Just as he has tried to avoid the thorns of erudite criticis_Life of Christ

LIFE OF CHRIST

_by_

GIOVANNI PAPINI

Freely translated from the Italian

_by_

DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY

THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY

RAHWAY, N. J.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The King James English version has been followed in the Bible quotations

of this translation, except in a few cases where an alteration in the

Revised Version was evidently the result of a better understanding of

the original Greek or Hebrew text.

For the form of proper names, the spelling of the Century Dictionary has

been used as a rule; for names not given in the Century, the form

current in the usual standard works. Since this book is intended to be

popular rather than either scholarly or archæological, it was thought

best to use the name-forms best known to most readers.

It will be noted that a number of the quotations are mosaics made up of

phrases taken from different parts of the Bible and put together to make

one passage. This not being the English usage in such matters, it seems

desirable to call the reader’s attention to the character of such

quotations.

The only other explanation which may be necessary is in connection with

the omission of occasional sentences, paragraphs and of one or two

chapters. In the case of individual sentences or phrases, they were

usually omitted because they contained an allusion sure to be obscure to

non-Italian readers. A characteristic example of such omissions is in

the scene of the crucifixion where Christ is described as being nailed

to the cross with outstretched arms like an owl nailed with outstretched

wings to a barn-door. This revolting country-side custom being unknown

to American readers, a reference to it could only cloud the passage.

Since translators into English who omit passages are usually accused of

suppressing valuable material which might displease too-narrow

Anglo-Saxon readers, it is perhaps as well to explain that the excision

of paragraphs here and there, and of a few chapters, is in no sense an

expurgation, because this _Life of Christ_ is very much of the same

quality throughout. It simply seemed to me that such occasional

lightening of the text would make it more acceptable to English-speaking

readers, so much less tolerant of long descriptions and minute

discussions than Italians.

I quite realize that this may seem a slight and arbitrary basis for

making actual excisions in an author’s work, and I understand that the

translator is not at all responsible for the matter which he translates,

but only for the truthfulness with which he presents the text given him

to set into another language. I was moved first by the fact that the

passages omitted are of no more importance than any other passages in

the book; and secondly by the author’s wish expressly stated in his

Introduction, to have this a readable book which will hold those who

pick it up, rather than to have it a book of exact learning or great

literature. This translation was made with the purpose of allowing the

general American reading-public to form an opinion on a book which has

aroused a great deal of discussion in modern Italy; and to carry out

this purpose, the occasional omissions mentioned and a certain freedom

in the rendering of the Italian seemed to me justifiable.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

INTRODUCTION

For five hundred years those who call themselves free spirits because

they prefer prison life to army service have been trying desperately to

kill Jesus a second time—to kill Him in the hearts of men.

The army of His enemies assembled to bury Him as soon as they thought

they heard the death-rattle of Christ’s second death. Presumptuous

donkeys mistaking libraries for their stables, top-heavy brains

pretending to explore the highest heavens in philosophy’s drifting

balloon, professors poisoned by the fatal strong drink of philology and

metaphysics, armed themselves. Paraphrasing the rallying-cry of Peter

the Hermit to the crusaders, they shouted “Man wills it!” as they set

out on their crusade against the Cross. Certain of them drew on their

boundless imaginations to evolve what they considered proof positive of

a fantastic theory that the story of the Gospel is no more than a legend

from which we can reconstruct the natural life of Jesus as a man,

one-third prophet, one-third necromancer, one-third demagogue, a man who

wrought no miracles except the hypnotic cure of some obsessed devotees,

who did not die on the cross, but came to Himself in the chill of the

sepulcher and reappeared with mysterious airs to delude men into

believing that He had risen from the dead.

Others demonstrated as certainly as two and two make four that Jesus was

a myth developed in the time of Augustus and of Tiberius, and that all

the Gospels can be reduced to a clumsy mosaic of prophetic texts. Others

conceived of Jesus as a good, well-meaning man, but too high-flown and

fantastic, who went to school to the Greeks, the Buddhists, and the

Essenes and patched together His plagiarisms as best He could to support

His claim to be the Messiah of Israel. Others made Him out to be an

unbalanced humanitarian, precursor of Rousseau and of divine democracy;

an excellent man for his time but who to-day would be put under the care

of an alienist. Others to get rid of the subject once for all took up

the idea of the myth again, and by dint of puzzlings and comparisons

concluded that Jesus never was born anywhere in any spot on the globe.

But who could have taken the place of the man they were trying to

dispose of? The grave they dug was deeper every day, and still they

could not bury Him from sight.

Then began the manufacture of religions for the irreligious. During the

whole of the nineteenth century they were turned out in couples and half

dozens at a time: the religion of Truth, of the Spirit, of the

Proletariat, of the Hero, of Humanity, of Nationalism, of Imperialism,

of Reason, of Beauty, of Peace, of Sorrow, of Pity, of the Ego, of the

Future and so on. Some were only new arrangements of Christianity,

uncrowned, spineless Christianity, Christianity without God; most of

them were political, or philosophic, trying to make themselves out

mystics. But faithful followers of these religions were few and their

ardor faint. Such frozen abstractions, although sometimes helped along

by social interest or literary passions, did not fill the hearts which

had renounced Jesus.

Then attempts were made to throw together facsimiles of religion which

would make a better job of offering what men looked for in religion.

Free-Masons, Spiritualists, Theosophists, Occultists, Scientists,

professed to have found the infallible substitute for Christianity. But

such mixtures of moldy superstition and worm-eaten necromancy, such a

hash of musty rationalism and science gone bad, of simian symbolism and

humanitarianism turned sour, such unskillful rearrangements of Buddhism,

manufactured-for-export, and of betrayed Christianity, contented some

thousands of leisure-class women, of condensers of the void ... and went

no further.

In the meantime, partly in a German parsonage and partly in a

professor’s chair in Switzerland, the last Anti-Christ was making ready.

“Jesus,” he said, coming down from the Alps in the sunshine, “Jesus

mortified mankind; sin is beautiful, violence is beautiful. Everything

that says ‘yes’ to Life is beautiful.” And Zarathushtra, after having

thrown into the Mediterranean the Greek texts of Leipzig and the works

of Machiavelli, began to gambol at the feet of the statue of Dionysius

with the grace that might be expected of a German, born of a Lutheran

minister, who had just stepped down from a chair in a Swiss University.

But, although his songs were sweet to the ear, he never succeeded in

explaining exactly what he meant when he spoke of this adorable “Life”

to which men should sacrifice such a living part of themselves as their

need to repress their own animal instincts: nor could he ever say in

what way Christ, the true Christ of the Gospels, opposed Himself to

life, He who wanted to make life higher and happy. And the poor

syphilitic Anti-Christ, when insanity was close upon him, signed his

last letter, “The Crucified One.”

And still Christ is not yet expelled from the earth either by the

ravages of time or by the efforts of men. His memory is everywhere: on

the walls of the churches and the schools, on the tops of bell-towers

and of mountains, in street-shrines, at the heads of beds and over

tombs, thousands of crosses bring to mind the death of the Crucified

One. Take away the frescoes from the churches, carry off the pictures

from the altars and from the houses, and the life of Christ fills

museums and picture-galleries. Throw away breviaries and missals, and

you find His name and His words in all the books of literature. Even

oaths are an involuntary remembrance of His presence.

When all is said and done, Christ is an end and a beginning, an abyss of

divine mystery between two divisions of human history. Paganism and

Christianity can never be welded together. Before Christ and After

Christ! Our era, our civilization, our life, begins with the birth of

Christ. We can seek out what comes before Christ, we can acquire

information about it, but it is no longer ours, it is signed with other

signs, limited by other systems, no longer moves our passions; it may be

beautiful, but it is dead. Cæsar was more talked about in his time than

Jesus, and Plato taught more science than Christ. People still discuss

the Roman ruler and the Greek philosopher, but who nowadays is hotly for

Cæsar or against him; and where now are the Platonists and the

anti-Platonists?

Christ, on the contrary, is still living among us. There are still

people who love Him and who hate Him. There is a passion for the love of

Christ and a passion for His destruction. The fury of so many against

Him is a proof that He is not dead. The very people who devote

themselves to denying His ideas and His existence pass their lives in

bringing His name to memory.

We live in the Christian era, and it is not yet finished. If we are to

understand the world, our life, ourselves, we must refer to Christ.

Every age must re-write its own Gospel. More than any other, our own age

has so re-written its own Gospel, and therefore the author ought perhaps

to justify himself for having written this book. But the justification,

if there is need of such, will be plain to those who read it.

There never was a time more cut off from Christ than ours, nor one which

needed Him more. But to find Him, the old books are not enough. No life

of Christ, even if it were written by an author of greater genius than

any who has ever lived, could be more beautiful and perfect than the

Gospels. The candid sobriety of the first four stories can never be

improved upon by any miracle of style and poetry. And we can add very

little to the information they give us.

But who reads the Gospels nowadays? And who could read them, even if he

set himself at it. Glosses of philologists, comments of the exegetical

experts, varying readings of erudite marginal editors, emendations of

letters, such things can provide entertainment for patient brains. But

the heart needs something more than this.

Every generation has its preoccupations and its thoughts, and its own

insanities. The old Gospels must be re-translated for the help of the

lost. If Christ is to remain alive in the life of men, eternally present

with us, it is absolutely necessary to resuscitate Him from time to

time; not to color Him with the dyes of the present day, but to

represent with new words, with references to things now happening, His

eternal truth and His never-changing story.

The world is full of such bookish resuscitations of Christ, learned or

literary: but it seems to the author of this one that many are

forgotten, and others are not suitable. To write the history of the

stories of Christ would take another book and one even longer than this

one. But it is easy to divide into two great divisions those which are

best known and most read: (1) Those written by orthodox authors for the

use of the orthodox; (2) and those written by scientists for the use of

non-believers. Neither the first nor the second can satisfy those who

are seeking in such lives for Life.

The lives of Jesus written for pious readers exhale, almost all of them,

a sort of withered mustiness, the very first page of which repels

readers used to more delicate and substantial fare. There is an odor of

burnt-out lamp-wick, a smell of stale incense and of rancid oil that

sticks in the throat. You cannot draw a long, free breath. The reader

acquainted with the biographies of great men written with greatness, and

possessing some notions of his own about the art of writing and of

poetry, who incautiously picks up one of these pious books, feels his

heart fail him as he advances into this flabby prose, torpid, tangled,

patched up with commonplaces that were alive a thousand years ago, but

which are now dead and petrified. It is even worse when these worn-out

old hacks try to break into the lyric gallop or the trot of eloquence.

Their faded graces, their ornamentations of countrified purisms, of

“fine writing” fit for provincial academies, their artificial warmth

cooled down to tepidity by unctuous dignity, discourage the endurance of

the boldest reader. And when they are not engulfed in the thorny

mysteries of scholasticism, they fall into the roaring eloquence of the

Sunday sermon. In short, these are books written for readers who believe

in Jesus, that is, for those who could, in a way, get along without

them. But ordinary people, indifferent people, irreverent people,

artists, those accustomed to the greatness of Antiquity and to the

novelty of Modernity, never look at even the best of such volumes; or if

they pick them up, let them fall at once. And yet these are the very

people whom such a book should win because they are those whom Christ

has lost, they are those who to-day form public opinion and count in the

world.

Another sort of books, those written by the learned men for the

neutrals, succeed even less in turning towards Christ the souls that

have not learned the way to Christianity. In the first place they almost

never have any intention of doing this, and in the second place they

themselves, almost all of them, are among those who ought to be brought

back to the true and living Christ. Furthermore, their method which is,

as they say, historical, scientific, critical, leads them to pause over

texts and external facts, to establish them or to eliminate them, rather

than to consider the meaning and the value and the light which, if they

would, they could find in those texts and those facts. Most of them try

to find the man in the God, the actual external facts of the miracles,

the legend in the tradition and, above all, they are on the look-out for

interpolations, for falsifications and apocrypha in the first part of

Christian literature. Those who do not go so far as to deny that Jesus

ever lived, take away from the testimony about Him everything they can,

and by dint of “ifs” and “buts” and doubts and hypotheses, so far from

writing any definite story themselves, succeed in spoiling the story

contained in the Gospels. In short, such historians with all their

confusion of fret-work and bunglings, with all the resources of textual

criticism, of mythology, of paleography, of archeology, of Greek and

Hebrew philology, only triturate and liquefy the simple life of Christ.

The most logical conclusion to draw from their rambling incoherent talk

is that Jesus never did appear on the earth, or if by chance He really

did appear, that we know nothing certain about His life. Christianity

still exists, of course, in spite of such conclusions, and Christianity

is a fact not easily disregarded. To offset this fact the best these

enemies of Christ can do is to search through the Orient and Occident

for the origins, as they say, of Christianity, their intention being

quite openly to parcel it out among its predecessors, Jewish, Greek, for

that matter Hindu and Chinese, as if to say: “You see, your Jesus at

bottom was not only a man, but a poor specimen of a man, since he said

nothing that the human race did not know by heart before his day.”

One might ask these deniers of miracles how they explain the miracle of

a syncretism of old traditions which has grown about the memory of an

obscure plagiarist, an immense movement of men, of thoughts, of

institutions, so strong, overwhelmingly strong, as to change the face of

the earth for centuries. But this question, and many others, we will not

put to them, at least for the present.

In short, when in looking for light we pass from the bad taste of the

devotional compilers to the writers who monopolize “historic truth” we

fall from pietistic boredom into sterile confusion. The pious writers

are unable to lead men to Christ, and the “historians” lose Him in

controversy. And neither one nor the other tempt men to read. They may

differ from each other in matters of faith, but they resemble each other

in the uncouthness of their style. And unctuous rhetoric is as

distasteful to cultivated minds, even superficially acquainted with the

divine idyll and divine tragedy of the Gospels, as is the

cold-heartedness of learned writers. So true is all this that even

to-day, after the passage of so many years, after so many changes of

taste and opinion, the only life of Jesus which is read by many lay

readers is that of the apostate priest, Renan, a book which all true

Christians dislike for its dilettante attitude, insulting even in

praise, and which every real historian distrusts because of its

compromises and its insufficient scholarship. But although this book of

Renan’s seems written by a skeptical romancer, wedded to philology, or

by a Semitic scholar suffering from literary nostalgia, it has the

merits of being really “written,” that is, of getting itself read, even

by those who are neither believers nor specialists.

To make itself readily read is not the only value nor the greatest which

a book can have, and the writer who contents himself with that alone and

who thinks of nothing else shows that vanity rather than ardor is his

motive-power. But let us admit that to be readable is a merit and not a

small merit for a book, especially when it is not intended as a tool for

study, but when it aims at the mark called, “moving the emotions,” or to

give it its real name, when its aim is to “transform human beings.”

The author of the present book finds—and if he is mistaken he will be

very glad to be convinced by any one who sees more clearly than he—that

in the thousands of books which tell the story of Jesus, there is not

one which seeks, instead of dogmatic proofs and learned discussions, to

give food fit for the soul, for the needs of men of our time.

The book we need is a living book, to make Christ more living, to set

Christ the Ever-Living with loving vividness before the eyes of living

men, to make us feel Him as actually and eternally present in our lives.

We need a book which would show Him in all His living and present

greatness—perennial and yet belonging intimately to us moderns—to those

who have scorned and refused Him, to those who do not love Him because

they have never seen His true face; which would show how much there is

of supernatural and symbolic in the human, obscure, simple and humble

beginning of His life, and how much familiar humanity, how much

simple-hearted plainness shines out when He becomes a Heavenly Deliverer

at the end of His life, when He becomes a martyr and rises again

divinely from the dead. We need a book which would show in that tragic

epic, written by both Heaven and earth, the many teachings suited to us,

suited to our time and to our life, which can be found there, not only

in what Christ said, but in the very succession of events which begin in

the stable at Bethlehem and end in the cloud over Bethany. A book

written by a layman for the laymen who are not Christians or who are

only superficially Christians, a book without the affectations of

professional piety and without the insipidity of scientific literature,

called “scientific” only because it perpetually fears to make the

slightest affirmation. A book, in short, written by a modern writer who

respects and understands his art, and knows how to hold the attention

even of the hostile.

The author of this book does not pretend to have written such a book;

but at least he has tried as far as his capacities can take him, to draw

near to that ideal.

Let him state at once with sincere humility that he has not written a

“scientific history.” In the first place because he could not; in any

case because he would not, even if he had possessed all the necessary

learning. He warns the reader, among other things, that this book was

written (almost all of it) in the country, in a distant and sparsely

settled countryside with very few books at hand, with no advice from

friends or revision from masters. It will, therefore, never be cited by

higher criticism or by those who scrutinize original sources with a

microscope; but that is of little importance compared to the possibility

of its doing a little good to a few souls, even to one alone. For as he

has explained, the author wishes this book to be another coming of

Christ and not another burial.

The author bases his book on the Gospels; as much, let it be understood,

on the synoptic Gospels as on the fourth. He confesses that he has no

interest in the endless dissertations and disputes over the authority of

the four Gospels, over their dates and interpolations, over their mutual

relationship, and over their probabilities and sources. We have no older

nor no other documents, contemporaneous, Jewish or Pagan, which would

permit us to correct them or to deny them. He who goes into all this

minute investigation can destroy many doctrines, but he cannot advance

the true knowledge of Christ by a single step. Christ is in the Gospels,

in the apostolic tradition, and in the Church. Outside of that is

darkness and silence. He who accepts the four Gospels must accept them

wholly, entire, syllable by syllable,—or else reject them from the first

to the last and say, “We know nothing.” To attempt in these texts to

differentiate what is sure from what is probable, what is historic from

what is legendary, what is original from what has been added, the

primitive from the dogmatic is a hopeless undertaking, which almost

always ends in defeat, in the despair of the readers, who in the midst

of this hubbub of contradictory systems, changing from one decade to

another, end by understanding nothing and by letting it all drop. The

most famous New Testament authorities agree on only one thing, that the

Church was able to select in the great mass of primitive literature the

oldest Gospels thought up to that time to be the most reliable. No more

need be asked.

In addition to the Gospels, the author of this book has had before his

eyes “the Logia and the Agrapha,” which seemed to have the most

evangelical flavor, and also some apocryphal texts used with judgment.

And finally nine or ten modern books which he had at hand.

It seems to him as well as he can judge, that he has departed sometimes

from ordinary ideas and that he has painted a Christ who has not always

the perfunctory features of the ordinary holy picture, but he is not

sure of this nor does he value any new thing which may be in this book,

written more in the hope of having it a good book than of having it a

beautiful book. It is rather more likely that he has repeated things

already said by others, of which he in his ignorance has never heard. In

these matters, the subject, which is truth, is unchangeable and there

can be nothing new except the manner of presenting it in a form more

efficacious because it may be more easily grasped.

Just as he has tried to avoid the thorns of erudite criticism on the one

hand, he has no pretensions, on the other, of going too deeply into the

mysteries of theology. He has approached Jesus with the

simple-heartedness of longing and of love, just as during His life-time

He was approached by the fishermen of Capernaum, who were, fortunately

for them, even more ignorant than the author. Holding loyally to the

words of the orthodox Gospels and to the dogmas of the Catholic Church,

he has tried to represent those dogmas and those words in unusual ways,

in a style violent with contrasts and with foreshortening, colored with

crude and vividly felt words, to see if he could startle modern souls

used to highly colored error, into seeing the truth.

The author claims the right to take to himself the words of St. Paul:

“To them that are without law, I became as without law that I might gain

them that are without law. To the weak became I as weak that I might

gain the weak; I am made all things to all men, that I might by all

means save some. And this I do for the Gospel’s sake.”

The author has tried to present not only the Hebrew world, but the world

of antiquity, hoping to show how new and how great Christ was compared

to those who preceded Him. He has not always followed the chronological

order of events, because it better suited his aims, which are not (as he

has said) entirely historical, to gather together certain groups of

thoughts and facts and to throw a stronger light on them instead of

leaving them to be scattered here and there in the course of the

narrative.

In order not to give a pedantic look to the book he has suppressed all

references to quotations and has used no foot-notes. He did not wish to

seem what he is not, a learned bibliographer, and he did not wish to

have his work smell, however faintly, of the oil of the lamp of

erudition. Those who understand these things will recognize the un-named

authorities, and the solutions which the author has chosen when

confronted with certain problems of concordance. The others, those who

are only trying to see how Christ appeared to one of them, would be

wearied by the apparatus of textual learning and by dissertations at the

bottom of the pages. One word only must be said here in connection with

the sinning woman weeping at Jesus’ feet: although it is generally

understood from the Gospel story that there were two different scenes

and two different women, the author for artistic purposes has allowed

himself to treat them as one, and he asks a pardon for this which he

hopes will be easily granted since there is no question of dogma

involved.

He must warn the reader that he refrained from developing the episodes

where the Virgin Mother appears, in order not to lengthen too greatly a

book already long, and especially because of the difficulty of showing

by passing allusions all the rich wealth of religious beauty which is in

the figure of Mary. Another volume would be necessary for that, and the

writer is tempted to try if God grants him life and sight to “say of her

what was never said of any woman.”

Those who are experienced in reading the Gospels will realize that other

things of lesser importance have been shortened and some others, on the

contrary, lengthened more than is customary. Some have seemed to the

writer more appropriate than the others for his purpose, which is, to

use an expression now out of date and distasteful to sophisticated

people, the purpose of edification.

This book is meant to be a book—the author knows how he will be jeered

at—of edification. Not in the meaning of mechanical bigotry, but in the

human and manly meaning of the “refashioning” of souls.

To build, or as the old word expressed it, to edify a house, is a great

and holy action; to make a shelter against winter and the night. But to

build up or edify a soul, to construct it with stones of truth! When

there is talk of edification you see in it only an abstract word worn

out with use. To edify in the original meaning was to construct walls.

Who of you has ever thought of all that goes into the making of a house,

a house firm on the earth, and honestly built, with well-plumbed walls,

with a good sheltering roof? Think of all that is needed to build a

house: well-squared stones, well-baked bricks, sound beams,

freshly-burned lime, fine, clean sand, cement that has not lost its

strength through age! And then patient, expert workmen to put each thing

in its place, to join the stones perfectly one by one, not to put too

much water or too much sand in the mortar, to keep the walls damp, to

know how to fill in the chinks, to smooth the rough-cast plaster! All

this so that a house may go up day by day towards heaven, a man’s house,

the house where he will bring his wife, the house where his children

will be born, where he can invite his friends.

But most people think that to make a book it is enough to have an idea

and then to take so many words and put them together. Not so. A kiln of

tiles, a pile of rocks, are not a house. To build up a house, to build

up a book, to build up a soul, are undertakings which require all of a

man’s power. The aim of this book is to build up Christian souls because

that seems to the writer at this time in this country an urgent need. He

who has written it cannot now say whether he will succeed or not. But

readers will recognize, he hopes, that it is a real book and not a

collection of scraps, not an assemblage of little pieces, a book that

may be mediocre and mistaken, but which is constructed: a work built up

as well as edifying or building up; a book with its own plan and its own

architecture, a real house with its atrium and its architraves, with its

divisions and its vaultings—and also with some openings towards heaven

and over the fields.

The author of this book is, or would fain be, an artist, and in writing

it he could not forget his own character. But he declares here that he

has not wished to create a work of Belles Lettres, or as they say now,

of “pure poetry,” because at least for this time truth is dearer to him

than beauty. But if his powers as a writer, however feeble they may be,

as a writer loving his art, are sufficient to persuade one more soul, he

will be more thankful than ever in his life for the gifts which he has

received. His inclination towards poetry has perhaps been of use to him

in rendering fresher and more vivid the picture of those things which

seem petrified in the usual hieratic consecrated wording.

The man of imagination sees everything as though it were new: every

great star, wheeling in the night, might lead you to the house hiding

the Son of God; every stable has a manger which, filled with dry hay and

clean straw, might become a cradle; every bare mountain top flaming with

light in the golden mornings above the still somber valley, might be

Sinai or Mt. Tabor: in the fires in the stubble, or in the charcoal

kilns shining on the evening hills you can see the flame lighted by God

to guide you in the desert; and the column of smoke rising from the poor

man’s hearth shows the road from afar to the returning laborer. The ass

who carries the shepherdess just come from her milking is the one ridden

towards the tents of Israel, or the one which went down towards

Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. The dove cooing on the edge of

the slate roof is the same that announced the end of the great

punishment to the Patriarch, or the same that descended on the waters of

the Jordan. For the poet everything is of equal value and omnipresent,

and all history is sacred history.

The author begs the pardon of his austere contemporaries if rather more

than is fitting he lets himself go to what is nowadays disdainfully

dubbed eloquence, illegitimate issue of pompous rhetoric and

illegitimate mother of overemphasis and other dropsical growths of

elocution.

He knows very well that eloquence displeases moderns as bright red cloth

displeases the fine city lady, as the organ in a church displeases

minuet dancers, but he has not always succeeded in dispensing with it.

When it is not borrowed declamation, eloquence is the ardent expression

of faith, and in an era which has no faith there is no place for

eloquence. And yet the life of Jesus is such a drama and such a poem

that in place of the words, worn thread-bare, which have at our

disposition, we should use only those “torn and sentient” words of which

Passavanti speaks. Bossuet, who knew something about eloquence, once

wrote: “Plût à Dieu que nous puissions détacher de notre parole tout se

qui delecte l’esprit, tout ce qui surprend l’imagination, pour ne

laisser que la verité toute simple, la seule force et l’efficace toute

pure du Saint Esprit, nulle pensée que pour convertir.”

Very true, but difficult to achieve.

At times the author of this book would have liked to possess an

eloquence vivid and powerful enough to shake all hearts, an imagination

rich enough to transport the soul by enchantment into a world of light,

of gold and of fire. Yet at other times he almost regretted that he was

too much the artist, too much the man of letters, too much given to

inlaying and chiseling, and that he did not know how to leave things in

their powerful nudity.

Only when he has finished a book does an author know how he ought to

have written it. When he has set down the last word, he ought to turn

back, begin at the beginning, and do it all over again with the

experience acquired in the work. But who has, I do not say the energy to

do this, but even the conception that it ought to be done.

If on some of its pages this book sounds like a sermon, there is no

great harm done. In these days when for the most part only women, and an

occasional old man, go to listen to the preaching in churches, where

mediocre things are often said in a mediocre manner, but where more

often still, truths are repeated which ought not to be forgotten, we

must think of the others, of the scholarly men, of “intellectuals,” of

the sophisticated, of those who never enter a church, but sometimes step

into a book-shop. For nothing in the world would they listen to a

friar’s sermon, but they condescend to read it when it is printed in a

book. And let it be said once and for all, this book is specially

written for those who are outside the Church of Christ; the others,

those who have remained within, united to the heirs of the Apostles, do

not need my words.

The author excuses himself for having written a book with so many, with

too many pages, on only one theme. Now that most books—even his own

books—are only bundles of pages taken out of journals, or short-winded

little stories, or short notes taken from note-books, and generally do

not go beyond two or three hundred pages, to have written more than four

hundred pages on one theme will seem a tremendous presumption. The book

certainly will seem long to modern readers used to light wafers rather

than to substantial home-made loaves. But books, like days, are long or

short, according to what you put into them. And the author is not so

cured of his pride as to think that this book will remain unread on

account of its length, and he flatters himself that it may be read with

less tedium than other books that are shorter. So difficult it is to

cure oneself of conceit—even for those whose wish it is to cure others.

Some years ago the author of this book wrote another to describe the

melancholy life of a man who wished for a moment to become God. Now in

the maturity of his years and of his consciousness he has tried to write

the life of a God who made Himself man.

This same writer in those days let his mad and voluble humor run wild

along all the roads of paradox, holding that a consequence of the

negation of everything transcendental was the need to despoil oneself of

any bigotry, even profane and worldly, to arrive at integral and perfect

atheism; and he was logical as the “black cherubim” of Dante, because

there is only one choice allowed man, the choice between God and

nothingness. When man turns from God there is no valid reason to uphold

the idols of the tribe or any other of the old fetiches of reason or of

passion. In those proud and feverish days he who writes affronted Christ

as few men before him have ever done. And yet scarcely six years

afterwards (but six years of great travail and devastation without and

within his heart), after long months of agitated meditations, he

suddenly interrupted another work begun many years ago, and almost as if

urged and forced by a power stronger than himself, he began to write

this book about Christ which seems to him insufficient expiation for his

guilt. It has happened often to Christ that He has been more tenaciously

loved by the very men who hated Him at first. Hate is sometimes only

imperfect and unconscious love: and in any case it is a better

foundation for love than indifference.

How the writer came to discover Christ again, by himself, treading many

roads, which all brought him to the foot of the Mount of the Gospel,

would be too long and too hard a story to tell. But there is a

significance not perhaps wholly personal and private in the example of a

man who always from his childhood felt a repulsion for all recognized

forms of religious faith, and for all churches, and for all forms of

spiritual vassalage and who passed, with disappointments as deep as the

enthusiasms had been vivid, through many experiences, the most varied

and the most unhackneyed which he could find, who had consumed in

himself the ambitions of an epoch unstable and restless as few have

been, and who after so many wanderings, ravings and dreamings, drew near

to Christ.

He did not turn back to Christ out of weariness, because his return to

Christ made life become more difficult and responsibilities heavier to

bear; not through the fears of old age, for he can still call himself a

young man; and not through desire for worldly fame, because as things go

nowadays he would receive more commendation if he continued in his old

ideas. But this man, turning back to Christ, saw that Christ is

betrayed, and, worse than any affront to Him, that He is being

forgotten. And he felt the impulse to bring Him to mind and to defend

Him.

For not only His enemies have left Him, and despoiled Him; the very ones

who were His disciples when He was alive only half understood Him, and

deserted Him at the end; and many of those who were born in His church

disobey His commands, care more for His painted pictures than for His

living example, and when they have worn out their lips and knees in

materialistic piety, think they are quits with Him, and that they have

done what He asked of man,—what He still is asking, what He has been

asking desperately and always in vain for nineteen hundred years.

A story of Christ written to-day is an answer, a necessary reply, an

inevitable conclusion. The balance of modern public opinion is against

Christ. A book about Christ’s life is therefore a weight thrown into the

scales, in order that from the eternal war between love and hate there

may result at least the equilibrium of justice. And if the author is

called a reactionary, that is nothing to him. The man who is thought to

be behind the times often is a man born too soon. The setting sun is the

same which at that very moment colors the early morning of a distant

country. Christianity is not a piece of antiquity now assimilated, in as

far as it had anything good, by the wonderful and not-to-be-improved

modern consciousness; but it is for very many something so new that it

has not even yet begun. The world to-day seeks for peace rather than for

liberty, and the only certain peace is found under the yoke of Christ.

They say that Christ is the prophet of the weak, and on the contrary He

came to give strength to the languishing, and to raise up those trodden

under foot to be higher than kings. They say that His is the religion of

the sick and of the dying, and yet He heals the sick and brings the

sleeping to life. They say that He is against life, and yet He conquers

death; that He is the God of sadness, and yet He exhorts His followers

to be joyful and promises an everlasting banquet of joy to His friends.

They say that He introduced sadness and mortification into the world,

and on the contrary when He was alive He ate and drank, and let His feet

and hair be perfumed, and detested hypocritical fasts, and the

penitential mummeries of vanity. Many have left Him because they never

knew Him. This book is especially for such readers.

This book is written, if you will pardon the mention, by a Florentine, a

son of the only nation which ever chose Christ for its King. Savonarola

first had the idea in 1495, but could not carry it through. In spite of

a threatening siege, it was taken up in 1527 and approved by a great

majority. Over the door of the Palazzo Vecchio, between Michael Angelo’s

David and Bandinelli’s Hercules, a marble tablet was built into the

wall, with these words:

JESUS CHRISTUS REX FLORENTINI

POPULI P. DECRETO ELECTUS.

Although changed by Cosimo, this inscription is still there; the decree

was never formally abrogated and denied, and even to-day after four

hundred years of usurpations, the writer of this book is proud to call

himself a subject and soldier of Christ the King.

LIFE OF CHRIST

Jesus was born in a stable, a real stable, not the bright, airy portico

which Christian painters have created for the Son of David, as if

ashamed that their God should have lain down in poverty and dirt. And

not the modern Christmas-eve “Holy Stable” either, made of plaster of

Paris, with little candy-like statuettes, the Holy Stable, clean and

prettily painted, with a neat, tidy manger, an ecstatic Ass, a contrite

Ox, and Angels fluttering their wreaths on the roof—this is not the

stable where Jesus was born.

A real stable is the house, the prison of the animals who work for man.

The poor, old stable of Christ’s old, poor country is only four rough

walls, a dirty pavement, a roof of beams and slate. It is dark, reeking.

The only clean thing in it is the manger where the owner piles the hay

and fodder.

Fresh in the clear morning, waving in the wind, sunny, lush,

sweet-scented, the spring meadow was mown. The green grass, the long,

slim blades were cut down by the scythe; and with the grass the

beautiful flowers in full bloom—white, red, yellow, blue. They withered

and dried and took on the one dull color of hay. Oxen dragged back to

the barn the dead plunder of May and June. And now that grass has become

dry hay and those flowers, still smelling sweet, are there in the Manger

to feed the slaves of man. The animals take it slowly with their great

black lips, and later the flowering fields, changed into moist dung,

return to light on the litter which serves as bedding.

This is the real stable where Jesus was born. The filthiest place in the

world was the first room of the only Pure Man ever born of woman. The

Son of Man, who was to be devoured by wild beasts calling themselves

men, had as His first cradle the manger where the animals chewed the cud

of the miraculous flowers of Spring.

It was not by chance that Christ was born in a stable. What is the world

but an immense stable where men produce filth and wallow in it? Do they

not daily change the most beautiful, the purest, the most divine things

into excrements? Then, stretching themselves at full length on the piles

of manure, they say they are “enjoying life.” Upon this earthly pig-sty,

where no decorations or perfumes can hide the odor of filth, Jesus

appeared one night, born of a stainless Virgin armed only with

innocence.

THE OX AND THE ASS

First to worship Jesus were animals, not men. Among men He sought out

the simple-hearted: among the simple-hearted He sought out children.

Simpler than children, and milder, the beasts of burden welcomed Him.

Though humble, though servants of beings weaker and fiercer than they,

the ass and the ox had seen multitudes kneeling before them. Christ’s

own people, the people of Jehovah, the chosen people whom Jehovah had

freed from Egyptian slavery, when their leader left them alone in the

desert to go up and talk with the Eternal, did they not force Aaron to

make them a Golden Calf to worship? In Greece the ass was sacred to

Ares, to Dionysius, to Hyperborean Apollo. Balaam’s ass, wiser than the

prophet, saved him by speaking. Oxus, King of Persia, put an ass in the

temple of Ptha, and had it worshiped. And Augustus, Christ’s temporal

sovereign, had set up in the temple the brazen statue of an ass, to

commemorate the good omen of his meeting on the eve of Actium an ass

named “The Victorious.”

Up to that time the Kings of the earth and the populace craving material

things had bowed before oxen and asses. But Jesus did not come into the

world to reign over the earth, nor to love material things. He was to

bring to an end the bowing down before beasts, the weakness of Aaron,

the superstition of Augustus. The beasts of Jerusalem will murder Him,

but in the meantime the beasts of Bethlehem warm Him with their breath.

In later years, when Jesus went up to the city of death for the Feast of

the Passover, He was mounted on an ass. But He was a greater prophet

than Balaam, coming not to save the Jews alone but all men: and He did

not turn back from His path, no, not though all the mules of Jerusalem

brayed against him.

THE SHEPHERDS

After the animals came those who care for animals. Even if the Angel had

not announced the great birth, they would have gone to the stable to see

the son of the stranger woman. Shepherds live almost always alone and

far away. They know nothing of the distant world, nor of the feast-days

of the earth. They are moved by whatever happens near to them, even if

it is but a little thing.

But as they were watching their flocks in the long winter night, they

were shaken by the light and by the words of the Angel. “Fear not, for

behold I bring you good tidings of great joy.... Glory to God in the

highest and on earth peace to men of good will.” In the dim light of the

stable they saw a beautiful young woman gazing silently at her son. And

as they saw the baby with His eyes just open, His delicate rosy flesh,

His mouth which had not yet eaten, their hearts softened. The birth of a

new man, a soul just become incarnate taking upon itself to suffer with

other souls, is always a miracle so deep as to move to pity even the

simple-hearted who do not understand it. For the shepherds forewarned,

this new-born child was not just a baby, but He for whom their suffering

race had been waiting, for a thousand years.

The shepherds offered what little they had, that little which is so

great when offered with love. They carried the white offerings of their

craft, milk, cheese, wool, the lamb. Even to-day in our mountains, where

one finds the last dying traces of hospitality and fraternal feeling, as

soon as a wife is delivered of a child, the sisters, wives and daughters

of the shepherds come hurrying to her; and not one of them empty-handed.

One has three or four eggs still warm from the nest, another a cup of

freshly drawn milk, another a little cheese, another a pullet to make

broth for the new mother. A new being has begun his suffering: the

neighbors hasten to carry their offerings almost as though to console

the mother.

Themselves poor the old-time shepherds did not look down on the poor.

Simple as children they loved children. They came of a race born of the

Shepherd of Ur, saved by the Shepherd of Madian. Their first kings had

been shepherds—Saul and David—shepherds of herds before being shepherds

of tribes. But these shepherds of Bethlehem, “unknown to the hard

world,” were not proud. A poor man was born among them and they looked

on Him with affection and lovingly brought Him their poor riches. They

knew that this boy, born of poor people in poverty, born of common

people in the midst of common people, was to be the redeemer of the

humble, of those men of good will, on whom the Angel had called down

peace.

THE WISE MEN