birth of Jesus, of which the Disciples knew nothing, grew up a story of his childhood. In the Mark Gospel it has not yet come into existence. Already in the old Persian apocalyptic, indeed, the Saoshyant as Saviour of the Last Day was said to be born of a virgin. But the new western myth was of quite other significance and had incalculable consequences. For within the Pseudomorphosis-region there arose presently beside Jesus a figure to which he was Son, which transcended his figure — that of the Mother of God. She, like her Son, was a simple human destiny of such arresting and attractive force that she towered above all the hundred and one Virgins and Mothers of Syncretism — Isis, Tanit, Cybele, Demeter — and all the mysteries of birth and pain, and finally drew them into herself. For Irenæus she is the Eve of a new mankind. Origen champions her continued virginity. By giving birth to Redeemer-God it is she really who has redeemed the world. Mary the "Theotokos" (she who bare God) was the great stumbling-block for the Christians outside the Classical frontier, and it was the doctrinal developments of this idea that led Monophysites and Nestorians to break away and re-establish the pure Jesus-religion.[1] But the Faustian Culture, again, when it awoke and needed a symbol whereby to express its primary feeling for Infinity in time and to manifest its sense of the succession of generations, set up the "Mater Dolorosa" and not the suffering Redeemer as the pivot of the German-Catholic Christianity of the Gothic age; and for whole centuries of bright fruitful inwardness this woman-figure was the very synthesis of Faustian world-feeling and the object of all art, poetry, and piety. Even to-day in the ritual and the prayers of the Roman Catholic Church, and above all in the thoughts of its people, Jesus takes second place after the Madonna.[2]
Along with the Mary-cult there arose the innumerable cults of the saints, which certainly exceeded in number those of the antique place-gods; when the Pagan Church finally expired, the Christian had been able to absorb the whole store of local cults in the form of the veneration of saints.
Paul and Mark were decisive in yet another matter of inestimably wide import. It was a result of Paul's mission that, contrary to all the initial probabilities, Greek became the language of the Church and — following the lead of the first Gospel — of a sacred Greek literature. Let the reader consider what this meant, in one way and another. The Jesus Church was artificially separated from its spiritual origins and attached to an alien and scholarly element. Touch with the folk-spirit of the Aramæan motherland was lost. Thenceforward both the cult-Churches possessed the same language, the same conceptual
- ↑ A brief survey of the Mary doctrine is given in article "Mary," Ency. Brit., XI ed. The symbolism involved in the details of the story of Mary, as told in writing and in art, is very fully gone into in Yrjo Hirn, The Sacred Shrine. — Tr.
- ↑ Ed. Meyer, Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums (1921), pp. 77, et seq.
the sum of the cult-communities, both the Churches were Catholic. In the East the word had no meaning. The Nestorian Church was no more a sum than was the Persian: it was a Magian unit.
