Page images
PDF
EPUB

perfection of the personality are in standing conflict with every kind of reasonable or social ethics, although, in the last analysis, the claims of Jesus are themselves reasonable, because it is only the man who has in his own soul overcome the world and freed himself from its obsession who can be effective as an ethical force in the world. If Jesus were to return to the world to-day, his thought would no longer move along the lines of the later Jewish eschatology, but the basis of his ethical thinking would be the same now as then; in face of the philosophical, theological, nationalist and social ethics which make up our modern 'system,' he would repeat: 'If your righteousness be not better than that of the scribes and Pharisees, ye cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven,' and would demand absolute perfection and absolute devotion. That is why it is futile to attempt to bring the ethics of Jesus into line with our modern system."

$ 4

We are forced back, then, to the real problem, the problem, not of what Jesus did, but of what he was, the problem of the personality, the consciousness, the inner life, the psychology, of Jesus. And, to study that problem, we have, as for Plato and Shakspere, Dante and Goethe, the evidence not of outward activities and social milieu, but of what we rightly entitle in the case of artists and thinkers, their works. That Goethe was a Geheimrat, Shakspere a Warwickshire gentleman, Dante a Florentine aristocrat, that Plato lived at Athens, tells us less than nothing about them. It is by their works, that is, by their surviving thoughts,

that we alone can know them. "My teachings and writings," says Plato, in one of his letters, "are only the smallest part of myself: they are but sparks from the fire burning within." True; but they are live sparks, real indications of personality, far more real than the external facts of biography, whether measurements of the Globe Theater or the record of Florentine factions or a faithful description of the society of Capernaum or Weimar.

In the case of Jesus the negative results of historical inquiry coincide with a remarkable advance in the study of human nature and personality. If the nineteenth century will live in intellectual history as the century of natural science and of the application of the methods of the natural sciences to human studies such as history, archæology, and sociology, the twentieth century bids fair to be an age of psychology, of subtle and intimate investigation into the inner life of men and nations. Immense and hitherto undreamed-of advances have already been made in the last two decades in the understanding of the inner springs of human nature. To take but a single instance, we have been made aware of the whole world of sub-consciousness which lies, often tumultuous and repressed, always alive and contributing ceaselessly to our personality, below the level of our conscious mental life. Thus it is but natural that the psychological method should have been applied to the study of Jesus. For some time past there has been a growing tendency in books about Jesus to include a psychological chapter; and a number of writers, among whom Sanday deserves particular mention, have dealt specifically

with the problem. Sanday's Oxford lectures on "Christologies, Ancient and Modern," published in 1910, put forward a theory, remarkable as coming from a scholar who had previously deprecated as irreverent any treatment of the subject, that the divinity of Jesus resided in his subliminal consciousness, which he regards as halfway between the conscious and the unconscious. "That which was divine in Christ," he says, "was not nakedly exposed to the public gaze; neither was it so entirely withdrawn from outward view as to be wholly sunk and submerged in the darkness of the unconscious; but there was a sort of Jacob's ladder by which the divine forces stored up below found an outlet, as it were, to the upper air and the common theatre in which the life of mankind is enacted." The vague, tentative, and quaintly metaphorical language employed by the Oxford canon is characteristic of the way in which theology, so long enthroned in solitary grandeur within its well barred citadel, has been pushing out of recent years to establish contact, perilous, yet inevitable, with the advancing forces of psychology.

But it is to one in particular of recent psychological discussions of Jesus's personality that attention can be drawn here in any detail, a volume recently translated and published in this country by a French Swiss Protestant clergyman named Georges Berguer. Berguer holds a pastorate in a suburb of Geneva, and his book is rewritten from a series of lectures delivered at that university between 1917 and 1919. It is modestly entitled: "Some Aspects of the Life of Jesus from the Psychological and Psychoanalytical Point of View," but, in

effect, it is a boldly pioneering work which puts the discussion of Jesus's personality on a wholly new plane and is certain to exercise an important influence on all subsequent inquiry into the subject.

Berguer's special contribution is to have attempted, for the first time, to apply to the study of Jesus the categories and methods of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, as is not always remembered by lovers of the latest fashionable shibboleth, is not a new philosophy, still less a new religion. It is simply a new method of exploring human nature, a means, and an approved and successful means, in Berguer's own words, "of discovering and revealing to men what is in them and how they can make use of their hidden energies." The result of Berguer's searching is twofold. He finds that the distinctive feature of Jesus's personality, from the psychoanalytical point of view, is that he was completely normal, immune from the crises and repressions from which the ordinary man suffers so much; and he finds, also, that in his attitude to others Jesus adopted, by anticipation, spontaneously, and naturally, the approved methods and attitude of modern psychoanalysis.

The first point is best illustrated by Berguer's treatment of Jesus's conception of God as the Father, or rather as his Father, and the Father of all who could follow him in his inner experience.

"What was the central experience," writes Berguer, "which so completely filled his life that his sole aim, the only possible meaning of his existence, consisted in revealing it to men, his brothers, and in helping them to participate in it? This experience can be

summed up in one word: the Father. Jesus, one can say, had discovered at the basis of his own inner life who God was. What he summed up in that word was an attitude of his whole being, his natural attitude, that which should have been, but, alas, was not, the attitude of mankind. In receiving, in its plenitude, the influx of life which made of him a human personality, he said, quite naturally 'Father.' This vital influx, this inner outburst of energy, that which Gaston Frommel has called 'the moral obligation,' which the psychoanalysis have called 'the libido,' Schopenhauer the will to live and Bergson the vital urge, Jesus experienced, differently no doubt, but in a manner akin to theirs, as 'the Father.' Jesus early recognized that he experienced it differently from other men, and that his manner of feeling it was the right manner, that his attitude was normal, while that of others was abnormal, since it cast them away from life into aberration, dreams, and sin. Hence both his suffering and his ardent and imperious desire to save his brothers in giving them the secret of life, in helping them to adopt the same inner attitude as himself, in order that they too might experience the power of the Father in the vital influx which penetrates man's nature from within."

If space permitted, it would be interesting to cite other passages in which this interpretation of Jesus's message is worked out in greater detail, especially the sections dealing with his experience of adolescence ("Wist ye not I must be about my Father's business?") and with the temptation. But we must pass on to what Berguer has to say about Jesus's method of teaching.

Professors Lake and Foakes-Jackson, as the result of a learned inquiry, lay it down as certain that the primitive appellation of Jesus wasnot "Lord," but "Teacher." It was thus that he was known, they hold, among his personal followers. How did he teach?

"It is the psychology of Christ which, as it is better studied," says Berguer, "will yield us the secret of his teaching; it is his personality which, in the last analysis, supplies the key to what has been called the gospel doctrine of the Kingdom." Modern scholars, such as Eduard Meyer, steeped in the intellectual life of the age of Jesus, are fond of telling us that this or that phrase or idea in Jesus's teaching is not original: it is found among his predecessors or contemporaries. But the real originality of his teaching was not in the phrases or ideas he used, but in the life and reality he gave to them, not in the substance of his teaching, but in its method.

The first characteristic which Berguer picks out in his suggestive chapter on the teaching of Jesus is that his method is always positive rather than negative. "Instead of proceeding by means of vetoes or negative instructions, he proceeds by affirmations. It would seem as though his whole nature were turned to the positive side of life, to the 'yes' side.

As we read the gospels we hear the same note sounded throughout. In the discussions with the Pharisees, particularly regarding the Sabbath, he does not set rules of his own in opposition to theirs. He adopts a positive, not a negative, attitude, affirming the supremacy of life over all else. "The God of Man is Lord also over the Sabbath.' Away with the restrictions which tie

up our lives! Let the God who is within you speak, and things will arrange themselves."

The same positive method Berguer finds employed in Jesus's work as a healer. "Sin wrinkles the brow of the sick; they feel themselves living under condemnation; their soul is chained by the old doctrine that sickness is a punishment of sin. Jesus approaches them and frees them by an affirmation: "Thy sins are forgiven thee.' In truth," he continues, "it would seem that in all this Jesus practised psychoanalysis before its time. He employs the same method: he preaches the same confidence in the work of life. He knew that what destroyed life was the obstacles and negations with which certain false doctors of the soul encumber it. And he entered upon his ministry as a liberator, as a Saviour."

These few extracts and indications must suffice to introduce a book which is certain to exercise a wide influence. It is not free from defects and even from inconsistencies; its argument is, at times, unduly interlarded with edifying reflections, and in parts it will strike many readers as overingenious. But it breaks new ground, which was waiting ready for cultivation, and will remain memorable as the first more or less systematic attempt to bring a method of study which is profoundly affecting our judgments of contemporary mankind to bear upon the greatest figure of the race. It is pioneer work with its inevitable limitations. But it marks the achievement of a fruitful contact between studies which had long been converging, and is surely destined to begin a new and vitalizing stage in the understanding of Jesus.

[graphic][merged small]

The Man Who Kept a Diary

Ma bachelor.

[merged small][ocr errors]

R. WILLIAM WIGGLESWORTH was He had graying hair, a bald spot, a small mustache, chambers in Gray's Inn, and a respectable, but not a bloated, income. His only near relative was his niece Mary, who was engaged in social work. Now it was nursing, now it was education, now it was the promotion of international harmony. She had poorly paid jobs in connection with all these successively, and she more than earned her pay, for her ability was considerable and her disinterested idealism even more notable still. They often talked of society and the duties of its members.

"Well, Uncle," Mary would say, "no doubt you are very kind in your own circle. You help your charwoman's family, you have helped me, I have sometimes persuaded you to subscribe, and you give handsome Christmas boxes to the porter at the gate; but you really do not justify your existence."

"My existence?" Mr. Wigglesworth would murmur in reply. "Can I really be of importance to any one? I am a very humble person, really. I merely want to go on my quiet way. I am unfitted at this stage to earn my living. I know nothing whatever about politics; besides which, nobody in politics would ever take me seriously. I make what you would consider a good use of the margin of my small

income; my pleasures, which consist of reading a little and observing the world a little, are surely harmless. I beg you do not attempt to convert me into something other than I am."

"Oh, Uncle, you are hopeless!" Mary would reply; and, with a sigh, she would resign herself to enjoying the admirable luncheon that he had provided for her.

The sherry and the claret she often forgot to commend; but, idealist though she was, she never attempted to conceal her liking for the lobster, of which she always secured the major share. After luncheon, with her coffee-cup in her hand, she would walk round the room, looking a little enviously at his books, which were numerous and well bound. She knew so little about them and she wished she had time to know more. Yet at the end, despite all their mutual affection, she always went away wondering whether this selfish bachelor existence ought to be tolerated. Was not such epicureanism the canker which destroyed empires? Was not Mr. Wigglesworth, however modest and conventionally virtuous, one of those drones in the hive whose parasitical presence makes the workers justly angry? She would sometimes discuss him with her more intimate friends.

"I know," she would say, "that it's hopeless to expect him to go into the

« PreviousContinue »