Part 3 of 3
WILL IN THE SEMITIC RACEStill profounder is the influence of the second trait of character.
We have seen that what I call the historical instinct of the Jews rests above all upon the possession of an abnormally developed will. The will in the case of the Jew attains such superiority that it enthrals and tyrannises over all other faculties. And so it is that we find on the one hand extraordinary achievements, which would be almost impossible for other men, and on the other, peculiar limitations. However that may be, it is certain that we see this very predominance of will in Christ at all times: frequently un-Jewish in His individual utterances, quite Jewish, in so far as the will is almost solely emphasised. This feature is like a branching of veins that goes deep and spreads far: we find it in every word, in every single conception. By a comparison I hope to make my meaning clear and comprehensible.
Consider the Hellenic conception of the Divine and the Human and of their relation to one another. Some Gods fight for Troy, others for the Achaeans; while I propitiate one part of the Divine I estrange the other; life is a battle, a game, the noblest may fall, the most miserable gain the victory; morality is in a way a personal affair, man is lord of his own heart but not of his destiny; there is no Providence that protects, punishes and rewards. The Gods themselves are in fact not free; Zeus himself must yield to fate. Herodotus says, "Even a God cannot escape what is destined for him." A nation which produces the Iliad will in a later age produce great investigators of nature and great thinkers. For he who looks at nature with open eyes which are not blinded by selfishness will discover everywhere in it the rule of law; the presence of law in the moral sphere is fate for the artist -- predestination for the philosopher. For the faithful observer of nature the idea of arbitrariness is, to begin with, simply impossible; do what he will, he cannot make up his mind to impute it even to a God. This philosophical view has been beautifully expressed by Here in Goethe's fragment, Achilleis:
Willkur bleibet ewig verhasst den Gottern und Menschen.
Wenn sie in Thaten sich zeigt, auch nur in Worten sich kundgiebt
Denn so hoch wir auch stehen, so ist der ewigen Gotter
Ewigste Themis [60] allein, und diese muss dauern und walten. [61]
On the other hand, the Jewish Jehovah can be described as the incarnation of arbitrariness. Certainly this divine conception appears to us in the Psalms and in Isaiah in altogether sublime form; it is also -- for the chosen people -- a source of high and serious morality. But what Jehovah is, He is, because He wills to be so; He stands above all nature, above every law, the absolute, unlimited autocrat. If it pleases Him to choose out from mankind a small people and to show His favour to it alone, He does so; if He wishes to vex it, He sends it into slavery; if he, on the other hand, wishes to give it houses which it has not built and vineyards which it has not planted, He does so and destroys the innocent possessors; there is no
Themis. So too the divine legislation. Beside moral commands which breathe to some extent high morality and humanity, there stand commands which are directly immoral and inhuman; [62] others again determine most trivial points: what one may eat and may not eat, how one shall wash, &c., in short, everywhere absolute arbitrariness. He who sees deeper will not fail to note in this the relationship between the old Semitic idolatry and the belief in Jehovah. Considered from the Indo-European standpoint, Jehovah would in reality be called rather an idealised idol, or, if we prefer it, an anti-idol, than a god. And yet this conception of God contains something which could not, any more than arbitrariness, be derived from observation of nature, namely, the idea of a Providence. According to Renan, "the exaggerated belief in a special Providence is the basis of the whole Jewish religion." [63] Moreover, with this freedom of God another freedom is closely connected, that of the human will. The liberum arbitrium is decidedly a Semitic conception and in its full development a specifically Jewish one; it is inseparably bound up with the particular idea of God. [64] Freedom of will implies nothing less than "ever repeated acts of creation"; carefully considered it will be clear that this supposition (as soon as it has to do with the world of phenomena) contradicts not merely all physical science, but also all metaphysics, and means a negation of every transcendent religion. Here cognition and will stand in strict opposition. Now wherever we find limitations of this idea of freedom -- in Augustine, Luther, Voltaire, Kant, Goethe -- we can be sure that an Indo-European reaction against the Semitic spirit is taking place. So, for example, when Calderon in the Great Zenobia lets the wild autocratic Aurelian mock him who called the will free.
For -- though one must certainly be on one's guard against misusing such formulary simplifications -- one can still make the assertion that the idea of necessity is in all Indo- European races particularly strongly marked, and is met with again and again in the most different spheres; it points to high power of cognition free from passion; on the other hand, the idea of arbitrariness, that is, of an unlimited sway of will, is specifically characteristic of the Jew; he reveals an intelligence which in comparison with his will-power is very limited. It is not a question here of abstract generalisations, but of actual characteristics, which we can still daily observe; in the one case intellect is predominant, in the other the will.
Let me give a tangible example from the present. I knew a Jewish scholar, who, as the competition in his branch prevented him from earning much money, became a manufacturer of soap, and that, too, with great success; but when at a later time foreign competition once more took the ground from beneath his feet, all at once, though ripe in years, he became dramatic poet and Man of Letters and made a fortune at it. There was no question of universal genius in his case; he was of moderate intellectual abilities and devoid of all originality; but with this intellect the will achieved whatever it wished.
The abnormally developed will of the Semites can lead to two extremes: either to rigidity, as in the case of Mohammed, where the idea of the unlimited divine caprice is predominant; or, as is the case with the Jews, to phenomenal elasticity, which is produced by the conception of their own human arbitrariness. To the Indo-European both paths are closed. In nature he observes everywhere the rule of law, and of himself he knows that he can only achieve his highest when he obeys inner need. Of course his will, too, can achieve the heroic, but only when his cognition has grasped some idea -- religious, artistic, philosophic, or one which aims at conquest, command, enrichment, perhaps crime; at any rate, in his case the will obeys, it does not command. Therefore it is that a moderately gifted Indo-European is so peculiarly characterless in comparison with the most poorly gifted Jew. Of ourselves, we should certainly never have arrived at the conception of a free almighty God and of what may be called an "arbitrary Providence," a Providence, that is, which can decree something in one way, and then in answer to prayers or from other motives decide in a contrary direction. [65] We do not find that, outside of Judaism, man ever came to the conception of a quite intimate and continual personal relation between God and mankind -- to the conception of a God who would almost seem to be there only for the sake of man. In truth the old Indo-Aryan Gods are benevolent, friendly, we might almost say genial powers; man is their child, not their slave; he approaches them without fear; when sacrificing he "grasps the right hand of God"; [66] the want of humility in presence of God has indeed filled many a one with horror: yet as we have seen nowhere do we find the conception of capricious autocracy. And with this goes hand in hand remarkable infidelity; now this, now that God is worshipped, or, if the Divine is viewed as a unified principle, then the one school has this idea of it, the other that (I remind the reader of the six great philosophically religious systems of India, all six of which passed as orthodox); the brain in fact works irresistibly on, producing new images and new shapes, the Infinite is its home, freedom its element and creative power its joy. Just consider the beginning of the following hymn from the Rigveda (6, 9):
My ear is opened and my eye alert.
The light awakes within my heart!
My spirit flies to search in distant realms:
What shall I say? of what shall my verse sing?
and compare it with the first verses of any Psalm, for instance, the 76th:
In Judah is God known: His name is great in Israel.
In Salem also is His tabernacle, and His dwelling-place in Sion.
We see what an important element of faith the will is. While the Aryan, rich in cognition, "flies to search in distant realms," the strong-willed Jew makes God pitch His tent once for all in his own midst. The power of his will to live has not only forged for the Jew an anchor of faith, which holds him fast to the ground of historical tradition, but it has also inspired him with unshakable confidence in a personal, directly present God, who is almighty to give and to destroy; and it has brought him, the man, into a moral relation to this God, in that God in His all-powerfulness issued commands, which man is free to follow or neglect. [67]
THE PROPHETThere is another matter which must not be omitted in this connection: the one-sided predominance of the will makes the chronicles of the Jewish people in general dreary and ugly; and yet in this atmosphere there grew up a series of important men, whose peculiar greatness makes it impossible to compare them with other intellectual heroes. In the introduction to this division I have already spoken of those "disavowers" of the Jewish character, who themselves remained the while such out and out Jews, from the crown of their heads to the soles of their feet, that they contributed more than anything else to the growth of the most rigid Hebraism; in chap. v. I shall return to them; only so much must here be said: these men, in grasping religious materialism by its most abstract side, raised it morally to a very great height; their work has paved the way historically in essential points for Christ's view of the relation between God and man. Moreover, an important feature, which is essentially rooted in Judaism, shows itself most clearly in them: the historical religion of this people lays emphasis not upon the individual, but upon the whole nation; the individual can benefit or injure the whole community, but otherwise he is of little moment; from this resulted of necessity a markedly socialistic feature which the Prophets often powerfully express. The individual who attains to prosperity and wealth, while his brothers starve, falls under the ban of God. While Christ in one way represents exactly the opposite principle, namely, that of extreme individualism, the redeeming of the individual by regeneration, His life and His teaching, on the other hand, point unmistakably to a condition of things which can only be realised by having all things common. The communism of "one flock and one shepherd" is certainly different from the entirely politically coloured, theocratic communism of the Prophets; but here again the basis is solely and characteristically Jewish.
CHRIST A JEWWhatever one may be inclined to think of these various Jewish conceptions, no one will deny their greatness, or their capacity to exercise an almost inestimable influence upon the moulding of the life of mankind. Nor will anyone deny that the belief in divine almightiness, in divine Providence and in the freedom of the human will, [68] as well as the almost exclusive emphasising of the moral nature of men and their equality before God ("the last shall be first") are essential elements of the personality of Christ. Far more than the fact that He starts from the Prophets, far more than His respect for Jewish legal enactments, do these fundamental views show us that Christ belonged morally to the Jews. Indeed, when we penetrate farther to that central point in Christ's teaching, to that "conversion of the will," then we must recognise -- as I have already hinted at the beginning of this chapter in the comparison with Buddha -- that here is something Jewish in contrast to the Aryan negation of the will. The latter is a fruit of perception, of too great perception; Christ, on the other hand, addresses Himself to men, in whom the will -- not the thought, is supreme; what He sees around Him is the insatiable, ever-covetous Jewish will that is always stretching out both hands; He recognises the might of this will and commands it -- not to be silent, but to take a new direction. Here we must say, Christ is a Jew, and He can only be understood when we have learned to grasp critically these peculiarly Jewish views which He found and made His own.
I said just now that Christ belonged "morally" to the Jews. This somewhat ambiguous word "moral" must here be taken in a narrow sense. For it is just in the moral application of these conceptions of God's almightiness and providence, of the direct relations between man and God following therefrom, and of the employment of the free human will, that the Saviour departed in toto from the doctrines of Judaism; that is clear to every one, and I have, moreover, sought to emphasise it in what has gone before; but the conceptions themselves, the frame into which the moral personality fitted itself, and out of which it cannot be moved, the unquestioning acceptance of these premisses regarding God and man, which by no means belong to the human mind as a matter of course but are, on the contrary, the absolutely individual achievement of a definite people in the course of an historical development which lasted for centuries: this is the Jewish element in Christ. In the chapters on Hellenic Art and Roman Law I have already called attention to the power of ideas; here again we have a brilliant example of it. Whoever lived in the Jewish intellectual world was bound to come under the influence of Jewish ideas. And though He brought to the world an entirely new message, though His life was like the dawn of a new morn, though His personality was so divinely great that it revealed to us a power in the human breast, capable -- if it ever should be fully realised -- of completely changing humanity: yet the personality, the life and the message were none the less chained to the fundamental ideas of Judaism; only in these could they reveal, exercise and proclaim themselves.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURYI hope I have attained my purpose. Proceeding from the consideration of the personality in its individual, autonomous import, I have gradually widened the circle, to reveal the threads of life which connect it with its surroundings. In this a certain amplification was unavoidable; the sole subject of this book, the foundations of the nineteenth century, I have nevertheless not lost sight of for a single moment. For how could I, an individual, venture to approach that age either as chronicler or encyclopaedist? May the Muses keep me from such madness! On the other hand, I shall attempt to trace as far as possible the leading ideas, the moulding thoughts of our age; but these ideas do not fall from Heaven, they link on to the past; new wine is very often indeed poured into old bottles, and very old, sour wine, which nobody would taste, if he knew its origin, into quite new ones; and as a matter of fact the curse of confusion weighs heavily upon a culture born so late as ours, especially in an age of breathless haste, where men have to learn too much to be able to think much. If we wish to become clear about ourselves, we must, above all, be quite clear about the fundamental thoughts and conceptions which we have inherited from our ancestors. I hope I have brought it home to the reader how very complex is the Hellenic legacy, how peculiarly contradictory the Roman, but at the same time how profoundly they affect our life and thought to-day. Now we have seen that even the advent of Christ, on the threshold between the old and the new age, does not present itself to our distant eye in so simple a form that we can easily free it from the labyrinth of prejudices, falsehoods and errors. And yet nothing is more necessary than to see this revelation of Christ clearly in the light of truth. For -- however unworthy we may show ourselves of this -- our whole culture, thank God, still stands under the sign of the Cross upon Golgotha. We do see this Cross; but who sees the Crucified One? Yet He, and He alone is the living well of all Christianity, of the intolerantly dogmatic as well as of that which gives itself out to be quite unbelieving. In later ages it will be an eloquent testimony to the childishness of our judgment that we have ever doubted it, and that the nineteenth century has reared itself on books, which demonstrated that Christianity originated by chance, at haphazard, as a "mythological paroxysm," as a "dialectical antithesis," as a necessary result of Judaism, and I know not what else. The importance of genius cannot be reckoned high enough: who ventures to estimate the influence of Homer upon the mind of man? But Christ was still greater. And like the everlasting "hearth-fire" of the Aryans, so the torch of truth which He kindled for us can never be extinguished; though at times a shadow of night may wrap manhood far and wide in the folds of darkness, yet all that is wanted is one single glowing heart, in order that thousands and millions may once more blaze under the bright light of day.... Here, however, we can and must ask with Christ, "But if the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness?" Even the origin of the Christian Church leads us into the profoundest gloom, and its further history gives us rather the impression of a groping about in darkness than of clear seeing in the sunlight. How then shall we be able to distinguish what in so-called Christianity is spirit of Christ's spirit, and what, on the other hand, is imported from Hellenic, Jewish, Roman and Egyptian sources, if we have never come to see this revelation of Christ in its sublime simplicity? How shall we speak about what is Christian in our present confessions, in our literatures and arts, in our philosophy and politics, in our social institutions and ideals, how shall we separate what is Christian from what is anti-Christian, and be able with certainty to decide, what in the movements of the nineteenth century can be traced back to Christ and what not, or in how far it is Christian, whether merely in the form or also in the content, or perhaps in content, i.e., in its general tendency, but not with regard to the characteristically Jewish form -- how shall we, above all, be able to sift and separate from the "bread of life" this specifically Jewish element which is so threateningly perilous to our spirit, if the revelation of Christ does not stand conspicuously before our eyes in its general outlines, and if we are not able clearly to distinguish in this image the purely personal from its historical conditions. This is certainly a most important and indispensable foundation for the formation of our judgments and appreciations.
To pave, to some modest degree, the way for that result has been the purpose of this chapter.
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Notes:1. "Dictum est tamen tres personae, non ut aliquid diceretur, sed ne taceretur." -- De Trinitate, V. chap. ix.
2. The existence of Christ was denied even in the second century of our era, and Buddha till twenty-five years ago was regarded by many theologians as a mythical figure. See, for example, the books of Senart and Kern.
3. Hegel in his Philosophie der Geschichte, Th. III., A. 3, chap. ii., says about Christ: "He was born as this one man, in abstract subjectivity, but so that conversely finiteness is only the form of his appearance, the essence and content of which is rather infiniteness and absolute being-for-self.... The nature of God, to be pure spirit, becomes in the Christian religion manifest to man. But what is the spirit? It is the One, the unchanging infinity, the pure identity, which in the second place separates itself from itself, as its second self, as the being-for-itself and being-in-itself in opposition to the Universal. But this separation is annulled by this, that the atomistic subjectivity, as the simple relativity to itself, is itself the Universal, Identical with itself." What will future centuries say to this clatter of words? For two-thirds of the nineteenth it was considered the highest wisdom.
4. See first edition. i. 72 ff., and the popular edition (ninth) p. 191 ff. Strauss never had the least notion what a myth is, what mythology means, how it is produced by the confusion and mingling of popular myths, poetry and legends. That, however, is another story. Posterity will really not be able to understand the reception given to such dreary productions as those of Strauss: they are learned, but destitute of all deeper insight and of any trace of genius. Just as bees and ants require in their communities whole cohorts of sexless workers, so it seems as if we human beings could not get along without the industry and the widespread but ephemeral influence of such minds, marked with the stamp of sterility, as flourished in such profusion about the middle of the nineteenth century. The progress of historico-critical research on the one hand, and on the other the increasing tendency to direct attention not to the theological and subordinate, but to that which is living and decisive, causes one to look upon the mythological standpoint of Strauss as so unintelligent that one cannot turn over the leaves of this honest man's writings without yawning. And yet one must admit that such men as he and Renan (two concave mirrors which distort all lines, the one by lengthening, the other by broadening) have accomplished an important work -- by drawing the attention of thousands to the great miracle of the fact of Christ and thus creating a public for profounder thinkers and wiser men.
5. Later there came a. dark period upon which light has still to be thrown.
6. I have translated das nichts by extinction, which is the rendering of Nirvana by Rhys Davids. He says: "What then is Nirvana, which means simply going out, extinction"; and then he goes on to say that it ought to be translated "Holiness." But that will not do here, nor is it altogether incapable of being argued. Extinction gives Chamberlain's meaning better than "nothingness," which is not quite satisfactory. Perhaps "Holy Extinction" comes near to the Buddhist conception. The idea of Rhys Davids would thus not be lost. (Translator's Note.)
7. The expression Uranos or "Kingdom of Heaven" occurs only in Matthew and is certainly not the right translation into Greek of any expression used by Christ. The other evangelists always say "Kingdom of God." (Cf. my collection of the Worte Christi, large edition, p. 260, small edition, p. 279. and for more learned and definite explanation see H. H. Wendt's Lehre Jesu, 1886, pp. 48 and 58.)
8. The emphasis clearly does not lie on the additional clause "and become as little children": this is rather an explanation of the conversion. What is it that distinguishes children? Unalloyed joy in life and the unspoilt power of throwing a glamour over it by their temperaments.
9. I need scarcely say that I take the word pessimism, which is capable of such a variety of interpretations, in the popular, superficial sense of a moral frame of mind, not a philosophical cognition.
10. Diderot also, to whom one cannot attribute orthodox faith, says in the Encyclopedie: "Christ ne fut point un philosophe, ce jut un Dieu."
11. See p. 25.
12. Wellhausen: Israelitische und judische Geschichte, 3rd ed., 1897, pp. 16 and 74. Cf. too, Judges, i. 30 and 33, and further on in this book, chap. v.
13. Graetz: Volkstumliche Geschichte der Juden, i. 88.
14. Ibid, i. 567. Galilee and Perea had together a tetrarch who ruled independently, while Judea, Samaria and Idumea were under a Roman procurator. Graetz adds at this point, "Owing to the enmity of the Samaritans whose land lay like a wedge between Judea and Galilee and round [sic] both, there was all the less intercourse between the two separated districts." I have here for simplicity refrained from mentioning the further fact that we have no right to identify the genuine "Israelites" of the North with the real "Jews" of the South; but cf. chap. v.
15. So completely disappeared that many theologians, who had leisure, puzzled their brains even in the nineteenth century to discover what had become of the Israelites, as they could not believe that five-sixths of the people to whom Jehovah had promised the whole world should have simply vanished off the face of the earth. An ingenious brain actually arrived at the conclusion that the ten tribes believed to be lost were the English of to-day! He was not at a loss for the moral of this discovery either; in this way the British possess by right five-sixths of the whole earth; the remaining sixth the Jews. Cf, H. L.: Lost Israel, where are they to be found? (Edinburgh, 6th ed., 1877). In this pamphlet another work is named, Wilson, Our Israelitish Origin. There are, according to these authorities, honest Anglo- Saxons who have traced their genealogy back to Moses!
16. Robertson Smith: The Prophets of Israel (1895), p. 153, informs us to what an extent "the distinguishing character of the Israelitish nation was lost."
17. Albert Reville: Jesus de Nazareth, i. 416. One should remember also that Alexander the Great had peopled neighbouring Samaria with Macedonians after the revolt of the year 311.
18. Graetz, as above, i. 400. See also I Maccabees, v. 23.
19. Graetz, as above, i. 568. Compare Josephus, Book XVIII., chap. iii.
20. Quoted by Renan from the Mishna: s. Vie de Jesus, 23rd edition. p. 242.
21. Juvenal says:
Aere minuto
Qualiacunque voles Judaei somnia vendunt
22. Mommsen, Romische Geschichte, v. 515.
23. Later, too, the inhabitants of Galilee were a peculiar race distinguished for strength and courage, as is proved by their taking part in the campaign under the Persian Scharbarza and in the taking of Jerusalem in the year 614.
24. As a matter of fact sufficient evidence of the difference between the Galileans and the real Jews could be gathered from the gospels. In John especially "the Jews" are always spoken of as something alien, and the Jews on their part exclaim, "Out of Galilee ariseth no prophet" (7, 52).
25. Cf., for example, Graetz, as above. i. 575. With regard to the peculiarity of the speech of the Galileans and their incapacity to pronounce the Semitic gutturals properly, see Renan: Langues semitiques, 5th ed., p. 230.
26. See, for example, the comparative table in Max Muller: Science of Language, 9th ed., p. 169, and in each separate volume of the Sacred Books of the East. The Sanscrit language has only six genuine "gutturals," the Hebrew ten; most striking, however, is the difference in the guttural aspirate h, for which the Indo-Teutonic languages from time immemorial have known only one sound, the Semitic, on the other hand, five different sounds. Again, we find in Sanscrit seven different lingual consonants, in Hebrew only two. How exceedingly difficult it is for such inherited linguistic marks of race to disappear altogether is well known to us all through the example of the Jews living among us; a perfect mastery of the lingual sounds is just as impossible for them as the mastery of the gutturals for us.
27. Jesus de Nazareth, etudes critiques sur les antecedents de l'histoire evangelique et la vie de Jesus, vol. ii. 1897.
28. How is one, for example, to explain the fact that Renan, who in his Vie de Jesus, published in 1863, says it is impossible even to make suppositions about the race to which Christ by blood belonged (see chap. ii.), in the fifth volume of his Histoire du Peuple d'Israe'l, finished in 1891, makes the categorical assertion, "Jesus etait un Juif," and attacks with unwonted bitterness those who dare doubt the fact? Is it to be supposed that the Alliance Israelite, with which Renan was so closely connected in the last years of his life, had not had something to do with this? In the nineteenth century we have heard so much fine talk about the freedom of speech, the freedom of science, &c.; in reality, however, we have been worse enslaved than in the eighteenth century; for in addition to the tyrants who have really never been disarmed, new and worse ones have arisen. The former tyranny could, with all its bitter injustice, strengthen the character: the new, which is a tyranny proceeding from and aiming at money, degrades to the lowest depth of bondage.
29. Cf. Hugo Winckler: Die Volker Vorderasiens, 1900.
30. The great legal authority Jhering is a praiseworthy exception. In his Vorgeschichte der Indoeuropaer, p. 300, he says: "The doctrine of Christ did not spring from his native soil, Christianity is rather an overcoming of Judaism; there is even in his origin something of the Aryan in Christ."
31. "The Semites have much superstition, but little religion," says Robertson Smith, one of the greatest authorities. (See The Prophets of Israel, p. 33.)
32. Herder says well, "Man alone is in opposition to himself and the earth; for the most fully developed creature among all her organisations is at the same time the least developed in his own new capacity.... He represents therefore two worlds at once and this causes the apparent duplicity of his being." -- Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit, Teil I., Buch V., Abschnitt 6.
33. Is not the core of nature
In the heart of man?
34. For details, see chap. v.
35. See chap. cxxv. of the Book at the Dead.
36. Quoted by Graetz, as above, i. 634, without indication of the passage.
37. "I do not require to adduce evidence of the polytheism of the Jews; one finds it in every scientific work and besides on every other page of the Old Testament; see chap. v. Even in the Psalms "all the Gods" are called upon to worship Jehovah; Jehovah is only in so far the "one God" for later Jews, as the Jews (as Philo just told us) are "the only men in the real sense," Robertson Smith, whose History of the Semites is regarded as a scientific and fundamental book, testifies that monotheism did not proceed from an original religious tendency of the Semitic spirit, but is essentially a political result!! (See p. 74 of the work quoted.) -- With regard to the monotheism of the Indo-Europeans I make the following brief remarks. The Brahman of the Indian philosophers is beyond doubt the greatest religious thought ever conceived; with regard to the pure monotheism of the Persians we can obtain information in Darmesteter (The Zend-Avesta, I. lxxxii. ff.); the Greek had however been on the same path, as Ernst Curtius testifies, "I have learned much that is new, particularly what a stronghold of the monotheistic view of God Olympia was and what a moral world-power the Zeus of Phidias has been" (Letter to Gelzer of Jan. 1, 1896, published in the Deutsche Revue, 1897, p. 241). Besides we can refer here to the best of all witnesses. The Apostle Paul says (Romans, i. 21): "The Romans knew that there is one God"; and the church-father Augustine shows, in the eleventh chapter of the 4th book of his De civitete Dei, that according to the views of the educated Romans of his time, the magni doctores paganorum, Jupiter was the one and only God, while the other divinities only demonstrated some of his "virtutes." Augustine employed the view which was already prevalent, to make it clear to the heathens that it would be no trouble for them to adopt the belief in a single God and to give up the others. Haoc si ita sint, quid perderent si unum Deum colerent prudentiare compendio? (the recommendation to believe in a single God "because it simplifies matters" is a touching feature of the golden childhood of the Christian Church!). And what Augustine demonstrates in the case of the educated heathen, Tertullian asserts of the uneducated people in general. "Everybody," he says, "believes only in a single God, and one never hears the Gods invoked in the plural, but only as 'Great God' 'Good God' 'As God will ' 'God be with you' 'God bless you.'" This Tertullian regards as the evidence of a fundamentally monotheistic soul: "O testimonium anima naturaliter Christianae" (Apologeticus, xvii). [Giordano Bruno in his Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, ed. Lagarde, p. 532, has some beautiful remarks on the monotheism of the ancients.] -- In order that in a matter of such significance nothing may remain obscure, I must add that Curtius, Paul, Augustine and Tertullian are all four labouring under a thorough delusion, when they see in these things a proof of monotheism in the sense of Semitic materialism; their judgment is here dimmed by the influence of Christian ideas. The conception "the Divine" which we see in the Sanscrit neuter Brahman and in the Greek neuter [x] , as well as in the German neuter Gott, which only at a later time in consequence of Christian influence was regarded as a masculine (see Kluge's Etymologisches Worterbuch), cannot be identified at all with the personal world-creator of the Jews. In this case one can say of all the Aryans who are not influenced by the Semitic spirit what Professor Erwin Rohde proves for the Hellenes: "The view that the Greeks had a tendency to monotheism (in the Jewish sense) is based on a wrong interpretation.... It is not a unity of the divine person, but a uniformity of divine entity, a divinity living uniformly in many Gods, something universally divine in the presence of which the Greek stands when he enters into religious contact with the Gods" (Die Religion der Griechen in the Bayreuther Blatter, 1895, p. 213). Very characteristic are the words of Luther in this connection, "In creation and in works (to reckon from without to the creature) we Christians are at one with the Turks; for we say too that there is not more than one single God. But we say, this is not enough, that we only believe that there is one single God."
38. Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion, 4th ed. i. 46.
39. Histoire du Peuple d'Israel, v. 415, ii. 539. &c. The enormity of the assertion in regard to Isaiah becomes clear from the fact that Renan himself describes and praises this prophet as a "litterateur" and a "journaliste," and that he proves in detail what a purely political role this important man played. "Not a line from his pen, which was not in the service of a question of the day or an interest of the moment" (ii. 481). And we are to believe that in this very man the whole personality of Jesus Christ is inherent? It is quite as unjustifiable (unfortunately in others as well as in Renan) to quote single verses from Isaiah, to make it appear as if Judaism had aimed at a universal religion. Thus xlix. 6, is quoted, where Jehovah says to Israel, "I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth," and nothing is said of the fact that in the course of the chapter the explanation is given that the Gentiles shall become the slaves of the Jews and their Kings and Princesses shall "bow down to them with their face toward the earth" and "lick up the dust of their feet." And this we are to regard as a sublime universal religion! Exactly the same is the case with the constantly quoted chapter Ix. where we find first the words, "The Gentiles shall come to thy light," but afterwards with an honesty for which one is thankful, "The nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish, yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted"! Moreover the Gentiles are told in this passage to bring all their gold and treasures to Jerusalem, for the Jews shall "inherit the land for ever." To think of anyone venturing to put such political pamphleteering on a parallel with the teaching of Christ!
40. As above, i. 570. It has often been asserted that the Jews have little sense of humour: that seems to be true, at least of individuals; just imagine the "wealth" of these crassly ignorant unimaginative scribes and the "emptiness" of the Hellenes! Graetz has not much regard for the personality of Christ; the highest appreciation to which he deigns to rise is as follows: "Jesus may also have possessed a sympathetic nature that won hearts, whereby His words could make an impression" (i. 576). The learned Professor of Breslau regards the crucifixion as the result of a "misunderstanding." With regard to the Jews who afterwards went over to Christianity Graetz is of opinion that it was done for their material advantages and because the belief in the Crucified One "was taken into the bargain as something unessential" (ii. 30). Is that still true? We knew from the Old Testament that the covenant with Jehovah was a contract with obligations on both sides, but what can be "bargained" in regard to Christ I cannot understand.
41. The following information about the expression "son of man" is important; "The Messianic interpretation of the expression 'son or man' originated from the Greek translators of the Gospel. As Jesus spoke Aramaic, He said not [x] but barnascha. But that means man and nothing more; the Arameans had no other expression for the idea" (Wellhausen: Israelitische und judische Geschichte, 3rd ed. p. 381).
42. "If man is impure, he is so because he speaks what is untrue," said the sacrificial ordinances of the Aryan Indians, one thousand years before Christ (Satapatha-Brahmana), 1st verse of the 1st division of the 1st book.
43. In the fifth book of Moses (Deuteronomy vi. 5) are to be found words similar to these quoted from Christ's sayings (from Matthew xxii. 37), but -- we must look at the context! Before the commandment to love (to our mind a peculiar conception -- to love by command) stands as the first and most important commandment (verse 2), "Thou shalt fear the Lord, thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments"; the commandment to love is only one among other commandments which the Jew shall observe and immediately after it comes the reward for this love (verse 10 ff.). "I shall give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, and houses full of all good things which thou filledst not, and wells digged which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive-trees, which thou plantedst not, &c." That kind of love may be compared to the love which underlies so many marriages at the present day! In any case the "love of one's neighbour" would appear in a peculiar light, if one did not know that according to the Jewish law only the Jew is a "neighbour" of the Jew; as is expressed in the same place, chap. vii. 16, "Thou shalt consume all the peoples which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee!" This commentary to the commandment to "love one's neighbour" makes every further remark superfluous. But in order that no one may be in doubt as to what the Jews later meant by the command to love God with the whole heart, I shall quote the commentary of the Talmud (Jomah, Div. 8) to that part of the law, Deuteronomy, vi. 5: "The teaching of this is: thy behaviour shall be such that the name of God shall be loved through you; man shall in fact occupy himself with the study of Holy Scripture and of the Mishna and have intercourse with learned and wise men; his language shall be gentle, his other conduct proper, and in commerce and business with his fellow men he shall strive after honesty and uprightness. What will people then say? Hail to this man who has devoted himself to the study of the sacred doctrine!" In the book Sota of the Jerusalem Talmud (v. 5) one finds a somewhat more reasonable but no less prosaic commentary. -- This is the orthodox Jewish interpretation of the commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy heart"! Is it not the most unworthy playing with words to assert that Christ taught the same doctrine as the Thora?
44. The orthodox Jew Montefiore, Religion of the Ancient Hebrews (1893), p. 442, admits that the thought, "God is love," does not occur in any purely Hebrew work of any time.
45. Montefiore and others dispute the statement that the relation of Israel to Jehovah was that of servants to their master, but Scripture says so clearly in many places, e.g., Leviticus xxv. 55: "The children of Israel are servants, they are my servants whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt," and the literal translation of the Hebrew text would be slave! (Cf. the literal translation by Louis Segond.)
46. It is scarcely necessary to call the reader's attention to the fact that the Egyptian and Syrian forms of worship from which the Jews took the idea of the ox and the serpent were purely symbolical.
47. When at a very late period the Jews could not quite resist the impulse to presentation, they sought to conceal the want of imaginative power by Oriental verbiage. We can see an example of it in chap. i. of Ezekiel.
48. Rigveda, x. 129. 7.
49. Adolf Bastian, the eminent ethnologist, in his work: Das Bestanddige in den Menschenrassen (1868), p. 28.
50. Les mythologies etrangeres se transforment entre les mains des Semites en recits platement historiques" (Renan, Israel, i. 49).
51. Cf. the history of creation by the Phoenician Sanchuniathon.
52. See chap. v. In order to give a fixed point and to reveal drastically the differences of mental tendencies, I may mention that this was about three hundred years after Homer, scarcely a century before Herodotus.
53. For example, the promise to Abraham in reference to Canaan, "To thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever."
54. See Rob. Smith: The Prophets of Israel, pp. 70 and 133.
55. In the Sippurim, a collection of Jewish popular sagas and stories, it is frequently mentioned that the ordinary uneducated Jew has 613 commandments to learn by heart. But the Talmud teaches 13.600 laws, obedience to which is divine command! (See Dr. Emanuel Schreiber: Der Talmud vom Standpunkte des modernen Judentums.
56. Even so orthodox an investigator as Stanton admits that the Jewish idea of the Messiah was altogether political (see The Jewish and the Christian Messiah, 1886, pp. 122 f., 128, &c.). It is well known that theology has occupied itself much of late years with the history of the conceptions of the Messiah. The principal result of the investigation for us laymen is the proof that the Christians, misled by what were specifically Galilean and Samarian heterodoxies, supplanted the Jewish conception of the coming of the Messiah by a view which the Jews never really held. The Jews who were learned in Scripture were always indignant at the strained interpretations of the Old Prophets; now even the Christians admit that the Prophets before the exile (and these are the greatest) knew nothing of the expectation of a Messiah (see, for example, the latest summary account, that of Paul Volz: Die vorexilische Jahveprophetie und der Messias, 1897); the Old Testament does not even know the word, and one of the most important theologists of our time, Paul de Lagarde (Deutsche Schriften, p. 53), calls attention to the fact that the expression maschiach is not of Hebrew origin at all, but was borrowed at a late time from Assyria or Babylon. It is particularly noteworthy also that this expectation of the Messiah wherever it existed was constantly taking different forms; in one case a second King David was to come, in another the idea was one only of Jewish world-empire in general, then again it is God himself with his heavenly judgment "who will put an end at once to those who have hitherto held sway and give the people of Israel power for ever, an all-embracing empire, in which the just of former times who rise again shall take part, while the rebellious are condemned to everlasting shame" (cf. Karl Muller: Kirchengeschichte, i. 15); other Jews again dispute whether the Messiah will be a Ben-David or a Ben-Joseph; many believe there would be two of them, others are of the opinion that he would be born in the Roman Diaspora; but nowhere and at no time do we find the idea of a suffering Messiah, who by his death redeems us (see Stanton, pp. 122-124). The best, the most cultured and pious Jews have never entertained such apocalyptic delusions. In the Talmud (Sabbath, Part 6) we read, "Between the present time and the Messianic there is no difference except that the pressure, under which Israel pines till then, will cease." (Contrast with this the frightful confusion and complete puerility of the Messianic conceptions in the Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud.) I think that with these remarks I have touched the root of the matter: in the case of an absolutely historical religion, like the Jewish, the sure possession of the future is just as imperative a necessity as the sure possession of the past: from the earliest times we see this thought of the future inspiring the Jews and it still inspires them; this unimaginative people gave its expectations various forms, according to the varying influences of surroundings, essential only is the firm ineradicable conviction that the Jews should one day rule the world. This is in fact an element of their character, the visible bodying-forth of their innermost nature. It is their substitute for mythology.
57. Tertullian makes the charmingly simple remark: "Pilate was already at heart a Christian" (Apologeticus xxi.).
58. The myth of the fall of man stands indeed at the beginning of the first book of Moses, but is clearly borrowed, since the Jews never understood it and did not employ it in their system. He who does not transgress the law is, in their eyes, free from sin. Just as little has their expectation of a Messiah to do with our conception of redemption. See, further, chap. v. and vol ii. chap. vii.
59. That is the tendency of gnosticism as a whole; this movement finds its most carefully pondered and noblest expression, as far as I can venture to express an opinion, in Marcion (middle of the second century), who was more filled with the absolutely new in the Christian ideal than perhaps any religious teacher since his time; but in just such a case one sees how fatal it is to ignore historical data. (See any Church History. On the other hand I must warn the student that the three lines which Professor Ranke devotes to this really great man (Weltgeschichte, ii. 171) contain not a single word of what should have been said on this point.) [For a knowledge of Marcion and gnosticism as a whole Mead's Fragments of a Faith Forgotten may be recommended.]
60. Themis has degenerated in modern times to an allegory of impartial jurisdiction, that is, of an altogether arbitrary agreement, and she is appropriately represented with veiled eyes; while mythology lived, she represented the rule of law in all nature, and the old artists gave her particularly large, wide-open eyes.
61. Arbitrariness remains ever hateful to gods and men, when it reveals itself in deeds or even in words only. For however high we may stand, the eternal Themis of the eternal Gods alone is, and she must lastingly hold sway.
62. Besides the countless raids involving wholesale slaughter divinely commanded, in which "the heads of the children" are to be "dashed against the stones," note the cases where command is given to attack with felonious intent "the brother, companion, and neighbour" (Exodus xxxii. 27). and the disgusting commands such as in Ezekiel v. 12-15.
63. Histoire du peuple d'Israil, ii. p. 3.
64. We can trace in every history of Judaism with what very logical fanaticism the Rabbis still champion the unconditioned and not merely metaphysically meant freedom of will. Diderot says: "Les Juifs sont si jaloux de cette liberte d'indifference, qu'ils s'imaginent qu'il est impossible de penser sur cette matiere autrement qu'eux." And how closely this idea is connected with the freedom of God and with Providence becomes clear from the commotion which arose when Maimonides wished to limit divine Providence to mankind and maintained that every leaf was not moved by it nor every worm created by its will. -- Of the so-called "fundamental doctrines" of the famous Talmudist Rabbi Akiba the two first are as follow: (1) Everything is supervised by the Providence of God; (2) Freedom of will is stipulated (Hirsch Graetz: Gnosticismus und Judentum, 1846, p. 91).
65. In the case of the Indo-Europeans the Gods are never "creators of the world"; where the Divine is viewed as creator, as in the case of the Brahman of the Indians, that refers to a freely metaphysical cognition, not to an historical and mechanical process, as in Genesis i.; in other cases the Gods are viewed as originating "on this side of creation," their birth and death are spoken of.
66. Oldenberg: Die Religion des Veda, p. 310.
67. If this were the place for it, I should gladly prove in greater detail that this Jewish conception of the almighty God who rules as free Providence inevitably determines the historical view of this God and that every genuine Aryan mind revolts again and again against this. This has caused, for instance, the whole tragic mental life of Peter Abelard: in spite of the most intense longing for orthodoxy, he cannot adapt his spirit to the religious materialism of the Jews. Ever and anon, for example, he comes to the conclusion that God does what he does of necessity (and here he could refer for support to the earlier writings of Augustine, especially his De libero arbitrio); this is intellectual anti-Semitism in the highest degree! He denies also every action, every motion in the case of God; the working of God is for him the coming to pass of an everlasting determination of will: "with God there is no sequence of time." (See A. Hausrath; Peter Abelard, p. 201 f.) With this Providence disappears. -- However, what is the use of seeking for learned proofs? The noble Don Quixote explains with pathetic simplicity to his faithful Sancho, "for God there is no past and no future, all is present" (Book IX. chap. viii.): hereby the immortal Cervantes expresses briefly and correctly the unhistorical standpoint of all non-Semites.
68. The latter, however, as it appears, with important limitations, since the Aryan idea of grace more than once clearly appears in Christ's words.