reverence the Logos as peacock and light; next to the Druses they have preserved most purely the old Persian conception of the substantial Trinity.
Thus again and again we find the Logos-idea getting back to the light-sensation from which the Magian understanding derived it. The world of Magian mankind is filled with a fairy-tale feeling.[1] Devils and evil spirits threaten man; angels and fairies protect him. There are amulets and talismans, mysterious lands, cities, buildings, and beings, secret letters, Solomon's Seal, the Philosophers' Stone. And over all this is poured the quivering cavern-light that the spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up. If this profusion of figures astonishes the reader, let him remember that Jesus lived in it, and Jesus's teachings are only to be understood from it. Apocalyptic is only a vision of fable intensified to an extreme of tragic power. Already in the Book of Enoch we have the crystal palace of God, the mountains of precious stone, and the imprisonment of the apostate stars. Fantastic, too, are the whole overpowering idea-world of the Mandæans, that of the Gnostics and the Manichæans, the system of Origen, and the figures of the Persian "Bundahish"; and when the time of the great visions was over, these ideas passed into a legend-poesy and into the innumerable religious romances of which we have Christian specimens in the gospels concerning Jesus's childhood, the Acts of Thomas and the anti-Pauline Pseudo-Clementines. One such story is that of Abraham's having minted the thirty pieces of silver of Judas. Another is the tale of the "treasure-cave" in which, deep under the hill of Golgotha, are stored the golden treasure of paradise and the bones of Adam.[2] Dante's poetic material was after all poetic, but this was sheer actuality, the only world in which these people lived continuously. Such sensations are unapproachably remote from men who live in and with a dynamical world-picture. If we would obtain some inkling of how alien to us all the inner life of Jesus is — a painful realization for the Christian of the West, who would be glad indeed if he could make that inner life the point of contact for his own inward piety — if we would discover why nowadays only a pious Moslem has the capacity livingly to experience it, we should sink ourselves in this wonder-element of a world-image that was Jesus's world-image. And then, and only then, shall we perceive how little Faustian Christianity has taken over from the wealth of the Church of the Pseudomorphosis — of its world-feeling nothing, of its inward form little, and of its concepts and figures much.
- ↑ M. Horten, op. cit., p. xxi. This book is the best introduction to the actually existing popular religion of Islam, which deviates considerably from the official doctrines.
- ↑ Baumstark, Die christl. Literaturen des Orients, I, p. 64.
by a very complicated set of ideas, from the Logos itself. Under old Persian influences the Jews also busied themselves with the same problem — observe the difference between 2. Samuel xxiv, 1, and 1 Chron. xxi, 1.
