Niemeyer Christian Sheen on Secular World

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A ChristianSheenon a

Secular WorldGerhart Niemeyer

THEMAIN TITLE of one of Professor J aroslavPelikan’s most challenging books-J esus

Through The Centuries-moves a readerto hold it in one’s hand, like a letter froman unknown sender that one turns backand forth before opening it, wonderingmuch about the sender and the messagethe letter might contain. For J esusThrough The Centuries, by its very sub-title, excludes a treatise on dogma, thedevelopment of the faith, or some othertheological scholarship.’ I t promises todeal with Jesus “in the history of culture.”The setting is familiar, but which “Jesus”would fit into it? The “historical” Jesus, the“son of the carpenter from Nazareth,” ashis neighbors described him? Or the figurefleetingly mentioned in J osephus andTacitus? Neither of these J esus figuresdeserves any kind of place in history. Theother J esus, however, isthe unique personwho has so overwhelmingly impressedspiritually sensitive followers that they

have felt a need to bestow on him sacrednames and titles in J esus’s own lifetimeand after his death, for centuries.

From the outset the J esus who isremembered is wholly what Bultmanncalled a “faith event,” the term slightlyhinting at something that is reaLonly to acertain kind of subjective imagination.Still, one need not take the term in thissense, for faith at its best has no idiosyn-cratic character. It is a steady and lovingopenness to those aspectsof reality that liebeyond sense impressions and include themysteries attending nature, history, andevery human life. It is true that people offaith have sensitivities others may be lack-

ing, and that they apperceive meaningswhere others would not even think of

looking, but the same applies, for instance,to those who are in love. DesignatingJ esus as a “faith event” does not imply anyreductionism but rather a wider horizon. I twas this J esus whose experience, inothers, marked an epoch in humanhistory. Throughout history epoch-makingevents have been experiences of timelessmeaning in the flow of time. In Jesus’scase this would refer not to the experienceof J esus himself, which might havebecome an object of knowledge had hewritten a book, but rather the experiencesJ esus called forth in people of faith.

By way of comparison, we do havePlato’s description of his soul’s movementsin the process of “discovering the mind:”“wondering,” “seeking,” “being drawn,”“questioning,” “loving.”* t is also signifi-cant that behind Plato’s own experiencesthere is his experience of Socrates which

moved him to put most of his work intothe mouth of Socrates. Socrates, too,wrote no book, but the Socrates whoentered history is the figure of Plato’s dia-logues, also a kind of “faith event.” InJesus’s life i t might have seemed that heheaded in the same direction as Socrates,for the first title conferred on him bymany was “rabbi,” or teacher. Soon, how-ever, it turned out that this designationcould not sufficiently capture the truedimension of J esus’s person. As Pelikanputs it:

The future belonged to the titles “Christ”and “Lord’ as names for Jesus,and to the

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identification of him as the Son of God andthe second person of the Trinity. It was notmerely in the name of a great teacher, noteven in the name of the greatest teacherwho ever lived, that J ustinian built Hagia

Sophiain Constantinople and J ohann Sebas-tian Bach composed the Muss i n B-Mnor.There are no cathedralsin honor of Socrates

(17).

That is precisely why the title ofPelikan’s book makes one wonder howthe work could be brought about. Forthere is no J esus in universal memoryother than the one of Christian experi-

ence, and the J esus of the dogma calls forthe bent knee rather than for a treatise onculture. Perhaps this particular approachcould not have occurred to anybody, norbeen carried to success by anybody, butJ aroslav Pelikan. A man of broad and pro-found erudition, a scholar of recognizedauthority who has authored threevolumes on The Christian Trudition, aL utheran, and Sterling Professor and de

Vane Lecturer at Y ale, he is a man whocombines professional detachment, livelyfaith, and poetic sensitivity. Tackling aparadoxical enterprise, the cultural mir-roring of high spiritual experiences, hesucceeds astonishingly, superbly, convinc-ingly, memorably. I t does not take awayfrom his success that it appears more pro-nounced in the first half of the book, inchapters each of which is linked to one ofthe names or titles conferred on Jesus bythe faithful. In his later chapters Pelikanhimself must hunt, in the literature, for asuitable characterization of J esus thatcould represent the culture o a period,e.g., the Renaissance, the Enlightenment,romanticism, modernity. “ I think 1 havealways wanted to write this book,” he saysat the beginning of the Preface. The fulfill-ment of a life’swish is indeed a joyfulevent, and Pelikan’s joy is contagious.

How does he proceed? We have seenthat one must start with the dogmataelicited, by Jesus’s appearance, from thefaithful, but Pelikan deals with them asdata, avoiding any trace of preaching, forhe aims not at the dogma but at the imageor images of Christ in a succession of cul-

tures. For instance, take this remark aboutJ esus Christ and history:

“The time is fulfilled . .. n these last days”:it is obvious from these and other state-

ments of the early generations of Christianbelievers that as they carried out the task offinding a language that would not collapseunder the weight of what they believed tobe the significance of the coming of J esus,they found it necessary to invent a grammaro history . . . [appropriating] the schemaofhistorical meaning that had arisen in theinterpretation of the redemption of Israelaccomplished by the exodus from Egypt,and adapted this schema to the redemption

of humanity accomplished by the resurrec-tion of J esus Christ from the dead (21f.).

No description of astrange religion couldbe more neutral than this, even though abelieving Christian wrote it. He knowswhen it is imperative for him to preservethe discipline of scholarly detachment,even in matters close to his heart. Thatap-plies also to the conclusion:

Thus theentire history of Israel had reachedits turning point in J esus as prophet, aspriest, and as king. After the same manner,hewas identified as the turning point in theentire history of all the nations of theworld,as that history was encapsulated in thehistory of the “mistress of nations,” theRoman empire.

What evidence does he mention? Not,primarily, Augustine’s City of God, eventhough Pelikan does acknowledge the keyrole of this work. But for the effects ongeneral culture he selects the history ofEusebius of the events of his own lifetime,the fourth century, and Athanasius’s biog-raphy o Saint Antony. Eusebius, whoknew Constantine personally and deeplyappreciated the significance of thatemperor’s conversion and victory, never-theless finds the decisive event in his nar-ration not in the fourth century but in the

life of J esus Christ. That, for him, was theevent with universal-historical implica-tions. Similarly, the history of Antony’spersonal life centers ultimately on J esusChrist, rather than the hermit himself:“A lthough the purpose of the book is topresent Antony as theembodiment of an



ideal, that does not prevent Athanasiusfrom describing his life as an existentialstruggle, and a struggle that never endsuntil death. Throughout, it is an effort to

describe Antony’s life as ‘the work of theSavior in A ntony.’” The image of J esusChrist creates perspectivesof history bothin public lifeand in the lifeof a particularperson.

Sometimes, Pelikan describes the broadcultural effect of Jesus’s image more inhints than in full elaboration, particularlyin the fourth chapter, “T he K ing of K ings.”“K ing” appeared in Pilate’s inscription on

the cross of J esus, as it also did in the Bookof Revelation where earthly monarchs areseen acclaiming Christ as “L ord of lords,and K ing of kings.” Pelikan briefly men-tions divergent political theories flowingfrom there: one thing celebrates Constan-tine’s empire as the ultimate fruition obeginnings in J esus himself and in Augus-tus, the emperor of universal peace;another manifests itself in Pope Leo 1’s

successful attempt to’stop Attila the leaderof the Huns from taking Rome, displayingthe power which Christ was said to haveconferred on the apostles as the firstbishops; a third opposes the political king-ship of Christ “both in the name of theautonomy of the political order and in thename of the eternal kingship of Christ.”

Pelikan gives too little attention to thebroadest political development stemmingfrom J esus Christ: the disappearance ofthat type of state in which priests werehigh state officials, and temples and riteswere the foremost political institutions.The meaning of Christ’s kingship forhuman life lay beyond and above thepolitical sphere, so that the apparatus ofpolitical rule could no longer be seen asthe sovereign agent of worship and salva-tion. Thus, first in Augustine’s penetratinganalysis and then in the formula coined by

Pope Celasius, two rules and two alle-giances came to be distinguished, sacer-dotium and imperium, spiritual andsecular rule. Cultural results were foundnot only in the acknowledged tension be-tween man’s legal order and the higherdestiny of his soul, but also in the phenom-

enon of the limited state, political ruleoperating within certain permanent con-finements. From the sixth century and on,the limited state has been the hallmark of

Western civilization. This basic trait alonecan account for what Albert Camus hascalled the “metaphysical rebellion” of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries, forour distinction between political and non-political dimensions of life, and for theWestern experience of totalitarian poweras an abomination. The Western conceptof politics and its limits is certainly one ofthe broadcast cultural effects of J esus

Christ.Another concept, possibly broader, istreated in the fifth chapter entitled “TheCosmic Christ.” This is a curious title, con-sidering what the chapter says, whichopens with a quotation from Alfred NorthWhiteheads Science and the ModernWorld (1925)concerning the contributionof medievalism to the formation of thescientific movement and the belief that

every detailed occurrence can be correlatedwith its antecedents in a perfectly definitemanner, exemplifying general principles.Without this belief the incredible labours oscientists would be without hope. I t is this in-stinctive conviction, vividly poised beforethe imagination, which is the motive powerof research:-that there is a secret, a secretwhich can be unveiled. How has this convic-tion been so vividly implanted on the Euro-pean mind? . . . It must come from the

medieval insistence on the rationality ofGod, conceived of as with the personalenergy o J ehovah and with the rationalityof a Greek philosopher (57).

Whiteheads surmise, at that time notproven, was concretely confirmed by theresearches into medieval science byPierre Duhem and, more recently, thenumerous books on the subject by StanleyL. J aki, theologian, philosopher, and phys-

icist. Several fourteenth-century scholars,among them Buridan and Nicole Oresme,reflecting on Aristotle’s cosmology in thelight of the Christian faith in the worldscreation ex nihilo by God, corrected bothAristotle’s law of motion and “his insis-tence on the eternity of the heavens, the

Modern Age 357



endless recurrence of the same ideas andviews. ‘This is not true,’ reads Oresme’sterse reb~ttal .”~ hrough Whitehead,Pelikan points to the entire phenomenon

of modern science as essentially linked tofaith in J esus Christ.Which of his titles is hidden under the

chapter heading, “The Cosmic Christ”? Itis the title “L ogos” as found in the openingof the Gospel according to J ohn: “In thebeginning was the Word, and the Wordwas with God, and the Word was God. ...All things were made through Him andwithout Him nothing was made that wasmade.” Pelikan comments:

Because the speaking of God (which is oneway to translate L ogos) made the worldpossible, t wasalsothe speakingo God thatmade the world intelligible: J esus Christ asL ogos was the Word of God revealing theway and will of God to the world. As themedium of divine revelation, he was alsothe agent of divine revelation, specifically ofrevelation about the cosmos and its crea-tion. His“credibility”was fundamental toallhuman understanding(59).

The Christian fathers drew from this in-sight far-reaching conclusions: “There was,therefore, an analogy between the Logosof God, which had become incarnate inJ esus, and the logos o humanity, whichwas incarnate in each person and percep-tible to each person from within” (63).After certain starts in false directions (atendency to glorify the irrational on theonehand and a rash claim that the mindhas power to know everything about Godon the other), the consensus of the Fatherssettled on “the cosmos [that] was reliablyknowable and at the same time mysteri-ous, both of these because the Logos wasthe Mind and Reason o God’ (65). Wehave seen how this deep conviction in thefourteenth century led to corrections ofAristotle by Christian scholars that pre-figured some of Newton’s principles.

These utterly new thoughts were passedon through L eonard0 to Galileo, so thatthe astonishing enterprise of modern

science was finally being born in Christianculture after several still births in ancientEgypt, China, and Greece.

I t isperhaps bad form for a critic to dis-cuss aparticular book chapter by chapter.My departure from this rule is an excep-tion simply because each of Pelikan’s first

eight chapters deals, powerfully andoriginally, with aspects of religion andculture that one finds hardly anywhereelse. Still, I want to mention only onemore chapter, the one centering onJ esus’s earliest sacred title, “Sonof Man,”the title by which J esus most often re-ferred to himself. Pelikan turns his atten-tion to this title late in the book, andastonishingly so. His topic is the gradualdiscovery of the mystery of human

nature, as Christians were reflecting onthe mystery of the incarnate word. J esushad come into this world to save mankind.Logically speaking one would surmise thatmen were first conscious of their need forsalvation, and this logical order is ob-served today in all Christian instruction.But it did not happen as such in historywhere the experience of J esus came firstand the awareness of man’s sinfulness

later: “Christian thought had to gauge themagnitude of the human crime by firsttaking the measure of the one on whomthe divine punishment of the cross hadbeen imposed and thus (shifting to theoriginal metaphor of salvation as health)making the diagnosis fit the prescription”

The full dimension of man’s self-aware-ness did not come until Augustine’s Con-

fessions, written almost 400 years afterChrist. “First Nicea had to determine whatJ esus the L ight was before Augustinecould determine why He had to bewhatHe was” (73).History has a parallel in theexperience of every Christian who main-tains a life of prayer and for whom thegradually deepening knowledge of J esusChrist becomes the source of an equallydeepening discovery of sin in his own life.Augustine himself had travelled this roadand experienced this discovery. But ifAugustine had left not only to Christiansbut to all of human culture the notion ofsin, including original sin, he also haddwelt on the grandeur of humanity in “theface of J esus Christ,” the human image of

(72).

358 Surnrner/F alll987



God. More than a thousand years afterAugustine, Blaise Pascal, in his Thoughts,found terse words for this knowledge:“T he knowledge of God without that of

man’s misery causes pride. The knowl-edge of man’s misery without that of Godcauses despair. The knowledge of J esusChrist constitutes the middle course,because in Him we find both God and ourmisery” (#426). “That a religion may betrue, it must have knowledge of ournature. I t ought to know itsgreatness andlittleness, and the reasons of both” (#433).

The maxim “K now thyself” came to usfrom the Greeks, who claimed it as a

divine revelation. In spite of Plato, Aris-totle, Zeno, Epicurus, human self-knowl-edge had been neither profound nor ac-curate. Augustine’s discovery of the depthof the human soul, in the presence of J esusChrist, created a psychology which to thisday is unsurpassed in scope and accuracyand which, empirically, deals with the uni-versal condition of man. Pelikan demon-strates great sensitivity by placing his

chapter on this problem late, among thefirst eight ones, centering it on Augustine’sdiscoveries, not only in his Confessionsbutalso in his On the Trinity. He might alsohave pointed to the very late date whenthis psychology created a literary form ofself-expression in the psychological novelas climaxed in Fyodor Dostoevsky. One istempted in fact to change Hegel’s dictumabout the owl of M inerva being a bird ofthe late evening into psychology being acreature of the latenight, tardy in makingits appearance, more tardy in finding aphilosophical expression, and even moretardy in moving the artist’s soul. As an ex-ample of the latter, Pelikan produces areproduction of the powerful painting bySiegfried Reinhardt, called Light, whichshows, in the front, a saxophonist and aperson lost in self-centered dreams, andthen behind them Christ, his face all-

rousing appeal, his figure all light. “It is notonly that in their self-indulgence theychoose to ignore Jesus the light of theworld,” declares Pelikan. “Rather, it is hisvery appearing that, for the first time,reyeals to them their true condition. Both

Modern Age

the misery and the grandeur have becomevisible through the coming of that light”

The sacred titles of J esus have provided

Pelikan with the themes of his first eightchapters, which compose one half of thebook. In the second half the chaptersreceive their topical unity from variouscultural results of the image of J esus, SO

that the images of J esus he describes arenot always born from a deep spiritual ex-perience of adoration. Even thoughPelikan orders these chapters mostly inchronological sequence of “ages”-theRenaissance, the Reformation, the En-

lightenment, Romanticism, the twentiethcentury-he deals with cultural phenom-ena more widely spread than the limits ofthese ages. In his chapter on the Renais-sance his central figure is Erasmus, thecreator of “Sacred Philology.” But Pelikanalso includes in this chapter both Danteand El Creco, neither of whom would nor-mally be counted as being within theRenaissance. One expects of a Lutheran

professor of church history a strong chap-ter on the Reformation, and one is not dis-appointed. Still, the chapter is culturalrather than church history and extends itscoverage to the eighteenth century, thetime of J ohann Sebastian Bach, “the fifthevangelist.” A chapter on Christian paci-fism appears to deal with the seventeenthcentury but also ranges considerably fur-ther in time. “T he Teacher of CommonSense,” a title often applied to J esus in theEnlightenment, illustrates the way inwhich such titles not only reflect thedogma about J esus Christ, but also reducethe image of J esus to the “spirit of thetime” (Hegel’s Zeitgeist), thereby pullingdivine transcendence into mundane im-manence. In his last chapters, Pelikangives other examples or varieties of thesame endeavor, e.g., J esus as “the bard ofthe Holy Ghost” (Emerson), as “the

L iberator” of contemporary liberationideologies, and as a world figure beyondthe frontiers of Christendom.

One must wonder whether, in order towrite these chapters, Pelikan had tomanipulate his portrait of particular ages

(72).

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to fit an image of J esus that he could findin some of the cultural manifestations. Forinstance, Pelikan uses the Renaissanceterm uomo uniuersale (universal man) as

meant to apply to J esus Christ. There isnoquestion that Jesus not only is auniversalman, but in a strict sense the universalman, and has thus figured both in dogmat-ic and generally cultural thinking abouthim. All the same, the Italian Renaissancecoined this symbol to characterize thelikes of Leon Battista A lberti, M ichel-angelo Buonarroti, and Leonard0 da Vin-ci, and when we now speak of “Renais-sance Man,” we really mean a uomouni-

uersale in the fifteenth-century sense. I fPelikan ignores this specific meaning ofthe term in order to concentrate only onthe meaning that applies to J esus, he doesjustice to Jesus but injustice to the Renais-sance. The same kindof distortion isfoundin Pelikan’s report on the Enlightenmentwith itsinsistence on J esus as “the teacherof common sense.” There is no denyingthat the term is used during the Enlighten-

ment, but there also can be no denyingthat Enlightenment deism emphaticallycenters on an absentee God without Jesus,and if it centers in turn on J esus, then it isJ esus without the Cross and the Resurrec-tion. One might even say that in the eigh-teenth century Zeus and the Olympianswere more frequently thought of thanJesus. Something like this needs to bepointed out in order to avoid the impres-

sion that the reality of the eighteenth cen-tury is still the same as in the thirteenth,only with a slightly different image ofJ esus.

More important is the question of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries. Weneed to be aware of the Christian com-ponent in the message of salvation pro-claimed by M arx. But by this time “thehuman mind left to itself,” first postulated

by Voltaire, has fully blossomed into arebellious doctrine. M arx’s savior isa Pro-methean figure, the revolutionary pro-letariat, and salvation is by way of revolu-tionary violence rather than a sacrificialdeath on the cross. On the one hand wecan see that ours, a Christian civilization,

cannot endure without faith in salvation,that is to say, in some kind of salvation. Onthe other hand, we find the message ofsalvation linked to J esus Christ pervertedinto its very opposite and claimed byrebellious man as his own work. A gain,we are no longer in the same reality inwhich a mankind composed of sinful per-sons can count on “the means of grace”and entertain “the hope of glory.” Rather,the entire doctrine of reality, and not justthe conduct of single persons, has beenturned against the divine Savior. The Biblehas names for this phenomenon. J esuscalled it the “unforgivable” sin against theHoly Spirit; and the letters of J ohn speakof “the Antichrist,” a political and not aprivate figure. My remarks here may ap-pear to some severely critical, even imper-missibly critical of ideas that are widelyheld. But in an age that suffers from“spiritual disease” (Schelling’s pneumo-pathology) sane persons need this kind ofcriticism in order to maintain a modicumof order. Pelikan’s pages concerning the

last two or three centuries are devoid ofany trace of critical description of themodern Zeitgeist. Does he believe that thecontinuing image of J esus, in someradically reduced form, will produce itsown critique of the age? Will the fashion-ing o images of J esus from the stuff of arebellious world be sufficient to heal ourspiritual disease? Be that as it may, onecannot read the second half of this book,

particularly the last four chapters, withouta sense of drifting, so different from thefirm footing provided by the first half.

But such complaints must remain strict-ly marginal since this isa book that raisesbroad questions of cultural morphology.Pelikan has demonstrated that the formwe call culture issues from great spiritualimpulses and experiences. L ike Spenglerhe has shown that a cultural form, once

having taken shape, will abide even whena culture seems to have turned its back onthe initial impulse. Unlike Spengler he isnot committed to looking on cultures asmonads or organic unities. The enduringimpulse of the spiritual beginning will beable to spread beyond a specific culture by

360 Summer/Fal11987



. the agency of secondary impulses result-ing from it. has opened for usways Of looking atourselves-our formOf

existence-in ways which may not be en-

tirely new but to which we have by now

regard this entire topic as distasteful, buteven they, and indeedallof us, will sooneror later acknowledge our gratefulness toJ aroslav Pelikan.

'J esusThrough the Centuries: His Place in fheHisforyof Culture (New Haven, 1985). All page referencesare included in the text. Eric Voegelin,Anamnesis, translated and edited by Gerhart Nie-meyer (Notre Dame, 1978), chapter 6, "Reason-The Classic Experience." 3The Free Press, 1967, p.12. 4Stanley L . J aki, Science and Creation (Scottish

'

long been unaccustomed' Many mayAcademic press, 19741,p, 237,

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