Triumphantly declaring on almost every 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
Humans are the offense of creation. It is an ancient thought in theology 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 human since eternity, independent of humanity’s fall from grace. Human ‘nature’ was thereby bestowed an honor that would 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 human 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 human: humans were the vision of eternity because they would bestow final significance upon the divine plan of creation.
If God’s favoring humans was vexing to the angels who resisted and were 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 humans 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 predestination of the Word would have turned, with the ‘justification’ of humanity, into the justification of incarnation against its despisers. Humans 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 were 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: humans 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.
God is too sublime even to think the world. In the Aristotelian tradition he only thinks himself. For the philosopher, if the cosmos had 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 there 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 human 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 humans 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 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 whether 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.
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, because 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 brothers—and ultimately in favor of the more radical land use of sedentary agriculture, even though God clearly had preferred the gentler practice of nomadic grazing. This 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, after all, with the initial admiration of shepherds who were 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 humans 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, because 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 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 after 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 matter’: 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 there 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 human. 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 creator 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 were 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 no choice but to preserve themselves. They might nonetheless understand that they could have a different God after 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, were 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 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.
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. Isn’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 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 after 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 under 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 between two lovers who are destined thus to become parents of a new living being: it is the will 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 were 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 present 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 will 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, 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, because “through her he felt the regular course of the world.”7
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 after Metamorphoses of a Youth, Doctor Carossa knows what characterizes these 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 favor 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 elements 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, there 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 literature is now turning so much to the psychology of children.” 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 century later a reader consults these ‘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 these world-artifacts as ‘history’ as soon as the membranes become permeable—and this 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 children as if they were 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’ will. 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 whole 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 after the higher purpose for which precisely this person, now, under this constellation, was put on earth. Purpose was more than fate. In Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, 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 under 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 children seemed to have vanished. Even Schopenhauer’s brilliant idea to involve those yet to come in the occasion of their conception could only survive as a metaphysical remnant. Until 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 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 after 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 here 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 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 everyone is free to ‘constitute’ him- or herself. The desire of the philosopher 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 Were 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.
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 mother. 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 because 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 everybody can claim. The place, too, was unusual: Kl[agenfurt] in 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 mother’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, because 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?”
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 “everything 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 mother 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 end, entrusted the witness: “Behold, your mother!” (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, because 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 there 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 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 here 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). Here 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 Father 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 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).
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 human (incarnate) found broad and deep approval. Implied in this theologoumenon is that the sin of human beings and the catastrophe of their salvation were not necessary to move God the Father 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 great 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 were it not for the clear or implied desperate question: whether 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.
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 ‘resistance’ 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 simple means were 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 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 century, 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 Christianity, 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.
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 because of their sins. For the metaphorics of ‘ransoming,’ the explanation that salvation takes time is nearly fatal. Would not every 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 great deal of time was necessary to fill the fixed number of places in the thinned-out celestial choir with saved souls. Here, after 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 after 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 those 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 selection 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 were larger than was conceded by pious calculation about the quality of angels? How much more problematic would things be for humans if even angels were 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 authority that could say “enough!”—especially not for the audience of the St. Matthew Passion.
“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 house 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 running 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 were 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 woman 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 here, in this case of a woman cherishing the body, a dimension is opened in which this memorable deed will 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 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 house 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 water 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 woman” (MP 5), not least because the listeners’ attention is supposed to be directed toward the body whose unanointed burial in the sealed tomb will 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 woman? 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 will not always have me. She has poured this water on my body because I will be buried” (MP 4e). The catastrophe of the master, which Judas will accelerate with his betrayal, is the hour of this woman 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 mother, 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 woman 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 those who wish to follow him into his higher regions of being. In the apocryphal texts it is mostly women to whom this kind of ‘fellowship’ as salvation makes sense and even appeals.
The worry that body, suffering, and death were 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 woman, 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).