Note 133 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

It is true that this fusion of the Gnostic Son of God and the Philonic Logos with the Synoptic Jesus first fixed the hazy uncertainty of mythological speculation and abstract thought in the clear form and living individuality of the personal mediator of redemption. It brought this personality nearer to the hearts of the faithful than any other figure of religious belief, and thereby procured for the Christian cult-god Jesus, in his pure humanity, his overflowing goodness and benevolence, such a predominance over his divine competitors, Mithras, Attis, and others, that by the side of Jesus these faded away into empty shadows. The Gnostic ideal man, that is, the Platonic idea, and the moral ideal of man merged in him directly into a unity. The miracle of the union of God and man, over which the ancient world had so hotly and so fruitlessly disputed, seemed to have found its realisation in Christ. Christ was the “Wise man” of the Stoic philosophy, in whom was united for them all that is most honourable in man; more than this, he was the God-man, as he had been preached and demanded by Seneca for the moral elevation of mankind.133 The world was consequently so ready to receive and so well prepared for his fundamental ideas that we easily see why the Church Christianity took its stand on the human personality of its redeeming principle with almost more decision than on the divine character of Jesus. Nevertheless, in spite of the majesty and sublimity, in spite of the immeasurable significance which the accentuation of the true humanity of Jesus has had for the development of Christianity, it remains true that on the other hand it is just this which is the source of all the insoluble contradictions, of all the insurmountable difficulties from which the Christian view of the world suffers. This is the reason why that great idea, which Christianity brought to the consciousness of the men of the West, and through which it conquered Judaism—the idea of the God-man—was utterly destroyed, and the true content of this religion was obscured, hidden, and misrepresented in such disastrous fashion, that to-day it is no longer possible to assent to its doctrine of redemption without the sacrifice of the intellect.