Transcript
{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this
Page, you must listen now, because this clock is really divine. You can't see it. God cannot be seen, and that's the topic today, because with the incarnation, the thesis is that God, although invisible, must be spoken to and speaks to us in such a way that we cannot escape, that we cannot deny, that we cannot forget His eternal presence. It's a contradiction in terms in which we live in the Christian era. And therefore the Christian era in itself is of course always denied, and forgotten; and today as I see it -- I mean, in this country, 80 percent of the people have -- are trying -- on the way of disembarking or leaving the boat. The -- Christianity is nothing stable, nothing you have. The Christian era consists of a constant rebirth.
And I told you that this very -- strange word "re," this syllable "re" is fraught with difficulties. It is the one unnatural addition to our equipment. In nature, everything is evolving, is just there. You can never say of anything in mere nature that it is returning. The word "re" is one of an additional capacity in man, of recognition. I -- you can recognize that you are your father's son. But if he -- you deny, and you decline your fath- -- the fatherhood of your father, he can hardly do very much about it. He can weep. He can curse you. And he'll bless you if you say, "Yes, you are my father." But that's a free act.
You may have read in the papers that this problem of recognition is still in a strange way acute between antiquity and our own era, in the shape of the -- emperor of Abyssinia, of Ethiopia. This mountain region south of the Red Sea at the northern tip of Africa was in the papers these days, because Hailie Selassie, this greatest survivor of the last 50 years--deposed and reinstated several times--has gone to Moscow on a visit. This is for us, in this course, quite important, because he is the oldest witness to the Christian era in the popular -- political realm, and the Russians certainly are the most modern form of government. The fact that a distance of 1800 years, or 1500 years separates these two forms of government has not excluded their meeting.
And there you look into the importance of knowing history, or understanding history that the emperor Selassie of Ethiopia, and Mr. Kosygin, or Koramemkin, or Banzypanski, that they meet. Government has a timeless quality. You have to recognize another man in power regardless of his antecedents, revolutionary or otherwise. It is certainly something incredible. If you --. You have not lived through the last 40 years as I have, or 50 years. If you knew how much down Mr. Hailie Selassie has been: completely counted out when Mussolini conquered his -- his empire, then you cannot sufficiently admire the elasticity of history in which this emperor of Ethiopia, Abyssinia, this lion of
Judah, now visits this tiger of Russia.
The -- the Ethiopians keep the Sabbath and the Sunday. They circumcise their children, and they baptize them. That is, for you and me in this moment, it is quite important to know that there is one form of existing government in which the antiquity of Judaism and the modernity of the Christian era have entered a fusion. You cannot say that Hailie Selassie is a Jew, and you cannot say that he is a Christian. He is both. This is a remarkable story. For 2,000 years--no, 1500 years--this man has, in a story of untold crimes, untold wars and defeats, have -- -s kept up the faith that the Revelation is contained in the Old and in the New Testament.
So what you testify to by buying a Bible, he practices every Friday, and Saturday, and Sunday. Because on Friday night, he enters upon the Sabbath. and on Sunday morning, he goes to Church.
I mention this, because it may show you the real topic of conversation, the real actions which were required in the first thousand years of our era, to place the Cross from Golgotha among all the people. You take it for granted that this -- there is a Christian era. What I shall try to do today is to convince you that this Christian era was created by toil, sweat, and tears in the way in which, as Winston Churchill has said, everything in this world has to be accomplished. There is no other way. And if you think it is done by writing books, or by passing doctor examinations, you are totally mistaken. The Greek manner of knowing everything doesn't change the world at all. That's why it has to be -- have -- the Greeks always have to be coerced, the academics.
We are, as academics, as I stand here, I can do very little. I can wake you up to the truth, but I can't put the truth into you if you don't want to accept it. And that's always disappointing for a teacher. The teacher mits with the immatur- -- meets the immaturity of his students. And the one thing I must repeat--I said at the beginning--is: that I do not know how much you and how many of you can accept what has to be said.
That is, the Christian era runs every day into the difficulty that only onethird of the people alive are ready for it. The others just aren't. And I must assume that you, too, in many ways, are utterly unprepared to accept the fact that the Christian era has to be created by you. You won't accept it. You will say, "It is a nice interesting story which I'm told. I can repeat the story. I can remember the story. I may even be interested in the story. It's a fascinating book," as you say, you see. When you want to dismiss a teacher, you say, "He's fascinating." I don't want to be fascinating. But I want to convince you that you must come into this, doing -- something yourself. And that is much more painful, and highly
improbable; and a very -- small number of you will do anything about it.
This cannot be helped. It is the abundance of the seeds in nature that out of a thousand seeds, one grows up, and so the same is true of teaching. I only warn you, because it is so easy to -- listen to such a story, to assume that by listening to the story, you already know the story. That is -- would be a -- very erroneous. Hailie Selassie at least is still the Lion of Judah. He still keeps the Sabbath; he still goes to church. And so the first thousand years of our era are embodied in the existence of this funny empire, or kingdom--or how you ever call it, this last original African state which has -- is -- exists. All the others are gone.
It was not clear in the first thousand years of our era in which form the new time should be expressed. Ethiopia is an experiment. The papacy is another. The Roman Empire was a third. So believe me, life has been as dangerous in the first thousand years of our era as it is at this moment. You don't know how we get out of this Vietnam mischief. We have to get out. And it is very in- -- unsafe to predict how it will be done.
[tape interruption]
...China and our ambition in Vietnam was the situation, of course, after the Crucifixion. It was utterly improbable that anything would ever happen after this. Because there was no vestige, nor any power, nor any way of securing any succession to the Lord after He had been eliminated.
The story of the first thousand years stor- -- is the story...
[tape interruption]
...He had left twelve disciples. These were young, uneducated men -- fishermen, who had never dreamt in their life that they had any specific task to fulfill, except catching fish. And at the end of the first thousand years, there was a church which had adopted from His disciples, the name "Apostolic Church." And on the other hand, out of these disciples, there had come these people now called by you "the Apostles." They were not called apostles { } in that time. They were just His disciples.
The change of name is the story of this -- Christian Church. His name, from Jesus became Christ, His students, His followers became -- out of disciples, or followers, became apostles. Now the word "apostle" is already understandable to you by -- as in opposition to the { } Jewish word "prophet." The prophets of the Old Testament are replaced by the Apostles in the first thousand years of the Church. And the Ethiopian kingdom also boasts of being ap- -- believing in an
apostolic emperor, Hailie Selassie. Whether he is or not, {he says so}.
What's the difference between a disciple or a student and an apostle? {The} becoming something -- becoming -- building up an office which has not existed before is the whole story of our era. There are today vocations that have not existed 500 years ago. And they are usually only gotten up by sweat, toil, and tears. The first disciples became martyrs, witnesses. The arch-martyr, of course, was not an apostle. Who was it? Who was the first martyr? Wonderful. Nobody knows { }. Well, in my days, you couldn't become confirmed -- they wouldn't confirm you if you didn't know that.
The first Apost- -- the Apostles were not the first martyrs. It's very significant. The economy of the Christian Church has been that for every new office, also a new, original person was chosen, that Peter is the prince of the Apostles. But the first martyr was Stephen. And He was not a disciple. That's quite significant.
{He} therefore wavered between apostles and martyrs. And He wasn't quite sure who would be the more important cornerstone of the Church. The -- Church needs martyrs, and it needs apostles. It needs other people, too. It needs teachers and other witnesses. But this -- the word "martyr" only means witness. It's the Greek word for witness. It's a very harmless word in this sense: somebody who gives testimonial in court.
The Apostles were not martyrs in the first place. They -- on the side also become martyrs, as you know. But it isn't because they became martyrs that Paul and Peter founded the Church. They founded the Church because they become -- became Apostles. So today I must devote some time to the strange fact that you have no idea what an apostle is.
An apostle is somebody who carries the good news into an area in which so far it has never been mentioned, and never been understood, and never been heard. That's an apostle: somebody who carries the war into enemy country.
The first messages of this kind are -- are retained for us, preserved for us in the so-called four gospels. The Apostles -- fell -- found out that in the four great realms which we have treated--the tribes, the empires, the Greeks, and the Jews--the text of the good news had to be worded in a specific way. And so we have four gospels in four different languages, or four different styles, or four different--how would you say?--selections. And the 19th century, which made the Greeks into, as -- I told you, into pure Aryans who never had heard anything, from the East, has forged this.
If you read the modern, last-century books on the four Gospels, you never hear anything but that they must reduced to some primeval, original gospel. And that there was one Gospel, and then there had -- accretions, they have destroyed all the four Gospels. But the four Gospels are something very important. They are the four forms in which the new order of things, the new insight that all men were equal, that all men had the same task on earth, that they should all worship the same Father, that this unity of man had to be preached to tribesmen, who thought their ancestors were the only true Jacob; and to empires who thought that only under their sky was the fertility guaranteed; and to Greeks who only thought by their genius could they really understand the universe; and to the Jews, who thought that, as the -- a minority, chosen group, they alone were able to win out over the tyrants and the idols of the mighty powers of this earth.
The four Gospels have been written against these four limitations of man which we call "antiquity," and which we have so far treated in this course of lectures as previous to our own existence. The limitations of the four orders are attacked, or are debunked, or are revealed by the Gospels. They reveal. That is, they draw the veil from the restrictions under which any Egyptian, under which any Solomonian--from the Solomon Islands, as our friend here--or any Greek, or any Jew labored. After all, these orders which we have discussed were all of a limited nature. They could not be expanded to any other country, or any other group, because the loyalty to the ancestor, the geography of the river valley--of the Nile, or of the Chinese valleys, or of the Ganges--could not be simply transferred to any other part of the globe.
What do the four Gospel writers do? Before I will tell you this, a little more elaborately, I like to draw your attention to the fact that we really have here the -- the growing point, or the toothache of history of the first thousand years. When Mohammed came, the great impostor, the great imitator of Christianity, he had of course the problem of a sacr- -- of scripture to solve. So he dictated it to somebody, the Koran, as you know. So it is the most boring book ever written. And he had to have also four gospelizers, the four evangelists. And he said -- they say in -- in -- in Islam that the four caliphs, the first four rulers after Mohammed, they play the role of the four Gospel writers, because they won all the battles for the Lord. Mr. Romney might say this, or anybody else of this -- Latter-day Saints in -- in Utah. You see: win battles, and the Lord is for you.
It's a wonderful idea, but I think you can measure the risk of the gospelizers of the four Apostles who wrote, the Evangelists best, when I remind you that the four caliphs, the four--how would you call them in -- do you say "caliph"? Is that the correct expression?--that they were treated in Islam to this day as substitutes for the four Evangelists. It's very primitive, and very effective, you see.
They don't have to say anything. They just say "head off," and by their victory in Egypt, or Spain, or Morocco, or wherever they go, or Ara- -- Persia, you see, they are the gospelizers. It's I think the most simple, debunking practice of -- Islam by -- for itself, by -- to say the four worldly rulers of the armies of Islam are the four Evangelists for Islam.
It is not wanton for you to -- to understand this. Today there is a tremendous misunderstanding about comparative religion. Any religion is counted in -- as good as anybo- -- any else. Don't be so stupid to believe such nonsense. There is only one religion. And there are attempts to formulate it. But you cannot speak of "comparative religion." That's one of these nonsensical ideas of modern humanism. There are no comparative religions. Who -- who can be taken -- who can take this seriously? After all, we speak of the most important thing in the world for your own life, and then you -- you compare it. E- -- when I hear this, I know that this man should be counted out. Don't read books on comparative religion.
One of my colleagues wrote a book on it, you see, and he put Islam last, because, as I -- he said, it's the latest.
I said, "But do you think it's worth to come at the end?" You know the man.
And he said, "No. But this came last. What else can I do? I just have to follow the order of things as they happen."
So this idiot was professor of philosophy.
Gentlemen, this is -- and ladies, this is the most important thing that I can hope to perform: that you free yourself from these natural science attitudes of comparing things without any guidance, without any principle. That's imp- -- all nonsense. You can compare pens. You can take sharp pens, and broad pens for writing. And you can pick and choose for all dead things. I already warn you to do it with ladies. There is no comparative religion with regard to lo- -- love. They resent it.
With regard to God, it is impossible. God is jealous. Either there is a God, or there is none. You cannot compare Him. He is incomparable. And to speak of -- of a comparative religion is an offense to all the people who believed in their gods. They were honest people. They did as best as they can to worship the true and only one. Give this up. It's all -- we are just steeped into this intoxicating brew of Greek -- all-knowledge, overall knowledge. This is -- may be good for botany or zoology. For the belief in God, it is absolutely ridiculous. It's madness.
Well, we live in a mad universe at this moment. If I talk about these -- these -- these ministers, they compare notes in -- whom they should believe, probably. They run from one church now to the other to exchange notes. None is true, so all together may be true. That's their hope, it seems.
You are in a madhouse today, when you -- become a student. And I have to warn you that it is very difficult to follow a path of insight and increase in knowledge. It's usually a decrease in knowledge and a great increase in confusion.
You must know this, that you are just -- facing a litter. Wastepaper baskets of human knowledge are poured over your heads.
I don't know -- dare to -- to speak to you about history if there was not one history to be told, and to be singled out, and to be brought together, and to be prepared for our understanding and for our succession in it, and for our loyalty. There are no -- no comparative religions.
So -- Mohammed, of course, was at least better than my colleague in philosophy. And he said the four caliphs, they take care of the orthodoxy, you see. These four caliphs, with their victories, that's enough. And so you can admire this. This is very simple, no debate. Mohammed stands for all and everybody.
But our Lord decided otherwise. In His humility, He admitted that the four pre-Christian orders--the tribe, the empire, the city of God, and the Homeric artists and geniuses--had to be approached in such a way that they could open up to the new message, to the coming of the Messiah, and that's why we have four Gospels. Matthew was written to the Jews, to the tribesmen in Judaism, the 12 tribes. And he's therefore the oldest. It was the first and the most difficult thing, to write to the most primitive people, because in Judaism, the 12 tribes of course represent the eternal beginning of people who just found themselves as children of Abraham -- Isaac, and -- and Jacob.
The second Gospel was written for the empire builders. Mark is the secretary of St. Peter who goes to Rome. And Peter ga- -- gave lectures in Rome before he was assassinated. And -- Mark took notes down. And when -- when Peter had been executed, he obviously put down this Gospel as the remnants of -- of Peter's lectures. That's why Mark begins in the middle. -- Matthew is interested in genealogy, in the story of the Jewish people, because he speaks to Jews, to people who belong to these tribes -- 12 tribes. In -- in Rome, that had no interest, because they -- what did they know of the Jews? Nothing. They -- but the story of the salvation of the Gentiles is the story of the Markian Gospel, and therefore Mark
begins right in the middle with the -- with the baptism of Jesus Himself, and -- the beginning of His -- of His gospelizing.
The third Gospel is Luke, and the fourth Gospel is John. Now the third Gospel is written by the Greek, the hellenistically educated, Luke, and is written in the tradition of the schools. Every generation has to be taught differently. I must teach you -- the same truth in a different way in which your grandfathers were told the same truth. And so, Luke--as you may recall from -- some of you may have read it--in Acts, he -- he speaks of the two forms in which he has written the Gospel, and says to -- to his addressee, who is -- to whom is the -- Luke addressed? Well, how does -- do Acts begin? Nobody knows? Who is the man who receives the book of Luke?
(Theophilus.)
Theophilus, yes. A Greek. And -- but -- obviously a Greek Jew. And so it's for the pious Pharisees, to the -- to the literate people--not the illiterate people, as Matthew--that the -- Luke is written.
And John begins, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God." And there we leave the created universe and speak of that, that is to be created, to be to come. John strips the story of Jesus from all the paraphernalia of geography, and cult- --. It's not a cultural history, as you think all history should be written. It's an anti-cultural history, the Gospel of St. John. The eternal truth, that is true, despite the fact that you live in the most enlightened part of the universe, called Santa Cruz.
The megalomania of the living, you see, that you are more advanced than anybody else who has ever lived before, is the most difficult problem of mine. How can I make you understand that people a thousand years ago were much more advanced than you are? That's what John tries to say. That's very difficult, because you don't believe it. You just say, "It's impossible. They had no cars, they had no electricity. So how can they be wiser than you and I?" And I assure you, they were. Because to have a car can make you just as much stupid as it can make you clever. There is no proof for one thing or the other. Cars have nothing to do with your soul, with your heart, and with your understanding. They have very much to do with accidents.
But the word "accident" is a very good word, because for your soul, neither the one ac- -- kind of accident on the street, nor the accident, you see, of birth, or of date, or of education plays any part. It's funny that the language should have coined this phra- -- word "accident" to warn you, that the accident of your living in 1967 is purely accidental. And you have no claim to immortality, just
because you are -- living 10 years later than McKinley, or somebody like that. Or McCarthy, for that matter.
Which you don't want to hear. You all want to get some premium for living that late. And Moses, and Abraham, and the prophets to you are not contemporaries. Well, they aren't. They are far ahead of you -- us -- you and me. They are certainly not contemporaries of yours. But you should at least try not to be too far behind them. Now you only think you have to do nothing but you live after them; therefore you are advanced.
The four gospelizers, the four Apostles who created these four inroads into the tribes, the empire, Israel, and the Greeks--the Olympiad, are so remarkable, because they show you how necessary it is to go backward in order to go forward. Their patience, their devotion to -- tackle roads that had become obsolete, and had to be left, relinquished now in the new order, they made the -- this made them immortal. This made them into saints of the Christian Church.
To become a saint therefore means to be indifferent to the difference between past and future. That's the best definition I can offer you, and I think it's worth a piece of chocolate for me, that I tell you this. Nobody seems to know it, that a saint is somebody in whose life and in whose actions the past and the future become indifferent, interchangeable. It makes no difference that this man goes to the old tribes. A missionary who does this today is just as modern as any Christian. And a Gospel -- a man who just preaches the Gospel here in Santa Cruz, in a stuffy church, is -- cannot keep up with him. The missionary is, although he deals with primitive people, is not primitive at all, himself. Because he heals the breach between the times. And we, all people of all ages, should be contemporaries.
Christianity is the doctrine that all times are contemporary. If you don't understand this, then don't say that you understand Christianity. Christianity is not progressive; Christianity is not history. But Christianity is an attempt to make all people, beginning with Abel, contemporaries, so that they are one -- of one heart and one soul, despite their historical distances. The whole doctrine of the saints in the Church is based on the assumption that St. Peter and St. Paul are just as necessary to your salvation and you to theirs, you see, as some contemporary, Mr. Smith, around the corner here.
This is hard doctrine. But I can't help it, you see, because history ever since has been transformed by this simple fact. We are not Mohammedans. We don't say that the four victorious emperors, the four important generals of Mohammed are the four gospelizers. But we do say that Matthew, Luke, and Mark, and John re- -- acted regardless of the time difference, and therefore made
all the people on the globe -- enabled them to become contemporaries. And as long as we do not become contemporaries, there can be no peace on earth. And therefore, the world must perish today, with all our communications, you see, unless this attitude of the four Gospel writers is continued, is perpetuated, is repeated.
It's very simple. As long as you treat your mother as belonging to the Stone Age, you can't treat her correctly. Most people do this today, quite naively. Somebody is born 20 years older, so he is discarded.
So all men of different age are nuisances to each other, before they are reconciled. The essence of Christianity is this stripping history of its magic divider -- dividing power, that because somebody lived a thousand years ago, he doesn't matter; and because he lives today, he does matter. You can't make it that simple. It may be that you have to forget nine-tenths of the people who live today, and nine-tenths of the people who have lived before. That may be. But the cause, that you forget the one and the other, because he's older, that's not a good -- good reason at all.
If I hear -- you hear the affection with which the zoologists talk of the sauriae and the elephants, you see how they can love people of different -- of a different era on earth. Now it is certainly exactly as true of humanity, you -- s- -- -ee, that they are our living brothers today. The fact that they -- that they have died is no reason.
Now you know that the Church therefore has introduced the -- not the worship of the -- that would be perhaps the--well, "worship" perhaps may do--the reverence for the saints. No Christian church in which not next to Jesus others are not also reclaimed as the saints, in which we recognize the -- the light stream. Just as in the sky a comet will describe a visible path, so the saints are that illumination in the darkness of our night by which we find our way. You are very privileged if you have one or two such saints as -- been -- given to you in baptism, perhaps, on whose guidance you can rely.
One of the leading Protestants of my own life was so anti-Catholic that I thought he -- he would not hold with the adoration of the saints. And -- he wasn't my teacher, but I revered him very much, and I began my career under him. I became a -- he -- he allowed me to begin to teach at his -- in his faculty. And I once talked to him about this problem of the Protestants and their relation to the saints. And he burst forth and said, "Well, if we did not look up to these sacred and saint -- souls in the -- in our sky, we wouldn't deserve to have been ever led out of Egyptian darkness."
I've never forgotten this sentence of his, because it came so -- surprising. Here was a radical -- Protestant, you see, who had no pictures on his walls; certainly never went into a Catholic Church. But he was quite aware that his own life had been guided by the great witnesses who had preceded him.
And you should have seen the man. He just oozed out this enthusiasm and this faith. He -- he said, "But that's just the -- the abstinence which -- which we officially hold. That is just for protecting the mob against superstition. But nobody lives who is not daily edified by the -- the model."
And ask yourself: If you have no such models in your own soul, go down on your knees and try to find one. You cannot live without them. It's all nonsense to believe that you can live in a right attitude towards your creator without these intermediaries who have suffered before you. How you call it, it doesn't matter, I mean. Whether you call it -- you can call it Roman Catholic, or Greek Catholic, or Chinese Catholic. It makes no difference. But you cannot be without them. And if you are now, you are very poor off, and you will go to Hell. Because man alone goes to Hell. That's the simple answer of Christianity, in our whole era.
All people who try to save themselves will perish, must perish. We can only save each other. Nobody can save himself. That doesn't exist. That is the one devil which paganism, or Grecism, or however you call it, has to -- that has to go. It is all of course in the schools. And as long as you are students, it costs you nothing to believe such nonsense. You are not put to the test. But once you have children, and once you have a wife, who wants to get her divorce from you, and you still love her, the -- what -- to whom do you appeal? You have to look up to people with a greater soul than your own. And to live without models is impossible. You may have passing models; you may improve your choices, your selections. But don't believe that you can be without them.
And this is today one of the greatest American heresies. Everybody is not only a self-made man, but a self-adoring man. Because as long as it's -- you have no others to adore, you adore yourself. And you do. You think you are wonderful.
It is this immense patience of the four evangelists to go back to the beginning and to say patiently--as though they had never heard anything--to the Jews, to the Hebrews, to the children of the 12 tribes that a child was born illegitimately, outside wedlock, and that it was the child of the Holy Spirit, and that -- the father recognized it--the -- the legal father, Joseph--and that therefore this child was now the heir of Israel on the one-hand side and the free agent of the Spirit on the other, with which the whole story of the Church began. Just the great
patience to say something so incredibly small, so incredibly incredible, that it made a difference when it was written down.
I take it that Matthew was the only scribe in the whole bunch of the 12 Apostles. Jesus selected him, as you know, from bookkeeping. And tax -- a tax collector, he was. And therefore, he was of course, able to write. And he, I think, when he -- we say that the Gospel was written by him, we may have to assume or to acknowledge that he asked the others what he should write. But he was the handy-man, you see, who was able to function as a secretary of the 12, and it certainly was written in Jerusalem after the Crucifixion, before the Apostles left. So Matthew must have been written between -- between 33--that's, I take it -- safe to be the date of the Crucifixion--and the leaving of the -- Jerusalem by the Apostles in 49. All these dates are to be mentioned with precaution. We have no -- no complete control of these -- knowledge.
What is important for you, however, is to know that writing down is a surpri- -- came as a surprise to the Christians, because writing was quite far from their first idea about the new life left behind by their Lord. They di- -- hadn't thought that they should write. I -- my assumption is -- or my hypothesis is that when the first martyr, Stephen, was stoned by the Jews for his confession that Jesus was the Lord, that they got terribly frightened. For the first time, they saw that they all might be -- dis- -- might disappear. And that if they had all been murdered, and executed, and crucified like their Lord, then who would bear witness to the good news? And I -- my idea is that we find vestiges of the -- of the -- Steph- -- Stephen's fate in the Gospel, I think, of Mar- -- Mark- -- that -- then the Apostles got together and said, "For Heaven's sake, let's write it, something down. It's unexpected. We thought it was all oral. The day of writing, of scripture was -- would be over. But with this -- with this aggressiveness of our enemies, we have to secure the facts in some form." And that's I think how the first Gospel came to light.
So -- are two things which you must consider when you consider a Gospel. It was not for getting a Ph.D. that they were written, as you treat them today. They were not written for a big publishing firm, for big sales. That's the Number 2 which you must know. But they were written in danger of life. And that's the only utterance that is tolerable for Christians. We s- -- tell the truth in danger of life, when something more otherwise would be lost. This is un- -- unknown today. The professors of theology treat these Gospels as though they were something interesting, to sit down, have a new typewriter -- with a new ribbon, and then begin. That's good for fiction stories; and that's good for making money. But a Gospel has nothing to do with it.
And I must shake you up -- cry you awake to the fact that all the Gospels
were written in danger of life, as an ultimate, as a resource, you see, because they couldn't help it. Otherwise, you don't -- will always misunderstand them. They are not books, as you write books. Or papers here for me, written in just a half an hour.
Well, it is terrible. But I have to cry you awake to the fact that Gospels are written in danger of life. Perhaps some respect will then accrue to them again. They are not written for pleasure. They are not written for entertainment. They are written as a last resort: if I go out of a business, and something is left as a witness in my place. You shouldn't write for any other reason. I hope when you write love letters, that they are all in this miserable state of affairs, that you are afraid that she might not take you. That's reason enough to write a love letter. But -- no other excuse for letters, I mean.
Today we live in such a pedera- --. I have a neighbor who sent out a million catalogs for his business from our little village. Of course, no other mail goes through. And that is -- considered commercial. One million catalogs he sends in -- in a village of 1500 inhabitants. Where are the 1499 other inhabitants, compared to this catalog bes- -- beast?
This is how we have to live today. That's why I have to -- to shout--pardon me--to make you aware that the Gospel is something different. It is not a book written on the side, in a leisure, you see, as my memoirs. It is a -- something quite different. It is written as a substitute for the real life of this person of the Gos- -- of the evangelist, because he may not be there. They may drag him ar- -- away. And so what can he do -- except condense everything he has experienced and he wants to bear witness to in this little booklet, you see?
One of my teachers in the University of Leipzig once received a great scholar from Sweden. And the Swedish man became later archbishop of Uppsala and the father of the ecumenic movement, Nathan S”derblom. And I had the honor of knowing this -- this Swede later, quite well. And he said to me, he was so impressed when this theologian received him, he took a little copy of the New Testament, just the four Gospels and nothing else, and said, "Isn't it incredible? Everything is in this little booklet."
That gives you an inkling of the -- of the importance that in this paper forest in which we have to live, there are still some writings that are written with blood and that therefore have to be distinguished from the books you touch, usually, and you read every day from morning to evening. Otherwise we'll -- we perish, if this isn't said. The Gospels are not books in the usual sense of modern printing and modern writing. They are written in danger of life as a belt so that the -- a swimmer may reach land in spite of the fact that the waves are going
over his head.
Four men in -- 300 years later, after the Gospels were written --. Obviously the last Gospel must have been written around 90, because John the Apostle -- the Evangelist has died before 100. So in the first century, these four gospelizers came forward at a moment when there was nothing else they could do. I mean, this was all that was left to them. It took 300 years before these Gospel- -- these four evangelists were--not replaced, but were--continued by a number of four, which I think I must bring forth. You know Matthew and Mark, and you know John, and you know Luke by name. I'm afraid that these four other -- four people -- may be -- quite unfamiliar to you.
So my addition today can only be that I now take the rest of this lecture to introduce you to four people who have in a way, 300 years later, done the same as the four -- these four men, by planting Christianity in this pre-Christian, nonChristian environment, and making it bloom, so to speak, and making it possible that ever since, the people know of the new -- good news, inside these thousands of tribes, these dozens of empires, these thousands of millions of books in the Alexandrinian library, all these poets and all these avant-gardists, you see, and about the -- among the pious Jews in all the cities of -- where they have established their synagogue.
The men are Anthony, St. Augustine, Athanasius, and Jerome. I prefer to call the -- poor Jerome "Hieronymus." That's the decent name; "Jerome" isn't. "Hieronymus" means the man with the sacred name. And so call him Hieronymus, please, and not Jerome. But it is the same word. And Anthony--Antonius; and of St. Augustine you may have heard; and Jerome--I'm not so sure; and Athanasius, I'm sure you have not heard. That's -- such a difficult name. Well, we owe Athanasius, we know Anthony, and we know -- owe St. Augustine, and we owe Jerome that we still have some connection with the first thousand years of our era. And that's quite strange how -- how it was done.
You think it is natural. But life is not natural. Since we are all mortals, you see, it is much more natural that everything is forgotten, that nothing survives. Ingratitude is the {Keln}- -- {Kennmark} of man. Forgetfulness. We just don't remember. You haven't been there. So I have not been introduced to them, so why should I care? That's by and large all human -- all humanity is based on this incredible ingratitude and forgetfulness.
So these four men took over in a new form when the four Gospels had done their part. And, so to speak, they enlarged on these four Gospels. You know yourself that the four Gospels alone would not suffice today to make you Christians. If this was all what was left of the Christian era, this wouldn't be suf- --
enough to make a dent.
The -- Christianity stands on this perpetual regeneration. Every generation has to find a new form for the same truth. And it can only be believed if the Gospels are followed by something different, and then again something different. The interesting thing of Christianity then is: it lives by the renewal of its forms. And it's e- -- each time a great surprise, each time a great scandal, each time, just as it is today when the chil- -- a minister dares to tell his stuffy congregation that they just are no Christians--which is of course true, but they don't like to be told. And it happens here in every -- in every town, something of this move is on foot, that some of the ministers, you see, are very glad that their congregation is no Christians, because the salary is much better if they are not -- no Christians. And the others are un- -- are nervous. They feel that they should tell their people, you see, and then they are fired.
We just got the news that in our neighboring town, the -- the minister was fired because he had said something about the equality of Negroes in church. And the congregation said they didn't want to be disturbed.
That's in every generation the same thing. In every generation, the previous forms of utterance must be replenished by a totally unheard-of, a new form. And this is what -- hard for you to understand, that the Christian Church consists of this tension, of this alternative. The old forms, all "yes," but a new form: "despite the fact," also, you see. It's usually beyond your understanding. You either are one, a pacifist, or you go to war. The thing is much more complicated, you see. Christians can go to war, but they also have to be pacifists. And only if you can understand this can you today be successful in political life. The order of the day is army plus -- plus Peace Corps. And it certainly is not Quaker on the one-hand side, and Mr. McNamara on the other.
That has always been the case with Christianity, you see, that: yes, the Gospel is written, and now we know! And tomorrow, if it isn't re-written, we don't know.
So the fertility, or the fecundity, the propagation of the Gospel is the secret. If you take the word "propagation" literally, it is perfectly satisfactory and perfectly sufficient to explain to you in what a wonderful presence of God we are allowed to live. The presence of God takes shape by the fact that all the old forms are fully alive, and fully fruitful under the one condition that you add one more form. If you do this, you understand suddenly all Gospels. But if you don't do anything yourself, you don't understand them. They become just stuffy, and just good for -- for the family Bible.
This has never existed before, you see, that -- act of tomorrow, and the life of yesterday are mutually needed, required. Without the life of yesterday, you would be a barbarian, a pagan. And without the additional creative force of tomorrow, you would be a heartless machine. Most people prefer to -- to divide their life in this manner. But please don't think that this is the -- the Gospel of the Christian era.
The Gospel of the Christian era says--now -- I come to a definition which you perhaps take down, because it's worth a million dollars--that Christianity recognizes the beginning in the end, and the end in the beginning. Christ is the middle of time. He came in the middle of time in order to make it impossible for the physicists and ge- -- -ographers, and historians to speak so glibly of past, and present, and future. We can only speak of the beginning and the end; and we are in the middle. And we have to lead the peo- -- things that have already been started to their accomplishment and their end, you see. Man is that being on earth who has to lead all things to their destination. And therefore, what has been before us, and what has to come after us puts you and me not in the museum as a visitor, but in the middle, where that which has been started has to be brought to its completion.
And so, please dismiss for history and for your own life always the word of past, present, and future. That is for physicists. You and I have to treat the creation as having begun, being entrusted to you, and waiting that you help it end. If you don't put yourself into the middle, between the beginning and the end, you don't understand what these Apostles did. You don't understand what these four men did, of whom I am now going to speak. And you don't understand why Jesus is the center of time. He is only for this simple reason the center of time, because He took it upon Himself to speak to the first pagan firecrack- -- worshipers, and to deal with him as His brother. He didn't speak to the most advanced minds of His age, only. He talked to them, too.
To make all men contemporaries is the essence of treating time in the right and proper way. You have here a friend from the Solomon Islands. I think everybody here instinctively recognizes that he is your contemporary, although for many other reasons, he is not.
It's a very simple rule, and I think instinctively most people are quite good at that, and treat a man whom they meet as a contemporary. But you have to be reminded that this is -- can be lost. This can be -- can misfire. And all superiority complexes, you see, are based on this assumption, that you have the right to choose your contemporaries. Every human being is your contemporary. And that is very difficult and very painful. Sometimes you think, when you look in the politicians, that's -- just impossible.
To treat everybody as your contemporary: that's -- is the saintliness of humanity. And that has created the saints.
Now Anthony, the first man I--have I still time? ja--is the father of the desert monks. He founded, or he had the great idea to leave the empire of Egypt, the great fruitland, where the bread would never -- would never fail. This great harvesting miracle of the Egyptian Nile valley. And he went just a little way --. It's like -- cut off with a razor blade. If you go into Egypt, the -- the desert encroaches on both sides of the valley, which is only 30 to 40 miles wide. And there's the desert. One step, and you are in desert land. And so it is a very peculiar impression you get there, that the fruitland--here, California--and the desert are much closer together than they -- are here. I mean, you go to Palm Desert, you have the same experience, of course. Or you go to Baker -- what is it called? Bakersfield.
Desert and fruitland were in the eyes of the professionalists, of the Egyptian priests, totally separated. They could fertilize the land of the Nile, but they left the -- the desert to the Bedouins, and never went there.
There -- to this day--I probably have told you this before--to this day, around Egypt, 70,000 Bedouins, who despise the {Nilots}, the Egyptians, because they build houses, you see, in which they perform all their necessities--shitting, et cetera--and they think they are the dirtiest creatures on the world. They are rich and dirty, you see. And the Bedouins are poor and clean. And they despise the -- the Egyptians, although the Egyptians think--and you think, too--that they are -- live in an advanced civilization. They invented temples, and writing, and the calendar. And -- and they are like we. They are very adroit with wonderful -- wonderful goldsmiths and such things. But the Bedouins spit at us, just as much as they spit at their Egyptian neighbors, you see. They think they are just dec- -- decadent.
And while I was in Egypt, the -- they -- they arrested -- these Bedouins arrested the king of Egypt, the last king. And right they were--and he was a great rascal--and -- and just expressed their complete indifference to his royalty, you see. What was his royalty? He belonged to these strange people who live in houses, you see, made by hand -- human hands, not in tents; and who lived in cities like Cairo--one of the dirtiest places in the universe, to be sure. And so these Bedouins were not impressed by the royalty, you see, of the king.
Well, it was his last gesture, then. He had to leave. It was really the last event in his royal -- in his highness's life.
So -- only to show you that Anthony, when he chose the desert, he made
of course a separation of Christianity with the environment under which it had grown. It had grown up in the rich town of -- Alexandria, in the Roman Empire, in the Greek cities of the Mediterranean -- on the islands of the Mediterranean. And here he said, "I go back to nowhere, before all these human palaces, handicrafts, et cetera, coins, images, temples were erected."
They tell the story that one of his monks was visited by a citified man. And he said, "But what are you doing here?"
He said, "I'm spending my time in getting enough water every day from the Nile valley to this desert place so that I can live."
The man laughed, this -- this, of course, this highly educated man. He probably was -- had a Ph.D. And -- and said, "You are ridiculous. You are a fool."
"Well," the man said, "That may be, that I am a fool in your eyes. But I have to prove that God wants the earth to be peopled everywhere. And if it takes 24 hours for me to supply this place with water from the Nile, that isn't too much. That is not too much work. It is very important that people should learn that the frontier-lands have to -- all to be abandoned, all to be transferred into real -- into real fruitland."
When you founded a -- monastery in the last -- first thousand years of the Church, of Christianity, all these famous monasteries, from St. Gall to St. Denis, they were always founded according to the verbiage of the document "In Eremo." In the desert. It was a condition for a monastery of antiquity, in Christian antiquity, that the formula was used: that the monks had to go to a desert place, you see. They could not settle a monastery in -- in the fruitland, in the rich land, in the fertile land. They had to stick their neck out and show their faith in God's -- in God's pity, or what do you call it? Barmherzigkeit? what's this in English? -- who helps out? Barmherzigkeit.
(Mercy.)
Wie? Mercy, ja. Pardon me--by saying in the document by which they wrote down their property rights on this soil that it was established in eremo.
Why is that so? Why is the hermitage--you know still the word "hermit"; that comes from "desert." The hermit is a man who lives in the desert.
Now the victory of the An- -- An- -- St. Anthony and his monks was that they said that the earth was the Lord's. This division which we have made between the -- the fruitland--the fertile land, the watered land, you may say, the
river land--and the desert is arbitrary. The -- earth is the Lord's, and everything that is in it must be declared to be His. Therefore we have to prove by our practical existence in these nowhere lands that they are as close to the Lord as these privileged, fruitful lands near the Vesuvius of Naples, where the good wine grows.
It's for you hard to understand. But this was -- is the immense change that all -- thanks to the monks of Anthony's leadership, the earth today is the Lord's. And you stick your neck out, and you go into the deserts. You even go there for promenades, and for vacation. And only through the monks has this happened, this choosiness has been given up, this selection that we like this place, and the other, we don't like. The equality of the whole earth is a product of monasticism. And it is the first -- man who dared -- planned this, is Antonius, St. Anthony, who lived from 262--pardon me; I should know it by heart, but I don't--251 to 356. Obviously in -- as a premium on his ascetic life, he is said to have become 105 years of age. No documents which prove this.
But the date -- the year 251 to 356 is a very important century. On the surface of this century, you see, there were emperors. There were the -- the Emperor Constantine, and the -- confessing the Trinity. There were very much movements in the -- on the surface of the big cities, and the wealth of the Roman Empire. But I think the real story was with -- Anthony and his monks in the eremo, with the monk who settled down, 24 hours spending on -- only on getting the water there. Because they insisted that God had not created just the fruits -- fruitful spots on the earth, but the whole earth.
And if you today see that the geography of your maps draws a line between Mexico and America and Canada as a line, that you can even say "54th degree of latitude"--as you know the political war cry was--this is owed to the monks exclusively. All frontiers down to 1800 were wide marches. The whole state of Vermont was one frontier between the French and the British. A hundred miles -- 200 miles had to stretch out to separate people in their settlements. It's unheard-of. You don't know how Christian you are that you can draw now an atla- -- on an atlas a line and say, "That's the frontier between Canada and the United States," or Mexico. That's a purely Christian invention.
In -- in -- in China, they still don't understand it. Vast stretches, whole states in China and Tibet, and -- you see, are used as marches, as frontiers. This is the normal behavior of man: suspicious, you see; in- -- hostile, and fencing off against the other. There was not a settlement between the French and the Canadian -- French-Canadian and the British settlements in New England for hundert -- and fifty miles. And that went on for 200 years. It is -- was only when the -- both sides became British, you see, in 1763 that the state of Vermont could
be settled. There was just no settlement before, because that was all frontier.
So believe me: the history of mankind is very much wrapped up even geographically with the story of the Church. It were monks who preached the unity of the globe, first.
Thank you.