Great issues

Chapter I

When Plato desired to utter some truth which lies deep in the mystery of being he was accustomed to glide into what he called a myth. Such myths, “truths embodied in a tale,” are among the master¬ pieces of his style, or, one might say, of all literature. He uses the myth, not to avoid speaking truth, but in order to speak it. There was no other medium through which he could convey realities which belong, not to the phenomenal, but to the noumenal world. Well he knew the difficulty of dealing with that spir¬ itual background of human life. Dialectic was no adequate instrument. Logic missed the mark. Science, if he had known the meaning of science in the modern sense, made no pretence to pene¬ trate that region, or to report on it. And yet men wished to know, and he for one felt able to tell, much that lay thus beyond the confines of scientific inquiry or of logical discussion. This vague stuff of the soul and of life, these certainties which ad¬ mitted of no proof, these dogmas which could never

B I be formulated, he brought into the plane of common observation, if not of common understanding, by means of tales — the Greek word /jlvOo<;) which in English takes the form of “myth” is only a tale — tales beautiful in form, sparkling with wit and wis¬ dom; tales which, not affecting to be true, yet con¬ veyed the deepest, the ultimate, the ineffable truth.

For example, the “Gorgias” ends with the myth of Minos, Rhadamanthus, and ^Lacus. “Listen,” says Socrates to Callicles, “as story-tellers say, to a very pretty tale which I daresay that you may be disposed to regard as a fable only, but which, as I believe, is a true tale, for I mean to speak the truth.” There the myth begins. Formerly men were judged in their bodies and clothes before death, with the result that the soul frequently reached the wrong destination. The judges were awed by the trappings, and also misled by the clothes which they themselves had on. Zeus therefore determined to make a change: “In the first place, I will deprive men of the foreknowledge of death, which they at present possess; that is a commission of which I have al¬ ready entrusted the execution to Prometheus; in the second place, they shall be entirely stripped be¬ fore they are judged, for they shall be judged when they are dead; and the judge, too, shall be naked — that is to say, dead : he with his naked soul shall pierce into the other naked soul, and they shall die suddenly, and be deprived of all their kindred, and leave their brave attire strewn upon the earth; conducted in this manner the judgment will be just.” The three judges shall give judgment in the meadow at the place where the three ways meet, out of which the two roads lead, one to the islands of the blessed and the other to Tartarus.

From the tale Socrates proceeds to draw infer¬ ences, precisely as a divine reasons from a passage of Scripture. The myth, indeed, is Scripture. “ Death, if I am right, is in the first place the separa¬ tion from one another of two things, soul and body, nothing else. And after they are separated they retain their several characteristics, which are much the same as in life; the body has the same nature and ways and affections, all clearly discernible; for example, he who by nature or training, or both, was a tall man while he was alive will remain as he was after he is dead, and the fat man will remain fat, and so on; and the dead man who in life had a fancy to have flowing hair will have flowing hair. And if he was marked with the whip and had the prints of the scourge or of wounds in him when he was alive, you might see the same in the dead body, and if his limbs were broken or misshapen when he was alive, the same appearance would be visible in the dead. ... I should imagine that this is equally true of the soul, Callicles; when a man is stripped of the body all the natural or acquired affections of the soul are laid open to view. When they come to the judge, as those from Asia come to Rhadamanthus, he places them near him, and inspects them quite impartially, not knowing whose the soul is; perhaps he may lay hands on the soul of the Great King, or of some other king or potentate, who has no sound¬ ness in him, but his soul is marked with the whip and is full of the prints and scars of perjuries and crimes with which each action has stained him, and he is all crooked with falsehood and imposture, and has no straightness, because he has lived without truth. Him Rhadamanthus beholds, full of all deformity and disproportion, which is caused by licence and luxury and insolence and incontinence, and despatches him ignominiously to his prison, and there he undergoes the punishment which he deserves.”

Some of the stained, distorted souls are curable; “they are improved, as in this world so also in an¬ other, by pain and suffering; for there is no other way in which they can be delivered from their evil.” Others are incurable, but they serve as deterrents; “ there they are hanging up as examples, in the prison-house of the world below, a spectacle and a warning to all unrighteous men who come thither.”

On the other hand, the judge “looks with ad¬ miration on the soul of some just one who has lived in holiness and truth,” and sends him to the islands of the blessed.

“Now I, Callicles,” says Socrates, “am persuaded of the truth of these things, and I consider how I shall present my soul whole and undefiled before the judge in that day. Renouncing the honours at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can and, when the time comes, to die.” And then he adds: “ Perhaps this may appear to you to be only an old wife’s tale, which you will contemn. And there might be reason in your contemning such tales, if by searching we could find out anything better or truer.”

It would seem, then, that no discourtesy need be intended if a narrative or a piece of literature is described as mythical. Such a judgment might mean that it is only an old wife’s tale, which can be told and heard, only for a child’s pastime; but it may mean that in this way the truth is conveyed by and for the wisest and most mature of human minds, because the nature of the truth is such that it cannot be otherwise expressed, or even suggested, to hearer or reader. One, for example, who has not reflected on this fact might be inclined to dismiss the story of Adam and Eve as incredible because it is a myth or another who has not reflected might resent the charge that it is a myth as a disparagement. But suppose the matter in hand is such as cannot be conveyed in any better form than that of a myth, and suppose the myth brings home to men, even to-day, the most and best that we can know about human freedom, and sin, and redemption, in that case the firmest believer will welcome the myth. The question about the story is not, Is it true ? but, Does it convey truth? The origin of evil is a prob lem which has never been solved. But men are engaged in a conflict with evil, sometimes suffering under defeat, sometimes rejoicing in the sense of victory. They ask eagerly the why and the where¬ fore. They feel the necessity of some interpretation in order to fight successfully. How does the myth of the Garden of Eden serve us? As history it would seem to break down. No reasoning can rep¬ resent the sin of Adam as a sufficient cause of all human sin. Milton’s heroic effort to tell the story of the fall,

“To justify the ways of God to man,”

does not convince the reason. The splendour of the poetry carries the mind away in another direction, and “Paradise Lost” becomes one of the transcen¬ dent creations of the human intellect. But no truer, no more reasonable, appears the suggestion that because an innocent and ignorant woman was per¬ suaded by a subtle serpent to eat the fruit which was forbidden, the whole progeny of Adam, to the re¬ motest generations, was involved in guilt which merits death and eternal pain. Milton still believed he was answering a theological problem by his argu¬ ment. St. Augustine found no difficulty in the theory. We hesitate to say whether St. Paul believed it or meant it, for his mind was soaked in the rabbinical symbolism; and it is more than likely that he, like the best of the Rabbis, knew that the story of Paradise was a myth to be interpreted, and not a fact on which to build a doubtful scheme of human sin and redemption.

But whatever Milton or St. Augustine believed, we to-day can never, except under the coercion of a dogmatic authority which we are afraid to question, seriously hold that the sins of mankind are due to the sin of a primal parent ; still less can we hold that the sin recorded is sufficient to account for the errors and the travails of the whole race.

So far as the story of Eden was mistaken for historical fact, and in that sense incorporated in theological dogma, we must welcome the assaults of doubt and infidelity which have poured ridicule upon it. Interpreted in that way, it not only fails to explain human sin, but it libels, and even cari¬ catures, God. To say that we are born in sin be¬ cause Eve transgressed in Paradise, and that God has condemned us on the ground of that transgres¬ sion, is to confuse every judgment, moral and theo¬ logical. How can the conscience work if it is led into the false position that the fault of a distant an¬ cestor lies at its door? The first condition of a healthy working of the conscience is to feel the re¬ sponsibility for what we have done or left undone ourselves, and to be assured that for this alone we are to give account. How can we understand or love or obey God if we are to suppose that the basis of His dealings with men is an injustice, an arbi¬ trary decree which causes generations of helpless beings to spring out of one mother, all tainted, cor¬ rupted, enfeebled, by her distant, and not very heinous, sin? The God who sanctioned that doctrine of original sin was not, and could not be, be¬ nevolent, just, or moral. Men cannot attribute such a thought to God without seriously injuring them¬ selves. They cannot set up arbitrary injustice on the throne of the universe as the object of devotion and worship without warping their own judgment and hardening their own heart.

But to sweep away the story of Eden on such theo¬ logical grounds is as misguided as to retain it in that misapplied sense. Apart from dogmatic prepos¬ session, any candid reader of Genesis to-day would recognize at once that the story is a myth, and must be used and interpreted as a myth. It cannot be said to claim attention on any other ground. The writer is as well aware of the nature of his story as Plato was in the myth at the end of the “ Gorgias.” When he connects knowledge and the opening of the eyes with the eating of a certain fruit, he avows that he is speaking in allegory. He is not so childish as to suppose that any vegetable product that ever grew on earth could generate our moral nature or endow us with eternal life. When the serpent talks the writer assumes, as H£sop did, that the reader will at once recognize the symbolical character of his story. When God and the serpent and the woman are represented in conversation the writer of that richly significant passage would be horrified if he thought that any one could be childish enough to take him literally. He, like Plato, weaves a myth, perhaps repeats an ancient story, breathing into it a truer and more spiritual meaning. He conveys the truth in a myth because he has no other vehicle in which to convey it. Have we to this day any other, or at least any better, vehicle in which to tell the meaning of man’s moral conflict, its origin and its issue?

“There might be reason in our contemning such tales if by searching we could find out anything better or truer.”

But let us take it as, what it is, a myth, and the story of Adam — or man — and of Eve — or life — becomes not only rich in meaning, but the best and the fullest truth that we have yet discovered on the subject of that mysterious disorder, or disloca¬ tion, in the relation between God and man, which it is the object of human life to overcome. The myth is told so faultlessly in Genesis iii. that it seems presumptuous to retell it. But in order to bring out its character and its truth it may serve a purpose to clothe it in slightly different dress, not better, but more in the fashion of our time. What is the mean¬ ing of our moral nature, and of the struggle, which goes on continually within us, between good and evil ? Is the struggle intelligible ? Has it an origin and an issue? We can partly trace our relation in it to our fellow-men, because the good is largely that which benefits them and the bad is almost wholly what injures them. But what is our relation in this lifelong struggle to powers beyond humanity? Are other intelligences concerned with our victory

IO or defeat? Are we assaulted or aided by them? Is the whole situation — human life as a conflict, a moral development — of value or despicable ? Is the interpretation optimistic or pessimistic? Is Leibnitz or is Nietzsche right ? It is to these essen¬ tial, important, and perennial questions that the myth gives an answer, the best answer that we have yet been able to obtain or to surmise.

There was, we suppose, at the beginning the beast-nature, the serpent, that degree of wisdom which comes to us as the crown of the brute crea¬ tion. The moral nature was not yet; we lived the life of unconscious animals. But the serpent im¬ pels us to make trial of right and wrong. We are driven to the fateful beginnings of the moral life. An instinct in us tells us that in this way alone we come into conscious relation with God. When the woman dared to eat the fateful fruit, and to become the mother of a race engaged in the moral struggle, the myth suggests that she violated the will of God. Did God design for men the unmoral lives of the lower creatures — that sinless, thoughtless rhythm between life and death which Walt Whitman ad¬ mired in the brutes ? Did He wish men, too, not to mourn for their sins or sigh with regrets and aspira¬ tions ? Here is the limitation of the myth, or rather the insoluble riddle of the stuff which the myth is trying to present. God meant man to have the knowledge of good and evil; He meant him to de¬ velop a moral life. And yet, this is the mystery of

II life, we enter upon that higher existence by the dis¬ covery of evil rather than of good. Good emerges first as the victory over evil. It is by an act of dis¬ obedience, not by an act of obedience, that we begin our genuinely human existence.

Here the myth, however mysterious, is more accurate than the most careful analysis which ethics can offer.

Consequently, the moral life begins in shame and the sense of nakedness. God comes upon us, in infancy, and always, as the voice walking in the garden in the cool of the day. It is an accusation and a judgment. Instinctively we try to shift the blame to the woman, and she to the serpent. But conscience disallows the excuses. The guilt is distributed, none escapes his share.

So far the myth presents in picturesque swiftness of detail the mystery of our moral life and relates it to God. The conscience is explained as the voice of God in the soul. The Fall is the assertion of the soul’s independence of God. But the truth is car¬ ried on into the explanation of human life and of its issue. As moral beings we shall gain the goal only by toil and conflict. There is no return to the earthly Paradise of unn loral innocence. “The flame of a sword which turns every way” forbids that easy, but useless, solution of the problem of human life. Man, every man, enters upon a career of achieve¬ ment. The serpent in him is condemned to sub¬ ordination and defeat. Birth is to be difficult and sorrowful. The man that is born of the woman is to work. In the sweat of his brow his earthly life is to be lived and his destiny is to be worked out. This is all good. The subjugated serpent, the pain¬ ful joys of motherhood, the strenuous work for man, this is the lot of humanity when at last it has entered upon its moral conflict. Nor is Adam or Eve re¬ moved from the thoughtful care of God; He made for them “coats of skin and clothed them.”

Thus the myth interprets human life, the life we are called upon to live in the knowledge of good and evil. What more can be said than is here said once for all ? No investigation of our moral nature carries us farther back ; and any theory which leaves God out fails to carry us as far. The decisions of the conscience, the struggle for right against wrong, the suffusion of the human life of pain and toil with the thought of a moral conflict, and of a goal to reach, are only justified in the last resort by faith in God, who ordains and watches the whole. The essential truth is carried home, embodied in this tale. As history it would be confusing and misleading; as a myth it is inspired, it is divine, the thought of God communicated to the intelligence of man.

Sometimes the myth is not so much the expression of the ineffable, which baffles other modes of com¬ munication, as the description of a large and general truth in a compressed or individualized tale. For example, the mediaeval mode of delineating the rela¬ tion of Judaism to Christianity, the life and destiny

I3 of the Jewish people, and their actual place in the society of the time, is to construct, perhaps uncon¬ sciously, the myth of the Wandering Jew. We could not for a moment think of such a person living on from age to age, appearing in countries near and distant. Treated literally, it is an idle tale. But as a myth it is truth. Even the article in the “En¬ cyclopaedia Britannica” on the Jews is not more instructive than this symbolic story which Matthew Paris copied from the chronicles of St. Albans. In the year 1228 “a certain Archbishop of Armenia Major came on a pilgrimage to England to see the relics of the saints and visit the sacred places in the kingdom, as he had done in others; he also pro¬ duced letters of recommendation from his holiness the Pope to the religious men and prelates of the churches.” He went to St. Albans and remained some days to rest himself. In conversation with the brothers he was asked if he had seen or heard any¬ thing of Joseph who had been living when our Lord suffered and was still alive. A knight in the retinue of the Archbishop replied in French: “My lord well knows that man, and a little before he took his way to the Western countries the said Joseph ate. at the table of my lord the Archbishop in Armenia, and he had often seen and held converse with him.” What had passed between Christ and the same Joseph was this: When the Jews were dragging Jesus forth from the judgment-hall, “ Cartaphilus, a porter in Pilate’s service, as Jesus was going out of the door, impiously struck Him on the back with his hand, and said in mockery, ‘Go quicker, Jesus, go quicker; why do you loiter?’

And Jesus, look¬ ing back on him with a severe countenance, said to him, ‘I am going and you will wait for My return.’ And, according as our Lord said, this Cartaphilus is still awaiting His return. At the time of our Lord’s suffering he was thirty years old, and when he attains the age of a hundred years he always returns to the same age as he was when our Lord suffered. After Christ’s death, when the Catholic faith gained ground, this Cartaphilus was baptized by Ananias (who also baptized the Apostle Paul) , and was called Joseph. ... He is a man of holy conversation and religious; a man of few words and circumspect in his behaviour; for he does not speak at all unless when questioned by the bishops and religious men, and then he tells of the events of old times. . . . And all he relates without smiling or levity of con¬ versation, as one who is well practised in sorrow and the fear of God, always looking forward with fear to the coming of Jesus Christ, lest at the Last Judgment he should find Him in anger whom, when on His way to death, he had provoked to just vengeance. Numbers came to him from different parts of the world, enjoying his society and conversa¬ tion; and to them, if they were men of authority, he explained all doubts on the matters on which he was questioned. He refuses all gifts that are offered to him, being content with slight food and clothing.

He places his hope of salvation on the fact that he sinned through ignorance, for the Lord when suffering prayed for His enemies in these words, ‘ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”

The legend assumes many forms in the process of time, as the reader may see, if he chooses, in Mr. Baring-Gould’s “Curious Myths of the Middle Ages,” but seldom or never does it depart from es¬ sential veracity. It follows with careful accuracy, under the form of a single wanderer, the fate of that wandering race out of which Christ came, and which is to wait for His return. It shows how this race on its converted side became the apostle of Christian¬ ity, and on its unconverted side must continue always the most remarkable, though unwilling, testimony to the Christian verities.

A fact so wide and fluctuating as the history of the Jews, a people without a country, yet always retaining a spiritual nationality, a people appearing in all Christian countries, yet not Christian, playing a remarkable part, in persecution or in liberty, pro¬ ducing men of the most varied and surprising genius 1 — such a fact is hard to record in its shifting and scattered details. But that fact is, for practi¬ cal purposes, sufficiently characterized and stamped

1 Mr. Zangwill’s “Children of the Ghetto” sets in a brilliant light the types of men that Judaism produces. Dr. Schechter’s “Studies in Judaism” (A. & C. Black) adds to the store which the novelist has given us.

i6 upon the popular mind by the legend of the Wan¬ dering Jew.

Half a century ago Christendom was greatly disturbed by Strauss’ “Life of Christ.” The argu¬ ment of the book transformed the fact on which Christianity was supposed to rest into a myth. The solid foundation of religion seemed to crumble away. The book was so serious, so reasonable, so plausible, that for a time the thinking world regarded the story of Christ as a mythical creation of a credulous company of enthusiasts. And in the opinion of many Christianity was ipso facto dis¬ solved. The echoes of Strauss’ revolutionary theory are still heard among the less informed opponents of the Christian faith; but the careful discussion of the theory has resulted in its almost complete rejection. A myth takes time to grow, and it demands certain conditions in the minds of those among whom it grows. A myth is not formed about contemporary persons and events, nor does it grow up in an active and aggressive movement of thought. Renan, in his oration on Lesseps, made a fine apostrophe which well embodies this truth: “You were born,” he exclaimed, “to pierce isthmuses, and in earlier times you would have become a myth.” That is the point : a person must lie in a distant past to become mythical ; and the story must shape itself in a long lapse of time, passing from mouth to mouth among naive and uncritical people. The myth, in a word, has its natural history, and we are not entitled to demand a miracle for its production. On investigation Strauss’ theory of the origin of the Christian religion did not stand the test. The myth, if myth it was, had sprung up in the minds of men, like Paul, who were actually contemporaries of Jesus. There was no mist of distance in which the figure could assume mythical proportions. When Paul referred to the resurrection he spoke of numbers of persons still living who had seen the risen Christ. And even if there had been longer time, if, which is impossible, the New Testament literature could all be moved into the second century, and a good hundred years could be interposed between the presumed life and the construction of the story, still the ceaseless activity and strenuous onrush which founded the Churches and shaped the thought of the early Chris¬ tian community do not afford the conditions in which a myth can grow. Granted that legends might accumulate around the name of Jesus, as they undoubtedly did, yet the central fact, the Person, could not be a myth. But the question of interest in the present connection is whether the thought of fifty years ago was right in assuming that the Chris¬ tian religion would have melted away, or ought to have melted away, if Strauss’ view had been con¬ firmed.

Let us suppose for a moment that the Gospel narrative was mythical, and that Jesus Himself was a creation of the mythopceic faculty which resides in human nature. We will assume, as Strauss did, c i8 that the figure and the events were constructed, with a free poetic licence, out of the stories and fore¬ casts of the Old Testament or the current facts and fancies of the time. It will sound to some an absurd, and to others an impious, assumption. But let us exercise forbearance and make it. There never was a Jesus ; the words in His mouth and the deeds which came from His hands are merely the creation of the popular imagination. The death and resurrection are not facts, but ideas clothed in the vivid colours of a story, “truth embodied in a tale.”

Nothing, of course, is more certain than that Christianity, as a historic religion, actually grew out of this supposed myth. Was it not justified in growing out of it ? Did not the myth afford a suffi¬ cient seed of truth to produce a religion, and a true religion? Let us look at it for a moment. First of all there are the moral teachings put into the mouth of Jesus, the ideas and suggestions, for example, of the Sermon on the Mount. This body of teaching, as Wendt has exhaustively shown, is so coherent, so convincing, so essentially true, that it stands by its own weight; it requires no further evidence. The central principle makes the spring of all morality love to God and to man. Morality is distinguished from external ceremonies and obligations ; it is sought and found in the inward state of the soul. The type of character commended is gentle, patient, merciful, pure, beneficent. This morality is iden¬ tified with religion.

Secondly, God is presented as a pure and holy Spirit, siding with, approving of, the right morality

— demanding it, indeed, as the only acceptable ser¬ vice or worship which man can render to Him. Attention is directed to the Spirit of God that wit¬ nesses in the human heart to God, and prayer is enjoined, real and heartfelt prayer, as the means by which God and man communicate.

Lastly, the character and conduct of Jesus are drawn to illustrate these teachings. He is such an One as the teaching commends. He embodies the precepts in Himself. He lives just such a life as one would live who believed that God is such as He taught. In Him religion ceases to be connected with a cultus, or a ritual, a temple, a holy place, a system, an organization of priests; it becomes a life, an inward life, expressing itself in holy activities

— a brave, self-sacrificing life, moving without hesi¬ tation to the death incurred by its fidelity. Thus the death assumes a special significance; it is the death which faultless benevolence and beneficence and obedience to God incur at the hands of men, even of men religious in the older and darker meaning of the word “religion.” The resurrection is added as God’s protest against the mistake of men; for such an one it was not possible that death should be the final issue.