NAPOLEON & JESUS CHRIST

 

NAPOLEON & JESUS CHRIST During his final years of exile on the island of St. Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte spoke and wrote extensively about Jesus Christ. Here is his astonishing summary: I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Shallow minds see a resemblance between Jesus Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance just isn’t there. There is an infinite distance between Christianity and whatever-other religion. Everything about Christ astonishes me. His spirit awes me and his willpower makes me marvel. Between him and anyone else in the world there is no possible point of comparison. He is truly unique. His ideas and emotions, the truth which he announces, his way of convincing, are not explained either by human organization or by the nature of things. His birth, and the history of his life; the depth of his teaching which grapples with the most difficult questions and is the most admirable solution to those questions; his gospel, his appearance, his empire, his march across the ages and the realms,—everything is for me a marvel, an insoluble mystery, plunging me into dreams that I cannot escape; a mystery that is there before my eyes; a mystery that I can neither deny nor explain. Here I see nothing human. The closer I get to him, the more carefully I examine him, I see that everything is beyond me; everything is immense with an overpowering grandeur. His religion is a revelation from a mind that is certainly not human. There lies a deep originality that has created a series of words and sayings hitherto unknown. Jesus borrowed nothing from our knowledge. One cannot find such a life absolutely anywhere except in him. I search vainly through history to find someone like Jesus Christ or anything resembling the gospel. Neither history, nor humanity, nor the ages, nor nature offer me anything with which to compare or explain it. Here, everything is extraordinary. The more I consider the gospel, the more I am certain that everything there is beyond the march of human events and above the human mind. You speak of Caesar, of Alexander, of their conquests and of the enthusiasm that they enkindled in the hearts of their soldiers. But can you conceive of any dead man making conquests with an army that remains faithful and entirely devoted to his memory? My armies have forgotten me even while I am living, just as the Carthaginian army forgot Hannibal. Such is our power. A single lost battle crushes us, and adversity scatters our friends. Can you imagine Caesar as the eternal emperor of the Roman senate, and, from the depth of his mausoleum governing the empire, watching over the destinies of Rome? Yet that precisely is the history of the invasion and conquest of the world by Christianity; that is the power of the God of the Christians; that is the perpetual miracle of the progress of the Faith, and of the government of his Church. Nations pass away, thrones crumble – but the Church remains. What then is the power that has protected this Church thus assailed by the furious billows of rage and the hostility of ages? Whose is the arm that for eighteen hundred years has protected the Church from so many storms that have threatened to engulf it? Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ alone founded his empire upon love; and, at this hour, millions of men would die for him. What an abyss between my deep misery and the eternal reign of Christ who is proclaimed, loved, adored, and whose reign is extending over all the earth.