Our Christ: the Revolt of the Mystical Genius [Hardcover]

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Please Note: What follows is from the preface. It was written by the editors.
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Constantin Brunner was born in Altona, near Hamburg, on August 28, 1862. His family was sure that after he received his doctorate he would have a brilliant academic career; but he preferred to stay removed from official philosophy, which he found too arid. He chose rather to live among friends with whom spontaneity and intimacy were possible. He wrote a considerable number of works of great size, most of them representing a reaction against the mechanization of man which has become more and more overwhelming in the modern world. After Hitler seized power in 1933, Brunner left Germany. He died in exile in Holland on the eve of his seventy-fifth birthday, August 27, 1937.
A selection of essential texts from his work has been translated into English under the title Science, Spirit, Superstition (London and Toronto, 1968).
In Our Christ: The Revolt of the Mystical Genius, Brunner propounds something entirely different from the easy path to one of the facile mysticisms now in fashion; he attacks the fundamental problems of science and philosophy. He does not make science the Absolute, but he is not opposed to it; he thinks that it has merely a relative and practical significance, but at the same time he considers science a way to the depths of our soul. The reader is advised to consult pages 13-28 of this book, in which the fundamental concepts of Brunner's philosophy are explained.
The thesis which Brunner defends in the present work is radically non-conformist. He opposes at one and the same time both the religious and the traditional secular interpretations of the personality of Christ. What I have just said must look like a foolish paradox to the reader still unacquainted with Brunner's work; however, it is one of those works which reveal interior universes, the existence of which had never been suspected, and one capable of changing one's entire life. The author accomplishes something which has to seem unlikely at first sight: a demonstration of the idea that, despite appearances, Christ had no desire to become a supernatural personage and the founder of another religion. This demonstration is founded upon an exceptionally vast erudition. Brunner considers Christ as the originator of a complete interior freedom of the same sort as that sought by modern man, who can no longer believe naively in angels and devils. Brunner does not confine himself to philosophic demonstration, but, as a great writer, he is also well qualified to evoke the epoch under study and to trace the portrait of an intensely vivid Christ, of a personality incomparably richer and more original than the one presented by the traditions. This personality inspires veneration because it is the creator of universally human values.
'Our Christ' demands to be read differently from the way we are accustomed to read in these times of cultural inflation. It is a very dense work, with audacious ideas flashing out of every page and capable of producing an inner revolution against the nihilism and skepticism that characterize our times, against ancient and modern dogmatism, against a thinking which has become overly technical and contributes to the reification of man. This interior revolution is by no means something sentimental or vaguely noble, but is the result of an exceptionally rigorous system of thought.
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This book gives one the courage not to read the authentic words of Christ in the New Testament in the well-worn and traditional way. The author has with great skill and infinite patience removed all the paint and gilding that has been used to paint over the Son of Man, who is one with the spirit of the Father. The dressed up idol of superstition is destroyed and Christ, the human figure of radiant mysticism re-appears; he is resurrected as the greatest of humanity's Spiritual elite.
Dare to read the book.
-From the Preface

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