the real discovery of death-a discovery which occasions, in peoples as in men, the entrance into spiritual puberty,✓ the realization of the tragic sense of life, and it is then that the living God is begotten by humanity. The discovery of death is that which reveals God to us, and the death of the perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation of death, being the death of the man who ought not to have died yet did die. Such a discovery-that of immortality-prepared as it was by the Judaic and Hellenic religious processes, was a specifically Christian discovery. And its full achievement was due above all to Paul of Tarsus, the hellenizing Jew and Pharisee. Paul had not personally known Jesus, and hence he discovered him as Christ. "It may be said that the theology of the Apostle Paul is, in general, the first Christian theology. For him it was a necessity; it was, in a certain sense, his substitution for the lack of a personal knowledge of Jesus," says Weizsäcker (Das apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche. Freiburg-i.-B., 1892). He did not know Jesus, but he felt him born again in himself, and thus he could say, "Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness (1 Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ. The important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died and had risen again, and not what he did in his life-not his ethical work as a teacher, but his religious work as a giver of immortality. And he it was who wrote those immortal words: "Now if Christ be preached that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection from the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. . . Then they also which are fallen 1 Gal. ii. 20. asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (1 Cor. xv. 12-19). And it is possible to affirm that thenceforward he who does not believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ may be Christophile but cannot be specifically Christian. It is true that a Justin Martyr could say that "all those are Christians who live in accordance with reason, even though they may be deemed to be atheists, as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and other such"; but this martyr, is he a martyr-that is to say a witness— of Christianity? No. And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced by Paul, the dogma of the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of the resurrection and immortality of each believer, that the whole of Christology was built up. The God-man, the incarnate Word, came in order that man, according to his mode, might be made God-that is, immortal. And the Christian God, the Father of Christ, a God necessarily anthropomorphic, is He who as the Catechism of Christian Doctrine which we were made to learn by heart at school says-created the world for man, for each man. And the end of redemption, in spite of appearances due to an ethical deflection of a dogma properly religious, was to save us from death rather than from sin, or from sin in so far as sin implies death. And Christ died, or rather rose again, for me, for each one of us. And a certain solidarity was established between God and His creature. Malebranche said that the first man fell in order that Christ might redeem us, rather than that Christ redeemed us because man had fallen. After the death of Paul years passed, and generations of Christianity wrought upon this central dogma and its consequences in order to safeguard faith in the immortality of the individual soul, and the Council of Nicæa came, and with it the formidable Athanasius, whose name is still a battle-cry, an incarnation of the popular faith. Athanasius was a man of little learning but of great faith, and above all of popular faith, devoured by the hunger of immortality. And he opposed Arianism, which, like Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism, threatened, although unknowingly and unintentionally, the foundation of that belief. For the Arians, Christ was first and foremost a teacher-a teacher of morality, the wholly perfect man, and therefore the guarantee that we may all attain to supreme perfection; but Athanasius felt that Christ cannot make us gods if he has not first made himself God; if his Divinity had been communicated, he could not have communicated it to us. "He was not, therefore," he said, "first man and then became God; but He was first God and then became man in order that He might the better deify us (@coπoińσŋ)” (Orat. i. 39). It was not the Logos of the philosophers, the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and adored; and thus he instituted a separation between nature and revelation. The Athanasian or Nicene Christ, who is the Catholic Christ, is not the cosmological, nor even, strictly, the ethical Christ; he is the eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ. Harnack says of this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is essentially docetic-that is, apparential because the process of the divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a myth or in a social atom? This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it to cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the 1 On all relating to this question see, among others, Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, ii., Teil i., Buch vii., cap. i. learned might pass over to Catholicism-that is to say, from reason to faith. To this same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with God, should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus, whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor yet Harnack himself. Among Protestants, this historical Jesus is subjected to the scalpel of criticism, while the Catholic Christ lives, the really historical Christ, he who lives throughout the centuries guaranteeing the faith in personal immortality and personal salvation. And Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith, that of asserting things mutually contradictory: "The complete contradiction that exists in the oμooúσLos carried in its train a whole army of contradictions which increased as thought advanced," says Harnack. Yes, so it was, and so it had to be. And he adds: “Dogma took leave for ever of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and habituated itself to the contra-rational." In truth, it drew closer to life, which is contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Not only are judgements of worth never rationalizable-they are anti-rational. At Nicæa, then, as afterwards at the Vatican, victory rested with the idiots-taking this word in its proper, primitive, and etymological sense-the simple-minded, the rude and headstrong bishops, the representatives of the genuine human spirit, the popular spirit, the spirit that does not want to die, in spite of whatever reason may say, and that seeks a guarantee, the most material possible, for this desire. Quid ad æternitatem? This is the capital question. And the Creed ends with that phrase, resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi sæculi-the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. In the ceme tery of Mallona, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a tombstone on which this verse is carved : 66 Aunque estamos en polvo convertidos, con la carne y la piel que nos cubria.1 With the same bodies and souls that they had," as the Catechism says. So much so, that it is orthodox Catholic doctrine that the happiness of the blessed is not perfectly complete until they recover their bodies. They lament in heaven, says our Brother Pedro Malón de Chaide of the Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque, 2 and "this lament springs from their not being perfectly whole in heaven, for only the soul is there; and although they cannot suffer, because they see God, in whom they unspeakably delight, yet with all this it appears that they are not wholly content. They will be so when they are clothed with their own bodies." And to this central dogma of the resurrection in Christ and by Christ corresponds likewise a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic piety-the Sacrament of the Eucharist. In it is administered the body of Christ, which is the bread of immortality. This sacrament is genuinely realist-dinglich, as the Germans would say—which may without great violence be translated "material." It is the sacrament most genuinely ex opere operato, for which is substituted among Protestants the idealistic sacrament of the word. Fundamentally it is concerned with-and I say it with all possible respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the expressiveness of the phrase-the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding upon Him. Little 1 Though we are become dust, In thee, O Lord, our hope confides, That we shall live again clad In the flesh and skin that once covered us. 2 Libro de la Conversión de la Magdelena, part iv., chap. ix. |