THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST
Contributions to a Psychology of Jesus

by Romano Guardini

Translated from the German by

Ronald  Walls

Pantheon Books

A Division of Random House
NEW YORK

     NIHIL OBSTAT Joannes M.T. Barton, S.T.D., L.S.S.  
                  Censor Deputatus

     IMPRIMATUR + Georgius L. Craven
		        Episcopus Sebastopolis
			   Vic. Cap.

     WESTMONASTERII  Die 12a Septembris 1963


THIRD PRINTING

Copyright, 1964, by Random House, Inc. and Burns & Oates Ltd. 
Published in New York by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 
and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada, limited.
Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress catalog card number: 64-11806

Originally published in German as "Die Menschliche Wirklichkeit Des Herrn."
Copyright 1958 by Werkbund-Verlag, Wurzburg


                    To The memory Of Karl Neundorfer


CONTENTS


PREFACE

I. THE SETTING AND THE LIFE

	[1]. The Historical Situation

	[2]. The Kind of Life

	[3]. The Basic Figure


II. ACTIONS, CHARACTERISTICS, ATTITUDES

	[1]. Introduction

	[2]. Jesus' Thought

	[3]. Jesus' Volition and Action

	[4]. Jesus and Material Things

	[5]. Jesus and Men

	[6]. Emotion in the Life of Jesus

	[7]. Jesus' Attitude towards Life and Death


III. THE PROBLEM OF THE STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY

	[1]. General Remarks

	[2]. The Structures of Growth

	[3]. Temperament and Behavior Structures

	[4]. Jesus Is Unique


IV. JESUS' MODE OF EXISTENCE

	[1]. The Person and Existence of Jesus

	[2]. His Achievement


V. THE UTTER OTHERNESS OF JESUS

	[1]. The Absolute Otherness Affirmed

	[2]. Jesus' Originality

	[3]. Jesus' Being Come

	[4]. Jesus as Teacher, as Power, as He Who Is



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.



THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST



I. THE SETTING AND THE LIFE


1. THE HISTORICAL SITUATION

Almost everything we know about Jesus comes from the New Testament, above 
all from the Gospels. These are not historical narratives in the modern 
sense- They do not even set out to provide edifying biographies written 
according to a unified scheme. They are a holy message.

Without attempting to achieve sequence and completeness, they record 
events, sayings, and actions in the life of our Lord, presenting them 
according to their significance for the proclamation of the message of 
salvation. Thus, from the standpoint of historical biography, the facts 
which we learn from the Gospels about the life of Jesus are at once 
accidental and precious.

The scene of Jesus' life is Palestine. because in the later and more 
important part of his life he moved about with considerable freedom, the 
story takes us to widely different regions. First there is the immediate 
homecountry--Galilee; then the capital with the surrounding province of 
Judaea; the solitude of the wilderness and the banks of Jordan; Samaria and 
the Syrian frontier. It is true that the account shows no interest in 
things which are not immediately connected with the holy message of 
salvation, and yet it throws light now and again upon the conditions of the 
country; upon the peculiarities of the different regions with the tensions 
which exist between them; upon occasional geographical and historical 
points of interest.

The time limits of Jesus' life are determined by certain statements in the 
Gospels. He was born during the reign of Augustus Caesar, Quirinius being 
governor in Syria, and Herod, the King of Galilee, under Roman vassalage. 
We cannot fix the year exactly (Luke 2. 1-2; Mat. 2. 1). His public 
activity began after the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, 
i.e. after the year 28; for it was in this year that John the Baptist began 
to preach, and Jesus appeared after that. Jesus was then about thirty years 
old (Luke 3. 1-3, 23). He died, at the latest, before Easter of the year 
35, for his death occurred while Pontius Pilate was in office, and by 
Easter 36 Pilate's term was over (Mat. 27. 11-26 et par.). Jesus lived, 
then, between these extreme dates. More exact dating depends upon how long 
we allow for the Baptist's and his own ministries, and how we interpret the 
statements of the various Gospels concerning his journeyings to Jerusalem. 
The highest reckoning puts the duration of Jesus' public life at about 
three years; the lowest at a little over one.

The reigns of Caesar Augustus (29 B.C.-14 A.D.) and Tiberius Caesar (A.D. 
14-37) form the historical framework of our Lord's life. All the world, 
from Gibraltar to Mesopotamia, from Britain to Ethiopia, was a single 
political entity. A multiplicity of local cultures was held together by 
strong unifying forces, above all by a view of life which blended 
Hellenistic intellectualism with Roman practicality. Greek and Latin were 
spoken everywhere. Political ordinances, a uniform administration, and 
commercial intercourse guaranteed a constant interchange between the 
different parts of the Empire. The religious scene presents a vast 
diversity; but the separate pagan cults had long since lost their sharp 
dividing lines. All of them had become imbued with certain tendencies, 
notably a predilection for myths and mysteries. A deep longing for 
redemption was felt everywhere, and this led to all kinds of syncretism.

The rulers of Palestine were the sons and heirs of Herod the Great (d. 4 
B.C.). Judaea and Samaria were ruled by Archelaus (4 B.C.-6 A.D.) until his 
banishment, when Judaea was made a Roman proconsulate under Quirinius. 
Herod Antipas (4 B.C.-39 A.D.) ruled in Galilee and Peraea. Philip (4 B.C.-
34 A.D.) ruled in the North-east, but his area, too, was destined to come 
under immediate Roman rule. The country's political independence, won by 
the Maccabees in the wars of freedom (167-142 B.C.), and upheld by the 
Hasmonaean dynasty, had been brought to an end by Pompey. From 63 B.C. 
onwards Palestine was a Roman province. Herod the Great himself had been a 
Roman vassal.

Despite this political dependence, however, a considerable spiritual 
independence persisted. The form of government was still the old theocracy, 
exercised by the high priest assisted by the supreme council of the 
Sanhedrin, composed of seventy-one members.

Supreme jurisdiction in matters involving the death sentence and crimes of 
a political nature was reserved to the Roman governor, as was taxation. 
Religious life was founded on a tradition which had withstood all change.

At the same time, a whole series of Greek and Asiatic influences had made 
themselves felt. The danger of hellenization may well have been warded off 
by the Maccabean wars and the country safeguarded for Judaism; but 
Palestine, too, was affected by Hellenistic culture, as well as by a 
religious movement which stirred the whole Mediterranean world, revealing 
itself in Palestine principally as a fervent longing for the Messiah, an 
expectation which was not purely religious but also strongly nationalist 
and political in tone.

The guardians of the nationalist-conservative tradition were the Pharisees. 
They were the purists, those who remained faithful to the Law. They were 
vigorously against all that was foreign and pagan; and they were the 
bitterest opponents of Hellenistic culture. And yet, for all their national 
consciousness, they were not really in touch with the people, but looked 
down on them as a despicable, confused, and ignorant rabble.

Opposed to them was the party of the Sadducees who were cosmopolitan and 
supported Hellenistic culture, seeing themselves as the enlightened, 
rationalist opponents of all that claimed to be above the senses or beyond 
this world.

Their image merges with that of the Hellenizers, the group that adapted 
traditional Jewish ideas to the popular philosophy of the times, and whose 
attitude to the Law was determined by this adaptation. The Sadducees were 
related also to the Herodians--members of the courts of Herod's heirs, who 
had no interest in serious issues but sought only power and pleasure.

A number of other well-defined groups stood out from the mass of the 
population.

Most conspicuous were the Essenes, a sect of a decidedly mystical and 
ascetic character.

John the Baptist's disciples seem to have had much in common with these 
people and while some of them adopted their masters attitude to Jesus, 
others continued as a separate community.

Besides these, we must take note of that little band that remained firmly 
within the ancient tradition, but drew its inspiration rather from the 
Prophets and the Psalms than from the Law- These were men and women of 
deep, quiet spirituality like Zachary and Elizabeth, the parents of John 
the Baptist; or the two prophetic souls who greeted the Child Jesus in the 
Temple, Simeon and Anna; or the family at Bethany, Lazarus, Martha and Mary 
(John 11).

Finally, there were the Samaritans, a racially and religiously hybrid 
group, the descendants of colonists who had been transplanted there at the 
time of the Assyrian conquest- They tried to hold themselves aloof from 
both Jews and pagans, but were unable to do so because of the confusing 
forces all about them. They were despised by their Jewish neighbors.


2. THE KIND OF LIFE

In this environment is set the figure of Jesus; here he lived out his life.

His ancestry is traced back to the ancient royal family, both in the 
genealogies and in isolated remarks (Mat. 1. 1 ff.; Luke 3. 23 ff)- This 
royal line had now lost all its power, possessions and significance, so 
that this late descendant lived in complete obscurity.

He grew up, not in true poverty, but in humble circumstances nevertheless, 
in the house of a simple craftsman--a carpenter- Jesus general behavior 
bears witness to the fact that he was accustomed to great simplicity, 
though we must not forget that he feels quite at ease among well-to-do 
people, and shows, for example, what he thought of the behavior of Simon 
the Pharisee, who had invited him but did not think it necessary to extend 
him the least token of hospitality (Luke 7. 44 ff).

We do not hear of his having had any special intellectual training. The 
puzzlement expressed on several occasions over where he got his knowledge 
of the Scriptures and his wisdom shows that he cannot have had any formal 
education (Mat. 13. 54; Mark 1. 22; Luke 2. 47; John7. 15).

Jesus' way of life is that of an itinerant religious teacher. He goes from 
place to place as outward occasion--a festival pilgrimage or spiritual 
necessity--his "hour"--demands. He often stays in one place for quite some 
time, visiting the surrounding district and then coming back to it again. 
Thus, for example, at the start of his ministry, at Capharnaum (Mat. 8. 5 
and 9. 35), or at its end, in Bethany (Mat. 21. 17--18; 26. 6). This 
pattern of life derived from the nature of his mission, not from a personal 
wanderlust. We can deduce this from the answer he made to the scribe who 
said he would follow him: "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have 
nests: but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head" (Mat. 8. 20). From 
his audience he gathered around himself a band of the more receptive whom 
he instructed in the deeper meaning of his message. From among these, 
again, he made another selection of the Twelve. The importance of this 
selection is underscored by the fact that the chosen are mentioned by name 
(Mark 3. 14 ff. et par.); and it is also recorded that he spent the 
previous night in prayer (Luke 6. 12).

The small inner circle, called "the Twelve" for short (Luke 8. 1, etc.), 
are especially close to him. We may recall the intimate bond which existed 
in ancient times between the philosopher or religious teacher and his 
disciples. The Twelve are always about him. Wherever he is invited, they go 
too. He shares food and lodging with them. After he has spoken they cluster 
around inquiring into the meaning of what he has said. And he tells them 
expressly that all is made clear to them, whereas the multitude will have 
to be content with parables (Mat. 13. 11 ff.). He sends them out to test 
their strength; he tells them what to preach, what to take with them, and 
how to conduct themselves on their journey; and he gives them power to 
perform signs. On their return he calls for their report, and the whole 
scene reveals how deeply he was involved in their activities (Mark 6. 7-13, 
30-l; and cf. Mat. 10-11. 6, 25-9; Luke 10. 1-22).

Within the band of the Twelve there is a more select group still, 
consisting of the Three: Peter, James and John. They are present on all 
important occasions, such as the raising of Jairus' daughter, the 
transfiguration on the mountain, and at Gethsemane (Mark 5. 37; 9. 2; 14. 
33). There was a specially close link between John and his Master, so close 
in fact that he was able to describe himself as the disciple "whom Jesus 
loved" (John 3. 23; 19. 26).

A number of women can be discerned within the wider circle of disciples. 
They are those whom he has helped in bodily or spiritual ills, or who have 
attached themselves to him for religious reasons (Mat. 27. 55-6; Mark 16. 
1; Luke 8. 1-2). Some are well-to-do and look after his material needs.

St. John's remark that one of the Twelve, Judas Iscariot, kept the common 
purse (John 12. 6), answers the question: What did Jesus and his companions 
live on? Each member of the group no doubt contributed something to the 
common upkeep; but in addition those who were impressed by the Master's 
message helped out as well. We learn, too, that alms were dispensed from 
the common purse (John 13. 29).

Besides this we learn that Jesus had friends with whom he could stay. 
Considering his manner of life and the highly developed hospitality of the 
East, this was only natural. He had especially close ties with the 
household of Lazarus, Martha and Mary of Bethany (Luke 10. 38 ff.; John 
11).

A characteristic element in Jesus' circle is constituted by the "publicans 
and sinners", people ostracized by the accepted standards of society 
because of their way of life. With him, however, they find understanding 
and love, and they, in turn, are especially devoted to him. His association 
with them, however, caused the shadow of suspicion to fall on him in the 
eyes of the devotees of the Law and of respectable citizens (Mat. 9. 9 ff.; 
11. 19; 21. 31; etc.).

We now approach the question: What attitude did the various strata of 
society and groups in the land adopt towards him?

It was the common people who from the first responded enthusiastically to 
his person and his message. They could see that he did not speak "like 
their scribes"--formally, technically, incomprehensibly--but with vitality, 
from observation and experience; not theoretically, but "as one having 
power", so that they felt the dynamic power of his words and the mysterious 
Reality which lay behind the words (Mat. 7. 28-9; Luke 4. 32). They sensed 
also that his attitude to them was different from that of the members of 
the influential classes. In the eyes of the Sadducees, they were just a 
rabble; to the Pharisees, they were the despised masses who "do not know 
the Law" (John 7. 49). By contrast, the attitude of Jesus made them feel 
that his concern for them was genuine. Words like those of the Beatitudes 
in the Sermon on the Mount have a primarily religious meaning. But they 
were in marked contrast to the standards of the wealthy, the powerful and 
the educated, and were therefore interpreted by the people as signs of 
sympathy for the distressed, the oppressed and the ignorant. This feeling 
was strengthened by the fact that Jesus was always ready to help the poor, 
the suffering and the outcast. Sayings like "Come to me, all who labor and 
are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest" (Mat. 11. 28) have reference 
first of all to his Messianic mission, but they also express his boundless 
readiness and power to be of service.

On the other hand, Jesus is no popular hero in the narrow sense of the 
word; certainly not in any sense of his being a champion of the lowly and 
simple against the wealthy and the educated. Certain sayings which seem to 
suggest this (Luke 6. 24 ff.; 16. 19 ff; Mat. 19. 23 ff.) in reality have 
nothing to do with social attitudes of this kind; still less do they imply 
any tactics of rousing the people against their rulers. In the same way, 
his relationship with the "publicans and sinners" does not mean that he is 
in revolt against law and morality, or that he favors moral decadence. His 
championing of the outcast is stressed because no one had ever done such a 
thing before. The reason for it lay not in any inner fellow-feeling but in 
the fact that "they that are in health, need not a physician, but they that 
are ill" (Mat. 9. 12), and because they, too, are "sons of Abraham" (Luke 
19. 9). Jesus is moved by the spirit of One who knows that he is sent to 
every man, regardless of his condition. But once this has been made clear, 
it must also be admitted that Jesus has a special tenderness for the poor 
and the outcast. This flowed from the ultimate purpose behind his entire 
mission, which was to upset all systems based on the standards of the 
world, in order to proclaim the unknown God and his kingdom. The poor, the 
suffering, the outcast are, through their very existence, forces of 
discharge capable of shattering the established order.

Furthermore, he did not allow the people to draw too close to him, and 
withdrew when the approaches were too pressing. He knew that the religious 
motives which inspired such enthusiasm could be confused, shallow and 
earthly, and that they might cause his message, especially his message 
concerning the Kingdom of God and redemption, to be seen in a false light 
(John 2. 23 ff; 6. 15ff.).

Among the ruling classes, the Pharisees, who were in closest touch with 
public life and all its manifestations, paid immediate attention to him. At 
once they became suspicious and began to work against him. They sensed the 
thoroughgoing contrast between him and them in spirit and mentality, and in 
their attitudes towards God and man. He himself often treated them openly 
as adversaries. This is obvious everywhere, especially in the famous 
invectives (Mat. 12. 22 ff.; 15. 1 ff.; 22. 15 ff.; 23. 13 ff.; etc.). Yet, 
his struggle with them was not one of uncompromising opposition. He 
recognized their function (Mat. 23. 1-3), appeared before them too as their 
Messiah, and, whenever they showed a glimmer of understanding the truth, 
received them (John 3. 1 ff.).

For a long time the Sadducees took no notice of him. Only at the every end, 
when a crisis was imminent, did they become sufficiently disturbed to join 
forces briefly with their former despised enemies in a common action 
against him (Mat. 22. 23 ff.; Acts 4. 1; 5. 17 ff.).

We read that Herod had heard of the new teacher and taken an interest in 
him (Luke 9. 7-9)--besides, he always had shown his interest in anything to 
do with religion, e.g. in his dealings with John the Baptist (Mark 6. 20 
ff.). Then he became suspicious and Jesus was informed of his intention to 
kill him, whereupon Jesus indicated clearly enough what he thought of him 
when he called him "this fox" (Luke 13. 31 ff.). Jesus did not come into 
personal contact with him until the trial, and then the meeting went badly 
enough (Luke 23. 6 ff.)

At first the Roman governor was completely unaware of his existence. He, 
too, was first forced to concern himself with Jesus at his trial. John, 
with his customary eye for involved human detail, has given us an 
impressive account of their meeting (18. 28 ff.).

We still have to emphasize the peculiar sympathy which Jesus showed for 
pagans. This was made clear, for example, when he met the Roman centurion 
or the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mat. 8. 5 ff.; Mark 7. 24 ff.); likewise, in 
what he had to say on Tyre, Sidon and Sodom (Mat. 11. 20 ff.). Even his 
behavior towards Pilate has a frankness unspoiled by any kind of prejudice.

The same is true of his attitude towards the half-pagan Samaritans--as 
indicated by his parable of the man who fell among thieves, or his story of 
the ten lepers (Luke 10. 30 ff.; 17. 11 ff.), or his reprimand to the two 
disciples who wanted to call down the vengeance of heaven upon the 
inhabitants of a village of Samaria because they would not give hospitality 
to the travelers. As this last instance shows, he certainly did not intend 
to reject the Samaritans (Luke 9. 51 ff.).

Something must now be said about his personal habits.

He had no fixed teaching center either near the temple or in a rabbinical 
school, but moved about from place to place. We have already noted that 
this way of life was not a manifestation of wanderlust. The instructions he 
gave the disciples he sent out may safely be taken to reflect, with certain 
limitations, the kind of life he himself led and the experiences he had 
gained by it (Mat. 10. 5 ff.). He taught wherever opportunity arose--in the 
synagogues, where, moreover, every adult Jew had a right to speak (Mat. 4. 
23, etc.); in the porticos and courts of the temple (Mat. 21. 21 ff.; 21. 
21-24. 1); in market-place and street (Mat. 9. 9 ff.); in houses (Mark 7. 
17); at the well where people came to draw water (John 4. 5 ff.); by the 
seashore (Mark 3. 9); on hill-slopes like the one that has given its name 
to the Sermon on the Mount (Mat. 5. 1 ff.); in the fields (Mat. 12.1); in 
the "wilderness", that is, in uncultivated places (Mark 8. 4), and so on.

When he was invited to a meal, he accepted (John 2. 1 ff.) even though his 
host was not kindly disposed toward him (Luke 7. 36 ff.). He healed the 
sick wherever he encountered them, and also went to their homes (Mark 1. 29 
ff.).

But then he would withdraw once more from the crowd, even from his 
disciples and nearest friends, to retreat into solitude. His public 
ministry began with a long fast and communing with God in the wilderness 
(Mat. 4. 1 ff.). Time and again it is recorded that he went off alone to 
pray (Mat. 14. 23). He did this particularly before important events like 
the choosing of the apostles (Luke 6. 12 ff.), the transfiguration (Luke 9. 
18, 28), and at Gethsemane before his Passion (Mat. 26. 36 ff.).

In all matters relating to custom and ritual, in the first place, he 
conformed to the Law like everyone else.

At the same time, however, he definitely set himself above the Law. He did 
this not merely in the sense that he expounded the Law more intelligently 
and more spiritually than the fanatics, as we see in his clashes on various 
occasions over the law of the Sabbath (Mat. 12. 9 ff., etc.), but 
radically. He looked upon the Law as something over which he had power: 
"The Son of man is lord of the sabbath" (Mat. 12. 8), and if Lord of the 
Sabbath, then Lord of the whole Law, of which the Sabbath was one of the 
most important parts. His anticipation of the Paschal meal by one day is 
likewise a sign of this lordship over the Law. At the Last Supper itself, 
this claim is made even more forcefully: not merely because he introduced 
into and instituted in this sacred rite himself, but because he annulled 
the rite itself and with it the whole old Covenant and announced the "new 
Covenant" and the new memorial feast (Luke 9 9. 20).

At this point we might ask about Jesus' outward appearance and manner. This 
is a difficult question to pose.

To ask what someone looked like, how he spoke or acted, is to presuppose a 
detachment which in fact we never find anywhere in the atmosphere which has 
surrounded the figure of Jesus for nearly two thousand years. When the 
question has been raised, however, as for example in connection with the 
various traditions concerning his true image, it seems to have had very 
minor importance. The question is also hard to put because the records, 
which are interested in quite other matters, make no direct comment on 
these details. They are concerned with Christ's importance in God's 
economy, his importance for the salvation of man. They concentrate on the 
absolute in his nature, compared with which all that is relative must 
yield. Thus, the image of Jesus has always been severely stylized. Any 
personal note we may discover is in each case attributable to an individual 
who has made it his interest. It will be found to reflect a particular kind 
of religious experience, or a special ideal of human perfection represented 
by some person or period as realized in the Redeemer. We need only point, 
in this connection, to the works of religious painters and poets.

So we shall not attempt to offer any solution, but will merely suggest 
where perhaps it might be found.

What sort of general impression does Jesus make if we compare him with the 
great figures by whom God revealed his will in the Old Testament, with 
Moses or Elias, for example?

The first thing which strikes us is his great calmness and meekness. We are 
apt to associate a certain weakness with these words. Was Jesus weak? Is he 
a figure of that tenderness which belongs to a late period in history when 
contrasted with the moods of earlier ages? Does he seem like some highly 
sensitive, vulnerable character of a later age, restricted by his very 
depth of understanding, so different from the creative and aggressive 
figures of early times? Is he merely the kind one, the all-compassionate 
one? Is he only the one who suffers and patiently accepts the burden of 
destiny and life?

Unfortunately art and literature have often presented him in some such 
guise; but the truth is quite otherwise.

The impression which Jesus obviously made upon his contemporaries was that 
of some mysterious power. The accounts show that all who saw him were 
caught, and indeed shaken, by his nature. They felt that his words were 
full of power (Mat. 7. 29; Luke 4. 36). His actions--apart from special 
occasions--reveal a spiritual energy which marked itself off completely 
from all human standards, so that, when describing his nature, men turned 
to the familiar concept of the prophet (Mat. 16. 14; Luke 7. 16). But on 
occasion this energy burst forth in an overwhelming display of power, as in 
the episode with Peter after the miraculous catch of fish (Luke 5. 8), or 
during the storm on the lake (Mat. 8. 23 ff. et par.). There is not a trace 
of hesitant reflection, sensitive reserve, diffidence, or passive 
spinelessness. He was filled with a power capable of any outburst or 
violence; but this power was controlled, nay transformed, by a moderation 
which took its source in his innermost being, by a deep goodness and 
kindness, and by a sublime freedom.

We could express the idea thus: Jesus is the personification of a 
marvelously pure "humanity", not in spite of his enormous spiritual power, 
but precisely because of it.

This unity of power and humanity--taking the word in its purest sense--is 
one of the most prominent features of the figure of Jesus, especially as it 
emerges in the accounts of the first three Gospels. His willpower, his 
awareness of mission, his readiness to accept its consequences, and finally 
the mighty power of the Spirit--all this is translated into pure humanity 
so completely and creatively, that we can describe his significance by 
saying: He is able to bring men to understand and put into effect what is 
meant by true humanity, even though--or because--he is more than a mere 
man.

To put it another way: unobtrusiveness is of the very essence of the 
"happening" we call Jesus.

We have only to compare his outward activity with other biblical or non-
biblical happenings to see how the mighty word, bold gesture, powerful 
deed, fantastic situation, and the like, are alien to him. Strange as it 
may seem, the character of the extraordinary is missing even in his 
miracles. These are certainly great; many of them, like raising the dead, 
feeding the multitude, or walking on water, are tremendously impressive. 
But even these have something about them which makes them seem, one might 
almost say, "natural". This "humanity" of which we spoke reappears as 
unobtrusiveness.

Jesus' manner must have been very simple, his attitude so natural that 
people hardly noticed it. His actions proceeded quietly from the needs of 
the situation. There was nothing incredible about them. His words, too, had 
this unobtrusive quality about them. If we compare them with the words of 
an Isaiah, or a Paul, they strike us as being extremely moderate and brief. 
Compared with the sayings of a Buddha, they seem brief to the point of 
bluntness, and almost commonplace.

Admittedly, we receive this impression only if we think of his words in a 
purely philosophical, aesthetic or contemplative sense. If we consider them 
in the situation in which they were uttered and take them seriously, we 
then realize the power revealed in them, which goes far beyond "depth", 
"wisdom", or "sublimity": they touch the chords of existence itself.


3. THE BASIC FIGURE

The more a man reveals his uniqueness as an individual and the greater the 
influence he exerts on history, the more significant becomes the question: 
What is the basic figure on which his personality and his life are modeled? 
For over a thousand years the West has seen in the person of Jesus purely 
and simply the sole canon of perfection; and for a great part of mankind 
today that is still the situation. Even where this meaning is denied, the 
denial itself is affected by it. If we examine the attitude of Friedrich 
Nietzsche, for example--to cite only one of the most typical cases--we see 
that both the general scheme and special features of the picture of man 
which he paints are a contradiction of the conventional picture of Christ: 
"Zarathustra" is, in fact, an anti-Gospel figure. The same thing holds true 
of the war against Christian values in most sectors. Indeed, we might well 
ask if any view of man could be possible in Europe for a very long time 
yet, which was not colored in some way by Christ. And so our question 
becomes all the more pertinent. To understand it better and to focus our 
thoughts on what is essential, let us first of all consider some lives 
which have come to be accepted as exemplary.

We shall begin with the man who has had more influence on determining the 
Western image of the "spiritual man" than almost any other person--
Socrates.

Neither birth nor wealth was responsible for his fame. Intellectually, he 
was a product of self-training and of the most remarkable cultural milieu 
ever assembled in so small a space--the Athens of the fifth century B.C. He 
was spurred on by an irrestrainable longing for the truth; he had a 
powerful intellect and an extraordinarily keen critical faculty. In 
addition, he had a great influence on younger men, which was felt by his 
followers to be something uncanny. He was a religious man, with an 
unquestioning consciousness of being led by God. While he tried to replace 
traditional mythical notions by a system of contemplation enlightened by 
philosophy, he nevertheless retained such a profound feeling for the 
mystery of things that he did not openly rebel against his environment, but 
remained faithful to its beliefs.

In this way, he lived a long life devoted to philosophical research and 
inquiry, a life spent in awakening and training men's intellects. This 
activity sprang from his own inner nature; it also took on the consecration 
of a divine commission, for, as he acknowledged at the end of his life 
before the supreme court, he knew that he had been called to such a life by 
Apollo, the god of light and mind. Moreover, this mission bore fruit. He 
could see its good effects all around him. In the constant struggle with 
his adversaries he displayed his own superiority and he could rest assured 
that the future would belong to him. He was surrounded by a host of 
disciples, one of whom was Plato, a man of genius, to whom he had imparted 
the best of his knowledge over a period of ten years. Finally, the inner 
logic of his vocation led him to take his ultimate decision. At the age of 
seventy, surrounded by his close friends, he died; and the manner of his 
death set round his being and his work a final halo of unsullied light.

The figure of Socrates can be compared with that of another personality, 
also from Greece, who belongs, not to history, but to legend. Nonetheless, 
he expresses very clearly that elemental zest for life that is so typical 
not only of the Greek but of universal man. The figure we have in mind is 
Achilles.

Achilles was no thinker; he was a man of action--handsome, fearless, 
passionate, skilled in all warlike pursuits and filled with a consuming 
desire for glory.

He had once been asked whether he would prefer a long, but uneventful life, 
or a short life which would make him the greatest in the hall of fame. He 
chose the latter. His life was thus a blazing flame soon extinguished; but 
for that very reason it was glorious, a symbol of that beauty which comes 
to flower, not through plodding enterprise and care, not through labor and 
endurance, not in any wide-stretching, fully traced arcs of life, but all 
in the extravagance and transience of youth. As Homer depicts him--the poet 
whom the Greeks regarded as more than a mere poet, rather as a teacher of 
things divine and human--Achilles was the very expression and 
personification of this zest for life.

The life of a Socrates or an Achilles proceeds directly from its own deep 
point of origin and fulfills itself with a necessity which is at the same 
time freedom, according to the law of its own nature. Everything that 
influences it from without has to serve the creative purpose dictated by 
the inner image. In contrast to this pattern we must cite another type of 
existence belonging to the antipodes, as it were, of ancient life--
Epictetus, or, more precisely, the man whom Epictetus regards as a model, 
that is, the Stoic.

Both Socrates and Achilles experienced existence as something bound up with 
their own inner nature as something familiar. And so events and influences 
which affected them neither introduced any alien elements nor distorted the 
shape of their personalities as they unfolded. With the Stoic, on the other 
hand, things are radically different. He is neither venturesome nor an 
extrovert, neither borne along by a powerful urge nor protected by a hard 
shell. He tends to be a contemplative, and certainly has a sensitive and 
vulnerable nature. The processes of history, his fate, strike him as alien, 
even hostile, and he has the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with 
them. And so he retreats within the shell of his own nature, there to 
become master of his fate, or at least to learn how to put up with it.

He does this, indeed, by saying that fundamentally nothing affects him at 
all. This results in his thrusting his deepest self so far into the 
background that not only outward events but even his own individual nature, 
which is subject to change and decay, appear as something alien. He says 
not only to fate, to possessions, family, power and honor, but even to 
health, state of mind and basic endowments: "I am none of these . . ." What 
remains as his ultimate true nature can scarcely be called an "image"; it 
is more like a mathematical point, the focal center of his being, a 
completely colorless self, invulnerable and indestructible. Everything that 
happens to it is regarded as mere occurrence, as something completely 
alien, something emerging from the realm of the unknown, uninvited and 
meaningless, and with which one's true nature must not be allowed to come 
in contact. For the Stoic, the basic process of human life is not 
unfolding, but affirmation and conservation. It is true that, 
involuntarily, a genuine figure is produced by this very process; a grim 
and solitary form, outwardly calm, but ablaze inside with hidden passion, 
desperately courageous and virile to the point of madness.

Between the extremes of pure self-development in a context of related 
contingencies on the one hand, and sheer self-assertion in the face of a 
hostile world on the other, we have the attitude which Virgil describes so 
well in his picture of Aeneas. Here, fate is what determines the content 
and meaning of personal existence.

Aeneas' ancestral home, Troy, was destroyed, a frightful disaster of which 
he felt all the horror and pain. But at the same time he received the 
assurance that, in spite of, or rather out of, this misfortune, he was 
being called to found a new city and inaugurate a new glorious period in 
history. And so he set out to face dangers and trials of every kind; not--
like Odysseus--to roam the world and taste its marvels, but to find the 
spot where, according to divine decree, the new race was to be founded. His 
life was that of a warrior, but his aim was not, like Achilles, to win a 
warrior's renown, but to reach the place where his destined task was to be 
fulfilled and the foundations laid for the future.

His personality had neither the creative power of a genius, nor the 
brilliance of a hero's swiftly consumed flame, nor the grim courage of the 
man who stands alone. It was narrow and restricted, but it was capable of 
feeling, kindly and brave, and had an inflexible power of perseverance and 
doggedness. What made up the life of Aeneas was not the self-expression of 
his inner nature or the challenge of the world's glory, in the form of 
discoveries or great deeds, but a divine vocation--fate, in the true sense 
of the word. That is why he was called "pious"; because he was capable of 
understanding and accepting the contingent as a divine command. Aeneas was 
the mythical ancestor of the most realistic power in the ancient world, the 
Roman empire. The consummation of this was reached in Augustus, the first 
"emperor of the world".

Finally, to these figures from the Graeco-Roman world, we can add another 
from the Far East, a religious figure--perhaps the greatest of all time, 
and the only one who can seriously be mentioned along with Christ--namely 
Buddha.

Buddha is curiously impersonal. His being is marked neither by a creative, 
self-expressing urge, nor by daring deeds and the kind of activity which 
makes history. He was dominated by an inexorable logic. We might almost say 
that he was a law of being assumed into an inflexible will. If we 
disregard, for the moment, the question of the truth of his message, we get 
the impression that in his life the world reached transparency, not in the 
positive sense that the world's totality was being revealed, as in a 
microcosm, in a single human life, as in Shakespeare's plays for example, 
or--in a different manner--in Goethe's genius, but in the form of a 
discovery, a lifting of the veil. It became apparent that the world was 
pain, guilt and illusion. Its deepest law was uncovered so that it could be 
overcome--even abolished.

Buddha grew up as a king's son in a privileged position. His education was 
such as to make him the perfect prince: he did and enjoyed all that makes 
life worth living. Then one day he came upon those things that make a man 
think: old age, suffering and death. These made him realize how meaningless 
his former life had been. He therefore withdrew from everything and 
embarked upon the search for reality. He went through the whole course of 
ancient Indian yoga exercises, including this domain also in his universal 
quest, and found that these things, too, did not lead to freedom. Finally, 
he arrived at the knowledge that all existence is but an illusion arising 
out of the will to live, and thought that he had found a way by which to 
abolish or annihilate existence itself. This knowledge did not come to him 
from some encounter with external things, nor yet as a grace from on high, 
but was the final consequence of the fact that he is as he is and has done 
what he has done; that means that his present life is the result of 
countless previous incarnations. Thus Buddha closed the circle of 
knowledge. He gathered a group of disciples about him, taught them so that 
they would be able in their turn to hand on his doctrine, and organized 
their communal life. Then, when he had had time to regulate everything, he 
died at a ripe old age surrounded by his followers, a death that appeared 
as the perfect consummation of his life.

The essence of his being cannot, perhaps, be better characterized than in 
the three names constantly given him in the texts: the Vigilant, the 
Perfect, the Teacher of Gods and Men.

The personalities we have been describing are quite different from each 
other, but they have one thing in common: greatness. Where we are dealing 
with this category, terrible things may indeed befall a man--one has but to 
think of Atreus or Oedipus--but, nonetheless, his whole life is on the 
princely scale and shines bright, no matter what the horror. He may suffer 
humiliation like Hercules, but he will still wrestle his way through to 
triumph while still in this life. The stature of his life is measured by 
the standards of worth. He does not have to face everything possible, but 
only what is fitting. And if, as in the case of the Stoic, "everything 
possible" can befall him, then it is regarded simply as non-existent and is 
pushed aside by the inner core of self. Even when things are at their worst 
the rule of congruity still applies. Only one who is no true man, who is at 
the mercy of the commonplace, a mere slave, has to suffer anything 
incongruous.

But what about Jesus? We note simply that he himself claimed unquestionably 
to be the one who was sent, the bringer of salvation, the exemplar of the 
true life; that Paul declared him to be the manifestation of God (2 Cor. 4. 
4; Col. 1. 15; Heb. 1. 3), and John described him as the Word made flesh, 
both meaning thereby that his was the most meaningful and purposeful life 
that ever was.

If ever a life was normative in character it was his. What was the pattern 
of his life?

As we have said, Jesus was born the latter-day descendant of a once royal 
line. His birth, however, brought him no privilege, power, property or 
education. It served only to emphasize the more his social status as that 
of an impecunious artisan. In particular, it was of no positive value to 
him later in life. He neither relied upon it as a pretext to claim 
anything, nor did he seek to restore its ancient power. Furthermore, it did 
not in any sense form a background to give greater relief to a life of 
self-abnegation. And yet his royal lineage was significant in the sense 
that because of it Jesus is most intimately bound up with antecedent sacred 
history; and its stored-up heritage of attitudes and reactions were 
expressed in his life, chiefly, by making his position ambiguous and 
causing his true character to be mistaken.

The first thirty years of his life were spent in complete obscurity. All 
that we hear about them is the short episode of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem 
at the age of twelve, when he became for the first time subject to this 
obligation. The whole period is marked neither by deep study, significant 
encounters, nor great deeds. We hear nothing about any great religious 
events. The only historical event recorded is the pilgrimage; all the rest 
that we find in apocryphal sources is mere legend. All we can say is that 
he led the life everyone else in similar circumstances led.

Then his public ministry began. He preached that the kingdom of God had 
arrived and was clamouring for admittance. He preached the renewal of life 
in the Spirit; that a revolution in history through God's creative power 
was at hand, a revolution whose nature had been foreshadowed by the oracles 
of the prophets; but that everything depended upon acceptance of the 
message by the Chosen People. At first he was successful: the people, 
including many who were influential, turned to him. A band of disciples 
began to follow him, men who, humanly speaking, had nothing at all 
extraordinary about them. Soon, however, a serious crisis arose. His 
various opponents, formerly at loggerheads with each other, began to unite 
in a common front. He was accused on the basis of a complete 
misrepresentation of the whole tenor of his teaching. The self-
contradictory charge was made, on the one hand, that he was blasphemous; 
and, on the other, that he was preparing a revolt against Caesar. The trial 
was conducted in utter disregard of legal forms and ended in his 
condemnation. Certainly no more than three, possibly less than two, years 
after the start of his public ministry, he suffered death, an agonizing 
death, and of a kind to discredit him for all time.

The catastrophe was so complete that the crowd whom he had helped and who 
had shown such enthusiasm for him earlier, abandoned him, as did also a 
great many of his disciples. It was actually a member of the closer circle 
of the Twelve who betrayed him. At his arrest they all fled. The disciple 
whom he himself had called "the Rock" and regarded as the first of his 
followers, denied him--before a despised slave-girl of a portress, 
moreover, and even confirmed his denial by an oath.

After the death of Jesus, there occurred the event that broke all 
precedents, namely Easter. Humanly speaking, however, it in no wise made 
good the destruction of all his work. Though he had won through to glory 
and power, he did not seek to avenge himself on his adversaries, or crush 
those who had opposed him; nor did he triumph over those elements which had 
rejected him. The event simply served as a great turning-point in history: 
it was the starting-point for a whole new historical process which was to 
be set in operation at Pentecost.

Then at length, in the name of this figure and by the power of the Spirit, 
the final conquest of the whole world for God was set in motion.

How, now, can we characterize this life?

Was it the kind we have described as the unfolding of some great figure? 
Quite obviously it was not. What happened had nothing to do with any 
"unfolding": the concept is not appropriate. Nor did any "figure" emerge, 
to use the term in its proper sense. This concept is equally inappropriate. 
Nothing happened which in any sense opened up vistas of final 
"accomplishment". We witness, rather, a movement towards disintegration.

We have only to imagine what it would have been like had Jesus lived 
longer--fifty, seventy, or even ninety years! As things were, after the 
peaceful period of childhood, youth and early manhood, there were left to 
him only three years or perhaps a little more than one year of activity and 
self-witness.

Was his death the climax of a life of heroic deeds? No; it had neither the 
character of a mighty assault against an overwhelmingly powerful foe, nor 
of a fire which consumes by its ardor a man's very substance. Still less 
was it a case of an over-generous spirit dashing itself in vain against the 
triviality of its environment. Christ knew and declared that the 
fulfillment of his goal was possible--but only through a free response on 
the part of those who were called: and the latter withdrew or even opposed 
him, not because he was asking more than the times could comprehend, but 
because they were unwilling to make a definite religious and moral 
commitment.

Can his life perhaps be regarded as an example of self-assertion amidst a 
storm of opposition? No, because what happened to him was totally at 
variance with the nature of the Son of God; many things, such as the story 
of the fish and the didrachma (Mat. 17. 23, 24-26), illustrate this. It was 
distressing, unworthy and incomprehensible. The issue must not be allowed 
to become clouded as a result of the later significance which his life 
acquired. The cross has been placed upon the crowns of kings, but it was 
once a sign of death and ignominy. There were motives enough for adopting a 
stoic attitude; he did not do so. Jesus never made the slightest gesture of 
detaching himself from a hostile, degrading, senseless world; of repelling 
what he could not avoid, as having no part in him, or of retreating within 
himself. What he had to contend with was wrong in every way, but he 
accepted it and, indeed, took it to heart, we might even say.

His attitude is one that had never been seen before, and one that cannot 
exist except where the norm of his person is accepted.

Aware that he had been sent by the Father, and filled with a desire to obey 
the Father's will in all things, he accepted everything that happened to 
him. We see in action a union with the will of God that drew everything 
that happened into the deepest intimacy of the love of God. By the very 
fact that everything became an expression--or, more precisely, an 
instrument--of this love, earthly things acquired for God himself a meaning 
of which no myth had ever dreamt.

What of the kind of life exemplified by a man like Aeneas, who felt that a 
divine commission was being fulfilled in a long life of patient suffering 
and struggle, and that life was a blend of adventure and action determined 
by that mission? This type is not that of our picture either. From the 
point of view of the ultimate goal to be reached, the events in the life of 
Jesus were not in the least necessary. His goal could have been achieved 
equally well--and from the viewpoint of worldly considerations, much more 
logically--by other means. True, Jesus was charged with a mission of utmost 
importance, but what were its terms of reference? In the last analysis, all 
we can say is that he was to come among men and enter our historical world 
as the One sent from God, to take upon himself the burden not only of his 
personal existence, but of existence itself, and live it out with a 
transparency of knowledge and a depth of feeling which could have no other 
source than this mission received from his Father. He was to set reality in 
motion and thus release all the potentialities inherent in it. He was to 
bear the consequences of his incarnation and thereby create a new starting-
point for existence. In the final analysis, it would not be of great 
importance what actually did happen, so long as it was the proper thing 
required by the situation at that precise moment.

We could turn the statement round and say that, no matter how much blame 
attaches to those who caused Jesus to suffer what he did, for Jesus himself 
it was the right thing, ordained by God and, therefore, eternally right. 
Jesus himself expressed the matter in this way: Woe to them by whom 
offenses come! Woe to those who create the conditions which lead to the 
misrepresentation! But for Jesus himself, "offense" is the very situation 
in which he must fulfill the Father's will. He expressed this idea by 
referring to his "hour". Jesus' life was not the expressing of a 
"personage"; he did not live according to some divinely constructed plan 
spread out before his eyes, but by the will of the Father as he encountered 
it at every step he took in going to meet his "hour". Those steps were not 
taken following a definite program, but were, in each case, the result that 
followed from what had gone before and from the attitude taken up by the 
various people involved. Thus, union was achieved, at each stage, between 
the directing will of the Father and his own obedient will, and from this 
union his own actions followed.

As soon as Jesus' nature becomes clearer to us, we see that the category of 
"personality" does not fit him at all. Personality is a figure, in the 
sense of a man "modeled in the round" both as regards the basic structure 
of his nature and the actual course of his life: it is both the foundation 
and limitation of existence. Modern interpretations of Jesus have tended to 
turn him into a "personality", with the result that they completely lose 
sight of his most characteristic feature. He was something quite different. 
That is not to say that Jesus was a disintegrated person without either law 
of being or place in existence. This is not to say that he was a mere piece 
of flotsam to which anything could happen because his life had no distinct 
bearing of its own; mere human rubbish at the disposal of any power that 
tried to use it for its own purposes. It means, rather, that Jesus was 
clearly above and beyond any "figure". The various patterns of human life 
begin only on the hither side of his pattern of life.[1]

Granted that there is a logical thread running through the life of Jesus, 
it is one that is at variance with all accepted norms; one that makes 
manifest what is wholly "other"; one that reveals the mind and outlook of a 
religious reality so different from all worldly values that it proclaims 
itself precisely in its exploding of all worldly standards. The reality 
which it stands for is represented by the Beatitudes, or by the joy which 
Jesus felt when the apostles returned (Luke 10. 21 f.). To say this is, in 
the last analysis, only to repeat what has already been said, that the 
nature of Jesus was no ordinary "figure", in the accepted sense of the 
word.

Following the same line of thought, we may say that the life of Jesus is 
"Truth"; it is pure life without reservation or subterfuge; it is absolute 
harmony with the living reality of God. This identification with Truth was 
also an identification with the power of Truth and compelled those who 
encountered him to reveal their thoughts without reserve, to "disclose the 
secrets of the heart", as Simeon said at the presentation in the temple.

What can happen, then, in a human life which is determined by all this? The 
answer must be: Anything and everything. The question as to what can or 
cannot happen can never be answered by asking in turn what would be 
intrinsically great or small, proper or improper, constructive or 
destructive, fulfilling or frustrating. Everything can happen, even that 
which at first sight seems to be utterly inconsistent with holiness or 
divinity.

The reality of Jesus is of the kind which orders existence, literally 
conditions it, to reveal all its potentialities. For this reason it is not 
confined to one special form of existence, but is capable of appealing to 
every form, of entering every form, of transforming every form of 
existence.


     ENDNOTES

     1. One might well ask if we have not in him, purely and simply,
     an example of the tragic figure of the prophet. This must be
     denied categorically. His figure was not like one of theirs. To
     begin with, it is striking that, unlike the Old Testament
     prophets, Jesus did not establish his authority by appealing to
     his calling. It is even more significant that he boldly claimed,
     unlike any of the prophets, to be the one model, rule standard
     and way. Hence his mighty: "But I say unto you . . ." instead of
     the typically prophetic: "Thus saith the Lord."



II. ACTIONS, CHARACTERISTICS, ATTITUDES


1. INTRODUCTION

What then are we to make of the psychology of Jesus? Having prepared the 
ground, we now ask this question aware of the difficulties involved. It is 
obvious that we are not concerned here with experimental psychology or the 
psychology of the conscious, or with any kind whatsoever of scientific 
analysis of the psychic processes as such, but with an attempt to 
understand, or to discover, the structure of the particular personality, to 
see how it works, how it acts, and, above all, what its inner motivating 
power is.

But even this is problematic when we are speaking about the person called 
Jesus. Psychology is embarrassingly inquisitive. It seeks to probe those 
things which the guardian-like inner personality prefers to keep hidden 
because they are sensitive and deserve respect. Psychology is indiscreet 
and tries to drag out into the open what modesty prefers to keep covered up 
because it may cause shame. A secret urge to destroy is at work in 
psychology and it knows that personality--a unique and inexplicable thing--
is in danger of falling apart once it is translated into universal concepts 
and dissected.

This is true of every human person, especially of great and unusual 
figures. But there is a type of mentality which cannot abide the 
intellectual power and nobility of the great figure, and attempts to use 
psychology against it. This is specially true of this figure who affects so 
profoundly every man who encounters him. Psychology can be used as a means 
of destroying his claims. We need only recall the painful attempts to 
interpret Jesus as a pathological case. The scientific and literary works 
dealing with the psychology of Jesus in this vein should be a warning to us 
of the worst that can be done along these lines.

It need hardly be said, then, that our essay has nothing whatever in common 
with such tendencies. We are prepared to confront something which is 
greater than ourselves, and which, moreover, calls us to account, even 
though we may not be able to stand up to the test.


2. JESUS THOUGHT

Let us begin with the psychic process most amenable to analytical 
treatment--namely, thinking.

How did Jesus think? Of what kind are the thoughts he expressed?

If we compare his thoughts with those of other religious leaders, they 
seem, for the most part, to be very simple, at least as expressed in the 
Synoptic Gospels. It is true that if we take the word "simple" to mean 
"easily penetrated" or "primitive", then this impression is dispelled on 
closer analysis. The thought of Jesus is neither analytical nor synthetic: 
it states basic facts; and states them in a way at once enlightening and 
confusing. Very seldom, and then for the most part only in St. John, do his 
thoughts reach a metaphysical plane. Even then they do nothing more than 
state a plain fact. The only thing is that he happens to be speaking of the 
sublimity and hiddenness of the existence of God, speaking of the mystery 
of the Christian life. For the most part, the thought of Jesus, as 
expressed in his sayings, remains close to the immediate reality of things, 
of man and the latter's encounter with God. It is solidly realistic; but 
the realism is that of the man who is stripped bare by the judge of God and 
made new by his grace.

And so, Jesus speaks neither of the origin nor of the nature of the 
universe. He takes it for granted that the universe was created by God and 
finds its meaning in him; that it lies cradled in the hollow of his hand, 
and that he is guiding it towards a blessed future.

Nor does Jesus speak expressly about the nature of God. He presupposes what 
had been said about him in the revelation of the Old Testament, and passes 
on to its fulfillment by making known the way in which God is a Person, the 
way in which he can say "I" and "Thou" within himself. He does this, not 
speculatively in philosophical or theological language, but in a concrete 
way. He takes his stand within this divine life and speaks from it, as each 
successive occasion arises. Jesus spoke with greatest conviction about the 
Father, not revealing the ultimate mystery of this Fatherhood by explaining 
how we ought to think about it and how it is related to human fatherhood, 
but by telling us how this Father thinks and acts, and how man is to 
interpret God's Fatherhood seriously. Man will then achieve a real, 
existential encounter with God and come to the possession of the divine 
nature. His last word on the Father was said in the form of a prayer. A 
prayer is not doctrine but a guide to action. It exists, not to be thought 
about, but to be acted upon. If this is done. the worshipper begins to 
understand more clearly the nature of the One to whom he has turned.

Jesus was for ever speaking about Providence--again, not speculatively but 
with direct reference to reality; so much so that we are almost tempted to 
interpret his words as the simple pious man's philosophy of life, or even 
as a kind of beautiful childish fairy-tale (cf. the image of the birds and 
flowers in Mat. 6. 26, 28). The truth of the matter is that he presupposes 
the whole Old Testament view of the relationship of God to the world. It is 
a profoundly serious view and, for us today especially, of far-reaching 
significance. Jesus totally disregards questions about the possibility of 
God's providence, or about the precise relationship between the existence 
of God and the course of world history. He adopts a different approach: he 
provides us with a guide to the workings of providence, telling us in the 
Sermon on the Mount: "Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God and his 
justice; and all these things shall be added unto you" (Mat. 6. 33). This 
is no theoretical statement but a guide to the starting-point for action, a 
signal to start off, and a promise that strength will be given us on the 
way. And once a man has committed himself, he soon discovers that he is 
caught up in a process which demands nothing less than the complete 
reorientation of his whole life. To the extent that he does this, he 
achieves a true vision of reality.

Much more could be said about Jesus' conception of man, his moral teaching, 
and so on. Theoretical questions about the nature of existence play no part 
in his thinking--as the latter is expressed in his words: what lies beyond 
is unknown to us. It plays no part, not because it does not exist, but 
because Jesus' thoughts are oriented towards reality.

His thought was not intended to be a research course, a scheme, a mere 
intellectual construction or system, but to proclaim something which did 
not yet exist but was to come--namely, the kingdom of God. It pointed to a 
new reality and declared that it was meant for us. It made men cognizant of 
the fact that in view of this new reality events had been preparing which 
were now on the point of coming to pass. His thought is pre-speculative; 
but in a way different from the child or primitive man who has yet felt no 
need of facing the problem of truth in all its profundity. His thought is 
demonstrative, somewhat like that of the scientist who says: Here is a 
process in operation, something which has not yet been known, a possibility 
you have not yet grasped, powers which have not yet been at your command--
be on the watch for them. Going deeper, we see the issue in another light 
as something still more fundamental. This reality can only be created by 
him, that is, by the Father through him. For example, the relationship of 
being a child of God is made possible solely because of the existence of 
Jesus. So then, he places himself at the very first movement in the 
creation of this relationship. His words are therefore authoritative in the 
fullest sense of the word. They are gift-bearing. Only because he lives, 
acts and speaks, does what he is speaking about exist. Only then can we 
begin to reflect about what has been discovered, about its nature and its 
relation to what we already knew, and so on. What he does is prior to all 
speculation because speculation is possible only as a result of what he 
does.

All this makes it quite clear that his thought eludes psychology. All we 
can say is that it is clear, concise, utterly responsible, with no trace of 
self or superfluity, concentrated solely on what is essential. He says--and 
says because he has brought it about: This is so. This is happening. Do 
this; power to do it has been given you. If you do this, things will turn 
out thus, and so on. There can be no "psychology" about this sort of thing, 
because it cannot be categorized. We are dealing with a revelation which is 
initiatory and creative and therefore incapable of being made an object of 
analysis. It is only from within this revelation, as for example about the 
manner in which it is experienced or effected, that some kind of analysis 
is possible.


3. JESUS VOLITION AND ACTION

What about Jesus' willing and doing?

There are men whose interest is to know truth, to examine it thoroughly, 
and to explain it to others. Jesus was not one of these. He was concerned, 
as we have seen, with a reality that was not yet complete but was destined 
to be: with the reality of the sacred history of God and man; with the 
fulfillment of a divine decree and the consummation of an eternal destiny; 
with the coming of a new order of existence, that is, with willing and 
doing. But how did he will? How did he act?

It is not easy to answer these questions either. Once again our only way 
out is to make distinctions. Jesus did not exercise his will like a soldier 
making an attack; nor like an engineer drawing up his plans, weighing the 
possibilities, seeing and using all the means at his disposal; nor yet like 
a reformer with a guiding principle and a practical program, or a workman 
who has his task and performs it step by step. And we must distinguish, 
too, when it comes to the means that he applied. Jesus did not use force 
by, for instance, gathering men around him and going ahead. He employed no 
hypnotism which, with his tremendous personality, he could easily have 
done. He did not operate by making promises of any sort, holding out the 
prospect of advantage in order to win agreement to his policy. He neither 
threatened nor bluffed. He appealed neither to appetite nor imagination.... 
How, then, did he will and act?

His will was of great power. It was perfectly at one with itself, without 
fear, prepared for anything that might happen, conscious that the stake was 
the one thing of supreme importance--the decisive moment for the whole of 
existence. It knew also that, in the absolute sense, the "time" had come. 
At the same time it was completely calm, unhurried, not to be pressed. And 
while his heart may have been filled with pain at the destruction of that 
infinite possibility, this did not affect his behavior.

Jesus' will was in perfect union with the will of his Father who guides 
sacred history and fixes the appointed "hours" for things. The basic 
mystery of sacred history is this: God wills the coming of his kingdom and 
his will makes all things possible. But this will addresses itself to man's 
freedom and so can be rejected by man. As a result, the opportunity given 
only once can be missed; guilt and misery can arise, and yet all things 
remain encompassed by the will of God. This mystery permeated the volition 
of Jesus. He was aware of the infinite demands of the moment and did all he 
could to fulfill them. But the possibilities were measured not by human but 
by divine standards; and so there was no anxiety, no uneasiness, no excited 
activity. On the other hand, this resignation had nothing fatalistic about 
it.

What was wrong remained wrong, and the missed opportunity was not offered 
again. Yet appeal is made to a mystery which permits us to hope for all 
things, because in it love and almighty power are one and the same.

This will is firmly oriented towards its goal. It follows no program that 
has to be carried out: what must be done at each moment arises of itself 
from the situation which develops at each step, depending upon the "hour 
which has come" (John 2. 4; 7. 30; 8. 20). This will is so compelling that 
Jesus says, in St. John, that it is like hunger for the food which 
maintains life (4. 34). At the same time, he fully respects man's freedom. 
He never does it violence, by suggestion or inspiration, fear or surprise. 
The responsibility of the listener is always elicited and guided to the 
point where it must pronounce its own Yes or No.

Jesus was governed by a mighty, unerring, indomitable will, but he had 
neither "aims" nor "intentions". This will arose from no urge to create, 
dominate, reform; it was rooted in that reality of which we have spoken 
before. A work of God had come to maturity: "The kingdom of God is at hand" 
(Mark 1. 15). His will is to open up the road to this, but with the help of 
the truth of God which would be obscured by every act of mere human will, 
and with the help of man's freedom which would be compromised by any act of 
compulsion.

Will is inclined to isolate itself in its act of willing, to wrench reality 
away from truth and dominate it by force. No such thing happened with 
Jesus. His will was merely the obverse side of his knowledge, and his goal 
was truth alone.

Here, too, must be sought the source of Jesus' fearlessness. This is not 
merely an expression of individual temperament. It does not mean that he 
had strong nerves, that he was cool-headed, resilient or enterprising; that 
he viewed danger as an intensification of life or felt himself to be 
carried along by fate. His fearlessness lay in his calm identification with 
reality.

He presented reality, this reality which is sacred truth, each time it was 
necessary, as the occasion demanded. He did so without fear, being himself 
hidden in that reality, because all that he desired was that reality, and 
he was ready to make any sacrifice for its sake. He did this, however, not 
like some enthusiast or fanatic who fails to see the consequences of his 
acts. He knew exactly what was going to happen. His courage came, rather, 
from the fact that in him will and truth were one, so that the greatest 
crisis which courage ever has to face, namely, when what is willed loses 
all meaning and the will sinks into the void, could never arise for him. He 
might suffer unimaginable torments; but the identity of his will with the 
meaning of it all, with truth, could never be destroyed.

What has been said thus far still does not enable us to understand the 
meaning of those words on the cross: "My God, my God, why hast thou 
forsaken me?" (Mat. 27. 46). To penetrate them we have to probe behind the 
question and ask in what sense he can be said to have felt the burden of 
responsibility for the guilt of the world on his shoulders and what 
relation that gives him to divine justice; but we cannot go into this 
here.[1]

We are now in a position to get some light on another question: Was Jesus 
well-advised in his behavior?

In any case, we can affirm that he displayed no kind of mere cleverness. 
There is no trace of any kind of tactics, no playing one man off against 
another, no seizing an opportunity offered by a situation, no deliberately 
concealing some things while exaggerating others or making inferential 
remarks, or so forth. And this reveals something very significant about the 
elevation of his personality. Cleverness is proper in its place: but it 
does not seem to be a part of true greatness, especially in the 
spiritually-minded, and, above all, the religious man.

Jesus' way of life displays none of those methods which men employ to 
protect themselves in the battle for existence and to gain their ends, by 
pitting subtlety against strength, cunning against superior power, 
experience against great resources. In the sphere of Jesus' life there were 
no peripheral values, but always and only the one sacred issue, the "one 
thing necessary"--the glory of the Father and the salvation of the world.

Must we say, then, that Jesus' life was determined by noble and lofty 
ideals?

Offhand we would be inclined to answer Yes; but then we might begin to be 
assailed by doubt. These doubts certainly do not imply that there was in 
Jesus' life anything mediocre or base, any concession to weakness, 
cowardice or indolence, any departure from his absolute ideal. Even so, we 
cannot classify his character as noble or lofty in the sense in which we 
might apply these epithets to a hero or idealist.

For example, if "honor" is the strong, inexorable, yet sensitive and 
vulnerable thing which it is in the lives of men who are characterized by 
it; if it is a law which places men in a higher category than other men, 
but at the same time exposes them to the continual danger and probability, 
even, of total failure and disaster, then this is certainly not the 
determining factor in the life of Jesus, as his behavior in its concluding 
phase shows. But this is not because he is found wanting in honor in any 
sense; it is because what is the decisive thing for him left honor far 
behind. There was indeed "honor" in his life; but it was his Father's 
honor, which gave rise to demands and entailed consequences which could not 
possibly be measured by the common view.

The same sort of thing is true of the values of greatness or graciousness 
or, indeed, any of the other aspects of "magnanimitas". Closer analysis 
always proves that, in him, these values have not the importance they have 
in other personalities dominated by them. And this is because the thing 
which is decisive for him not only soars above the levels of this world, 
but confronts this world and its values, judges them, and reveals the new 
order of the unknown God, the "kingdom of God".

We cannot say, therefore, that lack of "prudence" or "cleverness" on the 
part of Jesus revealed the noble folly of the perfect hero. He had nothing 
in common either with Siegfried or with Parsifal; not because he was less 
than they in any sense at all--an average, drab personality--but because he 
lived at a depth which makes even these great luminaries appear somewhat 
immature. Compared with him their brilliance pales.


     ENDNOTES

     1. See below, "Structures of Growth" Chap. 3, Part 2 ff.


4. JESUS AND MATERIAL THINGS

What attitude did Jesus adopt towards material things?

Did he even notice them? Obviously he did. This is proved by his parables 
about the "lilies of the field" (anemones), the birds of the air, the 
farmer and his kinship with the soil, the shepherd and his flock, the corn 
and the threshing floor, bread, and salt, and lamps. They also show that he 
was not indifferent to these things. He understood and appreciated them.

We must, of course, discount the sentimentality of legends and pious 
writers. In order to understand his relation to material things we must go 
back to the Old Testament views about God's creation. Things do not 
constitute "nature" in the modern sense. They are God's handiwork, and 
anything that happens is not some spontaneous natural process but proceeds 
from the power of God. Jesus was always referring to this creating and 
ruling God, completing the picture, however, by presenting him as the 
Father, and showing that God's activity was the work of the Father's 
Providence. This thought explains his attitude towards things. To him they 
were not merely scientific, poetic, or cultural data; they were the 
materials and tools of Providence.

Not only was Jesus perfectly at ease with all things; because his will was 
at one with his Father's, he felt himself to be Lord of all things. He was 
the one who had been sent. His will was not for his personal interests; it 
was devoted entirely to the purposes of his mission. And so through 
obedience to this mission, "all power in heaven and on earth" was given to 
him, a power as great as that of the Father himself. This is a staggering 
thought, but it is the view of Jesus. Yet this power is never apart from or 
contrary to that of the Father: it is always joined with it, in obedience 
to it. "My Father worketh until now; and I work" (John 5. 17). The saying: 
"If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say to this 
mountain, Remove from hence hither, and it shall remove" (Mat. 17. 20) is 
not a mere description of the limitless faith which his followers ought to  
have, but of his own faith too, only we cannot speak of his having "faith" 
in our sense of the word. He possesses, rather, that which evokes faith in 
us and makes it possible, namely, his essential identification with the 
truth and the will of the Father. That is why all things obey him.

When we look at his miracles in their true light, they reveal the peculiar 
contact in reality that the will of Jesus has with material things. This 
contact is not established through something in the way of "powers" of a 
higher order, but flows from obedience, from his union with the Father's 
will and the mighty course of sacred history, working itself out from hour 
to hour. At the point of contact between the exercise of the Father's power 
when he is forming the world that is to be, and the faith of men which 
links them with Providence, Christ is at work.

What value did things have for Jesus? What use were they to him? Did he 
enjoy them or prize them?

First of all, we must assert that he was not insensitive to the attraction 
of things. Had he been so, then an experience like that of the temptation 
in the wilderness (Mat. 4.
ff.) would not have made sense. "The kingdom 
of this world" could be used as a temptation only for someone who was aware 
of their "glory". Jesus was no ascetic. He said so himself in connection 
with John the Baptist's way of life. Jesus fully recognized this way of 
life; but he himself lived otherwise. Did they not even call him a "glutton 
and a wine-bibber" (Mat. 11. 19)? An account such as that of the marriage 
in Cana reveals anything but a contempt for things; and the same is true of 
the story, also in St. John, of the anointing with precious oil at Bethany 
(John 2. 1 ff.; 12. 1 ff.).On the other hand he himself mentions his lack 
of a home and possessions (Mat. 8. 20; 19. 21). Nowhere does he show any 
special interest in the value of things. Indeed, he warns us against the 
danger of this, especially in his sayings about the rich, in the parable 
about the needle's eye, and in the story about Lazarus the beggar.

We would, no doubt, be nearer the mark were we to say that he was 
completely detached from things, not as a result of self-discipline and a 
more spiritual view of things, but by nature. To him, things were simply 
there, part of his Father's world. He used them when it was necessary to do 
so, and took pleasure in them without making any special fuss over them.

Things represented no danger to him, as they do to men. But he does not 
demand of men that they should dispense with all things, as any ascetic or 
dualist system would. He asks men to free themselves from the thraldom of 
things. This idea is expressed most tellingly in the story of the rich 
young man (Mat. 19. 16 ff.). In answer to the question about what he should 
do in order to have eternal life, Jesus told him to keep the commandments, 
that is, to use things properly in obedience to the will of God; then all 
would be right. However, as soon as the desire to do even more is aroused, 
Jesus accepts this and even enters into the relationship of "love" for it. 
This is not because a man wants to be rid of evil things, but because he 
desires to attain greater freedom and love. And now Jesus says: "Go sell 
what thou hast and give to the poor." Jesus does not by any means demand 
that everybody should be poor. Many are to be: those, that is, who "are 
able to take it". Among men, such people are to be witnesses to the 
possibility of becoming free from all things; and as such they are to be a 
help to those who retain possessions, enabling them to maintain freedom 
while using them.


5. JESUS AND MEN

What was the attitude of Jesus towards men and women?

The New Testament shows him in various relationships: as a child to his 
parents; as an adult to his widowed mother; as a kinsman to his relations. 
He was the one awaited by his precursor, and the Master to his disciples. 
The band of Twelve are marked off from the other disciples and live on 
terms of special intimacy with him. Within the Twelve, the three who were 
present at the raising of Jairus' daughter, the Transfiguration, and in 
Gethsemane, are even closer to him than the rest. These are Peter, James 
and John. The last of these is "the disciple whom Jesus loved" (John 13. 
23; 21. 7).

He was bound by a special tie of friendship to the family at Bethany, and 
within that family he was particularly attracted to Mary (Luke 10. 38 ff.). 
He had another equally close attachment with Mary of Magdalen, who is found 
beside his grave at Easter (John 20. 11 ff.).

Then there is the crowd: the people with their needs, their longing for 
salvation, unreliable and changeable. A whole series of individuals can be 
singled out from among them: those whom he had helped, such as the deaf-
mute, the cripple, the blind man, the grateful leper, the centurion and his 
servant, and the woman with an issue of blood.

And there were many enemies, among whom, again, were such individuals as 
the inhospitable Pharisee. There were people who wanted to embarrass or 
hinder him, the disciple who betrayed him, and the individuals who took 
part in the events of his last two days.

That is to say, there were human relationships of all kinds, which gave 
scope to all kinds of different feelings of sympathy, attachment, animosity 
and strife. Can we find some characteristic attitude of Jesus in all this?

He approached men with an open heart. He was almost always to be found in 
the company of people. He had no house of his own where he could be alone: 
he was a guest wherever he lived. We might almost say that he had no 
"private life" at all. He was sensitive to men's needs and full of an 
inexhaustible readiness to help them. We recall words like these: "Come to 
me, all you that labor and are burdened; and I will refresh you" (Mat. 11. 
28), or: "And seeing the multitudes, he had compassion on them; because 
they were distressed and scattered abroad like sheep that have no shepherd" 
(Mat. 9. 36); or the parable of the shepherd who had lost one animal from 
his flock.

On the other hand, he was reserved towards men, even towards his closest 
friends. He always remained peculiarly detached. John says: "Jesus would 
not give them his confidence; he had knowledge of them all, and did not 
need assurances about any man, because he could read men's hearts" (John 2. 
24-5). He wanted nothing from men. Between him and men there was no 
community of mutual interests, not even one of common work. We never find 
him portrayed attempting to clarify an issue in common with his companions, 
or seeking with them a way to become master of some situation. We do not 
even find him working together with them. Apart from occasions devoted to 
common worship, like the Paschal meal, he is never even seen praying with 
them. And the only time he did look for comfort of human companionship, he 
did not find it: "Could you not watch one hour with me?" (Mat. 26. 40).

And so a continual solitude enveloped Jesus. There were always men about 
him, but among them he was alone.

His solitude arises because no one understands him. His enemies do not 
understand, the multitude does not, but neither do his disciples. The depth 
of this lack of understanding is revealed by a series of incidents. For 
example, there is the shattering experience described in Mark 8. 14 ff. 
They are together in a boat on the lake. He had been speaking about the 
leaven of the Pharisees and they assume that he is talking about the 
provisions they had forgotten to bring with them. So he says plainly: "Why 
do you discuss the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet know or 
understand? Have you still your heart blinded? Having eyes, see you not? 
And having ears, hear you not?" Then he reminds them of the recent miracle 
of feeding the multitude. "How do you yet not understand?" Or, we can 
recall the scenes when he was arrested and put to death; or the sense in 
which they understood his message about the coming of the kingdom of God 
right up to and including the time after Easter (Acts 1. 6).

This lack of understanding constitutes to a decisive degree Jesus' fate. To 
see how deep that misunderstanding was, we have only to note the radical 
change which took place in the attitude of the disciples after Pentecost. 
Thus, the life of Jesus is lacking in every presupposition for being 
understood. It is well to be quite clear in our minds just how much this 
meant.

We gain the impression of a rigid isolation; a muteness in spite of much 
speaking. For life only begins to unfold before us from the heart of the 
other; and the word we speak is only perfected in the ear of one who 
understands. It is this isolation of Jesus which St. John tries to express 
in his Prologue in terms of the barrier which is raised up between him and 
the world: "And the darkness did not comprehend it (the light). . . He 
came unto his own and his own received him not" (John 1. 5, 11). Connected 
with this is the impression we get of the futility, in the ordinary sense, 
of the activity of Jesus. With most religious leaders in history, their new 
message usually began to be felt, after a period of struggle, within their 
own lifetime. By contrast, Jesus was to see no return at all; we are 
reminded of the picture of the grain of wheat which must die before it can 
bring forth fruit (John 12. 24); even in his disciples. This 
misunderstanding did not arise merely because his message was too lofty, 
but because it came from a God whom no one knew, and because between his 
message and mankind there lay the indispensable revolution in values which 
the Gospel calls "metanoia" (repentance). For this reason understanding 
could only come through the Holy Spirit who was to be sent by that selfsame 
God.

It might now be asked why this Spirit had not come sooner, in Jesus' own 
lifetime; or why he who supported Jesus' being--see the account of the 
baptism--and accomplished his words, had not been transmitted to his 
audience. This is a circle which we are unable to break. People do not 
understand because the Holy Spirit has not come to them. He does not come, 
because they are not ready for him. Yet this very preparedness is itself a 
gift of the Holy Spirit. Thus, normal thinking can find a way neither in 
nor out. This is the mystery of the new beginning in God himself, and as 
such it is inscrutable. But this much is certain: Jesus' message fell on 
deaf ears.

It was his existence, even more than what he said, that remained 
misunderstood, for it and his message were one. What his message was if we 
consider it as doctrine and proclaimed potentiality is that he himself was 
as an existent being. Let us take the concept of the focal point of 
existence. This is the spiritual fulcrum on which men balance their lives, 
the point of departure from which they approach both men and things and to 
which they return from them again. The greater and more exalted the 
personality, the deeper lies this focal point. Whether or not a man 
understands other men depends upon his capacity for observation and 
sympathy, upon his power to see things as a whole, and penetrate them; but 
most of all it depends upon the extent to which his own depth of existence 
is equal to or greater than that of others. We will have more to say about 
the nature of Jesus' existence later; but we may say here that the 
starting-point from which he looked upon, judged and confronted men, 
rejoiced and suffered, are obviously unfathomably deeper than that of his 
environment. For Jesus there was no such thing as a "we" in the sense of a 
direct community of existence, but only in the sense of a sovereign love 
which loves before others are capable of loving, and without their being 
capable of reciprocating the love shown them. Scarcely a single act of 
genuine communal existence is recorded in the Gospels; scarcely one true 
"we" in the strict sense of the term. Not even in prayer is it ever 
expressed. The resume of his message from the Father, and the basis of the 
proper relationship to him, were given by Jesus in the prayer, Our Father. 
The subject of the Our Father is the "we" of the Christian: but Jesus never 
repeated this prayer with his disciples, never included himself with this 
"we". There is no place, as far as I can see, where he took the lead in 
joining together with his disciples in prayer. Where he himself is seen to 
pray, as for example at the end of the Last Supper, and still more 
strikingly, in the Garden of Olives, he speaks and adopts an attitude which 
no other man can imitate.


6. EMOTION IN THE LIFE OF JESUS

Another equally instructive question is that concerning the part played by 
feeling in the life of Jesus.

In him we observe various kinds of emotional reaction. These show us that 
he was not cold and aloof, either by nature or by self-discipline. Thus we 
learn that he had pity on the people because of their suffering (Mat. 9. 
36); that he "looked at and loved" a man in whom something special was 
going on (Mark 10. 21); that he was irritated by the hypocrisy of those who 
watched to see if he would heal the sick on the Sabbath: he looked "round 
about on them with anger" (Mark 3. 5); that he expressed anger at the 
stupidity of the disciples: "Do you not yet know or understand?" (Mark 8. 
17); that he "rejoiced in the Holy Spirit" at the return of those whom he 
had sent out (Luke 10. 21), and so on. Obviously the sick and the suffering 
would never have come to him with such confidence; children would never 
have approached him for a blessing had they not felt a warm sympathy 
emanating from him. And the accounts about Gethsemane and Golgotha indicate 
anything but an unimpressionable nature or the attitude of one who was a 
stern ascetic, above all emotion.

And we could cite many other examples. In spite of this, however, the 
impression we have of Jesus' nature is one of complete calm under all 
conditions, a calm which has the same origin as his fearlessness.

This is revealed most clearly in connection with his mission. He proclaimed 
publicly that the kingdom of God was about to come openly and that the 
transformation of history, awaited by the prophets, was about to come to 
pass. This depended, however, upon the acceptance of his message by those 
who were being called. And so, it might be assumed, he must have been 
experiencing great excitement, wondering whether this would happen. In 
fact, we find no trace of this at all. His words and acts are not one whit 
different from what they are at every moment, as dictated by the will of 
the Father. When the moment of decision urges, Jesus does nothing to alter 
the course of events or to ease their effects. This attitude is made 
particularly clear once the decision has been taken. For example, the scene 
at Caesarea Philippi shows that it does not arise from any lack of feeling 
(Mat. 16. 21 ff.). When Jesus began to speak of the terrible things which 
were to happen to him and Peter tried to remonstrate with him, we are told 
that he turned and upbraided him (Mat. 16. 23). It was as though he could 
not bear to hear anything that might upset his decision, and one feels how 
his inner calm was being threatened by the horror of what was to happen. 
All the more impressive, therefore, is the way in which his calm continues, 
the way it lasts through all his experiences and enables him to go on 
teaching and helping men, strengthening him never to allow himself to be 
deflected by one hairbreadth from the perfect course of his mission, but, 
moment by moment, to perform all that that mission requires.

Let us stress once more, however, that in all this there is no trace of the 
imperturbability of the Stoic or the renunciation of a Buddha. Jesus is 
fully alive, fully sentient, fully human. His deep calm and human warmth in 
a situation which was becoming increasingly hopeless revealed what John 
meant when he wrote: "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you; not 
as the world giveth, do I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled; 
nor let it be afraid" (John 14. 27). These words are all the more 
significant because they were spoken on the last occasion when he was with 
his friends, just before the end.


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 bas