The Idea of Christ in the Gospels
SCRIBNER, $2.75
GRAYBEARDS will remember how, fifty years ago, Albrecht Ritschl strove to hold in check the “intuitionism ” then popular in American theological thought, by insisting that every alleged intuition be corrected by reference to the infallible standard that had been given the world in the historical Jesus. The cry became “Back to Jesus.” Theology was faced with the problem of recapturing from the Gospel narrative an authentic portrait of the man Jesus of Nazareth, divested of all the metaphysical features with which his eager biographers had embellished him. It became a task, first, for the textual critic; then, for the interpreter; and both were baffled. The complete story has been told by Albert Schweitzer in his Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1910.
One effect of this attempt to recapture the historical Jesus was to leave deeply impressed on the minds of Protestant theologians the idea that the only thing worth saving in the Gospels is that skeleton of authentic narrative stripped clean of all the theological flesh with which the Gospel writers, who were theologians in their own right, have clothed it. Thus, all the insidious pigmentation, editorial redactions, gratuitous comments, interpolations, textual tamperings, by means of which each author has tried to color the figure of Jesus to his own theological taste, must be scraped off as being of no value. The only thing that counts is the historical figure, the man Jesus of Nazareth.
Professor Santayana, born a Roman Catholic, allows the authors of the Gospels the right to do their work under the guidance of inspiration: he begins by saying that the Gospels are not historical works but products of inspiration. What he is trying to recapture is precisely what the Protestant theologian has been trying to discard: not the historical Jesus but the metaphysical Christ; not the skeleton of authentic history but the flesh of theological speculation which was current at the time. He raises not one single question of textual purity or of critical interpretation. He takes the text as is, since it is precisely to this editorial pigmentation that he must first look for what he seeks.
His book might be rated as an antithetical companion piece to Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, for it is “The Quest of the God-in-man Idea as it Appears in the Gospels.” He traces the growth of this idea — that in Jesus we are given the mystery of the Incarnation, God-inman - as it unfolds in the four Gospels: the timid suggestion of Mark, the greater confidence of Matthew and Luke, the “all-out” assurance of John. Then in the second part, the “Ulterior Considerations,” he examines the idea and satisfies himself (for the book has the flavor of a soliloquy) of its validity.
To read the book is a beautiful, cleansing, enlightening, challenging experience. We can close our eyes and be whisked back six hundred years to the age of the great Schoolmen, and listen to Abelard or Erigena as he investigates a point that has little utility but is its own justification. We are vaguely conscious all through the book of its scholastic limitation. The thought is not wideranging; it never questions the axiomatic assumptions, but it is intensive. Just as scholastic thinking, while it might be restricted in the lateral dimension, was free in the perpendicular, so this book delves to profundities and rises to heights that are not common in Protestant thinking.
The book does not preach. The nearest it comes to preaching is when it makes the quiet statement: “The idea of Christ is the intrinsic ideal of the spirit. Its impulse is to transcend life’s agitation into realization of the eternal, in which there is aesthetic delight, moral peace, and intellectual clearness.” We gather that all this awaits us; we may have it if we want it. Mr. Santayana is of the opinion that we shall not want it, but seems not to care much whether we want it or not.
CHARLES E. PARK