Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/67

 A PSYCHO- ANALYTIC STUDY OF THE CHRISTIAN CREED 59

fecundate this symbol of the womb from which the candidate for baptism was to be reborn like the Christ.

"One Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God"

A long Step towards the deification of Jesus was taken by the first person who dated the divine Sonship of Jesus from his birth and applied to Jesus the prophecy of Isaiah about a young woman as if it implied conception without a human father. The birth legends inserted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke contain a further satisfaction of unconscious desires by assimilating the Christ myth to the widespread myth of the hero's birth. There is the double parentage, the humble carpenter foster-father and the almighty God Father. The Messianic hero is cradled as an out- cast in a food box (ju^t as Mo'ses was in a basket) and is perse- cuted by an evil King. Herod represents the Father on to whom the unconscious projects its childish feeling of filial hate. Otto Rank reminds us in his book on "The Myth of the Birth of the Hero" (p. 51) that "the birth history of Christ is said to have the greatest resemblance to the royal Egyptian myth, over five thou- sand years old, which relates the birth of Amenophis III. Here again recurs the divine prophecy of the birth of a son to the waiting queen; her fertilization by the breath of heavenly fire; the divine cows, which nurse the new born child; the homage of the kings, and so forth."

Jesus was henceforth no mere man adopted to be the Messiah. But the Virgin Birth story does not satisfy the mystical author of the fourth Gospel. He exhalts Jesus still further from time into eternity. He pictures Jesus as God from the beginning and as man at an appropriate moment in history. Both the Virgin Birth and the Baptism stories are therefore omitted from the fourth Gospel. In their place we find a metaphysical theory of the Word who set up a temporary tent of flesh amongst men and then returned to His eternal glory with an added glamour. By this symbolism the mystic tendency to regression from the world of time and space is finally satisfied.

"Very God" and "Was made Man"

Many of the later Christian controversies arise from the attempt to express in one symbol the conflicting emotions towards the