Labyrinths (14 page)

Three Versions of Judas

There seemed a certainty in degradation.

      T. E. Lawrence:
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
CIII

In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith, when Basilides disseminated the idea that the cosmos was the reckless or evil improvisation of deficient angels, Nils Runeberg would have directed, with singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic conventicles. Dante would have assigned him, perhaps, a fiery grave; his name would extend the list of lesser heresiarchs, along with Satornilus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preachings, embellished with invective, would survive in the apocryphal
Liber adversus omnes haereses
or would have perished when the burning of a monastery library devoured the last copy of the
Syntagma.
Instead, God afforded Runeberg the twentieth century and the university town of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of
Kristus och Judas
and, in 1909, his major book,
Den hemlige Frälsaren.
(Of the latter there is a German translation, made in 1912 by Emil Schering; it is called
Der heimliche Heiland.)

Before essaying an examination of the aforementioned works, it is necessary to repeat that Nils Runeberg, a member of the National Evangelical Union, was deeply religious. In the intellectual circles of Paris or even of Buenos Aires, a man of letters might well rediscover Runeberg's theses; these theses, set forth in such circles, would be frivolous and useless exercises in negligence or blasphemy. For Runeberg, they were the key to one of the central mysteries of theology; they were the subject of meditation and analysis, of historical and philological controversy, of pride, of jubilation and of terror. They justified and wrecked his life. Those who read this article should also consider that it registers only Runeberg's conclusions, not his dialectic or his proof. Someone may observe that the conclusion no doubt preceded the "proof." Who would resign himself to seeking proof of something he did not believe or whose preachment did not matter to him?

The first edition of
Kristus och Judas
bears the following categorical epigraph, whose meaning, years later, Nils Runeberg himself would monstrously expand: "Not one, but all of the things attributed by tradition to Judas Iscariot are false" (De Quincey, 1857). Preceded by a German, De Quincey speculated that Judas reported Jesus to the authorities in order to force him to reveal his divinity and thus ignite a vast rebellion against the tyranny of Rome; Runeberg suggests a vindication of a metaphysical sort. Skillfully, he begins by stressing the superfluity of Judas' act. He observes (as does Robertson) that in order to identify a teacher who preached daily in the synagogue and worked miracles before gatherings of thousands of men, betrayal by an apostle is unnecessary. This, nevertheless, occurred. To suppose an error in the Scriptures is intolerable; no less intolerable is to admit an accidental happening in the most precious event in world history.
Ergo,
Judas' betrayal was not accidental; it was a preordained fact which has its mysterious place in the economy of redemption. Runeberg continues: The Word, when it was made flesh, passed from ubiquity to space, from eternity to history, from limitless satisfaction to change and death; in order to correspond to such a sacrifice, it was necessary that one man, in representation of all men, make a sacrifice of condign nature. Judas Iscariot was that man. Judas, alone among the apostles, sensed the secret divinity and terrible intent of Jesus. The Word had been lowered to mortal condition; Judas, a disciple of the Word, could lower himself to become an informer (the worst crime in all infamy) and reside amidst the perpetual fires of Hell. The lower order is a mirror of the higher; the forms of earth correspond to the forms of Heaven; the spots on one's skin are a chart of the incorruptible constellations; Judas in some way reflects Jesus. Hence the thirty pieces of silver and the kiss; hence the suicide, in order to merit Reprobation even more. Thus Nils Runeberg elucidated the enigma of Judas.

Theologians of all confessions refuted him. Lars Peter Engström accused him of being unaware of, or omitting, the hypostatic union; Axel Borelius, of renewing the heresy of the Docetists, who denied that Jesus was human; the rigid Bishop of Lund, of contradicting the third verse of the twenty-second chapter of the gospel of St. Luke.

These varied anathemas had their influence on Runeberg, who partially rewrote the rejected book and modified its doctrine. He left the theological ground to his adversaries and set forth oblique arguments of a moral order. He admitted that Jesus, "who had at his disposal all the considerable resources which Omnipotence may offer," did not need a man to redeem all men. He then refuted those who maintain we know nothing of the inexplicable traitor; we know, he said, that he was one of the apostles, one of those chosen to announce the kingdom of heaven, to cure the sick, to clean lepers, to raise the dead and cast out demons (Matthew 10:7-8; Luke 9:1). A man whom the Redeemer has thus distinguished merits the best interpretation we can give of his acts. To attribute his crime to greed (as some have done, citing John 12:6) is to resign oneself to the basest motive. Nils Runeberg proposes the opposite motive: a hyperbolic and even unlimited asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, vilifies and mortifies his flesh; Judas did the same with his spirit. He renounced honor, morality, peace and the kingdom of heaven, just as others, less heroically, renounce pleasure.
15
With terrible lucidity he premeditated his sins. In adultery there is usually tenderness and abnegation; in homicide, courage; in profanity and blasphemy, a certain satanic luster. Judas chose those sins untouched by any virtue: violation of trust (John 12:6) and betrayal. He acted with enormous humility, he believed himself unworthy of being good. Paul has written:

"He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord" (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought Hell, because the happiness of the Lord was enough for him. He thought that happiness, like morality, is a divine attribute and should not be usurped by humans.
16

Many have discovered,
post factum,
that in Runeberg's justifiable beginning lies his extravagant end and that
Den hemlige Frälsaren
is a mere perversion or exasperation of
Kristus och Judas.
Toward the end of 1907, Runeberg completed and corrected the manuscript text; almost two years went by without his sending it to the printer. In October 1909, the book appeared with a prologue (tepid to the point of being enigmatic) by the Danish Hebraist Erik Erfjord and with this perfidious epigraph: "He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not" (John 1:10). The general argument is not complex, though the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lowered Himself to become a man for the redemption of mankind; we may conjecture that His sacrifice was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by any omission. To limit what He underwent to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous.
17
To maintain he was a man and incapable of sin involves a contradiction; the attributes of
impeccabilitas
and of
humanitas
are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold, embarrassment, hunger and thirst; we may also admit that he could sin and go astray. The famous text "For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground; he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:2-3) is, for many, a future vision of the Saviour at the moment of his death; for others (for example, for Hans Lassen Martensen), a refutation of the beauty which vulgar opinion attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, the punctual prophesy not of a moment but of the whole atrocious future, in time and in eternity, of the Word made flesh. God made Himself totally a man but a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of reprobation and the abyss. To save us, He could have chosen
any
of the destinies which make up the complex web of history; He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; He chose the vilest destiny of all: He was Judas.

In vain the bookshops of Stockholm and Lund proposed this revelation to the public. The incredulous considered it,
a priori,
an insipid and laborious theological game, the theologians scorned it. Runeberg sensed in this ecumenical indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. God had ordained this indifference; God did not want His terrible secret divulged on earth. Runeberg understood that the hour had not yet arrived. He felt that ancient and divine maledictions were converging upon him; he remembered Elijah and Moses, who on the mountain top covered their faces in order not to see God; Isaiah, who was terrified when he saw the One whose glory fills the earth; Saul, whose eyes were struck blind on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simeon ben Azai, who saw Paradise and died; the famous sorcerer John of Viterbo, who became mad when he saw the Trinity; the Midrashim, who abhor the impious who utter the
Shem Hamephorash,
the Secret Name of God. Was he not perhaps guilty of that dark crime? Would this not be the blasphemy against the Spirit, the one never to be forgiven (Matthew 12:31)? Valerius Soranus died for having divulged the hidden name of Rome; what infinite punishment would be his for having discovered and divulged the horrible name of God?

Drunk with insomnia and vertiginous dialectic, Nils Runeberg wandered through the streets of Malmo, begging at the top of his voice that he be granted the grace of joining his Redeemer in Hell.

He died of a ruptured aneurysm on the first of March, 1912. The heresiologists will perhaps remember him; to the concept of the Son, which seemed exhausted, he added the complexities of evil and misfortune.

Translated by J. E. I.

The Sect of the Phoenix

Those who write that the sect of the Phoenix had its origin in Heliopolis and derive it from the religious restoration following upon the death of the reformer Amenophis IV, cite texts from Herodotus, Tacitus and the monuments of Egypt, but they ignore, or prefer to ignore, that the designation "Phoenix" does not date before Hrabanus Maurus and that the oldest sources (the
Saturnales
of Flavius Josephus, let us say) speak only of the People of the Custom or of the People of the Secret. Gregorovius has already observed, in the conventicles of Ferrara, that mention of the Phoenix was very rare in oral speech; in Geneva I have known artisans who did not understand me when I inquired if they were men of the Phoenix, but who immediately admitted being men of the Secret. If I am not deceived, the same is true of the Buddhists; the name by which the world knows them is not the one they themselves utter.

Miklosich, in a page much too famous, has compared the sectarians of the Phoenix with the gypsies. In Chile and in Hungary there are gypsies and there are also sectarians; aside from this sort of ubiquity, one and the other have very little in common. The gypsies are traders, coppersmiths, blacksmiths and fortunetellers; the sectarians usually practice the liberal professions with success. The gypsies constitute a certain physical type and speak, or used to speak, a secret language; the sectarians are confused with the rest of men and the proof lies in that they have not suffered persecutions. The gypsies are picturesque and inspire bad poets; ballads, cheap illustrations and foxtrots omit the sectarians. . . Martin Buber declares that the Jews are essentially pathetic; not all sectarians are and some deplore the pathetic; this public and notorious truth is sufficient to refute the common error (absurdly defended by Urmann) which sees the Phoenix as a derivation of Israel. People more or less reason in this manner: Urmann was a sensitive man; Urmann was a Jew; Urmann came in frequent contact with the sectarians in the ghetto of Prague; the affinity Urmann sensed proves the reality of the fact. In all sincerity, I cannot concur with this dictum. That sectarians in a Jewish environment should resemble the Jews proves nothing; the undeniable fact it that, like Hazlitt's infinite Shakespeare, they resemble all the men in the world. They are everything for everyone, like the Apostle; several days ago, Dr. Juan Francisco Amaro, of Paysandú, admired the facility with which they assimilated Creole ways.

I have said that the history of the sect records no persecutions. This is true, but since there is no human group in which members of the sect do not figure, it is also true that there is no persecution or rigor they have not suffered and perpetrated. In the Occidental wars and in the remote wars of Asia they have shed their blood secularly, under opposing banners; it avails them very little to identify themselves with all the nations of the world.

Without a sacred book to join them as the scriptures do for Israel, without a common memory, without that other memory which is a language, scattered over the face of the earth, diverse in color and features, one thing alone ― the Secret ― unites them and will unite them until the end of time. Once, in addition to the Secret, there was a legend (and perhaps a cosmogonic myth), but the shallow men of the Phoenix have forgotten it and now only retain the obscure tradition of a punishment. Of a punishment, of a pact or of a privilege, for the versions differ and scarcely allow us to glimpse the verdict of a God who granted eternity to a lineage if its members, generation after generation, would perform a rite. I have collated accounts by travelers, I have conversed with patriarchs and theologians; I can testify that fulfillment of the rite is the only religious practice observed by the sectarians. The rite constitutes the Secret. This Secret, as I have already indicated, is transmitted from generation to generation, but good usage prefers that mothers should not teach it to their children, nor that priests should; initiation into the mystery is the task of the lowest individuals. A slave, a leper or a beggar serve as mystagogues. Also one child may indoctrinate another. The act in itself is trivial, momentary and requires no description. The materials are cork, wax or gum arabic. (In the liturgy, mud is mentioned; this is often used as well.) There are no temples especially dedicated to the celebration of this cult, but certain ruins, a cellar or an entrance hall are considered propitious places. The Secret is sacred but is always somewhat ridiculous; its performance is furtive and even clandestine and the adept do not speak of it. There are no decent words to name it, but it is understood that all words name it or, rather, inevitably allude to it, and thus, in a conversation I say something or other and the adept smile or become uncomfortable, for they realize I have touched upon the Secret. In Germanic literatures there are poems written by sectarians whose nominal subject is the sea or the twilight of evening; they are, in some way, symbols of the Secret, I hear it said repeatedly.
Orbis terrarum est speculum Ludi
reads an apocryphal adage recorded by Du Cange in his Glossary. A kind of sacred horror prevents some faithful believers from performing this very simple rite; the others despise them, but they despise themselves even more. Considerable credit is enjoyed, however, by those who deliberately renounce the custom and attain direct contact with the divinity; these sectarians, in order to express this contact, do so with figures taken from the liturgy and thus John of the Rood wrote:

May the Seven Firmaments know that God

      Is as delectable as the Cork and the Slime.

I have attained on three continents the friendship of many devotes of the Phoenix; I know that the Secret, at first, seemed to them banal, embarrassing, vulgar and (what is even stranger) incredible. They could not bring themselves to admit their parents had stooped to such manipulations. What is odd is that the Secret was not lost long ago; in spite of the vicissitudes of the Universe, in spite of wars and exoduses, it reaches, awesomely, all the faithful. Someone has not hesitated to affirm that it is now instinctive.

Translated by J. E. I.