Jesus said to him, "I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father, but by Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; henceforth you know Him and have seen Him."

Phillip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied."

Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know Me, Phillip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, 'Show us the Father'?"

"Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does His works."

"Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me; or else believe Me for the sake of the works themselves." (John 14:6-11)

Monday, December 19, 2011

THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST: Contributions to a Psychology of Jesus by Romano Guardini - Preface


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.