The Daring Story of Christ by Giovanni Papini

The author, Giovanni Papini

In 1921 -now celebrating its centenary- a renowned Italian intellectual, Giovanni Papini, had the audacity to publish a History of Christ very different from all previous ones. He was 40 years old and had a past as an iconoclast of philosophies and religions.

Your Italian literaturewas very Nietzschean, as he had shown in A Finished Man (1913). He pretended to be one in life and in literature, and expressed his existential frustration with these words: "Here is buried a man who could have become a god".

He had knocked on the doors of ideologies to question everything that could be thought. He even went so far as to publish Memories of God (1911)The example of atheism to the extreme of a God who questions his own existence and rebels against those who ignore him.

The writer had hit rock bottom in his life, despite having a family with Giacinta Giovagnoli, a Catholic and patient woman. But one day he embarked on the adventure of reading Christian books.The Confessions of St. Augustine, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the Introduction to the Devout Life of St. Francis de Sales... This restlessness inevitably led him to reading and meditating on the Gospels.

He discovered that they did not express a conventional way of life. Rather, found in them an unexpected form of rebellion, which awakened his passion for life and his literary inspiration.

Influences for Giovanni Papini

At that time he read Leon Bloy, a French writer marked by polemic, a fustigator of a bourgeois Christianity and cultivator of an exalted and compulsive prose, someone who considered himself a fighter against positivism and the skepticism of the society of his time.

Giovanni Papini would be admired for his violent and energetic language. In both Bloy and Papini, adjectives are sharp throwing weapons, and among them there is no lack of expressions such as "stinking", "bloodthirsty", "impure"... In the History of Christ they are never enough to be used against the religious and political authorities of Palestine in the time of Jesusbut also for the scribes and Pharisees.

A discovery for Giovanni Papini

One of Papini's great discoveries in this book is the beatitudes. He does not see them as an expression of weakness or conformism.

On the contrary, they fascinate him as a way of life that makes him rise above himself. They are the hope for a truer life, in which intelligence is not enough.. Among other things, he discovers that to be poor in spirit it is not enough to be poor. It is necessary to become aware of one's own imperfection.

He will also understand that the meek are not the weak, but those who are obstinate in attaining spiritual goods. He writes that those who weep are not sad, but are blessed in shedding tears for the evil they have done and the good they could have done. He stresses that those who truly hunger and thirst for justice are those who trust in God's will, and that the merciful are not those who have pity on others, but those who also have pity on themselves.

Not only the beatitudes but the entire Gospel is a message addressed to the last. This is how Papini sees it, convinced that the last are destined by God to be the first.

Despite his past as an arrogant intellectual, he still considers himself one of the latter, and that is why the Good News has a lot to say to him.

Some time ago he was looking for the superman, and his History of Christ is the confirmation that he has found the Man, not the new man of the philosophies of his time. The descriptions of the Passion know how to combine lyricism and a realism that does not spare the cruelest details. Papini's conclusion in the epilogue is that the Crucified One has been tormented for love of us. But now He torments us with the force of His implacable love.