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Nikolai Berdyaev
Dear Parish Faithful,
The homily on the Sunday Before Nativity yesterday focused on the very Jewish Gospel According to St. Matthew (ch. 1:1-25). Commenting on the Jewishness of the Evangelist Matthew's presentation of Christ - in this context his genealogy and birth - I raised the troubling issue of the clear rise in Anti-semitism found in America today. This led me to share some very powerful passages from the French novelist Leon Bloy (+1917) on the issue of anti-semitism. A few parishioners were struck by Bloy's words, so I thought to reproduce them here for those who may want to return to them in the future. I actually found these passages from Bloy in the book by the Russian religious philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev (1948), Christianity and Anti-Semitism. Here are Leon Bloy's words:
Suppose that there were people round you continually speaking of your father and mother with the utmost contempt, who had nothing to offer them but insults and offensive sarcasms, how would you feel? Well, this is just what happens to our Lord Jesus Christ. We forget, or rather we do not wish to know, that our God made man is a Jew, nature's most perfect Jew, the lion of Judah, that his mother is a Jewess, the flower of the Jewish race; that the Apostles were Jews, as well as all the Prophets; and finally that our whole sacred Liturgy is drawn from Jewish books. In consequence, how may one express the enormity of the outrage and blasphemy of vilifying the Jewish race?
Anti-semitism is the most horrible slap in the face suffered in the ever-continuing Passion of our Lord. It is the most stinging and most unpardonable because he suffers it on His mother's face and at the hands of Christians.
Berdyaev then commented: "These words are addressed to Christians, who ought to understand them. In truth, the superficiality of Christians who believe they can possibly be anti-semites is prodigious!"
