Books: Preface to Androcles and the Lion
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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW >> Preface to Androcles and the Lion
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The chronicler of the Acts of the Apostles sees nothing of the
significance of this. The great danger of conversion in all ages
has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to
the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without
understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it
down to its level by degrading it. Years ago I said that the
conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of
Christianity to savagery. The conversion of Paul was no
conversion at all: it was Paul who converted the religion that
had raised one man above sin and death into a religion that
delivered millions of men so completely into their dominion that
their own common nature became a horror to them, and the
religious life became a denial of life. Paul had no intention of
surrendering either his Judaism or his Roman citizenship to the
new moral world (as Robert Owen called it) of Communism and
Jesuism. Just as in the XIX century Karl Marx, not content to
take political economy as he found it, insisted on rebuilding it
from the bottom upwards in his own way, and thereby gave a new
lease of life to the errors it was just outgrowing, so Paul
reconstructed the old Salvationism from which Jesus had vainly
tried to redeem him, and produced a fantastic theology which is
still the most amazing thing of the kind known to us. Being
intellectually an inveterate Roman Rationalist, always discarding
the irrational real thing for the unreal but ratiocinable
postulate, he began by discarding Man as he is, and substituted a
postulate which he called Adam. And when he was asked, as he
surely must have been in a world not wholly mad, what had become
of the natural man, he replied "Adam IS the natural man." This
was confusing to simpletons, because according to tradition Adam
was certainly the name of the natural man as created in the
garden of Eden. It was as if a preacher of our own time had
described as typically British Frankenstein's monster, and called
him Smith, and somebody, on demanding what about the man in the
street, had been told "Smith is the man in the street." The thing
happens often enough; for indeed the world is full of these Adams
and Smiths and men in the street and average sensual men and
economic men and womanly women and what not, all of them
imaginary Atlases carrying imaginary worlds on their
unsubstantial shoulders.
The Eden story provided Adam with a sin: the "original sin" for
which we are all damned. Baldly stated, this seems ridiculous;
nevertheless it corresponds to something actually existent not
only in Paul's consciousness but in our own. The original sin was
not the eating of the forbidden fruit, but the consciousness of
sin which the fruit produced. The moment Adam and Eve tasted the
apple they found themselves ashamed of their sexual relation,
which until then had seemed quite innocent to them; and there is
no getting over the hard fact that this shame, or state of sin,
has persisted to this day, and is one of the strongest of our
instincts. Thus Paul's postulate of Adam as the natural man was
pragmatically true: it worked. But the weakness of Pragmatism is
that most theories will work if you put your back into making
them work, provided they have some point of contact with human
nature. Hedonism will pass the pragmatic test as well as
Stoicism. Up to a certain point every social principle that is
not absolutely idiotic works: Autocracy works in Russia and
Democracy in America; Atheism works in France, Polytheism in
India, Monotheism throughout Islam, and Pragmatism, or No-ism, in
England. Paul's fantastic conception of the damned Adam,
represented by Bunyan as a pilgrim with a great burden of sins on
his back, corresponded to the fundamental condition of evolution,
which is, that life, including human life, is continually
evolving, and must therefore be continually ashamed of itself and
its present and past. Bunyan's pilgrim wants to get rid of his
bundle of sins; but he also wants to reach "yonder shining
light;" and when at last his bundle falls off him into the
sepulchre of Christ, his pilgrimage is still unfinished and his
hardest trials still ahead of him. His conscience remains uneasy;
"original sin" still torments him; and his adventure with Giant
Despair, who throws him into the dungeon of Doubting Castle, from
which he escapes by the use of a skeleton key, is more terrible
than any he met whilst the bundle was still on his back. Thus
Bunyan's allegory of human nature breaks through the Pauline
theology at a hundred points. His theological allegory, The Holy
War, with its troops of Election Doubters, and its cavalry of
"those that rode Reformadoes," is, as a whole, absurd,
impossible, and, except in passages where the artistic old Adam
momentarily got the better of the Salvationist theologian, hardly
readable.
Paul's theory of original sin was to some extent idiosyncratic.
He tells us definitely that he finds himself quite well able to
avoid the sinfulness of sex by practising celibacy; but he
recognizes, rather contemptuously, that in this respect he is not
as other men are, and says that they had better marry than burn,
thus admitting that though marriage may lead to placing the
desire to please wife or husband before the desire to please God,
yet preoccupation with unsatisfied desire may be even more
ungodly than preoccupation with domestic affection. This view of
the case inevitably led him to insist that a wife should be
rather a slave than a partner, her real function being, not to
engage a man's love and loyalty, but on the contrary to release
them for God by relieving the man of all preoccupation with sex
just as in her capacity of a housekeeper and cook she relieves
his preoccupation with hunger by the simple expedient of
satisfying his appetite. This slavery also justifies itself
pragmatically by working effectively; but it has made Paul the
eternal enemy of Woman. Incidentally it has led to many foolish
surmises about Paul's personal character and circumstance, by
people so enslaved by sex that a celibate appears to them a sort
of monster. They forget that not only whole priesthoods, official
and unofficial, from Paul to Carlyle and Ruskin, have defied the
tyranny of sex, but immense numbers of ordinary citizens of both
sexes have, either voluntarily or under pressure of circumstances
easily surmountable, saved their energies for less primitive
activities.
Howbeit, Paul succeeded in stealing the image of Christ crucified
for the figure-head of his Salvationist vessel, with its Adam
posing as the natural man, its doctrine of original sin, and its
damnation avoidable only by faith in the sacrifice of the cross.
In fact, no sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of
superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the
name of Jesus.
THE CONFUSION OF CHRISTENDOM.
Now it is evident that two religions having such contrary effects
on mankind should not be confused as they are under a common
name. There is not one word of Pauline Christianity in the
characteristic utterances of Jesus. When Saul watched the clothes
of the men who stoned Stephen, he was not acting upon beliefs
which Paul renounced. There is no record of Christ's having ever
said to any man: "Go and sin as much as you like: you can
put it all on me." He said "Sin no more," and insisted that he
was putting up the standard of conduct, not debasing it, and that
the righteousness of the Christian must exceed that of the Scribe
and Pharisee. The notion that he was shedding his blood in order
that every petty cheat and adulterator and libertine might wallow
in it and come out whiter than snow, cannot be imputed to him on
his own authority. "I come as an infallible patent medicine for
bad consciences" is not one of the sayings in the gospels. If
Jesus could have been consulted on Bunyan's allegory as to that
business of the burden of sin dropping from the pilgrim's back
when he caught sight of the cross, we must infer from his
teaching that he would have told Bunyan in forcible terms that he
had never made a greater mistake in his life, and that the
business of a Christ was to make self-satisfied sinners feel the
burden of their sins and stop committing them instead of assuring
them that they could not help it, as it was all Adam's fault, but
that it did not matter as long as they were credulous and
friendly about himself. Even when he believed himself to be a
god, he did not regard himself as a scapegoat. He was to take
away the sins of the world by good government, by justice and
mercy, by setting the welfare of little children above the pride
of princes, by casting all the quackeries and idolatries which
now usurp and malversate the power of God into what our local
authorities quaintly call the dust destructor, and by riding on
the clouds of heaven in glory instead of in a thousand-guinea
motor car. That was delirious, if you like; but it was the
delirium of a free soul, not of a shamebound one like Paul's.
There has really never been a more monstrous imposition
perpetrated than the imposition of the limitations of Paul's soul
upon the soul of Jesus.
THE SECRET OF PAUL'S SUCCESS.
Paul must soon have found that his followers had gained peace of
mind and victory over death and sin at the cost of all moral
responsibility; for he did his best to reintroduce it by making
good conduct the test of sincere belief, and insisting that
sincere belief was necessary to salvation. But as his system was
rooted in the plain fact that as what he called sin includes sex
and is therefore an ineradicable part of human nature (why else
should Christ have had to atone for the sin of all future
generations?) it was impossible for him to declare that sin, even
in its wickedest extremity, could forfeit the sinner's salvation
if he repented and believed. And to this day Pauline Christianity
is, and owes its enormous vogue to being, a premium on sin. Its
consequences have had to be held in check by the worldlywise
majority through a violently anti-Christian system of criminal
law and stern morality. But of course the main restraint is human
nature, which has good impulses as well as bad ones, and refrains
from theft and murder and cruelty, even when it is taught that it
can commit them all at the expense of Christ and go happily to
heaven afterwards, simply because it does not always want to
murder or rob or torture.
It is now easy to understand why the Christianity of Jesus failed
completely to establish itself politically and socially, and was
easily suppressed by the police and the Church, whilst Paulinism
overran the whole western civilized world, which was at that time
the Roman Empire, and was adopted by it as its official faith,
the old avenging gods falling helplessly before the new Redeemer.
It still retains, as we may see in Africa, its power of bringing
to simple people a message of hope and consolation that no other
religion offers. But this enchantment is produced by its spurious
association with the personal charm of Jesus, and exists only for
untrained minds. In the hands of a logical Frenchman like Calvin,
pushing it to its utmost conclusions, and devising "institutes"
for hardheaded adult Scots and literal Swiss, it becomes the most
infernal of fatalisms; and the lives of civilized children
are blighted by its logic whilst negro piccaninnies are rejoicing
in its legends.
PAUL'S QUALITIES
Paul, however, did not get his great reputation by mere
imposition and reaction. It is only in comparison with Jesus (to
whom many prefer him) that he appears common and conceited.
Though in The Acts he is only a vulgar revivalist, he comes out
in his own epistles as a genuine poet,--though by flashes only.
He is no more a Christian than Jesus was a Baptist; he is a
disciple of Jesus only as Jesus was a disciple of John. He does
nothing that Jesus would have done, and says nothing that Jesus
would have said, though much, like the famous ode to charity,
that he would have admired. He is more Jewish than the Jews, more
Roman than the Romans, proud both ways, full of startling
confessions and self-revelations that would not surprise us if
they were slipped into the pages of Nietzsche, tormented by an
intellectual conscience that demanded an argued case even at the
cost of sophistry, with all sorts of fine qualities and
occasional illuminations, but always hopelessly in the toils of
Sin, Death, and Logic, which had no power over Jesus. As we have
seen, it was by introducing this bondage and terror of his into
the Christian doctrine that he adapted it to the Church and State
systems which Jesus transcended, and made it practicable by
destroying the specifically Jesuist side of it. He would have
been quite in his place in any modern Protestant State; and he,
not Jesus, is the true head and founder of our Reformed Church,
as Peter is of the Roman Church. The followers of Paul and Peter
made Christendom, whilst the Nazarenes were wiped out.
THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES.
Here we may return to the narrative called The Acts of the
Apostles, which we left at the point where the stoning of Stephen
was followed by the introduction of Paul. The author of The Acts,
though a good story-teller, like Luke, was (herein also like
Luke) much weaker in power of thought than in imaginative
literary art. Hence we find Luke credited with the authorship of
The Acts by people who like stories and have no aptitude for
theology, whilst the book itself is denounced as spurious by
Pauline theologians because Paul, and indeed all the apostles,
are represented in it as very commonplace revivalists,
interesting us by their adventures more than by any qualities of
mind or character. Indeed, but for the epistles, we should have a
very poor opinion of the apostles. Paul in particular is
described as setting a fashion which has remained in continual
use to this day. Whenever he addresses an audience, he dwells
with great zest on his misdeeds before his pseudo conversion,
with the effect of throwing into stronger relief his present
state of blessedness; and he tells the story of that conversion
over and over again, ending with exhortations to the hearers to
come and be saved, and threats of the wrath that will overtake
them if they refuse. At any revival meeting today the same thing
may be heard, followed by the same conversions. This is natural
enough; but it is totally unlike the preaching of Jesus, who
never talked about his personal history, and never "worked up" an
audience to hysteria. It aims at a purely nervous effect; it
brings no enlightenment; the most ignorant man has only to become
intoxicated with his own vanity, and mistake his
self-satisfaction for the Holy Ghost, to become qualified as an
apostle; and it has absolutely nothing to do with the
characteristic doctrines of Jesus. The Holy Ghost may be at work
all round producing wonders of art and science, and strengthening
men to endure all sorts of martyrdoms for the enlargement of
knowledge, and the enrichment and intensification of life ("that
ye may have life more abundantly"); but the apostles, as
described in The Acts, take no part in the struggle except as
persecutors and revilers. To this day, when their successors get
the upper hand, as in Geneva (Knox's "perfect city of Christ")
and in Scotland and Ulster, every spiritual activity but
moneymaking and churchgoing is stamped out; heretics are
ruthlessly persecuted; and such pleasures as money can purchase
are suppressed so that its possessors are compelled to go on
making money because there is nothing else to do. And the
compensation for all this privation is partly an insane conceit
of being the elect of God, with a reserved seat in heaven, and
partly, since even the most infatuated idiot cannot spend his
life admiring himself, the less innocent excitement of punishing
other people for not admiring him, and the nosing out of the sins
of the people who, being intelligent enough to be incapable of
mere dull self-righteousness, and highly susceptible to the
beauty and interest of the real workings of the Holy Ghost, try
to live more rational and abundant lives. The abominable
amusement of terrifying children with threats of hell is another
of these diversions, and perhaps the vilest and most mischievous
of them. The net result is that the imitators of the apostles,
whether they are called Holy Willies or Stigginses in derision,
or, in admiration, Puritans or saints, are, outside their own
congregations, and to a considerable extent inside them, heartily
detested. Now nobody detests Jesus, though many who have been
tormented in their childhood in his name include him in their
general loathing of everything connected with the word religion;
whilst others, who know him only by misrepresentation as a
sentimental pacifist and an ascetic, include him in their general
dislike of that type of character. In the same way a student who
has had to "get up" Shakespear as a college subject may hate
Shakespear; and people who dislike the theatre may include
Moliere in that dislike without ever having read a line of his or
witnessed one of his plays; but nobody with any knowledge of
Shakespear or Moliere could possibly detest them, or read without
pity and horror a description of their being insulted, tortured,
and killed. And the same is true of Jesus. But it requires the
most strenuous effort of conscience to refrain from crying "Serve
him right" when we read of the stoning of Stephen; and nobody has
ever cared twopence about the martyrdom of Peter: many better men
have died worse deaths: for example, honest Hugh Latimer, who was
burned by us, was worth fifty Stephens and a dozen Peters. One
feels at last that when Jesus called Peter from his boat, he
spoiled an honest fisherman, and made nothing better out of the
wreck than a salvation monger.
THE CONTROVERSIES ON BAPTISM AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION.
Meanwhile the inevitable effect of dropping the peculiar
doctrines of Jesus and going back to John the Baptist, was to
make it much easier to convert Gentiles than Jews; and it was by
following the line of least resistance that Paul became the
apostle to the Gentiles. The Jews had their own rite of
initiation: the rite of circumcision; and they were fiercely
jealous for it, because it marked them as the chosen people of
God, and set them apart from the Gentiles, who were simply the
uncircumcized. When Paul, finding that baptism made way faster
among the Gentiles than among the Jews, as it enabled them to
plead that they too were sanctified by a rite of later and higher
authority than the Mosaic rite, he was compelled to admit that
circumcision did not matter; and this, to the Jews, was an
intolerable blasphemy. To Gentiles like ourselves, a good deal of
the Epistle to the Romans is now tedious to unreadableness
because it consists of a hopeless attempt by Paul to evade the
conclusion that if a man were baptized it did not matter a rap
whether he was circumcized or not. Paul claims circumcision as an
excellent thing in its way for a Jew; but if it has no efficacy
towards salvation, and if salvation is the one thing needful--and
Paul was committed to both propositions--his pleas in mitigation
only made the Jews more determined to stone him.
Thus from the very beginning of apostolic Christianity, it was
hampered by a dispute as to whether salvation was to be attained
by a surgical operation or by a sprinkling of water: mere rites
on which Jesus would not have wasted twenty words. Later on, when
the new sect conquered the Gentile west, where the dispute had no
practical application, the other ceremony--that of eating the
god--produced a still more disastrous dispute, in which a
difference of belief, not as to the obligation to perform the
ceremony, but as to whether it was a symbolic or a real ingestion
of divine substance, produced persecution, slaughter, hatred, and
everything that Jesus loathed, on a monstrous scale.
But long before that, the superstitions which had fastened on the
new faith made trouble. The parthenogenetic birth of Christ,
simple enough at first as a popular miracle, was not left so
simple by the theologians. They began to ask of what substance
Christ was made in the womb of the virgin. When the Trinity was
added to the faith the question arose, was the virgin the mother
of God or only the mother of Jesus? Arian schisms and Nestorian
schisms arose on these questions; and the leaders of the
resultant agitations rancorously deposed one another and
excommunicated one another according to their luck in enlisting
the emperors on their side. In the IV century they began to burn
one another for differences of opinion in such matters. In the
VIII century Charlemagne made Christianity compulsory by killing
those who refused to embrace it; and though this made an end of
the voluntary character of conversion, Charlemagne may claim to
be the first Christian who put men to death for any point of
doctrine that really mattered. From his time onward the history
of Christian controversy reeks with blood and fire, torture and
warfare. The Crusades, the persecutions in Albi and elsewhere,
the Inquisition, the "wars of religion" which followed the
Reformation, all presented themselves as Christian phenomena; but
who can doubt that they would have been repudiated with horror by
Jesus? Our own notion that the massacre of St. Bartholomew's was
an outrage on Christianity, whilst the campaigns of Gustavus
Adolphus, and even of Frederick the Great, were a defence of it,
is as absurd as the opposite notion that Frederick was Antichrist
and Torquemada and Ignatius Loyola men after the very heart of
Jesus. Neither they nor their exploits had anything to do with
him. It is probable that Archbishop Laud and John Wesley died
equally persuaded that he in whose name they had made themselves
famous on earth would receive them in Heaven with open arms. Poor
Fox the Quaker would have had ten times their chance; and yet Fox
made rather a miserable business of life.
Nevertheless all these perversions of the doctrine of Jesus
derived their moral force from his credit, and so had to keep his
gospel alive. When the Protestants translated the Bible into the
vernacular and let it loose among the people, they did an
extremely dangerous thing, as the mischief which followed proves;
but they incidentally let loose the sayings of Jesus in open
competition with the sayings of Paul and Koheleth and David and
Solomon and the authors of Job and the Pentateuch; and, as we
have seen, Jesus seems to be the winning name. The glaring
contradiction between his teaching and the practice of all the
States and all the Churches is no longer hidden. And it may be
that though nineteen centuries have passed since Jesus was born
(the date of his birth is now quaintly given as 7 B.C., though
some contend for 100 B.C.), and though his Church has not yet
been founded nor his political system tried, the bankruptcy of
all the other systems when audited by our vital statistics, which
give us a final test for all political systems, is driving us
hard into accepting him, not as a scapegoat, but as one who was
much less of a fool in practical matters than we have hitherto
all thought him.
THE ALTERNATIVE CHRISTS.
Let us now clear up the situation a little. The New Testament
tells two stories for two different sorts of readers. One is the
old story of the achievement of our salvation by the sacrifice
and atonement of a divine personage who was barbarously slain and
rose again on the third day: the story as it was accepted by the
apostles. And in this story the political, economic, and moral
views of the Christ have no importance: the atonement is
everything; and we are saved by our faith in it, and not by works
or opinions (other than that particular opinion) bearing on
practical affairs.
The other is the story of a prophet who, after expressing several
very interesting opinions as to practical conduct, both personal
and political, which are now of pressing importance, and
instructing his disciples to carry them out in their daily life,
lost his head; believed himself to be a crude legendary form of
god; and under that delusion courted and suffered a cruel
execution in the belief that he would rise from the dead and come
in glory to reign over a regenerated world. In this form, the
political, economic and moral opinions of Jesus, as guides to
conduct, are interesting and important: the rest is mere
psychopathy and superstition. The accounts of the resurrection,
the parthenogenetic birth, and the more incredible miracles are
rejected as inventions; and such episodes as the conversation
with the devil are classed with similar conversations recorded of
St. Dunstan, Luther, Bunyan, Swedenborg, and Blake.
CREDULITY NO CRITERION.
This arbitrary acceptance and rejection of parts of the gospel is
not peculiar to the Secularist view. We have seen Luke and John
reject Matthew's story of the massacre of the innocents and the
flight into Egypt without ceremony. The notion that Matthew's
manuscript is a literal and infallible record of facts, not
subject to the errors that beset all earthly chroniclers, would
have made John stare, being as it is a comparatively modern fancy
of intellectually untrained people who keep the Bible on the same
shelf, with Napoleon's Book of Fate, Old Moore's Almanack, and
handbooks of therapeutic herbalism. You may be a fanatical
Salvationist and reject more miracle stories than Huxley did; and
you may utterly repudiate Jesus as the Savior and yet cite him as
a historical witness to the possession by men of the most
marvellous thaumaturgical powers. "Christ Scientist" and Jesus
the Mahatma are preached by people whom Peter would have struck
dead as worse infidels than Simon Magus; and the Atonement; is
preached by Baptist and Congregationalist ministers whose views
of the miracles are those of Ingersoll and Bradlaugh. Luther, who
made a clean sweep of all the saints with their million miracles,
and reduced the Blessed Virgin herself to the status of an idol,
concentrated Salvationism to a point at which the most execrable
murderer who believes in it when the rope is round his neck,
flies straight to the arms of Jesus, whilst Tom Paine and Shelley
fall into the bottomless pit to burn there to all eternity. And
sceptical physicists like Sir William Crookes demonstrate by
laboratory experiments that "mediums" like Douglas Home can make
the pointer of a spring-balance go round without touching the
weight suspended from it.
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