Romano Guardini (17 February 1885, Verona – 1 October 1968, Munich) was a Catholic priest, author, and academic. He was one of the most important figures in Catholic intellectual life in 20th-century.
Guardini's books were often powerful studies of traditional themes in the light of present-day challenges, or conversely examinations of current problems as approached from the Christian, and especially Catholic, tradition. He was able to get inside such different worldviews as those of Socrates, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and make sense of them for modern readers.
THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST: Contributions to a Psychology of Jesus
by Romano Guardini
PREFACE
This book is an essay gathering together the results of many years of
study. While the problems treated here would certainly seem to require
still further elucidation, their manifest timeliness leads me to follow the
suggestions of friends and publisher and to present this essay as it
stands, in the hope that further discussion may benefit thereby. The work
goes out now in the shape it acquired about ten years ago as a series of
lectures.
I should not like to put forth this book, however, without first mentioning
how the problems have been approached, and how they relate to the general
picture of theological thought in our time.
We view with mixed feelings the pre-eminence which the science of
psychology claims in our day. The procedures of observation and analysis
seem to intrude into every sphere of life. They choose above all to focus
on the structure of personality, not excluding--indeed rather preferring--
the structure of those personalities we call great. While the achievements,
no doubt, merit attention, we must bear in mind that both the methods and
the results of psychological research are determined, even more than are
those of other sciences, by the motives which lie behind them. We have,
therefore, every right to be skeptical, for these motives, whether
acknowledged, half acknowledged, or unacknowledged, are multifarious and
frequently quite unacceptable.
Psychological analysis may well be motivated by the desire to improve our
understanding of the nature and destiny of some personality and to assess
it more accurately--to give it, that is, the honor due to it. It may,
however, just as well spring from the will to insert both personality and
man as such in a merely natural context, thus confounding him with an order
inferior to him. Were that effort to achieve its aim, the result would be a
triumph at the cost of reverence.
Motives of both kinds have always exerted their influence and are doing so
today. Those of the second kind, however, have been greatly strengthened by
certain contemporary trends. Democracy of the truly radical sort will not
tolerate gradations of rank among men. Positivism and materialism both deny
any essential difference between the spiritual and the animal, between man
and beast. According to totalitarianism the business of science is not to
discover what actuality is, but to change it and make it what it should be.
In practice this means placing men at the disposal of power. All this
enables us to understand why those who care about human worth and dignity
distrust psychology, especially in instances where what is at stake is the
worth and dignity of a great man, and why they feel that some destructive
force is at work, some technique of laying violent hands upon what has a
claim to be reverenced.
Inestimably greater, then, are the misgivings bound to arise when the
subject of a psychological enquiry is none other than that One who not only
surpasses all the great men of history but, indeed, completely transcends
everything merely human--none other than Jesus Christ.
On the other hand, we must not forget that he called himself the Son of
Man, a name which, all things considered, is much more than a mere term
designating the Messiah, which he had taken over from the prophets. Jesus
Christ is man, more unreservedly man than anyone else can ever be; for to
realize human nature as he did was an achievement possible only for one who
was more than mere man.
This point of view is in sharp contrast with the modern tendency to
interpret man in terms of a lower order: to see in his present state a
stage in an uninterrupted, steady ascent from the pre-human, and in his
structure an admittedly more complex, but essentially identical, ordering
of the same elements as in that of the animals. The contrary is true: man
can be properly understood only in terms of what is above him. The final
word on the meaning of the biblical text: "God created man in his own
image" (Gen. 1. 27) was only spoken by "the Word made flesh" (John 1. 14).
Seen in this light, the problem of a psychology of Jesus appears to be one
of the most urgent tasks confronting theology.
II
Early Christology sought, as its first task, to establish, beyond any
shadow of doubt, that Jesus of Nazareth was more, and other, than a mere
creature. Our minds, dulled by everything said and written on the subject,
can no longer comprehend the passion with which for centuries the early
Christians fought out the issues of Christology--a passion which can, in
spite of its many all too human features, yet be called holy. In the end,
the declaration affirming Christ to be the eternal, consubstantial Son of
the Father was established as a pillar of truth never again to be shaken.
The second phase came when the Christian mind saw clearly that this Son of
God had truly become man in Christ. It was not that he had come merely to
dwell in a man: he came as an actual member, indeed, as the crucial and
all-important member, in the whole history of the human race. He was
completely within human history, yet at the same time quite independent of
it. Indeed, the very reason for the uniqueness, the redemptive force of his
entry into human history, is to be sought in the fact that he came from the
freedom of him who is above all history and above the whole world. This is
what he meant when he said, as St. John reports: "I have power to lay down
(my life), and I have power to take it up again" (John 10. 18).
Thus the divine rigor of this true incarnation had to be purified from
every notion which, while apparently affirming a maximum of incarnation, in
fact destroyed its reality, because it substituted for a personal event one
which, in spite of the appearance of sublimity, still remained at the
natural level: namely, the confusion of the natures. A being in whom the
human blended with the divine in a single, undifferentiated substance would
be a myth. And so arose the concept of one person in two distinct natures,
a concept which exceeds the capacity of the human mind, to be sure, but
which guarantees the integrity of the God-Man.
The reality of the divine nature in Christ was now unassailable, his true
humanity was likewise established, as was also the indissoluble unity of
the two natures in the person of the Logos: a unity which constituted the
basis for the historicity of Christianity a unity which we may perhaps
even say made God himself historical. In saying this, we mean, of course,
something very different from the pantheistic processes of the Absolute.
And so, we now have these truths before us in a form which is both sublime
in purity and rich in content, both truth and mystery together: they have
become dogma.
And then the spirit began to ask further: what was the place in history of
the Son of God made man. This led to attempts to merge the unique
historicity of Jesus in the universal historicity of human life; and this
resulted in all those images of Christ which represented him as sheer man--
even though a most extraordinary man--or, on the other hand, as an idea, a
myth, the content of an experience.
We know that these ways are wrong. Alerted by the attitude of the Church,
theology is able to ward off all such attempts. But this resistance--if I
interpret it correctly--has remained essentially negative. It has told us
what is not. Now a positive task must be undertaken. We have seen how the
existence of Christ proceeds from an event which resists any attempt to
identify it with universal historical concepts. We have seen also that we
cannot penetrate the heart of his personality, not merely empirically,
because we lack the necessary means for such an insight, but in principle.
For, to achieve this, we would have to be able to reduce the absolute
reality of the divine nature and the relative reality of human nature to a
common denominator--which is impossible.
But something else is possible: the fact can be brought home to us that the
existence of Christ was a real earthly existence, taking place within the
framework of actual history. He had his own inward and outward experiences,
his encounters with men and things, his decisions and actions to be
constantly taken and performed, and so forth. All this took place within
the realm of being and event, that is to say, it can be understood. Hence
the questions what, how, why, wherefore, whence and whither, can properly
be asked and answered; and so also can the psychological questions, but--
and it is an important but--they must be asked with regard to a fact which
prescribes both an attitude and a method. This fact is the one already
mentioned: the incomprehensibility for us of both the origin and the heart
of Christ's personality.
So this psychology is going to be of a peculiar kind. If the word means, as
it generally does, an analysis of personality and individual circumstance,
then there can be no such thing as a psychology of Christ. The eternal
decree that he was to become man, no less than the existence of the Logos
in human flesh, resists any attempt to induce it to a psychological
concept--or to an historical one, for that matter. On the other hand, the
decision of the Logos to become man embraces everything that is essential
to human nature, including the possibility of being understood. All the
circumstances which determine human existence--body, soul, mind, society--
attain their fulfillment in the being and life of Christ. Basing ourselves
on these circumstances, we can, it is true, come to an understanding or, in
other words, a psychology, but we are going to find that, owing to its
inherent limitations, this psychology will be baffled at each line of
approach towards precisely these circumstances which we try out. And, it
must be repeated again, this defeat results not from any lack of material,
from any dullness of insight or deficiency of method, but from the very
nature of the object being investigated. The more complete the material,
the more penetrating our insight, the more thorough our method, the clearer
and more decisive becomes the impasse in the conviction forced upon us that
our undertaking simply opens out on to the incomprehensibility of God
incarnate.
III
How little justice was done to the figure of Christ by the historical and
psychological method of the liberal school of theologians! The
repercussions of this tendency in Catholicism, known as Modernism, have
been overcome. We know not only that a watered-down version of Christianity
is erroneous, but also that it is not even worth while wasting energy
trying to provide it with an intellectual basis. The self-commitment of
faith only makes sense when directed towards the one complete,
unadulterated revelation with its suprarational appeal.
Yet, on the other hand, it is evident that Christology must go a step
further. Not merely because of the logic of theological development, but
for the sake of Christian life. Prayerful meditation requires an approach
which will lead it deeper into the heart of real reality. The same thing is
true of life and action as well. We are accustomed to think of the
Christian life as a "following" or "imitation" of Christ. But what do we
mean by that? In what sense are the person and life of Jesus normative for
us? If we are to go any further than the usual abstract applications; if
Christ's actions, sufferings, behavior and attitude are to illumine and
guide our human existence; if the idea of the "new man" who "is being
changed into (the) likeness (of the glory of the Lord)" (2 Cor. 2. 18) is
to acquire a definite, inspirational content, then this image must be made
more concrete than is usually the case.[1]
This is the task, essentially, of a "theological psychology", the sort of
thing I referred to in my short work on "The Mother of the Lord" (1955),
and which I tried to provide, very tentatively, in my book, "The Lord"
(1937).
In this connection, we may dwell for a moment on the phenomenon on which
research might well try itself out and from which it could perhaps deduce
many of the concepts it will need. This phenomenon is the saint and the
life of his soul.
Hagiography has followed a course of development not unlike that of
Christology. The history of the way it dealt with its subject shows that it
first elaborated an abstract ideal of the supernatural, then created more
individual but still typical figures, and only finally succeeded in
grasping the concrete, historical person. The picture of the saint appears,
at first, in the highly stylized form of the icon, to become gradually more
and more concrete and individual. In the process it runs the very real
danger of having all its originality leveled out to accord with
preconceived historical or psychological patterns, until we come to the
final stage of treating sanctity as a pathological manifestation. At this
point the work of destruction is complete.
If the saint is what the Church knows him to be, then his figure, too,
contains a heart which defies all analysis: the "Christ in us" of which the
Epistle to the Galatians speaks (2. 20). Now, this Christ does not exist as
a separate transcendent entity above the man, Augustine, for example, or as
an alien body enveloped in some inaccessible depth of his soul; he
penetrates his genuine humanity and historical life. Furthermore, Christ
has become identified with the essential self of the man, so that the
Pauline text: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me", can
be completed by another: "and now for the first time I really am becoming
my true self". The basis for a psychology of sanctity is to be found in St.
Paul's thought on Christ's in-dwelling and the "emergence of the new man
within the old"; but, as far as I know, this idea has not yet really been
exploited. If we think of the saint in these terms, we learn, I think, much
about the way we ought to view the reality which is Christ.
We can see St. Francis of Assisi, for example, as he is revealed to us by
the biographies of Thomas of Celano or Bonaventure. They greatly overstress
the supernatural aspect of his character and the image they create remains
remote from the world of men. Again, we can see him as Sabatier portrayed
him. Here we have a concrete picture of his life, it is true, but the
essence, the heart of the saint has vanished. This is because Christ has
gone out of the picture too. For, along with Francis of Assisi, Christ also
is classified as one of a series of individuals belonging to the same
psychological type, that of the "homo religiosus". This train of thought
finally becomes lost in the rationalism and lyricism of a Henry Thode,
Hermann Hesse, or Nikos Kazantzakis. We are today engaged in the task of
penetrating to the true nature of Francis, who lived in the mystery of a
likeness to Christ such as, perhaps, no other individual has ever achieved
in such charismatic exactness. For that very reason he possessed so
definite and so unique a human personality that he was able to influence
history as few others have been able to.
IV
Finally, we must go into the question of method, for this sums up the whole
difficulty. In view of the confusing variety of images of Christ current
today, we must ask the further question: Which Christ have we in mind?
If we answer: The one who brought us the fullness of revelation and
revealed himself therein, then another question must be posed: Where is he
to be found? There is only one answer to this: In the New Testament. But
this means, in the complete New Testament, in all its books, and from their
first to their last sentence, and this brings us to the heart of the
theological problem.
The reality of Christ has been made known to us by means of the words, i.e.
the recollections, of the apostles, of all the apostles from Mark to John.
But this does not mean that the genuineness of the figure Christ diminishes
the further the witness is removed in time. The interval in time between
Luke and Mark does not mean that the theologian must be wary of the later
Gospel. It is even likely that the passage of time will have allowed the
writer to gain a fresh insight into the nature of Christ. As a result of
discipleship, prayer and meditation on his sayings and acts, a new
experience of his reality will have been gained, so that when he proclaims
Christ's message he will be able to say things which before were impossible
or untimely.
When research comes back from St. John's Gospel to an examination of the
earlier ones, this does not mean that it discovers forthwith more
authentic strata of the reality of Christ, but only ones that were
perceived earlier. On the other hand, if, as we proceed from the earliest
to the later statements about him, we find the emergence of strata in the
picture of Christ which show evidence of riper reflection, greater
metaphysical comprehension, and a more concrete appreciation in terms of
contemporary problems, the message proclaimed does not become less genuine;
but factors do emerge and impose themselves precisely because of the
general situation and the stage reached in the progressive unfolding of the
message.
Were we in a position to disregard all such accounts and gain an immediate
impression of Jesus Christ as he was on earth, we would not be confronted
by a "simple" historical Jesus, but by a figure of devastating greatness
and incomprehensibility. Progress in the representation of the portrait of
Christ does not mean that something was being added to what was proclaimed;
it means that we are witnessing the unfolding step by step of that which
"was from the beginning", on the supposition, of course--and this is
fundamental--that as God willed the revelation of the redeeming truth of
his eternal "Word" in Christ, so he also willed and brought it about that
this truth should, in fact, be handed on to later generations;[2] and handed
on in such a way that it could be included in the simplicity of the act of
faith, and need no specialized knowledge to extract it from the text of the
Gospel message.
We have said that the source for our knowledge about Christ is the memory
of the apostles, of all the apostles and throughout the whole time that
they were proclaiming the divine message right up to their death; that is,
from the day of Pentecost until the death of John. These were no mere
individual reporters, each one of whom would be credited only to the extent
of his personal abilities. They spoke as apostles, that is, as "pillars"
and members of the Church. The Church, that is, the sumtotal of local
communities, their faith, liturgical life, prayer, etc., is not something
existing alongside or apart from them, so that it would be legitimate to
make a distinction between a valid original witness and a secondary
"theology of the community".[3] The apostles are themselves the Church. They
are the Church in her earliest kerygmatic phase, when she derives her
commission and authority directly from Christ and the Pentecostal
enlightenment. This phase, as we have said, extends from the author of the
first logion to the writer of the Apocalypse.
It is obviously pertinent to ask what kind of picture of Jesus they painted
in the various historical stages of their preaching. A particular interest
attaches to the question of the picture found in the very earliest
preaching. The search for these strata, however, must not be dominated by a
suspicion as to the validity of that preaching which would tend to assume
that it became less and less reliable as the first century wore on. Our aim
must not be to "get behind" the apostolic preaching in order to reach the
authentic Jesus, thus freeing ourselves from too close a dependence on the
"temporal limitations" of the apostolic message. The authentic Jesus is
revealed to us by the apostles, by them alone, and by all of them together.
The attitude we are criticizing would be, not "scientific", but agnostic.
It would amount to a volatilizing of the only specific object of
theological investigation, and, consequently, of the whole scientific
character of theology. The different ways in which Paul, as compared with
Mark, and John contrasted with Matthew, recount the Gospel message are an
element of their apostolic mission. The fact that they were impelled (or
enabled) to fulfill their task by the changed circumstances of the later
period in which they lived and worked is due just as much to the Spirit of
Christ as was their enlightenment at Pentecost. So the picture of Christ
which is transmitted by the later preaching of the apostles is as
authoritative for the reality of Christ and as much an object of faith as
is the content of the earliest preaching. By the same title, it
constitutes, as readily as the former, the valid object of theology as a
science.
The attitude described earlier also closes its eyes to the full reality of
Christ in terms of method. It begins with the assumption that the first,
"historical" Jesus was the "simple", unmetaphysical, purely human
individual, and that his true greatness lay in his human genius, the depth
of his religious experience, and the power of his teaching. Thereafter, it
is affirmed, this primitive reality was metaphysically inflated in the
course of the first century, was assimilated to the mythical category of
the "Savior" and adapted to suit the religious needs of the communities
which felt the need of a cult figure. To admit this is to abandon at the
outset everything that could merit the name of "revelation" in the true
sense of the term, namely, the communication of a reality not conditioned
by man, but sent to him from God in order to judge and redeem all mankind.
At the same time, it abandons at once everything which the passage of time,
the increasing remoteness from the original event, the development in
historical circumstances, and the tradition that welds all that together,
can contribute to a disclosure of the "beginning" of that Reality which is
the foundation of redemption and the controlling force of history. To
repeat: the contrary of that premise is true. If we could get back to the
"original", that is, if we could work our way back to the picture of Christ
as it existed before it had been turned over in the apostles' minds or
elaborated by their preaching, before it had been assimilated by the
corporate life of the faithful, we could find a figure of Christ even more
colossal and incomprehensible than any conveyed by even the most daring
statements of St. Paul or St. John.
The Christ who interests the scholarly theologian and the faithful
Christian alike is the figure which comes to us from the whole of the
apostolic preaching. And this is so, not because that preaching is
concerned with the "Christ of faith" as distinct from the "Christ of
history", for that would mean that the Christ of faith existed only by
virtue of a religious attitude towards him and was not existent and real by
himself. Later accounts would then be nothing more than idealized versions
of the various experiences of Christ; evidence of the various ways in which
the apostles and their hearers had seen him in the course of the first
century, preliminary drafts for the way in which the faithful of later
generations would view him.
To make sense we must see things the other way around. The Christ whom
serious believers believe in is the original reality. The statements of the
apostles are guides to him which never quite do justice to the fullness of
his divine-human nature. The apostles never state more about the historical
Jesus than he actually was; it is always less. Consequently, everyone who
reads the New Testament aright feels that every sentence is pregnant with
meaning regarding a reality which surpasses all that is said about it.
As opposed to the rationalist approach, true biblical theology must now
accomplish a kind of "Copernican revolution". Its scientific purpose must
not be to isolate from supposedly over-emphasizing representations, as
likewise supposedly simple original reality; its object must be to bring
out clearly all the elemental greatness of the original, on the basis of a
whole series of representations, all of which are valid, but all of which,
in spite of a gradual deepening of perception somehow fall short.
It is this elemental greatness of the original which has been at work in
history, has built up the Church, and has furnished the irrepressible
impulse towards activity and transformation, which is a matter of past as
well as present experience. This is what "is, and was, and shall be". This
is the only source of salvation.
This is the Jesus Christ we intend to study in this work. The psychology of
which we are speaking here is no kind of analysis of a merely human
personality who was an initiator, for there never was such an individual.
Rather does it try to understand the figure which emerges from the whole
apostolic preaching of the first century and which in each phase of its
proclamation points back to an original reality which towers above them
all.
We are perfectly aware that both the object and the method of our
undertaking will be called "dogmatic", in a derogatory sense, by that
theology which calls itself "critical"; that this school considers such a
subject matter to be chimerical and its method unscientific. In fact,
however, the attitude of this school is based upon a false premise, namely,
that the person of Jesus and its historical witness must be treated in
exactly the same way as any other historical phenomenon.
True theology must open its eyes to that peculiar taboo of recent times,
the spirit or principle of "scientism", which claims to be universally
applicable, but in fact belongs to the spheres of the natural sciences and
history, and which, even in those spheres, has assumed a purely positive
and quantitative character. There has been a widespread inclination for
theology to accept this limitation, and as a result much harm has been
done. It is high time theology freed itself from this influence and
appealed to standards consistent with its own nature. We need hardly add
that this does not mean that we are underestimating or ruling out any of
the exacting demands of philology or history.
ENDNOTES
1. It should be noted here that the literature of spirituality,
which is too often neglected by systematic theology, has
anticipated many of the insights in this matter. It would be
useful, therefore, to investigate the writings of the Fathers,
the masters of the spiritual life and the mystics, for the light
they can shed on all this.
2. It passes understanding how any study of the biblical texts
which does not take into account this supposition, but treats
them like any other historical source, can merit the name of
theology. Such an approach presupposes a vagueness about basic
principles which is quite inadmissible in the realm of
scientific thought. We have to do here, however, with a
perversion of the idea of science which can be observed in other
domains also. Science is the study of a subject by means of the
method required by this subject, not by means of some generally
applicable method which undermines its specific character.
3. Theology can be called a science precisely because it uses,
not the methods of general history or psychology, but the method
demanded by the nature of the object being investigated, which
in this case is revelation. This nature is not something purely
personal which the student subjectively attributes to his
subject, and which then has to be discarded as soon as the
investigation becomes scientific. Theology is rigorously
scientific only when it accepts the nature of revelation as the
determining factor in its choice of method. It is obvious that
this consideration recognizes in the phenomenon a special
complication, and that the processes of research require a
special competence in the student's eye to enable him to
identify unerringly his object, and in the dialectic which will
serve him in its conceptual elaboration. Only to the extent in
which theology fulfills these conditions can it be regarded as
truly scientific.
