Christ in Art. Ernest Renan
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Название: Christ in Art

Автор: Ernest Renan

Издательство: Parkstone International Publishing

Жанр: Религия: прочее

Серия: Temporis

isbn: 978-1-78042-877-2, 978-1-78310-780-3

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ by an exalted Jew of the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, and placed by him under the shelter of an ancient sage, was the summing up of the spirit of the latter days. Its author, the real creator of the philosophy of history, for the first time dared to see in the movement of the world, and the succession of empires, merely a function subordinate to the destiny of the Jewish people. Jesus was at an early period thrilled by these lofty hopes. Perhaps also, he read the books of Enoch, then revered equally with the sacred books and the other writings of the same kind that upheld so great a movement in the popular imagination. The advent of the Messiah with his glories and his terrors, the nations dashing one against another, the cataclysm of heaven and earth, were the familiar food of his imagination. These revolutions were thought to be at hand, so that a multitude of people were seeking to compute their times, the supernatural order of things into which such visions transport us, appeared to him from the first perfectly simple and natural. That he had no knowledge of the general condition of the world that may be learned from every line of his most authentic discourses. The earth to him appears still to be divided into kingdoms which are at war; he seems to be ignorant of the “Roman peace,” and the new state of society which his century inaugurated. He had no precise idea of the Roman power; the name of “Caesar” alone had reached him. The court of the kings seemed to him a place where people wore fine clothes. The charming impossibilities with which his parables swarmed, when he put kings and mighty men upon the scene it proves that he had no conception of aristocratic society except that of a young villager who sees the world through the prism of his own simplicity.

      Still he was less acquainted with the new idea, created by Greek science, which is the basis of all philosophy and which modern science has fully confirmed, the exclusion of the capricious gods to whom the early faith of the ancient ages attributed the government of the universe. The negation of miracle, this idea that everything is produced in the world by laws in which the personal intervention of superior beings had no share, was the common law in the great schools of all countries that had received Greek science. Perhaps even Babylon and Persia were not strangers to it. Jesus knew nothing of this advance. Though born at a time when the principle of positive science had already been proclaimed, he lived in the midst of the supernatural. Never perhaps had the Jews been more devoured by the thirst of the marvellous. Philo, who lived in a great intellectual centre, and who had received a very complete education, has only a false chimerical science, Jesus differed in this point in no wise from his countrymen. He believed in the devil whom he looked upon as a sort of genius of evil, and imagined that nervous diseases were the work of demons who took possession of the patient and tormented him. To him the marvellous was not the exceptional – it was the moral condition. The idea of the supernatural with its impossibilities, was not conceived until the day when the experimental science of nature was discovered. The man who is a stranger to all notion of physics, who believes that by a prayer he changes the course of the clouds, controls disease and even death itself, sees nothing extraordinary in miracle since the whole course of things is to him the result of the free volitions of divinity. This intellectual state was always that of Jesus. But in his great soul such a faith produced effects entirely different from those which it produced upon the multitude. With the majority, faith in the special action of God led to a silly credulity and to the deceptions of charlatans. To him it gave a deep idea of the familiar relations of man with God and an exaggerated faith in the power of man, admirable errors which were the principle of his power, because if they were one day to put him to the fault in the eyes of the physicist and the chemist, they gave him a power over his time which no individual ever wielded before or since.

      Early in life his peculiar character revealed itself. Jesus, like all men exclusively absorbed in an idea, came to make small account of ties of blood. The bond of the idea is the only one which such natures recognize. “Behold my mother and my brethren,” he said stretching forth his hand towards his disciples; “whosoever shall do the will of my father, the same is my brother and my sister.” The simple people did not understand him and one day a woman, passing by him, exclaimed, it is said: “Blessed the womb that bare thee, and the paps that gave thee suck!” “Blessed rather,” he answered, “they that hear the word of God and keep it.” Soon, in his daring revolt against nature, he was to go still farther, and we shall see him trampling under his feet all that is human, kindred, love, country, devoting heart and soul only to the idea which appeared to him as the absolute form of the good and the true.

      Virgin Psychosostria and the Annunciation, early 14th century.

      Icon.

      National Museum, Ohrid.

      The Nativity, late 14th century.

      Fresco. Peribleptos Church, Mystras.

      Geertgen tot Sint Jans, The Nativity at Night, c. 1490.

      Oil on oak panel, 34 × 25.3 cm.

      The National Gallery, London.

      The First Aphorisms of Jesus. His Ideas on God the Father. His First Disciples

      Joseph died before the public life of his son began, Mary thus remained the head of the family, and this explains why her son, when it was desired to distinguish him from the many others of the same name, was usually called the “son of Mary.” It seems that, by the death of her husband, a stranger in Nazareth, she retired to Cana, where she may have been a native. Cana was a small town eight or ten miles from Nazareth at the foot of the mountains which are on the perimeter north of the plain of Asochis. The prospect, less grand than at Nazareth, extends over the whole plain and is closed most picturesquely by the mountains of Nazareth and the hills of Tzippori. Jesus appears to have made this place his residence for some time. There he probably passed a portion of his youth, and thence came his first splendours.

      He worked at the trade of his father, which was that of a carpenter. This was no humiliating or unwelcome circumstance. The Jewish customs demanded that the man devoted himself to intellectual labours and should apprehend an acceptable occupation.

      What was the progress of the mind of Jesus during this obscure period of his life? Through what meditations did he launch out into the prophetic career? His history having come to us in the state of isolated stories and without exact chronology only allows us to make assumptions.

      Jesus has no visions; God does not speak to him from without; God is in Him; he feels that he is with God, and he draws from his heart what he says of his Father. He lives in the bosom of God by uninterrupted communication; he does not see him, but he understands him without need of thunder and a burning bush like Moses, or a revealing tempest like Job, an oracle like the old Greek sages, of a familiar genius like Socrates, or of an angel Gabriel like Mohammed. The imagination and hallucination of St. Theresa, for example, are nothing in comparison. The intoxication of the Son proclaiming himself identical with God is also an entirely different thing. Jesus never for a moment enounces the sacrilegious idea that he is God. He believes that he is in direct communion with God; he believes himself the son of God. The highest consciousness of God which ever existed in the breast of humanity was that of Jesus.

      It is clear, on the other hand, that Jesus, setting out with such proclivity of soul, will be in no way a speculative philosopher like Sakya-Mouni. Nothing is further from scholastic theology than the gospel. The speculations of the Greek fathers in regard to the divine essence come from an entirely different spirit. God conceived immediately as Father, this is the whole theology of Jesus. And that was not with him a theoretical principle, a doctrine more or less proven which he sought to inculcate. He used no argument with his disciples, he did not demand any of their attention. He did not preach his opinions, he preached himself. Oftentimes the greatest and most disinterested souls present, associated with a high degree of elevation, this peculiarity of perpetual attention to themselves and extreme personal susceptibility. Their persuasion that God is within them and is СКАЧАТЬ