JESUS THROUGH THE CENTURIES
His Place in the History of Culture
Jaroslav Pelikan
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985
270 pp., $22.50
THE VINDICATION OF TRADITION
Jaroslav Pelikan
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984
93 pp., $5.95 (paper).
We are no longer surprised by the storm of protest that self-appointed guardians of "cultural pluralism" raise every time someone so much as mentions the Judeo-Christian tradition. Ever on the alert for subterfuge, these verbal vigilantes insist that religious zealots employ the familiar hyphenation in order to put a more respectable front on reactionary attempts to discredit "alternative life-styles" and advanced opinion. In this way, they betray their ignorance of history as well as their contempt for the public's intelligence, for Western culture, whatever one chooses to think of it, is Christian through and through. Neither Secretary of Education William Bennett, nor the Reverend Jerry Falwell, nor anyone else will find it necessary to "impose" Christian values on others; those values are warp and woof of the very fabric of our communal existence. So much so that even our civilization's most celebrated discontents discover soon enough that they are constrained to define their rebellion with reference to Christianity. "Only a Christian culture," T.S. Eliot observed, "could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche." No wonder, then, that the Olympian German thinker titled one of his last works Der Antichrist, which as Walter Kaufmann suggested, one should in this case translate 'The Anti-Christian'.
So central is Jesus of Nazareth to Western culture that each historical age has understood itself in terms of the image of him it projected. Happily for us, Jaroslav Pelikan, one of America's most distinguished scholars, conceived a plan to freeze those kaleidoscopic images in an effort to illuminate the development of our cultural tradition. And he did so for a particular reason. In The Christian Tradition, his multivolume magnum opus, he focused his attention on the historical significance of Jesus for the Christian Church. As he proceeded with his work, however, he became increasingly aware of a contemporary paradox: While the reputation of Jesus was growing, that of the Christian Church was declining. He resolved, therefore, to explore this curious situation and to uncover some of its implications.
In this ambitious undertaking, Pelikan has had recourse to an organizing principle that he employed with notable success in Human Culture and the Holy (1955). Fully aware that Christian culture owed an immeasurable debt to Periclean Athens, he observed that the historical images of Jesus grouped themselves quite naturally around the pagan categories of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. And yet, as a Christian, he believed that ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics had always to be informed by what Rudolf Otto called das Heilige (the Holy). "The Holy is not, first of all," Pelikan wrote more than thirty years ago, " a highest Good, a sublimely True, an ultimately Beautiful. Yet that Holy which men have vainly tried to grasp with their systems of thought, their categories of ethics, and their depictions of beauty; that Holy which has
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