CRISTIANESIMO

CHRISTIANITY. – The religion founded by Jesus Christ.

SUMMARY:

I. Time and Expansion

II. Value and Characteristics

III. Vitality in History

IV. Doctrinal Features.

I. TIME AND EXPANSION

Christianity inserts into the tradition of Judaism (v. HEBREWS) a new revelation and a new spiritual life, and arises at the culminating moment of Greco-Roman civilization, five centuries after Confucius (v.) had given Chinese Buddha (v.) had initiated the vast spiritual movement that was to spread from India throughout the Far East. With Christianity begins the era now generally adopted in the civilized world. Although from its very beginning it affirms its universality by reaching toward Persia and India, its immediate success is in the Mediterranean world. In less than three centuries, despite fierce opposition from official powers and paganism, it becomes the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, then survives the crisis of the barbarian invasions and converts Celts, Germans, Hungarians, and Slavs. During the roughly thousand-year period from about 500 to 1500, it inspires and shapes an RAGES (v.), and continues to exert its influence as one of the essential factors in the subsequent modern civilization. Today Christians are estimated at slightly over 800 million, a little more than a third of the world’s total population. Even where they are in the minority, Christianity makes its influence felt either directly as a religion through its spiritual vitality or indirectly through the civil mentality derived from II. This indirect influence holds sway in all regions of the earth because no area escapes either the dominion or the economic, political, and cultural influence of the powers of European civilization.

II. VALUE AND CHARACTERISTICS

This historical position of Christianity may already suggest a provisional and extrinsic judgment of superiority over other religions of humanity, but more valuable are intrinsic considerations.

1. First, the personality of its founder. The figure of Jesus towers above that of every other known man, even among the founders of religions (the so-called great initiates) and other historical figures of purest renown, such as Socrates. The personality of Jesus has been felt in every age by the saints, who relive it in the most varied ways, across every possible variety of class, age, sex, condition, intellect and culture, environment, and historical circumstances—all of them alike in one thing: loving him as a living person with a devotion that knows no bounds, learning from him a moral perfection ever more sublime, recognizing in him the source and nourishment of every virtue, and seeing in him alone the revelation, suited to us men, of the Divinity. The lives of the saints, not so much considered individually as taken collectively, constitute a distinctive feature of Christianity in contrast to other religions. These may possess virtuous souls and ascetics; they do not have saints. Only Jesus has had and still shows himself to have such a spiritual progeny.

2. Christianity then excels in its concept of the Divinity. Already Jewish monotheism, true but incomplete, had proclaimed the spirituality of God; yet, entirely focused on preventing any confusion between creature and Creator and the idolatry that would follow, it had only an initial concept of the Spirit as the Ineffable transcending all sensible reality, the Absolute One sufficient to Himself, the Omnipotent who creates the universe from nothing. But delving deeper into the concept of Spirit, “God may be said, with St. Thomas (De potentia, q. 11, a. 1),” to be by His very essence in a perfect act of intellection and therefore of love. Only in the explicit recognition of this essential actuality can a complete worship of God be founded: “God is spirit; and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:24). The Ineffable thus reveals Himself in His intimate essence, which is His very Life: an eternal and simultaneous process of Intellect and Love in which true spiritual unity is realized. No other religion rises to such concepts. The revelation of the Old Testament suggested only vague intimations of them; but Judaism, having rejected Jesus Christ, proved incapable of understanding them and closed itself within an opaque monotheism alien to the most intimate meaning of the Spirit. Islam followed the same path, adding to it the doctrine of fatalism, which further distances God from human souls.

3. The concept of religion follows from that of the Divinity. Christianity, without denying or neglecting the feelings of sacred awe and invocation of help toward the deity common to all religions, teaches that these must be surpassed by seeing in God not only the source of every material and moral benefit for us but Love itself, worthy of being cherished and served with limitless and disinterested devotion. This gives rise in the soul to an unceasing striving for moral growth, aimed at ever higher degrees of goodness, that is, of greater likeness to divine goodness: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). Thus worship, both interior and exterior, must be permeated by this spirit: religion in its fullest act is charity and divine holiness communicated to man. Yet man receives this as a free being and must freely practice II. Moral freedom is so essential an attribute of human persons that God Himself respects II. He loves His creatures and asks to be loved in return, making this the glory that creation can render to Him; but the return must be free, as must be the conscious cooperation that divine Providence expects from men in carrying out His plan for the universe—a plan that is history itself. The final destiny of each person is to know and possess God and to be possessed by Him: a relationship that is limited by the finitude of the creature but is always immediate, “face to face.” This is “eternal life,” which already begins in the present life, through charity, according to the explicit teaching of St. John the Evangelist and St. Paul. Christian charity gives universality in Christianity its own distinctive tone, setting it apart from the universalist tendencies of other religions such as Buddhism and Islam. Charity between human beings, while meeting an insuppressible human need—so much so that one may say nothing is more “natural” than it—at the same time assumes a supernatural realization in that, through the Incarnation, it becomes a corollary of the charity between God and man: it is the love of Christ for the rest of humanity. It is an act of love in which the one who loves is both God and man, so that His human love acquires a divine value and fruitfulness in which those who believe in Him can share. The universality of Christianity therefore extends not only to all individual members of the human race and all the peoples of the earth but aims to be realized in every possible way, in every conceivable and practicable form of good by which one person can benefit and serve another, with an order of wisdom that makes the good done more extensive and effective, with the utmost dedication and self-sacrifice, reproducing the charity with which Christ has loved us. Christianity is inexhaustible and tireless in finding ever new forms of charity in response to the spiritual, intellectual, and material needs of men, and in this it has surpassed all other religions in every age since its existence.

4. The love of God and of neighbour is the concise formula, established by Jesus Christ Himself, of Christian morality. It expresses in concrete and popular language the abstract philosophical concept that connects morality with the ordered actualization of personal values. First of all, every moral act is posited by a will, that is, by a person; moreover, it tends toward an end. In whom is the end of the moral act realized? Primarily in God, that is, in the personal Being par excellence, and secondarily in those beings that are His true image, namely, intelligent beings, who are also persons. Other beings are non-personal things and therefore have only instrumental value; as incomplete beings, they cannot be loved in themselves. Only “persons” have a title to be loved in themselves, though to varying degrees, depending on whether their personal being is essential goodness or merely participated goodness: God and intelligent creatures, among whom there is an order of unity and distinction. This order is precisely indicated by those simple words: love God and neighbour. From this, one understands the unsurpassed spirituality of Christian morality, which grasps the essence of values in the totality of existences and maintains their hierarchy, without allowing what is merely elemental, vegetative, or animal life to assume a place that does not belong to it in the practical esteem that man has for beings—an offense to the dignity of the spirit, that is, of God Himself, of whom spiritual beings are the true and only image in creation. Thus, the valorization of spirituality, or what amounts to the same thing, of personality, is the profound soul of Christian morality; and while it directly tends on the one hand to promote an unceasing moral progress, individual and collective, on the other it cultivates the human instinct to value intelligence. This is the faculty that renders man capable of mastering the material world and constitutes the basis of personality. By its virtue, man becomes conscious of his own dignity, a consciousness that is strengthened with the growth of his knowledge and his dominion over cosmic forces. Christian morality teaches him to make these forces a means for increasing moral good in the world. Thus, a higher value is communicated to non-spiritual things than they would naturally possess, and it appears that Christian morality, by affirming the primacy of the spirit, does not exclude or depreciate all that lies outside it, as some have claimed. On the contrary, it saves science from possible aberrations by directing it toward the Supreme Good, and in a certain way ennobles inferior nature, giving a new, supernatural function to earthly goods: transforming them from instruments of human egoism into instruments of divine Charity.

5. The singular loftiness of Christian morality is generally acknowledged; even Gandhi (q.v.) exalted the “Sermon on the Mount,” while reproaching Christian peoples for not being faithful to II. Yet it is also true that among them this spiritual code has been handed down for centuries, respected and inwardly venerated even by those who see in that very code their condemnation: an index of a potential inner conversion. In any case, the law of the Gospel makes no concessions, whether explicit or tacit, to human passions. Jesus showed Himself merciful to sinners, but He wanted them to open their hearts to the whole truth. For example, in the face of sexual instincts, no founder of a religion behaved as He did. The Buddha did not consider chastity in relation to the dignity of the human person, that is, in its true moral aspect. He condemned every use of the senses in general, including sexual intercourse, not as sin, but as attachment to life, as an impediment to liberation from suffering, that is, from individual existence. Muhammad saw the moral problem, but it is well known how, in its practical solution, he made concessions to the violence of the instincts of fallen man and to the customs of his people, sanctioning polygamy and divorce and tolerating concubinage. Jesus unhesitatingly puts His finger on the wound. Marriage itself is from God; but it is the hardness of heart, the σκληροκαρδία (Mt 19:8), the failure to know how to love, that leads to divorce, while the man who looks at a woman to use her as an instrument of his pleasure, *ad concupiscendam eam* (Mt 5:28), does not love her according to the dignity of the human person: similarly, it must be said that only in monogamy can full mutual love be given. In any case, it is the person—both of man and of woman—that is offended, debased, and degraded; thus the very essence of morality is violated. And this is never permissible, absolutely, for no excuse, for no reason. Jesus knew men and knew with what fury their flesh would rebel against such an imposition; and yet He did not hesitate to proclaim II. But the tone of His proclamation is that of one who calls men to look within themselves, to recognize a truth they ought to have known from the essence of their own humanity, in a clearer recognition of their very nature, of their very origin: “It was not so from the beginning” (Mt 19:8). Thus too, to all, not only to a class of special initiates, He imposes the “new commandment,” as He calls it, or “my commandment,” that of loving one another as He has loved us, and therefore also loving enemies and forgiving every offense. And He wills it to be carried out without compromise or evasion: here too His morality remains unique in its demands. Yet He does not fail to leave a vast field for freedom and individual initiative, especially in the choice of means by which one may aim at the perfection of the love of God and neighbour, among which He indicates some as more directly appropriate to achieve it and richer in supernatural magnanimity in themselves (such as poverty, virginity, obedience); but He wills that they be chosen by the Christian of his own free will, in an act of free love, in which God does not wish to give orders but only to invite, almost with the humble discretion that is not offended by a refusal. Moreover, there is no area of human life in which Christian morality does not urge man to be uncompromising in making his conscience ever more delicate, his intention ever purer. The call to “interiority,” to self-formation, to spiritual humility is continuous: a stimulus at all times to unceasing improvement, and in periods of decline, to awakening, reform, and renewal.

6. While the Church directly proposes the salvation of each human soul as having infinite value for itself, it is nonetheless characteristic of her to unite men with one another, to promote a sense of social responsibility, and to organize into communities. In every way, she strives to remove whatever may erect barriers between man and man, between people and people, and above all, whatever constitutes an insufficient recognition of human dignity or a danger and temptation for man to fall short of II. Ordinarily, the Church does not directly confront customs or positive laws that sanction such insufficiencies or dangers, but by influencing hearts, she creates the convictions that cause those customs or laws to fall away of their own accord. This is what happened with slavery, which among Christians generally ceased in practice before it was officially abolished. This is how the Church acts among those peoples in whom the social condition of women does not seem to reflect their full personal dignity.

Moreover, it is part of the Church’s spirit to infuse into social and political life, in general, a leaven of transformation aimed at making human society a kingdom of God on earth, a prelude to heavenly beatitude. Indeed, the phrase “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven,” which resounds as the dominant motif of the Synoptic Gospels, does not signify merely the life to come, but also the Church—the society of men among themselves that springs from their communion with God the Father and with the Son made man (1 John 1:3). It is true that, in its direct meaning here, the Church refers to the sacramental and hierarchical society in which the sanctification and eternal salvation of the faithful are effected; yet it is equally true that the Church cannot neglect either the glory that comes to the Father from the realization, even in this world, of social justice with the happiness it can bring, or the aid to the elevation of the human person that may result from a better temporal ordering of society. The Church therefore cannot remain indifferent to the progress of social life, even if she does not consider it her immediate and ordinary task to form cities and States.

The Church tends by her very nature to foster the social advancement of the poor and the lowly; yet always respecting the spontaneity of historical processes and developments, and confining herself to imposing the limits deriving from the moral principle that “evil is not to be done that good may come” (Rom. 3:8). The happiness even of the entire universe does not justify a single deliberate venial sin: on this point Christian morality is absolute, and this is one of its incomparable excellences. Yet, provided the morality of the means is preserved, the Church by her nature urges men along the path of social improvement, for this too is a way of celebrating “the kingdom of God.” In fact, it is in Christian countries that most has been done—and is still being done—toward that end.

Moreover, it is only the Church that has given man the effective word of consolation in suffering, that terrible legacy of humanity, and has shown, in depth, through the image of the Crucified, its purifying, educative, and elevating function.

7. Finally, the Church excels in her adaptability and understanding in the realm of reality. She accepts any kind of government, even if primitive, and knows how to conform to the mentalities of the most diverse peoples or races. Where she finds barbarism, she seeks to spread the elements of human civilization, a necessary foundation for a community of Christians, yet without suppressing or contradicting the characteristic tendencies and customs of each people, so long as they are compatible with the demands of natural law and the message of Christ. Where she finds an advanced civilization, as in the ancient Roman world or today in China, she embraces all that is good and lawful in it, infusing it with a new spirit. And in every case, she has shown herself capable of giving new life to whatever already existed.

There is no field of human activity—especially the noblest ones, such as scientific and philosophical thought, law, economics and politics, literature, music, the visual arts, architecture, and any other cultural expression—that has not received from the Church a special impulse, a distinctive inspiration, and a new style. Moreover, organized works of charity toward every form of human infirmity and misfortune are her creation: hospitals, asylums, refuges for the insane, orphanages, and so forth. The Christian must appropriate whatever is good and noble in the world, according to the Apostle’s teaching: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil. 4:8). The Church directs such interest toward moral improvement and religious evolution. There is no custom to which she does not give recognition in what it contains of spiritual or spiritualizable value, and thus she accompanies the changing of times in such a way as not to lose any of the potential human and religious value of spontaneous gestures and usages, even if tied to transient environmental motives, as, for example, was the case with medieval chivalry. In this universal power of assimilation, the Church’s vitality is at once revealed, and the drama of her earthly history is occasioned.

### III. VITALITY IN HISTORY

The Church presents the message of Jesus as a gift by which the Divinity gives of itself to man: “God so loved the world as to give his only-begotten Son” (Jn 3:16). This gift implies a “coming” of God into history and a cooperation which He desires from man in His designs for creation—a cooperation of man’s intelligence, will, and freedom, called in some way to contribute to the unfolding of the Revelation of divine Grace in the world. Preaching and sacramental action will be carried out by men, and for this reason Jesus will invest them with His Spirit (Lk 24:49), and the Holy Spirit will accompany human action, purifying it, vivifying it, strengthening it; yet this action will also be called upon to deploy all the energies proper to it, and for this reason it must also face fatigue, obstacles, and struggle. The history of the Church will therefore be a series of crises before the final victory. Vital crises, yet crises nonetheless. From the very beginning, while the Apostles—who had received the message directly from Jesus—were still alive, problems of principle and practice arose. After overcoming the opposition of the Judaizers (q.v.), who sought to confine the action of the Gospel within the limits of the Old Testament, the Apostles turned to the “Gentiles,” to the peoples of the world hitherto excluded from the covenant with God. The first they encountered were those of the Roman Empire, with its advanced civilization and preparation that facilitated the spread of the good news and the establishment of a strong center of action. The Church recognizes this as a providential fact, granting to Greek and Latin a place of honor among the human languages it intends to speak, in accordance with the prophetic charism of Pentecost.

In that civilization, the preeminence of philosophical reflection and reason, matured in Greece, was well known. The Church made use of this to give expression to revealed truths and to provide an organic form for the study and preaching of those truths. Thus, upon the data furnished by Revelation, there arose a science—theology—which, unlike Revelation itself, develops and progresses like every human science. The Church acknowledges the legitimacy of reason’s and philosophy’s function and does not hesitate to avail itself of the instrument offered at that moment.

The heresies that arise from time to time have their root in an abuse of subjective human reason, ambitious to substitute itself for the supernatural light that comes only from Christ and can reach us only through the channel He established: Tradition (q.v.). In heretics, this pretension is often clothed in mystical motives, and in any case it takes hold of Revelation, still accepted as a higher light. In more recent centuries, however, the rebellions of reason are unclothed; philosophy proclaims its self-sufficiency. It is not satisfied with autonomy in the realm of natural knowledge and method: it wishes to be all Spirit and all man. This is a position incompatible with the Church; yet this does not mean that the Church rejects every work of reason and philosophy. It continues to appreciate them in themselves as characteristic activities of human nature as God created it, and for the advantages that religion in fact derives from them; but it also invites them to recognize their natural limits and the order to which they belong. In doing so, it renders them a great service, for it moralizes intellectual labor. Moreover, the Church strengthens the act by which reason adheres to Truth, making its divine origin evident and thus fortifying man against the snares of skepticism, which is one of the paths by which man becomes alienated from himself.

Furthermore, the Church has given philosophy in general a more spiritual tone and a deeper and broader problematic, providing new subjects for meditation and suggesting solutions that, when subjected to the test of philosophical method, may enter the field of philosophy. The historical relations of the Church with human reason thus present a twofold aspect of agreement and disagreement, which alternate or intertwine. But even when philosophy assumes a discordant and even hostile attitude, it still benefits from the intellectual and moral climate that the Church creates and preserves by exalting the values of the spirit and the freedom of the human person, and by inculcating respect for the competence and rights of reason within its own sphere.

The Church also inspires those who sincerely profess it with the humility to acknowledge their own error when they fail to understand in time the demands of development and progress in human reason, confusing the value of the immutable divine Revelation with that of human study of the data of Revelation itself. In any case, the Church regards human misunderstandings as one of the applications of that providential law by which Divine Wisdom and Goodness permits evil in the world so that it may serve as an occasion and incentive for more generous action toward good.

The life of the Church is a continual encounter with obstacles to be overcome in order to ascend higher. Thus, heresies, while in themselves causing harm to the unity of the faithful, become occasions for better defining the meaning and strength of Christ’s message and for rendering its influence richer and more vigorous. Likewise, philosophical errors, while on the one hand distracting and misleading, on the other serve as a stimulus to sharpen reflection in order to penetrate more deeply into rational and revealed truths and to derive greater fruit for the human spirit.

The world to which the Church presented itself from Palestine was characterized, in addition to Hellenic philosophy, by another force: the juridical and political sense of Rome. Much has been insisted upon, even recently, regarding the benefit derived by the Apostles of Christ from finding themselves, at their first steps, within the *pax romana*. Some have even gone so far as to claim that it was from Rome that they took the principle and sense of universality; without Rome, they would have remained a scattered sect on the shores of the Jordan and the Dead Sea. It is

The range of the entire New Testament. What is true instead is that the magnificent organization of the Empire and the common civilization of the many different peoples that composed it greatly facilitated the path toward the realization of the universality intrinsic to the Church and to maintaining lively and continuous relations among the various Churches scattered throughout the world, converging in the unity of the Church, that which Jesus had called “my Church” (Mt 16:18) and to which, from the very beginning, Christians gave as their first appellation in their profession of faith the word “one.” That the living and manifest center of such unity, Peter, the first among the Apostles, established his see in Rome must have seemed entirely natural to the early Christians. By such a choice, even if there had been no command or direct inspiration from Jesus, there was a clear indication on the part of divine Providence: the Christian, as is known, sees in external circumstances, considered in the light of reason and grace, the signs of God’s will. And just as with every other good thing in the world, the Church also benefited from the school of juridical wisdom and civil organization that Romanism provided at that time, a school whose fruits the nascent Church would never forget, even though it always directed them toward the benefit of souls. That the Pax Romana was preserved and indeed expanded further across the rest of the earth, the Christians of that time desired precisely as a most useful means of maintaining the unity of the evangelized world (if nothing else, it would have prevented wars among Christians); but it is certain that they would not have been able to consider it essentially necessary without making the vitality of the mystical body of Christ dependent on an earthly government. Imperfect Christians could indeed fall into this temptation; and this is another of the crises that the Church had to face. It is inherent to the Church to instinctively permeate all human activities; and among these, one of the most important is politics. But this attempt carries with it the risk of becoming worldly: the men who were to be the workers of the Spirit were also the sons of Adam.

The risk was perceived. St. Anthony and the others who fled the world to populate the desert, living an angelic life there, represent the reaction against the tendency to become worldly, which was now spreading among Christians: Christ had indeed preached that to receive the kingdom of God, one must first detach oneself from the world. But the Church is not Buddhism. Christian perfection can also be attained by those who are not monks, because it consists in charity, which can be lived heroically in any state of life. One cannot fail to appreciate the magnanimity of those who choose a path that in itself entails greater sacrifice and leads more directly to God; but at the same time, one cannot exclude that God may and does wish to lead His saints along more ordinary paths, yet with equal interior grace. It is God’s will that decides, not man’s will; and it is in God’s will that the true essence of every good lies. Thus the Church resolves the question of detachment from the world. For all Christians, detachment must be that of the heart. To this can be added material detachment, but not necessarily. Those who, called by God, also practice the latter perform an act of generous virtue; and their act benefits both themselves and their neighbor as a splendid school of sacrifice and renunciation of the things in which fallen nature most delights. This explains the enthusiasm aroused by St. Anthony and the periodic return of similar movements, even in dramatic forms such as the medieval flagellants (q.v.), the rise of Western monasticism wisely organized by St. Benedict, and then of the Mendicants with St. Francis and St. Dominic, and finally of the modern religious orders, all considered in common sentiment as the most elect part of the mystical body of Christ. Yet it remains equally incumbent upon every faithful person to study to keep the heart free from any attachment to the world, so as to prevent or diminish love for God and neighbor from being impeded. This is essential to the spirit of the Church, and those who neglect it are nothing more than incoherent Christians. The danger for a Christian of becoming worldly, whether in private or public life, is a perennial one: feeling it always close at hand suggests the moderate pessimism that in the Christian soul stands alongside the optimism of grace and Providence.

With the barbarian invasions and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Church found itself in new and more difficult relations with the world. It was a matter of building a new society, of blending the disparate elements of conquerors and conquered, of ensuring that the victors not only allowed themselves to be baptized but adapted in some way to receive the civilization of the vanquished. The Church served as mediator. It was an act of charity, fully in keeping with its spirit; but it was also an immersion in the entire social life of the time, economic and political. The Church assumed the leadership of the new society, called to this task by the peoples: by the conquered because they saw in it the continuation of Roman civilization, and by the conquerors because in the pope and bishops they revered a divine authority. The Church fulfilled its task by creating medieval civilization, but at the same time found itself necessarily implicated in the temporal government of that world; bishops ended up becoming great feudal lords. The Holy Roman Empire, sanctified by the agreement between popes and Charlemagne, was to not only renew the Pax Romana—an idea always alive in the hearts of the peoples—but to establish a competent government of Christian princes, a respublica christiana, in which the Church would be a norm of life not only for individuals but for the community, and the profession and practice of it would be essential for being a member and, even more so, a magistrate or governor of the new society: the Gospel was to be lived no less in public life than in private. The attempt had grand effects, as a serious and deep study of medieval history demonstrates, but it was, one might say, constantly surpassed by an internal crisis. Within the Church, the worldly element, strengthened by the preeminent social position of bishops and abbots whom emperors and kings surrounded themselves with at their courts, fiercely resisted the spiritual element. The papacy itself suffered its pernicious influence; it is proof of the Church’s inner vitality that the triumph of worldliness was avoided. The great reforming popes of the type of Gregory VII and the saints such as St. Peter Damian, St. Bernard, and St. Francis of Assisi made the invincible force of the Spirit shine more brightly in the contrast of the terrible struggle.

The Church’s beneficent work during the Middle Ages in striving to preserve as much as possible of Graeco-Roman culture was repaid by Humanism (v.), which offered the Christian world an occasion for a new crisis. For a time it seemed that a new worldliness, that of culture and refinement, would triumph after the Middle Ages had given rise to the worldliness of power. The most terrible punishment for this was the Protestant revolt of the 16th century. This would not have succeeded in producing such a vast and lasting schism among Christians had not its political and economic factors found such powerful support in the moral and religious decay of that historical moment. The immediate effect of Protestantism upon consciences was absolute individualism, within a theoretical and practical apparatus of religion such as the justification by faith and the cult of the Bible. Yet the reaction was immediate not only in Catholic countries but also among Protestants. Even here, whatever of Christianity remained alive in hearts provoked at least a partial return to tradition and authority. To the Roman Catholic unity were substituted limited unities on the model of national States; these were unities of human origin but at least they served to curb the anarchic freedom that was the necessary consequence of the free examination (v.). The grace of Baptism and the nourishment of Holy Scripture preserved a Christian spirituality in those lands, and even the controversy with Catholicism helped to maintain in them adherence to the dogmas of at least the first six centuries of the Church. Yet the principle of free examination, never disavowed, worked gradually in men’s minds, carrying them from mystical and religious subjectivism to philosophical subjectivism, so that Hegel could later proclaim before Lutheran pastors that he was the true heir of Luther. And biblical criticism developed among Protestants gradually led even the masses, first among the educated, to cease believing in the Bible as the divine word of absolute value.

Today, among observers of the world situation, even those not bound to a positive faith, there is spreading the conviction that the true bulwark of Christianity is now the Roman Catholic Church. Purified in its human element by the great saints of the 16th century and by the popes who implemented the reforms decreed by the Council of Trent, and also renewed in a new life of missionary expansion, the Church now finds itself caught up in the vast drama that is the elaboration of a new civilization.

The modern age begins with the affirmation of the sovereignty of national States against the principle of the unity of a Christian republic. Among sovereign States wars are inevitable; it is therefore in the spirit of Christianity to oppose nationalism and imperialism, not to speak of racism (it is understood that nationality is one thing and nationalism another: the former is justified, like the family, as an instrument of civilization, a stage in the progress of human sociality; but it must not presume to have for consciences a value of supreme end). After the last wars the concept of a League of Nations gained ground. The name is immaterial; what matters is the admission of an authority superior to individual States that, in the name of justice, may settle possible conflicts. Nothing is more Christian than this subordination of politics to justice. The medievals felt this, even if in practice they failed to achieve II. Today it is the Pope, Pius XII, who raises his voice to summon peoples and States to that principle, the only way to eliminate war; the very fact that his appeal is heard with reverence throughout the world, even by the most powerful and non-Catholic States, is significant.

Perhaps we are approaching the overcoming of the deepest crisis of these first centuries of the modern age, the crisis that in the 18th century took the name of Illuminism (v.) but which had already begun earlier. Illuminism was not a heresy that attacked this or that part of revelation. It was a full and frontal attack upon revelation itself. Either to deny or to ignore the supernatural: everything had to be thought in terms of reason and nature. This “naturalistic” mentality passed over into other currents of thought and action that arose and developed subsequently, reproduced in part or in full. It is distinguished from neo-paganism, dear to literati and aesthetes, in that it does not denigrate Christianity as a product of decadence but rather transforms it in its own way, reducing it to a mere humanitarian movement. Thus is created the figure of a Jesus who is either a pure liberal or a socialist, a most exalted spirit intent upon humanitarianism, with nothing transcendent. Against such a mentality true Christianity is today reacting, and the struggle is in progress. The naturalistic infection corrupted what was good in liberalism (v.), which characterized the cultural and political life of the 19th century. It exalted freedom as an honor of humanity conceived in Christian terms; yet it was the freedom of “nature,” not the freedom of the human “person,” whose ordering principle it did not recognize, namely truth and moral justice. With its indifferent attitude toward religion, which it regarded as an individual and subjective matter of taste, it laid the deep causes of the recent crisis of political freedoms. Only Christianity can offer the vital means to overcome this crisis, by founding in God the true values of the human person and of sociality. So too can it alone offer the true principles for the solution of the social question that today agitates the world and occasions the realization of communism. Notable is the fact that while this latter, in reality, has an entirely materialistic conception of the world, in its propaganda it appeals to the Gospel, of which it presents itself as the true fulfiller. We are again at a “naturalistic” presentation of Christianity, of which the true meaning is formed by excluding its most essential and informing elements. Christianity condemns every form of dispossession, even when exercised in the name of the people, and it regards as doomed to certain failure every attempt, individual or collective, to seek happiness principally in the enjoyment of material goods. To labor, as man and as citizen, for a greater realization of social justice, especially in the distribution of wealth, is indeed a grave duty of conscience, to which men must become far more sensitive than they have been hitherto; yet this duty would not be discharged in a Christian manner if at the same time there were not also an effort to provide a spiritual education that would render the masses capable of a just evaluation of all human goods in their order and of a lively consciousness of their ultimate ends, which are truth, holiness, and beatitude in God.

Una form of insidious "naturalism" in the conception of Christianity is also that of modern, or rather modernist, biblical and historical criticism, which seemed to reduce the person of Jesus and the transcendent value of his message to mere dust. Christianity is not merely doctrine; it is life as well: "He who does not love does not know God" (Jn 4:8). Natural human erudition alone, even the most serious and powerful, can provide only formless materials, however precious in themselves. The edifice collapses: the most discordant conclusions are reached. Such is the result offered by the most acclaimed studies of recent times. A. Harnack, A. Loisy, E. Troeltsch and many others: each presents his own Jesus and his own primitive Christianity. Not that their studies lack value; but it is a fragmentary value, or else they serve as a stimulus to new research and to refine genuine criticism. Yet their concrete outcome is to obscure the problem of Jesus and his work still further rather than to clarify II. It is another sign of the vitality of Christianity that it can overcome the assault of this prestigious science precisely by utilizing its researches and its criticisms.

And in this epoch of world crisis, against the final disintegration of Christianity to which modernism leads, there is almost an instinctive reaction even on the part of those Christians who do not belong to the Catholic Church—a movement, the so-called "ecumenical," which seeks the return to the unity of all Christians. It is the cry raised in all ages by the Catholic Church, that of Jesus Christ Himself: "One flock and one shepherd" (Jn 10:16). But the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ is possible only in the way He Himself willed. He spoke of His Church and pointed out its foundation stone (Mt 16:18). Whoever separates himself from this stone separates himself from the Church of Christ and from Christ Himself, with whom the Church is identified: "He who hears you hears Me" (Lk 10:16).

IV. DOCTRINAL OUTLINES

Christianity, as has been said, is not merely doctrine; it is life. Jesus Christ, the author of the Good News, is the author of man, and He addressed Himself to the whole man. He spoke to his intelligence and at the same time exercised a supernatural action upon his personal reality, while making of all men a new society, His Church. The same is true of the Apostles: for them to make known Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead, to teach His doctrine, to communicate His grace through the Sacraments, and to form His Church were a single work; the four things called for one another. And at all times one cannot speak of the doctrine of Christianity without continually keeping in mind its dependence upon the person of Christ, upon His grace, and upon His Church. In fact, Christ and the Apostles announced to humanity that the time had come for renewal. This renewal consisted in entering into a new relationship with God revealed by His Son, Jesus Christ (Jn 1:18): this would include redemption from sin through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, the second birth (Jn 3:3) of man through grace, and a consequent manner of living and acting worthy of the Heavenly Father (Mt 5:48), within a society of which the Father Himself and Jesus Christ (Jn 1:3) are members, together with all the faithful, endowed with the power of the Holy Spirit to form the kingdom of God both on earth, as a time of trial, and in heaven, for eternity. Such, in summary, is the great message.

At its base, therefore, is a new knowledge given to men of God. By the command of Jesus, the Apostles were to teach "baptizing in the

"of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Mt 28:19). Later they were to lay hands on the neophytes and thereby give them the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:15–17). And before this they had heard Jesus proclaim: “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Mt 11:27). This knowledge of a mystery intrinsic to the Godhead thus received, so to speak, its first illustration in sacramental life, namely in Baptism (also called σωτηρία, “salvation,” and φωτισμός, “illumination”), in which the soul received a personal action of the Son or Word of God, and in Confirmation, which was the personal communication of the Holy Spirit. The Lord’s Supper, that is, the Mass, then liturgically expressed the profession of faith in the Father newly known and the worship rendered to him through the Son, present as Mediator before God and at the same time the spiritual nourishment and center of union of the faithful (v. EUCHARIST).

Thus the doctrine of the divine Trinity was a knowledge, so to speak, incorporated into worship and sacramental life. But, as has already been noted, the rational nature of man, far from being suppressed and indeed exalted by grace, led him to reflect upon the new gifts of God. Hence arose the need to express in a language and method “theological” the spiritual experiences of the new man created by grace. It is the task of the Church “teaching,” that is, of those who succeeded the Apostles (v. ECUMENICAL COUNCIL; BISHOP) in the guidance and government of the faithful and in the heritage of the promise made to them by Jesus, and particularly to Peter, of a divine assistance that would never fail through the ages: in the judgment of the teaching Church lies the criterion of certainty for the interpretation of the divine Word and the definition of the proper object of faith.

By this path, on the basis of Revelation preserved by Tradition and Scripture, there arises the theological doctrine of the unity and Trinity of God. First of all, the doctrine of the divinity of Christ and of his equality or consubstantiality with the Father is confirmed and defined, and then that of the divinity of the Holy Spirit: three Persons in one Nature. A mystery, not a contradiction, because God is one under one aspect and three under another. The divine Persons are then “subsistent relations,” whose knowledge partly opens to us the secret of the intimate life of God and of his unique transcendent spirituality. They are indeed relations of Intellect and of Love, as has already been hinted, and they present to us the eternal Being of God as a single pure Act that in knowing itself affirms itself and at the same time distinguishes itself as the knower and the known, and in loving itself reabsorbs this distinction into a Unity that is for us inexpressible; for we can only resort to analogies too remote, such as that of the noblest love, intellectual love, which unifies in itself all that it loves and makes “other” into “self,” realizing in this power the maximum actualization of its intellectuality. On the other hand, it is the very intellectuality, essential to the very concept of Spirit, that demands the opposition of knower and known; and in God, perfect Spirit, this must find its maximum application.

In the Son, that is, in his Word, in his essential Word, the Father finds the adequate expression of himself, without which his Being would not be conceivable, and in it he finds also the basis of every manifestation of himself. This is why creation is made through the Word (Jn 1:3). Indeed, the value of creation is the manifestation of God to beings that are other than himself; they in turn acknowledge him, and in this lies his external glory. For the same reason it is the Word that becomes man; in the Incarnation there is a further manifestation of God, indeed the greatest possible, to the creature. The knowledge of the Incarnation, that is, of the divinity of Christ, presupposes the knowledge of the divine Trinity, and the knowledge of the divine Trinity enables us, within the limits of our created capacity, to understand with what act of love God makes himself our Father, making us partakers of his Word and of his Spirit, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4). And at the same time it makes us understand the greatness of the mystery of Jesus, whose person is God who, uniting in himself the twofold nature, divine and human, draws the hearts of men to himself in a unique way.

In his humanity is satisfied the attraction of the like toward the like, in his divinity the attraction toward the transcendent of the intelligent being by nature open to the infinite; in the individual Christ, in whom divinity and humanity meet, there is the enchantment of the stupendous humility of his abasement and the immense joy of “emptying himself” (Phil 2:6–7) in the embrace of created “nothingness.” To call it an embrace is too little: the Incarnation implies a union far more perfect, and for this union a proper adjective is confidently employed: hypostatic (v.).

The Church that teaches thus is the same that gives us the Sacraments and in them grace, that is, the real action of Christ in the soul whereby there is created in us the supernatural sense vivifying the precise but abstract formulas of the catechism. If Christ alone is the source of grace and can distribute it to men when and as he wills, nevertheless he has declared that the ordinary means of it must be the Sacraments, in which he has willed his Church to be his collaborator. In them there is, as it were, a continuation of the sensible relations that Jesus in this world had with the disciples and others who approached him to be saved. He worked upon them, giving health of soul before that of body, using sensible means: the touch of his hand or of his garments, his word, a little mud, his spittle, as we read in the Gospels. In the Sacraments we have likewise material or at least sensible elements—water, bread and wine, oil, the laying on of hands, etc.; but these, by his institution, not only symbolize but effect in reality a presence, invisible yet real, of himself. It may be for an instant or even lasting (as in the Eucharist); in any case it is his intervention in this world of human history and his contact with souls, thus keeping them, even while living this earthly life, in a supernatural climate.

But Christianity does not think of Jesus Christ merely as the light and life of the soul; it thinks of Him as the Saviour. The love with which God became incarnate shines with a more sublime splendour in that He descended to a humanity not innocent but sinful. No religion is so profoundly moral as Christianity, because none has been so powerful in recalling man to a sense of sin. None has so seriously confronted him with that terrible reality; none has made him measure, as it does, the abyss of damnation. Original sin and the actual sins proper to each man have divided and still divide the beloved creature of God from his Creator. The evil of sin and the debt of humanity are assumed by Jesus: His Passion and Death. Men feel this title to their love as the one that strikes deepest into their human hearts. The grace that in fact came to the descendants of Adam was therefore the grace of Christ the Saviour, and Redemption with its historical presuppositions and its abiding consequences stands out as one of the principal features of Christian doctrine and psychology: the problem of man’s correspondence to the saving action of Jesus Christ remains always the most pressing, or becomes so as soon as, from a life of sin or lukewarmness, he regains consciousness of his relations with Christ. Once again he sees the perdition in which every soul is that is separated from the living and true God; he turns to Jesus as to the only salvation. Salvation means the mercy of Him who pardons and the interior justification of him who is converted. And from Christ we learn that the secret of happiness lies in justice. “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after justice” (Matt. 5:6), justice which in the Gospel means sanctity (Matt. 6:33). Here it is that Christianity best achieves the welding of nature and the supernatural. For nature necessarily tends to happiness, and the supernatural above all aspires to justice, which is the reconciliation of fallen man with God; and it aspires to this with an act of love which the action of grace renders disinterested.

Christianity shows man that both justice and beatitude may be said to be the end of man; but justice is the end which man must propose to himself: he must do so as a moral being, subjectively, and he must do so because he is free to propose it to himself; whereas happiness is the end which man cannot help proposing to himself because he is necessitated to do so by his nature. But if we consider what is just in beatitude as a consequence and completion of justice and as the effectuation of the will of God (Who in creating man proposed to make him blessed), then beatitude too is an end which man must propose to himself, because it is what God wills as Creator, and because it is supremely just that the just man should be blessed. And from this double point of view he is also free to propose happiness to himself, and may thereby earn merit. In Paradise, then, the consciousness of being blessed and the satisfaction that follows will be not only the just reward of merits acquired in this life, but will themselves be acts of recognition of the goodness and holiness of God, that is, they will themselves be acts of holiness. Thus Christianity reconciles the two equally vital exigencies of man, the need for happiness and the disinterestedness of virtue.

But the beatitude promised by the Gospel is known only by faith so long as man lives on this earth; hence he remains free to choose between what is promised as future and what the present offers him as pleasant. In him there is grace and there is freedom. Both act in him, and he is put to the test. The test is given him so that he may earn merit, that is, achieve the highest affirmation of his personality even while being united to Christ as the branches to the vine (John 15:5). Even this among the principles of Christianity, full of light and mystery, is one of the most fundamental, and in it appears the respect of the Redeemer for the men He wishes to redeem: He does not save them if, being able to use their freedom, they do not freely choose their ultimate destiny. Without Him they could not be saved; but He in turn does not save them without their free consent.

And so we come to the life beyond, to that other life to which by nature man aspires because of the obscure sense of immortality that is in the depths of his soul. Christianity, rather than speaking of the Platonic immortality of the soul, speaks of resurrection (1 Cor. 15:35-49), that is, of a re-formation, after death, of the whole man as God created him; and it sees in the resurrection of Jesus Christ the exemplar and efficient cause of this. It is the conclusion of His work on earth and the beginning of the new life that the redeemed will have in Him in the time of grace and in the eternity of glory. The resurrection of Christ closes one epoch of humanity and opens another; it is the crucial moment in the history of the world: the greatest scandal to those who do not believe, the surest guarantee of the future for those who do. And for them the gate of heaven is opened.

Of the discourses of Jesus, those that are perhaps the most charged with mystery are the “eschatological” ones, that is, those that concern the end of the world and its judgment. Among the modernists there were those who, by giving these an exclusive importance, reducing the whole message of Jesus to the prediction of that end as though it were imminent, came to distort its meaning. They imagined a Christ “eschatological,” almost obsessed by the anxiety of an imminent destruction of all things, which for Him became the exclusive or principal reason for preaching detachment from the things of this earth (in which there would be very little virtue), and the whole good news. But the reality of Jesus is quite otherwise. With superhuman serenity He speaks of the kingdom of heaven as of something that must first unfold here below and then be perfected in the life beyond. The Father must be adored as much in heaven as on earth. “Eternal life” begins here, and in this lies the value of the present time. “Now this is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Hence celestial glory is nothing other than a continuation of the life of grace, which is already a “knowing” of the only true God, He Whom Christ has revealed and communicated to man the intrinsic Life united, and a “knowing” of Christ Himself, the Messenger of God, the God-Man, the direct author of grace, the Christ Who redeems from sin and infuses the Holy Spirit, the Christ Who in the Eucharistic mystery nourishes His Church, the society of His redeemed, of which He makes His mystical body. It is a “knowing” that is not merely an intellectual act, but a real possession in which the whole man shares, with the new faculties that grace creates in him. These will reach their most perfect realization in the celestial kingdom. What is called “the beatific vision” will be the ultimate degree of the possession of God of which each man, in the measure of his merit, will be capable. Paradise means precisely the definitive enjoyment of communion with the Divine Trinity through Jesus Christ, the true “bread of life” (John 6:48), Who will make His mystical body, His Church—now militant and suffering (cf. PURGATORY)—partaker of that love which the Father has for Him (John 17:26), and which, triumphant, will be made glorious. All intelligent creatures, of which Christ is the King (Col. 1:15-18), will share in this, with the angels and men: first among these, above both, the Mother of the Incarnate Word, the true Mother of God. And the redeemed of Christ will be blessed and holy; blessed because at the summit of happiness, holy because raised to the peak of the love of God and of neighbour, in the fulfilment of the “royal law” (James 2:8), which in heaven is substantially the same as on earth, but there it dominates and shines without the contrasts and trials of this world.