Books: Preface to Androcles and the Lion
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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW >> Preface to Androcles and the Lion
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SALVATION AT FIRST A CLASS PRIVILEGE; AND THE REMEDY
Thus, even when the poor decide that the method of purchasing
salvation by offering rams and goats or bringing gold to the
altar must be wrong because they cannot afford it, we still do
not feel "saved" without a sacrifice and a victim. In vain do we
try to substitute mystical rites that cost nothing, such as
circumcision, or, as a substitute for that, baptism. Our sense of
justice still demands an expiation, a sacrifice, a sufferer for
our sins. And this leaves the poor man still in his old
difficulty; for if it was impossible for him to procure rams and
goats and shekels, how much more impossible is it for him to find
a neighbor who will voluntarily suffer for his sins: one who will
say cheerfully "You have committed a murder. Well, never mind: I
am willing to be hanged for it in your stead?"
Our imagination must come to our rescue. Why not, instead of
driving ourselves to despair by insisting on a separate atonement
by a separate redeemer for every sin, have one great atonement
and one great redeemer to compound for the sins of the world once
for all? Nothing easier, nothing cheaper. The yoke is easy, the
burden light. All you have to do when the redeemer is once found
(or invented by the imagination) is to believe in the efficacy of
the transaction, and you are saved. The rams and goats cease to
bleed; the altars which ask for expensive gifts and continually
renewed sacrifices are torn down; and the Church of the single
redeemer and the single atonement rises on the ruins of the old
temples, and becomes a single Church of the Christ.
RETROSPECTIVE ATONEMENT, AND THE EXPECTATION OF THE REDEEMER
But this does not happen at once. Between the old costly religion
of the rich and the new gratuitous religion of the poor there
comes an interregnum in which the redeemer, though conceived by
the human imagination, is not yet found. He is awaited and
expected under the names of the Christ, the Messiah, Baldur the
Beautiful, or what not; but he has not yet come. Yet the sinners
are not therefore in despair. It is true that they cannot say, as
we say, "The Christ has come, and has redeemed us;" but they can
say "The Christ will come, and will redeem us," which, as the
atonement is conceived as retrospective, is equally consoling.
There are periods when nations are seething with this expectation
and crying aloud with prophecy of the Redeemer through their
poets. To feel that atmosphere we have only to take up the Bible
and read Isaiah at one end of such a period and Luke and John at
the other.
COMPLETION OF THE SCHEME BY LUTHER AND CALVIN
We now see our religion as a quaint but quite intelligible
evolution from crude attempts to propitiate the destructive
forces of Nature among savages to a subtle theology with a costly
ritual of sacrifice possible only to the rich as a luxury, and
finally to the religion of Luther and Calvin. And it must be said
for the earlier forms that they involved very real sacrifices.
The sacrifice was not always vicarious, and is not yet
universally so. In India men pay with their own skins, torturing
themselves hideously to attain holiness. In the west, saints
amazed the world with their austerities and self-scourgings and
confessions and vigils. But Luther delivered us from all that.
His reformation was a triumph of imagination and a triumph of
cheapness. It brought you complete salvation and asked you for
nothing but faith. Luther did not know what he was doing in the
scientific sociological way in which we know it; but his instinct
served him better than knowledge could have done; for it was
instinct rather than theological casuistry that made him hold so
resolutely to Justification by Faith as the trump card by which
he should beat the Pope, or, as he would have put it, the sign in
which he should conquer. He may be said to have abolished the
charge for admission to heaven. Paul had advocated this; but
Luther and Calvin did it.
JOHN BARLEYCORN
There is yet another page in the history of religion which must
be conned and digested before the career of Jesus can be fully
understood. people who can read long books will find it in
Frazer's Golden Bough. Simpler folk will find it in the peasant's
song of John Barleycorn, now made accessible to our drawingroom
amateurs in the admirable collections of Somersetshire Folk Songs
by Mr. Cecil Sharp. From Frazer's magnum opus you will learn how
the same primitive logic which makes the Englishman believe today
that by eating a beefsteak he can acquire the strength and
courage of the bull, and to hold that belief in the face of the
most ignominious defeats by vegetarian wrestlers and racers and
bicyclists, led the first men who conceived God as capable of
incarnation to believe that they could acquire a spark of his
divinity by eating his flesh and drinking his blood. And from the
song of John Barleycorn you may learn how the miracle of the
seed, the growth, and the harvest, still the most wonderful of
all the miracles and as inexplicable as ever, taught the
primitive husbandman, and, as we must now affirm, taught him
quite rightly, that God is in the seed, and that God is immortal.
And thus it became the test of Godhead that nothing that you
could do to it could kill it, and that when you buried it, it
would rise again in renewed life and beauty and give mankind
eternal life on condition that it was eaten and drunk, and again
slain and buried, to rise again for ever and ever. You may, and
indeed must, use John Barleycorn "right barbarouslee," cutting
him "off at knee" with your scythes, scourging him with your
flails, burying him in the earth; and he will not resist you nor
reproach you, but will rise again in golden beauty amidst a great
burst of sunshine and bird music, and save you and renew your
life. And from the interweaving of these two traditions with the
craving for the Redeemer, you at last get the conviction that
when the Redeemer comes he will be immortal; he will give us his
body to eat and his blood to drink; and he will prove his
divinity by suffering a barbarous death without resistance or
reproach, and rise from the dead and return to the earth in glory
as the giver of life eternal.
LOOKING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
Yet another persistent belief has beset the imagination of the
religious ever since religion spread among the poor, or, rather,
ever since commercial civilization produced a hopelessly poor
class cut off from enjoyment in this world. That belief is that
the end of this world is at hand, and that it will presently pass
away and be replaced by a kingdom of happiness, justice, and
bliss in which the rich and the oppressors and the unjust shall
have no share. We are all familiar with this expectation: many of
us cherish some pious relative who sees in every great calamity a
sign of the approaching end. Warning pamphlets are in constant
circulation: advertisements are put in the papers and paid for by
those who are convinced, and who are horrified at the
indifference of the irreligious to the approaching doom. And
revivalist preachers, now as in the days of John the Baptist,
seldom fail to warn their flocks to watch and pray, as the great
day will steal upon them like a thief in the night, and cannot be
long deferred in a world so wicked. This belief also associates
itself with Barleycorn's second coming; so that the two events
become identified at last.
There is the other and more artificial side of this belief, on
which it is an inculcated dread. The ruler who appeals to the
prospect of heaven to console the poor and keep them from
insurrection also curbs the vicious by threatening them with
hell. In the Koran we find Mahomet driven more and more to this
expedient of government; and experience confirms his evident
belief that it is impossible to govern without it in certain
phases of civilization. We shall see later on that it gives a
powerful attraction to the belief in a Redeemer, since it adds to
remorse of conscience, which hardened men bear very lightly, a
definite dread of hideous and eternal torture.
THE HONOR OF DIVINE PARENTAGE
One more tradition must be noted. The consummation of praise for
a king is to declare that he is the son of no earthly father, but
of a god. His mother goes into the temple of Apollo, and Apollo
comes to her in the shape of a serpent, or the like. The Roman
emperors, following the example of Augustus, claimed the title of
God. Illogically, such divine kings insist a good deal on their
royal human ancestors. Alexander, claiming to be the son of
Apollo, is equally determined to be the son of Philip. As the
gospels stand, St. Matthew and St. Luke give genealogies (the two
are different) establishing the descent of Jesus through Joseph
from the royal house of David, and yet declare that not Joseph
but the Holy Ghost was the father of Jesus. It is therefore now
held that the story of the Holy Ghost is a later interpolation
borrowed from the Greek and Roman imperial tradition. But
experience shows that simultaneous faith in the descent from
David and the conception by the Holy Ghost is possible. Such
double beliefs are entertained by the human mind without
uneasiness or consciousness of the contradiction involved. Many
instances might be given: a familiar one to my generation being
that of the Tichborne claimant, whose attempt to pass himself off
as a baronet was supported by an association of laborers on the
ground that the Tichborne family, in resisting it, were trying to
do a laborer out of his rights. It is quite possible that Matthew
and Luke may have been unconscious of the contradiction: indeed
the interpolation theory does not remove the difficulty, as the
interpolators themselves must have been unconscious of it. A
better ground for suspecting interpolation is that St. Paul knew
nothing of the divine birth, and taught that Jesus came into the
world at his birth as the son of Joseph, but rose from the dead
after three days as the son of God. Here again, few notice the
discrepancy: the three views are accepted simultaneously without
intellectual discomfort. We can provisionally entertain half a
dozen contradictory versions of an event if we feel either that
it does not greatly matter, or that there is a category
attainable in which the contradictions are reconciled.
But that is not the present point. All that need be noted here is
that the legend of divine birth was sure to be attached sooner or
later to very eminent persons in Roman imperial times, and that
modern theologians, far from discrediting it, have very logically
affirmed the miraculous conception not only of Jesus but of his
mother.
With no more scholarly equipment than a knowledge of these habits
of the human imagination, anyone may now read the four gospels
without bewilderment, and without the contemptuous incredulity
which spoils the temper of many modern atheists, or the senseless
credulity which sometimes makes pious people force us to shove
them aside in emergencies as impracticable lunatics when they ask
us to meet violence and injustice with dumb submission in the
belief that the strange demeanor of Jesus before Pilate was meant
as an example of normal human conduct. Let us admit that without
the proper clues the gospels are, to a modern educated person,
nonsensical and incredible, whilst the apostles are unreadable.
But with the clues, they are fairly plain sailing. Jesus becomes
an intelligible and consistent person. His reasons for going
"like a lamb to the slaughter" instead of saving himself as
Mahomet did, become quite clear. The narrative becomes as
credible as any other historical narrative of its period.
MATTHEW.
THE ANNUNCIATION: THE MASSACRE: THE FLIGHT
Let us begin with the gospel of Matthew, bearing in mind that it
does not profess to be the evidence of an eyewitness. It is a
chronicle, founded, like other chronicles, on such evidence and
records as the chronicler could get hold of. The only one of the
evangelists who professes to give first-hand evidence as an
eyewitness naturally takes care to say so; and the fact that
Matthew makes no such pretension, and writes throughout as a
chronicler, makes it clear that he is telling the story of Jesus
as Holinshed told the story of Macbeth, except that, for a reason
to be given later on, he must have collected his material and
completed his book within the lifetime of persons contemporary
with Jesus. Allowance must also be made for the fact that the
gospel is written in the Greek language, whilst the first-hand
traditions and the actual utterances of Jesus must have been in
Aramaic, the dialect of Palestine. These distinctions were
important, as you will find if you read Holinshed or Froissart
and then read Benvenuto Cellini. You do not blame Holinshed or
Froissart for believing and repeating the things they had read or
been told, though you cannot always believe these things
yourself. But when Cellini tells you that he saw this or did
that, and you find it impossible to believe him, you lose
patience with him, and are disposed to doubt everything in his
autobiography. Do not forget, then, that Matthew is Holinshed and
not Benvenuto. The very first pages of his narrative will put
your attitude to the test.
Matthew tells us that the mother of Jesus was betrothed to a man
of royal pedigree named Joseph, who was rich enough to live in a
house in Bethlehem to which kings could bring gifts of gold
without provoking any comment. An angel announces to Joseph that
Jesus is the son of the Holy Ghost, and that he must not accuse
her of infidelity because of her bearing a son of which he is not
the father; but this episode disappears from the subsequent
narrative: there is no record of its having been told to Jesus,
nor any indication of his having any knowledge of it. The
narrative, in fact, proceeds in all respects as if the
annunciation formed no part of it.
Herod the Tetrarch, believing that a child has been born who will
destroy him, orders all the male children to be slaughtered; and
Jesus escapes by the flight of his parents into Egypt, whence
they return to Nazareth when the danger is over. Here it is
necessary to anticipate a little by saying that none of the other
evangelists accept this story, as none of them except John, who
throws over Matthew altogether, shares his craze for treating
history and biography as mere records of the fulfillment of
ancient Jewish prophecies. This craze no doubt led him to seek
for some legend bearing out Hosea's "Out of Egypt have I called
my son," and Jeremiah's Rachel weeping for her children: in fact,
he says so. Nothing that interests us nowadays turns on the
credibility of the massacre of the innocents and the flight into
Egypt. We may forget them, and proceed to the important part of
the narrative, which skips at once to the manhood of Jesus.
JOHN THE BAPTIST
At this moment, a Salvationist prophet named John is stirring the
people very strongly. John has declared that the rite of
circumcision is insufficient as a dedication of the individual to
God, and has substituted the rite of baptism. To us, who are
accustomed to baptism as a matter of course, and to whom
circumcision is a rather ridiculous foreign practice of no
consequence, the sensational effect of such a heresy as this on
the Jews is not apparent: it seems to us as natural that John
should have baptized people as that the rector of our village
should do so. But, as St. Paul found to his cost later on, the
discarding of circumcision for baptism was to the Jews as
startling a heresy as the discarding of transubstantiation in the
Mass was to the Catholics of the XVI century.
JESUS JOINS THE BAPTISTS
Jesus entered as a man of thirty (Luke says) into the religious
life of his time by going to John the Baptist and demanding
baptism from him, much as certain well-to-do young gentlemen
forty years ago "joined the Socialists." As far as established
Jewry was concerned, he burnt his boats by this action, and cut
himself off from the routine of wealth, respectability, and
orthodoxy. He then began preaching John's gospel, which, apart
from the heresy of baptism, the value of which lay in its
bringing the Gentiles (that is, the uncircumcized) within the
pale of salvation, was a call to the people to repent of their
sins, as the kingdom of heaven was at hand. Luke adds that he
also preached the communism of charity; told the surveyors of
taxes not to over-assess the taxpayers; and advised soldiers to
be content with their wages and not to be violent or lay false
accusations. There is no record of John going beyond this.
THE SAVAGE JOHN AND THE CIVILIZED JESUS
Jesus went beyond it very rapidly, according to Matthew. Though,
like John, he became an itinerant preacher, he departed widely
from John's manner of life. John went into the wilderness, not
into the synagogues; and his baptismal font was the river Jordan.
He was an ascetic, clothed in skins and living on locusts and
wild honey, practising a savage austerity. He courted martyrdom,
and met it at the hands of Herod. Jesus saw no merit either in
asceticism or martyrdom. In contrast to John he was essentially a
highly-civilized, cultivated person. According to Luke, he
pointed out the contrast himself, chaffing the Jews for
complaining that John must be possessed by the devil because he
was a teetotaller and vegetarian, whilst, because Jesus was
neither one nor the other, they reviled him as a gluttonous man
and a winebibber, the friend of the officials and their
mistresses. He told straitlaced disciples that they would have
trouble enough from other people without making any for
themselves, and that they should avoid martyrdom and enjoy
themselves whilst they had the chance. "When they persecute you
in this city," he says, "flee into the next." He preaches in the
synagogues and in the open air indifferently, just as they come.
He repeatedly says, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice," meaning
evidently to clear himself of the inveterate superstition that
suffering is gratifying to God. "Be not, as the Pharisees, of a
sad countenance," he says. He is convivial, feasting with Roman
officials and sinners. He is careless of his person, and is
remonstrated with for not washing his hands before sitting down
to table. The followers of John the Baptist, who fast, and who
expect to find the Christians greater ascetics than themselves,
are disappointed at finding that Jesus and his twelve friends do
not fast; and Jesus tells them that they should rejoice in him
instead of being melancholy. He is jocular and tells them they
will all have as much fasting as they want soon enough, whether
they like it or not. He is not afraid of disease, and dines with
a leper. A woman, apparently to protect him against infection,
pours a costly unguent on his head, and is rebuked because what
it cost might have been given to the poor. He poohpoohs that
lowspirited view, and says, as he said when he was reproached for
not fasting, that the poor are always there to be helped, but
that he is not there to be anointed always, implying that you
should never lose a chance of being happy when there is so much
misery in the world. He breaks the Sabbath; is impatient of
conventionality when it is uncomfortable or obstructive; and
outrages the feelings of the Jews by breaches of it. He is apt to
accuse people who feel that way of hypocrisy. Like the late
Samuel Butler, he regards disease as a department of sin, and on
curing a lame man, says "Thy sins are forgiven" instead of "Arise
and walk," subsequently maintaining, when the Scribes reproach
him for assuming power to forgive sin as well as to cure disease,
that the two come to the same thing. He has no modest
affectations, and claims to be greater than Solomon or Jonah.
When reproached, as Bunyan was, for resorting to the art of
fiction when teaching in parables, he justifies himself on the
ground that art is the only way in which the people can be
taught. He is, in short, what we should call an artist and a
Bohemian in his manner of life.
JESUS NOT A PROSLETYST
A point of considerable practical importance today is that be
expressly repudiates the idea that forms of religion, once
rooted, can be weeded out and replanted with the flowers of a
foreign faith. "If you try to root up the tares you will root up
the wheat as well." Our proselytizing missionary enterprises are
thus flatly contrary to his advice; and their results appear to
bear him out in his view that if you convert a man brought up in
another creed, you inevitably demoralize him. He acts on this
view himself, and does not convert his disciples from Judaism to
Christianity. To this day a Christian would be in religion a Jew
initiated by baptism instead of circumcision, and accepting Jesus
as the Messiah, and his teachings as of higher authority than
those of Moses, but for the action of the Jewish priests, who, to
save Jewry from being submerged in the rising flood of
Christianity after the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction
of the Temple, set up what was practically a new religious order,
with new Scriptures and elaborate new observances, and to their
list of the accursed added one Jeschu, a bastard magician, whose
comic rogueries brought him to a bad end like Punch or Til
Eulenspiegel: an invention which cost them dear when the
Christians got the upper hand of them politically. The Jew as
Jesus, himself a Jew, knew him, never dreamt of such things, and
could follow Jesus without ceasing to be a Jew.
THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS.
So much for his personal life and temperament. His public career
as a popular preacher carries him equally far beyond John the
Baptist. He lays no stress on baptism or vows, and preaches
conduct incessantly. He advocates communism, the widening of the
private family with its cramping ties into the great family of
mankind under the fatherhood of God, the abandonment of revenge
and punishment, the counteracting of evil by good instead of by a
hostile evil, and an organic conception of society in which you
are not an independent individual but a member of society, your
neighbor being another member, and each of you members one of
another, as two fingers on a hand, the obvious conclusion being
that unless you love your neighbor as yourself and he
reciprocates you will both be the worse for it. He conveys all
this with extraordinary charm, and entertains his hearers with
fables (parables) to illustrate them. He has no synagogue or
regular congregation, but travels from place to place with twelve
men whom he has called from their work as he passed, and who have
abandoned it to follow him.
THE MIRACLES
He has certain abnormal powers by which he can perform miracles.
He is ashamed of these powers, but, being extremely
compassionate, cannot refuse to exercise them when afflicted
people beg him to cure them, when multitudes of people are
hungry, and when his disciples are terrified by storms on the
lakes. He asks for no reward, but begs the people not to mention
these powers of his. There are two obvious reasons for his
dislike of being known as a worker of miracles. One is the
natural objection of all men who possess such powers, but have
far more important business in the world than to exhibit them, to
be regarded primarily as charlatans, besides being pestered to
give exhibitions to satisfy curiosity. The other is that his view
of the effect of miracles upon his mission is exactly that taken
later on by Rousseau. He perceives that they will discredit him
and divert attention from his doctrine by raising an entirely
irrelevant issue between his disciples and his opponents.
Possibly my readers may not have studied Rousseau's Letters
Written From The Mountain, which may be regarded as the classic
work on miracles as credentials of divine mission. Rousseau
shows, as Jesus foresaw, that the miracles are the main obstacle
to the acceptance of Christianity, because their incredibility
(if they were not incredible they would not be miracles) makes
people sceptical as to the whole narrative, credible enough in
the main, in which they occur, and suspicious of the doctrine
with which they are thus associated. "Get rid of the miracles,"
said Rousseau, "and the whole world will fall at the feet of
Jesus Christ." He points out that miracles offered as evidence of
divinity, and failing to convince, make divinity ridiculous. He
says, in effect, there is nothing in making a lame man walk:
thousands of lame men have been cured and have walked without any
miracle. Bring me a man with only one leg and make another grow
instantaneously on him before my eyes; and I will be really
impressed; but mere cures of ailments that have often been cured
before are quite useless as evidence of anything else than desire
to help and power to cure.
Jesus, according to Matthew, agreed so entirely with Rousseau,
and felt the danger so strongly, that when people who were not
ill or in trouble came to him and asked him to exercise his
powers as a sign of his mission, he was irritated beyond measure,
and refused with an indignation which they, not seeing Rousseau's
point, must have thought very unreasonable. To be called "an evil
and adulterous generation" merely for asking a miracle worker to
give an exhibition of his powers, is rather a startling
experience. Mahomet, by the way, also lost his temper when people
asked him to perform miracles. But Mahomet expressly disclaimed
any unusual powers; whereas it is clear from Matthew's story that
Jesus (unfortunately for himself, as he thought) had some powers
of healing. It is also obvious that the exercise of such powers
would give rise to wild tales of magical feats which would expose
their hero to condemnation as an impostor among people whose good
opinion was of great consequence to the movement started by his
mission.
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