The history of the West is too enormous, eclectic, and brutal for anyone to claim to discern a line of spiritual development running from Calvary to the present. To the Jews, who invented processive history, there is nothing inevitable about progress, for the future always depends upon the choices for good or ill made by individuals and communities in the present moment. We can sometimes, however, if we take into account large enough units of history, spot certain trends. The trends toward social justice, human rights, and political peace, though always being disrupted and pushed back, appear to have made undeniable advances. It is hard to imagine international organizations like the United Nations, the World Court, and Amnesty International existing in earlier times. And though war and injustice continue to rage, we have at last found words to describe and condemn these oppressions, rather than praise them as we might once have been tempted to do. Such trends, it seems to me, are well summed up in the words of the finely balanced classical historian Donald Kagan at the end of his monumental study of ancient and modern war, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace:
To understand the ancient Greeks and Romans we must be alert to the great gap that separates their views, and those of most people throughout history, from the opinions of our own time. They knew nothing of ideas such as would later be spoken in the Sermon on the Mount, and they would have regarded them as absurd if they had. They viewed the world as a place of intense competition in which victory and domination, which brought fame and glory, were the highest goals, while defeat and subordination brought ignominy and shame.…
The Romans had even fewer hesitations about the desirability of power and the naturalness of war than the Greeks. Theirs was a culture that venerated the military virtues, a world of farmers, accustomed to hard work, deprivation, and subordination to authority. It was a society that valued power, glory, and the responsibilities of leadership, even domination, without embarrassment. The effort needed to preserve these things could be taken for granted; it was in the nature of things and part of the human condition.
Modern states, especially those who have triumphed in the Cold War and have the greatest interest in preserving peace … are quite different. The martial values and the respect for power have not entirely disappeared, but they have been overlayed by other ideas and values, some of them unknown to the classical republics. The most important of these is the Judeo-Christian tradition, and especially the pacifist strain of Christianity that emphasizes the Sermon on the Mount rather than the more militant strain that played so large a role over the centuries. Even as the power and influence of formal, organized religion have waned in the last century, the influence among important segments of the population in the United States and other Western countries of the rejection of power, the evil of pursuing self-interest, the wickedness of war, whatever its cause or goal, have grown. There are now barriers of conscience in the way of acquiring and maintaining power and using it to preserve the peace that would have been incomprehensible to the Greeks and Romans.
It is this enormous shift in consciousness, the origin of which Kagan, a secular American Jew, rightly locates in the teachings of Jesus, that could save the children of the Janiculum and the Western world from the wars that wounded and killed the generations before them right through the hideous “world wars” of the twentieth century. The shift was long in coming, and has come, like many others—from abolition to labor relations, from suffrage to tolerance—only after centuries of struggle. Nor are any of these struggles won conclusively. There are still, for instance, pockets of slavery in the world; and even in the West, there remain abundant labor exploitation, the unjust incarceration of minorities, the demonization of immigrants, and the continuing sufferings of the poor. The Balkan peoples have awakened from their extended Soviet sleep as people of the nineteenth century, clutching their undying ethnic hatreds while living in the twenty-first. But everywhere the Christian value system makes demands unknown in earlier ages. Even in the extremities of the West—in Northern Ireland, for instance, and in Israel—the pressure to make peace is quite unlike anything the Greeks or Romans or even the Elizabethans could have imagined.
In none of these arenas would any but a madman be willing to abandon the gains the West has made and go backward even by a century or two into the past. Far beyond the West, we watch those who struggle for the freedoms we enjoy and wonder where they get their courage. But, says Yuan Zhiming, one of the Chinese intellectuals who supported the students of Tiananmen Square, “Democracy is not merely an institution nor simply a concept, but a profound structure of faith.” We must consider that Christianity’s “initial thrust” has hurled “acts and ideas” not only “across the centuries” but around the world.
So much for the world. What of Trastevere?
At the foot of the Janiculum there sits an unimportant square, embracing a small collection of buildings, once a cloistered Renaissance convent, today the center of a worldwide movement, named after the old convent and called the Community of Sant’Egidio. Given the glories of Trastevere, you could easily pass it by, thinking it just another pedestrian church unmentioned in your travel guide. This is the heart of an ecumenical community of laypeople, founded in 1968 by a handful of Roman high school students, who decided during that year of student uprisings throughout Western Europe that they, too, wanted to do something revolutionary, something that would have permanent effect, not something that would vanish without trace. They wished to live in Rome as the early Christians had lived there.
They began to gather each night to pray together and read from the Bible, especially from the Gospel. They reflected on the Gospel and they did what the Gospel impelled them to do. That was thirty years ago. Today there are about ten thousand members of the community in Italy and a similar number beyond its borders, representatives on every continent and in most of the countries of the world. They do not live together; they have normal jobs and normal lives. They have only one slogan that I am aware of: “The Gospel and Freedom.” Though they gather to read the Gospel and pray together in small communities throughout the world, usually several nights each week, no member is obliged to attend anything. What has the Gospel impelled them to do? As I cannot describe the works of each community, I will tell you about the works of the original community, which gathers each night for prayer in this ancient quarter of Trastevere, the same quarter where first-century Christianity gained its first Roman foothold.
Their church is filled to capacity, often to bursting. Though the founders are now in their late forties, the average age of the congregation seems about thirty, so the community continues to gather strength from fresh recruits. The prayer is the most beautiful I have ever heard, modeled on the sonorous chant of the Russian church and sung from the gut with reverence and feeling. Each night they choose a theme: on Monday night, for instance, there is “Prayer with the Poor,” on Wednesday “Prayer with the Saints,” on Friday “Prayer at the Foot of the Cross.” On Friday night, they sing:
Non piangere, Madre di Dio,
presso la croce del Signore,
e gioisci perche Egli è risorto:
nel suo corpo è nascosto
tutto il riscatto e la salvezza di ogni uomo.
Do not weep so, Mother of the Lord,
standing in the shadow of the cross,
and shout for joy because He is truly risen:
in his body is hidden
creation’s redemption and the salvation of all mankind.
They sing this three times with plangent conviction, as if to remind themselves of all those who have lost a child or a beloved or been themselves lost in the overwhelming tides of life and history. The darkness of the church is dramatically illuminated by icons, especially a riveting icon of Christ. There is a quiet but pervasive sense of community; and following the half-hour service, people linger in the piazza outside to renew friendship and go off in small groups to dine together. Friendship is a profound experience for these people: they are true frie
nds to one another, and they wish to be friends to the world.
There are more than a hundred satellite communities in and around Rome, engaged in various works. Some are communities of old people, some of poor working people, some of students. Each community tends to have its own coloration. The Trastevere community, which is made up mostly of middle-class professionals, sends out tutors to students in the poor communities. Each night in Trastevere fifteen hundred homeless people are fed, not on soup lines but at sit-down dinners, served with style and graciousness. Once a week fifteen hundred substantial bags of groceries are prepared and distributed. The sorting of the food into bags takes an assembly line of a dozen volunteers all evening. An identification sheet is started for everyone who comes to Sant’Egidio for help, so that the community may offer continuity of assistance, not just a handout. This assistance takes many forms—from helping resident aliens cut through bureaucratic red tape to the publication each Christmas of a colorful, easy-to-read handbook, titled Dove Mangiare, Dormire e Lavarsi a Roma (Where to Eat, Sleep, and Wash in Rome), a gift especially prized by the homeless. On Christmas afternoon, the ancient basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere opens its gates to a great feast for the poor, homeless, and elderly of Rome, hosted with true Italian generosity by the Community of Sant’Egidio. The Trastevere community runs three refuges for old people, two AIDS hospices, and a home for abused and abandoned children. Its members have founded throughout the poor perimeter of the city many after-school programs for small children called scuole popolari, or “people’s schools,” where the children are taught the things they are seldom taught in state schools—not only reading but kindness. There are free language programs for immigrants, outreach programs for gypsies, and biweekly visits to prisoners, all organized by Sant’Egidio.
Each October, the community organizes a torchlight March of Remembrance for the Roman Jews and all other Jews who perished under the Nazis. It starts at the portico of the basilica of Santa Maria (which contains the first-century Jewish and Christian grave slabs) and proceeds to Tiber Island (where the Jews of Rome were brought by the Nazis in 1943 prior to their deportation to Auschwitz) and ends at the steps of the synagogue beyond the river. Large black banners are held aloft, each with the name of one of the death camps printed in white letters. At the head of the march, which is silent (an unusual occurrence in Italy), the largest banner contains Santayana’s famous sentence “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Several years ago, members of the community, believing they had a Gospel mandate to act as peacemakers, undertook a series of quiet, amateur efforts on their own and succeeded in arranging a peace in Mozambique between the guerrillas and the government (after sixteen years of war and one million casualties). The peace has held, as has a similar peace that the community has helped to achieve in Guatemala. They continue to attempt reconciliation in Algeria, the Balkans, and other hotspots, working intuitively and patiently, never abandoning hope, and true to their belief that “war is the greatest poverty of all.” As I write, a million refugees are spilling out of Kosovo. At its muddy borders are the people of Sant’Egidio, constructing sanitation and housing, offering medicine, food, and schooling, and helping to coordinate the efforts of others. In this new mission of peace, the community has at its disposal only its own part-time volunteers (almost no one at Sant’Egidio is salaried) and what it calls “the weak strength of the Gospel.”
But it also has a growing network of religious leaders of all kinds, committed to its vision that the religions of the world must take the lead in bringing peace to their regions. In this spirit, the community organized in 1986 the first Uomini e Religioni (People and Religions) conference in the Assisi of Saint Francis. Leaders of all the world’s religions were invited—and they came, and they prayed and talked together for several days. Each year since then the community has organized a similar conference in a European city, in the course of which you may spy Arab sitting down with Israeli, Serb with Bosnian Muslim, Irish Protestant with Irish Catholic. Over time, this mingling in friendship could spell the difference between war and peace in many regions—and the difference between death and life for many individuals.
If there is no magic in the people of Sant’Egidio, there is much goodness. It is a goodness cultivated as any quality must be cultivated—with practice and attention—and, no doubt, in their case, with grace from above; and it has transformed the lives of countless human beings in Trastevere, in Rome, in Italy, and far beyond. But the only mystery here is the mystery of human will. Anyone on earth could do what they have done.
Cynics often say that “nothing can be done,” meaning that nothing can really be accomplished to improve the lot of those who suffer. Defensive Christians are often heard to say of Christianity that “it has never been tried.” But people like Mother Teresa and the Community of Sant’Egidio give the lie to all cynicism and defensiveness. This earth now holds six billion souls. How many Mother Teresas would it take to succor the abandoned and dying? How many Sant’Egidios would it take to transform the social fabric not just of Trastevere but of the earth itself?
As a percentage of global population, not all that many. It requires only that each of us take the first step—“open [our] hearts” and hold out our hands. When asked once by an incredulous interviewer, “But, Mother, how do you do it?” the shrunken and smiling Albanian nun replied, “One by one.”
Tomorrow
There is an old French saying, “Hell is paved with the skulls of priests.” I wouldn’t know, nor does anyone. But I am pretty sure, harking back to Jesus’s description of the Last Judgment, which is preceded by his excoriation of the religious establishment of his day, that many people, both high and low, are in for a surprise. When dealing with hallowed religious material, we must always be on our guard against a knee-jerk piety that obscures rather than assists insight and that prefers to judge, punish, and exclude rather than welcome. Christians, therefore, reading their own sacred texts and revering their own sacred objects, should welcome especially the insights of outsiders—like Chaim Potok’s Asher Lev, Yale’s Donald Kagan, and China’s Yuan Zhiming—who can bring new depth to their experience.
Modern scripture scholarship, rising in nonsectarian, agnostic circles, has brought believers new riches, allowing us to see anew the life of Jesus and the story of the early Church—to view these ancient treasures from venues never available before. Now we can appreciate the personalities, the strengths and limitations, of each evangelist, even finding useful scripture scholarship’s “criterion of embarrassment”—the idea that certain elements of the text were so embarrassing to the sponsoring community that the writer could have included these things only because he did not feel free to leave them out. Such a criterion gives us confidence that Peter (later a great figure) was indeed the bumbler he is portrayed to be, that women (later told to keep their mouths shut) like Magdalene were leaders of the early church, that Jesus casually forgave sexual transgressions, and that his crucifixion rattled his followers to their bones. Modern scholarship has also given us a better sense of the continuities (and discontinuities) between the teaching of Jesus and his first followers and among the various factions of the developing Jesus Movement, as it grew into the Church of later centuries. All these are new insights that give new strength.
If we take from the most modern, we also borrow from the most ancient, for the worldview of the Jews is the rock-solid promontory that supports Christian faith. Without the Jewish sense of destiny, both corporate and individual, without the Jewish sense of history and the meaning given to suffering, no part of the story that Christians tell themselves would make any sense whatever. It is from the Jews that we received the idea of chosenness by God—“You have not chosen me; I have chosen you”—and from the Jews that we learned that chosenness implies both suffering and redemption. Indeed, to approach the idea of chosenness with humility and imagination is to find oneself on the point of retching—because it bring
s one in fresh proximity with one’s own suffering (past, present, and to come) and with the pain of others, of all others—the great moaning and shuddering that runs through the whole of human history.
But because it still requires a great artist or a great saint to “look on” Jesus in his suffering, all our approaches—scientific, Jewish, orthodox, pious—to authentic Christianity are likely to prove inadequate; and I wonder how far we have come—as a civilization—from his own mother’s peasant judgment that what this guy is saying doesn’t really add up. Jesus insists on forgiveness, turning the other cheek, peace, and compassion, always compassion—and which of us wants to hear that? The leaders of the Jewish religious establishment rejected Jesus in his own lifetime, not principally because he rejected the Torah of Moses or because he claimed to be God, but because of his midrash, his interpretation of God’s word. He insisted that all of Jewish sacred scripture—the Torah and the Prophets—was asking them to live in a way that they considered unrealistic. Any Christian who imagines himself morally superior to those who turned away has only to glance at the subsequent history of Christian persecution of Jews to realize that Christians have been far more successful at rejecting Jesus than any Jew has ever been.
Despite this catastrophic bimillennial failure, the image of Jesus haunts our civilization in exceedingly persistent ways. Everyone knows who he is; everyone knows what he looked like; everyone knows what he expects of us. This consistency, this transultimate reliability is found in the four original gospel portraits and has persisted through the ages. As the ancient liturgy of Easter says of him: “Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega—his are the seasons and the ages.” Or, far less triumphally, as a Jewish woman confided to me recently: “I love Jesus. Don’t get me wrong: I have no interest whatsoever in Christianity. But I love Jesus; I feel he belongs to me.”