THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
CHAPTER II
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS, OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY, AND OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE
IT may be said of our Lord that His written life is far from being proportionate to His place in the world of souls. To a very great extent love for Christ is independent of the Gospels taken as mere narratives. In most cases, love for Christ exists in the human soul long before the books of the New Testament have been taken up as a spiritual study. Children of tender years will kiss a crucifix with the reverence of deepest love, because it is the image of Christ ; and it would be an entire disregard of facts to say that the boy of six loves Christ so deeply because he has been made to understand the sublime charity of His Crucifixion from the gospel narrative. Long before the child is capable of understanding the great moral beauty of Christ’s passion, he loves
Christ crucified as sincerely as he loves his parents. A deeper comprehension of the love-drama of Christ’s death is almost exclusively the achievement of more mature sanctity. Nor is this the peculiar characteristic of childhood’s love for our Lord ; the observation holds good much more generally. What there is of living faith in Christ in this world is out of all proportion to what there is written of Him, and, still more, to what practical perusal there is even of the written documents. For millions of men and women Christ is a great living Personality, dominating their innermost thoughts ; yet with nearly all of them it is perfectly true to say that it is not the habitual perusal of the Gospels that has given to Him such a place in their soul. Their knowledge of the Gospel is not a very intimate one ; they are satisfied with its general facts, whilst Christ Himself is a very clear, very distinct power in their life. If the study of our Lord’s written life is made a special spiritual practice by a Christian, it is because the Gospel speaks to him of One whom he loves and knows already, just as the lover takes the keenest interest in being told of the doings and movements of the person loved.
It seems paradoxical, yet it is the experience of all observers of spiritual things : no one profits by the Gospels unless he be first in love with Christ. But this psychological fact may be stated in a yet more comprehensive form : The sacred Gospels are no adequate explanation of the place Christ holds in the hearts of men. They may account for the spiritual portrait of Christ which Christian men and women hold enshrined in their minds, but they do not account for the power with which Christ sways the hearts of millions. From time to time there are great Gospel enthusiasms passing over the Christian world. The sacred text is distributed broadcast in cheap editions ; sayings of Christ are seen everywhere ; even the very modern billposter is pressed into service to render Christ’s sayings accessible to the man that runs. These manifestations of zeal, however laudable, are generally short lived precisely because they never succeed in stirring any deeper feeling.
Great nations in Europe live in the faith and love of Christ, and it may safely be asserted that any textual knowledge of our Lord’s sayings is conspicuous by its absence in the vast majority of the good Christians of those nations. Christ for them is not a text, but a living Person, whose presence and whose look is infinitely more drastic in its spiritual effect than any saying of His recorded in the Gospels ; and if the Gospel text is at times like the sword of fire to the soul, it is because it is connected with the living Presence, because it is read in the living love of Christ.
On the other hand, it is true again to say that the Christ of the human soul is not greater than the Christ of the Gospels. It is easy enough, for instance, to see what Christ was to the soul of St. Teresa, to the soul of St. Catherine. Those great mystics have left very clear records of their faith in and their love for Christ. Yet the Divine Master of St. Teresa’s writings is not greater than the Master of the Gospels. St. Teresa did not create in her intense religious consciousness a Christ not warranted by the sober Gospel narrative. She may speak of the Spouse of her soul with greater enthusiasm than the Evangelist ; but she never says a greater thing than was said by the Evangelist.
With Christ, the soberness of the narration belongs to the official historian who has lived with Him or His disciples. The enthusiasm is found in the ordinary worshipper to whom the work of the historian is more a canticle of love than a source of love. But the enthusiasm of the worshipper never assumes anything about Christ’s merits which cannot be stated in the exact language of the Evangelist.
It has been said with great truth of certain religions that they are like inverted pyramids standing on their apex. The basis is the thinnest part, and the monument broadens as it leaves the almost invisible starting-point. The religious consciousness of the race has evolved a vast religious personality from a being of much smaller compass. Now, such a comparison would be quite unfair with the position of Christ in the world. The Christ of our Eucharistic Congresses is not greater than the Christ of St. John’s Gospel. With Him there is no gradual broadening of a religious ideal, till it covers the whole extent of the human mind. The Christianity of the Gospels is as broad as the Christianity of the Summa of St. Thomas. But where the disproportion comes in is the efficacy and vividness of Christ’s Personality as realised by human souls. No books, even divinely inspired, could create in the human consciousness such a presence of a living God-man, even if such books were constantly perused by the believer.
It is the conviction of all Christians that Christ enters into the secrets of their hearts, and that they are answerable to Him for their innermost thoughts. Christ is not only the object of their worship, He is also the voice of their conscience ; and more than that, He is their Judge, He is the umpire of their eternal destiny. Here again it could not be said that Christian conscience has evolved a Christ not warranted by the authentic records of Christianity. We have endless utterances in the sacred Gospels and the Apostolic writings stating most clearly Christ’s judicial powers. For neither doth the Father judge any man, but hath given all judgment to the Son.
It is the common teaching of theologians that there is in man a life that is inaccessible to the gaze even of the greatest spirits. God alone can read the secrets of the human heart ; it is the most incommunicable portion of our being ; it is there that we show practically our individuality. The stronger the man or the woman, the less ready is he or she to reveal that inner self. Perhaps a man in his whole life finds only one other man to whom he opens the treasure-house of his thoughts, and it may even be asserted that most men go through life with their hearts sealed. Readiness to manifest one’s innermost thoughts, unless it be to a mind entirely in sympathy with one’s own and thoroughly trustworthy, is not a sign of manliness ; it belongs to the superficial, to people who have no deep life of their own. Now it is into that portion of our life that Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man, has penetrated, according to invariable Christian conviction. It is impossible for a Christian to doubt the universality of Christ’s knowledge as to the secrets of our hearts. Are we not habitually convinced of Christ’s human way of discerning the secrets of our hearts ? For us it is essentially a human knowledge possessed in a human and created manner. To speak in metaphors, we know that every one of our thoughts falls into one of the scales of supreme justice, but the scales are Christ’s human mind and human heart ; the impression made on the scales is a human impression a created factor. Such is the Christ of practical Christian experience.
