My review:
If only everybody wrote as lucidly and beautifully as Benedict. What rare qualities for an academic. His style is simply sublime, whether you agree with him or not.
I, on my part, do agree with him.
As benedict writes, what he is presenting in this book is his “personal search ‘for the face of the Lord'”. There have been plenty of books written about this. The difference between his opinions, however, and other academics’ is that he lives what he writes. He has a personal relationship with Christ and hence knows him more intimately than others. You can just tell he has this relationship by the depth of his utterances, despite their seeming simplicity. When he quotes or references others to disprove their points, you can see that they treat the topic on a purely scientific rather than also on a personal level – and hence their commonly wrong opinions. These opinions rely on conjectures and hypotheses and build their theories on the bases of them. Benedict in a way does the same, but because he knows Jesus so well, he can easily recognise where others have gone astray and can refute them. He refutes them by scientific means, too, of course, but when he speaks he truly speaks of somebody rather than of just an object of supposition and research. Hence the power of his argumentations through which his love of Christ shines.
To summarise, this is the best book on Jesus I have ever read. It should be deemed a classic beside the likes of “On the Incarnation” by St Athanasius, for example. For when Benedict writes he presents to us Christ as He is: as the infinite depth of love – a depth that you can delve into for eternity. Few authors do it the way he does. This is not just a “textbook”, so to speak, but also a book to meditate on because it can elevate your soul and take it on an epic journey into theological infinity.
What a joy it was to read – a nourishment and escape from a world devoid of spirit and profundity.
To be informed when new content like this is posted, subscribe to the mailing list: