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Chapter 3
The Pilate-mentality as the dominant temperament
Just as Pilate, the Roman procurator in Palestine, was confronted with the Christ-mentality and the Barabbas-mentality in the form of the two people, Christ and Barabbas, between whom he had to judge, so too is the civilised human being confronted many times a day with these two temperaments in his own psyche and must judge between them. The Pilate-mentality constitutes his standard mentality; it is the dominant temperament. It is this temperament that makes him a judge over his own being. With this temperament he is to sentence to death the Barabbas or the Christ in his own being. Through the Pilate-mentality he probably has a feeling that it is Barabbas and not Christ in his own being who should be put to death, but he, like Pilate, the Roman procurator in Palestine, is afraid of popular opinion. So on many occasions he does not dare set Christ in his own being free; he sets Barabbas free.
      The question "What is truth?" or "What is the true solution of life: the Christ-mentality or the Barabbas-mentality?" still causes the civilised human being's Pilate-temperament to falter in precisely the same way as it did in the Roman governor's psyche. He knew that the Romans had their particular perception of the truth; he saw that the Jewish priests and scribes had another perception of their own. And now he was faced with Christ, who claimed to be one with the truth itself. Therefore the famous question to Jesus, "What is truth?", was not really a question on the part of the governor but rather the expression of a kind of irony born of the doubt that he naturally felt about all these very different perceptions of the same truth he was witnessing.
      But he saw clearly that the Jewish scribes' and priests' persecution of Jesus was dictated more by intolerance than by real love of the truth; and that it was thus in reality not at all a question of what the truth was. It was, on the contrary, a matter of getting this competitor for the people's favour out of the way. If he were to be allowed to live, his spiritual light would quickly come to outshine the spiritual light of the priests and the old traditions. The hidden imperfections and shortcomings that existed in their light would become all too apparent. The people would quickly follow Jesus and accept the new light, whereby the priests would lose their authority and power and so their means of earning a living. This was why they, while they still had position and power over the people through falsification and lies, incited the crowd to demand that the thief Barabbas be set free instead of Christ. The release of the thief could of course never come to endanger the priests' position or living. And as it was here so very obviously a matter of preserving these, quite regardless of what was truth and justice, one understands why the priests and scribes fought so diligently, and by such base and impure means, to free the thief and to have the innocent man executed.


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