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VIII. Jesus (1954) 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Next>> JESUS OF NAZARETH Lecture I: May 14, 1954 I I have said that to take Jesus of Nazareth as the concluding figure in our group of original thinkers is a strange enterprise. All of the men we have considered up until now were free thinkers. Free, in the sense that they tried to face the real position of man in the world and to discover a genuine creative capability within man's mind. But to include Jesus of Nazareth here, especially where those discoveries are concerned, is indeed strange, because if we consider him not as the the Son of God (as he is taken by believers) but merely as a man (as he has been taken by many thinkers since the end of the eighteenth century) then we find that as far as personality goes he is the most amazing man that one could ever hope to encounter. That he is a kind of phenomenon, even a curious phenomenon, and if we abstract from him all of the divine significance that he would have as the Son of God, then it becomes almost inexplicable why this man should have had the great influence on world history that he did. Perhaps the greatest influence that any single man ever has had. If we abstract from him a hit, relying only upon his teachings and sayings (and we have only a few left that can be considered original such as the Sermon on the Mount and various dispersed sayings in the Gospels) then we are forced to ask ourselves how he came to have such an effect? If we consider only his sayings and his deeds--namely, that he was a man who apparently was a healer in the psycho- somatic sense, then he could not impress us as a performer of miracles because historians have discovered that Palestine was just overflowing with people like that, with Rabbis who vent around healing people and so forth. Many Jewish Rabbis at that time healed people, and many doctors and psychologists now believe that all of the miracles Jesus of Nazareth performed are things that many other people can perform in a psychosomatic sense, and this was of course a very hysterical country at that time. We didn't even need the historians to tell us that, because the Jews in Poland right up until the time of Hitler still had their Rabbis who performed miracles, and they were continually praising their miracle Rabbis to one another. So taken as a performer of miracles Jesus of Nazareth is, so to speak, pretty run-of-the mill stuff, and taken as a preacher, as a maker of sayings, then if we don't impart any higher divine purpose to them we are forced to conclude that they are all banalities. They are ethical banalities, the same as were being preached by every Rabbi in Palestine for Palestine was, and had been for many centuries, a deeply religious country and there is not a single saying of any of them that the ancient prophets had not said better and that was not contained in the whole of the Bible already. Thus considering Jesus merely as a man (and we shall consider him here only as a man, because philosophically we must exclude belief and therefore are not entitled to consider him in any other way) he appears as a very remarkable performer of miracles of which we have hundreds, and as a very convincing speaker who walks the streets preaching the ethical banalities of his time and place. But there is another view. For if we look at him as a Jewish Rabbi of a very definite time, of whom we now know, historically speaking, that he was indeed a living person (and of whom we could have known long ago that he lived if we had really looked into his teachings) then he must be included among the most illustrious of philosophical thinkers who each, in their own turn, discovered absolute human creative possibilities existing in man. And that means to consider him as a philosopher, as someone who had something absolutely new and amazing to say, who brought ideas into the world without which we would not be able to live, eternal ideas to be eternally considered. I say that this is so. I say that Jesus of Nazareth, considered as a man, belongs not only to the ranks of those few original philosophers but is the culmination of the whole process of discovery that they begun. That he was a thinker, and taken merely as a thinker one of the greatest men that has ever lived. To consider him in this way runs against our whole non-religious tradition, and so we must first have a look at the great objections that have been put forth against this man by two of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Nietzsche once said 'Jesus has been introduced to us as a hero. Lately, he has even been presented to us as a genius. To make a hero of Jesus, and even more, what a misunderstanding is the word "genius". Jesus of Nazareth a genius? Wasn't he rather an -----? (But the word that he wrote was eliminated by his sister from his archives). The word has been discovered. What he said was: 'Wasn't Jesus of Nazareth rather an idiot'? (1) He said that, because he was pursuing the same line of thinking Dostoevsky had pursued when, he wrote his novel The Idiot. Dostoevsky, being thrown into the nihilistic predicament was wavering between an absolute and foolish belief, that is, a belief in the sense of Kierkegaard, an hysterical belief, and also an hysterical negation of belief. That is why he created the character of "The Grand Inquisitor" in The Brothers Karamazov who says to Jesus 'Entirely impossible what you have taught. That is why we created the church, distorted your teachings, and used you and your splendid personality but under the condition that you were dead. Again you are coming you fool trying to tell the people to live your way, and destroying our whole work. So again, we will have to execute you.' (2) Dostoevsky pursued this line of thinking and in The Idiot he gives us the portrait of a man who is perfectly good in the sense of Jesus of Nazareth (who does all of those things that Jesus of Nazareth prescribed), and then goes on to show us that this is possible only because this man is insane. This man is an idiot. This man is infantile. This man does not have reason. He does not know the world and he will never know the world. He does not have the slightest sense of reality. Rather, he lives in a dream world all of his own. It is a miracle that he is able to live at all, because his way of life is entirely worthless. He might seem admirable for a moment, but only until one sees that he is not free. He is an automaton. His love is not love. It only seems to be love. Rather, he does nothing but let every other person have their own way with him. This incapacity to act humanly is idiocy, thus Nietzsche said 'Wasn't Jesus perhaps an idiot'? Nietzsche could never refrain from concerning himself with Jesus of Nazareth. He returned to him again and again, because he was fascinated by him. He once said 'This man, this young Jew, was one of the noblest men ever born. He just died too young. Imagine-he didn't have any opportunity to know the world. If he had lived long enough to be able to know the world and reality, then he would have confessed that he was wrong. He was noble enough to do so. He would have seen the world and he would have laughed at his own illusions. It was idealism, absolute infantile idealism, to think that human beings could live that way'. (3) These then, are the opinions of the two most radical philosophers of our time as to the thought and figure of Jesus of Nazareth. That he might be an idiot. A Moslem in the former League Of Nations once said, before a gathering of Christians:
Same result He said that the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth have never been tried, that they can, so to speak, never be tried. So again, Jesus of Nazareth was an idiot. From this judgment, only one single quality seems to save him. Namely, that he was the Son of God. Now I have recommended to you this book The Man From Nazareth by Harry Emerson Fosdick, because he is the first man of whom I have the knowledge who agrees with me on one basic point: Namely, that if we consider Jesus of Nazareth merely as a man then (contrary to the above judgment) he grows and grows to a fantastic degree. He does not even discover him as a philosopher, because he himself is not a philosopher, therefore he does not see how new, decisive, and fundamental the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were, but merely as a man. However he does see one thing. He sees the fantastic significance of the deeds of this man and how they go together with his teachings, and he adds tremendously to our historical knowledge of Palestine during the time of Jesus. It is an amazing historical book, and I am glad that it has been written and this job has been done so I don't need to go in that direction any more but can concern myself solely with the philosophy of Jesus. That as a man he could have been considered to be an idiot is a very valuable point. It means that what he did and what he taught is absolutely daring in a sense that had never been seen before him. The impact of that event can be seen in this statement: Namely, that they say 'it is incomprehensible'. Yes! It is incomprehensible. If we could believe in the superman, or at least in the possibility of supermen (not to even speak of the Son of God) then we could say of his teachings and deeds that they are "highly probable", because it would then relieve us of one tremendous task. Namely, to explain how it can be that what Jesus of Nazareth did and taught is within human capabilities, because it seems to transcend and negate that. But this much is true. The event, the very idea of this man is of such a nature that it becomes the hardest problem of philosophy to explain and comprehend how it was that this man could have been human. The moment we are told he was superhuman, everything is solved. This might be a wonderful position, but it doesn't even begin to explain the tremendous impact that his teachings have had upon the church and why it is that they are so easily believed. Nothing is easier to believe than that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God, His only Son, whom God sent into the world and who was engendered through immaculate conception. There is nothing easier to believe, because otherwise he literally seems to come out of the mysterious, that is, out of divine mysteries which are believable, though not entirely explainable, and into a realm of human miraculousness so great that it is almost unbearable. It becomes an even greater miracle when considered in purely human terms then if we could believe that he in fact was the Son of God. That is the main trouble with the problem of Jesus of Nazareth. We have first then to see why it is that he belongs to our line of philosophers. What, approximately, did he contribute? I said, in our last session, that when we came to Socrates the philosophy of philosophy was discovered. This means that philosophy is capable of self-reflection, that philosophy can check itself, can know about itself, and that with this discovery a whole new constellation of human capabilities became possible, all of which revolved around a center. With Socrates, everything seems to have been completed. Everything seems to be discovered. All the capabilities of the human mind seem to be there. Man, if only he would realize them, could now become creative and free ... or could he? Then, there arrives this late comer, Jesus of Nazareth, and something new seems to come into play when Jesus enters the scene. Let us first see what he did for us historically, and by historically I do not mean the fact that through slight distortions the Christian Church came to be founded upon his teachings, but rather that through his personality many of his fundamental teachings have been preserved by the Christian Church. What service did he render? The service, when looked upon historically, is absolutely fantastic. This man had the greatest impact on the history of mankind any man has ever had. The whole of western development is unthinkable without him. It is most probable that the God of Abraham who is also the God of Jesus of Nazareth, the transcendent personal God, and the whole of the Jewish religion including the prophets would have been lost for humanity had it not been for this man. The entire achievement of the Greeks up to and including Plato (as well as their discovery of the possibility of political freedom for man) would have been lost; that the heritage of the Roman empire as the last attempt to bring about an approximately free human community would have been lost as well. They all would have been lost, because none of them could have converted the barbarians. Only Christianity could do that, and once this had been accomplished then they could learn Latin, the great achievement of the Romans, and also help to preserve the Greek tradition. The same is true for the Jewish religion which also did not get lost. |
