Enrico Norelli argues that there is nothing more misleading than talking about the “birth of Christianity”, because the word “birth” refers to an event whose protagonist was presented from the first moment in the completeness of its nature, where Christianity required at least three centuries to take a form relatively close to the one we know today. All this the illustrious historian introduces him to a beautiful volume which, evidently in homage to the laws of the market, is entitled “The birth of Christianity”. The first merit of the book by Monsignor Ettore Malnati, theologian and episcopal vicar for culture of the diocese of Trieste, is therefore this: clarity, right from the cover. “Jesus the Christ in the faith of the Church. From Kerygma to the Councils, synodality and tradition “(Cantagalli 2021, pp. 225, € 20) may frighten the layman, but it suggests that the awareness of the identity of the founder of Christianity, his nature as a true man and true God and the content of his announcement of salvation: all this was formed in the course of a very long and complex process, which cost many discussions and even persecutions and suffering, and which in some respects must still be considered unfinished.
Accustomed to dealing with refined theologians, but also young people, students and entrepreneurs, Malnati uses an extremely accessible language to describe the stages through which, in substance, that special branch of theology which is called Christology was born. The reader therefore feels taken by the hand and accompanied step by step through a path that, after having described the time of Jesus and what he said about himself and his mission of salvation, proceeds with the answer that is not always coherent or linear that came from the first disciples, to arrive at the thought and the work of those who, starting from the end of the first century, ventured into the great enterprise of defining the authentic nature of the founder of Christianity. Passing from Clement Roman to Irenaeus of Lyons, from Tertullian to Origen, the author introduces us among other things to that extraordinary melting pot of passionate and devoted intelligences that was the Church of Alexandria, where in the first decades of the fourth century it found fertile ground there. heresy of the presbyter Arius.
For each of the ecumenical councils that have followed one another almost every ten years since then, Malnati describes in a schematic but not at all pedantic way the reasons that led to the convening of the assembly, the development of the debate as far as we know it, and the conclusions a which came.
Impressive is the amount of doctrinal elaborations that the answer to the single question “who is Jesus?” (echo of what he himself had asked the apostles: “who do you say I am?”) produced during the first centuries of the Church’s life, each of which elaborations questioned the authority of the bishop of Rome, from the middle of the second century accepted more or less tacitly as superior to all the others, forcing it from time to time to take a position for or against the thesis in question. But equally impressive to us inhabitants of a secularized world is the fact that in no case these doctrinal elaborations and the related debates remained detached from the daily life of the provinces in which they developed, causing bloody riots and causing the ruin or fortune of many, with a participation of the people that may seem incongruous to us at the very least.
In the theological discussions on the nature of Christ the Christian emperors were also involved in the first person, promoters on their own or the bishop of Rome’s own impulse of almost all the councils of the first centuries precisely because they were interested in guaranteeing that peaceful civil coexistence that alone could derive from a conscious adherence to the orthodoxy of faith, in communion with the universal Church.
Accompanying the reader like Virgil with Dante in the forest of heresies of the first centuries, Monsignor Malnati dwells on that of Arius enough to make him discover that, almost a “felix culpa”, that heresy produced the magnificent fruit of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan symbol. It is here, in the “creed” that we recite at Sunday Mass, elaborated in Nicaea in 325 and perfected in Constantinople in 381, that we find the most complete definition of Christ true God and true man in response to Arius’s thesis, which preached Christ alone man, and of Apollinaris of Laodicea who wanted him to be pure divine Logos. The subsequent addition of the “Filioque”, that is the affirmation according to which the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father “and from the Son”, at the origin of the division with Eastern Christians, seems to have derived above all from the need to reaffirm the divinity of Christ in response to Arianism. The council of Florence of 1439 came a step away from healing the rift with the Orientals, without affecting the “Filioque”. But if Christology, as we said, is still a work in progress, we cannot fail to start from here for a reflection on the relations between the Latin Christian Church and that of the East. So, perhaps, in a few years, Monsignor Ettore Malnati will be forced to update his beautiful book.
* Journalist, central editor of Tg1