the product of an Indo-European soul, an absolutely Jewish structure, a kind of latticework, through which a congenial eye might indeed see, but which for Christianity growing up amid the unhappy chaos became so much the chief thing that the inner core was practically neglected. But this outer work could naturally not possess the faultless consistency of a pure system like the Jewish or the Indian. In itself a contradiction to the inner, creative religious thought, this pseudo-Jewish theological structure became entangled in one inconsistency after the other in the endeavour to be logically convincing and uniform. We have already seen that it was Paul himself who made such a fine attempt to bring the Old Testament into organic connection with the new doctrine of salvation. This is particularly the case in the most Jewish of his letters, that to the Romans. In contrast to other passages the Fall of Man is here introduced as a purely historical event (v. 12), which then logically postulates the second historical event, the birth of the second Adam "from the seed of David" (i. 3). Hence the whole history of the world runs in accordance with a very clear, humanly comprehensible, so to say" empirical" divine plan. Instead of the narrow Jewish view we here certainly find a universal plan of salvation, but the principle is the same. It is the same Jehovah, who is Conceived quite humanly, who creates, commands, forbids, is angry, punishes, rewards: Israel is also the chosen people, the "good olive," upon which some twigs of the wild tree of Heathendom are henceforth grafted (Rom. xi. 17); and even this extension of Judaism Paul brings about solely by a new interpretation of the Messianic doctrine, " as it had been fully developed in the Jewish Apocalypse of that time." [69] Now everything is arranged in a finely logical and rationalistic manner: the creation, the accidental fall of man, the punishment, the selection of the special race of priests, from whose midst the Messiah shall come, the death of the Messiah as atonement (exactly in the old Jewish sense), the last judgment, which takes account of the works of men and distributes punishment and reward accordingly. It is impossible to be more Jewish: a capricious law decides what is holiness and what sin, the transgression of the law is punished, but the punishment can be expiated by the making of a corresponding sacrifice. Here there is no question of an inborn need of redemption in the Indian sense, there is no room for rebirth, as Christ so urgently impressed it upon His disciples, the idea of grace possesses in such a system no meaning, any more than does faith in the Pauline sense. [70] Between the two religious views of Paul there is not a merely organic contrast, such as all life furnishes, but a logical one, that is, a mathematical, mechanical, in. dissoluble contradiction. Such a contradiction leads necessarily to a conflict. Not necessarily in the heart of the One originator, for our human mind is rich in automatically working contrivances for adaptation to circumstances; just as the lens of the eye accommodates itself to various distances, whereby the object which at one time is clearly seen is On the next occasion so blurred as to be almost unrecognisable, so the inner image changes with the point of vision, and hence on the various levels of Our philosophy there may stand things which are not in harmony without our ever becoming aware of the fact; for if we contemplate the One the details of the other disappear, and vice versa. We must therefore distinguish between those logical contradictions which the martyred spirit of compulsion with full consciousness presents -- as for example those of Augustine, who is always hesitating between his conviction and his acquired orthodoxy, between his intuition and his wish to serve the practical needs of the Church -- and the unconscious contradictions of a frank, perfectly simple mind like Paul. But this distinction serves only to make the particular personality better known to us; the contradiction as such remains. Indeed Paul himself confesses that he is" all things to all men," and that certainly explains some deviations; but the roots strike deeper. In this breast lodge two souls: a Jewish and an un-Jewish, or rather an un-Jewish soul with pinions fettered to a Jewish thinking-machine. As long as the great personality lived, it exercised influence as a unity through the uniformity of its conduct, through its capacity for modulating its words. But after its death the letter remained behind, the letter, the fatal property of which is to bring all and everything to the same level, the letter, which destroys all perspective moulding and knows but one plane -- the superficial plane! Here contradiction stood side by side with contradiction, not as the colours of the rainbow which merge into each other, but as light and darkness which exclude each other. The conflict was unavoidable. Outwardly it found expression in the establishment of dogmas and sects; nowhere was it more powerfully expressed than in the great Reformation of the thirteenth century, which was throughout inspired by Paul, and might have chosen as its motto the words: "Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage" (Gal. v. I); even to-day the conflict between the Jewish and the non-Jewish religion of Paul goes on. Still more fatal almost was and is the inner struggle in the bosom of the individual Christian, from Origenes to Luther, and from him to every man of the present day who belongs to a Christian Church. Paul himself had not been in the least bound down by any kind of dogma. It has been proved that he knew very little of the life of Christ; [71] that he received counsel and instruction from no one, not even from the disciples of the Saviour, nor from those who were "regarded as pillars"; he explicitly states this and makes it a boast (Gal. i. and ii.); he knows nothing of the cosmic mythology of the Trinity; he will have nothing to do with the metaphysical hypostasis of the Logos, [72] nor is he in the painful position of having to reconcile himself with the utterances of other Christians. He passes with a smile many a superstition that was widespread in his time and that was later transformed into a Christian dogma, saying, for example, of the angels that "no one hath seen them" (Col. ii. 18), and that one should not by such conceptions be "beguiled of one's reward"; he frankly admits that we "know only in part; we see now through a glass darkly" (I Cor. xiii. 9, 12), and so it never occurs to him to fit his living faith into dogmatic piecework: in short, Paul still remained a free man. No One after him was free. For by his fastening on to the Old Testament, he had produced a New Testament: the old was revealed truth the new consequently the same; the old was certified historical chronicle, the new could be nothing less. But while the old at a late period had been put together and revised with a particular aim, it was not so with the new; here the One man stood naturally beside the other. If for example Paul, clinging firmly to the one great fundamental principle of all ideal religion, teaches that it is faith not works that redeems us, then the pure Jew James immediately utters the fundamental dogma of all materialistic religion that not faith but works make us blessed. We find both in the New Testament, both are in Consequence revealed truth. And now for the striking contradiction in Paul himself! Those learned in Scripture may say what they like -- and amongst them we must in this case include even a Martin Luther -- the Gordian knots that we have to deal with here (and there are several of them) can only be cut, not loosened: either we are for Paul or we are against him, either we are for the dogmatically chronistic pharisaical theology of the one Paul or we believe with the other Paul in a transcendental truth behind the mysterious mirage of empirical appearance. And it is only in the latter case that we understand him when he Speaks of the "mystery" -- not of a justification (like the Jews), but of the mystery of "transformation" (I Cor. xv. 51). And this transformation is not something future; it is independent of time altogether, i.e., something present: "ye are saved; he has made us sit together in heavenly places ..." (Eph. ii. 5, 6). And if we must speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of our flesh" (Rom. vi. 19), if we must speak with words of that mystery which is beyond words, that mystery which we indeed see in Jesus Christ, but cannot conceive and hence cannot express-then we do speak of original sin, of grace, of redemption by regeneration, and all this we embrace with Paul as "faith." Though therefore we put aside the. different teachings of other Apostles, neglect the later additions to the church doctrine from mythology, metaphysics and superstition, and hold to Paul alone, we kindle an inextinguishable fire of conflict in our own hearts, as soon as we try to force ourselves to look upon both religious doctrines of the Apostle as equally justified. This is the conflict in which Christianity has from the very first been involved; this is the tragedy of Christianity, before which the divine and living personality of Jesus Christ, the one source of everything in Christianity that deserves the name of religion, soon faded into the background. Though I named Paul especially, it must be clear from many a remark here and there, that I am far from regarding him as the one source of all Christian theology; very much in it has been added later, and great world-revolutionising religious struggles, such as that between Arians and Athanasians, are carried on almost altogether outside of the Pauline conceptions. [73] In a book like this I am compelled to simplify very much, otherwise the mass of material would reduce my pictures to mere shadows. Paul is beyond question the mightiest "architect" (as he calls himself) of Christianity, and it has been my object to show, in the first place, that by introducing the Jewish chronistic and material standpoint Paul establishes also the intolerantly dogmatic, causing thereby unspeakable evil in later times; and secondly, that even when we go back to pure unmixed Paulinism, we encounter inexplicable hostile contradictions -- which are historically easy to explain in the soul of this one man, but which, when stamped into lasting articles of faith for all men, were bound to sow discord among them and to extend the conflict into the heart of the individual. This unfortunate discordancy has from the first been a characteristic of Christianity. All that is contradictory and incomprehensible in the never-ending strifes of the first Christian centuries, during which the new structure of religion Was erected stone by stone with such difficulty, awkwardness, inconsistency, toil and (apart from some great minds) indignity -- the later deviations of the human intellect in scholasticism, the bloody wars of confessions, the fearful confusion of the present day with its Babel of Creeds, which the secular sword alone holds back from open combat with each other the whole drowned by the shrill voice of blasphemy, while many of the noblest men shut their ears, preferring to hear no message of salvation than such a cacophony -- all this is really the result of the original hybrid or discordant nature of Christianity. From the day when (about eighteen years after the death of Christ) the strife broke out between the congregations of Antioch and Jerusalem, as to whether the followers of Christ need be circumcised or not, to the present day, when Peter and Paul are much more diametrically opposed than then (see Galatians ii. 14), Christianity has been sick unto death because of this. And that all the more as from Paul to Pio Nono all seem to have been blind to two simple clear facts: the antagonism of races, and the irreconcilability of the mutually exclusive religious ideals lying side by side. And thus it came to pass that the first divine revelation of a religion of love led to a religion of hatred, such as the world had never known before. The followers of the Teacher who yielded without a struggle and went unresistingly to the Cross, within a few centuries murdered in cold blood, as "pious work," more millions of human beings than fell in all the wars of antiquity; the consecrated priests of this religion became professional hangmen; whoever was not prepared to accept under oath an empty idea which no man comprehended but which had been stamped as dogma, an echo perhaps from the leisure hour of the intellectual acrobat Aristotle or the subtle Plotinus -- that is, all the more gifted, the more earnest, the nobler, the free men -- had to die the most painful death; though the truth of religion lay not in the word but in the spirit, for the first time in the history of the world the Word entered upon that fearful tyranny which even to-day lies like a nightmare upon our poor struggling "Middle Ages." But enough, everyone understands me, every one knows the bloody history of Christianity, the history of religious fanaticism. And what is at the root of this history? The figure of Jesus Christ? No, indeed! The union of the Aryan spirit with the Jewish and that of both with the madness of the Chaos that knew neither nation nor faith. The Jewish spirit, if it had been adopted in its purity, would never have caused so much mischief; for dogmatic uniformity would then have rested on the basis of something quite comprehensible, and the Church would have become the enemy of superstition; but as it was the stream of the Jewish spirit was let loose upon the sublime world of Indo-European symbolism and freely creative, rich imaginative power; [74] like the poison of the arrow of the South American this spirit penetrated and benumbed an organism to which only constant change and remodelling could give life and beauty. The dogmatic element [75] the letter-creed, the fearful narrowness of religious conceptions, intolerance, fanaticism, extreme self-conceit -- all this is a consequence of the linking on to the Old Testament of the Jewish historical belief: it is that "will," of which I spoke before, which Judaism gave to growing Christianity; a blind, flaming, hard, cruel will, that will which formerly at the sacking of an enemy's city had given the order to dash the heads of the babes against the stones. At the same time this dogmatic spirit transformed as by a spell the most stupid and revolting superstition of miserable slavish souls into essential components of religion; what had hitherto been good enough for the "common man" (as Origenes expressed it) or for the slaves (as Demosthenes scoffingly says), princes of intellect must now accept for the salvation of their souls. In a former chapter I have already called attention to the childish superstitions of an Augustine (vol. i. p. 311); Paul would not for a moment have believed that a man could be changed into an ass (we see how he speaks of the angels), Augustine on the other hand finds it plausible. While therefore the highest religious intuitions are dragged to the ground and so distorted as to lose all their fine qualities, long obsolete delusive ideas of primitive men -- magic, witchcraft, &c. -- were at the same time given an officially guaranteed right of abode in praecinctu ecclesiae. No human being offers such a fine but at the same time sad example as does Augustine of the discord caused in the heart by a Christianity thus organised. It is impossible to open any work of his without being touched by the fervour of his feeling, and held spellbound by the holy earnestness of his thoughts; we cannot read it long without being forced to regret that such a spirit, chosen to be a disciple of the living Christ, capable as few only were capable to carry on the work of Paul and to assist the true religion of the Apostle to victory at the decisive moment, was yet unable to contend -- without Fatherland, race or religion as he was -- against the powers of the Chaos, from which he himself had arisen, so that finally in a kind of mad despair he clung to the one ideal only -- to help to organise the Roman Church as the saving, ordering, uniting, world-ruling power -- even though it should cost the better part of his own religion. But if we remember what Europe was like at the beginning of the fifth century (Augustine died in 430), if the Confessions of this Father of the Church have thrown light on the social and moral condition of the so-called civilised men of that horrible time, if we realise that this "Professor of Rhetoric," educated by his parents in the "spes litterarum" (Confessions ii. 3), well acquainted with the rounded phrases of Cicero and the subtleties of neo-Platonism, had to live to see the rude Goths, truculentissimae et saevissimae mentes (De Civ. Dei i. 7). capturing Rome, and the wild Vandals laying waste his African birthplace, -- if we remember, I say, what terror-inspiring surroundings impressed themselves upon this lofty spirit from every side, we shall cease to wonder that a man, who at any other time would have fought for freedom and truth against tyranny of conscience and corruption, should in this case have thrown the weight of his personality into the scale of authority and uncompromising hierocratic tyranny. Just as in the case of Paul, it is not difficult for anyone with knowledge to distinguish between the true inner religion of Augustine and that which was forced upon him; but here, owing to the continued development of Christianity, the matter has become much more tragical, for the ingenuousness and thus the true greatness of the man is lost. This man does not contradict himself frankly, freely and carelessly, he is already enslaved, the contradiction is forced upon him by alien hands. It is not a question here, as in the case of Paul, of two parallel views of existence; nor of a third which is added to them in the mysteries, sacraments and ceremonies of the Chaos; but Augustine must to-day assert the opposite of what he said yesterday: he must do it in order to influence men who would otherwise not understand him; he must do it because he has sacrificed his own judgment at the threshold of the Roman Church; he must do it in order not to lack some one subtle dialectical sophistry in dispute with would-be sectarians. It is a tragic spectacle. No one had seen more clearly than Augustine what pernicious consequences the forced conversion to Christianity entailed upon Christianity itself; even in his time there was in the Church, especially in Italy, a majority of men who stood in no inner relation to the Christian religion and who only adopted the new mystery cult in place of the old one, because the State demanded it. The one, as Augustine informs us, becomes Christian because his employer commands him, the other because he hopes to win a suit through the intervention of the bishop, [76] the third seeks a situation, a fourth wins by this means a rich wife. Augustine gazes sorrowfully upon this spectacle, which actually became the poison that consumed the marrow of Christianity, and utters an urgent warning (as Chrysostom had done before him) against "conversion in masses." Yet it is this same Augustine who establishes the doctrine of "compelle intrare in ecclesiam," who seeks sophistically to establish the grave principle that, by means of "the scourge of temporal sufferings," we must endeavour to rescue "evil slaves" -- who demands the penalty of death for unbelief and the use of the State power against heresy! The man who had said these beautiful words concerning religion, "By love we go to meet it, by love we seek it, it is love that knocks, it is love that makes us constant in what has been revealed" [77] -- this man becomes the moral originator of the inquisition! He did not, indeed, invent persecution and religious murder, for these were of the essence of Christianity from the moment when it became the State religion of Rome, but he confirmed and consecrated them by the power of his authority; it was he who first made intolerance a religious, as well as a political power. It is very characteristic of the true, free Augustine that he, for example, energetically rejects the assertion that Christ meant Peter when he said "upon this rock will I build my Church," and even denounces it as something senseless and blasphemous, since Christ evidently meant upon the rock of this "faith," not of this man; Augustine consequently makes a clear distinction between the visible Church, which is built partly upon sand, as he says, and the real Church: [78] and yet it is this very man who, more than any other, helps to establish the power of this visible Roman Church which claims Peter as its founder, who praises it as directly appointed by God, "ab apostolica sede per successiones episcoporum," [79] and who supplements this purely religious claim to power by the more decisive claim of political continuity -- the Roman Church the legitimate continuation of the Roman Empire. His chief work De Civitate Dei is inspired to as great an extent by the Roman imperial idea as by the Revelation of St. John. Still more fateful and cruel does this life in inconsistency, this building up from the ruins of his own heart, appear when we contemplate the inner life and the inner religion of Augustine. Augustine is by nature a mystic. Who does not know his Confessions? Who has not read again and again that magnificent passage, the tenth chapter of the seventh book, where he describes how he only found God when he sought him in his own heart? [80] Who could forget his conversation with his dying mother Monica, that wondrous blossom of mysticism which might have been culled in the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad: "If the storms of the senses were silent, and those shadowy figures of earth, of water and of air were dumb, if the vault of Heaven were silent and the soul too remained silent and turned back upon itself, so that it should, self- forgotten, float out beyond itself; if dreams were silent and revelations that are dreamt, if every tongue and every name were silent, if everything were silent that dying passes away, if the universe were still -- and He alone spoke, not through His creatures, but Himself, and we heard His words, not as though one spoke with tongue of man nor by voice of angels nor in thunder nor in the riddle of allegories -- and this supreme and unique Being thrilled the one who looked upon Him, consuming him completely and sinking him in mystic bliss (interiora gaudia) -- would not eternal life be like this conception suggested by a brief moment conjured up by our sighs?" (ix. 10). But Augustine is not merely a mystic in feeling (many such have been prominent in Christianity), he is a religious genius who strives; after the inner "conversion" which Christ taught, and who through the Epistles of Paul became regenerated; he tells us how it was Paul that caused light, peace, blessedness to penetrate his soul rent by passion and driven to complete despair by years of inner conflict and fruitless study (Conf. viii. 12). With the fullest conviction, with profound understanding he grasps the fundamental doctrine of grace, of gratia indeclinabilis, as he calls it; it is to him so absolutely the foundation of his religion that he rejects the appellation" doctrine" for it (De gratia Christi, § 14); and as a genuine disciple of the Apostle he shows that the merit of works is excluded by the conception of grace. His view of the importance of redemption and of original sin is more uncertain and not to be compared with those of the Indian teachers; for the Jewish chronicle here dims his power of judgment, though that is almost of secondary importance, since he on the other hand establishes the idea of regeneration as the "immovable central point of Christianity." [81] And now comes this same Augustine and denies almost all his inmost convictions! He who has told us how he had discovered God in his own soul and how Paul had brought him to religion, writes henceforth (in the heat of combat against the Manichaeans): "I would not believe the gospel, if the authority of the Catholic Church did not compel me to do so." [82] Here accordingly for Augustine the Church -- which, he himself testified, contained few true Christians -- stands higher than the gospel; in other words, the Church is religion. In contrast to Paul, who had exclaimed "Let each man take heed how he build upon the foundation of Christ," Augustine gives the explanation that it is not the soul but the bishop who has to settle the creed; he refuses to the most earnest Christians something which even almost every Pope later granted, namely, the investigation of varying doctrines: "As soon as the bishops have spoken," he writes, "there is nothing more to investigate, the superior power shall put down heterodoxy by force." [83] We must take up detailed histories of dogma to trace how the pure doctrine of grace is gradually weakened; he never could altogether give it up, but he so emphasised works that, although they remained (in Augustine's view) as "gift of God," components of grace -- visible results of it -- yet this relation was lost to the common eye. Thereby the door was thrown wide open to materialism-which is ever on the watch. As soon as Augustine emphasised this point, that no redemption Was possible without the service of works, the previous clause was soon forgotten, viz., "that the capacity for these works was a gift of grace, and these accordingly blossom on the tree of faith." Augustine himself goes so far as to speak of the relative merit of various works and regards the death of Christ also from the standpoint of a value to be calculated. [84] That is Judaism in place of Christianity. And naturally this changing and shifting of the fundamental views cause as much hesitation and doubt in regard to subordinate questions. I shall return later to the question of the sacrament, which now began to be discussed; these few hints I shall close with a last one, a mere example. to show what far-reaching consequences these inner contradictions of this growing Church were to have in the course of centuries. In various places Augustine develops with acute dialectics the idea of the transcendentality of the conception of time (as we should say to- day); he does not find a word for his idea, so that in a long discussion of this subject in the eleventh book of the Confessions he at last confesses: "What is time then? As long as no one asks me, I know it quite well, but when I am called upon to explain it to a questioner, I know it no more" (chap. xiv). But we understand him quite well. He wishes to show that for God, i.e., a conception no longer empirically limited, there is no time in our sense and thus demonstrates how meaningless are the many discussions concerning past and future eternity. Evidently he has grasped the essence of genuine religion; for his proof forces us irresistibly to the conclusion that all the chronicles of the past and prophecies for the future have only a figurative significance, and thereby punishment and reward are also done away with. And that is the man who later was not able to do enough to prove, and to impress upon the mind as a certain, fundamental and concrete truth the unconditional literal eternity of the punishment of hell. If we are fully entitled to recognise in Augustine a predecessor of Martin Luther, then he became at the same time a vigorous pioneer of that anti-Pauline tendency which at a later time found undisguised expression in Ignatius and his order and in their religion of hell. [85] Harnack thus summarises his chapter on Augustine: "Through Augustine the Church doctrine became in extent and meaning more uncertain . . . Around the old dogma, which maintained its rigid form, there grew up a large uncertain circle of doctrines, in which the most important thoughts of faith were contained, but which could not yet be fully surveyed and firmly attached to the old." Although he had worked so untiringly for the unity of the Church, he left, as is evident, more material for conflict and discord than he had found. The stormy conflict which even after his entry into the Church had arisen in his own breast, perhaps in many ways unconsciously, lasted till his death; -- no longer in the form of a struggle between sensual enjoyment and longing for noble purity, but as a conflict between a grossly materialistic, superstitious Church faith and the most daring idealism of genuine religion. I shall not be so bold as to sketch the history of religion here, any more than I undertook to write a history of law in the second chapter. If I succeed in awakening a vivid and at the same time intimately correct conception of the nature of the conflict that has been bequeathed to us -- the conflict of various religious ideals struggling for the mastery -- then my end will be attained. The really essential thing is to perceive that historical Christianity -- a hybrid affair from the beginning -- planted this conflict in the breast of the individual. With the two great figures of Paul and Augustine I have tried to show this as briefly but as clearly as I could. I have thereby revealed the chief elements of the external conflict, that is, of the conflict in the Church. "The true basis is the human heart," says Luther. And so I now hasten to the end, choosing from the almost incalculable mass of facts relating to the "struggle in religion" a few which are especially suited to enlighten our views. I limit myself to what is absolutely necessary to supplement what has already been indicated. In this way we may hope to get a bird's-eye view as far as the threshold of the thirteenth century, where the external conflict begins in earnest, while the inner has practically ceased: henceforth divergent views, principles, powers -- above all divergent races -- opposed each other, but these are relatively at harmony with themselves and know what they wish. Considered in the commonest outlines, the conflict in the Church during the first ten centuries consists first of a. struggle between East and West, and later of one between South and North. These terms are not to be taken in the purely geographical sense: the "East" was a last flickering of the flame of Hellenic spirit and Hellenic culture, the "North" was the beginning of the awakening of the Germanic soul; there was no definite place, no definite centre for these two powers: the Teuton might be an Italian monk, the Greek an African presbyter. Rome was opposed to both. Its arms reached to the most distant East and to the remotest North; but here again this term "Rome" is not to be understood merely in a local sense, though in this case there was a fixed immutable centre, the sacred city of ancient Rome. There was no specific Roman culture to oppose to the Hellenic, for all culture in Rome had from the first been and still was Hellenic; still less could one speak of a distinctly individual Roman soul, like that of the Teuton, since the people of ancient Rome had disappeared from the face of the earth and Rome was merely the administrative centre of a nationless mixture; whoever speaks of Rome talks of the chaos of races. And yet Rome proved itself not the weaker but the stronger of the opponents. Of Course it did not completely prevail either in the East or in the North; the three great "movements" are still more manifestly opposed to each other than they were a thousand years ago; but the Greek Church of the schism is in relation to its religious ideal essentially a Roman Catholic one, a daughter neither of the great Origenes nor of the Gnostics; nor did the Reformation of the North more than partially throw off what was specifically Roman, and it was so long before it produced its Martin Luther that considerable parts of Europe, which some centuries before would have belonged to it, since the "North" had reached the heart of Spain and the doors of Rome, were lost to it for ever -- Romanised beyond all hope of salvation. A glance at these three principal movements, in which an attempt was made to build up Christianity, will suffice to make clear the nature of the struggle which has come down to us. The first enchanting bloom of Christianity was Hellenic. Stephen, the first martyr, is a Greek, Paul -- who so energetically commands us to "rid ourselves of Jewish fables and old wives' tales" [86] -- is a mind saturated with Greek thought, who clearly only feels at home when he is addressing those who have acquired Hellenic culture. But soon there was added to the Socratic earnestness and the Platonic depth of conception another genuinely Hellenic trait, the tendency to abstraction. It was this Hellenic tendency of mind which furnished the basis for Christian dogmatics, and not merely the basis, but all those conceptions which I have termed "external mythology" -- the doctrine of the Trinity, of the relation of the Son to the Father, of the Word to the Incarnation, &c., indeed the whole dogma. Neo-Platonism and what we might call neo-Aristotelianism were then in a flourishing condition; all who had acquired Hellenic culture, no matter to what nationality they belonged, occupied themselves with pseudo-metaphysical speculations. Paul indeed is very cautious in the employment of philosophical arguments; he uses them only as a weapon, to convince and to refute; on the other hand, the author of the Gospel of St. John calmly welds together the life of Jesus Christ and the mythical metaphysics of late Hellenism. This was a beginning, and from that time forth the history of Christian thought and of the moulding of the Christian faith was for two centuries exclusively Greek; then it was about two hundred years more before, with the subsequent anathematising of the greatest Hellenic Christian, Origenes, at the synod of Constantinople in the year 543, Hellenic theology was finally silenced. The Judaising sects of that time, such as the Nazarenes, the Ebionites, have no lasting importance. Rome, as the focus of the empire and of all traffic, was naturally and necessarily the organic centre for the Christian sect as for everything else in the Roman Empire; but it is characteristic that no theological thoughts came from there; when finally, at the end of the third century, a "Latin theology" arose, it was not in Italy but in Africa that it appeared, and it was a very stubborn Church and theology that caused Rome great uneasiness, until the Vandals and later the Arabs destroyed it. The Africans, however, like all those Greeks, who -- like Irenaeus -- fell under the spell of this overwhelming power, played into the hands of Rome. Not only did they look upon the pre-eminence of Rome as an understood thing, but they also resisted all those Hellenic conceptions which Rome, with its political a1id administrative ambitions, was bound to regard as injurious, but above all the Hellenic spirit in its whole individuality, which was opposed to every process of crystallisation, and in research, speculation and reorganisation always strove after the Absolute. Here we have really a conflict between Imperial Rome, now bereft of all soul, but as an administrative power at its very highest perfection, and the old spirit of creative Hellenism which was flickering up for the last time; -- a spirit so permeated and dimmed by other elements as to be unrecognisable, and lacking much of its former beauty and strength. The conflict was waged obstinately and mercilessly, not with arguments alone but with all the means of cunning, violence, bribery, ignorance and especially with a shrewd manipulation of all political conjunctures. It is clear that in such a conflict Rome was bound to be victorious; especially as in those early days (till the death of Theodosius) the Emperor was the actual head of the Church even in matters of dogma, and the Emperors -- in spite of the influence which great and holy archbishops in Byzantium for a time exercised over them -- with the unerring instinct of experienced politicians always felt that Rome alone was capable of introducing unity, organisation and discipline. How could metaphysical brooding and mystical meditation ever have prevailed over practical and systematic politics? Thus, for example, it was Constantine [87] -- the still unbaptized murderer of wife and children, the man who by special edicts established the position of the heathen augurs in the Empire-it was Constantine who called together the first oecumenical council (at Nicaea, A.D. 325) and, in spite of the overwhelming majority of the bishops, established the doctrines of his Egyptian favourite Athanasius. Thus originated the so-called Nicene creed: on the one side the shrewd calculation of a level-headed, unscrupulous and un- Christian politician, who asked himself but the one question, "How can I most completely enslave my subjects?" on the other side the cowardly pliancy of frightened prelates, who put their signature to something which they considered false, and as soon as they had returned to their dioceses, began to agitate against it. For us laymen, by far the most interesting thing about this first and fundamental Church council is the fact that the majority of the bishops, as genuine pupils of Origenes, were altogether opposed to all enclosing of the conscience in such intellectual straitjackets and had demanded a formula of faith, wide enough to leave free play to the mind in things which transcend the human understanding, and thus to ensure the right of existence to scientific theology and cosmology. [88] What these Hellenic Christians therefore aimed at was a condition of freedom within orthodoxy, comparable to that which had prevailed in India. [89] But it was just this that Rome and the Emperor wished to avoid: nothing was any longer to remain indefinite or uncertain; in religion, as in every other sphere, absolute uniformity was to be the law throughout the Roman Empire. How unbearable the limited and "limiting" dogmatising was to the highly cultured Hellenic spirit becomes sufficiently clear from the one fact that Gregory of Nazianz, a man whom the Roman Church numbers among its saints because of his orthodoxy, even in the year 380 (long after the Nicaean Council) could write as follows: "Some of our theologians regard the Holy Ghost as God's method of manifesting His power, others regard it as a creation of God, others as God Himself; there are those again who say that they do not know which they should accept, because of reverence for the Holy Writ, which is not clear on the point." [90] But the Roman Imperial principle could not yield to Holy Scripture; one tittle of freedom of thought and Rome's absolute authority would have been endangered. Hence in the second general synod at Constantinople in the year 381, the confession of faith was supplemented with a view to stopping up the last loophole of escape, and at the third, held at Ephesus in the year 431, it was definitely decided that "nothing might be added and nothing taken from this confession on penalty of excommunication." [91] Thus the intellectual movement of dying Hellenism, which had lasted more than three hundred years, was finally brought to an end. Detailed accounts of that are given in histories; but the works of theologians (of all churches) are to be taken with great caution, for a very natural feeling of shame causes them to pass hastily over the accompanying circumstances of the various councils, in which the dogmatic creed of Christianity was fixed, as it was supposed, for "all time." [92] In one council the proceedings were such that even in Roman Catholic works it was described as the "Robber-synod"; but it would be difficult for the impartial to decide which synod most deserved this title. Never were proceedings more undignified than at the famous third oecumenical council at Ephesus, where the "orthodox" party, that is, the party that wished to gag all further thought, brought into the city a whole army of armed peasants, slaves and monks, in order to intimidate, to cry down and, if need be, to murder all the hostile bishops. That indeed was very different from the Hellenic way of furthering theology and cosmology! Perhaps it was the right way for that wretched age and those wretched human beings. And there is another important consideration: in spite of my repugnance for that chaos of races incorporated in Rome, I firmly believe that Rome did religion a service by emphasising the concrete as opposed to the abstract and saving it from the danger of complete evaporation. And yet it would be ridiculous to feel admiration for such narrow and common characters as Cyrillus, the murderer of the noble Hypatia, and to hold in reverence councils like that over which he presided at Ephesus, which the Emperor himself (Theodosius the younger) characterised as a "shameful and mischievous gathering," and which he had to break up on his own authority, in order to put an end to the squabbles and rude violence of the holy shepherds. Already at this second oecumenical council at Ephesus the special Hellenic theme, mythological mysticism, was no longer in the foreground; for now the specifically Roman dogma-mongering had begun, and that, too, with the introduction of the worship of Mary and of the child Christ. I have mentioned above that this cult which was taken from Egypt had been for long established throughout the whole Roman Empire but especially in Italy. [93] The term "mother of God," instead of "mother of Christ," which first came into use in Christianity at the beginning of the fifth century, was opposed by the noble and almost fanatically orthodox Nestorius; he saw in this -- and rightly too -- the resurrection of heathendom. It was natural and consistent that it should be the Bishop of Egypt and the Egyptian monks, that is, the direct heirs of the cult of Isis and Horus, who with passion and rage, and supported by the rabble and the women, demanded the introduction of these primeval customs. Rome joined the Egyptian party; the Emperor, who loved Nestorius, was gradually stirred up against him. But here we have to deal not with the Hellenic cause in the real sense of the word but rather with the beginning of a new period: that of the introduction of heathen mysteries into the Christian Church. It was the business of the North to oppose them; for the question was one less of metaphysics than of conscience and morality; thus the frequent assertion that Nestorius (who was born in the Roman military colony Germanicopolis) was by descent a Teuton, is exceedingly plausible; he was at any rate a Protestant. One more word about the East, before we pass to the North. In its zenith of prosperity Hellenic theology, as has been pointed out, had occupied itself principally with those questions that hover on the borderland between myth, metaphysics and mysticism. Hence it is almost impossible, in a popular work, to enter more fully into it. At the end of the first chapter, when discussing our Hellenic legacy, I pointed to the amount of abstract speculation of Greek origin that has passed over into our religious thought -- though mostly in an impure form. [94] So long as thought of this kind remained active, as was the case in Greece before Christian times, where the eager student could by crossing the street pass from one "heresy," that is, from one "school," to another, these abstractions formed a supplement to the intellectual life, which was perhaps all the more welcome, as Greek life was so inclined to busy itself wholly with artistic contemplation and scientific study of the empiric world. The metaphysical inclination of men asserted itself by startlingly daring phantasies. But if one studies the words and life of Jesus Christ, one cannot but feel that in comparison with them these proud speculations evaporate into nothing. Metaphysics, in fact, are merely a kind of physics; Christ, on the other hand, is religion. To call Him logos, nous, demiurgos, to teach with Sabellius that the Crucified one was only a "transitory hypostatising of the word," or with Paul of Samosata that "He had gradually become God," is simply to change a living personality into an allegory, and that an allegory of the worst kind, namely, an abstract one. [95] And since it happened that this abstract allegory was compressed into a desolate Jewish chronicle, amalgamated with grossly materialistic mysteries, transformed into the one and only dogma held to be necessary to salvation, we may rejoice when practical men after three centuries exclaimed: "Enough! henceforth nothing more may be added!" We can well understand how Ignatius, when questioned regarding the authenticity of this or that word in Scripture, could answer that for him the unfalsified documents concerning Jesus Christ were Christ's life and death. [96] We must admit that Hellenic theology, though large-minded and brilliant in its interpretation of Scripture though far removed from the slavish sentiments of Western theology, yet was inclined to lose sight of these "unfalsified documents," namely, the actual manifestation of Jesus Christ. There is room for admiration as well as criticism, but we must at the same time regret that all that was greatest and truest in this theology at its best was rejected by Rome. I will not try the patience of the reader by plunging into theological discussions; I will simply quote a sentence of Origenes; it will give us an idea of how much the Christian religion lost by this victory of the West over the East. [97] In the twenty-ninth chapter of his book On Prayer, Origenes speaks of the myth of the Fall of Man and makes the remark: "We cannot help observing that the credulity and inconstancy of Eve did not begin at the moment when she disregarded the word of God and listened to the serpent, they were manifestly present before, and the serpent came to her, because in its cunning it had already noticed her weakness." With this one sentence the myth -- which the Jews, as Renan rightly remarked (see vol. i. p. 418), compressed into a dry historical fact -- is once more awakened to life. And with the myth nature steps into its rights. That which may be called sin, as soon as we aim at something higher, belongs to us, as Paul had already said, "by nature"; with the fetters of the chronicle we throw off the fetters of credulous superstition; we no longer stand opposed to all nature as something strange, something that has been born higher but that has fallen lower, we rather belong to nature, and we cast back upon it the light of grace that fell into our human heart. By carrying on the Pauline thought, Origenes here liberated science and at the same time pushed back the bolt that shut the heart to true, direct religion. Such was the Hellenic theology that was vanquished in the struggle. [98] If we proceed to study the second anti-Roman movement, that movement which I summed up in the one word "North," we shall immediately observe that it sprang from a quite different intellectual disposition and had to vindicate itself under entirely different temporal circumstances. In Hellenism Rome had contended against a culture higher and older than its own; here, on the other hand, it was a question first and foremost not of speculative doctrines, but of a tendency of minds, and the representatives of this tendency were for the most part at a considerably lower stage of culture than the representatives of the Roman idea; it took centuries to remove the difference. Then there was another circumstance to be considered. [99] While in the former struggle the still embryonic Roman Church had to seek to win the authority of the Emperor for its cause, it now stood as a perfectly organised powerful hierarchy whose absolute authority no one could question without danger to himself. In short, the conflict is different and it is being waged under different conditions. I say "is " and "is being," because the struggle between East and West was ended a thousand years ago -- Mohammed crushed it out; the schism remained as a cenotaph, but not as a living development, whereas on the other hand the conflict between North and South is still going on and is throwing threatening shadows over our immediate future. I have already had an opportunity of mentioning, at least in general outline, at the end of the fourth chapter and at the beginning and end of the sixth, wherein this revolt of the North consisted. [100] Here in consequence I merely require to briefly supplement these remarks. Let me first of all remark that I have used the expression "North," because the word "Germanicism" would not correspond to the phenomenon, or at best would be equivalent to a daring hypothesis. We find everywhere and at all times opponents of the civil and ecclesiastical ideals which were incorporated in Rome; if the movement assumes significance only when it approaches from the North, the reason is that here, in Celtic and Slavonic Germanicism, whole nations thought and felt uniformly, whereas in the chaos of the South it was an accident of birth, when an individual came into the world with the love of freedom and spiritual religion in his heart. But that which one might call "Protestant" sentiment has existed since earliest times: is this not the atmosphere that the Gospel histories breathe in every line? Is it possible to imagine that apostle of freedom, the writer of the Epistle to the Galatians, with his head bowed, because a Pontifex maximus on his curial chair has proclaimed some dogmatic decree? Do we not read in that rightly famous letter -- belonging to the earliest Christian times -- of the anonymous writer to Diognetus, that" invisible is the religion of the Christians?" [101] Renan says: "Les Chretiens primitifs sont les moins superstitieux des hommes ... chez eux, pas d'amulettes, pas d'images saintes, pas d'objet de culte." [Google translate: The primitive Christians are the least superstitious of men ... home, not amulets, no holy images, not objects of worship.] [102] Hand in hand with this goes a great religious freedom. In the second century Celsius testifies that the Christians varied very much in their interpretations and theories, all united only by the one confession: "through Jesus Christ the world is crucified for me and I for the world!" [103] Religion as spiritually profound as possible, its outward manifestation absolutely simple, freedom of individual faith-such is the character of early Christianity, it is not a later transfiguration invented by the Germanic races. This freedom was so great that even in the East, where Rome had always been predominant, every country, indeed frequently every city with its congregation, for centuries possessed its own confession. [104] We men of the North were far too practically and secularly inclined, too much occupied with civil organisation and commercial interests and sciences ever to go back to that absolutely genuine Protestantism of the pre-Roman period. More- over these early Christians were more fortunate than we: the shadow of the theocratically transformed Roman imperial idea had not yet fallen upon them. It was, however, a fatal feature of the northern movement that it always had to make itself felt as a reaction -- that it had to tear down before it could think of building up. But this very negative character permits us to unite an almost inestimable mass of heterogeneous historical facts under one single term, viz., the Revolt against Rome. From the opposition of Vigilantius, in the fourth century, against the scandal of monachism which was threatening the prosperity of the nations, to Bismarck's conflict with the Jesuits, there is a trait of relationship uniting all these movements; for, however different the impulse may be which drives them to revolt, Rome itself represents so uniform, so persistently logical and so strongly established an idea, that all opposition to it receives a peculiar and to a certain extent similar colouring. In order therefore to be clear we must hold fast to this idea of a Revolt against Rome. But inside it we must note an important difference. Under the uniform exterior the idea "Rome" conceals two fundamentally different tendencies: the one flows from a Christian source, the other from a heathen; the one aims at an ecclesiastical, the other at a political ideal. Rome is, as Byron says, "an hermaphrodite of empire." [105] Here again the unfortunate discord that we encounter in Christianity at every step! And in fact not only do two ideals -- a political and an ecclesiastical -- stand side by side, but the political ideal of Rome, Jewish-heathen in foundation and structure, contains a social dream so magnificent that it has at all times captivated even the greatest minds; whereas the religious ideal, permeated though it may be by the presence of Christ (so that many a sublime soul sees only Christ in this Church), has introduced into Christianity and brought to perfection there, conceptions and doctrines which are directly anti-Christian. Many a man of sound judgment has therefore thought the political ideal of Rome more religious than its ecclesiastical one. If then the revolt against Rome received a certain uniformity by the fact that the fundamental principle of Rome in both spheres (the political and the religious) is absolute despotism, so that every contradiction means sedition, then we can easily comprehend that in reality the reasons of revolt were very different in the case of different men. Thus the Germanic Princes of the earlier age accepted without question the religious doctrine, just as Rome preached it, but they at the same time stood up for their own political rights in opposition to the ideal that lay at the root of all Roman religion -- that political ideal with its splendid dream of a "city of God" upon earth -- and it was only in the greatest extremity that they abandoned a few of their national claims; on the other hand, the Byzantine Emperor Leo, although there was no attempt to threaten his political rights, was moved by purely religious and Christian conviction when, in order to stem the inflowing tide of heathen superstition, he opposed the worship of images and so came into conflict with Rome. [106] But how complicated are these two examples when we contemplate them carefully! For those Germanic princes, though questioning the secular claims of the Pope and the ecclesiastical conception of the Civitas Dei, used the Papal authority as often as it was to their advantage; and on the other hand such men as Vigilantius and Leo the Isaurian, who from purely religious interests attacked things which they looked upon as a scandal to Christianity, fell likewise into a grave inconsistency, in that they did not question the authority of Rome in principle and so logically submitted to it. The more closely we investigate the matter the greater becomes the confusion which is only indicated here. Any competent scholar who should devote himself to the exposition of this one subject -- the revolt against Rome (from about the ninth to the nineteenth century) -- would reveal the remarkable results that Rome has had the whole world against it, and is indebted for its incomparable power solely to the impelling force of a relentlessly logical idea. No one ever proceeded logically against Rome; Rome was always recklessly logical in its own cause. Thereby it overcame not only open resistance but also the numerous attempts from within to force it into other directions. Not only did Leo the Isaurian fail, who attacked it from without, the holy Francis of Assisi failed just as signally in his endeavour to reform the ecclesia carnalis, as he called it, from within; [107] that fiery apostolic spirit, Arnold of Brescia, failed to realise his fond hope of separating the Church from its secular aims; the Romans failed in their repeated and desperate revolts against the tyranny of the Popes; Abelard -- a fanatic for the Roman religious ideal -- failed in his endeavour to unite to it more rational and higher thought; Abelard's opponent, Bernhard, the reformer of monkdom, who desired to force upon the Pope and the whole Church his mystical conception of religion and would gladly have forcibly closed the mouths of "the incomparable doctors of reason," as he called them in mockery, failed to do so; the pious abbot Joachim failed in his struggle against the "Apotheosis of the Roman Church" and the "carnal conceptions" of the sacraments; Spain, which in spite of its Catholicism refused to adopt the decisions of the Council of Trent, failed; the devout house of Austria and that of Bavaria as well, which as a reward for their characterless submissiveness were still quarrelling in the seventeenth century about the refusal of the cup to the laity and the marriage of priests in their States, failed; [108] Poland failed in its daring attempts at reformations; [109] France, in spite of all its persistency, failed in the endeavour to maintain the shadow of a half-independent Gallic Church ... but especially signal was the failure of all those, from Augustine to Jansenius, who tried to introduce into the Roman system the apostolic doctrine of faith and of grace in its perfectly pure form, likewise of all those who, from Dante to Lamennais and Dollinger, demanded the separation of Church and State, and the religious freedom of the individual. All these men and movements -- and their number is in all centuries legion -- proceeded, I repeat, illogically and inconsistently; for either they wanted to reform the fundamental Roman idea, or they wished to obtain for themselves inside this idea a certain measure of personal or national freedom, both manifestly preposterous ideas. For the fundamental principle of Rome (not only since 1870 but since all time) is its divine origin and consequent infallibility; as opposed to it freedom of opinion can only be sinful obstinacy; and in regard to the question of reform, we must point to the fact that the Roman idea, however complicated it appears on closer inspection, is nevertheless an organic product, resting on the firm foundations of a history of several thousand years and further built up under careful consideration of the character and religious needs of all those men who in any way belong to the chaos of races -- and we know how far the sphere of the latter extends. [110] How could a man of Dante's intellectual acumen regard himself as an orthodox Roman Catholic and yet demand the separation of secular and ecclesiastical power, as well as the subordination of the latter to the former? Rome is, in fact, the heir of the highest secular power; it is only as its agents that the Princes wield the sword, and Boniface VIII. astonished the world only by his frankness, not by the novelty of his standpoint, when he exclaimed: "Ego sum Caesar! ego sum Imperator!" [Google translate: I am the Caesar! I am the Emperor!] Let Rome relinquish this claim (no matter how theoretical it might be as regards actual facts), it would have meant putting the knife to its own throat. One must never forget that the Church derives all its authority from the supposition that it is the representative of God; as Antonio Perez with real Spanish humour says: "El Dios del cielo es delicado mucho en suffrir companero in niguna cosa" (The God of Heaven is much too jealous to endure a rival in anything). [111] And in this connection we should not overlook the fact that all the claims of Rome, religious as well as political, are historical; its apostolic episcopate, too, is derived from divine appointment -- not from any mental superiority. [112] If Rome were at any point to surrender its flawless historical continuity, the whole structure could not fail to fall to pieces; and in fact the most dangerous point would be the point of connection with the supremacy of the Roman secular Imperium, henceforth extended to a divine Imperium; for the purely religious institution is so forced that even Augustine questioned it, [113] whereas the actual Empire is one of the most massive and fundamental facts of history, and the conception of it as of "divine origin" (and therefore absolute) goes farther back and is more deeply rooted than any evangelical tradition or doctrine. Now none of the Protestants mentioned above -- for they and not those who left the Roman Church deserve this negative characterisation -- exercised lasting influence; within this firmly jointed frame it was impossible. If we take up detailed Church histories, we are astonished at the great number of pre-eminent Catholic men, who devoted their whole life to the spiritualising of religion, the struggle against materialisation, the spread of Augustinian doctrines and the abolition of priestly misconduct, &c.; but their efforts left not a trace behind. And in order to have a lasting influence in this Church, important personalities had either, like Augustine, to contradict themselves, or, like Thomas Aquinas, to grasp the specifically Roman idea by the roots and resolutely from youth up to remodel their own individuality according to it. The only other solution was complete emancipation. Whoever exclaimed with Martin Luther: "It is all over with the Roman stool" [114] -- gave up the hopeless inconsistent struggle, in which first of all the Hellenic East and then the. whole North, as far as it continued it, were vanquished and broken: and yet it was he and he only who made national regeneration possible, since he who rebels against Rome at the same time throws off the yoke of the Imperial idea. In the period with which we are here occupied matters did not go so far -- except in the case of the Waldensian movement. The struggle between North and South was and remained unequal, and was carried on within what was regarded as the authoritative Church. There were countless sects, but mostly purely theological ones; Arianism could have provided a specifically Germanic Christianity, but the adherents of this faith lacked the cultural equipment needed to be vigorous in propaganda, or to be able to vindicate their standpoint; on the one hand the hapless Waldensians, although Rome on several occasions caused them all to be massacred (the last being in the year 1685) -- so far as it could lay hands on them -- have maintained themselves to the present day and now possess a Church of their own in Rome itself: a proof that whoever is just as consistent as Rome, endures, no matter how weak he may be. Hitherto I have been compelled to sketch this struggle without regard to proper sequence, because of the disjointed efforts and inconsistency of the men of the North as opposed to their uniform foe. Moreover, I have con- fined myself to mere indications; facts are like gnats: as soon as a light is struck, they fly in thousands in through the windows. Hence, to complete what has been indicated regarding the struggle between North and South I shall take two men as examples: a practical politician and an ideal politician, both zealous theologians in their. leisure hours and enthusiastic sons of the Roman Church at all times; I refer to Charlemagne and Dante. [115] If ever a man had acquired a right to exercise influence upon Rome, it was Charlemagne; he could have destroyed the Papacy, he saved it and enthroned it for a thousand years; he, as no one before or after him, would have had the power to separate the Germans at least definitely from Rome; he on the contrary did what the Empire at its period of greatest splendour had not been able to do -- incorporated them, all and sundry, in the "Holy" and "Roman" Empire. This so fatally enthusiastic admirer of Rome was nevertheless a good German, and nothing lay nearer his heart than reforming from top to bottom, and freeing from the clutches of heathenism this Church which he so passionately prized as an ideal. He writes pretty blunt letters to the Pope, in which he wars against everything possible and calls ecclesiastically recognised councils ineptissimae synodi [Google translate: of the synod is a very silly]; and not content with criticising the apostolic stool, his care extends so far as to inquire how many concubines the country priests maintain! He takes heed above all that the priests or at least the bishops should once more become acquainted with the Holy Writ, which under the influence of Rome had become almost forgotten; he sees carefully to it that the sermon is reintroduced and in such a way that "the people can understand it"; he forbids the priests to sell the consecrated oil as a charm; he ordains that in his empire no new saints shall be invoked, &c. In short, Charlemagne proves himself a Germanic prince in two ways: in the first place, he and not the bishop, not even the Bishop of Rome, is master in his Church; secondly, he aims at that spirituality of religion which is peculiar to the Indo-European. That manifests itself most clearly in the quarrel about image-worship. In the famous libri Carolini, addressed to the Pope, Charlemagne indeed condemns iconoclasm but also iconolatry. He expresses the view that it is permissible and good to have images as ornaments and memorials, but they are a matter of absolute indifference, and in no case should they be honoured, much less worshipped. In this he opposed the doctrine and practice of the Roman Church, and that with perfect consciousness, by expressly rejecting the decisions of the synods and the authority of the Church fathers. An attempt has been made and still is made in the most modern Church histories to represent the matter as a misunderstanding: that the Greek word proskynesis was falsely translated by adoratio and that Charlemagne was thus misled, &c. But the important point is not the fine distinction between adorare, venerari, colere, &c., which still plays such a large part in theory and so small a one in practice; it is a case of two views being opposed to each other: Pope Gregory II. had taught the doctrine that certain images work miracles; [116] Charlemagne, on the other hand, asserts that all images possess only artistic worth, being in themselves of no account; the opposite assertion is blasphemous idolatry. The seventh general synod of Nicaea had ordained in the year 787 at its seventh sitting, that "candles and incense should be dedicated to the worship of images and other sacred utensils"; Charlemagne answers literally: "It is foolish to burn incense and candles in front of images." [117] And so the matter stands to-day. Gregory I. (about the year 600) had expressly ordered the missionaries to leave the heathen local gods, the miracle-working springs, and such things untouched, and be satisfied with merely giving them a Christian name; [118] his advice is still followed at the close of the nineteenth. century; even to-day noble Catholic prelates contend desperately but without Success against the heathenism systematically nurtured by Rome. [119] In every Roman "church of pilgrimage" there are particular images, particular statues, in fact, special works of art, which have assigned to them a generally quite definite, limited influence; or it is a fountain which springs up at the spot where the mother of God had appeared, &c.: this is primeval fetishism, which had never died out among the people but had been already quite abandoned by Europeans in the age of Homer. This fetishism has been newly strengthened and nurtured by Rome -- perhaps rightly, perhaps because it felt that there was here a true motive power capable of being idealised, something which those men who have not yet "entered the daylight of life" cannot do without -- and Charlemagne opposed it. The contradiction is manifest. Now what has Charlemagne achieved in his struggle against Rome? Momentarily a good deal, but nothing permanent. Rome obeyed where it had to, resisted where it could, and quietly pursued its way, as soon as the powerful voice became silent for ever. [120] Dante achieved less than nothing, if that be possible. His ideas of reform went further and of him his most modern and praiseworthy Roman Catholic biographer says: "Dante did not after the manner of the heretic aim at or hope for a reform against the Church but through the Church: he is a Catholic, not a heretical or schismatic reformer." [121] But for this very reason he has exercised upon the Church -- in spite of his mighty genius -- not the slightest influence, either in life or in death. "Catholic Reformer" is a contradictio in adjecto, for the movement of the Roman Church can only consist, as it has actually consisted, in making its principles clearer, more logical and more unrelenting and in putting them into practice as such. I should like to know what curse of excommunication would be hurled at the man who, as a Catholic, would to-day venture to address the followers of Christ Upon earth in the following words:
and who, after branding and scorning the Roman priesthood as an un-Christian unevangelical brood," continued:
The very fact that no one would venture to-day to use such language shows us how completely all those northern men, [124] who had dreamt of a reform "not against the Church but through the Church," have been vanquished. [125] Also the emphasis Dante lays on faith as opposed to works,
(see, for example, Purgatorio xxii. &c.), would scarcely be allowed to-day. But what I should like particularly to call attention to here is the fact that Dante's views on the purely spiritual office of the Church -- which is subordinate to the secular power -- have been doubly anathematised by paragraphs 75 and 76 of the Syllabus of the Year 1864. And this is perfectly logical, since, as I have shown above, the power of Rome lies in its consistency and especially in the fact that it under no circumstances gives up its temporal claims. It is a poor, short-sighted orthodoxy which tries to whitewash Dante to-day, instead of openly admitting that he belongs to. the most dangerous class of genuine protestors. For Dante went further than Charlemagne. The latter had had in his mind a kind of Caesaric papacy, in which he, the Emperor, like Constantine and Theodosius, should possess the double power in contrast to the Papal Caesarism, which the Roman Pontifex maximus aimed at; he did not therefore go beyond the genuine Roman idea of universal empire. Dante, on the other hand, demanded the complete separation of Church and State; but that would be the ruin of Rome, as the Popes have understood better than Dante and his latest biographer. Dante reproaches Constantine as being the author of all evil, because he had founded the ecclesiastical State.
And according to him Constantine deserves double blame, first because he led the Church astray, secondly because he weakened his own Empire. In verse 55 of the twentieth canto of the Paradiso, he says that Constantine "destroyed the world," by giving power to the Church. And if we trace this idea in Dante's work De Monarchia, it is clear that we have here to deal with an absolutely heathen-historical doctrine -- the conception that universal power is the legitimate legacy of the Roman Empire! [127] How is it possible to approach so close to the fundamental idea of Rome's ecclesiastical power and yet not grasp it? For it is the Church itself that inherits that world-power. It was only by its taking possession of it that the Civitas Dei came into being. Long ago Augustine had proved with a logic which we should have liked Dante and his apologists to have possessed, that the power of the State was based upon the power of sin; henceforth, since by Christ's death the power of sin was broken, the State must submit to the Church, in other words, the Church stood at the head of the civic government. The Pope is, according to the orthodox doctrine, the representative of God, vicarius Dei in terris; [128] if he were merely the "representative of Christ" or the "successor of Peter," his function could be regarded as exclusively the care of souls, for Christ said: "My Kingdom is not of this world"; but who would presume to exercise authority over the representative on earth of the almighty Godhead? Who dare deny that the Temporal is just as much subject to God as the Eternal? Who would venture in any sphere to refuse to recognise his supremacy? Though, therefore, in theological matters of faith, Dante may have been a strictly orthodox Catholic, who did not doubt the" infallible preceptorship of the Church" [129] -- such dogmatic agreement is of little importance, the important thing is to know what a man, by the whole tendency of his nature, is and must be, wills and must will: and this impelled Dante to attack in passionate words not only the inviolable person of the Pontifex maximus and almost continuously to scourge all the servants of the Church, but to undermine the foundations of the Roman religion. This attack, too, was hurled back from the mighty walls of Rome, upon which it left not a single trace. I have intentionally emphasised the struggle between North and South only as it manifested itself inside the Church of Rome, and that not merely because I have already had occasion to speak of other manifestations, or because in point of time and historical sequence they belong only to the next epoch of culture, but because I think that this side of the matter is usually neglected, and that it is of great significance for the comprehension of the present age. The Reformation strengthened the Catholic Church at a later time; for it effected the elimination of elements that could not be assimilated, elements which, in the persons of submissive and yet rebellious sons -- like Charlemagne and Dante -- were much more dangerous than if they had been enemies, inasmuch as they inwardly hindered the logical development of the Roman ideal while outwardly they could further it little or nothing. A Charlemagne with Dante as his Chancellor would have wrecked the Roman Church; but a Luther has made the Church so clear concerning itself that the Council of Trent has meant for it the dawn of a new day. I need not return to the question of race-differences, although they are at the bottom of this struggle between North and South; what is evident does not require proof. But I shall not break off this short discussion of the northern power in the Christian religious struggle and pass to "Rome," without first begging the reader to take up some good history, e.g., the first volume of Lamprecht's Deutsche Geschichte; [130] careful study will convince him how deeply rooted in the Germanic character are certain fundamental convictions; at the same time he will discover that though Jacob Grimm may be right in his assertion that "Germanic strength decided the victory of Christianity," this Christianity is essentially and from the first different from that of the Chaos. It is a question, as it were, of brain convolutions: [131] whatever is put in must bend and yield according to their shapes. Just as a boat, entrusted to the apparently uniform element of the ocean, will be driven very different ways, according as the one current or the other seizes it, so the same ideas in different heads travel in widely different ways and reach regions that have very little in common. How infinitely important, for example, is the old Germanic belief in a "universal, unchangeable, predestined and predestining fate!" [132] Even in this one "brain convolution," which is common to all Indo-Europeans, lies -- perhaps along with much superstition -- the guarantee of a rich intellectual development in entirely different directions and upon clearly defined paths. In the direction of idealism faith in destiny will with the necessity of nature lead to a religion of grace, in the direction of empiricism to strictly inductive science. For strictly empiric science is not, as is often asserted, a born enemy of religion, still less of the doctrine of Christ; it would have harmonised excellently, as we have seen, with Origenes, and in the ninth chapter I shall show that mechanism and idealism are sisters; but science cannot exist without the idea of flawless necessity, and hence, as even a Renan must admit, "all Semitic monotheism is essentially opposed to physical science." [133] Like Judaism, Christianity developed under Roman influence postulates as its fundamental dogma absolute creative arbitrariness; hence the antagonism and never-ending struggle between Church and science; it was nonexistent among the Indians; it has been artificially forced upon the Germanic races. [134] Just as important is the fact that for the old Teutons -- in the same way as for the Indians and Greeks -- moral speculation did not narrow off into a question of good and bad. [135] Out of this with the same inevitableness the religion of faith in contrast to the religion of works was bound to develop, i.e., idealism in contrast to materialism, inner moral conversion in contrast to Semitic sanctity of law and Roman sale of indulgences. Here we have moreover an excellent example of the importance of mere direction, that is, of feeling one's way correctly in the intellectual sphere. For never has any man taught the doctrine that life could be good without good works, [136] and on the other hand it is the unexpressed assumption of Judaism and a religious law of the followers of Rome, that good works without faith avail not: in itself therefore each view is noble and moral; but according as the one or the other is emphasised, we place the essence of religion in the spiritual conversion of the man, his disposition, his whole manner of thinking and feeling, or on the other hand in outward observances, redemption outwardly brought about, reckoning up of good and evil deeds and the calculation of morality after the manner of a profit and loss account. [137] Such things are scarcely less remarkable than the fact that it was impossible to bring home to the Teutons the idea "devil"; Walfila rendered Mammon as Viehgedrang (crowd of cattle), but he had to leave Satan and Beelzebub untranslated. [138] Happy beings! And how suggestive that is, when one remembers the Jewish religion of terror and Loyola the Basque's constant references to devil and hell. [139] Other things again are of purely historical interest. as for example the fact that the Teutons possessed no professional priesthood. that in consequence theocracy was strange to them, a circumstance which, as Wietersheim shows, has much facilitated the introduction of Roman Christianity. [140] But I shall leave these inquiries concerning natural religious tendencies to the reader, in order that I may have the necessary space left to bring forward some facts concerning the third great force in the struggle, as a supplement to what has already been indicated in connection with the discussion of East and North. The power of Rome lay in the continuance of the imperial idea, indeed, originally in the actual continuance of the imperial power. It was a heathen Emperor, as we have seen (p. 46) who first settled a quarrel between Christians by proclaiming the voice of the Roman bishop decisive, and the true founder of Roman Christianity as a world-power is not a Pope, Church father, or concilium, but the Emperor Theodosius. It was Theodosius who on his own authority, by his edict of January 10, 381. did away with all sects except the one which he had elevated to the dignity of a State religion and confiscated all churches in favour of Rome; it was he who founded the office of "Imperial inquisitor" and punished with death every deviation from the orthodoxy which he recommended. But the whole conception of Theodosius was "imperial," not religious or apostolic: this is sufficiently clear from the fact that heterodoxy or heathenism was characterised juristically as high treason. [141] We cannot understand the full significance of this until we look back and find that two centuries earlier even so fiery a mind as Tertullian had demanded universal tolerance, because he was of opinion that each one should worship God according to his own conviction, and that one religion cannot injure the other. It becomes further clear when we see that 150 years before Theodosius, Clemens of Alexandria used the Greek word hairesis in the old sense, namely, to denote a particular school in contrast to other schools, no blame being expressed in the word. [142] To view heresy as a crime is, one can see, a legacy of the Roman Imperial system; the idea first occurred when the Emperors had become Christians, and it rests, I repeat, not upon religious assumptions, but upon the notion that it is high treason to hold a different creed from the Emperor. This respect for the Emperor was afterwards inherited by the Pontifex maximus. In the second chapter, to which I refer the reader, I have discussed in detail the power of the genuine Roman idea of State as the history of that incomparable people that disappeared but too soon represents it, and also the revolutionary modifications which practically transformed this idea into its opposite, as soon as its creator, the Roman people, no longer existed. [143] The world was accustomed to receive laws from Rome, and from Rome alone; it was so used to this that even the separated Byzantine Empire still called itself "Roman." Rome and ruling had become synonymous expressions. We must not forget that to the men of the Chaos Rome was the one thing that held them together, the one idea of organisation, the only talisman against the influx of the Barbarians. The world is not ruled by interests alone (as modern historians are apt to teach), but above all by ideas, even when these ideas have become nothing but words; and thus we see Rome, even when bereft of its Emperor, retain a prestige such as no other city in Europe possessed. From time immemorial Rome had been called by the Romans "the holy city": that we still call it so is no Christian custom, but a heathen legacy; for to the old Romans, as we have shown at an earlier point (vol. i. p. 110), the one sacred thing in life was the Fatherland and the family. Henceforth there were no Romans; yet Rome remained the holy city. Soon, too, there was no Roman Emperor (except in name), but part of the imperial power had remained, e.g., the Pontifex maximus. [144] Here, too, something had taken place which originally had no connection with the Christian religion. Formerly, in pre-Christian times, the complete subjection of the priesthood to the secular power had been a fundamental principle of the Roman State, the priests had been honoured, but they had not been permitted to exert any influence on public life; only in matters of conscience did they possess jurisdiction, that is, they could impose upon anyone who accused himself (confession!) a punishment in expiation of his guilt (penitence!), exclude him from public worship, indeed lay upon him the curse of God (excommunication!). But when the Emperor had united in his own hands all the offices of the Republic, it became more and more the custom to regard the Pontificate as his highest dignity, whereby gradually the idea of Pontifex received a significance it had never before possessed. Caesar was of course not a title but only an eponym; Pontifex maximus, on the other hand, designated the highest, and from time immemorial the only lifelong, office; as Pontifex the Emperor was now "a sacred majesty," and before this "representative of the divine upon earth" everyone had to kneel in worship -- a relation in which nothing was changed by the conversion of the Emperors to Christianity. But there is a second consideration. There was -- and had been since earliest times -- another conception inseparably bound up with this heathen Pontifex maximus: though no longer influential externally he was absolutely supreme within the priesthood; it was the priests who chose him, but in him they selected their dictator for life; he alone nominated the pontifices, he alone possessed in all questions of religion the final right of decision. [145] If now the Emperor had usurped the office of Pontifex maximus, so the Pontifex maximus at a later age could with still greater right regard himself as Caesar et Imperator (see p. 98), since he had in the meantime actually become the all-uniting head of Europe. Such is the stool (the sella famous since Numa's time), which the Christian bishop had bequeathed to him in a Rome that had lost its Emperor, such the rich legacy of dignity, influence, privileges, firmly established for 1000 years, which he received. The poor apostle Peter has little merit in the matter. [146] Rome possessed therefore, if not culture and national character, at least the immeasurable advantages of firm organisation and old sacred tradition. It is probably impossible to over- estimate the influence of form in human things. Such an apparent trifle, for example, as the laying-on of hands to preserve the material, visible, historical continuity is of such direct influence upon the imagination that it has more weight with the people than the profoundest speculations and the most sacred examples of life. And all this is old Roman discipline, old Roman legacy from the pre-Christian time. The ancient Romans -- otherwise poor in invention -- had been masters in the dramatic shaping of important symbolical effects; [147] the modern Romans maintained this tradition. And thus here, and here alone, young Christianity found an already existing form, an already existing tradition, an already practised and experienced statesmanship, on which it could support itself, in which it could crystallise itself into a firm and lasting form. It found not only the idea of statesmanship but also the experienced statesman. Tertullian, for example, who struck the first fatal blow at freely speculative Hellenic Christianity, by introducing Latin into the Church instead of Greek -- Latin, in which all metaphysics and mysticism are impossible and which rob the Pauline Epistles of their deep significance -- was a lawyer, and started "the tendency of western dogmatics towards juristicism"; he did so by emphasising on the one hand the materially legal motive power in religious conceptions, on the other by introducing ideas with a legal colouring -- suited to the practical Latin world -- into the conceptions of God, of the "two substances" of Christ and the freedom of the human being, who wag felt to be in the position of a defendant, as at law. [148] Side by side with this theoretical activity of practical men there was also great activity in organisation. Ambrosius, for example, the right hand of Theodosius, was a civil official and was made a bishop, before he had been baptized! He himself tells frankly how he was " carried off from the bench," because the Emperor wished to employ him elsewhere, namely, in the Church, for the work of organisation, and how he thereby came into the painful position of having to teach others Christianity before he knew it himself. [149] It was men like these and not the successors of Peter in Rome, whose names are scarcely known in the first centuries, who laid the foundations of the Roman Church. The influence of the bishops was incalculably enhanced, for example, by the ordinance of Constantine, according to which, in the old Roman legal arrangement of the receptum arbitrii (court of arbitration) it was enacted that when the bishop was arbiter, his judgment should be unconditionally final; for the Christians it was in many cases a religious duty to apply to the bishop; henceforth he was even in civil law their supreme judge. [150] From this same purely civil, and absolutely non-religious source is derived the imposing idea of strictest uniformity in faith and worship. A State must manifestly possess a single, universally valid, logically perfected constitution; the individuals in the State cannot give legal decisions as they please, but must, whether they will or not, be subject to the law; this was all well understood by these Doctors of the Church and legal bishops, and regarded by them as ruling the religious sphere as well. The close connection of the Roman Church with Roman law was visibly expressed by the fact that for centuries the Church stood under the jurisdiction of this law and all priests in all lands were regarded eo ipso as Romans and enjoyed the many privileges which were attached to this legal position. [151] The conversion of the European world to this political and juristical Christianity was nor, as is w often asserted, brought about by a divine miracle, but by the commonplace method of compulsion. Even the pious Eusebius (who lived long before Theodosius) complained of the "unspeakable hypocrisy and dissimulation of the so-called Christians"; as soon as Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, there was no need for dissembling; men became Christians as they paid their taxes, and they became Roman Christians because they must give to the Emperor what is the Emperor's; religion had become, like the soil, the property of the Emperor. Christianity as an obligatory world-religion is therefore demonstrably a Roman imperial idea, not a religious one, When the secular Empire declined and disappeared, this idea remained behind; the religion ordained by the Emperors was to supply the cement for the world which had become disjointed; all men were hereby benefited and consequently the more sensible ever gravitated back towards Rome, for there alone was found not merely religious enthusiasm, but a practical organisation, which exercised an untiring activity in all directions, left nothing undone to resist every counter-movement, possessed knowledge of men, diplomatic skill and above all a central unchanging axis -- not excluding movement, but guaranteeing security -- namely, the absolute Primacy of Rome, that is, of the Pontifex maximus. Herein lay first and foremost the strength of Roman Christianity, against the East as well as the North. Then came the further fact that Rome, situated in the geographical centre of the Chaos, and moreover endowed almost exclusively with secular and political gifts, knew exactly the character and the needs of the half-breed population, and was hindered by no deep-rooted national tendencies and conscientious objections from making advances all round -- under the one reservation that its supremacy remained unconditionally recognised and maintained. Rome was accordingly not only the one firmly established ecclesiastical power during the first thousand years, but also that which professed the most elasticity. Nothing is more stiff-necked than religious fanaticism; even the noblest religious enthusiasm will not easily accommodate itself to a different view. Now Rome was strict, and cruel if need be, but never really fanatical, at least not in religious things nor in earlier times. The Popes were so tolerant, so anxious to arrange matters, and to make the Church acceptable to all shades of opinion, that some of them long after their death had to be excommunicated in their graves, for the sake of uniformity of doctrine. [152] Augustine, for example, had considerable trouble with Pope Zosimas, who did not think the doctrine of peccatum originale important enough for him to conjure up on its account the dangerous struggle with the Pelagians, especially as the latter were not anti-Roman, but, on the contrary, yielded more rights to the Pope than their opponents did. [153] And whoever follows the course of Church history from this time down to the great dispute about grace between the Jesuits and the Dominicans in the seventeenth century (really the same thing again, but grasped at the other end and without an Augustine, to hinder the development of materialism) and sees how the Pope sought to settle it "by tolerating [154] both systems and forbidding the adherents of both to persecute each other" -- he who, I say, follows with a clear eye this history will find that Rome without yielding an iota of its claims to power was yet more tolerant than any other Church organisation. It was the religious Hotspurs in its midst, especially the numerous secret Protestants, as also the violent opposition from without, that gradually forced the Papal stool to adopt a more and more definite and more and more one-sided dogmatic tendency, till finally a rash Pontifex maximus of the nineteenth century in his Syllabus declared war upon the whole European culture. [155] The Papacy was formerly wiser. The great Gregory complains bitterly of the theologians, who torture themselves and others with questions regarding the nature of the Godhead and other incomprehensible things, instead of devoting themselves to practical and benevolent objects. Rome would have been glad if there never had been any theologians. As Herder rightly remarks, "A cross, a picture of Mary with the child, a Mass, a rosary, were more to its purpose than much fine speculation." [156] It is self-evident that this laxity went hand in hand with distinct secularity. And this too was an element of power. The Greek meditated and "sublimated" too much, the religious Teuton was too much in earnest; Rome, on the other hand, never departed from the golden mean, which the vast majority of humanity prefers to follow. One need only read the works of Origenes (as an example of what the East aimed at) and then in strong contrast Luther's Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen (as a summary of what the North understood by religion), to see at once how little the one or the other was suited for the men of the Chaos -- and not only for them but for all who were at all infected with the poison of connubia promiscua. A Luther presupposes men, who have a strong support in themselves, who are capable of fighting spiritually as he himself has fought; an Origenes moves on the heights of knowledge, where the Indians might be at home, but not the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, not even a man like Augustine. [157] Rome, on the other hand, thoroughly understood, as I remarked above, the character and the needs of that parti-coloured population which for centuries furnished the bearers and mediators of civilisation and culture. Rome demanded from its adherents neither greatness of character nor independent thought, the Church itself relieved them of that; for talent and imaginative enthusiasm it had indeed room -- under the one condition of obedience -- but such gifted and visionary men were merely auxiliaries; the attention was directed continuously to the great masses, and for them religion was so completely transferred from head and heart to the visible Church, that it became accessible to every one, comprehensible to every one, and as clear as daylight to all. [158] Never has an institution displayed so admirable and clear-sighted a knowledge of mediocre humanity as that Church, which began at an early time to organise itself around the Pontifex maximus as central point. From the Jews it took the hierocracy, the intolerance, the historical materialism -- but carefully avoided the inexorably strict moral commands and the sublime simplicity of Judaism, the sworn foe of all superstition (for this would have scared away the people, which is always more superstitious than religious); it willingly adopted Germanic earnestness, as also mystical rapture -- but it took care that strict subjectivity did not make the path of salvation too full of thorns for weak souls and that mystical flights did not emancipate from the cult of the Church; it did not exactly reject the mystical speculations of the Hellenes -- it understood their worth for the human imagination -- but it robbed the myth of its plastic, incalculable, developable and so ever revolutionary significance, and condemned it to perpetual immobility like an idol to be worshipped. On the other hand, it adopted in the most large- hearted manner the ceremonies and especially the sacraments of the splendour-loving Chaos which sought religion in magic. This is its own real element, the one thing which the Imperium, that is, Rome, contributed independently to the structure of Christianity; and so it was that while holy men did not cease to reveal in Christianity the contrast to heathendom, the great masses passed from the one to the other without much noticing the difference: for they still found the splendidly robed priesthood, the processions, the images, the miracle-working local sanctuaries, the mystical transformation of the sacrifice, the material communication of eternal life, the confession, the forgiveness of sins, the indulgences -- all things to which they had long been accustomed. I must still say a few words in explanation of this open, ceremonious entrance of the spirit of the Chaos into Christianity; it gave Christianity a peculiar colouring, which has more or less tinged all confessions up to the present day (even those which are separated from Rome), and it reached its culminating point at the end of the period with which we are occupied. The proclamation of the dogma of transubstantiation, in the year 1215, betokens the completion of a 1000 years' development in this direction. [159] The adoption of the objective religion of Paul (in opposition to the subjective) involved as was inevitable a view of expiation similar to that of the Jews; but what gives the Jew a special claim to our honest admiration is his unceasing struggle against superstition and magic; his religion was materialism, but, as I pointed out in a former chapter, abstract, not concrete materialism. [160] Now towards the end of the second century of our era an absolutely concrete materialism, though tinged with mysticism, had spread like a plague through the whole Roman Empire. That this sudden resuscitation of old superstitions was brought about by the Semites, by those Semites, namely, who were not under the benevolent law of Jehovah, has been proved; [161] for the Jewish Prophets themselves had had trouble enough to suppress the belief (which was always asserting itself) in the magic efficacy of eaten sacrificial flesh; [162] and it was this very faith, which was so widespread among born materialists, that now spread like wildfire through all the countries of the strongly Semitised Chaos of peoples. It was everlasting life that was demanded by miserable creatures, who might well feel how little of eternity there was in their own existence. It was everlasting life that the Priests of the newly arranged mysteries promised them through the mediation of "Agapes," common, ceremonious meals, in which flesh and blood, magically transformed to divine substance, were partaken of, and in which by the direct communication of this substance of eternity which conferred immortality the body of the human being was likewise transformed, to rise after death to everlasting life. [163] Thus Apuleius, for example, writes about his initiation into the mysteries of Isis, that he dare not betray what must be concealed, and can only say this: he had reached the borders of the realm of death, had crossed the threshold of Proserpina and had returned from thence "reborn in all elements." [164] Those initiated into the cult of Mithras were also called in aeternum renati, for ever regenerate. [165] There is no doubt that we must see in this a revival of the very earliest, most widespread, totemistic [166] delusions, conceptions against which the noblest men of all countries have long and successfully contended. It certainly seems to me doubtful whether the conception in this particular Semitic form of the Egypto-Roman mysteries ever existed among the Indo-Europeans; but these Indo-Europeans had in the meantime developed another idea, that of substitution at sacrifices: in sacris sirnulata pro veris accipi. [167] Thus we see the old Indians using baked cakes in the form of discs (hosts) as symbolical representatives of the animals to be slain. Now in the Roman chaos, where all thoughts are found jumbled confusedly together, that Semitic conception of the magic change of substance in the human being became fused with this Aryan symbolic conception of simulata pro veris, which had really been meant only to show that the former literally interpreted thank- offering was now a matter of the heart only. [168] Thus in the sacrificial meals of the pre- Christian Roman mystery-cults men partook not of flesh and blood but of bread and wine -- magically transformed. It is well known what a part these mysteries played. Everyone will at least remember having read in Cic. De Legibus ii. 14, that it was only these mysteries (then consisting of a "baptism" and a "love-feast") that gave men "understanding in life and hope in death." But no one will fail to notice that we have here, in these renati, a view of regeneration absolutely contrary to that taught and. lived by Christ. Christ and Antichrist stand opposed. Absolute idealism, which aims at a complete transformation of the inner man, his motives and purposes, is here opposed by a materialism intensified to madness, for by partaking of a mysterious food it hopes for a magical transformation of the ephemeral body into an immortal one. This conception means a moral atavism, such as only a period of the most utter decay could produce. These mysteries, like everything else, were influenced by the genuine Christianity of the early days: it idealised them and used the forms of its time to give them a new purport. In the oldest post-evangelical writing, the Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles, found in 1883, and dating from the first Christian century, the mystic meal is merely a thank-offering (Eucharist). When taking the cup the congregation says: "We thank Thee, ) Father, for the sacred vine of Thy servant David, which Thou hast proclaimed by Thy servant Jesus; Thine be honour to all eternity." When taking the bread it says: "We thank Thee, O Father, for life and knowledge, which Thou hast made known to us by Thy servant Jesus; Thine be honour to all eternity." [169] In the somewhat later so-called Apostolic Constitutions the bread and wine are designated "gifts in honour of Christ." [170] Of a transformation of the elements into body and blood of Christ no one at that time knows anything. It is in fact characteristic of the earliest Christians to avoid the word "mysterion" which was then so common (in Latin it was rendered by sacramentum) It is only in the fourth century (that is, after Christianity became the official, obligatory religion of the absolutely un-Christian Empire) that the word comes into use, unquestionably as the symptom of a new idea. [171] But the best minds strove unceasingly against this gradual introduction into religion of materialism and magic. Origenes, for example, is of opinion that not only is it to be understood merely "figuratively," when we speak of the body of Christ at the Eucharist, but that this "figure" is suited only to "the simple"; in reality it is a "spiritual communion" that takes place. Hence, too, according to Origenes it is a matter of indifference who partakes of the Sacrament, he partaking in itself neither helps nor harms, it depends solely on the state of mind. [172] Augustine was in a much more difficult position, for he lived in a world so sensualised that he found the conception widespread that the mere partaking of bread and wine makes one a member of the Church and secures immortality, whether one lives as a criminal or not -- a conception against which he frequently and vigorously contends. [173] Eminent Church teachers too, like Chrysostom, had even then made the assertion that the body of the recipient was essentially changed by the consecrated food. Yet Augustine firmly maintains that sacraments are always merely symbols. Sacrificia visibilia sunt signa invisibilium, sicut verba sonantia signa rerum. [174] The host, according to Augustine, bears the same relation to the body of Christ as the word to the thing. When he nevertheless in the case of the Sacrament teaches that the Divine is actually communicated, it is a question of communication to the mind and by the mind. So clear an utterance leaves no room for interpretations and excludes the later Roman doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass. [175] These extremely sketchy remarks will suffice to show even the uninitiated reader that the Eucharist could be viewed in two ways: the one way was opened up by the more ideal and more spiritual mysteries of the purer Hellenes (henceforth tilled with concrete purport as "feast of remembrance" through the life of Christ); the other, which was connected with Egyptian and Semitic magic doctrines, tried to see in the bread and wine the actual body of Christ and from that to prove that a magic transformation was brought about in its recipients. These two tendencies [176] existed side by side for centuries, without ever coming to a decisive dogmatic struggle. The feeling of a mysterious danger may have contributed to prevent it; besides Rome, which at a very early period had quietly chosen the second way, knew that it had against it the most eminent Church fathers, as well as the oldest tradition. Once more it was the too conscientious North which threw the torch of war into this idyllic peace, where under the stole of a single universal and infallible Church the adherents of two different religions lived. In the ninth century the abbot Radbert, in his book Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini, taught for the first time as an irrefutable dogma the doctrine of the magical transformation of the bread into the objectively present body of Christ, which exercised a magical and immortalising influence upon all who partook of it -- even upon the ignorant and unbelieving. And who took up the gauntlet? In the most rapid survey such a fact cannot be passed over: it was the King of the Franks, later supported by the King of England! As always, the first instinct was correct; the Germanic princes immediately divined that their national in- dependence was being attacked. [177] Commissioned by Charles the Bald first of all Ratramnus and then the great Scotus Erigena refuted this doctrine of Radbert. That it was not a question here of a theological dispute of little consequence is Proved by the fact that this same Scotus Erigena produces a whole system inspired by Origenes -- an ideal religion, in which the Holy Script with its doctrines is viewed as "symbolism of the Inexpressible" (res ineffabilis, incomprehensibilis) and the difference between good and bad proved metaphysically indefensible, &c., and that exactly at the same moment the admirable Count Gottschalk, following in the footsteps of Augustine, develops the doctrines of divine grace and predestination. The quarrel could no longer be settled diplomatically. The Germanic spirit began to awaken; Rome could not let it have its way, otherwise its own power would soon be gone. Gottschalk was publicly scourged almost to death by the ecclesiastics in power and then condemned to lifelong misery in prison; Scotus, who had fled in time to his English home, was treacherously murdered by monks commissioned by Rome. And so, for centuries, men wrangled over the nature of the Sacrament. The Popes indeed maintained personally a very reserved, in fact ambiguous, attitude; they were more con- cerned about the keeping together of all Christians under their episcopal staff than about discussions which might shake the Church to its very foundations. But when in the eleventh century that fiery spirit Berengarius of Tours had once more begun to carry the religion of idealism through all France, the decision could no longer be postponed. There now sat on the Papal throne Gregory VII., the author of the Dictatus papae, [178] in which for the first time it was frankly declared that Emperors and Princes were unconditionally subject to the Pope: he was that Pontifex maximus who first imposed on all bishops of the Church the vassal oath of complete allegiance to Rome, a man whose purity of heart increased tenfold his might which was great in itself; now, too, Rome felt strong enough to enforce its view in regard to the sacrament. Dragged from prison to prison, from council to council, Berengarius had finally in the year 1059, in order to save his life, to retract his doctrine before an assembly of 113 bishops in Rome, and to confess to the faith that "the bread is not merely a sacrament but the true body of Christ that is chewed with the teeth." [179] However, the conflict still went on, indeed it now became general. In the second half of the thirteenth century there was in all countries into which Germanic blood had penetrated -- from Spain to Poland, from Italy to England [180] -- an awakening of religious consciousness such as has perhaps never since been equalled; it signified the first dawn of a new day and manifested itself as a reaction against the enforced unassimilable religion of the Chaos. Everywhere there arose Bible and other pious societies, and wherever the knowledge of the Holy Writ had spread among the people there followed, as if with mathematical necessity, the rejection of the secular and intellectual claims of Rome and above all the rejection of transubstantiation and the Roman doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass. The situation became daily more critical. If the political situation had been more favourable, instead of being the most hopeless that Europe had ever known, an energetic and final severance from Rome would then have taken place even to the South of the Alps and the Pyrenees. There were reformers enough; in a way there was no need of them. The word Antichrist as a designation of the Roman stool was on every one's lips. Even the peasants knew that many ceremonies and doctrines of the Church were borrowed from heathendom, for at that time it had not yet been forgotten. Thus there was a widespread inner revolt against the externalising of religion, justification by works and particularly against the sale of indulgences. But Rome stood at that moment at the zenith of its political power, it conferred crowns, dethroned Kings and passed through its hands the threads of all diplomatic intrigues. It was then that that Pope ascended the Papal throne who used the memorable words, "Ego sum Caesar! ego sum Imperator." It became again, as in the time of Theodosius, high treason to hold a different faith from him. The defenceless were cut down; those who had to be treated more considerately were imprisoned, intimidated, demoralised; those who were for sale were bought. Then began the reign of Roman absolutism even in the sphere in which hitherto comparative tolerance had ruled, namely, in the sphere of the inmost religious conviction. It was introduced by two measures, whose connection is not at first manifest, but will become so from the above exposition: the translation of the Bible into the language of the people was forbidden (even the reading in the Latin vulgate by educated laymen); the dogma of transubstantiation was promulgated. [181] This completed the structure, in an absolutely logical manner. The Apostolic Constitutions had admonished the layman "when he sat at home to study the Gospel diligently," [182] and in the Eucharist he was to see "an offering of gifts in honour of Christ"; but who at this time had preserved any knowledge of early, pure Christianity? Besides, as I have tried to show, Rome has never from the first adopted a specifically religious or a specifically evangelical standpoint; consequently those who have for centuries reproached it for its lack of evangelic spirit are in the wrong. Rome, by banishing the Gospel from the house and the heart of the Christian. and by taking as the official bases of religion the magical materialism, upon which the dying chaos of races had supported itself, as well as the Jewish theory of sacrifice, by which the priest became an indispensable mediator, has simply been consistent. At the same fourth Lateran synod, which in the year 1215 proclaimed the dogma of magical transformation. the Inquisition Court was organised as a standing institution. Not the doctrine alone, but the system as well was henceforth perfectly frank. The synod of Narbonne established in the year 1227 the principle: "The persons and goods of heretics are given to anyone who takes possession of them"; [183] heretici possunt non solum excommunicari, sed et juste occidi, was taught soon after by the first really Roman Church doctor, Thomas Aquinas. These principles and doctrines have not been abolished; they are a logical, irrefutable consequence of, the Roman premisses and are still valid to-day; in the last years of the nineteenth century a preeminent Roman prelate, Hergenrother. has confirmed this. adding: "There is no yielding except under compulsion." [184] At the beginning of the thirteenth century therefore the struggle of almost a thousand years had ended with the apparently unconditional victory of Rome and the complete defeat of the Germanic North. But what I have called the awakening of the Germanic spirit in the religious sphere was only the symptom of a general effort of men feeling their way, and making up their minds; soon it penetrated the civic, political and intellectual life; it was no longer merely a question of religion, it was an all-embracing revolt against the principles and methods of Rome. The struggle broke out afresh, but with different results. If Rome could venture to be tolerant, the struggle might be regarded to-day as at an end; but she cannot venture, for it would mean suicide; and thus the intellectual and material position which we Northmen have won with such pains and so incompletely is continually being undermined and eaten away. Besides Rome possesses, unsought and without any obligations, born allies in all enemies of Germanicism. What we need as a protection against this danger is an immediate and powerful regeneration of ideal sentiment, a regeneration that shall be specifically religious: we need to tear away the foreign rags and tatters that still hang upon our Christianity as the trappings of slavish hypocrisy: we need the creative power to construct out of the words and the spectacle of the crucified Son of Man a perfect religion fitting the truth of our nature, our capacities, and our present culture -- a religion so directly convincing, so enchantingly beautiful, so present, so plastic, so eternally true, and yet so new, that we must give ourselves to it as a maid to her lover, without questioning, happy, enraptured -- a religion so exactly suited to our highly gifted. but delicate, easily injured, peculiar Teutonic nature, that it shall have the power to master our inmost souls, ennobling and strengthening us: if we do not succeed in this, from the shadows of the future a second Innocent III. will come forth, another fourth Lateran synod will meet, and once more the flames of the Inquisition will crackle and flare up to heaven. For the world -- and even the Teuton -- will rather throw themselves into the arms of Syro- Egyptian mysteries than be edified by the threadbare twaddle of ethical societies and such- like. And the world will be right. On the other hand an abstract, casuistically dogmatic Protestantism, imbued with Roman superstition such as the Reformation has bequeathed to us in various different forms, is no living power. It certainly conceals a power, a great one -- the Germanic soul; but this kaleidoscope of manifold and inwardly inconsistent intolerances means hindrance to, not improvement of, this soul; hence the profound indifference of the majority of those who are of this confession, and the pitiful absence of cultivation of the greatest power of the heart, the religious power. Romanism, on the other hand, may be weak as a dogmatic religion, but its dogmatism is at least consistent; moreover the Romish Church -- provided only certain concessions are made to it -- is peculiarly tolerant and generous; it is so all-embracing that only Buddhism can compare with it, providing a home, a civitas Dei, for all characters, all tendencies of mind and heart, a home in which the sceptic (like many a Pope) can scarcely be called Christian; [185] and it joins hands with the average mind still fettered to heathen superstition and with the fanatical enthusiast, like Bernard of Clairvaux, "whose soul is enraptured in the fulness of the house of God and drinks new wine with Christ in the kingdom of his Father." [186] In addition there is the seductive and captivating idea of world and State, which is of great influence; for as an organised system, as a power of tradition, as a discerner of the human heart, Rome is great and admirable, more so almost than one can express in words. Even a Luther is said to have declared (Tischreden): "As far as outward government is concerned, the Empire of the Pope is the best thing for the world." A single David -- strong in the innocently pure revolt of a genuine Indo-European against the shame inflicted upon our race -- could perhaps lay low such a Goliath, but for a whole army of philosophising Lilliputians it would have been impossible. Its death too would be in no case desirable; for our Germanic Christianity will not and tan not be the religion of the Chaos; the delusion of a world religion is rank chronistic and sacramental materialism; like a malady it clings to the Protestant Church out of its Roman past; only in limitation can we grow to the full possession of our idealising power. A clear understanding of the momentous struggles in the sphere of religion in the nineteenth century and in the approaching future will be impossible if we have not before our minds an essentially correct and vividly coloured picture of the struggle in early Christianity, until the year 1215. What came later -- the Reformation and the counter- reformation -- is much less important from a purely religious point of view, much more saturated with politics and ruled by politics; besides it remains a riddle, if we have not a knowledge of the past. It is this need that I have tried to meet in the present chapter. [187] If in the above account I am accused of partiality, I would reply that I do not possess the desirable gift of lying. What is the good of "objective phrases"? Even an enemy can appreciate honest frankness. When it is a question of the dearest possessions of the heart, I prefer, like the Teutons, to rush naked to battle, with the sentiment that God has given me, rather than to march to the field adorned in the artificial armour of a science which proves nothing, or in the toga of an empty rhetoric which reconciles everything. Nothing is further from my intention than the identification of individuals with their Churches. Our Churches to-day unite and separate by essentially external characteristics. When I read the Memorials of Cardinal Manning and see him calling the Jesuit Order the cancer of Catholicism, when I hear him violently complaining of the development (so zealously carried on at the present day) of the sacrament to downright idolatry, and calling the church in consequence a "booth" and an "exchange," when I see him working so actively for the spreading of the Bible and openly opposing the Roman tendency to suppress it (which he admits to be the predominant tendency), or when I take up such excellent, genuinely Germanic writings as Professor Schell's Der Katholizismus als Prinzip des Fortschrittes, I have a strong feeling that a single divine whirlwind would suffice to sweep a way the fatal jugglery of delusions inherited from the stone age, to scatter like a veil of mist the infatuations of the fallen empire of half-breeds and to unite in blood fraternity all Teutons -- in religion and through religion. Moreover in my account, as I promised, the centre of all Christianity -- the figure on the Cross -- has remained untouched. And it is this figure which binds us all together, no matter how we may be separated by mode of thought and tendency of race. It is my good fortune to possess several good and true friends among the Catholic clergy and to the present day I have not lost one. I remember moreover a very highly gifted Dominican, who liked to argue with me and to whom I am indebted for much information on theological matters, exclaiming in despair: "You are a terrible man! not even St. Thomas Aquinas could be a match for you!" And yet the reverend gentleman did not withdraw from me his good graces, nor I from him my admiration. What united us was greater and mightier than all that separated us; it was the figure of Jesus Christ. Though each may have believed the other so fettered to false error, that, transferred to the arena of the world, he would not have hesitated for a moment to attack him, yet, in the stillness of the cloister, where I was wont to visit the father, we always felt ourselves drawn into that condition so beautifully described by Augustine (see p. 75), in which everything -- even the voice of the angels -- is silent and only the One speaks; then we knew that we were united and with equal conviction we both confessed, "Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but His words shall not pass away." _______________ Notes: 1. Novalis: Fragmente. 2. Herder says regarding the man of this time: "He had strength for nothing but believing. Troubled about his wretched life, trembling for the future and in dread of invisible powers, timid and powerless to investigate the course of nature, he lent his ear to stories and prophecies and let himself be inspired, initiated, flattered, betrayed" (Complete Works, Inghan's ed. xix. 290). 3. It is scarcely right for me to name special works; the literature even in as far as it is available to us laymen is extensive; the important thing is to get instruction from various sources and not to be satisfied with a knowledge of generalities. Thus the short text-books of Harnack, Muller, Holtzmann, &c., in the Grundriss dey theologischen Wissenschaften (Freiburg, Mohr) are invaluable, I have used them diligently; but the layman will get much more out of larger works, such as Nean der's Kirchengeschichte or Renan's Origines du Christianisme, &c. Still more instructive, because more vivid and clear, are the works of the specialists, as Ramsay: The Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170 (1895); Hatch: The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church (1897); Hergenrother's great work: Photius, sein Leben, seine Schriften und das griechische Schisma, which begins with the founding of Constantinople and thus traces in great detail the development of the Greek Church from the beginning; Hefele: Konziliengeschichte, &c. &c. We laymen can naturally acquire detailed knowledge of only a portion of this literature; but, I repeat, it is only from detailed accounts and not from summaries that we can get vivid conceptions and knowledge. (An important new work is Adolf Harnack's Mission und Ausbreiung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 1902; 2nd ed. 1906.) 4. Ambrosius admits this implicitly; see i. 24. Much is indeed an almost literal translation. How much more important, however, are his independent writings, as the speech on the death of the Emperor Theodosius with the beautiful ever-recurring refrain: "Dilexi! I loved him!" 5. Influence of Greek Ideas, pp. 139-170. In this lecture Hatch refers to Ambrosius' work and is of opinion that it is essentially Stoical not only in conception but also in detail. The Christian element is indeed there, but merely as an adjunct. Its fundamental doctrine of wisdom, virtue, justice, temperance, is pure Graeco-Roman doctrine of pre-Christian times. 6. See especially vol. i. p. 213 f. and p. 411 f. 7. As I afterwards found, Hamann has suggested this comparison: "Go into any community of Christians you like, their language in the sacred precincts, their Fatherland and their genealogy betray the fact that they are Gentile branches, artificially grafted upon a Jewish stem." (Cf. Romans xi. 24.) 8. I said five hundred years, for see Harnack on the identity of Logos and Nous: Dogmengeschichte, § 22. 9. See vol. i. pp. 411 to 440. 10. It is easy to understand how the pious Tertullian, who grew up in Heathenism, could say of the conceptions of the Hellenic poets and philosophers, that they were tam consimilia to the Christian ones! (Apol. xlvii.) 11. Christliche Symbolik (1854) i. p. viii. 12. That the Indo-Europeans also were at bottom monotheists, I have at a much earlier point emphasised, in opposition to the wide spread popular error (see vol. i. pp. 218 and 424); cf. also Jac. Grimm in the preface to his Deutsche Mythologie (pp. xliv.-xlv.) and Max Muller in his lectures on the Science of Languages (ii. 385). But this kind of monotheism must be distinguished from the Semitic. 13. Thus, for example, the so-called necessary progression of the thesis, antithesis and synthesis, or again the deity of the Absolute as father, the different existence as son, the return to itself as spirit. 14. See the whole conclusion of the first chapter. 15. The Egyptian Triads were formerly allowed to have a greater influence upon the moulding of Christian dogmas than was right. In truth the conception of the son of God in his relation to God the Father (the son "not made, nor created but begotten," literally as in the Athanasian Creed) seems specifically Egyptian: we find it in all the various Egyptian systems of gods; but the third person is the goddess (Cf. Maspero: Histoire ancienne des peuples de l'Orient classique, 1895, i. 151, and Budge: The Book of the Dead, p. xcvi.) 16. Bhagavadgita, Book IV. §§ 7 and 8. 17. See vol. i. p. 181. 18. Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, ed. 1898, p. 46. Every year new proofs of the universal spread of the Isis cult in all places where the influence of the Roman chaos had penetrated are being discovered in all parts of Europe. The belief in the resurrection of the body and the communication by sacrament of the manna of eternal life were elements of these mysteries long before the birth of Christ. One finds the greatest number of evidences in the Museum of Guimet, since Gaul and Italy were the chief seats of the Isis cult. (In the meantime Flinders Petrie has made new discoveries, especially in Ehnasya, from which step by step it can be traced how the cult of Isis and of Horus were transformed into the would-be "Christian" worship of the Madonna. See the communications of this scholar before the British Association, 1904.) 19. Interesting in this connection is the demonstration by the same author that the well- known Christian monogram so frequent on old monuments and still employed to-day (supposed to be khi-rho from the Greek alphabet) is nothing more or less than the common Egyptian symbol of the God Horus! 20. See especially the famous speech of Demosthenes De Corona, and for a summary of the facts Jevons: Introduction to the History of Religion, 1896, chap. xxiii. For the tracing back of the Last Supper to Old Babylon see Otto Pfleiderer's Christusbild, p. 84, and for its relation to other old mysteries see the same author's Entstehung des Christentums, 1905, p. 154. For the fundamental facts see Albr. Dieterich's Eine Mithras-liturgie, 1903. 21. Pachomius, the founder of real monkhood, was an Egyptian like his predecessor, the hermit Antonius. He was a native of Upper Egypt, and as a "national attendant on Serapis" learned the practices which he afterwards transferred almost unchanged to Christianity. (Cf. Zockler: Askese und Monchtum, 2nd ed. p. 193 f.) 22. Cf. vol. i. p. 313. For the "adoption of heathendom," see also Muller, p. 204 f. 23. Cf. vol. i. p. 413, and also the passage on p. 337, quoted from Graetz. 24. Iliad ix. 401, and xxii. 73. 25. That in the case of Homer the word muthos corresponds to the later logos, that is, that all speech is viewed, so to speak, as poetry (which it obviously is), is one of those things in which language reveals to us the profoundest facts concerning the organisation of our mind. 26. Kluge gives in his Etymologisches Worterbuch the following as etymology and explanation of grace (Gnade). Root meaning, "to bend, bend oneself"; Gothic, "to support"; Old Saxon, "favour, help"; Old "High German, "Pity, compassion, condescension"; Middle High German, "bliss, support, favour." 27. The myth of degeneration forms, as is well known, a fundamental component of the circle of conceptions of the Greeks, who nevertheless are so persistently called "cheerful." "Would I had
sooner died, or else had been later born! So speaks the "joyful" Hesiod (Works and Days, verse 175 f.). And he paints to us a past "golden age," which we have to thank for the little good that still exists among us degenerate men, for these great men of the past still move as spirits in our midst; cf. vol. i. p. 89. 28. Luther's thoughts are vaguely anticipated in the 5th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, but they are found quite fully expressed in the writings of Scotus Erigena, whom he valued so highly (see De. div. Nat., Book V. chap. 36). 29. Consult as an example Philippson's Israelitische Religionslehre, ii. 89. 30. Sin is a breach of the everlasting law by word, deed or desire. 31. Cf. especially Pfleiderer: Der Paulinismus, 2nd ed. p. 50 f. This purely scientific theological exposition is naturally different from mine, but nevertheless confirms it, especially by the proof (p. 59) that Paul assumed the presence of an impulse to sin before the Fall, which obviously could mean nothing but the removal of the myth beyond arbitrary historical boundaries; then also by the clear demonstration that Paul, in opposition to the Augustinian dogmatists, recognised in the flesh the common and unchanging source of all sinful nature. 32. Rigveda vii. 86. 33. Cankara: Die Sutra's des Vedanta i. 3. 25. 34. See the fictitious genealogies in Matthew i. and Luke ii., both of which go back to Joseph -- not to Mary. 35. See Hergenrother: Photius iii. 428. 36. See vol. i. pp. 230. 418, and 433. 37. Professor Graetz (i. 650) considers the doctrine of original sin to be a "new doctrine," invented by Paul! 38. This may have been difficult enough for Augustine himself, for earlier, in the 27th chapter of the 15th book of the De Civitate Dei, he had spoken strongly against attempting to interpret the book of Genesis as historical truth entirely free of allegory. 39. "I shall only quote one witness whose judgment is moderate and correct, Sainte-Beuve. He writes (Port Royal, Book IV. chap. 1): "Les Jesuites n'attestent pas moins par leur methode a'education qu'ils sont semi-pelagiens tendant au Pelagianisme pur, que par leur doctrine directe." [Google translate: The Jesuits do not certify their method by less they a'education are semi-Pelagian Pelagianism leading to pure, by their doctrine Direct.] 40. Cf. vol. i. pp. 193 and 437; and the paragraph on "Views of Existence'' in the ninth chapter (vol. ii.). 41. Histoire du peuple d'Israel v. 227. 42. See vol. i. pp. 238 f. and 415 f. 43. Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 6th ed. p. 312. 44. See vol. i. pp. 452 and 460. 45. See vol. 1. p. 235 note. 46. See the excursus on Semitic religion in the fifth chapter (vol. i.) and compare especially p. 437 with p. 453. Compare, too, the details concerning the Germanic view of the world in the particular paragraph of chap, ix. (vol. ii. p. 423). 47. This system is most perfectly developed among the old Egyptians. who believed that the heart of the dead was laid on scales and weighed against the ideal of right and uprightness; the idea of a conversion of the inner man by divine grace was quite alien to them. The Jews have never risen to the height of the Egyptian conceptions; formerly the reward for them was simply a very long life to the individual and future world-empire to the nation -- the punishment, death and misery for future generations. In later times, however, they adopted all sorts of superstitions, from which there resulted a kingdom of God which was altogether secularly conceived (see vol. i. p. 481) and as counterpart to it a perfectly secular hell. From these and other conceptions which arose from the lowest depths of human delusion and superstition the Christian hell was formed (of which Origenes knew nothing, except in the form of qualms of conscience!), while neo- latonism, Greek poetry and Egyptian conceptions of the "Fields of the Blest" (see the illustrations in Budge's The Book of the Dead) provided the Christian heaven, which, however, never attained to the clearness of hell. 48. Mostly on the strength of a misinterpretation (Isaiah lxiv. 4). 49. Concerning the relation between these two, see vol. i. pp: 46 and 86. 50. I refer especially to chap. xxix. of the work On Prayer by Origenes; in the form of a commentary to the words "Lead us not into temptation" this great man develops a purely Indian conception concerning the importance of sin as a means of salvation. 51. As a fact Origenes has expressly recognised the mythical element in Christianity. Only he thought that Christianity was "the only religion which even in mythical form is truth" (cf. Harnack: Dogmen geschichte, Abriss. 2nd ed. p. 113). 52. Take up, for example, the Handbuch fur Katholischen Religionsunterricht by the Prebendary Arthur Konig, and read the chapter on redemption. Nicodemus would not have found the slightest difficulty in understanding this doctrine. 53. See his second letter, § 6. 54. Cf. vol. i. p. 318. 55. This fancy has found its most complete expression in the novel Esther. 56. This assertion will meet with many contradictions; all I mean by it, however, is that Paul rather uses his systematic ideas as a dialectical weapon to convince his hearers than endeavours to establish a con nected, solely valid and new theological structure. Even Edouard Reuss, who, in his immortal work, Histoire de la Theologie Chretienne au siecle apostolique (3rd ed.), vindicates to the Apostle a definite, uniform system, admits at the end (ii. 580) that real theology was for Paul a subordinate clement, and on p. 73 he shows that Paul's aim was so completely directed to popular and practical work that wherever questions begin to be theoretical and theological, he leaves the metaphysical sphere for the ethical. 57. We must read the whole passage, I Cor. ix. 19 t., to see how exactly the apostle denies the later formula extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Cf., too, the Epistle to the Philippians, i. 18: "What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice." 58. See, for example, Acts of the Apostles xvi, I. 59. Cf. vol. i. p. 119 note. 60. What we know of the laws of heredity would speak very strongly for the supposition of a Jewish father and a Hellenic mother. The formerly popular saying: A man inherits the character of his father and the intellect of his mother, has indeed shown itself to be much too dogmatic; if twins that have grown together with but one pair of legs can yet be absolutely different in character (cf. Hoffding: Psychologie, 2nd ed. p. 480), we see how cautious we must be with such assertions. Yet there are so many striking cases among the most important men (I will only mention Goethe and Schopenhauer) that we are entitled in the case of Paul, where a striking incongruence stands before us as an inexplicable riddle, to put forward this hypothesis which is historically quite probable. From Harnack's Mission, &c., p. 40, I learn that even in earliest times the suggestion was made that Paul was descended from Hellenic parents. 61. Graetz asserts (Volkstumliche Geschichte der Juden i. 646): "Paul had but a scanty knowledge of Jewish writings and knew the sacred writings only from the Greek translation." On the other hand, his quotations from Epimenides, Euripides and Aratus prove his familiarity with Hellenic literature. 62. See, for example, the two episodes with John "whose surname was Mark" (Acts of the Apostles xiii. 13, and xv. 38-39). 63. Especially by the works of W. M. Ramsay: Historical Geography of Asia Minor, The Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170. St. Paul, the Traveller and the Roman Citizen. 64. The Church, &c., 4th ed. p. 57. 65. Kirchengeschichte (1892) i. 26. 66. See especially Galatians, ii. 15: "Although we are by nature Jews and not sinners of the Gentiles," and many other passages. 67. Let me give the reader who is not well read in Scripture some quotations. Redemption forms the subject of all the Pauline Epistles. The universality of sin is implicitly admitted by the adducing of the myth of the Fall of man and by its un-Jewish interpretation. So we find such passages as Rom. xi. 32: If God has included all men in unbelief," and the still more characteristic Ephesians ii. 3: "We all are by nature children of wrath." With regard to grace perhaps the most decisive passage is the following: "For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure" (Philippians ii. 13). With regard to the importance of faith in contrast to merit by good works we find numerous passages, for this is the main pillar of Paul's religion, here -- and here perhaps alone -- there is no shadow of a contradiction; the apostle is teaching the purely Indian doctrine. We should note especially Rom. iii. 27-28, v. I, the whole of chaps. ix. and x., likewise the whole Epistle to the Galatians, &c. &c. As examples: "Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law" (Rom. iii. 28); "We know that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ" (Gal. ii. 16). But grace and faith are only two phases, two modes -- the divine and the human -- of the same process; hence in the following passage faith is to be regarded as included in grace: "And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work" (see the letter to Titus iii. 5). Re-birth is mentioned as "regeneration" in a manner akin to the Indo-Platonic view. 68. Pierre Bayle: Dictionnaire. See the last note to the statement about the Jesuit Jean Adam, who in the year 1650 caused much offence by his public sermons against Augustine. One may trust this report absolutely, since Bayle was altogether sympathetic to the Jesuits and remained until his death in close personal intercourse with them. The famous Pere de la Chaise also declares that "Augustine can only be read with caution," and this refers naturally to the Pauline elements of his religion (cf. Sainte-Beuve: Port Royal, 4th ed. ii. 134. and iv. 436). 69. Pfleiderer, p. 113. 70. My space is so
limited that I cannot help asking the reader to consult the authorities
on such an important point. The double process of thought with its
inextricable antinomy is most clearly seen when we fix our attention
upon the end, the judgment, and in this we are excellently assisted by a
small specialised work (in which all the literature is also given),
Ernst Teichmann's Die paulinischen Vorstellungen von Auferstehung und
Gericht und ihre Beziehungen zur judischen) Apokalyptik (1896).
Armed with an exact knowledge of the Jewish literature of that time,
Teichmann shows, sentence for sentence, how literally all the New
Testament, and especially the Pauline conceptions of the last judgment,
are taken from the late apocalyptic doctrines of Judaism. That these in
turn are not of Hebrew origin, but borrowed from Egypt and Asia and
saturated with Hellenic thoughts (see pp. 2 f., 32. &c.), only
shows from what a witches' cauldron the Apostle drew his material, and
it matters little, since the powerful national spirit of the Jews made
everything it took hold of "Jewish." Decisive, on the other hand, is the
detailed proof that Paul elsewhere (especially where his real religion
is making headway) expressly does away with the idea of judgment. See
especially the paragraph on Die Aufhebung der Gerichtsvorstellung,
p. 100 f. Teichmann writes here: "The doctrine of justification by faith
was diametrically opposed to all former views. Jews and Gentiles knew no
better than that the deeds, the works of man decided his destiny after
death. But here religious conduct takes the place of moral conduct." And
on p. 118 the author thus sum marises his statements: "On the other hand
the Apostle is quite independent when he, by the consistent development
of his pneuma-doctrine, puts aside the conception of judgment. On the
basis of faith, gracious reception of the
71. See especially Pfleiderer, p. iii. f. 72. Full and remarkably precise information in Reuss Book V. chap. viii. 73. I do not overlook the fact that the Arians appeal to the somewhat vague passage in the Epistle to the Philippians, the authenticity of which is very much doubted, chap. ii. 6. 74. See vol. i. p. 216. 75. In vol. i. p. 428 f. I have explained at length what a different significance dogma had for the Jew. 76. See below for the part played by bishops as judges in civil cases. 77. De moribus eccl. i. § 31. 78. In his letters Augustine addresses the Bishop of Rome simply as "brother." He certainly employs also the expression "Thy Holiness," not, however, to the Bishop of Rome alone, but to every priest, even when he is not a bishop; every Christian belonged, according to the way of speaking at that time, to the "community of the Saints." 79. Ep. 93 ad Vincent (from Neander). 80. "Turning away from books I inclined myself to my own heart; led by Thee I entered the deepest depths of my heart; Thou didst help me, that I was able to do it. I entered in. However weak my eye, I yet saw clearly -- far above this the eye of my soul, raised beyond my reason -- the unchanging light. It was not that common light with which the senses are familiar, nor was it distinguished from this merely by greater power, as though the daylight had become ever brighter and brighter, till it had filled all space. No, it was not that, but another, a quite different one. And it did not hover high above my reason, as oil floats upon water or the heaven above the earth, but it was high above me, because it had created me myself, and I was of small account as a creature. Whoever knows the truth knows that light, and whoever knows that light knows eternity. Love knows it. O eternal truth and true love and loved eternity! thou art my God! Day and night I long for thee!" 81. Particularly in the De peccato originali. Concerning grace Augustine expresses himself very clearly in his letter to Paulinus, § 6, where he is arguing against Pelagius: "Grace is not a fruit of works: if it were so, it would not be grace. Because for works there is given as much as they are worth; but grace is given without merit." In this connection he had had a good teacher in Ambrosius, for the latter had taught: "Not by works but by faith is man justified." (See the beautiful Speech on the Death of the Emperor Theodosius, § 9; Abraham is here quoted as an example.) 82. Contra epistolam Manichaei, § 6 (from Neander). 83. A doctrine to which the Church at a later time appeals (thus, for example, the Roman synod of the year 680), in order to demand from the civil power that it should make orthodoxy "supreme, and see that the weeds be torn out" (Hefele, iii. 258). 84. More details of Augustine's theory of grace will be found in Harnack's large Dogmengeschichte: the abridged edition is too short for this exceedingly complicated question. But the layman must never forget that, however confused the shades may be, the fundamental question remains always exceedingly simple. The confusion is simply a result of too subtle disputation, and its complication is caused by the possible complications of logical combinations; here we reach the sphere of intellectual mechanics. But the relation of the religion of grace to the religion of law and service is just the same as that of + to -; everybody is not able to understand the subtleties of the mathematicians and still less of the theologians, but every one should be able to distinguish between plus and minus. 85. See vol. i. p. 569. The abuse of indulgences which came into practice several centuries later could also appeal for support to Augustine in so far as from the above-mentioned relative valuation of works and especially of the death of Christ there was derived the idea of opera supererogationis (works beyond the necessary measure), from which excessive fund, through the intervention of the Church, condignities are bestowed. Our whole conception of hell and of the pains of hell is, as is now known, taken from old Egyptian religion. Dante's Inferno is exactly represented on very early Egyptian monuments. Still more interesting is the fact that the conception of opera supererogationis, the treasure of grace, by which souls are freed from purgatory (also an Egyptian idea), is likewise a legacy from ancient Egypt. Masses and prayers for the dead, which to-day play so great a part in the Roman Church, existed in exactly the same form some thousands of years before Christ. On the gravestones too might be read then as to-day: "O ye who are living upon earth, when ye pass by this grave, utter a pious prayer for the soul of the dead N. N." (Cf. Prof. Leo Reinisca: Ursprung und Entwickelung des Agyptischen Priestertums.) 86. I Tim. iv. 7. and Tit. i. 14. (Added in the 4th ed., these letters are supposed not to be by Paul.) 87. We can read in Bernouilli: Das Konzil von Nicaa, how exclusively Constantine was actuated by political and not religious motives, for though he was inclined owing to circumstances to favour Arius, he took the opposite side as soon as he noticed that this offered better sureties of more vigorous organisation, in short, more hope of political duration. 88. Karl Muller: Kirchengeschichte i. 181. 89. Cf. vol. i. p. 429 f. 90. According to Neander: Kirchengeschichte iv. 109. According to Hefele: Konziliengeschichte ii. 8, it appears also as if Gregory of Nazianz had not advised or signed along with the others the extended symbolism of Constantinople (in the year 381). 91. Hefele: Konziliengeschichte ii. II f. 372. 92. In spite of all new works I still should like to recommend to the layman chap. xlvii. of Gibbon's Roman Empire as being unsurpassed, at least as a preliminary survey of the subject. 93. See p. 28. 94. See vol. i. p. 69 f. 95. When so acute a thinker and one so strong in intuition as Schopenhauer asserts, "Christianity is an allegory, which represents one true thought," we cannot too energetically refute so manifest an error. We might throw overboard all the allegorical elements of Christianity and the Christian religion would still stand. For the life of Christ and the conversion of will which he taught are reality, not figure of speech. It is none the less real because reason cannot think out, nor contemplation interpret, what is here present. Reason and understanding will always in the last instance find themselves compelled to go allegorically to work. but religion is nothing if not a direct experience. 96. Letter to the Philadelphians, § 8. Ignatius had sat at the feet of the Apostle John, indeed, according to tradition, he had as a child seen the Saviour. 97. For more details I refer the reader to the small book of Hatch Already quoted: The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages Upon the Christian Church. This book is unique, it is absolutely scholarly, so that it is recognised by authorities and yet it is readable for every educated thinker, though he possess no theological training. 98. I have already briefly alluded to the fact, and shall discuss it later in this and the ninth chapter, that in the ninth century this theology awoke again to life in the person of the great Scotus Erigena, the real pioneer of a genuinely Christian religion. 99. Naturally the individual from the barbarian North might be an outstanding personality, and the citizen of the Empire was certainly in most cases a very rude, uncultured individual; but culture is a collective term -- we saw that especially in the case of Greece (vol. 1. p. 34) -- and so one can unquestionably assert that in Germanic countries a real culture scarcely began to show itself before the thirteenth century. 100. See vol. i. pp. pp. 325, 511 f., 554 f. 101. § 6. 102. Origines du Christianisme, 7th ed. vii. 629. 103. Cf. Origines: Against Celsus v. 64. 104. Cf. Harnack: Das apostolische Glaubensbekenninis, 27th ed. p. 9. The differences are not unimportant. The present so-called "apostolic symbolism" came into use only in the ninth century. 105. The Deformed Transformed i. a. 106. Read in Bishop Hefele's Konziliengeschichte, vol. iii. the detailed and aggressively partial account of the dispute about images; it will be seen that Leo the Isaurian and his advisers simply attempted to stop the rapid decline of religious consciousness through the introduction of superstitious un-Christian customs. It is not a dogmatic quarrel, nor is there any political interest at stake; on the contrary, by his courageous conduct the Emperor incites against himself the whole people, led by a countless army of ignorant monks, and Hefele's explanation that the Emperor lacked aesthetic feeling is too childishly simple to deserve refutation. On the other hand, it is becoming clearer and clearer that he was right in his assertion that image-worship meant a step back into heathendom. In Asia Minor at the present day the archaeologists trace from place to place the transformation of the former gods into members of the Christian Pantheon, who remained as before local Gods to whom pilgrimages were, and still are, made. Thus, for example, the giant-slaying Athene of Seleucia became a "Saint Theta of Seleucia"; the altars of the virgin Artemis were only renamed altars of the "virgin mother of God"; the God of Colossus was henceforth regarded as the Archangel Michael ... for the populations the difference was scarcely noticeable (see Ramsay: The Church in the Roman Empire, p. 466 f.). The whole worship of images was connected with these primeval popular and absolutely un-Christian and anti- Christian superstitions; the Church could introduce as many distinguos as it liked, the image remained, like the stone at Mecca, an object endowed with magic powers. In view of such facts which have kept the belief in local miracle-working divinities alive till the present day not only in Asia Minor but in all Europe (wherever we find Romish influence) (cf. Renan: Marc-Aurele, chap. xxxiv.), the "arguments" for image-worship, which Gregory II. brings forward in his letters to Leo, seem exceedingly comical. There are two especially which he expects to have decisive weight. The fact that the woman healed by Christ (Matth. ix. 20) erected on the spot where she was healed an image of Christ, and God, far from being angry, caused a healing plant hitherto unknown to grow up at the foot of the image! That is the first proof, the second is still finer. Abgar, Prince of Odessa, a contemporary of the Saviour, is said to have sent a letter to Christ, and the latter in thanking him sent him his portrait!! (Helele, pp. 383, 395.] It is very noteworthy, and in judging the Roman standpoint very instructive, for us to know that the Pope reproaches the Emperor (see p. 400) with having robbed men of images and given them instead "foolish speeches and musical farces." That means that Leo, like Charlemagne a few years later, had reintroduced the sermon into the Church and provided music to elevate the minds. Both of these seemed to the Roman monk as superfluous as image-worship was indispensable. If we remember that Germanicia, the home of Leo, on the borders of Isauria, was one of those veteran colonies planted by the late Emperors (Mommsen: Roman History, 3rd ed. v. 310), if we remember that numerous Teutons served in the army, and that, further, Leo was a son of the people, who had so distinguished himself from the genuine sons of Asia Minor, not by his culture but by his character, as to actually hate what they loved, then we may well begin to ask whether this attack upon Roman heathen materialism, although springing up in the South, was not in reality a product of northern soil? Many a hypothesis rests on a weaker foundation. 107. It has lately been proved and should be kept in mind that the intellectual development of this remarkable man was most probably under the direct influence of the Waldensians. (Cf. Thode: Franz von Assisi, 1885, p. 31 f.) 108. For this and the former assertion compare the episcopally approved edition of the Concilii Tridentini canones et decreta by Canon Smets, with an historical introduction, 1854. p. xxiii. 109. See vol. i., p. 515. 110. Cf. vol. 1. pp. 287 and 328. 111. Quoted by Humboldt in a letter to Varnhagen von Ense on September 26, 1845. 112. Towards Peter, Christ used words such as he uttered to no other apostle: "Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me; for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men" (Matth. xvi. 23). And not only his threefold denial of Christ but also his conduct in Antioch which Paul denounced as "hypocrisy" (Gal. ii. I3) prove to us that Peter was a violent but weak character. Supposing that he did actually receive the primacy, it was not for his service or to secure the natural preponderance of his pre- eminent greatness, but in consequence of an appointment pleasing to God and ratified by history. 113. See p. 74. 114. Missive of the year 1520 to Pope Leo X. 115. Dante was born in 1265, in the century that forms the great turning-point; apart from this formal justification for naming him here, there is a further one in the fact that the eye of this great poet looked back as well as forward. Dante is at least just as much an end as a beginning. If a new age begins with him, that is not least of all explained by the fact that he has closed an old one: especially as regards his attitude on the relation between Church and State he is quite biased by the views and visions of the age of Charlemagne and of the Ottos, and really remains blind to the great political reformation of Europe which manifests itself so stormily around him. 116. Cf. p. 94 note. 117. See the documentary account in Hefele's Konziliengeschichte, iii. 472 and 708. It requires audacity to attempt to persuade us laymen that we have to do with an innocent misunderstanding; here, on the contrary, two different views of life, two different races are opposed to each other. 118. Greg. papae Epist. xi. 71 (from Renan). 119. One proof only from among the great number: in the year 1825 the Archbishop of Cologne, Graf Spiegel zum Desenberg, testifies that in his archbishopric "the real religion of Jesus has become gross image-worship" (Letters to Bunsen, 1897. p. 76). What would the right reverend gentleman say to-day? 120. A thousand years after Charlemagne the sale of the "holy oil" as a domestic charm was vigorously pursued; thus, for example, a newspaper published by Abt in Munich, Der Armen-Seelen Freund, Monatsschrift zum Troste der leidenden Seelen im Fegfeuer, in the 4th number of 1898 advertises "holy oil from the lamp of Mr. Dupont in Tours at 4d. per bottle! This oil is praised as particularly efficacious for inflammations!" (The editor of this paper is a Catholic city priest; the magazine is under episcopal censure. The high nobility are said to be Mr. Dupont's best customers.) 121. Kraus: Dante (1897), p. 736. 122. Inferno, canto xix. "What then distinguishes you from an idolator except that he worships one and you a hundred idols?" 123. Paradiso, canto xxix.: "From the gains [of the depicted misleading of the 'stupid people '] the holy Antonius feeds his swine, and many others do likewise, who are worse than swine and pay with unstamped coin [indulgences]." The Italians never seem to have had any particular admiration for their Roman priests, Boccaccio also calls them "swine which flee to where they can eat without working" (Decamerone iii. 3). 124. See vol. i. p. 538 note. 125. Dante would have shared the same fate as those "Church fathers and saints" of whom Balzac in Louis Lembert writes: "To-day the Church would brand them as heretics and atheists." 126. Inferno xix.: "O Constantine! How much evil has been caused not by your conversion but by the gift which the first rich father [= Pope] received from you." 127. De Monarchia, the whole of the second book. But see especially chap. iii. in which the "divine predestination" of the Roman people as the world-ruling power is derived not from interpretations of Old Testament prophets or from the appointment of Peter but proved from the genealogical tree of AEneas and Creusa! Race and not religion is the decisive thing for Dante! 128. Concilium Tridenlinum decretum de reformatione, chap. i. 129. Kraus, p. 703 f., seems to successfully establish his thesis, but to have no idea how little such formal orthodoxy means and how dangerous his own standpoint is for the Roman Church. Moreover I cannot help calling attention to the fact that Dante's famous confession of faith at the end of the 24th canto of the Paradiso is really grievously abstract. Kraus regards as final proof of Dante's orthodoxy a Credo, which does not mention the name of Jesus Christ! What, on the contrary, has struck me is that Dante does not go beyond general mythology. And if I review in my memory a series of other utterances, I get the impression that Dante (like many other of his contemporaries) can hardly be called a Christian at all. The great cosmic God in Heaven and the Roman Church on earth; everything intellectual and political, or moral and abstract. There is an infinite longing for religion, but religion itself, that Heaven which does not come with outward signs, had been stolen from the great and noble man in his cradle. Dante's poetical greatness lies not least of all in the fearful tragedy of the thirteenth century, the century of Innocent III. and Thomas Aquinas! His hope is content with the luce intellettual (Par. xxx.), and his true guide is not Beatrice nor the holy Bernhard, but the author of the Summa theologiae, who sought to illuminate with the pure light of reason and to idealise the almost un-Christianised Christendom and the night of that age which hated all knowledge and beauty. Thomas Aquinas signifies the nationalistic supplement of a materialistic religion; Dante threw himself into his arms. (See the interesting book -- which in truth is written in support of quite a different thesis -- of the English Catholic, E. G. Gardner, Dante's Ten Heavens, 1898.) 130. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 2nd ed. pp. iv. and 550. 131. Cf. vol. i. p. 481. 132. 2nd ed. i. 191. Cf. my remarks in vol. i. chap. iii. p. 239. 133. Origines du Christianisme vii. 638. 134. See vol. i. p. 431. 135. Lamprecht, p. 193. Lamprecht himself, like most of our contemporaries, has no idea of the meaning of this phenomenon (which I discuss fully in the ninth chapter). He is of opinion that "moral individualism was still slumbering." 136. It is incredible that even at the present day in scientific Roman works it is still taught (see, for example, Bruck: Lebrbuch der Kirchengeschichte, 6th ed. p. 586) that Luther preached that whoever believed could sin as he pleased. The following quotation may suffice to refute such criminal stupidity: "As now the trees must be before the fruits, and the fruits do not make the trees good or bad, but the trees make the fruits, so too the man must be good or bad in person, before he does good or bad works. And his works do not make him good or bad, but he does good or bad works. We see the same in all handiwork: a good or bad house does not make a good or bad carpenter, but a good or bad carpenter makes a good or bad house; no work makes a master according as the work is, but as the master is, so is his work" Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen). 137. Among the Israelites even in ancient times "the whole idea of right and wrong was reduced to a money standard" (Robertson Smith: Prophets of Israel, p. 105), so that Hosea had to complain, "They eat up the sin of my people, and they set their heart on their iniquity" (iv. 8). I remember once in Italy threatening a man who broke his word with the qualms of his own conscience. "Ah what! good sir," he said, "that was only a minor lie; seven years in purgatory and ten soldi is all it will cost me!" Thinking that he was making a fool of me, the next time that two Franciscan monks knocked at my door I asked the reverend gentlemen how Heaven punishes a "minor" lie, and their immediate answer was, "Seven years in purgatory! But you are a benefactor of Assisi, much will be forgiven you." It is interesting to note that the West Goths already in the sixth century fight against the "irregularity in the system of penitence, so that one sins as one likes and is always demanding reconciliation from the priest" (Hefele, iii. 51): these are again symptoms of the struggle of the Teutons against a religion spiritually alien. One finds in Gibbon's Roman Empire, chap. lviiii., details of the tariff of indulgences for money or scourgings shortly before the first Crusade. 138. Lamprecht, p. 359. 139. See vol. i. pp. 222 and 569. This timor servilis remained henceforth the foundation of all religion in Loyola's order. Very interesting in this connection is a letter of a Canadian Jesuit (published in Parkman's The Jesuits in North America, p. 148) who is ordering pictures for his congregation: one Christ, one ame bienheureuse, several holy virgins, a whole selection of condemned souls! One is here reminded of the anecdote told by Tylor (Beginnings of Culture, ii. 337). A missionary disputing with an Indian chief said to him: "My God is good, but he punishes the godless"; to which the Indian replied: "My God is also good, but he punishes no one, being content with doing good to all." 140. Volkerwanderung, 2nd ed. ii. 55. 141. I mention Theodosius because he possessed the power as well as the will; but it was his predecessor Gratian who first established the idea of "orthodoxy," and that too as a purely civil matter; anyone who was not orthodox lost his right of citizenship. 142. Tertullian: Ad Scap. 2; Clemens: Stromata, 7, 15 (both quoted from Hatch, p. 329). 143. See particularly vol. i. p. 121 f. 144. We have seen above that this Roman formula, dating from primeval heathen times was adopted by the Council of Trent for the Christian Pope. 145. These details from Mommsen: Romisches Staatsrecht, and from Esmarch: Romische Rechtsgeschichte. How great, moreover, the authority of the Pontifex maximus was in old Rome is made sufficiently clear by a passage in Cicero (De Nat. Deorum, lib. iii. chap. ii.). where he says that in all things pertaining to religion he simply referred to the Pontifex maximus and was guided by what he said. 146. That the Popes actually ascended the Roman Imperial throne and owe to it their claims to power has recently been testified by a Roman Catholic Church historian. Prof. Franz Xavier Kraus writes in the Wissenschaftliche Beilage zur Munchener Allgemeinen Zeitung of February 1, 1900, No. 26, p. 5: "Soon after the Caesars had left the palaces of the Palatine, the Popes established themselves firmly there, so as to put themselves unnoticed into the Position of Imperator in the eyes of the people." 147. See vol. i. p. 147. 148. Cf. Harnack, p. 103. Concerning the inevitably retarding effect of the Latin tongue upon all speculation and science, see Goethe's remarks in his Geschichte der Farbenlehre. 149. Cf. the beginning of the De Officiis Ministrorum. 150. This, too, was not a new Christian invention; even in antiquity there had been in Rome a jus pontificium in contrast to the jus civile: but the sound sense of the free Roman people had never permitted it to gain practical influence. (See Mommsen, p. 95.) 151. Savigny: Romischen Rechtes im Mittelalter vol. i. chap, iii. 152. This has been finally proved of at least one Pope, Honorius (see Hefele, Dollinger, &c.). 153. See Hefele: Konziliengeschichte, 2nd ed. ii. 114 f. and 120 f. 154. Bruck: Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte, 6th ed. p. 744 (orthodox Roman Catholic). 155. Since the assertion that "the Pope in his syllabus declared war on the whole European culture" has met with contradiction, I quote the words of § 80 of the document itself: Si quis dixit: Romanus pontifex potest ac debet cum progressu, cum liberalismo et cum recenti civililate sese reconciliare et componere; anathema sit. 156. Ideen fur Geschichte der Menschheit xix. i. I. 157. Augustine was reproached by Hieronymus for not understanding Hellenic thought. It is easy to see how true that was of the whole Roman Church if we take the trouble to read in Hefele's Konziliengeschichte, vol. ii. p. 255 f., the edict of the Emperor Justinian against Origenes and the fifteen anathemas against him of the Synods of Constantinople of the year 543. What these people did not notice gives us as good an idea of their mental qualities as what they found worthy of being anathematised. For example, the bigots did not notice that Origenes believes that the peccatum originale existed before the so-called fall, and yet that is, as I have shown above, the central point of his absolutely anti-Roman religion. On the other hand, it was revolting to them that this clear Hellenic mind considered a plurality of inhabited worlds an understood thing and that he taught the doctrine that the earth must have gradually grown by process of development. But they found it most fearful of all that he praised the destruction of the body in death as a liberation (whereas the people of the Chaos who were led by Rome could not think of immortality as anything but the eternal life of their wretched bodies), &c. &c. Many Popes, e.g., Coelestin, who crushed Nestorius, understood not a word of Greek and had in fact a very indifferent education, but this will surprise no one who has learned from Hefele's Konziliengeschichte that many of the bishops who by vote of majority founded the Christian dogma could not read, write, nor even sign their name. 158. The high-spirited African Church had given the Roman Church a good example in this as in so much else, by inserting in its confession of faith the words: "I believe in forgiveness of sins, in the resurrection of the body and in eternal life through the holy church (see Harnack: Das apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis, 27th ed. p. 9). 159. The final formal completion was reached some years later, first by the introduction of the obligatory adoration of the Host in the year 1264, secondly by the universal introduction of the festival of the holy body in the year 1311, to celebrate the wonderful transformation of the Host into the body of God. 160. See vol. i. p. 224 f. 161. See especially Rob. Smith: Religion of the Semites (1894). p. 358. For this whole question read lectures 8, 9, 10, 11. 162. See Smith, and as a supplement Cheyne: Isaiah, p. 368. 163. Rohde: Psyche, 1st ed. p. 687. 164. Der goldene Esel, Book XI. 165. Rohde, as above, and Dieterich's Eine Mithrasliturgie. 166. The use of the word totemism in this passage has led to misunderstandings and it indeed betrays an almost too daring ellipsis of thought. Totemism means "animal-worship," a. custom spread over the whole world; the animal in question is sacred and inviolate (the cow in India, the ape in Southern India, the crocodile among certain African races, &c.). But if we trace the further development of this custom, we finds that the sacred Totem nevertheless was sometimes sacrificed -- thus, for example, in Mexico the youth worshipped as a God, the idea here being that by partaking of divine flesh and blood one receives a share of divinity: in view of this connection I have characterised these conceptions as totemistic. 167. See Leist: Graco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, p. 267 f.; Jhering: Vorgeschichte der Indoeuropaer, p. 313; &c. 168. Augustine in his happy hours has this view too: Nos ipsi in cordibus nostris invisibile sacrificium esse debemus" (De Civ. Dei x. 19). 169. According to the edition of the Roman Catholic Professor Narcissus Liebert. 170. Book VIII. chap. xii. 171. Hatch. p. 302. Cf., too, what has been said on p. 29. 172. According to Neander: Kirchengeschichte, 4th ed. ii. 405 173. Cf., for example, Book XXI. chap. xxv. of the De Civitate Dei. 174. De Civitate Dei, Book X. chap. xix. This doctrine was later adopted almost literally by Wyclif -- the real author of the Reformation; for he writes regarding the host: "Non est corpus dominicum, sed efficax ejus signum." 175. Gregory the Great (of about the year 600) was the first to teach that the Mass was an actual repetition of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, and this gave the Sacrament a sacrificial (Jewish) as well as Sacramental (heathen) significance. 176. In reality there are only two. Whoever has cast the most superficial glance at the witches' cauldron of theological sophism, will be grateful to me for seeking to introduce by means of extreme simplification not only clearness but also truthfulness into this confused matter, which, partly owing to the cunning calculation of greedy priests, partly owing to the religious delusion of honest but badly balanced minds, has become the real battlefield for all subtle follies and profound impossibilities. Here in particular lies the hereditary sin of all Protestant churches; for they rebelled against the Roman doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass and of transubstantiation but had not the courage to sweep out all the superstitions derived from the Chaos. Instead they took refuge in wretched sophistries and have ever since been flitting with characterless indecision hither and thither on dialectical pin-points, without ever putting foot on solid ground. 177. It is worth noting that in the case of the old mysteries, partaking in them removed all bonds of connection with the nation of one's birth. The initiated formed an international, extra-national family. 178. In recent times the authorship of the Pope has been doubted, but Catholics who are to be taken earnestly from a scientific point of view admit that this representation of the supposed "rights" of Rome, if not from the Pope himself, yet originated from the circle of his most intimate admirers and thus in the main gives correctly the opinions of Gregory, and this is confirmed by his actions and letters (see Hefele, 2nd ed. v. 75). Most amusing, on the other hand, is the twisting and turning of the historians who write under Jesuitical influence; they have taken much from the great Gregory but not his honesty and love of truth, and thus in their attempts at improvement they spoil the deeds and words of that very Pope under whom the Roman idea of State attained its noblest, purest and most unselfish form, and exerted its greatest moral influence. Note, for example, what trouble the Seminar-Professor Bruck (as above, § 114) takes to prove that Gregory "wished no universal monarchy," and "did not regard the Princes as his vassals," &c., but Bruck cannot at the same time refrain from mentioning that Gregory has spoken of an imperium Christi and admonished all Princes and peoples to recognize in the Church "their superior and mistress." Such dissimulation in face of the great fundamental facts of history is as unworthy as it is fruitless; the Roman hierocratic idea of a world-state is so great that one does not need to be ashamed of it. 179. In a letter to the Pope he calls them wild animals who begin to roar at the mere word "spiritual communion with Christ" (see Neander, vi. 317). At a later time Berengarius called the Papal throne sedem non apostolicam sed sedem satanae. 180. About the year 1200 there were Waldensian congregations "in France, Aragon, Catalonia, Spain, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Lithuania, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, Italy, Sicily, &c." (See the excellent work of Ludwig Keller: Die Anfange der Reformation und die Ketzerschulen, 1897.) 181. Innocent had already in the year 1198 forbidden the reading of the Bible; the synod of Toulouse in the year 1229 and other councils were continually emphasising the prohibition. The synod of Toulouse forbade most strictly that laymen should read a fragment of the Old or the New Testament, except the Psalms (chap. xiv.). If therefore the Bible was widespread in Germany before Luther's time, it is nevertheless throwing sand in our eyes to represent this fact, as Janssen and other Catholic writers do, as a proof of the liberalism of the Roman stool. The invention of printing had had a quicker influence than the slowly moving curia could counteract, moreover the German was at all times instinctively drawn to the Gospel, and if he was earnest about anything, he did not pay overmuch heed to prohibitions. In any case the Council of Trent soon brought order into this matter, and in the year 1622 the Pope forbade all reading of the Bible unless in the Latin vulgate. It was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that episcopally approved, carefully revised translations were permitted, and that only when they were provided with notes also approved of -- a forcible measure against the spread of the Holy Script in the faithful editions of Bible societies. he Bible studies of the Roman clergy in the thirteenth century are humorously shown up by the fact that at the synod of Nympha, in the year 1234, at which Roman and Greek Catholics met to pave the way to reunion, neither among the one party nor the other, nor in the churches and cloisters of the city and surroundings, was a copy of the Bible to be found, so that the followers of the Apostles had to proceed to the order of the day in regard to the wording of a doubtful quotation and have recourse once more, not to Holy Scripture, but to Church fathers and councils (see Hefele, v. 1048). At exactly the same time the Dominican Rainer, who had been sent to persecute the Waldensians, reports that all these heretics were very well read in the Holy Writ and he had seen uneducated peasants who could repeat the whole New Testament by heart (quoted in Neander, viii. 414). 182. First book, Von den Laien, division 5. 183. Hefele, v. 944. 184. Cf. Dollinger: Das Papsttum (1892), p. 527. 185. In the posthumous process against Boniface VIII many ecclesiastical dignitaries asserted on oath that this mightiest of all Popes laughed at the conception of Heaven and Hell and said of Jesus Christ that he had been a very clever man, nothing more. Hefele is inclined to regard these charges as not unfounded (see vi. 461 and the preceding discussion of the subject). And yet -- or rather in this way -- Boniface grasped the central idea of the Roman thought more clearly than almost any one before or after him, and in his famous bull Unam sanctam, on which present Catholicism rests as on a foundation-stone, he has given expression to it. (More details of this bull in next chapter.) In his Port Royal (Book III. chap. iii,) Sainte-Beuve proves convincingly that "one can be a very good Catholic and yet scarcely a Christian." 186. Helfferich: Christliche Mystik 1842 ii. 231. 187. To anyone who wishes to read an attempt at a systematic refutation of the opinions which I have expressed in this chapter and in other parts of the book on the essence and history of the Roman Churches I recommend Prof. Dr. Albert Ehrhard's Kritische Wurdigung of these "Foundations," originally published in the periodical Kultur and now as No. 14 of the Vortrage und Abhandlungen, published by the Leo- Gesellschaft (1901, Mayer and Co., Vienna).
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