John the Baptist, a spirit-filled man, who lived apart from the world, represents, because of his humble and stark way of life in the wilderness, the archetype of the monk or desert father, devoid of material goods but rich in spiritual goods. The whole tradition that will take him as its model, along with Elijah and Elisha, invites us to discover what we usually call the desert spirituality.
This type of spirituality focuses on the search for inner spiritual richness, an inner abundance which remains hidden under humble exteriors ( John the Baptist "wore a garment of camel's hair") to those who seek only the glittering and the noisy, but which is revealed to those who have a heart well-disposed to receive it.
Based on this observation, I would like, first, to link what we just said about the desert spirituality with the mystery of the Incarnation, where we"ll find the same process at work, the same paradox: a special kind of poverty which becomes a source of (spiritual) wealth. Second, I'll like to compare that paradoxical cultural phenomenon with the brillant but not supernaturally inspired culture of the Ancient Greeks.
The Christian Paradox
In becoming human in Jesus, God impoverished himself and, at the same time, kept all his divine treasures intact within Himself. To this day, this incomparable divine wealth remains hidden from the eyes of men who know how to see nothing but worldly realities (wealth, pleasure, power, and honor), and others who cling to competing non-Christian worldviews. This is why Jesus himself is often overlooked as a mere prophet, and the Church, the mystical body of Christ, seen as an ordinary human institution. In truth, all Catholic theology is based on this paradoxical reality: namely, that the most "luminous" thing there is, i.e. the divine glory of God, has come to be hidden in a human body, not to remain hidden though, but to be revealed.
From a divine standpoint, the Earth is a kind of desert compared to Heaven, that is to say, a place of sobriety and poverty, where the glory of God dwelling in Jesus Christ is perfectly preserved, but hidden. Through the Incarnation of the Son of Man, the hidden God of Isaiah (cf. Is 45:15) is revealed, but only in part. The simplicity of his human appearance on Earth still hides him from those who have no eyes to discover his divine identity. And what is true for the very being of Jesus, is true for the words of Jesus as well. Behind the apparent simplicity of the words of John the Baptist and parables of Jesus, lies the deepest and most inexhaustible wisdom.
This paradox prolongs that of the divine Revelation in general, that is to say, that of a divine Wisdom who, in order to make Himself known, has wrapped Himself in human words and reveals Himself to those who are well-prepared and well-disposed to receive Him in all His richness, but who remains hidden from others, ill-prepared to receive Him and ill-disposed to detect and perceive some transcendent and sanctifying reality behind the surface.
Thus, at first glance, the apparent cultural poverty, or rather the simplicity and rusticity of the Jewish culture of someone like John the Baptist or Jesus, has nothing to do with the scholarly/scientific/literate culture of the Ancient Greeks. But paradoxically, when it comes to the meaning of life, all the sophisticated wisdom of the Greeks ultimately contains less richness than the small culture/memory/biblical hope of a desert recluse like John.
Comparison between Biblical literature and ancient Greek culture
Having said this, the gap between Greek complexity and Jewish simplicity, between Greek sophistication and Jewish rusticity, should not be exaggerated. For the Jews, as great readers of the Scriptures, are far from pertaining to a purely oral culture. Their religious culture is in fact based on the Sacred Scriptures, which preserve and revive the national memory, even if illiteracy characterizes at least part of the people.
The Jewish collection of sacred books we now call the Bible, developed and enriched over ten centuries, took on greater importance after the Exile in Babylon, in 587 BC. In a context of radical dispossession, the sacred corpus replaced, in a symbolic way, the temple, destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. And after the Exile, the Jews continued to "inhabit" the word more than ever, so that the word would inhabit them.
That said, the sacred books of the Jews retain something of the simplicity of popular wisdom, for example in the Sapiential Books. This literature of wisdom remains close to the practical experience of which they are, in a certain way, the distillation. It does not reach the same level of abstraction than Greek moral philosophy. Obviously, this biblical sapiential literature presents an absence or "lack" of abstraction, structuring and systematization, if not an absence or "lack" of rationality.
But there is on both sides, on the Jewish side as well as on the Greek side, this common “natural desire to know", mentioned by Aristotle in his Metaphysics. In biblical Judaism, the experience of life leads to wisdom in practical ways, but this knowledge rises to the truth while remaining “colored”, so to speak, by the whole existential context it emerges from. Philosophical enquiry also leads to wisdom, but in theoretical ways, based on practical experience, whose sensitive origin it obliterates, in order to raise to the level of abstraction.
There is also something candid in the Gospels. These four books have an extremely stripped-down and naive aspect, with their short miracles accounts. And, according to the categories of the literary theory of genres, they belong to a type of literature which we call “marvelous”. But mysteriously, these little sacred fables, fashioned centuries ago, have the power to shape us from within over the course of days and years. Such is the Christian experience of biblical revelation, that it brings inner transformation to a whole new level.
reviewed on updated on 05-14-2020