The Work
Christus: A Mystery is a three-part dramatic poem published in 1872 by Ticknor and Fields (Boston). It represents the culmination of a project Longfellow had conceived as early as 1841 - a comprehensive American dramatic engagement with the history of Christianity comparable in ambition to Dante's Commedia or Goethe's Faust. The three parts are: Part I, 'The Divine Tragedy,' dramatizing scenes from the life and death of Jesus drawn from all four Gospels; Part II, 'The Golden Legend,' a medieval miracle play previously published separately in 1851; and Part III, 'The New England Tragedies,' two verse plays about Puritan Massachusetts.
The complete work was never fully realized according to Longfellow's original conception. He intended a fourth part on the present state of Christianity, but this was never written. The three parts that were completed are uneven in quality: 'The Divine Tragedy' is earnest but often labored; 'The Golden Legend' (his reworking of Hartmann von Aue's medieval narrative) is generally considered the most artistically successful; and 'The New England Tragedies' dramatize the persecution of Quakers and the Salem witch trials as instances of Christian failure.
Biblical Engagement
John 11:35 ('Jesus wept') - the shortest verse in the Bible - is represented in Longfellow's dramatization of the raising of Lazarus, where the simplicity of Christ's tears at the tomb becomes the emotional center of the scene. Longfellow was drawn to the emotional directness of John's Gospel and to moments where the humanity of Jesus is most plainly visible. His Jesus weeps, questions, and struggles - a figure of pathos rather than triumphalist theology.
Matthew 27:46 ('And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?') is dramatized in the crucifixion scene with a restraint that contemporaries found either moving or inadequate depending on their expectations. Longfellow presents the dereliction cry as the climax of Christ's humanity - the point at which the experience of human abandonment is most complete.
Luke 23:34 ('Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do') is given central emphasis in Longfellow's Passion narrative as the expression of the divine mercy that makes the entire drama meaningful. His Jesus is pre-eminently a figure of forgiveness, and the dramatic structure of 'The Divine Tragedy' builds toward this declaration as its theological climax.
Author and Context
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was the most widely read American poet of the nineteenth century. Born in Portland, Maine, he taught modern languages at Bowdoin College and Harvard University before devoting himself fully to writing. His earlier poetry - Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) - made him a household name in the United States and gave him a readership comparable in scale to Tennyson in Britain.
Longfellow's personal engagement with Christianity was that of a nineteenth-century New England liberal Protestant: sincere, Christocentric, moralistic, and doctrinally unspecific. He had suffered profound personal loss - the burning death of his first wife Frances in 1861, from which he never fully recovered - and his later religious poetry, including the Christus project, reflects a sustained meditation on suffering, mercy, and hope. His Dante translations (1867) were undertaken partly as a way of disciplining grief through intellectual labor.
The Christus project occupied him for three decades and reflects both his literary ambition - his desire to produce an American epic on the scale of Dante or Milton - and his theological position: that Christianity's core is the life and teaching of Jesus rather than doctrinal formulation, and that dramatic representation is the most powerful way to make that life present to a modern reader.
Themes
The three-part structure of Christus reflects Longfellow's philosophy of religious history: the divine origin (Jesus), the medieval elaboration (Catholic Europe), and the New England application (Protestant America) together constitute the trajectory of Christian civilization. This Hegelian-inflected narrative of religious progress was common in nineteenth-century American liberal Protestantism and reflects Longfellow's deep engagement with German idealist thought.
'The Divine Tragedy' is organized as a series of scenes rather than a continuous drama: the Nativity, the baptism, the calling of the disciples, specific miracles (the wedding at Cana, the raising of Lazarus), the Passion, and the Resurrection. Each scene is dramatized in blank verse that aims for biblical simplicity while achieving varying degrees of poetic success.
Reception
Contemporary reception was respectful but mixed. Critics recognized the ambition while noting the unevenness. The comparison to Dante, which Longfellow invited, was not always favorable to Longfellow. British reviewers were particularly skeptical of 'The Divine Tragedy' as drama, finding the verse competent but the theology thin. American readers, particularly in New England's Protestant culture, were more enthusiastic.
Longfellow's reputation declined sharply in the twentieth century, as the New Critics found his moral directness and formal regularity unsuitable to modernist aesthetics. Christus has received less scholarly attention than his earlier narrative poems. Contemporary reassessment of nineteenth-century American poetry has restored some interest in the work as a document of its cultural moment.
Legacy
The work's legacy is primarily historical: it represents the most ambitious American literary engagement with the Gospel narratives in the nineteenth century and demonstrates both the possibilities and the limits of liberal Protestant poetics. Its influence on subsequent American religious poetry is limited compared to the influence of Whitman or Dickinson, both of whom developed more idiosyncratic and powerful ways of engaging biblical material. But as an index of the religious imagination of educated Protestant America in the 1870s, Christus remains an important document.