by Bart Schultz
it must be a valuable science.
But I have not yet had occasion or interest for the mastery of it. So that I fear
you would think me quite out of court if I were to attempt to testify what I think
of that great problem – which certainly is a historical one. Indeed you know what I think. The Gospel History you have ascertained to be legend. Then of course
Jesus was not Son of God and Man – for there never was such a person, or we
know nothing of him who was so called for centuries.
It may be the effect of sheer prejudice. I cannot help believing the main body of the history as I read it. True, I have not minutely analysed the various accounts and found all the constituent elements evaporating and leaving a sorry residuum. But
as a whole it commends itself to me as the most solid, substantial history of all –
as the central history, throwing light on all other. Who conceived the character
of Christ? – fluctuating and heterogeneous from Renan’s point of view, no doubt,
but from one which I shall call profounder and more spiritual, (and that partly
because the profoundest and most spiritual men in successive ages have taken it),
homogeneous and consistent. This is not a mere Art-creation. And if a profound
spiritual harmony and homogeneity underlies the character, it is not an accretion
of myths – No, look at all other myths. There is not the flesh and blood life-look
about them that there is here.
Besides, if some History be resolvable into Myth, is not Myth often resolvable
into History?
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For Noel, the figure of Christ – who “both proclaimed and acted upon the purest and most exalted morality, who was at all events the most loving and
unselfish of men, the most self-renouncing and self-sacrificing” and “by
the force of His life and death, as well as His words” made “the principle of
Love the most honoured of all, giving it a new energising force in society,
teaching men, in short, to feel that God is Love” – quite transcends
biblical criticism: “Now cut away passage after passage with criticism, still
you must destroy the whole conception of the character in the Gospels
before you get rid of this distinct impression.” Thus,
I must believe that His consciousness simply mirrored the Truth. I do not say that God has not given us other less spiritual kinds of light – intellectual, e.g. from
other sources – other old-world civilisations, such as the Roman, and Greek. Let
us fully acknowledge it. But such a God-saturated human life is the profoundest and most vital of all influences on the human spirit, and therefore indirectly acts
upon all our systems of thought.
I do not wish to isolate Him. I know I am most unorthodox. If I isolate Him He
is no use to me. But I cannot agree with you that whether He was all this, or not, is of no religious importance. To me it is of the very highest. For here . . . God has manifested Himself as He has not done elsewhere, and if so, we cannot dispense
with the contemplation of this biography without lowering our standard and our
idea of God. Comparing ourselves with Christ, we feel infinitely dwarfed, and yet
(as His is our own proper human nature of which we have all the elements) there
is that in us which responds to the virtue in Him, and draws us up to His level.
We learn then both about God and about man. He reveals in His person the fact
of our Sonship to God – He opens up in our Nature the choked spring of Deity
within it – and He leads the way to the full realisation, in the consciousness of
all men, of their relationship to God, and their full enjoyment of the privileges of
it. He has triumphed over selfishness. . . . Without that life as a beacon, I should have thought it im possible that the Ideal should so triumph in me or my race.
Noel admits that he has left Sidgwick a “loophole,” since he could
urge that Christ’s ideal was a mistaken one, not the highest. But there
“we should differ in toto. Goethe, I suppose, could hardly think His
Life the highest. But if you say ‘we cannot know what is the highest
kind of life,’ you then cut away all possible hope of progress. You must
have an ideal, and strive to live more and more up to that.” Indeed, the
“ideal” is more than mere argument. Sidgwick seems to “undervalue his-
tory – fact – example – the love and worship of an external noble object.”
But “[t]heories and metaphysics won’t do alone to teach us all about the
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‘eternal and spiritual part of our nature’. And Christ truly is a man, not the dried-up part of one, a philosopher or metaphysician, (that is why most of
them object to Him).” To such an ideal, one must subordinate one’s own
judgment.
This is fine Apostolic soaring, though one would never guess from
Noel’s religious arguments that he was to prove to be one of Sidgwick’s
most licentious bisexual friends, one who was once photographed naked as
Bacchus. But their discussions of religious matters rather overshadowed
their exchanges on sexual matters, such as the advisability of marriage,
which will be considered in later chapters. For the present, what is of
interest is the way in which Noel, more than such friends as Dakyns, was
impressing upon Sidgwick the importance of both orientalist studies and
the figure of Christ as an ideal of perfect love and altruism. Here was an
Apostolic intimate pushing a case that resembled in some respects that of
Renan – who retained a vivid appreciation of Christ as a moral exemplar –
but who was perhaps even more in line with other forces attempting in
unorthodox ways to revitalize the image of Christ’s greatness. At a later
date, Noel would be more mystical, more Hegelian, more pantheistic,
and more apt to put forth Whitman as an exemplar of greatness. But in
the years of storm and stress, he, like so many others, was obsessed with
the personality of Jesus, and he found in Sidgwick a most disturbing
doubter. For Noel, “Manhood reverences noble example and experience,
and profits by them” – or ought to. And the example of Goethe is not the
right one: “Intellect is the Deity of Goethe. But to furnish food for intellect
he sees the fullest experience to be necessary. Yet both the practical and
the etherial Goethe is radically wrong, Intellect is not the most Divine
element. In my creed, it is Love. Therefore Christ and not Goethe is
the ideal of Humanity.” This would prove to be, for Sidgwick, the all-
important contrast, capturing the contest between Christian sympathy
and Greek perfection in more modern form. His theological vacillations
met his ethical vacillations just here.
Of course, given the battering that religion was receiving at this time,
&
nbsp; from biblical criticism and Darwinian and geological science, it is not to
be wondered at that such revisionary readings of the Gospels as Renan’s
should find a wide audience, or that he was hardly alone in providing
provocative new interpretations of the life of Jesus. In England, a book that
shared this emphasis on the character and ethics of Jesus was published
anonymously in . This was Ecce Homo, which, as it transpired, was
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authored by Sidgwick’s longtime Cambridge colleague, the historian John
Seeley – not coincidentally, another profoundly orientalizing influence,
one of the leading theorists of British imperialism. It was Sidgwick’s
review of Seeley’s volume that summed up the results of his linguistic
turn, the fruit of his visits to Germany. The review was published in the
Westminster Review in , and it included some trenchant remarks on
Renan:
The defect of Renan’s Vie de Jésus was not its historical fidelity but its want of that quality. It was not in so far as he had realised the manner in which the idea
of Jesus was conditioned by the circumstances of time and place and the laws of
human development, but in so far as he had failed to do so, that his work proved
inefficacious to stir the feelings of Englishmen. We felt that he had looked at his
subject through Parisian spectacles; and taken up too ostentatiously the position
of a spectator – a great artistic error in a historian. His most orthodox assailants
in England felt for the most part that their strength lay in showing not that the
Jesus of Renan was a mere man and ought to have been more, but that he was not
the right man. (MEA –)
As is clear from other sources as well, Sidgwick had some sympathy with
such critics. Renan’s type of history is a “system of ingenious guesses,” and
if Darwin’s great champion T. H. Huxley would “have us worship (‘chiefly
silently’) a Subject without Predicates,” Renan would “have us adore . . .
Predicates without a Subject.” Strauss is “better than many Renans.”
(M , ). Perhaps Sidgwick even had in mind Maurice’s view that
Renan’s Jesus “is a charming Galilean with a certain sympathy for beautiful
scenery and an affectionate tenderness for the peasants who follow him;
but he is provoked to violence, impatience, base trickery, as soon as he finds
his mission as a reformer unsuccessful. . . . We in England should say he
was a horrible liar and audacious blasphemer.” For Maurice, “the book is
detestable, morally as well as theologically. It brought to my mind . . . that
wonderful dream of Richter’s in which Jesus tells the universe, ‘Children,
you have no Father.’”
For all that, when it comes to addressing the vision of Ecce Homo,
Sidgwick’s indebtedness to the more critical, historical sides of both
Strauss and Renan is manifest; his views contrast with Seeley’s in much
the same way they did with Noel’s:
Considering that we derive our knowledge of the facts from a limited num-
ber of documents, handed down to us from an obscure period, and containing
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matter which in any other history we should regard as legendary: considering
that in consequence these documents have been subjected for many years to an
elaborate, minute, and searching investigation: that hundreds of scholars have
spent their lives in canvassing such questions as the date of their composition,
their authorship, the conscious objects or unconscious tendency of each author,
his means of information, and his fidelity to fact, the probability of their be-
ing compiled or translated from previous works in whole or part, or of their
having undergone revisions since the original publication, the contradictions
elicited by careful examination of each or close comparison of them together,
the methods of reconciling these contradictions or deciding between conflict-
ing evidence, and many other similar points, – it might seem natural that the
author of such a work as this should carefully explain to his readers his plan
and principles for settling or avoiding these important preliminary questions.
(MEA )
Sidgwick, in other words, was not impressed by the historical conscious-
ness of Ecce Homo – the method is “radically wrong” and the conclusions
“only roughly and partially right” (MEA ).
In fact, the criticisms directed at Seeley are withering, and often devel-
oped by way of invidious comparison with the historical school. Unlike the
historical school, Seeley believes that the compelling, “incontrovertible”
evidence regarding the character and thought of Jesus might in itself be
so suggestive of his uniqueness that it could lend credence to the mira-
cle stories. But to follow Seeley and speak “of miracles ‘provisionally as
real’ is the one thing that no one will do. The question of their reality
stands at the threshold of the subject, and can by no device be conjured
away.” The new criticism accepts the principle applied elsewhere in his-
tory – namely, that nothing happens in violation of the laws of nature –
and does “not regard the reality of miracles as a question of more or less
evidence, to be decided by presumptions with regard to the veracity of
witnesses.” (MEA , ) The very question of which evidence is acceptable
requires taking a position on the miraculous, and in fact the evidence that
Seeley adduces is anything but incontrovertible. As Owen Chadwick has
observed, for Renan, “to believe in the supernatural was like believing in
ghosts.” Sidgwick, as we shall shortly see, thought that this was just the
right challenge.
Characteristically, however, and in line with his Socratic anxieties,
Sidgwick could not rest content with mere negative criticism. Sound
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history may require unstinting criticism and controversy, but
it is good to be reminded from time to time to drop the glass of criticism, and let
the dust-clouds of controversy settle. Many students who cannot patiently lend
their minds to our author’s teaching may be stimulated by it to do as he has done:
may be led to contemplate in the best outline that each for himself can frame, with
unwonted clearness of vision and unwonted force of sympathy, the features of a
con
ception, a life, a character which the world might reverence more wisely, but
can never love too well. (MEA )
As he put it to Dakyns:
I have had the work of Christ put before me by a powerful hand, and been made
to recognise its extraordinary excellence as I have never before done; and though
I do not for a moment relinquish my right to judge it by the ideal, and estimate
its defects, partialities, etc., yet I do feel the great need that mankind have of a
pattern, and I have none that I could propose to substitute. Hence I feel that I
should call myself a Christian if I were in a country where [text missing]. Now,
as long as the views I hold on religion and morality are such as I should think
only desirable to publish to the educated, it seems to me it is not my social duty
to dissent. (M –)
Seeley is “diffuse,” but he is not “turgid,” and he has stirred Sidgwick
“with real eloquence.” There is much in his vision of Jesus that, as with
Renan’s or Noel’s, would appeal to someone with utilitarian sympathies,
since he is presented as a teacher of love, whose view of religion as a positive,
warm, emotional matter contrasted with the older Hebrew conception of
religion in terms of a legalistic set of “Thou shalt nots.” Still, Sidgwick’s
vision of Jesus and the Christian religion is subtler and far more historical
than Seeley’s. He even accuses Seeley of going too far in making Jesus
out to be a utilitarian, objecting to his central claims about Jesus’ placing
happiness in a political constitution and requiring “a disinterested sacrifice
of self to the interests of the whole society.” This, Sidgwick urges, is an
overstatement, making Jesus too nearly akin to Bentham. It is better to
say that “Jesus taught philanthropy more from the point of view of the
individual than from that of society” (MEA ). Ultimately, according to
Sidgwick,
The truth seems to be that in the simple and grand conception that Jesus formed
of man’s position and value in the universe, all the subsequent development of
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