Giovanni Papini and his Life of Christ

Giovanni Papini's Life of Christ is rightly considered as one of the masterpieces of all literature. Surely his masterly reconstruction of the life of the Saviour is one of the most universally popular and inspiring books of all times. Journalist, polemical critic, poet, and novelist, Papini (1881-1956) published over 80 books on philosophy, theory and literary criticism, as well as novels and short stories.

The author wrote this book because he felt the need to write a living book which makes Christ more living in order to set Him with living richness before the eyes of living men, even those who have scorned and refused Him or who do not love Him because they have never seen His true face.

Papini's Life of Christ is written by a layman for laymen who are not Christians or who are only superficially Christians; it is a book written by a modern writer who respects and understands his art, and knows how to hold the attention even of the hostile.

This Italian writer wrote his book in the maturity of his years. Just some years before he wrote another book (Un uomo finito) to describe the melancholy life of a man who wished for a moment to become God. Those were the days when he let his mad and voluble humour run wild along all the roads of paradox, denying everything transcendental, trying to despoil of any bigotry to arrive at perfect atheism. His was only one choice - that between God and nothingness.

But after six years of great travail and devastation within his heart and after long months of agitated meditations and treading many roads, he came to discover Christ again. From his childhood, Papini felt a repulsion for all recognised forms of religious faith and for all churches.

Almost as if urged and forced by a power stronger than himself, he began to write this book about Christ with the intention of bringing him to mind and defend him. Turning back to Christ, he saw that Christ is betrayed, and worse still, he is being forgotten. It has indeed happened often to Christ that he has been more tenaciously loved by the very ones who hated him at first. After all, hate is sometimes only an imperfect and unconscious love. In any case it is always a better foundation for love than indifference.

Papini expressly declares that he wrote this book not for pious readers, but for ordinary people, indifferent people, irreverent people, artists, those accustomed to the greatness of Antiquity and to the novelty of Modernity. It was these very people that the book was intended to win because they are those whom Christ has lost, and at the same time they are those who today form public opinion and count in the world.

I confess that it is above all the masterly introduction to the book that strikes me most.. In this long introduction, Papini states that for 500 years those who call themselves free spirits have been trying desperately to kill Jesus a second time - to kill him in the hearts of men. Paraphrasing the rallying-cry of Peter the Hermit to the Crusaders, they shouted "Man wills it!" as they set out on their crusade against the Cross.

Drawing in their boundless imagination, they evolved what that they considered a positive proof of a fantastic theory that the story of the Gospel is no more than a legend from which we can reconstruct the natural life of Jesus as a man, one-third prophet, one-third necromancer, one-third demagogue. A man who wrought no miracles except the hypnotic cure of some obsessed devotees, who did not die on the cross, but came to Himself in the chill of the sepulchre and reappeared with mysterious airs to delude men into believing that He had risen from the dead.

Papini states that others demonstrated as certainly as two and two make four that Jesus was a myth developed in the time of Augustus and of Tiberius, and that all the Gospels can be reduced to a clumsy mosaic of prophetic texts. Others conceived of Jesus as a good well-meaning man, but too high-flown and fantastic, who went to school to the Greeks, the Buddhists, and the Essenes and patched together His plagiarisms as best He could to support his claim to be the Messiah of Israel.

Others who pride themselves on being historians, with all the resources of textual criticism, of mythology, of paleography, of archeology, of Greek and Hebrew philology, by simplifying the life of Christ conclude that Jesus never did appear on the earth, or if by chance He really did appear, that we know nothing certain about His life.

Then there are those who though not going so far as to deny that Jesus ever lived, take away from the testimony about Him everything they can, trying only to find the man in the God, thereby spoiling the story contained in the Gospels.

Others made Him out to be an unbalanced humanitarian, precursor of Rousseau and of divine democracy, while others to get rid of the subject once for all, took up the idea of the myth again, and by dint of puzzlings and comparisons concluded that Jesus never was born anywhere in any spot of the globe.

"But who could have taken the place of the man they were trying to dispose of?", asks Papini. The grave they dug was deeper every day, and still they could not bury Him from sight. Thus began the manufacture of religions for the irreligious during the 19th century: the religion of Truth, of the Spirit, of the Proletariat, of the Hero, of Humanity, of Nationalism, of Imperialism, of Reason, of Beauty, of Peace, of Sorrow, of Pity, of the Ego, of the Future and so on.

But still, all these frozen abstractions did not fill the hearts of the few faithful followers of these religions who had renounced Jesus.

Attempts then were made to throw together facsimiles of religion which would make a better job of offering what men looked for in religion. Freemasons, Spiritualists, Theosophists, Occultists, Scientists, professed to have found the infallible substitute of Christianity. But all these went no further than contented some thousands of superstitious or rationalist individuals.

And still Christ is not yet expelled from the earth either by the ravages of time or by the efforts of men, concludes Papini. His memory is everywhere: in the walls of the churches and the schools, on the tops of bell-towers and of mountains, in street-shrines, at the heads of beds and over tombs, thousands of crosses bring back to mind the death of the Crucified One.

Take away the frescoes from the churches, carry off the pictures from the altars and from the houses, and the life of Christ fills museums and picture-galleries. Throw away breviaries and missals, and you find His name and His words in all the books of literature. Even oaths are an involuntary remembrance of his presence.

When all is said and done, Christ is an end and a beginning, an abyss of divine mystery between two divisions of human history. Paganism and Christianity can never be welded together. Before Christ and After Christ!

We can seek out what comes before Christ, we can acquire information about it, but is no longer ours, it is signed with other signs, limited by other systems, no longer moves our passions; it may be beautiful, but it is dead. Caesar was more talked about in his time than Jesus, and Plato taught more science than Christ. People still discuss the Roman ruler and the Greek philosopher, but who nowadays is hotly for Caesar or against him: and where now are the Platonists and the anti-Platonists?

Christ, on the contrary, is still living among us. There are still people who love Him and who hate Him. There is a passion for the love of Christ and a passion for His destruction. The fury of so many against Him is a proof that He is not dead. The very people who devote themselves to denying His ideas and His existence pass their lives in bringing His name to memory.