Kitabı oku: «The Dawn of Day», sayfa 6

67

The Price of Believers. – He who sets such a value on being believed in has to promise heaven in recompense for this belief: and every one, even a thief on the Cross, must have suffered from a terrible doubt and experienced crucifixion in every form: otherwise he would not buy his followers so dearly.

68

The First Christian. – The whole world still believes in the literary career of the “Holy Ghost,” or is still influenced by the effects of this belief: when we look into our Bibles we do so for the purpose of “edifying ourselves,” to find a few words of comfort for our misery, be it great or small – in short, we read ourselves into it and out of it. But who – apart from a few learned men – know that it likewise records the history of one of the most ambitious and importunate souls that ever existed, of a mind full of superstition and cunning: the history of the Apostle Paul? Nevertheless, without this singular history, without the tribulations and passions of such a mind, and of such a soul, there would have been no Christian kingdom; we should have scarcely have even heard of a little Jewish sect, the founder of which died on the Cross. It is true that, if this history had been understood in time, if we had read, really read, the writings of St. Paul, not as the revelations of the “Holy Ghost,” but with honest and independent minds, oblivious of all our personal troubles – there were no such readers for fifteen centuries – it would have been all up with Christianity long ago: so searchingly do these writings of the Jewish Pascal lay bare the origins of Christianity, just as the French Pascal let us see its destiny and how it will ultimately perish. That the ship of Christianity threw overboard no inconsiderable part of its Jewish ballast, that it was able to sail into the waters of the heathen and actually did do so: this is due to the history of one single man, this apostle who was so greatly troubled in mind and so worthy of pity, but who was also very disagreeable to himself and to others.

This man suffered from a fixed idea, or rather a fixed question, an ever-present and ever-burning question: what was the meaning of the Jewish Law? and, more especially, the fulfilment of this Law? In his youth he had done his best to satisfy it, thirsting as he did for that highest distinction which the Jews could imagine – this people, which raised the imagination of moral loftiness to a greater elevation than any other people, and which alone succeeded in uniting the conception of a holy God with the idea of sin considered as an offence against this holiness. St. Paul became at once the fanatic defender and guard-of-honour of this God and His Law. Ceaselessly battling against and lying in wait for all transgressors of this Law and those who presumed to doubt it, he was pitiless and cruel towards all evil-doers, whom he would fain have punished in the most rigorous fashion possible.

Now, however, he was aware in his own person of the fact that such a man as himself – violent, sensual, melancholy, and malicious in his hatred —could not fulfil the Law; and furthermore, what seemed strangest of all to him, he saw that his boundless craving for power was continually provoked to break it, and that he could not help yielding to this impulse. Was it really “the flesh” which made him a trespasser time and again? Was it not rather, as it afterwards occurred to him, the Law itself, which continually showed itself to be impossible to fulfil, and seduced men into transgression with an irresistible charm? But at that time he had not thought of this means of escape. As he suggests here and there, he had many things on his conscience – hatred, murder, sorcery, idolatry, debauchery, drunkenness, and orgiastic revelry, – and to however great an extent he tried to soothe his conscience, and, even more, his desire for power, by the extreme fanaticism of his worship for and defence of the Law, there were times when the thought struck him: “It is all in vain! The anguish of the unfulfilled Law cannot be overcome.” Luther must have experienced similar feelings, when, in his cloister, he endeavoured to become the ideal man of his imagination; and, as Luther one day began to hate the ecclesiastical ideal, and the Pope, and the saints, and the whole clergy, with a hatred which was all the more deadly as he could not avow it even to himself, an analogous feeling took possession of St. Paul. The Law was the Cross on which he felt himself crucified. How he hated it! What a grudge he owed it! How he began to look round on all sides to find a means for its total annihilation, that he might no longer be obliged to fulfil it himself! And at last a liberating thought, together with a vision – which was only to be expected in the case of an epileptic like himself – flashed into his mind: to him, the stern upholder of the Law – who, in his innermost heart, was tired to death of it – there appeared on the lonely path that Christ, with the divine effulgence on His countenance, and Paul heard the words: “Why persecutest thou Me?”

What actually took place, then, was this: his mind was suddenly enlightened, and he said to himself: “It is unreasonable to persecute this Jesus Christ! Here is my means of escape, here is my complete vengeance, here and nowhere else have I the destroyer of the Law in my hands!” The sufferer from anguished pride felt himself restored to health all at once, his moral despair disappeared in the air; for morality itself was blown away, annihilated – that is to say, fulfilled, there on the Cross! Up to that time that ignominious death had seemed to him to be the principal argument against the “Messiahship” proclaimed by the followers of the new doctrine: but what if it were necessary for doing away with the Law? The enormous consequences of this thought, of this solution of the enigma, danced before his eyes, and he at once became the happiest of men. The destiny of the Jews, yea, of all mankind, seemed to him to be intertwined with this instantaneous flash of enlightenment: he held the thought of thoughts, the key of keys, the light of lights; history would henceforth revolve round him! For from that time forward he would be the apostle of the annihilation of the Law! To be dead to sin – that meant to be dead to the Law also; to be in the flesh – that meant to be under the Law! To be one with Christ – that meant to have become, like Him, the destroyer of the Law; to be dead with Him – that meant likewise to be dead to the Law. Even if it were still possible to sin, it would not at any rate be possible to sin against the Law: “I am above the Law,” thinks Paul; adding, “If I were now to acknowledge the Law again and to submit to it, I should make Christ an accomplice in the sin”; for the Law was there for the purpose of producing sin and setting it in the foreground, as an emetic produces sickness. God could not have decided upon the death of Christ had it been possible to fulfil the Law without it; henceforth, not only are all sins expiated, but sin itself is abolished; henceforth the Law is dead; henceforth “the flesh” in which it dwelt is dead – or at all events dying, gradually wasting away. To live for a short time longer amid this decay! – this is the Christian's fate, until the time when, having become one with Christ, he arises with Him, sharing with Christ the divine glory, and becoming, like Christ, a “Son of God.” Then Paul's exaltation was at its height, and with it the importunity of his soul – the thought of union with Christ made him lose all shame, all submission, all constraint, and his ungovernable ambition was shown to be revelling in the expectation of divine glories.

Such was the first Christian, the inventor of Christianity! before him there were only a few Jewish sectaries.

69

Inimitable. – There is an enormous strain and distance between envy and friendship, between self-contempt and pride: the Greek lived in the former, the Christian in the latter.

70

The Use of a Coarse Intellect. – The Christian Church is an encyclopædia of primitive cults and views of the most varied origin; and is, in consequence, well adapted to missionary work: in former times she could – and still does – go wherever she would, and in doing so always found something resembling herself, to which she could assimilate herself and gradually substitute her own spirit for it. It is not to what is Christian in her usages, but to what is universally pagan in them, that we have to attribute the development of this universal religion. Her thoughts, which have their origin at once in the Judaic and in the Hellenic spirit, were able from the very beginning to raise themselves above the exclusiveness and subtleties of races and nations, as above prejudices. Although we may admire the power which makes even the most difficult things coalesce, we must nevertheless not overlook the contemptible qualities of this power – the astonishing coarseness and narrowness of the Church's intellect when it was in process of formation, a coarseness which permitted it to accommodate itself to any diet, and to digest contradictions like pebbles.

71

The Christian Vengeance against Rome. – Perhaps nothing is more fatiguing than the sight of a continual conqueror: for more than two hundred years the world had seen Rome overcoming one nation after another, the circle was closed, all future seemed to be at an end, everything was done with a view to its lasting for all time – yea, when the Empire built anything it was erected with a view to being aere perennius. We, who know only the “melancholy of ruins,” can scarcely understand that totally different melancholy of eternal buildings, from which men endeavoured to save themselves as best they could – with the light-hearted fancy of a Horace, for example. Others sought different consolations for the weariness which was closely akin to despair, against the deadening knowledge that from henceforth all progress of thought and heart would be hopeless, that the huge spider sat everywhere and mercilessly continued to drink all the blood within its reach, no matter where it might spring forth. This mute, century-old hatred of the wearied spectators against Rome, wherever Rome's domination extended, was at length vented in Christianity, which united Rome, “the world,” and “sin” into a single conception. The Christians took their revenge on Rome by proclaiming the immediate and sudden destruction of the world; by once more introducing a future – for Rome had been able to transform everything into the history of its own past and present – a future in which Rome was no longer the most important factor; and by dreaming of the last judgment – while the crucified Jew, as the symbol of salvation, was the greatest derision on the superb Roman prætors in the provinces; for now they seemed to be only the symbols of ruin and a “world” ready to perish.

72

The “Life after Death.” – Christianity found the idea of punishment in hell in the entire Roman Empire: for the numerous mystic cults have hatched this idea with particular satisfaction as being the most fecund egg of their power. Epicurus thought he could do nothing better for his followers than to tear this belief up by the roots: his triumph found its finest echo in the mouth of one of his disciples, the Roman Lucretius, a poet of a gloomy, though afterwards enlightened, temperament. Alas! his triumph had come too soon: Christianity took under its special protection this belief in subterranean horrors, which was already beginning to die away in the minds of men; and that was clever of it. For, without this audacious leap into the most complete paganism, how could it have proved itself victorious over the popularity of Mithras and Isis? In this way it managed to bring timorous folk over to its side – the most enthusiastic adherents of a new faith! The Jews, being a people which, like the Greeks, and even in a greater degree than the Greeks, loved and still love life, had not cultivated that idea to any great extent: the thought of final death as the punishment of the sinner, death without resurrection as an extreme menace: this was sufficient to impress these peculiar men, who did not wish to get rid of their bodies, but hoped, with their refined Egypticism, to preserve them for ever. (A Jewish martyr, about whom we may read in the Second Book of the Maccabees, would not think of giving up his intestines, which had been torn out: he wanted to have them at the resurrection: quite a Jewish characteristic!)

Thoughts of eternal damnation were far from the minds of the early Christians: they thought they were delivered from death, and awaited a transformation from day to day, but not death. (What a curious effect the first death must have produced on these expectant people! How many different feelings must have been mingled together – astonishment, exultation, doubt, shame, and passion! Verily, a subject worthy of a great artist!) St. Paul could say nothing better in praise of his Saviour than that he had opened the gates of immortality to everybody – he did not believe in the resurrection of those who had not been saved: more than this, by reason of his doctrine of the impossibility of carrying out the Law, and of death considered as a consequence of sin, he even suspected that, up to that time, no one had become immortal (or at all events only a very few, solely owing to special grace and not to any merits of their own): it was only in his time that immortality had begun to open its gates – and only a few of the elect would finally gain admittance, as the pride of the elect cannot help saying.

In other places, where the impulse towards life was not so strong as among the Jews and the Christian Jews, and where the prospect of immortality did not appear to be more valuable than the prospect of a final death, that pagan, yet not altogether un-Jewish addition of Hell became a very useful tool in the hands of the missionaries: then arose the new doctrine that even the sinners and the unsaved are immortal, the doctrine of eternal damnation, which was more powerful than the idea of a final death, which thereafter began to fade away. It was science alone which could overcome this idea, at the same time brushing aside all other ideas about death and an after-life. We are poorer in one particular: the “life after death” has no further interest for us! an indescribable blessing, which is as yet too recent to be considered as such throughout the world. And Epicurus is once more triumphant.

73

For the “Truth”! – “The truth of Christianity was attested by the virtuous lives of the Christians, their firmness in suffering, their unshakable belief and above all by the spread and increase of the faith in spite of all calamities.” – That's how you talk even now. The more's the pity. Learn, then, that all this proves nothing either in favour of truth or against it; that truth must be demonstrated differently from conscientiousness, and that the latter is in no respect whatever an argument in favour of the former.

74

A Christian Arrière-pensée. – Would not this have been a general reservation among Christians of the first century: “It is better to persuade ourselves into the belief that we are guilty rather than that we are innocent; for it is impossible to ascertain the disposition of so powerful a judge – but it is to be feared that he is looking out only for those who are conscious of guilt. Bearing in mind his great power, it is more likely that he will pardon a guilty person than admit that any one is innocent, in his presence.” This was the feeling of poor provincial folk in the presence of the Roman prætor: “He is too proud for us to dare to be innocent.” And may not this very sentiment have made its influence felt when the Christians endeavoured to picture to themselves the aspect of the Supreme Judge?

75

Neither European nor Noble. – There is something Oriental and feminine in Christianity, and this is shown in the thought, “Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth”; for women in the Orient consider castigations and the strict seclusion of their persons from the world as a sign of their husband's love, and complain if these signs of love cease.

76

If you think it Evil, you make it Evil. – The passions become evil and malignant when regarded with evil and malignant eyes. It is in this way that Christianity has succeeded in transforming Eros and Aphrodite – sublime powers, capable of idealisation – into hellish genii and phantom goblins, by means of the pangs which every sexual impulse was made to raise in the conscience of the believers. Is it not a dreadful thing to transform necessary and regular sensations into a source of inward misery, and thus arbitrarily to render interior misery necessary and regular in the case of every man! Furthermore, this misery remains secret with the result that it is all the more deeply rooted, for it is not all men who have the courage, which Shakespeare shows in his sonnets, of making public their Christian gloom on this point.

Must a feeling, then, always be called evil against which we are forced to struggle, which we must restrain even within certain limits, or, in given cases, banish entirely from our minds? Is it not the habit of vulgar souls always to call an enemy evil! and must we call Eros an enemy? The sexual feelings, like the feelings of pity and adoration, possess the particular characteristic that, in their case, one being gratifies another by the pleasure he enjoys – it is but rarely that we meet with such a benevolent arrangement in nature. And yet we calumniate and corrupt it all by our bad conscience! We connect the procreation of man with a bad conscience!

But the outcome of this diabolisation of Eros is a mere farce: the “demon” Eros becomes an object of greater interest to mankind than all the angels and saints put together, thanks to the mysterious Mumbo-Jumboism of the Church in all things erotic: it is due to the Church that love stories, even in our own time, have become the one common interest which appeals to all classes of people – with an exaggeration which would be incomprehensible to antiquity, and which will not fail to provoke roars of laughter in coming generations. All our poetising and thinking, from the highest to the lowest, is marked, and more than marked, by the exaggerated importance bestowed upon the love story as the principal item of our existence. Posterity may perhaps, on this account, come to the conclusion that its entire legacy of Christian culture is tainted with narrowness and insanity.

77

The Tortures of the Soul. – The whole world raises a shout of horror at the present day if one man presumes to torture the body of another: the indignation against such a being bursts forth almost spontaneously. Nay; we tremble even at the very thought of torture being inflicted on a man or an animal, and we undergo unspeakable misery when we hear of such an act having been accomplished. But the same feeling is experienced in a very much lesser degree and extent when it is a question of the tortures of the soul and the dreadfulness of their infliction. Christianity has introduced such tortures on an unprecedented scale, and still continues to preach this kind of martyrdom – yea, it even complains innocently of backsliding and indifference when it meets with a state of soul which is free from such agonies. From all this it now results that humanity, in the face of spiritual racks, tortures of the mind, and instruments of punishment, behaves even to-day with the same awesome patience and indecision which it exhibited in former times in the presence of the cruelties practised on the bodies of men or animals. Hell has certainly not remained merely an empty sound; and a new kind of pity has been devised to correspond to the newly-created fears of hell – a horrible and ponderous compassion, hitherto unknown; with people “irrevocably condemned to hell,” as, for example, the Stony Guest gave Don Juan to understand, and which, during the Christian era, should often have made the very stones weep.

Plutarch presents us with a gloomy picture of the state of mind of a superstitious man in pagan times: but this picture pales when compared with that of a Christian of the Middle Ages, who supposes that nothing can save him from “torments everlasting.” Dreadful omens appear to him: perhaps he sees a stork holding a snake in his beak and hesitating to swallow it. Or all nature suddenly becomes pale; or bright, fiery colours appear across the surface of the earth. Or the ghosts of his dead relations approach him, with features showing traces of dreadful sufferings. Or the dark walls of the room in which the man is sleeping are suddenly lighted up, and there, amidst a yellow flame, he perceives instruments of torture and a motley horde of snakes and devils. Christianity has surely turned this world of ours into a fearful habitation by raising the crucifix in all parts and thereby proclaiming the earth to be a place “where the just man is tortured to death!” And when the ardour of some great preacher for once disclosed to the public the secret sufferings of the individual, the agonies of the lonely souls, when, for example, Whitefield preached “like a dying man to the dying,” now bitterly weeping, now violently stamping his feet, speaking passionately, in abrupt and incisive tones, without fearing to turn the whole force of his attack upon any one individual present, excluding him from the assembly with excessive harshness – then indeed did it seem as if the earth were being transformed into a “field of evil.” The huge crowds were then seen to act as if seized with a sudden attack of madness: many were in fits of anguish; others lay unconscious and motionless; others, again, trembled or rent the air with their piercing shrieks. Everywhere there was a loud breathing, as of half-choked people who were gasping for the breath of life. “Indeed,” said an eye-witness once, “almost all the noises appeared to come from people who were dying in the bitterest agony.”

Let us never forget that it was Christianity which first turned the death-bed into a bed of agony, and that, by the scenes which took place there, and the terrifying sounds which were made possible there for the first time, it has poisoned the senses and the blood of innumerable witnesses and their children. Imagine the ordinary man who can never efface the recollection of words like these: “Oh, eternity! Would that I had no soul! Would that I had never been born! My soul is damned, damned; lost for ever! Six days ago you might have helped me. But now all is over. I belong to the devil, and with him I will go down to hell. Break, break, ye poor hearts of stone! Ye will not break? What more can be done for hearts of stone? I am damned that ye may be saved! There he is! Yea; there he is! Come, good devil! Come!”