On Christianity

On Christianity

 

The Old Testament abounds in poetry and metaphor; the Jews who composed it did not take their own figures literally; but when European peoples, more literal and less imaginative, mistook these poems for science, our Occidental theology was born. Christianity was at first a combination of Greek theology with Jewish morality; it was an unstable combination, in which one or the other element would eventually yield; in Catholicism the Greek and pagan element triumphed, in Protestantism, the stern Hebraic moral code. The one had a Renaissance, the other Reformation.

 

The Germans, the northern barbarians, had never really accepted Roman Christianity. A non-Christian ethics of valor and honor, a non-Christian fund of superstition, legend and sentiment, subsisted always among medieval peoples. The Gothic cathedrals were barbaric, not Roman. The warlike temper of the Teutons raised its head above the peacefulness of the Oriental, and changed Christianity from a religion of brotherly love to a stern inculcation of business virtues, from a religion of poverty to a religion of prosperity and power. It was this youthful religion – profound, barbaric, poetical – that the Teutonic races insinuated into Christianity, and substituted for that last sigh of two expiring worlds.

 

Nothing would be so beautiful as Christianity, if it were not taken literally; but the Germans insisted on taking it literally. The dissolution of Christian orthodoxy in Germany was thereafter inevitable. For taken literally, nothing could be so absurd as some of the ancient dogmas, like the damnation of innocents, or the existence of evil in a world created by omnipotent benevolence.

 

The principle of individual interpretation led naturally to a wild growth of sects among the people, and to a mild pantheism among the elite – pantheism being nothing more than “naturalism poetically expressed.” Lessing and Goethe, Carlyle and Emerson, were the landmarks of this change. In brief, the moral system of Jesus destroyed that militaristic Yahveh who by an impish accident of history had been transmitted to Christianity along with the pacifism of prophets and of Christ.  

 

Quoted from “The Story of Philosophy” by Will Durant.