Émile Poulat

There was a time when one saw humankind projected into a chronologically brief future: a few millenniums, but no more. One knew where it came from and where it was going. Today, thanks to a minute fossil, a bone splinter, what remains of an ancient utensil, man has understood that his origin dates back to the beginning of time, to millions of years ago. But these discoveries have shattered his concept of the future.

We live, above all in the West, in a "disposable" society; a modern form of the age-old phenomenon of "vandalism", a kind of perseverance in destruction. The great lesson of history is, however, the irreplaceable value of everything that bears witness to the past, but also to the very long time that was needed for man to "become hominoid" to "become human". And it is precisely in this reorganized, revolutionized human adventure that humankind has failed, so much so that today it is necessary to re-write and re-live the Christian mystery.

For a person whose memory is as long as mine, it is good to "capitalize" all this religious history, not to throw anything away, to add page by page to this unfinished work without letting oneself be crushed by the weight of the past.

Today much is said about "interreligious dialogue" associated with a "theology of religions": is this not perhaps an invitation to unite the two Testaments in which the biblical God and that virtual object which Victor Hugo called The Bible of Humanity, are revealed?

In our thankless youth my generation was far from being capable of understanding such vast horizons, as neither would the teachers who were forming us have been able to.

For me Jesus was first of all what I breathed in a deeply Catholic non-clerical family environment, where one had to toe the line and where we all prayed together: devotion kept pace with virtue.

Later there was the institution of the catechism: the smallest schoolbook with questions and answers to learn by heart. I wonder what would have remained of all this if there had not been that family "humus", and then the reading of passages from the Gospel and later the discovery of Sacred History.

The first shock, the first flash came at the age of sixteen, at the cinema: the American film Green Pastures, produced and interpreted by coloured American actors, Protestants in the full biblical sense of the word. They did not live in God: it was God the Father who lived in them.

The first moderate "alarm" with regard to the difficulties that Genesis presents for the modern reader dates back to that same year. "Before very long" – they were the first echoes of a phase of theological obscurantism – "you will witness the modernist crisis".

Unlike Jacques Duquesne, I had lost my innocence very early.

Jesus and his time (it was Daniel Pops' title, 1945) or Jesus in our time is still always the signum contradictionis, a sign of ambivalent contradiction – according to the answer given to the question, "And who do you say that I am?" - but also, regardless of the answer, before the infinite variety of representations whose object it has been for twenty centuries now.

From the Pantacreator to Jesus the worker or artisan of our century within the same Church, within the same faith, there is an abyss. And might not Jesus the revolutionary or liberator represent a modernized and contrary version to the former?

I have not become either an exegete or a theologian. But I have been satisfied, in all modesty, to graduate in sociology and become a scholar of Christianity, who left his family soon, without inner conflicts or unsettled accounts with anyone, but ever more aware of the problems created among us by these same people who proclaim Jesus and profess the Christian faith.

By that time conscious of the needs and limits of university discipline, I literally threw myself for many long years into the complex, intricate history of modernism, and its opposite Unitarianism, without ever binding myself to either of them, but wanting only to understand the meaning of their antithesis under the dual pressure of our liberal society and its erudite culture.

How could I devote myself to them without remaining ensnared by them? A historian cannot remain extraneous to history, just as a sociologist cannot remain foreign to the society in which he lives.

Christianity laid bare by social or intellectual criticism is a compulsory passage like walking on burning coals.

The "critical night" is equally true of the "mystic night", but this does not mean that the two must be confused.

"In the beginning was the Word, the Logos". In the course of the centuries, faith in God cannot stop in a shout; it must become a language that can be transmitted. "Take the Gospel to the ends of the earth" means giving an intelligible form to the Christian message so that first of all we ourselves may understand it and then make it known to others.

University knowledge, removed from the Word of God, has become a teacher in the critique of human language, while the increasingly multilingual contemporary culture is getting to know other languages and losing the natural wisdom of the Christian language.

At this point three prospects come to the fore:

1) The necessary revision at the bases of a Christology that has allowed itself to be bewitched by real theological "romances", closer to certain apocryphas – what has it not been possible to read about "consciousness of Christ"? – than to the canonical Gospels? We need to return to greater sobriety and modesty, to accept that there is a secret about the life, work and person of Jesus, in keeping with what the exegetes have defined as the "messianic secret". God's "confidants" must be more discrete, after many, too many excesses.

2) In the age of ecumenism and "all-embracing media communication" no one asks the great historical Churches to renounce their own profession of faith, but all must know that now the monopoly of the discourse about Jesus is slipping from their hands. Without excessive concern for dogma, the latter is now common property. "Jesus" is part of the historical and cultural patrimony of humanity, without "copyrights". Anyone who wants to speak about him may do so, in whatever way they like, and the result may be disconcerting. Churches announce a new Pentecost, but is it the Tower of Babel that has returned, even among Christians themselves?

3) Therefore in this context, should we not despair? Weep and throw in the sponge? Miguel de Unamuno, who lived this torment profoundly, expressed it in a magnificent and ambivalent title, The Agony of Christianity inspired by Pascal: "Christ will be in agony to the end of time". The criticism that today seems inevitable will always be insufficient. The Bible is given undefended to the learned who have a right to exercise their talent on it, but it was not written for them, or for their intellectual ability. Through their texts, they merely reach a kind of virtual belief. What remains is the living faith and the Gospel lived by men and women whose faith is founded on the agape - which is love and which we translate with the word "charity" - according to which prayer abides unceasingly in us and speaks its language. We ought to speak less in order to listen better to the language that does not always find words.

"Believing" is a somewhat complaisant definition, too complaisant. "Follow me" is a more demanding call, addressed to the disciples of that Son of Man in whom they recognize the Son of God. The experience of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Doctor of the Church – her only title – is the testimony that her "little way", first of all a spiritual way, was not only spiritual: it includes also knowledge of the mystery of Christ in which we live.