rel="nofollow" href="#_23.jpg"/>
Arthur Hughes, The Nativity, 1858.
Oil on canvas, 61.2 × 35.8 cm.
Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham.
As for those who believe, on the contrary, that history should be written by reproducing without interpretation the documents that have come down to us, I beg them to observe that in such a subject that is not permissible. The four principal documents are in flagrant contradiction with one with another; Josephus, moreover, sometimes corrects them. We must make a choice. To assert that an event could not have happened in two ways at once, nor in an impossible way, is not to impose upon history an a priori philosophy. When we possess several different versions of a single act, when credulity has mingled fabulous circumstances with all these versions, the historian should not conclude that the act is unreal; but he should in such cases be upon his guard, compare the texts and proceed by induction. There is in particular one class of relations to which this principle must necessarily be applied – supernatural relations. Seeking to explain these relations or to reduce them to legends, is not to mutilate the facts in the name of theory, it is to base ourselves upon the observation of facts. None of the miracles with which ancient histories are filled occurred under scientific conditions. Observation never once contradicted, teaches us that miracles occur only in periods and countries in which they are believed in and before persons disposed to believe in them. The miracle was ever performed before an assembly of men capable of establishing the miraculous character of an act. Neither men of the people nor men of the world are competent for that. Great precautions and a long habit of scientific research are requisite. Marvellous acts attested by every inhabitant of small towns have become, under a more severe scrutiny, acts of felony. If it is certain that no cotemporaneous miracle bears examination, is it not probable that the miracles of the past, all of which were performed in popular assemblages, would also present to us, were it possible for us to criticise them in detail, their share of illusion?
It is not therefore in the name of these different philosophies, but in the name of constant experience, that we banish miracle from history. We do not say “Miracle is impossible” we say, “there has been no miracle proved.” Let a thaumaturgist present himself tomorrow with testimony sufficiently important to merit our attention; let him announce that he is able to raise the dead; what would be done? A commission composed of physiologists, physicians, chemists, and persons experienced in historical criticism would be appointed. This commission would choose the corpse, make certain that death was real, designate the hall in which the experiment should be made, and regulate the whole system of precautions necessary to leave no room for doubt. If, under such conditions, the resurrection should be performed, a probability almost equal to certainty would be attained. However, as an experiment ought always be capable of being repeated, as one ought to be capable of doing again what one has done once, and as in the matter of miracles there can be no question of easy or difficult, the thaumaturgist would be invited to reproduce his marvellous act under other circumstances, upon other bodies, in another medium. If the miracle succeeds each time, two things would be proven: first, that supernatural acts do come to pass in the world; second, that the power to perform them belongs or is delegated to certain persons. But who does not see that no miracle was ever performed under such conditions; that always the thaumaturgist has chosen the subject of the experiment, chosen the means, chosen the public; that, moreover, it is, in most cases, the people themselves who from the undeniable need which they feel of seeing in great events and great men something divine, create the marvellous legends afterwards. Till we have new light, we shall maintain, therefore, this principle of historical criticism, that a supernatural relation cannot be accepted as such, that it always implies credulity or imposture, that the duty of the historian is to interpret it, and to seek what portion of truth and what portion of error it may contain.
Such are the rules which have been followed in the composition of this life. For the reading of the texts I have been able to add a fresh source of light, an examination of the places in which the events occurred. I have visited Jerusalem, Hebron, and Samaria; scarcely any locality important in the history of Jesus has escaped me. All this history which, at a distance, seems to be floating in the clouds of an unreal world, thus assumed a body, a solidity which astonished me. The striking accord of the texts and the places, the wonderful harmony of the evangelical ideal with the landscape which served as its setting, were to me as a revelation. I had before my eyes a fifth gospel, torn but still legible, and thenceforth, through the narratives of Matthew and Mark, instead of an abstract being, which one would say had never existed, I saw a wonderful human form live and move. During the summer, having been compelled to go up to Ghazir in Mount Lebanon to take a rest, I fixed with rapid strokes the image which had appeared to me, and the result was this book. When a cruel fate intervened to hasten my departure, I had but few pages left to write. The book has been, in this way, composed entirely near the very place where Jesus was born and raised. Since my return, I have laboured incessantly to verify and to test in detail the sketch which I had written in haste in a Maronite hut with five or six volumes about me.
Many will, perhaps, regret the biographical form which has thus been given to my work. When I for the first time conceived a history of Christianity, what I wished to write was in fact a history of doctrines, in which men would have had scarcely any part. Jesus would hardly have been named; I should have endeavoured, above all, to show how the ideas which were produced under his name, germinated and spread over the world. But I have learned since, that history is not a mere play of abstractions, that in it men are more than doctrines. It was not a certain theory in regard to justification and redemption which produced the Reformation; it was Luther, and it was Calvin. Parseeism, Hellenism, Judaism, might have combined in all forms the doctrines of the resurrection and the word might have been developed for centuries without producing this fecund, unique fact, which is called Christianity. This fact is the work of Jesus, of St. Paul, of St. John. To write the history of Jesus, St. Paul and St. John, is to write the history of the origins of Christianity. The previous movements belong to our subject only in so far as they serve to throw light upon these extraordinary men, who must of course have had some kind relationship with what preceded them. In such an effort to revive the lofty souls of the past, we must be permitted to some extent to divine and conjecture. A great life is an organic whole which cannot be represented by the simple agglomeration of little facts. A deep feeling must embrace the whole and form its unity. The method of art in such a subject is a good guide; the exquisite tact of a Goethe would here find full scope. The essential conditions of art creations is to form a living system of every portion which answers and demands every other. In histories of this kind, the great sign that we have attained the truth is success in combining the texts so as to constitute a logical, probable, concordant narrative. The intimate laws of life, of the advance of organic products, and of the toning down of shades, must be consulted at every step. What we have here to find is not the material circumstance that is impossible to verify, but the very soul of history. What we have to seek is not the petty certainty of the meticulous, but the justness of the general idea, the truth of the colouring. Each touch which violates the rites of classic narration should warn us to beware. The feat which we had to narrate was living, natural and harmonious. If we do not succeed in rendering it such in our narration, surely it is because we have not attained the right view of it. Suppose that in restoring the Minerva of Phidias according to the texts, an unnatural, maimed, artificial whole should be produced; what must we conclude from there? Only one thing: that the texts demand artistic interpretation, that they must be gently treated until they finally combine to produce a whole in which all the materials are happily fused. Should we be sure of having then, feature for feature, the Greek statue? No; but at least we would not have a caricature. We would have the general spirit of the work, one of the forms in which it may have existed.
Salvator Rosa, The Resurrected Christ, date unknown.
Oil on wood, 109 × 96 cm.
Musée Condé, Chatilly.
Marc Chagall, Yellow Crucifixion, 1943.
Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.
Emil