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 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 after 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 righteous 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 will 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 will 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 gently, gently rest!” (MP 68).
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, because 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 else 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 apologetic ‘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 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 will 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 later 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 were 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’ toward his servant as someone 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 these 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 because 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 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 dying. The episodes of the triple 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 after 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 him.” And the chorus responds four times: “My Jesus, good night!” (MP 67). The final chorus strengthens this mood with the perennial “Rest gently, gently 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 here 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 here—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 silent. 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).
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 those 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 women, who do not know what to do with the emptiness of the tomb; after 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 music.
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 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.’
The age-old conflicts between fathers 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 Father 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 Father demands this ransom for a pardon 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 Father 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 Father. 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 these 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 Father? 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 Father after the Passion. Why did he not make this known to those 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 father 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 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, because 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 Father too—or may the pious listener to the St. Matthew Passion not think this way?—the Father 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 father figure of what we like to call—to conceal its harshness—‘salvation history’ sits among the listeners.
In the Middle 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 mother, 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 Father reconciled with his maternal side? Or a repentant accomplice in the Passion? If these questions have not been raised, it is, after 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?
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 future 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, after a thorough inspection of the agonies of the damned, does he ask the all-encompassing question: “Why were 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 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 those who did not want to serve his Lord and therefore have been punished. Had his objection—that those excluded from salvation were 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?
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. Every 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 will 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 mother 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 people, which the preacher from the pulpit in Portugal may have asked himself. Was not this the truth of his God, that he would rather suffer himself than let others suffer? When his redeemer—he might have reasoned—gained the immeasurable treasury of grace, he also would have gained the bit of graciousness that others do not have to suffer because 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 will.
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.