52
EUGENE GOODHEART
way out of the world leads to experiences for others. They are
by the total staking of their whole natures like modern
martyrs, which, however, they precisely denied being. Through
their character as exceptions, they SQlved their problem.
Both are irreplaceable, as having dared to be shipwrecked.
We orient ourselves by them. Through them we have intima–
tions of something we could never have perceived without
such sacrifices, of something that seems essential which even
today we cannot adequately grasp. It is as
if
the Truth itself
spoke, bringing an unrest into the depths of our conscious–
ness of being.
The characters of whom Jaspers speaks must enact their destiny
no matter what the risks may be, and that destiny is to remain faith–
ful to a vision which may defy what Lawrence called "the little fold
of law and order." The greatest of these characters was Christ him–
self (Jaspers' insistence on the uniqueness of the modern "martyrs"
notwithstanding).
If
Christ comes to fulfill the law, he also comes
to destroy the version of the law-whatever it may be-that prevails
in the world. Blake, for instance, makes this the central fact of
Jesus' career when he invokes him as an ally in his war against the
life-killing rules that govern the human spirit.
I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten
commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse,
not from rules.
And Dostoevsky's Christ brings the gift of complete spiritual free–
dom, because the Church that bears His Name has taken it away
from mankind in exchange for mystery, miracle and authority. The
opposition between Christ and law in its worldly embodiment is
the opposition between vital spirit and dead matter, between free–
dom and coercion, spontaneity and compulsion.
If
it is the nature
of the world to turn energy into matter, power into weakness, the
spirit into the word, then Christ exists as the permanent possibility
of the reuewal of energy, power and spirit. Though he has no
permantnt abode in the world, there is always the possibility of
his
return.
From this point of view even Nietzsche, the great "Anti-Christ"
of modern culture is, as G. Wilson Knight has pointed out, "analog-
