Ecce Homo

“ Not only do we see many of the eminent, but also countless multitudes of the lowly and obscure, whose common lives are, as it were, transfigured with a light from heaven. Unhappy, indeed, is he who has not known such men in person, and whose hopes and habits have not caught some touch of radiance reflected from the nobility and virtue of lives like these. The thought has been well expressed by the author of Ecce Homo, and we may well ask with him, "If this be so, has Christ failed, or can Christianity die?" ”

“ The book is called Ecce Homo, and is an attack on the Crucified without the slightest reservation; it ends in thunders and lightnings against everything that is Christian or infected with Christianity, till one is blinded and deafened. I am in fact the first psychologist of Christianity and, as an old artilleryman, can bring heavy guns into action, the existence of which no opponent of Christianity has even suspected. ”

“ In 1865 appeared anonymously Ecce Homo, a work which created intense excitement and keen controversy in the theological and religious world. Other works were The Life and Times of Stein, the Prussian statesman (1879) , Natural Religion (1882) , The Expansion of England (1883) , Life of Napoleon (1885) , and a work on Goethe. The Growth of British Policy (1895) was left finished but unrevised at his death. ”

“ Know thyself, and God will supply The armor of divinity the wisdom and the occasion for a victory over evil. Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you. The cement of a higher humanity will unite all interests in the one divinity.
Through trope and metaphor, the Revelator, immortal scribe of Spirit and of a true idealism, furnishes the Pure religion enthroned mirror in which mortals may see their own image. In significant figures he depicts the thoughts which he beholds in mortal mind. Thus he rebukes the conceit of sin, and foreshadows its doom. ”

“ It is not our business to gauge the Bishop of D—— from an orthodox point of view. In the presence of such a soul we only feel inclined to respect. The conscience of the just man must be believed on its word; besides, certain natures granted, we admit the possibility of the development of all the beauties of human virtue in a creed differing from our own. What did he think of this dogma or that mystery? These heart-secrets are only known to the tomb which souls enter in a state of nudity. ”

“ This “Life Worship” becomes revealed as a gluttonous grasping at the present, the sucking of the rind and core of its delights; a response to the consciousness of the crowd; a refusal to accept any standard but the standard of Life, before which many impulses and all inhibitions stand judged and condemned. “I believe in the Body,” is the beginning of the Creed. “I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy; blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship.... The ascetics are the only persons that are impure.” ”

“ Again, those who with complete submission bow before the majesty of the Divine, and who out of love for Him love the Creator in the created, and love themselves because they are fashioned after the image of God, who conform to Him as far as human weakness permits, and, holding the flesh subservient to the spirit, triumph over their mind by transferring it to things celestial, these glory in the sixth grade with the Rulers. ”

“ The heroes, of whom history tells, Alexander, or Cæsar, or Scipio, or Saladin, are the representatives of that magnanimity or self-mastery which is the greatness of human nature. Christianity too has its heroes, and in the supernatural order, and we call them Saints. The artist puts before him beauty of feature and form; the poet, beauty of mind; the preacher, the beauty of grace: then intellect too, I repeat, has its beauty, and it has those who aim at it. ”

“ What is there in human nature so glorious as the humanity of Christ, and what is esteemed more foul in human nature than the carcase of the leper, with tumours, and ulcers, and reeking stench? But he who is to be venerated above all creatures, vouchsafed to appear in that foul form, to the end that we might pity the misery of human beings, and according to our power comfort them, for love of the merciful and humble Jesus ”

“ Here another problem arose in the divine mind—how to raise human personality to such a union with the Theanthropos as, without infringing upon its nature, to raise its being and its acts to the value, excellence, and dignity of theanthropic being and acts, and thus to exhibit in it the most perfect image of the infinite. ”

“ The contrast between the divine and human natures is needed to throw personality into relief. Take away the human nature, and that contrast disappears, and with it goes the distinction between divine person and divine nature. Then, instead of a transcendent personality in whose portrait divine and human features are distinctly limned, we have a blur. ”

“ And in Christ the Person was even looked upon as the product of two Natures, the Divine and the Human, hence of two Impersonal Forces.” [456] Here two peculiarities in the early Conciliar Definitions are emphasized, which were doubtless as helpful, indeed necessary, for the apprehension of the great abiding truths thus conveyed to the Graeco-Roman mind, as they are now in need of reinterpretation in the light of our greater sensitiveness to the difference, in character and in value, which obtains between the concept of Spirit and Personality and that of Substances and Things. ”

“ In every human being the Divine and the Human are intermingled. In every one there are the Reason and the Moral sense, the passions that prompt to evil, and the sensual appetites. "If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die," said Paul, writing to the Christians at Rome, "but if ye through the spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. ”

“ And if, having accurately read these vital passages, you then as carefully consider the tenour of the two songs of human joy in the birth of Christ, the Magnificat, and the Nunc dimittis, you will find the theme of both to be, not the newness of blessing, but the equity which disappoints the cruelty and humbles the strength of men; which scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts; which fills the hungry with good things ”

“ You the orthodox, and you the reasoners, assert through the mouths of your churches or philosophies that purely human virtues are actually predicable of Christ, and appeal for evidence to his life and death. Well and good; we will, to gain ground for argument with you, forget that the Passion is not, and admit that it is, what you would call a purely human transaction. ”

“ There remains, therefore only the doctrine, which is that of Catholic theology, that the human species is corporeally propagated by means of generation, and was therefore, in this respect only, virtually in Adam; but that each individual soul is immediately created by God, and comes into the generic and specific relations of humanity through its union in one integral personality with the body. How, then, can each individual soul become involved in a original sin? ”

“ Wherefore even the Lord Himself, when He condescended to lead a human life in the form of a slave, had no sin whatever, and yet exercised these emotions where He judged they should be exercised. For as there was in Him a true human body and a true human soul, so was there also a true human emotion. ”

“ Can it be that the book of Ecclesiastes is the mere record of the miserable experiences of an embittered and disappointed sensualist, or is it the profound and searching exposition of the vanities of this world as they appear to a lofty searcher after truth and God, measured by the realities of a future and endless life, which the soul emancipated from pollution pants and aspires after with all the intensity of a renovated nature? ”

“ But while the vulgar and the superstitious were thus deluded, they who possessed superior education and superior minds, united, with a belief in the future, a more cheerful faith in the justice and beneficence of the Deity. They discovered, even by the light of reason, that human nature has been perverted from its original perfection,—that an evil principle has been introduced into our inmost essence,—that in our sinful state we are at enmity with God and all goodness,—and must by prayers and sacrifices be purified and reconciled to him ere we can taste of happiness. ”

“ The ancient world no doubt peers into this world of the Catholic poet, but only as the guiding star and companion of human wisdom and culture; for, where it is a question of doctrine and dogma, it is the scholasticism of Christian theology and love which speaks. ”

“ This human sense of Deity yields to the divine sense, even as the material sense of personality yields to the incorporeal sense of God and man as the infinite Principle and infinite idea, — as one Father with His universal family, held in the gospel of Love. ”

“ Setting aside all refinements of theology for the moment, the word Augustinian represents to us the conception of the individual human soul as a sinful thing, thrown out in all its nakedness and isolation upon an angry sea of retribution, from which nothing can save it but the arbitrary action of the grace of God. Here was individualism indeed! ”

“ Masculine, feminine, and neuter genders are human concepts. In one of the ancient languages the word for man is used also as the synonym of mind. This definition has been weakened by anthropomorphism, or a humanization of Deity. The word anthropomorphic, in such a phrase as “an anthropomorphic God,” is derived from two Greek words, signifying man and form, and may be defined as a mortally mental attempt to reduce Deity to corporeality. The life-giving quality of Mind is Spirit, not matter. The ideal man corresponds to creation, to intelligence, and to Truth. ”

“ This spirit of God is made manifest in the flesh, healing and saving men, — it is the Christ, Comforter, “which taketh away the sin of the world;” and yet Christ is rejected of men!
The evil in human nature foams at the touch of good ”

“ A noble and good man, he was conscious within himself of a lofty conception of humanity, and whatever in experience contradicts such a conception,—all the undeniable defects which remove every one from perfection, he reconciled by his idea of the Divinity which in the midst of ages came down into human nature in order completely to restore its earlier image. ”

“ This creed, which made the most agonizing death so easy, and filled the most wretched with peace, calmness, joy—must indeed be the creed of redemption, high above all that the wisdom of men had yet devised—and it would surely pour balm even into his aching wounds, and bear him up on the wings of enthusiasm to triumph over the terrors of death. ”

“ No doubt you people who mortify the flesh, who listen to the voice of conscience, who consider the soul more than the body, and who look upon this life as a preparation for a future existence, are happy in your self-torturings. All that sort of thing came in with Anno Domini, and made the mediæval ages a hell of anguish; but I—I am a Greek—a pagan, if it pleases you—who looks on this world not as a prison, but as a garden wherein to live happily. Your mourning Man of Sorrows is entirely opposed to our joyous Apollo, your gloomy views of life to our serenity of temperament. ”

“ That we might all love him spiritually, and that no Man should appropriate Christ to himself upon the Earth, but that we should equally lift up our Minds to Heaven, knowing that our Head is there. For if Men now so much please themselves in the Colour and Shape of the Garment, and do boast so much of the Blood or the Foreskin of Christ, and the Milk of the Virgin Mary, what do you think would have been, had he abode on the Earth, eating and discoursing? ”

“ Nothing is lost from that perfectly preserved atmosphere of something foreign to our own experience in time and place, which one felt instinctively to be foreign whether or not one were Egyptologist enough to recognize it as perfect; while at the same time the interest is kept up by a stress of human feeling which makes the thrilling events chronicled hold one as if they happened before one’s eyes. The early Christians are represented, not as martyrs and haloed heroes, but as human beings with a great deal of human nature in them ”

“ For He who prohibited the making of a graven image, would never Himself have made an image in the likeness of holy things. [87] Nor is there at all any composite thing, and creature endowed with sensation, of the sort in heaven. But the face is a symbol of the rational soul, and the wings are the lofty ministers and energies of powers right and left; and the voice is delightsome glory in ceaseless contemplation. Let it suffice that the mystic interpretation has advanced so far.
Now the high priest’s robe is the symbol of the world of sense. ”

“ It is his humanism and his naturalism, his interest in men and women, and in bird and beast as well, that fills this sweet lover of Christ with tender sympathy for them all. Through him human interest and love of man drew monasticism from its cloister, and sent it forth upon an unhampered ministry of love. ”

“ Yet they still insisted that Jesus in his life, conduct, and death demonstrated that human nature could rise no higher than in him, and that he was all and fulfilled all that God had comprised in the Logos “man.” ”

“ And do not be surprised if we speak of a perfect soul as the clothing of the body (which, on account of the Word of God and His wisdom, is now named incorruption) , when Jesus Christ Himself, who is the Lord and Creator of the soul, is said to be the clothing of the saints, according to the language of the apostle, “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.” [161] As Christ, then, is the clothing of the soul, so for a kind of reason sufficiently intelligible is the soul said to be the clothing of the body, seeing it is an ornament to it, covering and concealing its mortal nature. ”

“ Why not assert the deity or deities to be corporeal, and to have eyes, a nose, mouth, ears, &c.? Epicurus maintained, that no man had ever seen reason but in a [Pg 472] human figure; therefore the gods must have a human figure. And this argument, which is deservedly so much ridiculed by Cicero, becomes, according to you, solid and philosophical. ”