There is a view that Jesus was not quite as human as we are—that he was the Son of God disguised as a man, not a real man. The authors of The Myth of God Incarnate some of whom I suspect of having been brought up on this docetist heresy, are in revulsion against it. They reject it, however, not because the Church long ago threw it out as an option incompatible with her life, a heresy, but because it is found to be incompatible with the European way of life in the second half of the twentieth century. It seems odd for Christians to reject a doctrine on these grounds, since it is the very heart of the gospel to challenge conventional and accepted attitudes in any age; still, they do reject docetism, and that can’t be bad.

When Christians do this it is customary for them to do so in the name of the incarnation, the doctrine that the one person, Jesus, was both fully human and fully divine. What is peculiar to these authors is that they think the rejection of docetism involves also the rejection of its contrary, the incarnation. At least I think they are rejecting it. Professor Maurice Wiles at first talks definitely about a “Christianity without incarnation”, but then goes on to speak of it as a ‘myth’, and it is not at all clear whether a myth is always meant to be an untruth. Sometimes the authors merely seem to mean by ‘mythical’ the same as ‘subject to the limitations of religious language.’

The revival at Covent Garden this season of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, though it was but indifferently well directed and sung, confirmed me in a supposition that this opera affords the Christian a useful pair of images for his meditation upon the ways in which God is said to justify man. The musical action of Ariadne presents whomsoever would employ them with lively images for the common faith of Christians and for the different doctrinal formulations of this faith by Roman and Lutheran theologians. It suggests, also, how far these formulations may be related to that faith. The theologian’s nice arguments are rendered immediately appreciable in Strauss’ music. Whether he, or Hofmannsthal his librettist, had ever been confronted with the excitements of the sixteenth century disputants, Strauss, in the composition of this delightful opera, was exploring for himself just that relation of seeing to knowing which is structurally so important for doctrines of justification, and he was doing so within a context which most naturally suggested that a man might come to share in the divine life.

‘Seeing’ is commonly taken as a strong metaphor for all kinds of ‘knowing’, not only that which depends on our opening our eyes. This much, at least, is evident. Nodding in comprehension, I say ‘I see’.

I believe that the underlying philosophy of our culture has become nihilistic. If we pursue the implications of nihilism to their ultimate conclusions, where do we arrive? Very few have dared to do this: Max Stirner, who published a book on this theme in 1845, was one who dared. If we turn back to him we can see that he is the unacknowledged prophet of today’s fashionable culture.

The ultimate problems posed by nihilism are examined in a book on this German philosopher, by Dr. R. K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner, (Hull University Press, 1971). Stirner grew out of the neo-Hegelian movement, and published his one important work in 1945: Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum— ‘The Unique One and His Property’.

Stirner belonged to movements which Marx rejected as ‘intellectual nihilists’. Following the nihilist logic to its ultimate implications, he denied God and Christian values, the State’s authority, and all traditional morality.

But he went still further, and denied all ethical obligations. In the face of nothingness he embraced nothingness, and he sought no commitment or ultimate responsibility, to man or the universe. ‘What is the commonweal to me?’ All that he was left with was— self. The self and the world were ultimately Nothing—but the Unique One ‘makes Nothing his cause’.