Christianity

CHRISTIANITY. - The religion founded by Jesus Christ.

SUMMARY:

I. Time and expansion

II. Value and characteristics

III. Vitality in history

IV. Doctrinal outlines.

I. TIME AND EXPANSION

Christianity (C.) 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, Confucius (v.) had given Chinese civilization Buddha (v.) had initiated the vast spiritual movement that from India was to extend to all the Far East. With Christianity begins the era generally adopted today in the civilized world. Although from its very inception it asserts its universality, aiming toward Persia and India, its immediate success lies in the Mediterranean world. In less than three centuries, despite the fierce opposition of official powers and paganism, it becomes the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, then overcomes the crisis of the barbarian invasions and converts Celts, Germans, Hungarians, and Slavs. It inspires and elaborates, during the millennium that spans roughly from 500 to 1500, an Middle Ages (v.),

and continues its efficacy as one of the essential factors even of the subsequent modern civilization. Christians today are estimated to number just over 800 million, slightly more than one-third of the earth'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 prevails in all regions of the earth because none of them 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 judgment of superiority, albeit provisional and ab extrinseco, over other religions of mankind. More valid, however, are the considerations ab intrinseco.

1. First, the personality of the founder. The figure of Jesus stands above that of every other known man, even among the founders of religions (the so-called great initiates) and other historical figures of the purest glory, such as Socrates. The personality of Jesus is especially perceived 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 contingencies. Yet all are united in one thing: loving Him as a living person with a devotion that excludes all limits, learning from Him an ever higher moral perfection, recognizing in Him the source and nourishment of all their virtue, and seeing in Him alone the Revelation, suited to us men, of the Divinity. The life of the saints, considered not individually but as a whole, is a characteristic of Christianity in contrast to other religions. These know no such fecundity. They may possess virtuous souls and ascetics; they do not have saints. Only Jesus has had and continues to show such spiritual progeny.

2. Christianity then excels in its concept of the Divinity. The Jewish monotheism, true but incomplete, had already proclaimed the spirituality of God; but entirely focused on preventing any confusion between the creature and God and the consequent idolatry, it possessed only an initial concept of the Spirit as the Ineffable transcending all sensible reality, the Absolute Unique sufficient unto Himself, the Omnipotent who creates the universe from nothing. Yet delving deeper into the concept of Spirit, "God — as St. Thomas can say (De potentia, q. 11, a. 1) — is by His very essence in a perfect act of intellect" and thus of love. Only in the explicit recognition of this His essential actuality can a complete worship of God be founded: "God is spirit; and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth" (Jo. 4:24). The Ineffable thus manifests Himself in His intimate essence, which is His own Life: an eternal and simultaneous process of Intellect and Love in which the true spiritual Unity is realized. No other religion rises to such concepts. The revelation of the Old Testament suggested vague foreshadowings of them; but Judaism, which rejected Jesus Christ, rendered itself incapable of understanding them and closed itself in an opaque monotheism, estranged from the most profoundly true meaning of the Spirit. Islam followed the same path, adding to it the doctrine of fatalism, which further distances God from human souls.

3. Consequent to the concept of the Divinity is that of religion. Christianity, without denying or neglecting the feelings of sacred fear and invocation for help toward the divinity, common to all religions, teaches to surpass them by seeing in God not only the source of every material and moral benefit for us, but the Love lovable in Himself, worthy of being appreciated and served with a limitless and disinterested dedication. This provokes in the soul an unceasing pursuit of moral growth, aimed at an ever higher degree of goodness, that is, of greater resemblance to divine goodness: "be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt. 5:48). Both internal and external worship must be pervaded by this spirit: religion in its complete act is the charity and divine holiness communicated to man. Yet man receives this as a free being and must practice it freely. 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 Him; but the return must be free, just as free and conscious must be the cooperation that divine Providence expects from men in realizing His plan for the universe, a realization that is history. The final destiny of each man is to know and possess God, and to be possessed by Him: a relationship that receives limits from the finitude of the creature, yet remains 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 St. Paul. Christian charity gives to the universality of Christianity a tone of its own that distinguishes it from other religions also tending toward universality, such as Buddhism and Islam. Charity between man and man, while meeting an inescapable demand of humanity — so much so that nothing can be said to be more "natural" than it — at the same time assumes a supernatural realization insofar as it becomes, through the Incarnation, a corollary of 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 both God and man, so that His human love acquires a divine value and fecundity, in which those who believe in Him can participate. The universality of Christianity thus extends not only to all individual members of mankind and all peoples of the earth, but aims to realize itself in every possible way, in all conceivable and achievable forms of good by which man can benefit and serve man, 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 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 precedes, in every century since its existence, all other religions.

4. The love of God and 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, 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 Being who is personal par excellence, and secondarily in those beings who are His true image, that is, intelligent beings, persons themselves. Other beings are things, not persons, and thus have only the value of means; as incomplete beings, they cannot be loved in themselves. Only "persons" have a title to be loved in themselves, though in different measure, according to 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 neighbor. From this is understood the unsurpassed spirituality of Christian morality, which grasps the essence of values in the complex of existences and maintains their hierarchy, without allowing that, in the practical appreciation man makes of beings, what is mere elementary, vegetative, or animal life assumes 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 creation. Thus, the valorization of spirituality — or, what amounts to the same, of personality — is the profound soul of Christianity; and it, while on the one hand

the Christian religion directly strives to promote an unceasing moral progress, both individual and collective, while also cultivating the human instinct to valorize intelligence. This faculty renders man capable of conquering the material world and constitutes the foundation of personality. By virtue of intelligence, man becomes aware of his own dignity, a consciousness that strengthens as his knowledge and dominion over cosmic forces grow. Christianity teaches him to employ these forces as means to increase moral good in the world. Thus, non-spiritual things are imbued with a higher value than they possess by nature, demonstrating that Christianity, in affirming the primacy of the spirit, neither excludes nor depreciates all that lies outside it, as some have claimed. On the contrary, it safeguards science from possible deviations by directing it toward the Supreme Good, and in a certain sense, it ennobles inferior nature by assigning a new, supernatural function to earthly goods: transforming them from instruments of human egoism into instruments of divine Charity.

5. The singular elevation of Christian morality is universally acknowledged; Gandhi (v.) extolled the "Sermon on the Mount," though he reproached Christian peoples for not remaining faithful to II. Yet it is true that among them, this spiritual code has been transmitted for centuries, respected and inwardly venerated even by those who see in it their own condemnation: a sign of a potential inner revolution. In any case, the law of the Gospel makes no concessions, neither expressed nor tacit, to human passions. Jesus showed mercy to sinners but demanded that they open their hearts to the whole truth. For example, regarding 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 the sexual act, not as sin but as attachment to life, as an impediment to liberation from suffering—that is, from individual existence. Mohammed recognized the moral problem but, as is well known, made concessions in its practical solution to the overwhelming force of fallen man’s instincts and to the customs of his people, sanctioning polygamy, divorce, and tolerating concubinage. Jesus, without ambiguity, lays His finger on the wound. Marriage in itself is from God; but it is the hardness of heart, the σκληροσκαρδία (Mt. 19, 8). The inability to love, which leads to divorce, while the man who looks at a woman to desire her, 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 there be the fullness of reciprocal love. In every case, what remains offended, deteriorated, debased is the person of both man and woman: thus, the very essence of morality is violated. And this is never permissible, absolutely, for no excuse, for no reason. Jesus knew men and understood with what fury their flesh would rebel against such a command; 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 should 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). Likewise, to all—not only to a class of special initiates—He imposes the "new commandment," as He calls it, or "my commandment": that we love one another as He has loved us, and therefore also love our enemies and forgive every offense. And He demands its fulfillment without compromise or evasion: here, too, His morality remains unique in its exactingness. Nevertheless, He leaves ample room for freedom and individual initiative, especially in the choice of means by which one may aim at the perfection of love for God and neighbor, among which He indicates some as more directly suited to its realization and richer in supernatural magnanimity (such as poverty, virginity, obedience); but He wills that the Christian choose them of his own free will, through 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 refusal. Moreover, there is no sphere of human life in which Christianity does not exhort man to be unassailable in rendering his conscience ever more delicate, his intention ever purer. There is a continual call to "interiority," to self-formation, to the humility of spirit: a stimulus at all times for unceasing improvement and, in periods of decadence, for awakening, reform, and renewal.

6. While Christianity directly proposes the salvation of each human soul as possessing infinite value in itself, it is nevertheless characteristic of its solicitude to unite men among themselves, to promote the social sense, to organize them into community. It strives in every way to remove what may erect barriers between man and man, between people and people, and above all, what constitutes an insufficient recognition of the dignity of the human person or a danger and temptation for man to fail in this regard. Ordinarily, Christianity does not directly confront the customs or positive laws that sanction such insufficiency or dangers but, by influencing hearts, creates the convictions that cause those customs or laws to fall away 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 where the social condition of women does not fully preserve their personal dignity. Moreover, it is of the spirit of Christianity to infuse into social and political life a leaven of transformation, aimed at making human society a kingdom of God on this earth, a prelude to celestial beatitude. Indeed, the phrase "kingdom of God" or "kingdom of heaven," which resounds as the dominant motif of the Synoptic Gospels, does not signify only the afterlife but also the Church, that society of men among themselves which springs from their society with God the Father and with the Son made man (I Io. 1, 3). It is true that in its direct meaning, "Church" here refers to the sacramental and hierarchical society in which the sanctification and eternal salvation of the faithful is accomplished; but it is also true that Christianity cannot neglect either the glory that comes to the Father from the realization of social justice in this world, with the happiness that may follow, nor the aid to the elevation of the human person that may derive from a better temporal order of society. Christianity, therefore, cannot remain indifferent to the progress of social life, even if it does not consider its immediate and ordinary task to form cities and States. Christianity inherently tends 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 upon them the limits descending from the moral principle, according to which "evil is not to be done that good may come" (Rom. 3, 8). The happiness 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 merits. Yet, while safeguarding the morality of means, Christianity, by its very nature, urges men toward social improvements, for this too is a way of celebrating "the kingdom of God": in fact, it is in Christian countries that the most work has been and is being done toward that end. On the other hand, only Christianity has given man the efficacious consoling word in suffering, this terrible heritage of humanity, and has shown, profoundly, with the image of the Crucified, its purifying, educative, and elevating function.

7. Finally, Christianity excels in its adaptability and understanding in the realm of reality. It accepts any form of government, even primitive ones, and knows how to conform to the mentality of the most diverse peoples or races. Where it encounters barbarism, it seeks to spread the elements of civilized human life, the necessary foundation for a Christian community, without suppressing or contradicting the characteristic tendencies and customs of each people, so long as these are compatible with the demands of natural law and the message of Christ. Where it finds an advanced civilization, as it did in the ancient Roman world or today in China, it embraces all that is good and lawful within it, infusing it with a new spirit. And in every case, it has always proven capable of giving new life to what already existed. There is no field of human activity, especially the noblest—scientific and philosophical thought, law, economics and politics, literature, music, the visual arts, architecture, and any other cultural expression—that has not received a special impulse, a unique inspiration, and a new style from Christianity. Moreover, organized works of charity toward every form of human infirmity and misfortune are its creation: hospitals, asylums, shelters for the mentally ill, orphanages, and so on. The Christian must appropriate all that 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). Christianity directs such interest toward moral improvement and religious elevation. There is no custom to which it does not grant recognition in what it contains of the spiritual or spiritualizable, and thus it accompanies the changing of times in such a way as to preserve nothing of the potential human and religious value of spontaneous gestures and usages, even if tied to transitory environmental motives, as was the case, for example, with medieval chivalry. In this universal power of absorption lies both the index of Christianity’s vitality and the occasion for the drama 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" (John 3:16). This gift implies an "entry" of God into history and a cooperation that He desires from man in His designs for creation, a cooperation of man's intelligence, will, and freedom called to contribute in some way to the realization of Divine Revelation and 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 (Luke 24:49), and the Holy Spirit will accompany human action, purifying, vivifying, and strengthening it; but human action will also be given the task of deploying all the energies proper to it, and thus it will have to confront fatigue, obstacles, and 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—whom Jesus directly entrusted with His message—were still alive, problems of principle and practice arose. Having Judaizers (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 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. Christianity recognizes this as a providential fact, granting Greek and Latin an honored place among the human languages it nevertheless intends to speak in all, according to the prophetic charism of Pentecost. In that civilization, it is well known what prominence philosophical reflection, the reason matured in Greece, held. Christianity makes use of it to give expression to revealed truths and an organic form to the study and preaching of those same truths. Thus, on the data provided by Revelation, a science is built, which is theology; and this, unlike Revelation, has its developments and progress like any human science. Christianity recognizes as legitimate that function of reason and philosophy and does not delay in availing itself of the instrument offered to it at the time. The heresies that then arise 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 He established, tradition (v.). In heretics, this pretension is often cloaked in mystical motives and in any case takes hold of Revelation, still accepted as a superior light. In recent centuries, however, the rebellions of reason are unveiled; philosophy proclaims its self-sufficiency. It is not content with autonomy in the field of natural knowledge and method: it wants to be all Spirit and all man. This is a position incompatible with Christianity; but the latter does not therefore reject 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 work. Moreover, Christianity makes the act by which reason adheres to Truth more vigorous, because it makes its divine origin manifest and thus strengthens man against the snares of skepticism, which is one of the ways by which man denatures himself. Furthermore, Christianity has given philosophy in general a more spiritual tone and to its problems a greater depth and breadth, providing new subjects for meditation and suggesting solutions that, subjected to the scrutiny of 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 assumes a discordant and even 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 rights of reason in its own field. Christianity then inspires in those who sincerely wish to profess it the humility to recognize their own wrong when they fail to understand in time the demands of development and progress of human reason, and confuse the value of immutable Divine Revelation with that of human study on the data of Revelation itself. In any case, Christianity considers the misunderstandings of men 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 a more generous action of good. The life of Christianity is a continuous encounter with obstacles to be overcome in order to ascend higher. Thus, heresies, while in themselves they harm the unity of the faithful, are the occasion for better defining the meaning and force of Christ's message and making its influence richer and more vigorous. Thus, philosophical errors, while on the one hand they distract and mislead, on the other stimulate reflection to penetrate more deeply into rational and revealed truths and to derive greater fruit from them for the human spirit.

The world into which Christianity emerged from Palestine was characterized not only by Hellenic philosophy but also 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 encountering the pax romana at their first steps. It has even been affirmed that it was from Rome that they took the principle and sense of universality; without Rome, they would have remained a lost sect on the shores of the Jordan and the Dead Sea. It is not enough to say that this is an exaggeration; it is a gross igno—

Christianity is the religion founded by Jesus Christ.

That which is true, however, is that the magnificent organization of the Empire and the common civilization of the many diverse peoples who composed it greatly facilitated the realization of the intrinsic universality of Christianity and the maintenance of living and continuous relations among the various Churches scattered throughout 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 very beginning, Christians gave as its first appellation in their profession of faith that of "one." That the living and manifest center of this 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 with every other good thing in the world, Christianity also benefited from the school of juridical wisdom and civil organization that Romanism offered at that time—a school whose fruits the then-nascent Church never forgot thereafter, though always turning them to the benefit of souls. That the pax romana should still be preserved, indeed extended ever further over the rest of the earth, was something the Christians of that time desired precisely as a most useful means to maintain the unity of the evangelized world (if nothing else, it would prevent wars among Christians); but it is equally certain that they could not have considered 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 Christianity had to face. Christianity has an innate instinct to penetrate all human activities, and among these, one of the most important is politics. But the attempt carries with it the risk of worldliness: the men who were to be the workers of the Spirit were also the children of Adam.

The risk was perceived. St. Anthony and the others who fled the world to populate the desert, living there an angelic life, represent the reaction against the tendency toward worldliness that 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 Christianity is not Buddhism. Christian perfection can also belong to those who are not monks, 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 is one of greater sacrifice and leads more directly to God; but at the same time, one cannot exclude that God may wish to lead His saints by more ordinary paths, yet with equal interior grace. It is the will of God that decides, not the will of man; and in the will of God lies the true essence of every good. Thus does Christianity resolve the question of detachment from the world. For all Christians, detachment must be that of the heart. To this may be added material detachment, but not necessarily. Whoever accomplishes the latter, called by God, performs an act of generous virtue; and his act benefits both himself and his neighbor as a splendid school of sacrifice and renunciation of those 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 "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 considered in the common sentiment as the most elect part of the mystical body of Christ. Yet it remains equally incumbent upon every faithful to strive to keep the heart free from any attachment to the world that might hinder or diminish love for God and neighbor. This is essential to the spirit of Christianity, and whoever neglects it is nothing but an inconsistent Christian. The danger for a Christian of becoming worldly, whether in private or public life, is a perennial danger: the constant awareness of its proximity suggests the moderate pessimism that in the Christian soul accompanies the optimism of Grace and Providence.

With the barbarian invasions and the collapse 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 blending the disparate elements of conquerors and conquered, of ensuring that the victors not only allowed themselves to be baptized but also adapted in some way to the civilization of the vanquished. Christianity 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 direction of the new society, called to do so by the peoples: by the conquered because only in her did they see the continuator of Roman civilization, and by the conquerors because in the pope and the bishops they revered 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; bishops ended up becoming great feudal lords. The Holy Roman Empire, born from the agreement of the popes with Charlemagne, was to not only renew the pax romana—an idea always alive in the hearts of the peoples—but also to realize a government imbued with the principles of Christianity, a respublica christiana, in which Christianity was to be a norm of life not only for individuals but for the collectivity, and its profession and practice were essential to 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 individual life. The attempt had grand 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, strengthened by the preeminent social position of bishops and abbots, whom emperors and kings attached to their courts, fiercely resisted the spiritual element. The papacy itself suffered from its harmful influence; it is a testament to the inner vitality of Christianity that the triumph of worldliness was avoided. The great reforming popes of the type of Gregory VII and saints like 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 tremendous struggle.

The beneficial work carried out by the Church during the Middle Ages in its attempt to preserve all that was possible of Greco-Roman culture was repaid with humanism (v.), which offered the Christian world the occasion for a new crisis. For a moment, a new worldliness nearly triumphed—one of culture and refinement—after the Middle Ages had given way 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 political and economic factors not found such powerful support 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 framework of religion such as justification by faith and the worship of the Bible. However, the reaction was immediate, not only in Catholic countries but also among Protestants. Even here, the Christianity that remained alive in hearts provoked at least a partial return to tradition and authority. In place of Catholic Roman unity, limited unities emerged on the model of national states; these were unities of human origin but at least served as a brake on the anarchic freedom that was 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 maintain adherence to the dogmas of at least the first six centuries of the Church. But the principle of free examination, never repudiated, gradually worked its way into minds, leading 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 the biblical criticism developed among Protestants gradually led first the educated and today even the masses to no longer believe in the Bible as the divine word of absolute value. In our days,

among observers of the global situation, even those not bound to a positive faith, the conviction spreads that the true bulwark of Christianity now remains the Roman Catholic Church. Having purified its human element through the virtue of the great saints of the 16th century and the work of the popes who implemented the reforms decreed by the Council of Trent, and having also resumed a new life of missionary expansion, it now finds itself involved in the vast drama of the shaping 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. Among 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, nationalism another: the former is justified, like the family, as an instrument of civilization, a step in the path of sociality among men; but it must not presume to have for consciences a value as the supreme end). After the last wars, the concept of a League of Nations emerged. The name matters little; what is important is to admit a superior authority over individual states that, in the name of justice, resolves potential conflicts. Nothing is more Christian than this subordination of politics to justice. The medievals sensed this, even if in practice they failed to achieve II. Today, it is the pope, Pius XII, who raises his voice to call peoples and states back to that principle, the only way to eliminate wars; the very fact that his call is listened to with reverence in every part of the world, 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 the name of the Enlightenment (v.) but had already begun earlier. The Enlightenment was not a heresy attacking this or that part of revelation. It was a full and frontal attack against revelation itself. Either deny or ignore the supernatural: everything had to be conceived in terms of reason and nature. This "naturalistic" mentality passed into the other currents of thought and action that arose and developed subsequently, reproduced either in part or in full. It differs from neopaganism, 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 purely humanitarian movement. Thus was created the figure of a Jesus, either a pure liberal or a socialist, an elect spirit intent on practicing humanitarianism, without anything transcendent. Against such a mentality, true Christianity finds itself reacting today, and the struggle is ongoing. 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 a Christian manner; but its was the freedom of "nature," not the freedom of the human "person," whose ordering principle—truth and moral justice—it did not recognize. With its indifference toward religion, which it considered a private and subjective matter, it laid the deep foundations for 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 sociality. Likewise, it alone can offer the true principles for the solution of the social question that agitates the world today and gives occasion to present-day communism. Notable is the fact that the latter, while in reality holding a wholly materialistic conception of the world, in its propaganda appeals to the Gospel, presenting itself as its true fulfiller. We are again faced with a "naturalistic" presentation of Christianity, whose true meaning is distorted 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 any attempt, individual or collective, to seek happiness primarily in the enjoyment of material goods. That of striving, 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 one must become far more sensitive than has been the case until now; but it is a duty that would not be very Christian if, together, one did not seek a spiritual education that renders the masses capable of a just evaluation of all human goods in their order and of a lively awareness of its 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, when combined, seemed to reduce the person of Jesus and the transcendent value of "his message" to dust. Christianity is not merely doctrine; it is also life: "qui non diligit, non novit Deum" (John 4:8). Human erudition alone, even the most serious and powerful, can provide only raw materials, valuable as they may be in themselves. The construction fails: one arrives at the most discordant conclusions. 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 are devoid of value; but it is a fragmentary value, or they serve as a stimulus for new research and to refine genuine criticism. Yet their concrete outcome is to obscure, rather than clarify, the problem of Jesus and His work. It is another sign of Christianity's vitality that it can overcome the assault of this prestigious science precisely by utilizing its research and critiques. And in this era of global crisis, against the final disintegration of Christianity to which modernism leads, we see an almost instinctive reaction even among those Christians who do not belong to the Catholic Church—a movement called "ecumenical," which seeks the return to unity among all Christians. It is the cry raised in all ages by the Catholic Church, the cry of Jesus Christ Himself: "unum ovile et unus pastor" (John 10:16). But the unity of the mystical body of Christ is possible only in the way He willed II. He spoke of His Church and indicated its foundation stone (Matthew 16:18). Whoever distances themselves from this stone distances themselves from the Church of Christ and from Christ Himself, who identified Himself with the Church: "qui vos audit, me audit" (Luke 10:16).

IV. DOCTRINAL OUTLINES

Christianity, as has been said, is not merely doctrine but life. Jesus Christ, the author of the Good News, is the author of man, and He addressed the whole man. He spoke to his intellect and at the same time exercised a supernatural action upon his personal reality, while forming all men into a new society, His Church. The same may be said of the Apostles: for them, making known Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead, teaching His doctrine, communicating His Grace through the Sacraments, and forming His Church were a single work; these four aspects mutually implied one another. And at all times, speaking of the doctrine of Christianity cannot be done without continually bearing in mind its dependence on the person of Christ, on His Grace, and on 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 (Io. 1, 18): it included redemption from sin through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, the second birth (Io. 3, 3) of man by way of Grace, and a consequent way of living and acting worthy of the heavenly Father (Mt. 5, 48), within a society of which the Father Himself and Jesus Christ (I Io. 1, 3) are members, along 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 synthesis, is the great message.

At its foundation, then, lies 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). Subsequently, they were to lay hands on the neophytes, thereby imparting to them the Holy Spirit (Act. 8, 15-17). And earlier, 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. 9, 27). This knowledge of a mystery intrinsic to the Divinity received, so to speak, its first illustration in 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 Lord’s Supper, that is, the Mass, liturgically commented on the profession of faith in the newly known Father 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 for the faithful (v. EUCARISTIA). Thus, the doctrine of the divine Trinity was a knowledge incorporated, as it were, into worship and sacramental life. Yet, as has already been noted, man’s rational nature, far from being suppressed, is exalted by Grace, leading him to reflect upon God’s new gifts. Hence arises the need to express in theological language and method the spiritual experiences of the new man created by Grace. Satisfying this need is the task of the “teaching” Church—that is, of those who succeeded the Apostles (v. ECUMENICO; VESCOVO) in the direction and governance of the faithful and in the inheritance of the promise made to them by Jesus, and particularly to Peter, of divine assistance, indefectible throughout 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. In this way, on the basis of Revelation, preserved by Tradition and Scripture, arises the theological doctrine of the Unity and Trinity of God. First, the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ and 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 “subsistent relations,” whose knowledge partially reveals to us the secret of the intimate divine life and its unique transcendent spirituality. They are, in fact, relations of Intellect and Love, as has already been mentioned, and 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 knower and known, and in loving itself reabsorbs this distinction into a Unity that is for us unfathomable; we can, indeed, only resort to very remote analogies, such as that of the noblest love, intellectual love, which unifies within itself all that it loves, transforming “other” into “self,” thus realizing in this power the fullest actualization of its intellectuality. On the other hand, it is the same intellectuality, essential to the very concept of Spirit, that requires the opposition of knower and known; and in God, the most perfect Spirit, its highest application must be found. 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 therein also finds the basis for all His manifestation. This is why creation is made through the Word (Io. 1, 3). Indeed, the value of creation lies in God’s manifestation to beings who are other than Himself; they, in turn, recognize 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, postulates 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 His Spirit, “partakers of the divine nature” (II Pt. 1, 4). And at the same time, it enables us to grasp the greatness of the mystery of Jesus, whose person is God who, uniting in Himself the dual nature, divine and human, draws the hearts of men in a unique way.

In His humanity, the attraction of like toward like is satisfied; 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 the Supreme and the 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 a proper adjective is coined for this union: hypostatic (v.). The Church that teaches thus is the same that gives us the Sacraments and, in them, Grace—that is, that real action of Christ in the soul by which the supernatural sense is created in us, 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 how He wills, nevertheless He has declared that the ordinary means of Grace are to 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 relations that Jesus had in this world with His disciples and other men who approached Him to be saved. He acted upon them, granting the health of the soul before that of the body, using sensible means: the touch of His hand or His garments, His word, a little mud, His saliva, as is read in the Gospels. In the Sacraments, we also have material, or at least sensible, elements: water, bread and wine, oil, the laying on of hands, etc.; but by His institution, these not only symbolize but effectively realize an invisible yet real presence of Him. It may be momentary 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, who are thus kept, even while living this earthly life, in a supernatural climate.

But Christianity does not conceive of Jesus Christ merely as the light and life of the soul; it conceives of Him as Savior. The love with which God became incarnate shines with a more sublime splendor insofar as He descended to a humanity not innocent but sinful. No religion is as profoundly moral as Christianity because none has been as powerful in calling man back to the sense of sin. None has placed him so seriously face to face 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 divided and divide the creature beloved by God from its 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 most deeply touches their hearts as men. The Grace that in fact came to the descendants of Adam was thus the Grace of Christ the Savior, and Redemption with its historical presuppositions and its perpetual consequences stands out as one of the principal features of Christian doctrine and psychology: the problem of its correspondence to the saving action of Jesus Christ always remains the most pressing, or becomes so as soon as a life of sin or lukewarmness regains awareness of its relationship 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 the only salvation. Salvation means the mercy of Him who forgives and the interior justification of the one who converts. And one learns from Christ that the secret of happiness lies in justice. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness" (Mt. 5:6), righteousness that in the Gospel means holiness (Mt. 6:33). Here is where Christianity best accomplishes the welding between nature and supernature. For nature necessarily tends toward happiness, and supernature first aspires 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 as a moral being, subjectively, and he must because he is free to propose it to himself; happiness, on the other hand, is the end that man cannot help but propose to himself because he is necessitated to it by his nature. But if one considers what is just in beatitude as a consequence and completion of justice and as the effectuation of God’s will (who in creating man proposed to make him happy), 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 be happy. And under this twofold aspect, he is also free in proposing happiness to himself, and can merit II. In Paradise, then, the consciousness of being happy and the satisfaction that follows will be not only the just reward of the 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 vivid 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 free to choose between what is only promised as future and what the present offers as pleasant. In him there is Grace and there is also freedom. Both act within him, and he is put to the test. The test is given to him so that he may acquire merit, that is, effect within himself the highest affirmation of his personality 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 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 they, being able to use their freedom, do not freely choose their ultimate destiny. Without Him they could not save themselves; but He, in turn, does not save them without their free consent.

And so one arrives at the hereafter, that other life to which man naturally aspires by the obscure sense of immortality he bears 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 remaking, beyond death, of the whole man as God created him; and it sees its exemplar and efficient cause in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. This 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 for those who do not believe, the surest guarantee of the future for those who do. And through it, the door of heaven opens. Among Jesus’ discourses, 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 were those who, by giving them exclusive importance, reducing the entire message of Jesus to the prediction of that end as if it were imminent, came to distort its meaning. They imagined an "eschatological" Christ, almost obsessed with 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 entire good news. But the reality of Jesus is quite different. With sovereign serenity, He speaks of the kingdom of heaven as something that must first unfold here below and then be fulfilled in the hereafter. 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. "Now this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent" (Jn. 17:3). Thus, heavenly glory

is but a continuation of the life of Grace, which is already a "knowing" of the only true God, the one whose intrinsic Trinitarian Life Christ revealed and shared with man, and a "knowing" of Christ Himself, the Sent One 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 mystical body. It is a "knowing" that is not merely an intellectual act, but a real possession in which the whole man concurs, with the new faculties that Grace creates in him. These will reach their most perfect realization in the heavenly 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 His mystical body, His Church—which from militant and purifying (v. PURGATORIO) has become triumphant—partake of that love which the Father has for Him (Jn. 17:26). All intelligent creatures, of whom Christ is the King (Col. 1:15-18), will participate in it, with angels and men: first among them, above all others, 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 height of happiness, holy because risen to the summit of the Love of God and neighbor, in the fulfillment of the "royal law" (Jas. 2:8), which in heaven is substantially the same as on earth, but there it reigns and shines without the contrasts and 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. II. 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. II. 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. II. 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. II. 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