31.
I have already given my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to
it is the assumption that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a
greatly distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there are many
reasons why a type of that sort should not be handed down in a pure form,
complete and free of additions. The milieu in which this strange figure
moved must have left marks upon him, and more must have been imprinted by
the history, the destiny, of the early Christian communities; the
latter indeed, must have embellished the type retrospectively with characters
which can be understood only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda.
That strange and sickly world into which the Gospels lead us—a world
apparently out of a Russian novel, in which the scum of society, nervous
maladies and “childish” idiocy keep a tryst—must, in any
case, have coarsened the type: the first disciples, in particular,
must have been forced to translate an existence visible only in symbols and
incomprehensibilities into their own crudity, in order to understand it at
all—in their sight the type could take on reality only after it had been
recast in a familiar mould.... The prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the
teacher of morals, the worker of wonders, John the Baptist—all these
merely presented chances to misunderstand it . . . . Finally, let us not
underrate the proprium of all great, and
especially all sectarian veneration: it tends to erase from the venerated objects
all its original traits and idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strange—it
does not even see them. It is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky
lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting decadent—I mean
some one who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime,
the morbid and the childish. In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the
décadence, may actually have been peculiarly complex and
contradictory: such a possibility is not to be lost sight of. Nevertheless,
the probabilities seem to be against it, for in that case tradition would have
been particularly accurate and objective, whereas we have reasons for assuming
the contrary. Meanwhile, there is a contradiction between the peaceful preacher
of the mount, the sea-shore and the fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a
soil very unlike India's, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of
theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan's malice as
”le grand maître en ironie.”
I myself haven't any doubt that the greater part of this venom
(and no less of esprit) got itself into the concept of the Master
only as a result of the excited nature of Christian propaganda: we all know
the unscrupulousness of sectarians when they set out to turn their leader into
an apologia for themselves. When the early Christians had need of an
adroit, contentious, pugnacious and maliciously subtle theologian to tackle
other theologians, they created a “god” that met that
need, just as they put into his mouth without hesitation certain ideas that
were necessary to them but that were utterly at odds with the Gospels—”The
second coming,” “the last judgment,” all sorts of expectations and
promises, current at the time.—