Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (837 page)

^§
Ibid. s. 706. Hades replies to Satan :
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^||
Orig. c. Cels. ii.
25.

^¶
Hieron.
Comm. in Matth. in loc.
: Contristaba/ur non timore patiendi, qui ad hoc venerat, ut pateretur, sed propter infelicissimum Judam, et scandalum omnium apostolorum, et rejectionem populi Judæorurn, et eversionem miserae Hierusalem.
physical suffering, or to his own person, attained its highest pitch in the ecclesiastical tenet, that Jesus by substitution was burthened with the guilt of all mankind, and vicariously endured the wrath of God against that guilt.* Some have even supposed that the devil himself wrestled with Jesus.
^†

But such a cause for the trouble of Jesus is not found in the text; on the contrary, here as elsewhere (Matt. XX. 22 f.
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for the removal of which Jesus prays, must be understood of his own bodily sufferings and death. Moreover, the above ecclesiastical opinion is founded on an unscriptural conception of the vicarious office of Jesus. It is trite that even in the conception of the synoptists, the suffering of Jesus is a vicarious one for the sins of many; but the substitution consists, according to them, not in Jesus having immediately borne these sins and the punishment due to mankind on account of them, but in a personal suffering being laid upon him on account of those sins, and in order to remove their punishment. Thus, as on the cross, it was not directly the sins of the world, and the anger of God in relation to them, which afflicted him, but the wounds which he received, and his whole lamentable situation, wherein he was indeed placed for the sins of mankind: so, according to the idea of the Evangelists, in Gethsemane also, it was not immediately the feeling of the misery of humanity which occasioned his dismay, but the presentiment of his own suffering, which, however, was encountered in the stead of mankind.

From the untenable ecclesiastical view of the agony of Jesus, a descent has in more modern times been made to coarse materialism, by reducing what it was thought hopeless to justify ethically, as a mental condition, to a purely physical one, and supposing that Jesus was attacked by some malady in Gethsemane ;‡ an opinion which Paulus, with a severity which he should only have more industriously applied to his own explanations, pronounces to be altogether unseemly and opposed to the text, though he does not regard as improbable Heumann’s hypothesis, that in addition to his inward sorrow, Jesus had contracted a cold in the clayey ground traversed by the Kedron.§ On the other hand, the scene has been depicted in the colours of modern sentimentalism, and the feelings of friendship, the pain of separation, the thoughts of parting, have been assigned as the causes which so lacerated the mind of Jesus :|| or a confused blending of all the different kinds of sorrow, selfish and sympathetic, sensual and spiritual, has been presupposed.
^¶
Paulus explains
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^*
Calvin, Comm. in harm. evangg. Matth. xxvi. 37:
Non — mortem horruit simpliciter, quatenus transitus est e mundo sed quia formidabile Dei tribunal illi erat ante oculos, judex ipse incomprehensibili vindicta armatus, peccata vero nostra, quorum onus illi erat impositum, sua ingenti mole eum premebant.
Comp. Luther’s Hauspostille, die erste Passionsprcdigt.

^†
Lightfoot, p. 884 f.

^‡
Thiess, Krit. Comm. 6. 418 ff.

^§
Ut sup. s. 549, 554
f., Anm.

^||
Schuster, zur Erläuterung des N. T., in Eichhorn’s Biblioth. 9, s. 1012 ff.

^¶
Hess, Gesch. Jesu, 2, s. 322 ff
. ;
Kuinöl, in Matth., p. 719.
pass from me)
as the expression of a purely moral anxiety on the part of Jesus, as to whether it were the will of God that he should give himself up to the attack immediately at hand, or whether it were not more accordant with the Divine pleasure, that he should yet escape from this danger: thus converting into a mere inquiry of God, what is obviously the most urgent prayer.

While Olshausen falls back on the ecclesiastical theory, and authoritatively declares that the supposition of external corporeal suffering having called forth the anguish of Jesus, ought to be banished as one which would annihilate the essential characteristics of his mission; others have more correctly acknowledged that in that anguish the passionate wish to be delivered from the terrible sufferings in prospect, the horror of sensitive nature in the face of annihilation, are certainly apparent.* With justice also it is remarked, in opposition to the reproach which has been cast on Jesus, that the speedy conquest over rebellious nature removes every appearance of sinfulness † that, moreover, the shrinking of physical nature at the prospect of annihilation belongs to the essential conditions of life ‡ nay, that the purer the human nature in an individual, the more susceptible is it in relation to suffering and annihilation ; § that the conquest over suffering intensely appreciated is greater than a stoical or even, a Socratic insensibility.||

With more reason, criticism has attacked the peculiar representation of the third gospel. The strengthening angel has created no little difficulty to the ancient church on dogmatical grounds, — to modern exposition on critical grounds. An ancient scholium on the consideration,
That he who was adored and glorified with fear and trembling,
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ascribed to the angel as a
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ie. as the offering of a doxology
^¶
while others, rather than admit that Jesus could need to be strengthened by an angel, transform the
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into an evil angel, who attempted to use force against Jesus.
^*
The orthodox also, by founding a distinction between the state of humiliation and privation in Christ and that of his glorification, or in some similar way, have long blunted the edge of the dogmatical difficulty: but in place of this a critical objection has been only so much the more decidedly developed. In consideration of the suspicion which, according to our earlier observations, attaches to every alleged