Jesus through the centuries.

Jesus through the Centuries

THERE IS every reason why this book should become a long-lasting bestseller. While Pelikan presents Jesus as a kind of universal cultural hero, his book is also a factual, informative history of Christianity, every chapter mirroring an age as it was drawn to Jesus, and illustrating the artistic, literary, and spiritual form that the attraction took.

Pelikan's main problem must have been precisely this cultural inclusiveness. Many people may find it objectionable to present Christ less as the central religious figure of the Christian era than as a reference point for 18 different approaches--Jesus as Rabbi, as Monk, as Poet, as Prince of Peace, as King, as Liberator, and so on. All things to all men, yes, but also a fragmented Christ, Who appears to have been spread too thin. One may speak of Christ as God, in which case His ever-presence is taken for granted; spoken of on any other level, including that of art and culture, He risks becoming a mere superman, the book a panopticon.

The volume is attractively presented, its illustrations are apposite, and the author's faith comes through as solid and uncompromising. It is a timely and telling antidote to the likes of Godard's pornographic film Hail Mary, as also to the Church's frenetic self-desacralization. For this Catholic reader, it is a n irony that, in the midst of a clergy and episcopate stripping churches and liturgy of their beauty for the eyes, ears, touch, and spirit, it is Professor Pelikan, a Lutheran, who has devoted a book to the subject of Christ as the focus of two thousand years of sensory inspiration. He does not seem even to notice that Catholicism has plunged, since the Second Vatican Council, into an eclipse that may last for centuries. Instead, he sails through the book with his eyes fixed on Jesus, the eternal figure, next to Whom institutions seem less important.

Structurally, the book is somewhat frustrating, perhaps because is somewhat frustrating, perhaps because it was originally a series of lectrues; it appears, therefore, as a succession of tableaux, each with a grand opening and a moving finale, but each, also, demanding a new effort on the part of the reader as he tackles what is, essentially, a new book. Ultimately, Jesus through the Centuries comes across as a product of "television culture": fragmented, capsulized, pretentious. You go from the Jewish Jesus to the iconoclastic crisis in Constantinople, from the Crusades to Luther's stand on politics, from the Grand Inquisitor to the redemption of Raskolnikov and Sonya.

All this is to say that the book has not found its genre. Is it cultural history, devotional literature, art history, or theology? In the end it is all of these, yet what overriding impression remains after 272 larger-than-normal-sized pages? I, for one, remember bits of information, interesting rapprochements, evocations of changes of style in art, but mostly what stays in my mind is a succession of well-turned, imaginative essays, amounting to a n anthology; not a book that taught me anything essential or essentially new, not a thesis with a comprehensive insight.

What I miss in Mr. Pelikan's work is a forceful point of view and an argument in its service. Mr. James Billington summarized perhaps best my own overall impression when, in a comment reproduced on the back cover, he notes: "Like a master jeweler working with hard but valuable material, Jaroslav Pelikan . . . has chiseled 18 surfaces . . . affecting human culture. The result is an often glittering intellectual history . . ."

On second thought, I must admit the book is more than that. Pelikan has written a well-timed apologia, recalling wayward theologians to the sanity of another council, the one held in Trent in the mid-sixteenth century, whose first order of business was to restore images after the initial fury of Protestant devastation. That council explained that believers rise to supernatural verities through the perceptions of their senses. Chateaubriand too comes to mind. His Le Genie du christianisme (1802) illustrated the truth of religion by way of the beauty inspired by the Church for many centuries. Chateaubriand, the ever sensitive romantic, understood that with Napoleon not only the Revolution but also the Enlightenment that had spawned it came to an end. The time was not yet ripe for a philosophical defense of Christianity; hence the aesthetic approach to religious sensibility had to be employed.

If there is a message in the book, it is that Christ sails through our turbulent centuries and will safely reach the other shore. There will always be people and epochs that He will inspire, illuminate, set into spiritual motion. But--and here the message is suspended--what about the Church, liturgy, doctrine, magisterium, Mass, canon law, discipline, morality? I am not arguing that the Church is more important than Christ--to do that would be absurd and blasphemous. Yet the Church is Christ's salvational sequel, His body. A work presenting Jesus alone can be, at this time, only half of the story. The Christian intention of Jesus through the Centuries is all-embracing, yet it is unmistakably a Protestant product.

This is also how it avoids a certain ecumenicist demagogy, a unity at any price, which is always heavily paid for. On the authentically spiritual plane, the book may even have the value of a prognosis, a suggestion of where the main denominational lines might, if not converge, then at least find a common ground. This cause is in good hands with Professor Pelikan. He is a man of strong conviction, ready to defend his points with erudition, fire, and--if need be--sarcasm. A professor with faith! A rare spectacle; and, all told, a rare book.