Reviewing a book titled The Son of Man written by François Mauriac (a French Roman Catholic who wrote about the problems of good and evil in human nature and in the world), Flannery O’Connor writes:
He proposes in the place of that anguish that Gide called the Catholic’s ‘cramp of salvation’ — obsession with personal salvation — an anguish transmuted into charity, anguish for another. Thus for Sartre, ‘hell is other people,’ but for the Christian with Mauriac’s anguish others are Christ. We realize that this way of looking at life was so completely left out of Mauriac’s youthful Catholic education that it has had to come to him as a discovery of later life. (The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews by Flannery O’Connor)
What caught my attention is that quote about Sartre, that “hell is other people.” The Christian perspective, informed by the reality of Christ and the work of grace, is that “others are Christ.” That is one of the best descriptions of a sacramental worldview that you will find in one sentence.
October 20th, 2010 | 10:33 am | #1
James,
James said: “What caught my attention is that quote about Sartre, that “hell is other people.” The Christian perspective, informed by the reality of Christ and the work of grace, is that “others are Christ.” That is one of the best descriptions of a sacramental worldview that you will find in one sentence.”
Steve Drake: Are others the incarnate God-man come to redeem His people from their sins? Are others ‘without sin’, perfect in all their ways?
To say that ‘others are Christ’, is to blur the distinction between the Creator and the creature. To say that ‘others are Christ’ is to blur the distinction between the infinite and the finite. To say that ‘others are Christ’ is to blur the distinction between the Holy and the unholy.
To understand that ‘others’ are created like oneself in God’s image, or that we are to treat ‘others’ with the same love that Christ has showed us; to treat ‘others’ in a Christlike fashion because He has commanded us to do so, is not the same thing as saying that ‘others are Christ’.
October 20th, 2010 | 1:14 pm | #2
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute ME?”
-Jesus
October 20th, 2010 | 3:59 pm | #3
I think it’s probably more biblical to say that (in this context at least) believers are Christ.
We are, after all, described as being His body.
The problem with saying “others are Christ” is that Jesus seemed to say that non-believers are “sons of hell”.
October 20th, 2010 | 9:22 pm | #4
Orthodoxdj,
To say that Saul was persecuting the body of Christ, in persecuting CHRISTIANS is not the same thing as saying all others are Christ. There is a distinction between believer and non-believer here, is there not?
October 23rd, 2010 | 3:06 pm | #5
I think the statement is accurate to the degree that we understand the Christian life as fundamentally relational. This is reflected in our trinitarian confession of who God is and in the incarnate nature of God’s revelation to us in Jesus Christ. God does truly love us through the other, and so seeing this as a sacramental view is appropriate. This does not deny the reality of sin, but claims God’s power over it and final destruction of it in Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can see and experience Christ in the other as they too are one for whom He died. This is true regardless of their belief. Rather, it is true because of who God is.
“I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
Are we so certain we can determine in every case who it as that Christ is referring to here in this parable? I say we must be alert. We never know when the Lord will come knocking and in what “otherly” form he might choose to meet us. Prepare ye the way.
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