Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (105 page)

When I was a boy of Pat's age the day he rushed toward the
Führer-bunker,
I was rushing through the woods of Virginia with my buddy Peter Seligman at my side. I knew nothing of his Jewishness, and he and I together knew nothing of the real significance of the Johnny Rebs we emulated. Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, the Gray Ghost, Robert E. Lee—all devoted to keeping in place the right of white people to own black people as chattel slaves. Within a year or two of our discovery of each other as playmates, and our dedication to the lost cause of the South, the U.S. Supreme Court would rule on
Brown v. Board of Education.
Only by the fluke of my growing up in the era of that decision, instead of, say, the era of the Dred Scott decision, can I indulge the self-affirming integrity of a man devoted to civil rights for all.

Hindsight often opens us to hubris because we imagine, in looking back over the wrecked landscape of the past, that we ourselves, had we been there, would have done things differently. We would certainly never have owned slaves. We would certainly never have stormed into a Jewish district wielding a club. But such certainty presumes that we would have occupied our places in the past knowing what we know now. The moral meaning of behavior is understood completely only after the connection between choice and consequence has revealed itself. Or, as Hannah Arendt, with whom we began this book, put it, "Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants."
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For that reason, one comes to the end of a story like this purged of any feeling of moral superiority one might have begun with. The shame I feel as a Catholic Christian, aware in detail of the ways that the Church sanctified the hatred of Jews, not only betraying Jesus but tilling the soil out of which would come the worst crime in history, is shame not only at what my people did, but at what I can now admit I might well have done myself.

When, on one of our European adventures, I found myself in Rome with Lexa, Lizzy, and Pat, I took them to St. Peter's Basilica, wanting them to see Michelangelo's
Pietà,
the work that had so moved me when I saw it as a boy. Entering St. Peter's was a problem, because our daughter, still a child, was wearing a skirt that the guard at the entrance deemed too short. It is hard to convey what witnessing Lizzy's humiliation did to me. I had not drawn attention to the border of Vatican City as we crossed it, and so the question of the Church's alliance—with Anne?—had not come up, a question I could not have answered. But the Vatican functionary, offended by the sight of my little girl's knees, represented every Catholic failure I could think of.

We retreated, but my savvy, non-Catholic wife was unintimidated. She helped Lizzy pull the skirt down to her hips, hiding the gap at her waist with a sweater, so that her knees were covered. The guard let us pass. St. Peter's had never seemed more like an emperor's palace.

But soon we were standing before the statue of Mary holding her son, and it still worked a spell on me, and perhaps it did on my family. Despite its subject, there is an unrestrained spirit of optimism in the
Pietà,
the human form never rendered more lovingly, the possibility of meaning in the midst of anguish never affirmed more directly. The guard at the door could not have approved of the sensuality of the youthful Mary's turned-out wrist, her son's perfect torso. Michelangelo created the
Pietà
as a young man, and it was as a boy on the threshold of manhood that I had found it irresistible. In the statue's presence I entered the presence of the young man I had been. That was the spell. I realized that the
Pietà
was not what it had been to me all those years before.

Was I already preparing for a task I had barely begun to imagine, but which Lizzy, with her border question, was sponsoring? Whose side were these stone figures on? Only now do I see why I then instinctively turned away from the high Renaissance triumphalism of Michelangelo's celebration of the death of Jesus.

We moved through St. Peter's, stunned less by its beauty than by its mass. In Maine, we had been on a mountain; here, we were inside one. It was when, on another occasion, I stood before
The Last Judgment
in the Sistine Chapel that I experienced another realm of the artist's work as the place where I belonged, and it is in that realm I find myself now. To enter the chapel, with its remarkable frescoes on the ceiling and walls, is to enter a jewel box. The cardinals of the Church meet here to elect the pope, an ultimate act of historical continuity. But the huge painting behind the high altar, toward which the room is oriented, portrays nothing less than the end of history.

Michelangelo was an old man when he mounted the scaffolding to paint this last great masterwork, and you can see how time had flogged him. In the years since he had created the serenely poignant
Pietà,
Luther, Copernicus, Magellan, Henry VIII, and several Borgia popes had all helped to upend the moral universe. The grand inquisitor Gian Pietro Caraffa had come to Rome, and soon, as Pope Paul IV, would establish the Roman ghetto, the antechamber of Auschwitz.
The Last Judgment,
painted between 1534 and 1541, reflects the era's loss of faith in the human project, and it is a certain window into Michelangelo's soul. His scathing vision is staggering, especially because it so contrasts with the earlier hopefulness of the scenes on the ceiling just above, with their triumphal rendition of the Creation.
The List Judgment,
as it were, rebukes
The Creation,
for the beautiful creature to whom God had entrusted the spark of divinity, with that unforgettably outstretched finger, is now repudiated. Sinners and the righteous alike cower below the upright figure of the judging Lord. It is as if Michelangelo, looking afresh into the soul of humanity, had glimpsed the coming religious wars, slavery, Inquisition, genocide, death camps, and the black hole of the
Führerbunker.

To me, the most heart-rending and fearsome aspect of Michelangelo's dark masterpiece is not despair overtaking the created world, but a smaller and more personal statement. Among the multitude of figures in
The Last Judgment
is a rare Michelangelo self-portrait. It is so discreetly done that his contemporaries failed to see it as him, and no wonder. Michelangelo, the genius celebrant of the human body, the creator of
David
and
Moses
and the
Pietà,
chose to put his own face, at last, on a shriveled, limp, formless skin that had been flayed from the body of a martyr.
⁴
Apparently the artist had lost all sense of the noble things he had done, and was still doing. The self-portrait of a face ripped from its bones is an abject confession of sin, impossible to behold out from under the crushing weight of conscience. The portrait says, "I stand as accused by God as anyone in this scene." As the artist who, in fact, conjured the devastating judgment of his own era, Michelangelo is saying, through his portrait, "There is nothing of which I accuse any other person here—popes, Borgias, Medicis—that I do not accuse myself of."

"You have utterly betrayed me," one hears the damning Lord declare—and what Christian, mindful of the story we have recounted here, would not know what, among all else, is being referred to? But
The Last Judgment
is not thereby a
Christian
vision. It is biblical faith that is fully in touch with the mystery of evil as it lurks in the human heart, and it is biblical faith that includes, always, the call to judgment. In the supersessionist rewriting of biblical narrative, the judging God stands in contrast to the redeeming God of the New Testament, but that is a total fabrication, unfaithful to the history of Israel and the story of Jesus. Despite the darkness with which Michelangelo renders it, judgment is the opposite of despair. Judgment, which is "action revealing itself fully," in Arendt's phrase, is the source of meaning. That is why visitors to the Sistine Chapel, after marveling at the grandeur of the Creation scene above, stand transfixed before the fresco on the wall behind the altar.

What do they see? In the burly nakedness of the majestically centered Christ figure, whose right arm is raised above his head, poised for one cannot say what, the doomed and the saved equally search for, in Arendt's phrase, "the possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility—of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing." If the past is irreversible, then we are all doomed. No one can be saved. Is the history of Christian anti-Judaism reversible? That is a far more potent question than Is it forgivable? But only apparently so. For as Arendt goes on to point out, "Forgiving serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose 'sins' hang like Damocles' sword over every new generation ... Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never re-cover; we would remain the victim of its consequences forever."
⁵

Arendt is not talking here about the easy forgiveness we disparaged in the previous chapter, nor, in the context of the ancient crime of anti-semitism, does forgiveness like this necessarily come from Jews, for whom forgiveness may equate with denial. The premature request for forgiveness, made by a Christian to a Jew, may constitute presumption at best, a further oppression at worst. That is why the act of repentance offered to the Jewish people by a council of the Church must carry no hint of a required or expected response, as if Jews have to accept it for the act to be complete. But there is another problem. Emmanuel Levinas, among others, has warned that the erasure of the past through cheap forgiveness, whereby the soul can "free itself from what has been," can slide all too easily into a valueless individualism according to which "no attachment is ultimately definitive."
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In Arendt's view, the human disposition to seek forgiveness, which responds to the otherwise irreversible predicament of the past, is protected from presumption and from irresponsibility when it is paired with the quest for a "remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, [which] is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises." In other words, there is no recovery from the past without a commitment for the future. More concretely, there is no apology for Holy Week preaching that prompted pogroms until Holy Week liturgies, sermons, and readings have been purged of the anti-Jewish slanders that sent the mobs rushing out of church. The capacity to be forgiven resides in the simultaneous capacity to make and keep a promise that "serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men."
⁷
Forgiveness for the sin of antisemitism presumes a promise to dismantle all that makes it possible. Holy Week, that is, must become an island of Jewish security. We saw in the previous chapters what this means for the Church.

What does it mean for me? To be suspended between past and future, in Arendt's phrase, is to stand between the world into which my beloved parents brought me and the world to which I am sending my beloved children. How do I get out from under the irreversibility of my past, which is another way of asking, How do I get out from under the sword of my self-doubt? How is the chaotic uncertainty of the future to be tamed? The most deadly prospect at this point would be to find myself alienated from the community that has been the focus of my "backward glance." Instead of telling this story from the position of moral purity I may once have imagined myself occupying, I have felt flayed by every word. Like Michelangelo, I find myself unable to accuse my Church of any sin that I cannot equally accuse myself of.

Seeing the action of this awful narrative from the point of view of the participants, even while recounting it from the detached point of view of the storyteller, has left me readier than ever before to claim membership in this community, if only because I recognize myself
at the time
as much in Ambrose as in Augustine, as much in Anselm as in Abelard, as much in Pius XII as in Edith Stein. "Do we really have the right to cast the first stone at the sinful woman who stands accused before the Lord and is called the Church—or are we now accused in her and with her, and delivered up to Mercy for good or ill?"
⁸
It is only through this communion of saints and sinners that I have my connection to the biblical people for whom judgment, forgiveness, and the promise-making of covenant are all the same thing. And as Arendt writes, "No one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one's self."
⁹
Therefore, in the presence of my dear family, in the presence of my Church, and in the presence of the imagined communion of my readers, I have told this story in the hope of forgiveness, and as a promise.

Peter. The name of my Jewish friend. The name of my imperial basilica. Yet always, Peter is something else. I return again and again to the story of Simon Peter spying a stranger on the beach. It is some days after the death of Jesus, the one whom this Peter betrayed not once but three times. Simon Peter is in his fishing boat with the others. They have worked through the night. In the haze of dawn, he watches the figure on the beach. The boat draws closer to shore. The figure is bent over a fire, preparing a meal. When Peter steps from the boat and approaches the man, he seems familiar. The meal is the first hint. The second is the act of judgment, for this stranger faces Peter with the truth of his condition as fiercely as the Christ of Michelangelo will the human world with the truth of its condition. The irreversible act that stands between these two is betrayal. Peter had loved Jesus, but also, three times—"and at once the cock crowed"
¹⁰
—he denied him.