Theosophy - Was Jesus a Perfect Man? by F.D. - as published in the magazine "The New Light" and reprinted in "Theosophical Siftings" afterwards
WAS JESUS A PERFECT MAN?
by F.D.
Published originally in "The
New Light" in
1888
reprinted from “Theosophical
Siftings” Volume 1 -
[Page
3] Was
Jesus a perfect man ? has been asked and answered by
so many writers who refused to take into account that
which alone can explain his whole nature and spirituality,
that the question ought to be asked by one who accepts
his spirituality as the sole key to the nature of the
man, without accepting any of the tenets of Christian
belief. Jesus can only be measured by his own measure — the
spirit. That the assumption of divinity can give no
result satisfactory to human reason (and the highest
human reason must always be enlightened by the spirit),
the endless controversies among Christians themselves,
and among those judging outside the realm of free reason,
have made so plain, that the question of placing Jesus
in a rational light has become the question
of modern religious controversy. Whether I am capable
of dealing with this question in a final, or even satisfactory
way, is a mere detail. May others, more capable, bestow
their best thought upon it, for the subject richly
deserves it.
All
men are divine. Every human being is divine to me. If
I offend a costermonger I offend that which is divine
in the costermonger. I offend that which is divine in
me, and I am punished in regret and sorrow. Therefore,
to a spiritually-minded man, it is almost impossible to offend
any man — that
is, to give true offence. In this sense, Jesus was divine,
only more so than most other men. If he had been God
in the flesh, his example would be worthless to me. If
he overcame temptations by Godlike powers, I, who have
no such powers, cannot look to him as my moral explanation.
If the Matterhorn, with its 14,000 feet of rock uplifted
above the level of the sea, were a pyramid with almost
perpendicular smooth sides, no man would think of climbing
to its summit. If some man with supernatural powers could
climb up to the very top, the Matterhorn would still be inaccessible
to any mortal climber. The Matterhorn of moral perfection
would be unassailable. But when we take Jesus as a man,
overcoming temptations by the powers of a divinely-gifted
nature, he becomes at once our great brother. I can then
imitate [Page
4] him as thousands
have done, and it is an open question with me whether or
not thousands have not been as good as he was. But perfection
is only with the spirit.
Whence comes it that every Christian
regards Jesus as a perfect man ? The explanation is easy.
Every Christian, as every other man, possesses something
which in itself is perfect; that is, the spirit. The spirit
is above criticism, being itself the criterion of criticism,
and of everything else besides. Looking, therefore, at Jesus
only with the spiritual eye, seeing him only in the spirit,
the Christian can see in him no shortcomings. He is even
forbidden to perceive them; and if, by a free use of common-sense,
he should happen to find some glaring defects, he would excuse
them on the ground that spirit is above every law. Spirit
is allowed to contravene every human consideration. But,
clearly, humanity cannot allow that. If humanity once granted
an exception to one of its units, there would be no end to
exceptions, and it would become impossible to establish any
law, human or divine, as binding on everybody. The Christian
is debarred from judging Jesus in any other than a spiritual
sense, and such a judgment leaves nothing whatever which
the other human faculties could seize upon. The brook does
not criticise the spring; cloud does not criticise the ocean;
odour does not criticise the rose; beauty does not criticise
the landscape; light does not criticise the sun; the sun
does not criticise his maker. But suppose that there are
men who, having also drank from this eternal fountain, had
also received, without Jesus, and outside Jesus, the assurance
of the divine spirit, what then ? Will such men bow down
before Jesus as God, knowing that they owe nothing to him
? Can they see anything more in him than a vessel like themselves,
into which the same spirit was poured ? Will they not be
allowed to sift out, in the life of Jesus, that which was
of earth, earthy, from that which was heaven-born ? Especially
when they see millions of men born blind, who, in their blindness,
are barring the way to those who can see; when they surround
with deep trenches the temple of truth and allow no one to
enter who will not sacrifice his common-sense to an illusion.
Is it not time that this should cease ? Shall the Carlyles
and the Emersons remain forever the Johns in the wilderness
? Is it not time that some one should come baptising, not
in the murky waters of Christian theology, but in the spirit
of truth and common-sense ? I know there are thousands waiting
in every church, bishops among others, for some one to utter
the first bold word. Millions are waiting outside the churches,
of those united long ago to their God by common-sense.
Ralph
Waldo Emerson, a man whose whole mind-life centred
in his spirit; who never wrote and taught anything that
was not in strict keeping with the spirit; who knew
the human heart, the laws of thought, the relations between
spirit and matter, better than any man living, states
in the most unequivocal language that Jesus was a man,
open to criticism, and who
[Page
5] fell
short, as such, from the perfection which blind belief
credits him with. In one of his incomparable Essays, he says: “Each
exaggeration of all fine characters arises from the fact
that we identify each in turn with the soul. But there
are no such men as we fable; no Jesus, nor Pericles, nor
Caesar, nor Angelo, nor Washington, such as we have made.
We consecrate a good deal of nonsense, because it was allowed
by great men. There is none without his foibles”.
I don't care a straw whether Emerson's
dictum is accepted as absolute truth or not, but I know this,
that it is accepted as such by almost every thinking man
in the land, and will be so accepted by steadily growing
numbers of men. I could cite hundreds of passages in the
writings of Emerson (the above being rather a “mild” one),
and Emerson will be, for ages to come, the deepest, the truest,
the most divinely gifted of all modern moral philosophers
or mind-readers. What Carlyle objectively taught in his grand
delineations of historical characters and in the unfolding
of universal laws in contemporary and past history, Emerson
treated subjectively as coming fresh from the pure source
of all life, the spiritual revelation. Whether even a Carlyle
would have been equal to such a task is extremely doubtful.
Carlyle would not emancipate himself from the necessity of
colouring his pictures. They never left the creating mind
without the shadows of a troubled soul. Emerson's pictures
are light itself, colourless, with just such outlines as
the necessity of articulation imposes upon every writer.
Even Goethe is below Emerson in this respect. Goethe wandered
far and wide, and placed his mind in almost every focus from
which human brains have sent forth their ideas of life; nor
was the spirit unknown to Goethe; but he dealt with it as
an artist, for the production of his master-pieces, but not
as the starting-point of all life; and certainly it cannot
be said of Goethe that his own life rose above a mere acquiescence
in this, the first and last appeal in all human endeavour.
A
perfect man is an impossibility. If we dissect man, if
we look at every man noted in any department of life, whether
in religion, philosophy poetry, language, science, war,
teaching, art, handicraft, civil office, we never find
man perfect in any of these branches, no matter how high
his excellency may be. There never has been a perfect religious
teacher (even Buddha seems to overshoot the mark by making
too little of this world). [“Seems”
is the right word to use; such overshooting of the mark being
made apparent only in Buddha’s exoteric teachings [T.P.S.]
Perfectibility was always possible, and every one attaining
excellency in any branch of art, science, or ethics, which
nature led him to cultivate, has always been found wanting
in some, or in all the other, developments of human capacity.
Men have never been more than excellent in one, or two, perhaps
three, different [Page
6] directions,
and this excellency always was attained at the cost of other
faculties. Buddha, whom I hold to be the ideal moral philosopher,
not as much as tried his hand in other fields of human endeavour;
Alexander was a great general, and a ruler of men, in none
of these the best, and lamentably deficient in moral soundness;
Caesar was both, and an author to boot, but overshot the
mark in his contempt for men; the saints neglected everything
except the salvation of their own souls, which was in itself
sublime egoism; Martin Luther was a staunch German
bourgeois reformer; yet far from any originality,
he borrowed his religious views from other men, and coloured
them in the Teutonic light, which is not a universal light;
Calvin carried into perfection a jaundiced reading of the
dead letter, and overlooked the spirit. The greatest philosophers
could never do anything more than carry the human thought
a little further than usual, leaving it to their successors
to do no more than they had done. Napoleon was beaten by
raw Prussian recruits and the fishings of the English press
gang. Shakespeare is not so great that a greater one is
not possible, and his works are full of mistakes, small
ones, it is true. Richelieu had only the cunning of genius,
and imagined the earth was revolving around France. Pitt,
a greater man than Richelieu, sacrificed to his ideal,
England and the happiness of England's sons. Bismarck suppresses
the just aspirations of large classes of his countrymen;
Gladstone seeks the Divine spirit in Acts of Parliament
and Articles of Convocation. Thus it will be seen that
the greatest men are not even perfect in their specialities,
in those developments of human nature forced on the individual
through the whole bent of his being; that is to say, man
is imperfect even in those things which he can do best.
But what would any of these men have been in some other
field of human activity ? What would Gladstone be as a
railway conductor, Bismarck as a citizen, with just one
vote; what would Napoleon have been as a lieutenant, Carlyle
as a bank clerk, Emerson as an hotel-keeper, Pitt as a
letter carrier, Richelieu as a curate in a little village,
Luther as a large proprietor with plenty of wine and music,
the saints as farm labourers and factory hands, Alexander
as a groom, or the strong man among a troupe of acrobats,
Buddha as an English parish minister, and Jesus as a member
of the Board of Poor Law Guardians? Each and all would
have been complete failures, and their biographers would
have been compelled to admit that A B or C were great in
X, but very small in K, that is to say, they were not perfect
men. They could only be great in some things in order to
be small in some other thing. But a perfect man is perfect
in everything; he is perfect in every relation of life.
Especially are we disposed to look for something very near
perfection in men pretending to be the true guides of humanity
in moral conduct. A man assuming such an office must disarm
criticism at the outset and keep before his mind not only
the temper and inclinations and [Page
7] knowledge
of the men composing a small and insignificant nation,
but he must be able to overlook all contemporary and all
future nations. Jesus ought to have understood the influences
shaping human dispositions and establishing mental conditions,
not only of a handful of simple-minded Jews, but of all
the Jews, the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the
Romans, the Teutons, the Celts, the Hindus, the Chinese,
etc., of his own time, as well as the mental development
of the later French, Italians, Germans, Russians, English,
Americans, and of all nations whatever which shall fill
this earth. That this is utterly impossible needs no
demonstration, and that Jesus could, therefore, be no trustworthy
guide for man in all his legitimate
moral expansion is plain enough. But as no man could
have this universal knowledge, a universal moral teacher
should have at least a complete knowledge of the human
heart, which at the time of Jesus had certainly attained
such a growth that it could serve as a model for an immeasurable
future. Did Jesus possess this knowledge ? By no means.
His teaching denies it. He fell far short of the knowledge
common among the Greek philosophers, the wise men among
the Hindus and Chinese; and the later philosophers, those
of the Middle Ages and our own time, have one and all followed
paths independent of the concept of Jesus, and have in
the heart of their hearts always looked upon Jesus as a
man bereft of the gift of very high reason, as a man swayed
wholly and solely by one idea, which would,
if carried out, unpeople this earth within the space
of 100 years, and frustrate the aim of creation itself.
The spirit in such a volume would be much too powerful
for this earth, which demands millions of years of slow
development, of an exceedingly slow ripening towards
greater spiritual development. To this overpowering might
of the spirit in the heart of Jesus must be ascribed his
unmeasured, illogical denunciation of the Pharisees and
Sadducees, of the rich, of the Jews in general, of his
anger in driving out the money-changers from the temple,
his unnecessary harshness towards his family, and it was
the cause of all his suffering and his cruel death. This
death, the death of a martyr, is altogether unnecessary
for the stamping of a truth. Truth of every kind must have
a mathematical certainty, and the death of the discoverer
of such a truth provesabsolutelynothing. If a hundred-thousand men had died
for the truths in the multiplication table, the multiplication
table would not be truer than it is. Buddha had no
need to die for the truth he found; the truth did
not kill him, but he died of old age. It is in the
nature of truth that it prolongs life, and a truth
which kills is always only a truth allied to human
self-will and stubbornness. To consider this self-will
necessary to the safety and vitality of an eternal
truth is sheer nonsense. Truth is independent of all
such helps; they are at the best only miserable crutches.
If Emerson had, at one time of his life, denied everything
he wrote, it would still have remained true; Galileo
was found to deny the [Page
8] truth;
and the truth was not in the least affected by such
a denial, and only branded its tormentors with eternal
infamy. If Socrates met with something of a similar
fate as Jesus, he also was one of those one-sided men
who take their views of things as heaven-sent gospels,
and neglect the nearest obligations of blood for the
one idea which possesses them. In this, they are certainly
not perfect, and cannot serve as examples. They are
always law-breakers, and the eternal law finally brings
them to grief. Jesus acted as if he held this Universe
in his hand, and the Divine Silence crushed his body.
With the temper and knowledge of a Plato, he would
have remained unmolested; he would have expostulated
with the Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes; he would
have gathered a few learned meditative men around him
instead of ignorant, obscure individuals, who, without
the help of scholars, would never have done anything
for the spread of Christianity. They were only superior
in the capacity of unquestioned belief, and this capacity
has in our own time told rather heavily against the
religion of masonry, gothic windows, and high steeples.
It is no more than befitting that a religion founded
for little children and the simple-minded should be
rejected by men, by the Rousseaus and Voltaires, by
the Fredericks and Goethes, the Carlyles and Emersons,
and should be accepted by the churches cum grano
salis;
being unserviceable in its raw state and useful only
after due plastering and doctoring to suit “the
ever-growing requirements of the age”. In the
frantic Salvationist, who gives his heart to Jesus,
we have an object lesson of what first Christianity
must have been. These attempts to convert the world
by doing violence to the unchangeable, immutable laws
of the universe have all come to naught, and while
there still flow out from the seas of eternity such
wavelets of spirit as man can hold (more would kill
him) it is mere madness to hasten the reign of the
spirit by human cunning, as if the sun needed this
or that ray of light, or as if eternity needed “General” Booth
and brass buttons for its helpers.
I
shall now proceed to a closer examination of the differences
between Jesus and the Pharisees. Who were the Pharisees
? According to the best sources we have, they were, like
everything else under the sun, the necessary evolution
of thought (taking the name as representing ideas) in a
certain direction. Given the Mosaic law with its innumerable
prescriptions of forms of worship, and of observances even
in ordinary life, tying man to his Jehovah, it would follow
as certainly as the fungus follows certain atmospheric
conditions, that a set of men should lay particular stress
upon such formalities, and should finally consider them
as all-important. Man always wants a visible object to
handle in order to fulfil his spiritual obligation, and
forgets the latter in an amazingly short time. But is it
right to anathematise this fungus of the human mind ?
Is there any other way left than the removal of the conditions
under which the [Page
9] fungus
grows ? Is there any sense in anathematising the fungus
? Was there any sense in anathematising the Pharisees ? They
were still a great deal better than those who denied altogether
that there was a God in Israel, that there had been a divinely-gifted
law-giver, that man needed a better guide than the whisperings
of animal nature. Even Jesus found true disciples among
the Pharisees, and one of them, Paul, afterwards did more
for the spread of the Gospels than all the other Apostles
combined. But we of our own time, we Aryans who refuse altogether
the Semitic concepts of man and God, of sin, sacrifice, and
redemption — we can go a step further and
explain the whole hollowness of Pharisaical
and Messianic presumption. They all have their reason,
and being in that fatal, fundamental error of putting the
whole Universe on a wrong plane, an inclined plane upon which
they are found gliding down into nothingness, into the seas
of time. This Universe was not created on the Mosaic idea,
with no foresight worth speaking of; it was not created
in obedience to a whim, followed by the regret and destructive
rage of a blind God; we even blaspheme when we speak of any
intention at all. What the wisest men have ever known about
it, and what they ever will know about it, leaves them nothing
but silent adoration and unspeakable love! It leaves them
with a childlike trust that it is all for the best. No more
does a child encircling with its tender arms the mother's
neck establish any belief or philosophy about the wisdom
and foresight of his mother, and her terrible punitive power,
than the true man, the Aryan, childlike and brave, pesters
the Universe with impertinent questions! He takes in childlike
faith what he gets, and he asks no more. It was left to the
apocryphal Moses and the non-apocryphal Pharisees to explain
the riddle of the Sphinx in the childhood of the human race.
It now remains to be seen whether the grown man will accept
the solution of this riddle from the baby's mouth. A baby
may well say: “Mama, I seen Dod”. The sensible
mother kisses the child and says nothing. No doubt the child
has “seen
Dod”, just in the
same way as everyone sees God in innumerable ways.
But if the baby were to establish it as the never-changing
law that all human beings were to look upon his “Dod” as
the true God, baby would find very few listeners. Yet the
same thing is constantly attempted by theologians. The Pharisees
saw their “Dod”, which was not the God of Jesus,
and so they fell foul of each other. No doubt the God of
Jesus had more of vitality in it than the Dod of the Pharisees,
but, as the best of all Gods has always been a God of love
and mercy, he would not have used such harsh language to
the Dod of the baby-Pharisees, nor would he have called
them vipers, whitened sepulchres, nor would he have threatened
them with eternal damnation, but would have tried to
reason with those babes, who were rather large, wide-awake
babes, and had considerable reasoning power in them. Socrates
was somewhat wiser in this, but not [Page
16] much,
and Plato, I think, wiser than all (Buddha excepted,
who would never have spoken to a fool), because he would
not have spoken to babes of things they could not understand.
To sum up, the Pharisees produced a God with the Mosaic
law, as the lantern sending its rays of grossly coloured
light through the minds of law-and-order men — men
who reasoned about the unknown things in the same way
as a London cheesemonger reasons on his stock and customers.
Jesus was different from them, for he was moved by the
spirit, which human language always fails to interpret
in an objective sense, and he was driven to use symbolical
language. He could not get over this; he entirely failed,
as everyone since has failed, to convince the poor man
that he is a rich man, that he has got something which
the poor man knows he has not; and instead of getting
angry about it and calling the Pharisees bad names, he
ought to have tried to find a dozen such men as John,
spiritual men, who could understand him. The Christianity
which the emotional masons and shoemakers founded has
all along been a sort of Donnybrook fair, and only here
and there could be found a spiritually-minded man who
prevented this mad humanity from going to wreck altogether.
Jesus had the true spirit, but unfortunately he was a
Jew. Feeling possessed of a power which he could see
was foreign to nearly all around him, a power which always
leaves the possessor with a sense of superhuman strength,
he, as a Jew, conceived the fatal idea that he was the
promised Messiah, the son of God, that God was his father
in every sense of the term (I wish to leave the question
of bodily descent open), he cast in this self-created
mould a whole system of salvation, bliss and damnation;
started to prophesy, in all of which he has appeared
since as a deluded mortal. His prophecies, couched in
the most positive terms, have not been fulfilled; salvation
and redemption have not come; the millennium can only
come in the natural way of evolution, which is an exceedingly
slow process; but this is true, and in this Jesus has
been right, that some kind of a millennium is coming — a
millennium with better physical health and sanitary arrangements;
with extended knowledge; with railways, telegraphs and
telephones; with man's increased and finally almost
complete power over nature; with more wisdom, and a wider
diffusion and knowledge of the spirit eternal which will
enlighten man's understanding, and remove from him the
temptations of the flesh, as belonging to beasts, and
not to the divinely gifted man. In this sense, that of
moral purity, Jesus will always be the glory of the human
race; and it will come to pass then when men shall feel
tempted to cry over his fate, they will embrace in the
same wide sweep of sympathy all his enemies, the Pharisees
and Sadducees, Pilate and the mob, because they all ate
also our brothers, and any individual man always is and
always has been the whole universe in himself. The spirit
is always right, even in such a dangerous field as prophecy;
and it is always safe to prophesy the downfall of nations
who [Page
11] live
only after the lusts of the flesh. But, clearly, Jesus
was only a partial, and not a perfect man.
The
Sadducees, who likewise could not please Jesus, interest
me chiefly on account of their numerous disciples in our
own time. Jesus, who was a thorough sceptic in almost everything
pertaining to Mosaic form traditions, used milder language
in opposition to the sceptics of his time, the Sadducees.
When I wish to enter a restaurant to appease my hunger,
the man who blocks the door is always a greater nuisance
to me than the man who merely stands in the street. Him
I can avoid, but the man standing in the door I must politely
ask to let me pass. If he should not let me pass, and there
were no other way left to satisfy my hunger than to enter
this particular restaurant, I should have to call a policeman
or use violence. Jesus used violence in regard to this
man blocking the door to paradise, but to those merely
standing in the street he appealed with more reason and
not so much “denunciation”. He felt more of pity
for them than hatred — the hatred born of truth opposed
to falsehood. I fully sympathise with the Sadducees. Having
nothing before them save an array of senseless forms, seeing
no earthly reason in the whole supernatural arrangements,
they were compelled to disbelieve — or to abandon human
reason. It was not their fault that they could not see with
our eyes. They lived 2,000 years ago, among a religious people
whose religious ideals never left the domain of book-keeping
and double entry, with whom it was a matter of credit and
debit, and their God was not altogether a creditor but also
a debtor, bound to pay his debts, only he was permitted to
have his own way of doing so. A Sadducee, thinking of such
subjects as the resurrection, judged of it in the same matter-of-fact
way as a modern teamster or street lecturer, and their mental
status must be considered as on a par with these our living
fellow men. I think most Christians ought to have some higher
concepts than these, as Jesus certainly has not failed to
treat the question in a spiritual sense. If he is not understood
by the Christians themselves it is not his fault. Not being
a Christian, I have no trouble in understanding it, and all
the objections of freethinkers fall flat. At the same time
I hold with Emerson that the question of immortality is not
susceptible of popular treatment. Nothing is so certain as
a certain aspect of immortality — that is, its reality;
but the spirit does not like to deal with it. It is like
the sunbeam deserting the sun. The Sadducees, the knowing
ones in their own estimation, were the worst babies of the
Jewish family. The Pharisee baby tried at least to please
his mother, but the Sadducee baby simply said: “It
is no use. Had he gone a step further he might have arrived
at a more spiritual conception of man's relation to the unseen,
and would have become a disciple. This possibility had something
to do with the milder treatment they received from Jesus.
The modern Sadducee stands just in the same predicament. [Page
12] By diving
a little deeper, by studying more earnestly the Carlyles
and Emersons, he might catch a glimpse of a world which does
not at present exist for him. In the writings of the Apostles
we find the name Sadducee mentioned merely as a melancholy
echo; there is always a tinge of sadness in it; a conviction
that they are only blind, but not bad children, shines through
everything connected with the name and substance of unbelief.
But
in nothing was Jesus so incomprehensible as in his opposition
towards the rich. When I consider that the idea of property
lies in the very core of the Mosaic idea of creation, the
position of man as a moral factor or, better, victim, tilling
his acre by divine ordinance and sacrificing a part of
his acquired property; when I consider that the patriarchs
were taught to look upon property, when it assumed the
proportion of riches, as a blessing of Jehovah; when I
consider that in the grandest poetic book of the Old Testament,
the book of Job, the idea of property is the material hinge
upon which the relation between God and Job turns; when
I come to think of the Mosaic law, built upon the very
sanctity of property, introducing indeed a few checks here
and there to dangerous accumulations; when I see that
in all the dealings of Jehovah with the chosen people,
property is the never-snapping pivot, around which everything
not of a strictly spiritual nature revolves, and sacrifice
makes property the corner stone of the relation of man
to God; when I consider that possession, to be rich, has
been ingrained from the beginning in the Hebrew character
and has been its stamp ever since, the science of getting
rich being among the Jews much older than their religion:
the hatred of riches as shown by Jesus is marvellous and
leaves one in doubt as to his sanity of mind. It is only
explicable on the theory that his belief in a near millennium
had all the power of positive knowledge. Property would
have been of no use in the millennium, and man's attachment
to property was the greatest hindrance in converting him,
even a greater hindrance than the cast-iron righteousness
of the Pharisees. Jesus was thus led to look upon riches
as the prime evil, and gave vent to opinions which the
good sense of mankind, believing Christians included, utterly
refused to make a law. The rich man of our time, if he
is a Christian — and there are plenty such — simply
denies the authority of his God, and I do not wish to put
into plain language what the rich man thinks about him.
At any rate it is the hugest compromise between matter
and spirit in this world and deserves to be fairly treated.
That the Jewish idea of property and riches is universal
is evident. That the organisation of man into communities,
into mutually dependent factors, would give to the stronger
more property than to the weaker, is the experience of
mankind and seems to be the universal rule. Being a universal
rule, it must rest on a universal law. Wherever a philosopher
has undertaken to think about property he never could [Page
13] arrive
at any other conclusion than this: that the right of holding
property was the very basis of all human society, and that
it was impossible to prevent some from getting rich except
by reducing man to a State-slave. The smallest amount of
liberty would always bring property as naturally as a sponge
will absorb water. Going further and studying the effects
of property upon society, every thinker found that it was
property which made everything possible that enlightens
life. Property is the material mother of all science and
arts, and, by their aid, of every higher religion. The
Christian churches, one and all, have always accepted the
universal verdict about property, and have acted upon it,
paying not the slightest heed to the terrible warnings
of their nominal founder. It is interesting to note the
similarity of the doctrine of Jesus with the Buddhistic
ideal. Buddha commanded his disciples, the mendicants,
to disown all property except a few articles of clothing,
and a wooden bowl for begging. This spiritual hierarchy
of Buddhistic saints should have no material relation with
this world other than the urgent needs of animal existence
required. But such rules only applied to this body of teachers,
who should show by their own examples — always the
best mode of teaching — the shortest way to Nirvana.
For the other classes of men Buddha only had his incomparable
moral law, which placed every man in possession of the
necessary knowledge to find his way to deliverance. Buddha
did not curse, he did not close the gates of paradise to
anybody. One rather concludes from his teaching that the
salvation, the final purification of everything bearing
the mark of man, and of a divine descent, was the universal
law, and logical thinking can lead to no other conclusion.
But, while Buddha only formulated a universal law upon
the keenest philosophical reasoning, Jesus at once shut
the gates of heaven upon the whole most worthy and advanced
portion of mankind. The answer of mankind has been equivocation,
contempt, and ridicule. In our time Jesus with his denunciation
of the rich finds a willing echo only among those who understand
the nature of universal laws as well as he did himself.
It is clear that a moral teacher can never do more than
deal with the “abuse of property”, and this
he must do on the authority of a mathematically correct, i.e.,
a spiritual and therefore for the evil-doer more terrible
law. Such a law sanctions much that reformers strive for,
but it stops short of spoliation or of damming up the streams
of human energy. The spirit is the natural antagonist of
matter, but as the moral law would be objectless without
matter, and property is this matter, the two antagonistic
forces, spirit and property, make up the moral life of
man. Each is as necessary to life as the rays of the sun,
and life would be unthinkable without it. Attraction and
repulsion is the mode of expression for all life, and property
is as much of the divine order of things as the spirit.
A man who denies this does not know the first law of all
being; his [Page
14] God is
no God at all, but a phantom, and the millennium he dreams
of is the child of an overworked and heated brain.
The treatment the family of Jesus received at his hands is easily explained
by his utter absorption in the Messianic idea. Whether or not a little more
suavity of manner towards his mother and his brothers would have thrown
a new lustre around his name is immaterial. A man like Jesus does not
stand on ceremonies, nor does any spiritually-minded man treat his
relations with very great consideration when they become a nuisance.
Gentlemanly conduct is of this world, not of the children of light. They are
above such things, just as the snow, the rain, and the light are above
ground. On the same reason, Jesus' want of patriotism was a virtue. He
might have used different ways with the Jews. Many worldly men have
shown more patience. His was a stormy temper, and his gentleness was
imposed upon him by the spirit. The spirit always tames a lion, but now and
then the lion breaks through. Jesus had rather much of the blood of David
in him.
Suppose
some keen-witted Hindu philosopher were to do us the same
service in regard to the New Testament (the Old Testament
having lost caste altogether), to take everything out of
it which is not of Jesus and without any moral bearing
? I should be willing to accept such a revised version.
It is no use to let English and American divines tinker
it. They are just a little prejudiced and clumsy. Subtlety
is not English. The Americans have a little more of it,
and Emerson is very subtle. There are strange things scattered
in his writings. The subtle Greek converted the coarser-grained
Roman; some subtle minds seem to be working on the conversion
of the robust English mind. People are apt to imagine because
they have plenty of money, ships and gunboats, versatile
statesmen, and pious party leaders they have also a hold
on the subtle spirit. [Page
15] But this
is a delusion of children who take a pantomime for dead
earnest.
Besides an over-estimate of his mission, Jesus appears to me in every
respect lovable, unique, divine. We are forced to see him through the
glasses of his disciples. They saw no wrong. We can see no wrong either,
only imperfections. If Jesus did not show in the garden of Gethsemane the
brute courage of a soldier; if he seemed for a moment to doubt his mission,
a different mission from what he conceived it to be, it showed him to be a
hyper-sensitive man, and I love him the more for it. The manner in which
he faced his traducers, Pilate and the mob, the manner in which he died,
stamped him a hero, the noblest son of his perverted although gifted race.
For the Jews, the murder of this
man has had terrible consequences. It is hard to understand
how any man can look at the relation of Jesus to the fate
of the Jews without becoming a believer. He need not become
Christian or a Jew, but he must acknowledge that the murder
of Jesus did not simply violate a law running parallel with
human life, but branched off into higher regions. The effect
was terrible. With the history of the Jews before one's eyes
it is difficult to remain a sceptic. I have been a sceptic
all my life, but the Jew has always been the worst strain
upon my unbelief. Carlyle, in his honest hatred, calls them “this
terrible people”. But
who has suffered like the Jews ? Their fate might move a
stone. It seems as if every human hand ought to be uplifted
in supplication for this unfortunate people. They have been
the victims of the grandest tragedy ever enacted on the world's
stage. Then what a man this Jesus must have been ! ?
It is sad to think that any man
should seemingly place himself under the suspicion of detracting
from the merits of such a man. But when I see on the one
hand the same man made the subject of vile jokes and viler
caricatures disgracing the thoroughfares of this great city,
and, on the other hand, the endeavour to transport him into
the clouds as a useless phantom, serving as a kind of side
reflector to illuminate with a much needed supernatural light
a vaporous theology — it becomes a duty to put
him before the human gaze as a man, sent by divine law into
this world in due time and season to fill a gaping void.
This void he filled like a man; other voids are created
in their time and have to be filled by other men.
F. D.
IT
must not be supposed that the T. P. S. [Theosophical Publishing
Srvices] endorses every statement, or agrees with every
argument of the foregoing. It is possible to feel much
sympathy with the views expressed, but differ as to the
conclusions [Page
16]
and the method
by which they are reached. The author can hardly be said
to be right when arguing that Jesus was not perfect because
he was not politic. He had work to do, and he did it in
the best way possible to him. We have only a few accounts
of the manner in which he did it, and there is the strongest
ground for the belief that these accounts have passed through
the hands of those who did not scruple to alter them
as suited their own convenience.
The T. P. S. fully agrees with
the author's idea as to the power of the spirit in man;
but it strongly dissents from the statements as regards property
being a necessary adjunct to spirituality. Why is it that
all the “enlighteners” of the world have most
strongly insisted that, as a rule, material prosperity is
a barrier to spiritual advancement ?
Jesus, the Adept, had to die; therefore, Karmically he was not yet a
perfect man.