The assumption that the problem of the connection with political power can be resolved simply by highlighting the difference [between God and Caesar], as the old liberal theology used to do, does not stand up to the exegesis of Mark 12: 17, or other similar passages in Matthew and Luke. The entire patristic tradition leads to a very different polemical reading of this passage, one in which perhaps more ‘violently’ Jesus appears as a sign of contradiction far from any concession to idle irenicism.1
An initial interpretation of Christ’s words might sound like this: obey Caesar up to the point that Caesar demands of you such things as will not harm your reverence for God (in nullo modo pietati nocent). If you are asked for a tribute, give it – for your action will have no negative effect on your pietas.2 You must be able to distinguish between a Caesaris tributum, a tribute to Caesar and a Diaboli tributum, a tribute to the devil. Satan demands a tribute that contradicts reverence owed to the Lord, Caesar does not. Caesar asks only for the nummus, for coin. What cannot Caesar possibly demand? That which is of God and from God, and thus Caesar can demand neither the body nor the soul nor the will. The tribute owed him can only be paid in aurum, in gold. Nomisma Caesaris in auro est. Such is Jerome’s summation concluding the entire hermeneutic tradition preceding him.
Caesar is represented on the coin – and the representation must always be connected to what it represents. The coin represents Caesar and so you don’t so much give as give it back to him. It belongs to him. But where do you find the image of God? The thing on which God represents himself, that you must return to him. And this ‘thing’ is the whole human, body, soul and will. To Caesar nothing but gold, the tax we must pay for our lives in this world. Necessarily of course for with coin you acquire necessities (necessaria). Not only is there no abstract asceticism in Jesus but the asymmetry affirmed here is a radical one: to Caesar only that which means nothing to either the spiritual dimension or the human body and will. Give unto God the human being: The human is the image of God. God’s image is figured in the human (Dei autem nomisma homo est. In homine est Dei imago figurata).
Unto Caesar not even the body – only what materially nourishes it. Caesar is needed only to sustain the body. The living body is from God and unto Him we must return it, together with the soul and the will. However, even here we do not reach the highest level of asymmetry; this consists in understanding ‘to render unto Caesar’ as a radical renunciation of everything that is Caesar’s. Paying the tribute no longer appears as the fulfilment of an obligation or a duty but as a liberation from everything in us that is not imago Dei, in God’s image. First Origen and later Ambrose interpret the passage from the Gospels in the light of ‘leave everything and follow me’. Aurum, gold, is a burden, an impedimentum. What must be nothing to you give to Caesar. He only has power over that which for you is nothing. Only a faint line separates this statement, in which the idea of power is hollowed out, from the annihilation of the bearer of power.
Far from finding in the passage from the Gospels the basis of a peaceful arrangement, Origen and Ambrose exalt its mystical dimension. The human being is the image of God but has also committed sin – and since then the original image is in conflict with another stemming from the Enemy. ‘Render unto Caesar’ comes to signify not only freeing yourself from all religio, all obligations, to him but also deposing the image of the Enemy who still marks you. That is to say, lay aside all that still inclines you to malevolence. To return the coin to the one who is represented on it is the ‘image’ of the will finally to renounce all that binds us to the true prince of this world. If you do not give up the nummus, the coin, you can never express your being as imago Dei, as the image of God. Still, this translatio is required: on the coin Caesar’s effigy ultimately appears as the mask, as the persona of the Enemy himself.
The spirit of the Gospel account seems to accord with this interpretation. To the question of the Scribes ‘whether’ the tribute should be paid, Jesus responds just as though they understood neither his preaching nor his deeds. Do you not see I have left everything? Have you not heard that those who follow me are called to abandon even their mother and brother? And yet you want me not to abandon, not to reject what is Caesar’s? Not only my soul but my body and will are absolutely alien to Caesar and to his State. Caesar asks me for a coin? Here it is – it was always his and I had already freed myself of it. I do not in the least contest the authority of Caesar in this field. Indeed, I fully acknowledge it precisely because it has nothing to do with whom I obey and whose part I am.
However, the dilemma arises because Jesus neither says that the image on the gold coin is that of the Enemy nor does he simply show ignorance of its ‘value’; he just wants to give it back to Caesar. Implicit here is the recognition of Caesar’s function as guarantor of necessities, the recognition of his servitium and just as much perhaps of his function as already a barrier to evil. But this Caesar is simply impossible – even more impossible than the love of Jesus. Power could not be reduced to such a minimal catechontic form without disappearing. A power that is pure service is no longer power and could not continue to reign if every link with the will of its cives were to be broken. A katechon without a soul is perhaps conceivable but not without a body and a will. This indeed seems to be the meaning of the Word of Jesus. Faced with the question of the scribes, he does not simply repeat that his kingdom is not of this world, he does not merely ‘look and pass on’3 but listens and responds. He lives in the city and knows who Caesar is – and it is here at the very heart of the city where he forcefully poses an irresolvable problem. On the one hand, do not fight political authority – for to fight means to reinvigorate it4 – and on the other, empty it out from within, divest it precisely of all its auctoritas. That is, on the one hand arrive to a point where its image borders on that of the Enemy, and on the other demand it, so to speak, in the bare form of servitium. It would be easy to escape the dilemma by conceding that the gold coin also has soul and will – and, conversely, it would be easy to escape it by ‘absolutizing’ the Kingdom, as if it were not written ‘thy will be done on earth’. But to follow the paradox of Jesus ‘is the task where the mighty labour lies’ (‘hoc opus, hic labor’5).
1 On the interpretation of the reply of Jesus, see M. Rizzi (2009). For an interpretation seeking to moderate the power of the passage from the Gospel, see J. Ratzinger (2008).
2 In the New Testament the Latin term pietas, which originally meant ‘duty’, came to denote a special kind of reverence towards God (tr. note).
3 Dante, Inferno, Canto III, 51.
4 This is my summary of Karl Barth’s position from the first edition of his Commentary to Romans 13 (1919). See Karl Barth, The Epistles to Romans (1968).
5 lit. ‘here is the task, here is the hard work’, Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 129 (tr. note).