CHRIST – AND THE SECOND CHRIST

1 6 1 R C H R I S T — A N D T H E S E C O N D C H R I S T J A R O S L A V P E L I K A N Vol. 74, no. 3, Spring 1985 Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of supermagnet, to pull up out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left? It is from his birth that most of the human race dates its calendars, it is by his name that millions curse and in his name that millions pray. The larger study from which the following is an extract is a history of portraits of Jesus as they have appeared from the first century to the twentieth. Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of that history is the kaleidoscopic variety those portraits have assumed over the years. ‘‘Each successive epoch,’’ Albert Schweitzer once said, ‘‘found its own thoughts in Jesus, which was, indeed, the only way in which it could make him live’’; for, typically, one ‘‘created him in accordance with one’s own character.’’ Precisely because this is so, an important part of our task is to set these portraits into their historical contexts. We need to see what it was that each age brought to its portrayal of Jesus, for the way in which an age depicts him is often a key to its special genius. 1 6 2 P E L I K A N Y One of the most crucial of those portraits to the world in general (and, if I may say so, to me personally) is the image that began to emerge early in the sixth century of Christ as the model of the perfect monk, and, early in the thirteenth century, of Francis of Assisi as the perfect exemplar of that model. The part played by the monastic orders in placing Jesus in the history of culture simply cannot be overstated. Indeed, Protestant scholars from Francis Parkman to Kenneth Scott Latourette have flatly noted that the name of Jesus Christ would have remained largely unknown in Europe and in the Americas ‘‘but for the monks.’’ And the importance of Saint Francis is as easily described. If a public opinion poll were to ask a representative group of informed and thoughtful people, ‘‘Which historical figure of the past two thousand years has most fully embodied the life and teachings of Jesus Christ?’’ the person mentioned most often would certainly be Francis of Assisi. That answer might, if anything, be even more frequent if the people polled were not a≈liated with any church. And it is probably also the answer that many of his own contemporaries would have given to such a question – or, at any rate, those who lived within a century or so after him. For in Francis of Assisi the imitation of the life of Jesus and the obedience to his teachings (which were, at least in principle, binding on every believer) attained such a level of fidelity as to earn for him the designation, eventually made o≈cial by Pope Pius XI in 1926, of ‘‘a second Christ [alter Christus].’’ 1 They left everything and followed him. ‘‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’’ (Matthew 16:24): these words of Jesus in the Gospels had been, from the very beginning, a summons to discipleship. But early in the sixth century they became the charter of Western Christian monasticism, which denied the world for the sake of Christ and then went on to conquer the world in the name of Christ. This saying also shaped the portrait of Jesus as the perfect monk. For he in a unique sense had denied himself and had taken up his cross, and by this denial of the world he had conquered the C H R I S T — A N D T...