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PARTISAN REVIEW
forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of
divine emotion, "I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me,
speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou thinkest
as 'I now think."
As
it turned out, the divinity of man demanded the humanity
of Christ. Two years later, Theodore Parker, in his famous sermon
on "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity," completed the
transformation:
If
you make
him
a
God,
the son of
God
in a peculiar and exclusive
sense, much of the significance of his character is gone. His virtue has
no merit, his love no feeling, his cross no burden, his agony no pain.
His death is an illusion. . . . Then his resignation is no lesson, his life
no model, ' his death no triumph to you or me, who are not gods, but
mortal men, that know not what a day shall bring forth, and walk by
faith "dim sounding on our perilous way."
Thus, in America the secularization of culture finds a focus in the
humanization of Christ. In these words a revolutionary shift of per–
spective is evident; an independent value is now placed on secular
,human life, to which Christ is related with naive selfishness: he must
be
human if his suffering and sacrifice are to have any meaning to
us. Parker gives the first candid expression of the desire to use Christ
asa human paragon, yet he as well as Emerson
also
express in their
writings the dominant mood of their time. Christ is "our brother;
the son of man, as we are, the Son of God, like ourselves." "There
was never an age, when men did not crucify the Son of God afresh,"
says Parker at another point, and thi8 is precisely the idea informing
the fate of Pierre, Billy Budd, of Joe Christmas and the Corporal.
While Emerson, Parker, and the transcendentalists linked the idea
of the divinity of man to the supreme humanity of Christ, they sug–
gested that the two served each other symbolically. Man in his
di–
vine nature calls for the testimony of Christ; and the sacrifice of
Christ is only redeemed when man in his suffering is consoled and
elevated by its example. In other words, Christ had become peculiarly
suitabie for literary appropriation;
his
new metamorphosis really de–
manded it, as a proof of
his
service to man. This service consists,as
we have seen in the examples given above, in lending glory and the
,~rance
of transcendence to man in
his
last suffering and
his
death,
