In short, either Jesus Christ is God—not in a manner of speaking, or in the way that every man is an image of God, but really and truly God—or He was a mere man. And if He is not who He claims to be, if He was not sent uniquely by the Father to proclaim the truth and bring salvation, He was a madman at best, a deceiver at worst. One wishes to say to many people: Please, let us not spend our time talking about "symbolic" or "ethical" interpretations of Christianity. Christ is the absolute Either/Or: you must accept Him for who He claims to be or reject His claims altogether. There is no middle road. The moment one isolates Christ’s "moral teachings" and ignores the rest of His message, one has falsified the entire doctrine He preached. "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Mt. 28:18-20). The infamous "Jesus Seminar" would tell us that a nice young man from Galilee could never have said something so intolerant and exclusivist. Yet if He is the true and only Son of God and Savior of mankind, then He not only may but must speak in this way, and we not only may but must respond to His Gospel.

The problem is that people introduce far too much sophistication into their first-level understanding of Christianity. It is not first and foremost a story, a philosophy of life, a social code, an attitude or worldview. It is the power and the wisdom of God revealed as fact in the person and life of Jesus Christ, who is really our Lord and God, our only way to return to the Father from whom we are really estranged by sin. Once we have accepted the factual or "incarnate" basis of the Christian faith, then, and only to the extent that we keep this basis unchanged and present to mind, may we talk about the allegorical or philosophical aspects of Christian doctrine. Fallen man is, however, notoriously rationalistic, and the temptation of rationalism is to jump to these other levels without earnestly pondering the realities we are asked humbly to accept. The great Danish philosopher Kierkegaard says that much of modern theology attempts to make Christianity look "profound" in a worldly sense so that it can vie with the human geniuses, the philosophies and arts of the age—a process that completely perverts what it is. No matter how unfathomable its mysteries are, the essential message of the Christian faith is simple, direct, accessible to all: it does not strive to be profound in a worldly sense. Indeed, one cannot think of anything it cares less about. It has but one concern: the salvation of souls and the glory of God. And it presents itself as an Either/Or: either you believe it and try to live it every day, or you reject it and go on your way.

The process of degeneration observable in the history of liberal Christianity perfectly illustrates what happens when the content of the faith is forgotten or half-heartedly believed. Over time, dogmas first lose their concrete factual meaning, then their spiritual meaning, and finally their moral meaning, until only a psychological maxim or holiday sentiment remains. Take Christmas. Christmas is, in fact, the solemn celebration of the Incarnation of the Word and the beginning of man’s redemption by God. But when this sublime mystery is pushed out of the mind, Christmas comes to mean a celebration of the innate dignity of man in the eyes of God. When even this comes to be regarded as too overtly religious, Christmas then collapses into a smarmy exhortation to "love all men" and "lay aside all differences." But not even the minimal moral lesson can last, it makes too many demands; in the end, Christmas is allowed to be little more than an excuse for distributing carnal goods accompanied by vague sentiments for a prosperous New Year. The same progression can be observed regarding the celebration of Easter, or, for that matter, of any Catholic mystery that has fallen into the vortex of liberalism. Liberal Protestantism strikes at the dogmatic meaning, rationalism explains away the spiritual meaning, modern democratism undermines the moral meaning. One after another the axe-blows fall, chopping the Creed into pieces and leaving only an incoherent mass of platitudes. This is the sort of degeneration we must continually fight against by proclaiming the Gospel in its full integrity, in season and out of season.

The distinctiveness and irreducibility of the Christian faith is best understood by focusing on the two central mysteries which define our faith: the Holy Trinity ("I believe in one God, the Father almighty. . . and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God. . .and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son"), and the historical Incarnation of the Son of God ("God from God, light from light, true God from true God, who for us men and for our salvation descended from heaven and became incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man"). The wondrous and ever-blessed union in which human nature is assumed into the hypostasis of the second Person of the Trinity brings it about that the Heart of Jesus, a heart of flesh and blood, becomes the very center of all reality, the revelation of God’s infinite mercy and the gateway through which we attain eternal life. The mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation immediately separate the Christian faith from every other religion that has ever existed on the face of the earth. Superficial similarities there may be, but the essential difference is infinite. Above all else, therefore, the Catholic priest, always returning to the foundations of Christianity, must preach the glorious truth of the all-holy and blessed Trinity and the love God has revealed to us in the Incarnation of the Word. Assisted by the insights of the great saints and teachers of the faith over the centuries, he must work at endowing these truths with a living meaning that the faithful here and now can reflect on and incorporate into their daily lives. If, owing to a priest’s negligence or em-barrassment, or a presumption on his part that basic truths of the catechism need no special attention, these definitive mysteries are allowed to fade out slowly from the thoughts and prayers of lay Christians in the world, sooner or later the Catholic faith and the entire way of life it demands will just vanish, transformed willy-nilly into one or another mythology hostile to Christ and His Gospel. Against this gradual slide into ignorance and indifference, we must always announce the givens of the Christian religion, the revealed truths, the immutable starting points. The great theologians—St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure—start from and return to the same truths: creation, providence, Incarnation and redemption, the sending of the Holy Spirit, the sanctification of the believer, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. These are the foundation and the goal of their thoughts, words, and deeds. Their lives were devoted to one and the same Christ, their minds to one and the same faith.

These considerations raise a number of serious questions about how Catholics are to think about and approach non-Christian religions. There are definite extremes: first, that all non-Christian religions (leaving aside Judaism as a special case), and all non-Western forms of theoria and praxis (prayer, contemplation, exercise, medicine, and so on), are just plain false. Perhaps some Christians would not formulate their attitude in such words, but it is often what they think. For example, one often hears thoughtless dismissals of Hinduism, Buddhism, yoga, acupuncture, etc., as though all of them were the devil’s instruments. This conflicts not only with the Church’s Magisterium—one might consult the nuanced teaching of the Second Vatican Council and "commentaries" on it like Crossing the Threshold of Hope—but also with natural reason. As St. Thomas Aquinas argues, it is impossible that any view be altogether false, since the human mind cannot embrace anything as true unless it has some truth in it, nourishing it.

The other extreme, and a far more dangerous one, is that all religions are equal guardians of "primeval truth," all of them pointing to the one Absolute beyond their competing absolute claims—which, in its simplistic form, is the indifferentism of the 18th century philosophers, but in its sophisticated form is the so-called "perennialism" of a body of 20th century thinkers like Frithjof Schuon, René Guénon, and Titus Burckhardt, who claimed to have glimpsed what they called "the transcendental unity of all religions." According to the perennialist, each historical religion seems to be exclusive and irreducible in its unique content, but in fact, all of the religions are so many diverse mediators or symbolic languages straddling the abyss between man and the Absolute, and may thus be "ranked," as it were, according to the more or less perfect metaphysical insight they contain in a veiled form. Nevertheless, the "Absolute" invoked by perennialism also involves a "leap of faith," but of a peculiarly profane character: it demands faith in a totalizing rationalism whereby one believes that human thought (dressed, it is true, in the beautiful finery of mysticism and symbolism) can attain the ultimate synthesis, can discern from afar the ancient unity behind expressly contradictory statements of great world-religions. This view is a warmed-over presentation of the Hegelian quest for absolute knowledge or gnosis. In the philosophy of Hegel, ontology is reduced to epistemology, to the perfection of human reason divinized into Absolute Spirit, in which man attains salvation after the struggles of the dialectical clash and overcoming of contradictions. The difference between Hegel and the perennialist (and it is enough to deceive even the elect) is that the perennialist dwells in the incense cloud of symbolism and mystical experience, giving a glow of religious authenticity to the skeletal Hegelianism whose fallaciousness is evident to a believer in genuine divine revelation.

As was said earlier, the Christian faith is fundamentally an Either/Or, not a Both/And. The Christian believes in, adores, and seeks salvation through Jesus Christ alone, Son of David, Son of Mary, Son of God. Anything else, even the slightest deviation, is not Christianity. The early Councils of the Church were not playing games of intellectual leisure; they were solemnly defining the divinely revealed mysteries which separate the Christian faith from every conceivable narrowing or corruption of the truth. Between Catholicism and any other religion, regardless of how close or distant it may seem, there is an infinite gap, the gap between the religion God has revealed and approved, and the innumerable religions he has not. This is why even daring mystics like Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) or Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), often wrongly brought forward as examples of externally practicing Catholics who were internally perennialist in their views, never in fact abandoned the sacraments, the divine liturgy, or the teaching authority of the Church. They knew just as well as any simple Christian that "there is salvation in no one else" than Jesus, "for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). The Catholic mystics would resist with all their might being categorized as "peren-nialists," precisely because they know that their attainment of grace and truth, with its transcendence over all relativity, comes through Christ and his Church. In the same Lord, we discover the fundamen-tal mystery of our own being: the human person is spirit in flesh, created to the image and likeness of God embodied in Jesus Christ, who is the exemplar of humanity and the perfect expression of the Father. Thus the origin and fulfillment of the human person is the God-man who is not only the way but the end of the way, the bridge as well as the promised land, at once the human companion beside us on our pilgrimage and the divine goal towards which we journey. Jesus Christ, as true God and true man, is the absolute end and the exclusive means of attaining it.

There may indeed be some room for Nicholas of Cusa’s "charitable reading" of the Koran, which finds in it muffled echoes of the truths revealed to God’s chosen people; but there can never be room for a "higher reconciliation" or unification between Christianity, which is founded on the supreme mystery of the Triune God and the unique Incarnation of the Word, and any other religion you please, be it Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or a Judaism that denies Christ as its messianic fulfillment. The example of the syncretistic Nicholas of Cusa indicates only that any serious Christian thinker will always seek the higher unity, the broader reconciliation, in imitation of His divine Lord—"I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself" (Jn. 12:32). But it is always the one Son of Man who thus draws all to Himself, and it is in Him that all things are gathered into unity (Eph. 1:3-10; Col. 1:15-20). If one reads the sermons of Nicholas of Cusa, one can see that he is no proto-perennialist limited by the intellectual climate of his times; he is as interior a believer as St. Thérèse of Lisieux or St. Francis de Sales.

The rationalist temptation, on the other hand, is to put God at a remove, denature or depersonalize him, getting lost in abstruse metaphysics and betraying the innermost reality of God as revealed in the person, life, and teaching of Christ. This betrayal is countered only by total and humble submission to the Word made flesh, who in himself fulfills and surpasses all the longings of the human heart and frees us from the many slaveries, sensual or intellectual, into which we fallen sons of Adam are liable to fall. In Jesus Christ God has a face, a heart, flesh and bones, living and life-giving blood, human emotions and human thoughts; and through His suffering and glorified humanity God has opened the one way of salvation. "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise Him up at the last day" (Jn. 6:53-54). Christ is a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles, folly to the Greeks with their intellectuality and the Romans with their worldly efficiency, but to us He is the power and the wisdom of God, for the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength and the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom (1 Cor. 1:18-25). Because of the teaching of Christ the Lord, we know that to know God is to seek the face of Jesus, to rest in His heart, to eat the heavenly food and drink the heavenly chalice. The revelation of God in Christ forever closes off the escape-routes of abstractionism and depersonalism. Our God is a radiant Bridegroom, a Warrior King, a crucified Lover, our Savior, Father, and Friend.

As for the perplexing question of Eastern Orthodoxy versus Roman Catholicism, the room for congenial harmonization decreases as the insistence on idiomatic differences increases. If there are truly irreconcilable doctrinal differences, then obviously ecumenism, at least in regard to these differences, is impossible. Nevertheless, the supposition that there are two basically incompatible Christianities, Eastern and Western, is a rather facile one; the reality is more subtle. There is a certain kind of Christian, whether Latin or Byzantine, who will insist until blue in the face that Athos and Rome are as far apart as being and non-being. With such a person, there is no possibility of fruitful dialogue. A kind of a priori machine has been installed that will exalt each peculiar doctrine in its peculiarity and amplify each divergence in its divergency. The common faith is broken apart until nothing common remains. Such a method can only come from a pre-intellectual insistence that there must not be anything truly common; and one may justly ask whether this attitude is compatible with the Christian charity that always seeks higher common ground in the worship of the same Lord and adherence to the same life-giving mysteries.

Returning to the extreme mentioned earlier of rejecting non-Christian religions as entirely false, what ought to be said about them? The Second Vatican Council and subsequent Popes have given us clear indications about the "treasures a bountiful God has distributed among the nations of the earth." We must hold, first of all, that the God who is the Lord and Ruler of all peoples and of all history has never abandoned mankind. In the words of John Paul II, connecting certain points taught by the Second Vatican Council:

"God, who creates and conserves all things by his Word, provides men with constant evidence of himself. . .and he has never ceased to take care of the human race, for he wishes to give eternal life to all who seek salvation through perseverance in doing good" (Dei Verbum, 3). Accordingly, there is only one divine plan for every human being who comes into this world, one single origin and goal. . . .The divine plan, unique and definitive, has its centre in Jesus Christ, God and man, "in whom men find the fullness of their religious life, and in whom God has reconciled all things to himself" (Nostra Aetate, 2). Just as there is no man or woman who does not bear the sign of his or her divine origin, so there is no one who can remain outside or on the margins of the work of Jesus Christ who "died for all" and is therefore "the Saviour of the world" (cf. Jn. 4:42). "We must therefore hold that the Holy Spirit gives to all men the possibility of coming into contact with the paschal mystery, in the way that God alone knows" (Gaudium et Spes, 22).

The essential lesson may be briefly summarized: Christ is the Word made flesh, the eternal truth made known among us. He is also the light which enlightens every man coming into the world. All salvation comes through the crucified and risen Lord, whose Paschal Mystery embraces the entire destiny of the world and leaves no man untouched. Because the Catholic Church is His Mystical Body, she is the universal sacrament of salvation, the visible society and invisible communion to which all who are journeying towards God are in some manner joined, and into which any man who is to be saved must be finally incorporated. The Holy Spirit has distributed signs or tokens of the Word everywhere, to lead men to communion with Him, and through Him, to the blessed vision of the Most Holy Trinity and perfect friendship with all the saints and angels. Insofar as the beliefs, ideas, and practices of the various peoples of the world contain truth, goodness, and nobility, they are gifts of the Spirit of God, gifts to be honored, studied, and integrated into Christian life. This balanced view of the Magisterium makes it possible for us to steer clear of narrow dismissiveness and meandering relativism. The supreme condition is that one test everything prudently and wisely, applying universally the rule of the Gospel and of the Church’s Magisterium in order to separate truth from error, insight from corruption. In this way, rejecting the weeds sown by the devil, we may gratefully receive nourishment from the wheat planted everywhere by the Spirit of God for our benefit, for the building up of the Body of Christ until the end of time.