Vigils Reading

THE SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY

From “The Faith and Modern Man” by Fr Romano Guardini3

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We associate the word saints with the idea of exceptional persons. In the

New Testament, however, it signifies Christians generally. Being a Christian at

all was extraordinary. For the Christians stood out sharply from the

environment; either one lived in the Old Testament world, or in the Hellenistic-

pagan world, and by both they were regarded as something strange if not

hostile. The experience of conversion lifted them out of the environment. A

sense of the reality of God not learned from natural religious experience or from

the teaching of the Old Testament had shaken and, at the same time, blessed

them.

In the existence of Christ, God’s countenance had been unveiled. The life

of Christ had made them aware of how God is minded toward us. These

experiences had changed their whole lives. They had acquired new ideas of God,

new standards of judging the world. The “renewal of mind” of which the Gospel

speaks and which they had begun to fulfill, now consisted not only in a

conversion to a good and pious life, but in a change of direction in their whole

way of thinking. Thus for them, actually, “all things had become new” -and with

all these “new things” they found themselves still in an old world, a world which

regarded them with distrust and hostility. All this is, in itself, extraordinary

-indeed the very essence of the extraordinary, and the “saint” was one who led

this existence.

But the spread of Christianity and its increase in members tended to

obscure its unique nature. Time went on, the Gospel grew familiar, and the

sense of newness wore off. Christianity became the state religion and, as such,

the official order of society. Thus the fact that being a Christian at all was in itself

extraordinary faded out of people’s consciousness, and Christianity grew to be

regarded as normal and usual.