The fact that Pontius Pilate, fainthearted mercenary, had the courage to answer the high priests’ request that he change the title, which he had ordered be put on the cross of Christ, with this unexpected and markedly authoritarian and defining sentence, has sparked much thought. According to the Johannine account “Pilate also wrote a title and put it on the cross; it read, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Many of the Jews read this title –for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city– and it was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. The chief priests of the Jews then said to Pilate, Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’ Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written” (Jn 19, 19-22).
Three aspects of the above are the following: Firstly, the title was the governor’s personal gibe against the Jews, who obliged him to condemn someone whom he considered innocent; or the subtle revenge of a politician humiliated by public animosity and is aware of the injustice being committed. Secondly, the intention of the chief priests was, as is said, to “lower the profile” of a public statement that came to close to the order of a truth, to transform it into a simple opinion, more than that, the opinion of a condemned man; in other words, to lower the objective to something subjective. Thirdly, the inscription in the three most spoken languages in the eastern part of the Roman Empire conferred on the title a clearly universal character. With his solemn Quod scripsi, scripsi Pilate, unwittingly, was reaffirming prophetically both the true character of what was written as well as its universal validity.
However, not only then, but continually throughout history these three facts regarding the title Christ the King are present: the ridicule and contempt of the politicians governing the events of the world; the attempt to trivialize the absolute (and, consequently, to absolutize the relative) by the chief priests of all times; and, as a constant fact, the insistent proclamation in three languages of the universal validity of the truth about Christ’s royalty.
Today I will address only the third of these aspects, namely, the “proclamation in the three languages.” They were not three languages chosen at random, but those that in the course of time would represent the three cultures in which the Christian genius would be molded: the Hebrew, the Hellenic and the Roman. The Constitution Dei Verbum (I, 5) reminds us that Christian faith is man’s answer to the fact that God reveals Himself. However, to enter the human heart and intelligence, this revelation had to make use of the notional, symbolic, linguistic, liturgical vehicle, in a word, the cultural vehicle of that time. The facts of revelation had to be incarnated in the culture to ensure their diffusion in the world. However, the alphabet in which the language of the logos was expressed was not singular but threefold: three types of letters in three different alphabets to incarnate in this world the divine revelation.
Trinity in Heaven, Triad on Earth
Taking a further step, if we recall the capitals of those cultures, namely, Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, we will be faced with the triptych of the cities-symbols of Christianity. In his book Les mères patries: Jérusalem, Athènes, Rome (Paris, 1982), Jean-Marie Paupert already formulated things this way. Even at the risk of oversimplification, it could be said that Jerusalem contributed to the original base of Christian culture. Athens represents the perennial contribution of reason, philosophy and art, and Rome its special talent to forge juridical, political and social structures. Neither were the roads and military efficiency of Rome foreign to the propagation of the Gospel. Moreover, it must not be said that only Rome would be valid for the Western Church as the Eastern also assimilated its law and benefited from the protection of the Empire. In the course of the centuries the Church has read, meditated and proclaimed the Old Testament addressing God in the language of Jerusalem. To better understand the constant presence of Rome in Christian culture, there is nothing more enlightening than reading the Liber sacramentorum, the monumental work of Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster. As for Athens’, its contribution is unequalled. Two examples suffice: Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals Veritatis splendor (1993) and Fides et ratio (1998).
Immediately there follows a new observation: more than a simple triptych, these cities make up a triad or inseparable threesome among themselves. When embracing the totality of the Christian cultural phenomenon, it is not possible to choose one, excluding the other two. Moreover, neither do they make up an undivided whole, given that they are clearly distinguished among themselves. It could be said that though being and acting differently, yet remaining a sole dynamic entity, a relationship emerges, a sort of reflection of the Divine Trinity. If the Trinity of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, with their perfect love and interchange, their mutual respect and harmony, must be recognized as source and animation of all creation, the threefold citizenship of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome make up the initial clay and the permanent material of the construction of the Church, dynamic influence of the Trinity in the history of the world. Derived as a consequence from this admitted threefold cultural incarnation of the Christian Creed is the necessary calling to attention of those who interpret Jesus’ phrase before Pilate: “My kingship is not of this world… my kingship is not from the world” (Jn 18, 36), a statement of evasion of the earthly, a refusal of any compromise with history. Although the kingdom of Christ certainly does not belong to this world, which is hostile to the divine and, therefore, does not have the characteristics of the kingdoms of his world, it will nevertheless be always present in the world created by God and not in the vague and ethereal forms of a spiritual myth, but precisely through the visible and palpable body of the three cultures. It is known that of all the religions in the world, Christianity carries out the most powerful trans-cultural dynamism, that is, no other creed surpasses Christianity in its capacity to incarnate and express itself in the most diverse cultures.
At least two theses could be derived from this observation, easily verifiable in history. The first would be that this trans-cultural dynamism would stem from this triad –differentiated and at the same time harmonious–, of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. The second, more daring, would be that no Christian inculturation could be successful if it did not adopt as its point of departure the unity and indispensable correlation of the three founding entities.
The Apostle of the Gentiles in the confluence of these three currents
Those who reflect meditatively on the passage of the Acts of the Apostles which refers to the Apostle Paul’s captivity first in Jerusalem and then in Caesarea, (21, 27 to 26, 32), will note with what case he acts between the three worlds (Jewish, Hellenic and Roman) and how obvious the confluence is of the representative currents of these worlds. If we propose, as a fact and an interpretative key of the history of the Church, the synthesis of the three cities, this synthesis has already been sketched in the Apostle of the Gentiles. With profit and shrewdness, Saint Paul makes use at least twice of his privilege of being a Roman citizen, which was not purchased, but is a result of his very birth in Tarsus of Cilicia (Acts 21, 39). He had already made use of this civic prerogative in the incident of his imprisonment in Philippi (Acts 16, 35-39). Now, when the Romans want to scourge him after his arrest in Jerusalem, he appeals with the same defense: “But when they had tied him up with the thongs, Paul said to the centurion who was standing by, ‘Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman citizenship, and uncondemned?‘ When the centurion heard that, he went to the tribune and said to him: ‘What are you about to do? For this man is a Roman citizen.’ So the tribune came and said to him. ‘Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?’ And he said ‘Yes’” (Acts 22, 25-28).
This condition of Roman citizenship also saved him shortly after when forty Jews bound themselves by an oath to kill him. Tribune Claudius Lysias, who was already fearful “for he realized that Paul was a Roman citizen and that he had bound him” (Acts 22, 29), then removed him from the ambush of his Jewish compatriots, sending him with a heavy military guard to Caesarea to bring him before Felix, the governor. In the letter of introduction he repeats what so impressed him: “This man was seized by the Jews, and was about to be killed by them, when I came upon them with the soldiers and rescued him, having learned that he was a Roman citizen” (Acts 23, 27). Although the Apostle probably did not speak Latin with the same facility as he did Hebrew and Greek, he was familiar with Roman law (see for example Acts 16, 37; 22, 25; 25, 10) and he knew how to speak with the officials of the Empire, Claudius Lysias, Anthony Felix, Porcius Festus. However, the culminating moments of his relationship with world of the pagan Roman would be recognized in the depth of his analysis of that world at the beginning of his Letter to the Romans and in his final martyrdom in the Empire’s capital.
As has been said, Saint Paul spoke and wrote both Hebrew and Greek perfectly. Allusion is made to this in another notable passage related to his arrest: “As Paul was about to be brought into the barracks, he said to the tribune, ‘May I say something to you?’ And he said, ‘Do you know Greek [Ellhinisti ginswskeis]? Are you not the Egyptian, then, who recently stirred up a revolt and led the four thousand men of the Assassins out into the wilderness?’ Paul replied, ‘I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city; I beg you, let me speak to the people’. And when he had given him leave, Paul, standing on the steps, motioned with his hand to the people; and when there was a great hush, he spoke to them in the Hebrew language [th Ebraidi dialektw]” (Acts 21, 37-40).
«To Jerusalem, that as the Psalm sings “the Most High Himself has founded,” is undoubtedly the primacy, since it concentrated between its walls the yearnings and piety of the first People of God and being, and secondly, but no less urgently the earthly anticipation of the new, the Church. However, her brilliance as Christian capital, with her Constantinian Basilica of the Anastasis and her unequaled liturgy, lasted only three centuries, until she was seized in 636 A.D. by the warriors with turbans and scimitars, who reduced the Christians to second-class citizens.» (Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem, 1910.)
But there is more: “The following night the Lord stood by him and said, ‘Take courage, for as you have testified about me at Jerusalem, so you must bear witness also at Rome.” (Acts 23, 11) Resounding here, then, in the very mouth of Jesus are the words “Jerusalem” and “Rome” and pointed out in addition are two “testimonies” that his great disciple gives and must give in those cities. Here Jesus does not mention Athens, but the meeting with the Athenians and the address in the Areopagus (Acts 17, 16-34) undoubtedly fulfilled all the requirements of a consummate witness, comparable to the one the Apostle gives in Jerusalem and Rome. Also in the case of this third apostolic “testimony,” it could be said that previously there was a supernatural mandate, referred in this case not directly to Athens, but to Macedonia and with it to the whole of Greece and also to Europe. From his stay in Troas, the Acts state: “And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing beseeching him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’” And the universalistic interpretation of this appeal continues on the part of the Apostle and his collaborators: “And when he had seen the vision, immediately he sought to go into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the Gospel to them” (Acts 16, 9-10).
Saint Paul’s witness before Jerusalem, which happened every time that he proclaimed Christ to his compatriots as Messiah and Lord of history and which complied with the rigor of a liturgy, was of theological order, in regard to the primacy of the Holy City as Bride of Yahweh. Instead his witness before Athens already poses the necessary relationship between theology and philosophy, between reason and faith, another pillar of the Catholic edifice. The witness before Rome, will finally be, of the three, the finishing touch, given that it consisted in the giving of his life, in genuine “martyrdom,” on whose sepulchral monument would be raised the Eternal City’s magnificent Basilica of Saint Paul Outside-the-Walls.
The three Holy Cities: None for itself, all dignified
We could be reproached for having a tendency to canonize. Why these cities and not others? The answer will be found solely in the mysteries of Providence. The fact is that only these three fulfilled the necessary requirements. Not that they possessed them of themselves, for their famous names could not hide their deficiencies and mistaken actions. All of them, in some way, had to be elevated above themselves.
Regarding Jerusalem, Jesus shed tears over her (Lk 19, 41) and reproached her for two things: “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (Lk 13, 34) and “You did not know the day of your visitation” (Lk 19, 41). In other words: Jerusalem had not collaborated with the plan dearest to Jesus’ heart, namely, to gather, to bring together the children of God who are dispersed. And second: that the Holy City was insensitive to the decisive times, to the kairoi of the history of salvation. That is why the earthly Jerusalem, the head of Israel, would be destroyed by the Romans; however, “the new Jerusalem” would arise that much stronger, “the Jerusalem from above,” whose advent the Church would prepare. Just as the threefold denial of Peter was not an obstacle for Christ to entrust his sheep to him, so the infidelity of Jerusalem will not be an impediment so that in God’s plan she becomes the patroness, the paradigm of the Church, the beloved Bride. Neither was Rome’s debut in the earthly triad glorious. Her official representative, Governor Pontius Pilate, showed the most ignominious political opportunism and the coldest skepticism in face of the truth (Jn 18, 38). However, in God’s plans it was precisely that Rome, pre-announced in the uprightness and equity of the Roman personalities of the Acts of the Apostles (Cornelius, the centurions and tribunes) that gave the Church the Headquarters of the Petrine primacy, its structuring structures, its juridical competence, necessary for a magisterium destined to defend the truth.
Regarding Athens, which in the Church would be the incarnation of the passion for truth and love of beauty, none of this did she evidence in her first appearance before the Apostle Paul in the known passage of Acts 17, 16-33: “Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols.” The representatives of Greek philosophy behaved like frivolous, deriding, contemptuous intellectuals more interested in novelties than in everlasting truths. “So Paul went out from among them” (Acts 17, 33). With this laconic sentence Saint Luke marks the end of the first dialogue between the Church, represented by Saint Paul, and the apex of the intellectual world of Antiquity.
If we now move from the ambiguous conduct of its representatives to the historical validity of the three cities, we see that they flowered and withered like other cities of the world. The difference lies in the fact that, beyond their full historical validity of a moment, they maintained their influence, their spirit and their invisible collaboration through the centuries, up to today.
To Jerusalem, that as the Psalm sings “the Most High Himself has founded,” goes undoubtedly the primacy, since it concentrated between its walls the yearnings and piety of the first People of God and being, secondly, but no less urgently the earthly anticipation of the new, the Church. However, her brilliance as Christian capital, with her Constantinian Basilica of the Anastasis and her unequaled liturgy, lasted only three centuries, until she was seized in 636 A.D. by the warriors with turbans and scimitars, who reduced the Christians to second-class citizens.
The earthly Athens, which entered the community of Jesus Christ through Saint Paul and the Greek Fathers, but previously had also H H82 83 been present in sacred history through the seventy wise men of Alexandria, who translated the Bible into Greek, was conquered by Rome and later Byzantium (which in 529 closed her famous Academy) and afterwards by the Turks. The explosion of the powder-keg in the 18th century installed by them in the Parthenon reduced the supreme monument of classic architecture to ruins.
Neither was glorious Rome spared the fate of decrepitude, annexed to all earthly power and in the famous Imperial Forum cows ended up by grazing between the fallen columns, while in the niches and passages of the ruined Palatine, seat of the emperor, hundreds of cats roamed.
None of this was a definitive impediment for Jerusalem, Athens and Rome to form the constitutive cultures of the Christian faith. They loaned their walls and squares and supplied their priests, wise men and soldiers so that the faith would be able to settle its royals in this land so foreign to the divine “the ruler of Israel” (Mic 5, 1). The Church assumed them and integrated them as her own, so that they were able to subsist beyond the historical vicissitudes and be able to merit the title “eternal.” Before them –not excluding Athens– the believer raises his eyes and blesses himself with respect.
«Rome’s debut in the earthly triad has not glorious. Her official representative, Governor Pontius Pilate, showed the most ignominious political opportunism and the coldest skepticism in face of the truth (Jn 18, 38). However, in God’s plans it was precisely that Rome, pre-announced in the uprightness and equity of the Roman personalities of the Acts of the Apostles (Cornelius, the centurions and tribunes) that gave the Church the Headquarters of the Petrine primacy, its structuring structures, its juridical competence, necessary for a magisterium destined to defend the truth.» (Arch of Septimo Severo, Rome.)
Attempts at “purifications” of the faith
Not always in the course of history did the earthly cultural triad enjoy general acceptance and recognition. In several periods and for different reasons attempts were made to “purify” the cultural expression of the Christian faith, discarding or excluding one or another or the totality of the mentioned constitutive elements. This was done with zeal and conviction, but despite this it was inevitable that the law of evangelical discernment would be fulfilled here as well: “You will know them by their fruits” (Mt 7, 16). A recent attempt to recover a more “spiritual” conception of God, that is, one stripped of the many cultural elements considered as harmful, can be found in the writings of the Hindu Jesuit Anthony de Mello (1931-1987). The careful reading of the Notification on the writings of the said author by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (June 24, 1998) enables one to appreciate all the consequences entailed in such a separation between faith and culture. The Magisterium’s document states that “the author substitutes the revelation that took place in Christ by an intuition of God without form or images, to the point of speaking of God as a pure vacuum. To see God it would only be necessary to look directly at the world. Nothing can be said about God; the only thing we can know about Him is that He is unknowable.”
To comment on de Mello’s ideas in light of what we have said, we could say that the thesis of the Hindu religious is the same as believing that the logos (perhaps) spoke, but that there were no literates to read or understand Him. Otherwise, said in another way, Jerusalem, Athens and Rome would be the greatest obstacle to access God. No wonder the authority of the Magisterium states that the positions mentioned “are incompatible with the Catholic faith and can cause grave harm.” In general, the attacks against the culture of the faith do not assume de Mello’s radicalism. In the majority of cases it is a question of rejecting only some of the historical ingredients of Christianity. It must be recalled, for example, that in certain European academic melieus, both before and after the last Council, clamors were raised in favor of a “de-Hellenization” of the Christian faith. This would be an offensive statement against Athens, alleging that Bethlehem is sufficient for us. Much earlier to this attempt to exclude Athens from the triptych of the cities-symbols of the Christian culture is the hostility against Jerusalem and the Old Testament. It was the heretical leader Marcion (85-160 A.D.) who in the 2nd century posed the need for Christ’s religion to separate itself definitively and totally from the Jewish dead weight and, hence, of the whole Old Testament. Marcion did not tire of stressing the contrast between the Gospel and the law, the redeeming love of the New Testament and the punitive justice of the Old and he went to the extreme of distinguishing two gods: that of Moses and that of Jesus Christ. The Evangelical theologian Harnack saw in Marcion the “first Protestant,” for his having continued with radical division the fight that in his days the Apostle Paul had against the Jewish law. The Church at the time believed it necessary to exclude Marcion from its ranks. Unpleasant repercussions of this old prejudice have percolated and remained in some of our catechetical literature, in which the unjust comparison continues to be made between the severity and rigor of Yahweh and the universal goodness of Jesus Christ: the legalistic attitude of the Old Testament, with the charismatic liberty of the New. In face of this we must reaffirm that these variations of anti-Semitism are contradictory with the Christian faith.
Neither could Rome free itself from the assaults of dissenters. Martin Luther did this with unheard of vehemence. It is true that the reformer also distrusted the philosophers and “prostitute reason” and did not fear the possible fissures between reason and faith, which he always resolved in favor of the latter. In the chapter of his personal hatreds, Aristotle occupied an important place, as did Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theologica, which he knew only indirectly, relegating them to, what for him was the brittle attic of Athens.
Undoubtedly, however, in thirty years of incessant diatribes, his main fury was directed against Rome, the Pope, the Petrine primacy, the Church of Rome and the whole Roman system. His almost metaphysical hatred of “Papism,” which he transmitted to Anglicans, Calvinists and the numerous religious institutions derived from them, led him to advocate in practice a Christianity without a Church. However, in the end such Christianity without a Pope, without Rome, without the priesthood, without a visible Church, ended by being also a Christianity without Mary, without saints, and –despite what is said– without the Eucharist.
The inevitable conclusion is that such “purifications” have not led at any time to any reformation, or renewal or progress of the Gospel, but only to mutilations of the faith and tragic divisions between believers. Also in this sense the so-called purifications are more dangerous for the faith than the heresies themselves. The latter affect the faith directly, “choosing” or preferring certain truths of the Creed to the detriment of others. The Church, through the Councils, generally succeeded in neutralizing the deleterious effects of those doctrinal deviations.
However, in the case of secularization –which is what these “purifications” ultimately amount to– the evil is much more insidious. As the faith in itself is not attacked, but only cultural elements of Christianity are eliminated or modified, (what we call “the three cities”), it would seem that the essential is not at stake and, hence, in the ecclesial body no defense is put forward. The Word of God continues to be respected, but the language, the “alphabet” in which it has been expressed, is doubted. Christians themselves, not realizing what is at stake, can even collaborate in the dismantling of the faith, believing that it is only about contingent elements which can be dispensed with, which are not essential, which in the end are debatable. What is characteristic of secularization is that it acts gradually and discreetly, without the majority realizing what is really happening. Not wanting, however, are the perspicacious, but their voice of alarm is often unauthorized and even silenced. They are the men with the vocation of prophets, who are infallibly recognized as true when their word is fulfilled (cf. Dt. 18, 18-22).
To address the erosion caused by secularization there is nothing more beneficial and advisable than to listen to the true prophets who have arisen and continue to arise in the progress of the Church.
Translated by Virginia Forrester
