St. Matthew Passion 9781501759079

Citation preview

St. Matthew Passion

Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University Signale|TRANSFER provides a unique channel for the transmission of ­critical German-­language texts, newly translated into En­glish, through to current debates on theory, philosophy, and social and cultural criticism. Signale|TRANSFER is a component of the series Signale: Modern German Letters, Culture and Thought, which publishes books in literary studies, cultural criticism, and intellectual history. Signale books are published ­under the joint imprint of Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library. Please see http://­signale​.­cornell​.­edu​/­.

St. Matthew Passion

Hans Blumenberg

Translated by Helmut Müller-­Sievers and Paul Fleming

A Signale Book

Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Ithaca and London

 Originally published ­under the title Matthäuspassion, by Hans Blumenberg. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1988. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. English-­language translation copyright © 2021 by Cornell University “Translators’ Afterword” by Helmut Müller-­Sievers and Paul Fleming copyright © 2021 by Cornell University Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library gratefully acknowledge the College of Arts & Sciences, Cornell University, for support of the Signale series. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2021 by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Blumenberg, Hans, author. | Müller-Sievers, Helmut, translator. | Fleming, Paul, 1968– translator. Title: St. Matthew Passion / Hans Blumenberg, translated by Helmut Müller-Sievers and Paul Fleming. Other titles: Matthäuspassion. English Description: Ithaca [New York]: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2021. | Series: Signale|TRANSFER | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2021005651 (print) | LCCN 2021005652 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501705809 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501759079 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501759062 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ—Passion. | Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685–1750. Matthäuspassion. | Bible. Matthew—Criticism, interpretation, etc. Classification: LCC BT430.B5713 2021 (print) | LCC BT430 (ebook) | DDC 226.2/06—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005651 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005652 Cover illustration: Detail from The Inspiration of Saint Matthew (1602) by Caravaggio.

Contents

The Horizon Pacing Off the Horizon

1 1

The One Author of the One Story

13

The Beginning of Wisdom

18

Relief—or Even More?

22

The Theological Generosity of the St. Matthew Passion 26 Saving the ‘Implied Listener’ from Historical Reason

32

The Meta­phorical Horizon

36

The Ransom

36

The Lamb

43

And the Listening Never Ends

49

An Apostrophe Goethe Could Not Understand

49

Imagining Nietz­sche Listening to the St. Matthew Passion

50

v i   C o n te nts

Listening to Rilke as He Listens to the St. Matthew Passion

52

Wittgenstein’s ­Mother

56

‘Never ­Will This Child Be Crucified . . .’ Escalations of a God

56 60

If It Was This One, It Can Be No Other

60

An Aesthetics of Creation: How It Justifies the Existence of the World

64

God Refuses to Be Transparent

67

Time and Again: What Happened in Paradise?

69

The Magnification of God

72

The Work of the Patriarchs and the Work of M ­ usic

76

Abraham’s Fear of God Thought to the End: The Lamb, Not the Ram

81

Corporeality

86

The Incarnation of the Word as an Offense to the Angels

86

Countermove: The Angel of the Annunciation

88

God’s Entanglement in the World

90

Since When Am I? Since When Was This One?

95

Why So Late?

109

A Fulfilled Promise

113

Apostates

117

The Comic Ele­ment of Simon Peter

117

The Denial Becomes Defamation

120

The One Driven by G ­ reat Expectations

123

When Someone Becomes Too Old to Reach for Dominion

130

Visit to a Stone That Almost Cried Out

133

The Realism of the Field of Blood

136

The Pieces of Silver

139

C o n ten ts    vii

Between Two Murderers

145

Jesus’s Susceptibility to Temptation

145

Barabbas and the Au­then­tic Words of Jesus

149

The ‘Two Murderers’ on Golgotha

152

‘He Calls for Elijah!’

156

The Primal Scream

163

Theological Defense and H ­ uman Recovery

166

No Martyrdom

168

The Last Word in the Passion of Saint John

169

The Witness of the Fourth Evangelist

174

The Tears

179

‘We Sit Down in Tears . . .’

179

Unto the Sealed Tomb

181

Tears of the F ­ ather, Only to Be Thought

187

Paul Weeps

190

The Power of Tears over Omnipotence

192

The Imperceptibility of the Messiah

194

Caravaggio’s Emmaus 194 Traces 196 From the Unwritten

197

A Misinterpreted Agraphon 198 The Messianic: Prophet and Sybil

200

The Risk of Still Waiting for the Messiah

202

Messianic Minimalism

205

The Desperate Messianism of the Second Rome

208

The Sin That Cannot Be Forgiven

212

Remembering Origen

219

v iii   C o nte nts

The Excesses of the Phi­los­o­phers’ God

223

Translators’ Afterword

233

Notes

239

St. Matthew Passion

The Horizon

Pacing Off the Horizon ­ here is, to begin with, no such t­ hing as ‘pacing off the horizon’; it T is a paradox, a meta­phorical attempt to achieve the impossible. Whoever tries to approach the horizon in order to pace it off would experience a childlike disappointment: e­ very such effort simply opens up a new, equally unapproachable field of vision. You can ‘pace off’ the horizon only with your eyes, searching it in one of two pos­si­ble directions. The paradoxical desire to pace off a horizon derives from its optical ambiguity: it opens up the field it encloses through the ‘proximity’ of what is clear and accessible to us, to our sense of orientation in directions and distances; but it also limits us to the ‘narrowness’ of what is near, it withholds from us what at each of its points would be circumscribed by yet another horizon; the ‘and-­so-­forth’ of ­these

2    S t . Matthe w Passi on

multiplications draws us into a ‘distance’ both alluring and confusing, a distance named by a pathos concept—­“infinity.” One avoids this by defining the ‘horizon of horizons’ as a world. Only by relating the concept of the ‘horizon’ to time—­that is, by assuming a meta­phorical proximity and distance in both directions, past and f­ uture, from the vantage point of the pre­sent—­was the full potential of the spatio-­optical schema for capturing experienced and lived ‘real­ity’ realized. Whoever dares or is challenged to ‘pace off’ the horizon ­will have to ‘circumvent’ every­thing that lies within the vicinity of his current position or of the position into which he wants to ‘proj­ect’ himself as an interpreter. The horizon thus becomes the background against which every­thing that is ‘foregrounded’ stands out and ‘plays out.’ All events and all figures, when they become real, have become real, or could become real, stand before their horizon. Being in the background is not a positive predicate, any more than standing in the foreground is a disqualification. Isolating the foreground of history ‘as it ­really happened’ deprives us of essential insights, as does the fixation on the apparent pre­ce­dence of the background, which in the pro­cess seems only to acquire the under­ground as a rival. Even the primacy of the ‘horizon of expectation’ over memory is the temporary effect of a course correction: one-­sidedness is the fate of all perception. ­Every presence depends on the guiding thread of ‘shadings’ that calls upon what is withdrawn in the given (staying with the meta­phor of the horizon) to ‘play along’: to preserve an openness ­toward absence ­because and insofar as it is never wholly absent. On this conceptual floor plan we can think about the audience of the St. Matthew Passion: about ­those who had to be pre­sent to Bach so that he may not fail them, and about the listeners a­ fter the irrecoverable delay from whose horizon the images and parables, the sacred stories and the speeches, the proverbs and the chorales of Bach’s congregation have dis­appeared without being replaced by anything comparable. Two hundred years of historical ‘criticism’ have clarified exactly what could not have happened the way ‘it is written’; but they have failed to give rise to anything ­else that could lay claim to real­ity. As a consequence, the doubt ­whether this Jesus of Nazareth ­really existed became unavoidable. We may even ask

Th e Ho r izo n    3

­ hether the historical disparagement of this doubt, by now almost w forgotten, did not f­avor agreement upon a minimal set of images and figures—­for example, on the philosophically reduced ‘kerygma,’1 or on Jesus as the teacher who taught us to say “­Father” to God;2 such agreement would leave the late listener no chance to determine who is being sung about in the St. Matthew Passion, and with whom it seeks to console us. The arrogance of theologians might have led some to a liberating truth; the majority who have come to the threshold of this experience through the musical renewal and the ubiquitous broadcasts and recordings of the Passion have—­for fear of appearing ‘naive’—­ moved away from the work rather than gained a more sophisticated understanding. In this listening situation, the theoretical task at hand is neither ‘pacing off the horizon’ nor the ‘reoccupation’ of the horizon of Bach’s ‘implied’ congregation, but instead the constitution of still pos­si­ble listeners as contemporaries who have been abandoned by their tradition and yet are still capable of its selective remembrance. What they w ­ ill or might want to remember, however, is neither ­here nor elsewhere a question of method or system; it is a question of their affinity, their choice, and—­I dare say—of their taste. The distribution and the density of all acceptable positions on the horizon that impart and heighten the Passion’s ‘significance’ and to which experience, reflection, and contemplation might still refer, can be determined only by ‘experimenting’ with what is represented and offered. It would be meaningless, therefore, to abandon the qualities of ‘aesthetic attraction’; Bach’s St. Matthew Passion—­whatever ­else it might be and do—­also exerts the ‘aesthetic attraction’ not to be indifferent to its content and, for the hours of its duration, to ­settle into its horizon. That would not be pos­si­ble from a blank slate. In the post-­Christian era, a person listening to the St. Matthew Passion is prob­ably less moved by the obsolete question concerning what is true in the story than by what may be true. If ­there was a God in this play of bloody seriousness—­can he have remained a God? What does it mean to call him such if he was an actor in this story, directed it, used it for his own reconciliation and for the salvation of ­others?

4    S t . Matthe w Passi on

The evangelist Matthew did not transmit the word that conveys the pain inherent to any answer to such questions; it can, though, be found in the beloved and still popu­lar beginning of the Gospel of Luke, which contains one of the defining images of Christian art, the annunziata: the angel’s reply to the Virgin, who, upon learning she w ­ ill give birth, inquires: “How can this be, since I do not know a man?” (Luke 1:34).3 The angel concludes his communication with the ­great expression of theology: “For with God nothing is impossible” (Luke 1:37). ­These words are the key to all that follows, including the Passion, even though Matthew does not include them. He preferred the dream of Joseph—­who thought of secretly abandoning the pregnant w ­ oman ­because he was sure he was not the ­father of the child—­and thus made inquiries with the enlightening ‘Angel of the Lord’ impossible. This version was never much liked during the centuries of faith: dreams may have their place elsewhere but not so close to the realest real­ity, the incarnation of God’s son; ­here, a veritable angel with a given name was needed, just as he would l­ater be represented in the images. Matthew thus denies his readers and listeners the very words that seems to have been captured straight from the throne of God by the infallible ear of the nearest archangel, a direct transmission of divine self-­consciousness. Unspoken, unrepeated, pre­sent to ­every ‘implied listener’ of Bach, ­these words also stand above the Passion, threatening every­body who desires to rebel like Jesus in Gethsemane: he, and we, should have been spared. It would sound quite dif­fer­ent: with God nothing is impossible, not even this. That the angel’s advice to the hesitating annunziata seems exasperating to us rather than helpful, dismissive rather than consoling, is already the result of historical training—­and of its philosophical systematization. That every­thing was pos­si­ble for God becomes— as the hard-­won result of unifying the biblical stories—­the foundation for the expectation that in his promises and in his covenants anything could be expected from God. It begins with the fact that for him—­for this One alone, not for anyone ­else around—­something like a world, consisting of heaven and earth, was pos­si­ble and then he only needed to command what

Th e Ho r izo n    5

would attain real­ity in it and upon it. The first and hardest step of ‘pacing off the horizon’ is not to accept this with the placidity of someone who claims to know that this is implied in the concept of God and that all that remains to be established is ­whether what is defined by this concept exists or not. That, as ­every expert since Kant knows, cannot be proven. Omnipotence, ­were it to exist, would approximate boredom as much as the phantastical. If every­thing is pos­si­ble, only the shortest ways are plausible, ­every intricacy is superfluous, ­every difficulty exaggerated. The closer the power­ful get to a state of supremacy, the more they are gripped by a sense of adventure. And it is no blasphemy to suppose that for divine omnipotence the world became an adventure. What e­ lse could God have done? Every­thing would have become a world for him, b ­ ecause “world” means precisely that not every­thing that is pos­si­ble remains pos­si­ble. Other­wise every­thing would already be over before it had even begun. Time and space are the essential attributes of a world insofar as in it not every­thing is pos­si­ble everywhere and at the same time. The creation of a world put an end to the everything-­at-­once, the totum simul of an empty eternity. With the world, divine omnipotence competes against itself. It stops leaving every­thing to itself and engages with “what is the case.” It is not as if omnipotence does not itself take risks when it exposes every­thing to risk. Its inviolability through a mere actio per distans is not only the philosophical myth of Aristotle’s self-­thinking thought that forever imparts rotation on uncreated spheres without noticing them. As an attitude of sovereignty, this was also attempted in the biblical creation story, calling every­thing forth with a command. But this calling forth by the Word cannot have been entirely without question, other­wise the explicit confirmation ‘that it was very good’ would have been superfluous. Was it good? Every­thing hinges on the fact that it, in any case, did not have to be good. Omnipotence’s short-­circuiting was over. It had indulged itself in finitude. Least obvious of all is that ­there is something rather than nothing—­this could not have been what was found to be ‘good.’ Through Augustine, Christian theology has unwittingly accepted as a metaphysical inheritance from antiquity that being as such is

6    S t . Matthe w Passi on

already good, and that only h ­ umans ­were able to turn the world into misery through their original guilt. This overestimation—­not of ­human beings but of the most harmless of their lapses—­was designed to make us forget that the creator’s judgment of the ‘quality’ of his creation had been made too early: before its end. A ‘world’ is precisely that which cannot at any point in its existence be conclusively evaluated. Other­wise it would not be that through which and in which omnipotence could put itself at risk. Nothing is good simply ­because it is. If this is ‘speculation,’ it is ‘counter-­speculation’ against the predominance of Platonic metaphysics, which regarded all being as being by virtue of the Good and therefore as infallibly ‘good.’ But the biblical God had to ‘make up’ for something, and the prologue to the Gospel of John speaks of nothing ­else. The Word that commanded creation (through which every­thing became what it is) had to perform this ‘making up,’ as if omnipotence, when it condescended to the finitude of the world, had not given enough of itself. This withholding came as the Word itself through which the world was commanded into being, and it came as a ‘piece of the world’: it became flesh. It dwelled as a ­human among ­those h ­ umans who had been burdened with God’s worldly adventure. Omnipotence fi­nally accepted the consequences for its refusal to remain omnipotent. It did not take back its stakes but doubled down: Word upon Word. No other guilt was to be redeemed ­here than omnipotence’s own—­for not having given its all. Only if it is a ­matter of divine guilt is it consistent that it had to be nothing less than divine Log­os itself, and that no lesser burden had to be imposed on God than on the main victim of the universe, ­human beings: temptation, loneliness, pain, and death. In the Passion of the ‘Son of man’ the worldly adventure of omnipotence fi­nally came to ruin. The deadly seriousness of creation caught up with the Word of creation. What the evangelist John in the high pitches of his theologizing no longer dared to say, his pre­de­ces­sor Matthew revealed pitilessly in the crucified’s last word of reproach against his God. ­Toward this moment and ­toward this outcry a world gravitates that “gave no peace” to its creator. Amid the worldly adventure the

Th e Ho r izo n    7

Log­os perishes; it is transformed into the counter-­word of the erstwhile “Let ­there be” of being, into the “Eli, Eli” of annihilation. Was it planned that the world would be judged and consigned to perdition when, on the last day of creation, it was pronounced to be ‘very good’? Or was not precisely this pronouncement meant to eliminate the need for judgment and destruction? It is true that ‘The Day of the Lord,’ as a day of judgment over the p ­ eoples, had been a prophetic threat; but now it is Matthew who on multiple occasions shows Jesus announcing himself as the judge of the world. It ­will not have been indifferent to Matthew, the author of the ‘toughest’ Passion, who should come as judge. For Matthew it had to be the one who had suffered the disaster of creation on his own body. This judge would not first and foremost hold h ­ umans responsible for the misery of the world, as Augustine would do in order to prove h ­ uman freedom. It was Schopenhauer who corrected Schiller’s dictum that world history is the judgment of the world: the world itself is the judgment of the world. This might not be the original biblical thought, but it is closer to its hidden presupposition that the Word of creation would above all judge itself through the Word of judgment. Matthew knows nothing of that b ­ ecause the Logos-­identity of Jesus is still alien to him. With this thought John ­will open an abyss that he cannot close ­because he has not read Matthew; for John, all is already judged in life and death. For Matthew, the day is still to come when many ­will scream “Lord, Lord (kyrie, kyrie)” as if the “Eli, Eli” of the Passion had not already been spoken. In the Passion, creation fails, and in the Passion the one who is judged is predestined to become the judge. Every­thing that ­will be called ‘grace’ has its “sufficient reason” in the miscarriage of the world. Grace is therefore not ‘earned’ through the Passion as a mystical “substance” from an inexhaustible store, but is claimed as a demand for restitution in that world in whose calamitous center ultimately this had become pos­si­ble. Now it r­ eally cried to the heavens what this world had been designed to wreak. Satan is overcome, says the Passion; true, but it is not Satan the seducer, it is Satan the prosecutor, as he had appeared in the book of Job before God

8    S t . Matthe w Passi on

against humanity, as diabolos. Now, a dif­fer­ent prosecutor appears before God in ­favor of humanity, insofar as he ‘demonstrates’ the extremity of their suffering and death upon himself. It is like a parody of that sentence in the first chapter of Job: “So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord” (Job 1:12). None of the presuppositions of Matthew’s Passion is more scandalous and more incomprehensible to us, who are poor in faith, than a God who can be offended: offended by his own feeble creatures, offended enough to grimly demand an atonement equally incomprehensible. It is indisputable that this figure cannot be extirpated from the premises of the work, even less from t­ hose of the evangelist himself. Key is to not let an engagement with the Passion founder on this difficulty; this must be the intention of any attempt to situate the still pos­si­ble listeners within their horizon of reception. ­Whether or not t­ hese listeners have a god is secondary to the concept of God by which they still can comprehend what it would mean to have one. For this concept would imply: Never should humanity’s disobedience have been able to embitter God to such a degree that he could, and even had to, decide that only through suffering and ­dying—on the part of whomever—­could he be reconciled. More had to be at stake. This ‘more’ constitutes the difference between word and ­music in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Setting aside the ‘canonical’ status of the text, the tone transcends every­thing that ‘underlies’ it. The ‘more’ resonates throughout the St. Matthew Passion. Any attempt to capture it ­will always be in vain; to give it one version may already require an effort so extreme that only approximations can be attempted. The initial hypothesis is that the offended God is the God who failed. With the world, omnipotence falls short of an intention worthy of God; it runs aground not on the world but only in it—­this is the theme of the Passion. Whoever this suffering and ­dying person, this ‘Son of man’ or ‘God’s servant’ may have been (and no one ­really knows what ­these attributes may mean): in him God abandons himself. It is even pos­si­ble to say why. Within the horizon of biblical par­ameters, it is b ­ ecause he let death into the world, and according to Paul as a consequence of sin.

Th e Ho r izo n    9

Another possibility more fitting to the original text: ­because the creator demanded of his ‘image and likeness’ (Gen. 1:26) not to want to be like him. Temptation and limitation ­were thus forced together in the contradiction of one existence. ­There was no need for a tempter, no need for a snake beneath the fruit tree—­the author of this creature had designed it to be hubristic. Luther was right in the seventeenth of his ­theses “Against Scholastic Theology” of 1517: By virtue of their nature, h ­ uman beings cannot want that God be God (Non potest homo naturaliter velle deum esse deum). To the contrary, they themselves want to be God, and God Not-­God (Immo vellet se esse deum et deum non esse deum).4 This is not atheism but the ‘reoccupation’ of the place of the singular God; ­here the s­ imple demand Me too! can never be enough. The rivalry can only be absolute. The God of Gan Eden at the beginning of the Bible is not offended for the duration of worldly time. He employs the simplest medium, one that he had already used for himself ‘in full force’ in the creation of the world: finitude. By banishing ­humans from Eden, God cuts them off from the most impor­tant means by which their rivalry with divinity might be fueled. In the illusion of being God’s counterpart, created by the snake’s “Eritis sicut dii!” [“You ­will be like God!,” Gen. 3:5]5 and their own obstinacy, ­humans lose the nourishment from the tree of life, and are delivered to mortality. Death is not in­ven­ted, it is simply released from the grasp of its antidote. ­Humans w ­ ill not give up on what is part of them: wanting to be like God. But they ­will be able to pursue this only at the cost of the atrocities of their history. The conjunction of being made in God’s image and being delivered to death in a world where they face ­limited resources for their preservation and enjoyment implies the failure of creation. Log­os ­will chase ­humans ­until death. ­Will all of this be revealed? The theological term ‘revelation’ presupposes that it ­will be. History, however, gives rise to the suspicion that it has become undetectable. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion can be heard as the apotropaic conjuration of this suspicion: it ­counters an imperceptibility in the meaning of events. Even in the futility of such meaning, the conjuration should not be ignored.

1 0    S t . Matthe w Passi on

It is remarkable how ­little re­spect theologians have for their source of revelation as soon as it violates the standards that an older philosophy has prescribed. The Bible knows nothing of a ‘highest Being’ or a ‘pure spirit’; in fact, it abandons such superlatives when it speaks of the tremendousness and the sensitivity of its God. He punishes and rewards like a common oriental potentate from Herodotus or One Thousand and One Nights, especially if that potentate had more of that special ‘power’ that can create a world in six days. Is it wrong to assume that a God who gets upset when his intricate ritual laws are broken, may have been bored by the eternity before the world? That he came up with the world—­nothing less—­because other­wise he could never have enjoyed his power, could never have given proof of his wisdom and charity? What good would omniscience have done him when t­here was nothing to know? Should he have counted, endlessly, as some theoretical mathematicians wish? Counting to come to a state of rest: from what? It made much more sense to rest on the seventh day ­after the ­great task of creating the world and declaring that it was “very good.” This, too, is a story. And as with ­every story, one may well ask ­whether it is a good one. B ­ ecause it demonstrates something, it has to be judged according to w ­ hether it manages to make intelligible what is unintelligible: the world, for example—or one who listens to the St. Matthew Passion at the end of the second millennium. Or both. For the latter witnesses how the former, the creator, fails with the world through death. That this should be a peripeteia, Bach’s listener, ­after the last note of the St. Matthew Passion has sounded, never needed to know. But in that case, this listener still has to have a hypothesis about how a world that could—or indeed had to—­fail came about in the first place. Such a hypothesis would have to satisfy the same criteria as other successful theories: it has to proceed from a ­simple and stable presupposition that is then set into motion by minimal deviations. Think of Epicurus’s “swerve” (clinamen) of a single atom from its path; or of Kant’s homogeneous distribution of ­matter in space in his cosmogony of 1755 [Universal Natu­ral History and Theory of the Heavens].

Th e Ho r izo n    1 1

Similarly, omnipotence is ­simple and stable in its eternity—­were it not for the dis­plea­sure of possessing the most sublime attributes without ever ‘­doing anything’ with them. I call this boredom; but it is boredom of the highest order: incompatibility with oneself. ­Although nothing would have had to happen, something has to happen; the disposition is too power­ful. It would be plausible not to have exercised this freedom only if one ­were compelled by metaphysical dictates to accept that omniscience does not need to test itself in order to know the outcome. But that is nineteenth-­century kitsch-­cleverness. The most remarkable feature of the history of Christian theologies is their linguistic pusillanimity, the suffering from the poverty of language. They always speak the language of ­others, in par­tic­u­lar of philosophies: from the unbiblical ‘providence’ of Stoicism in the church ­fathers to Bultmann’s ‘kerygma’ and its linguistic assimilation to Heidegger’s analytic of ‘Dasein.’ Indeed, the vari­ous dominant philosophies have done much less to enrich theological language than they have to restrict it. The Aristotelianism of high Scholasticism, for example, was the sum of all verdicts on the ‘foreign relations’ of God, who, as ‘unmoved mover,’ could not be ‘moved’ by the world he had created; he had to know it in himself insofar as the cause had to contain every­thing that the effect expressed. Only the ­great mystics created their own language, based on the via negationis, against philosophy; but it w ­ asn’t the language of the founding documents of this religion, which by virtue of the incarnated Log­os should have shown itself (and initially did show itself, as is still palpable in the St. Matthew Passion) as a religion of linguistic potency. In the end, it was always metaphysics that claimed it was undignified to say this or that about the ens perfectissimum. But what was and is perfection? In the twentieth c­ entury in Marburg [in Rudolf Bultmann’s notion of kerygma], it was the veiled majesty of the owner of the world who insists on unconditional surrender to a message whose ‘content’ cannot be questioned so that obedience can turn into philosophical ‘decisiveness.’ The god of the phi­los­o­phers is insensitive; the God of the Bible, hypersensitive. That is why theologians speak the idiom of philoso-

1 2    S t . Matthe w Passi on

phy, to spare their God: Could he even bear the language of the Bible? Not only in the sense that the Bible contains words that the phi­los­o­phers disapproved of already in ancient myths, but also in the sense that what is told and narrated violates the dignity of the concept of a being greater than which nothing could be thought (quo maius cogitari nequit). What cannot be said but is nonetheless narrated is this: God has failed with the world. Over and over again, he was at the verge of angrily taking it all back and of letting it perish in vari­ous ways. The entrance of the Log­os into this world changes so l­ittle of this predicament that the revocation of creation truly becomes the epitome of God’s w ­ ill. Whoever prohibits or is prohibited from articulating this predicament has to accept the same consequences that brought first-­century Chris­tian­ity to the brink of ruin: the ‘explanation’ of the state of the world as the result of a degenerative pro­cess of creation that culminates in the separation of ‘gods’ of the world and ‘gods’ of salvation, including the illusory nature of the salvific deeds of the latter in the eyes of the former in the ‘Docetism’6 of the gnosis. Such explanations would rather destroy the realism of the Passion and abandon the ‘first article’ of the Apostles’ Creed than jeopardize the ‘purity’ of the alien God. He must not have failed with the world if he should be able to save it, and in it bring salvation to humanity. The ‘realism’ of the St. Matthew Passion, both of its language and its ­music, is first and foremost a triumph over the Gnostic prohibition against mentioning the God of salvation in the same breath with the God of the world, against letting the one God suffer in the other the fate of creaturely existence to its b ­ itter mortal end, which the concept of ‘sin’ barely covered and made decent so as not to offend the hypersensitive God with the truth of his entanglement in the disintegration of the world. ­After all, he had to s­ ettle the following with himself: the open question ­whether omnipotence was justified in ‘trying out’ a world and r­ unning the risk of failure as much as the chance of success. ­There is no immanent theological answer to this question. But perhaps ­those who listen to the St. Matthew Passion ­will have gained the courage to answer it for themselves—­even if the answer turns out to

Th e Ho r izo n    1 3

be a ‘no.’ It does not change the ‘realism’ of its ‘being-­nonetheless’ and of the Passion it depicts. Gnostic dualism never fully lost its explanatory power. Why can it not be the strug­gle between light and darkness that the Passion represents? The defensive, perhaps hopeless answer is: ­because ­under the absolute dualism between good and evil every­thing would be permissible—­and not, as ­under the princi­ple of monistic omnipotence, just “nothing impossible.”

The One Author of the One Story Goethe’s Young Werther, who experienced nature in new ways walking around Wetzlar with a copy of Homer u ­ nder his arm (before he replaced Homer with Ossian), did not yet know of Friedrich August Wolf. And, given his circumstances, he could not have met him anyway—as would, indeed, his inventor. Werther would have lost much had he been forced to accept that t­here are multiple singers of both epics, not just the one with whom he tried to experience nature. He would have lost just as much if he had realized that ­Ossian, while being by a single author, was falsified and falsifying: MacPherson, who far outlived Werther, was a master of fash­ion­ able sentimentality. Philological criticism has since destroyed such ‘Werther experiences’—­ and nonetheless left much in them unchanged, ­because we still believe Werther when he ‘placed’ himself at the heart of the world, disregarding that it is no longer pos­si­ble. The subtle craft of historical and philological Bible criticism has changed so ­little that throughout two millennia we—­who have gained and lost from the dissection of a few authors into multiple ones—­perceive the Bible reader as the consumer of a single author who guarantees and explains the obvious heterogeneity of the given text. Even modern theologians can still be caught using the Bible like the church f­ athers, stringing together quotation a­ fter quotation, image ­after image, as if ‘God’s Word’ ­were that of a single author, who only for reasons of expediency had used so many voices, so many multiplying sources, original sources, and editors—an author

1 4    S t . Matthe w Passi on

who, not wanting to spoil the play of history, held himself back by feigning to be many. It might be that a theological postlude plays a role h ­ ere—­even the most infidel of readers can receive no better counsel than that given to the readers who wants to enjoy their Homer and not be both­ered by news of multiple authors: to read the ­whole work as if it had only one author, and as if this author’s intention could be explained and enriched in ­every passage by all the other passages. It is a consequence of the ‘artificial’ horizon of this type of ‘hermeneutics’ that it refer back, not to a shared original horizon—­because it never existed—­but only to the horizon of a long tradition of faithful readers, one that need not be any stranger to us than the horizon we assume for the audience of the Early Greek rhapsodists, who had to listen to tales whose incongruency did not bother them ­because they had heard them so often. In texts of such dignity, familiarity replaces the intelligibility that historical understanding demands but rarely can furnish if more than details and facts are required. Enlightened Bible criticism has mistakenly made every­one feel stupid who does not incorporate in their relationship to the text the facts they could or ­ought to have known. It has delegitimized experience. It need not be that way. Even nonreligious readers are the victims of this splitting into ever more authors, ­because it challenges the fundamental activity of ­every reading—­that is, overcoming the discontinuity of the factual substratum by means of subjective investments and creating a counterpart of the ‘subject.’ Why ­wouldn’t blind Homer with his many birthplaces—­I know, I’ll be savaged in the Classics journal Gnomon!—­have accumulated all t­ hese incongruences during a long life and without a written text? Why w ­ ouldn’t he be seduced by his growing fame to be generous with himself and ready to engage ever new rearrangements and insertions even against existing copyrights, just to indulge the desires of his paying audience for more detail, more color, more extravagance? Well then: ­Didn’t the author-­God of the Bible also have to satisfy an insatiable audience, an excessive demand? A look at the endless supply of apocryphal stories about Jesus’s childhood and the miracles or martyrdoms of the apostles with their garrulous fantasies of imitation sustains this comparison. In the end, the biblical

Th e Ho r izo n    1 5

canon also came together along the lines of better, if not good, taste. Can the result of this se­lection pro­cess not be understood post festum as the emergence of singular authorship? Would it not be unbearable for the reader if the Lord of the garden, the one who barred the tree of knowledge by benevolent cunning, ­were not identical with the thundering volcanist who hurled down from Mount Sinai the first commandment proclaiming his jealousy ­toward all other gods? No, this is a god who has too long a history with his creature to be effective with benevolent means, who has just seen the Egyptian generations pass him by in their servility to the animalistic idols, to the promises of fleshpots in return for cultic subservience. Every­thing is lost forever for the listeners and readers if they are no longer capable of putting together from the many stories the single narrative in which they can feel as one with the One. They have to be able to recognize the God who spared Abraham the sacrifice of his son in the God who, to keep his word, knew no other way out than to let his own Son offer himself, without animal substitute, as a sacrificial lamb and, even worse, to accept this sacrifice. And who let even this pass by as if nothing had happened. And for a good reason: so that he would not discredit himself too obviously with his old creation. Thus, the imperceptibility of the Messiah turns into the ‘protection’ of God’s glory, ­because ­every change to the world could imply criticism of creation. In this way, the excruciating concealment and in­effec­tive­ness of redemptive deeds turns into the discretion owed to the unity of the One. This is more than just an aesthetic stratagem for the reader: it is the provocation of hermeneutics by means of textual criticism. Questions of theological importance can arise from the study of the Bible only if its ‘subject’—­its ‘author,’ b ­ ecause it is the only way through which he is known—­can be assigned an identity. It is not Marcion’s Gnostic dualism of creator and redeemer that first expresses this annoying desire; the creator himself through his own actions raises questions of identity that are not t­hose that would arise from an already abstruse text. The one question that has not been asked in the exegetical tradition is that of the plurality of h ­ uman individuals. Apparently the

1 6    S t . Matthe w Passi on

first two ­humans did not procreate in paradise. And it would have been entirely plausible if offspring had been outside of creation’s plan, b ­ ecause with access to the tree of life and to immortality coextensive with the duration of the world, the preservation of the species would have been superfluous: Why should ­there be more ­humans than t­ hose single-­handedly created by God? Every­thing beyond this initial state is already placed ­under the premises of death, which is supposed to have entered the world only as a consequence of sin—­more precisely, through the cherubim who w ­ ere placed to guard access to the tree of life with their swords. That a w ­ oman should give birth in pain ­because she had followed the snake seemed to place the accent on pain—­but what if it had been on giving birth? For ­those first two h ­ uman beings, the garden seemed to have yielded just enough not to let them experience any lack. Proliferation does not fit into the concept of paradise as a lovely garden. But to ask this question is not enough. God as Elohim (a plural subject) created man in his image and likeness. The Elohim represent multiplicity, carefully forgotten once the claim to singularity became dominant. Yet t­here is a vague remainder of this likeness stemming from multiplicity. It echoes in the word that reveals the root of multiplication: “It is not good that man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18), the ‘Yahwist’ has the Elohim say. Why is it ‘not good,’ if the original of the likeness had no attribute more sublime and more jealously defended than singularity? Why ­couldn’t man, crafted by hand, also remain alone? F ­ ree of conflict, immune to seduction, especially if no partner for procreation was needed? One God, one h ­ uman—­would t­here be a crisis of salvation? Thinking about Mount Sinai and the proclamation of divine exclusivity, the conclusion arises that the ­human—­still conceived as single—­would have been the perfect partner for this claim: one God, one ­human. Why all this bustle, the source of all rivalry and malice, the reason for the entire Decalogue, which would have been delightfully superfluous? No, Elohim did not follow his own resolution to create an exact likeness of himself. That would have been the One and Only who could have existed alone, just as he had declared aloneness as belonging to his essence. Man perished ­because he was a multitude—­that is, not the likeness and counter-

Th e Ho r izo n    1 7

part at the center of all excellence. For multiplicity in the image of one prototype meant not simply that one was envious of another’s fortunes and possessions or that one wanted to appropriate natu­ ral resources ahead of the other. Instead, and above all, it meant the inevitability of the question of selfhood: Why me and not him? Why him and not me? The story of Abel and Cain with its murderous result was—­despite being clothed as a conflict between nomad and farmer—­above all the exposition of the fact of indifference, created in and by multiplicity: what one possesses, the other cannot—­unless he uses vio­lence or deception to put himself in the other’s place, as Jacob did with Esau. For the man–­woman doubling, however, this dilemma did not seem to exist—­that it nonetheless lay dormant in it would become apparent only at the end, when the call to be fruitful and multiply had lost its intelligibility and its reasonableness. When both elevated being “­human” as their program, they became rivals and took on the posture of enemies. What in biblical language seemed to have been avoided was thus reduced to the immanent paradox of any Platonism: The One is the Good and, as such, evidence that t­ here should be more than one; the world of appearances is the execution of the world of Ideas as obedience to their intrinsic value, but at the same time the devaluation of the ideal of perfection, b ­ ecause multiplicity is pos­si­ble only in the space of friction and disturbance. The substrate of the world implies the consequence that the copy can never equal the original. And with the population explosion, the progressive escalation of this fact has become a palpable experience that exceeds the limit of philosophical explanations. By now, every­body knows what it means to be one of many—­indeed, one of too many. Looking back at the Bible, at the reader’s futile attempt to maintain the identification of the divine author with the subject of ‘sacred’ history, it becomes apparent that God erred. He admitted as much when he deviated from the consent added to all other works of creation: “And Elohim saw all that he had created, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). The Yahwist, in contrast to the author of the Priestley source, came to the conclusion that despite the likeness with his own form it was not good how man had turned

1 8    S t . Matthe w Passi on

out, alone and as this single being. Whereupon he ‘corrected’ the error in the essence of God in a procedure characterized as irregular—­ for it occurred u ­ nder anesthesia—by taking the much-­maligned rib and “forming it into a w ­ oman” (Gen. 2: 22). He does not bestow to this additional work the predicate ‘that it was good.’ The Yahwist author does not hesitate to exploit this weakness by setting the snake on it. It was not the case that the one ­human had been created in the image and likeness of the one author. But this story can be ‘read’ this way only if on the other side the unity and singularity of the divine subject has not been ‘critically’ destroyed, as my reference to the originators of modern Bible criticism has shown.

The Beginning of Wisdom In the assembly hall of my venerable high school that had already robbed Thomas Mann of the honor of graduating from it, at the front wall above the organ and the images of the protestant reformers Luther and Bugenhagen (who had secularized the former monastery school), one could read in gothic letters the biblical verse: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). ­Either ­because it was too expensive to replace it with a new slogan, or ­because the provenance of the verse was unknown to the new masters a­ fter 1933, it was under­neath this saying that the Nazi director gave his ersatz-­attempts for the former Monday devotional ser­vices, attempts which he overrated as ‘speeches.’ Half a ­century ­later, in 1984, the “Medical Association of Lübeck” published a brochure on the occasion of its 175th anniversary. The most humanely touching contribution was the “Childhood Reminiscences of a Doctor from Lübeck” by Ulrich Thoemmes. He could not give a positive testimonial for his high school, which he began in 1930, or for his teachers. He found the rude tone of a Prus­sian cadet school inappropriate for the ethos of a ­free city, as ­were the exaggerated demands for blind obedience on the part of the teachers, who ­were united by their experiences in the war and their rejection of the

Th e Ho r izo n    1 9

Weimar Republic. For the boy, all of this culminated in the Monday morning ser­vices under­neath the saying about the fear of the Lord in the assembly hall “which only could have meant the fear of the teachers who ­were positioned next to the rows of students and participated in the God-­fearing ritual.” On top of this, the teachers appeared to him to be “willing executioners” of the two somber reformers, Luther and Bugenhagen, who in retrospect seemed to have chased the gaiety of monks from the brick building near St. Catherine’s. The doctor’s memory space, including its inventory, is the same as mine, the p ­ eople are the same as in my retrospection, the dates ­those of my attendance at the school, even though my experiences might have been still more somber. But the center of his scholastic world was quite alien to me. During the many Monday devotional ser­vices, I had never made a connection between the Old Testament saying and the more or less authoritarian, but mostly benevolent teachers on the side benches, who ­were just as bored as we ­were as we made it through yet another stanza of the chorale. Who has enough enthusiasm and reason to praise God at such length on a Monday morning anyway? What ­really surprised me—­I have to confess this to my ­great shame—­was how Ulrich Thoemmes interpreted the saying on the wall: grammatically speaking as an objective genitive, that is, as the fear directed t­ oward the Lord. In all t­ hese years, this reading never occurred to me. It seemed obvious to me that this was a subjective genitive: the “fear of the Lord” was His fear of something ­else, and fearing it had been the beginning of His wisdom. And it was equally clear that this lordly fear was directed ­toward ­humans, b ­ ecause He did not let them take part in His paradise a­ fter they had become a dangerous confidant in the knowledge of good and evil. To fear h ­ uman beings and to persecute their ambitions to be like God throughout history seemed to me to be quite naturally the epitome of the multiform faith that was practiced in this assembly hall—­including the humanistic tradition at the school with its grammatical exercises and the ascetic reluctance to actually enjoy the fruits of such learning. The worst t­hing that my friend’s reminiscences have made me realize and for the first time made explicit is my own short

2 0    S t . Matthe w Passi on

Confessions: my child-­like reading of the saying has remained, ­despite knowing better, the tenor of my ‘theology,’ if it deserves this name. God’s acts of salvation might have benefited humanity, but they ­were precautions to placate his in­de­pen­dence and stubbornness, an invitation to join a pacified community that would exclude ­those who did not want it. They ­were the remainders of what the Lord had to fear at the beginning of his wisdom. Only much ­later did I begin to realize that the ‘fear of the Lord’ had to be quite extensive if the ‘death of God’ was humanity’s last threat in its self-­empowerment to be ‘superman.’ It always seemed to me too ‘cheap’ a concept that an omnipotent God had nothing to fear from such a wretched being—­after all, it was created in his image and as his likeness. He had made it that way explic­itly, and thereby renounced any means of forcing his creature to give up on its metaphysical ambitions. The one who created something like the ­human being had to be prepared, even as Lord, to fear that creature and to be resigned to the use of wisdom as an instrument. Only as an old man did it become clear to me in what excellent com­pany of heretics I found myself with that interpretation of the assembly hall slogan: when I happened upon the “Hypostasis of the Archons,” one of the Gnostic texts found in 1945 near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, which I studied as a hobby. ­Here, Sophia (Wisdom) is, as in many Gnostic speculations, the highest, or one of the highest instances of the universe, and the ‘Lord’ is the creator of the world, the Demiurgos. The Old Testament God of multiple names—­ here: Samael—is a figure of fatuous arrogance who first has to be taught to fear in order to be wise, in the most literal sense: by Sophia, wisdom. Gnosticism is a system in which the Lord-­of-­the-­world is rebuked and overpowered by otherworldly wisdom. The ways to such instruction in ‘the fear of the Lord’ are multiple and go through vari­ous instances. The Gnostic teacher Justinus writes about the horror that grips the Lord of the world when he realizes that he is not the God of the universe, that t­here is not just a god next to him but a super-­ godhead above him who, as wisdom, was able to induce enough wisdom in him to let his fear change over into that admiration through which the Greeks—­who always lurk in the background—­were able

Th e Ho r izo n    2 1

to discover wisdom. In the Apocryphon of Nag Hammadi, the Gnostic Justinian quotes this verbatim: “That is the meaning of the saying ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’.” At times, life regales us with the happiness of coincidences. That ­these coincidences make us happy has to do with their mythic nature as ‘significances.’ At the same time as I discovered the “Hypostasis of the Archons,” I happened upon a marginalium that Arthur Schopenhauer had added to a passage in J. Ch. Mortzfeld’s Fragmente aus Kants Leben [Fragments from Kant’s life] (Königsberg, 1802), where he speaks of Kant’s openheartedness and friendliness: “Salomon dit que le commencement de la sagesse est la crainte de Dieu: mais je crois que c’est la crainte des hommes [Solomon says the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God, but I think it is the fear of ­humans].” This is the anthropological ‘reoccupation’ of the moment where the gnostic Lord of the World was gripped by horror—­ with the difference that fear no longer reaches into the ‘vertical,’ but into the horizontal. ­Unless, of course, one believes that instead of Sophia the ­Will is the last ground of all fear that can afflict a worldly being, especially a­ fter the anxiety of Dasein has fully replaced the ­Will. Let’s return from heresy and dark metaphysics to the locus of righ­teous or false faith—to the reformation in Lübeck and its pre­sent representative, Bishop Ulrich Wilckens. While he was still a professor of New Testament theology, Wilckens was one of the sharpest and most insightful critics of my Legitimacy of the Modern Age, while at the same time conceding that the book represented a “very fruitful common ground for the desired and provoked conversation with theologians.”7 I hope I have not disappointed him, or am currently ­doing so. This hope would not be a sufficient reason to introduce ­here my old acquaintance as pastor at Lübeck Cathedral ­were it not for the fact that he contributed something like a coincidentia oppositorum to the discordances and coincidences mentioned above. In the year 1966, the same year in which The Legitimacy of the Modern Age appeared, he contributed an eminently scholarly article—­almost of monograph length—on “wisdom” (Sophia) to the seventh volume of the Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament [Theological

2 2    S t . Matthe w Passi on

Dictionary of the New Testament]. At the center of this article was a sentence that threw new light on the difference noticed in the assembly hall of the old school and explained it in a ‘humanistic’ way. Wilckens claimed that no Greek could ever have comprehended how the two concepts fear and wisdom ­were related: “How strange does the immediate proximity of phobos, kyriou, and sophia sound to Greek ears.” This, he continues, would explain certain tendencies of translators when dealing with “the Greek rendering of fundamental concepts of wisdom” as well as the “underhanded” alteration of ­these texts into Greek traditions of thought. What happened in the brains of two schoolboys when confronted with the saying of King Solomon was, then, nothing but a continuation of Alexandrian scholars’ incomprehension of an alien god whom the language of the ‘seventy’ could not grasp. What had eluded the Septuagint reoccurred two thousand years ­later as the ­simple grammatical confusion of two genitives.

Relief—or Even More? If one wants to be moved by the St. Matthew Passion, one has to make a concession without being able to comprehend it: one has to concede that the God of Johann Sebastian Bach, the God of Paul, of Augustine, and of Martin Luther, could be offended to no end. Only then does the immensity of what is offered to Him as compensation and reconciliation on the part of the suffering and d ­ ying creature acquire a palpability that precludes a sense of pointlessness. The monstrosity of ‘justification’ (the path to which the Passion is supposed to lead the way for every­one) appears against the backdrop of a world-­creator whose honor, or love, or majesty has been injured beyond forgiveness. We forget that ransom had to be paid for a creature that was subjected or bonded to another being—­a being, Lucifer, who had belonged to the original offenders of his Lord and who had no other claim to inviolability than his naked power over the world. All this has been erased from the original story, consigned to oblivion. Why?

Th e Ho r izo n    2 3

In order to define for this sufferer the greater, singularly im­mense, and absolute mission? To offer infinite reparation for insulting the Infinite—if only through the most finite of his creatures, though still through the creature most like him—­a reparation, in which all further insults by ‘sinners’ like the one who is currently listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion are forgiven in advance: Luther’s peccator et iustus [sinner and righ­teous] is sanctioned. For ­those who are open to it, the entire difficulty of listening to the St. Matthew Passion ­after a quarter of a millennium—­performed as it is with constant, even growing enthusiasm, in old churches or modern concert halls—­comes down to this incomprehensibility: to think how a god can be offended. This is not any easier for atheists than for believers still clinging to their faith. The atheist can only think: If God r­ eally exists, the one whose existence I deny, but who for some around me is their God, then much would be pos­si­ble for him, through him, and with him except for one ­thing: that he would let himself be offended. To be offended to death—­including to the death of him who in the beginning let himself be seduced; to the death of all of his descendants; and fi­nally to the death of the one who wanted to force and demonstrate the impotence of death itself. This difficulty cannot be eliminated from the world. For that to happen, something would have to be reinserted into the world, something that ­under our given historical conditions would be completely erratic, without relation to anything we know. Even the most fervent believers no longer understand what, within this theological dimension, a ‘sin’ ­really is. Before we can think of redemption and justification and mercy, we need to ‘search’ for the surrogates of sin and the sinner. It is no accident that theologians are desperately keen to do just that, such that guilt acquired long ago assumes the guise of a transcendental ‘burden of sin.’ And yet ­there is nothing to satisfy the need to identify a guilt commensurate with the promise of salvation, nothing that would make the ‘event of the Passion’ (to use the jargon of the theologians) even remotely acceptable. One has to make concessions to incomprehensibility and utter strangeness, and this is required of us contemporaries who are not unused to dealing

2 4    S t . Matthe w Passi on

with the incomprehensible in day-­to-­day life—­who are always ­under the assumption that t­here is some justness, some strange, even terrifying ‘truth.’ Our real­ity rests on the ungroundedness of such concessions. The most remote concession imaginable is to accept an infinite God who is drowning in his glory and yet mortally offended. Something is ‘fulfilled’ ­here that we no longer notice in the smaller portions in which we constantly encounter it. In other words, we no longer feel what bestows a hidden greatness on us: to not believe and yet, at least for a few hours, to concede, to accept, to admit an offended God. This act approaches a higher tolerance that has nothing to do with “leniency” for the all-­too-­human. Is this a situation into which the omnipresent ‘historicism’ has maneuvered us? Does tradition demand from us entry and custom payments to cross borders, so that we may not be excluded from a good part of the humanly pos­si­ble? Not entirely. When the old Thomas Mann wrote his ‘­little novel’ about sin and mercy—­The Holy Sinner, adapted from the Gregorius material by Hartmann von Aue—he repeated for the last time the theme of his life’s work: the emergence of art from the abyss of defect, illness, de­cadence, deviance, and madness. This time it was the allegory of the greatest sinner, conceived in greatest sin, as an aspirant to highest holiness. Mann could not have used more machinations, precautions, and stylistic tricks to compel his readers to make concessions; and every­ thing fails when this ‘transposition’—­which is dif­fer­ent from historical ‘empathy’—­cannot be accomplished. That is why the only pos­si­ble protagonist is not a character in the plot but the ‘spirit of narration,’ incorporated in the Benedictine monk Clemens in the monastery of St. Gallen. He in turn is captured by the ‘spirit of irony’ in order to extract from the hiatus between the immensity of sin and mercy the ‘spirit of humor,’ the essence of which is disproportion. The God who could only be offended by the sinner turns into a god who, according to Mann, “has a sense of humor.” How does he know this? ­Because other­wise “he would not have let the creature of the artist come to life.” That’s why the author can say at the moment when he completes the work that “he has known grace.”8

Th e Ho r izo n    2 5

Taken at its word—­the word of the twentieth ­century—­none of this brings us closer to becoming a listener of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. And yet if it is not the ­recipe, then it is the schema to such a disposition. ­Those final tears to which Bach has his believing congregation sit down at Jesus’s tomb surely are not tears of humor, but they are tears of a ‘relief’ that can only come from the disproportion of reaction and resonance in what one has just experienced. One cannot ‘earn a right’ to relief from this God—­yet ‘no right’ is the equivalent of ‘grace.’ That we can ‘breathe a sigh of relief’ a­ fter every­thing or ­because of every­thing is not dif­fer­ent from any other ­grand finale, no m ­ atter how relatively small the unresolved and delayed sufferings that preceded it may have been. And they always have preceded it. Even where t­ here are no longer any resolutions and redemptions, the open end, the interruption of what cannot be completed, is at least a release that makes us ­free, ­because it sets us ­free. Believers and nonbelievers alike are released from the Passion even if their tears might have been meta­phorical, as is the custom t­ oday. It is a consequence of my l­ imited courage that only in the case of Simon Peter do I dare to speak about ‘humor’ with re­spect to Bach’s composition. I simply shy away from it. But if ‘humor’ is literally a ­matter of fluids, of flowing and streaming, then tears definitely belong ­here. That they afford relief—­against all semblance of inconsolability—is their commonality with laughter, which traditionally does not appear to be worthy of tears despite the common locution ‘laughter and tears.’ Again and again, it is the suspicion of Docetism that forbids us the laughter of relief: this cannot have happened only as an illusion. For that would entail taunting even the listeners who allowed themselves to feel empathy. In contrast to the story of Gregorius, which is at liberty to fib and to lampoon, the seriousness of the Passion rests on the sanction of the text—­even for the reader for whom ‘Bible criticism’ has left ­little historical ‘substance.’ Criticism has accomplished something absurd: it has dissolved and dismantled that to which the history of reception has bestowed a higher degree of consistency than ­simple verisimilitude or noncontradictoriness. This

2 6    S t . Matthe w Passi on

‘dissolution’ certainly was the duty of science, which does not pass over what it can ‘work on.’ But it has ignored, as it did in the case of Homer, the fact that time is a ­factor in establishing the aggregate status of this text. It has worked in a direction c­ ounter to the accrual of meaning that had occurred in the texture of the heterogeneous. This observation of a ­counter rotation between accruing meaning and destructive criticism contains an immediate reference to that which, aside from the results of the constitution and interpretation of the text, could have been ‘won’ at all: through m ­ usic.

The Theological Generosity of the St. Matthew Passion When the ‘enthusiasts’ of the very first hour—­who might themselves have been the ‘disappointed ones’ of even e­ arlier times, like the dispersed apostles ­after the Passion—­when the charismatics of the ‘original congregation’ have reached a certain age, then, invariably, the hour of the apologists has arrived. By now the sober ones, the hard-­ to-­move, have heard all about the ‘kerygma’ not only what is edifying, but also, and more importantly, what is contradictory and o ­ ffensive. This is especially the case if the elect have to preserve their spiritual property in an esoteric manner. It is hard to accept that some claim to be exempt from common misery, and one watches them all the more carefully. Apostates help in the dissemination of information. In any case, the primary stock of tradition suffers from the unusual focus and attention, and requires repair and defense, even if the opportunity for the systematic theologians is still far in the f­ uture. It would be wrong to expect at this point the type of discourse that in the classification of l­ater scholarship is strictly and properly called ‘apol­o­getics’: a special rhe­toric to discipline the nonbelievers. The first order, rather, is to make the unacknowledged yet not unrecognized inconsistencies of the original tradition dis­appear. This eagerness has its own weaknesses: it putters about sporadically and selectively; it seeks to rectify suspicious details and to reintegrate what seems obstinate and deviant. For l­ater readers this phase produces far more damage than benefit. Tradition has received its first

Th e Ho r izo n    2 7

‘redaction,’ and that means: it has received the first fractures that ­later ­will be subjected to historical ‘criticism.’ As a consequence, apol­o­getics has to be ever more apol­o­getic. It becomes autonomous and extends its needs for consistency ever further to what only with difficulty remains recognizable as genuine ‘substance.’ The fatal notion of kerygma—­this penultimate asylum ignorantiae—­rests on the suspicion that a­ fter all the redacting and compensatory narration, nothing e­ lse is left but a sullen that-­ at-­all [Daß-­überhaupt]. You get out of this what you have put in it (of Heidegger). At some point, apologists have to transform the aggregate of what they are defending into a ‘system.’ This means that e­ very part of the narrative has to stand in a dependent relation to e­ very other part, such that changing, for what­ever reason, one part entails adding or subtracting other parts. Once the limit of the system has been reached, the w ­ hole pro­cess moves ‘as if by itself’; the limit produces increased attention and emendations along with their secondary corruptions and ‘radiations’ u ­ ntil the system as a w ­ hole, weakened by calcifications and extenuations, is condemned to be replaced by another, wherever it may come from. In this pro­cess it is customary to declare what is new to be in fact ancient—­indeed, to be the original that is fi­nally given its rightful due. For example, the origin of modern science is declared to derive from Platonism—so as to defeat obsolete Aristotelianism—­ and this in a ­later phase ­will serve to support the claim that scientific theories have aesthetic merits as well. Religious studies, ethnology, and cultural anthropology at one point shared the heuristic assumption that myths are ‘explanations’ for rituals that have lost their intuitive comprehensibility. This hypothesis, though proven by results, fell victim to the ‘unbearable’ reproof that it treats language as a secondary f­ actor, and that it neglects social forces. Leaving aside the hypothesis’s rec­ord of success, what remains impressive is the assumption that ‘inspection’ [Begehung] has priority over ‘narration,’ ritual over narrative, and that this follows a pattern of real-­life obviousness, which in this case has the literal

2 8    S t . Matthe w Passi on

meaning that in the beginning it was ‘obvious’ what it was about. At one time it had been enough to point with a fin­ger to the Mount of Olives, to Golgotha, to the empty tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, to ‘inspect’ the sites of the Passion, b ­ ecause every­one knew what would have to be reported and the inspection in all likelihood would be adorned with cultic gestures, like the breaking of bread in the Lord’s Supper. Such familiarity with the locale, time, and gesture has its own consistency in the continuum of space and time. But it would have acted as a moment of inertia against the command to go forth and proselytize, it would have established a local cult and its provinciality in roughly the same area in which the t­emple in Jerusalem had become, and remained, the center of worship for its neighbors. Even Mark Twain during his ‘pilgrimage’ was still astonished at how close to each other all biblical sites w ­ ere, close enough to shoot a cannon from one to the other. And the religion that had started h ­ ere—­that was the point of his observation—­should be the appropriate one for a continent like the one he hailed from? It would never have come to that but for the transition from ritual to narrative. Only thus was the ease produced with which Paul—in a section especially inserted into the Acts of the Apostles—­surprised the Athenians during his first tour through the ‘world’ of his time. He, of course, had long since become a ‘systematic theologian’ and therefore only needed a minimum of narrative clichés. Their transportability brought almost ­every one of the new congregations into conflict with the dogmatic discipline of the ‘systematizer,’ the reconciliation of which in turn became part of theology. The line from narration to apol­o­getics to dogmatics suggests its retrograde continuation: If this was its direction, what had come before? Analytical philology of the New Testament has portrayed the ‘first Christian community’ as a kind of creative narrative club that conjoined and added to and reshaped what was extant as pericopes from the post-­Easter period. Yet it is hard to believe that a cult like that would have afforded much ‘freedom’: texts rapidly become ‘sacred’ and thus final. To still suppose their elasticity means to turn them into ‘secondary’ forms of repre­sen­ta­tion: the text explicates what the inspection celebrates, and it has to do so all the more when one adds to the community ‘converts’ who have not wit-

Th e Ho r izo n    2 9

nessed anything, who do not understand the ceremonies without explanations. And even the explainers ­after a few years have to think hard to remember ‘how it r­ eally was.’ What results from this effort has to be consistent and, if it proves its worth, should in turn be canonized. It is impossible to argue against inspection or gestures; but as soon as memory has been formed and explicated, the entire edifice is liable to become unstable. Work has to be done. Especially when more than one explicative text already exists, and when the explainers fight over their claim to authenticity, to autopsy, to testimony: Mark has Peter, Luke has Mary, John—­even though the latest—­could exploit the usual advantage of the youn­gest and claim to have seen for himself. No one was left to contradict him. And Paul miraculously managed to claim a ‘higher’ level of testimony for himself, in spite of having seen nothing and having no witnesses—­a level higher than even ­those who had simply stared at the miracles of the rabbi whom Paul had never known. How is this relevant to the person listening to the St.  Matthew Passion ­after more than one and a half millennia? ­Because it is the only pos­si­ble path back to the level of ritual that would neither surrender the addition of narrative nor dare to lay a hand on it. What no one achieved in the transition from narrativity to fictionality—­ not even the edifying modernizers, whose supposed tales of ‘experience’ claim that reference to ‘the text’ is obsolete—­every program director achieves with their cache of St. Matthew Passion broadcasts. Cultural analy­sis of its text has contributed to the notion that the ‘rhe­toric’ of Bach’s composition stands in the lineage of the first Christian community: it is an event to be ‘witnessed’ rather than ‘information’ to be broadcast. This bears comparison with the coordination of baptism and resurrection, and its ‘systematic’ sanctioning in Paul’s letter to the Romans. It could also be illustrated by the astonishing fact that Jesus—­though himself baptized—­never performed a baptism. From Paul’s perspective that makes sense: the mystical exchange of identity through baptism was ‘justified’ only ­after death and resurrection. The rite of the communal meal, however, was founded by Jesus in close connection to the Passion, demonstrated as a ‘procedure,’

3 0    S t . Matthe w Passi on

and designated for repetition: a series of gestures that r­ eally does not require any accompanying words. The rite of breaking bread had to be associated with a myth that would explain that it was not just an addendum but instead the fulfillment of the duty to remember the origin of which it narrates. Full convergence of t­hese ele­ments was achieved in a liturgy in which participants understood one as the condition of the other—­the words of institution as the ‘words of consecration.’ The power of this ritual of remembrance was forged through the connection between the communal meal and the Passion, which the words of institution so forcefully represented. If the texts w ­ ere ­shaped by an encounter with cultic forms, their subdivision becomes as plausible as the tendency to assign the same dignity to the cult and to the reading and hearing of the text. Announcing and hearing the Gospel became in themselves instruments of salvation. They could fulfill this function b ­ ecause they enact justification through faith without the law—­a faith of which it was much less obvious what kind of act and content it entailed than was assumed by subsequent generations, who handled the notion of faith as if it ­were beyond all questioning. Such conviction is an ‘achievement’ of history: one no longer doubts knowing what is meant b ­ ecause one has forgotten what questions could cause uncertainty about what could legitimately be required. (To say nothing about what could be required if one does not want to ‘succeed’ the law oneself.) The dilemma of requiring conditions for justification drove Paul, and long ­after him Augustine as well as Luther and Calvin, into the dead-­end street of predestination. Reducing the narrative of the Passion to the cult of remembrance entails an increased need for ornamentation, in par­tic­u­lar if the ritual act was so sparse that saying grace and breaking bread w ­ ere enough to identify it. The congregation wanted to be sure that this was not an arbitrary act to install a new priestly caste, that it occurred in the name of the one who had commanded baptism. The repetition of the instituting words served this need, and incited a new one: for Jesus had not only instituted this meal, he had related

Th e Ho r izo n    3 1

it to the Passion, to the shedding of his blood “for many for the forgiveness of their sins” (Matt. 26:28). But ­hadn’t this forgiveness been acquired once and for all through baptism? Therein consists the prob­lem of coordinating the ritual of resurrection with that of the Passion. The desire to retain an instrument of salvation beyond baptism is prob­ably best understood from the transitional needs of the first community. The onetime forgiveness of sins would have precluded relapses only if the imminence of the apocalypse could have been maintained—­only with the shortest of deadlines. Experience showed that this would not work. When the first community’s expectations of the Lord’s return w ­ ere disappointed, the ritual was transferred to that part of the salvific event that could be repeated and that would compensate for the flagging re­sis­tance against sin: the perpetual forgiveness implied in the Passion. Its tendency, if not expressed in so many words, was that the ‘grace’ won through the Passion and death became the good that could be celebrated in the ritual. Or, to use the language of the St.  Matthew Passion: “His flesh and blood, o preciousness/ He bequeaths into my hand” (MP 12).9 What­ever f­ actor in the pro­cess of distancing the text of the Gospels from the ritual may have prompted the much-­discussed ‘double supper’ of Passover lamb and the institution of remembrance, for one who listens to the St. Matthew Passion the ritual of exodus from Egypt merges with the forgiveness of sins even before the cleansing through baptism. In the mind of the believer, the Passion, when set to m ­ usic by Bach, has long since found its place before the genuine power of baptism. Baptism has become more of a rite of initiation than a washing away of sins, even though a ‘sin’ has emerged that was as yet unknown to the first community: the hereditary sin of Adam and its generative importance for the species. Baptism thereby lost its relation to the guilt of the individual and became instead absorbed by its correlative with its singularity. ­After the eschatological hopes had faded over time, the guilt of life changed into the pressure on individuals who are exposed to the multiplicity of their life, in contrast to the simplicity of this originary guilt. The immea­sur­ableness of forgiveness that bread and wine

3 2    S t . Matthe w Passi on

promised in the Last Supper could relate only to the content of consciousness. In its almost ecumenical disregard for the subtleties of protestant ‘justification,’ Bach’s Passion is shot through and vivified by the notion of the vicarious suffering of the Lamb for the sake of the soul. The superiority of the work also consists in its theological ‘generosity.’ It shapes the contour of the entire text, from the incident in Bethany to the sealing of the tomb. It reaches a kind of ‘originality’ that—­though it does not derive from the ritual core of the Gospel—­ nonetheless manages to restitute it from other ­factors. The extent of such theological generosity is open-­ended and remains perhaps forever to be determined, which can only mean: forever to be explored. E ­ very ‘reception’ has to risk it anew. In this re­spect, the ­music of the Passion is the successor of the ritual: the symbol can be generous. No one w ­ ill break into the recitativo and ask what exactly it means when saying grace while breaking bread, or when Jesus says: “Take, eat, this is my body” (Matt. 26:26). It is not an offer to doubt the text, to which the ­music bestows the sacral quality of being unquestionable. That is the life condition of its ‘generosity.’

Saving the ‘Implied Listener’ from Historical Reason Historical Bible criticism has peeled away much that was obviously fragmentation or insertion, and any reader turning from critical analy­sis back to the text w ­ ill not be able to dismiss this; she has to assume that the same must have been apparent especially for pious readers and listeners, in proportion to their immersion in the holy scripture. Are the palpable inconsistencies of the text supposed to cause no discomfort? Bach’s Passion ­music allows even us late descendants of centuries of enlightened dissection of the Gospels to fail to hear, as it ­were, the disjointedness of the textual tradition in Matthew. We begin to understand why the textual vigilance we assumed in the pious readers never resulted in discomfort. The contradictions in the drama dis­appear, which takes place entirely on the level of divine-­human

Th e Ho r izo n    3 3

existence—­whatever such a double nature might be—­and which in regard to the imminent end had to be incompatible: suffering and glory, death and return for the Last Judgment. What the text seemingly could not keep together, ­music, impervious to logic, homogenizes. It does not recognize the question of the identity of a torn subject who within the shortest time span can experience regal pride and creaturely fear. At the Last Supper with his apostles, Jesus said grace over the chalice, equated wine with his blood, and encouraged his companions to drink: spilling his blood would result in the New Testament, would seal for many the new covenant (diatheke) for the forgiveness of their sins. Immediately ­after this prediction of bloodshed and forgiveness follows the messianic prophecy as the final goal: “From this moment forth I ­will no longer drink from this fruit of the grapevine u ­ ntil the day when I ­will drink it anew with you within my ­father’s kingdom” (Matt. 26:29; see MP 11). Death, forgiveness, and salvation are twisted and braided into one another in a manner that is hardly comprehensible. Why does this one have to die so that sins can be forgiven and drinks can be had in the kingdom of the ­Father? So much for so ­little? Yet this is the legacy the soprano receives “with joy”: “Although my heart is swimming in tears/ ­Because Jesus takes leave of me” (MP 12). This is a reflection of the ambivalence of events; in the aria it seems that the soul already partakes in the purification through this blood and is worthy of indemnifying Jesus as he leaves this world: “If the world is too small for you, / Ah, you alone s­ hall be for me / More than heaven and earth” (MP 13). In the report of the evangelist, every­body joins in singing a hymn (hymnezantes) before they go forth to the Mount of Olives. But Jesus has to give yet a dif­fer­ent message: “This night all of you w ­ ill be offended ­because of me” (Matt. 26:31). At that moment, he is not the sacrificial lamb that the opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion had conjured as its guiding figure—­the lamb whose blood has to be shed in order to gain renewed f­avor from God; he is the shepherd who is being beaten, and “the sheep of the flock ­will be scattered” (Matt. 26:31). They are lost just as the sheep of a flock would be lost if their shepherd had abandoned them. No amount of textual criticism

3 4    S t . Matthe w Passi on

could ever have admitted that the following sentence had been uttered by Jesus: “But ­after I am risen again, I ­will go before you into Galilee” (Matt. 26:32). But in the eyes of the evangelist, Jesus must have been frightened by the words in the Old Testament about the beaten shepherd and his dispersed flock; for he tells them how and where the shepherd ­will re­unite the flock. The ever-­loquacious Peter promptly failed to hear the word about resurrection and the renewal of the flock, and only remembered the skandalizesthai, the taking offense at what was about to happen. ‘Failing to hear’ is a psychological term. ­Those who listen to the St. Matthew Passion do not need it. Confidingly, the chorus relieves them of any suspicious thoughts by taking up the motif of the shepherd as if it had never been used in connection with the abandonment of the flock: “Acknowledge me, my keeper / My shepherd, take me in!” (MP 15). ­After that, Peter is the one who adopts the wrong tone by stubbornly picking up the thread when it has long been spun around the events of the Passion. ­Music alone founds an identity that could not exist in the text even if the evangelist had attended to it with all his intensity rather than compiling heterogeneous m ­ atter. Just before Bible criticism began to turn the offense of the one suffering on the cross into the scandal of the text, Bach, as if he had a premonition, found a way to save a dif­fer­ent carry­ing capacity of the Gospel. One would have to be devout enough to understand—or even ‘believe’—­this act of saving the image alone from the impending catastrophe as an event of salvation. For every­one outside the circle of trust in salvation, something uncanny is happening: the preemption through the spirit of ­music against the approaching historical reason. With each listening to the St. Matthew Passion one witnesses the creation of an institution that cannot have temporal continuity with the institution of the Last Supper but that nonetheless accepts this heritage as if it w ­ ere that of the beaten shepherd for his abandoned flock. The founding of identity h ­ ere can only be a m ­ atter of ‘art.’ This is obvious from the fact that ­because the apostles ­were overtaken by the blessings of sleep, they could not know of the real ‘offense’: the offense of the Son of man quarreling with his ­Father. The one

Th e Ho r izo n    3 5

who ­earlier had offered the cup as an image of salvation now speaks of a cup—­the same one?—­that may pass from him. Only for the ears of his religious posterity does Jesus express doubt, and despair ­whether he could or should pay the ultimate price. It is the unprovoked temptation not to be the one whom he had just declared himself to be. Or, which rarely if ever had been read from this text: the temptation to renegotiate with the ­Father the terms of forgiveness and of owner­ship of the kingdom, the necessity of which at this moment he no longer accepts—­just as the nonreligious listener to the St. Matthew Passion does not comprehend them as necessary. Annoyance and offensiveness in both cases are implied in the ­Father’s ‘­will.’ It turns Jesus into an instrument of a directive that must have set the conditions ­under which he now acts. Inevitable—­why? Jesus does not ask this question, and yet must have pondered the possibility of solving the task without self-­sacrifice. By subjecting himself to what is now an external ­will, he transforms himself from a shepherd into a sacrificial lamb of whom it is nonsensical to say that it offers itself in sacrifice. He is the lamb b ­ ecause he is being sacrificed from this moment on, ­after he had admitted—­inaudible to the sleepers—­that it is not his ­will that w ­ ill be done in order to save all the ­others. The last words on the cross in the Aramaic language are thus foreshadowed ­here: the lament that he has been abandoned by the one whose ­will he has done, as if it w ­ ere the most insidious of all the unknown conditions in a contract no one has seen. It prob­ably is the diatheke [covenant] of which Jesus has spoken with the cup in his hands that he now references when he says he wants to be relieved of an intention that has become alien to him. What the readers of the Gospel had to accept as the humanity of the Son of man, dogma turned into almost Docetist relief and mitigation: How could the Son of God ever ­really fall into disunity with his ­Father? Would this not have meant speaking in a language unsuited for intra-­divine communication? Was it only the appearance of an event [Sein-­an-­sich] to which every­body relates just as the apostles did, who rightly insisted on their need for sleep? ­There was no witness to this scene—­and ­there could not have been one. It was as if it never happened—­why should they have to stay awake with him?

3 6    S t . Matthe w Passi on

Once again, the meaning of m ­ usic is deepened: it lets us bear the unbearable, and in place of the mercy of sleep, it puts the grace of its own beauty, unfathomable to the sleepers.

The Meta­phorical Horizon The Ransom ‘Redemption’ has become a quotidian word a­ fter two Christian millennia. B ­ ecause h ­ uman beings always want to be ‘redeemed’ from one ­thing or another, the attractive power of this concept has remained constant, not least ­because it was not quite clear from what this new chapter of history had promised redemption. Yet even if it had been clearer from what redemption was promised and vouched for, and even if the need for redemption had been commensurate with this promise, the causal connection between the events in the Bible, their protagonist, and the success of redemption might have indeed been acknowledged but not understood with regard to their mode and consequence. ­Going back to the au­then­tic findings of the linguistic and imaginative ‘meanings’ at the basis of this concept-­to-be, one is taken aback, perturbed, perhaps even shocked by the inevitability of the connotation ‘ransom.’10 ­After all, philosophy and theology share a certain chrematophobia, a fear of the role of money: it is common to both Socrates and Jesus and their ‘apostles’ up to Luther’s rebellion against the connection between salvation and money. It thus sounds bad that redemption was once conceived of as a ‘release’ from an alien power by means of a demanded or negotiated price. This conception has its root in a world in which slavery, capture in war, and all sorts of punishment from which one could be ransomed and released ­were the norm. Some of ­these practices existed solely to exact ransom, conceived as exchange for booty. The God of the Old Testament is the redeemer of his chosen ­people from their subordination, and if he does not seem to be paying ransom, this is only ­because no one recognizes that preventing and waiving an even

Th e Ho r izo n    3 7

worse fate counts as a ‘premium’ ­toward liberation. ­After all, the reservoir of plagues for the pha­raoh was not empty when he acquiesced and let the p ­ eople of the alien god go. Ransom also means: renouncing the use of one’s full potential. In all of this, the question remains why this power­ful being, who could create an entire world with his ‘outstretched arm’ and the power of his word, would let himself be dragged into negotiations that belie his majesty. The basic thought that ‘every­thing has its price’ could hardly belong to the most power­ful being, even if he still lacked the attribute of omnipotence that was bestowed on him ­later. While the princi­ple of ‘ransoming’ is already part of Israel’s history, it culminates in the offering of ‘ransom money’ (lytrón) as the core of the promise of redemption in the Passion, as, for example, in Mark: “The Son of man has come to give his life as ransom for the many” (Mark 10:45). Regardless of ­whether textual criticism would ever admit this to be a Logion of Jesus: against the meta­ phorical backdrop of the language of suffering and death, this sentence represents a ‘ransoming’ of many or even of most (hoi polloi) from servitude. This was identified with increasing caution as servitude to sin, but must originally have been servitude to the confuser and accuser (diabolos), whose rights could not simply be denied—­after all, ­there ­were ‘relations,’ one was party to the same ‘trial’!—­but had to be purchased or cunningly evaded. ­Every Docetism prefers cunning—­but the ­future church could never have become ‘Roman’ had it not been able to pre­sent proceedings amenable to juridical codification. It was therefore the most practical means of a merciful divine ­Father to offer to his creatures amnesty, however flimsy in substance and ­limited by its inapplicability to ­future sinning. At stake is the incontestability, the ‘realism’ of equivalency within a culture constituted by juridical thought. That the ransom money was not ‘properly’ handed over was due to the fact that in the theological environment of the New Testament this could not be represented other­wise. It is not difficult to imagine a juridically milder demand: the ransom money would be deposited ­until the day of the trial, when all demands would be

3 8    S t . Matthe w Passi on

weighed against one another—­soon, in other words. It was only natu­ral that Paul would refer the acquittal of guilt to the day of the trial as the anticipation of its sentence. In retrospect, all of this looks as though it had been manufactured for, or at least offered to, the crude ‘realism’ of t­hose Romans in North Africa—­for Tertullian, Arnobius, and especially Augustine, for whom the right to salvation could not be codified enough. Even though it would not be systematized ­until the third and fourth centuries, the right to salvation has antecedents. It creates much less speculative distance than it does, say, for the Greeks in Alexandria, who did not care as much for the relief from guilt as they did for the possibility of deification. At this point the trea­sury of mercy becomes infinite, which it need not have been for the formality of paying ransom; it had to become infinite only ­because for this sacrifice a real increase in salvation had to be defined: ­humans became more than they ever ­were, and the snake’s promise in paradise became the prophecy of the right end, yet with regrettably wrong means. The infinity of the trea­sury of mercy demanded that the ridiculously finite debt of the Fallen Angel could be waived. Origen drew the consequences only when he made the iterability of the world and of the opportunities for salvation into the essence of salvation itself. Anathema sit! [Let it be anathema!] was the verdict on the greatest heretic in Church history who could imagine himself forgiven, like the Prince of Darkness. Ransom money stands for something ­else, for a value that has come due and that needs to be compensated for, in extreme cases, with a lifetime of servitude. This is especially the case with cultic sacrifices where every­thing depends on ­whether one party is satisfied with the substitution of one t­hing for another, like Abraham’s El Shaddai with the ram instead of Isaac. The difference between symbolic and natu­ral demands was ­here instituted where every­ thing depends on the recognition of the demand and its orderly depreciation. A symbol is as much the opposite of mere appearance as the t­ hing itself, ­because the opponent has ‘elevated’ it to this status. Value is constituted by exchange. The attempt to save the symbol from Doce-

Th e Ho r izo n    3 9

tism thus precedes by far the ­great debates about nominalism and the Eucharist: Jesus is not—­unlike the ram—­a mere substitute; as the one who is without sin and without guilt, he embodies the highest value of a relationship to God. Already at the time of Peter’s first Letter (I, 18) ­there must have been reason to insist that this Christ who had suffered in our stead (epathen hyper hymon) was entirely f­ ree of cunning so that he could carry nothing but our sins into his death on the cross. It is as if an exchange had taken place: the transfer of guilt from t­hose who had too much of it onto him who was ­free to bear every­thing and make it dis­appear. It is worth paying attention not just to the awkwardness of this image of exchange but also to the obvious burden of inquiries, which are still alien to the Evangelist of the St. Matthew Passion. The quality of solutions might be worrisome, above all in their confusing multiplicity, but what becomes vis­i­ble is how early arise the prob­ lems of real­ity and the symbol, prob­lems that proliferate and blossom fully in scholasticism, and how their common goal is to avoid the notion of mere appearance, which in turn seems necessary to ‘save’ the purity of the notion of God. Saving this purity was not the ‘meaning’ of a story that had to pay down the ‘surplus’ in God’s intensification in the Old Testament to the very death of God: it is just this point that Bach’s St. Matthew Passion keeps in mind for its late listener who has passed through new purities of abstraction ­after theology or is still ‘laboring’ within them. With regard to the background metaphorics of ‘ransom money,’ it is worth remembering Georg Simmel’s analy­sis of ‘substance’ in the concept of value in his Philosophy of Money of 1900: in the symbolic ­there always has to be a remainder of the valued substance lest the nominalism in the value sign lead to an evaporation of trust. Even at the moment when Cassirer’s animal symbolicum has achieved the full dignity of its existence, it has to carry as a burden—as a kind of ‘anthropoge­ne­tic remainder’—­the oscillation between ‘being’ and ‘appearance.’ This is not its ‘sin,’ but has come to the fore ­because of it. The world in which redemption can be conceived as the rendering of ‘ransom money’ is shot through with property relations between h ­ uman beings: ­fathers own ­children; men, ­women; rulers,

4 0    S t . Matthe w Passi on

subjects; gods, h ­ umans. ­These relations are defined as slavery only when this property passes from one hand to another. That God, as their creator, owns the world and h ­ uman beings, is absorbed into the demand for obedience to him as lawgiver and contractual partner, but it survives as a corollary to the first article of faith into con­ temporary Christian theology: in Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament, it is still a central thesis that ­humans must not claim to belong to themselves. Whenever the Bible considers the power (exousia) of Satan over ­humans, at stake is the exercise of a property right that seems derived from that of the creator. How exactly this is the case remains a conundrum. Since Cain and Abel (both still equally treated), the firstlings of birth and harvest belong to the creator as a preferential gift, but also as symbolic substitute for his relinquishing the w ­ hole. The ­human firstborn belongs to God; but then the law from Mount Sinai stipulated that one of the twelve tribes should take the place of the firstborns of all ­others: the descendants of Jacob’s son Levi. The world can exist only ­because of the partial relinquishment of the creator’s property rights, and the reliability of this concession is legally binding. Sacral law has developed the meaning of ‘substitution’ just as Christian dogma would propagate the cultivation of an intermediary sphere between realism and symbolism. Tying the concept of redemption to that of property turns ‘sin’ into a heterogeneous ingredient. The thought that the entire species had sinned in Adam seems like a curiously belated ‘translation’ of the fact that owner­ship of ­humans passes from one hand to another: from that of the Lord of the Garden to that of the Ruler of the World. God had not been able to, indeed could not, insist on his property ­because the ­enemy had penetrated his domain—­through the cunning of the metamorphosis of the snake, as is only appropriate for a false god. ­There would be an arrangement for a reversal. The vari­ous strands of Docetism ­were consistent enough to describe the means for this reversal again as metamorphosis and insinuation, without realizing that the time for ‘immoral’ gods was over, due to the pressure from philosophy, which was no longer willing to allow gods the exercise of every­thing entailed in their concept.

Th e Ho r izo n    4 1

Looked at closely, the circuitousness and the painfulness of the Passion result from the re­spect for property rights as the guarantee that the world endures. The late prophets as well as the apocalypticists would have liked to see God in the glory of someone who exercised his right over every­thing when he liberated ‘his p ­ eople’ from servitude and waived their contractual obligations. Messianism contains a good deal of this apocalyptic substitution of vio­lence for justice insofar as vio­lence is simply the enforcement of an ‘original’ universal property right. Sitting in judgment of the world is also a consequence of owning it, not of some revulsion God may feel against sins as an injury to his majesty. It is not surprising that the first centuries of Christian history, when the expectation of Christ’s imminent return had to be dampened, w ­ ere characterized by the figure of the martyr who quite unexpectedly confirmed God’s claim to obedience with blood—­‘ransom money’ in small change for the unexpected return of the pact with Satan. The blood of the martyrs quieted the doubts as to ­whether the renewed state of fallibility that emerged with the continuation of the world could perhaps be remedied only through the repetition of baptism. On the graves of saints the memorial supper for the Saint would be held. Whereas baptism was oriented ­toward the one resurrected on Easter, the Eucharist was directed t­ oward the one ­dying on the cross. In fact, one could go further and say: the Eucharist was directed ­toward Jesus’s most difficult moment of abandonment by God, in which he became one with ­those lost in captivity. In that moment he offered himself to the angel of death, the Prince of Darkness in more than just a symbolical manner. The descent into the underworld while lying in the tomb is nothing but the result of this offer: the Passion was the presupposition for the inversion of the events in paradise—­namely, to come into the realm of the Other, to demand from him his property on the condition of once again leaving this realm. Even without cunning, without recourse to Docetism, the ­legal framework for the descensus ad inferos can thus be reconstructed, while at the same time avoiding Messianism’s approximation to a mere power move and triumphalism (which was supposed to remain imperceptible). ­Every such approximation raises the nagging question: Why d ­ idn’t power and strong-­arming immediately

4 2    S t . Matthe w Passi on

accomplish every­thing, which would have amounted to the salvific act. Instead, it was all approximation to ­legal conditions within preexisting property requirements. The connection between property and obedience is constitutive for the concept of sin as well as its atonement. The accent in this set of issues may have shifted to negation: whoever is not someone’s property does not have to act with obedience. For biblical narration it is more impor­tant that the one who does not obey negates both the right of the property owner and his obligation to protect; he becomes a masterless res nullius, is expelled, and rightfully falls into the hands of o ­ thers. Obedience thus is the essence of restitution: absolute obedience that cannot be referred to any ‘morality.’ The Passion is first and foremost injustice, a mockery of all justice. As embodied obedience, the cross is restitution of owner­ship as right and obligation. Sins are atoned only insofar as they had disputed owner­ ship. While the content of God’s directives about his property look as though they are part of a moral law, their compulsory quality derives from something ­else entirely: something like the constant continuation of the “let t­here be!” of creation with its “and t­here was!” The existence of sin is like creation having not been executed fully; it marks the refusal of Nothing to surrender and to become something. ­Wasn’t the fall of the angels a contradiction and a re­sis­ tance to creation? The Passion is not the pre­sen­ta­tion of an ideal of godly be­hav­ior that, like the platonic virtues, would evince its adoption by sheer contemplation. The Passion is the act of renewing owner­ship of the species through obedience; and the l­egal warranty for this obedience. That is why the decision about the Passion had already been made on the Mount of Olives: it is not the high-­minded ac­cep­tance of the role to save the world and then judge it at its end; rather, it is the terrified confrontation with obedience as an imposition that ­will always result in subjection, never in f­ ree ­will. It is not only that ‘autonomy’ remains unknown—it is excluded completely as a reservation against all obedience. ­There is a rabbinical parable about the obligation to ransom Jewish slaves from heathen captivity that is often discussed in exegetical lit­er­a­ture ­because it illustrates the horizon in which ‘ransom money’

Th e Ho r izo n    4 3

functions not as a means to freedom but as the transferal from one bondage into another. ­There is no such t­hing as res nullius: the son of a friend of the king has fallen into captivity and is ransomed by the king, who immediately clarifies that he has not freed him but transferred him into his own captivity. He can thus justify his ­orders with the words: “You are my slave!” It was the same, the story goes on, when God ransomed the seed of his friend Abraham from captivity in Egypt; he assumed them not as his c­ hildren but as his slaves and could tell them in cases of disobedience: “You are my slaves!” Ransom money, in the context of Jesus’s contemporaries, appears to be a means of ‘mea­sured’ variability. It cannot effectuate freedom, only the transfer into another’s property. One can see now that the mysticism of freedom and absolution in Paul’s letter to the Romans, which promises the possibility of passing in front of the judge of the world, would in the long term be the more durable interpretation of redemption (apolytrosis)—­because it is more in­de­pen­dent of the comprehension of the world.

The Lamb Lambs are sexually immature sheep. They are sacrificial animals, especially among the firstling sacrifices that are most pleasing to God, and they are the sacrifice most worthy of pity b ­ ecause of their innocence. When compared to a lamb, a wolf with all its greed must make the worst impression. In the opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, the lamb cuts a rather embarrassing figure. True, as the ‘lamb of God’ innocently slaughtered on the cross, it is full of biblical and liturgical dignity. But the fact that lamb [Lamm] rhymes with groom [Bräutigam] is its downfall. The ­daughters of Zion who are called forth with the first words of the chorus are supposed to see the groom—­and only in introducing the groom does it fall to the ­daughters to lament—­ but against all logic they are supposed to see him “as a lamb.” In addition, they employ the figure of one who has “to bear the wood for the cross” by himself (MP 1)—­a turn of phrase that obviously suggests that the lamb has to carry the very firewood upon which it ­will be sacrificed as a burnt offering.

4 4    S t . Matthe w Passi on

This confusion of the mystical groom of the believer’s soul with the sacrificial animal of the expired t­emple ritual creates a quandary that, in its uninspired musical setting, is powerfully interrupted by the word of the Evangelist and his transition to the prophecy of delivering the Son of man to the crucifixion. The contrast with the softish haze of the initial double chorus liberates the listener from the embarrassment of having to contemplate more precisely the interferences of this meta­phor. The familiarity of the lamb as the animal of innocence and sacrifice (which turns its conjunction with the groom into an oxymoron) made it into the iconic companion of both Johns: John the Baptist, who upon seeing Jesus approach the banks of the River Jordan exclaimed: “Behold the lamb of God” (John 1:36)—­and John of the Apocalypse who commences his vision with “And I saw the lamb standing on Mount Zion . . .” (Rev. 14:1). Even before, the lamb, standing between the elders “as if it was strangled” (Rev. 5:6), was the only apocalyptic figure worthy of accepting the book of judgment and breaking its seven seals. It is a figure of the revelation par excellence. Whenever a writer encounters the prob­lem of requiring a ‘revelation’ in order to motivate the plot—­a divine aid to prevent narrative collapse—­the lamb is a likely option. Thomas Mann in The Holy Sinner pointedly used it twice in order to save the pope in Rome from impending disaster through the im­mense sinner Gregorius. How ­else could he have been whisked away from his stone in the ­middle of the lake and onto the papal throne than by a bleeding lamb? Thomas Mann ­here mea­sures himself with Johann Sebastian Bach—­and both fail. For even the reader most willing to entertain the exuberant legends and excesses of the ­Middle Ages ­will disagree with the author’s ‘solution’ to an aporia and ask more than once: Was that ­really necessary? The sacrificial lamb was patient, ­because it was s­ ilent; this bleeding lamb talks, and peremptorily so. The adroitness in the arrangement of the vision of the lamb comes from the attractive impossibility of the scene in a decayed, already overgrown Rome, as if nothing mattered anymore before the end of times. At a marble bench adorned with the heads of Pan, and with a view onto a toppled pillar with the figure of Amor, who has lost

Th e Ho r izo n    4 5

his head but kept his bow and arrow, the lamb is said to have appeared before the patrician Anicius in the dusk of a mild April eve­ ning: “It bled from its side, opened its pitiful lamb’s mouth and pronounced with a shaky but im­mensely sweet voice that it had ­great t­ hings to announce to Probus.”11 Probus ­doesn’t focus on the greatness of the lamb but only sees its piteousness, so that his eyes fill with tears and his heart “overflows with love.”12 This is one of the most impor­tant tricks to banish what is unbearable: the sentimentality of the old Roman for the ‘lamb of God,’ his caritative willingness to tend to its wounds, and, on the other hand, the unexpected toughness of the lamb that withdraws from e­ very act of care ­because it fulfills an exclusive mission: “­Don’t worry about that . . . ​ it is quite necessary that I bleed.”13 This switching of ‘roles’ [in Mann’s The Holy Sinner], the contrast between the moods and the external condition of the events breaks its aesthetic inadmissibility: it amounts to vio­lence against readers for long enough u ­ ntil they start to enjoy it. Then it is too late. For the lamb is filled with its mandate to give instructions so that its habetis papam [you have a pope] can be followed with procuring the sinner from the inhospitable desert without contradiction and hesitation. ­After the lamb’s imperious directives for changing history, the scene can end in a kitschy transformation of drops of blood into rosebuds. To the reader this may seem like Thomas Mann’s superfluous competition with his dead rival Franz Werfel, but soon it becomes clear that it is a demonstration of objectification: the other, the church dignitary, to whom the lamb had also appeared, did not see the miracle of the rosebuds—­and when both visions are compared, this difference in seeming details yields the necessary confirmation of reliability. Nothing in the world may correspond too closely to one’s wishes. Thomas Mann knew the real­ity princi­ple firsthand. Only when the messengers sent by the papal interregnum have reached the pitifully shrunken penitent on his rock in the lake—­ without any knowledge yet of the proportions between sinfulness and repentance, dubious about this demonic phantom between animal and man, between hedgehog and groundhog—­only then does the memory of the animal that gave directions on how to save the

4 6    S t . Matthe w Passi on

papacy return, the memory of the “double vision of a most moving lamb”14 that by itself turns into the “lamb of God,” the most commonly invoked liturgical symbol since John the Baptist. This brutishly disfigured creature on the rock sheds a tear from each eye, not drops of blood—­nothing could have been in­ven­ted more felicitously for this moment of recognition in the unrecognizable than the exclusion of dev­ilish deception at the sight of tears. The lamb of both Roman visions was certified by its blood, suitable for a religion honoring the bloodiest of sacrifices and the consecration of its altars through blood. “Are you crying, dearest creature?” asks Sextus Anicius Probus on the penitent’s rock, and continues with a question that should evince the truth: “By the blood of the lamb, w ­ ere you a ­human being before your current state was conferred to you?”15 The embarrassment of the bleeding, talking lamb in The Holy Sinner ­isn’t simply aesthetic. The lamb of the Passion is ­silent. In that re­spect, it was the ‘fulfillment’ of ancient prophecy. In the Acts of the Apostles, the trea­surer of the Nubian queen Candace reads in the prophet Isaiah ­these enigmatic words: “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; / And as a lamb before its shearers is ­silent, / So he opened not his mouth” (Acts 8:32; Isaiah 53:7). At this point the ‘Spirit’ has to bring in the Apostle Philip to provoke in the distant queen’s trea­surer a religiously fruitful confusion about ­whether he understands what he is reading. Of course, he does not, b ­ ecause book religions always need experts for that. The apostle explains every­thing as a prefiguration of the Passion and death of Jesus, and at the next oasis the foreign functionary stops and has himself baptized. The lamb ‘speaks’ only when it is explained. Even in John the Evangelist, the ‘Word’ incarnate has not yet made a sound when the Baptist in the desert points to the approaching Jesus: “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The next day—­Jesus still has not said a word—­ the abbreviated formula: “Behold the Lamb of God!” (John 1:36). Only to the visionary of John’s Revelation does a chimera rising from the ocean appear “like a lamb, and it spoke like a dragon” (Rev. 13:11). It is not the revelatory figure of the sealed book; the voice of the dragon is one of vio­lence rather than of mildness—

Th e Ho r izo n    4 7

in any case, it is not the model of the bleeding-­speaking lamb of The Holy Sinner. The lamb is the animal of the ritual feast commemorating the flight from Egypt. In order to make the connection between the words of the Baptist at the beginning of his Gospel and the Passover lamb, the evangelist John had to put the crucifixion of Jesus on the day of preparation, on the moment when the lambs ­were slaughtered for the upcoming Passover cele­brations starting on the fifteenth of the month of Nisan. He thus extends the validity of the prescription from the second book of Moses that no bone of the Passover lamb may be broken to the exemption of Jesus from crucifragium, the obligatory breaking of the bones to ascertain the death of ­those crucified. John’s looping back at the end to the beginning of his Gospel through the meta­phor of the lamb makes it difficult for him to justify the death of Jesus. More about this l­ater. ­Here it only serves to characterize the evangelist, and that having the lamb be ‘pregnant with meaning’ and the Baptist ‘proven right’ are worth his effort. He also gave up the possibility that Jesus’s farewell supper the night before was a Passover meal, b ­ ecause on the thirteenth of Nisan consecrated lambs, which could be slaughtered only in the t­ emple area, ­were not yet available. Bach’s Passion of St. John therefore perfectly follows the intentions of the evangelist when it begins with the crossing of the Kidron stream: into the garden where the arrest could be ‘defused’ theologically by a short demonstration of power with the high priest’s servant. A person listening to the St. Matthew Passion is ­under the impression that Jesus would eat the Passover lamb with his apostles and have every­thing prepared. What­ever may have happened when they fi­nally sat down and the traitor was stigmatized by Jesus, ­there is no longer any mention of eating the lamb. The meal seems to consist only of bread and wine, which traditionally w ­ ere blessed by the master of the ­house before the lamb was eaten. This is not a question of investigating ‘historically’ ­whether this was a Passover meal and was celebrated as such; what is at stake is the impression, which is not a m ­ istake, but intentionally created in the recounting of the

4 8    S t . Matthe w Passi on

Passion, that ­after the institution of the ‘new’ ritual the ‘old’ one was simply forgotten. The Gospel’s silence about eating the lamb gave Bach the opportunity to open the Passion with the double chorus “Come, d ­ aughters, help me lament” and the interlaced chorale “O innocent Lamb of God” (MP 1). The lamb is not being eaten, it w ­ ill be sacrificed. As such, its equivalent is not the Passover lamb but the two lambs that ­were slaughtered daily in the t­ emple rite as burnt offerings. From the point of view of the ‘original’ congregation, such sacrifices have come to an end. All rites of the lamb—­that of the ­temple as well as that commemorating the Exodus—­are merged into the one lamb, “slaughtered on the trunk of the cross” (MP 1). The intentional passing over of the main part of the Passover meal is designed to let Jesus appear as the last lamb, the fulfillment of all prophecies and the dissolution of all ritual obligations. In the ­future, the only lambs are ­those that are not sacrificed: lambs of the flock of the ‘good shepherd’ as the central figure in Early Christian iconography, its high point being the mosaic in the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. This change of roles was initiated by John when he has Jesus say about himself: “I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd gives his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). It is as if Jesus had not quite agreed to the baptismal declaration that he is the lamb. In Peter’s first epistle this change of roles is accomplished to such a degree that neither the lives of sheep nor that of the shepherd are threatened any longer—as if the ‘bloody’ part of history had already vanished in the distance: “For you w ­ ere like sheep g­ oing astray, but have now returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls” (1 Peter 2:25). Bach’s predilection for the figure of the ‘faithful shepherd’ is well documented in his cantatas. For the late hearer, the absence of any allusion to the world of Aesop’s fables is remarkable. The good pasture, “the delicious grass / of his holy Word” as in The Lord Is My Faithful Shepherd (BWV 112), is thematically more pressing than any threat by a wolf. What ­causes fear is at most the absence of the shepherd when food is scarce: “Though my shepherd may remain hidden,” as one finds in You Shepherd of Israel, Listen (BWV 104).

Th e Ho r izo n    4 9

But t­here is always consolation in the faithfulness of the shepherd: “The highest shepherd watches over me, / what use are my worries? / Indeed e­ very morning / is the shepherd’s goodness renewed” (ibid.). It is against this almost pastoral and idyllic background that one has to see the ‘theological summa,’ which in the St. Matthew Passion is inserted with the same imagery, but without shying away from the harshest of impositions a­ fter the gruesome screams of “Barabbas!” and “Let him be crucified!” as an abbreviated form of the choral: “How strange is this punishment! / The good shepherd suffers for the sheep. / The Lord, the righ­teous one, atones for the crime / on his servants’s behalf” (MP 46).

And the Listening Never Ends An Apostrophe Goethe Could Not Understand In the autumnal friendship between Goethe and Carl Friedrich Zelter, the Berlin musician has never received the attention he deserves. Yet his letters are incomparably fresh, and superior in their expression of feeling to t­ hose of Goethe in his last de­cade. And if we w ­ ere to read them only to help solve the one riddle of how he was able to set Goethe’s most intimate poem, “At Midnight” [“Um Mitternacht”], to ­music, it would be well worth the effort to highlight Zelter’s role. Even in his choice of anecdotes, Zelter was superior to his friend in Weimar. On February 21, 1829, he reported on the death of old Marcus Levin, Rahel Varnhagen’s f­ ather, a man with a sense of humor. How well this is written! “This wily fox on the day of his death asks the servant for ­water to wash and reproaches him that it is cold as ice; the servant then brings him boiling w ­ ater. ‘You oaf! Am I a pig that you want to scald?’ The servant comes back and says: ‘­there was no tepid w ­ ater to be found in the entire h ­ ouse!’ And Levin 16 Marcus laughed out loud and died.” Barely three weeks ­later, on March 11, Zelter, ­under the direction of his student Felix Mendelssohn, stages the St. Matthew Passion for the first time. Taking into account how long the rehearsals

5 0    S t . Matthe w Passi on

at his Singakademie must have lasted, it is obvious that Zelter lets the old Jewish man die with a variant of the gripping words which in Bach’s Passion the Evangelist has to sing: “But Jesus cried out loudly once again and died” (MP 61e). It is not blasphemous that Zelter had t­ hese words in mind and let the scream of one turn into the laughter of the other. The latter was just a smaller death, one in accordance with a man’s wish, not one for all mankind. Goethe was not a good reader of his friend’s letter; he ­wasn’t a good reader at all. It is almost irritating how, on March 4, he responds to Zelter’s anecdote; not only irritating but also indicative of Goethe’s utter inability to let death be what it is. That is the blind spot of his worldview. Without even mentioning the protagonist of the story (and what would be the w ­ hole story without the presence of someone d ­ ying?), Goethe writes: “Your cute story about the servant who c­ ouldn’t get it into his head that hot and cold produce tepid ­water comes just at the right time.”17 And then he tries to repay his correspondent in his own coin, with an anecdote about an Irishman in a burning ­house who calms every­body down by saying that he is only renting. Goethe clearly does not respond with equivalent quality. Not only does he not mention death; he replaces a named person with a national type. H ­ ere, the reader, no longer someone d ­ ying, could laugh that the trivialities of marginal ­people are of no concern to him. If Zelter w ­ ere capable of scorn at all, it could be found in this sentence from his answer: “Your Irish bull is worth as much as my story. . . .”18 ­Today’s reader sees it differently.

Imagining Nietz­sche Listening to the St. Matthew Passion Louis Kelterborn, a student in Basel during the few years in which Nietz­sche lectured at the university, wrote a series of reminiscences in 1901 that w ­ ere first published in the 1940/42 critical edition of Nietz­sche’s works and letters edited by Wilhelm Hoppe. ­These recollections of a musically mediated relationship almost a quarter of a ­century e­ arlier provide the precious information that in addition

Th e Ho r izo n    5 1

to Mozart’s Requiem Nietz­sche also listened to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Basel’s Cathedral. On both occasions, Kelterborn remembered, Nietz­sche omitted the usual “direct or indirect reference to Wagner.” As for the Passion, Nietz­sche observed that ­there hardly could be a city “where one could get a better impression of the ­music,” b ­ ecause in Basel “the work is produced much like a church ser­vice and received by the audience as such. . . .” ­After that, however, the report implies that Nietz­sche went on to discuss Bach’s influence on Wagner, in par­tic­u­lar on the Meistersinger, as if only this reference would ratify a higher and ultimate destiny. We cannot reconstruct the experience b ­ ehind ­these notes. The person who recognized that the “pietism in Bach’s m ­ usic” belongs to the “spirit of the Counter-­Reformation,” and therefore was complicit with the spirit of modern m ­ usic, was no longer a Christian when he expressed this radical equivalence in a single phrase from ­Human, All-­Too-­Human: “This is how profoundly indebted we are to religious life.”19 This construction contains the entire cult of one musical idol. Let us ask hypothetically: If Nietz­sche had an ‘experience’ listening to the St. Matthew Passion in the Old Cathedral in Basel that went deeper than this construction of convergence, what would it have been? If I know anything about Nietz­sche, it is that the experiences that became impor­tant for his philosophy predominantly—if not exclusively—­had the quality of ‘offenses.’ If that is the case, ­there must be an experiential relationship between the phi­los­o­pher of the ‘Übermensch’ and the St. Matthew Passion that has l­ittle to do with the latter’s ‘theology’ of the suffering servant of God. If Jesus’s last words on the cross ­were “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” they could be heard as the epitome of what may not and cannot ever again happen to h ­ umans as soon as they are able to leave the lowlands of their pre-­Übermensch misery. The paradox of Jesus’s Aramaic words is this: Someone calls out to his own god and in so d ­ oing accuses him of not being t­ here, of abandonment, of not being his god. This god of the crucified is the one who must not exist if the abandonment of a Passion is not to recur. The antinomy of the last words demands a solution. Nietz­sche’s solution is the Übermensch.

5 2    S t . Matthe w Passi on

Listening to Rilke as He Listens to the St. Matthew Passion Half a c­ entury ­after Nietz­sche, Rilke listens to the St. Matthew Passion in the same place—in two separate parts, as was tradition before the competitive pressure exerted by Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—on March 20 and 21, 1920. On March 22, Rilke sent a report to Nanny Wunderly-­Volkart, the pen pal of his Swiss years in whose care he would spend his last days in 1926; in it he added the brochure with the text, in which he had underlined the recitative “He has done good ­things for all of us” (MP 48) and “In the eve­ning, when it was cool” (MP 64). She in turn attended a per­for­mance ten days ­later in Zu­rich, also in two parts. Rilke w ­ ill ask her w ­ hether it was also Karl Erb who had sung the Evangelist’s part and who, in the midst of Rilke’s feeling “this is too much for me right now,” had impressed him with an exemplary reticence: “. . . ​and yet irrefutably interpreting, just like someone who points . . .”20 This characterization still reveals the fear of being oppressed by the work. The ‘pointing’ Evangelist remains outside the field of play, between rhe­toric and conjuration; his ‘mastery’ is not that of the listener, but of the power emanating from the ­matter of which he must testify. “Observation and distance,” not emerging “from the experience”—­this is how Rilke defines the decision to withhold from “­today’s listener” something that would overwhelm them. He speaks of a listener for whom “Bach’s Evangelist could be even more ­simple, in the thoroughly protestant spirit of this enormous work, more standing on the side, more surprised . . .”21 In a subtle way, Rilke speaks less of Bach than of himself, or rather: through Bach of Rilke. The power­ful word, pitiable in its impotence, is not being ‘spoken’ but ‘pointed at.’ To speak of God and angels as if they surely do not exist, this artifice of lyrical incompatibility that saves the poet from the pain of having to be what he can only signify is projected on the Evangelist—­because he, in the person of Karl Erb, can hold himself back for an entirely dif­fer­ ent reason: namely, to keep open the ‘aesthetic’ approach to the work without the ‘experience’ of immersion in the faith.

Th e Ho r izo n    5 3

This is anything but obvious, for the St. Matthew Passion is at its heart a work of religious rhe­toric, a sermon by other means, which are less prone to chance than the artlessness of the pulpit: t­hose of the ‘law.’ Even Rilke’s reservations—­his regard for himself—­break into the work “at its most impor­tant parts,” where Bach “deployed his most basic and most exacting experiences: a craft incessantly perfected and a faith continuously practiced.”22 Rilke puts a full stop ­here where he could continue—­because he had begun ambivalently with the ‘continuously practiced’—­with the faith in this ‘incessantly perfected’ craft. This is a statement about the survival of this work of art, as it rests on an essential anachronism—­just like Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which are impervious to the disbelief in angels ­because they are deaf to t­ hose who scream: “Who, if I screamed, would hear me from the order of angels?”23 Who would not have seen that this overlaying of the subjunctive allows for two dif­fer­ent answers and strategies of resolution: Why still scream? and: Why not scream? This is what Bach has become, but this is not what he was, and above all not what he wanted to be. But what does this ­matter, if for a short moment we are listening to the aesthetics of reception? It is the ‘implied listener’ as the substitute for the author of the work who writes to the friend: “how pure, how unconcerned for their effect are ­these applications of his sensitivity.”24 Does the word ‘application’ not have a therapeutic function ­here? As if a pharmakon of special subtlety would have to be applied. How far are we from the understanding of ‘catharsis’ in Bernay’s reading of Aristotle? But up to this point only half of the letter is written and read. ‘The aesthetic’ is still a means of distancing an affront, as if the listener ­were spared any decisiveness so long as the decision for the crucifixion has not been made. For this ‘application of sensitivity’ shows itself again as “unforgettable” when Pilate asks the accusers: “What evil has he done then?” (MP 47); and before they can ‘scream even more,’ the Evangelist is delayed by the recitativo and the soprano aria in order to give the ‘true answer’ to Pilate’s question: “He has done good ­things for all of us; [. . .] other than that, my Jesus has done nothing” (MP 48).

5 4    S t . Matthe w Passi on

Rilke writes of this delay as if it ­were the grace period of his sensitivity: “One enters a musical valley of such mildness of climate that to dwell in it is almost too much for one’s strength, ­because one sees in front of oneself nothing but hardness and terror up to the steep summit in the eternal snow of sacrifice.”25 One sees ­here that the listeners’ dilemma consists in knowing all too well what awaits them and yet, in the as-if of their willingness, having to accept that before the mob ­will call for the crucifixion, they are granted what is more than just a reprieve: the genuine uncertainty of judgment vis-­à-­vis the innocence of the victim. It is this discrepancy that is “almost too much for one’s strength”: not to turn one’s knowledge of the Passion into its inevitability. This is not a story that one can ‘know.’ The meta­phor of the ‘steep summit in the eternal snow of sacrifice’ concerns not so much the path of the Passion as its inaccessibility for this listener—­and perhaps not only for this one. Rilke writes about the “increasing difficulty to take part immediately in the Christian experience.”26 The distance that the St. Matthew Passion, like all ‘aesthetic objects,’ also grants, does not sadden him; he is grateful for it. “Being enraptured” is not his t­ hing, and every­ thing keeps him away from that frosty summit, makes it palpable to him—­“again quite palpably”—­“how this agreement to which God and humanity come in the figure of the suffering Christ seems suspiciously to curtail”27 the mystery of this relation. The Passion shows God pushed into a corner b ­ ecause of h ­ umans—in order to provide them with an “essential relief.” Even though God would have “unlimited means of salvation” at his disposal, he now is tied ineluctably “to this one recognized solution.”28 God’s involvement with finitude unsettles the person who can revel in the infinities of a God. For this, God does not have to exist, can be unimaginable—­ and be so undefined that he can become every­thing, especially every­thing other than ‘flesh’ or h ­ uman body. Rilke does not forget the metamorphoses of the God of the Word vis-­à-­vis the Passion and its rejection of a ‘more beautiful’ Docetism: his idiosyncratic take on the Passion wants to keep open all ave­nues to world and figurality—as well as ­those back into nonconceptuality. His paganism draped in Christian language takes the position of God’s ‘higher’ interest as if it ­were not His interest in humanity. That is

Th e Ho r izo n    5 5

what he calls ‘immediacy.’ For him it is blocked by the anthropomorphic solution to the question of salvation. It is not one of Rilke’s most beautiful sentences that summarizes his ultimate difficulties and articulates them in the comparative of an immediacy that cannot be increased: “My heart, insofar as it is more immediately believing and more unconditional, cannot comprehend a god who would not be diminished by the per­sis­tence of a mediator, for what is the purpose of all this channeling of a power that formerly used to flood every­thing and urge us with most pressing inundations?”29 The antithesis in the meta­phors is quite evident: the steep-­frosty summit of the Passion and the flattest plane of a flood that w ­ ill erase and dissolve all figures. Rilke: the amorphous infinity from which every­thing can yet emerge versus the canonical rigidity of the figure. This is what has to occur again and again in the musical cele­bration of salvific deeds of the ‘Son of man.’ What a letter, in the midst of this often so precious correspondence. It is not yet exhausted and explained. It culminates in forging an essential link between the ‘too-­much-­of-­God’ and the ‘nature of ­music.’ For the latter is the counter-­figure to the meta­phor of flooding, to the aperture of that ‘infinity’ that the Greeks, without attaching a positive meaning to it, called apeiron [boundlessness, infinity] and ranked below their eidos. Thus, the letter about the St. Matthew Passion ends with an expression of astonishment as well as leniency: “Precisely this elementary too-­much-­of-­God entertains such an intense relationship to the nature of m ­ usic that I want to object to this most protestant of all ­music for the programmatically restricted mind from which it has originated, even if one has to concede again and again that it was made so purely and honestly part of its profession that it could reach, against its own purposes, ­toward the most tremendous.”30 The very m ­ usic that provides the listener Rilke with the ‘aesthetic distance’ to the unbearable turns out to be the adequate restriction to a form that the Passion represents for the ‘infinity’ of God. What Rilke discovers in his stance of nobly bowed defensiveness is the noncontingency of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion as a musical work of solitary rank—in accordance with this “steep summit in the eternal snow of sacrifice.”

5 6    S t . Matthe w Passi on

Wittgenstein’s ­Mother What can one say about a ­human being? This question may appear as too naive. For what has not already been said about h ­ uman beings! And yet the means to say something about ­human beings seem to me to be very l­imited—­not drastic enough to describe their meanness, not colorful enough to illustrate their goodness. No number of adjectives, no meta­phors alleviate the palpable paucity that makes itself felt in ­every phrase. How rare it is to capture someone with a word even in an obituary that clearly aims to empathize; it is especially when completeness is the objective that the banality of routine most often prevails. It is rare to experience how it could be other­wise. Hermine Wittgenstein, the phi­los­o­pher’s ­sister, commemorated her m ­ other in her private ­Family Remembrances: she was a ­woman with a talent for compassion but incapable of empathy who seemed to have no desires of her own; she was devoted only to her obligations in which her eight ­children figured as abstract items whom she was able neither to influence nor to understand, but whom she accepted as they ­were. Hermine encapsulates her feeling about her m ­ other’s capacity for compassion in a single sentence, when she remembers that while listening to the scene in the St.  Matthew Passion in which Jesus scolds the apostles for not staying awake with him, “the thought occurred to me: my m ­ other would not have fallen asleep.”31 Has a d ­ aughter ever said anything comparable about a m ­ other— whom in other instances she judges quite harshly? No psychological riddle, no worries about the abyssal depths of a character in whom empathy was absent—­just the reference to a scene, infinitely intensified by the ­music, that raises the most ­bitter complaint ever made to ­human beings, and the certitude that it could not have been made to her ­mother.

‘Never ­Will This Child Be Crucified . . .’ Bach has celebrated other feasts of the liturgical calendar: the cantata “Praise God in his Realms” he called “The Ascension Orato-

Th e Ho r izo n    5 7

rio” (BWV 11); in addition to the two Easter cantatas “Heaven laughs, Earth exults” (BWV 31) and “Christ lay in Death’s Bonds” (BWV 4), ­there is his Easter Oratorio “Come, hurry and run” (BWV 249); and t­ here is the Christmas Oratorio, prob­ably his most popu­ lar work. In none of ­these works was Bach able to fit the ­music to the theological content as well as he was in his passions, especially in the St. Matthew Passion. Most apparent is the lack of specificity in the compositions for the ascension, which could be ­adopted for other joyous occasions; the opening chorus of the Ascension Oratorio was written for the opening of the rebuilt Saint Thomas School in 1732. Precisely b ­ ecause ­there is nothing objectionable in this, the passions stand out as that which is most adequate to and incomparable in Bach’s musical mind. This is not a bit of personal psy­chol­ogy. Rather, it is anchored, even legitimized, by fifteen hundred years of se­lection among theological doctrines. The ascension has always been a pale event, not to be celebrated by t­hose who expected salvation from the Lord’s earliest return. The triumph of Easter was obscured by the lack of a public, by contradictory testimony, and on the ­whole by the necessity of adding the doubting twin Thomas as proof against Docetism. Christmas struck a nerve with Hellenistic communities and with ­mental attitudes that made it into the most impor­tant feast of the year. This came about with significant delay, as is evident from the fact that only one of the four evangelists reported the Christmas story and had to refer to a special source, the commemorative heart of Mary. Sentimental needs conflicted with the difficulties of determining the provenance and origin of the Son of man, his genealogy and patrilineal filiation, the exact time of his birth, and the correct Davidian birthplace. In this re­spect, the highly speculative beginning of the last Gospel was theologically liberating, ­because in sovereign manner it declared the Log­os eternal as well as temporal and carnal, but let it appear immediately with the initiation through the Baptist in the River Jordan, as if birth and childhood ­were unnecessary. Only the Passion and death are common to all the Gospels, and have been the center of Christian thought due to the affinity for the cross shown by the first theologian, Paul, and then by his

5 8    S t . Matthe w Passi on

followers Augustine and Luther. Bach is ­great b ­ ecause he has taken on this focus and made it resound in m ­ usic. Is this account unfair to Luke? Was not the second chapter of his Gospel with the nativity scene the ‘most successful’ story ever told in the world? It would be rather unfair if one did not harbor reservations against this predilection. ­Until ­today it has remained a ‘sentimental ­matter,’ and has been one of the most salient impediments for the historico-­critical spirit of the nineteenth c­ entury to hold on to the real existence of Jesus of Nazareth—­even without all the ele­ments of apotheosis. Luke had shown himself to be a theologian of facile accommodation, not least ­because of the fictional access to Mary as a source; he was closer to the world of a lit­er­a­ture that, since the completion of the canon, had lost much of its credibility: the world of the apocryphal gospels with their stories about Jesus’s childhood. The turn t­ oward Nazareth and Bethlehem was an indication of a forgetfulness in the face of apocalyptic promises that had faded even as threats, and that had to be revived from time to time by the ‘calculations’ of depressive heretics. As disappointing as it may be, it has to be said that Christmas has become the sweet and warm feast of Christendom—­the exception being the Eastern Church with its emphasis on the glorious rather than the vivid ‘epiphany’ of the Kosmokrator [ruler of world]—­ because it was the least determined by ‘Christology.’ It was the thread that anyone could continue to spin at any time, and in the spinning of which one could forget what was dogmatically problematic, like the meaning of the baptism in the Jordan as an initiation to a mission that, thereby, could not have begun with the shepherds and magi, with the twelve-­year-­old and his ­mother and the scribe in the ­temple. Piety is delicate, incredulity disinterested. That might be the reason we have so few testimonies that reflect any kind of distance on the decision to grant preponderance to the cele­bration in the manger, so few indications that this required the assurance of salvation: a savior who took more than thirty years to begin the work of salvation, who seemed so other-­worldly in his ‘epiphany’ before the envoys of the world, so alien to what was waiting for him, to what had been imposed upon him ­because he had accepted the instrument of flesh and thus the capacity to suffer and die.

Th e Ho r izo n    5 9

When the frontline medic Hans Carossa returned from the G ­ reat War to Lower Bavaria, he carried out a decision he had made in mortal danger: to describe his own childhood. It appeared, with the indefinite article, A Childhood, with Insel Press in 1922. He recounts the helpless attempt of the nine-­year-­old to put together a manger that he had envisioned in a feverish dream during the recovery from a grave illness. What the image-­averse ­father barely countenanced, the secret support of the ­mother achieved: an encouragement of the imagination that preceded all ­later creation. But ­there is also the quiet worry that it may be inadmissible to grant such a privilege to this sacred image, even though precisely its unreality was pleasant in retrospect. The joys of childhood are all vulnerable to that which one day ­will not be mere appearance: “Never w ­ ill this child be crucified, never w ­ ill this angel fly away, never w ­ ill this star set.”32 The certitude of the child makes the Passion unthinkable.

Escalations of a God

If It Was This One, It Can Be No Other In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. That is how the Bible begins, and that is what every­one whose faith is determined by the Bible believes to believe. To believe is not to know, but it is not sheer ignorance e­ ither. At least it appears that both faith and knowledge are focused on the same question: What was at the beginning? How was the beginning? Does it make sense to ‘think’ about the beginning in this or that way and to infer something from it? Those who ‘hold on to’ the first sentence of the Bible think they possess something other than a proposition about how the world ‘emerged.’ It did not emerge, it was created, and the creator was called ‘God.’ Nothing seems to cut deeper into mind and spirit than this hiatus between ‘creation’ and ‘emergence.’ But what does it consist in? Do we even know what we are talking about when faced

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     6 1

with this alternative, which might well be that of an ‘absolute fundamentalism’? Do we know what we inflict upon ourselves when we choose this or that ‘answer’ to the question of beginning? What is meant by the phrase ‘God created’? For ­those with a wider historical horizon, it is remarkable that this part of the first sentence of the Bible is increasingly difficult to understand, whereas the temporal determination ‘in the beginning,’ which only a few centuries ago seemed to represent the greatest hurdle to reason, now only attracts minor and milder inquiry. Cosmological models of the world’s ‘emergence’ have become retroconvergent: they ‘refer’ back to a degree zero of space and time, to a quasi-­nothing of all m ­ atter. ­Because we know of the expansion of the universe and the background radiation of three degrees Kelvin, this implies a beginning—­ but not a beginning when something was ‘created.’ Just a short time ago every­one seemed to know from h ­ uman experience and self-­ understanding what such ‘creation’ could entail. H ­ umans, too, ‘created,’ w ­ ere creatively active: as inventors, as artists. Much was made of the fact that h ­ uman beings possessed this quality of ‘being creative,’ especially by ­those who appeared to have been given it. All o ­ thers could participate in it by enjoying and using what was so mysteriously ‘created.’ The backlash and reversal came from t­ hose who claimed to have been endowed with this creative quality—­they no longer wanted this ‘exceptional’ quality. Every­one should be able to do what they, the creative ones, could do; it was only by virtue of a quirk in the division of ­labor that some ­were pursuing this métier, and o ­ thers a dif­fer­ent one. ­Those deemed special no longer wanted to be special, and they accomplished this by rejecting, in words, the aura of creativity: they called themselves ‘makers,’ ­because every­body ‘made’ something even when it became odious to find oneself called just a ‘maker’ in a field where every­ body seemed to be ‘making’ something. Disqualifying a politician by calling him a ‘maker’ or ‘doer’ was an anticipation of new, still vague attributes that endowed this ability with an aura of the fateful, perhaps of the sacred, more certainly of the moral, if not of the aesthetic. However the attributes may have shifted and changed their values, the intelligibility of the ‘creative’ as something that was concerned with ‘origin’ had been lost. The equivalent, in h ­ uman

6 2    S t . Matthe w Passi on

terms, for what God was thought and said to have done in the beginning was no longer apparent. To what could one point if, prior to any belief or knowledge, one was asked to understand what the names for the alternative even ‘meant’? Should God also be renamed a ‘maker’ in order to keep him intelligible among all the song makers and film makers, text makers and ­thing makers? The exegetical tradition seemed strictly to forbid this. It had put the utmost effort into dissociating ‘creating’ from the curse of ‘making,’ into differentiating the creator of the world from a demiurge who seems to have ‘accomplished’ his cosmos by executing a given design with given materials like a master craftsman. The origin of the world could not have been like that. It did not follow a model, ­there w ­ ere no raw materials in which and from which it was formed; and if ­there w ­ ere any, they had to be part of what originated in the beginning. This is what resisted the assignation of ‘making’; and this re­sis­tance was anchored in the text of the Bible by the second word of the first sentence: bara’ in Hebrew was a verb that could refer only to this context, and in ­every translation it would have to be matched by a similarly exalted and singular equivalent, even if it had to be in­ven­ted for this purpose. With such a unique concept, it is always difficult to control the translation; lexical identity can only be determined by the context. The Alexandrian Septuagint used the Greek verb ktizein and did well with it, ­because it preserves a crucial aspect of the biblical expression: effecting something by sovereign command rather than by craft. An example would be ­those situations that ­were preceded by ‘nothing,’ like the ‘founding’ by sovereign fiat of cities or t­ emples in the Hellenistic world or, ­after the proclamation of the German Reich, the ‘Gründerzeit’ [founding period] for industries and companies. Perhaps at the turn of the c­ entury the biblical God would even have become an ‘inventor’ if the aesthetic dignity of the creator of the Gesamtkunstwerk had not attained even higher acclaim at almost the same time and in opposition to the inventor, in order to deny historical-­critical and evolutionary explanations to that which could not be understood. In all this, the ‘subject’ of the first sentence of the Bible has been overlooked as the most obvious of ­things, as if this ­were a minor

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     6 3

­ atter, just as ‘beginning’ and ‘creation’ once had been. Is it not pure m tautology to insist on knowing who this Elohim is who in the beginning created heaven and earth—­someone who could do this and initially only this? But this entire story was not told in order to educate about the origin of the world, to instigate or to answer the questions of ­future metaphysicians about being and nothingness. The beginning with ‘the’ beginning was as casual as any once-­upon-­ a-­time or a-­long-­time-­ago, and ‘creation’ was a sacred word with a lot of pathos but very l­ittle meaning. Every­thing was designed ‘to provide’ the subject of the sentence with the power to do something like this, and to legitimize this subject to do similar t­hings within its self-­posited historical frame. The stress falls on the sense that it could have been no one e­ lse but this one who set the conditions for every­thing and who therefore could set the rules every­thing had to obey. In short, it is the intention of the text to imply the lawgiver in the existence giver. This is also noticeable in the specification to let every­thing happen through the commanding word and to send the world on its course with a word of affirmation. Every­thing was ‘good’ to ‘very good,’ and that it had to stay that way might not have been obvious, ­because it had to be said in the ‘beginning.’ This was not a God of ‘automatic success.’ He had to look closely and determine w ­ hether every­thing had turned out as it had been ordered—­like ­those found­ers of cities who would return to ‘inspect’ them. It is therefore not far-­fetched to presume or to fear that events might occur that would contradict the initial approbation. For that, too, the subject of the first sentence in the Bible had to be qualified, and this sentence at least made sure that no other would be his rival, regardless of what might happen. Let me explain the results of this analy­sis of the first sentence of the Bible with an ‘analogous case.’ When Giambattista Vico and his followers first uttered the statement that h ­ umans make history, it contained ­little as to what history making entails, and ­little about the ­human as its ‘subject.’ Every­thing hinged on excluding the notion that anyone or anything ­else could be a ‘maker’—­least of all the ‘maker’ of something e­ lse: namely, of nature. Between humanity and history only a relationship of exclusivity was established,

6 4    S t . Matthe w Passi on

not one of causation. The latter was, for the ‘beginning,’ rather uninteresting and irrelevant compared to the exclusion of contingencies that would fall u ­ nder the domain of someone e­ lse. For only if ­humans alone made this one t­ hing—­just as God alone had made the other t­hing—­could they know, like he does, what and how every­thing was and how it ­ought to be. ­Humans qualified themselves to become the lawgiver of their own historical deeds. The God of the Bible was all this when he first appeared ‘in the beginning.’ No art of interpretation, however, could tease out from this first sentence that he could or would also be a ‘­father.’ For a lawgiver and a covenant partner, this would not have been a plausible qualification.

An Aesthetics of Creation: How It Justifies the Existence of the World “A theme for a g­ reat poet would be God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation.” Nietz­sche wrote this in a short, three-­sentence text entitled “Spirit and Boredom.”1 This is not blasphemy. Other­wise, Luther’s claim that God watches history like a theater play or carnival would also be blasphemous. He is excited to see how it ­will all turn out. To preserve this suspense, he could not have determined how it would end. Freedom of the w ­ ill guarantees that God does not get bored. But why is this restricted to the seventh day of creation? This was, of course, b ­ ecause creation had come to an end and God had nothing more to do than to watch—­that is why he had done all of this in the first place. If this is true, then creation was the consequence of God’s previous boredom. Is this statement less dignified than the one that claims God started creation only in order to replenish the lacunae, caused by the fall of Lucifer and his minions, in the heavenly choir of angels exulting him? This is the case only if choir m ­ usic is more appropriate for God’s eternal court than spectacle, if listening is better than watching. It is in the nature of spirit that the threat of boredom hangs over it or eats into it. This does not make boredom

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     6 5

inferior. Rather, it is the motor that drives the creativity of the mind. Most ­things in the world happen so as to avoid boredom, including all ­those extravagances one might regard as the complicated cult of an unknown Godhead, if one ascribes such belief to its prac­ti­tion­ers, advocates, and supporters. It is just that for some inexplicable reason it is considered ignoble to admit as a reason for one’s superfluous action: ‘I did not want to be bored.’ ­There is a hint h ­ ere for nonconformists: they can excel by claiming to have done something simply ­because they did not want to be bored. They are then almost like perpetrators without a motive. Nietz­sche’s ­imagined subject for a ­great poet—to represent God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation—­thus suffers from the defect of not representing God’s boredom before creation as the reason that drove him to make the world no less suspenseful than it is. The best of all pos­si­ble worlds would be boring for this absolute spectator. Instead of creating it, he could simply have deduced it. It would be a world that does not need to exist, that could be construed in thought alone. “Existence is not a real predicate”2—­Kant’s harshest indictment of the ontological proof of God’s existence applies to the world as well: if it is to satisfy its rationale, it cannot be perfect. It is only its contingency that justifies its existence as a ‘novelty’ ripped from nothingness. Precisely ­because it would be superfluous for the ‘most perfect of all pos­si­ble worlds’ to exist (in addition to being thought), it also lacked a sufficient reason for its creation. This diagnosis does not explain anything, but it prevents facile explanations. One might well say that the h ­ uman’s role as a ‘novelty act’ on the world’s stage before the eyes of God is just too demeaning and desperate; a Pulcinella, and nothing more. Yet in its banality this figure has enough allure to dispel the boredom of another. According to Nietz­sche, even “the small, repetitive tragicomedies” of everyday life, ­because they are being “represented by ever dif­fer­ent actors,” are capable of defying boredom, as can be seen in the fact that they always have interested spectators, even though “one would presume that the spectators of the world theater had long tired of it and committed suicide en masse.”3 If the l­ittle that an individual

6 6    S t . Matthe w Passi on

offers or is being offered is already entertaining to a spectator, how much more must this be the case for the one spectator who sees the totality, and with perfect resolution? ­Were one to share this viewpoint, one would see the species engaged in a curious sort of self-­ portrayal for the enrichment of its self-­preservation, as if it had always lived in awareness of acting before this one spectator, even without Nietz­sche’s remarks. At all times and in all places, h ­ uman beings have made astonishing efforts to appease their gods and gain their f­ avor—­much greater efforts than t­hose necessary for self-­preservation. Against the background of the history of humanity and its religions, it is not specious to imagine ­humans as destined for entertaining a highest being, ­because they saw themselves as constantly providing for this being, petitioning and praising it. The supposed foundational myth of the theatricality of world history reduces the demands on h ­ uman life to merely living that life: to implementing what one would have been resolved to do anyway. ­People play themselves by being themselves. Exhausting their potential freedom determines the level of suspense they bring to the comedy or tragedy. The immanent dimension of their freedom, their morality, their responsibility would not be touched by this. For they could take care of their happiness, worry about their unhappiness—­ and above all: evade their own boredom, having been made in the image and likeness of their creator. They would become artists in a work of art, just like artists became the favorite subjects of epic and lyric poetry. This aesthetic conception does not diminish the seriousness of the situation. It remains incredibly difficult to cut a good figure in this play, even without being the comedic or tragic hero. No one needed to think that he in par­tic­u­lar had the task of pleasing the world spectator, even though erring in this ­matter would contribute greatly to this spectator’s amusement (in the best sense). The same applies to the ­mistakes of the ascetics and prophets, of the saints and fanatics, who all remain in the world as they are, without anyone knowing which figure in par­tic­u­lar would increase or decrease the appeal of it all. At the end what would come is not judgment, but critique.

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     6 7

God Refuses to Be Transparent This God of commands and laws starts out by forbidding h ­ umans in paradise to eat from the tree of knowledge. They may, however, eat from the tree of life. They do not have to die so long as they renounce knowledge. As soon as they know, they have to die. The general consensus has been that the prohibition in paradise against enjoying knowledge was intended for humanity’s own good. It would have been better for them to live without knowledge and without the fear of death. The snake’s tempting promise that they would be like the gods if they ate from the forbidden tree was detrimental not only b ­ ecause it led to the loss of paradise and the tree of life, but also ­because the promised similarity to God would not be good for them. God had provided for the good of h ­ uman beings when he excluded them from the knowledge he himself possessed, the burden of which he could bear but did not believe they could. What the temptation of the snake ­really meant—­that eating from the tree of knowledge would make h ­ umans like God—­remains unclear in the biblical context. What does it mean to be like gods? To be omnipotent? In that case, it would have been a tree of power, not of knowledge. A rather insidious, skeptical, yet entirely permissible and even inevitable thought in the context of this myth is contained in the question of ­whether God did not enact this prohibition in order to protect himself: the original imperative of all reason, that of self-­preservation, is ­here the self-­preservation of a God. In this case, even this God would have had his ‘cares’ [Sorge]. Even he would have suffered from the lack of obviousness regarding self-­preservation. Even for him it would have been a risk being God. Did he know that he could be killed? That his murderer would be the ‘madman’? This is a thought of Nietz­sche’s that is incompatible with this myth. To eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil meant ‘seeing through’ a thought that God thought incessantly when he de­ cided what was good and what was evil. He had given his assent to ­every act of creation he accomplished. But how did he arrive at the decision that something he had ordered into existence had been good or even very good?

6 8    S t . Matthe w Passi on

­Humans would never know this. That is why they had to obey and believe. Theodicy would be their final attempt to figure out God’s thought, why he let ­there be something rather than nothing—­ not, ultimately, to defend him, as the title ‘justification’ seemed to indicate, but to see through him. As knowing subjects, ­human beings wanted something from God that he refused his own kind: to be transparent. The snake had exaggerated only a ­little. For being able to see through someone means, strictly speaking, to be or have the ability to be like them. Therein lies the intrusiveness that every­body who refuses to be transparent rejects. H ­ umans are God’s image and likeness insofar as their entire comportment is a defense against being transparent. They are similar to their God as entia abscondita [hidden beings] that want to be in control of their esse revelatum [being revealed]. H ­ umans want to communicate, but this presupposes that they are concealed and opaque and withdrawn from openness as much as they want to be. One is a correlative of the other. The God who forbade the fruit in paradise is the God who does not want to be known. He created knowing beings only for the knowledge of what he made, not of what he is. Perhaps he did so to show himself a l­ ittle but remain essentially concealed. The world distracted the knowing being from its claim to recognize and know its origin and likeness. Most likely, one can be God only when one rejects this claim. He thus forbids any access to a pos­si­ble ‘psychoanalysis’ of God. He opposes himself to ­humans at this limit. ­Humans ­were never content to just stop at this limit and not set foot beyond it. And so God distracted them with a torrent of dictates and regulations, whose observance drove to desperation beings who strove for nothing more than to see through their God—­just as ­these beings never rest u ­ ntil they manage to see through each other, and who dislike it just as much as the God whom they resemble. We can now see better the monstrosity in the fact that everywhere ‘priests’ of all colors want p ­ eople to bare themselves, want to exercise and even ‘savor’ the divine power to make transparent, as ‘caretakers of the soul’ in the literal sense of the word. In 1922 a drama entitled Kain by Anton Wildgans had its premiere. In his review, Alfred Polgar wrote a profound sentence about

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     6 9

the God of humanity’s original tragedy: “It almost looks as though God had denied his creatures the fruit from the tree of knowledge so that they ­don’t see through him. As soon as they had eaten, they saw him as he is. He could not forgive this.”4 What can turn the biblical God into a figure of tragedy would not be his watching while h ­ umans suffer; he himself would have to play a part in this history. Something has to be at stake that gives existential weight to his ‘cares.’ He has to have something to lose. What he can indeed lose is the exclusivity of his self-­reflection, the sovereign reservation to be himself just for himself. That is why ­humans ­were not allowed to participate in the knowledge of good and evil. That was more than ‘something’ with him or in him. It was every­thing. That is why he made creation, in order to display and practice for himself this knowledge: in judging his own works—­ just as one day he would pass judgment on humanity who had also wanted to be a ‘judge’ but was doomed to founder in the attempt: one who was to be judged, but should not judge.

Time and Again: What Happened in Paradise? I In his third octavo notebook, Kafka jots down a remark about biblical primordial history that looks like extreme nitpicking: “Why do we complain about the Fall? We ­were not expelled from Paradise ­because of it, but rather b ­ ecause of the tree of life, lest we eat from 5 it.” ­Here we find the substance, the secret that is at the center of The Trial. ­There was no original sin in paradise, no eating from the prohibited tree of knowledge. ­There was the permitted tree of life, the fruits of immortality. Right when they began to reach for it, h ­ uman beings, who had done nothing to be refused this tree, got involved in an affair that served as a pretense for denying them their likeness to God—­a desire for which no temptation was needed, ­because ­there it stood, the tree of life. That is how the fiction of guilt arose that would seem to justify the expulsion from paradise. The expulsion consigned life to death ­because the ambrosia from the tree was missing: thus

7 0    S t . Matthe w Passi on

death came into the world, as the apostle Paul would l­ater say. Death turned a fictive guilt into a real one: mortal beings, due to their finite lifetime, cannot live without the guilt of not being able to love each other ­because they are rivals for e­ very good of life. The innocent became guilty ­because they ­were expelled from the reach, from the cultivated garden of the tree of life. God was afraid of what other immortals would do with their infinity. In order not to have a rival, he made his likenesses into rivals of each other who could not escape their guilt. The trial and judgment made the accused guilty. In four lines Kafka revealed the reversal that was hidden in the myth of paradise. It was all about the tree of life; the tree of knowledge was just a pretext. Perhaps man ate from the tree of knowledge only ­after realizing that the tree of life was prohibited. A last instance of paradisiac clairvoyance: if one has to be mortal, ‘knowledge’ is the only means of making use of the remainder of life. Why ­else w ­ ere the sons Cain and Abel—­each in his own way, as a nomad or as a farmer—­intent on using all their skill to wrest from the earth what it would yield, and perhaps more? It was the illusory hope that something other than death could come from it, above all b ­ ecause the first death was violent. This first murder may look like an act of jealousy due to the other’s winning God’s f­ avor; in fact, it was an act of rivalry for the ‘technics’ of mastering nature as a substitute for the possession of the tree of life. In another entry in the same notebook, Kafka expressed in one sentence what kind of illusions resulted from the expulsion into finitude: “The fact that our task is commensurate with our life gives this task an appearance of infinity.”6 It is in appearances that we possess life—as if life still came from that tree that nourishes the gods yet whose fruits they did not want to share with us.

II Adam has to die when he eats from the tree of knowledge. But he does not die, at least not immediately; instead he is expelled from the garden in which the tree of life stands, whose fruits would have offered immortality if he had been able to reach them. It is an in­def­

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     7 1

initely deferred death sentence. More precisely: it is the exclusion from a preventative against death, like the ambrosia of the Olympian gods. This ‘small difference’ is not pedantic and insignificant, ­because for Christian theology this ‘sin’ is such a terrible crime against God’s majesty that the punishment, which is immediately imposed but not enforced, does not even come close to what the theologians insinuated. The Lord of the Garden revokes the right to its fruits, but hesitates to follow through on his threats: Adam survives his transgression, does not suffer the vagus death of the breaker of taboos, and grows very old. Did God make a m ­ istake when he issued the death threat, when he predicted that none of his creatures would survive if they ­were to resist him? In that case, the snake would have been right: By eating the fruit, Adam would have attained something like the status of a coequal who could bear and survive the Other’s enmity. This would have been the first act in a long h ­ uman ‘enlightenment’: the experience that mea­sur­ing oneself against this God was, in fact, not as blameworthy as commandments and threats would have it. The difference between commandment and autonomy emerges for the first time—as a survivable conflict. At least ‘enlightenment’ had been given a taste of paradise. This had to be taken into account for all the promises that this or that enlightenment would bring paradise back. Adam’s triumph in not ­dying ­after eating the fruit was premature. It may be that he did not recognize this in his initial relief over being spared. The first ­actual death was irregular, a crime: Cain murdered Abel. The God of the lost paradise was not entirely innocent in this ­matter; he refused to accept ‘fruits’ as sacrifice, b ­ ecause he suspected in them a stubborn insistence on life in paradise—­but he did accept Abel’s lambs. For this f­ avor Abel had to die. Why was Cain enraged over Abel’s favored status? ­Because their God was a weather god, whose ­favor was more impor­tant to the farmer Cain than to the nomad Abel? It might indeed have been so. Even before Adam’s death, Cain’s misdeed showed that evil had come into the world—­paradoxically b ­ ecause ­humans now had to die. The brevity of their lifetimes pressured them not to renounce

7 2    S t . Matthe w Passi on

t­ hings they could enjoy or ­things belonging to ­others that they coveted for themselves. It took time out of life to get every­thing that one could get from life. Other­wise, Cain could have waited for better weather.

III ­Humans are not god, much as they wanted to be. They are not master over life and death. They have to die themselves instead of letting ­others die, and they have to live themselves instead of letting o ­ thers live. One is as difficult as the other. It is one of the greatest self-­domestications of humanity to have renounced the instrument of capital punishment, even against the majority of most public opinions. Even the g­ reat autocracies of the twentieth c­ entury did it with gritted teeth. With gritted teeth? Yes, ­because the ground over this abyss is very thin. But h ­ umans are also not masters over life. They are not permitted to impose it. An ever more impor­tant prob­lem of their power through knowledge is at stake h ­ ere. Ever more ­people live ­because living was imposed on them through artificial means. This is a test case of an ethics that we do not have. The myth of the prohibition against eating from the tree of Good and Evil gains new relevance. Humanity could perish not from its ability to destroy itself but from the ability to preserve itself in­def­initely. This ability would have turned the legitimacy not to use it into the necessity not to use it. ­Humans w ­ ill never be able to meet this necessity. Nobody can grant the authority not to save what can be saved. B ­ ecause we know what evil is does not mean that we w ­ ill be able to do good. In mythical terms: History is ruptured by the dilemma with which it began.

The Magnification of God What would this God be without the h ­ umans who magnified him? The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—­using h ­ ere the ambiguous

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     7 3

subjective and objective genitive that Pascal intentionally used to distinguish him from the god of the phi­los­o­phers. Without noticing, however, that this genitive cuts both ways and makes God a creature of the patriarchs in just the same way he wanted to shunt aside the god of the phi­los­op ­ hers. Moses is not mentioned, even though he finalized this work with a new and trademarked name for God: Moses turned into divine law what the forefathers, in the manner of theologians, had achieved before the descent into Egypt, with painstaking ­labor and without normative or threatening intent. Only the evangelist Luke attributes to Mary as she visits John the Baptist’s ­mother the singular saying that has resisted so many attempts to set it to m ­ usic b ­ ecause it precisely describes the l­abor of the faithful for their God: megalynei he psyche moy ton kyrion—­ magnificat anima mea Dominum [My soul magnifies the Lord]. God created ­humans so that they would ‘magnify’ him. ­There is only a difference in time in Anselm of Canterbury’s foundational myth that correlates the fall of the angels and the creation of man. The eternal task of t­hose found worthy was to bring the depleted choirs of angels back to their target strength. The beauty of this myth in motivating the world can still be seen in the simplicity of this Magnificat. In it, both time and function are preemptively suspended. Already h ­ ere and now, in this moment between Elizabeth and Mary—­just as in the search of the patriarchs for the solitary inaccessibility of their God b ­ ehind ­every accessible one—­ the mandate is fulfilled that lets world and humanity be: the mandate to do theology. In other words, to boost God, to exaggerate him in the sense of the leap between the two definitions that this Anselm of Canterbury had found: God is that beyond which nothing can be thought—­and he is greater than anything that can be thought. In this interval—­not to call it ‘leeway’—­the magnification of God takes place, which, like every­thing e­ lse in religion, can degenerate into thoughtless phraseology. Julien Green, raised in a puritanical h ­ ouse­hold but softened as a Catholic, relates in the memoirs of his childhood how confused he was to hear the Anglican formula of God: “We magnify him.” He could understand this only as similar to what a “magnifying glass”7

7 4    S t . Matthe w Passi on

could do. Martin Meyer once wrote to me that he was invited by Green’s new German publisher in the fall of 1986 to a dinner with the author, and that he had prepared for the conversation by reading in the Pléiade edition on the train from Munich to Zu­rich. “I noticed this passage, but without thinking about it. When we sat down to dinner, the old gentleman took out the aforementioned magnifying glass—in order to study the menu. Was he looking for ambrosia? In any case, I reminded him of the semantic confusion.” The narrator, who graciously gave me this anecdote, added that he had not read all that much by Green and had obviously landed a lucky shot, “for he looked at me as if I had come from that office that administers the balances for the ­Great Transition.” I responded that I knew only one author who had described the ‘magnifying’ of God without the aid of modern optics—­Thomas Mann in the mythlike introduction to the temporal frame of his Joseph and His B ­ rothers tetralogy. ­Here, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob certainly was not the god of the phi­los­o­phers, as Pascal would have wanted; he was a pure artifice of h ­ umans, created in their likeness so that they could have a God without being dependent on his prophecies and suggestions. In an ambivalent ‘catharsis,’ the beings that ­were made in the image of God create for themselves this God in their image, a God they then subject themselves to ­because of this likeness. That He does not tolerate a god beside Himself, according to the first of the laws from Sinai, is an expression of h ­ umans’ jealousy demanding for themselves an incomparable, absolute singularity. It would have been only a small step to rise from jealousy to generosity and to let this God be indifferent to the throng of humanity’s nascent or decaying gods—­ there w ­ ere so many that the proto-­ philosopher [Thales] could not bear it that “all was full of gods” and in­ven­ted philosophy instead. But philosophy itself turned into nothing but another means of intensifying and magnifying the One, to the chagrin of Pascal. Was it the Northern protestant in Thomas Mann who could not and did not want to leave the work of magnification to the patriarchs in the prelude to his Joseph novels? Who had to write something like a post-­Christian sequel, perhaps even an Augustinian-­Lutheran am-

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     7 5

plification, as his last work, as the completion of the myth of God? For it is only in the light of the stories of the patriarchs that a reader can see the strict correlation with the legend of Pope Gregorius in Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner: the reciprocal buildup of sin and grace, the lowness of humanity and the glory of God, the unimaginable abyss and the safe bridge across it. It goes so far that the sinner humiliates God with his penitence, and challenges Him to display the greatest insights of His so-­called inscrutability. This is most impressive, perhaps, when Sibylla commits double incest but withdraws rigorously from this God through self-­castigation and poverty, “but not out of the love of God, but to defy him, so that he may t­remble through and through and be frightened.”8 Sibylla, the one who no longer wanted to dedicate her beauty to her God, made it her ­will “that God be aggrieved and that the rejection of the suitors should sadden him, even though as penitence he could not have disapproved of it. This dilemma she did not begrudge him.”9 A theological duel, or rather: theology as a duel. Does this mean that the exuberance of the interpreter has been added to the exuberance of the penitent? If neither the prelude to the Joseph novels nor the reference to the (never executed) plan for the “Wedding of Luther” weigh heavi­ly enough against this suspicion, then perhaps a last pointer from The Holy Sinner may be helpful for the person immersed in and burdened by the book, which I strengthen with this thesis: This—­this too—­the late Thomas Mann got from Goethe. This claim loses its apparent improbability only when it is supported by the most incontrovertible of evidence: by the proof—­ often overlooked—­that Goethe’s “prodigious saying” [ungeheuerer Spruch]10 is introduced by the narrating monk Clemens during a reflection preceding the chapter about saving the abandoned child of sin in his l­ittle barrel on the Channel. Immediately a­ fter God’s infliction of grief, Clemens praises the Lord’s wisdom, represented by the Channel between Carolingia and ­England on which the baby’s tiny conveyance can be saved by the island’s fishermen and their abbot. The pious narrator, who knows t­hese ­waters, shudders at the “paucity of hope,” the counterpart of which is an ambiguous divine quality that is rarely named: “God’s skillfulness.” It helps Him

7 6    S t . Matthe w Passi on

to master the adversity that He Himself as the agent of providence has heaped upon the babe and his ­little ship. It is this inner contradiction of God’s decrees that lets the narrator close with the words: “on such an occasion the saying ‘Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse’ [No one (can go) against God except God himself] suggests itself.” What a masterly use of irony, to attribute to a pious narrator in the imaginary ­Middle Ages Goethe’s saying of absolute impiety! Just as the saying’s multiple meanings had marked Goethe’s mythical bent of mind in the unfinished fourth part of Poetry and Truth, ­here it is the model for the variegated interplay of contradictions in the mythical irony with which Thomas Mann seals off, and reflects on, his life’s work. ­Because Master Thomas of Lübeck has a monk write this, ­there is no longer the escape into the imprecision of thinking the god of the saying without a definite article, as the lowercase script implies, an escape that Goethe perceived and took. The monk means the One whom he can write only with a capital letter b ­ ecause he is about to magnify him through the divine self-­duel of this legend, God against God, who stays his own hand from the absolutism of the depths as well as of the heights. Praise—to whom? To the God who can put up with himself in this implacable conflict?

The Work of the Patriarchs and the Work of M ­ usic The general theme of The Stories of Jacob, the first part of Thomas Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His ­Brothers, is how the sublime and jealous God—­named El or Yahu—­was distilled from the multiplicity of Baalim in the swamps and deserts between the Euphrates and the Nile. This prelude to the enormous epic was planned and begun in 1925 ­after the Magic Mountain and was published in October 1933, still in Berlin. At the end of the last volume, Joseph the Provider, which was finished in January of 1943, the sons of Jacob are established with the God of their f­ather in Egypt. Fortunately for him and his readers, the author does not have to expand on the fortunes of this God, who was raised with such difficulty, during the subsequent three to four centuries in the Land of Goshen.

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     7 7

The Bible is discreetly ­silent about this long epoch. For God’s sublimity and singularity ­were jeopardized, given away, forgotten: perhaps it was a legacy too exhausting, too alienating in its exclusivity. It ­will take forty years in the desert to end the mésalliance with the bull of Apis and the cow of Hathor, the guarantors of fertility for rustic worshippers. ­There must have been something right about fertility, however: other­wise the small clan of Joseph could not have turned into the numerous ­people whom Moses had to drive out of Egypt. A lot speaks for assuming that Moses—­even if he was an Egyptian, as Freud discovered—­used the old godhead from the times of the patriarchs and purified it more than even Jacob’s striving for God (as described by the novelist) managed to do. In the pro­cess of refining God, Egypt, with its bovine deities, would have been the perfect rest stop, a chance for Yahweh to catch his breath a­ fter Yahu, and the incubation time for the law-­giving God on Sinai. The deities El Shaddai and Horus-­Sapdu, merged in Goshen, had to be separated again: Yahweh’s ark no longer showed the symbol of a bull. The ark was the symbol of the transportability of a god who in the Land of Goshen was bound to the settlement of t­ hose who championed him; he could be fruitful only as a ­couple, like Horus and Hathor—­the latter who appears as Baalat Mana in the inscriptions at the mines in Sinai (Serabit). ­There was no use for that anymore during the Exodus from Egypt through the desert. It would take more than another millennium for it to become conceivable, as a further intensification in divinity, that this God ‘procreated’ by himself a begotten Son (genitum non factum) who— as if to overcome this ‘lack’—­needed as Log­os incarnate the Virgin as ­mother and the angel as announcer. The god-­fearing patriarchs—­ following Thomas Mann’s Stories of Jacob—­would not have been able to bear this ­human face, and would have become culprits in the Passion of the Son of man, with the right of the inventors and refiners on their side. But also with the incapacity to understand that intensification is also ‘evaporation,’ and that what is incompatible with intensification is not only ‘un-­refinement’ but also a return to vividness that alone can withstand the co­ali­tion of abstraction and palpable idols. Paul the Pharisee would understand what the despair

7 8    S t . Matthe w Passi on

over obeying the Law would threaten in a world of migrating gods. The ‘Son of God’ was a violation of the first law of the Decalogue, but ceased to be so when he died, ­because this in itself was the negation of the glory (kavod) pertaining to God. The crucifixion was another one of the intensifications that Abraham contemplated during the Exodus from Charran. Léon Bloy, one of the ­great ranters in modern French lit­er­a­ture and in the Renouveau Catholique, declared in his 1897 novel The ­Woman Who Was Poor: “God would not have been worthy to create the world had he forgotten to evoke from the void the terrible scum that one day would crucify him.”11 This monstrous coupling of the first and second articles of the Apostles’ Creed makes the dignity of God depend on exhausting all possibilities contained in the creation from Nothing; it does so in such a way that God could not avoid the direct lineage to the perpetrators of the Passion if he did not want to humiliate himself before his own mortification. It is a strange thought, but again one of divine intensification and of fearlessness in the face of what had since creation awaited its presumed Lord: having to be more than this ‘Lord.’ Nothing in Thomas Mann’s ancestry, biography, education, or palpable experiences pointed ­toward the theological intimacy displayed in the first part of Joseph and His B ­ rothers; nothing in his sources and notes, in his essays and letters, allows us to understand how he developed this sensibility. In the case of this nonbeliever ­there is only one answer, one that he himself has given in many variants, not least in the figure of Joseph: all art is sustained by a bit of imposture, if not by something more. And theology? Is it not art’s closest relative, with its arrogant claims of ineffability and inaccessibility, with its parading before the occult majesty, its objections to the withdrawal of divinity? Joseph turns into the Egyptian Felix Krull, a serene comedian; but he only continues on a larger scale what the patriarchs began when they, in their earnest ruminations, deemed themselves ‘too good’ for the cruelties of the cults around them. Jacob had flourished ­under the surreptitiously obtained blessing of his ­father and was called to order only when he wanted to correct the higher decision on the sequence of Laban’s ­daughters destined to him. His God is jealous of the per-

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     7 9

son who has magnified Him and thereby alienated Him from His wishes: “For what is this unbridled feeling of one ­human being for another that Jacob allowed himself first for Rachel and then, in perhaps even stronger transference, for her firstborn—­what is it other than idolatry?” ­There should be no doubt “that this is jealousy in its purest meaning and finest luster.”12 This God rivals ­humans in precisely the qualities that the latter’s nobility of mind and profundity had attributed to him: a God with a passion for eminence. “Call it a vestige of the desert,” the narrator continues, but it is still true “that the thundering word of the ‘living God’ fulfills and proves itself in passion.”13 It w ­ ill be Joseph who understands what had still troubled his ­father and who takes this God with all his escalations; he had a better sense for “this God’s vitality and was able to take it into account more adroitly than his progenitor.”14 Joseph in his pleasantness was above all suited to respond to the excessive demands of his ­father’s God, as if he was created by Him for Himself. But t­ here was also this trait of imposture, the exact correlate to the increasing demands that the narrating ‘theologian’ puts into ­these words: “Let Me become holy in you, and you are to be holy as well!”15 It was strange, but it was the result of The Stories of Jacob: “The purification of God from murky perfidy to holiness also encompasses, in retrospect, the purification of humanity, for whom God wanted it urgently.”16 It is a circle, but it need not be a vicious one. Only ­because ­humans proj­ect into the dignity of God the rigorism and burden of commandments and laws does “this amalgamation, this sublime marriage, this reciprocity of relations” emerge, which is “sealed in the flesh and guaranteed by the ring of circumcision.” It is an alliance or covenant in which ­humans have lost the “prerogative of emotional exuberance”17—­a loss equivalent to not thoroughly examining the small print. The ‘becoming God’ became not out of himself but through h ­ umans, and he became, inadvertently, the God of Care, not the wished-­for God. Only the Passion of Jesus of Nazareth, I contend, ­will represent the extreme: the extreme of fulfillment and of imposition, pleroma and kenosis.18 This work on God, the work on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, on the God of Jesus Christ, might have had its epilogue in

8 0    S t . Matthe w Passi on

the God of Anselm of Canterbury, even though his formulae w ­ ere directives rather than the implementations of such work: God as that beyond which nothing greater can be thought and as that which is greater than anything that can be thought. A young Romanian despiser of God published in Bucharest in 1937 Lacrimi si Sfinti, which half a ­century ­later appeared—­after the author advanced to being the French master of tough thoughts—as Des larmes et des saints and a year ­later in an amended German translation as Von Tränen und von Heiligen [En­glish: Tears and Saints]. Emil Michel Cioran in his early aphorisms worshipped both Johann Sebastian Bach and tears, and compressed his metaphysical re­sis­tance into the sentence: “­Music has made me too bold ­towards God.”19 ­Under ­these auspices he could hardly be oblivious of the final chorale of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and indeed, he dared to formulate the ‘proof’ that God had to exist ­because other­wise the cantor of St. Thomas would have sung in vain: “When we listen to Bach, we see God sprout, his m ­ usic gives birth to God. ­After an oratorio, a cantata, or a Passion, He must exist. Other­wise the entire oeuvre of the cantor would be a heartbreaking illusion. . . . ​To think that so many theologians and phi­los­o­phers have wasted days and nights searching for a proof for God’s existence and have forgotten the proper one . . .”20 Is this not the God of Pascal’s Mémorial? Or is this just a sophisticated way, through the Passion and its ‘proof of God’s existence,’ to ‘save’ the god of the phi­los­o­phers as the misunderstood pseudonym for the God elaborated by the patriarchs? It is to be feared that even this detour ­toward a proof of God’s existence would fall prey to Kant’s devastating critique of all imaginable proofs: what­ ever might be shown can never be demonstrated to be ultimate and insuperable, to be Anselm’s ens quo maius cogitari nequit [a being than which no greater can be thought]. But does the person listening to Bach’s Passion ­really have to insist on this so that the tears of the ending are not mocked by a “heartbreaking illusion”? No, the sufferer on the cross does not have to be mea­sured by the standards of the ‘god of the phi­los­o­phers.’ ‘Does not have to be’ is too weak, still susceptible to evasion; he cannot be mea­sured by ­these standards, and for the simplest reason in the

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     8 1

world: we do not know what the biblical names for this sufferer mean: not ‘Son of man,’ not ‘servant of God’ not even—if he ever called himself this—­‘Messiah.’ To continue in the subjunctive: even if he ever had called himself a ‘god,’ we would not know what this means. Paul on the Areopagus wanted the Athenians fi­nally to get acquainted with the ‘unknown god’ for whom they had built an altar as a precaution. He presupposed that they would know what a god is, b ­ ecause they had so many. For us, it is the other way around: we cannot ­handle an ‘unknown god,’ ­because no god is ‘known’ to us. That is why we look with relief to the ‘servant of God’ ­because he said to us: his ‘Lord’ could be called “Abba”—­“­Father.” It is a suggestion of the phi­los­op ­ hers that the name ‘god’ is the most precise of our concepts. This is not so. It is a boundary case between marked clarity and the most merciful indeterminacy. It must suffice for ­those who listen to the Passion that its suffering is not mere appearance, and that the one suffering and d ­ ying for them is all but an indifferent being, and that through this being they can experience something so moving, so decisive, that this ­music was needed to reach them fi­nally, the listeners.

Abraham’s Fear of God Thought to the End: The Lamb, Not the Ram On November 23, 1654—­a Monday—at about 10:30 in the eve­ ning, Blaise Pascal begins his Mémorial, the ‘last word’ of his religious life, with the unfathomable signal-­word Feu, “fire,” before invoking his God as the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not the god of the phi­los­o­phers and scholars.”21 This fiery antithesis is dif­fer­ent from the fragments of his planned apologia of Chris­tian­ity, the Pensées. For the God of Abraham could not be defended with the means of philosophy, as perhaps the God of Jesus Christ could, whom Pascal invokes immediately afterward. Naming the God of Abraham was—­even if it was never said—­a challenge to a philosophically ‘tolerable’ god, even if he was no longer subject to proofs.

8 2    S t . Matthe w Passi on

What the phi­los­op ­ hers could not tolerate about this God was the obedience, against all nature, that he demanded from Abraham in requiring the sacrifice of his only son, and preventing it only at the last moment with the messenger’s voice from heaven: “Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me” (Gen. 22:12). Abraham then receives the confirmation of an oath that God had already sworn and that he would have had to break if he had accepted the sacrifice of the late-­born son: the oath to make him the ancestor of a g­ reat p ­ eople, as could be seen from his name. We hear nothing about the f­ ather’s state of mind a­ fter being released from sacrificing his son, a­ fter the confirmation of the oath. Abraham takes his son and wanders with him from the mountain to Beersheba and stays ­there. Was he angry for the rest of his life with the God who had demanded this from him? Was he grateful for the reprieve from having to kill his son? Did God lie, just to test him one more time? Or had He forgotten about the oath that was tied to the overdue conception of this son, and remembered it only in the last moment? Was this not a God who always remembered ­later or needed to be reminded, a forgetful contractor? We do not know any of the questions Abraham asked himself, nor any of the answers. We only know the attempts of the exegetes to sanitize the immorality of the story, to save the God who got entangled in it. Singular is the remark attributed to Rabbi Yehuda ben Simon at the beginning of the fourth c­ entury: “Abraham thought by himself and said: perhaps ­there was something unsuitable in my son, that he was not accepted.”22 He thought about this ­until a voice from heaven (Bath Kol) assured him that God had not rejected the sacrifice ­because of dis­plea­sure. That would have r­ eally taken the phi­los­o­ phers’ breath away. But they did not know of ben Simon’s remark. The late rabbinical musing over the story of Abraham is not ­simple pedantry. It denies the f­ather—­willing to sacrifice but prevented from ­doing so—­the subjective frame of mind in which he can accept the waiving of the sacrifice with satisfaction, assured of the promise; instead, it lets him think intently about how God could reject the most valuable of all gifts, the most precious gift a f­ ather

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     8 3

could give: this God who was entitled to exactly that, ­here and wherever ritualistic sacrifice took place. Was the sacrifice perhaps objectively not of the quality the f­ ather assumed? Perhaps this one, among the many sons, was not the most appropriate, and therefore the surrogate ram was accepted in his place? To wit: Abraham could have doubted ­whether his ­mental submission was ­really what this demanding God wanted. In the Christian tradition, Abraham stands for the primal image of faith in its extreme form: the credo quia absurdum [I believe ­because it is absurd]. Against all nature, this son was promised to him, and he did not doubt. Against all nature, this son was supposed to be taken from him and he did not hesitate to trust that it would be good. That is the faith that Paul’s theory of justification would provide, an absolute m ­ ental state that is so impermeable to psy­chol­ ogy that only the addressee of such obedience can pass it off as mercy. But what would ever render the subjective surrender of self-­ consciousness fitting for God? From this point of view, the effort of Rabbi Yehuda ben Simon to objectify the rejection of Isaac as a sacrifice is a subtle criticism of the ‘­Father of Faith,’ the image of Abraham projected by the Christian New Testament. The Abraham of the Old Testament and of the rabbinical tradition is first and foremost the recipient of the promise, the forger of the first identity of this p ­ eople with God. He ended its nomadic existence, founded the first religious sites, wandered with Isaac to Beersheba, and was buried in Hebron. To Abraham, God’s promise of the seed and the land was given unconditionally—­even if this was always only ­after the fulfillment of what ­later turned out to be the ‘condition’ of salvation—­whereas the covenant of Sinai was and remained conditional and tied to the fulfillment of a law that in all experience—­and definitely in the mind of Paul—­could not be fulfilled. It is b ­ ecause of this difference between the unconditional oath given to Abraham and the conditions implied in the covenant with Moses that the figure of the patriarch has overshadowed the leader of his ­people out of Egypt—­especially at times when the burden of the law and the punishment for its infraction confused the sense of justice with which Paul, with a view to Abraham and Jesus, wanted to, and for millennia managed to, eliminate the prob­lem: to elevate

8 4    S t . Matthe w Passi on

the patriarch of devotion over the founder of the unity of p ­ eople and history in the promise of God. Theologically speaking, Rabbi Yehuda ben Simon’s concerns are not fully exhausted in the antithesis to the ‘­Father of Faith.’ On the contrary, the doubt about the Christian viewpoint offers an unexpected twist that was not yet available to the rabbi. He lets Abraham won­der ­whether his son might not have been a worthy sacrifice, ­whether the ram was preferable in God’s eyes, regardless of what his own resolve to give away what was most precious to him might have said about his state of mind. This had to have been the most perfect, the absolute sacrificial gift, if the origin of this late-­born son and his value for the ­future of humanity had been a ­factor. But the rejection reveals something about the doubtful quality of the sacrifice, which h ­ ere perhaps was more impor­tant than the sheer obedience of a slighted ­father. This thought, attributed so specifically and so late to Abraham, could be followed to its conclusion by t­hose against whom it was perhaps directed. If Abraham’s God had been dissatisfied with the sacrifice of Isaac, and if this had been the secret and long-­concealed reason for the rejection, a question immediately arises: What e­ lse could have satisfied this God if not the begotten son of this ­father? This EL or JHWH was insatiable when it came to sacrifices, and since rejecting Cain’s gift had insisted on the highest quality. Highest quality—­ theologically speaking, this always implies: a tendency t­oward the insuperable, the unheard-of, the infinite, the absolute. If the son of the promise to the patriarch was not ‘acceptable,’ it could only be—­ following the logic of the ‘only begotten’—­ one other son who could satiate God’s thirst for sacrifice: His own only Son. This Son was, insofar as he was allowed to exist, the solution to the dilemma of objective quality. In him the doubt of Abraham in its deepest form was nullified: he was the solution that could not be wished for. That is why he had to exist. “What is needed, is needed,” is the refrain of all theologies since the beginning of time. So it is ­here: once JHWH’s dissatisfaction with all sacrifices and their suitability became legible in the failures in the history of the ­people, in the withholding of premiums for promises, all that was left was the

Esc al atio n s o f a Go d     8 5

ideal construct of a sacrificium perfectissimum and the final and infinite satiation of the highest thirst for sacrifice. This construct was not initially connected to the passion of Jesus of Nazareth. He himself understood his death—­following the ­later, communal testimony of the synoptic gospels—­more as the obedience of the ‘servant of God,’ that is, as following the ideal of the subjective quality of Abraham’s sacrifice. The objective quality emerged with the theological speculations about ransoming all of humanity. If initially the Son of man was offered to the Antagonist as the prize for the liberation of t­ hose who had fallen to his temptation, he was l­ater taken out of this mythical ‘exchange’ and offered, as the Son of God, to the ‘infinite satisfaction’ of the offended majesty of the creator F ­ ather for the benefit of humanity fallen to his wrath. Fi­nally, the only fitting sacrifice: the lamb, not the ram.

Corporeality

The Incarnation of the Word as an Offense to the Angels Triumphantly declaring on almost e­ very page that one can live without God and angels strikes kindred spirits as boring, opponents as dogmatic, and both as ridicu­lous. —Moritz Schlick to Rudolf Carnap, January 20, 1935

­ umans are the offense of creation. It is an ancient thought in theH ology that ­there was a rivalry of the heavenly princes against the ­humans even before creation, and that the fall of Lucifer and his followers had something to do with the rejection of ­humans a limine. Further: that the Son of the ­Father would have to be the ‘Son of man’ in order to save ­these offensive creatures from their self-­ inflicted calamity. Even further: that the Son had been predestined to become h ­ uman since eternity, in­de­pen­dent of humanity’s fall from grace. H ­ uman ‘nature’ was thereby bestowed an honor that would

C o r p o r eality   8 7

have been contrary to the angels’ sense of dignity if God had not approached their ‘nature’ in a similar way. Was the fall of the angels, then, a drama of jealousy, instigated by a clear view of the ­future, of creation and its central creature? If so, the foundational myth of Anselm of Canterbury—­that is, that ­humans had only been created to take up the seats in the celestial choir that had become vacant with the fall of the angels—­would be impossible. The theologoumenon of the eternal predestination of the Son to become h ­ uman drags the species into the necessities of the Godhead itself. The ­human species had to exist in preparation for John’s verbum caro factum est [the Word was made flesh]. This thought of Duns Scotus was the last attempt of the ­Middle Ages not to assert the intensifications of the concept of God at the cost of the self-­worth of the h ­ uman: h ­ umans w ­ ere the vision of eternity ­because they would bestow final significance upon the divine plan of creation. If God’s favoring h ­ umans was vexing to the angels who resisted and w ­ ere overthrown, then one mystery in biblical prehistory that has scarcely been probed becomes a ­little clearer: What made the snake, as a figuration of the diabolos, goad ­humans against God? Certainly not its being in the ‘nature’ of evil to drag every­thing down to its level, as has often been assumed. It was instead the belated ‘verification’ of the disapproval of humanity by ­those angels who saw their God—­and with him, themselves—­humiliated by a kind of conspiracy of salvation, which began when the creator of the world gave away his own image as a model for making this hapless creature. It had to be shown that h ­ umans ­were incapable of fulfilling the original visions of creation, that they could and should be corrupted. It is plausible, therefore, to see lurking in the unspoken background the wager that God and Satan made about the ‘quality’ of man. Given the risk, it had a certain validity. Was it an obvious outcome that humanity should belong to whomever was right? And was it an equally obvious outcome that the ‘Son of man,’ rejected by Lucifer, could provide evidence to the contrary, could lead the ­human nature he assumed to its destiny, and could regain, through absolute obedience in the hour of his death, the entire species’ right to existence? The repugnant primeval vision regarding the eternal

8 8    S t . Matthe w Passi on

predestination of the Word would have turned, with the ‘justification’ of humanity, into the justification of incarnation against its despisers. H ­ umans would have ceased to be the offense of creation by becoming the instrument of the absolute worship. Obedience is the offense of redemption. This is not rooted in the rebellion of the angels; it is, instead, the result of humanity’s review of its own past, now offered to it as ‘salvation history.’ We should remember, again, that for the Age of Enlightenment the prob­lem in the Bible was the story of Abraham and his absolute obedience; by following the outrageous demand of ­human sacrifice—­and, indeed, the sacrifice of his only son—­Abraham had embodied the model of ‘faith’ as an act of obedience. The Enlightenment, which did not accept the sacrificium intellectus, heaped scorn on its prototype, made him into the opposite of autonomous reason, into the epitome of unethical be­hav­ior. It was, as so often, an indirect pro­cess: initially, it was not the believers who w ­ ere criticized but their God, who should have done what he did with Abraham when he substituted at the last minute the ram for the son: instead, he abandoned his own Son to the cold sweat and dread of Gethsemane. Thus humanity, for whose salvation all of this was supposedly done, became again the offense of reason. The subtext was: No being should exist for whose salvation only the unethical sacrifice of the son would suffice. In this case, the fallen prince of the angels would have been right: h ­ umans ­were not worthy of creation; its author should have preserved his divine innocence by staying put for eternity. No text and no ­music of the Passion can reflect the full extent of presuppositions that crystallized around the core of the death on Golgotha in the biblical and Christian world. It is the horizon of the listener, not the ‘content’ of the work, that determines what it ‘means.’ It cannot be unambiguous.

Countermove: The Angel of the Annunciation God is too sublime even to think the world. In the Aristotelian tradition he only thinks himself. For the phi­los­o­pher, if the cosmos had

C o r p o r eality   8 9

not been coeval with god, he would never have thought of creating it—­could not have thought of it without destroying himself. But if creation had to happen? In that case t­ here is the auxiliary argument that God still does not think the world himself, but lets it be thought. That is what the angels are for: in them the world is ‘in­ven­ted,’ from them it is ‘extracted’ and thus created without having been thought by the highest authority; in the h ­ uman intellect, fi­nally, it is traced out. This argument is found in the treatise On the Spirit by the Platonist Carolus Bovillus, published in Paris in 1510: “Deus antequam fierent omnia, ea concepit in angelico intellectu, deinde omnia protulit et fecit, postremo ea in humano intellectu descripsit. [Before anything was, God conceived of it in the intellect of the angels, then brought every­thing forth and made it. At the end he traced it out in the intellect of ­humans.]”1 This is too beautiful not to be quoted in the original. This is an entirely Neoplatonist thought, disguised only by the ‘reoccupation’ of the positions of the One and of the Nous, the Spirit. The One was pure exuberance, received and regulated, as it ­were, by the Nous from which the first multitude of ‘essences’ is projected onto the second multitude of the world and its realities. The One in its ‘superfluousness’ is completely incapable of forming a world in which something like ­human beings could exist. Within the Neoplatonist schema, it is difficult to accommodate the biblical thought that God could create something in his likeness that, in turn, would not need to be further thought out by the Nous. In the humanist Bovillus’s Christian version, this would mean that h ­ umans are a creation of the angels, brought into existence simply by divine approval. This would amount to avoiding all the mysteries of the world, which no longer require solving. The offensiveness of ­humans to the angels is resolved at its root. Only dissent on the angelic level of the cosmic pro­cess could make it intelligible that former co-­creators had persecuted ­humans in paradise. But then it would have been up to the angels not to let their lack of consensus become a burden for humanity. It is from this point of view that I turn to the scene in Luke in which the archangel Gabriel comes unto the Virgin and promises

9 0    S t . Matthe w Passi on

her the Son that only God can make pos­si­ble. In this way, the angels would have returned order to their world. But it remains doubtful w ­ hether this would not end in Docetism. It could escape this end only if the world itself, as a ­mental design, ­were not a piece of Docetism. Other­wise, how could that which happens in the world have a more solid consistency? The angel of the annunciation at the beginning strengthens the suspicion that the passion at the end is mere illusion. The Son of the Virgin, announced by Gabriel of the failed angelic invention, would suffer the same lack of being as the world into which he was to be born. Bethlehem and Golgotha would lack the strongest attributes of ‘ontology.’ This has to be considered in order to comprehend all that with which the St. Matthew Passion does not engage.

God’s Entanglement in the World What was intended? Was paradise, the garden of Eden, from the beginning just a stopover for the creature God had modeled in his image and likeness? Was the expulsion, that crossing of the threshold from ­simple to careworn life, intended from the outset, was it merely delegated to be carried out by the tempter—as is the case up ­until Faust—­while protecting the ‘Lord’ from the impositions of ‘theodicy’? With the concession that the tempter would get an owner­ship share of this strange product in case of success? And in what relation would the entire enterprise of creation then stand to the institution of a gated garden called paradise? Is all of creation the terminal station of the small piece of garden? And if this is the case, then the procreation of man cannot have been part of the original program, b ­ ecause Eden contained the tree of life. As soon as ­humans ­were separated from the tree of life and became mortal, procreation would be repeatedly invoked as their foremost task so that the created world would not remain fallow. How this world was to be used soon became a ­matter of life and death between the first pair of b ­ rothers—­and ultimately in f­ avor of the more radical land use of sedentary agriculture, even though God clearly had preferred the gentler practice of nomadic grazing. This

C o r p o r eality   9 1

preference was disregarded by the species. It insisted on settlement and land owner­ship, which alone could justify something like the promised land the God of the covenant was to deliver. A contrary sign was the fact that the savior who was supposed to rehabilitate the entire relationship was presented as a good shepherd, concluding his time on earth with the command: “Feed my lambs, feed my sheep!” (John 21:15, 16). He was born, a­ fter all, with the initial admiration of shepherds who w ­ ere tending their herds and happened to find themselves nearby. Was this on purpose? The Bible could not say what nonetheless suggests itself: that God did not know what he was ­doing when he created the world. And definitely not when he modeled a creature ­after himself, let it get accustomed to life in paradise, and then expelled it into naked self-­preservation. When, in Luke, Jesus begs from the cross: “­Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” (Luke 23:34), he is aware of another case of not knowing in addition to that of his miserable torturers. God separated h ­ umans from the source of life ­because ­there they would have become his rivals. Through death, he turned them into mortal rivals of each other. If the garden had been enough for two ­people, the ­whole earth was never enough for the many, b ­ ecause each had only one life to have all of every­thing. Thus ‘sin’ entered the world through death, not the other way around. Was this on purpose? How could it not have been on purpose, if God’s omniscience had to know what was to come? With the expulsion from paradise, the churning of theodicy begins. ­There is only one plausible solution: God did not know what was to come ­because he could not know it. How could he know what effect death would have on life if he could not fathom death? This is comparable to the situation in which only someone who has experienced ‘pain’ can know what pain is; and even in that case, it is only partially true that one can know the pain of another. It was no dif­fer­ent with all the consequences that the exclusion from the tree of life had for humanity: life became ‘care,’ and at the extreme it provided the motive for the first murder. ­There can be no foreknowledge of something for which one has no ‘concept,’ no intuitive knowledge. How would such knowledge

9 2    S t . Matthe w Passi on

arise, what would it look like? Therefore, God became entangled in something that had to terrify him, so strangely and unexpectedly did it appear in his creatures: a species of potential murderers who ­really only wanted to come to terms with their new condition of worry and concern a­ fter their expulsion. This cannot have been on purpose. It must have been ‘unforeseeable’ even for a ‘providence’ that originated only from its self-­given conditions and had to govern the world with it. All of this was a cul-­de-­sac of divine ignorance, of an essential divine stupidity. And therein lay the logic in the way in which God undertook to right ‘the m ­ atter’: he had to gain au­then­tic ­human ‘intuition,’ had to become someone capable of feeling pain and fearing death—­capable of experiences, in other words, that have nothing to do with ‘knowledge’ of the world or the quality of nature through the insight of its creator. It was not the ‘essence’ of a likeness of God to care, to suffer, and to die. Incarnation was not the hyperbole of divine love but the compensation for a divine lack of self-­evidence. God was the sheer opposite of a ‘deficient being.’ That put him into a culpable position vis-­à-­vis a creature he first deprived of a privilege and then abandoned to its deficiencies. Understood as nature, the ‘world’ was an object of knowledge; its author could know and master every­thing about it, and thus t­ here was no need for theodicy in his relationship to the world. That ­there was such a relationship is less difficult to understand than the entanglement with the unknown and unknowable that manifested itself in the h ­ uman. For if God was supposed to be the absolute subject, which is the only way philosophy is capable of thinking him, then the self-­thinking thought that Aristotle attributed to him was the pure dissatisfaction of what meaningfully can be called subjectivity: it demands the other of itself as its object. To say this less abstractly: the absolute subject cannot bear its own lack of care; it burdens itself with the weight of the world, and ­humans—­its image and likeness—­with the care for their own being. But even an absolute being cannot know a priori what care actually is; that requires the experience of being condemned to death, stigmatized by pain, betrayed by one’s community. ­Whether the cre-

C o r p o r eality   9 3

ator has to love his creatures in order to become like them, the ones he intended to be like himself, remains an open question; but out of love for himself he has to seek the fulfillment of his intentions. He has to relinquish the subjunctive of his pre-­worldly existence and self-­protection in paradise, which remains stuck in the mode of what if . . . ​, and cross the threshold to the indicative: So this is what I have done! This is what is meant by the Log­os having become flesh and dwelling among us—­how ­else could God have ‘saved’ himself in his previous mode of existence? Without descent into the death-­bound limitations of life, he could not have realized the intentions of a reciprocal and rectifying creation in his own likeness. This ‘integration’ of divine subjectivity before and beyond any consideration of salvation is comprehended only in the Gospel of John, when he begins with kai ho log­os sarx egeneto kai eskenosen en hemin [And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us], and ends the Passion with the ­dying words tetelestai [it is finished]: corporeality as self-­ fulfillment (John 1:14 and 19:30). What has been won? First, something that deviates from and is entirely foreign to the tradition of Christian salvation: the sinner is not the focus of this story. We perhaps reflect too ­little on the fact that contemporaries listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion are not only more or less ‘non-­believers’ who have lost access to the ‘dogma’ of the one who suffered and died, but also ‘non-­knowers’ who can neither understand nor know the admission that they are ‘sinners’ and therefore in need of salvation. They would much rather understand that someone has suffered for himself rather than for them, ­because he could not bear not understanding what it meant that ­those created in his image and likeness have to live in the face of death, have to experience their finitude as the exclusion from full owner­ship of the world, an exclusion to which they are not resigned. In this way, God would have canceled the deficit in his engagement with creation. He would have won—­even if one w ­ ere still to attempt to ‘save’ him as the epitome of his ‘classical’ attributes, such as omniscience. What is won for ­humans has to be intelligible even for ­those who do not understand that they are sinners in a world that left them

9 4    S t . Matthe w Passi on

no choice but to preserve themselves. They might nonetheless understand that they could have a dif­fer­ent God a­ fter the Passion if they wanted: a God who fi­nally understood them and who would no longer let them bear alone the ‘consequences’ of his entanglement in the world, as he did with the expulsion from paradise. To put it differently: now both creator and creature would know what kind of care death has brought into the world. That this might indeed have been at stake is proven by the scene of Jesus’s temptations by the diabolos in the New Testament; their purpose, to put it pointedly, was to exempt the one being tempted from his inclusion in the condition of ­human care. The comparison of ­these temptations with Faust’s pact has hardly ever been thought through, perhaps out of fear of blasphemy. Although Faust has to die like every­body ­else, he accepts the pact only ­under the condition of a fulfilled life—an impossible condition to fulfill, even for a demon. This is why the ‘highest moment’ can be conjured up as a trick only when he has gone blind. Had the pact been fulfilled realistically, Faust’s death would have constituted a coincidentia oppositorum with his apotheosis: he would have died as a god. When ­Jesus is tempted, he resists the suggestion that he retreat from his incarnation of the Log­os into Docetism’s levity of being and its play of metamorphoses. He preserves himself in the likeness of ­human beings for beings created in the likeness of God. From this minimalistic theological position, we can see better what comparative scenarios have to offer. What would happen, for example, if the promise of a visio beatifica, the blessed eternal communion with God, w ­ ere fulfilled? Such scenarios have in common the memory of an existence marked by pain and death, and what once had been real­ity would be turned into the possibility of an infinite ‘­free variation,’ the compensation for factual fates by the subjunctive of pos­si­ble ones. ­There is nothing contemptible in calling the furnishing of such a promise a question of ‘taste’—­happiness would remain what it is and has to be in its essence, a subjective epitome of fulfillment. We might smile when we see the poet and his friends dream about a basileia, a kingdom of poiesis ­under the ultimate dominion of the subjunctive. But to narrate and to hear about life from this distance

C o r p o r eality   9 5

presupposes having possessed it in real­ity and without distance. Just as it presupposes having one’s life no longer consecrated to death— no longer to be what one once was. God and his creatures would have become members of a consortium of the subjunctive, which in spite of its distance from the indicative presupposes ‘intuition’ without which no one can know what is being said. That something has ‘to be said’ is the correlative to the Christian dogma of the resurrection of the flesh—­what ­else would it be good for? That it necessitates an aesthetic aspect of theological eschatology was noticed by medieval scholastics. Since then, ‘aspect’ has become too ­little: whoever wanted this, wanted more.

Since When Am I? Since When Was This One? Urged both by the Delphic Apollo and Socrates to ‘know thyself,’ one never quite knows what this question entails. What am I? By now we have learned how to answer: a religion, a nation, a profession, a faction or sub-­faction—­all excuses to circumvent Socrates’s indeterminacy. In contrast, the question “Since when am I?” is rarely posed. I­ sn’t it a bit too ­simple to look into one’s ‘documents’ to find the date? Yet this is how biographies begin—­they must always satisfy ­others’ desire to know how long someone has existed and, if appropriate, when they are to be celebrated. Whoever asks this question of themselves does not seek this information. It is always a bit disappointing when writers who write ‘about themselves’ begin with this most trivial of data, in par­tic­u­lar ­because the more impor­tant date—­when they ­will no longer be—by definition has to be missing in an autobiography. We know, therefore, that it cannot be the result of looking back on his life that Goethe begins his autobiography, Poetry and Truth, with the sentence: “It was on August 28, 1749, at the stroke of the midday bell, that I came into the world in Frankfurt am Main.” He could not know this by himself, it is not a result of self-­reflection, not an answer to the question “Since when am I?” Rather, it is an example of the doubt as to ­whether our memory might trick us into

9 6    S t . Matthe w Passi on

believing that what we have heard from ­others is “what we ­really know from our own examined experience.”2 Goethe concealed this predicament of memory by setting the sober dates in the widest frame pos­si­ble: in the frame of the universe. With an artifice learned from Girolamo Cardano, in the second sentence Goethe invokes the portents of the heavens: “The constellation was auspicious; the Sun was in Virgo. . . .”3 Cardano mentioned the nativitas nostra [our birth] only in the second chapter of his autobiography, the first was dedicated to patria et maiores [fatherland and ancestors]. Goethe consciously inverts this sequence by speaking of his grand­father Johann Wolfgang Textor as the benefactor of his town, who in his role as mayor hired an obstetrician and promoted the education of midwives a­ fter his grand­son, in spite of all propitious aspects, had nearly died at birth. Thus Goethe, favored by the heavens, helped posterity t­oward a better chance at life. Even ­under inferior constellations. All this is an ‘exterior view’ on beginnings. It is not what the urgent question seems to want to know: “Since when am I?” This question belongs to an epoch that makes hitherto unknown demands on our memory. Forgetfulness about one’s own life and experience has recently come u ­ nder the suspicion of amounting to a dereliction of duty. The suspicion of ‘repression’ has emerged as a reproach that is rhetorically as insistent and importunate as hardly any other, as if it ­were a conscious blockage, an unwillingness to admit responsibility. But the discovery of ‘repression’ as a defense against earliest trauma does not involve barricading available memories of culpable misdeeds and lived events; the analy­sis of repression recovered, for psychic life, that which is submerged and can no longer be remembered, claiming to make its ‘encryption’ legible. The question “Since when am I?” seems to have developed a prehistory with regions such as ‘birth trauma’ and ‘prenatal perception’ for which no memory could ever be accessed. ­There are not even literary attempts at exceeding what can be described. “Since when am I?” The most daring answer to this question was given almost exactly at the same time as Goethe started writing ­Poetry and Truth; it came from Schopenhauer. According to him, the prehistory of childhood begins with the first exchange of looks be-

C o r p o r eality   9 7

tween two lovers who are destined thus to become parents of a new living being: it is the w ­ ill to live of this being that directs the parents’ gaze ­toward one another, long before their bodies provide the physical basis. The metaphysics of the will begins before all psychology of the unconscious. It cannot be questioned, just like the deus absconditus [hidden god]. This thought outwits, so to speak, all doubt of literary investigations into the most impor­tant question of ­every existence: ­whether it was willed. That is why Telemachus searches for the missing Odysseus, that is why all ­children in lit­er­a­ture search for their ­fathers. When and with what urgency this question was raised for them, and what kind of explicitness they w ­ ere willing to accord it, depends on the situation in which it emerges. When has this question “Since when am I?” been posed? Hans Carossa posed it at the beginning of his book Führung und Geleit (Leadership and conduct; published in 1933, still uncompromised by the Nazis), where he explains: “Amid the initial tumult of the war some of my earliest childhood memories came back to me, and on the battlefield I wrote some of them down. The unrest of the ­battle did not disturb me. . . .”4 It is almost too obvious: a physician, surrounded by the deaths of ­others, is led away from the pre­ sent to think about his own. It is the end that makes one think of the beginning: “The hour in which the world takes us in, and that other hour, in which it hands us over, are recorded and, ­after a while, forgotten. But no heart can remember when it began to beat; it experiences itself as without beginning or end. . . .”5 This sounds like metaphysical pathos, but it is not. It is the description of a fact that every­one could know if only they wanted to. Memory jumps over its own dark spots, becomes more sporadic, more isolating, hard to date, but no less precise in its images. Before the most distant memorable event lies an infinite prehistory— no one knows anything about a beginning, just as no one w ­ ill ever know anything about the end. Every­one who has said “I am ­dying” was still alive when they said it. It is a myth that consciousness ever reaches completion, but it is still true that it desires it: “Since when am I?” But the one who reached with this question back into the dark, what was he to do? When the First World War and death had passed,

9 8    S t . Matthe w Passi on

Hans Carossa published in 1922 A Childhood—­and began it almost like Goethe: “On a winter Sunday in 1878, I was born in Toelz in Upper Bavaria.”6 No constellation, no nativity scene. One night his ­mother wakes him and carries him down to the street, where ­people have congregated and are pointing to the sky: “Do you see the comet?” The child saw it along with ­those to whom enough time would be granted to see Halley’s comet twice in one life span. That much ‘significance’ was not in store for Carossa. It is characteristic of the ­future medical doctor that the worried whispering of the spectators impressed him more than the comet’s long tail above the village. To be sure, all of this would move him “more ­later in life than in that night.” But it was already clear that this three-­year-­old in his ­mother’s arms would not become susceptible to apocalyptic visions and portents, b ­ ecause “through her he felt the regular course 7 of the world.” It goes without saying that in this meteoric moment no vital decision needed to be made; the decision was already pre­sent as a cosmic feeling, beyond doubt as to how and when it arose. The memory of the physician searches and finds symptoms for what is even deeper and farther away. ­There is no platonic preexistence, and no anamnesis of it; life itself is always eternally ahead of itself when “the world takes us in.” Beginnings are not originally encountered, just as infinity is unquestionably expected—­the opposite, finitude, is learned, is narration, knowledge from procreation to the exitus. The precision of t­hese first sentences, in Goethe as in Carossa, is only an ironic stand-in for the information that ­will never come: Since when does one exist? Memory is not congruent with a documented life, with a life that can be reported according to witnesses and sources. Its theoretical equivalent is the positivistic assumption that the world material of sensation condenses into volatile states that generate the illusion of identity. ­Going backward, memoria would make t­hese condensations evaporate but never arrive at a Nothing before the moment of generation. The separation of world and I ­under t­hese auspices reaches back all the way to the beginning of experienced life, even becoming the prime object searched by memory. Looking back a de­cade ­after A Childhood, five years a­ fter Metamorphoses of a

C o r p o r eality   9 9

Youth, Doctor Carossa knows what characterizes t­ hese beginnings: “We know ourselves as being one with every­thing that surrounds us. The child that emerges from the dusk of infancy does not know that the universal world-­material from which it is taken has long since turned dangerously away; the child smiles at ­every being, knows neither compassion nor fear, reaches for the gleaming eyes of ­humans and animals, would caress tigers, embrace a flame.”8 Even in Carossa’s most precise and forceful poems, the world’s f­ avor for the child is described in the image of commotion: “Concealed by the trees at the shore / the morning sun lay. / We pushed off from the bank. / The sun jumped into the ­water, / gave us across the stream / a sparkling convoy.”9 But ­after another world war a reader may ask: Has this country doctor never heard of psy­chol­ogy? Has he missed the demonization of childhood through which even the earliest events become ele­ ments of a far-­reaching psychic determination—­such that in the end all biography is just the post-­history of primal scenes? When Carossa died in 1956, t­ here ­were no longer any readers for this kind of ‘idyllic’ childhood accounts; the appetite for a benevolent world had been spoiled. Freud wrote to Fliess in 1897: “It is in­ter­est­ing that lit­er­at­ ure is now turning so much to the psy­chol­ogy of c­ hildren.” Being the eternal skeptic, he added: “So one always remains a child of one’s age, even in what one deems one’s very own.”10 The same is true for ‘bad taste’: barely a c­ entury ­later a reader consults t­ hese ‘self-­analyses’ of infantile libido dramas with reluctance, bearing in mind the words of the first analyst in the course of his self-­analysis: “True self-­analysis is impossible; other­wise ­there would be no [neurotic] illness.”11 Memory as ‘enlightenment’ has failed. But as what has it remained? What can it become? In our world, with ever fewer ­children—­a result of available options for enjoying life and renouncing proliferation—­childhood has been idealized as an exotic world of its own and could well turn into a ‘reservation.’ But that is the exterior view of ­others onto a ‘life-­world’. What kind of memories it produces, what kind of questions can be directed back into the darkness, we can only guess from the context that surrounds and infiltrates t­ hese world-­artifacts as ‘history’ as soon as the membranes become permeable—­and this

1 0 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

is their fate, in direct proportion to their prior insulation. It is from this ‘history’ that all opportunities to understand and communicate arise. They are all we know, not the amalgams they could form. Armies of specialists are interested in c­ hildren as if they w ­ ere unknown beings—­supposedly and paradoxically in order to let them be as they are. Presupposing ­children’s high degree of susceptibility to failure, the goal of their protectors is the elimination of faults. What distinguishes ­today’s ­children from ­those of other epochs is the ­simple fact that they exist at all: at least they do not have to be born against their parents’ w ­ ill. It is no longer the result of an inscrutable ‘why they became what they are.’ In modern childhoods, the question “Since when am I?,” which one can pose only to one’s own memory, no longer arises and is replaced by “Why am I?,” which can be asked of real persons and their decisions. As if to verify Schopenhauer’s speculation, the choice of procreational partner becomes an act of determination that can be further questioned: “Why me?” This gives us the outlines of a form of autobiography that investigates other ‘prehistories’ in order to understand the one ‘phenomenon’ that in the philosophy of this ­century has obscured—­ and, with re­spect to willed existence, ­will further obscure—­all other infantile determinisms: ‘contingency,’ its impact, its overcoming. Why am I, if I could so easily also not have been, despite the force of nature’s drive for continuity? The world of Christian creation certainly was a world of wanted ­children, at least according to creationism, which conceded the conditionality of organisms to parental procreation but attributed ­every individual soul in ­every parentally ‘occasioned’ case to the creative intervention of God. This became the ‘reigning opinion’ of Christian dogma. It is not clear what followed from this, however. Perhaps it increased the level of trust, so that individuals would possess some mea­sure of divine guarantee for the meaning of their existence and could lay claim to participation in the history of salvation, just as creation as a w ­ hole could not be discarded if it honored its origin. In special cases, it was pos­si­ble not only to regard natality as a worldly condition and—in deserving cases—to trust in it, but also to inquire a­ fter the higher purpose for which precisely this person,

C o r p o r eality   1 0 1

now, ­under this constellation, was put on earth. Purpose was more than fate. In Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Most Excellent Paint­ ers, Sculptors, and Architects (Florence, 1568), Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti Simoni’s ‘honorable and noble’ wife gave birth “­under a fateful and favorable star”12 on March 6, 1474, around the eighth hour—­when Mercury and Venus ­were in Jupiter’s second ­house u ­ nder favorable aspect—to their son Michelangelo. Vasari saw “the Ruler of Worlds kindly directing his gaze to earth,” taking pity on the futile efforts of so many industrious and talented artists since Giotto to represent the grandeur of nature with the glory of art “by sending to earth a spirit who was omnipotent in ­every art,”13 who would end all confusion. The beneficence of the constellation was the guide to realizing the intention from above. The biographer could determine this only post festum. But it meant that every­thing that would be called ‘life’ and ‘work’ was ordered and aligned with divine consent. It is remarkable that with this approach any autobiography had to be less ‘efficient’ than the depths revealed by a biographer friendly with and longer-­lived than the subject. In the epoch of scientific causality, it became impossible to understand nature as subservient to divine providence. The world of willed c­ hildren seemed to have vanished. Even Schopenhauer’s brilliant idea to involve t­ hose yet to come in the occasion of their conception could only survive as a metaphysical remnant. U ­ ntil the year 1951, when Gregory Pincus [the developer of the birth control pill] laid the groundwork for a new world of intention, thereby changing ­human be­hav­ior more than any religious founder or messiah before him. Suddenly, new and unexpected questions could be posed. To uncover early infantile experience is nothing compared to the right to know why one is rather than not. The proto-­biographical humor of Tristram Shandy became a terra incognita of insistence. In a humorous manner, Laurence Sterne circumvented the impossible prob­lem of all biographers: determining when a hero’s childhood has ended so that he can be released safely into adulthood. Sterne’s Shandy, due to numerous digressions, never actually reaches this ‘problematic state.’ The biographer differs most decisively from the autobiographer in that the former remains most indebted to the

1 0 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

world for something the latter is least authorized to do: to cross briefly over the often-­invisible threshold between childhood and ‘youth’—or what­ever ­else the time a­ fter childhood might be called. The autobiographer has to be able to describe as ‘experience’ what the biographer at most can register as a departure from custody or a flight from a nest in order to begin ‘life proper’ as the documented sediment of actions or ‘works.’ But concessions have been made to the imagination of biographers since Freud withdrew his ­earlier trust in the realism of memory, confessing to Wilhelm Fliess: “To the question ‘what happened in earliest childhood?’ the answer is: ‘Nothing, . . .’ ”14 In order to preserve the resigned tone of this statement (the discussion concerns the reliability of ‘self-­analysis’), I feel justified in omitting the “germ of sexual impulse” ­after the word “nothing.”15 This omission does not change the fact that what supposedly is memory begins with—­ and perhaps ends with—­the retro-­projection of fantasies. Fantasy was instilled with the privilege of a ‘final authority,’ and the doubts of autobiographers regarding their own childhoods ­were confirmed and became meaningless. Childhood had become a ­matter of ‘aesthetic experience,’ and with a vengeance. “Poetry and Truth” in this ­century would instead sound like “Poetry as Truth.” In 1899, the year of Freud’s letter, Rilke wrote, in an advertisement for his own “Two Stories from Prague” in Maximilian Harden’s journal Die Zukunft (The ­Future), that he had tried to “somehow come closer to [his] own childhood: for all art yearns to grow richer by this lost garden, its perfumes and darkness, to become more eloquent by its murmurs.”16 When science no longer objects to memory’s ‘historical’ dubiousness, it gains the liberty to create itself, to let ­those who have become who they are by virtue of having just t­hese memories be what they decide to be. This is the language of existentialism, chosen h ­ ere on purpose in order to highlight the liberation of memoria as an ‘accentuation’ of the question of origin. In the de­cade of Gregory Pincus, in which a world of wanted births has become pos­si­ble, philosophy culminates in the ‘wanting oneself,’ in the esse sequitur agere [being follows action]. To postwar readers of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), this reversal became legible, and dubious, only two

C o r p o r eality   1 0 3

de­cades ­later in The Words (1963): We are amazed how a childhood cancels itself with retro-­projections and thereby ends itself. As causa sui ipsius, childhood is the pure refusal to make any concessions to the imminence of maturity. Only books are property of the species: whoever gains access to them becomes coeval with all of them. Childhood is mere appearance; a world war and a stepfather seem to function as the caesura that should never have existed if every­ one is ­free to ‘constitute’ him-­or herself. The desire of the phi­los­o­ pher can be satisfied by his memory as well as by his reflections—an unexpected deviation from schoolmaster Descartes. If it ­were appropriate to call this an error, it would be that of misunderstanding the way the child is bound to the species. All memory converges in the species commonality of the biologically ‘youthful’ ­human being, presupposing it could only lose this being by aging, could ‘forfeit’ in a literal sense its ‘essence’ by acting. In this view, childhood is ‘preexistence,’ even if not in the Platonic sense, and remembrance is access to the clarity of species unity; it is the emergence from this unity that first makes all individuation comprehensible—as separation, particularity, peculiarity. The desire for the explanation as well as for the glorification of one’s own childhood, which seems to arise with age and is difficult for autobiographers to avoid (­because that is why they began in the first place), becomes conflicted through the immediate appearance of the question of guilt about having agreed to, or even called for, the forfeiture of such ‘possession.’ One of the most appalling answers is the figure of the ‘sinner from the beginning’; it follows from the fact that one has become this rather than that person. Like no other, Julien Green has investigated this sinfulness comingled with individuation, ranging from the feeling of existence as ‘­under suspicion’ to the desire to not have to be who one is: “I remember quite distinctly that I could hardly draw lines on a piece of paper when I first asked myself why I had to be myself rather than someone ­else.”17 The fact that his novel about this feeling of contingency, If I W ­ ere You (1947), was unsuccessful only strengthens the doubt as to ­whether anything can be made out of this ‘idea.’ It contains nothing, and in this it is similar to Freud’s ‘nothing’ mentioned above.

1 0 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

For Julien Green, the one who is capable of this remembrance is all but a visionary of Satan. At the age of just seven years old, Green once conjured up Satan in the depths of the parental wardrobe but could not bear his appearance and ran crying into the arms of his uncomprehending m ­ other. Even at age sixty, when he remembers the episode in To Leave before Dawn (1963), he does not doubt “that ­there was something ­there,” and believes it to have been a ­great failure in his life not to have had the courage to confront the conjured horror. Are we supposed to believe that another life, the life of another, would have resulted from enduring this vision of evil? The paradox of remembered childhood can be reduced to two sentences: Childhood never was, and nothing ever happened in it; and Childhood always is, and every­thing derives from it. Neither of ­these statements has been able to prevail over the other. The antinomy of childhood finds expression in the trivial beginnings of autobiographies from Cardano to Carossa: memory, which certainly cannot have been pre­sent, simulates the witness, the registrar, the document itself. Childhood is atemporal, but memory has to reassure itself of its contemporaneity, not least b ­ ecause in a literary text it would be too impoverished without its ‘world.’ From the constellation in the skies, Goethe in only a few lines descended to the city of his birth and the obstetric improvements that the danger of his own birth brought to the city. As participants in a memoir, readers are interested in a world in which ­others have also lived and to which innumerable memories—­some articulated, some muted, some printed, and some narrated—­refer. The reference to chronology and dates is an ironic aid to allow for further associations; the remembering person becomes secondary ­unless she credits the stars with responsibility for her being. I myself—­just to make this point— do not know ­whether it was night or day when I was born. In a note found in the twenty-­ eighth book of his diaries (1928/1930), Robert Musil condenses the insidious ambivalence that is conceivable ­here to the shortest pos­si­ble formula ­under the keyword “con­temporary”: “I was born on . . . ​, which not every­ body can claim. The place, too, was unusual: Kl[agenfurt] in

C o r p o r eality   1 0 5

K[ärnten]; relatively few ­people are born ­there. In a certain sense, both of ­these are intimations of my ­future.”18 The disproportion between what is memorable and what is datable has reached its maximum degree of irony in the well-­known fact that our calendar refers to post Christum natum, but does not satisfy the necessary condition that the date of birth in the manger in Bethlehem be certain to ­those who, aside from questions of post-­ Christianity, still celebrate it as the most vis­i­ble of all the events in the history of salvation or damnation. Years, not days or hours, are at issue in the debate about the date of birth of Jesus of Nazareth. And yet in proportion to its uncertainty, the date has assumed the strangest normality ­because the myth by now is embedded so deeply in our minds that it has assumed the status of timelessness. The sole evangelist to relate the nativity story took the only valid precaution and invoked from the beginning the memories of the principal witness, Mary. Where no ­human memory can serve to answer the questions of beginning and origin, ­there intervenes the anthropological fact that ­humans as nidicolous beings are protected by the attentions of their parents, who guard memoria as well. Not long before his m ­ other’s death, Goethe asked Bettine [von Armin] to interview her for his autobiography. For the beginning of his Gospel, Luke invoked Jesus’s ­mother—­had to do so, b ­ ecause he was alone with his account for which ­there ­were no witnesses, not even Mark and Matthew, who had written their Gospels before his. Legend made the painter Luke into the only au­then­tic portraitist of Jesus’s ­mother, into the originator of the iconic patterns of all religious painting. It is as if the late evangelist, who could no longer pass for an eyewitness of Jesus’s words and deeds, had an even more succinct means of producing authenticity when he added an image to the power­ful scene he could generate only ­because his portrait sitter was his exclusive ‘source.’ Luke is establishing her trustworthiness when he ends the Christmas pericope with the sentence: “But Mary retained all t­hese words (panta syneterei) and held them together (symballoysa) in her heart” (Luke 2:19). That is why he was the only evangelist who could answer with pious frankness the question: “Since when was this one?”

1 0 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

Luke alone can be radically honest in confronting the question of origin: he goes back even before the story of nativity and reveals a secret that most ­mothers keep from their ­children, not only out of decency but ­because they cannot be certain themselves. For Mary and for Luke, who in­ven­ted her as his ‘source’—­she could hardly have been alive when he began to write ­after the destruction of the ­temple—­the moment of her consent to the incarnation of God, of her contract with the originator of her child, could be told in ­great detail. She remembers even the name of the angel who offers the contract of conception. The date is determined indirectly by the slightly less miraculous pregnancy of the wife of the priest Zachary, who is to give birth to John the Baptist, the one who invents the invocation ‘Lamb of God’ and performs the baptism that, according to the Synoptic Gospels, inaugurates the public phase of Jesus’s works. The elapsed time between the conception of the pre­de­ces­sor, the son of the priest, and the conception of the one he ­will designate, is exactly half the annual orbit of the sun, represented for millennia in the polarity of the birthdays in the church calendar. Only Matthew has recounted what Mary must have concealed from Luke: how a dream of an angel convinced her betrothed, Joseph, to tolerate the strange provenance of the fruit of her womb as the Son of God and not to sign the letter of divorce. Even so—­only a dreamed angel for such an imposition! Every­thing hinges on Mary’s role as witness for Luke. She makes it pos­si­ble for him to enter late and still compete with ­those who had written down the reports of eyewitnesses from the beginning (hoi ap arches autoptas), and yet as someone who followed “every­ thing closely from the beginning” (anothen pasin akribos) (Luke 1:3), in the words of the singular dedication of the Gospel, with clear reference to the m ­ other of God. This one evangelist alone knew about the beginning of beginnings. Or perhaps not he alone? In any case, Luke had, prob­ably without ever knowing it, a late rival in John, the last evangelist, who believed he did not need to know about the angel’s message and the birth in the manger—­that is, about every­thing that was so familiar to the faithful—­even though he portrays himself as the one to whom the crucified, close to the

C o r p o r eality   1 0 7

end, entrusted the witness: “Behold, your m ­ other!” (John 19:27). The apostle, thus addressed, took her in—­but from him she must have concealed much. So much, in fact, that he commences with an entirely dif­fer­ent, highly abstract story of the origin of the Son of God that immediately turns to the bearing witness and baptism by John in the River Jordan. This could be a gospel about how difficult it is for a God to become ­human—­and to live among ­human beings as a ­human without constantly referring to his own divine background. The messiah figure in the Gospel of John never quite descended from the heights of abstraction as Log­os. John responds to the question “Since when was this one?” by maximizing a statement that is unconditional and does not require commentary: “In the beginning was the Log­os” (John 1:1). Before every­thing ­else, b ­ ecause every­thing was created by it: life, the light that would not be overpowered by darkness. As soon as this is said, a man appears who is not the incarnate Log­os: John the Baptist. He lessens the abstraction and is the witness who is supposed to show ­others where they might find light and life. John, too, appears from nowhere and has, like Jesus, no history—­only together, when they meet, do they have a history, just as the prophet is verified by truth, and truth by the prophet. The fourth evangelist knows nothing about the relationship between John, the son of the priest, and Jesus the son of the Virgin— he must not make it known, for the Baptist encounters one who is a stranger in this world, who came into this world as Log­os ­because the Word is God’s only known ‘activity’ in scripture. First and foremost, it is the expression of his power in the creation of the world by the word “Let t­ here be!” For Log­os to come into the world, it is necessary that it be created by him: he comes into his own. Every­thing the biblical God does is ‘Word’: he creates, reveals, and judges. That is why Log­os is eternally preexistent. His relationship to the world in the last instance is entirely in­de­pen­dent of the fact that ­humans need him ­because of their sinfulness. Preexistence in John is the precursor to the much ­later theological speculation about the eternal predestination of the Son of God to become man. It proclaims the in­de­pen­dence of this act of God from any dealings

1 0 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

with ­humans. That is why the last word of the crucified in John is the confirmation of an act: tetelestai—­“It is finished” (John 19:30). It is as if the creator of the world had repeated his “it was good.” The equivalence of creation and salvation is at the heart of invoking the Log­os. But it is also already the evangelist’s ‘theology’ of needing to elevate the story of Jesus that visibly oppresses him ­because of its ‘lowliness’ (kenosis). What he composes in the prologue in order to surpass and outdo all previous answers to the question “Since when was this one?” does not have the slightest bearing on his story of Jesus and his question, “Since when am I?” Nowhere does Jesus refer to himself as Log­os, even though he is filled with the filial mission and closeness to God more clearly h ­ ere than in Luke. For Luke, the mission of the Son as savior begins in the strictest sense when Mary agrees to the offer of the angel: to let herself be overcome by the Holy Spirit (pneuma hagion), to be overshadowed by the highest power (dynamis hypsistou), to be nothing but the slave of the Lord (he doule kyriou), and to succumb to the speech of the messenger angel (kata to rhema sou). H ­ ere was a ‘space’ for a hint of the Log­os as the agent of annunciation and effectuation—­but Luke uses the banal to rhema [utterance] to designate ‘word.’ Of course, we must not conclude that Mary as the witness did not transmit the right word to her listener. For she did not speak Greek, as much as we are made to believe that it was a current language then. Mary only spoke about the word of an angel, not the Log­os of God, and Mary’s evangelist was not thinking of the eternal preexistence of the “Son of God” (as Gabriel called him) when he let him begin not in abstract eternity but in this most definite hour in Nazareth. The firstborn (prototokos) of Joseph’s fiancée was not yet he whom the second article of the Apostles’ Creed ­will call “filium dei unigenitum” [the only begotten Son of God] and “ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula” [born of the F ­ ather before all ages] and fi­nally “genitum, non factum” [begotten, not made], at a time when every­thing is so much more exactly known than at the time of the evangelist. What Mary confides to Luke about the night of the nativity and the visit of the shepherds is not even close to the same altitude of

C o r p o r eality   1 0 9

the Log­os or even the logia; it was much closer to something like ‘chatter’ (ta rhemata), if this expression ­were not so ambiguous. And what reaches the Baptist in the desert and makes him go to the place of baptism is the ‘word of God’ (rhema theou), but, as if in defiant refusal, nothing of the level of Log­os. John’s prologue remains singular both in its rivalry with Luke’s reliance on Mary regarding the certification of the true beginning and in the intensification of his Son of God into a dif­fer­ent, unthinkable beginning. With utmost zeal John positions his script literally and figuratively next to the scripture when he begins with “In the beginning” (en arche), just as Moses, according to the Septuagint, put the beginning of all beginnings as “In the beginning” (b’reschit) (John 1:1 and Gen 1:1).

Why So Late? Nothing was supposed to have been more appropriate to God’s essence than becoming ­ human. Although it never was an official dogma, the doctrine of the Franciscan monk Duns Scotus that the Son of God was forever predestined to become h ­ uman (incarnate) found broad and deep approval. Implied in this theologoumenon is that the sin of h ­ uman beings and the catastrophe of their salvation ­were not necessary to move God the F ­ ather to let his Son assume ­human form and send him into the world. He would have come even without this felix culpa, elected as he was since eternity by the innermost being of the godhead. Consequently, it has been cautiously suggested at times that the likeness of man with his creator was intended from the beginning to prepare the carnal container for the Son. In a reversal of all ‘classic’ explanations, this view sees the creation of the world and of man in divine likeness as nothing but the prelude to God’s g­ reat salvific act of divine incarnation as well as to the apotheosis of man, who thereby is included in eternal election. In this view, original sin would be nothing but a slight mishap w ­ ere it not for the clear or implied desperate question: w ­ hether God-­ become-­man would have had to suffer and die if his mission had not been the rescue of lost souls, which in this view it did not have to be.

1 1 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

It belongs to the essence of any theology that it cannot raise ­every question. Immanent barriers prevent this. In this regard, theology is not dissimilar to a theoretical system, except that the latter uses ‘para-­theories’ to ­either discredit or minimize inadmissible questions. Now, t­here is always a kind of topography in the defense against questions. Not all can be declared as symptoms of a ‘re­sis­ tance’ to the truth, as Sigmund Freud did so masterfully and intimidatingly. From the history of Christian doctrine, we can derive an Analy­sis situs of such unavoidable questions. ­After the frenzied expectation of the imminent destruction of the world, which had dominated all other questions, had subsided, the most urgent question became that of God’s choice for the timing of his arduous act of salvation: “Why did God appear so late?” It is easy to see how the beautiful medieval thought of the eternal predestination of God’s Son for incarnation would give new urgency to this question: If every­thing had been de­cided since eternity, why did he leave humanity alone for so long in its misery? In this re­spect, early Chris­tian­ity had an advantage. The thought of salvation had not yet reached its speculative culmination and therefore only s­ imple means w ­ ere needed to address the prob­lem of delay. The most successful was the ­later article in the Apostles’ Creed of the Decensus ad inferos, Jesus’s descent into hell during his time in the tomb, which thereby lost the odor of weakness in death. An act of salvation was accomplished while the rock was in front of the tomb and nothing pointed ­toward hope. The descent into the underworld makes the delay in salvation worthwhile: whoever would have been saved ­earlier now received salvation retroactively by the opening of the gates of hell for the righ­teous of antiquity. It is not incarnation that thereby became unimportant, only its exact date in the chronology of world history. The question “Why so late?” did not fall ­under the rubric of factual issues that much ­later assumed the title of ‘theodicy.’ And yet especially in missionary work the question remained urgent and could not be trivialized, lest the temporally and spatially narrowly defined ‘event of salvation’ of the Gospel lose its ‘singularity.’ It had to have been utterly necessary that every­thing happened exactly the way it did—­and did not become a coup de main that an

C o r p o r eality   1 1 1

omnipotent God also could have accomplished more easily. And especially ­earlier: Why had the Lord of Eden not intervened when the tempter approached His creature? Why was that not the moment to avert the imminent disaster? To intervene by means of the Log­os, the Word incarnate, of which the beginning of John’s Gospel speaks? The church f­ather Gregory of Nyssa, an eminent theologian of the Greek East in the fourth c­ entury, asked this question in his ­Great Catechesis; he was obviously motivated by the impossibility of arguing any longer that the Son came and ended the world at its moment of readiness. ­After all, the Son’s arrival had not been the end of history, but much rather a caesura before an immea­sur­able extension. The end had become a peripeteia, and even that could be noticed only with well-­meaning attention. It was the dilemma of the imperceptible Messiah for which Jewish theologians—­perhaps with an eye on Christian misfortunes—­would find such subtle arguments. Gregory of Nyssa uses meta­phors from medicine: the art of healing lies in intervening at the right moment. All the evils of the illness, according to his doctrine, have to be pre­sent, the ‘image of the illness’ has to be complete. Practice has to be preceded by theory, and therapy by secure knowledge. For ­there was not to be any remainder of new potential evil when the savior came “in order to spread salvation across the expanse of wretchedness.” When Gregory justifies the need for salvation by listing all the evils that had arisen between the fratricide of Cain and the murder of the firstborn by Herod, he would have to—­but explic­itly does not—­deny that in the three centuries hence anything new or worse had occurred. This, in turn, would have meant the devaluation of the singular cruelty visited by the emperors upon Christians. Martyrdom as testimony for truth was specific to the history of early Chris­tian­ ity, and the sanctity and credibility it accrued on one side had to be counterbalanced by wickedness and hatred for the truth, by refusal of salvation and damnable actions, on the other. Gregory’s answers obviously ­were already standardized by apol­o­getic demands, but remained helpless ­because they lacked any support from scripture, which had not anticipated this line of argumentation. For the greatest quandary, which it had bequeathed as ‘glad tidings,’ scripture had no answer.

1 1 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

Above all, the concept of redemption that Gregory takes from the Gospels has ­little to do with his medical meta­phor for the late salvational intervention. Redemption was the ransom of the souls fallen to Satan b ­ ecause of their sins. For the meta­phorics of ‘ransoming,’ the explanation that salvation takes time is nearly fatal. Would not e­ very day conceded to the epoch of sinfulness drive up the price to be paid for the multitude of ­those to be ransomed? Anselm of Canterbury ­will advance a slightly more probable solution: Given the scarcity of the righ­teous and the saints, a g­ reat deal of time was necessary to fill the fixed number of places in the thinned-­ out celestial choir with saved souls. ­Here, a­ fter a millennium, a definite yet unknown number of vacant places was enumerated, whose filling determined the timing of the world. This idea failed to provide even the slightest consolation, however. The longer history continued, especially a­ fter the caesura of salvation, the more clearly the suspicion arose that despite constant demand, the number actually supplied in a given time must have been very low. The number of t­ hose unworthy of salvation, Augustine’s massa damnata, would rise in proportion to the length of history. God obviously could use only very few: he had searched hell for the righteous—­but how many could t­here have been if the se­ lection continued for such a long time? If we ­were still confronted with a philosophical version of this prob­lem, we would say: only a few passed the exam for eternity. Or maybe the gaps caused by the fall of Lucifer’s horde w ­ ere larger than was conceded by pious calculation about the quality of angels? How much more problematic would ­things be for ­humans if even angels w ­ ere hard to find, given that they are plagued neither by doubt nor by carnality? Why did salvation come so late? Imperceptibly, this question expands to: Why is every­thing so late? Why is every­thing as miserable as it is? Who pays the ransom for God’s ancient debt to man? Is this an additional, or perhaps the foremost, reason the Son of man died? ­These questions remain open, if biblical philology is right in confirming that no dictum of Jesus is reliably passed on in which he attributes any salvific importance to his death. That would have been added on the via kerygmatica, and on this road ­there is no au-

C o r p o r eality   1 1 3

thority that could say “enough!”—­especially not for the audience of the St. Matthew Passion.

A Fulfilled Promise “Wozu dienet dieser Unrat?—­What is the point of this waste?” the chorus of apostles sings in four voices at the beginning of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (MP 4). The scene takes place in the h ­ ouse of Simon the Leper in Bethany. An unnamed ­woman pours a precious perfume over Jesus and thereby provokes the charitable zeal of his followers, who ask the question in Luther’s drastic German. One could have sold this perfume, given the proceeds to the poor. But Jesus tolerates the luxury; time is r­ unning out, and soon this perfumed body ­will be buried. In contrast to his admonishment about the shortness of his time, the rabbi also pronounces that the poor ­will always (pantote) be with us. Always? How long would that be if the prophecies w ­ ere right in predicting that the world ­will soon come to an end and the Son of man ­will return on the clouds of heaven for the Last Judgment? This contradiction becomes even starker when Jesus, beginning with the prophetic amen (Luther’s ‘verily’), promises to the w ­ oman that she ­will be mentioned wherever the Gospel is preached in the world—­not to glorify him but to commemorate her (eis mnemosynon autes, Matt. 26:13). None of the commentaries express the slightest curiosity about this sentence out of the mouth of the eschatological savior. This world is destined to perish; ­those now living ­will experience the end. ­There is no use in acting with prudence and foresight as if the world ­were constant. And yet h ­ ere, in this case of a w ­ oman cherishing the body, a dimension is opened in which this memorable deed w ­ ill long be glorified, the doxa and gloria of the pagans. She is promised not otherworldly redemption but the mere splendor of eternal remembrance among ­humans who ­will hear her story all over the world. The vastness of the world and the length of time—­how do they figure in this context where every­thing but the per­sis­tence of the

1 1 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

world is being expected, hoped and prayed for? A worldly reward in a fallen world? In 1727 Bach presented his St. Matthew Passion for the first time. And right then, in all its auditory magnificence, both the promise and its fulfillment became evident. A world much bigger than the one that could have been conceived of ­earlier became witness, for a quarter of a millennium, to the glory of an unknown ­woman who had been reviled for the ‘irrelevance’ of her action. She was proven correct against the apocalyptic visions of the rabbi whose body she prepared for death. The world that Jesus, contradicting himself, had named as the condition for her memoria persisted and learned, in sounds never before heard, about the ­woman in the h ­ ouse of the Leper of Bethany. The greatest master of his art made her and her story worthy of praise throughout the entire world. She became the archaic figure of Christian charity when Bach, in the recitativo, says that we should take her side in the quarrel with the apostles: “In the meantime let me, / with the tears flowing from my eyes, / pour w ­ ater upon your head!” (MP 5). The inconsistency of the St. Matthew Passion is that of its Evangelist. He awards glory and the right to prophecy to the ­woman who performs the anointing in the ­house of Simon in Bethany, but does not satisfy the first condition of all glorification: to give her a name. She remains “this pious w ­ oman” (MP 5), not least b ­ ecause the listeners’ attention is supposed to be directed ­toward the body whose unanointed burial in the sealed tomb w ­ ill end the Passion. With his death, Jesus justifies the waste of the perfumed oil to the grumbling apostles who pretend to think of alms for the poor ­because they ­don’t believe, in a strict sense, in the needs of this individual body. Secretly, they are Docetists. Jesus himself has to insist on the ‘realism’ of his coporeality; disregarding any offense, he speaks of the needs of his corpse, which the unnamed ­woman unknowingly anticipates: “Why do you trou­ble this w ­ oman? She has done me a good deed!” (MP 4e). For the apostolic critics, only a brutally real body can receive what is called ‘a good deed.’ He who was supposed to have no needs equates himself with the needy: “You ­will have the poor with you always, but you w ­ ill not always have me. She has poured this ­water on my body ­because I ­will be buried” (MP 4e).

C o r p o r eality   1 1 5

The catastrophe of the master, which Judas ­will accelerate with his betrayal, is the hour of this w ­ oman as well as of the other ­women pre­sent ­under the cross and near the tomb when all the apostles have fled the scene. It is therefore unsurprising that theological speculation was not satisfied with the anonymity of the anointing ­woman: she was identified as the “Maddalena Penitente,” the penitent of Magdala. Upon viewing her portrait as painted by Paolo Veronese in the Palazzo Durazzo in Genova, Heinrich Heine wrote: “She is so beautiful one should fear that one day she certainly ­will be seduced.”19 In Rilke’s poem “Pietà,” the Mary who is holding the body of Jesus on her lap is apparently not, as usual, Jesus’s m ­ other, but Mary of Magdala, who had anointed his body and wanted to embalm it the day ­after the Sabbath (according to Mark alone). Rilke conceived of this Pietà configuration as the lamentation of a love relationship that death had ended prematurely: “And so I see your never-­loved limbs / For the first time in this night of love.”20 His wounds ­were not ­those of her frenzied love, the wound ­under his heart not an opening for her: “O Jesus, Jesus, when was our hour?”21 Neither Heine nor Rilke could know the apocryphal tradition in the Gospel of Philip found in Nag Hammadi in 1945, according to which Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s ‘partner’ whom he used to kiss on the lips. In this Gnostic text the jealousy of the apostles ­toward the preferred w ­ oman has a dif­fer­ent meaning: “Why do you love her more than all of us?” To which Jesus is supposed to have answered: “Why do I not love you like I love her?”22 Just as the naming of the anointing ­woman in Bethany as Mary in the Gospel of John was a fragment slipped through from an older tradition, so is the grumbling of the apostles in the Matthew Passion the sign of a conflict about the ‘realistic’ implications of Jesus’s corporeality; this is recognizable in Jesus’s reinterpreted and refused messianic anointment, which anticipates the anointing of a dead body, reflected in Matthew’s drastic change from ‘head’ to ‘body.’ In the long run, the scene in Bethany announces the alliance of Docetism and asceticism: the halfhearted corporeality of the incarnate one is the correlate of the subdued corporeality of t­ hose who wish to follow him into his higher regions of being. In the apocryphal texts it is mostly ­women

1 1 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

to whom this kind of ‘fellowship’ as salvation makes sense and even appeals. The worry that body, suffering, and death w ­ ere offered to the powers and ­people of the world simply as spectacle is no longer the worry of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. His insistence on ‘realism’ is intended to reassure the soul of its salvation. The ­woman in the promise of Bethany to whom the ­music gives ultimate confirmation would no longer have reminded the faithful of anything ­else but the capacity of Jesus’s body to suffer and die. But the riddle as to why Judas took offense at Jesus in Bethany might become more intelligible. Judas knew only too well—­like so many followers do about their ‘saviors’—­what was to be expected of someone to whom he could entrust his hopes and aspirations. The loss of aura when Jesus’s corporeality ‘showed itself’ also diminished his stature as savior: How could the one anointed by this w ­ oman, full of mortal premonitions, be the Messiah, the ‘anointed one’ from the lineage of David, the embodiment of charisma? “Then one of the twelve went forth. . . .” (MP 7).

Apostates

The Comic Ele­ment of Simon Peter In the story we call the “Passion,” t­ here is no respite before the end. Every­thing that happens has to convey a seriousness that testifies to the real­ity of the suffering and ­dying of a savior. Even the slightest appearance that this one does not literally need to bear what is being narrated would give full credence to the suspicion of Docetism: that God stands aside while man suffers death in his stead. Before this death has been accomplished, no one sits down, not even in tears. Only the end, and nothing ­else, can mercifully resolve what came before. That is why t­here is not the slightest trace of humor, not even the knowing smile of a foresighted, pious soul. The Passion has to deal with a God of the utmost sensitivity. The loyalty he had wanted to show his creatures from the beginning corresponds to his insistence on theirs. Loyalty is what is asked of, and imposed upon, ­every soul as faith. In view of the story of the

1 1 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

Passion, this means at ­every moment: All this is absolutely true. In Bach, a musically ritualized loyalty is tested and celebrated. Its core is the seriousness of the realization that salvation arises from frailty. Why does this need to be mentioned? ­Because it has become too obvious—­not least through the St. Matthew Passion—to be understood. ­There are plenty of ‘ingredients’ in this narrative that could bring the comedy inherent in ­every tragedy to light. ­After all, with the election of his apostles Jesus assembled a ‘crew’ that was singularly unsuited for its task: p ­ eople who ­until the very end did not quite know what the point of it all was except for an attractive kingdom of God (basileia theou). Who scampered off in all directions when the entry into Jerusalem did not go as planned. Whose knowledge of scripture apparently was not sufficient for them to be able to understand that every­thing had been prophesied. For whom every­thing had to happen just as it did, and only b ­ ecause it all ‘arrived’ so precisely was the one whom they never ceased to doubt vindicated. The apostles, with their mixture of expectation and disappointment, are as ‘comical’ in their disposition as has to be the case considering the power­ful discordance between the real and the imaginary; they are rendered laughable by the drastic futility of their alleged virtue: hope. And is not Peter, the one who first sounds the theme of ­bitter tears, furnished with all the qualities of a comic figure? But he, too, belongs to the obligatory ‘fulfillments’ of scripture: “I ­will beat the shepherd and disperse the herd,” according to Zechariah (Matt. 26:31). Luke has Jesus add (­because no one had yet understood): “Yes, every­thing must be fulfilled that has been written about me” (Luke 24:44). This turns even the comics into functionaries of salvation in this night of disloyalties. This Peter is a blowhard before he fails, a miles gloriosus [vainglorious foot soldier] when he reaches for his sword to hack off an ear of the high priest’s servant. Luke knows that it was the right ear, and only John knows that it was Peter who did this; Matthew does not mention the name, and only John knows that the name of the injured servant was Malchus.

A p o s tates    1 1 9

For the subtle humor of the ­eager swordsman Bach has no sense. He eagerly waits for the Evangelist’s sentence that concludes the scene: “Then all the disciples deserted him and fled” (MP 28). This is the moment to draw the listener’s soul again to its task and tribute: “O humanity, bewail your ­great sins . . .” (MP 29). Nothing is more offensive to this Jesus than the fickleness of t­ hose on whom he, a­ fter years of teaching and of miracles, has not been able to impart any firmness. The weakness of faith is always first of all the weakness of the God who finds himself offended by it. In ­every other case one would say: not a very convincing god. How then can the sin of failure among ­those who ­were so carelessly elected be so ­great? Why does Peter have to confess to the maids in the palace of the high priest that he, too, belonged to the followers of the Galilean? Why does his false oath: “I do not know the man” (MP 38a) so move us, if, ­after all, we know how l­ittle he could stand by his big words, ­because he, too, did not know what it was all about. For him, and for the believers, Bach offers the consolation of the chorale: “Although I have strayed from you / I return yet again . . .” (MP 40). Why should the belated listener not be allowed to smile about such ingenuousness? In the sequence of tears that are being cried in the St. Matthew Passion, Peter’s are somewhat premature. They are not, like the tears of the final chorus, ‘rightful,’ but wrong and sentimental: “And he went out and wept bitterly” (MP 38c). What does Peter do next? Does he stand u ­ nder the cross? He does not show up again u ­ ntil every­thing is over and counsel has to be taken about what can be made of the messianic catastrophe. Only his apostolic successors ­will again (let o ­ thers) draw the sword. Beyond all faith, this belief ­will remain: that this God w ­ ill be mortally insulted by the slightest deviation from his text and therefore has to be protected from it. The humor that could find its place neither ­here nor anywhere ­else in the history of faith has its ultimate foundation in the absolute disproportion between the infinity that God has to be and the banality of the insults to which he can be exposed. Never must the witness listening to the St. Matthew Passion think about how all had begun: with the violation of a dietary rule in paradise, the first

1 2 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

of many which also have their humor in the disproportion between the lawgiver and the law, and between his injury and the infraction. The St. Matthew Passion is ­free of such petty stuff; but not ­free enough, ­because it is only the ‘distance’ of h ­ uman history that separates it from the offense against the F ­ ather for which the Son of man has to die.

The Denial Becomes Defamation In the world of the Bible, every­thing reminds us of every­thing ­else. This has determined the idiosyncratic treatment of its texts: every­ thing could be related to every­thing ­else. Traditional exegesis looks very much like unbridled association. To say this with a bit of levity: so ­little did God concentrate on the essentials in his revelation that its recipients have strug­gled to keep it together and see the ‘connecting thread.’ Some t­hings ­were not noticed at times. Contributing presuppositions seemed unimportant, and sometimes downright alarming. In the denial episode of the St. Matthew Passion, one secondary aspect becomes almost too prominent: the emphasis on the country of origin of Jesus and Peter. In the courtyard the maidservant says to Peter: “And you ­were also with that Jesus of Galilee” (MP 38a). ­There is an undertone ­here of someone living in the capital near the t­ emple: who is this prophet from the provinces about whom every­body is so exercised—­for it is Jesus, not Peter, whom the designation of origin Galilaios concerns. The second maidservant does the same but specifies Jesus as being from Nazareth (Nazaraios). Already in the first instance Peter opened his mouth and said he did not know what she was talking about. In the second he goes too far in his carelessness and vows “I do not know the man” (MP 38a). But this torrent of words betrays him. All who had stood around and listened now come closer to him (threateningly?): “Truly, you are also one of them, for your speech (lalia sou) betrays you” (MP 38b; Matt. 26:73). The heightened drama comes not only from that fact that Peter now reaches for the extreme mea­sure of cursing himself—­just like

A p o s tates    1 2 1

the good old days: ‘I want to be cursed if this is true!’—­but also ­because now every­thing is concentrated on the one who by his denial in the idiom of the Galilees (from the southern end of Lake Tiberias, and a fisherman to boot) betrays himself as a liar. Without any real need, for nothing is happening to him. The suspicion of being a ‘foreigner’ suffices, even though the city is teeming with them during Passover. Was this ­whole excitement not a m ­ atter for ­people from the provinces and their outlandish gullibility? Imported from Galilee to Judea, where one knew better what was and was not appropriate? This seemingly anecdotal ­matter has rarely been considered. Yet every­body well versed in the Bible certainly remembered that ­great effort was expended at the beginning of Jesus’s story not to let him be born in Galilee. The Census of Quirinus that would turn out to be so bothersome for chronology became an ele­ment of the story only so that the birthplace could be moved to Bethlehem in Judea, the only place where a claimant to the throne of the h ­ ouse of David could hail from. In the end, and despite Luke’s ingenious transposition of the childhood story as told by the m ­ other, it was all in vain. Even before Pilate has the inscription affixed to the cross, declaring Jesus a Nazarene and the King of the Jews (Matthew saw the contradiction and fixed it), the maidservants know that Jesus was from Nazareth and his followers from Galilee. Was the reason for the scorn directed at Peter, as well as his fear of embarrassment, not precisely that he who had just been celebrated as the “Son of David” during his messianic entrance into Jerusalem on a donkey’s back, following the words of the prophet, could not have been Davidian ­because he was from Galilee, was not born of the tribe of Judah like the royal ­family? Had the excitement and the cheering abated b ­ ecause it had become known that he could not have been who he claimed to be? In that case, it would have been a decisive ­mistake to begin the salvific mission in Jerusalem, where no one cared for the ­people from Galilee and where the Hosanna at the entrance would be understood as an attempt by the pilgrims from Galilee to install their messiah. No one, then, thought about Bethlehem in Judea, the place that would become as impor­tant to Christians as Jerusalem. And Peter?

1 2 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

He had not only denied his master. He had done him the disser­vice, in the m ­ iddle of the palace courtyard of t­ emple administrators and in front of all their servants, to also defame his master as a Galilean like himself with the very language (lalia) of his denial—­and thereby to drag into contempt the one who had affirmed again in the interrogation that he was the King of the Jews. In his eagerness not to be who he was, Peter by his dialect had provided the counterproof both for himself and for the one whose status as a Davidian could so easily be extinguished that Pilate could risk the inscription, the point of which the St. Matthew Passion conceals from us. The reader familiar—­through Luke and Bach—­with the Christmas story w ­ ill hardly remember the beginning of Matthew during the episode with Peter, a beginning that was never popu­lar ­because it contained the genealogy of Joseph and thus makes Jesus into a Davidian: “Story of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1). From the depths of time, across three times fourteen generations, the husband of Mary emerges and accepts in a dream the angel and its message when he is addressed as the Son of David. The birthplace Bethlehem ­here needs no justification: ­here Joseph lives, ­here he takes the pregnant ­woman as his wife, ­here she gives birth, ­here the magi come from the East to pay homage, following the words of the prophet and the guidance of the stars. Only ­after the return from the flight into Egypt does Matthew decide to turn Jesus into a Nazarene. Again it is external coercion, the fear of the successors of Herod in Judea, which makes Joseph hesitate to declare his son a Bethlehemite. Only then does he fi­nally turn ­toward Galilee, apparently unwillingly, b ­ ecause a second command in a dream is necessary so that the further prophecy, that the one who is to come ­will be called Nazaraios, is fulfilled. In Matthew, he is from Nazareth not even by virtue of his f­ ather’s place of residence, of whom it is explic­itly said that only now had he ‘settled’ (katokesen) in Nazareth. Matthew noticeably insists that his Jesus originates in e­ very sense—­not only accidentally—in Judea and only was regarded as a Galilean as a further humiliation. In order to follow attentively Peter’s self-­incrimination from denial to defamation in Bach, the at-

A p o s tates    1 2 3

tention of the ‘implied listener’ has to be already attuned to the keyword “Galilean.”

The One Driven by G ­ reat Expectations Perhaps the second most impor­tant function of repetition in myths ­after the dissolution of fears is to dissolve hatred. Not only the central figure of the ‘Servant of God’ but also the minor characters like Pontius Pilate, or even Judas, are kept in a peculiar suspension between being guilty and contributing to salvation. Christian dogma has never allowed that the fallen angel in the role of Satan be turned into the princi­ple of evil and an object of unbridled hatred, principally ­because the reservoir of creatureliness is inexhaustible and even in rejecting God’s incarnation the zealot betrays a detectable remainder of zeal for God; similarly, in the case of Judas the complicity with the one who drew him into his fold and intimacy is undeniable. It was inevitable for someone who was overly zealous for the purity of the Messiah to take offense, someone who had already, in the scene in Bethany with the anointing ­woman, reached the limits of his tolerance. Much has been said but too ­little has been thought about this. But part of such a rethinking must be that Bach begins the St. Matthew Passion with this scene, which as an anticipatory anointment of Jesus’s corpse relates to the Passion but also prepares and introduces the digression of Judas. It is not just Judas but all of the apostles who grumble (eganaktesan) and utter the deprecatory word ‘waste’ (apoleia; in Luther’s translation: Unrat) that for Bach seems to emerge from the background of the looming crisis: “Wozu dienet dieser Unrat?” [What is the point of this waste?]. When Jesus answers with the provocative promise that this w ­ oman, no less than they, the grumblers, ­will become part of the gospel, Judas is only the amplifier. He is the true believer who, without hesitation, gives his answer to this provocation: “Then one of the twelve, named Judas Iscariot, went to the high priests. . . .” (MP 7; Matt. 26:14). It is not only the reaction of the messianic brotherhood to the elevation of the anointment by the nameless ­woman into the gospel,

1 2 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

not only the stinginess of the keepers of the alms who know at all times where the money could be invested better—it is the conjunction of anointment and burial, and the intimation of a long period of missionizing and waiting, that bestows on this moment such an ominous effect with regard to the Passion as the messianic catastrophe into which it would develop. The one anointed in advance by the ­woman would be buried—­ that meant: he would not triumph as the Davidian king, and he would not elevate to high positions in his kingdom ­those who ­were entitled to them. ­There is only a gradual difference between Judas and the rest of the apostles, and when John calls him ‘the son of perdition’ (ho hyios tes apoleias) he becomes ‘waste’ as a figure—­ precisely what all of them had condemned in Bethany: the futility of an effort. Judas is simply an exponent of messianic impatience. He does in his fashion what the ­others ­will do in theirs. It is not only their annoying falling asleep in Gethsemane, their flight a­ fter the capture, or the ­triple denial of Peter. Just as Judas wants to turn the page by forcing a demonstration of power, the o ­ thers ­will try the same but avoid suicide: they w ­ ill try to salvage what can be sal­vaged. ­These lost souls, ‘sons of perdition’ in their own right, ­will found ­behind closed doors the association that the theological lit­er­a­ture calls—­without much further definition—­‘the post-­Easter community’ and whose product is the ‘kerygma’: the renunciation of the what in order to strengthen the that. For that every­thing had to happen as it did in order to fulfill the scripture compensates for the disappointment over what had actually happened, which looked like the destruction of an entirely dif­fer­ent expectation. ­Those listening to the St. Matthew Passion do not have to reflect on the ‘post-­Easter community’ ­because with the scene in Bethany they are being pulled into the story and can already anticipate how this ‘community’ is unable to meet the demands of the Passion. Where was the common sense—­not to speak of higher senses— of the one who selected this motley crew of pathetic and susceptible followers? And then, in the moment when they are ready to make their full claims, to confront them beyond all mea­sure with anointing w ­ omen and gloomy allusions to his tomb? Vae victimis—­

A p o s tates    1 2 5

the innocent is guilty of that which approaches. The one whose task it should have been to prevent this failed. Could Jesus know that this was precisely the way to turn his own downfall into a Christology that would explode all theological dimensions? With his premature death, Judas ­will have missed a solution for the prob­lem of God’s kingdom ­after the catastrophe. This solace might have convinced him not to despair of the g­ rand dream. This is not the view that the community of ­those who witnessed the Passion has on the Judas pericope; it is that of the ‘post-­Easter’ ­people. They have no reason to see Judas as the antagonist of their salvation just ­because he visibly could not wait. Judas is not the one who effectuates what other­wise would have not occurred and in the absence of which the ‘sinners’ in the community could go to sleep reassured. His guilt as part of salvation is no more decisive than the snake’s seduction in paradise. Augustine w ­ ill look back on the scene in paradise with the almost joyful locution felix culpa ­because in Paul he had found an entirely dif­fer­ent fundamental thought: God’s responsibility for salvation and damnation through the act of predestination. This decree no longer has anything to do with this sin or that salvation, b ­ ecause it presupposes and includes the imperceptibility of the Messiah. This is the price one pays for the conception of a God beyond the reach of deeds or misdeeds in the world. For John, Judas is, in Luther’s parlance, “the lost child.” No one ­else is lost but this one, but with the addendum “that scripture be fulfilled” (John 17:12). Who ­else could it have been but the one in Matthew who was unable to bear his Lord’s discourse about death and burial: the accelerator of the decision, not its originator. Indeed, what did Judas actually contribute? Nothing to the official indictment, b ­ ecause he agreed with its truth, and Jesus’s withholding it in Bethany was the reason for his betrayal. In John, Jesus prophesizes differently: his isolation from every­body, but not his abandonment by the ­Father. In John’s ‘theology,’ this has become impossible: “Indeed the hour is coming, yes, has now come, that you ­will be scattered, each to his own (hekastos eis ta idia), and w ­ ill leave me alone. And yet I am not alone, b ­ ecause the F ­ ather is with me” (John 16:32). This is a precise contradiction to Matthew’s and Bach’s moment of the “Eli, Eli. . . .” John, the only apostle at the

1 2 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

foot of the cross, does not fulfill the prophecy of abandonment— he claims to have been an eye-­and ear-­witness and does not report the last scream, but only the last word of completion and fulfillment. He stands at the opposite pole to the “lost child.” The explicit addition that scripture has been fulfilled is the proof of Judas’s ‘role’ in the drama of salvation in John and, even more, the reduction to a minimum of what ‘theologically’ is still worth mentioning. Matthew still has the mysterious exchange between ­Jesus and Judas during the Last Supper, ­after the “woe” about the betrayer of the Son of man for whom “it would have been good for that man if he had not been born” (Matt. 26:24). Judas asks: “Rabbi, is it I?” And Jesus responds, as if he had not asked: “You have said it” (Matt. 26:25). As if at a loss, Bach passes over this exchange to the breaking of the bread and the ‘testament’ in flesh and blood. And when Judas arrives with the kiss of betrayal, Jesus, as if oblivious, as if denying the determinism of salvation in the words during the supper, says: “My friend, why have you come?” (Matt. 26:50). What happens between ­these two is, aside from God abandoning the servant of God, the most enigmatic event in the Passion— an enigma that John demonizes when he says as ‘explanation’ upon the dunking of the piece of bread: “Now a­ fter the piece of bread, Satan entered him” (John 13:27). But Jesus encourages him to do soon what he is about to do—­a monstrosity that only the favorite apostle reports ­because he alone could hear it. Acceleration of salvation? Participation in or even assumption of guilt, if t­ here could be any guilt? John, it has to be said, acts as the a­ dept who was allowed to rest on his master’s breast during the meal and thereby heard and saw what escaped the o ­ thers. That is his artifice: to add unknown ele­ ments as the latecomer among the evangelists, and to claim authenticity against t­hose who had not been pre­sent or followed from afar. This evangelist knows more, but he does not yet know of the ‘inspiration’ that he could invoke for every­thing he adds. No, he occupied the privileged place of the witness who experienced even what could not have been seen: how the devil entered into Judas. The ritual communion in which the piece of wine-­soaked bread is offered by the Lord is perverted into divisiveness.

A p o s tates    1 2 7

In Matthew, it is Jesus’s apparent desertion of his calling as the ruler in Jerusalem that drives the traitor to his deed—­plausible enough, given the un-­messianic anointing of the ‘Anointed One’; in John, this turns into a mystical act of repulsion, into the false ‘mission’ of one possessed by Satan with whom the g­ reat exorcist of demons accomplishes his work in reverse. In all of this, ­there was nothing that had to be ‘fulfilled’ according to scripture. The speculative evangelist ranges with terrifying freedom over what in Luke is entirely abstract, in a formula isolated from its context: “Then Satan entered Judas . . . ​and he went forth . . .” (Luke 22:3–4). Should that which is no longer ‘fulfillment of scripture’—­Satan’s entering into Judas ­under the hand of Jesus as he offers the piece of bread—­have its purpose in making divisiveness final by exceeding any relation to scripture? Is it the founding act of all ­future dualisms? If this is right, it is John’s exclusion of Judas’s deed from the realm of acceptable be­hav­ior of the apostles ­after Bethany, ­after the Last Supper, a­ fter Gethsemane, that promulgates it. Satan did not enter into the ­others, was not ingested with the fateful piece of bread. They are, by way of negation, marked for salvation. Judas in this case would not be the exponent of an apostasy that inexplicably experiences a ‘post-­Easter’ conversion. In the sense of a radical loss of salvation, Judas would be the victim against which the o ­ thers are mea­sured and absolved. The entire construction of a betrayal that is completely superfluous has to be understood as the fiction of a scapegoat that had ‘done’ something when the o ­ thers had ‘simply’ been passive. In this case, John would be the indicator of the promulgated tendency to turn one into the ‘son of perdition,’ and leave for the ­others the escape into post-­Easter withdrawal. The ‘exponent’ would have been turned into the ‘solitary actor,’ into an instrument of Satan and not simply into one who despaired in his disappointed messianic fervor, and who would not let himself be consoled and stalled by apocalyptic promises. What would the expectation of an imminent end even mean, if the entry of the Davidian into Jerusalem had already happened? ­After the halfheartedness of the Synoptic Gospels, John fi­nally cuts off this escape for Judas, legitimized by a Jesus who had encouraged him to do his deed. Which he immediately carried out.

1 2 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

The demonology of John is not transparent enough to evaluate sufficiently the entering of Satan into Judas—as the expulsion of the ‘exponent’ of the apostles’ debility—­and to put it into relation to Jesus’s words in Matthew that it would be better for this man never to have been born. Could this judgment, this refutation of the right to be created, be applied to Satan? Gnosticism lurks in this thought. ­Under no circumstances could it truly have been better for the fallen prince of angels not to have been created—­that would have been worse for the creator than for the creature. Even for the creature it must have been a mercy to exist, however much he had rejected all mercy. Could the demonization of Judas be advanced beyond this point by equating being born with being created? The ‘implied listeners’ of the St.  Matthew Passion, as they are intended and ‘addressed’ in the arias and chorales, are the sinners whose redemption is assured by the ‘strength’ of the Servant of God; but in the figures who conspire against Jesus they are also presented with their complicity in creating and permitting suffering. The apostles who fall asleep three times represent the stolid refusal of compassion and solidarity; Peter’s ­triple denial is the temptation to refuse to bear witness to a world that, even without threat, despises and laughs at special claims to salvation. But Judas—is he still the ‘exponent’ of the believers, or is he the exotic miscreant who is best excluded from any pos­si­ble identification by the declaration of better-­ not-­to-­have-­been-­born and, more forcefully still, by having Satan enter into him? The composer of the St. Matthew Passion passes over the theological enormity of the saying ‘this man would have been better off had he not been born’ (ei ouk egennethe ho anthropos ekeinos) as if he did not notice it (Matt. 26:24; MP 11). This corresponds to the suppression of creation in the entire history of salvation. When it is said of a Greek tragic hero that it would have been better had he never been born, it is implied that the gods who delude him in order to destroy him or let him destroy himself have not created the world in which this takes place. More importantly, they have not created the one who suffers or imparts suffering. The Greek gods possess only l­ imited power against one another and especially against a world that dictates the conditions of their actions. This

A p o s tates    1 2 9

would have to be radically dif­fer­ent in the Gospels and their Passion stories, assuming the ‘unity’ of the Apostles’ Creed that was common to composer and audience: the unity of the first and second articles of faith. Then the saying ‘better not to have been born’ would be impossible, for the God of redemption is supposed to be identical with the God of creation: the traitor would remain the creature of the betrayed. John pre­sents himself as the exclusive witness of many ­things that allegedly escaped his evangelist pre­de­ces­sors. He reports the most words from the cross, and he mentions the entering of Satan into Judas “together with the piece of bread” (meta to psomion) offered by Jesus (John 13:27). But as we have seen, this scandalous demonization—­ unbeknownst to all the other celebrants who do not even understand Jesus’s urging and believe it refers to Judas’s office as keeper of the alms—in its secrecy cannot compare to the extreme case Matthew’s Passion states with its tragic word: “It w ­ ere better for him that he had never been born” (Matt. 26:24; MP 11). Matthew does not seem to know what he makes the Lord say at the ­table: he, too, fails to keep the creation and the responsibility of the creator for ­every one of His creations in mind. It might be this ­factor that lets John choose the other path, that of the possession by Satan. For John, the master of the Log­os prologue, is the first ‘theologian’ to consciously forge the unity of creation and salvation. By declaring that in Jesus the Log­os became flesh, he identified Jesus with the Word of creation, of which he said: “All ­things ­were made by it; and without it nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3). This includes Judas. That is why the devil had to take possession of him and provide the motivation for the episode in Bethany, which in Matthew leads to catastrophe. Could John let Satan be pre­sent at the Last Supper if he knew what Matthew had written about the three temptations of Jesus in the desert, and to which Luke had added that Satan had let him go “­until the next opportunity (achri kairou)” (Luke 4:13)? Did John simply continue the Satan episode by making Judas into the instrument of the last and greatest ‘temptation,’namely, to refuse to suffer, and to command the legions of angels? If that ­were so, Jesus would urge Judas on, b ­ ecause he wants to force exactly this decision

1 3 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

(krisis). Should the justification for introducing Satan into the digression about Judas consist in showing Jesus as the acting and decisive subject, ­because he imposed the ‘crisis’ on his tempter and antagonist when he offered to Judas the magical symbol of the wine-­ soaked bread? This would introduce a mea­sure of coherence into the scene: It was still the Log­os that caused the events to unfold, even forcing the beginning of the Passion at the fixed hour and—as if in mockery of the temptations in the desert ­after the baptism—­with a view to the final and absolutely valid test of strength in the face of death. John’s intimacy with the Lord almost makes vis­i­ble a sort of conspiracy with Satan. Something remarkable from the episode in the desert a­ fter the initiation at the River Jordan is repeated: Jesus had been “driven into the desert by the Spirit” in order “to be tested” (periasthenai) by the tempter (Matt. 4:1). Yet how could it be that the tempter (ho peirazon) not only approached him with words but also twice took him away (paralambanei)—­would the evangelist have let this happen without consent, including the hypage satana [Begone, Satan] (Matt. 4:10)? ­There is an agreement in the background, as if every­thing w ­ ere part of larger dealings.

When Someone Becomes Too Old to Reach for Dominion “Judas, are you betraying the Son of man with a kiss?” (Luke 22:48). Only Luke has t­ hese words in the scene of Jesus’s arrest. It expresses the outrage that the betrayal is executed through the sign of love (philemati). Luke obviously could presuppose in his ‘implied listeners’ that they would meet Judas’s action with even greater disgust. Matthew reports only briefly the arrangement between Judas and the armed gang, and has him give them the sign with the address ‘Rabbi’: “and kissed him” (Matt. 26:49). He had used the same address shortly before, during the Last Supper: “Rabbi, is it I?” (Matt. 26:25). But now when the expected occurs, Jesus asks Judas: “My friend, why have you come?” (Matt. 26:50). Perhaps he is asking for the explanation of the betrayal, which he had omitted ­earlier during

A p o s tates    1 3 1

the meal as if he knew it already? The answer, if it was of any interest, w ­ ill never come. The servants of the high priest intervene. Exegetically, it seems as if this betrayal is unambiguous and the kiss the hyperbole of a depraved cynic. But why should Jesus not have reacted to the ritual greeting? B ­ ecause he did not want to expose Judas as the one who had just challenged him w ­ hether he knew of his scheme for betrayal? As if Judas had just come h ­ ere to greet the rabbi, and the t­ emple servants had thus, by chance, recognized him as the one they w ­ ere searching for? We cannot get to the bottom of the story of Judas ­because this figure was stigmatized as evil so quickly. Does the kiss in the garden on the Mount of Olives only confirm that this betrayal was superfluous? That every­thing would have happened as it was written even without the traitor? This is what Jesus had told the traitor during the meal, even before he had singled him out, as if to expose the pointlessness of his action: “The Son of man indeed goes just as it has been written of him, but woe . . .” (Matt. 26:24). Jesus and Judas encounter one another during the arrest as if Judas had not been able to accomplish anything: he is not evil, he is superfluous. But this is only the concealed implication of this event. For the functionaries of the ­temple, Judas must have accomplished something. It was prob­ably trivial: nobody knew Jesus. He himself says: “I sat daily with you, teaching in the t­ emple, and you did not seize me” (Matt. 26:55). It is accepted as a forgone conclusion that his enemies feared public commotion and therefore seized him at night. But was this public, intermixed with pilgrims, ­really to be feared—­ the next day they would shout exactly what was expected of them. No; even if Jesus had taught in the vast expanse of the t­ emple like many other teachers—he looked like the other teachers, yet they did not know him. Jesus of Nazareth in Jerusalem was not, as in Galilee, the con­spic­u­ous figure posterity wants to see in him. Someone was needed who knew him well, lest an irksome ­mistake be made. ­Because Jesus was to be accorded a high degree of popularity among his contemporaries, at the time the Gospels w ­ ere written the betrayal by Judas could not be depicted as if its sole purpose w ­ ere to create the opportunity to apprehend him discreetly u ­ nder the cloak of night.

1 3 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

The beginning of Matthew’s Passion offers an entirely unlikely sequence of events: first, Jesus discloses to the apostles “that in two days ­will be Passover, and the Son of man w ­ ill be handed over to be crucified” (Matt. 26:2; MP 2a); only then does the evangelist recount that the meeting in the palace of the high priest Caiaphas took place where it was discussed “how with stealth they might capture Jesus and kill him” (Matt. 26:4; MP 4a) without risking a popu­lar uprising during the festival; and, fi­nally, Judas goes to the high priests and offers his ser­vices, as if he had known about the meeting. The reverse order is much more likely: Judas turns to the Curia and denounces his rabbi for the heresies with which l­ater, in the ‘trial’ of the Passion, Jesus is confronted. ­Because no one knows anything about this visitor from Galilee, Judas offers to identify the right person. In the council of the priests Jesus has, as we know, at  least one secret ally and hears from him what awaits him and who has already ‘betrayed’ him, not who ­will betray him. The arrest on the Mount of Olives is the crisis moment of ‘betrayal’ only if one presupposes the sequence so carefully rearranged by Matthew. ­There is no deceptive intent in this artifice u ­ nless we adopt the par­ameters of ‘historical reason.’ The congregation to whom the Gospel was addressed would never have tolerated that the ‘Lord’ who would soon return was so inconspicuous and common in the city of the t­emple. Jesus’s aura of singularity had to be intensified, perfect for the authorities to notice him. The St. Matthew Passion makes us notice that ­after being flooded with images for thousands of years, we imagine we know what Jesus looked like. In real­ity we know nothing. Even less than not knowing what he looked like. We do not even know how old Jesus was when he was subjected to the terror of suffering and death. Is it impor­tant w ­ hether he was thirty or fifty years old? ­There is a venerable tradition that says he was thirty-­three—­equally venerable is the objection of Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon in the treatise Against Heresies that Jesus would have lacked the full mea­sure of incarnation if he had been deprived of old age and maturity. Unfortunately, Irenaeus follows this beautiful thought with a less pleasant afterthought: He wants to eliminate the thirty eons in the gnostic system of the Valentinians from any association with Jesus’s

A p o s tates    1 3 3

lifetime. That is why he ignores Luke’s information that Jesus at the time of the baptism in the Jordan was “about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23) and instead seizes on an interjection made to a remark of Jesus in John: “You are not yet fifty years old and have seen Abraham?” (John 8:57). Though a quibble—­does one say this to someone who is thirty? No, says Irenaeus, someone addressed in this way is not far from fifty. The crucified was not a young man, and for that ­there was a rich tradition: “From the fortieth to the fiftieth year is the age of accomplishment, the age of our Lord when he taught. The Gospel testifies to that, as do the priests in Asia Minor who have heard it from John, the pupil of the Lord.”1 Some had heard it from other apostles “and are witnesses thereof.”2 Trustworthy w ­ ere t­hose who wanted to dispute that Abraham had “rejoiced to see my day.”3 They had not risked in this polemic to judge his age wrongly. To the contrary, they had searched the archives or had trusted in their senses: “As they saw him so they spoke. But what he looked like, that he was in real­ity.”4 A pointed, yet parenthetical dig at the Docetism of the Gnostics. To defend the ‘full humanity’ of the savior meant to deny that he had rushed through his bodily existence as a mere transit. He could bear to be h ­ uman. This is an anticipation of the Passion before it begins to appear. Older ­people may claim that they, too, w ­ ere implicated in this incarnation of the Son of God. Could it be that the Gnostics w ­ ere an unacknowledged ‘youth movement’? One could find support for this suspicion in the inverse fact that youth movements, broadly and typologically speaking, like to pre­sent themselves as Gnostics. Should we imagine Judas as one of ­those youthful believers to whom his rabbi seemed gradually to have become so old and tentative that He needed to be forced to use His powers? Perhaps it is good that we do not know the dates of Jesus’s birth and death, in spite of all the ingenuity invested in the search.

Visit to a Stone That Almost Cried Out The evangelist Matthew denied the composer of his Passion the opportunity to represent the g­ reat crowd scene of the Messiah’s entry

1 3 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

into the ­temple city—on the donkey’s foal, accompanied by cries of “Hosanna” from the masses—­between the initial scene of the anointment in Bethany and the Last Supper of unleavened bread in Jerusalem. Instead, Matthew places the episodic recognition of the Davidian as the last trigger for his execution further ­toward the beginning in order to leave enough space for his teachings and miracles, for the cleansing of the ­temple and the prophecies that city and world w ­ ill perish. The participation of Judas—as well as the in­de­pen­dent development of his story—­becomes more impor­tant in proportion to the scandal of eliminating the messianic triumphal march from the context. The Passion is driven by the betrayal of someone whose messianic expectations have been disappointed. The episodes with Peter and Judas arrange themselves alongside the story of the Nazarene. Along with this, another short episode is omitted from its pos­si­ ble setting to ­music: the calling of the ­children in the t­ emple. They apparently continue to imitate what they have heard from the frenetic masses during the entry to Jerusalem, the “Hosanna.” Yet more openly than the spectators had dared, the ­children confer upon the One who is pre­sent, and not to someone yet to come, the full power of the Son of David: “Hosanna to the Son of David!” (Matt. 21:9). The theocrats and the scribes want to tie Jesus to this. They ask ­whether he hears what the ­children are calling? Jesus’s response is a reference to the psalmist, to the fulfillment of the verse: Had they not read that God uses the mouths of c­ hildren and nursing infants for his praise? Then he turns around and goes back to Bethany (Matt. 21:15–17; cf. Psalms 8:2). Thus, we find the scene in Matthew, who places the emphasis entirely on the indirect confirmation through the clairvoyance of the ­children. In Luke, the reference to the psalmist is missing. ­Here, the Pharisees, a­ fter the entry into Jerusalem, point out to Jesus the messianic blasphemies of his apostles. He should silence them. Jesus’s answer would have corresponded even better to the reprimand that he should silence the cheering ­children: “If ­these keep ­silent, the very stones w ­ ill cry out” (Luke 19:40). The image of the stones crying out comes from the prophet Habakkuk (2:11), but serves in this instance as the immediate transition to Jesus’s tears over the fall of Jerusalem in his vision. It is not, as in Matthew, the fulfilled proph-

A p o s tates    1 3 5

ecy of the messianic truth from the mouths of c­ hildren but the outstanding fulfillment of the apocalyptic threat from the mouth of the crying Jesus—­the clamor of the bursting walls of ­temple and city—­that Luke uses as confirmation of the one who is supposed to forbid his apostles to call him by his name. But it is only a­ fter Jesus has placed the stones’ crying out ­under the condition that he should silence his followers—­which he w ­ ill not do and which therefore would be entirely hy­po­thet­ic­ al—­that he has the terrifying vision of a destroyed Jerusalem and hence access to an unconditional ­future. How can this be, given that his proclamation as king by his followers has passed as unopposed as the “Hosanna” for the Son of David from the mouths of the ­children in Matthew? The Passion is also the story of the falling s­ ilent of the followers without any exhortation by the master. Betrayal, denial, flight, and suicide are only keywords for the g­ reat confusion sown among his followers by the impotence of the one who is fi­nally triumphant— as if the vociferous enjoyment of their pretension to the kingdom had ­really been denied them. The Passion signifies that the condition for the crying out of the stones obtains even if it happens in a dif­fer­ent manner than predicated by the authorities. This continues far into the story’s aftermath, which unfolds in such obscurity as if its truth w ­ ere as endangered as Bible criticism claims. What is to be called ‘resurrection’ and constitutes the hope of all believers is a secret story concocted b ­ ehind closed doors. No “Hosanna” can be heard, as would be expected if the victory over death w ­ ere certain. The silence satisfies the condition: t­ hese h ­ ere keep ­silent, therefore the stones ­will cry out. Eigh­teen hundred years ­after the stones cried out, Jerusalem had become the city of monks and pilgrims—­and of their modern descendants, tourists. One of them—no longer pious but still curious and well versed in the Bible—is Mark Twain, who crosses the Atlantic in a boat full of Quakers in 1867. He is reporting for a newspaper in San Francisco and, two years ­later, publishes a charming ­little travel book about it. He does not possess the patience of the pilgrims for whom the eagerness to see and the burden of travel melt into an experience of salvation. But he still can relate to their ‘concept of real­ity’: only that which leaves traces is real.

1 3 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

Along the Via Dolorosa where the Lord bore his cross, he [Twain] sees with their eyes—­but writes in the language of disbelief and distance—­the old stones and the traces of the Passion on the path to Golgotha. Fixed in the wall of a h ­ ouse was a scarred and scuffed stone, polished by the pilgrims’ kisses, that seemed to bear “a grotesque resemblance to a h ­ uman face.” The guide explained the venerability of the stone. This was one of the “very stones of Jerusalem” that Jesus had said would be clamoring when he was told to silence his apostles. One of the pilgrims objected that Jesus had said this would happen only if they did not shout Hosanna. The guide was unfazed: “This is one of the stones that would have cried out.”5 Some w ­ ill say that ­there is nothing reasonable to be learned from the craftiness of the guide. That may be so, but still we are reminded of something that is always worth thinking about: the language that Jesus of Nazareth and his followers spoke and that his enemies as well as his supporters understood lacked the mode of expression used by the guide—it had no subjunctive. The language of the New Testament in which this passage has come to us may reflect this fact by using the ­future tense even before the vision of the destroyed ­temple justifies the indicative. What­ever he might have ‘thought,’ Jesus first would have to have said, for the comprehension of his enemies: “If t­ hese w ­ ere not shouting—as they obviously are—­then the stones would be crying out.” Could he think this even if he could not say it? We meet the limit of language, where, as we know since Wittgenstein, it collides with thought; such a collision is (possibly) the case h ­ ere, as the late history of the reception of this passage in Luke and its quotation from Habakkuk in the ears of a carefully listening reporter lets us deduce, presume, suspect, or hope.

The Realism of the Field of Blood “Unto the pre­sent day” the potter’s field designated as a cemetery for pilgrims is called the ‘field of blood’ (agros heimatos), ­because it was paid for with the “blood money” (time heimatos) that Judas had ruefully brought back and thrown into the ­temple.

A p o s tates    1 3 7

Bach does not enter deeper into the outcome of the betrayal story. In contrast to Peter’s denial episode, he does not offer the sinner the opportunity to identify with the figure of the betrayer. ­After the ­triple denial and the crowing of the cock, the “Aria” evokes the b ­ itter tears of the apostle and allows the sinner to beg, with Peter, for mercy: “Look ­here, heart and eyes / Weep bitterly before you” (MP 39). The “chorale” completes the identification with someone who had only ‘deviated’ and now returns to the fold. “Although I have strayed from you / I return yet again . . .” (MP 40). The end of Judas is peculiarly understated even though Judas performs the ritual of repentance that other­wise is sufficient for a sinner. The focus is not on the betrayer but on the betrayed. The aria demands, without any identification with the one who had just repented and hanged himself, the return of the betrayed from the high priests, as if the contract w ­ ere void a­ fter the return of the blood money, and the previous situation could be reinstated: “Give me back my Jesus! / See the money, the murderer’s fee, / The lost son throws at you, / Down at your feet! / Give me back my Jesus!” (MP 42). The singer demands what Judas, who had only admitted his guilt, had not demanded. The ones listening to the St. Matthew Passion are meant to stay focused on their Savior even while the Evangelist allows himself a long and detailed digression on Judas for whom he cannot say anything more definitive than he “hanged himself” (MP 43c)—­even shorter in the Greek, kai apelthon apenxato. Only one t­ hing seems to be impor­tant: the contrast to the Peter episode, which is comparable to the path of a sinner, whereas the Judas episode is incomparable with any path faced by the composer or his listener. ­There are many exegetical opinions on why the evangelist has rendered the end of Judas in such a long digression and thus has brought the composer of the St. Matthew Passion into such difficulties with regard to the proportions—of course without yet showing any concern for the greatest of all ‘side effects’ of this text. To my mind, the key to understanding this disproportionate interest seems to lie in the short phrase I quoted at the beginning: heos tes semeron—­“unto the pre­sent day.” This could be, in­de­pen­dently of

1 3 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

all questions of chronology, a very late day. The designation of the field as the field of blood by means of the blood money signified that ­there could be no opening of the graves u ­ ntil the day of resurrection. Thus, the location, the name, and the function—­and, on the day of Judgment in the nearby Valley of Josaphat, the resurrected themselves—­could testify to the authenticity of this origin. Much ­later, all the instruments of Jesus’s Passion as corpora delicti ­were said to have been recovered: the cross and the nails, the crown of thorns and the shroud, including the most obscure relics. But that was during a dif­fer­ent time, more prone to legends. Within the canon of the Gospels, the field of blood is a singular case: the precise location of a fact that can be visited and owned, and that emerged, as if accidentally, in the course of the Passion. It is a sales contract entered into with the previous owner—­identified as a potter—­for the most real article in any time: a parcel of land. Jesus did not leave ­behind any footprints, in contrast to the ­horse of the prophet who, from very nearly the same place, ascended with him into heaven and dis­appeared. The field of blood is only a mediated trace, a reflection of the implosion of messianic hope in the traitor, and, via the traitor, the trigger of the Passion. But the ‘detour’ that the evangelist’s digression follows, from the state of mind to the betrayal, from the blood money to the pilgrim cemetery, is a monument to ‘realism’: the absolute duration, the place where the dead are conserved, unto ­every pre­sent day. The reference to continuity unto ­every pre­sent day is a doubled-­ edged sword, and with its thoughtless use Matthew lets us see how ­little it bothers him that the world continues to exist and that the departed has not yet returned from the “right hand of the power” on the clouds of heavens, as he had declared fearlessly to the high priest (Matt. 26:64), thus earning the death sentence for blasphemy according to all sacred law. The messianic self-­declaration as the one who ­will return and the reference to something that reminds us of him “unto the pre­sent day” follow each other closely—as insurance for the continued verifiability of the Passion story, and as the proclamation of the apocalyptic ephemerality of every­thing that is done to the one who had answered the high priest’s question ­whether

A p o s tates    1 3 9

he is Christ, the Son of God, without any subtlety and theological ado: “sy eipas” [You say so] (Matt. 27:11). The terrifying correspondence in this context is the answer given to the repentant traitor: “ti pros hemas; sy opse”—­What is that to us? You see to it yourself” (Matt. 27:4; cf. MP 41b). This kind of pointed emphasis even of longer episodes is a stylistic peculiarity of the evangelist Matthew; it contributes much to the text’s suitability for m ­ usic, especially the crowd scenes. Foremost the bone-­chilling “Barabbas!” Part of this predilection for phrases that indicate an appalling end is the “. . . ​and died”—­Luther’s own phrasing, so impor­tant for Bach. The original text, perhaps to avoid the ultimate harshness of realism using a bit of metaphysics, is: “apheken to pneuma”—­“and gave up his spirit” (Matt. 27:50). Luther, with his disdain for the metaphysical, provided better for Bach.

The Pieces of Silver Two episodes, tied to persons from the closest circle of the apostles, have prominent places in the St. Matthew Passion: the betrayal by Judas and the denial by Peter. The importance of ­these two digressions cannot consist only in the fact that they increase the overall mea­sure of suffering, as two p ­ eople of the group assembled by Jesus who not only abandon him like all the ­others but also act with special perfidy. More is at stake ­here: precisely the relationship of trust, the degree of distinction, and the expectations that came with it led to the betrayal and the sheer meanness of distancing. This Jesus did not live up to what was expected of him. Is this not the deeper justification for Bach’s opening the St. Matthew Passion with the anointment in Bethany in the h ­ ouse of Simon the Leper, b ­ ecause it points t­ oward Jesus’s death and the (­later omitted) embalming of his dead body? Jesus takes exception to the criticism that this is wasteful—­originally, in Mark, the grumbling of “a few,” in Matthew that of “his apostles,” in John fi­nally the explicit naming of Judas who is already suspected h ­ ere of having misappropriated the fund of alms belonging to the group (Mark

1 4 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

14:4; Matt. 26:8; John 12:4). The layering is significant: Jesus refuses the mischaracterization of the anointment as a messianic homage by speaking not of his dominion but of his death. This contradiction is adumbrated in the reproach: “What is the point of this waste?” This question concerns the “price” of the ointment, and in a model case for associationism the man from Kerioth [Judas] is made to think about the “price” of the one anointed and to ask: “What are you willing to give me?” (Matt. 26:14). That is how the thirty pieces of silver get into the Gospel. A memorable, ‘disdainful’ sum, about which it has rarely been asked ­whether it was a lot or a l­ittle, w ­ hether Judas would have found himself enriched or ­whether he wanted the symbolism of a cheap sale for almost nothing: a disappointed person who wanted to show quantifiable contempt for this messianic loser who seemed to wish his own death. So much has to be written and sung about this Judas in order to cover up what expectations ­were aroused in him and what disappointments he met. Only with difficulty does the late evangelist John bring consistency to the story by having Judas use the betrayal to recover the money he tried to embezzle. Luckily, Matthew knows nothing about this concatenation of motifs. To him, it looks as if Judas Iscariot hanged himself like a figure in a tragedy blinded by higher delusion. In contrast to the loquaciousness of the apocryphal gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, the canonical evangelists have shown remarkable discipline in resisting the urge of the imagination to complete the story; between Mark and John they have added just enough ‘motivation’ to ascribe a ‘betrayal’ to the figure of a traitor without clarifying what it actually comprised. Why is the use of the remorsefully returned pieces of silver so impor­tant that the Passion has to dwell on it even though the tragedy of Judas is long over? One answer could be: It is so incredible that money plays a role in the presence of God’s son—­and a role that is entirely superfluous for his salvific destiny—­that ­there has to be an accurate rec­ord of its existence. His value as a piece of property fulfills this function. Was that the end of the thirty pieces of silver? Not quite. Imagination could not leave them t­here for random usage a­ fter the purchase of the potter’s field. Bach dedicated a basso aria to the money, wedged

A p o s tates    1 4 1

between the rejection of the ‘blood money’ from the t­emple trea­sury and the decision to purchase the ‘blood field’: “See the money, the murderer’s fee, / The lost son throws at you, / Down at your feet!” (MP 42). The pious ambiguity of this remorseful restitution consists in the sinner’s soul participating in the line that is not spoken by Judas but insinuated as such: “Give me back my Jesus!” But the priests and elders had rejected Judas even before he could think t­ hese words, using a statement of irreversibility that must not apply to the sinner: “What is that to us? You see to it yourself!” (MP 41b). Next to the identity of Judas emerges an identity of the pieces of silver, insofar as the sum cannot return to where it was taken, from the offertory (korbanas). As blood money it is impure. The numerable ‘sum’ of individual coins turns into a single substance, homogenized by the impurity of treason. This is the story in Matthew—­ still without the prehistory of the trea­surer who believed to have been defrauded of exactly this sum. Imagination was not satisfied with this ‘role’ of the pieces of silver. The Legenda Aurea by the late thirteenth-­century bishop Jacobus de Voragine contains an entire vita of Judas, explic­itly taken from an older historia apocrypha: on the w ­ hole, this vita in its circularity resembles the tragedy of Oedipus without, however, the aporia of the tragic, as Friedrich Ohly in his impor­tant reconstruction of the figure of the ‘damned’ and the ‘elect’ has shown.6 And one finds the exact offsetting of the price of Mary Magdalene’s ointment in Bethany with the ‘blood money.’ ­After Judas has escaped the circle of patricide and incest with his ­mother, he becomes the accomplice of Pilate as the ‘accountant’ of Jesus; he calculates the price of the ointment at three hundred pieces of silver and his own share at 10 ­percent—or ­else he converts the special value of the t­ emple’s coin into its full amount, ten times the value of ordinary money. Every­ thing has to be accounted for exactly. Precise accounting represents a bit of reliability in the w ­ hole story, “although it is prob­ably better left aside than repeated,” as the writer of the Legenda admonishes his readers.7 He does this all without apparently realizing among what mythical archetypes he is moving. The possibility that Judas could have made the transaction especially ‘cheap’ ­because he wanted to sell symbolically the messianic

1 4 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

loser or abdicator is blocked as an ingress to the story by the motivation that John has added. But if Judas’s greed wanted to have the full equivalent, the price had to be very high. This he could achieve only if the coin used to pay possessed an age-­old, mythical provenance. As, for example, in a Latin poem from the twelfth c­ entury in which the wicked Assyrian king Ninus ­orders the ­father of Abraham to mint thirty pieces of pure gold, precious enough to pay for his residence in Nineveh. ­These pieces of gold ­were in Abraham’s purse when he left Mesopotamia and moved to Canaan, where he used the money to purchase land near Jericho in order to till the land and bury his dead. With the same coin the purchase price for Joseph was paid to his ­brothers. From them it moves back to Joseph on the occasion of their grain purchase. Joseph then used the money to buy, for the first time, ingredients for embalming—­namely, for the corpse of Jacob, his f­ather. The thirty coins remained together, entering into the trea­sury of the ­temple in Jerusalem as the offering of a sybil and queen, whence they ­were taken to Babylon and passed through the hands of the Queen of Saba ­until they w ­ ere brought to the manger in Bethlehem by the three magi and kept hidden in the cavern during the flight to Egypt, and l­ ater, on Jesus’s order, offered to the trea­sury of the ­temple in Jerusalem—­where the falsely named “pieces of silver” (argyria) awaited the one who would be worthy of them. Evidently what constitutes ‘value’ h ­ ere is no longer the exchange of the metal but instead its function in salvation history, its constantly playing a role at turning points in Jesus’s prehistory. Judas has become entirely a cipher in this metal’s appreciation in value. So much for the returns produced by the stamina of the imagination, collected by Godfrey of Viterbo, who aided Frederick Barbarossa as chronicler with this Pantheon. In par­tic­u­lar with the lesson that no one involved in this translatio knew what they w ­ ere ­doing, especially from a higher, and indeed from the highest, viewpoint. The last words on the cross transmitted only by Luke—­“­Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34)—­not only forgive the misdeeds and the misdoers, but refer to the mystery of the entire history leading up to this turning point, a history that is ‘made’ only by t­ hose who do not ‘understand’ what they are

A p o s tates    1 4 3

­ oing when they receive and spend ­these overvalued pieces of sild ver, for what­ever purpose. The evangelist’s phrase that the ‘field of blood’ is preserved “unto the pre­sent day” is an equally ‘realistic’ and melancholic statement. Not even the ­temple into which Judas threw the ‘murderer’s fee’ was still standing when the Gospel according to Matthew was written down. It is as if nothing had happened: neither the expectations, nor the disappointments. Without the restlessly traveling apostle [Paul] who never even met Jesus, a ‘Christology’ against which John could competitively mea­sure his own would never have emerged. But one piece of real­ity remained: the value of the land purchased with the thirty coins. For anybody who ever comes in contact with a ‘Philosophy of Money,’ this story of the pieces of silver, their revaluation and their transformation into the indestructible piece of land for pilgrims’ graves is a singular lesson in the paradoxical ‘realism’ of the nominal, as if it w ­ ere made for a “De moneta” treatise. The “unto the pre­sent day” remained a binding word of God for the witnesses of a world that would not end: for the crusaders in the ­Middle Ages who forced their way into the holy land with bloodshed. Together with the flow of sacred relics, new local legends emerged. Knights and pilgrims found what they w ­ ere looking for. The pilgrim’s report of Ludolf von Suchem from the ­fourteenth ­century describes the ‘field of blood’ and the summary burials on it. For the cemetery is too small for the unexpected onrush of ‘cases.’ Into the field deep, round holes have been dug, into which the corpses are thrown; a­ fter three days only the bones are left, other­ wise “such a ­little space would not be sufficient to contain so many dead bodies.”8 That the ‘field of blood’ is so small has its reason in a circumstance that had been newly ‘imported’: the high priests had paid half of the blood money to the guards at the tomb, which means they had bought their silence. For this the small miracle of the quick decay of the corpses has to stand in. It ‘condenses,’ if this can be said, the ‘realism’ of the already more-­than-­millennium-­old “unto the pre­sent day.” The further history of the coins’ capital wanes, b ­ ecause the first split of the money between the guards and the potter continues in

1 4 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

the manner of the miraculous multiplication of relics. Leopold Kretzenbacher has compiled an entire cata­logue of trea­suries in cathedrals, monasteries, and ­castles that contained a ‘piece of silver’ with the worn head of the emperor who might well have been Ninus, the founder of Nineveh. As late as 1480, Johannes Tucher from Nuremberg, an ancestor of Hegel’s wife, saw one of the coins in Rhodes in the ­castle of Saint John: “­There also is one of the coins for which the Lord Christ had been sold.” Tucher made a cast of lead, brought it back, and poured silver copies, which he sold. That was, paradoxically, the multiplication of the ‘true’ pieces of silver.

Between Two Murderers

Jesus’s Susceptibility to Temptation Both dramatically and musically the scene in Gethsemane is the weakest in the St. Matthew Passion. “The savior falls down before his ­father . . .” (MP 22) the basso begins his recitativo a­ fter the Evangelist has recounted the first of the three times that Jesus submits to the ­will of the ­Father. A meditative and interpretive composition could develop h ­ ere the ­great drama that unfolds immediately before the Passion and that ends in Christ’s consent to arrest. That Jesus rebels, that he has not yet submitted to his extreme fate, is a fact that neither theological exegesis nor popu­lar piety has taken seriously—­and not only b ­ ecause every­thing seems to be a resolved and settled decision of the salvific ­will within the Godhead, like a law that, if opposed, would have meant guilt and apostasy even for Jesus, the Son of man, if this possibility could have been thought. Jesus in Gethsemane thought it! He argues with the ­Father, as he

1 4 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

­ ill do ­later on the cross in his abandonment by God, which is nothw ing less than an accusation. Jesus thinks the unthinkable, and although he submits to the ­Father’s ­will, he does not exclude that the cup could pass from him. To deny him this b ­ ecause he knew every­ thing so exactly means to degrade the entire torrent of submission before the ­Father to a merely edifying phrase. Bach’s weakness is that of the entire theological tradition. It’s just that he has his allotted task, and cannot simply pass it over in silence. That is why he turns the cue of the basso recitativo into the lightest touch with the story, into the quickest of allegories: By throwing himself to the ground, Jesus lifts us all “from our fall / Upward to God’s grace again.” And immediately following: “He is ready / To drink the cup of death’s bitterness . . .” (MP 22). Why should Bach have been more successful than all theological masters before him? The implicit presumption in immediately deflecting every­thing ­toward the w ­ ill of salvation lies in the insinuation that the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth’s life was to suffer and die for us ­humans. Evading this task would have been akin to repeating the angels’ fall from grace. But that is utter theological recklessness. It presumes an inner logic from Bethlehem to Golgotha, from the River Jordan to the ­house of Simon the leper in Bethany, from the desert as the place of temptation to the garden on the Mount of Olives. Especially the symmetry between the ‘temptation’ by the devil a­ fter forty days of fasting and the ‘temptation’ to evade the Passion ­after the messianic entry into Jerusalem at the end of this ­career—­especially this framing with successful ‘tests’ is suggestive: Jesus does not betray his mission. In addition, it seems quite obvious that the three temptations in the desert are related to the three appeals to the ­Father on the Mount of Olives. The difference h ­ ere is that the escalation into monstrousness—­ bowing before Satan—is missing. On the other hand, the t­ riple repetition invalidates the argument that submitting to the w ­ ill of the ­Father was always submitting to the fate of suffering. To the contrary, it looks as if Jesus returns to the place of his solitary supplication twice b ­ ecause he does not want his plea for abatement to be silenced in the act of submission.

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 4 7

In the St. Matthew Passion nothing of the importance of this t­ riple plea for mercy can be felt; Bach follows the evangelist in focusing all attention on the be­hav­ior of the apostles, who cannot keep awake while their master wrestles with God. Swiftly the basso recitativo turns his attention to the fidelity of the pious listener for whom he is the stand-­in: “I w ­ ill gladly submit myself / To take up cross and cup / ­Because I drink as my Savior did” (MP 23). ­There is no topos of imitatio Christi more pallid in the entire St. Matthew Passion. Every­thing depends on understanding this failure as a failure of theology, as its flight from the impertinences of the sacred text. It is closely tied to the exegetic inertia with regard to the sixth supplication in the only prayer Jesus himself taught—­also an appeal to the ­Father. Already the cleverest of all heretics, the Gnostic Marcion, could not bear what all Bible manuscripts have at Matthew 6:13 and Luke 11:4: May God not lead ­those who pray into temptation (eis peirasmon). Marcion read this as meaning the ­Father should not let them be led into temptation (by whomever). But it is firm scriptural tradition that God leads ­humans into temptation; most capriciously when he demands the sacrifice from Abraham. In the Lord’s Prayer, believers are taught by Jesus to do what he himself would do in Gethsemane: ask God to release him from having to prove his obedience. Exegetes have, of course, highlighted that for Jesus this test was dif­fer­ent ­because he was not exposed to the danger of guilt. This trivialization is at the root of all that follows—of all the meekness up to the St. Matthew Passion and its implied community of listeners who could not take seriously the ‘danger’ for Jesus as he refused to surrender to the salvific w ­ ill of the ­Father without also admitting the blasphemous premise that ­Jesus could have sinned. Or was already the baptism by John in the River Jordan not to be taken seriously, and certainly not the temptations by Satan in the desert? ­Here, a canonical text from the New Testament has done the most work: the letter to the Hebrews. In it, Jesus appears as the high priest who has ascended to the heavens and reached the sanctum sanctorum, and who had taken with him the weakness of mankind,

1 4 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

also the temptation in every­thing, but without sin (choris hamartias). This means: he has been tempted (pepeirasmenon) but did not yield, just as when Satan approached him a­ fter he fasted in the desert. No one at that time held the reservation that t­ hese ­were not sins. On the contrary: each of ­these temptations would have constituted, in­de­pen­dently of their connection with the messianic mission, a breach of God’s law. It is dif­fer­ent on the Mount of Olives with the three appeals to the F ­ ather: Jesus would not have acted against any of the biblical laws had he refused to take upon himself the burden of the Passion. Other­wise he would not even have been allowed to beg for the passing of the cup. Jesus does not enter the Passion in order to remain innocent as a sufferer: “like a lamb, . . . ​the innocent lamb of God” to which the chorus points with ­grand gestures at the beginning of the St. Matthew Passion (MP 1). If Jesus suffered through the Passion in order to preserve his innocence, another theology than that of the New Testament would be necessary. In that case, the salvation of mankind would only be a secondary success to the preservation of innocence of the Son of man. ­There was, for the Son of man, no “obligation to save” mankind. The outcome of the drama in Gethsemane was open, without touching the sinlessness of the high priest in the letter to the Hebrews. No theologian has ever seriously dared to say that God could have executed his ­will for salvation without sacrificing the Son of man. Thereupon rests the guilt-­free decidability of the Passion in the night on the Mount of Olives, and the most tremendous m ­ usic should have turned the listener into its witness—­had its power not been para­lyzed, like millennia of failing theologians, by the fear of the harshness of a salvation not owed to us. The m ­ usic of the St. Matthew Passion reflects perhaps the greatest failing of the Christian tradition, the failure to overcome the Docetism of Christology at its very center: to let Jesus’s susceptibility to temptation stand in its full ‘realism.’ In Bach’s work, as the Passion of the Passion, one can still experience something of the utter insuperability of gnosticism.

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 4 9

Barabbas and the Au­then­tic Words of Jesus That in the beginning the Word was with God and was God himself, became flesh and dwelled among men—­that is the core truth of Chris­tian­ity. Every­thing depended on the Word, and to return to the Word was the quintessence of all reformations, but also of all schisms. Philologists and historians have applied their full critical acumen to the sacred scriptures, the objectified result of the worldliness of the original Word. We have all of ­these texts in a single language, ancient Greek, which was not—­and in the theological context this must be downright disconcerting—­the language of the incarnate Log­os. More importantly: this Jesus of Nazareth who speaks to us across the millennia did not know the language in which his speech would be conserved. The official language of the power that dominated the country in which he lived and died was likewise not the language of the texts in their oldest form. It is true that ancient Greek was the cultured language of the Hellenistic world in which this new religion ultimately spread—­but this, too, occurred only through the accident that in the figure of Paul someone who was familiar with this culture challenged the original congregation to get ready for the rivalry with other spiritual forces in the fight over souls. ­These circumstances have led to the grotesque situation that we have only four casual remarks by the incarnate Word of God in the language that Jesus of Nazareth truly and constantly spoke. In that language he could not have interested anyone in their salvation outside the borders of the West Aramaic speaking areas—­which did not even include the language of the God of the Old Testament. Seared into Christian consciousness is the harrowing cry of desperation with which the crucified turns to his God (“El” with the possessive suffix “i”). In the St. Matthew Passion it is: “Eli, Eli lama sabachthani? My god, my god, why have you abandoned me?” (Matt. 27:46; cf. MP 61a). That God ­here is addressed almost like a stranger can be guessed from the singular use of the Aramaic “Abba” in Mark 14:36. ­Because Jesus speaks so frequently about the ‘­father,’ it is strange that this word does not at least appear more often as a name. Philologists claim that to con­temporary ears

1 5 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

the address “Abba” would have sounded too familiar and intimate, as if ­today someone ­were to translate ‘­Daddy God’ or w ­ ere to begin the Lord’s Prayer with ‘Our ­Daddy in heaven.’ At the beginning of the 1970s, in the address “Abba” many interpreters heard the accent and affect against Jesus’s principal enemies, the Pharisees, b ­ ecause their pedantry had turned Judaism into a kind of ‘competitive religion.’ In that re­spect, it is argued, the ipsissima vox of the Nazarene provides relief long before Paul turned the impossibility of fulfilling the law into the theology of ‘justification.’ Jesus’s license to say “Abba” is not yet the ‘kerygma,’ but shares its pointedness. The polarity between “Eli” and “Abba” had to be felt strongly before the original congregation ­adopted the “Abba” consecrated by Jesus into the language of their prayers. In addition, in Aramaic the suffixes of the first-­person singular and plural possessive pronouns are dissolved: “Abba” has been the au­then­tic first word of the Lord’s Prayer, regardless ­whether Jesus spoke it for himself or ­whether he taught it to his apostles as the common address to the common ­Father. It has been passed down in the scene of intense intimacy in Gethsemane when the F ­ ather could have still let pass what was about to happen. The beginning of the Passion in Mark and its end in Matthew create a kind of polarity that neither evangelist might have been capable of bringing into a ‘literary’ form on his own. Mark passes down another original word of Jesus, spoken on the occasion of the healing of the deaf-­mute person near the Decapolis. He ritualistically touches the ears with his fin­gers and the tongue with saliva, and raises his gaze up ­toward heaven, but then puts every­thing into the decisive command: Ephphathá, which the evangelist translates as “Be opened!” (Mark 7:34). One recalls that the language of command in the biblical account of creation is the proper language of God as Lord. ­Here in Mark, ‘his word’ acts in the same way, so much so that the evangelist feels he needs to conserve this ‘outbreak’ of lordliness in the servant of God in the original verb with the root ptch. The last au­then­tic utterance from Jesus’s lips is also a command. Again, it is the final act of a complicated miracle that ­children for the last two thousand years have known: his raising the ­daughter of Jairus, the precept of the synagogue. Upon hearing of her death,

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 5 1

Jesus tones down the miraculous vio­lence by claiming that the girl was simply asleep. And he maintains just this ambivalence by addressing the presumed dead as if she ­were asleep: Talithá cumi, which is translated as “­Little girl, I say to you, wake up” (Mark 5:41). She is twelve years old, and talithá is a Syriac diminutive, connected ­here with the female Hebrew imperative of the root cum, which, like in German, combines the meanings of waking up and rising. When one looks back on the rich history of searching for au­then­ tic words of Jesus that ­were not uttered in the New Testament’s Greek, the yield is quite low if one applies strict philological criteria. But t­ here is a side aspect that has to do with Johann Sebastian Bach. When the St. Matthew Passion was first performed in Israel, thirty years a­ fter the foundation of the state, and when the old accusation of the murder of God threatened to become virulent again, a prominent man asked what, in the view of Christians, would have happened if the ‘turba’ [crowd] of the Jews had demanded from Pilate that Barabbas be crucified. One of the most profound questions, and far too rarely asked. The answer of a listener of Bach would be: in that case, the St. Matthew Passion would not exist. ­There is a mystery ­here that is closely tied to the name “Abba.” For ‘Barabbas’ is not a name at all, but the au­then­tic self-­designation of Jesus as ‘Son of the F ­ ather’ in his native Aramaic: “Bar-­abbas.” This agrees with the story of the entry into Jerusalem and the homage to the Son of David as the King of the Jews. It is this ‘Son of the ­Father’ whom the excited crowd had wanted to see freed, against the ­will of the high council. For that purpose, they had protested in front of the representative of the occupying power, who did not dare to yield to the ­people and thereby make enemies out of ­those he needed in order to exercise power. The ­people, the ‘turba,’ stuck with what they had shown during Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and with what had driven the priests to take action. The ­people had shouted in their language. The evangelists Matthew and Mark, who pass on the apparent name, no longer understood it or wanted it to be understood differently. Thus, the robber and murderer Barabbas was in­ven­ted, and the p ­ eople of God w ­ ere turned into a murderous mob that betrayed its King. It defies the consistency of the story that Pilate gave the p ­ eople this alternative.

1 5 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

He was beholden to the demands of his po­liti­cal reasoning and would never have agreed to a ‘plebiscite.’ The ­people shouted whom it wanted to see freed without having been asked. Pilate did not care that they wanted an obscurely named ‘Son of the ­Father’ who had worried his security officials a few days e­ arlier with his spectacularly triumphant rituals. Only historical criticism was indignant that the supposed name cannot be shown to be used anywhere e­lse, even though this ‘name’ is entirely meaningless b ­ ecause ‘son’ and ‘­father’ are mutually dependent, ­unless in the language of this One the privilege to call the ‘­father’ “Abba” is transferred to his apostles. Pilate’s misunderstanding and indifference can still be seen in the inscription he had affixed to the cross: A dead man could be the King of the Jews, their “Barabbas.” Johann Sebastian Bach could not have known any of this. But the person listening to the St. Matthew Passion who reflects on the fact that now it can also be performed in Israel and who does not underestimate its implications, ­will forever hear the tremendous Barabbas-­turba a l­ittle bit differently.

The ‘Two Murderers’ on Golgotha The ‘implied listeners’ of the St.  Matthew Passion can hardly be thought of without the world of images in which they live, even if they know them only from visits to museums or as tourists in churches. If a­ fter the Evangelist’s recitativo about the crucifixion the listeners hear the heartbreaking sorrow in the alto recitativo “Ah, Golgotha, hapless Golgotha!” (MP 59), they have in their minds the image of the three crosses on the ‘place of a skull’ with three bodies: Jesus, accused of being the King of the Jews, and on his sides the “two murderers who w ­ ere crucified with him” (Matt. 27:38; MP 58e). For anyone familiar with the story of the Passion—or with its vari­ous musical representations—­the manner in which Matthew treats the two o ­ thers on the cross is startling: they are almost monsters and remain so ­until the end, not least ­because they join the passers-by in vilifying Jesus. That is why in Matthew, one of Jesus’s

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 5 3

seven last words reported in the Gospels is missing, the one in Luke where he promises one of the murderers that this very day they ­will be together in paradise for he had not vilified him. Bach, who is intent on showing how humiliatingly our Lord has to perish, is better served by Matthew’s text; he does not have to break the dramatic arc ­toward the “hapless Golgotha” with the promise of paradise for one of the murderers: “The innocent must die h ­ ere guilty, / That strikes deep into my soul; / Ah, Golgotha, hapless Golgotha!” (MP 59). In terms of salvation history, t­ here is a discrepancy between the theological subtlety of Luke, who wants to amplify the effect of the cross with an act of mercy, and Matthew’s preference for inner coherence in the crucifixion scene. We learn nothing further about ­these “two murderers.” Tradition has preserved the name Barabbas who was released in Jesus’s stead but who nowhere ­else is shown to have any relationship to him. The two men who share the experience of death with him—­whether vilifying him or acting in opposite ways—­remain nameless. The imagination that proliferated so richly next to the canonical Gospels and that produced apocryphal material we can only surmise was not to be satisfied so easily. Eusebius knew the Acts of Pilate when it still had its anti-­Christian tendencies, before they would be quickly transformed to serve apol­o­getic ends. In them, the names of the two men crucified with Jesus are given as Dysmas and Gestas, whereby Dysmas is identified as the one who intercedes against the taunts of Gestas and for that reason receives the words of mercy recorded in Luke. Other than that, the “two murderers” have no contours, no history, no prehistory. It was almost to be expected that at some point in the eagerness to fill in and make use of lacunae in the canonical texts someone would invent a story for t­ hese two that would make a point of their presence in the Passion and illustrate a moment in the history of salvation. For this ­there was always a grateful audience. The history of the “two murderers” who w ­ ere “crucified” with Jesus on Golgotha, one to the right, one to the left, leads far back into the childhood of Jesus, back to the flight to Egypt. For example, in the Arabic Infancy Gospel, based perhaps on an even older Syriac

1 5 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

version. It belongs to the Christian apocrypha that Mohamed knew, and from t­ hese apocrypha he ­adopted some legends for the Koran. On their way to Egypt, Mary and Joseph along with the child Jesus have to pass through a deserted area, made dangerous by the presence of robbers. Two robbers waylay them while a larger group of bandits is sleeping nearby. One of them is prepared to let the ­family pass without waking the o ­ thers; for the other robber, allowing them to pass amounts to a breach of loyalty among the group. To make him change his mind, the well-­meaning one offers the other a ­belt with forty drachmae as a deposit for f­ uture gains. Mary wants to say something comforting and promises the forgiveness of his sins. The child Jesus in his precocious wisdom—­though for Gnostic texts wisdom cannot ­really develop—­has a more realistic view on the ­matter: a robber like this one ­will need forgiveness for his sins only when his days of robbery are over. So he defers the forgiveness by thirty years. At that time he, Jesus, would be crucified in Jerusalem with t­hese robbers on his sides, the good one to his right, the hard-­hearted one to the left. But the child Jesus speaks of this deferral of forgiveness not to the two robbers but to his ­mother. And he strikes a certain tone when he begins: “In thirty years, ­mother . . . ,” and Mary answers: “May God save you from that, my son.”1 This legend would not work if the names of the two robbers w ­ ere not mentioned. The one who is destined for the right side of Jesus is called Titus, the one who is paid off with forty drachmae is called Dumachus. Was that it? Of course not; pious minds do not simply want to hear about ­pardons and prophecies, they also want to see fulfillment and triumph. The descensus lit­er­a­ture satisfies that desire as it penetrates the smallest of gaps in the canonical Gospels: the gap between death and resurrection. It was an urgent requirement of salvific thinking to empty out Hades of all t­hose between Adam and John the Baptist who did not deserve to be overlooked in the victory of the redeemer. Hence the Son of man’s descent into Hades as he overcomes his own death, and this part of the apocryphal imagination has made it, like Pilate, into the Apostles’ Creed. It is on Jesus’s triumphant descent that we encounter one of the “two murderers” from “hapless Golgotha.” Pilate, whom the Cop-

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 5 5

tic Church venerates as a saint, had two papyri in his archive, on which two men resurrected from the dead had recounted their liberation from the underworld in identical words—­even though they ­were deposed in strict separation—­whereupon they returned to their graves. Karinus and Leucius had experienced how a tremendous voice demanded from Satan and Hades to open of the gates of hell and, at last, a man appeared with a cross on his back “who looked like a robber.” As indeed he was, and that might have led Satan carelessly to let him in through a gap between the gates of hell. But ­there he stood as a figure “in radiating light” and blinded the righ­ teous of prehistory with his splendor. Not without suspicion, they then asked him: “You look like a robber. Explain to us what burden you carry on your back.” He explained to them that he was the robber crucified next to Jesus: “I come thus as his precursor, he himself ­will come right ­after me.”2 The underworld is thus already subverted—in the disguise of the robber and thus in analogy to the disguise of the servant of God and his relation to the powers of the world—­before the triumphant one himself appears. The gates of hell are pried open by him, Satan is bound and taken into custody in Hades, and the cross as the sign of victory is erected in the m ­ iddle of hell. The apocryphal imagination has ‘expanded’ the robbers on Golgotha into functionaries of salvation history: one with his ser­vice from Egypt all the way to Hades, the other with his failure as the always-­necessary foil that instills the fear of what could have happened or could have been missing if ­there had been—­and still ­were—­only obdurate ­people in the world. Again it had been at night, this time the darkness of the shadow world, and again the probity of the robber had opened the way that without a ­little Docetic deception, with only the ‘glory of the Lord,’ would not have been passable—­just as in Egypt with the bribe of the forty drachmae. That is what stories are like when they do not simply rely on superior power.

1 5 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

‘He Calls for Elijah!’ If ­there is even a hint of possibility that this Jesus of Nazareth was more than a Son of man amongst men, the only indication—­ comparable to the pointed fin­ger of John the Baptist in Mathias Grünewald’s painting—­lies in the last words that the crucified spoke in Matthew and that the evangelist thought necessary to pass on in the original language: “Eli, Eli. . . .” ­Here, for once, he talked not to his apostles, not to the Pharisees, not in parables, not in threats. This turning away from any listeners is dif­fer­ent from the prayer for mercy on the Mount of Olives of which it is entirely unclear how the evangelist could know of such intimacy with God the ­Father. On the cross, Jesus spoke loudly, ­because uninvolved passers-by could hear him and thought he called the prophet Elijah—­which is no small m ­ atter, given that the prophet was spared death and belonged to the candidates for precursor to the Messiah: “He calls for Elijah,” Bach has the four-­ part choir sing (MP 61b). While it is audible, it is not intelligible, as the listeners notice from the fact that it has to be translated for them. This misunderstanding robs the mystery of the Passion of its witnesses. It consisted and consists in the fact that this cry of abandonment could come only from someone for whom this was not the constant state of being—­and not from the zealots of the law in his vicinity who ­were certain they served God and did not need to be abandoned by him to know it. As mystics tell us, the nearness of God is a state of exception. According to Plotinus, the phi­los­o­pher who claims to have ‘experienced’ it, this ‘touch’ (haphe) of the One—as His only conceivable mode of presence—­only happened to him once. In contrast to such singular positivity, Jesus’s last words evoke negativity. If it is correct that he wanted to show absolute obedience, we have to say: Jesus let himself be abandoned by his God. Yet this already is an interpolation of the gap between Gethsemane and the empty tomb. The Passion knows nothing about that; it represents the one who is abandoned by God in his complete emptiness of confidence. It is not by accident that Matthew reports the misinterpretation of the double “My God” cry. It is impor­tant to him that the uninvolved

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 5 7

passers-by are, by virtue of their misunderstanding, even more reliable witnesses. But could the evangelist exclude for himself the misunderstanding that Jesus had called Elijah? The bystanders w ­ ere not entirely indifferent: they had come into the holy city for the highest holiday of Passover and ­were in the state of intense messianic excitement that came with the remembrance of the liberation out of Egypt. Could not a desperate forerunner of the apocalypse call Elijah, given that the prophet Malachi had said: “Behold, I ­will send you the prophet Elijah before the coming of the ­great and terrible day of the Lord; he ­will guide the hearts of the f­athers back to their sons, and the hearts of the sons back to the ­fathers, lest I come and curse all the land” (Malachi 4:5–6). Should ­these words of the prophet, among all the prophecies that ­were fulfilled, remain unfulfilled? It has been argued that the witnesses to this death knew their Bible too well not to have recognized the quotation from Psalm 22 [“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Psalm 22:1]. Does a d ­ ying man quote the psalmist? Certainly not in an epoch of creative authenticity, nor as a last word—­but certainly and especially if life is so thoroughly ritualized, from the first hours to the last, that ­there are no occasions for the embarrassment of searching for the right word. Bach, in any case, did not presume that the bystanders had recognized the psalm. Other­wise he would not have let them mock the “Eli” call. You cannot have both: Jesus reciting the psalm, and the mocking crowd who must not have recognized God’s word. It is also applying the standards of a dif­fer­ent time to claim that the “Eli” call, as a recognizable quotation, has lost its elementary grandeur. Whoever fears this loss should look at the concession made to piety in Luke, who, in contrast to Matthew and Mark, apparently felt the unusualness of the “Eli” too keenly and inserted the intimate “Abba.” He, too, calls on the psalmist to supply a quotation—­a dif­ fer­ent one, from Psalm 31: “­Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” How diminishing, even trivializing this substitution of words from the psalms is becomes evident in the change of address from the “Lord!” of the psalmist to the “­Father!” of the crucified. ­There is no need ­here to recall John’s sublimation in the tetelestai, the “It is finished” (John 19:30)—it most closely reaches the register

1 5 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

of the words of creation: “And behold, it was very good!” (kai idou kala lian) (Gen. 1:31). ­Those listening to the St.  Matthew Passion ­were supposed to know how to understand the last words of Jesus, which are followed by a wordless cry that no one can forget even though the evangelist only speaks of it. But in the moment of this reference to the unrepresentable, the listener knows how wrong the address to the ­Father in Luke is—­even though it belongs, according to textual criticism, to the au­then­tic core of the ‘original source’ of the Synoptic Gospels. Ever since the beginning of critique historique, contradictions are lethal for a source, whereas small deviations serve as confirmations. Mark has a variant of the address to God, spoken with “eloi,” but maintains nevertheless that the passers-by still misunderstood “Elijah.” Both Mark and Luke recount the lingering of ­those who misheard the name: they wanted to see ­whether Elijah would come and save Jesus (soson auton), in Mark even ­whether he would lift him from the cross (kathelein auton). Did they in fact hear correctly and simply insinuate the call for Elijah as a taunt? Or did Jesus indeed call to Elijah, and ­those who heard him do not exclude that he might be saved? In that case, Luke would have been right to reject the call to “Eli” as blasphemy whereas Mark and Matthew could not tolerate that Jesus had called to Elijah in vain—­for then he would not have been who they wanted him to be. In the end, it does not ­matter what ‘motivated’ the greatness, the sublimity that Bach’s ­music undoubtedly achieves, even if it came from the abyss of an irrecoverable and therefore no longer recognizable ambiguity. ­Because this imperceptibility cannot be made vis­i­ble against the sense of history, the listeners in the third ­century a­ fter Bach have to rediscover it—­just as they have made the rediscovery of the Passion into more than a repetition. To be clear: I am not arguing that we should doubt the meaning of the call in Bach and for Bach, and for the taunting crowd. My point is to highlight—­against a background of undecidability—­that this decisiveness is anything but obvious. Could Jesus have even thought of addressing the Psalmist’s words of despair to Elijah? I would want to say: it was for him the only chance, the obvious ­thing to do. But it was also not strange or unusual for the bystanders, his contemporaries, to hear, in their reck-

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 5 9

lessness and their scorn, only the laughable, and not the seriousness in this call. Elijah would not have been just any helper in this situation. In Jewish apocalyptic lit­er­a­ture, the prophet Elijah had become the extreme figure. That his return, even his continuing presence in the world, could be thought—­and ­after the destruction of the ­temple increasingly was thought—­has to do with the fact that he belongs to the few figures in history for whom ­there was no grave: he was ‘raptured’ and therefore not visibly dead. Not to have a grave—­like Moses—­not even an ‘empty grave’: in a world in which ‘immortality’ was not yet a familiar religious concept, this was a relatively clear indication for continuing reliability for the living, from whom he simply remained concealed. It is remarkable how such ‘mediators’ ‘grow’ in religions according to a set typology. It ­isn’t that Elijah shares Adam’s fate b ­ ecause he has not sinned: “God said: Does not Elijah, b ­ ecause he has kept my commandments, live forever?” As a scribe, Elijah keeps the g­ reat book of all ­human deeds and notarizes marriage contracts so that at the beginning of messianic time the p ­ eople can be purged of their illegitimate offspring. He stays God’s hand when He wants to punish Israel: “Elijah spoke to Moses: you faithful shepherd, the writ of destruction of Israel is already written! Moses answered: If it is sealed with clay, our prayers can be heard; but if it is sealed with blood, then what happens is final. Elijah said to him: It is sealed with clay . . .”3 This is already an embellishment at the end of the third c­ entury. Elijah appears in ‘figures’: as an Arab, as a Roman, as a prostitute, as an old man, on h ­ orse­back, in flight. He instructs in questions of the law, and is a guarantor for the rabbis in questions of exegesis, especially in intractable cases: “When Elijah comes, he ­will tell us” is the comforting phrase. Or: “One day Elijah w ­ ill explain this passage.” When t­ here are disputes about escrows, ­after the distribution of what is not undisputed, it is said: “The rest remains as a deposit u ­ ntil Elijah comes.”4 Elijah is good for a lot of t­ hings for which the overpowering mono­the­istic God, in his affect for and against his ­people, is useless. Who is not reminded ­here of the theological elevation—­unexpected, given the theological sources—of the ­ mother of Jesus to the

1 6 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

I­ mmaculata, the radical sinlessness, the Assunta, the mediatrix (omnium) gratiarum [Mediatrix (of all) Grace]? But as an apocalyptic figure she has not experienced a similar growth of stature. Her ‘soft power’ had to act beforehand. Could Jesus thus have called on the ‘emergency responder’ Elijah—­which would not contradict the abandonment by God—as the bystanders claimed to have heard and for whom they seemed to wait? This does not suffice fully to explain the misunderstanding the evangelist wants to represent. For the Malachi, Elijah was the figure of the end times, whose return would immediately precede the messianic time. If Jesus was certain of the end of the world and of the Judgment to come, then his last words provided the last opportunity in which his own expectations could be fulfilled: Elijah had to come so that the end could come. This would not have been Jesus’s ‘private belief,’ but instead the belief of all of the bystanders except for the Roman soldiers, who could not have understood the words of the d ­ ying man anyway. As Matthew himself reported, Jesus had talked to his apostles about this certitude when he announced his Passion for the first time, and Peter took him aside to talk him out of it: This must not happen to you (ou me estai soi touto)! Jesus sent Peter away, as he had done with the tempter in the desert, and addressed him as “Satan” (Matt. 16:22–23). Then the so-­called transfiguration on the mountain happened where Moses and Elijah, the ones who never died, appeared to them and the voice from the cloud bestowed the sonship upon the transfigured one. Jesus charges the three disciples with him to keep s­ ilent about what they had seen. The apparition of Elijah makes them think, and they ask about Elijah and his arrival, ­because he had just ‘arrived’: Why do the scribes say that Elijah had to come first (before the g­ reat prophecies can be fulfilled)? Jesus confirms this: Elijah comes and restores every­ thing (Elias men erchetai kai apokatastesai panta) (Matt. 17:11). What is more: This Elijah had already returned but not been recognized. They interpreted this—­ hardly correctly—as a reference to John the Baptist. In any case: the expectation for Elijah’s return was in the air, it was not a ‘special feature’ of Jesus and his followers.

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 6 1

As long as ­human beings have only one life to live, they ­will tend to believe that all that is impor­tant and world-­changing w ­ ill happen in this interval. ­There is always enough potential expectation for something unheard-­of: for apocalypses of any kind. If Elijah was the apocalyptic figure for the contemporaries in Galilee and Judea, he also belonged to the expectations of the Nazarene. To assume that they are ­later additions is a failure of ‘critique.’ Why should the community have burdened its foundational text with prophecies that failed to materialize? Jesus designated the hope that was placed in Elijah with a word that Origen would ­later take up as a key word of salvation: Apocatastasis—­the restoration of every­thing.5 The object in this case is not so much the world—on which the infusion of Greek cosmology would ­later concentrate—­but the nation of the twelve tribes, in time for the return of their King, the anointed Davidian from Judea. In order for Elijah to be able not only to precede, but also to assist him as the high priest of the restored cult in the ­temple, he has to come from the tribe of Levi. That is the ‘urgency’ of the rabbinic dissent over the tribal provenance of Elijah. ­There ­were three options: Gad, Benjamin, and Levi. Each foregrounded a dif­fer­ent aspect of Elijah’s task; but it is obvious that ‘restoration’ could include, or even privilege, the function of high priest only ­after the destruction of the ­temple by Titus. The same is true for the Christology of the pseudo-­ Paulinian letter to the Hebrews, in which Jesus is accorded the office of the permanent high priest. That Elijah might be the Messiah himself is documented only once, in Rabbi Huna at the turn of the fourth ­century, as one of seven pos­si­ble identifications. It is inconsistent with the ternary of the origin of the tribes. The royal Messiah ben David and the priestly Elijah ben Levi—­ this appears to be the most sensible combination for the end times before the Judgment. But then it would be impor­tant to think about how both ‘offices’ relate to one another. The institution of precursor, which the New Testament had retroactively ‘legitimized’ in the role of John the Baptist, is for Elijah not simply a ­matter of purification and restoration of the cult. It reaches much farther, as Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho testifies: “Supposing that the

1 6 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

Messiah (Christ) has been born somewhere and lives somewhere: he cannot be recognized, does not even recognize himself and has no power u ­ ntil Elijah appears, anoints him, and proclaims him for all the world.” That, in its most concise form, is the difference to ­those “who have made a Christ for themselves.”6 Without a doubt the role of the Baptist was ­shaped in view of this precursorship, and therein lies an ‘iconological’ justification for the apostles when they refer Jesus’s words about Elijah’s apparition to John. At least it had to sound plausible to the listeners of this pericope—­whenever this enigmatic passage had entered the Gospel of Matthew. No one ­will ever know what Jesus called out in his last words. The listener of the St. Matthew Passion no longer has any patience for the fussiness with which Luke reports the last words. But in Matthew ­there is a ‘prob­lem of reception’: the discovery of a lack of unambiguousness. It points from the personal intimacy of the abandonment by God to the eschatological dimension. Suddenly the bystanders lose their aura of stupidity. Lingering and waiting, they give their misunderstanding the opportunity to be right: Was this not a moment for Elijah, if this Jesus was indeed the one whom the triumphant entry into Jerusalem had revealed? ­These witnesses, presented by the evangelist as ignorant but too impor­tant not to be mentioned, had understood, in their way, what Jesus could have said—­indeed, should have said—if he ­really believed himself to be the one he had presented himself to be in the interrogation by the high priests and by Pilate: in Mark as the Christos, the anointed one, the messiah; in Luke as the basileus, the king of the Jews, the Davidian. Can we simply neglect this self-­understanding, articulated in ‘official’ interrogations and against challenges including the risk of death, if we want to understand the evangelist and what he might have intended when he reports the “Eli” call with such laboriousness in the original language, then includes the translation and adds another layer of significance when he describes the misunderstanding of the witnesses? This is more than, and dif­fer­ent from, mockery. But Bach did not perceive this ‘more,’ and prob­ably could not. That his late listeners are ‘ahead’ of him in this case bestows an unusual tone to the decision for the Jesus who screams not for Eli-

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 6 3

jah but for his God. This is not the repetition or intensification of the frustrated interaction on the Mount of Olives. Had he called for Elijah, it would have been the last moment in the life of the unproclaimed Messiah who had failed in his mission. The bystanders could go even further and say: He was not. Only the empty tomb would save his aura, and initiate the millennial history of ‘Christology.’ It w ­ ill be ‘­after Easter,’ as if Elijah had indeed come and spoken as he does in the Midrash Pirqe Mashiah: “Raise yourselves! For I am Elijah, and this is the King, the Messiah!”7

The Primal Scream One desire emerges as inevitable when thinking about the history of the early Christian community and its predicament when the hoped-­for (or feared) short time span ­until the return of the savior on heavenly clouds for the Last Judgment was extended beyond expectations and, fi­nally, seemed endless: the desire to ‘fill out’ the time span thus gained or imposed in such a way that the new and gleeful tidings neither sink into oblivion nor lose their urgency for the conduct of one’s life. We only have this one opportunity to observe the ‘recovery’ of donated time. Stories and sayings, portents and fulfillments swirl round the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, whom even Paul still kept so unadorned. For historical and critical scholarship, the ele­ments of the canonical texts of the New Testament are an almost random se­lection from a development that began with the meager Logia of an unfathomable origin and reached to the legend-­filled loquaciousness of apocryphal gospels, the exuberance of which appeared as contradictory and irreconcilable only to the conservators of a pure doctrine. From the canon, we can look in ­either direction; backward to the construction of a ‘kerygma,’ the demystified core of which is so impoverished that it looks like every­thing and nothing; and forward to the trea­sure of legends around holy sites and relics, produced by a loquacious piety that could not get enough of narratives a­ fter time had become ‘long.’ Compression and dilation lie on ­either side of

1 6 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

the story that a wise, perhaps even admirable, economy had established as the official and binding account. No less wise and witty is Rudolf Bultmann’s concept of ‘kerygma.’ It strips the biblical text of all historical questions and doubts, just as Marcion had once tried. This capacious reduction leaves hardly anything but the genuine “It is I”: prophecy and hope are fulfilled, that is the message. And this can be the extent of it, ­because every­body in their ‘existence’ knows what a message of salvation has to contain in order to satisfy their feelings of worry and guilt. ‘Content’ is given not in the pronouncement but in the reception. Critically peeling away the myth from this ‘substance’ is itself a historical fact that emerged with modern historicity. It is enough that it has happened this one time. ‘Kerygma’ is able to withstand ­every new fact: historically the weakest ele­ment—­the ‘Easter event’—­sets the standard. What does this look like in the biblical text? Especially in the Passion, and assuming that the cross is at the center of Christian belief? Even for this corpus, Bultmann has given a critical account—­ quite obviously in the belief that ‘kerygma’ gains in proportion to the contingency of the text. If one accepts any and all critical emendations, it is all the more remarkable how successfully a long tradition has molded disparate ele­ments into a homogeneous w ­ hole. A late part of this tradition is ­music. Not only the Passions, but also the collection called “The Seven Last Words,” which—in contrast to the Passions—­has no basis in a single Gospel. It is a compilation of all of the sayings the four evangelists attributed to Jesus on the cross. When the Spanish cleric Marquès de Valde-­Inigo ­after the earthquake of Lisbon wanted to consecrate a church in a cavern near the town of Cadiz with the sole purpose of proclaiming and worshipping the last words of Jesus, he turned to Joseph Haydn for m ­ usic that would be played in the devotional intervals between the individual last words. In 1785, almost thirty years a­ fter the construction of the church “Oratorio de la Santa Cueva” in the cavern near Cadiz, the Musica Instrumentale Sopra le sette ultime Parole del nostro Redemtore in Croce o siena Sette Sonate con un Introduzione ed al Fine un Terremoto [Instrumental ­Music on the Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross, or Seven Sonatas with an Introduction and at the

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 6 5

End an Earthquake] ­were composed. In 1786 the orchestral score was performed at the designated place, and in 1787 Haydn gave it the form of a string quartet, in which it developed its greatest resonance. The finale with its earthquake evokes the reason for its commission for a church that was sunk into the ground and draped in black; when Jesus died, the earth had also shaken. As if it had been struck by the dreadfulness of ­these last words, none of which was worthy to be sung by a h ­ uman voice: the priest read each one of them, and the ­music created a horizon for meditative contemplation. Haydn had the musical fortune that the specific rite in the cavern omitted the a­ ctual wording of Jesus’s last words. In spite of their comparative succinctness—­asking forgiveness for the tormentors, promising redemption for the repentant sinner, turning to the ­mother and the favorite apostle, complaining to God about being abandoned, complaining about thirst, professing obedience, and commending his spirit—­a compilation of Jesus’s last words would have become quite wordy, compared to what Bach had to work with in the text of Matthew. Matthew lets every­body ­else speak and taunt, while Jesus is s­ ilent u ­ ntil the ninth hour when he “cries out with a mighty voice” and utters the complaint to God about his abandonment as the only word on the cross. For the second, wordless scream the evangelist changes verbs: from anaboao (to cry out) to krazo (scream terribly), amplified by the phone megale [with a loud voice]. Linguistically this could not be more extreme: the screaming and croaking of a demon. Unlike with the first cry, no word is appropriate: “But Jesus cried again aloud and died” (Matt. 27:50). Musically, Bach was even more fortunate than Haydn: a repeated cry and the one phrase in Jesus’s ­mother tongue. Looking at the painstaking results of textual criticism of the final part of the Passion, one can see how the text of Matthew, so congenial to Bach, almost fades into nothingness. For no evangelist could have sung this screaming, no ­music could have represented it, even in its doubled and intensified form. The one word in the ­mother tongue, duplicated by the translation of the evangelist and of Luther, is the ‘kerygma’ of the Passion that could not be destroyed. Textual criticism, of course, had no difficulties d ­ oing exactly that. The address to God a­ fter the first scream was, according to Bultmann,

1 6 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

a “secondary interpretation of the wordless scream of Jesus.”8 Therefore, he said nothing. Of the seven words, not even the most terrible one. The double scream would not have satisfied ­those who refused to believe that the one who proclaimed the Word had left wordlessly, given that they could not even bear the idea of a redeemer who was crucified and had died. That is why the scream was ‘explained,’ meaning was ‘imputed’ to it—­and the word of the psalmist became a prophecy. It is not for the sake of ‘saving’ Matthew’s Passion that we need to be careful. It does not need protection for its text. But the patterns of Bible criticism raise doubts. The scream on the cross as the residual of the entire tradition is all too similar to the ‘kerygma.’ Even the latter’s “ego eimi—­It is I” is a fragment, the reduction of the Gospels’ Log­os and of the Logia to pure theolalia. ­Those who already know who is to come and who already suffer from the lack of what he has to bring them do not even need this “It is I.” They need no ‘last word’ on the cross, for every­thing must have been said already. The terribleness of the last scream is nothing but the negation of any dogmatics, of any Docetism, of any realism of incarnation—­with a l­ittle temporal remodeling of the ‘kerygma’: “It was he and it ­will be him.” The reduction to its hard, inarticulate core destroys the possibility of its reception: a Bach conceived ­after the ‘demythologization,’ would have been condemned to musical impotence and silence. ­After Bach, Bultmann is just a marginalium to a story that, in­de­pen­ dently of its philological soundness, has become indestructible. The “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” as Luther read it, has the truth of a scream that could be directed even at a ‘dead God.’ Perhaps especially at a dead one.

Theological Defense and H ­ uman Recovery The twin “Eli, Eli . . .” in Jesus’s sole words on the cross in Matthew moves us as a desperate plea to the ­Father, ­because the double address is followed by the unanswerable question ‘why.’

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 6 7

Theologians do not tolerate emotional redundancy in a document that is marked as ‘revelation.’ God does not repeat himself without reason to us, and he does not admit documents without truth. Thus, the most plausible explanation is that Jesus had called his God twice ­because t­ here w ­ ere two individuals to call, the first and the third in the Trinity of which he held the m ­ iddle position. This is good exegetical work, and we w ­ ill not gain anything by criticizing it. It also makes it clear that the double address could not be meaningless for the orthodoxy of mono­the­ism. The deviation from the absolute singularity of the Jewish God could only be temporal and historical. In the ­middle of the third ­century a­ fter Christ, for example, the Rabbi Chija ben Abba had argued polemically: “If the son of the whore” (an unflattering designation of Jesus’s provenance) “says to you: ‘­There are two gods,’ tell him: I am the one from the Sea of Reeds, I am the one from Sinai”9—­the God of the Exodus from Egypt and the God of the Commandments, the two decisive divine acts in the history of the ­people. But how did it occur to Rabbi Chija to ascribe to the cursed ­Jesus the doctrine of two Gods? ­There is hardly any other explanation than that he believed with the double “Eli, Eli” Jesus had taught, not ‘just’ called. ­There is confirmation in a Midrash to Psalm 22:2 where the double “my God, my God” is so clearly preformed that Jesus’s scream could have been—­and perhaps had to be—­understood as a quotation in fulfillment of scripture. And this formula in the Psalm is glossed in the Midrash as “ ‘my God’ in the Sea of Reeds, ‘my God’ in Sinai.” This polemic against the son of a whore is not only illustrative for the reservations and the reuses of arguments between Chris­tian­ ity and Judaism; it is also significant for the difference between a dogmatic type of exegesis that was practiced throughout the Christian centuries in the expectation that truth has not yet been exhausted and the referring of God—­who had become abstract and solitary—­back to history. It was not a question of attributes so much as of claiming for him certain magnificent acts in certain places and certain times. Salvation as well as disaster in this history was not

1 6 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

expended on one date. God showed who he was, ­here and ­there, during the Exodus and on Sinai. Thus, the “Eli, Eli” had to be reclaimed from the sheer expectation of revelation. That is what Bach did: for this moment in the Passion ­there was nothing to ‘communicate’ to o ­ thers—to us as ­others.

No Martyrdom The Passion is not a martyrdom, hence not a piece of evidence for a truth. Bach is not a ‘missionary.’ He does not let Jesus suffer and die for a ‘cause.’ What­ever Jesus of Nazareth has preached and prophesized is not proven by what happened to him. On the contrary: ­Those who had believed in him, who had followed him when he had summoned them, all fled from him. They, in any case, believed the ‘cause’ was lost. ­There is none of that cult of martyrdom in the Passion that emerged with the church from the catacombs of its persecution. Sinners may think they have found their salvation, their relief, their reconciliation effected and guaranteed; but the ­people for whom the word ‘sin’ means nothing are not convinced to be harder on themselves and to worry about something they previously knew nothing about—­that ­will be the task of p ­ eople distributing new burdens, whose recognition can then constitute the meaning of life. Jesus’s contemporaries w ­ ere ready to feel that they had ‘failed’ b ­ ecause they had to live with the experience of a failed history of their ­people, of a broken covenant with a God who had once favored them. His rage—­where could it have come from if not from the infidelity of his p ­ eople to his laws? But the post-­Christian audience of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion stands no longer ­under this law and is no longer part of this covenant. When they hear ‘sin,’ they have to believe rather than feel themselves as sinners in need of redemption. ­There are ­those who are weary and burdened, and for them it is a sublime story, the story of the one who suffers and dies for them. No m ­ atter how mysterious and obscure the connection between guilt and suffering may be—it is a m ­ atter of a f­uture ‘theology,’ when the events of which the ­music of the Passion lets us hear take place.

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 6 9

In other words: one does not have to be the person for whom Jesus suffers and dies in order to be shaken by the vio­lence of this suffering and this ­dying. It is not a ‘detour’ ­toward aestheticizing the Passion when one admits that for o ­ thers it may have a dif­fer­ent ‘significance’ than for the listeners to whom it cannot ‘demonstrate’ what they are not already willing to concede. The martyrs of the church are part of the demonstrations of apologists and missionaries who want to help a new ‘truth’ achieve victory: Can one be prepared, even e­ ager, to die for something that is not true? This is not the rhe­toric only of the centuries of persecution but even more of the subsequent centuries, which insist on the fiction that their cult is based on the tombs of t­ hese witnesses. The Passion is not a testament to truth. It is not the sight of the crucified but the dubious ‘amplification’ of the earthquake that lets the Roman captain and the guards at the cross—­set by Bach for four voices—­proclaim: “Truly, this was the Son of God” (Matt. 27:54; MP 63b). This fear-­driven proclamation almost denies the truth of the deceased. Luke is a ­little more reserved. He does without the earthquake and, thus, without the rupture of the rocks; he especially does without the ‘chorus’ of the Roman guards, when he lets the centurion say to himself: “Truly, this man was righ­teous” (Luke 23: 47). This evangelist knows how ­little a word about being God’s Son means from the mouth of a Roman—in any case, he knows nothing about the reasons for which the council of high priests had condemned Jesus to death.

The Last Word in the Passion of Saint John Far removed already from the events surrounding the carpenter’s son, the evangelist John pre­sents a highly stylized metaphysical giver of life: the eternal Log­os that has become flesh and dwelled among us. To the loftiness of the prologue belongs the amount of self-­ explications that none of the other evangelists know, including the nightly conversation with Nicodemus and the commentary Christ himself bestows on his unworldly actions.

1 7 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

It is consistent with this procedure that the crucified does not die, as he does in Matthew, with a scream and in despair. In John he declares his work completed with a clear conscience. The crucifixion in John u ­ nder the trilingual sign of the prefect Pilate declaring: this is the ‘King of the Jews’—­even if he might have meant: this is what happens to someone who cannot stop wanting to be this King—­focuses not on the misery of the abandonment by God, but instead on the consummation of an orderly farewell to life. Part of this is the description of the ‘usage’ of the pieces of clothing by the four executioners; also, that Jesus puts his ‘­family affairs’ in order by consigning his m ­ other to his favorite apostle. Mary Magdalene is also mentioned, hardly without purpose; that she belongs to the ‘­family,’ and in what capacity, the apocryphal gospel of Phillip ­will reveal very late to the astonished discoverers of the Gnostic library of Nag Hammadi, even though Max Weber already wrote about the founder of a Chinese sect, Hong Xiuquan, who had seen Jesus’s wife in a vision. Only then does the evangelist use the word about ending, twice in quick succession. Once when he says that Jesus had demanded the quenching of his thirst (dipso), when he knows (eidos) that all is achieved (panta tetelestai). The evangelist also lets Jesus say what he knew Jesus knew. With a single word that we cannot even guess in the original language: “tetelestai.” The lofty ‘all’ that was mentioned just before is now omitted in dramatic abbreviation. Every­ body can hear that the ‘end,’ the telos, is declared: it has come to the end. The end of what? That is not easy to say, ­because Jesus uses the impersonal form that the Vulgata ­later emulates with the very differently accentuated “consummatum est”—it is ‘exhausted.’ No German translation should distance itself—­the eagerness for modernization notwithstanding—­from the “Es ist vollbracht” [“It is finished,” or, more literally, “It is achieved”] that both major confessions have in common. Upon which Jesus quietly bowed his head and—­though this is rarely translated literally—­gave up his spirit (paredoken to pneuma). Justifiably, this last “tetelestai” is accorded the highest dignity of unalterable tradition, even in the translations (given that the ‘origi-

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 7 1

nal’ ­here is itself a translation of something unknown!). Nonetheless, as is the case in sacred texts of all religions, at its center, at the adyton [the innermost sanctuary] reigns obscurity and unintelligibility. Why should we not reflect upon the reasons for the evangelist’s usage of the same word in quick succession? And, thus, perhaps not with the identical meaning? First, that Jesus knew that he had now brought “all” to an end of which only he could “know” what it looked like viewed from the end: a ‘work’ accomplished, proclaimed, and suffered by him that was unreachable to the bystanders in this moment of apparent failure and defeat. Then the—­ from ­today’s standpoint understandable—­capitulation from the mouth of someone d ­ ying ­under t­ hese circumstances who has ‘every­ thing ­behind him.’ No longer does he have to suffer, no longer need he do anything but bow his head and give up his spirit. This is a most h ­ uman expression for which no one can deny understanding and compassion. Not even for the impersonal phrase: “it is endured” [es ist ausgestanden]. With the extravagant “all,” John the Evangelist would have shown in the first “tetelestai,” ascribed to the inaccessible consciousness of the Servant of God, on what level he wanted to be understood or remain misunderstood. With the second occurrence, with the articulation of just this “tetelestai,” he would have ‘lowered the standard,’ had invited, indeed suggested, an exegesis that was devoid of all messianic-­metaphysical charge: relief about the end of such suffering. This change in perspective ­toward the ‘external view’ on the redeemed rather than the redeemer—as someone who is redeemed from his Passion—­makes the objectionableness of the naked phrase about surrendering his spirit more understandable; more than this word could not be heard and more than bowing of the head as the sign of giving up his spirit could not be seen. John apparently had no taste for the intimate phrase that only Luke has and that was hardly spoken for the bystanders: “­Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Was it legitimate to let Jesus say this with such finality when in a few hours at the resurrection he would have to demand back his pneuma, his spirit? The same concerns apply to the word about finality. It could be spoken as long as it communicated to the bystanders the end of the

1 7 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

suffering. But was it meant only for ­these ­people and only in this sense? I have talked about the sensitivity with which this last word has to be interpreted. But we should not fear the accusation of attacking the adyton too harshly if we have the opportunity to extract a genuinely richer understanding from the background meta­ phorics of Jesus’s salvational mission. The pathos of the accomplished mission is not diminished when we include another meaning for teleo: namely, “it is paid.” For it is not a spurious interpretation of the ‘salvation’ of which we constantly talk if we imagine it as the release from the captivity of guilt, as the ransoming from the stronghold of God’s Antagonist. To recapitulate: as the likeness of God, ­humans in the safety of Eden w ­ ere the creatures privileged by immortality; nonetheless, the ‘Other,’ the Confuser, managed to effect their expulsion from this locus of privilege. ‘Expulsion’ h ­ ere does not mean first and foremost the loss of a carefree life, but exposure to death, to the need to fend for their own lives—­and, ­because of temporal and material limitations, exposure to sin. ­Humans did not simply succumb to temptation ­here and ­there; they ­were, as exiles, constitutively outlawed and rightly delivered to the princi­ple of their most secret desire: not merely to be the likeness of God but to be God himself. That the creator had to pay a ‘price’ in order to ‘ransom’ this guilty creature is strange only ­after taking into account the influences of ancient metaphysics on the conception of God. Why d ­ idn’t this omnipotent God just employ his power instead of letting the Son of man suffer and die, letting him accept the consequences of original guilt without being guilty himself? With this question one has left ­behind the image world of the genuine concept of redemption. For the background meta­phorics by which it is governed belong to a world in which treating ­humans as property—­their purchase and ransom, as well as the juridical framework that regulates ­these property relations—­was normal and deeply ­shaped the conception of gods. So ­humans had been transferred from one’s property to another’s, had fallen to someone who was able to alienate them from their original image. The price that would have to be paid for them could only be the highest pos­si­ble—­that is a consequence from their ear-

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 7 3

liest history. Jesus’s d ­ ying word “tetelestai” could only mean that this highest price had now been paid. Only ­because the ransom had been paid and freedom from slavery to the demon of death had been achieved could the theologoumenon of the descent into Hades and the opening of its gates immediately follow. It is not a demonstration of power but a juridical transaction in which the erstwhile defeated Lord of paradise had to pay the maximum price. The fact that l­ater, a­ fter the criticism of moral phi­los­o­phers, this was no longer dignified and appropriate for a God of the World indicates the transition of the original concept from one world into another. Whoever believes that the thought of a ransom to be paid to the diabolos is an unbearable offense should realize that the entire Passion, as it was presented theologically to the original congregation, was nothing but an offense. For Jews and for pagans: for the latter, the crucified Son of God meant the contradiction of a d ­ ying immortal; for the former, the thought of a descendant of JHWH as a failed messiah was the ultimate sacrilege. But this offensiveness also provided a mea­sure of freedom for the theological ‘decoration’ of the sequence of events in which the Passion had to find its place—­ culminating in the reversal of the act of redemption ­toward the ­Father as the addressee of a reconciliation that humanity owes him and that the Son of man, by taking it upon himself, obtained with the surplus of ‘infinite grace.’ The fact that this scenario was much more difficult to conceive of than the archaic schema of ransoming was drowned out, so to speak, by ‘its success.’ Comparing the death scenes in Bach’s two Passions—­Jesus ­dying with a scream in Matthew, and the end in John with the word about achievement—it is not hard to see into what kind of ambivalences the “It is finished” leads the cantor of St. Thomas. As if Jesus’s final words had to be thought about deeply, the organ, with a kind of indecisive intimacy, transitions to the alto aria that picks up Jesus’s word and looks upon the salvation of the soul promised in it: “O comfort for the afflicted souls!” But as if the voice has to reproach itself for not having thought first of the redeemer, it bursts into jubilation over the triumph, which this Passion is first and foremost, before it addresses the last hours of the faithful: “The hero of Judah conquers with might / And concludes the b ­ attle. / It is finished!”

1 7 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

(Bach, St. John Passion, sect. 30). Quite obviously, the difficulty of sounding the right note of redemption in this final word is far removed from the long-­forgotten background myth of “It is paid!” The drama of the scene in John is generated by the composer, and it forces him into the intensifications that so move us. At the same time we feel something like gratitude for the simpler mind of the synoptic Matthew ­because—if one may say this frankly—he ‘ignored’ Jesus’s last word. He only heard the scream of the ­dying man. Most likely b ­ ecause he did not linger among the bystanders like the fourth evangelist, who proclaims to be the only ‘witness,’ but had, together with the other small-­minded followers, fled from the catastrophe of their Lord and his Kingdom. His Jesus did not comment and thus did not embarrass ­those who would have to comment on the commentary—­among them, with the exegetes and preachers, the composers.

The Witness of the Fourth Evangelist Bach’s St. Matthew Passion ends with the sealed tomb, not the empty tomb. It leaves the congregation in mourning and tears, not in hope and certitude. What Jesus’s corpse had been deprived of when he was laid to rest becomes the reason for the w ­ omen to go to the tomb early on Easter morning where they are the terrified first witnesses of the tomb’s emptiness: they got up and went to fulfill the last obligation to the dead, the anointment. For on the eve of the Sabbath, this embalmment could not be performed before sunset b ­ ecause of the hastiness of the burial. This was a job for w ­ omen, and their ardor for the dead person who had only confused and disappointed the men makes them the first ‘post-­Easter’ figures in history: they are the ones who hear the first ‘kerygma’ from the angel in front of the tomb and understand it as l­ ittle as every­one ­after them. As ­little as ­those who refuse to accept that a ‘kerygma’ is not a ‘communication’ to be understood, as has recently and cunningly been claimed, ­after the catastrophic death of faith at the hands of the historical-­ critical method.

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 7 5

The ­women on Easter morning are still the mourning congregation that at the end of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion sits down in tears. They have not yet been acquainted with the pos­si­ble expectation of a reversal, if it ever had existed. That is why they are better witnesses for the emptiness of the tomb than the men who, ­behind closed doors, discuss the messianic failure and perhaps concoct new conspiracies. The w ­ omen had to have a motive specific to their gender: the forced delay of the funeral rites. Against this line of motivation, which has always been recognized, t­ here is another line with the opposite effect, which has been neglected: the doubt about the emptiness of the tomb. For the aspect that explains the w ­ omen’s omission—­the imminence of the Sabbath and its rigid prescriptions—­gives rise to another thought: that the shortness of time before sunset could have made the entire deposition from the cross premature anyway. John must have known this moment of doubt precisely. Only he goes into details about how the day of preparation came to an end and the bodies of the executed had to be taken from the crosses, how the Roman soldiers ‘finished off’ the two other crucified men, but did not crush the bones of Jesus ­because he was already dead. How could they have known this, one has learned to ask. John ­here tells the story of the lance thrust into the heart and of ­water and blood flowing separately. Then follows the confirmation of this event through an oath: He who has seen this has born witness (memartyreken) to it, and his testimony (martyria) is true (John 21:24). He can be believed, not least ­because the witnessed event fits so perfectly into the schema of fulfilling scripture. But the witness is not he who has done it but he who has seen it—­which is, again, precisely the manner in which John likes to bring himself into the story. How impor­tant must this testimony already have been! For the ‘post-­Easter’ community this was decisive, and it might well be that John had intended the interchangeability of witness-­ as-­actor and witness-­as-­spectator. His ‘implied reader,’ a­ fter all, is not yet the solitary Bible reader of the Reformation who pours over his own copy of the sacred text, but the ‘implied listener’ of the pericopes during the liturgical reading. Who w ­ ill not recall the soldier

1 7 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

with the lance as a firm witness to the truth of the fourth Gospel? Yet, being the only one among the apostles who claimed to have stood at the foot of the cross and even to have been spoken to—­the ­others could not have seen him for they w ­ ere dispersed ­after the night of the capture, as John was initially—­John alone had remained ­after the last words ­until the death certification by the Romans in Pilate’s employ. He did something that stood in contrast to his e­ arlier claim that the crushing of the bones was unnecessary ­because this one was already dead. He omitted something, however; the witness needed something vis­i­ble. That is why the soldier thrust his lance, and the witness saw the proof of blood and ­water. The Enlightenment hypothesis about the fraud of the priests was only superficially expedient. It relieved the rationality of ­those to be enlightened from the suspicion of excessive gullibility and thus preserved reason as a target of f­ uture enlightening; it also transferred the entire burden of deception to the side of the instigators who had a strong motive in their desire for power. But already in the myth of the cave, Plato had shown that the sophists manipulating the shadows in the background would have never succeeded in binding the prisoners to their entertainment had ­these not been all too willing and amused by a real­ity of the lowest kind. The shadow plays only gave them the opportunity to make something out of their ‘ontological’ modesty. And this was a kind of theory, certainly also a truth. The cynicism of a fraud becomes vis­ib ­ le only to someone who claims not to be enthralled by appearances. This is what is meant when the Enlightenment of the eigh­teenth ­century is accused of lacking a ‘sense of history’; but the historical and critical reduction of the Bible to its nonetheless-­residual ‘kerygma’ one hundred years ­later only has pretensions to historicity. Only late does it begin to take into account the ‘reception’ of texts and the ‘disposition’ of the congregation and its ritual conventions: something like the ‘implied reasonableness’ of ­those who fail due to messianism and are intent on self-­preservation. The best witness for John, the fourth evangelist, is John himself. For him, it means that a witness knows best w ­ hether he tells the truth or not, and this witness declares to know (kai ekeinos oiden

Be twe e n Two Mu r d er ers    1 7 7

hoti alethe legei, John 19:35). The congregation is not a tribunal where a witness can be ambivalent at first, and where criteria of consistency obtain. This one can be believed just as he believes himself (hina kai hymeis pisteusete, John 19:35). ­Those willing to believe should be able to believe just as the witness believes himself. The quality of testimony depends on the horizon of reception, not on the consideration of concerns by a ‘third’ party or of the post-­ Christian historian. The haste of the deposition ­after the verdict of the law that a crucified person may never be left overnight, especially not a blasphemer over the night of the Sabbath—­this obliging haste is compensated for by the proof of death at the hands of the pagan foreigner. For us contemporaries of posthistory, an evangelist who calls himself as a witness by means of a rhetorically confusing offer is no longer convincing; but that should not detract from the greatness of the thought that a witness is the foremost guarantor of his own credibility: only he can mea­sure his words by what he has seen. Is it not obvious that he counts on t­ hose who would not take kindly to a critical theorist from another time who doubts that a witness can testify for himself? It is not therefore ‘demythologization’ if Rudolph Bultmann writes in his commentary on John: “It cannot be the eyewitness himself, but must be another who is in the position to guarantee the truth of the testimony. In that case, however, only Jesus himself can be meant.”10 This is sheer nonsense that claims to be ‘critical.’ It would imply that the dead person has to confirm the witness of his own death. Even if the magical term ‘kerygma’ ­were to apply to this situation, it would destroy the intimacy of the ­witness with himself, with his patent reliability—­all to have someone who seems to die only in appearance testify to his own death. A corrupt text would be preferable! Someone r­ eally had to be dead so that his empty tomb could become the center of joyful faith. The last public and vis­i­ble ‘fact’ had been the burial of a dead man—­every­thing that came afterward happened at the discretion of the ­women and due to their fear that they could be accused of hiding the corpse they had not found. An angel and an earthquake (which would have aftershocks into the Enlightenment) had to convince them of the unbelievable.

1 7 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

The prob­lem of John’s status as a witness of Jesus’s death for the participants of Matthew’s Passion lies no longer in the dubiousness of the procedure, b ­ ecause they can separate ­those who have been or could have been addressed from the ‘third’ position of the spectator. What they might realize in this detour, however, is the questionable nature of this death in view of the unreality of ‘post-­Easter’ events: the St. Matthew Passion itself turns its listeners into witnesses of a contestable real­ity, even though they do not ‘see,’ they only ‘listen.’ Only? It has been argued repeatedly that for the Greeks real­ity had been entirely visual, for the Old Testament audible, and that in phases of contact between the spheres—­for example, in Alexandria—­one language had to be ‘translated’ into the other. We have the Gospels only in Greek, and their emphasis on eyewitness testimony for what occurred strikes one as somewhat outré. John went the furthest in his artful-­artificial approximation of the Greek sense of real­ity, not least in the assurance of his own testimony. If that is true, then the ­music of the St. Matthew Passion, with its own and only pos­si­ble ‘assurance’ of salvific acts, returns to the biblical origin. The witness of the Log­os is its listener, and to reactivate the ability to listen is the ‘immanent’ task of a Passion embedded in liturgy. ­Those who are reduced to tears do not doubt this death. They do not need anything more to be consoled when faced with their own.

The Tears

‘We Sit Down in Tears . . .’ The apocalyptic stigmata during the crucifixion transport the world into a state of waiting. The world continues as if it did not have to continue. Its being becomes its appearance, its existence an unreal predicate. The real danger in the early history of theology was Christological Docetism. It is likely that it has remained such to this day despite all attempts at dogmatic reassurance: no one believes fully that this Jesus suffered with all of his body, that he was abandoned by God just like a normal ­human being. Did it not help him at all to have been the one who had claimed his ­Father would send him legions of angels in order to rescue him from the imminent Passion? True, this was said to calm down the over­eager apostle (anonymous in Matthew 26:53) with the sword on Mount Olive; but it was a reminder that a Passion tinged by the suspicion of revocability

1 8 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

would not be a real intervention in a world in which nothing is revocable. Docetism does not have to go so far as to claim that the real Christ had been hidden during the Passion on Golgotha in a cave ­under the Mount of Olives, and that only the semblance of his body was tortured and died—­perhaps to make “the Lord of this world” believe he had won the game a­ fter all. ­Every diminishment of realism is Docetism. Realism however—­and we get to hear it in the St.  Matthew Passion—­inverts the situation: in his kenosis, the suffering of the righ­ teous one hollows out the world. The world is no longer, it just seems to be. The fulfillment of all apocalyptic threats begins at this moment. The end becomes the beginning. The earth is quaking and the sun is eclipsed, the dead rise from their graves to be judged, and the curtain in the ­temple is torn from top to bottom, even though this t­emple w ­ ill endure for quite a while as if nothing had happened, and the world even longer as if no one had predicted its destruction. Every­thing is transposed into another modality: into the as-­if of its mere per­sis­tence. Has this Docetism of the world been forgotten—­perhaps ­because no one had noticed Christ’s stigmata? Even though ‘many’ had seen the risen bodies of the just—­where did they end up? Then Docetism reverts back to the ens realissimum on Golgotha, to the dead one on the cross who so soon w ­ ill dis­appear and whose ‘shoddy’ resurrection gives rise to the apostles’ suspicion that he has turned into a ghost who can walk through closed doors that are much more solid than he who seems to mock them. The separation of resurrection from ascension—an interval that in the early sources oscillates by a wide margin—­has not been good for the realism of the Passion: for a god, ­after all, it was a cheap triumph, and for the one who died on the cross it was a premature revocation of the seriousness of the Passion. How pious—­indeed, how wise—­that the St. Matthew Passion ends with the sealing of the tomb and the tears of t­hose who are left ­behind. As if it ­were forever, both choirs call ­after him in the tomb: “Rest g­ ently, ­gently rest!” (MP 68).

Th e Tears    1 8 1

Unto the Sealed Tomb Repetition is the constructive princi­ple of myth. It implies the assurance that the entirely unexpected is excluded, that pre­sent events can be survived, that accidents can be endured—­even if it is the ekpyrosis, the burning down of the world, from whose ashes the phoenix of a new one can rise. If one claims that damnation as such exists, that the unbearable is a constant state, then the mythical princi­ple has to be invalidated. That is why the apokatastasis of Origen became anathema, b ­ ecause it wanted to declare the world, and all decisions about salvation and damnation, to be repeatable. Apokatastasis eliminated the source for trust in salvation history—­ namely, prototype and prophecy—in as much as it denied the finality of grace and mercy. As long as the law in history is not the law of history, repetition can become a pattern only as obedience. Then repetition can be the execution of an initial ‘program’ that holds every­thing together and makes it intelligible. Or e­ lse it can have the evidence of a ‘solution’ to a prob­lem that arises again and again and that relates to something that is given in the ‘significance’ of an archaic act: it offers relief from the need for decisions when faced with the seemingly new. Confirmation is already provided by tradition, and via tradition it becomes exemplary, if only in a suggested, ritual implementation—in contrast to prophecy, in which symbolic forms precede any realization. In its fulfillment, prophecy shows the event to be unique, and it does so even and especially when multiple ele­ments of the prototype converge into one. The de verbo proof of prophecy, which Matthew practices extensively among the evangelists, defines the events of salvation differently than does the misnamed de facto ‘proof of prophecy,’ which Mark prefers—­has to prefer—­for the Passion for his ‘implied audience.’ The so-­called apol­og­ etic ‘proof of scripture’ that was supposed to characterize one figure as the ‘Son of man’ or ‘Servant of God’ or ‘Messiah’ works with heterogeneous means. Equally impor­tant to identifying the salvific person is recognizing that the actions and passions this figure undergoes are adequate for salvation and accurately pleasing to God. The Passion follows the pattern for salvation that was developed in Isaiah 2:53. The

1 8 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

same Jesus who asked the apostles at the Last Supper for a ritual of remembrance thereby initiated a prescribed ritual whose ele­ments ­were so familiar to the original congregation that reference to the servant of God was unnecessary. Hence the servant’s act of subjection to the w ­ ill of the lord. This subjection in Gethsemane becomes, in parallel to the ­triple denial of Peter, the ­triple repetition and intensification of the fear of the servant and the sleep of the apostles. It is not the quotation in reference to the prophecy but the clarity of the events that makes the ‘fulfillment’ so impressive for anybody familiar with scripture. Linguistically, t­here is the ambivalence of the Greek pais theou—­translated both as ‘child’ and ‘servant’ of God—­that must and can be de­cided only with reference to the servitude to, or the right to protection by, the ­Father and Lord. As servant, the subject of the Passion is the executor of a commission and an order—­indeed, the ‘means’ of the proprietor’s ­will. The scene in Gethsemane must not be read in light of l­ ater Trinitarian dogmas of consubstantiality; in that case the subjection of the terrified Son would be artificial, a case for the psychologist. Being a servant of God is not a predicate of humiliation and renunciation (kenosis), but of fidelity to a duty—­not a meta­phor for a social relation but for an ethos. The servants of biblical patriarchs w ­ ere often their confidants, who knew better than anybody ­else the ‘case’ of their master and the secret of their provenance and legacy—­just as Thomas Mann demonstrated in the first part of Joseph and His ­Brothers in the figure of Eliezer, the con­vey­or of memories and their translator across generations. At the core of the ‘figure of the servant’ is not his humiliation but the demonstration of his faithfulness. Every­thing ­else is just painful ornamentation around this core—­that is why Goethe in Faust’s “Prologue in Heaven” has the ‘Lord,’ at the beginning of his confrontation with the cosmic accuser Mephistopheles, specify his brusque question: “Do you know Faust?” with the addendum “My servant!”1 Read in a strictly biblical fashion, this would be more than the beginning of the wager about moral obedience and ambition; it would be an aggression within the relationship of steadfast fidelity of the poignantly named ‘Lord’ t­ oward his servant as some-

Th e Tears    1 8 3

one who has to prove himself but who in the end ­will always be rescued. Moral interpretations are of no use against Goethe’s ‘implied readers,’ who are familiar with their Bible just like the author and know this ‘Lord’ as the unfailing rescuer of his ­people: of the patriarchs and of the twelve tribes with whom he keeps faith through vari­ous covenants and sometimes cunning and bellicose succor. The commitment to contracts is the dominant attribute of this God, over and above his power as the creator of the world and his dominance over other gods. This is the ‘Lord’ to whom the ‘servant of God’ in the St. Matthew Passion appeals with his last words “Eli, Eli . . . ​ ,” words at once intimate and disappointed; he appeals to the fiduciary duty breached in the moment of death by him whose servant he still is and just now ceases to be. Did God not have a cunning plan for him in reserve? He did, and the believers know it already: the empty tomb. It is not obvious that Jesus has to suffer and die. Other­wise, his initial strug­gle with the ­will of his ­Father and his last screams against him would lose all conviction; especially if the audience of the St. Matthew Passion shares the Christian dogma that t­ hese events, on which all converges and from which all emanates, are necessary in salvation history. The thought of satisfying the ­Father is too closely linked to the narrative transformation of the basic idea for it to be related to an act against this story. Even Paul’s idea of ‘justification’ is more about manufacturing identification with death and resurrection through faith rather than about restitution. Especially b ­ ecause it resists moralization, the thought of justification implies the ‘cunning’ of a higher justice: a rupture with the culpable identity via death in baptism, and attainment of the right to absolution in a new identity with the resurrected one, who as such no longer was ‘the same’ as the crucified. To complete this thought, God the savior as supreme judge would have countenanced a protest against the due guilty verdict, and would have ‘institutionalized’ this protest in the Son of man. That is a subtler, more ‘theologically’ sophisticated thought than the myths—­ prob­ably au­then­tic—of outwitting the Lord of the world and his archons through the servile figure of the savior. With the semblance

1 8 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

of his helplessness, the Son of man would ­either violently liberate the expired pledge in the drama of salvation or fulfill the conditions of ransom through the incarnation, the reason for Lucifer’s fall ­because he deemed it ‘impossible’ for God. ­Those listening to the St. Matthew Passion, as Bach’s historical instruments of reception, are almost too faithful to understand fully the ‘contingency’ of the servant of God. What they have to understand, but hardly can, is the point of view of the apostles who, ­after the triumph in Jerusalem, had seen the heavens open but had not anticipated the hours of Passion and d ­ ying. The episodes of the t­ riple sleep of the apostles, the betrayal of Judas, the t­riple denial of Peter, and the absence of the apostles during the Passion serve as evidence that they recognized none of this as part of salvation, least of all of their own. The apostles are the representatives of disbelief. They make it pos­si­ble, two hundred and fifty years ­after Bach, for unbelievers in our time to understand the Passion as a provocation against justice and reason, intermixed with hostility and re­sis­tance. This would be a way of understanding similar to that of Greek tragedy by l­ater audiences who no longer know how to integrate being deluded and deceived by the gods into their worldview. ­There is such a ­thing as a via negationis of reception—it is the via regia for the audience of the St. Matthew Passion. They can no longer be told that every­thing had to happen the way it did in order to change a god’s mind. The St.  Matthew Passion ends with the sealed tomb, not the empty tomb. The seal is the last emblem of Pilate’s involvement in the ­matter; he wants to avoid further annoyance when he yields to the high priests and Pharisees who remind him that this seducer— in the original: this deceiver (planos)—­had announced he would rise again a­ fter three days. His apostles could come and take the corpse from the private tomb and then tell the ­people he had risen as promised—­“and thus the second deception would be even greater than the first” (Matt. 27:64; MP 66b). Pilate seems to share this concern and provides guards and the seal. In the context of the St. Matthew Passion, the basic sensation of the finality of death is expressed in the weight of the sealed stone before the tomb: “Now the Lord is brought to rest / The weariness is over, that our sins have given

Th e Tears    1 8 5

him.” And the chorus responds four times: “My Jesus, good night!” (MP 67). The final chorus strengthens this mood with the perennial “Rest ­gently, g­ ently rest!” addressed to the buried, and the exhortation to the mourners to sit down in tears (MP 68). But the basso aria “Make yourself pure, my heart, / I want to bury Jesus myself” turns this final act of the St. Matthew Passion into an allegory of another, mystical finality: of the “sweet rest,” which ­shall be prepared for the Savior in his believers “forever and ever”—­not just ­until the time of his resurrection (MP 65). The faithful h ­ ere seem to be on the side of ­those who want to prevent the empty tomb: they themselves want to be this receptacle: “World, get out, let Jesus in!” (ibid.) Considering how short the liturgical mourning ­will be ­until the same congregation bursts out in the Easter jubilation of their cantor, the unio mystica of faith and tomb appears as an absurdity that can be imposed on the faithful. The unbelieving listeners have it better: they leave the St. Matthew Passion’s realm of reception as if all ­were over and well gone, as if no new imposition ­were awaiting them. This ‘closure’ of the work in accordance with the sealed tomb constitutes the virulence of the work for ­later and most recent listeners. Yet even the believing listeners with their awareness of relief from guilt are entirely bound to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion: relief is deserved even without resurrection. The Passion’s kerygma has a completely dif­fer­ent intention: the triumphant return at the end of times of the savior who must not belong to ­those whom the trumpet calls forth from their graves to judgment. That is why at the end of the older version of Mark, it is sufficient that the tomb is found empty, that ­there ­will be no corpse. It is h ­ ere—­and not in the Passion—­that a Docetism could take root that transposes the ‘appearances’ of the resurrected into a ghostly dimension. How weak this is in comparison to the sheer terror of the pious ­women who had sat down with their backs to the stone sealing the tomb and who do not seem to know and dare to hope what had led to the sealing. Mark only speaks of their panic (tromos) and their ecstasy (ekstasis), then of their falling s­ ilent. Matthew augmented their fear with ­great joy (meta phobou kai charas megales) and designated them as the first messengers of the good news (Mark 16:8; Matt. 28:8).

1 8 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

For any listener who impatiently pushes beyond the limits of the Passion, its realism’s power to impress evaporates quickly. When the theology of the kerygma extolls the ‘post-­Easter’ condition, it violates blatantly the seriousness of the statement that the Log­os has become flesh and dwells among us. Someone who appears only sporadically and seemingly without a body does not ‘dwell’ among his fellow beings, and it is entirely incongruous that he be carried away into the heavens if indeed he never acquired any terrestrial density. That is why doubt about this story of the suffering and death remains even on that mountain in Galilee, the place of his disappearance, where it is said that some did not believe, against all ‘corporeality,’ what they saw before them: “hoi de edistasan . . .” [some doubted; Matt. 28:17]. Ever since Judas is gripped by doubt during the anointment scene with which Bach opens his St. Matthew Passion, every­thing is filled with aversion, doubt, denial, and flight—­ including the visionary scene on the mountain in Galilee where Jesus could offer the doubters nothing more than the restatement of his mission and the promise of support. The audience of the St. Matthew Passion with whom we are concerned are contemporaries of [Bultmann’s] ‘demythologization’ as well as of the opposite ‘new quest’ for the historical Jesus; they are contemporaries of notions of ‘real­ity’ that are dif­fer­ent from t­ hose of Enlightenment Bible criticism with its core argument about suspecting the priests of fraud, for the proof of which Hermann Samuel Reimarus paradigmatically pointed to the ‘empty tomb.’ The late listeners are rather consorts of the terror, the ecstasy, and the silence of the w ­ omen, who do not know what to do with the emptiness of the tomb; a­ fter trying so hard to recognize the prophesized ‘servant of God’ in the Jesus of the Passion, their energy utterly found­ers on anything that goes beyond the tomb of the ‘rich man.’ The term “perplexity” characterizes better than “doubt” their common state of mind: that of the two Marys ­there, and of the con­temporary listeners of the St. Matthew Passion ­here as soon as they look beyond the limits of the text that is set to m ­ usic. But this is just what the dominating princi­ple of musical finitude protects the listeners from. The listeners are released. Reimarus and the ‘formal-­historical’ method can be left as they are—­and with

Th e Tears    1 8 7

them the dilemma of competing concepts of real­ity that I want to call, with ­great latitude, “Passion” and “kerygma”—­or: the power to impress and the command to proselytize. The listeners of the St. Matthew Passion who cannot, or ­will not, ‘follow’ the 1964 “Instructio de historica evangeliorum veritate” [Instruction on the historical truth of the Gospels] of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, nor the 1965 Constitution of the Second Vatican Council on divine revelation, ­will understand the allegory of the burial in Bach not in reference to the “sweet rest” in the heart of the atoned sinner, but to the silencing of the ‘question of Jesus’ that the St. Matthew Passion enacts. It might be difficult to hear, but con­temporary listeners have become immune both to the bloated industriousness of the historians of traditions and forms who construe ever new ‘creative’ congregations, and to the imperious kerygma of demythologization, which commands the renunciation of all questions of What, How, and When in ­favor of the naked That. Unconcerned, the rebellious listeners return to the texts of their childhood and their earliest memories. They are touched by the intimation of another ‘real­ity’ that does not claim to be ‘higher’ but has become untouchable in its kind of ‘realism.’

Tears of the ­Father, Only to Be Thought The age-­old conflicts between f­ athers and sons usually end with the death of the ­father. The conflict that was settled in the garden of Gethsemane ends with the death of the son. The Son’s last reproach, the greatest pos­si­ble reproach against a ­father, is the cry “Eli, Eli.  . . .” Normally, sons abandon their ­fathers, leave them to their senility. This one time the F ­ ather leaves the Son in the misery that he, for inscrutable reasons, has imposed on him. Was ­there ever a reason to justify the cruelty of this ­Father? It is remarkable that no one took offense that ­here a ­Father demands his Son surrender himself to him, and before him, to the Passion—­ not only for the sake of a creature of whom it was doubtful that it would ever deserve this sacrifice, but even more so ­because the

1 8 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

­ ather demands this ransom for a p F ­ ardon that, in a glaring disproportion of means, he could have effected with a divine stroke of the pen: by canceling the affair with the tree, no ­matter how it was meant to be understood symbolically. We look at the Passion of the Son. His obedience, his willingness to suffer, his greatness in death have captured the imagination of millennia. But we are embarrassed about the F ­ ather who seems to accept this superfluous prostration without any signs of feeling—­ after he had declared this Son, during the baptism in the River Jordan, as the one “in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). The Son might not have forgotten this when he cried for his F ­ ather. The entire Passion acquires another dimension, one of which we dare not think, if we perceive in it the misery of the other ‘lost son’ abandoned by his ­father into loneliness. Someone who gave the impression of knowing a l­ittle about t­ hese ­matters has said that the death of the ­father is “the most significant event,” the “most decisive loss in a man’s life.”2 This sentence is in the preface to the second edition (1908) of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Was, inversely, the death of the Son the decisive event in the life of the F ­ ather? Did God above suffer when the Son below underwent a Passion of His design? And was every­thing settled with the return to life, the return to the right of the throne, the investiture with the office of judge? Was ­there no ‘work of mourning,’ as one says ­today? That cannot have been the case. He must have been a dif­fer­ent god: the F ­ ather a­ fter the Passion. Why did he not make this known to t­ hose he left sitting ­there, in tears, to fend for themselves? The conflicts between ­fathers and sons do not end with the death of the ­father. They begin with it. Now the son has to live with the unchangeable fact that he can no longer learn from the f­ ather what would have been essential to know for his own fatherhood, his own conflicts, his own introduction into all the phases and stations of life that he had observed only from the outside: as a foreigner—­and now he himself is that foreigner. A foreigner to himself, too; for it adds to his lack of understanding not to have understood what the ­father has been. As long as the conflict smoldered—­more often symbolically than actually—­there

Th e Tears    1 8 9

was no opportunity to ask what it was that made the old man so stubborn, so uncomprehending, so diffident, so resistant. ­After the lethal disruption, it is too late for all questions. The mystery remains, it grows painful, b ­ ecause and insofar as it is one’s own. It belongs to the greatness as well as to the misery of the Passion of Jesus of Nazareth that it puts every­body who listens to it and who is moved by it into the same position: ­There are no more questions. Can a god not be tormented by what he has done? It is ancient metaphysics to believe this to be impossible. The F ­ ather too— or may the pious listener to the St. Matthew Passion not think this way?—­the F ­ ather too “sits down in tears,” as one of ­those whom the power of the ­music has turned into a member of a stunned congregation. He has to live with the unsolved riddle of his own inscrutable counsel—­there is nothing that suggests that ‘inscrutable counsels’ are not also inscrutable to the counselor. The f­ ather figure of what we like to call—to conceal its harshness—­‘salvation history’ sits among the listeners. In the M ­ iddle Ages quite a few questions ­were asked in images that the magistri did not dare ask in their quaestiones. In the “Deposition from the Cross” by Simone Martini (1344, Antwerp), a calm Divine ­Father on top of a ladder lets the corpse just taken from the cross slide into the arms of the apostles and in par­tic­u­lar into ­those of the m ­ other, for the image of the Pietà. Almost two centuries had to pass ­until Bernt Notke, on the ‘Mercy Seat’ in the Church of the Holy Spirit in Lübeck, dared to think the Pietà anew: he put the expired body of the Son into the arms of the ­Father. Is this a heavenly F ­ ather reconciled with his maternal side? Or a repentant accomplice in the Passion? If ­these questions have not been raised, it is, a­ fter two millennia, time to let Bach’s work, which leaves the listeners without questions, do so. While the sons of men had always been asked—or have asked themselves—­how they could live with the burden of their f­athers, ­here God the ­Father has to be asked how he could remain a ‘god’ ­after the burden of his Son’s Passion. Is it pos­si­ble to think this is what killed him? “We sit down in tears . . .” over the Son’s death. And over the ­Father’s?

1 9 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

Paul Weeps The longer the world survives him who supposedly died for it, the more of his attributes as savior migrate over to the executors of his mission—­which initially had not needed such cleanup workers, given that all was quickly to come to its end. It does not take long before the apostles work miracles, heal the sick, strike the healthy with sickness, wake the dead, and operate at the very limit of magic. Fi­nally, they themselves, while making way for successors, suffer exquisite passions and deaths. The apocryphal Acts of the Apostles abounds with stories that turn their heroes into ­little saviors. Paul, too, has his own lit­er­at­ure. Someone who has never met Jesus, an entirely mediate apostle, is not ­limited to the role of the proto-­theologian of Christendom, responsible for all f­ uture schisms of this religion. He also becomes a ­great protagonist, already in the Acts of the Apostles and even more so in the writings that ­were deemed too fantastical for the canon. Among the manuscripts found in Nag Hammadi is a Coptic Apocalypse of Paul; Augustine knew of a Latin version, and we have one in Old Rus­sian. Added to the visions in the third heaven is a descensus ad inferos, the classical nekyia, the journey into the netherworld that for Jesus would be incorporated into the Apostles’ Creed. Led by an angel, Paul has to look down into the abyssos of the damned from which emanate sighs and screams for mercy: “but no one showed them any mercy.” Such is the nature of pitiless justice, in spite of the salvational death on the cross. But Paul bursts into tears and sighs when he sees the fate of humankind. The angel on his side reprimands him: “Why do you weep? Are you more merciful than God?”3 In his Apocalypse, Paul does not report an answer. Only much ­later, a­ fter a thorough inspection of the agonies of the damned, does he ask the all-­encompassing question: “Why w ­ ere they born?” Again, the angel reprimands him: “Why do you weep? Are you more merciful than the Lord?” And a l­ittle l­ater, this time including himself, Paul says: “It would be better if we had not been born, all of us sinners.”4 It counts for much that this Paul weeps. When in the history of this religion of love have ­those convinced of their salvation ever

Th e Tears    1 9 1

cried about the rejected and the damned, about the majority, the massa damnata? But should Paul not have contradicted the angel, with defiance and indignation? Something like: Of course I am more merciful than this God, who created ­those he knew could never be saved; I am more merciful, for I am like them, and almost am one of ­those down ­there; I weep out of outrage about this God, in whose name I have in­ven­ted a theology that includes this ignominy as part of a ‘salvation history.’ It is of course not historically appropriate to accuse the author of the Apocalypse of Paul of not articulating ­these objections. It is remarkable enough how far he went with the core insight of Greek tragedy that given such a fate it would be better not to have been born. This is no longer the Paul of the Letter to the Romans who had transferred his prob­lems as a Pharisee fulfilling the letter of the law into a concept of ‘justification’ that rendered the law indifferent, ­because one no longer had to remain the same person one had been as the breaker of the law. But if salvation was offered through the change of identities—in the mystical passage through the death and resurrection of Jesus—­then the formula of better-­not-­to-­have-­ been-­born loses its justification. The Paul of the Apocalypse cannot have known the Paul of the Letter to the Romans. An apostle must not weep. He must not commiserate with t­ hose who did not want to serve his Lord and therefore have been punished. Had his objection—­that ­those excluded from salvation w ­ ere better off not being born—­been heeded, he would stare into an empty abyssos. Where would that leave the triumph of Good over Evil? Could and should the Paul of the Apocalypse have understood the Paul of Romans? Could he have understood the theologian of a God who elects ­those worthy of redemption and at the same time condemns t­hose to perdition, who then allow him to demonstrate his justice in judgment? This cannot have been the reason for history to end immediately, as the man on the cross had promised. The swift end of times—­another way to the empty abyssos?

1 9 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

The Power of Tears over Omnipotence It is alleged that in Portugal a long time ago—up ­until the earthquake of Lisbon—­people ­were especially pious, and the orators from the pulpits therefore especially effective. Pinheiro da Veiga was a master of this kind of oratory. E ­ very year in his sermons on the Passion, he drove his listeners to tears. But this effect acted on him as well. ­After the compassion for the tormented and ­dying savior, he was gripped by compassion for the compassionate. Therefore, he reached for a theologically daring yet nonetheless permissible means of mercy: “Do not cry, my brethren! Stop crying! God w ­ ill certainly make it so that all of this is not true!” Of course, he was not a Docetist—in Portugal that would have meant burning at the stake. But he was one of t­hose purists of God’s attribute of omnipotence who, since Petrus Damiani, refused to deny God the power to subvert the princi­ple of contradiction or to change the past. This God, whose help the congregation required to lift it out of despair, held even the past in his power and could give history a direction dif­fer­ent from the one it reportedly took. And was he not prepared to do this for his faithful? In this re­spect the priest was not a weak advocate of the case of a Lord who was not able to endure what God, facing an infinity filled with a majority of damned souls, should be able to endure without emotion and indulgence. Obviously, the priest could not have been a follower of Origen ­either. He would not have gotten around to annually overwhelming his congregation. But did his semi-­revocation, his making the Passion disposable, agree with its importance for the history of grace, which even the tears of the m ­ other of God could not suspend? Bach, too, in the final chorus of the St.  Matthew Passion, saw his congregation in tears—­but asked them to sit down and gave them no reprieve. Or did he? Was ­there reprieve in the fact that all of this could be sung? That is a dif­fer­ent power than omnipotence. It laid to rest the question ­whether any truth was worth the tears of t­hese good p ­ eople, which the preacher from the pulpit in Portugal may have asked him-

Th e Tears    1 9 3

self. Was not this the truth of his God, that he would rather suffer himself than let o ­ thers suffer? When his redeemer—he might have reasoned—­gained the immea­sur­able trea­sury of grace, he also would have gained the bit of graciousness that o ­ thers do not have to suffer b ­ ecause of his sufferings. For God it is irrelevant to contradict himself and use his power to replace one truth with another, ­because all truth is grounded in his w ­ ill. Lastly and fi­nally, this story shows that the likeness of man to God is most pronounced in the exercise of rhe­toric. The story plunges the audience through the power of its vividness into despair—­only to pull it back out by means of imaginary changes. It is a salvation history in nuce. Better than by any standard theory of oratory, this story is explained by Aristotle’s theory of the effect of tragedy, which drives the audience into compassion and fear and then purifies and rescues it from the same by homeopathic means. The material for this was myth, which served its purpose without having to raise the question of its truth. It only seems as if this ­were easier for the tragedian than it was for the Christian preacher of the Passion; for the latter, God’s omnipotence accomplished the same ­thing myth did on the tragic stage in its ­simple unquestionability.

The Imperceptibility of the Messiah

Caravaggio’s Emmaus Every­body wants to be a realist; becoming one is the hard part. Caravaggio, who died in 1610, is an example for this unresolvable difficulty. Without question he lived as a ‘realist.’ But how did this enter his work? The National Gallery in London shows Caravaggio’s Emmaus, finished shortly before 1600. The apostle sitting to the left of Jesus, Cleopas, exhibits the stigma of real­ity on the sleeve of his tunic: a hole. The apostle to the right of the unrecognized one, perhaps Peter, bears the signs of hard work with fishing nets: callouses on his hands. The host of the tavern is a rough sort, who like the two apostles does not notice anything, but unlike them never w ­ ill. Against the drama of the image, against the pathos of that moment shortly before the opening of the eyes, the gaping hole in the sleeve in the foreground has to carry all the weight of sober-­

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     1 9 5

mindedness. That realism is stigmatized by an obedience to real­ity is more than a convention, more than an aesthetic economy of selective reticence; it is a sign of its grudging ac­cep­tance of what cannot be wished away. This extends to the texts of modernity, in which proscribed words begin to make an appearance as if the author had to make a concession to the power of real­ity. On the other hand: this stigmatic epiphany of real­ity presupposes, and is conditioned by, the criterion of immanent consistency; it may not be disrupted by appeals to accept what at any moment may reveal itself as legend or myth, as mere imagination, construction, or fiction. How ­else could Christ in the town of Emmaus have been painted than with this gaping hole in the sleeve of the apostle Cleopas? How can anything remotely associated with ‘realism’ represent the pictorial topic of recognizing the resurrected one, who as such could only be a God? What the painter cannot show is the sign typical of divine appearances in antiquity. Gods cannot appear as themselves ­because ­there is nothing remarkable in their h ­ uman form; but to step out of appearance, to dis­appear quietly and discreetly as Athena dis­appeared for Odysseus—­this is ex eventu [from the event] the proper self-­evidence that it had to be a god. The idea that an epiphany may be unbearable, as that of JHWH to Moses on Mount Sinai, is alien to the ancients; based on their experience with gods, they suspect afterward that the one who withdrew from visibility—­ the burden of e­ very being—­cannot have been a mortal. The scene in Emmaus ends in the manner of the ancients: without transfiguration or unbearable glory, ­after the apostles had recognized Jesus from the way he broke bread and said grace. It was the ritual of remembrance he himself had connected to his death and his identity. The gaze of the apostle is fixed on the hands that perform every­thing that is necessary to give a sign. Once the sign has fulfilled its function and the gaze moves from the hands to the totality of the figure, it ­will be disappointed ­because ­there is nothing to blind it. ­There is nothing more to see. The sign is confirmed by the absence of the one who gave it. The painter is in the awkward position of not being able to paint a Jesus so ethereal that his disappearance would be a consequence of

1 9 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

his appearance. That is why Caravaggio painted a highly corporeal, somewhat unpleasantly fleshy Jesus who seems to have recovered well from the Passion that is a de­cade ­behind him. Looking back, this is an offense; looking forward ­toward his disappearance, which only the image’s viewers know w ­ ill occur before it has happened, it magnifies the effect: this much visibility ­will soon dis­appear! This, too, is a bit of realism—­not in ser­vice of the scene but of the viewer who knows the story. It is realism applied to a circumstance that cannot be realistic: to the be­hav­ior of a god.

Traces The footprint functions worldwide as a trace that demonstrates the ‘real­ity’ of religious events and personalities. ­There are multiple gigantic traces of the Buddha’s foot: no doubt, he was ­here. On the ­Temple Mount in Jerusalem t­here is a trace of a hoof of Mohammad’s h ­ orse, which lifted both to heaven from t­here; the depth of the impression demonstrates the thrust of the upward motion, no doubt. Jesus did not leave any trace at his ascension. When Thomas doubted the real­ity of the Resurrection, he was allowed to put his fin­ger in the chest wound of the crucified: it was him, and it was true when John had him say: “ego eimi”—­It is I! It is a specialty of the Ethiopian Epistula Apostolorum, first edited in 1913, that the resurrected Jesus showers the doubting apostles with proofs of his real­ity—in other words: that he denies being a mere ghost of the departed. Peter is asked to touch the wounds on his hands, Thomas the wound on the side of his chest, and Andrew is told: “See if my foot touches the earth and leaves a trace.”1 If the foot touches and leaves a trace, the body has weight that ­causes the imprint—­‘real­ity’ appears, and the trace is a sign not of remembrance but of immediate presence and its certainty. The prob­ lem of the certainty of the Resurrection arose with all the more urgency as the second coming receded: Had the ascended Christ been real even though he had not returned, as promised, on the clouds of the heavens? At the beginning of the second ­century, when

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     1 9 7

this text was prob­ably written and before t­here was an ‘ersatz dogma’ for the lack of eschatology, a lot of convincing had to be done just to save the Resurrection as an event in salvation history. For this, the argument of the trace is a precious indicator. ­After the catastrophe of Golgotha, the apostles believed in the possibility of a ghost. Docetism, against which the Epistula Apostolorum was prob­ably written, believes neither in fraud nor in a ghost. It is concerned only with the purity of the image of God: God can only appear to have suffered the consequences of being ­human. A ­little Platonism is helpful ­here: The shadows are not fraudulent; if they appear as something they are not, it is the fault of t­ hose who see and are confused by them. But this is also platonic: vestigium umbra non facit [a shadow does not leave a trace]. In the apocryphal Epistula Apostolorum, this is turned into a prophecy: “A ghost, a demon leaves no trace on earth.”2

From the Unwritten Not many of the agrapha—­Jesus’s sayings in the noncanonical tradition—­have survived the church’s demand for the binding exclusivity of the four Gospels; a­ fter a massive delay of two thousand years, the historico-­critical acumen of the penultimate theology has left us not even a dozen of t­ hese sayings. They are rarely longer than a sentence. The most beautiful one comes from the Actus Vercellenses: “­Those with me have not understood me.”3 ­Every reader of the Bible knows that Jesus was indignant about the ignorance of his apostles and followers. But ­because he promised them a Holy Spirit who would remedy their inabilities, he r­ eally cannot have been surprised that they could not be brought to reason with just his sayings and parables. He left them riddles and promised their solution in a f­uture that was to come ­after much confusion. Why was it so difficult to understand what this creature of God needed? The Agraphon is testimony to a somewhat harsher Son of man. It does not merely illustrate the desolate position of a savior, it inverts

1 9 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

it: Whoever agrees with me and follows me, testifies thereby that he has not understood me. And it has to be that way. When the envoy of the ­Father, the messenger from another world, has spoken, any conviction about understanding this message has to be a pious misunderstanding. Was it ever any dif­fer­ent with ­those who ­were not messengers of a god but announcers of higher, unheard-of truths—­ the phi­los­o­phers, for example? Who had understood and would ever understand what Socrates meant when he declared self-­knowledge the epitome of all claims to truth? Socrates could have spoken the Agraphon of Jesus of Nazareth first—­had he not been so convinced of the power of his midwifery. This Logion, excluded from ‘scripture,’ is neither a word of desperation nor a cold rejection of contemptible fellow travelers. Rather, it declares what is essential. No Holy Spirit would change this: it is enough to be with Him even if one thereby becomes the witness to something unrealizable. Put another way: no one would have been able to stand this Jesus of Nazareth had they understood the impositions contained in his words and demands. One could bear him only if one did not understand, and if one indulged in the beautiful illusion of having understood and obliged him. This is not a pious story, not an example of dialectical self-­ negation. It is a ‘circumstance’ that could belong in a phenomenology of history. We can bear having a history, and insist on it, only ­because we ­don’t understand it. Misunderstanding—­even that which is consolingly called ‘productive’—is the mode in which we are with anything that we ourselves cannot be.

A Misinterpreted Agraphon Among the dozen or so original sayings of Jesus that as Agrapha have survived the merciless sifting and purging of historical critique is a scene based on Luke about a man ­doing work on the Sabbath. Jesus says to him: “O man, if you know what you are d ­ oing you are blessed! But if you do not, you are cursed and a transgressor of the Law.”4

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     1 9 9

Coming from the mouth of Jesus, it is astonishing to hear that t­ hose who do not know what they are ­doing should not be able to find forgiveness. Did not the crucified one say: “­Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” (Luke 23: 34)? Was this not the only pos­si­ble declaration that should have endured? The commentator on the Apocrypha is brief in his commentary on Agraphon 11:5 “The accent in the antithetical parallelism is on the second half. It is a warning against the thoughtless infraction of the Sabbath.” Of course! For the rather liberal editor of the Apocrypha, what­ever is not in the canonical four Gospels does not have the power to correct our image of Jesus. Especially if it does not render him more sublime. For the Jesus in Luke 6 lays claim to another Law in the pronouncements on the Sabbath, when he places himself above the Sabbath and elevates his followers with him, even if only for the purpose of harvest work: Dominus est sabbati Filius hominis [The Son of man is also the Lord of the Sabbath; Luke 6:5]. This would mean that violating the Sabbath is legitimized by the Messiah. But t­ here is no trace of this in the Agraphon. Why should the accent be on the second half of the paradox? In fact, this is out of the question, even if the first half could be explained with the facile psychologism that only t­ hose who know they are wrong can recognize the sinfulness of their actions, and t­hose who do not and persist in their ignorance are eternally lost. To the contrary, the Jesus of Codex D, with its additional reading of Luke 6, has gone through Gnosticism—­which might be the reason it did not find ac­cep­tance in the canonical tradition. This exclusion would be inexplicable if our commentator w ­ ere right about his idyllic view of the Sabbath. The rejection of the Agraphon from the tradition makes it clear that Jesus’s call to provoke the God of the Jews—­indeed, the God of the world—­had been well heard. Whoever violates the laws of this JHWH without wanting to do so has forfeited the opportunity to hear the message of the ‘alien God,’ of the savior. It could be that this man who seemed to flaunt so openly the prescriptions of the Sabbath no longer belonged to the epoch of the Law, ­because the Sabbath is a monument to the completion of creation. If

2 0 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

creation is degraded to the work of a demiurge, then all t­hose are cursed who do not realize that the order of the demiurge is already over. Therefore, the part of the saying that is modeled on the Gospel of Luke belongs to the rebellion against the demiurge—­like harvesting during Sabbath.

The Messianic: Prophet and Sybil Sibyls are mythical artifacts of a time addicted to oracles, when peril and destruction are expected with mea­sured equanimity. Heraclitus knew only one, and her voice penetrated “with raving mouth” the millennia, prophesying the “un-­laughed, un-­adorned, and un-­ anointed.”6 What the name means and whence it comes remains unclear, but it reaches back to the eighth c­ entury BC. The single sibyl of which Heraclitus speaks and who belongs to the outskirts of the Ionian world turns into a group of ultimately ten ecstatic demons who, in contrast to the Pythia of the oracle, renounce polysemy in ­favor of sheer terror. In Rome, the books of the sibyls perished in the fire of the ­temple of Jupiter on the Piazza del Campidoglio in 83 BC. But in Alexandria, where every­thing was collected, a Jewish variant of sibyls emerged, rivals of the prophets, and from them derived the Christian sibyls, who continued to grow in Byzantium and throughout the Latin M ­ iddle Ages. This kind of apocryphal lit­er­a­ture shows how the obsession with destruction in apocalyptic and Gnostic writings drew the suspicion of the empire and became the core of the accusations against the Christians as allies and beneficiaries of decline. We know from Justinian that reading the sibyls was forbidden u ­ nder pain of death. Rightly so, one is tempted to say from an all-­too-­modern perspective. For the excesses in indulging the sense of doom only served as a prelude to the advent of the messianic ruler, and emperors of real existing empires did not want to hear about that. As so often with prophecies of doom, it is difficult to distinguish between t­hose who perish and ­those who can enjoy the messianic realm. For the excess of terrifying visions leaves l­ittle room for survivors: “For the fire ­will ravage with such power on earth / and the

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     2 0 1

­ ater ­will rush, and destroy all the earth. / Mountains w w ­ ill burn / the rivers ignite and the springs run empty. / No longer w ­ ill the world be the world when all ­humans perish.”7 A long night ­will then begin on earth, and only a new creation could let ­there be light and every­thing ­else, including new and dif­fer­ent ­humans. But promises of salvation intended only for ­others have never ­really been attractive. That is why, when the Messiah comes, ­there ­will inevitably be some who have persevered in the fashion of Noah or in their own way: “Then He w ­ ill generate pure minds / In ­humans, and renew the ­human race.”8 The sibyl did not yet know that ­there are sensible reasons to reject concrete utopias. She makes the ­mistake—­one is tempted to say—of unveiling some of the changes that ­will occur through the new state of mind. What ­will ­those of pure mind do? More precisely: What w ­ on’t they do? It is remarkable that their new be­hav­ior seems to connect to the myth of Cain and Abel. How to use the earth, how to derive nourishment from it, becomes the differentiating marker: “No longer ­will the land be tilled with the round plough; / No longer the steers plough with sharpened iron.”9 The slain nomad Abel ­will be resurrected, the farmer Cain definitively shown to be in the wrong ­because he has ­violated the law of terra inviolata, as all of humanity did ­after him. True, Abel, whose sacrifice was accepted by JHWH, was favored by God; but, rationally speaking, it was Cain who took seriously the expulsion from paradise and the divine imprecation to work by the sweat of his brow. Should the new nomads simply forget that Abel pretended to still be in paradise, where nature offered every­thing freely for his gathering and grazing? Cain was the one who had accepted the loss of paradise. That is why it is only natu­ral to furnish the new eon with the promise that its inhabitants ­will eat “dewy manna as nourishment with white teeth.”10 In the end, the earth, a­ fter being reset into the tohuwabohu [without form, and void; Gen 1:2] w ­ ill be newly created and inviolate. Purity of mind is made pos­si­ble and durable ­because Care, as motivator of self-­preservation and its evil ‘side effects,’ has crossed the river from whence it came. As pretty as this messianic image is, it is still surprising what the proto-­feminist sibyl as rival and successor of the prophets has

2 0 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

forgotten. Her ­sisters w ­ ill ­later lay claim to the peacefulness of their sex, and quote with emphasis the messianic vision in the second chapter of the prophet Isaiah that “in this distant ­future time” the ­peoples with their flocks ­will come to the ‘mountain of the Lord, to the ­house of the God of Jacob’—to Jerusalem—­and with his own ­people “turn swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:3-4). The sibyl at the end of the second c­ entury AD could not have known this. It is a dif­fer­ent messianism, one that proceeds from a dif­fer­ent level of change: from the martial to the agrarian instead of from ploughing to gathering. What­ever is and can be considered promising depends on the condition that only the ­great savior can be trusted to leave ­behind. Messianism is relative, like all absolutisms in which the finality of peace and fulfillment are to be thought. The seemingly positive utopia of the sibyl’s messianism is as negative as that of Isaiah—­ negative in its mere subtraction of bellicose vio­lence in the one, of agrarian vio­lence in the other. Paradise is always only one level higher.

The Risk of Still Waiting for the Messiah If the Messiah has already come, ­there are false apostles, false evangelists, false popes, but no false messiahs. If the Messiah is still to come, e­ very epoch is in danger of accepting a false one. And ­there is not always an authority at hand to c­ ounter him. Such was the case in the twelfth ­century, when the Egyptian doctor and phi­los­o­pher Moses Maimonides was queried in 1172 by the Yemenite Jews, ­because someone arose in their midst who claimed to be the Messiah. With his “Letter to the Yemenites” (in Arabic, “Iggeret Teman”), Maimonides—­who would go on to write with his Guide for the Perplexed (More’ Nebuchim) a philosophy of religion that was influential u ­ ntil Latin Scholasticism—­begins his philosophical ­career. Alas, with a small, irrational blemish: the Yemenites should not believe this fraud, b ­ ecause the best sources predicted the advent of the Messiah in the year 1211.

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     2 0 3

Maimonides had thought about this hard. But only for himself, ­ ecause he died in 1204 and did not have to answer for the date he b had given. Additionally, his most impor­tant argument did not especially further religious tolerance in his environment. For he pointed the Yemenite Jews to all the false messiahs that had already appeared—­Jesus, Paul, and Mohammed among them. This was the youthful sin of a thirty-­seven-­year-­old man against religious tolerance. But it might well have been that the Yemenites would not have accepted a lesser argument. The author of the book that in its Latin version of 1520 carried the telling title “Dux seu director dubitantium aut perplexorum” [Guide or leader of the doubters or perplexed] (already Albertus Magnus calls it “Dux neutrorum”) had in his Mishnah commentary accepted Jesus and Mohammed as precursors of the Messiah, and declared the date of the Messiah’s advent unknowable. In the face of such incertitude, it seemed better that a guide for the undecided should advocate tolerance t­ oward the past and let the Messiah deal with the ‘consequences’ of his tardiness. Translated from Arabic into Hebrew, the “Letter to the Yemenites” became a ‘classic’ in the preparations against false messiahs in Jewish history. Solomon Ibn Verga, a Marrano at the end of the fifteenth ­century, incorporated Maimonides’s cata­logue in his “Scepter of Judah,” a history of the persecution of Jews in the Diaspora, but of the eight messianic usurpers he omitted the three Maimonides had not hesitated to mention. Instead he offers the ­great parable of tolerance that would arrive, by way of Boccaccio, in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise: the ‘ring parable’ of the goldsmith as the testator and his two sons as heirs. Only two sons. Ibn Verga did not know Boccaccio and had obviously referred to a genuine Jewish version of the story. For the ring parable Lessing refers to Boccaccio, who in turn refers to the 1311 “Sicilian Adventures” of Busone de Rafaelli. That is exactly one c­ entury a­ fter the date Maimonides had given the Yemenites for the advent of the Messiah. ­There is no demonstrable, and hardly any pos­si­ble, relation to Maimonides. But the religion of reason that Maimonides would develop from the Mosaic laws is

2 0 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

kindred in spirit to efforts of Latin High Scholasticism and its interpretation of the New Testament. Moritz Steinschneider was the first to suspect that Busone, as the supplier of the ring parable to Boccaccio, might have learned it from his friend Manuello, who has been identified as Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome. Immanuel, in turn, had poeticized the main theorems of the religion of reason in his poem “Yigdal,” which Lessing’s friend Moses Mendelssohn had translated into German. The Italian Immanuel had also adapted Dante’s Commedia Divina for the tradition of Maimonides—of course, without the Purgatorio—­and in his Paradiso made room for the righ­teous of the Jews as well as for the ‘righ­teous of the pagans.’ It must remain speculation that someone with ­these convictions had transmitted, or perhaps created, the ring parable and sent it out in two dif­fer­ent directions—to Boccaccio via Busone, and to the Jewish tradition via Solomon Ibn Verga. In this view, Maimonides would not be the ultimate origin of the parable, but through his transformation ­toward tolerance vis-­ à-­vis the reputedly ‘false’ messiahs, he is the f­ ather of its ethos. The lessons for the theory of tolerance that can be drawn from ­these considerations are the following: It was easier to generate re­ spect for the recurring figures of religious found­ers when the Messiah had failed or continued to fail to appear than to firmly believe that the Messiah had once and for all already been h ­ ere—­just a l­ittle too imperceptibly to convince the skeptics of his own time and ­future times. If the immediate witnesses had not been able to believe in him, how should ­those who had learned of him only from hearsay do so? Looking at the state of the world, it was more convincing to claim that the hour of God’s messenger was still to come; but the danger of falling for an impostor was ­great ­because of the secret teaching (one could almost call it beautiful) that the Messiah would come with his due delicacy and imperceptibility and would not have to change anything, b ­ ecause his arrival would change every­thing. This pious suspicion was the consequence of a strict creational mono­the­ism: the only true messianism would be one that least criticizes the workmanship at the beginning of the world and of the

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     2 0 5

Bible and does not imply any rejection of creation. This would best describe Maimonides’s concern.

Messianic Minimalism What if the Messiah comes? If every­thing w ­ ere to change, the ­people who think that a ­Great Revolution is the secularized form of messianism would be right. If every­thing, or almost every­thing, stays the same, the ­people who do not expect more from the coming Jewish Messiah than from the already departed Christian one would be right. It is impor­tant to realize that the in­effec­tive­ness of both would answer to a common necessity beyond all theological strife: protecting the creator of all t­ hings against criticism of his workmanship by a changer of all ­things. How can a world be in need of complete change without humiliating its god? Any spectacular turn in the need for salvation would imply such humiliation. Appearances have to be kept up when the time for the decision is near. The Messiah to come, who is not supposed to be a suffering and ­dying ‘servant of God,’ is further removed from conflict with the work of the six days. ­Because he does not suffer and die, the world does not have to be changed to avoid such drastic consequences. But the Passion of the one who had already come? What would be its equivalent in terms of changing the state of the world? The theological idea of an ‘inexhaustible trea­sury of grace’ may imply the avoidance of this question, but it raises another: What degree and what extent of new wickedness does humanity have to assume to reach the bottom of the thesaurus gratiae? To put it differently: If the crucified truly was the Messiah—­a claim no reliable witness attributes to him but theologians demand of him—­does not the continuance of the world conceal and render doubtful that the Messiah truly had already come? The ‘first article’ of faith of the Apostles’ Creed gains in proportion to the weakening of the ‘second.’ Discrediting creation and calling for the Messiah are related reciprocally. Walter Benjamin’s earliest note on Kafka’s The Trial is enclosed in a letter to Gershom Scholem from November 1927, and

2 0 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

begins to elevate this relation into a thesis: “To pre­sent history as a trial in which man as the advocate of mute nature makes a complaint against creation and against the nonappearance of the promised Messiah.”11 That Benjamin did not resign himself to this thesis is shown in the ­great essay he wrote in 1934 on the tenth anniversary of Kafka’s death. ­There he compares Kafka’s figures that are crushed by an unfathomable guilt with the ‘hunchback’ of the folksong, who is “at home in a distorted life” and ­will dis­appear “with the coming of the Messiah, of whom a g­ reat rabbi once said that he did not wish to change the world by force, but would only make a slight adjustment in it.”12 ­Later in the essay he speaks of ‘distortions,’ which the Messiah “­will return to adjust” and which are not confined only to space, ­because in the indifference of space the world as a ­whole would be displaced to no effect whatsoever: no, “they are also distortions of our time.”13 This is vague enough, but corrects for the spatial focus of meta­phors of rearrangement and adjustment. The identity of the ‘­great rabbi,’ whom Benjamin claims as the authority for this messianic minimalism, does not become clearer in his sketch “In the Sun,” written on Ibiza and first published on December 27, 1932, in the Kölnische Zeitung. A tired wanderer ­under the midday sun of the island lets his imagination run wild as it anticipates the path he intends to take. “Does the imagination move rocks and hilltops? Or does it touch them only like a breath? Does it leave no stone unturned, or does it leave every­thing as it was?”14 The keyword is “move” with its options of both vio­lence and gentleness. This leads to the minimalism of the promised change to the world, identified h ­ ere more specifically as part of Hasidic culture: “The Hasidim have a saying about the world to come: every­thing t­ here ­will be arranged just as it is with us. . . . ​Every­thing w ­ ill be the same as ­here—­only a l­ittle bit dif­fer­ent.” Not even the privacy of home w ­ ill be touched: “As our room is now, so it w ­ ill be in the coming world; where our child now sleeps, it w ­ ill sleep in the coming world.”15 Every­thing seems predicated on calmness, as if an apocalyptic threat, rather than a promise, formed the background. For the time being, one has to content oneself with Hasidic authority—­there is not yet a ‘­great rabbi.’

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     2 0 7

This landscape picture in Ibiza is nothing more than a meta­phor for the power of the imagination, which does not disturb or destroy the landscape: “Thus it is with the imagination. It merely draws a veil over the distance. Every­thing might remain as it is, but the veil billows and beneath it t­hings are displaced imperceptibly.”16 It is not that this soft power of the imagination is the prototype of messianic imperceptibility, but that the latter is a meta­phor for the former. This is not an unimportant relation, ­because Benjamin makes the messianic allusion only in passing, as an ‘illustration,’ without ­going deeper into it than into the Potemkin-­Schuvalkin anecdote with which he begins and attunes the reader to his Kafka essay. Hasidic rabbis have names. That is how their stories and sayings are preserved for history. Who was the ‘­great rabbi’ who had taught the minimalism of the ‘adjustment’ of the world by the Messiah? We learn about him in a letter from Scholem to Benjamin in which he responds to the request for a “fundamental critique” of the Kafka essay. At the end he writes: “One question: Who is actually the source of all ­these stories? Does Ernst Bloch have them from you or you from him? The g­ reat rabbi with the profound dictum on the messianic kingdom who appears in Bloch as well is none other than I myself; what a way to achieve fame! It was one of my first ideas about the Kabbalah.”17 In the 1980 edition of his correspondence with Benjamin, Scholem w ­ ill drily comment: “I learned from this instance what honors one can garner for oneself with an apocryphal saying.”18 This is not one of ­those academic detective cases, whose collection had become such an unexpectedly expansive hobby for Dimitri Tschizewsky. But neither is it a case of violating ideological property, ­because the saying about the rearranging nonviolence of the Messiah has the authority of ‘connoisseurship.’ The imperceptibility of the Messiah’s advent not only solves the Christian dilemma of reconciling the first two ‘articles’ of the Apostles’ Creed, it also suspends the prob­lem of time in messianism in a way that in other contexts could be called ‘elegant.’ No one can ever know ­whether what is supposed to happen has already happened; but neither can anyone ever usurp the role of messiah and thereby disfigure it to the point of rendering it vis­ib ­ le. It may be preferable to not be allowed to know how far in the pro­cess we are, when so ­little

2 0 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

needs to be done to transform the world of creation (zimzum) into its messianic state (tikkun). Vio­lence loses its chance. It is always too much, ­because it is rooted in a dualism, what­ever the names of it poles. Even if this is not simply a mind game, the cunning of the story’s inventor is unmistakable: Scholem tested the usefulness of a type of thinking and writing entirely unknown to his contemporaries and of which he alone was perhaps the sole world expert. What would come of it? In any case, nothing that would run ­counter to his own dislike for the salvific expectations of a “­great” renovation of the world or f­avor the revolutionary illusions of his friend Benjamin. The “new heaven and the new earth” of John’s apocalypse ­were not on the horizon (Rev. 21:1). One is tempted, in fact forced, to think of Leibniz, whom Scholem demonstrably knew: the ‘monads’ seemed to derive directly from the sefirot of the Kabbalah. More impor­tant, though less vis­ i­ble, is the temporal dimension of the ‘best of all pos­si­ble worlds.’ The analy­sis of this concept required not only the highest static quality of simultaneity—in this case, the better world still could be thought to be the best, if it could acquire over time all ­those perfections that would have been incompatible si­mul­ta­neously. That is why the optimal world had to be defined as being capable of becoming ever better ‘over time’ (cum tempore), although this was pos­si­ble without contradiction only if the continuous transitions are imperceptible. Imperceptibility is the condition of perfection; it excludes the perception of lack at any moment in time—­whatever the ‘real­ity’ of that time. We can see now that the messianic minimalism of the ‘­great rabbi’ was embedded solidly in two traditions, and did not require the spectacle of an apocalypse.

The Desperate Messianism of the Second Rome It seems pedantic when Goethe, at the beginning of Poetry and Truth, reports the time and place of his birth as if copying it from a document. Yet already in the next sentence the pedant changes

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     2 0 9

colors when he uses the exact date to determine the cosmic dimension and to cast himself a horoscope. In spite of Goethe’s inclination ­toward omens, this contrast is not a serious one: a de­cided lack of fatalism lets the irony shine through. It is okay to be a favorite of the universe, but one should not count on it. Goethe scholarship has not always succeeded in perceiving and accepting the balance between t­ hese two. Goethe’s beginning is openly declared anachronistic in Sigmund Freud’s letter to Wilhelm Fliess from November 14, 1897, in which he announces an urgent discovery, ‘repression.’ “ ‘It was on November 12, [18]97; the sun stood precisely in the eastern quarter, Mercury and Venus ­were in conjunction’—­No, birth announcements no longer start like that.” Then follows the ‘con­temporary’ equivalent, the setting of an objective thought—­however speculative it might be—in private and familiar surroundings: “It was on November 12, a day dominated by a left-­sided migraine, on the after­noon of which Martin sat down to write a new poem, on the eve­ning of which Oli lost his second tooth, that, a­ fter the frightful l­abor pains of the last few weeks, I gave birth to a new piece of knowledge.”19 What had shown itself repeatedly stayed this time “and looked upon the light of day.”20 Reading this with a good portion of leniency, it is impor­tant not to forget the addressee, the Berlin friend and rhinologist Wilhelm Fliess, who had spent his entire life identifying organic rhythms and periods, and who never doubted—­indeed, who affirmed—­the cosmic interrelation of h ­ uman life with its dif­fer­ent sexual periods and its bisexuality. Fliess’s calculations concerning patients and friends ­were, in fact, pedantic. Freud’s admiration for him as someone who was still his superior in m ­ atters of the imagination dwindled in proportion to the increase of Freud’s own strokes of genius. This first break among many with members of the ‘school’ is too well known to be recounted. At a time when the intimacy between the friends had already suffered—­how could it be other­wise, given that over time they knew every­thing about each other?—­one of Freud’s lifelong wishes, a trip to Rome, became real­ity in the summer of 1901: “As such fulfillments are if one has waited too long for them, this one was slightly

2 1 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

diminished, yet a highpoint of my life.”21 Happiness, Freud once wrote, is always the fulfillment of a childhood wish. In this case, it was a wish for ‘Bildung,’ a Goethean desire at that. Happiness at last, even if long a­ fter ­these early wishes. Too close to the real­ity princi­ple? Surprisingly not: ‘modern’ Rome is not at all sobering for Freud; he finds it “full of promise and likeable.”22 Coming from a Vienna he loathed, it might have been the contrast to the Viennese fin de siècle. With his ancient Rome he was entirely undisturbed, as he wrote to Fliess on September 19, 1901, in par­ tic­u­lar in front of the “abased and mutilated remnant of the ­Temple of Minerva,” which he “could have worshiped.”23 In contrast to Goethe, he could not enjoy the ‘second Rome’ of Chris­tian­ity. It is not so much the cross that bothers him, as it did Goethe in 1790 in the sixty-­sixth Venetian Epigram. No, for Freud it is the inability to “cast off the thought of my own misery and all the other misery I know about.”24 What disturbs him in Christian Rome is that messianism appears as realized—it disturbs him not as an observing Jew, which he was not, but as an explorer of the depths of souls into which nothing of the light of two thousand years of salvation seems to have penetrated. Even this side of the failed ‘self-­analysis’ and before the g­ reat mysteries of the unconscious, Freud is not susceptible to any seemingly easy form of overcoming. That is why he could “not tolerate the lie concerning man’s redemption, which raises its head to high heaven.”25 This is not the re­sis­tance of the classicist, of the aesthete, of the ascetic—it is the re­sis­tance of the psychopathologist who seems already to know quite a bit about how to overcome the misery that he has recognized as his own as well. The relationship to the ‘second Rome’ is like a test case for overcoming the propensity for illusions and the plea­sure princi­ple that drives it—if only t­ here ­were not the suspicion that a more sophisticated illusion had replaced the one that ‘raises its head ­toward heaven’ in Rome. Freud was a nonbeliever, but also one who never would have converted to Chris­tian­ity, no m ­ atter what advantage it might have brought him. Yet ­there is a ‘formal’ incongruity that keeps him from fully understanding Chris­tian­ity. Expressed in nonsecular language: Every­thing of any importance indicated that the Messiah had not

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     2 1 1

come. It is pos­si­ble to understand the psychoanalytical ‘expenditure,’ its therapeutic as well as its theoretical side, as correlates to this deficiency; in any case, not as its secularization. Hardship and life circumstances did not ­matter as long as ­there was no ‘redemption.’ And ­there would never be! The ‘second Rome’ was opposed to this view like nothing ­else, not even the anti-­Semitism of Doctor Lueger in Vienna or, ­later, the ethnologist Wilhelm Schmid and his hostility t­oward Freud’s primal horde with its patricide and its totemism. The ‘first Rome’ had not known ­these conflicts: neither the expectation of a messiah nor the vio­lence unleashed ­under the assumption of his advent. Had the ‘third Rome,’ that of a unified Italy, renewed this indifference and ‘innocence’? I know I ­will be criticized when I say that in Freud self-­analysis and self-­staging cannot always be distinguished. That, too, joins his world to that of Goethe; only that he disposed of more subtle means to disguise this indistinguishability. Even to himself. To give an anticipatory illustration: In 1907, during another stay in Rome, Freud issues the infamous and much-­admired edict to his Wednesday eve­ning circle in Vienna, dissolving the group and inviting members to join a new foundation so that they may conceive of themselves as f­ ree associates. On a postcard from Rome! Not an excommunication exactly, but with the same effect of keeping the unbelievers away from the mysteries. Rome had become the center of his own self-­assertion, which consisted in nothing less than overcoming the inhibition of entering it. Just like Hannibal, the Phoenician from Carthage, Freud had turned around in 1897 at Lago Trasimeno and renounced entry into Rome. He had shown re­spect for an inconceivable barrier, which might have been as trivial as the cost of living in the capital but became a symbol for the not yet deposed ­father figure. “My longing for Rome is, by the way, deeply neurotic. It is connected with my high school hero worship of the Semitic Hannibal, and this year in fact I did not reach Rome any more than he did from Lake Trasimeno. Since I have been studying the unconscious, I have become so in­ter­est­ing to myself.”26 More insight is provided by a ­mistake in the Interpretation of Dreams, published late in the year 1899, where he confuses Hannibal’s f­ ather

2 1 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

Hamilcar with his ­brother Hasdrubal: not a lapse of memory but a symptom—­and yet critics of the dream book “find nothing better to do than to highlight t­ hese instances of carelessness, which are nothing of the sort.”27 Thus wrote Freud in a letter to Fliess on December 12, 1899. And then Freud fi­nally reached the city that had been denied to Hannibal, and the vivid “lie of redemption” was in front of his eyes. ­Here too he has his own paths to salvation, shielded from the light of reason: He performs the tourist’s ritual at the Fontana di Trevi, and then adds something, “and I in­ven­ted this myself—­dipped my hand in the Bocca della Verità at Santa Maria Cosmedin and vowed to return.”28 Before that return would become real­ity, the overcoming of his Hannibalesque inhibition about entering Rome has another, immediate consequence: Freud refuses to continue to suffer. He decides no longer to tolerate the humiliation in the delay of his appointment as professor. And he talks about it in the language of the ‘second Rome.’ “One must look somewhere for one’s salvation, and I chose the [professorial] title as my savior,” he writes to Fliess on March 11, 1902.29 The reference to the victory over the Roman inhibition is the final act in this self-­staging for the spectating friend and himself: “When I came back from Rome, my enjoyment of life and work was somewhat heightened and that of martyrdom somewhat diminished.” Now he entered upon the path that every­body took to ‘salvation’: “­Others are that clever without first having to go to Rome.”30

The Sin That Cannot Be Forgiven Enlightenment critics of Chris­tian­ity, and even theologians, have worried too ­little that a religion, for the sake of redeeming humanity from guilt, permitted the most disproportionate expenditure—­the incarnation and death of its God—­and at the same time announced in its first proclamation a new sin that now could not be redeemed through any salvation: the sin against the Holy Spirit. Although two of the evangelists, Mark and Matthew, know of it, and Mark introduces Jesus’s declaration with the amplifying

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     2 1 3

amen, it remains unsaid and unknown in what this unforgivable transgression consisted; nothing ­else is its equivalent, ­because Jesus had confirmed that all sins and blasphemies—­even ­those against him—­would be forgiven, but the sin against the Holy Spirit would not be forgiven in all eternity (eis ton aiona). In the language—­still unknown to the New Testament—of Trinitarian dogmatics: A lèse-­ majesté against the third person of the Godhead would not be worthy of the grace of redemption from the first person even through the suffering and death of the second. The ‘infinite reparation’ provided in the act of the crucifixion was impotent when finite beings with their paltry means acted against the majesty of the Holy Spirit. Given the lack of interest on the side of the authorities, I ­will try to make an extra effort. ­Because majesties have become rare, it is difficult to imagine the gravity of such ‘infringements.’ We know the epoch of terrible curses and accursedness only from novels. Among all the commandments brought down from Mount Sinai, the second, against taking the Lord’s name in vain, has paled the most, even more than the sixth. Yet already the knowledge of the true name of the Lord was a sanctioned trea­sure, ­because it held the access key to the ear of the highest power, made the magic of the cult pos­si­ble, and therefore had to be kept secret from the servants of Baal. The name of God is in the pro­cess, as it w ­ ere, of dissociating itself from its ­bearer, of ‘hypostasizing’ itself like the aura of majesty (kavod) of JHWH and his ‘dwelling’ (shekinah) as the presence among his ­people. God can be insulted and blasphemed by t­ hese preliminary manifestations b ­ ecause they represent him actively and passively. ‘Wisdom’ and ‘Log­os’ are similar filiations of God, and the tendency to hypostasize properties to ‘figures’ is not restricted to the history of religion, as Neoplatonism shows—­especially with its influence on the development of doctrine of the Trinity. Hence my assumption that the pneuma hagion [Holy Spirit], in the two instances in which the unforgivable blasphemia is mentioned, indeed meant the ‘name’ of God, or one of its ‘substitutions.’ Most likely, one of the substitutions whose translation from the original text was especially difficult—­like the above mentioned kavod [glory of the Lord] and shekinah [dwelling of the divine presence]—­compelled

2 1 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

l­ater interpreters to grasp for the Holy Spirit. The indirect lèse-­ majesté that was produced by the explication of the second commandment was applied so extensively to the ‘messengers’ of God, to the angels and the powers, that not even Michael dared to ‘blaspheme’ the fallen archangel Lucifer whom he had vanquished, if we are to believe the Epistle of Jude in the New Testament. Put differently: the angel did not curse the devil, b ­ ecause a ‘remnant’ of immunity may still be attached to him. If we now ask what is meant at the climax of the trial in Matthew’s Passion when the high priest Caiaphas says to Jesus: “I put you ­under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God!” (Matt. 26:63), one has to be aware of the extreme sanction that Jesus’s answer “So say you” elicits in its simplicity, unadorned by any protestations or oath. Then follows a further hyperbole of the messianic claim: Jesus is also the Judge of the World who ­will return on the clouds of the heavens. It is at this moment that the high priest tears Jesus’s clothes asunder and utters the death sentence: “He has blasphemed God” (eblasphemesen). No further investigation was necessary. But apparently it is only the apocalyptic vision of Judgment Day—­“sitting at the right hand of power” (another of ­these figurations) (Matt. 26:64)—­that makes the blasphemy worthy of capital punishment. The names ‘Christos’ and ‘Son of God’ ­were too vague to rend someone’s clothes. Caiaphas was still unaware of the dogma of the ‘Second Person’; the ‘anointed’ was just one messianic attribute among many, that of the Davidian King of the End Times. ­There is, therefore, a tight connection between the Logion of the unforgivable sin and the reason for Jesus’s death sentence; what is at stake in both is the extremity of turpitude, the unsurpassable insult to the Godhead. Luke did not incorporate the Logion of the unforgivable sin. Can we guess why he did not? Matthew and Luke are the ones that report—­even if in dif­fer­ent ways—­the Holy Spirit’s authorship of Mary’s pregnancy. Matthew passes over it so conspicuously that it looks as if he did not quite know what to do with this ‘finding’ (heurethe): she “was found with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 1:18). The angel in Joseph’s dream uses the same language to soothe him and prevent him from rejecting his betrothed. This dream angel is

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     2 1 5

a substitute for the angel of annunciation in Luke who even details that the Holy Spirit ­will ‘overcome’ her and who introduces an additional authority that ­will return in the interrogation before Caiaphas: the “power of the Highest” (Luke 1:35) ­will ‘overshadow’ Mary. In both Luke and the interrogation scene of Matthew’s Passion, the seating arrangement “at the right hand of power” is the same; except that Luke had introduced this synonym at the beginning of the story of the Son of man. But Luke did not seem to have understood the meaning of this intensification. He inverts the sequence in the interrogation: first the ‘anointed,’ then the ‘Son of man to the right of the power of God,’ then, separately, the ‘Son of God’ (Luke 22:66–70). It is the last denomination that is supposed to render any further investigation superfluous. One could say that, dogmatically speaking, nothing much became of the ‘power of God,’ whereas the Spirit gains theological contours. This might be the reason Luke l­ater does not incorporate the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’: it would have implied that Jesus extends to the author of his incarnation the special protection that he, as redeemer, is powerless to do anything about, if someone w ­ ere to blaspheme the mystery of his provenance. Luke confronts this danger without reference to the indissoluble curse: he tells the story with the protective addition of a named angel—in contrast to the anonymous angel of the dream in Matthew—­and adds the ‘power of the Highest’ known already from the Passion. At the beginning and at the end, Luke has the milder words. An unforgivable sin was not in line with his way of thinking. The history of biblical exegesis shows that the sin against the Holy Spirit was difficult to interpret. This is the case even for Augustine, a specialist in sins, who identified it as the hardening of the heart u ­ ntil the end of life (duritia cordis usque ad finem huius vitae), in which ­humans refuse to accept the forgiveness of sins earned by Christ. But so it was with ­every sin insofar as the sinner does not disavow it and the sin can be forgiven. The sin against the Holy Spirit, in this view, is a kind of meta-­sin that renders all other sins final. And yet neither ­here nor anywhere ­else it is stated what this atrocity entails.

2 1 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

It is therefore understandable that in spite of a noted enthusiasm for confessing one’s transgressions, no one in two thousand years of Chris­tian­ity has ever confessed to this ultimate guilt. With the exception of Kierkegaard’s f­ ather, who was prepared to believe that cursing God as a young shepherd in Jutland was this unbearable sin, and who found proof of this conviction in his worldly success, which he took as a sign of his terrestrial ‘compensation’ and hence of his eternal ‘rejection.’ None of which prevented his son Søren from using this compensation to support his existence as a writer. ­Here we have the paradox of justification by faith alone in its clearest form: a man, intensely conscious of his guilt, assumes that he must have committed the greatest sin mentioned in the Bible. Only by accepting this biblical ‘exception’ can he testify to the intensity of his faith. He believes even what should destroy him. His faith obscures the paradox that keeps him alive: whosoever believes in the unforgivable sin cannot have committed it, ­because other­wise the ‘justification by faith alone’ would be untrue. And yet for that ­there is no guarantee. The believer must remain in doubt as to ­whether he has committed this unknown sin. The most extreme means of redemption from the most extreme guilt suspends even the certitude of salvation. The childhood story of Kierkegaard’s ­father seems to have taken on a life of its own. Friedrich Dürrenmatt recounts that in the village of his childhood the custom had been that his ­mother told stories from the Bible, while his ­father, who was a pastor, told stories about the pagans. The stories the f­ ather told, when returning with the child from the ‘woods’ ­after ministering to the lonely farmers, mentioned the names of the stars in the sky. In t­hese myths, t­here was talk of the curse of the gods on rebels and blasphemers, and the son understood neither what a curse was nor why ­there ­were so many gods when his ­mother had said every­thing depended on ­there being only one. And yet this one God also seems to be dealing in curses, and that was what, in the midst of his ­father’s Greek myths, startled the child as an alien ingredient: “. . . ​once, when we returned from a snowy night in the ‘woods,’ my ­father told the story of a man who as a poor boy had cursed God, and from then on had prospered, had become rich, but also sadder; and he told me

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     2 1 7

that ­there is a sin that God cannot forgive, but that no one ­really knows what it consists in—­a secret that preoccupied me ­because it also seemed to preoccupy my f­ ather.”31 It is strange that t­ here is no clear connection in this story between what the poor boy, of unknown age, understands as a curse and the unforgivable sin; at most, the misunderstood curse could be an indication of the direction where the unknown sin could be found. But why would one search for it, given that ­there was no benefit in recognizing it as the sin that one had already committed? The answer can only repeat what has been said: ­because just believing in the unknown sin is already every­thing it can be and is about. Dürrenmatt’s point is the reason this story bothers the child in the first place. It is not the mysterious transgression that worries him but the perception that the f­ ather seems to be worried by it. The reason can only be conjectured from the context. Dürrenmatt’s ­father loved to tell the myth of Theseus, who, upon returning from Crete and killing the Minotaur, forgot to raise the white sails as the sign of his victory and survival. This caused the ­father to believe falsely that his son was lost and to throw himself into the sea in desperation. What did that mean? The distraction of the sons kills the f­ athers if the latter get too attached to the former. For the son listening to the f­ ather’s tale during the nightly walk, it means that he, too, does not do justice to the ­father: “. . . ​I thought too ­little about him, and I reflected on him even less.”32 This doubt about never being able to do enough lends this winter night in the mountains an aura of indeterminate significance that on a larger scale accrues to the unforgivable sin: his ­ father seems confused by it, ­because his God is a god who can be insulted and cursed, and who, with the splendor of worldly success, beguiles sinners into not seeing that they are lost. And the village pastor prob­ably did not even know that his son carries on this legacy and its guilt and erects from it a vast edifice of thought. Other­wise the son’s reminiscence would not have omitted the name of the sin. To be persecuted by God with blessings is a thought that can be borne only in its self-­dissolution, in its reflexive deviousness that does not make the Passion entirely superfluous. It nonetheless belongs to the mysteries of the history of Chris­tian­ity how an ‘inclusion’

2 1 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

like this could survive in its founding document. Or was it one of its strengths to have this instrument handy? Indeterminateness is perhaps the last chance that an idea has to exert power over minds. Chris­tian­ity had to abandon its indeterminateness when it made it its core certainty that the one who is to come had already been h ­ ere. Although a second coming on the clouds of heaven is, joyously or fearfully, promised on Judgment Day, the decision for this salvific event is already anticipated by justification or disbelief. What­ever was yet to come, what ­really mattered had already happened. The intellectual condition of Judaism is the uncertainty of the Messiah’s coming. No one could say when or how he would come, not even who he would be: w ­ hether he is someone who w ­ ill return or someone as yet unnamed. It is this state of suspension—in which every­thing is still pos­si­ble, in which no single event could ever prove the failure of the Lord of the Covenant and e­ very event could exculpate him with an increase of expectation—­that Chris­tian­ity had jeopardized. It might have been a minor functional equivalent that the savior left his faithful with a new uncertainty: what the greatest and absolute sin might be. This sin’s only intelligible and exclusively eschatological meaning could have been that every­body at ­every moment has to fear committing it. Only then would they prefer above all e­ lse the destruction of the world in order to eliminate the risk of committing this sin. No amount of time granted to the world could outweigh the unknown temptation, the consequences of which not even the dearly purchased release from the bonds of Satan could compensate. Montesquieu once said that ­every power becomes despotic at that moment when it is no longer clear what constitutes treason. To be sure, treason is not the secularized version of the sin against the Holy Spirit, but functionally it occupies the same position. Treason and sin are both mythical, when one can become guilty without having committed them—as with original sin—or when one cannot avoid them, as is the case in spiritual or ideological betrayal. H ­ ere the covenant between moral consciousness and dogmatic system escapes all rational control. At the same time, power increases infinitely when it makes accomplices out of t­ hose who are still suppos-

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     2 1 9

edly innocent and turns them against ­those who are already or supposedly guilty. One of the achievements of a state governed by the rule of law is that it demands the designation of its secrets. If revealing them is treason, they have to be known to be secrets. The price for this is that the levels of classification and the stamps to signal them continue to multiply. And at the same time, so do the risks of using them. The guilty one is not only the person who divulges the secret but also the one who uses the stamp TOP SECRET too sparingly. That is how the discipline of arcana proliferates. The degree of betrayal and the risk of committing it become inescapable, if the suspicion is omnipresent that it has already been committed. This w ­ asn’t successful with the sin against the Holy Spirit and could not happen once the imminence of the apocalypse had to be postponed. In the case of the betrayal of state secrets, enemies and situations can be in­ven­ted to justify the vividness of the suspicion. Conspiratorial groups of a dif­fer­ent kind—­given that no one believes in real mysteries anymore—­live by the fiction of managing secret insights. De­cades ago they still could be of an aesthetic kind. The ‘Cosmics’ in Munich at the turn to the twentieth ­century threatened to kill anyone who betrayed their secrets. But even the members of the inner circle did not know what t­ hese secrets w ­ ere. They could have been communicated just as ­little as the nature of injustice in the sin against the Holy Spirit. The Countess of Reventlow, an insider, rendered this situation in a short scene in her Munich novel Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen [1913, The Notebooks of Mr.  Dame]: “Konstantin turned pale: ‘Have I betrayed cosmic secrets?’ he asked, looking questioningly at Mary. She just shrugged: ‘You never know’.”33

Remembering Origen The discourses of ‘coming to terms with the past’ and the ‘work of mourning’ exhibit, in their burdensome indeterminateness, similarities to the exegetical fate of the biblical ‘sin against the Holy Spirit.’

2 2 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

Where are ­those who have committed it? Where are the ­others who worry that they may be capable of committing it? Thus, it remains a threat with an indelible consciousness of guilt for all ­those who one day ­will have to realize, in despair as much as surprise, that they have committed it. How does this fit into a theological landscape in which it cannot be denied on princi­ple—­even if it is not explic­itly affirmed—­that even the devil could be redeemed with gifts from the infinite trea­ sury of forgiveness that Jesus has provided with his death of atonement? For an infinite mea­sure of mercy may not be negated or doubted by excepting a single creature from its efficacy. The sources of revelation do not say ­whether or not the fallen angel actually benefited from this gift, but the doctrine of infinite grace certainly does not deny it. Even Origen, the most profound of the early theologians, did not claim that in the apocatastasis God’s antagonist would be pulled from the deepest recess of hell; he only wanted to leave open the possibility that, in the repetition of the world, every­body from the highest to the lowest could be or become anything. The freedom between Good and Evil would be restored by suspending the finality of having to be one or the other. ­After all, the leader of the angels’ rebellion had not simply become evil; in his place in hell, he could only remain evil. Origen had taken the princi­ ple of the inexhaustibility of the trea­sury of mercy so far, b ­ ecause he thought it appropriate that an infinity makes the infinite pos­si­ ble—­and ­under the auspices of traditional metaphysics, this was pos­si­ble only through repetition: of the same, but not by the same. We do not know how Origen coped with the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit.’ It could not fit into his system. For it shares the invaluable advantage with similar injunctions that no one ­will ever be happily ­free of guilt. ­People ­free of guilt would appear as an ominous threat to all officers administering feelings of guilt. What ­else can we do if, hardly having escaped from the womb, we already have to plot the murder of the parent who stands in the way of our libido? That we are murderers from the very beginning is no longer a demonic figure of projection, it is virtually each of us, even if the fulfillment of our desire happens only in the latency of our dreams. Why has no theologian—­always eagerly searching for

The Impe rc e pti bi l i ty of th e Mes s iah     2 2 1

sources of guilt—­ever considered declaring the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ to be the one that every­body has always already committed? And perhaps this sin consisted in not having refused life in the womb already, and not having killed one’s m ­ other to prevent similar ‘misdeeds’? Or is it the boundary concept of a w ­ ill to live that, on the other side of being (that is, mortality), refuses to acquiesce in its finitude and instead insists virtually—in ­every biotropic act of defense, of procreation, of borrowed deferral—on immortality? The Idea of the Good can never fully appear in the world—­but could that of Evil? Only if one shares the biblical premise that among all transgressions ­there is one that was not expiated through the sacrifice of the Son of God, and that someone had committed it—by accident, b ­ ecause no one knows what it consists in. One has to try to imagine t­ hese ‘sinners against the Holy Spirit’ as p ­ eople who got the idea that they are just that. What can they do? Do they repent, even if they did not know what they did? ­Will they, like Gregory on his stone, become penitents and appeal for an unattainable ­pardon? If the world knows of their guilt, w ­ ill it demand from them the renunciation of passing time and the related abatement of identity? Why did Jesus say to his apostles, when they criticized his anointment, that the poor would always be among them? When instead he could and should have said that they would never lack guilty ­people—­that they would live off the guilt of o ­ thers, which they are authorized to forgive with the exception of the unforgivable sin? Or maybe not? The refusal of absolution from this one sin—­should it not lead to the much more pressing need to learn to live with guilt? Are t­ hose who impose ‘the work of mourning’ not at the same time its supervisors? Might the unforgivable sin have been in­ven­ted as an instrument to burden all-­too-­facile forgiveness with the suspicion that the unforgivable might have been ‘overlooked’? This is not a random prob­lem: whoever was uncertain of salvation might have committed unforgivable deeds. In this case, someone could appear as a benefactor and yet be cursed. The presupposition that the cata­log of sins is continuously enlarged in order to accommodate the offer of forgiveness is of no use ­here; just as in the case of a death, posterity demands from the

2 2 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

survivors a vis­i­ble tribute of mourning in order to then offer the ser­ vice of solace. Solace lies in the fact that it could happen to anyone. But consoling should not be conceded to every­one; at the limit, this is exactly what must not happen and for which solace may be withheld. ­There are always approximations to the point where the futility of solace and forgiveness emerges. Should t­ here be no name, no threat for it? We can almost sense how every­thing converged on introducing this possibility: the contradiction to the inexhaustibility of redeeming mercy. “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”34 Advice that was followed, and remains to be followed, in the case of the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit.’

The Excesses of the Phi­los­o­phers’ God

The power of a god, whenever it is observed or ‘experienced’ or just proclaimed, seems to be so g­ reat that it cannot be thought any greater. In myth, this is represented and enacted in a story whose end coincides exactly with its being told. And yet, the ultimately triumphant god is always threatened by a god who could be greater, just as the former had been the greater in a long line of greater gods. The point of any discourse of such threats is that the last triumphant god knows how to defend himself against the ­others in a timely and legitimate manner so as to appear fi­nally as the one who cannot be overcome. The god of the phi­los­o­phers seems to be closer to this mythical pro­cess than to the history of Christian dogma as it developed in the first half of the first millennium. The dogma’s descriptive difference to myth consisted in fact that the enlargement of divine singularity—­a result of the Old Testament—by the addition of the Son and the Holy Spirit did not lead to renewed rivalry. According to

2 2 4    S t . M atthe w Passi on

its definition, the ‘Holy’ Spirit did the exact opposite: it guaranteed the unity of ­Father and Son as a unity of love. That is why the seemingly trivial dispute between the Eastern and Western Churches about the filioque in the Apostles’ Creed—­about the common authorship of ­Father and Son in the spiration of the Sanctus Spiritus—is not the quodlibet it appears to be. True, the inner-­godly sequence of generation and spiration is also the sequence of historical revelation, but not as a sequence of successive power relations. The Spirit remained the ­great unknown mostly ­because of its lack of visibility: Spirit was not the Log­os that became flesh, although it was the impregnating power of this incarnation. All of this seems to be unknown to the phi­los­op ­ hers’ thought of God ­after another half millennium when it reaches its purest and briefest definition in Anselm of Canterbury: God is quo maius cogitari nequit, that beyond which nothing greater can be thought. Anselm immediately used this concept as a model for the most extreme philosophical effort: to derive existence immediately from the concept, and from the concept alone. Across all manner of rejection and refutation, this model has remained inherent to philosophy and its dreams of conquest: to have the concept produce what other­wise is entrusted to perception and its accidents. The greatest thought, in order to be just that, could not possibly lack anything, least of all existence. The thought defined as the greatest could not lack this predicate. The unsurpassable being was unsurpassable even in logic: it could be demonstrated. It was necessary ­because its concept could be thought. Without contradiction? This question was raised a few centuries ­later by Duns Scotus, who was more concerned with the ­mother of God than with her eternally destined son. The synthesis of Anselm and Duns Scotus by Leibniz was reaffirmed by Hegel’s nemesis Kierkegaard: “Leibniz’s statement: ‘if God is pos­si­ble, he is necessary,’ is quite correct.”1 The irony in this escalation of the concept of God as the epitome of demonstrable existence by Anselm of Canterbury is that he, the most profound thinker in the Christian tradition of the first millennium a­fter Origen, soon demonstrated that the concept on which he built his ‘ontological argument’ did not satisfy the exacting condition that beyond it nothing further could be thought in

T he Exc e sse s of the P hi l­ os­o ­p h ers ’ Go d     2 2 5

determining the dignity and majesty of God. Anselm himself, sharp as he was, continued the escalation effortlessly by claiming God is greater than anything that can be thought: quiddam maius quam cogitari possit. This destroys the derivation of existence from the concept even according to Anselm’s own conditions. In fact, the relation between concept and existence is no longer even intelligible. In­de­pen­dent of this consequence, however, the leap from what can possibly be thought to what is beyond thought leads outside the horizon of philosophy. It defines, rather, the mystics’ conception of God through via negationis. But this is a distinction unknown to Anselm’s time and not relevant to it. This distinction, however, is invoked h ­ ere to indicate t­here is a criterion of certainty for the fact that thought’s contemplation of the idea of God has reached its limit, thereby arriving at the one true concept of God. The fact that this criterion is not reached and satisfied even with the concept of a beyond-­all-­thought and, instead, that the debate continued in an often concealed and potentially explosive manner, is shown by events in the thirteenth c­ entury around the rejection of Aristotle’s metaphysics and its doctrines of the unmoved mover and of the in­de­pen­dence of the cosmos in existence and essence. God the creator had to be distinguished most sharply from God the mover: the world was not the universe of what he could create but of what he wanted. The negative definitions of 1277 led to two centuries of debates in which the concept of God is defined by the attribute of omnipotence—­and indirectly by the upsurge in criticism of omnipotence as the sole attribute, which anticipates the beginning of modernity. The radical antidote was pantheism, as the negation of any difference between possibility and actuality, power and work, w ­ ill and being. The world reoccupied the ‘position’ in the definition that t­here had to be something quo maius cogitari nequit [of which nothing greater can be thought]. It could satisfy the demands of reason. The world itself is God, God exhausts himself in the world and as world—­this sounds like one of ­those ‘pathos formulae,’ rhetorical derivatives that Aby Warburg recently identified in the fine arts to ­great acclaim. But t­ here is another way to see it: the open or latent Spinozism of modernity is an artifice to reduce the tendency to

2 2 6    S t . M atthe w Passi on

make God in his indecipherable freedom as deus absconditus [hidden god] into the epitome of incomprehensibility. Spinoza’s deus sive natura [god or nature] is exempt from this tendency. He has withdrawn into the sobriety of being able to give no more and nothing other than what he has given: one god, one world. Such was the new maximization—­Neoplatonism without the deficiency of the world’s multiplicity in contrast to the singularity of its absolute princi­ple. It was a creation upgraded to identity with the begetting of the Son, in which the innate Son is extended beyond humanity to the body of the world: his praedestinatio aeterna coincides with the creatio ab aeterno. All of ­these conceptual artifices ­were pre­sent in Nicolas von Cues with his coincidentia oppositorum as the enabling of the impossible. The justification of the factual, which does not require a theodicy, follows from its identity with the divine. As so often in the history of theologies, this new phase in the escalation of God contains a prohibition against further questions, which is not about a taboo; rather, it is the prohibition against meaninglessness. If nothing can be dif­fer­ent from what is, it cannot be mea­sured against the idle thought of what could be better. That is why the Enlightenment—in spite of Jacobi’s legend about Lessing—­never fully embraced Spinoza, leaving him as a ‘pre­de­ces­sor’ to Romanticism. The deepest reassurance ever given to ­humans about gods gave no further solace than to declare h ­ umans divine in a divine world— as opposed to being the claimants of preferential rights, as in the Theodicy; such is the price paid for renouncing God’s transcendence and concealment. Pantheists only want to see the world differently, instead of wanting to have a dif­fer­ent world. They renounce Vulcanism and turn to Neptunism as long as they preserve the capacity not to have to ascribe to the world the indignity of being the eruption of ‘expression.’ ­These decisions remain valid even for the concept of a god who does not play dice, who is sophisticated but not devious. Could t­ here be, ­after the failure of theodicy in the earthquake of Lisbon and the concealed ‘success’ of Spinozism, a further escalation in the concept of God? I want to condense the answer into a single sentence: The sublimity of the idea of God was revealed only

T he Exc e sse s of the P hi l­ os­o ­p h ers ’ Go d     2 2 7

a­ fter the death of God was diagnosed but neither mourned nor overcome. His disappearance from transcendence as well as immanence only confirmed the finality of his ‘aura,’ of what the Hebrew Bible called the kavod of JHWH, the Septuagint the doxa theou. The common suspicion that it was always a question of his successor does not explain the situation. It was a question of the ‘cause of death,’ and it was a question of the manner of ‘remembrance.’ It is no coincidence that a quality of anamnesis unrivaled since Plato emerges almost si­mul­ta­neously in theology and aesthetics: the unexpected idea that only in ‘remembrance’ is the full ‘real­ity’ of what has been lost first reached, ‘produced,’ and ascertained. Indeed, one has to return to the Platonic comparative in order to be able to describe this complex phenomenon: God is more ‘real’ as ‘a ­thing of the past’ than as an object of logical demonstration or faith in salvation. Such remembrance does not have to offer the theological reverence of nostalgia, of the pain of separation and deprivation; but humanity has had ‘experiences’ with its gods that cannot be consigned to oblivion. While trivial atheism—­the atheism of the astronaut who reports seeing nothing of God—­converges in the sentence that the Psalmist already quoted: “­There is no God” (Psalm 14:1), and thus claims that the contrary was an error or a disgraceful deception, Nietz­sche rejects precisely this statement. His ‘dead God’ has become final in his death, and no negation can reach his perfected existence. The anamnesis of Platonism, so bitterly contested but not vanquished, has gained a surprising correlate to its notion of ‘preexistence’: We remember our common history with this dead God just as the slave from Thessaly remembered the geometrical figures of Socrates—­ without remembering having been pre­sent. This is the platonic commonality of such anamnesis: memories that stay with t­ hose who w ­ ere not pre­sent. What is remembered is not as immutable as the Ideas; but its last ‘mutation’ makes it unchangeable. It assumes the quality of the combined desires of Eu­ro­pean metaphysics. As something unrecoverable, it also has become immutable. As paradoxical as it may sound: The god of remembrance, the god of nihilism, the god erratically sought ­after by an inconsolable subject is more power­ful than the

2 2 8    S t . M atthe w Passi on

God of a trusting faith in a judge who is said to have acquitted his subjects in advance. The thought of the death of God moves the god of philosophy somehow closer to the historical god of the theologians, the god who had ‘founded’ and ritualized his own anamnesis. The command to repeat inherent in the instauration of the Eucharist [“Do this in remembrance of me”]—­what meaning could that have if the return on the clouds of the heavens was so certain that it required only expectation, not remembrance? In Matthew’s Passion, the Son of man insists on his ‘remembrance’ and endows it with the stability of the ‘symbolic form’ of his corporeal suffering. That the god of the phi­los­o­phers was also able to die was the unexpected ‘reoccupation’ that would happen in Nietz­sche’s brain: the Passion of God reoccupied by the Übermensch or by the aspirant of this enormity. Just that for Nietz­sche this dead God was supposed not to have sacrificed himself for humankind, but instead to have been sacrificed by humankind for their f­ uture and eternal return. Remembrance of God would become assurance of man’s self-­ intensification: history as evidence of a new self-­confidence. At the heart of Christian reflection had been the contemplation of a ­dying God—of a ­dying God destined for resurrection, although he had just consecrated himself to remembrance [at the Last Supper]. This contradiction between the rituals of remembrance and the Resurrection has never ­really been felt. Above all, it has not been felt as doubt that the messianic failure of the Passion may, at the time, have been entirely unknown and perhaps even repugnant to the founder of the Eucharist. The difference between the visibility of the Passion and the invisibility of the Resurrection has rarely been felt as an affront. As real as the suffering one was beyond any Docetism of his corporeality, the resurrected one was proportionately unreal when he ‘appeared’ to this or that person, walked through closed doors and dis­appeared through them. ­There is nothing of the triumph over death, which the church would l­ater add to its liturgy. It is an ‘event’ without public, without all ­those who ­were supposed to witness his miracles and who w ­ ere now excluded from the miracle of miracles that happened ‘in ­house’ and among a ‘small circle.’

T he Exc e sse s of the P hi l­ os­o ­p h ers ’ Go d     2 2 9

In contrast to its effect on the early Christian community, the Resurrection does not make a ‘strong’ impression on the solitary reader of the Bible, whom the Reformation envisaged for the first time. This is impor­tant for understanding that Nietz­sche, the son of a pastor and an avid reader of the Bible, does not need to counterpose anything to the possibility of resurrection in his thought of the death of God, as this is not an obvious association. The Passion, not the vision, had created the standard of realism against which henceforth every­thing that claimed to be real­ity was mea­sured. The ascension is the entirely superfluous counterpart to the Passion. Why a leave-­ taking if the resurrected no longer lived with his flock but only visited them episodically? ­These considerations lead us back to a specific aspect of the crucifixion: to the image of the God who relinquishes himself, indeed, who gives himself up. What ­else if not this do ­those listening to the St. Matthew Passion experience when they hear the cry of desperation “Eli, Eli”? Without the consent of the Son to the ­will of the ­Father during the night in Gethsemane, this extreme of ‘depletion,’ this kenosis, would not have been pos­si­ble, according to the dogmatic-­ Trinitarian exegesis: God could not abandon himself without being in such agreement with himself as is expressed in the filioque of spirituation. This may not be the language of the evangelists, but it is the theological implication of their under­lying dogma. The freedom of the death on the cross—­a freedom to servitude—­turns it into a deed of salvation. It is h ­ ere, in the dogmatic explication of the Passion according to Matthew, that we approach unexpectedly another, perhaps the last pos­si­ble, escalation of the concept of God, which can be expressed negatively: God could not be murdered, and therefore the death of God in Nietz­sche only appears to be his murder by the Übermensch or by ­those determined to do this deed. If God was dead, it was b ­ ecause of his own decision, just as he had existed solely ­because of himself, causa sui ipsius. The Passion leads us close to this thought via an inversion: No one can murder God ­unless he consents. That he consents is the most sacred core of Christian salvation history. Part of ‘salvation history’—­albeit not the Christian one—is also that God has to give

2 3 0    S t . M atthe w Passi on

way to the ‘Übermensch,’ if the latter ever should come into existence. This looks like a late consequence of the first commandment on Sinai that the jealous God does not suffer other gods next to him. The implications of obedience—to renounce the Baalim and the golden calf—is only one alternative; the other is the myth that the old god has to give way to the new god. In its most excessive form, this means: the dead god has to yield to h ­ umans as the emerging beings of the world, the guarantors of the Eternal Return. At issue is the responsibility for the world as a w ­ hole and for all of its destinies—­only one can have it. But whoever holds this responsibility is defined by the anamnesis of whoever held it before and from whom it could be wrenched only by the command: Get out of the way. Why did it have to be this way? B ­ ecause the old God of the World had failed in his responsibilities. This was proven in the trial of theodicy, the one in 1755 [with the Lisbon earthquake] or the one lost in Kant’s “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical ­Trials in Theodicy” of 1791. The God who had no reason for his existence turned into the God who deprived himself of the right to facticity. This is the culmination in the escalation of God: He wants to be identical with his right to existence. And he lets himself go in a kind of metaphysical Passion in which he consigns his spirit to the very abyss from which he had emerged in his self-­causality. One day in the course of the world, the Übermensch ­will follow him. He might already be ­doing just that. If the God who could be blamed for the ills of the world had to die, then ­humans also have to die if they do not know how to avoid or disburden themselves of the guilt of the world. The separation of God of the World and God of Salvation in the figures of F ­ ather and Son was a sort of attempt to cope with the ‘weight’ of the world without falling into the dualism of Gnosticism. The incarnate God had died, but the world had remained when the apocalypse failed to manifest. This already was the moment of failure that postponed the Judgment and its enactment: ­there was no trust left in the one who had been unable to unburden himself of authorial responsibility for the world. More poignantly: ­there was no mercy for him. Nietz­sche’s ‘solution’ is unfailingly con-

T he Exc e sse s of the P hi l­ os­o ­p h ers ’ Go d     2 3 1

sistent with the anti-­Gnosis of modernity, and in its procedure it is identical with myth: not a dualistic simultaneity but a succession. Reliability, faithfulness, and believability had been the attributes of the God of the Covenant of the Old Testament. But his reliability was conditional, and he alone established and intensified the conditions. The medieval deus absconditus still operated this way: a God who through unbounded mercy chose ­those he favored for salvation. ­Humans as generational successors of this God ­were reliable enough, ­because they themselves ­were the addressees of his actions. The death of God cleared the way for the absolute self-­ confidence of humanity. Except that the way thus opened remained empty. Was it b ­ ecause the story of the Übermensch was tainted with a murder? If so, then every­thing could be set right by telling the story differently than Nietz­sche did. ­There was no murder. At least not just this one; instead, t­ here w ­ ere innumerable murders that disqualified h ­ umans from succeeding God. The vacancy remained. Was it ­because Nietz­sche in real­ity had not finished off the sequence of escalations of God, b ­ ecause he did not see what would follow from the loss of ground in God’s self-­relinquishment? ­Because he could not understand the Passion? The term ‘passion’ harbors, from its Latin provenance, an ambivalence of suffering and enthusiasm that cannot be emulated in German. Only as a h ­ uman being, only through incarnation, would it have been pos­si­ble for God to suffer. But looking at it with a view to the totality of the history of myth and religion, it seems to have been something of a ‘passion’ for h ­ umans to pursue the escalation of God. H ­ uman inflation of their God is already the pursuit of their own cause, as if they ­were preparing the site of ‘reoccupation’ for their self-­definition far in advance. ­Until ­there is a yet another solution. Emile  M. Cioran, the spokesperson for all misanthropes, described in one sentence the ambivalence of this destructive ‘Passion’: “It is the historical fate of humankind to bring the idea of God to its end.” Bringing the idea to what end? Nietz­sche’s point was the necessity with which the end of God would coincide with the end of the ­human in its prehistorical existence as a mere hominid before the Übermensch. ­There

2 3 2    S t . M atthe w Passi on

is no vacancy; history’s horror vacui is too power­ful. Is this the presumed ‘Passion’ of t­hese intensifications of God u ­ ntil his overtaking, on the via negationis, of all real predicates ­toward the negation of the predicate, which, according to Kant, is not real? If so, is it then also the negation of ­humans, who are no longer h ­ uman as such, ­because in ­every sense they have gotten “über,” over themselves? The old horror vacui obviates the quest for the energy that, flowing unrecognized across all degrees of escalation, had driven the supposed God-­searcher, the indefatigable God-­finder, to exhaustion—­ there as well as ­here.

Translators’ Afterword

In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest t­ hings. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of His laws, for example, that shock ­will spend itself in waves; that our images w ­ ill mimic ­every gesture, and that shattered they w ­ ill multiply and mimic e­ very gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. From: House­keeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson

Two dimensions of the phi­los­o­pher Hans Blumenberg’s writing—­his tremendous learnedness and his digressive style—­make this book on the Gospel of Matthew and the setting of its Passion to ­music by Johann Sebastian Bach so challenging and so rewarding to read (and to translate). It is the most serious and sustained engagement with the substance of Christian doctrine and art since Friedrich Nietz­sche, and, in the willingness and competency to meet Christian theology

2 3 4    Tra nsl ators’ Afte rword

on its own exegetical grounds, perhaps entirely unpre­ce­dented in philosophical thought. Learnedness and digression in the exegesis of the Bible have long been virtues associated with the ‘lower’ of the four senses of scripture, with the literal explanations of words, names, concepts, and historical references, and with the allegorical network of references across the entire corpus—­canonical, apocryphal, and exegetical—of Christian writings. It is on t­hese senses that Blumenberg trains his enormous scholarly and interpretive powers—on the literal ambiguity of the genitive in “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom,” for example, or on the allegorical relation between the (aborted) sacrifice of Isaac and Jesus’s death on the cross. Textual obscurities and referential inconsistencies trou­ble the core of the Christian message. This procedure is surprising and not a ­little disorienting; we are not used to such exegetical immersion (and competency) from critics of Chris­tian­ity. They rarely engage with the Word in its textual presence; instead they base their rejection on the two ‘higher’ senses of scripture, its moral impact and its anagogical subtext. Nietz­sche, though a philologist by training (and a constant interlocutor in Blumenberg’s book), had focused all of his polemical energy on an alternative genealogy of morality, and on replacing eschatology with the figure of the Eternal Return. To Blumenberg’s mind, this neglect of the lower senses harbors the danger of turning the criticism of Chris­tian­ity, and of religion more generally, into an ineffectual exchange of convictions, or into an affirmation of incommunicable beliefs. What Blumenberg sets out to show instead is that at the heart of the Christian text ­there lurks a contradiction that no amount of moral posturing can eclipse: the conflict between an omnipotent god and the in­de­pen­dence of his creation. Blumenberg’s influential works on the emergence of modern science and modern forms of philosophizing have visited this neuralgic point often: it is the ‘threshold of Gnosticism’ where the discrepancy between God’s unlimited power and the presence of evil in his creation threatens to split the Godhead into an evil creator and a good redeemer. As Blumenberg delineated with remarkable detail in The Legitimacy of the Modern World (1966), the first attempt to overcome Gnosticism, in Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, put

Transl ators ’ A fter wo r d    2 3 5

the entire onus of a seemingly failed creation on humanity; it called forth a second attempt in the self-­grounding of humanity in early modern science and philosophy. In the St. Matthew Passion, Blumenberg returns with an equal intensity to the locus in scripture where this threat of a divine diremption is experienced and confronted: the Passion. And the Gospel that narrates this experience most elaborately is that of Matthew. Blumenberg’s analyses of the historical and textual contradictions that culminate in the Passion foreground the experience of doubt, abandonment, pain, and resignation in Jesus, and the bewilderment, the stolidity, even the cowardice in the reaction of the apostles. Over and over Blumenberg returns to Jesus’s scream “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” and insists that in this moment of abandonment the meaning of God’s entire creation is on a knife edge. Against the conciliatory and moralistic tendencies of con­ temporary theologians—­his favorite target is Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) who reduced the teachings of the Gospels to the bare self-­announcement, the ‘kerygma,’ of Jesus—­Blumenberg insists on the visceral and open-­ended dimensions of the Passion: for example, God’s decision to make ­humans in ‘his own image’ and the aspirations this inspires in them; his lack of experience with the finitude and mortality that confronted ‘fallen’ humanity; his need to amend for a faulty creation and, thus, the need to ‘redeem’ himself; and the monstrosity of sacrificing his Son to achieve this. Without keeping open the deep seriousness of ­these prob­lems, the Passion would just be a spectacle for the edification of an entirely self-­absorbed God. In Blumenberg’s mediations, the role of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (1727) is to ensure that the experiential dimensions remain pre­sent. Bach, too, stripped his masterpiece of all the theatricality in which the Passion and mourning plays of the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries indulged, and focused with near-­ unbearable intensity on the suffering of the Son of man. The careful interplay between the chorus, the Evangelist, the vari­ous soloists, and the ethereal voice of Jesus serves to highlight the deep psychological and bodily pain caused by the failure in God’s creation. Even in its secularized version as a concert piece, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion retains traces of this corporeality, most insistently in the many

2 3 6    Tra nsl ators’ Afte rword

references the m ­ usic makes to blood and tears, the literal yet nonlinguistic manifestations of passion and compassion. A per­for­mance of the St.  Matthew Passion is the closest we can come, according to Blumenberg, to comprehending the bewilderment and the deep trauma of the first Christians and their attempts to make theological sense of the catastrophe of the crucifixion and its double abandonment: of Jesus by his God and the disciples by their Messiah. Blumenberg points out at vari­ous junctures that Bach ended his Passion without giving any indications of a coming resurrection. The oratorio’s final chorus could not be clearer: “We sit down in tears / And call to you in the grave / Rest ­gently, ­gently rest.” In the dust jacket written for the original publication of the work in 1988, Blumenberg frames the study with the following text: This book concerns a delay, the anachronism that the St. Matthew Passion reaches the pinnacle of its dissemination and of its diverse interpretations and per­for­mances in a time alienated from its content. The book’s gaze focuses on the listener. Con­temporary listeners, who can only be inferred, have their own horizons for taking in the work, just as Bach, when he created it, kept in mind the horizon of his community, to whom he wanted—­using the antiquated phrase—­‘to give something.’ The mea­ sure of giving cannot remain the mea­sure of taking. Nevertheless, the paradox of all reception remains valid: t­ hose who have yet to learn something by experience, learn nothing by experience. Nothing falls into the lap of the listener. ­Because con­temporary listeners can neither submit to nor bring themselves closer to the historical situation of Bach’s community, they themselves w ­ ill have to fill their horizon with two millennia of fading images and stories, from which the ‘language’ of the Passion is derived or to which it returns. Nothing can change the distance of the listeners who cannot see themselves as sinners in light of the deed done for their atonement; only their lack of familiarity with the ideas and events by which this deed constitutes the center of a history can be restituted. Each of this book’s texts aims at enriching a wide horizon of memories of thoughts and figures, of gestures and symbols, of salvation and damnation, of imagination and abstraction.

The pos­si­ble access that Bach’s oratorio affords to the theological questions posed by the Passion is, therefore, all but ­simple or direct, given that the largely secular listeners of the 1980s (or the 2020s) are removed not only from the world of nascent Chris­tian­

Transl ators ’ A fter wo r d    2 3 7

ity but also from that of Bach’s Leipzig church community. It is this nonshared horizon between Bach’s world and ours (much less the world of early Chris­tian­ity) that the book addresses: What do, what can, secular listeners hear t­ oday, when they listen to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion? If the focus is on the listeners, it is not in order to understand them, w ­ hether in the eigh­teenth, twentieth, or twenty-­ first ­century; rather, Blumenberg seeks to challenge ­future listeners—­ “implied” listeners to come—by populating our rather restricted horizon of religious knowledge with exegeses and images that help to experience the Passion in its fraught complexity. In a longer version of the book’s dust jacket text h ­ oused in the German Literary Archive in Marbach, Blumenberg writes: “At stake is immersion, enlivenment, indeed ‘illustration,’ and not instruction—­ without alienating ­those who also expect precisely this.”1 This path of producing images alongside penetrating exegeses results in a series of theological Denkbilder, often at odds with traditional literal and allegorical readings, often mediated via Gnostic and agnostic reception histories. And just as Walter Benjamin announces his method as detour (“Method is detour”) at the beginning of The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, a similar strategy holds ­here: “Es werden Umwege versucht”2 Blumenberg writes in a draft to the dust jacket—­ “We ­will try, attempt, pursue detours.” St. Matthew Passion offers a mode of ‘theory as detour,’ a constant hovering around, diverting from, and returning to a prob­lem (the theological stakes of the Passion in Matthew and Bach) not (only) to deepen an understanding of the Passion but, more decisively, to generate ideas and images that expand the horizon in which it can be experienced.

Notes

The Horizon 1. Greek for “preaching” or “proclamation,” kerygma is the performative ele­ment of proclamation in Christian apol­o­getic (Jesus saying “It is I”), as contrasted with “didache” or its instructional aspects. Rudolf Bultmann (1884– 1976), professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Marburg, proposed to strip the New Testament of all “mythologizing” narrative padding and contended that only the kerygma, the fact that the Good News had been proclaimed, was a worthy object of faith, not the vagaries of the historical figure of Jesus or the coherence of doctrine. (Adapted from F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, editors, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. rev. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005]). All endnotes and references throughout the book, including parenthetical citations of the Bible and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in the main text, are from the translators. Translations throughout may be silently modified. For key theoretical terms in Blumenberg’s lexicon, we have largely followed the bilingual glossary appended to History, Meta­phor, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader, edited and translated by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).

2 4 0     N o te s to Page s 3–45 2. “God” is capitalized when the text refers to the mono­the­istic God of the Bible; when referring to a god or a divine power in general, “god” remains lowercase. The pronouns “he,” “him,” and “his” for God and Jesus, which are not capitalized in German, are only capitalized when necessary for the clarity and disambiguation of the sentence in En­glish. ­“Father” is capitalized when referring to God, as is “Son” when referring to Jesus. 3. The Bible is cited according the New King James version, though often amended to reflect the German (or Greek or Latin) version Blumenberg quotes. All parenthetical citations of the Bible are from the translators. 4. Martin Luther, Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam, in Luthers Werke in Auswahl, ed. Otto Clemen and Albert Leitzmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 5:321 (thesis 17). Cf. https://­williamroach​.­org​/­2017​/­08​/­20​/­martin​ -­luthers​-­1517​-­disputation​-­against​-­scholastic​-­theology​/­. 5. Translations of Greek and Latin phrases in square brackets are provided by the translators. 6. From the Greek δοκέω, “I seem,” Docetism was in the early Church a tendency that considered the humanity and sufferings of the earthly Christ as apparent rather than real. Evidence for Docetism is to be found in the New Testament (1 John 4:1–3; 2 John 7; cf. Col. 2:8f.), but it reached its zenith among the Gnostics. In some forms, it held that Christ miraculously escaped the ignominy of death—­for instance, by Judas Iscariot or Simon of Cyrene changing places with him just before the Crucifixion. Docetic doctrines w ­ ere vigorously attacked by St. Ignatius and all the leading anti-­Gnostic writers. (Adapted from F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, editors, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. rev. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005]). 7. Ulrich Wilckens, “Zur Eschatologie des Urchristentums: Bemerkungen zur Deutung der jüdisch-­urchristlichen Überlieferungen bei Hans Blumenberg,” in Beiträge zur Theorie des neuzeitlichen Christentums, ed. Hans Joachim Birkner and Dietrich Rössler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968), 127–42, ­here 127. 8. Thomas Mann, letter to Ida Herz, September  10, 1951, in Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Das Leben als Kunstwerk (Munich: Beck, 1999), 584; Regesten 51/ 382. 9. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is cited parenthetically with the sigla MP followed by a number designating the vocal movement and a letter for the subsection. ­These references have been added by the translators and draw on the Emmanuel M ­ usic translation available online: http://­www​.­emmanuelmusic​.­org​ /­notes​_­translations​/­translations​_­cantata​/­t​_­bwv244​.­htm. The numbering of the sixty-­eight vocal movements with lettered subsections follows the Neue Bach-­Ausgabe (New Bach Edition). H ­ ere too we often silently modify the translation to highlight aspects of Blumenberg’s theoretical concerns. 10. In German, redemption (Erlösung) and ransom (Lösegeld) share the common root lösen: to dissolve, loosen, release. 11. Thomas Mann, The Holy Sinner, trans. H. T. Lowe-­Porter (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1951), 257. 12. Ibid.

Note s to Pages 4 5 –7 5     2 4 1 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 291. 15. Ibid., 292. 16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Carl Friedrich Zelter, Goethe’s Letters to Zelter: With Extracts from ­Those of Zelter to Goethe, trans. Arthur Duke Coleridge (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1892), 350. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietz­sche, ­Human, All Too ­Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101–2. 20. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an Nanny Wunderly-­Volkart (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1977), 1:193. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. A. Poulin Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 5. 24. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an Nanny Wunderly-­Volkart, 193. 25. Ibid., 194. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Hermine Wittgenstein, Familienerinnerungen, ed. Ilsa Sommavilla (Innsbruck: Haymon, 2016), 132. 32. Hans Carossa, Eine Kindheit und Verwandlungen einer Jugend (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1947), 98.

Escalations of a God 1. Friedrich Nietz­sche, ­Human, All Too ­Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 323. 2. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 567. 3. Nietz­sche, ­Human, All Too ­Human, 324. 4. Alfred Polgar, Kleine Schriften, ed. Marcel Reich-­Ranicki and Ulrich Weinzierl (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), 5:244. 5. Franz Kafka, Dearest F ­ ather: Stories and Other Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), 43. 6. Ibid., 84. 7. Both ­these phrases are quoted in the original En­glish. 8. Thomas Mann, The Holy Sinner, trans. H. T. Lowe-­Porter (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1951), 77.

2 4 2     N o te s to Page s 75–97 9. Ibid. 10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, pt. 4, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, trans. Robert R. Heitner (New York: Suhrkamp, 1987), 598; cf. Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 523–56. 11. Léon Bloy, The ­Woman Who Was Poor, trans. I. J. Collins (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), 8. 12. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His B ­ rothers: The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, Joseph the Provider, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2005), 257. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 256. 16. Ibid., 256–57. 17. Ibid., 257. 18. From the Greek, kenosis (κένωσις, “the act of emptying”) is Jesus’s renunciation of his divine nature in the incarnation and becoming entirely receptive to God’s ­will. The concept appears in Phil. 2:7, translated in the RV as “emptied himself.” See, F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. rev. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 19. E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-­Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6. 20. Ibid., 66. 21. Blaise Pascal, Pascal Se­lections, ed. Richard H. Popkin (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 69. 22. Hermann Leberecht Strack and Paul Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch (Munich: Beck, 1922), 1:134.

Corporeality 1. Carlous Bovillus, Que Hoc Volumine Contine[n]Tur. Liber De Intellectu.: Liber De Sensu. Liber De Nichilo. Ars Oppositorum. Liber De Generatione. Liber De Sapiente. Liber De Duodecim Numeris Epistole Complures. Insup[Er] Mathematicu[m] Opus Quadripartitu[m] De Numeris Perfecti De Mathematicis Rosis De Geometricis Corporibus De Geometricis Supplementis, ed. Henri Estienne and Jean Petit (Paris: Emissum ex officina Henrici Stephani, Impensis eiusdem et Ioannis Parui in chalcotypa arte sociorum, 1510). 2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, pts. 1–3, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, trans. Robert R. Heitner (New York: Suhrkamp, 1987), 21. 3. Ibid. 4. Hans Carossa, Führung und Geleit: Ein Lebensgedenkbuch (Leipzig: Insel, 1933), 125.

Note s to Pa ges 9 7 –1 3 3     2 4 3 5. Ibid., 5. 6. Hans Carossa, Eine Kindheit und Verwandlungen einer Jugend (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1947), 7. 7. Ibid., 8. 8. Ibid. 9. Hans Carossa, Gedichte: Die Veröffentlichungen zu Lebzeiten und Gedichte aus dem Nachlass, ed. Eva Kampmann-­Carossa (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1995), 8. 10. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. J. Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 277, Nov. 5, 1897. 11. Ibid., 281, Nov. 14, 1897. 12. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Paint­ers, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Knopf, 1996), 2:643. 13. Ibid., 642. 14. Freud, Complete Letters, 338, Jan. 3, 1899. 15. Ibid. 16. Rainer Maria Rilke, Two Stories of Prague, trans. Angela Esterhammer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New E ­ ngland, 1994), xxxviii. 17. Julien Green, If I ­Were You, trans. John Hellas Finnie McEwen (New York: Harper, 1949), v. 18. Robert Musil, Diaries, 1899–1941, ed. and trans. Philip Payne and Mark Mirsky (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 340. 19. Heinrich Heine, Heinrich Heine’s Pictures of Travel, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland (Philadelphia: I. Kohler, 1863), 297 (“Journey from Munich to Genoa,” chap. 33). 20. Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, trans. Len Krisak (Rochester, NY: Camden House Press, 2015), 33. Blumenberg writes “sah” (saw) instead of “seh” (see). 21. Ibid. 22. “The Gospel of Philip,” in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, ed. Marvin Meyer (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 171. See http://­gnosis​.­org​/­naghamm​/­gop​ .­html.

Apostates 1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies; in The Ante-­Nicene ­Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the F ­ athers down to A.D. 325, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (­Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1950), 1:392. See http://­gnosis​.­org​/­library​/­advh2​.­htm. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid.

2 4 4     N o te s to Page s 136–177 5. Mark Twain, The Complete Travel Books of Mark Twain: The Early Works, ed. Charles Neider (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 382. 6. Friedrich Ohly, The Damned and the Elect: Guilt in Western Culture, trans. Linda Archibald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 7. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saint, trans. William Granger Ryan (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012), 168. 8. Ludolf von Suchem, Ludolph von Suchem’s Description of the Holy Land, and of the Way Thither: Written in the Year A.D. 1350, ed. Aubrey Stewart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 112.

Between Two Murderers 1. The Arabic Infancy Gospel, in The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Lit­er­a­ture in an En­glish Translation, ed. J. K. Elliott and M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 105. See, http://­gnosis​ .­org​/­library​/­infarab​.­htm (para. 23). 2. “The Acts of Pilate,” in Elliott and James, The Apocryphal New Testament, 189. 3. C. G. Montefiore and H. Loewe, A Rabbinic Anthology (1938; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 99. 4. For all the Elijah quotes, see Hermann Leberecht Strack and Paul Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch (Munich: Beck, 1922), vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 796. 5. In the Christian context, the Greek concept apocatastasis (ἀποκατάστασις, “restoration” or “return”) implies that ultimately all ­free moral creatures—­ angels, men, and devils—­will share in the grace of salvation. It is to be found in Clement of Alexandria, in Origen, and St. Gregory of Nyssa. This “restoration of every­thing” was strongly attacked by St Augustine of Hippo and formally condemned in the first anathema against Origenism, prob­ably put out by the Council of Constantinople in AD 543. (Adapted from F. L. Cross and Elizabeth  A. Livingstone, editors, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. rev. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005]). 6. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, ed. Thomas P. Halton and Michael Slusser (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­ic­ a Press, 2003), 16. See, http://­ www​.­e arlychristianwritings​ .­c om​ /­t ext​ /­j ustinmartyr​-­d ialoguetrypho​ .­h tml (chap. 8). 7. Strack and Billerbeck, Kommentar, vol. 4, pt. 2, p.798. 8. Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsh (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1963), 273. 9. Strack and Billerbeck, Kommentar, 1:1040. 10. Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. G. R. Beasley-­Murray (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971), 678.

Note s to Pages 1 8 2 –2 0 6     2 4 5

The Tears 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I & II, vol. 2 of Goethe’s Collected Works, updated ed., trans. Stuart Atkins (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2014), 10. 2. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 4:xxv. 3. All ­these citations come from the third-­century Latin “Apocalypse of Paul,” which is also known as Visio Pauli or Visio sancti Pauli (based on a lost Greek original), and not the Gnostic Coptic text found in Nag Hammadi. “The Apocalypse of Paul,” in The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Lit­er­a­ture in an En­glish Translation, ed. J.  K. Elliott and M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 633–34. 4. Ibid., 637 and 638.

The Imperceptibility of the Messiah 1. “The Epistle of the Apostles,” in The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Lit­er­a­ture in an En­glish Translation, ed. J. K. Elliott and M R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 563. See, http://­ www​.­earlychristianwritings​.­com​/­text​/­apostolorum​.­html. 2. Ibid., 563. 3. “The Acts of Peter,” in Elliott and James, The Apocryphal New Testament, 407. 4. “Agrapha,” in Elliott and James, The Apocryphal New Testament, 28. 5. Elliott and James, The Apocryphal New Testament, lists it as Agraphon 5. 6. Heraclitus, Heraclitus: Translation and Analy­sis, trans. and ed. Dennis Sweet (Lanham, MD: University Press of Amer­ic­ a 1995), 39 (fragment 92). 7. Jörg Dieter Gauger, ed., Sibyllinische Weissagungen: Griechisch—­Deutsch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 167. 8. Ibid., 169. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Amer­ic­ a, 1981), 144. 12. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 134. 13. Ibid., 135. 14. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael William Jennings and Marcus Paul Bullock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 664.

2 4 6     N o te s to Page s 206–237 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 123. 18. Ibid. 19. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. J. Moussaieff Masson and Wilhelm Fliess (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 278. 20. Ibid., 279. 21. Ibid., 449, Sept. 19, 1901. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 285. 27. Ibid., 385. The letter is actually dated Nov. 12, 1899. 28. Ibid., 449, Sept. 19, 1901. 29. Ibid., 456. 30. Ibid., 457. 31. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Franz Josef Görtz (Zu­ rich: Diogenes, 1991), 6:22. 32. Ibid., 21–22. 33. Franziska Reventlow, Romane, ed. Else Reventlow (Munich: Langen-­ Müller, 1976), 228. 34. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus, trans. David Pears and Brian McGuinness (New York: Routledge, 2001), 89.

The Excesses of the Phi­los­o­phers’ God 1. Søren Kierkegaard, Die Tagebücher, trans. Hayo Gerdes (Dusseldorf: E. Diederich, 1962), 4:7, Jan. 5, 1850.

Translators’ Afterword 1. Cited by permission of DLA, Marbach. 2. Ibid.