CHRISTIANITY. - The religion founded by Jesus Christ.
I. TIME AND EXPANSION
Christianity inserts into the tradition of Judaism (v. EBREI) a new revelation and a new spiritual life, and arises at the culminating moment of Greco-Roman civilization, 5 centuries after Confucius (v.) had given Chinese civilization its moral foundation and after the Buddha (v.) had initiated the vast spiritual movement that was to spread from India to the whole of the Far East. With Christianity begins the era generally adopted today in the civilized world. Although from its birth it affirms its universality, aiming toward Persia and India, its immediate success is in the Mediterranean world. In less than 3 centuries, despite the fierce opposition of the official powers and of paganism, it becomes the dominant religion in the Roman empire, then weathers the crisis of the barbarian invasions and converts Celts, Germans, Hungarians and Slavs. During the millennium that runs, approximately, from 500 to 1500, it inspires and elaborates an entire civilization called the Middle Ages (v.), and it continues its effectiveness as one of the essential factors also of the subsequent modern civilization. Christians today are reckoned at a little over 800 million in all, a little more than a third of the total population of the earth. 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 that has derived from it. This indirect influence prevails in all the regions of the earth by the fact that none of them escapes either the dominion or the economic, political and cultural influence of the powers of European civilization.
II. VALUE AND CHARACTERISTICS
Such a historical position of Christianity can already by itself suggest a judgment of superiority over the other religions of mankind, but only a provisional one and ab extrinseco. The considerations ab intrinseco are of greater weight.
1. First of all, the personality of the founder. The figure of Jesus rises above that of every other man known, even among the founders of religions (the so-called great initiates), and among the other historical figures of purest glory, such as Socrates. The personality of Jesus is especially felt in every century by the saints, who relive it in the most diverse ways, in every possible variety of class, age, sex, condition, talent and culture, environment, and historical circumstance, yet all alike in one thing: in loving him as a living person with a devotion that excludes every limit, in learning from him an ever higher moral perfection, in recognizing in him the source and the nourishment of all their virtues, in seeing in him alone the Revelation, suited to us men, of the Divinity. The life of the saints, considered not so much individually as taken as a whole, is a characteristic of Christianity in contrast to the other religions. These are ignorant of such fruitfulness. They too may possess virtuous souls and ascetics; they do not have the 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 the Hebrew monotheism, true but incomplete, had proclaimed the spirituality of God; but wholly concentrated on preventing any confusion of the creature with God and the consequent idolatry, it had possessed only an initial concept of the Spirit as the Ineffable transcending every sensible reality, the Absolute One sufficient to himself, the Almighty who creates the universe from nothing. But entering more deeply into the concept of Spirit, «God — it may be said with St. Thomas (De potentia, q. 11, a. 1), — is by his very essence in a perfect act of intellectuality» and therefore of love. Only in the explicit recognition of this essential actuality of his can a complete worship of God be founded: «God is a spirit; and they that adore him must adore him in spirit and in truth» (Jn 4:24). The Ineffable will thus manifest himself in his intimate essence, which is his own Life: an eternal and simultaneous process of Intellect and of Love in which true spiritual Unity is realized. No other religion rises to such concepts. The revelation of the Old Testament suggested vague foreshadowings of them; but the Judaism that rejected Jesus Christ made itself incapable of understanding them and shut itself up in an opaque monotheism, foreign to the most intimately true meaning of the Spirit. Islam followed the same path, adding to it the doctrine of fatalism, which still further removes God from human souls.
3. Consequent upon the concept of the Divinity is that of religion. Christianity, while not denying or neglecting the sentiments of holy fear and of invocation of help toward the divinity, common to all religions, teaches us to go beyond them by seeing in God not only the source of every material and moral benefit for us, but the Love lovable for its own sake, worthy of being esteemed and served with a limitless and disinterested devotion. This provokes in the soul an unwearying effort of moral growth, directed toward an ever higher degree of goodness, that is, of greater resemblance to the divine goodness: «Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect» (Mt 5:48). The worship, thus internal as well as external, must be pervaded by this spirit: religion in its complete act is the divine charity and holiness communicated to man. But man receives it as a free being, and must practice it freely. Moral freedom is an attribute so essential to human persons that God himself respects it. He loves his creatures and asks to be repaid with love, making the glory that the created order can render him consist in this; but the repayment must be free, just as the cooperation that divine Providence expects from men in realizing its plan of the universe — a realization which is history — must be free and conscious. The final destiny of each man, moreover, is to know and possess God, and to be possessed by him: a relationship that receives limits from the finitude of the creature, but is always an immediate relationship «face to face». This is the «eternal life» that already partially begins, through charity, in the present life, according to the explicit teaching of St. John the Evangelist and of St. Paul. Christian charity gives to the universality of Christianity a tone of its own that distinguishes it from that of other religions also universal in tendency, such as Buddhism and Islam. Charity between man and man, while it meets an irrepressible need of humanity, so that it may be said that there is nothing more «natural» than it, at the same time assumes a supernatural realization insofar as it becomes, by way of the incarnation, a corollary of the charity between God and man; it is the love of Christ for all the rest of mankind. It is a love in which the one who loves is God and is man, so that his human love acquires a divine value and fruitfulness, in which whoever believes in him can participate. The universality of Christianity therefore extends not only to all the individual members of the human race and to all the peoples of the earth, but aims to be realized in all possible ways, in all the realizations of good that can be devised and carried out by which man can benefit and serve man, with an order of wisdom that renders the good that is done more extensive and more effective, with the maximum of devotion and of sacrifice of oneself, reproducing the charity with which Christ has loved us: Christianity is inexhaustible and tireless in finding ever new forms of charity in the face of the spiritual, intellectual and material needs of men, and in this it precedes the other religions in every century since it has existed.
4. The love of God and of neighbor is the summary 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 realization 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 who are a true image of him, that is, intelligent beings, persons themselves. Other beings are things, not persons, and therefore have only the value of means; being incomplete beings, they cannot be loved in themselves. Only «persons» have a title to be loved in themselves, though in different measure, according as their personal being is essential goodness or only participated goodness: God and intelligent creatures, among whom there is an order of unity and of distinction. This order is precisely indicated by those simple words: to love God and neighbor. From this one understands the unsurpassed spirituality of Christian morality, which grasps the essence of values in the complex of existences, and maintains their hierarchy, without permitting that, in the practical appraisal that man makes of beings, what is mere elementary or vegetative or animal life should assume a place that does not belong to it, to the offense of the dignity of the spirit, that is, of God himself, of whom spiritual beings are the true and only image in the created order. Thus the valuing of spirituality or, what comes to the same thing, of personality is the deep soul of Christianity; and it, while on the one hand tends directly to promote unceasing moral progress, both individual and collective, while on the other it cultivates the human instinct to value intelligence. It is this faculty that makes man fit for the conquest of the material world, and that constitutes the basis of personality. It is by virtue of it that man becomes conscious of his own dignity, a consciousness that is strengthened as his knowledge and his dominion over cosmic forces grow. Christianity teaches him to make these a means for the increase of moral good in the world. Thus a higher value than they would have by their own nature is communicated to non-spiritual things, and thus it appears that Christianity, in affirming the primacy of the spirit, does not exclude or depreciate all that lies outside it, as some have said. On the contrary, it saves science from possible aberrations by directing it toward the Supreme Good, and in a certain way ennobles lower nature, giving a new, supernatural function to earthly goods: from instruments of human egoism it transforms them into instruments of divine Charity.
5. The singular loftiness of Christian morality is generally recognized; even Gandhi (v.) extolled the "Sermon on the Mount," while reproaching Christian peoples for not being faithful to it. But it is also true that among them that spiritual code has been handed down for centuries, respected and intimately venerated even by those who see in that very code their own condemnation: a sign of a potential inner upheaval. In any case the law of the Gospel makes no concessions, whether expressed or tacit, to human passions. Jesus showed himself merciful to sinners, but he willed that they open their hearts to the whole truth. For example, in the face of sexual instincts no founder of religions 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 the sexual act, not as a 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 tyranny of the instincts of fallen man and to the customs of his people, sanctioning polygamy and divorce and tolerating concubinage. Jesus puts his finger on the wound without ambiguity. Marriage is in itself from God; but it is the hardness of heart, the σκληροκαρδία (Mt. 19:8). The failure to know how to love, which leads to divorce, whereas the man who looks at a woman to have 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: analogously it must be said that only in monogamy can there be fullness of mutual love. In every case, the one who remains offended, deteriorated, debased is the person of the man as well as of the woman: thus the very essence of morality comes to be violated. And this is never lawful, absolutely, for any excuse, for any 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 it. But the tone of his proclamation is that of one who calls men to look within themselves, to recognize a truth that they should have known by themselves in 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). Likewise 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 of loving enemies and forgiving every offense. And he wills it put into practice without compromises and without evasions: here too his morality remains unique in demanding so much. Yet he does not fail to leave a vast field to freedom and individual initiative, especially in the choice of means by which one may aim at the perfection of the love of God and neighbor, among which he indicates some as more directly suited to realizing it and richer in themselves in supernatural magnanimity (such as poverty, virginity, obedience); but he wills them to be chosen by the Christian of his own free will, with 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 field of human life in which Christianity did not exhort man to be unflagging in rendering his conscience ever more delicate, his intention ever purer. Continuous is the call to "interiority," to the formation of self, to humility of spirit: a stimulus in every age to unceasing improvement and, in periods of decadence, to awakening, reform, renewal.
6. While Christianity directly proposes the salvation of each human soul as having in itself an infinite value, it is nonetheless characteristic of it to be solicitous to unite men among themselves, to promote the social sense, to organize them into communities. It tends in every way to remove what can place barriers between man and man, between people and people, and first of all what constitutes an insufficient recognition of the dignity of the human person or a danger and a temptation for man to fall short of it. Ordinarily Christianity does not directly confront the customs or positive laws that sanction that insufficiency or those dangers, but by influencing hearts it creates the persuasions that cause those customs or those laws to fall of themselves. Thus it happened with slavery, which among Christians generally ceased in fact before it was officially abolished. Thus Christianity acts among those peoples in which the social condition of woman does not preserve her personal dignity intact. But it is furthermore of the spirit of Christianity to infuse in general into social and political life a leaven of transformation, aimed at making human society a kingdom of God on this earth, a prelude to heavenly beatitude. In fact the phrase "kingdom of God" or "kingdom of heaven," which sounds like the dominant motif of the Synoptic Gospels, means not only the next life, but also the Church, that society of men among themselves that springs from their society with God the Father and with the Son made man (1 Jn. 1:3). It is true that in its direct meaning "Church" here means the sacramental and hierarchical society in which the sanctification and eternal salvation of the faithful is brought about; but it is also true that Christianity cannot neglect either the glory that comes to the Father from the realization even in this world of a social justice with the happiness that can follow from it, or the help toward an elevation of the human person that can derive from a better temporal ordering of society. Christianity therefore cannot remain indifferent to the progress of social life, even if it does not consider it its immediate and ordinary task to form cities and States. Christianity tends of itself to favor the social elevation of the poor and the humble; but it always respects the spontaneity of historical processes and courses, contenting itself with imposing on them the limits deriving from the moral principle, whereby "evil must not be done that good may come of it" (Rom. 3:8). Not even the happiness of the whole universe justifies a single deliberate venial sin: on this point Christian morality is absolute, and this is one of its incomparable merits. But, provided the morality of the means is preserved, Christianity by its nature urges men along the path of social improvements, because 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 being done for that purpose. On the other hand, it is only Christianity that has given man the efficacious word of consolation in suffering, this tremendous inheritance of humanity, and has shown, to the depths, with the image of the Crucified, its purifying, educating, elevating function.
7. Finally, Christianity excels for its adaptability and understanding in the field of reality. It accepts any kind of government, even a primitive one, and knows how to conform itself to every mentality of the most diverse peoples or races. Where it finds barbarism it seeks to spread the elements of civilized human living, the necessary basis of a community of Christians, but without foreclosing on or opposing the characteristic tendencies and customs of each people, so long as they are compatible with the demands of the natural law and of the message of Christ. Where it finds an advanced civilization, as already in the ancient Roman world or today in China, it embraces everything good and lawful that it contains, instilling in it a new spirit. And in every case it always showed itself capable of giving new life to whatever already preexisted. There is no field of human activity, especially of the nobler ones — scientific and philosophical thought, law, economics and politics, letters, music, the figurative arts, architecture and any other cultural manifestation — that has not received from Christianity a special impulse, an inspiration of its own and a new style. Moreover, the organized works of charity toward any form of human infirmity and misfortune are its creation: hospitals, asylums, homes for the insane, orphanages, etc. The Christian must appropriate whatever is good and gentle in the world, according to the teaching of the Apostle: "whatever is true, whatever is worthy of reverence, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever merits honor, if there is any virtue, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" (Phil. 4:8). Such an interest Christianity directs toward moral improvement and religious elevation. There is no custom to which it does not give its recognition in what it contains of the spiritual or the spiritualizable, and thus it keeps pace with the changing of the times in such a way as not to let anything be lost of the potential human and religious value of spontaneous gestures and usages, even if bound to environmental motives of transitory vitality, as was the case, for example, with medieval chivalry. In this universal power of absorption of Christianity lies at once the index of its vitality and the occasion of the dramatic character of its earthly history.
III. VITALITY IN HISTORY
Christianity presents the message of Jesus as a gift that the Divinity makes of itself to man: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son" (Jn 3:16). This gift implies an "entering" of God into history and a cooperation that He wills from man with regard to His designs for creation — a cooperation of man's intelligence, will and freedom, called to contribute in some way to the realization of Revelation and 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, quickening it, strengthening it; but to that action it will also be granted to deploy together all the energies proper to it, and for this reason it must also face toil, obstacles, struggle. The history of Christianity will therefore be a series of crises before the definitive victory. Vital crises, but crises nonetheless. From the very beginning, while the Apostles to whom Jesus directly entrusted His message were still living, problems of principle and of practice arose. Having overcome the opposition of the Judaizers (v.), who tended 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 until then excluded from the covenant with God. The first whom they encountered were those of the Roman Empire, with an advanced civilization and a preparation that facilitated the spread of the good news among them and the establishment of a valid center of action. This is a fact that Christianity recognizes as providential, whereby it grants to Greek and Latin a place of honor among the human languages which it nonetheless intends to speak all, according to the prophetic charism of Pentecost. In that civilization it is well known what preeminence philosophical reflection had, reason matured in Greece. Christianity makes use of it to give expression to the revealed truths and an organic form to the study and preaching of those same truths. Thus upon the data that Revelation provides a science is built up, which is theology; and this, unlike Revelation, has its developments and its progress like every human science. Christianity recognizes as legitimate that function of reason and philosophy and does not delay in availing itself of the instrument that is offered to it at the moment. The heresies that then are reborn in every age have their root in an abuse of man's subjective reason, ambitious to substitute itself for the supernatural light that derives only from Christ and that can come to us only through the channel established by him, tradition (v.). In heretics such a pretension is often clothed in mystical motives and in any case takes its foothold from Revelation still accepted as a superior light. In recent centuries, on the other hand, the rebellions of reason are unveiled; philosophy proclaims its self-sufficiency. An autonomy in the field of natural knowledge and of method is not enough for it: it wants to be itself all of Spirit and all of man. This is a position incompatible with Christianity; but Christianity does not for that reason reject every work of reason and philosophy. It continues to appreciate them in themselves, as an activity characteristic of human nature as God created it, and for the advantages that religion in fact derives from them; but at the same time it invites them to recognize their natural limits and the order to which they belong. In doing so it confers a great benefit upon them, because it moralizes intellectual work. Moreover, Christianity makes more vigorous the act by which reason adheres to the Truth, because it makes manifest its divine origin and thus strengthens man against the snares of skepticism, which is one of the paths by which man denatures himself. Furthermore, Christianity has given to philosophy in general a more spiritual tone and to its problematic a greater depth and extension, providing new subjects for meditation and suggesting solutions that, subjected to the scrutiny of the philosophical method, can enter the field of philosophy. The historical relations of Christianity with human reason thus present us with a twofold aspect of agreements and disagreements, which alternate or intertwine. But even when philosophy increasingly assumes a discordant and perhaps hostile attitude, even then it benefits from the intellectual and moral climate that Christianity 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 the rights of reason in its own field. Christianity then inspires in those who wish sincerely to profess it the humility to acknowledge their own fault when they fail to understand in time the demands of development and progress of human reason, and confuse the value of the immutable divine Revelation with that of human study upon the data of Revelation itself. In any case Christianity considers the misunderstandings of men as one of the applications of that providential law whereby Divine Wisdom and Goodness permits evil in the world, so that it may serve as an occasion and an incitement to a more generous action of good. The life of Christianity is a continuous striking against obstacles to be overcome in order to climb higher. Thus heresies, while in themselves they bring harm to the unity of the faithful, are the occasion for better defining the meaning and the force of Christ's message and for rendering its influence richer and more vigorous. Thus philosophical errors, while on the one hand they distract and lead astray, on the other are a stimulus to sharpen reflection in order to penetrate more deeply into rational and revealed truths, and to draw from them greater fruit for the human spirit.
The world, upon which Christianity came forth from Palestine, was characterized, besides by 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 the pax romana at their first steps. It was even asserted that it was from Rome that they took the principle and the sense of universality; without Rome they would have remained a sect lost on the banks of the Jordan and the Dead Sea. It is an understatement to say that this is an exaggeration; it is a gross ignorant ignorance of the whole New Testament. What is true, on the other hand, is that the magnificent organization of the Empire and the common civilization of the many different peoples that composed it greatly facilitated the way for the realization of the universality intrinsic to Christianity and for maintaining living and continuous relations among the various Churches scattered in every part, converging in the unity of the Church, of that which Jesus had called "my Church" (Mt. 16:18) and to which, from the beginning, in their profession of faith, Christians gave as the first appellation that of "one." That the living and manifest center of such unity, Peter, the first among the Apostles, should fix his see in Rome must have seemed quite natural to the early Christians. For such a choice, even if there had been no command or direct inspiration from Jesus, there was an evident 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 from every other good thing in the world, Christianity also benefited from the school of juridical wisdom and civil organization that Romanism gave at that time, a school whose fruits the Church, then nascent, never afterward forgot, even while always directing them to the benefit of souls. That the pax romana should then be preserved still further, indeed extended more and more over the rest of the earth, this the Christians of that time desired precisely as a most useful means of maintaining the unity of the evangelized world (if for no other reason, it would have prevented wars among Christians); but it is likewise certain that they could not have regarded it as essentially necessary without making the vitality of the mystical body of Christ depend on an earthly government. Imperfect Christians could indeed fall into this temptation; and this is another of the crises that Christianity had to face. It is innate to Christianity to have the instinct to penetrate all the activities of man, and among these one of the most important is politics. But the 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 flee the world, to go and populate the desert, living there a life like that of angels, represent the reaction against the tendency to become worldly, which by then was spreading among Christians: Christ had indeed preached that to receive the kingdom of God one must first detach oneself from the world. But Christianity is not Buddhism. Christian perfection can also belong to one who is not a monk, because it consists in charity, which in any condition of life can be lived heroically. One cannot fail to appreciate the magnanimity of those who choose a path that in itself involves greater sacrifice and leads more directly to God; but at the same time one cannot exclude that God can and will lead his saints along more ordinary paths but with equal interior grace. It is God's will that decides, not man's will; and in God's will lies the true essence of every good. Thus Christianity resolves the question of detachment from the world. For all Christians the detachment must be that of the heart. To this there may be added material detachment, but not necessarily. Whoever also accomplishes the latter, called to it by God, performs an act of generous virtue; and his act benefits him and benefits his neighbor as a splendid school of sacrifice and of renunciation of the things in which fallen nature takes the greatest pleasure. This explains the enthusiasm aroused by St. Anthony and the periodic return of similar movements, even in dramatic forms such as the "flagellants" (v.) of the Middle Ages, the rise of Western monasticism wisely organized by St. Benedict, and then of the Mendicant Orders with St. Francis and St. Dominic, and finally of the modern religious Orders, all regarded in the common sentiment as the most chosen part of the mystical body of Christ. Nevertheless, it remains equally obligatory for every faithful soul to strive to keep the heart free from any attachment to the world, whereby love toward God and toward neighbor may be impeded or diminished. This is essential to the spirit of Christianity, and whoever neglects it is but an incoherent Christian. The danger for a Christian of becoming worldly, whether in private or in public life, is a perennial danger: to feel it always near suggests the moderate pessimism that in the Christian soul is set alongside the optimism of Grace and Providence.
With the barbarian invasions and the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, Christianity found itself in new and more difficult relations with the world. It was a matter of building a new society, of fusing the disparate elements of conquerors and conquered, of ensuring that the victors not only allowed themselves to be baptized but adapted themselves to receiving in some way the civilization of the vanquished. Christianity served as mediator. It was a work of charity, fully in conformity with its spirit; but it was also an immersion in the whole social life of the time, economic and political. The Church assumed the direction of the new society, called to this by the peoples: by the conquered because only in it did they see the continuer of Roman civilization, and by the conquerors because in the pope and the bishops they venerated a divine authority. The Church fulfilled its task by creating the civilization of the Middle Ages, but at the same time it found itself necessarily implicated in the temporal government of that world; the bishops ended up becoming great feudal lords. The Holy Roman Empire, arising from the understanding of the popes with Charlemagne, was to not only renew the pax romana, an idea always alive in the hearts of the peoples, but to bring about a government thoroughly imbued with the principles of Christianity, a respublica christiana, in which Christianity would be a norm of life not only for individuals but for the collectivity, and the profession and practice of it would be essential for being a member and all the more so a magistrate or governor of the new society: the Gospel was to be lived no less in public life than in individual life. The attempt had grandiose effects, as a serious and profound study of medieval history demonstrates, but it was troubled, one might say, by a continuous internal crisis. Within the Church the worldly element, having grown stronger through the preeminent social position of the bishops and abbots, whom emperors and kings drew to their courts, resisted fiercely against the spiritual element. The papacy itself suffered its baneful influence; it is a proof of the intimate vitality of Christianity 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, St. Francis of Assisi, made shine forth more vividly in the clash of the tremendous struggle the invincible force of the Spirit.
The beneficial work carried out by the Church during the Middle Ages in seeking to preserve as much as possible of Greco-Roman culture was repaid with humanism (v.), which offered the Christian world the occasion for a new crisis. A new worldliness—that of culture and refinement—nearly triumphed, 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 its factors of a political and economic nature not found such powerful assistance in the moral and religious decadence of that historical moment. The immediate effect of Protestantism on consciences was absolute individualism, within a theoretical and practical apparatus of religion, such as justification by faith and the worship of the Bible. The reaction, however, was immediate not only in Catholic countries but also in Protestant ones. Here too, the measure of Christianity that remained alive in hearts provoked at least a partial return to tradition and authority. Roman Catholic unity was replaced by limited unities on the model of national States; these were unities of human origin, but at least they served as a brake on anarchic freedom, the necessary consequence of free examination (v.). The grace of Baptism and the nourishment of Holy Scripture preserved a Christian spirituality in those countries, and the very controversy with Catholicism helped to maintain in them adherence to the dogmas of at least the first 6 centuries of the Church. But the principle of free examination, never disavowed, worked in minds little by little, leading them from mystical and religious subjectivism to philosophical subjectivism, whereby Hegel could later proclaim before Lutheran pastors that he was the true heir of Luther. And biblical criticism carried out among Protestants gradually led first the educated and today even the masses to no longer believe even in the Bible as the divine word of absolute value. In our own days among observers of the world situation, even those not bound to a positive faith, the conviction is spreading that the true bulwark of Christianity remains henceforth the Roman Catholic Church. This Church, having purified itself in its human element through the virtue of the great saints of the 16th century and through the work of the popes who brought about the reforms decreed by the Council of Trent, and having also taken up a new life of missionary expansion, now finds itself caught up in the vast drama that is the elaboration of a new civilization.
The modern era begins with the affirmation of the sovereignty of national States against the principle of the unity of a respublica christiana. Between sovereign States wars are inevitable; it is therefore in the spirit of Christianity to oppose nationalism and imperialism, not to mention 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 journey of sociality among men; but let it not presume to have for consciences a value of supreme end). After the last wars, the concept of a League of Nations made headway. This name or another is indifferent; what matters is to admit an authority superior to individual States that in the name of justice settles any conflicts. Nothing is more Christian than this subordination of politics to justice. Medieval people felt it, even if in practice they did not succeed in bringing it about. Today it is the pope, Pius XII, who raises his voice to recall peoples and States to that principle, the only way to eliminate wars; the mere fact that his appeal is heard with reverence in every part of the world, and even by the most powerful and non-Catholic States, is significant.
Perhaps we are moving toward overcoming the deepest crisis of these first centuries of the modern era, the crisis that in the 18th century took its name from the Enlightenment (v.) but that had already begun earlier. The Enlightenment was not a heresy attacking this or that part of revelation. It was a full frontal attack against revelation for its own sake. Either deny or ignore the supernatural: everything had to be thought in terms of reason and nature. This "naturalistic" mentality passed into the other currents of thought and action that arose and developed afterward, reproduced either in part or in full. It is distinguished from neo-paganism, dear to men of letters 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 purely humanitarian movement. Thus is created the figure of a Jesus, either purely liberal or socialist, a most elect spirit intent on bringing about humanitarianism, with nothing transcendent. Against such a mentality the true Christianity finds itself reacting today, and the struggle is ongoing. The naturalistic infection spoiled 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 a Christian way; but its freedom was the freedom of "nature," not the freedom of the human "person," whose ordering principle—namely truth and moral justice—it did not recognize. With its indifference toward religion, which it considered an individual affair and a matter of subjective taste, it laid the deep causes of the recent crisis of political freedoms. Only Christianity offers the vital means to overcome it, grounding in God the true values of the human person and of sociality. Likewise, it alone can offer the true principles for the solution of the social question that today agitates the world and that gives occasion to present-day communism. Noteworthy is the fact that this, while it actually has a wholly materialistic conception of the world, in its propaganda appeals to the Gospel, of which it presents itself as the true fulfiller. We are again at a "naturalistic" presentation of Christianity, whose true meaning is deformed by excluding its most essential and formative elements. Christianity condemns every form of despotism even when exercised in the name of the people, and predicts certain failure for every attempt, individual or collective, to seek happiness principally in the enjoyment of material goods. To work, as a man and as a citizen, for a greater realization of social justice, especially in the distribution of wealth, is indeed a grave duty of conscience, to which we must become sensitive far more than we have been hitherto; but it is a duty that would not be very Christian if at the same time a spiritual education were not provided that renders the masses fit for a just evaluation of all the goods of man in their order and for a lively awareness of his supreme ends, which are truth, holiness, and beatitude in God.
An insidious form of "naturalism" in the conception of Christianity is also that of modern, or rather modernist, biblical and historical criticism, which, taken together, seemed to arrive at pulverizing the person of Jesus and the transcendent value of "his message." Christianity is not only doctrine, it is at the same time life: "whoever does not love does not know God" (1 Jn. 4:8). Human, natural erudition alone, even the most serious and powerful, can provide only formless materials, however precious they may be in themselves. The construction fails: one arrives at the most discordant conclusions. Such is the result that the most acclaimed studies of recent times offer us. A. Harnack, A. Loisy, E. Troeltsch and many others: each has his own Jesus and his own primitive Christianity to present. Not that their studies are devoid of value; but it is a fragmentary value, or else they serve as a stimulus to undertake new research and to render genuine criticism more refined. But their concrete outcome is to obscure even further, rather than to clarify, the problem of Jesus and of his work. It is another sign of the vitality of Christianity that it can withstand the assault of this prestigious science precisely by making use of its research and its criticisms. And we have in this era of world crisis, against the final disintegration of Christianity to which modernism leads, an almost instinctive reaction even on the part of those Christians who do not belong to the Catholic Church, a movement, so-called "ecumenical," that seeks the return to the unity of all Christians. It is the cry raised in all times by the Catholic Church, that of Jesus Christ himself: "one fold and one shepherd" (Jn. 10:16). But the unity of the mystical body of Christ is not possible except in the manner that his will has established. He spoke of a Church of his and indicated its foundation stone (Mt. 16:18). Whoever separates himself from this stone separates himself from the Church of Christ and separates himself from Christ himself, who has identified himself with the Church: "whoever listens to you listens to me" (Lk. 10:16).
IV. DOCTRINAL OUTLINES
Christianity, as has been said, is not only 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 he made of all men a new society, his Church. The same is to be said of the Apostles: for them, to make Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead known, to teach his doctrine, to communicate his Grace through the Sacraments, to form his Church was a single work; the four things mutually called for one another. And at no time can one speak of the doctrine of Christianity without keeping continually present its dependence on the person of Christ, on his Grace, on his Church. In fact Christ and the Apostles announced to humanity that the time had come to renew itself. The 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), in a society whose members are the Father himself and Jesus Christ (1 Jn. 1, 3) together with all the faithful, invested with power by the Holy Spirit to form the kingdom of God both on earth, a time of trial, and in heaven, for eternity. Such in summary is the great message.
At the basis, then, is a new knowledge of God given to men. By Jesus' command the Apostles were to teach "baptizing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Mt. 28, 19). Afterwards they were to impose hands on the neophytes and thereby give them the Holy Spirit (Act. 8, 15-17). And before that they had heard Jesus proclaim: "All things have been delivered to me by my Father. And no one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and he to whom the Son will have wished to reveal him" (Mt. 9, 27). This knowledge of a mystery intrinsic to the Divinity received, so to speak, its first illustration in the sacramental life, that is, in Baptism (also called gavonà and 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 Supper of the Lord, that is, the Mass, then liturgically commented on 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 spiritual nourishment and center of union of the faithful (v. EUCHARIST). Hence the doctrine of the divine Trinity was a knowledge incorporated, so to speak, in worship and in the sacramental life. But, as has already been noted, the rational nature of man, not suppressed but rather exalted by Grace, led him to reflect on the new gifts of God. Hence the need to express in a "theological" language and method the spiritual experiences of the new man created by Grace. To satisfy this is the task of the Church "teaching," that is, of those who succeeded the Apostles (v. ECUMENICAL COUNCIL; BISHOP) in the direction and government of the faithful and in the inheritance of the promise made to them by Jesus, and particularly to Peter, of a divine assistance, unfailing through the centuries: 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 there arises, on the basis of Revelation, preserved by Tradition and by Scripture, the theological doctrine of the divine Unity and Trinity. 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 a single Nature. A mystery, not a contradiction, because God is one under one aspect and three under another. The divine persons are then "subsistent relations," the knowledge of which opens to us in part the secret of the intimate divine life and of its unique transcendent spirituality. They are in fact relations of Intellect and of Love, as has already been hinted, and they present to us the eternal Being of God as a single and pure Act which in knowing itself affirms itself and at the same time distinguishes itself as knowing and known, and in loving itself reabsorbs this distinction in a Unity that is for us inexpressible; we cannot in fact have recourse except to analogies too remote, such as that of the noblest love, the intellectual, which unifies in itself all that it loves and from "other" makes it become "itself," realizing in this its power the maximum actuation of its intellectuality. On the other hand it is the same intellectuality, essential to the very concept of Spirit, that demands the opposition of knowing and known; and its maximum application must be found in God, most perfect Spirit. 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 there he also finds the basis of his every manifestation. This is why creation is made through the Word (Jn. 1, 3). Indeed the value of creation is the manifesting of God to beings who are other than he; they then recognize him, and in this consists 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, postulates the knowledge of the divine Trinity, and the knowledge of the divine Trinity makes us understand, always within the limits of our created capacity, with what an act of love God makes himself our Father by making us partakers of his Word and of his Spirit, "partakers of the divine nature" (II Pt. 1, 4). And at the same time it makes us understand the greatness of the mystery of Jesus, whose person is God who, joining in himself the twofold divine and human nature, draws in a unique way the hearts of men.
In his humanity the attraction of like toward like is satisfied, in his divinity the attraction toward the transcendent of the being intelligent 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 the Supreme and Immense who descended to "empty himself" (Phil. 2, 6-7) in the embrace of created "nothingness." To say embrace is too little: the Incarnation implies a far more perfect union, and for this union an adjective of its own is coined: hypostatic (v.). The Church that so teaches is the same that gives us the Sacraments and in them Grace, that is, that real action of Christ in the soul whereby there is created in us the supernatural life-giving sense of the precise but abstract formulas of the catechism. If Christ is, he alone, 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 willed the Church to be his collaborator. In them there is, as it were, a continuation of the sensible relationships that Jesus in this world had with the disciples and the other men who approached him to be saved. He worked upon them, giving health of soul before that of body, making use of sensible means: the touch of his hand or of his garments, his word, a little mud, his saliva, as we read in the Gospels. In the Sacraments we too have material, or at least sensible, elements: water, bread and wine, oil, the imposition of hands, etc.; but these, by his institution, not only symbolize but actually bring about an invisible yet real presence of him. It may be of an instant or even lasting (as in the Eucharist); in any case it is an intervention of his in this world of human history and a contact of his with souls, kept thus, even while living this earthly life, in a supernatural climate.
But Christianity does not think of Jesus Christ only as the light and life of the soul; it thinks of him as Savior. The love with which God became incarnate shines with more sublime splendor inasmuch as He descended to a humanity that was not innocent but sinful. No religion is as profoundly moral as Christianity, because none has been equally powerful in recalling man to a sense of sin. None has placed him so seriously face to face with that terrible reality; none has made him measure, as Christianity has, the abyss of damnation. Original sin and the actual sins proper to each man divided and divide God's beloved creature from its Creator. The evil of sin and the debt of humanity are assumed by Jesus: Passion and Death. Men feel this title of his to their love as the title that most strikes their hearts as men. The Grace that came in fact to the descendants of Adam was therefore the Grace of Christ the Savior, and the Redemption, with its historical presuppositions and its perpetual consequences, stands out as one of the principal features of the doctrine and psychology of the Christian: the problem of his correspondence to the saving action of Jesus Christ remains always the most pressing, or becomes such as soon as, from a life of sin or of lukewarmness, he regains awareness of his relations with Christ. One returns to seeing the perdition in which every soul separated from the living and true God finds itself; one turns to Jesus as to the only salvation. Salvation means the mercy of Him who forgives and the interior justification of him who is converted. And one learns from Christ that the secret of happiness lies in justice. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice" (Mt. 5:6), a justice that in the Gospel means holiness (Mt. 6:33). Here is where Christianity best accomplishes the welding of nature and the supernatural. For nature tends necessarily toward happiness, and the supernatural aspires first of all to justice, which is the reconciliation with God of fallen man; and it aspires to it with an act of love, which the action of Grace renders disinterested. Christianity shows man that both justice and beatitude can be called the end of man; but justice is the end that man must propose to himself: he must do so insofar as he is a moral being, subjectively, and he must do so because he is free to propose it to himself; happiness, on the other hand, is the end that man cannot help proposing to himself because he is necessitated to it by his nature. But if one considers what there is of justice 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 that man must propose to himself, because it is what God wills as creator, and because it is supremely just that the just man be blessed. And under this twofold aspect he is also free in proposing happiness to himself, and can have merit in it. In Paradise, moreover, the consciousness of being blessed and the satisfaction that follows from it will be not only the just reward of the merits acquired in this life, but will themselves be acts of acknowledgment of the goodness and holiness of God, that is, will themselves be acts of holiness. Thus Christianity reconciles the two equally living demands of man, the need for happiness and the disinterestedness of virtue.
But the beatitude promised by the Gospel is known only by faith as long as man lives on this earth; hence he remains still free to choose between what is only promised as future and what the present offers him that is pleasant. There is in him Grace and there is together freedom. The one and the other act in him, and he is put to the test. The test is given him, so that he may acquire merit, that is, effect in himself the highest affirmation of his personality even while being united to Christ as the branches to the vine (Jn. 15:5). This too, among the principles of Christianity, full of light and of mystery, is one of the most fundamental, and in it appears the Redeemer's respect for the men he wishes to redeem: he does not save them if they, being able to use their freedom, do not freely choose their own ultimate destiny. Without him they could not be saved; but he in turn does not save them without their free consent.
And so one arrives at the beyond, at that other life to which man by nature aspires through the obscure sense of immortality that he has in the depths of his soul. Christianity, rather than of the Platonic immortality of the soul, speaks of resurrection (1 Cor. 15:35-49), that is, of a remaking, above death, of the whole man as God created him; and it sees its exemplar and efficient cause in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the conclusion of this one's work on earth and it is 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 the human race and opens another; it is the crucial moment of the history of the world: the greatest scandal for those who do not believe, the surest guarantee of the future for those who believe. And through it the door of heaven is opened. Of the discourses of Jesus, the most dense with mystery are perhaps those called "eschatological," that is, those concerning the end of the world and its judgment. Among the modernists there was one who, by giving them an exclusive importance, reducing the whole message of Jesus to the prediction of that end as though it were imminent, came to spoil its meaning. A "eschatological" Christ was fantasized, almost obsessed by the anxiety of an imminent destruction of everything, which becomes for him 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 other. With sovereign serenity he speaks of the kingdom of heaven as of something that must first unfold here below and then be completed in the beyond. The Father must be adored as in heaven so on earth. "Eternal life" begins here, and in this lies the value of the present time. "And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (Jn. 17:3). Hence the celestial glory is but a continuation of the life of Grace, which is already a "knowing" the only true God, the one whose intrinsic Triune Life Christ has revealed and shared with man, and a "knowing" 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 nourishes his Church with himself in the eucharistic mystery, the society of his redeemed of which he makes his own mystical body. It is a "knowing" that is not only an intellectual act, but a real possession in which the whole man takes part, with the new faculties that Grace creates in him. These will reach their most perfect actualization 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" (Jn. 6:48), who will make partaker of that love which the Father has for him (Jn. 17:26) his mystical body, his Church, which from militant and purgative (v. PURGATORIO) has become triumphant. All intelligent creatures, of whom Christ is the King (Col. 1:15-18), will partake of it, with the angels the men: first, above the one and the other, the Mother of the incarnate Word, true Mother of God. And the redeemed of Christ will be there blessed and holy; blessed because at the height of happiness, holy because raised to the summit of the Love of God and of neighbor, in the fulfillment of the "royal law" (Jas. 2:8) which in heaven is substantially the same as on earth, but up there reigns and shines without the contrasts and the trials of this world.
BIBLI: Tutto il DFC è un'esposizione e una difesa del c. integrale. Sull'espansione del c.: A. Harnack, Missione e propagazione del c. nei primi tre secoli (trad. it. di P. Marucchi), Torino 1906, 2ª ed., ivi 1946; J. Riviere, La propagation du christianisme, Parigi 1907; A. D. Sertillanes, Il miracolo della Chiesa, trad. it., Brescia 1936, pp. 99-131; G. Bardy, La conversion au christianisme durant les premiers siècles, Parigi 1949. Sull'excellence e caratteristiche del c.: R. R. Benson, I paradisi del c., trad. it., Firenze 1923; H. de Lubac, Catholicisme, Parigi 1938; trad. it., Roma 1948; G. Ceriani, Giustizia e carità nella città di Dio, Venegono 1941; P. Tacchi-Venturi, La storia delle religioni, 2 voll., Torino 1944; E. Weber, La carità cristiana, trad. it. di G. Sandri, Roma 1947; F. Fabbri, Il c. rivelazione divina, 3ª ed., Assisi 1948, pp. 445-72; N. Turchi, Le religioni del mondo, 1ª ed., Roma 1948. Sulla vitalità del c. nella storia: G. Balmes, Il protestantesimo paragonato ed cattolicesimo nelle sue relazioni con la civiltà europea, trad. it. del card. A. Orioli, 4 voll., Napoli 1849; C. S. Devas, L'Eglise et le progrès du monde, Parigi 1909 (s'ispira al card. Newman); E. Chénon, Le rôle social de l'Eglise, ivi 1920; F. Ozanani, La civiltà cristiana nel suo primo formarsi (a cura di A. Coiazzi), Torino 1935; C. Dawson, Progrès et religion, Parigi 1935; J. Belloc, L'anima cattolica dell'Europa, trad. it. di M. Bendiscioli, Brescia 1935; P. Brezzi, Cristianesimo e civiltà, Roma 1945. Sulla sintesi dottrinale del c.: P. Batiffol, L'enseignement de Jésus, Parigi 1905; J. Huby, Christus, ivi 1935, pp. 932-1058; G. Bozzetti, Tra noi e Dio, Domodossola 1935; id., Nella Chiesa di Cristo, ivi 1930; id., Nell'altra vita, ivi 1942.
Giuseppe Bozzetti