De immutabilitate traditionis contra modernam haeresim evolutionismi

And beginning from Christ, from whom our religion has its name and its origin, we must distinguish, as it were, two Christs. One historical, who alone exists for us in the real order of facts. The other non-historical, who is the Christ of faith, the Christ-idea, the Christ-spirit, or the mystical Christ¹.

Now the historical Christ is not, first of all, the Christ risen from the dead. First, because the risen Christ no longer belonged to the order of the present life, which is the order of sensible experience².

Second, because if the testimony of the New Testament be considered independently of the faith of the apostles, it offers only a limited probability, which no one will fail to see as disproportionate to the gravity of the thing attested³.

Third, because it is necessary that every natural argument for a supernatural fact be always found incomplete and deficient⁴.

Again, the Johannine Christ is utterly excluded from the truth of history. For the fourth Gospel can in no way be held as historical testimony concerning the life and doctrine of the Saviour. If Jesus acted and spoke as in the Synoptics, He could not have acted and spoken as in John; and conversely, if John's account is historical, the account of the Synoptics is nothing but an artificial account that disfigures Christ. But the Johannine Christ is the Christ of faith, spiritual and mystical, who transcends all the conditions of time and of earthly existence. Hence the narratives in John are not histories, but a mystical contemplation of the Gospel; the discourses, however, are theological meditations on the mystery of salvation⁵.

Still further, the Synoptic Christ is for the most part excluded from that same truth of history, because the Synoptics, in view of the purpose they had of producing faith, did not greatly care for historical fidelity, and in narrating the Gospel they interpreted the Gospel. Their books are books written for edification, and here and there adapted to the needs of the nascent churches. Whence it comes about that the burden falls upon the critic of making a selection in the evangelical facts·and in the preaching of the Saviour, between what belongs to the primitive memory and what pertains solely to the appraisals of faith, or to the later evolution of the Christian mind⁶.

Hence in the Gospel they have no historical truth: neither, first, Christ's attestation of His own divinity; nor, second, His affirmation of His mission to redeem the world by death on the cross; nor, third, the founding of the Church, especially as distinct from the Synagogue; nor, fourth, the institution of any sacrament.

Not, first, Christ's attestation of His own divinity. For that attestation would pertain to the preaching of Jesus, and as such ought to be recognized by the historian, if the fourth Gospel were a direct resonance of the doctrine of Jesus, or if the words of the Synoptics: No one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and him to whom the Son has willed to reveal Him, were anything other than the offspring of a later tradition. But the fourth Gospel is a book of mystical theology in which nothing is heard but the voice of the Christian consciousness. And the passage of Matthew (XI, 25-27) and of Luke (X, 21-22) is a kind of imitation of the prayer of Jesus the son of Sirach (Eccli. LI), and seems to be the work of a certain Christian prophet. For since it can scarcely be believed that Christ wished to imitate Ecclesiasticus, it is probable enough that the words cited above were never spoken by Christ, but were the fruit of christological evolution in the first age of the Church⁷.

Nor, second, Christ's attestation of His mission to redeem the world by death on the cross. For faith in the expiatory death did not exist from the beginning, but was brought in by Paul. And the passage of Mark (X, 45), where it is read that the Son of Man came to give His soul as a redemption for many, was fabricated under the influence of Pauline theology, no less than the narratives of the last supper⁸.

Nor, third, the founding of the Church, especially as distinct from the Synagogue. For the institution of the Church is not a fact that can be historically demonstrated, and the apostolic tradition, rightly understood, supposes the Church founded upon Jesus rather than by Jesus; or at least, if by Jesus, not by Jesus preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, but by Jesus raised from the dead, and thus already placed beyond all the conditions of history and of demonstration. Accordingly, all the testimonies concerning the institution of the Church are nothing but testimonies of faith, which present to faith the mystical Christ, and His will over the Church⁹.

Nor, fourth, the institution of any sacrament. For Jesus, 'during His ministry, prescribed no ritual form of exterior worship characteristic of a religion: since in the Gospel preached by Him Christianity was not yet a religion distinct and existing by itself, but a certain simple religious renewal in the bosom of Judaism¹⁰.

And so the historical truth of the Gospel has nothing from first to last, except that Christ by prayer, confidence, and love gradually raised Himself to the greatest union with God, and consequently to the consciousness of a messianic vocation; that He began to preach the kingdom of heaven as soon to come with the end of the world; that He asserted Himself in this kingdom as the vicar and minister of God; that finally He accommodated His preaching to the supreme event of the now imminent consummation of the age, His preaching which was wholly about contempt for the world and the renunciation of temporal things¹¹.

Such, therefore, is the Christ of history, after whom began the evolution of Christian dogma, and in the first place the evolution of christological dogma, concerning the mystical Christ, the Christ-spirit, the immortal Christ, the Christ-God, who no longer belongs to the order of facts, but has His subsistence in faith alone, because He has from faith alone even His origin.