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Christological Figure

Entertainment / Literature / Christological Figure: In theology, Christology is the study of Jesus' nature, i.e., whether Christ had both a human and divine nature, whether he had one sentient will alone or one human will and one divine will, whether he was theoretically capable of sin like humanity or perfectly righteous like the other persons in the trinity, whether he shared in the Father's omniscience or suffered from human afflictions like doubt or ignorance, whether he existed or not before his biological birth, whether he was equal in authority and power to the other persons in the trinity, and whether he actually had a physical body (the orthodox view) or was composed entirely of spirit (the Arian view). In literary studies, the term christological has been commandeered to refer to (1) an object, person, or figure that represents Christ allegorically or symbolically, or (2) any similar object, person, or figure with qualities generally reminiscent of Christ. Examples of christological figures include the Old Man in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, who after his struggle with the fish ends up bleeding from his palms and lying on the floor in a cruciform pattern, the lion Aslan in C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, who allows himself like the lion of the tribe of Judah to be slain in order to redeem a traitorous child, and the unicorn in medieval bestiaries, which would lie down and place its phallic, ivory-horned meekly in a maiden's lap so that hunters might kill it--which medieval monks interpreted as an allegory of Christ allowing himself to enter the womb of the virgin Mary so that he might later be sacrificed. Zora Neale Hurston creates a christ-figure in Delia Jones, who in the short story 'Sweat' suffers to support her ungrateful husband and 'crawled over the earth in Gethsemane and up the rocks of Calvary many, many times . . .' and so on.
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