Becoming still in this edifice of the centuries, being deeply moved by the beauty and greatness of its displays, coming into contact full of portent with the great, the wholly other, the eternal, that is the first thing contact with this church gives us. And it is something lofty and noble that we need especially today. But it is not everything. It would remain a beautiful dream, a fleeting feeling without binding authority and, therefore, without power, if we did not let ourselves be taken to the next step, namely, to the Yes of faith. Then something further becomes clear: the cave is not empty. Its actual contents are not the relics that are preserved as the manger of Bethlehem. Its actual content is the Midnight Mass at the birth of Christ. Only there does the transition into reality finally occur. Only there have we reached the Christmas image that is no longer an image. Only when we let ourselves be led there from the message of the room do the words hold true anew: Today a Savior is born to you. Yes, really today.
With such thoughts we can now turn to the other image of Saint Mary Major that I would like briefly to present to you, to the ancient Marian image that is preserved under the title Salus populi Romani in the Borghese Chapel. In order to understand what it says to visitors, to us, we have to recall once again the basic statement of this church. It is a Christmas church, as we said, built as a shell around the stable of Bethlehem, which here for its part is understood as image of the world and of the Church of God, yet, at the same time, demands surpassing all images, superseding everything merely aesthetic.
Now someone could object that this is not a Christmas church, that is to say, a Christ church, but a Marian church, actually the first Marian church of Rome and of the West. Such an argument would indicate that the questioner had failed to understand the essence of both the Marian devotion of the Church as well as the mystery of Christmas. Christmas has a very particular meaning in the interior structure of Christian faith. We do not celebrate it as we otherwise do the birthdays of great men, because our relationship to Christ is very different from the honor we show great men. What interests in them is their work, the thoughts they thought and wrote, the works of art they created, and the mechanisms they left behind. This work belongs to them and is not the work of their mothers, who interest us only insofar as they can shed light on some element of the work.
But Christ counts for us not only through his work, through what he did, but above all through what he was and what he is in the entirety of his person. He counts for us differently from any other man because he is not merely man. He counts because in him earth and heaven touch, and thus in him God for us is tangible as man. The Church Fathers named Mary the holy earth from which he was formed as man. And the miracle is that God in Christ forever remains in union with the earth. Augustine expressed the same thought once as follows: Christ did not want a human father in order to make visible his sonship to God, but he wanted a human mother.
He wanted to take up the male sex in himself and give distinction to the female sex by honoring his mother. . . . If Christ had appeared as man without regard for the female sex, women would have to despair of it. However, he honored both, recommended both, assumed both. He is born of the woman. Men, do not despair! Christ saw fit to become a man. Women, do not despair! Christ saw fit to be born of woman. Both sexes work together for salvation. Come the male or come the female, in the faith there is neither man nor woman.
Let us express it a bit differently. In the drama of salvation it is not the case that Mary had a part to play before exiting the stage like an actor who has said his lines and departs. The Incarnation from the woman is not a role that is completed after a short time; rather, it is the abiding being of God with the earth, with men, with us who are earth. That is the reason why Christmas is at the same time both a feast of Mary and a feast of Christ, and for this reason a proper Nativity church must be a Marian church. We should view with the same thoughts the ancient, mysterious image that the Romans call Salus populi Romani. According to tradition it is the image that Gregory the Great in 590 carried in a procession through the streets of Rome as the plague tortured the city. At the conclusion of the procession the pestilence ended, and Rome was again healthy. The name of the image means to say to us that man can become healthy again and again from Rome. The maternal goodness of God looks out at us from this at once youthful and time-honored figure, from its knowing and kindly eyes. “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you”, God says to us through the prophet Isaiah (66:13). God apparently prefers to accomplish maternal consolation through the mother, through his mother, and whom could it surprise? Self-righteousness falls from us before this image. The tenseness of our pride, the fear of feeling, and everything that makes us internally ill dissolve. Depression and despair result when the balance of our feelings becomes disordered or even suspended. We no longer see the warmth, the consolation, the goodness, and the salutariness in the world, everything that we can perceive only with our hearts. The world becomes despair in the coldness of knowledge that has lost its roots. For this reason, acceptance of this image cures. It gives us back the earth of faith and humanity when we accept its language interiorly and do not close ourselves to it.
The interaction of arch of triumph and cave teaches us to pass from aesthetics to faith, as we said before. The transition to this image can lead us a step farther still. It helps us to loosen faith from the strain of will and intellect and allow it to enter into the whole of our existence. It gives aesthetics back to us in a new and greater way: if we have followed the call of the Savior, we can also receive anew the language of the earth, which he himself assumed. We may open ourselves to the closeness of the mother without fear of falling into false sentimentality or myth. It only becomes mythic or sick when we tear it away from the great context of the mystery of Christ. Then, what has been pushed aside comes back as something esoteric in confused forms whose promise is empty and deceptive. The true consolation appears in the image of the Mother of the Savior. God is near enough for us to touch him, even today. If in our watchful stay in this church, we become aware of this consolation, then its saving and transforming message has entered into us.
Conversion of the Apostle Paul
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The Warrior and the Sufferer
In the nineteenth century, Pope Pius IX erected two powerful statues of the Apostles Peter and Paul at the approach to Saint Peter’s Basilica. Both are easily recognizable in their attributes, the keys in the hand of Peter, the sword in the hands of Paul. Anyone without knowledge of Christian history, looking at the imposing figure of the Apostle of the Gentiles, could easily come to the opinion that the statue is that of some great general or warrior who makes history with the sword and subjects whole peoples. That would make him one of many who have attained fame and fortune at the cost of the blood of others. The Christian knows that the sword in the hands of this man has the opposite meaning. It is the tool of his own execution. As a Roman citizen he could not be crucified like Peter. He died by the sword. But even if this was considered a noble execution, Paul belongs in world history to the victims of violence and not to the perpetrators.
Whoever immerses himself in Paul’s letters, perhaps in order to find something like a hidden autobiography of the Apostle, will recognize at once that with the attribute of the sword, the tool of the passion, more is being said than something about the last moments in the life of Saint Paul. The sword can rightfully stand as the attribute for his life. “I have fought the good fight”, he says to his favorite pupil, Timothy (2 Tim 4:7), thinking of death and looking back over the path of his life. Such words have led to Paul being described as a warrior, as a man of action, as a man with a fiery nature. A superficial look at his life seems to sustain this appraisal. In four great voyages he traveled a significant part of the then known world and really became a teacher of peoples, a teacher who carried the gospel of Jesus Christ “to the ends of the earth”. With his letters he kept the founded communities together, furthered their development, and secured the
ir existence. He passionately opposed his enemies, who were not few in number. He applied all available means to satisfy as effectively as possible the “necessity” of the proclamation that was laid upon him (1 Cor 9:16). And so he is represented again and again as the great activist, as the patron of inventors of new pastoral and missionary strategies.
All that is not false, but it is not the whole Paul. Indeed, whoever sees him only in that way misses the core of his personality. First we must establish that the struggle of Saint Paul was not the struggle of a careerist, of a powerful person, or even of a ruler and conqueror. It was a struggle in the way that Teresa of Avila describes it. She clarifies her saying “God wants and loves spirited souls” with the following sentence: “The first thing the Lord accomplishes for his friends when they become weak consists in giving them courage and taking away the fear of suffering.” In this regard, I recall a certainly biased and also, no doubt, a little unjust comment of Theodore Haecker, which he recorded during the war in his day and night diaries. It can in any case help us to understand what is at stake here. The sentence I mean reads: “Sometimes it seems to me that they have quite forgotten in the Vatican that Peter was not only Bishop of Rome . . . but also a martyr.” The struggle of Saint Paul was the struggle of the martyr from the beginning on. To put it more precisely: at the beginning of his way he belonged to the persecutors and engaged in violence against Christians. From the moment of his conversion, he went over to the crucified Christ and chose for himself the way of Jesus Christ. He was not a diplomat. When he made diplomatic attempts, he had little success. He was a man who had no other weapon than the message of Jesus Christ, to which he dedicated his own life. Already in his Letter to the Philippians (2:17) he says that his life is being poured out like a libation. At the twilight of his life in his last words to Timothy (4:6) this formulation recurs. Paul was a man who was ready to let himself be wounded, and that was his real strength. He did not spare himself, and certainly did not try to fashion a fine life for himself by avoiding controversy and unpleasantness.
The opposite is the case. Precisely that he presented himself, did not spare himself, yielded to the blows and let himself be consumed for the gospel made him trustworthy and built up the Church: “I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls.” This passage from the Second Letter to the Corinthians (12:15) lays bare the innermost essence of this man. Paul was not of the opinion that the chief pastoral task was to avoid controversy. Nor did he think that an apostle should have above all a good press. No, he wanted to arouse, to awaken consciences, even if it cost him his life. From his letters we know that he was anything but a great orator. He shared his lack of rhetorical talent with Moses and with Jeremiah, who had both argued against God that they were completely unsuited for the proposed mission because of deficient speaking ability. “His bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account” (2 Cor 10:10), his opponents said of him. He said himself about the beginning of his mission in Galatia: “You know it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first” (Gal 4:13). Paul was not effective because of brilliant rhetoric and sophisticated strategies, but rather because he exerted himself and left himself vulnerable in service of the gospel. The Church even today can convince people only insofar as her ambassadors are ready to let themselves be wounded. Where the readiness to suffer is lacking, so too is the essential evidence of truth on which the Church depends. Her struggle can only ever be the struggle of those who let themselves be poured out: the struggle of martyrs.
To be sure, we can attribute still another meaning to the sword in the hands of Saint Paul than that of the martyr’s tool. In Scripture the sword is also the symbol for the Word of God, which is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword . . . and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12). Paul wielded this sword, and with it he conquered men. Ultimately, “sword” is simply an image for the power of truth, which is of a wholly unique nature. Truth can hurt; it can wound—that is its nature as sword. Since life often appears more comfortable lived in the lie or simply without regard to truth than according to the demands of truth, for this reason, men dispute or become bothered by the truth. They want to hold it down, suppress it, remove it from their way. Which of us could deny that truth has not sometimes been disturbing—the truth about oneself, the truth about what we should do and let go of? Which of us can maintain that he has never tried to steal past the truth or tried at least to fashion it so that it becomes less painful? Paul was uncomfortable because he was a man of truth. Whoever commits himself entirely to the truth, has no other weapon but truth, desires no other task than truth, may not necessarily be killed, but he will always approach the vicinity of martyrdom. He will become a sufferer. To proclaim truth without becoming a fanatic or a dogmatist—that would be the great task.
Paul may at times become a little acerbic in a dispute and come close to fanaticism. But he was by no means a fanatic. Texts full of kindliness, as we see in all his letters but most beautifully perhaps in the Letter to the Philippians, are the real marks of his character. He was able to remain free of fanaticism because he did not speak for himself; rather, he bore the gift of another to men, namely, truth from Christ, who died for truth and remained loving unto death. Even there, I believe, we must correct our picture of Paul a little. We have too much in our ear the pugnacious texts of Paul. Something similar to what is true for Moses is applicable here as well. We see Moses as “horned”, the iron man, the outraged. But the Book of Numbers says of him: Moses was the mildest of men (12:3; LXX). Whoever reads Paul entirely will discover the mild Paul. We said before that his success is connected to his readiness to suffer. Now we must add the following: suffering and truth belong together. Paul was resisted because he was a man of truth. His words and life still have meaning today because he served truth and suffered on its behalf. Suffering is the necessary authentication of truth, but only truth gives meaning to suffering.
The figures of the two Apostles Peter and Paul stand at the approach to Saint Peter’s Basilica. The two are also associated with each other on the main portal of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, where scenes of their lives and sufferings are depicted. From the beginning on, the Christian tradition has considered Peter and Paul inseparable from one another. Together they represent the whole gospel. In Rome, the association of the two brothers in the faith has acquired another quite specific meaning. Christians of Rome saw them as alternatives to the mythical pair of brothers who, according to legend, founded the city of Rome: Romulus and Remus. These two men stand in remarkable correspondence to the first pair of brothers of the biblical narrative, Cain and Abel. One becomes the murderer of the other. Humanly speaking, the word brotherliness leaves a bitter taste. How it can be seen among men is depicted across all religions in such pairs of brothers. Peter and Paul, who were in human terms so different from one other and, truthfully, not without conflicts, appear as the founders of a new city, as the embodiment of the new and true way of brotherliness that has become possible through the gospel of Jesus Christ. The world is saved, not by the sword of the conquerors, but by the sword of those who suffer. Only following Christ leads to the new brotherliness, to the new city. This is what the pair of brothers says to us through the two great basilicas of Rome.
The Chair of Saint Peter
Chair of Peter
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“Primacy in Love”
The Chair Altar of Saint Peter’s in Rome
Anyone who, after wandering through the massive nave of Saint Peter’s Basilica, at last arrives at the final altar in the apse would probably expect here a triumphal depiction of Saint Peter, around whose tomb the church is built. But nothing of the kind is the case. The figure of the Apostle does not appear among the sculptures of this altar. Instead, we stand before an empty throne that almost seems to float but is supported by the four figures of the great Church teachers of the West and the East. The muted light over the throne emanates from t
he window surrounded by floating angels, who conduct the rays of light downward.
What is this whole composition trying to express? What does it tell us? It seems to me that a deep analysis of the essence of the Church lies hidden here, is contained here, an analysis of the office of Peter. Let us begin with the window, with its muted colors, which both gathers in to the center and opens outward and upward. It unites the Church with creation as a whole. It signifies through the dove of the Holy Spirit that God is the actual source of all light. But it tells us also something else: the Church herself is in essence, so to speak, a window, a place of contact between the otherworldly mystery of God and our world, the place where the world is permeable to the radiance of his light. The Church is not there for herself; she is not an end, but rather a point of departure beyond herself and us. The more transparent she becomes for the other, from whom she comes and to whom she leads, the more she fulfills her true essence. Through the window of her faith God enters this world and awakens in us the longing for what is greater. The Church is the place of encounter where God meets us and we find God. It is her task to open up a world closing in on itself, to give it the light without which it would be unlivable.
Images of Hope Page 2
