29.
What concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour.
This type might be depicted in the Gospels, in however mutilated a form
and however much overladen with extraneous characters—that is, in spite
of the Gospels; just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself
in his legends in spite of his legends. It is not a question of
mere truthful evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually
died; the question is, whether his type is still conceivable, whether it
has been handed down to us.—All the attempts that I know of to read the
history of a “soul” in the Gospels seem to me to reveal
only a lamentable psychological levity. M. Renan, that mountebank in psychologicus, has contributed the two most
unseemly notions to this business of explaining the type of Jesus: the
notion of the genius and that of the hero (”héros”..
But if there is anything essentially unevangelical, it is surely the concept of
the hero. What the Gospels make instinctive is precisely the reverse of all heroic
struggle, of all taste for conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is
here converted into something moral: (”resist not evil !”—the
most profound sentence in the Gospels, perhaps the true key to them), to
wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness, the inability to be
an enemy. What is the meaning of “glad tidings”.—The true life,
the life eternal has been found—it is not merely promised, it is here, it
is in you; it is the life that lies in love free from all retreats
and exclusions, from all keeping of distances. Every one is the child of
God—Jesus claims nothing for himself alone—as the child of God each man
is the equal of every other man. . . .Imagine making Jesus a hero!—And
what a tremendous misunderstanding appears in the word “genius”.
Our whole conception of the “spiritual,” the whole conception of
our civilization, could have had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in.
In the strict sense of the physiologist, a quite different word ought to be
used here. . . . We all know that there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile
nerves which causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from
every effort to grasp a solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion, such a
physiological habitus becomes an
instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the “intangible.”
into the “incomprehensible”. a distaste for all formulae, for
all conceptions of time and space, for everything established—customs,
institutions, the church—; a feeling of being at home in a world in which
no sort of reality survives, a merely “inner” world, a “true”
world, an “eternal” world. . . . “The Kingdom of God is
withinyou”. . . .