The fundamental idea of Jesus from the beginning was the establishment
of the kingdom of God. But this kingdom of God, as we have already
said, appears to have been understood by Jesus in very different senses.
At times we should take him for a democratic leader desiring only
the triumph of the poor and the disinherited. At other times the kingdom
of God is the literal accomplishment of the apocalyptic visions of
Daniel and Enoch. Lastly, the kingdom of God is often a spiritual
kingdom, and the approaching deliverance is a deliverance of the spirit.
In this last sense the revolution desired by Jesus was the one which
has really taken place -- the establishment of a new worship, purer
than that of Moses. All these thoughts appear to have existed at the
same time in the mind of Jesus. The first one, however -- that of
a temporal revolution -- does not appear to have impressed him much;
he never regarded the earth or the riches of the earth, or material
power, as worth caring for. He had no worldly ambition. Sometimes
by a natural consequence, his great religious importance was in danger
of being converted into mere social importance. Men came requesting
him to judge and arbitrate on questions affecting their material interests.
Jesus rejected these proposals with haughtiness, treating them as
insults. Full of his heavenly ideal, he never abandoned his disdainful
poverty. As to the other two conceptions of the kingdom of God, Jesus
appears always to have held them simultaneously. If he had been only
an enthusiast, led away by the apocalypses on which the popular imagination
fed, he would have remained an obscure sectary, inferior to those
whose ideas he followed. If he had been only a puritan, a sort of
Channing or "Savoyard vicar," he would undoubtedly have been unsuccessful.
The two parts of his system, or, rather, his two conceptions of the
kingdom of God, rest one on the other, and this mutual support has
been the cause of his incomparable success. The first Christians were
dreamers, living in a circle of ideas which we should term visionary;
but, at the same time, they were the heroes of that social war which
has resulted in the enfranchisement of the conscience. and in the
establishment of a religion from which the pure worship, proclaimed
by the founder, will eventually proceed.
The apocalyptic ideas of Jesus, in their most complete form, may
thus be summed up. The existing condition of humanity is approaching
its termination. This termination will be an immense revolution, "an
anguish" similar to the pains of child-birth; a palingenesis, or,
in the words of Jesus himself, a "new birth," preceded by dark calamities
and heralded by strange phenomena. In the great day there will appear
in the heavens the sign of the Son of man: it will be a startling
and luminous vision like that of Sinai, a great storm rending the
clouds, a fiery meteor flashing rapidly from east to west. The Messiah
will appear in the clouds, clothed in glory and majesty, to the
sound of trumpets and surrounded by angels, His disciples will sit
by his side upon thrones. The dead will then arise, and the Messiah
will proceed to judgment.
At this judgment men will be divided into two classes according
to their deeds. The angels will be the executors of the sentences.
The elect will enter into delightful mansions, which have been prepared
for them from the foundation of the world; there they will be seated,
clothed with light, at a feast presided over by Abraham, the patriarchs
and the prophets. They will be the smaller number. The rest will
depart into Gehenna. Gehenna was the western valley of Jerusalem.
There the worship of fire had been practiced at various times, and
the place had become a kind of sewer. Gehenna was, therefore, in
the mind of Jesus, a gloomy, filthy valley, full of fire. Those
excluded from the kingdom will there be burnt and eaten by the never-dying
worm, in company with Satan and his rebel angels. There, there will
be wailing and gnashing of teeth. The kingdom of heaven will be
as a closed room, lighted from within, in the midst of a world of
darkness and torments.
This new order of things will be eternal. Paradise and Gehenna
will have no end. An impassable abyss separates the one from the
other. The Son of man, Seated on the right hand of God, will preside
over this final condition of the world and of humanity.
That all this was taken literally by the disciples and by the
Master himself at certain moments appears clearly evident from the
writings of the time. If the first Christian generation had one
profound and constant belief, it was that the world was near its
end, and that the great "revelation" of Christ was about to take
place. The startling proclamation, "The time is at hand," which
commences and closes the Apocalypse; the incessantly reiterated
appeal, "He that hath ears to hear let him hear!" were the cries
of hope and encouragement for the whole Apostolic age. A Syrian
expression, Mayan atha, "Our Lord cometh!" became a sort of password,
which the believers used among themselves to strengthen their faith
and their hope. The Apocalypse, written in the year 68 of our era,
declares that the end will come in three years and a half. The "Ascension
of Isaiah" adopts a calculation very similar to this.
Jesus never indulged in such precise details. When he was interrogated
as to the time of his advent, he always refused to reply; once even
he declared that the date of this great day was known only by the
Father, who had revealed it neither to the angels nor to the Son.
He said that the time when the kingdom of God was most anxiously
expected was just that in which it would not appear. He constantly
repeated that it would be a surprise, as in the times of Noah and
of Lot; that we must be on our guard, always ready to depart; that
each one must watch and keep his lamp trimmed as for a wedding procession,
which arrives unforeseen; that the Son of man would come like a
thief, at an hour when he would not be expected; that he would appear
as a flash of lightning, running from one end of the heavens to
the other. But his declarations on the neamess of the catastrophe
leave no room for any equivocation. "This generation," said he, "shall
not pass till all these things be fulfilled. There be Some standing
here which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man
coming in his kingdom." He reproaches those who do not believe in
him for not being able to read the signs of the future kingdom. "When
it is evening, ye say, it will be fair weather, for the sky is red.
And in the morning, It will be foul weather to-day, for the sky
is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of
the sky, but can ye not discern the signs of the times? "By an illusion
common to all great reformers, Jesus imagined the end to be much
nearer than it really was; he did not take into account the slowness
of the movements of humanity; he thought to realize in one day that
which, eighteen centuries later, has still to be accomplished.
These formal declarations preoccupied the Christian family for
nearly seventy years. It was believed that some of the disciples
would see the day of the final revelation before dying. John, in
particular, was considered as being of this number; many believed
that he would never die. Perhaps this was a later opinion suggested
towards the end of the first century, by the advanced age which
John seems to have reached; this age having given rise to the belief
that God wished to prolong his life indefinitely until the great
day, in order to realize the words of Jesus. However this may be,
at his death the faith of many was shaken, and his disciples attached
to the prediction of Christ a more subdued meaning.
At the same time that Jesus fully admitted the Apocalyptic beliefs,
such as we find them in the apocryphal Jewish books, he admitted
the doctrine, which is the complement, or rather the condition,
of them all -- namely, the resurrection of the dead. This doctrine,
as we have already said, was still somewhat new in Israel: a number
of people either did not know it, or did not believe it. It was
the faith of the Pharisees, and of the fervent adherents of the
Messianic beliefs. Jesus accepted it unreservedly, but always in
the most idealistic sense. Many imagined that in the resuscitated
world they would eat, drink, and marry. Jesus, indeed, admits into
his kingdom a new passover a table, and a new wine; but he expressly
excludes marriage from it. The Sadducees had on this subject an
apparently coarse argument, but one which was really in conformity
with the old theology. It will be remembered that, according to
the ancient sages, man survived only in his children. The Mosaic
code had consecrated this patriarchal theory by a strange institution,
the levirate law. The Sadducees drew from thence subtle deductions
against the resurrection. Jesus escaped them by formally declaring
that in the life eternal there would no longer exist differences
of sex, and that men would be like the angels. Sometimes he seems
to promise resurrection only to the righteous, the punishment of
the wicked consisting in complete annihilation. Oftener, however,
Jesus declares that the resurrection shall bring eternal confusion
to the wicked.
It will be seen that nothing in all these theories was absolutely
new. The Gospels and the writings of the Apostles scarcely contain
anything as regards apocalyptic doctrines but what might be found
already in "Daniel," "Enoch," and the "Sibylline Oracles," of Jewish
origin. Jesus accepted the ideas, which were generally received
among his contemporaries. He made them his basis of action, or rather
one of his bases; for he had too profound an idea of his true work
to establish it solely upon such fragile principles -- principles
so liable to be decisively refuted by facts.
It is evident, indeed, that such a doctrine, taken by itself
in a literal manner, had no future. The world, in continuing
to exist, caused it to crumble. One generation of man at the
most was the limit of its endurance. The faith of the first Christian
generation is intelligible, but the faith of the second generation
is no longer so. After the death of John, or of the last survivor,
whoever he might be, of the group which had seen the Master,
the word of Jesus was convicted of falsehood. If the doctrine
of Jesus had been simply belief in an approaching end of the
world, it would certainly now be sleeping in oblivion. What is
it, then, which has saved it? The great breadth of the Gospel
conceptions, which has permitted doctrines suited to very different
intellectual conditions to be found under the same creed. The
world has not ended, as Jesus announced, and as his disciples
believed. But it has been renewed, and in one sense renewed as
Jesus desired. It is because his thought was two-sided that it
has been fruitful. His chimera has not had the fate of so many
others which have crossed the human mind, because it concealed
a germ of life which, having been introduced, thanks to the covering
of fable, into the bosom of humanity, has thus brought forth
eternal fruits.
And let us not say that this is a benevolent interpretation,
imagined in order to clear the honor of our great Master from
the cruel contradiction inflicted on his dreams by reality, No,
no; this true kingdom of God, this kingdom of the spirit, which
makes each one king and priest; this kingdom which, like the
grain of mustard seed, has become a tree which overshadows the
world, and amid whose branches the birds have their nests, was
understood, wished for, and founded by Jesus. By the side of
the false, cold, and impossible idea of an ostentatious advent,
he conceived the real city of God, the true "palingenesis," the
Sermon on the Mount, the apotheosis of the weak, the love of
the people, regard for the poor, and the reestablishment of all
that is humble, true, and simple. This reestablishment he has
depicted as an incomparable artist, by features which will last
eternally. Each of us owes that which is best in himself to him.
Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second
coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these
were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true
that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it,
since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained
him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?
We must, then, attach several meanings to the divine city conceived
by Jesus. If his only thought had been that the end of time was
near, and that we must prepare for it, he would not have surpassed
John the Baptist. To renounce a world ready to crumble, to detach
one's self little by little from the present life, and to aspire
to the kingdom about to come, would have formed the gist of his
preaching. The teaching of Jesus had always a much larger scope.
He proposed to himself to create a new state of humanity, and
not merely to prepare the end of that which was in existence.
Elias or Jeremiah, reappearing in order to prepare men for the
supreme crisis, would not have preached as he did. This is so
true that this morality, attributed to the latter days, is found
to be the eternal morality, that which has saved humanity. Jesus
himself in many cases makes use of modes of speech which do not
accord with the apocalyptic theory. He often declares that the
kingdom of God has already commenced; that every man bears it
within himself; and can, if he be worthy, partake of it; that
each one silently creates this kingdom by the true conversion
of the heart. The kingdom of God at such times is only the highest
form of good. A better order of things than that which exists,
the reign of justice, which the faithful, according to their
ability, ought to help in establishing; or, again, the liberty
of the soul, something analogous to the Buddhist "deliverance," the
fruit of the soul's separation from matter and absorption in
the divine essence. These truths, which are purely abstract to
us were living realities to Jesus. Everything in his mind was
concrete and substantial. Jesus, of all men, believed most thoroughly
in the reality of the ideal.
In accepting the Utopias of his time and his race, Jesus thus
was able to make high truths of them, thanks to the fruitful
misconceptions of their import. His kingdom of God was no doubt
the approaching a Apocalypse, which was about to be unfolded
in the heavens. But it was still, and probably above all the
kingdom of the soul, founded on liberty and on the filial sentiment
which the virtuous man feels when resting on the bosom of his
Father. It was a pure religion, without forms, without temple,
and without priest; it was the moral judgment of the world, delegated
to the conscience of the just man, and to the arm of the people.
This is what was designed to live; this is what has lived. When,
at the end of a century of vain expectation, the materialistic
hope of a near end of the world was exhausted, the true kingdom
of God became apparent. Accommodating explanations throw a veil
over the material kingdom, which was then seen to be incapable
of realization. The Apocalypse of John, the chief Canonical book
of the New Testament, being too formally tied to the idea of
an immediate catastrophe, became of secondary importance, was
held to be unintelligible, tortured in a thousand ways, and almost
rejected. At least, its accomplishment was adjourned to an indefinite
future. Some poor benighted ones, who, in a fully enlightened
age, still preserved the hopes of the first disciples, became
heretics (Ebionites, Millenarians) lost in the shallows of Christianity.
Mankind had passed to another kingdom of God. The degree of truth
contained in the thought of Jesus had prevailed over the chimera
which obscured it.
Let us not, however, despise this chimera, which has been the
thick rind of the sacred fruit on which we live. This fantastic
kingdom of heaven, this endless pursuit after a city of God,
which has constantly preoccupied Christianity during its long
career, has been the principle of that great instinct of futurity
which has animated all reformers, persistent believers in the
Apocalypse, from Joachim of Flora down to the Protestant sectary
of our days. This impotent effort to establish a perfect society
has been the source of the extraordinary tension which has always
made the true Christian an athlete struggling against the existing
order of things. The idea of the "kingdom of God," and the Apocalypse,
which is the complete image of it, are thus, in a sense, the
highest and most poetic expressions of human progress. But they
have necessarily given rise to great errors. The end of the world,
suspended as a perpetual menace over mankind, was, by the periodical
panics which it caused during centuries, a great hindrance to
all secular development. Society, being no longer certain of
its existence, contracted therefrom a degree of trepidation,
and those habits of servile humility, which rendered the Middle
Ages so inferior to ancient and modern times. A profound change
had also taken place in the mode of regarding the coming of Christ.
When it was first announced to mankind that the end of the world
was about to come, like the infant which receives death with
a smile, it experienced the greatest access of joy that it has
ever felt. But, in growing old, the world became attached to
life. The day of grace, so long expected by the simple souls
of Galilee, became to these iron ages a day of wrath: Dies irae,
dies illa! But, even in the midst of barbarism, the idea of the
kingdom of God continued fruitful. in spite of the feudal church,
of sects, and of religious orders, holy persons continued to
protest, in the name of the Gospel, against the iniquity of the
world. Even in our days, troubled days, in which Jesus has no
more authentic followers than those who seem to deny him, the
dreams of an ideal organization of society, which have so much
analogy with the aspirations of the primitive Christian sects,
are only in one sense the blossoming of the same idea. They are
one of the branches of that immense tree in which germinates
all thought of a future, and of which the "kingdom of God" will
be eternally the root and stem. All the social revolutions of
humanity will be grafted on this phrase. But, tainted by a coarse
materialism, and aspiring to the impossible -- that is to say,
to found universal happiness upon political and economical measures
-- the "socialist" attempts of our time will remain unfruitful,
until they take as their rule the true spirit of Jesus, I mean
absolute idealism -- the principle that, in order to possess
the world, we must renounce it.
The phrase, "kingdom of God," expresses also, very happily, the want which the soul experiences of a supplementary destiny, of a compensation for the present life. Those who do not accept the definition of man as a compound of two substances, and who regard the Deistical dogma of the immortality of the soul as in contradiction with physiology, love to fall back upon the hope of a final reparation, which, under an unknown form, shall satisfy the wants of the heart of man. Who knows if the highest term of progress after millions of ages may not evoke the absolute conscience of the universe, and in this conscience the awakening of all that has lived? A sleep of a million of years is not longer than the sleep of an hour. St. Paul, on this hypothesis, was right in saying, In ictu oculi! It is certain that moral and virtuous humanity will have its reward, that one day the ideas of the poor but honest man will judge the world, and on that day the ideal figure of Jesus will be the confusion of the frivolous who have not believed in virtue, and of the selfish who have not been able to attain to it. The favorite phrase of Jesus continues, therefore, full of an eternal beauty. A and of exalted divination seems to have maintained it in a vague sublimity, embracing at the same time various orders of truths.
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