Jesus

Jesus is presented as one of two foundational ethical ideals conceived by the First Men: a life of unselfish love directed toward other people and God. Complementary to Socrates’ devotion to truthful, dispassionate thought, this ideal expresses integrity of will and a perception of divinity in the world. Its history is also a history of failure: the people who inherited it could admire the ideal without possessing the mental and spiritual coherence to live by it consistently.

Identity and Ethical Ideal

In the account of the First Men, Jesus stands for passionate yet self-oblivious worship, grounded in regard for actual human beings and in a sense of divinity pervading the world. His emphasis differs from Socrates’, who represents intellectual honesty and the pursuit of truth for its own sake, but the two ideals are not opposites. Each, the narrative stresses, ultimately involves the other: clear thought requires integrity, while love cannot be separated from an honest apprehension of people and the world.

This pairing makes Jesus a figure in a broader account of human ethical possibility rather than the subject of a developed personal life story. The narrative presents love and intelligence as twin requirements for the spirit’s well-being. Jesus embodies the affective and devotional dimension of that hope, while Socrates supplies its intellectual counterpart.

An Ideal the First Men Could Not Sustain

The promise represented by Jesus was greater than the capacities of the First Men’s nervous system. For centuries, the ideals associated with him and Socrates drew the more precociously human members of the species, but they were not put into practice with sufficient consistency. Their failure helped produce a cynical lassitude that contributed to the race’s decline.

The ideal also belonged to a culture troubled by the problem of Fate. The peoples from whom Jesus and Socrates arose were among the first to admire Fate, encountering in tragic art, divine law, and resignation a beauty that seemed alien and higher than human life. That attraction conflicted with loyalty to Life in its struggle against Death. The account describes this tension as unresolved and as an obstacle to spiritual development, even when individuals were not consciously aware of it. Jesus’ ideal therefore stands within a history shaped not only by the difficulty of loving well, but by a deeper conflict over whether to affirm life or submit to a beauty associated with what lies beyond it.

Later Religious Appropriation

In a later society, a secret sect formed among people excluded from the officially sanctioned sexual order. It reworked the ancient Christian faith in a God of Love by treating love as exclusively sexual and making sexual union with God the basis of worship. The narrator describes this as a gross distortion and notes that people more fortunate within that society regarded the cult with contempt. The passage presents it as an illicit response to social exclusion, not as a continuation of Jesus’ own teaching.

The contrast between Jesus’ ideal and this later cult is significant: a teaching centered on unselfish love becomes, through the sect’s interpretation, a doctrine of private desire. The narrative thus traces not a direct institutional legacy but a mutation of religious language under social pressure. Jesus remains the measure against which that distortion can be recognized, while the episode reinforces the larger account of ideals that survive as names and claims even when their original spirit is misunderstood.