Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/445

 JESUS

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JESUS

the conduct of Jesus is so many-sided that His char- acter seems to elude all description. Command and sympathy, power and charm, authority and affection, cheerfulness and gravity, are some of the qualities that make the task of analysis impossible. The make-up of the Gospels does not facilitate the work. At first they appear to us a bewildering forest of dogmatic state- ments and moral principles; there is no system, no method, everything is occasional, everything fragmen- tary. The Gospels are neither a manual of dogma nor a treatise on casuistry, though they are the fountain of lioth. No wonder then that various investigators have arrived at entirely different conclusions in their study of Jesus. Some call Him a fanatic, others make Him a socialist, others again an anarchist, while many call Him a dreamer, a mystic, an Essene. But in this variety of views there are two main concepts under which the others may be summarized: Some consider Jesus an ascetic, others an aesthete; some emphasize His suffering, others His jovfulness; some identify Him with ecclesiasticism, others with humanism; some recognize in Him the prophetic picture of the Old Testament and the monastic of the New, others see in Him only gladness and poetry. There may be solid ground for both views; but they do not exhaust the character of Jesus. Both are only by-products which really existed in Jesus, but were not primarily intended; they were only enjoyed and suffered in passing, while Jesus strove to attain an end wholly different from either joy or sorrow.

(a) Strength. — Considering the life of Jesus in the light of reason. His strength, His poise, and His grace are His most characteristic qualities. His strength shows itself in His manner of life, His decision. His authority. In His rugged, nomadic, homeless life there is no room for weakness or sentimentality. Indecision is rejected by Jesus on several occasions: " No man can serve two masters"; "He that is rot with me, is against me"; "Seek first the kingdom of God", these are some of the statements expressing Christ's attitude to indecision of will. Of Himself He said : ' ' My meat is to do the will of him that sent me"; "I seek not my own will, but the will of him that sent me." The authority of the Master does not allow its power to be questioned; He calls to men in their boats, in their tax-booths, in their homes, "Follow me", and they look up into His face and obey. St. Matthew testifies, "The multitude. . . glorified God that gave such power to men " ; St. Mark adds, "the kingdom of God comes in power" ; St. Luke says, " His speech was with power"; St. John writes, "Thou hast given him power over all flesh"; the Book of the Acts reads, " God anointed him. . . with power"; St. Paul too is impressed with "the power of our Lord Jesus". In His teaching Jesus does not argue, or prove, or threaten, like the Pharisees, but He speaks like one having authority. Nowhere is Jesus merely a long- faced ascetic or a joyous comrade, we find Him every- where to be a leader of men, whose principles are built on a rock.

(b) Poise. — It may be said that the strength of Christ's character gives rise to another cjuality which we may call poise. Reason is like the sails of the boat, the will is its rudder, and the feelings are the waves thrown upon either side of the ship as it passes through the waters. The will-power of Jesus is strong enough to keep a perfect equilibrium between His feelings and His reason; His body is the perfect instrument in the performance of His duty ; His emotions are wholly sub- servient to the Will of His Father; it is the call of complying with His higher duties that prevents His austerity from becoming excessive. There is there- fore a perfect balance or equilibrium in Jesus between the life of His body, of His mind, and of His emotions. His character is so rounded off that, at first sight, there remains nothing which could make it characteristic. This poise in the character of Jesus protluces a sim-

plicity which pervades every one of His actions. As the old Roman roads led straight ahead in spite of mountains and valleys, ascents and declivities, so does the life of Jesus flow quietly onward in accordance with the call of duty, in s]iite of pleasure or pain, honour or ignominy. Another trait in Jesus which may be considered as flowing from the poise of His char- acter is His unalterable peace, a peace which may be ruffled but cannot be destroyed either by His inward feelings or outward encounters. And these personal qualities in Jesus are reflected in His teaching. He establishes an equilibrium between the righteousness of the Old Testament and the justice of the New, be- tween the love and life of the former and those of the latter. He lops off indeed the Pharisaic conventional- ism and externalism, but they were merely degene- rated outgrowths; He urges the law of love, but shows that it embraces the whole Law and the Prophets; He promises life, but it consists not so much in our posses- sion as in our capacity to use our possession. Nor can it be urged that the poise of Christ's teaching is destroyed by His three paradoxes of self-sacrifice, of service, and of idealism. The law of self-sacrifice inculcates that we shall find life by losing it; but the law of biological organisms, of physiological tissues, of intellectual achievements, and of economic processes shows that self-sacrifice is self-realization in the end. The second paradox is that of service: "^"hosoever ■will be the greater among you, let him be your min- ister: and he that will be first among you, shall be your servant." But in the industrial and artistic world, too, the greatest men are those w-ho have done most service. Thirdly, the idealism of Jesus is ex- pressed in such words as "The life is more than the meat", and "Not in bread alone doth man live, but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God." But even our realistic age must grant that the reality of the law is its ideals, and again, that the world of the idealist is impossible only for the weak, while the strong character creates the world after which he strives. The character of Jesus therefore is the em- bodiment of both strength and poise. It thus verifies the definition given by such an involved writer as Emerson: "Character is centrality, the impossibility of being displaced or overset. . . . The natural measure of this power is the resistance of circum- stances."

(c) Grace. — But if there were not a third essential element entering into the character of Jesus, it might not be attractive after all. Even saints are at times bad neighbours ; we may like them, but sometimes we like them only at a distance. The character of Christ carries with it the trait of grace, doing away with all harshness and want of amiability. Grace is the un- constrained expression of the self-forgetting and kindly mind. It is a beautiful way of doing the right thing, in the right waj-, at the right time, and there- fore opens all hearts to its possessor. SjTupathy is the widest channel through which grace flows, and the abundance of the stream testifies to the reserve of grace. Now Jesus symijathizes with all classes, with the rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the happy and the sad; He moves with the same sense of familiarity among all classes of society. For the self-righteous Pharisees He has only the words, " Woe to you, hypocrites"; He warns His disciples, "LTnless you become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." Plato and Aristotle are ut- terly unlike Jesus; they may speak of natural virtue, but we never find children in their arms. Jesus treats the publicans as His friends; He encourages the most tentative beginnings of moral growth. He chooses common fishermen for the corner-stones of His king- dom, and by His kindliness trains them to become the light of the world and the salt of the earth; Ho l)ends down to St. Peter whose character was a heap of sand rather than a solid foundation, but He graciously