BOOKS.
THE HIDDEN WISDOM OF CHRIST.*
THIS is a very strange book, one which will deeply interest the class who are interested in watching the development of modern heresy. Its author, who is the second son of the great German scholar, has employed immense reading and no inconsiderable power of statement to support a singular thesis, the main points of which may, we think, without injustice to his marvellous power of digression, be reduced to three. Mr. de Bunsen believes, first, that there has existed from the earliest ages a doctrine which he calls the "hidden wisdom," and which was first made known to any section of mankind by Zoroaster, that this doctrine was retained among the Jews, though unknown to the nation, and was the basis of the religious reform which followed the Babylonian captivity, that it is therefore con- tained in the books we now call the-Apocrypha, i, e., books of hidden things, and that this doctrine was the one which governed the public teaching of Christ and His first disciples. Secondly, that Christ Himself taught it to His immediate disciples only, and not to the mass of His followers, that after His ascent He revealed it in all its fulness to St. Paul, that St. Paul was the first to reveal it in its breadth to the Gentile world, that the contest
between him and the Apostles at Jerusalem was a quarrel as to the expediency of publishing the esoteric doctrine, and that the Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Lai& were drawn up with the intention of excluding those sayings of the Lord which contain this hidden wisdom. Thirdly, that the" hidden wisdom" is embodied in the theory of the following extract, which we must note is a resam6 of the primary doctrine of the Zendavesta, the Scripture of Zoroaster, to whom Mr. de Bunsen assigns extraor- dinary antiquity, believing, for example, that the conflict of Cain and Abel is an allegorical account of the great division produced by Zoroaster in the original Aryan section of mankind. Zoroaster dwelling in the Aryan " home " in Bactria in the year 6129, revealed the monotheistic truth to the Aryan tribes, and exhorted them to abandon their nomad life for one of agriculture. Some consented and migrated, but others resisted, and in the expulsion of Cain and death of Abel Mr. de Bunsen sees the expression of that historic truth. At all events he holds that to Zoroaster the Aryan teacher this great truth was given :—
" Thefirst-born among all creatures is the Divine Spirit,Wisdom or Word, the Mediator between the Creature and the Creator, and the organ of sancti- fication and immortality. The first-born or firstling of creation is not, strictly speaking, a creation, but an emanation from the Creator' con- veying the Divine element to reasonable creatures, by endowing them with a living soul, that is, with 'fatness and immortality.' The primordial spirit' proceeds from the Father,' and by inhabiting the soul of man produces, if unopposed, Vohumano, that is, 'the best mind or Ridden Wisdom of Christ. By Ernest de Bunsen. London: Longman. Spirit,' and thus the Son of God. It is the principle of life for the body, and of sanctification and immortality for the soul. The divinely- wrought 'good mind' produces the fruits of the spirit, that is purity in 'thought, word, and deeds,' which is capable to withstand the is, of the material world 'which passes away,' and by redeeming the Soul from its earthly prison-house to translate the former to the golden thrones' of the living God and of His Angels. The indwelling Divine Spirit is also called the holy Word,' the Word of God, spoken by Him in the beginning, which was 'Lord,' or Master, before the crea- tion of the day, before the creation of the Archangels,' and which the good Spirit of God has continuously spoken.' The Divine Spirit, or Word, or 'Wisdom' is designated as the type of the creations' in the world of God. If he (the Spirit or Word), "Honovar," teaches in the beings, 0 thou Creator of All (Mazda), he becomes like unto his beings (becomes incarnate), and brings the kingdom of the living God. There- fore to be led by the Spirit of God is to be in God. If man 'gives him- self over to the Good Spirit,' as to his Lord and Master, then spirit and matter harmoniously combine—the embodied spirit and the spiritualized matter have become one ; through the best operating spirit' the finite creature has become united with the infinite Creator ; mortality has put on immortality ; the enmity caused by the opposing principles in man has been abolished ; the new man is of the Spirit, as the Spirit is of God ; the son of man has become a son of God ; for the living God is a friend, brother, or father' of those who worship Him."
This unity of the spirit and of matter, of God and the flesh, was accomplished perfectly in one Man only, Jesus of Nazareth, who, though absolute Man, having no previous existence of any kind, spiritual or material, nevertheless so received the Divine Spirit that he became a God, and in so becoming recon- ciled flesh and spirit, man and His Maker, at once and for ever. "In the fulness of time the man was born, lived, and died, who in not opposing by his own will the inwardly revealed will of God, became the Son well-pleasing to the Father, the perfect human organ or advocate of the Divine Spirit, became identical with the same, became the heavenly Messiah, ' the Saviour of all.' God spake by His Son. This Divine mission of the righteous servant of God, of the Son of Man,' so far as it was confined to the earth, could not be eternal. But after his death, through the divinely wrought resurrection, the Son of God was to be tram- lated to the throne of God, there to live and rule for evermore at the right hand of the Father. He was taken up into the pre- sence of the Ancient of Days, and there was invited, as David saw in the Spirit, to sit on his right hand." Each of these three propositions, which together make up a new creed, leading to a new system alike of dogma and of ethics, is supported by a mass of quotations, of arguments, and of learning, which, despite the strangeness of the ideas conveyed, will probably give Mr, de Bun- sen's speculations a large, though not a general circulation. His criticism upon the Apocryphal books in particular is most valuable, and he has pointed out with great power the connection between the great "heresies" of the early Christian world and ideas older than Christianity, or perhaps than the historic period, and for these two results we may in part welcome his work with some cor- diality. If Mr. de Bunsen can induce Protestants to re-open the study of the heresiarchs without the prejudices they have inheri- ted from Rome, to re-examine books like the Wisdom of Sirach without the prepossessions derived from Luther, to re-discuss the question of the existence of a permanent, but unwritten revela- tion in the heart of man, his volumes will have done a great service, monstrous as may be the theory in support of which they were written.
For it is monstrous. With the first proposition we have little concern, for it is only one effort among many to fix a recognized, but as it were subtle and ether-like element of truth. That in
all ages and under all dispensations God has been pleased to
reveal to great souls portions of truth beyond the intellectual or moral capacity of the mass, that there have been men to whom ideas despised or misunderstood by the world have seemed living certainties, that these ideas have included many of the highest truths of theology, is as certain as that Zoroaster and Gautaina ex- isted, that the Book of Wisdom had an author, that Cicero wrote the
Offices, that Philo anticipated truths so mighty that his terminology served the "beloved disciple" for the greatest of the relations of
Christ. Mr. de Bunsen may, if he pleases, make Zoroaster oldest of these minds, and connect the light which irradiated them with some abiding ray which had always existed on earth, without giving us offence. To us be seems like a man who, ignoring the power of flint and steel when struck together, should endeavour to prove that every hearth in England is lighted by a flame deduced through generations from some ori- ginal lamp ; but still his statement is a question of fact open to any amount of fair and frank discussion, specially worthy to be dis- cussed by men of Mr. de Bunsen's deep research. But of his remaining propositions one is in our judgment utterly bad, and the other demonstrably false. We cannot conceive of an idea which would or could work so frightful an amount of moral and
intellectual mischief as that Christ and His Apostles entertained an esoteric as well as an exoteric creed, one doctrine for the en- lightened and another for the vulgar, one to be published out of season and the other to be kept secret till the season was propitious. To assert such a faith is to assert that Christ, the Man in whom, according to Mr. de Bunsen, the Spirit became incarnate, was guilty throughout life of the suppressio yeti, guilty of the worst act an apostle can commit, the suppression of the Gospel, which, as his secret teaching showed, he knew that lie was divinely appointed to deliver, that, to sum up the case in a single illustration, Christ committed the offence of Belem. Such an impression once prevalent would justify all wise and good men in yielding to their most besetting temptation, the wish to con- ceal the truth for the sake of peace or the avoiding of scandal— a wish which has for ages tempted the Roman Catholic casuists into defending what Dr. Newman calls an "economy" of truth, a thriftiness in uttering what they believe to be of divine import and vital necessity to the world. Such economy was sternly reprimanded by Christ when practised by the Pharisees, and yet Mr. de Bunsen, who quotes that text, wishes us to believe that it was practised by Christ Himself, that the absolute exemplar to all ages of truthfulness unto death,—for the human cause of Pilate's sentence was the refusal of the accused to accept a defence suggested by Pilate himself,—instructed mankind in the art of casuistry, of seeming to reveal all while revealing nothing. Mr. de Bunsen seems to us to confound the agent with the thing acted upon, moral responsibility with material power. It is of course quite possible for a man to be in a state in which only part of the truth can be told him, his mind being incompetent to comprehend more than a part,—but is the sun not shining because men live behind darkened windows ? A child is, as respects his teacher, always in this state of incompetence, but the fact does not justify the teacher in concealing from the child things essential for it to know, as, for example, that fire will burn, or in teaching it a half-truth, as, for example, that fire will burn bad little children. When Christ said, "I have many more things to tell you, but ye cannot bear them now," He did not mean that He had reserved a secret—and the one essential secret of the world's history—for a chosen few, but that they all needed further pre- paration, as the world had needed it for thousands of years, perhaps for thousands of ages. That the ancient Oriental world, with its in- tense belief in the radical difference among men, should have ac- cepted the idea of esotericism is natural enough, and so it also is when expressed by the philosophers of our own day, who despise the uncultivated as Egyptian priests despised Egyptian labourers. But to attribute such a belief to Christ, before whom all are equal, who came to redeem mankind, not to save the intellectual, is to destroy the only foundation of man's hope,—the belief that God can only speak in truth, that His testimony, whether written on rocks, or delivered through human pens, or transmitted through the lips of his Divine Son, must always be true. If Christ held an esoteric creed, what warranty have we that a new creed may not some day appear, and show not only that we know little, but that we know that little wrongly, that our " truth " is the reverse of truth ? He told his audience, i. e., mankind, plainly, "Before Abraham was, I am," a sharp, clear statement to them of His pre- existence. Oh dear no, says Mr. de Bunsen, reverently enough in form, He had another faith than that, which was revealed in fulness to St. Paul years after His death, viz., that He had not pre-existed at all, but had only received the fulness of a pre-existing Divine Spirit. This may be esotericism, but if it be, the difference between esotericism and falsehood is not to us perceptible. We say nothing of the fact that St. Paul asserted the pre-existence of his Saviour in words as clear as those of Christ Himself, affirming distinctly that "he took upon himself the form of a servant," for it is not into %he doctrinal controversy that we desire to enter. All we wish to show is that this new creed of Mr. de Bunsen, this compromise between the Unitarian and Orthodox theories is based on a dogma which if accepted would destroy the root idea of the Christian life. Mr. do Bunsen is of course at full liberty to believe that Christ was but a prophet, and taught thus, but be is not at liberty to believe it, and yet also that in Jesus the Divine Spirit became flesh, that He who could conceal truth vital to his teaching yet became God. That belief would destroy theological morality, and really do• what Rome says Protestantism does, give the rein to the human imagination to make a creed for itself irrespective alike of the inner and the outer light. Even on Mr. de Bunsen's own theory his dogma is inadmissible, and to those who, like our- selves, believe the Incarnation, it is utterly unreasonable. They could as soon believe, with an eccentric writer, that the world had
been created with all its geological phenomena on purpose to de- ceive man, as with Mr. de Bunsen that it was possible for the Son of Man to teach half-truths subsequently to be supplemented by another half, which together made of the former falsity. There is development in religion, but it is in the increase of men's capacity, not of the Divine truthfulness—in the muscles and bones and nerves, not in the organic principles of life.
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