Amongst Jesus’s friends and disciples, stunned as they were by the appalling outcome of the journey to Jerusalem, there spread after a few days the news of his resurrection and reappearance. The impression of this news on such souls and in such a time can never be more than partially echoed in the sensibilities of a Late mankind. It meant the actual fulfilment of all the Apocalyptic of that Magian Springtime--the end of the present æon marked by the ascension of the redeemed Redeemer, the second Adam, the Saoshyant, Enosh, Barnasha, or whatever other name man attached to “Him,” into the light-realm of the Father. And therewith the foretold future, the new world-æon, “the Kingdom of Heaven,” became immediately present. They felt themselves at the decisive point in the history of redemption.

This certainty completely transformed the world-outlook of the little circles. “His” teachings, as they had flowed from his mild and noble nature--his inner feeling of the relation between God and man and of the high meaning of the times, and were exhaustively comprised in and defined by the word “love”--fell into the background, and their place was taken by the _teaching of Him_. As the Arisen he became for his disciples a new figure, in and of the Apocalyptic, and (what was more) its most important and final figure. But therewith their image of the future took form as an image of memory. Now, this was something of quite decisive importance, unheard-of in the world of Magian thought--the transference of an actuality, lived and experienced, on to the plane of the high story itself. The Jews (amongst them the young Paul) and the Mandæans (amongst them the disciples of John the Baptist) fought against it with passion and made of Jesus a “False Messiah” such as had been spoken of in the earliest Persian texts.[362] For them “He” was still to come from afar; for the little community “He” had already been--had they not seen him and lived with him? We have to enter into this conception unreservedly if we are to appreciate the enormous superiority it had in those times. Instead of an uncertain glimpse into the distance,[363] a compelling present; instead of fearful waiting for a liberating certainty, instead of a saga, a lived and shared human destiny--truly they were “glad tidings” that were proclaimed.

But to whom? Even in the first days the question arose which decided the whole Destiny of the new revelation. Jesus and his friends were Jews by birth, but they did not belong to the land of Judea. Here in Jerusalem men looked for the Messiah of their old sacred books, a Messiah who was to appear for the “Jewish people,” in the old tribal sense, and only for them. But all the rest of the Aramæan world waited upon the Saviour of the _world_, the Redeemer and Son of Man, the figure of all apocalyptic literature, whether written out in Jewish, Persian, Chaldean, or Mandæan terms.[364] In the one view the death and resurrection of Jesus were merely local events; in the other they betokened a world-change. For, while everywhere else the Jews were a Magian nation without home or unity of birth, Jerusalem held firmly to the tribal idea. The conflict was not one between “preaching to the Jews” and “preaching to the Gentiles”--it went far deeper. The word “mission” had essentially here a twofold meaning. In the Judaic view there was essentially no need for recruiting--quite the reverse, as it was a contradiction to the Messiah-idea. The words “tribe” and “mission” are reciprocally exclusive. The members of the Chosen People, and in particular the priesthood, had merely to convince _themselves_ that their longing was now fulfilled. But to the Magian nation, based on _consensus_ or community of feeling, what the Resurrection conveyed was a full and definitive truth, and consensus in the matter of this truth gave the _principle of the true nation_, which must necessarily expand till it had taken in all older and conceptually incomplete principles. “A Shepherd and his sheep” was the formula of the new world-nation. The nation of the Redeemer was identical with mankind. When, therefore, we survey the early history of this Culture, we see that the controversy in the Apostles’ Council[365] had been already decided, five hundred years before, by facts. Post-exilic Jewry (with the sole exception of self-contained Judea) had, like the Persians, Chaldeans, and others, recruited widely amongst the heathen, from Turkestan to inner Africa, regardless of home and origin. As to this there is now no controversy. It never at any time entered the heads of this community to be anything but what it really was. It was itself already the result of _a national existence in dispersion_. In utter contrast to the old-Jewish texts--which were a carefully preserved treasure, and of which the right interpretation, the Halakha, was reserved by the Rabbis to themselves--the apocalyptic literature was written so that it could reach all the souls to be wakened, and interpreted so that it might strike home in everyone.

It is easy to see which of these conceptions was that of Jesus’s oldest friends, for they established themselves as a community of the Last Days in Jerusalem and frequented the Temple. For these simple folk--amongst them his brothers, who erstwhile had openly rejected him, and his mother, who now believed in her executed Son[366]--the power of the Judaic tradition was even stronger than the spirit of Apocalypse. In their object of convincing the Jews they failed (although at first even Pharisees came over to them) and so they remained as one of the numerous sects within Judaism, and their product, the “Confession of Peter,” may fairly be characterized as an express assertion that they themselves were the true Jewry and the Synedrion the false.[367]

The final destiny of this circle[368] was to fall into oblivion when, as very soon happened, the whole world of Magian thought and feeling responded to the new apocalyptic teaching. Amongst the later disciples of Jesus were many who were definitely and purely Magian, and wholly free from the Pharisaic spirit. Long before Paul, they had tacitly settled the mission question. Not to preach, for them, was not to live at all, and presently they had assembled, everywhere from the Tigris to the Tiber, small circles in which the figure of Jesus, in every conceivable presentation, merged with the mass of prior visions.[369] Out of this, a new discord arose, as between mission to the heathen and mission to the Jews, and this was far more important than the conflict between Judea and the world on issues already decided. Jesus had lived in Galilee. Was his teaching to look west or east? Was it to be a Jesus-cult or an Order of the Saviour? Was it to seek intimacy with the Persian or with the Syncretic Church, both of which were in process of formation?

This was the question decided by Paul--the first great personality in the new movement, and the first who had the sense not only of truths, but of facts. As a young rabbi from the West, and a pupil of one of the most famous of the Tannaim, he had persecuted the Christians qua Jewish sectaries. Then, after an awakening of the sort that often happened in those days, he turned to the numerous small cult-communities of the West and forged out of them a Church of _his own_ modelling: so that thenceforward, the Pagan and the Christian cult-Churches evolved in parallel, and with constant reciprocal action, up to Iamblichus and Athanasius (about A.D. 330). In the presence of this great ideal, Paul had for the Jesus-communities of Jerusalem a scarcely veiled contempt. There is nothing in the New Testament more express and exact than the beginning of the Epistle to the Galatians; his activity is a self-assumed task; he has taught how it pleased him and he has built how it pleased him. Finally, after fourteen years, he goes to Jerusalem in order, by force of his superior mentality, his success, and his effective independence of the old comrades of Jesus, to compel them there to agree that his, Paul’s, creation contained the true doctrine. Peter and his people, alien to actualities, failed to seize and appreciate the far-reaching significance of the discussion. And from that moment the primitive community was superfluous.

Paul was a rabbi in intellect and an apocalyptic in feeling. He recognized Judaism, but as a _preliminary_ development. And thus there came to be two Magian religions with the same Scriptures (namely, the Old Testament), but a double Halakha, the one setting towards the Talmud--developed by the Tannaim at Jerusalem from 300 B.C. onwards--and the other, founded by Paul and completed by the Fathers, in the direction of the Gospel. But, further, Paul drew together the whole fullness of Apocalypse and salvation-yearning then circulating in these fields[370] into a salvation-_certainty_, the certainty immediately revealed to him and to him _alone_ near Damascus. “_Jesus is the Redeemer and Paul is his Prophet_”--this is the whole content of his message. The analogy with Mohammed could scarcely be closer. They differed neither in the nature of the awakening, nor in prophetic self-assuredness, nor in the consequent assertion of sole authority and unconditional truth for their respective expositions.

With Paul, urban man and his “intelligence” come on the scene. The others, though they might know Jerusalem or Antioch, never grasped the essence of these cities. They lived soil-bound, rural, wholly soul and feeling. But now there appeared a spirit that had grown up in the great cities of Classical cast, that could only live in cities, that neither understood nor respected the peasant’s countryside. An understanding was possible with Philo, but with Peter never. Paul was the first by whom the Resurrection-experience was _seen as a problem_; the ecstatic awe of the young countryman changed in his brain into a conflict of spiritual principles. For what a contrast!--the struggle of Gethsemane, and the hour of Damascus: Child and Man, soul-anguish and intellectual decision, self-devotion to death and resolve to change sides! Paul had begun by seeing in the new Jewish sect a danger to the Pharisaism of Jerusalem; now, suddenly, he comprehended that the Nazarenes “were right”--a phrase that is inconceivable on the lips of Jesus--and took up their cause against Judaism, thereby setting up as an _intellectual quantity_ that which had previously consisted in the knowledge of an experience. An intellectual quantity--but in making his cause into this he unwittingly drove it close to the other intellectual powers, _the cities of the West_. In the ambiance of pure Apocalyptic there is no “intellect.” For the old comrades it was simply not possible to understand him in the least--and mournfully and doubtfully they must have looked at him while he was addressing them. Their living image of Jesus (whom Paul had never seen) paled in this bright, hard light of concepts and propositions. Thenceforward the holy memory faded into a Scholastic system. But Paul had a perfectly exact feeling for the true home of his ideas. His missionary journeys were all directed westward, and the East he ignored. _He never left the domain of the Classical city._ Why did he go to Rome, to Corinth, and not to Edessa or Ctesiphon? And why was it that he worked _only in the cities, and never from village to village?_

That things developed thus was due to Paul _alone_. In the face of his practical energy the feelings of all the rest counted for nothing, and so the young Church took the urban and Western tendency decisively, so decisively that later it could describe the remaining heathen as “_pagani_,” country-folk. Thus arose an immense danger that only youth and vernal force enabled the growing Church to repel; the fellah-world of the Classical cities grasped at it with both hands, and the marks of that grasp are visible to-day. But--how remote already from the essence of Jesus, whose entire life had been bound to country and the country-folk! The Pseudomorphosis in which he was born he had simply not noticed; his soul contained not the smallest trace of its influence--and now, a generation after him, probably within the lifetime of his mother, that which had grown up out of his death had already become a centre of formative purpose for that Pseudomorphosis. The Classical City was soon the only theatre of ritual and dogmatic evolution. Eastward the community extended only furtively and unobtrusively.[371] About A.D. 100 there were already Christians beyond the Tigris, but as far as the development of the Church was concerned they and their beliefs might almost have been non-existent.

It was a second creation, then, that came out of Paul’s immediate entourage, and it was this creation that, essentially, defined the form of the new Church. The personality and the story of Jesus cried aloud to be put into poetic form, and yet it is due to one man alone, Mark, that Gospels came into existence at all.[372] What Paul and Mark had before them was a firm tradition in the community, _the_ “Gospel,” a continued and propagated hearsay, supported by formless and insignificant notes in Aramaic and Greek, but in no way set out. In any case, of course, serious documents would have come into existence some time or another, but their natural form as products of the spirit of those who had _lived_ with Jesus (and of the spirit of the East generally) would have been a canonical collection of his sayings, amplified, conclusively defined, and provided with an exegesis by the Councils and pivoting upon the Second Advent. But any tentatives in this direction were completely broken off by the Gospel of Mark, which was written down about A.D. 65, at the same time as the last Pauline Epistles, and, like them, in Greek. The writer had no suspicion, perhaps, of the significance of his little work, but it made him one of the supremely important personalities not only of Christianity, but of the Arabian Culture generally. All older attempts vanished, leaving writings in Gospel-form as the sole sources concerning Jesus. (So much so that “_Evangelium_,” from signifying the content of glad tidings, came to mean the form itself.) The work was the outcome of the wishes of Pauline, literate, circles that had never heard any one of Jesus’s companions discourse about him. It is _an apocalyptic life-picture from a distance_; lived experience is replaced by narrative, and narrative so plain and straightforward that the apocalyptic tendency passes quite unperceived.[373] And yet Apocalyptic is its condition precedent. It is not the words of Jesus, but the doctrine of Jesus in the Pauline form, that constitutes the substance of Mark. The first Christian book emanates from the Pauline creation. But very soon the latter itself becomes unthinkable without the book and its successors.

For presently there arose something which Paul, the born schoolman, had never intended, but which nevertheless had been made inevitable by the tendency of his work--the _cult-church of Christian nationality_. While the Syncretic creed-community, in proportion as it attained to consciousness of itself, drew the innumerable old city-cults and the new Magian together and by means of a supreme cult endowed the structure with henotheistic form, the Jesus-cult of the oldest Western communities was so long dissected and enriched that it also came to consist of just such another mass of cults.[374] Around the 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.[375] 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.[376]

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 traditions, the same book-literature from the same schools. The far less sophisticated Aramaic literatures of the East--the truly Magian, written and thought in the language of Jesus and his companions--were cut off from cooperating in the life of the Church. They could not be read, they dropped out of sight, and finally they were forgotten altogether. After all, notwithstanding that the Persian Scriptures were set down in Avestan and the Jewish in Hebrew, the language of their authors and exegetes; the language of the whole Apocalyptic from which the teachings of Jesus, and secondarily the teachings about Jesus, sprang; the language, lastly, of the scholars of all the Mesopotamian universities--was Aramaic. All this vanished from the field of view, to be replaced by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom were taken up, worked upon in common, and misunderstood in common by the Schoolmen of the two cult-Churches.

A final step in this direction was attempted by a man who was the equal of Paul in organizing talent and greatly his superior in intellectual creativeness, but who was inferior to him in the feeling for possibilities and actualities, and consequently failed to achieve his grandly conceived schemes--Marcion.[377] He saw in Paul’s creation and its consequences only the basis on which to found the true religion of salvation. He was sensible of the absurdity of two religions that were unreservedly at war with one another possessing the same Holy Writ--namely, the _Jewish_ canon. To us to-day it seems almost inconceivable that this should have been, but in fact it was so, for a century--but we have to remember what a sacred text meant in every kind of Magian religiousness. In these texts Marcion saw the real “conspiracy against the truth” and the most urgent danger for the doctrines intended by Jesus and, in his view, not yet actualized. Paul the prophet had declared the Old Testament as fulfilled and concluded--Marcion the founder pronounced it defeated and cancelled. He strove to cut out everything Jewish, down to the last detail. From end to end he was fighting nothing but Judaism. Like every true founder, like every religiously creative period, like Zarathustra, the prophets of Israel, like the Homeric Greeks, and like the Germans converted to Christianity, he transformed the old gods into defeated powers.[378] Jehovah as the Creator-God, the Demiurge, is the “Just” _and therefore the Evil_: Jesus as the incarnation of the Saviour-God in this evil creation is the “alien”--that is, the good Principle.[379] The foundation of Magian, and in particular Persian, feeling is perfectly unmistakable here. Marcion came from Sinope, the old capital of that Mithradatic Empire whose religion is indicated in the very name of its kings. Here of old, too, the Mithras cult had originated.

But to the new doctrine properly belonged new Scriptures. The “Law and Prophets” which had hitherto been canonical for the whole of Christendom was the _Bible of the Jewish God_, and in fact it had just been given final shape as such by the Synedrion at Jabna. Thus, it was a Devil’s book that the Christian had in his hands, and Marcion, therefore, now set up against it the Bible of the Redeemer-God--likewise an assemblage and ordering of writings that had hitherto been current in the community[380] as simple edification-books without canonical claims. In place of the Torah he puts the--_one and true_--Gospel, which he builds up uniformly out of various separate, and, in his view, corrupted and falsified, Gospels. In place of the Israelite prophets he sets up the Epistles of the _one prophet of Jesus_, who was Paul.

Thus Marcion became the real creator of the New Testament. But for that reason it is impossible to ignore the mysterious personage, closely related to him, who not long before had written the Gospel “according to John.” The intention of this writer was neither to amplify nor to supersede the Gospels proper; what he did--and, unlike Mark, consciously did--was to create something quite new, _the first sacred book_ of Christianity, the Koran of the new religion.[381] The book proves that this religion was already conceived of as something complete and enduring. The idea of the immediately impending end of the world, with which Jesus was filled through and through and which even Paul and Mark in a measure shared, lies far behind “John” and Marcion. Apocalyptic is at an end, and Mysticism is beginning. Their content is not the teaching of Jesus, nor even the Pauline teaching about Jesus, but the enigma of the universe, the World-Cavern. There is here no question of a Gospel; not the figure of the Redeemer, but the principle of the Logos, is the meaning and the means of happening. The childhood story is rejected again; a god is not “born,” he is “there,” and wanders in human form over the earth. And this god is a Trinity--God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. This sacred book of earliest Christianity contains, for the first time, the Magian problem of “Substance,” which dominated the following centuries to the exclusion of everything else and finally led to the religion’s splitting up into three churches. And--what is significant in more respects than one--the solution of that problem to which “John” stands closest is that which the Nestorian East stood for as the true one. It is, in virtue of the Logos idea (Greek though the word happens to be) the “easternmost” of the Gospels, and presents Jesus, emphatically not as the bringer of the final and total revelation, but as the second envoy, who is to be _followed by a third_ (the Comforter, Paraclete, of John xiv, 16, 26; xv, 26). This is the astounding doctrine that Jesus himself proclaims, and the decisive note of this enigmatic book. Here is unveiled, quite suddenly, the faith of the Magian East. If the Logos does not go, the Paraclete[382] cannot come (John xvi, 7), but between them lies the last Æon, the rule of Ahriman (xiv, 30). The Church of the Pseudomorphosis, ruled by Pauline intellect, fought long against the John Gospel and gave it recognition only when the offensive, darkly hinted doctrine had been covered over by a Pauline interpretation. The real state of affairs is disclosed in the Montanist movement (Asia Minor, 160) which harked back to oral tradition and proclaimed in Montanus the manifested Paraclete and the end of the world. Its popularity was immense. Tertullian went over to it at Carthage in 207. About 245 Mani,[383] who was intimately in touch with the currents of Eastern Christianity,[384] cast out the Pauline, human Jesus as a demon and confessed the Johannine Logos as the true Jesus, but announced himself as the Paraclete of the fourth Gospel. In Carthage, Augustine became a Manichæan, and it is a highly suggestive fact that both movements finally fused with Marcionism.

To return to Marcion himself, it was he who carried through the idea of “John” and created a Christian Bible. And then, verging on old age, when the communities of the extreme west recoiled from him in horror,[385] he set out to build the masterly structure of his own Redeemer-Church.[386] From 156 to 190 this was a power, and it was only in the following century that the older Church succeeded in degrading the Marcionites to the rank of heretics. Even so, in the broad East and as far out as Turkestan, it was still important at a much later date, and it ended, in a way deeply significant of its essential feeling, by fusing with the Manichæans.[387]

Nevertheless, though in the fullness of his conscious superiority he had underestimated the _vis inertiæ_ of existing conditions, his grand effort was not in vain. He was, like Paul before him and Athanasius after him, the deliverer of Christianity at a moment when it threatened to break up, and the grandeur of his idea is in no wise diminished by the fact that union came about in opposition to, instead of through, him. The early Catholic Church--that is, the _Church of the Pseudomorphosis_--arose in its greatness only about 190, and then it was in self-defence against the Church of Marcion and with the aid of an organization taken from that Church. Further, it replaced Marcion’s Bible by another of similar structure--Gospels and apostolic Epistles--which it then proceeded to combine with the Law and the Prophets in one unit. And finally, this act of linking the two Testaments having in itself settled the Church’s attitude towards Judaism, it proceeded to combat Marcion’s third creation, his Redeemer-doctrine, by making a start with a theology of its own on the basis of _his_ enunciation of the problem.

This development, however, took place on Classical soil, and, therefore, even the Church that arose in opposition to Marcion and his anti-Judaism was looked upon by Talmudic Jewry (whose centre of gravity lay entirely in Mesopotamia and its universities) as a mere piece of Hellenistic paganism. The destruction of Jerusalem was a conclusive event that in the world of fact no spiritual power could nullify. Such is the intimacy of inward relationship between waking-consciousness, religion, and speech that the complete severance after 70 of the Greek Pseudomorphosis and the Aramaic (that is, the truly Arabian) region was bound to result in the formation of two distinct domains of Magian religious development. On the Western margin of the young Culture the Pagan cult-Church, the Jesus-Church (removed thither by Paul), and the Greek-speaking Judaism of the Philo stamp were in point of language and literature so interlocked that the last-named fell into Christianity even in the first century, and Christianity and Hellenism combined to form a _common_ early philosophy. In the Aramaic-speaking world from the Orontes to the Tigris, on the other hand, Judaism and Persism interacted constantly and intimately, each creating in this period its own strict theology and scholastic in the Talmud and the Avesta; and from the fourth century both these theologies exercised _the most potent influence upon the Aramaic-speaking Christendom that resisted the Pseudomorphosis_, so that finally it broke away in the form of the Nestorian Church.

Here in the East the difference, inherent in every human waking-consciousness, between sense-understanding and word-understanding--and, therefore between eye and letter--led up to purely Arabian methods of mysticism and scholasticism. The apocalyptic certainty, “Gnosis” in the first-century sense, that Jesus intended to confer,[388] the divining contemplation and emotion, is that of the Israelite prophets, the Gathas, Sufism, and we have it recognizable still in Spinoza, in the Polish Messiah Baal Shem[389] and in Mirza Ali Mohammed, the enthusiast-founder of Bahaism, who was executed in Teheran in 1850. The other way, “Paradosis,” is the characteristically Talmudic method of word-exegesis, of which Paul was a master;[390] it pervades all later Avestan works, the Nestorian dialectic,[391] the entire theology of Islam alike.

On the other side, the Pseudomorphosis is single and whole both in its Magian believing acceptance (Pistis) and its metaphysical introversion (Gnosis).[392] The Magian belief in its Westerly shape was formulated for the Christians by Irenæus and, above all, by Tertullian, whose famous aphorism “_Credo quia absurdum_” is the very summation of this certainty in belief. The Pagan counterpart is Plotinus in his Enneads and even more so Porphyry in his treatise _On the Return of the Soul to God_.[393] But for the great schoolmen of the Pagan Church too, there were Father (Nus), Son, and the middle Being, just as already for Philo the Logos had been first-born Son and second God. Doctrines concerning ecstasy, angels and demons, and the dual substance of soul were freely current amongst them, and we see in Plotinus and Origen, both pupils of the same master, that the scholasticism of the Pseudomorphosis consisted in the development of Magian concepts and thoughts, by systematic transvaluation of the texts of Plato and Aristotle.

The characteristic _central idea of the whole thought of the Pseudomorphosis is the Logos_,[394] in use and development its faithful image. There is no possibility here of any “Greek,” in the sense of Classical, influence; there was not a man alive in those days whose spiritual disposition could have accommodated the smallest trace of the Logos of Heraclitus and the Stoa. But, equally, the theologies that lived side by side in Alexandria were never able to develop in full purity the Logos-notion as they meant it, whereas both in Persian and Chaldean imaginings--as Spirit or Word of God--and in Jewish doctrine--as Ruach and Memra--it played a decisive part. What the Logos-teaching in the West did was to develop a Classical formula, by way of Philo and the John Gospel (the enduring effect of which on the West was its mark upon the schoolmen) not only into an element of Christian mysticism, but, eventually, into a dogma.[395] This was inevitable. This dogma which _both_ the Western Churches held, corresponded, on the side of knowledge, to that which, on the side of faith, was represented _both by_ the syncretic cults and the cults of Mary and the Saints. And against the whole thing, dogma and cult, the feeling of the East revolted from the 4th century on.

For the eye the history of these thoughts and feelings is repeated in the history of Magian architecture.[396] _The basic form of the Pseudomorphosis is the Basilica_, which was known to the Jews of the West and to the Hellenistic sects of the Chaldeans even before the time of Christ. As the Logos of the John Gospel is a Magian fundamental in Classical shape, so the Basilica is a Magian room whose inner walls correspond to the outer surfaces of the old Classical temple, the cult-building introverted. The architectural form of the pure East is the _cupola building, the Mosque_, which without doubt existed long before the oldest Christian Churches in the temples of the Persians and Chaldeans, the synagogues of Mesopotamia, and probably the temples of Saba as well. The attempts to reconcile East and West in the Church Councils of the Byzantine period were finally symbolized in the mixed form of the domed basilica. For this item of the history of ecclesiastical architecture is really another expression of the great change that set in with Athanasius and Constantine, the last great champions of Christianity. The one created the firm western dogma and also Monasticism, into whose hands dogma gradually passed from those of the ageing schools. The other founded the State of Christian nationality, to which likewise the name of “Greek” passed in the end. And of this transition the domed basilica is the symbol.