POSTSCRIPT
Walter Lowrie translation
THE judgments passed upon this realistic account of the life of Jesus may be very diverse, according to the dogmatic, historical, or literary point of view of the critics. Only, with the aim of the book may they not find fault: to depict the figure of Jesus in its overwhelming heroic greatness and to impress it upon the modern age and upon the modern theology.
The heroic recedes from our modern “Weltanschauung,” our Christianity, and our conception of the person of Jesus. Wherefore men have humanised and humbled him. Renan has stripped off his halo and reduced him to a sentimental figure, coward spirits like Schopenhauer have dared to appeal to him for their enervating philosophy, and our generation has modernised him, with the notion that it could comprehend his character and development psychologically.
We must go back to the point where we can feel again the heroic in Jesus. Before that mysterious Person, who, in the form of his time, knew that he was creating [pg 275] upon the foundation of his life and death a moral world which bears his name, we must be forced to lay our faces in the dust, without daring even to wish to understand his nature. Only then can the heroic in our Christianity and in our “Weltanschauung” be again revived.