IV

THE HUMAN LIFE OF GOD

NEARLY fifty years ago, Horace Bushnell,

the most mystical of logicians, or the most logical of mystics, delivered before Yale University a magnificent discourse upon The Divinity of Christ. In that fine work of genius, wrought out of darkness and light, like an intricate carving of ebony and ivory, I find these words: "Christ is in such a sense God, or God manifested, that the unknown term of his nature, that which we are most in doubt of, and about which we are least capable of any positive affirmation, is the human."

This sentence, it seems to me, is not of light, but of darkness. It does not represent that illuminating and harmonious kind of truth which comes directly from the divine revelation of Christ. It belongs rather to that obscured and discordant manner of presenting truth which is the consequence of studying it too much at second-hand and too little at firsthand, too much in the speculations and reason

ings of men and too little in the facts of life wherein it was first manifested. Whatever may be said of this sentence as a statement of the result of dogmatic theology, and in this sense I do not question its accuracy,-when we consider its plain meaning as an expression of Christian experience and faith, one thing is clear: It is utterly out of touch with the experience and faith of the first disciples. It is in sharp and striking discord with the consciousness of the primitive Church. For if there is anything in regard to which the New Testament makes positive and undoubting affirmation, it is the complete, genuine, and veritable humanity of Christ. If there is any fact which stands out luminous and distinct in the experience of the early Christians, it is that they saw in Christ, not merely a mysterious manifestation of the Divine, but something utterly different. They saw the mystery reduced to terms of simplicity, the revelation levelled to the direct apprehension of man, the unveiling of the Father under conditions which were so familiar that they dissolved doubts and difficulties They saw in Christ the human life of God.

I

Definition is dangerous. And this is the nature of the danger: the definition has an inherent tendency to substitute itself for the thing defined. The terms in which a fact is expressed creep into the place of the fact itself. The reality is removed insensibly to a remote distance behind the verbal symbols which represent it. The way of access to it is blocked, and its influence is restricted by the forms of expression invented to define it.

I do not know where we can find a more vivid illustration of this process than that which is given, in many ways, in the history of art. The first pictures of Christ, traced in colour upon the walls of the Catacombs, or carved in stone upon the sarcophagi of the Christian dead, do not give us indeed the very earliest conception of him; for the Christian art of the first two centuries, if it ever existed, has perished. But that which remains, dating from the third and fourth centuries, bears witness to an idea of the Christ which was simple and natural and humane. He appears as a figure of youthful beauty and graciousness; the good Shepherd bearing a lamb upon his shoulders; the true Orpheus drawing all creatures and souls by the

charm of his amiable music. These are only symbolic representations, yet they evidence a conception of him which was still in touch with the facts. A little later we find an effort to conceive and depict him with more realism. His face appears in pictures which resemble the description given in the spurious Epistle of Lentulus: "A man of dignified presence, with dark hair parted in the middle and flowing down, after the custom of the Nazarenes, over both shoulders; his brow clear and pure; his unfurrowed face of pleasant aspect and medium complexion; his mouth and nose faultless; his short, light beard parted in the middle; his eyes bright and lustrous."

But when we pass on to the creations of socalled Byzantine art, we find ourselves face to face with an utterly different view of the Christ. His countenance now stares out in glittering mosaic from the walls of great churches, huge, dark, threatening, a dreadful and forbidding face. The fixed and formal lines are repeated and deepened by artist after artist. Every feature of naturalness is obliterated; every feature that seemed to express awfulness is exaggerated and emphasised. The wide-set eyes, the long narrow countenance, the stern, inflexible mouth, -in this ocular definition the man Christ Jesus

has vanished, and we see only the immense, immutable, and terrible Pantokrator, who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities.

When we turn to the intellectual life of the Church out of which this type of art grew, we see there the process explained. The early Greek Fathers, like Irenæus, went directly to the Holy Scriptures for their view of the person of Christ, and frankly accepted all the features of the living portrait there disclosed. They recognized without reserve the reality of Christ's human growth in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and men; the actual limitations of Christ's human knowledge as expressed in the questions that he asked and in his profession of ignorance in regard to the time of his second advent; the intimacy of his sympathy with us in temptation, suffering, and death.

But with the development of theological definition this direct view of Christ was modified, obscured, and at last totally eclipsed. Instead of looking at God through his revelation in Christ, the Fathers began to look at Christ through a more and more abstract, precise, and inflexible statement of the metaphysical idea of God. It became necessary to harmonize the Scripture record of the life of Jesus with the theories of the divine nature set