Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (11 page)

But when the Christian movement, so ingeniously braced, became the victorious Church, this structure of meaning reversed itself, a development that, beginning with Constantine, we will track in this book. The triumphalism of an empowered Christianity led to a betrayal of faith that all of pagan Rome's legions had failed to bring about. And what reveals that betrayal so clearly, of course, is the Church's relations with the Jews. It was at Nicaea—the city named for Nike, the goddess of victory—at the council enshrining the Christian victory, that Constantine, forbidding the observance of Easter at Passover time, declared, "It is unbecoming that on the holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people."
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But in this victory—here is the other side of Saint Paul's magnificent irony—lay the seeds of the defeat implied in that "henceforth," and which we must now chronicle.

In what follows we will see that the Church, precisely when it claims to be above the human condition, embodies the human condition. This is no revelation to Jews, who have stood as witnesses against Christian self-aggrandizement from the beginning. From the beginning theirs has been, in a phrase of Rosemary Radford Ruether's, a "prophetic critique refused."
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This refusal extends to central Christian affirmations about the Messiahship of Jesus Christ, because a Messiahship defined by an idea of redemption that occurs outside history could seem to Jews like Messiahship cut loose from biblical hope. Jews awaited a Messiah whose redemptive act would heal not another world—"My kingdom," Jesus said, "is not of this world"—but
this
one. We will see in Part Two how the rejection of messianic claims for Jesus, far from heretical, was required of a religious Jew by everything he'd been taught to value and defend as a faithful son of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Thus, to the rabbis, Jesus came to exemplify the "false Messiah," and the rejection of Jesus came to be a measure of Jewish devotion. Rabbi Irving Greenberg, a New York-based veteran of Jewish-Christian dialogue and chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, suggests that in this the rabbis made a mistake. "Out of defensiveness," he writes, "the rabbis confused a 'failed' messiah (which is what Jesus was) and a false messiah. A false messiah is one who has the wrong values ... A failed messiah is one who has the right values, upholds the covenant, but who did not attain the final goal."
⁴³
Rabbi Greenberg demonstrates how a Jew can retrieve some measure of reverence for Jesus by seeing him in the context of other failed Messiahs, like Bar Kochba, who led the unsuccessful revolt against Rome in
130 C.E
. Greenberg goes so far as to compare the failure of Jesus with the "failures" of Abraham, Moses, and Jeremiah, each of whom died without attaining the final goal.

But the notion of Jesus as a failed Messiah can take the faith of a Christian even further. Instead of blithely assuming that the plan of God was fulfilled in the disaster of the crucifixion, we might consider that, in the mystery of God's submission to human freedom, God's plan for creation was profoundly thwarted. It is important to know, as the third part of this book will show, that the idea of the Father of Jesus callously presiding over his son's death, willed by the Father as a means of salvation, takes root in the Christian imagination only with the emperor Constantine, at a time when he had compelling political and personal reasons for embracing such an ideology. It is equally important to know, as Part Four describes, that this idea takes lasting root in Christian theology only with Saint Anselm, who saw in the mortal obedience of the Son of God a courtly adjudication proper to the violent eleventh century. God is the offended Lord who must be appeased by an offering commensurate with the offense, and the only such offering the Son of God could make was his death. What if Constantine and Anselm and all those who, following them, have gilded the cross, turning it into a symbol of triumphalism, are in understandable but mistaken flight from the more evident meaning of the cross—that the world remains unredeemed?

The cross at Auschwitz puts the question baldly: Who is this God who requires human suffering and death as a proof of human subservience? What does it mean that the death and suffering of Jesus have been made the source of salvation? Does it mean that the deaths and sufferings of all other human beings are fit, in my mother's phrase, to be "offered up," like so many turtledoves, so many goats? It is the rejection of even the hint of such sacrificial thinking that prompts some Jews to refuse to refer to the events of the Shoah as a "holocaust," the burnt offering with smoke wafting up to heaven.

But what does this do to our understanding of God? "The worst day of my life was Tuesday, January 11, 1983." This is the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the distinguished former chaplain of Yale who, with Rabbi Heschel and Daniel Berrigan, founded Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam. Coffin is an eloquent preacher, and it seems fitting that his words should make the dark meaning of this theology clear. Coffin is referring to the day that his twenty-four-year-old son, Alex, died. The eulogy he preached at Riverside Church in New York includes these lines:

When a person dies there are many things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be said ... The night after Alex died, a kind woman came into the house carrying about 18 quiches, saying sadly, "I just don't understand the will of God."

I exploded. "I'll say you don't, lady. Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper, that he was probably driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of beers too many? Do you think it is God's will that there are no streetlights on that road and no guardrail separating that right-angle turn from Boston Harbor?"

For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn't go around this world with his finger on triggers, his fist on knives, his hands on steering wheels. Deaths that are untimely and slow and pain-ridden raise unanswerable questions ... Never do we know enough to say that a death was the will of God ... My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break.
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The alternative to thinking of God as a "cosmic sadist ... an eternal vivisector," in Coffin's phrases, is to stand before the unfathomable mystery of death—the death of Jesus, the death of one's own son, the deaths of the six million—without attempting to understand it, and also without attempting to deny its character as a terrible outbreak of evil. It is here that these questions break out of any narrow reference to religion, Christian or Jewish, to press against the awful anxiety that every human must feel in the face of death. For all of the questions entangled in the cross at Auschwitz are put to every person, even if here they seem cast in the categories of theology and history. How do we live on earth with failure and evil? Not only the evil done to us, but the evil we do? How do we come in contact with the transcendent for which every human spirit longs? Or is it possible to hope, as Heschel does, that the transcendent longs for us?

7. Between Past and Future

I
N ADDITION TO
signifying the problem that death puts to God, whether a Jew's God or a Christian's, the cross at Auschwitz evokes with rare immediacy everything that has separated Jew and Christian during the two-thousand-year-old conflict between the two religions. The technical term for that conflict is supersessionism, a word I have already used. It comes from the Latin
supersedere,
meaning "to sit upon."
¹
The idea is that the Jesus movement, as it evolved into the Church, effectively replaced the Jews as the chosen people of God. Replacement became the motif, even in trivial ways, and even in relation to the emerging symbol of the cross: Before any follower of Jesus had touched a hand to forehead, heart, and shoulders, making the "sign of the cross," some Jews had used a similar manual rubric to symbolize the Hebrew letter with which the word "Torah" begins.
²
When the Jesus movement took up the sign—it is referred to in Tertullian (c. 160–225)
³
—rabbinic Judaism dropped it.

As we shall see in Part Two, Christianity "sat upon" Judaism by claiming to be the "true Israel." Saint Paul is commonly regarded as the initiator of this claim, indeed its poet laureate, especially in Romans 9–11: "Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for [the Jews] is that they may be saved...[but] they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified."
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Paul's attitudes toward "the Jews" were, in fact, far more complex than such citations indicate, and we will see more of that, too. Suffice to note here that, from a very early time, Jews were dismissed by Christians as custodians of a false Israel. The New Testament "sat upon" the Old Testament, the New Covenant upon the Old, and so on.

This dynamic is classically enacted by younger siblings usurping the place of older siblings, and the pattern is even played out repeatedly in Jewish religious mythology. One need think only of Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Reuben and Judah, Menassah and Ephraim, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his older brothers. In each case, the younger sees his brother as hoarding the family blessing, which amounts, of course, to the love of the parent. Sibling rivalry, a struggle for the most precious thing there is, presumes its scarcity. A parent has only so much love, and what one sibling gets, or so the feeling runs, comes at the expense of the other—a dread echoed, for example, in the "bitter cry" of the supplanted Esau: "Bless me, even me also, O my father!...Have you not reserved a blessing for me?... Have you but one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father." And Esau, the Scripture says, "lifted up his voice and wept."
⁵

That this pattern provides the structure of Jewish-Christian conflict only proves how deeply rooted in Judaism the Church is.
⁶
But something new began to happen when the energy of such a conflict was generated by Christian claims over the Jews. On the one hand, there was a mortal aspect to this competition, with the Christian assumption that the no longer chosen people had forfeited their right to continue in existence, especially once the power relationship between the two groups had shifted. Replacement implied the elimination of the replaced. This strain would lead to conversionism and expulsions, and ultimately it would be reduced to its perverted essence by the attempted genocide. On the other hand, Christianity's self-awareness depended on the continuing existence of the Jewish people as the negative other against which positive Christian claims were made. "Christianity could have had no other religion as precursor," Søren Kierkegaard wrote, "for no other but Judaism could establish, by means of negation, so definitely, so decisively what Christianity is."
⁷
This is what has always set Jews apart from every other religious entity with which Christianity has found itself in conflict, whether it be the "pagans" of the ancient world or, say, the Buddhists of today. Only Jews, because of what they deny, tell us Christians who we are—which is why, as an enemy, Jews have always been the enemy inside. This dynamic would play itself out in various ways through the centuries, from Augustine to the rationalist theologians of the Middle Ages, to the Catholic anti-Semites of post-Enlightenment France.

What emerges here is a Christian response to Jews that is defined by its ambivalence. In the long course of Christian Europe's history with the Jews, there were many times when the positive side of that ambivalence held sway, to good effect. We will see that, for example, in Iberia, in Renaissance Italy, and during the Enlightenment. But when the negative energy of this conflict outweighed the positive, the result was so disproportionately lethal as to raise the question of whether Christians had kept Jews "inside" for any other purpose than mortal betrayal. What kind of ambivalence is it when even the positive aspect is finally revealed as serving a negative end that reveals itself as absolute? Such is the ambivalence uncovered by the cross at Auschwitz: The mass graves are the ultimate evil, but they are also a source of ultimate redemption. Those who squirm in the presence of the cross at that place do so out of a sense that honoring such ambivalence there only enshrines supersessionism more grotesquely than ever. If the sight of that cross forces us into an exploration of the past, it is not for "so-called lessons of history,"
⁸
but to understand where that ambivalence comes from, and to ask if there can be a future without it.

So here I am, at the foot of the cross at Auschwitz. I will remain here, in effect, throughout the telling of this story. Here the sibling rivalry between Judaism and Christianity has been twisted into a contest not over who is the "true Israel" but over who can lay claim to the mantle of "suffering servant," an image that the Church applies to Jesus but that originates in the prophecy of Isaiah. Here suffering has been defined as the source of identity, and ironically, on the Christian side, as the source of superiority. That is what it means when Polish Catholics from towns around Auschwitz complain that their victimhood is being slighted by a Jewish monopoly on the Holocaust.

It is no small complaint. Polish Catholicism particularly is inclined to define itself around the idea of its victimhood. Since the nineteenth century and through most of the twentieth, Poland was a self-styled "Christ among the nations," an epithet associated with the nineteenth-century Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz.
⁹
Poland's passion and death, repeatedly enacted at the hands of imperialist neighbors from the early 1800s to 1939, engendered a stoic hope. Poland's suffering would redeem the godlessness of modern Europe and would at last restore Christendom. This ideology braces Karol Wojtyla, and, as the Polish pope, especially in his years of decline, John Paul II has become an embodiment of suffering. In March 2000, he made a pilgrimage to Israel and Jerusalem which, despite the thicket of political and religious problems that awaited him, was taken to be, in the words of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a "historic journey of healing."
¹⁰
The pope's ability to overcome Jewish misgivings, even those based on criticisms of what many regarded as the Church's unfinished self-examination, seemed mainly to be a matter of the patent anguish with which the ailing pontiff carried himself. As he bent to kiss the bowl of Israeli soil, held to his lips by children, observers could feel the tremor of his pain. As he greeted a Polish woman, a camp survivor who credited him with saving her life near Kraków in 1945, he touched her arm softly, then said of the horror, "It makes us cry out!"
¹¹
The woman wept before him.