Who is Christ? Unamuno, Life 4.7
Who
is Christ? Unamuno presents two grand visions of the Lord: one from Athanasius, and the
other from a long line of heretics whose contemporary representative
is the theologian Harnack. Athanasius makes Christ a
divinity-turned-human, while the heretics conceive him as
humanity-turned-divine. Unamuno prefers the Christ of Athanasius,
like the devout Catholic he is.
Después
de Pablo rodaron los años y las generaciones cristianas, trabajando
en torno de aquel dogma central y sus consecuencias para asegurar la
fe en la inmortalidad del alma individual, y vino el Niceno, y en él
aquel formidable Atanasio, cuyo nombre es ya un emblema, encarnación
de la fe popular. Era Atanasio un hombre de pocas letras, pero de
mucha fe, y sobre todo, de la fe popular, henchido de hambre de
inmortalidad. Y opúsose al arrianismo, que, como el protestantismo
unitariano y sociniano amenazaba, aun sin saberlo ni quererlo, la
base de esa fe. Para los arrianos, Cristo era ante todo un maestro,
un maestro de moral, el hombre perfectísimo, y garantía por lo
tanto de que podemos los demás llegar a la suma perfección; pero
Atanasio sentía que no puede el Cristo hacernos dioses si él antes
no se ha hecho Dios; si su divinidad hubiera sido por participación,
no podría habérnosla participado. «No, pues —decía—, siendo
hombre se hizo después Dios, sino que siendo Dios se hizo después
hombre para que mejor nos deificara (θεοποιήσῃ)»
(Orat. I, 30). No era el Logos de los filósofos, el Logos
cosmológico el que Atanasio conocía y adoraba. Y así hizo se
separasen naturaleza y revelación. El Cristo atanasiano o niceno,
que es el Cristo católico, no es el cosmológico ni siquiera en
rigor el ético, es el eternizador, el deificador, el religioso. Dice
Harnack de este Cristo, del Cristo de la cristología nicena o
católica, que es en el fondo docético, esto es, aparencial, porque
el proceso de la divinización del hombre en Cristo se hizo en
interés escatológico; pero ¿cuál es el Cristo real? ¿acaso ese
llamado Cristo histórico de la exégesis racionalista que se nos
diluye o en un mito o en un átomo social?
Este
mismo Harnack, un racionalista protestante, nos dice que el
arrianismo o unitarismo habría sido la muerte del cristianismo,
reduciéndolo a cosmología y a moral, y que sólo sirvió de puente
para llevar a los doctos al catolicismo, es decir, de la razón a la
fe. Parécele a este mismo docto historiador de los dogmas,
indicación de perverso estado de cosas, el que el hombre Atanasio,
que salvó al cristianismo como religión de la comunión viva con
Dios, hubiese borrado al Jesús de Nazaret, al histórico, al que no
conocieron personalmente ni Pablo ni Atanasio, ni ha conocido Harnack
mismo. Entre los protestantes, este Jesús histórico sufre bajo el
escalpelo de la crítica mientras vive el Cristo católico, el
verdaderamente histórico, el que vive en los siglos garantizando la
fe en la inmortalidad y la salvación personales.
After
Paul, the years went by, and so did generations of Christians,
working out that central dogma and its consequences in order to make
sure of our faith in the immortality of the individual soul. Then
came the generation of Nicaea, and within it the formidable
Athanasius, whose name is still an emblem, giving vivid shape to
popular faith. Athanasius was a man of few letters, but much faith,
and especially the faith of the common people, which is swollen with
hunger for immortality. He opposed the doctrine of Arius, which
threatened the foundation of that faith blindly, not realizing or
desiring what it did—just as Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism
would do later (†). For the Arians, Christ was before all else a
teacher—a moral instructor, the most perfect man—and in keeping
with this, his gospel guaranteed that the rest of us can achieve
moral perfection. But Athanasius felt that Christ cannot make us gods
unless he has also made himself God, already. If his divinity were
simply a matter of participation, of sharing with the Father, then he
would not have been able to share it with us. "Nay!"
Athanasius said. "It is not that being a man, he made himself
God, but that being God, he made himself man, in order thus to create
us in the divine image (to deify us, in Greek)" (Oration
1.30). It was not the Word of the philosophers, the rational
Order of the cosmos, that Athanasius knew and worshiped. And so he
caused a separation between nature and revelation. The Christ of
Athanasius or Nicaea, the Catholic Christ, is neither a force of
nature nor (if we speak carefully) a moral exemplar: he is a creator
of eternity, a god-maker, a religious messiah. Harnack, speaking of
this Christ, the one that rises from Nicene or Catholic Christology,
says that he is fundamentally docetic (‡)—a revelation made
manifest darkly, in symbols, because the process of divinizing the
man in Christ took on an eschatological flavor. But which of our
options is the actual Christ? Is it perchance the so-called
historical Christ revealed by rational exegesis, who dissolves before
us into either a myth, or a tiny social artifact?
This
same Harnack (*), a rational Protestant, tells us that Arianism or
Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it
to cosmology and ethics, and that the only historical purpose of the
heresy was to serve as a bridge between the learned and
Catholicism—between reason and faith, in other words. Here we have
an indication of the perverse state of things! Our learned historian
of dogma seems to think that the man Athanasius, who saved
Christianity as a religion that cultivates living communion with God,
might have erased the historical Jesus of Nazareth, a figure unknown
to Paul or Athanasius, and unknown to Harnack, too. Thus, among the
Protestants the historical Jesus suffers still under critics'
scalpel, while the Catholic Christ remains truly and historically
alive, enduring over the centuries, keeping watch over our faith in
personal immortality and salvation.
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(†)
The Unitarian movement began in the 16th century CE, in northern
Europe. Unitarians denied the divinity of Jesus, whom they regarded
as a prophet and moral exemplar, but not God in the flesh. One early
witness of their doctrine was Peter Gonesius (Piotr of Goniądz, c.
1525-1573): On January 22nd, 1556, he attended a synod of the
Reformed Church of Poland in Secemin, where he denounced the doctrine
of the Trinity, which this church, following Calvin, accepted; he was
excommunicated the same year by another synod in Pińczów, but many
folk followed him out, enough to constitute a sect known as the
Polish Brethren. This sect became a refuge for many homeless
heretics, including two brothers from the Tuscan Sozzini family, Lelio and
Fausto, who found their way to Poland and published many tracts along
the way supporting and elaborating Unitarian doctrines that were
called Socinian in light of
their Latin surname, Socinus. One doctrine worth noting here: Fausto
explicitly denied the immortality of the soul. In 1658, the Sejm
expelled the Polish Brethren from the country, suspecting them of
having collaborated with the Protestant Swedes in a recent invasion,
and they scattered abroad,
to the duchy of Prussia, the Netherlands, and Transylvania. Once
removed from Poland, they were called Unitarians.
(‡)
Some early Christians believed that Christ was an illusion, that his
humanity was no more real or actual than that of Athena, when she
takes human forms in the Homeric epics. They were called Docetists
from the Greek word δοκεῖν, meaning to seem, to pretend
(cf. Eusebius, Historia
Ecclesiastica 6.12).
(*)
Carl Gustav Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) was a contemporary of
Unamuno, a Baltic German
theologian and church historian who published many works as part of a
long and distinguished academic career at Lutheran universities. His
outlook on early Christianity was sober and rational, rejecting
miracles, the gospel of John (whose apostolic authority he vigorously
disputed), and the value of
speculative theology. What
remained, the essence of Harnack's Christianity, was a system of
ethics for relating well to oneself, one's neighbor, and the world at
large. This system did not prevent
him from signing the Manifesto of the 93, a document which justified
German actions at the commencement of the first World War (it was
published on October 4th, 1914). Karl Barth (1886-1968) cited this
action of Harnack's as one of his main reasons for repudiating
liberal theology.