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)

Saturday, December 31, 2011

THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST: Contributions to a Psychology of Jesus by Romano Guardini - Chapter II, Section 7

7. JESUS ATTITUDE TOWARDS LIFE AND DEATH




Now we must touch upon another topic which also throws light on the life of

Jesus: his attitude towards life in the obvious sense of the word.



In the total economy of human existence it is the spirit that makes it

possible to venture forth from the immediate world of things and one's own

nature and become creative. However, the growth of the spirit is not

without its dangers: it can cause difficulties in one's adaptation to life;

be a hindrance to bodily development and also to the unfolding of the

emotional life. Genius can lead either to the utmost limit of human

development or beyond it to a sheer pathological state. Religious genius is

no exception. We have, for example, the man with extraordinary religious

gifts who dies young. In such cases we refer to an early maturity or say

that he had an unearthly quality about him. Or there is the man who seems

to be a borderline case, the visionary who enjoys very poor health, the

mystic with a dangerous penchant for suffering, the man threatened by

demons, and so forth.



What is to be said about Jesus in this connection?



Is he a man in whom the spirit loomed so large that his very constitution

was devoured by it so that he died, as it were, from inside? Not at all.

Jesus gives an impression of perfect vigor. When he died he had, humanly

speaking, immeasurable possibilities left which could have been realized

had there been time and opportunity.



His personality and life are in no respect those of one who attains

perfection and then dies in the flower of youth; his life was destroyed

from outside, by violence. Jesus constantly gave the impression that he was

infinitely more as a being than was apparent on the surface; that he could

do more than he did, that he knew more than he revealed. His death showed

that he possessed incalculable reserves of strength and life.



What of the second type? Is Jesus one of those religious persons who are

borderline cases and, for that very reason, are able to comprehend and

perform the special tasks entrusted to them?



He is not this type either. In him we find no trace of that biological and

psychic instability we encounter so often in religious psychology and

pathology; nor of that oscillation in emotional states between an

extraordinary and unhuman exhilaration and a weakness and depression far

below the normal. The only scene that might suggest such a state is

Gethsemane, but this has a totally different meaning.



Nor can we induce this kind of psychic structure from his eschatological

consciousness, holding, for instance, that he first lived in expectation of

a colossal upheaval in the power of the Spirit, but that when this failed

to materialize he went to the other extreme and fixed his hopes upon a

dialectic of annihilation, hoping to gain through destruction what had not

been attainable the other way. Such an explanation would make sense only if

we could suppose a nature it would suit: and there is no trace of this at

all. The eschatological awareness of Jesus was of a totally different kind,

not to be explained in terms of the presuppositions of religious

psychology.



The essential character of Jesus shows no hint of melancholy, that

commonest of all pathological religious symptoms. He never knew a moment's

real depression. His repeated retreat into solitude was not the escape of

the melancholic from man and from the light of day: it was the result of a

longing for peace in the presence of God, especially at times of momentous

decision; and even more than this, it was the entry into that exclusive

relationship in which he knew he stood to him whom he called his Father.



Jesus was no visionary either, visited by apparitions of the supernatural

or the future, oppressing him at least as much as they exalt him. Nor was

he an apocalyptic so acutely conscious of God's threatening wrath that

everything around him, even his own life, seemed in imminent danger of

collapsing.



He gave the impression of perfect health. We never hear of his being ill or

having to be nursed, or of his being weakly or overworked and needing a

respite. He led the arduous life of an itinerant preacher, and there is no

hint that he ever had to exert every ounce of his strength in order to

carry on. The account which tells how he was too weak to carry the beam of

the cross to the place of execution (Mat. 27. 32), taken in conjunction

with what he had just gone through and with what was taking place within

him, does not contradict this fact. On the contrary, we cannot comprehend

how he was able to bear so much. The same is true of his rapid death (John

19. 33). As a rule it was a long time before a crucified person died; but

we do well to remember that death comes not only from the body, but also

from the spirit.



We have still to deal with the question of Jesus' relationship to death.

What is said here presupposes, of course, that the Gospels do not indulge

in fantasies. That they should have done so seems absurd, for they would

have had to choose either to portray a mythical figure, in which case the

unreality of the figure would have been immediately apparent, for mythical

figures have no psychology and are mere idealizations, whereas Jesus is

full of the most concrete life--or to invent a pattern of life quite

unknown to men, in which case improbabilities would occur at every turn.



If, then, we accept the Gospel narrative as true, we must admit that the

thought of death was not present in the mind of Jesus in the way in which

it is in our minds. Each time he spoke of his dying--he did this five

times--he connected this with his resurrection.



For us, death is simply the end. Our immediate awareness of life does not

penetrate beyond that. True, we say that the essential thing about our life

cannot come to an end with death. We express this in various presentiments,

metaphors and hopes; and the hope of eternal life is assured by faith in

revelation. With Jesus, however, the matter was quite different. He knew

that he was to die and accepted death: but he viewed it as a passage to an

existence involving both soul and body which would immediately follow after

death: "From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to

Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and scribes and chief

priests; and be put to death, and the third day rise again" (Mat. 16. 21).

These are no casual words: they proceed from a general attitude, from an

original and unique mode of being in life.



To regard such sayings as retrospective explanations in the light of the

later Paschal experience of the disciples would be to distort everything.



For Jesus, the concept of death and resurrection which they express is

fundamental to his whole person. As soon as this idea is removed from the

picture it is not a real man who is left, much less the truer one one might

have thought would emerge when stripped of his mythological trappings--his

whole nature and reality vanish. The span of life of which he was directly

aware did not end for him, as it does for us, at the approach of death,

thereafter to be resumed again tentatively; it passed with perfect clarity

right through death. For him, death was not the end but a point of

transition; and not at all--to make the point quite clear--in the sense

that nothing led beyond death but hope. The way in which Jesus felt himself

to be alive, spiritually and bodily, was of such a kind that it reached far

beyond death. It saw this as an event within life itself. This total view

of life has, of course, nothing in common with any mythology or esoteric

certitude: it derived from the reality of God, the beginning and end of all

his existence.



The Christian conception of life, death and resurrection is based on Jesus'

knowledge of life. It is something more than an assurance of spiritual

indestructibility. It is the hope of an eternal human existence in God

himself. But the reality in and with whose accomplishment it is found to be

possible is Jesus' sense of life. Here again the decisive thing is not what

he says but what he is.



All this leads us to the conclusion that he lived and died in a different

way from us. And this reveals, in all its greatness and clarity, what we

have already met before when talking of his "health"; it is something more

than mere natural vitality or the spiritual will to live. It is a quality

of his psychosomatic existence for which there is no standard of measure

based on our natural knowledge.



We can perhaps get some hint of what this means from the power to endure

and to suffer, which can spring from personal love, or from the spirit's

pure will to create; or from a truly religious sense of duty and will-

power. In mere men, however, this "health" has to assert itself in spite of

the disorders and malformations which are found even in the healthiest of

us. But in Jesus there was nothing like this whatever. He was utterly sound

and alive, but in a special sense. An animal can be healthy in terms of its

own nature. Man who has turned from God would like to be healthy but he

cannot be. He was created to exist in dependence on God: this is his

health, which he lost once and for all by sin. That "health", by contrast,

which we commonly speak about, is altogether a problematic thing. One is

even tempted to say that it is more enigmatic than sickness; for what is it

after all but sickness so entrenched as to have become normal? The

ontological sickness of the fallen creature which disguises its own total

disorder under cover of a relative order? There is nothing like this in

Jesus. In him is the fullness of that which this confusion has upset:

existence from God, directed to God, life in the Pneuma of God. Therefore,

our notion of health, worked out inevitably on the basis of our experience,

does not apply to Christ. His state is altogether beyond our notions of

sickness and health.



It is St. John again who analyses and puts plainly into words what appears

in the Synoptics as a simple, and hence elusive, reality. In St. John's

Gospel our Lord says to the disciples: "I am . . . the life" (14. 6); and

to Martha: "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me,

although he be dead, shall live" (11. 25). This is a theological expression

of what the Synoptics present as an objective fact.



"Psychology", however, can do no more than indicate that we are in the

presence of something very special, of a state of affairs which is

expressed not merely in conceptual propositions, but in a living attitude;

in the way, that is, in which personality and life are built up; by means

of words which are the double of an existence or form of life to which

nothing in any other man corresponds.



Further than this psychology cannot go. It can only point out a direction

to follow and show how this human-superhuman reality, once accepted by

faith, appropriated in love, and put into practice in deed, makes possible

an attitude to life which man could never have achieved by himself. That is

to say, psychology can try to exhibit the Christian sense of life and

death. If it does this, it will once more reach its limit at the point

where the believer's "Christ in me" emerges, the point at which the real

"synergeia," accomplishment in and with Christ, begins.



The nature of Christ cannot be deduced from a study of the psychology of

the religious man in general and the Christian in particular. The Christian

can exist only in terms of a Christ who eludes psychological analysis as

long as this is honestly pursued. If it is not honestly pursued, however--

and as a general rule it is not--then it makes no sense at all and becomes

merely another tool in the hands of self-glorifying man who uses it to

prove that there never was a God-man.