Anthony Esolen contributes articles on the Catholic faith to many publications. The last article I posted from his pen was his beautiful tribute to the new English translation of the Roman Missal which was first used in the United States on the first Sunday of Advent last year.
A love supreme
A review of 'The Infancy Narratives"
By ANTHONY ESOLEN
Imagine touring the Sistine Chapel with someone who has done more than merely read some learned commentary on the paintings of Michelangelo. He has looked at them, pondered them, loved them, even waited upon them to reveal their inner harmony, and now he seeks to hand on to you what he has found.
Imagine listening to a master organist, not playing the whole
St. Matthew Passion but showing you, as he touches a chord here and makes a progression there, some hint of the grandeur of Bach's composition that you might miss in the overwhelming storm of its performance.
Then you have an idea of what Pope Benedict XVI has attempted in his three-volume work on the life of Jesus, but most humbly and sweetly in the "Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives."
Modern men too often see things only by the guttering firelight of politics. Pope Benedict, who wrote many works of deep scholarship while simply Joseph Ratzinger, also served as the head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, earning him a reputation among the ignorant as combative — "God's Rottweiler."
It may surprise some, then, to read that Pope Benedict has written about one topic all his life long. Love is the key to his work, as it is the theme and lesson of this work. Indeed, the Pope has written that in Jesus, the man and the mission are one, and the mission is the holiness of love — of being entirely for and with God, and for and with mankind, without reserve.
Now Benedict shows how this understanding of Jesus is manifest from the beginning, in his conception, his birth and his childhood.
Any scholar who would write on the first few chapters of Matthew and Luke faces two problems. The first is the opinion that the narratives about the birth of Jesus are add-ons, not central to the mission and the person of Jesus. The second is that we are too familiar with them. We have heard the carols and seen the crèches.
We do not see the shadow of the cross fall upon the stable at Bethlehem.
My addendum:Orthodox Christianity makes this foreshadowing of the tomb in the crib very clear in its Christmas iconography - in which
the manger is a tomb, and the infant's swaddling clothes are reminiscent of the Jewish burial cloth.
Benedict addresses both problems at once, affirming the historicity of the narratives and showing that the question of who Jesus is hinges upon the question of whence he has come.
People who encountered Jesus, whether they chose to follow him or not, claimed that they knew exactly where he came from, the no-account village of Nazareth. Yet they did not know where he came from —whence he derived his authority.
The early Christians, by contrast, saw the life of Jesus as a coherent whole. The end of Matthew's Gospel, says Benedict, when Jesus commissions his disciples to go forth to the ends of the earth, baptizing all nations, is present in the beginning, in the genealogy that links Jesus with Abraham and God's promise of universality. Abraham is the essential wayfarer, Benedict writes, whose "whole life points forward," a dynamic of "walking along the path of what is to come."
Even to those who think themselves familiar with Niblical texts, every page of
Jesus of Nazareth will present some pearl of great value, something that should have been obvious but that has been passed over in haste or inattention.
For example, when Luke places Jesus's birth in the context of the Augustan empire, and notes that Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem to register for the tax, he expects his readers, Benedict argues, to compare one "prince of peace" with another, for that is what Augustus styled himself ("Princeps Pacis").
The epithet was more than propaganda, Benedict says. It expressed a heartfelt longing in the people of the time, racked by the Roman civil wars and conflicts between the Roman empire and her rivals to the east.
We might see how seriously it was taken if we study Augustus's Altar of Peace
[the Ara Coeli] in Rome, consecrated a few years before Jesus's birth. It was so placed that on the emperor's birthday, between morning and evening, the sun cast the shadow of an obelisk, says the Pope, along a line that struck the very center of the altar, where Augustus himself was portrayed as supreme pontiff.
But Augustus belongs to the past, Benedict notes, while Jesus "is the present and the future." That is because the salvation we yearn for is not simply a truce, with some economic prosperity, but the healing of our very selves.
Man is "a relational being," Benedict writes, by which he means that we only know ourselves when we give ourselves away in love. More to the point, Benedict teaches, God allows us to know Him by giving Himself in love to us. This gift, though grand, is necessarily also secret and humble, seeking not to overmaster but to invite.
In speaking of an intimate love, all the Gospel writers speak the same language, Benedict explains, whether it is Matthew showing that the birth of Jesus occurs outside of and against the predilections of the grand court of Herod, or Luke stressing the quiet interior life of Mary, or John saying that God has pitched his tent among us, submitting to the infirmities of the flesh, and to rejection.
This love is no mere sentiment. It is the ground of our being. Yet Benedict points to the gospels themselves for examples of how often we seek less than love, even while we believe we are seeking more.
Jesus's own disciples believed that he would reestablish the earthly kingdom of David — and Matthew takes trouble both to establish Jesus's descent from David (it is why Joseph had to travel to the city of David, Bethlehem) and to show that this kingship is wholly new, and not of this earth.
Thus Joseph is told that the child's name will be called Jesus, a name derived from the Hebrew word meaning "to rescue," because "he will save people from their sins."
That seems at once too little and too much, Benedict says. He compares the verse with the episode of the paralytic in Luke, who hears Jesus say, "Your sins are forgiven." But he wanted to walk — and the Jews wanted freedom from their overlords.
The paralytic would indeed rise up and walk, but the point is clear: The gospel calls people to no less than complete love of God and neighbor—to the surrender of illusions that we can heal ourselves.
"The Infancy Narratives" is a short volume but for that very reason may be an ideal introduction to Benedict's writings, and for that matter Jesus's message of love.
Carl Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight and its blog, Scoop, as well as of the Catholic World Report called attention to Mr. Esolen's WSJ piece, and quotes some passages from his own review of the book coming out in the December 23 edition of Our Sunday Visitor (unfortunately available online only to subscribers):
Connecting crib and cross
by Carl Olson
Excerpted from
The book has four chapters and an Epilogue. The second chapter is on the annunciation of the births of John the Baptist and Jesus; the third on the birth of Christ; the fourth on the wise men and the flight into Egypt; the epilogue discusses the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple.
The first chapter, notably, begins not with the Gospels of Matthew or Luke, but with the Gospel of John. It is similar to how
Verbum Domini, Pope Benedict’s 2010 postsynodal apostolic exhortation on the Word of God, began by stressing that the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel would be “a guide” for the rest of that lengthy and impressive document.
In “The Infancy Narratives,” it is John 18, which describes Jesus’s encounter and exchange with Pontius Pilate, serving as the starting point. “Where are you from?” asked the Roman judge of Jesus, wanting “to understand who he really is and what he wants.”
This question about Jesus’s true origins, Pope Benedict emphasizes, is found in key passages in both the Fourth Gospel and the three Synoptic Gospels. All four texts were written to answer the questions: “Who is Jesus? Where is he from?”
From there, the Pope moves into an engaging discussion of the genealogies presented by Matthew and Luke. Each genealogy points purposely to the end of the Gospel.
What is established from the start is Pope Benedict’s intent to show how the birth and death of Jesus Christ are intimately connected, and how the Incarnation and the Passion are not merely two episodes in salvation history, but are part of a cohesive whole that is “present from the beginning: the universality of Jesus’s mission is already contained within his origin.”
In other words, there is one Story, and unless we see the outlines of that startling mystery, we cannot rightly gauge, appreciate, and consider the many events and details within it.
For example, the second chapter concludes with the observation (drawn from Protestant exegete Karl Barth) that God’s direct interventions in the material world “in the story of Jesus” consist of “the virgin birth and the resurrection from the tomb.”
These two moments, Pope Benedict further notes, “are a scandal to the modern spirit” even as they are “the cornerstones of faith.” And in the following chapter, on Jesus’s birth, he points out the “child stiffly wrapped in bandages is seen as prefiguring the hour of his death … The manger, then, was seen as a kind of altar.”
This orientation to the Cross is summed up perfectly in the Epilogue: “The closer one comes to Jesus, the more one is drawn into the mystery of his Passion"....
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/12/2012 14:18]