Volume 2 — CHAPTER VII PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (A) HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES (continued 2)

But to the new doctrine properly belonged new Scriptures. The “Law and Prophets” which had hitherto been canonical for the whole of Christendom was the Bible of the Jewish God, and in fact it had just been given final shape as such by the Synedrion at Jabna. Thus, it was a Devil’s book that the Christian had in his hands, and Marcion, therefore, now set up against it the Bible of the Redeemer-God—likewise an assemblage and ordering of writings that had hitherto been current in the community⁠[380] as simple edification-books without canonical claims. In place of the Torah he puts the—one and true—Gospel, which he builds up uniformly out of various separate, and, in his view, corrupted and falsified, Gospels. In place of the Israelite prophets he sets up the Epistles of the one prophet of Jesus, who was Paul.

Thus Marcion became the real creator of the New Testament. But for that reason it is impossible to ignore the mysterious personage, closely related to him, who not long before had written the Gospel “according to John.” The intention of this writer was neither to amplify nor to supersede the Gospels proper; what he did—and, unlike Mark, consciously did—was to create something quite new, the first sacred book of Christianity, the Koran of the new religion.⁠[381] The book proves that this religion was already conceived of as something complete and enduring. The idea of the immediately impending end of the world, with which Jesus was filled through and through and which even Paul and Mark in a measure shared, lies far behind “John” and Marcion. Apocalyptic is at an end, and Mysticism is beginning. Their content is not the teaching of Jesus, nor even the Pauline teaching about Jesus, but the enigma of the universe, the World-Cavern. There is here no question of a Gospel; not the figure of the Redeemer, but the principle of the Logos, is the meaning and the means of happening. The childhood story is rejected again; a god is not “born,” he is “there,” and wanders in human form over the earth. And this god is a Trinity—God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. This sacred book of earliest Christianity contains, for the first time, the Magian problem of “Substance,” which dominated the following centuries to the exclusion of everything else and finally led to the religion’s splitting up into three churches. And—what is significant in more respects than one—the solution of that problem to which “John” stands closest is that which the Nestorian East stood for as the true one. It is, in virtue of the Logos idea (Greek though the word happens to be) the “easternmost” of the Gospels, and presents Jesus, emphatically not as the bringer of the final and total revelation, but as the second envoy, who is to be followed by a third (the Comforter, Paraclete, of John xiv, 16, 26; xv, 26). This is the astounding doctrine that Jesus himself proclaims, and the decisive note of this enigmatic book. Here is unveiled, quite suddenly, the faith of the Magian East. If the Logos does not go, the Paraclete⁠[382] cannot come (John xvi, 7), but between them lies the last Æon, the rule of Ahriman (xiv, 30). The Church of the Pseudomorphosis, ruled by Pauline intellect, fought long against the John Gospel and gave it recognition only when the offensive, darkly hinted doctrine had been covered over by a Pauline interpretation. The real state of affairs is disclosed in the Montanist movement (Asia Minor, 160) which harked back to oral tradition and proclaimed in Montanus the manifested Paraclete and the end of the world. Its popularity was immense. Tertullian went over to it at Carthage in 207. About 245 Mani,⁠[383] who was intimately in touch with the currents of Eastern Christianity,⁠[384] cast out the Pauline, human Jesus as a demon and confessed the Johannine Logos as the true Jesus, but announced himself as the Paraclete of the fourth Gospel. In Carthage, Augustine became a Manichæan, and it is a highly suggestive fact that both movements finally fused with Marcionism.

To return to Marcion himself, it was he who carried through the idea of “John” and created a Christian Bible. And then, verging on old age, when the communities of the extreme west recoiled from him in horror,⁠[385] he set out to build the masterly structure of his own Redeemer-Church.⁠[386] From 156 to 190 this was a power, and it was only in the following century that the older Church succeeded in degrading the Marcionites to the rank of heretics. Even so, in the broad East and as far out as Turkestan, it was still important at a much later date, and it ended, in a way deeply significant of its essential feeling, by fusing with the Manichæans.⁠[387]

Nevertheless, though in the fullness of his conscious superiority he had underestimated the vis inertiæ of existing conditions, his grand effort was not in vain. He was, like Paul before him and Athanasius after him, the deliverer of Christianity at a moment when it threatened to break up, and the grandeur of his idea is in no wise diminished by the fact that union came about in opposition to, instead of through, him. The early Catholic Church—that is, the Church of the Pseudomorphosis—arose in its greatness only about 190, and then it was in self-defence against the Church of Marcion and with the aid of an organization taken from that Church. Further, it replaced Marcion’s Bible by another of similar structure—Gospels and apostolic Epistles—which it then proceeded to combine with the Law and the Prophets in one unit. And finally, this act of linking the two Testaments having in itself settled the Church’s attitude towards Judaism, it proceeded to combat Marcion’s third creation, his Redeemer-doctrine, by making a start with a theology of its own on the basis of his enunciation of the problem.

This development, however, took place on Classical soil, and, therefore, even the Church that arose in opposition to Marcion and his anti-Judaism was looked upon by Talmudic Jewry (whose centre of gravity lay entirely in Mesopotamia and its universities) as a mere piece of Hellenistic paganism. The destruction of Jerusalem was a conclusive event that in the world of fact no spiritual power could nullify. Such is the intimacy of inward relationship between waking-consciousness, religion, and speech that the complete severance after 70 of the Greek Pseudomorphosis and the Aramaic (that is, the truly Arabian) region was bound to result in the formation of two distinct domains of Magian religious development. On the Western margin of the young Culture the Pagan cult-Church, the Jesus-Church (removed thither by Paul), and the Greek-speaking Judaism of the Philo stamp were in point of language and literature so interlocked that the last-named fell into Christianity even in the first century, and Christianity and Hellenism combined to form a common early philosophy. In the Aramaic-speaking world from the Orontes to the Tigris, on the other hand, Judaism and Persism interacted constantly and intimately, each creating in this period its own strict theology and scholastic in the Talmud and the Avesta; and from the fourth century both these theologies exercised the most potent influence upon the Aramaic-speaking Christendom that resisted the Pseudomorphosis, so that finally it broke away in the form of the Nestorian Church.

Here in the East the difference, inherent in every human waking-consciousness, between sense-understanding and word-understanding—and, therefore between eye and letter—led up to purely Arabian methods of mysticism and scholasticism. The apocalyptic certainty, “Gnosis” in the first-century sense, that Jesus intended to confer,⁠[388] the divining contemplation and emotion, is that of the Israelite prophets, the Gathas, Sufism, and we have it recognizable still in Spinoza, in the Polish Messiah Baal Shem⁠[389] and in Mirza Ali Mohammed, the enthusiast-founder of Bahaism, who was executed in Teheran in 1850. The other way, “Paradosis,” is the characteristically Talmudic method of word-exegesis, of which Paul was a master;⁠[390] it pervades all later Avestan works, the Nestorian dialectic,⁠[391] the entire theology of Islam alike.

On the other side, the Pseudomorphosis is single and whole both in its Magian believing acceptance (Pistis) and its metaphysical introversion (Gnosis).⁠[392] The Magian belief in its Westerly shape was formulated for the Christians by Irenæus and, above all, by Tertullian, whose famous aphorism “Credo quia absurdum” is the very summation of this certainty in belief. The Pagan counterpart is Plotinus in his Enneads and even more so Porphyry in his treatise On the Return of the Soul to God.⁠[393] But for the great schoolmen of the Pagan Church too, there were Father (Nus), Son, and the middle Being, just as already for Philo the Logos had been first-born Son and second God. Doctrines concerning ecstasy, angels and demons, and the dual substance of soul were freely current amongst them, and we see in Plotinus and Origen, both pupils of the same master, that the scholasticism of the Pseudomorphosis consisted in the development of Magian concepts and thoughts, by systematic transvaluation of the texts of Plato and Aristotle.

The characteristic central idea of the whole thought of the Pseudomorphosis is the Logos,⁠[394] in use and development its faithful image. There is no possibility here of any “Greek,” in the sense of Classical, influence; there was not a man alive in those days whose spiritual disposition could have accommodated the smallest trace of the Logos of Heraclitus and the Stoa. But, equally, the theologies that lived side by side in Alexandria were never able to develop in full purity the Logos-notion as they meant it, whereas both in Persian and Chaldean imaginings—as Spirit or Word of God—and in Jewish doctrine—as Ruach and Memra—it played a decisive part. What the Logos-teaching in the West did was to develop a Classical formula, by way of Philo and the John Gospel (the enduring effect of which on the West was its mark upon the schoolmen) not only into an element of Christian mysticism, but, eventually, into a dogma.⁠[395] This was inevitable. This dogma which both the Western Churches held, corresponded, on the side of knowledge, to that which, on the side of faith, was represented both by the syncretic cults and the cults of Mary and the Saints. And against the whole thing, dogma and cult, the feeling of the East revolted from the 4th century on.

For the eye the history of these thoughts and feelings is repeated in the history of Magian architecture.⁠[396] The basic form of the Pseudomorphosis is the Basilica, which was known to the Jews of the West and to the Hellenistic sects of the Chaldeans even before the time of Christ. As the Logos of the John Gospel is a Magian fundamental in Classical shape, so the Basilica is a Magian room whose inner walls correspond to the outer surfaces of the old Classical temple, the cult-building introverted. The architectural form of the pure East is the cupola building, the Mosque, which without doubt existed long before the oldest Christian Churches in the temples of the Persians and Chaldeans, the synagogues of Mesopotamia, and probably the temples of Saba as well. The attempts to reconcile East and West in the Church Councils of the Byzantine period were finally symbolized in the mixed form of the domed basilica. For this item of the history of ecclesiastical architecture is really another expression of the great change that set in with Athanasius and Constantine, the last great champions of Christianity. The one created the firm western dogma and also Monasticism, into whose hands dogma gradually passed from those of the ageing schools. The other founded the State of Christian nationality, to which likewise the name of “Greek” passed in the end. And of this transition the domed basilica is the symbol.