It is _an apocalyptic life-picture from a distance_; lived experience is replaced by narrative, and narrative so plain and straightforward that the apocalyptic tendency passes quite unperceived.[373] And yet Apocalyptic is its condition precedent. It is not the words of Jesus, but the doctrine of Jesus in the Pauline form, that constitutes the substance of Mark. The first Christian book emanates from the Pauline creation. But very soon the latter itself becomes unthinkable without the book and its successors. For presently there arose something which Paul, the born schoolman, had never intended, but which nevertheless had been made inevitable by the tendency of his work--the _cult-church of Christian nationality_. While the Syncretic creed-community, in proportion as it attained to consciousness of itself, drew the innumerable old city-cults and the new Magian together and by means of a supreme cult endowed the structure with henotheistic form, the Jesus-cult of the oldest Western communities was so long dissected and enriched that it also came to consist of just such another mass of cults.[374] Around the birth of Jesus, of which the Disciples knew nothing, grew up a story of his childhood. In the Mark Gospel it has not yet come into existence. Already in the old Persian apocalyptic, indeed, the Saoshyant as Saviour of the Last Day was said to be born of a virgin. But the new western myth was of quite other significance and had incalculable consequences. For within the Pseudomorphosis-region there arose presently beside Jesus a figure to which he was Son, which transcended his figure--that of the Mother of God. She, like her Son, was a simple human destiny of such arresting and attractive force that she towered above all the hundred and one Virgins and Mothers of Syncretism--Isis, Tanit, Cybele, Demeter--and all the mysteries of birth and pain, and finally drew them into herself. For Irenæus she is the Eve of a new mankind. Origen champions her continued virginity. By giving birth to Redeemer-God it is _she_ really who has redeemed the world. Mary the “Theotokos” (she who bare God) was the great stumbling-block for the Christians outside the Classical frontier, and it was the doctrinal developments of this idea that led Monophysites and Nestorians to break away and re-establish the pure Jesus-religion.[375] But the Faustian Culture, again, when it awoke and needed a symbol whereby to express its primary feeling for Infinity in time and to manifest its sense of the succession of generations, _set up the “Mater Dolorosa” and not the suffering Redeemer_ as the pivot of the German-Catholic Christianity of the Gothic age; and for whole centuries of bright fruitful inwardness this woman-figure was the very synthesis of Faustian world-feeling and the object of all art, poetry, and piety. Even to-day in the ritual and the prayers of the Roman Catholic Church, and above all in the thoughts