This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Christ

I have searched in vain for a historic figure more complete than Jesus, the Christ. There are perhaps figures that have walked across time’s stage with a more forceful gait, yet they lack, specifically because of their intense external activity, the interior spiritual realm of Jesus. The mystics themselves, given their intense interior life, cannot claim their place in the town square as Jesus can, for he was an active historical being. The greatest scientists, in the interest of and in obedience to the indispensable objectivity of credible results, abstain from attributing spiritual or even moral dimensions to their work. One cannot blame Albert Einstein for the deaths at Hiroshima, though one can blame Himmler for the deaths at Auschwitz. The personal shortcomings of the great mystical creators are as anecdotal — fascinating, but anecdotal — as their virtues. But in the end, the obscenity of Mozart, the slovenliness of Beethoven, the insolence of Gogol, the gluttony of Balzac, and the vices of Coleridge and Baudelaire do not affect our appreciation of their works. Nobody would want a character as neurotic as Dostoevsky for their next-door neighbor. And Bach would have been, without a doubt, a placid, invisible fellow resident in an apartment building. The ideological sphere, however, is where the public personality and the private life of an artist produce a more problematic combination. Aragon, Eluard, Neruda, and Alberti as protagonists of Communism, and Benn, Pound, D’Annunzio, Céline, and Brasillach as bulwarks of fascism have earned themselves severe recriminations that nevertheless do not damage the intrinsic quality of their work. Victims of intolerance, on the other hand, of dictatorship and dogma, often transcend the extraordinary quality of their artistic work to become recognized and remembered, above all, as martyrs — from Vives to Lorca and Miguel Hernández, from Giordano Bruno to Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Anna Akhmatova. And the long list of those expelled from their homes by Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Franco-era Spain, the Latin American dictatorships, McCarthyism in the United States.

The singularity of Jesus is that the permanence, fame, or value of his work arises from obscurity and anonymity. Had he not been rescued by the apostles and propagandized by St. Paul, it is highly likely that the preacher from Galilee would have become lost among the hundreds of holy men who traveled the paths of the ancient world. But nothing — not the Gospels, not St. Paul, not even the Christian Church itself — can divest Jesus of his condition as a humble man, stripped of all power, unadorned by luxury, a man whose humility and poverty transform him into the most powerful symbol of human salvation.

Can we then attribute that power to the notion that Jesus is God the Son, yet also a partner in the power and the virtue possessed by God the Father and the Holy Spirit, the other, winged member of the Trinity? The Church has condemned as heresy the seductive and very literary theories regarding the relationship between God the Father (Yahweh) and God the Son (Jesus). The Syrian gnostic Saturnilus maintained that there existed only one Father, completely unfathomable, who, upon coming to the world as Savior, is an uncreated savior — without body, without form. Only his appearance (as Jesus of Nazareth) is human. Why? So that the human world might recognize him. Basilides and the Egyptian gnostics proposed that God had never been born at all and never had a name. Christ was only a particle in the mind of the Father. Patripassian Monarchianism earns its fascinating name from the belief that God is one and indivisible. The Father introduced himself into the body of Mary, was born of her, and suffered and died on the cross. In this sense, men actually crucified God the Father. The Sabellians swore that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were one and the same Being: one singular God with three different worldly manifestations. The Apollonian dualists defended the existence of two Sons, one sired by God the Father and the other by Mary the Woman. The Nestorians carried this double-personality theory to an even greater extreme, stating that Jesus is really two people — one, the Man, and the other, the Verb. And it is up to us to distinguish between the actions of Jesus the Man and the words of Christ the Lord. Finally, the most influential of all the heretics, the Arrians, believed the Son to be a mere influx, projection, or co-non-creation of the Father, derived from the substance of the Father.

Of all the heresies revolving around the figure of Christ, the one that attracts me most is the one that, respecting all the fictions regarding his nature, focuses on the man who lived among men and who offered, here on Earth, the most conclusive and lasting evidence of what it means to be a human among humans. Jesus as the living nucleus of all human possibilities and contradictions is, for me, the most appealing and lasting of all the Christs. The man who preaches innocence and goodness and at the same time displays active fury against the Pharisees and the merchants in the temple. The Jesus who asks us to “turn the other cheek,” along with the Jesus who says he brings war and not peace. The Jesus who asks us to “let the children come to me,” but also the Jesus who exhorts us to abandon father and mother so that we may participate in the world.

This is the incomparable power of Jesus. From poverty, humility, and anonymity, he preaches much more than the salvation of the world. He preaches and practices salvation in the world. He offers us the world as an opportunity for salvation, not as a land irredeemably condemned to evil. Eternal life, in this light, becomes a spiritual dimension of human desire. The loss of Jesus to the world beyond human existence vanishes when we witness the power of his earthly example. This is a man who considers the loftiest possible aspirations for the human race to be those of learning to live with one another, caring for one another, and not falling prey to hypocrisy, the Phariseeism and Simonism that, in the end, tarnished the Church created in his name.

Jesus’s greatness lies in his temporality. His obscure, mysterious life is what makes him eternal. His personal relationships are with the most unworthy and unbelieving of souls. He does not preach to the converted. He espouses no dogma. His own contradictions would not permit it. After all, we know nothing of Christ’s adolescence and youth. With whom did he spend his time? Was he heterosexual, homosexual, or did he abstain from sex altogether? Was he, like the saints Francis and Augustine, a sated and reformed sinner? Precisely because he works within the constraints of time, Jesus encourages us to believe in time. His words reveal an extraordinary temporal faith, for even when eternity seems to appear at the horizon of his words, the goal of Christ’s faith is the future of the human race. Jesus’s faith exhorts us to work in the world. The heaven of Jesus Christ is found in solidarity with one’s brothers, not in some kind of celestial empiricism. And his hell is found in earthly injustice, not in some bottomless pit consumed by flames. Jesus does, however, extend the values of life on earth to the realm of the eternal: “For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; a stranger and you welcomed me; naked and you clothed me; ill and you cared for me; in prison and you visited me.” “When did we give you all this?” his listeners ask him. And Jesus replies, “Amen I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”

The very metaphor of the Resurrection is a way of telling us that we are obligated to complete life, not just continue it, and that the continuity of life, in spite of death, is the reality of eternal life. Salvation is found in the world. Hell exists in the world. And the world has chosen to believe Jesus. Jesus did not revive the dead. He resurrected the living.

The relationship between God the Father and God the Son, which caused heretics and doctors of the Church so many sleepless nights, cannot escape the fact that nobody knows the Father, whereas the Son allowed himself to be seen. We can devise fictional stories. Perhaps the Father does not tolerate the Son no matter how much Jesus tells him, “Look, I’m doing everything possible to reveal your existence.” The Father might resent the fact that the Son is seen not as his delegate but as the True God, given that he is the God that assumed an earthly form. And to cap it all, Jesus does not only redeem Man. He redeems God the Father himself, and rescues the God of Israel from his cruel and vengeful image. Jesus gives God the Father “a human face,” as they would have called it during the crisis of Communism. Does the Father resent it? Is the end of Calvary Yahweh’s punishment of the insurrectionary humanity of Jesus? “Father, why have you forsaken me?” So painful, these words; so tragic, the ending; and so problematic, the issue of Jesus’s death and Resurrection. Abandoned by God, what choice is there for his legacy other than Resurrection, which ends up being his compensation for the Father’s abandonment, the promise that he will return to the Father’s side, united with him, in a perfect and trinitarian symbiosis, or forever punished by the Father, reduced to silence, to a mean existence, to silence itself?

The battle between Father and Son — if it existed at all— would ultimately be useless. The Son already achieved eternal triumph on Earth, no matter what God the Father — if He exists at all — may say or think. For that reason all heaven is in a rage, to borrow William Blake’s profoundly intuitive phrase. Jesus is the Disobedient Son. God the Father is fed up.

As I said earlier, had it not been for the apostles (and, most especially, Paul of Tarsus), Jesus might have been forgotten for all posterity. Beyond the testimonies found in the Gospels, it was St. Paul who ensured that Christ would reign over the institution that is the Church. What ensures Jesus’s place throughout history, however, is the same thing that prevents him from being truly present in history: the Christian Church, subject to the ebb and flow of political life, to obligations and exceptions, to betrayals of Christ, to the seduction of the very things Christ harshly denounced — Simonism, Phariseeism, the faith of petty lies, the hunger for earthly power — things that transformed the Church into the industry of Christ, an industry that takes us further and further away from Christ himself. The Church is God the Father’s vengeance against an intolerable Christ. St. Augustine, brilliant Sophist that he was, predicted what was to come. The priest, like the Church, may be weak or mad. But the priesthood dignifies him. The Church places its ministers above their own condition as humans. What the saint of Hippo does not say is that the Church is an institution that forgives itself, and as such places itself, in the name of Christ, far above and beyond its earthly condition. Origen was condemned for believing that God’s mercy, being infinite, would eventually forgive the Devil. He should have said that it would eventually forgive the Church as well. And I am not referring to Luther and the Protestant revolution. I need look no further than my own era and my own lifetime to reject the Church of Pius XII, Pacelli, and their collusion with Franco and the Nazis. And then, following the Allied victory, their collusion with the CIA, various mafias, and the corrupt Christian Democrats in Italy. The Church’s honor has been rescued, of course, by popes like John XXIII and bishops like Oscar Romero in El Salvador, but once again shame has fallen upon the Argentine Church, for example, which gave its blessing to dictatorships led by criminals, assassins, and torturers. .

The extraordinary thing about all this, however, is that two thousand years of betrayals have still not managed to kill Jesus. The empires of evil were relatively short-lived — the Reich, which, according to Hitler, was destined to reign for a thousand years, or the Communist future promised by the Soviet bureaucracy: “How many divisions has the Pope?” Stalin asked mockingly. Far more than the Kremlin, as it turned out. Yet those armies of Christian faith exist in spite of — not because of — the Vatican institution. The Church may administer and take advantage of the Christ figure, but it has not managed to appropriate Jesus, who has always been so far beyond the Church that was created in his name. Jesus is the eternal reproach to the Church. But the Church has to tolerate Jesus if it wants to keep going. Jesus slips from the hands of the Church by becoming a problem for those who remain outside it. In the hunt for heretics and non-believers, the Church has been unable to remain exclusively of and for Jesus because Jesus extends the values of eternal life to the values of earthly life and that is where he becomes something much more than a fragile God who became man. He becomes the God whose power resides in his humanity. And Christ’s humanity is what keeps him alive as a problem for a modern world that may have religious temperament if not religious faith. Luis Buñuel, the lapsed Catholic; Ingmar Bergman, the Protestant who lived outside the tenets of the Church; Albert Camus, socially and civically religious. But there are also men of faith who are able to put faith to the test in the real world: François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, Graham Greene. And most of all the woman of faith, Simone Weil, who asks herself, “Can you love God without knowing Him?” and answers yes. That is the terrible answer to Dostoevsky’s terrible question: “Can you know God without loving him?” Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov answer yes. This is the dilemma and only Jesus can resolve it. A person is not God, but God can be a person. And that is why millions of men and women believe in Jesus and represent his strength, far beyond churches and clergy. Jesus does not resurrect the dead. He revives the living. Jesus is the copy editor of human life.