The Life of Jesus. Ernest Renan

quite opposed to those produced on the vulgar. Among the latter, the belief in the special action of God led to a foolish credulity, and the deceptions of charlatans. With him it led to a profound idea of the familiar relations of man with God, and an exaggerated belief in the power of man—beautiful errors, which were the secret of his power; for if they were the means of one day showing his deficiencies in the eyes of the physicist and the chemist, they gave him a power over his own age of which no individual had been possessed before his time, or has been since.

      [Footnote 1: Matt. vi. 13.]

      His distinctive character very early revealed itself. Legend delights to show him even from his infancy in revolt against paternal authority, and departing from the common way to fulfill his vocation.[1] It is certain, at least, that he cared little for the relations of kinship. His family do not seem to have loved him,[2] and at times he seems to have been hard toward them.[3] Jesus, like all men exclusively preoccupied by an idea, came to think little of the ties of blood. The bond of thought is the only one that natures of this kind recognize. "Behold my mother and my brethren," said he, in extending his hand toward his disciples; "he who does the will of my Father, he is my brother and my sister." The simple people did not understand the matter thus, and one day a woman passing near him cried out, "Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which gave thee suck!" But he said, "Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it."[4] Soon, in his bold revolt against nature, he went still further, and we shall see him trampling under foot everything that is human, blood, love, and country, and only keeping soul and heart for the idea which presented itself to him as the absolute form of goodness and truth.

      [Footnote 1: Luke ii. 42 and following. The Apocryphal Gospels are full of similar histories carried to the grotesque.]

      [Footnote 2: Matt. xiii. 57; Mark vi. 4; John vii. 3, and following.]

      [Footnote 3: Matt. xii. 48; Mark iii. 33; Luke viii. 21; John ii. 4; Gospel according to the Hebrews, in St. Jerome, Dial. adv. Pelag., iii. 2.]

      [Footnote 4: Luke xi. 27, and following.]

      CHAPTER IV.

      THE ORDER OF THOUGHT WHICH SURROUNDED THE DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS.

       Table of Contents

      As the cooled earth no longer permits us to understand the phenomena of primitive creation, because the fire which penetrated it is extinct, so deliberate explanations have always appeared somewhat insufficient when applying our timid methods of induction to the revolutions of the creative epochs which have decided the fate of humanity. Jesus lived at one of those times when the game of public life is freely played, and when the stake of human activity is increased a hundredfold. Every great part, then, entails death; for such movements suppose liberty and an absence of preventive measures, which could not exist without a terrible alternative. In these days, man risks little and gains little. In heroic periods of human activity, man risked all and gained all. The good and the wicked, or at least those who believe themselves and are believed to be such, form opposite armies. The apotheosis is reached by the scaffold; characters have distinctive features, which engrave them as eternal types in the memory of men. Except in the French Revolution, no historical centre was as suitable as that in which Jesus was formed, to develop those hidden forces which humanity holds as in reserve, and which are not seen except in days of excitement and peril.

      If the government of the world were a speculative problem, and the greatest philosopher were the man best fitted to tell his fellows what they ought to believe, it would be from calmness and reflection that those great moral and dogmatic truths called religions would proceed. But it is not so. If we except Cakya-Mouni, the great religious founders have not been metaphysicians. Buddhism itself, whose origin is in pure thought, has conquered one-half of Asia, by motives wholly political and moral. As to the Semitic religions, they are as little philosophical as possible. Moses and Mahomet were not men of speculation; they were men of action. It was in proposing action to their fellow-countrymen, and to their contemporaries, that they governed humanity. Jesus, in like manner, was not a theologian, or a philosopher, having a more or less well-composed system. In order to be a disciple of Jesus, it was not necessary to sign any formulary, or to pronounce any confession of faith; one thing only was necessary—to be attached to him, to love him. He never disputed about God, for he felt Him directly in himself. The rock of metaphysical subtleties, against which Christianity broke from the third century, was in nowise created by the Founder. Jesus had neither dogma nor system, but a fixed personal resolution, which, exceeding in intensity every other created will, directs to this hour the destinies of humanity.

      The Jewish people had the advantage, from the captivity of Babylon up to the Middle Ages, of being in a state of the greatest tension. This is why the interpreters of the spirit of the nation during this long period seemed to write under the action of an intense fever, which placed them constantly either above or below reason, rarely in its middle path. Never did man seize the problem of the future and of his destiny with a more desperate courage, more determined to go to extremes. Not separating the lot of humanity from that of their little race, the Jewish thinkers were the first who sought for a general theory of the progress of our species. Greece, always confined within itself, and solely attentive to petty quarrels, has had admirable historians; but before the Roman epoch, it would be in vain to seek in her a general system of the philosophy of history, embracing all humanity. The Jew, on the contrary, thanks to a kind of prophetic sense which renders the Semite at times marvellously apt to see the great lines of the future, has made history enter into religion. Perhaps he owes a little of this spirit to Persia. Persia, from an ancient period, conceived the history of the world as a series of evolutions, over each of which a prophet presided. Each prophet had his hazar, or reign of a thousand years (chiliasm), and from these successive ages, analogous to the Avatär of India, is composed the course of events which prepared the reign of Ormuzd. At the end of the time when the cycle of chiliasms shall be exhausted, the complete paradise will come. Men then will live happy; the earth will be as one plain; there will be only one language, one law, and one government for all. But this advent will be preceded by terrible calamities. Dahak (the Satan of Persia) will break his chains and fall upon the world. Two prophets will come to console mankind, and to prepare the great advent.[1] These ideas ran through the world, and penetrated even to Rome, where they inspired a cycle of prophetic poems, of which the fundamental ideas were the division of the history of humanity into periods, the succession of the gods corresponding to these periods—a complete renovation of the world, and the final advent of a golden age.[2] The book of Daniel, the book of Enoch, and certain parts of the Sibylline books,[3] are the Jewish expression of the same theory. These thoughts were certainly far from being shared by all; they were only embraced at first by a few persons of lively imagination, who were inclined toward strange doctrines. The dry and narrow author of the book of Esther never thought of the rest of the world except to despise it, and to wish it evil.[4] The disabused epicurean who wrote Ecclesiastes, thought so little of the future, that he considered it even useless to labor for his children; in the eyes of this egotistical celibate, the highest stroke of wisdom was to use his fortune for his own enjoyment.[5] But the great achievements of a people are generally wrought by the minority. Notwithstanding all their enormous defects, hard, egotistical, scoffing, cruel, narrow, subtle, and sophistical, the Jewish people are the authors of the finest movement of disinterested enthusiasm which history records. Opposition always makes the glory of a country. The greatest men of a nation are those whom it puts to death. Socrates was the glory of the Athenians, who would not suffer him to live amongst them. Spinoza was the greatest Jew of modern times, and the synagogue expelled him with ignominy. Jesus was the glory of the people of Israel, who crucified him.

      [Footnote 1: Yaçna, xiii. 24: Theopompus, in Plut., De Iside et Osiride, sec. 47; Minokhired, a passage published in the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft, i., p. 263.]

      [Footnote 2: Virg., Ecl. iv.; Servius, at v. 4 of this Eclogue;

       Nigidius, quoted by Servius, at v. 10.]

      [Footnote 3: Book iii., 97–817.]

      [Footnote