We Protestants must sooner or later face this question: Are we to understand the ‘imitation of Christ’ in the sense that we should copy his life and, if I may use the expression, ape his stigmata: or in the deeper sense that we are to live our own proper lives as truly as he lived his in all its implications? It is no easy matter to live a life that is modelled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his. My central argument turns on a long quotation from Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul (which would have made a good subtitle for the novel) and which Moorcock includes within his text (along with many other explicit allusions to Jung): The title not only quotes Pilate’s words from St John’s gospel but alludes to Nietzsche’s autobiographical work Ecce Homo and the book is a challenging exploration of the ‘truth’ of Christianity, using ideas from Nietzsche, Freud and Jung as part of a classic SF time-travel-loop paradox. Behold the Man was one of the finest stories ever published in New Worlds, winning a Nebula Award and later being expanded into a full-length novel, but it has never (in either of its versions) had the critical attention given to Ballard’s equally ground-breaking stories, though it shares their pattern of an ambiguous psychological quest. New Worlds 166 (September 1966) was a particularly strong issue, including the novella-length version of Moorcock’s Behold the Man, Ballard’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, and stories by Brian Aldiss and Thomas M.
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