When was hope born? In “Spe salvi” the German Pope discusses the “scandalous” claim in the “Epistle to the Ephesians” that before Jesus hope did not exist.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 2 of 5. Read article 1.
Considering the 2007 encyclical of Benedict XVI “Spe salvi,” a great treatise on hope, as a theatrical drama in four acts is my own reconstruction. It is not a scheme proposed in the text himself. I believe, however, that Benedict XVI’s encyclical may be read as a sacred play, which has as its theme the story of hope.
The first act shows us hope “in statu nascenti,” beginning with a statement, which certainly sounds scandalous today, in the “Epistle to the Ephesians” (2:12). The author reminds the Ephesians that before the encounter with Jesus Christ the pagans were “without hope and without God in the world.” One can easily imagine here the immediate reaction of a modern scholar of comparative religions: certainly before Christianity there were gods in the world, indeed perhaps there were even too many. But maybe the hypothetical reaction would have been more common among scholars of some decades ago. Today, most academics would agree that at the time the “Epistle to the Ephesians” was written, Roman faith had decayed to a mere state religion, whose rites were wearily celebrated by salaried officials with no real popular participation.
The Pope uses precisely in “Spe salvi” the expression “state religion” (no. 5), recalling how the reason of Greek philosophy was a force capable of building but also of destroying and corroding. Of building up, when faced with a young religion as vibrant and solid as Christianity. But also to corrode an intellectually weak religion, as the Roman one had become. “Philosophical rationalism had confined the gods within the realm of unreality” (no. 5). The myth of classical religion “had lost its credibility”; Roman religion “had become fossilized into simple ceremony, which was scrupulously carried out, but by then it was merely ‘political religion’” (no. 5).
After rationalism had corroded the faith in the gods, there remained—according to a conception that, Benedict XVI notes, “in a different way, has become fashionable once again today”—a relationship with the sacred that deified “cosmic forces” (no. 5). What the German Pope sees as a decadent Roman religion expressed itself in a gloomy deterministic astrology, in which the stars dominated human lives without humans being able either to prevent the action of the celestial bodies or to fully understand their dynamics. This fear of cosmic forces, Benedict XVI believes, was exorcised by the Bethlehem event, the birth of Jesus. Benedict XVI quotes Gregory of Nazianzus (330–390) to claim that “at the very moment when the Magi, guided by the star, adored Christ the new king, astrology came to an end, because the stars were now moving in the orbit determined by Christ” (no. 5). Or perhaps an old deterministic astrology died, opening the way to what will eventually become the new Medieval astrology in which many Christians will believe: but this is not a theme Benedict XVI discusses in his text.
He is more interested in noting how, even after Christianity came, old decadent religious forms not only survived but could even be reborn where hope as a fruit of the encounter between reason and faith faded or disappeared. Here again, as in the Regensburg lecture mentioned in the previous article on this series, the German Pope is on dangerous ground, as the text includes a reference to Islam that some may consider Islamophobic.
Yet, it is barely hinted at, and what Benedict really wants to criticize is the religious justification of slavery by both Muslims and Christians. This is done through the account of the life of Josephine Bakhita (1869–1947), a crucial character in the encyclical.
Bakhita, taken in “Spe salvi” as a symbol of a hope that can flourish even from the darkness of a society founded on slavery, was born in Oglassa, in the Darfur region of Sudan, probably in 1869. At the age of five, she was kidnapped by slave traders, who give her the name Bakhita, “the lucky one.” But the name turned out to be inappropriate: the child slave passed for years through masters one meaner than the other, who made her suffer all sorts of violence and real torture. In 1882 in Khartoum she was bought by the Italian consul, Callisto Legnani from Como, who had already returned several slaves to their families.
Bakhita, however, no longer even remembered where she came from. Legnani took her into his service as a maid. Later, he brought her with him to Italy when he had to flee Sudan because of the Mahdi uprising in 1884. In Italy she was declared legally free from her slave status. In the meantime she came to know the Canossian nuns of Verona, with whom she received baptism in 1890 under the name Josephine. She entered as a novice in their convent in 1890, becoming a nun in 1896. In 1902, she was transferred to the convent in Schio, where she remained for the rest of her life (except for a brief period spent in Vimercate) and acquired a reputation for holiness. She died in Schio on February 8, 1947. Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) beatified her in 1992. She was canonized in 2000.
Bakhita was a slave from a land whose evocation in 2007 was not accidental. Darfur, in Sudan, was at that time the scene of a genocide in which slavery was still practiced by Arab Muslims at the expense of other Muslims whose only fault was that they were not Arabs. Bakhita, after a particularly horrific experience of slavery—the encyclical reports that “she was flogged every day till she bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life” (no. 3)—had at least the good fortune to be sold to a humane Italian master. In Verona she met the person whom “in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning” (no. 3) she called the “Paron,” the master par excellence: God. She thus began a journey that would eventually lead her to Catholic canonization.
Only the encounter between faith and reason, Benedict insists, makes it possible to recognize the one founded on slavery as an “improper society,” be it Muslim or Christian or dominated by any other religion. When reason is obfuscated by a fundamentalist approach to faith, slavery is justified (no. 4).
On the other hand, Benedict spends some words to deny the old theory propagated by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) that Christianity managed to become the dominant religion only by converting en masse the slaves. The Pope notes that there were also “conversions in the aristocratic and educated classes” (no. 5).
This ability of early Christians to attract converts from different classes is illustrated by Benedict with an iconographic reference to the sarcophagi of the early centuries. “The figure of Christ is interpreted on ancient sarcophagi principally by two images: the philosopher and the shepherd” (no. 6). However, both of these figures, in the crisis of religion and of classical culture itself, had taken on caricatural aspects. Many supposed philosophers “were just charlatans.” As for shepherds, bucolic genre literature depicted them with their shepherdesses always intent on enjoying a “tranquil and simple life” (no. 6). This was beautiful but hardly realistic when compared to the concrete experience of shepherding, which also knows hard times and assaults by wolves.
To many educated Romans, Jesus appeared as the true philosopher, who unlike the charlatans did not exhibit his mastery as the ability to argue one thesis and its opposite in turn, but showed the truth, and indeed “was” the truth. To the poor and oppressed, Jesus presented himself as the true shepherd who not only defends the sheep from the wolves but even walks with his flock on the “way that passes through the valley of death” (no. 6.). Death is an enemy far worse than the wolves and one which, however, Jesus as the Lord—and he alone—had confronted and defeated. It is in this sense, Benedict insists, that it was properly with Jesus Christ that hope was born in history.
