THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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not only be driven out of the temple with a whip, as Jesus did to them, but the whole state and temple will fall, totally, through a catastrophe, before long. The great
eschatological chapter (Mark 13) is one of the best­attested in the New Testament; without this utopia, the Sermon on the Mount cannot be understood at all. If the old
fortress is to be so soon and so totally razed to the ground, then economic questions also seem pointless to Jesus, who regarded the ‘present aeon’ as finished in any
case and believed in the immediately imminent cosmic catastrophe; thus the phrase about the lilies of the field is much less naive, or at least surprising and disparate on
quite a different level, than it appears. And the instruction: ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's’ was
uttered by Jesus out of contempt for the state and with a view to its speedy destruction, not as a compromise, as St Paul would have it. A natural catastrophe is of
course a substitute for revolution, but an extremely extensive one, and in this appeal to the Last Judgment it does of course defuse every real revolt, as it does even in
the account of the old servant in ‘Cabal and Love’ (Act 2, Scene 2),* but it still did not make any truce with the existing world, there was no forgetting the ‘future
aeon’. The catastrophe of the kingdom of this world is even cruelly fulfilled according to Jesus, there is little more talk of loving one's enemies when it comes to the Last
Judgment. The new team owed its allegiance solely to Jesus; the new social community, redeemed from the previous aeon, exists through him, in him, for him. ‘I am the
vine, ye are the branches’ (John 15, 5), the founder had ordained; thus Jesus merged into the community just as much as he encompassed it. ‘Inasmuch as ye have
done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’ (Matthew 25, 40): this saying grounds the social utopia intended by the early Christians in
its communism of love and in the International of whatever bears a human face, however poor. The saying also adds, in a momentous way, an element that was
completely lacking in the Stoics: a social mission from below and a mythically powerful person to watch over it. Even where the social mission had almost disappeared,
as in the case of Augustine, the opposition to the power of this existing world and to its misanthropic content remained predominant; throughout all church­building and
all compromises. As it certainly did in the Christian revolutions, bearing in mind the killing of the Egyptian overseer, the exodus, the thundering prophets, the expulsion
of the money­changers
* A play by Schiller.