Life of Christ
THE ATLANTIC’S BOOKSHELF
These reviews of recent books of unusual value are based upon lists furnished through the courteous coöperation of such trained judges as the following: American Library Association Book List, Wisconsin Free Library Commission, and the staffs of the public libraries in Springfield (Massachusetts), Newark, Cleveland, Kansas City, and St. Louis.
by , translated by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1923. 8vo. vi+416 pp. $3.50
THE modern biographer, who has endeavored to analyze and resuscitate the great historical figures of the past, to take the dead material of document and record and extract from it the enduring element of vital personality, is naturally tempted by the life that has done more to transform and transfigure the world than any other that has ever been known. But the biographer shrinks from the utter impossibility of the task. Material such as he demands is wholly lacking. Written words of Christ Himself do not exist, Words and acts attributed to Him by others have come down through such a mist of confusion, transformation, misunderstanding, misinterpretation that a careful, scientific study of the fundamental personality seems quite hopeless.
But this very fluid, mobile condition of the material, which is the despair of the biographer, is clear gain for the spiritual interpreter, who is looking not for historical portrayal, but for emotional result.
And he who would effect this spiritual end is wholly right to approach the subject as Signor Papini does, casting away all critical apparatus and all nice and sceptical discussion, going straight to Christ’s divine origin, his divine mission, his divine endowment. Ever since the Reformation the Protestant world has insensibly, logically, been making the figure of Jesus the object of a process of attenuation, explaining away, lopping off, cutting down this attribute, reducing that, till there was nothing left but the pale shadow of New England Unitarianism. And shadows may blight the world—they cannot make it over.
What Christ has done for mankind has been done as God not as man. Ethical teaching may be helpful, may be comforting. But all through these long centuries what has really taken hold of agony and sin and sorrow has been the divine personality made flesh, knowing all the weakness of earth and pouring upon it all the strength of heaven. Among the varied and crying needs of the modern world none is greater than that of such an immediate personal contact with the Divine. ‘There never was a time more cut off from Christ than ours, nor one which needed Him more,’says Signor Papini, with absolute truth. To meet this need he re-tells the old story, but with a certain fresh and fiery ardor; takes what we have all known from childhood, but brings it, as it were, right up to date; gives it an indefinable color and vigor of modern touch; shows that the Christ-Ideal is so simple that a child can understand it, yet so difficult that the wisest can realize it only by getting rid of their wisdom and becoming as little children. To get this result he employs often the methods of melodrama, and he would be the last to deny it. He would say, perhaps with justice, that an age which battens on the sensations of the movies can be touched only by what stirs and stings it to the point of actual pain. But he would say further, and many of us will agree with him, that, if the twentieth century is to be regenerated by Christianity, it can be only by the Christianity of Christ.
GAMALIEL BRADFORD.