Christianity: Transforming humanity through faith and compassion

The text below is the excerpt of the book Christ in Art (ISBN: 9781783107803), written by Ernest Renan, published by Parkstone International.

Jesus, it is seen, never went out of the Jewish circle. Although his sympathy for all those despised by the orthodoxy led him to admit the heathen into the kingdom of God, although he had more than once resided in a pagan country, and once or twice he is found in kindly relations with unbelievers, it may be said that his life was spent entirely in the little world, close and narrow as it was, in which he was born. The Greek and Roman countries heard nothing of him; his name does not figure in profane authors until a hundred years later, and then only indirectly, in connection with seditious movements provoked by his doctrine, or with persecutions of which his disciples were the object. Within the heart even of Judaism, Jesus did not make any durable impression, Philo, who died about the year 50, has no glimpse of him. Josephus, born in the year 37, and writing in the last years of the century, mentions his execution in a few lines, as an event of secondary importance in the enumeration of the sects of his time he omits the Christians.

The Mischna again, presents no trace of the new school; the passages of the two Gemaras in which the founder of Christianity is named, do not carry us back beyond the fourth or fifth century. The essential work of Jesus was the creation around him of a circle of disciples in whom he inspired a boundless attachment, and in whose breast he implanted the germ of his doctrine. To have made himself beloved, “so much that after his death they did not cease to love him,” this was the crowning work of Jesus, and that which most impressed his contemporaries. His doctrine was not at all dogmatic, that he never thought of writing it or having it written. A man became his disciple, not by believing this or that, but by following him and loving him. A few sentences treasured up in the memory, and above all, his moral type, and the impression which he had produced, were all that remained of him. Jesus is not a founder of dogmas, a maker of symbols; he is the world’s initiator into a new spirit. The least Christian of men were, on the one hand, the doctors of the Greek Church, who from the fourth century involved Christianity in a series of puerile metaphysical discussions, and, on the other hand, the scholastics of the Latin middle ages, who attempted to draw from the Gospel the thousands of articles of a colossal “Summation.” To adhere to Jesus in view of the kingdom of God was what it was originally to be a Christian.

Thus we comprehend how, by an exceptional destiny, pure Christianity still presents itself, at the end of twenty centuries, with the character of a universal and eternal religion. It is because in fact the religion of Jesus is, in some respects, the final religion. The fruit of a perfectly spontaneous movement of souls, free at its birth from every dogmatic constraint, having struggled three hundred years for liberty of conscience, Christianity, in spite of the falls which followed, still gathers the fruits of this surpassing origin. To renew itself, it has only to turn to the Gospel. The kingdom of God, as we conceive it, is widely different from the supernatural apparition which the first Christians expected to see burst forth in the clouds. But the sentiment which Jesus introduced into the world is really ours. His perfect idealism is the highest rule of unworldly and virtuous life. He has created that heaven of free souls, in which is found what we ask in vain on earth, the perfect nobility of the children of God, absolute purity, total abstraction from the contamination of the world, that freedom, in short, which material society shuts out as an impossibility, and which finds all its amplitude only in the domain of thought. The great master of those who take refuge in this ideal kingdom of God, is Jesus still. He first proclaimed the kingliness of the spirit; he first said, at least by his acts: “My kingdom is not of this world.” The foundation of the true religion is indeed his work. After him, there is nothing more but to develop and fructify.

“Christianity” has thus become almost synonymous with “religion.” Jesus founded religion on humanity, as Socrates founded philosophy, as Aristotle founded science. There had been philosophy before Socrates and science before Aristotle. Since Socrates and Aristotle, philosophy and science have made immense progress; but all has been built upon the foundation which they laid. And so, before Jesus, religious thought had passed through many revolutions; since Jesus it has made great conquests; nevertheless it has not departed, it will not depart from the essential condition which Jesus created; he has fixed for eternity the idea of the pure worship. The religion of Jesus, in this sense, is not limited. The Church has had its epochs and its phases; it has shut itself up in symbols which have had or will have their day. Jesus founded the absolute religion, excluding nothing, determining nothing, save its essence. His symbols are not fixed dogmas, but images susceptible of indefinite interpretations. We should seek vainly in the gospel for a theological proposition. All the professions of faith are disguises of the idea of Jesus, much as the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, by proclaiming Aristotle the sole master of a perfect science, was false to the thought of Aristotle.

Aristotle, had he witnessed the discussions of the schools, would have repudiated this narrow doctrine; he would have been of the party of progressive science against the party of routine, which was shielding itself under his authority; he would have applauded his contradictors. And so, were Jesus to return among us, he would acknowledge as his disciples, not those who claim to include him entirely in a few phrases of the catechism, but those who labar to continue him. The eternal glory, in every order of grand achievements, is to have laid the first stone. It may be that, in the “Physics” and in the “Meteorology” of modern times there is found no word of the treatises of Aristotle which hear these titles: Aristotle is none the less the founder of natural science. Whatever may be the transformations of dogma, Jesus will remain in religion the creator of its pure sentiment: the Sermon on the Mount will never be surpassed. No revolution will lead us not to join in religion the grand intellectual and moral line at the head of which beams the name of Jesus. In this sense, we are Christians, even though we separate upon almost all points from the Christian tradition which has preceded us.

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