Everybody wants to be a realist; becoming one is the hard part.
Caravaggio, who died in 1610, is an example for this unresolvable difficulty. Without question he lived as a ‘realist.’ But how did this enter his work?
The National Gallery in London shows Caravaggio’s Emmaus, finished shortly before 1600. The apostle sitting to the left of Jesus, Cleopas, exhibits the stigma of reality on the sleeve of his tunic: a hole. The apostle to the right of the unrecognized one, perhaps Peter, bears the signs of hard work with fishing nets: callouses on his hands. The host of the tavern is a rough sort, who like the two apostles does not notice anything, but unlike them never will.
Against the drama of the image, against the pathos of that moment shortly before the opening of the eyes, the gaping hole in the sleeve in the foreground has to carry all the weight of sober-mindedness. That realism is stigmatized by an obedience to reality is more than a convention, more than an aesthetic economy of selective reticence; it is a sign of its grudging acceptance of what cannot be wished away. This extends to the texts of modernity, in which proscribed words begin to make an appearance as if the author had to make a concession to the power of reality.
On the other hand: this stigmatic epiphany of reality presupposes, and is conditioned by, the criterion of immanent consistency; it may not be disrupted by appeals to accept what at any moment may reveal itself as legend or myth, as mere imagination, construction, or fiction. How else could Christ in the town of Emmaus have been painted than with this gaping hole in the sleeve of the apostle Cleopas?
How can anything remotely associated with ‘realism’ represent the pictorial topic of recognizing the resurrected one, who as such could only be a God? What the painter cannot show is the sign typical of divine appearances in antiquity. Gods cannot appear as themselves because there is nothing remarkable in their human form; but to step out of appearance, to disappear quietly and discreetly as Athena disappeared for Odysseus—this is ex eventu [from the event] the proper self-evidence that it had to be a god. The idea that an epiphany may be unbearable, as that of JHWH to Moses on Mount Sinai, is alien to the ancients; based on their experience with gods, they suspect afterward that the one who withdrew from visibility—the burden of every being—cannot have been a mortal.
The scene in Emmaus ends in the manner of the ancients: without transfiguration or unbearable glory, after the apostles had recognized Jesus from the way he broke bread and said grace. It was the ritual of remembrance he himself had connected to his death and his identity. The gaze of the apostle is fixed on the hands that perform everything that is necessary to give a sign. Once the sign has fulfilled its function and the gaze moves from the hands to the totality of the figure, it will be disappointed because there is nothing to blind it. There is nothing more to see. The sign is confirmed by the absence of the one who gave it.
The painter is in the awkward position of not being able to paint a Jesus so ethereal that his disappearance would be a consequence of his appearance. That is why Caravaggio painted a highly corporeal, somewhat unpleasantly fleshy Jesus who seems to have recovered well from the Passion that is a decade behind him. Looking back, this is an offense; looking forward toward his disappearance, which only the image’s viewers know will occur before it has happened, it magnifies the effect: this much visibility will soon disappear!
This, too, is a bit of realism—not in service of the scene but of the viewer who knows the story. It is realism applied to a circumstance that cannot be realistic: to the behavior of a god.
The footprint functions worldwide as a trace that demonstrates the ‘reality’ of religious events and personalities. There are multiple gigantic traces of the Buddha’s foot: no doubt, he was here. On the Temple Mount in Jerusalem there is a trace of a hoof of Mohammad’s horse, which lifted both to heaven from there; the depth of the impression demonstrates the thrust of the upward motion, no doubt.
Jesus did not leave any trace at his ascension. When Thomas doubted the reality of the Resurrection, he was allowed to put his finger in the chest wound of the crucified: it was him, and it was true when John had him say: “ego eimi”—It is I! It is a specialty of the Ethiopian Epistula Apostolorum, first edited in 1913, that the resurrected Jesus showers the doubting apostles with proofs of his reality—in other words: that he denies being a mere ghost of the departed. Peter is asked to touch the wounds on his hands, Thomas the wound on the side of his chest, and Andrew is told: “See if my foot touches the earth and leaves a trace.”1
If the foot touches and leaves a trace, the body has weight that causes the imprint—‘reality’ appears, and the trace is a sign not of remembrance but of immediate presence and its certainty. The problem of the certainty of the Resurrection arose with all the more urgency as the second coming receded: Had the ascended Christ been real even though he had not returned, as promised, on the clouds of the heavens? At the beginning of the second century, when this text was probably written and before there was an ‘ersatz dogma’ for the lack of eschatology, a lot of convincing had to be done just to save the Resurrection as an event in salvation history. For this, the argument of the trace is a precious indicator.
After the catastrophe of Golgotha, the apostles believed in the possibility of a ghost. Docetism, against which the Epistula Apostolorum was probably written, believes neither in fraud nor in a ghost. It is concerned only with the purity of the image of God: God can only appear to have suffered the consequences of being human. A little Platonism is helpful here: The shadows are not fraudulent; if they appear as something they are not, it is the fault of those who see and are confused by them. But this is also platonic: vestigium umbra non facit [a shadow does not leave a trace]. In the apocryphal Epistula Apostolorum, this is turned into a prophecy: “A ghost, a demon leaves no trace on earth.”2
Not many of the agrapha—Jesus’s sayings in the noncanonical tradition—have survived the church’s demand for the binding exclusivity of the four Gospels; after a massive delay of two thousand years, the historico-critical acumen of the penultimate theology has left us not even a dozen of these sayings. They are rarely longer than a sentence.
The most beautiful one comes from the Actus Vercellenses: “Those with me have not understood me.”3
Every reader of the Bible knows that Jesus was indignant about the ignorance of his apostles and followers. But because he promised them a Holy Spirit who would remedy their inabilities, he really cannot have been surprised that they could not be brought to reason with just his sayings and parables. He left them riddles and promised their solution in a future that was to come after much confusion. Why was it so difficult to understand what this creature of God needed?
The Agraphon is testimony to a somewhat harsher Son of man. It does not merely illustrate the desolate position of a savior, it inverts it: Whoever agrees with me and follows me, testifies thereby that he has not understood me. And it has to be that way. When the envoy of the Father, the messenger from another world, has spoken, any conviction about understanding this message has to be a pious misunderstanding. Was it ever any different with those who were not messengers of a god but announcers of higher, unheard-of truths—the philosophers, for example? Who had understood and would ever understand what Socrates meant when he declared self-knowledge the epitome of all claims to truth? Socrates could have spoken the Agraphon of Jesus of Nazareth first—had he not been so convinced of the power of his midwifery.
This Logion, excluded from ‘scripture,’ is neither a word of desperation nor a cold rejection of contemptible fellow travelers. Rather, it declares what is essential. No Holy Spirit would change this: it is enough to be with Him even if one thereby becomes the witness to something unrealizable. Put another way: no one would have been able to stand this Jesus of Nazareth had they understood the impositions contained in his words and demands. One could bear him only if one did not understand, and if one indulged in the beautiful illusion of having understood and obliged him.
This is not a pious story, not an example of dialectical self-negation. It is a ‘circumstance’ that could belong in a phenomenology of history. We can bear having a history, and insist on it, only because we don’t understand it. Misunderstanding—even that which is consolingly called ‘productive’—is the mode in which we are with anything that we ourselves cannot be.
Among the dozen or so original sayings of Jesus that as Agrapha have survived the merciless sifting and purging of historical critique is a scene based on Luke about a man doing work on the Sabbath. Jesus says to him: “O man, if you know what you are doing you are blessed! But if you do not, you are cursed and a transgressor of the Law.”4
Coming from the mouth of Jesus, it is astonishing to hear that those who do not know what they are doing should not be able to find forgiveness. Did not the crucified one say: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” (Luke 23: 34)? Was this not the only possible declaration that should have endured?
The commentator on the Apocrypha is brief in his commentary on Agraphon 11:5 “The accent in the antithetical parallelism is on the second half. It is a warning against the thoughtless infraction of the Sabbath.” Of course! For the rather liberal editor of the Apocrypha, whatever is not in the canonical four Gospels does not have the power to correct our image of Jesus. Especially if it does not render him more sublime. For the Jesus in Luke 6 lays claim to another Law in the pronouncements on the Sabbath, when he places himself above the Sabbath and elevates his followers with him, even if only for the purpose of harvest work: Dominus est sabbati Filius hominis [The Son of man is also the Lord of the Sabbath; Luke 6:5]. This would mean that violating the Sabbath is legitimized by the Messiah. But there is no trace of this in the Agraphon.
Why should the accent be on the second half of the paradox? In fact, this is out of the question, even if the first half could be explained with the facile psychologism that only those who know they are wrong can recognize the sinfulness of their actions, and those who do not and persist in their ignorance are eternally lost.
To the contrary, the Jesus of Codex D, with its additional reading of Luke 6, has gone through Gnosticism—which might be the reason it did not find acceptance in the canonical tradition. This exclusion would be inexplicable if our commentator were right about his idyllic view of the Sabbath. The rejection of the Agraphon from the tradition makes it clear that Jesus’s call to provoke the God of the Jews—indeed, the God of the world—had been well heard. Whoever violates the laws of this JHWH without wanting to do so has forfeited the opportunity to hear the message of the ‘alien God,’ of the savior.
It could be that this man who seemed to flaunt so openly the prescriptions of the Sabbath no longer belonged to the epoch of the Law, because the Sabbath is a monument to the completion of creation. If creation is degraded to the work of a demiurge, then all those are cursed who do not realize that the order of the demiurge is already over. Therefore, the part of the saying that is modeled on the Gospel of Luke belongs to the rebellion against the demiurge—like harvesting during Sabbath.
Sibyls are mythical artifacts of a time addicted to oracles, when peril and destruction are expected with measured equanimity. Heraclitus knew only one, and her voice penetrated “with raving mouth” the millennia, prophesying the “un-laughed, un-adorned, and un-anointed.”6 What the name means and whence it comes remains unclear, but it reaches back to the eighth century BC. The single sibyl of which Heraclitus speaks and who belongs to the outskirts of the Ionian world turns into a group of ultimately ten ecstatic demons who, in contrast to the Pythia of the oracle, renounce polysemy in favor of sheer terror. In Rome, the books of the sibyls perished in the fire of the temple of Jupiter on the Piazza del Campidoglio in 83 BC. But in Alexandria, where everything was collected, a Jewish variant of sibyls emerged, rivals of the prophets, and from them derived the Christian sibyls, who continued to grow in Byzantium and throughout the Latin Middle Ages.
This kind of apocryphal literature shows how the obsession with destruction in apocalyptic and Gnostic writings drew the suspicion of the empire and became the core of the accusations against the Christians as allies and beneficiaries of decline. We know from Justinian that reading the sibyls was forbidden under pain of death.
Rightly so, one is tempted to say from an all-too-modern perspective. For the excesses in indulging the sense of doom only served as a prelude to the advent of the messianic ruler, and emperors of real existing empires did not want to hear about that.
As so often with prophecies of doom, it is difficult to distinguish between those who perish and those who can enjoy the messianic realm. For the excess of terrifying visions leaves little room for survivors: “For the fire will ravage with such power on earth / and the water will rush, and destroy all the earth. / Mountains will burn / the rivers ignite and the springs run empty. / No longer will the world be the world when all humans perish.”7 A long night will then begin on earth, and only a new creation could let there be light and everything else, including new and different humans.
But promises of salvation intended only for others have never really been attractive. That is why, when the Messiah comes, there will inevitably be some who have persevered in the fashion of Noah or in their own way: “Then He will generate pure minds / In humans, and renew the human race.”8 The sibyl did not yet know that there are sensible reasons to reject concrete utopias. She makes the mistake—one is tempted to say—of unveiling some of the changes that will occur through the new state of mind. What will those of pure mind do? More precisely: What won’t they do?
It is remarkable that their new behavior seems to connect to the myth of Cain and Abel. How to use the earth, how to derive nourishment from it, becomes the differentiating marker: “No longer will the land be tilled with the round plough; / No longer the steers plough with sharpened iron.”9 The slain nomad Abel will be resurrected, the farmer Cain definitively shown to be in the wrong because he has violated the law of terra inviolata, as all of humanity did after him. True, Abel, whose sacrifice was accepted by JHWH, was favored by God; but, rationally speaking, it was Cain who took seriously the expulsion from paradise and the divine imprecation to work by the sweat of his brow.
Should the new nomads simply forget that Abel pretended to still be in paradise, where nature offered everything freely for his gathering and grazing? Cain was the one who had accepted the loss of paradise. That is why it is only natural to furnish the new eon with the promise that its inhabitants will eat “dewy manna as nourishment with white teeth.”10 In the end, the earth, after being reset into the tohuwabohu [without form, and void; Gen 1:2] will be newly created and inviolate. Purity of mind is made possible and durable because Care, as motivator of self-preservation and its evil ‘side effects,’ has crossed the river from whence it came.
As pretty as this messianic image is, it is still surprising what the proto-feminist sibyl as rival and successor of the prophets has forgotten. Her sisters will later lay claim to the peacefulness of their sex, and quote with emphasis the messianic vision in the second chapter of the prophet Isaiah that “in this distant future time” the peoples with their flocks will come to the ‘mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob’—to Jerusalem—and with his own people “turn swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:3-4). The sibyl at the end of the second century AD could not have known this. It is a different messianism, one that proceeds from a different level of change: from the martial to the agrarian instead of from ploughing to gathering.
Whatever is and can be considered promising depends on the condition that only the great savior can be trusted to leave behind. Messianism is relative, like all absolutisms in which the finality of peace and fulfillment are to be thought. The seemingly positive utopia of the sibyl’s messianism is as negative as that of Isaiah—negative in its mere subtraction of bellicose violence in the one, of agrarian violence in the other. Paradise is always only one level higher.
If the Messiah has already come, there are false apostles, false evangelists, false popes, but no false messiahs. If the Messiah is still to come, every epoch is in danger of accepting a false one. And there is not always an authority at hand to counter him.
Such was the case in the twelfth century, when the Egyptian doctor and philosopher Moses Maimonides was queried in 1172 by the Yemenite Jews, because someone arose in their midst who claimed to be the Messiah. With his “Letter to the Yemenites” (in Arabic, “Iggeret Teman”), Maimonides—who would go on to write with his Guide for the Perplexed (More’ Nebuchim) a philosophy of religion that was influential until Latin Scholasticism—begins his philosophical career. Alas, with a small, irrational blemish: the Yemenites should not believe this fraud, because the best sources predicted the advent of the Messiah in the year 1211.
Maimonides had thought about this hard. But only for himself, because he died in 1204 and did not have to answer for the date he had given. Additionally, his most important argument did not especially further religious tolerance in his environment. For he pointed the Yemenite Jews to all the false messiahs that had already appeared—Jesus, Paul, and Mohammed among them. This was the youthful sin of a thirty-seven-year-old man against religious tolerance. But it might well have been that the Yemenites would not have accepted a lesser argument.
The author of the book that in its Latin version of 1520 carried the telling title “Dux seu director dubitantium aut perplexorum” [Guide or leader of the doubters or perplexed] (already Albertus Magnus calls it “Dux neutrorum”) had in his Mishnah commentary accepted Jesus and Mohammed as precursors of the Messiah, and declared the date of the Messiah’s advent unknowable. In the face of such incertitude, it seemed better that a guide for the undecided should advocate tolerance toward the past and let the Messiah deal with the ‘consequences’ of his tardiness.
Translated from Arabic into Hebrew, the “Letter to the Yemenites” became a ‘classic’ in the preparations against false messiahs in Jewish history. Solomon Ibn Verga, a Marrano at the end of the fifteenth century, incorporated Maimonides’s catalogue in his “Scepter of Judah,” a history of the persecution of Jews in the Diaspora, but of the eight messianic usurpers he omitted the three Maimonides had not hesitated to mention. Instead he offers the great parable of tolerance that would arrive, by way of Boccaccio, in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise: the ‘ring parable’ of the goldsmith as the testator and his two sons as heirs. Only two sons. Ibn Verga did not know Boccaccio and had obviously referred to a genuine Jewish version of the story.
For the ring parable Lessing refers to Boccaccio, who in turn refers to the 1311 “Sicilian Adventures” of Busone de Rafaelli. That is exactly one century after the date Maimonides had given the Yemenites for the advent of the Messiah. There is no demonstrable, and hardly any possible, relation to Maimonides. But the religion of reason that Maimonides would develop from the Mosaic laws is kindred in spirit to efforts of Latin High Scholasticism and its interpretation of the New Testament.
Moritz Steinschneider was the first to suspect that Busone, as the supplier of the ring parable to Boccaccio, might have learned it from his friend Manuello, who has been identified as Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome. Immanuel, in turn, had poeticized the main theorems of the religion of reason in his poem “Yigdal,” which Lessing’s friend Moses Mendelssohn had translated into German. The Italian Immanuel had also adapted Dante’s Commedia Divina for the tradition of Maimonides—of course, without the Purgatorio—and in his Paradiso made room for the righteous of the Jews as well as for the ‘righteous of the pagans.’ It must remain speculation that someone with these convictions had transmitted, or perhaps created, the ring parable and sent it out in two different directions—to Boccaccio via Busone, and to the Jewish tradition via Solomon Ibn Verga. In this view, Maimonides would not be the ultimate origin of the parable, but through his transformation toward tolerance vis-à-vis the reputedly ‘false’ messiahs, he is the father of its ethos.
The lessons for the theory of tolerance that can be drawn from these considerations are the following: It was easier to generate respect for the recurring figures of religious founders when the Messiah had failed or continued to fail to appear than to firmly believe that the Messiah had once and for all already been here—just a little too imperceptibly to convince the skeptics of his own time and future times. If the immediate witnesses had not been able to believe in him, how should those who had learned of him only from hearsay do so?
Looking at the state of the world, it was more convincing to claim that the hour of God’s messenger was still to come; but the danger of falling for an impostor was great because of the secret teaching (one could almost call it beautiful) that the Messiah would come with his due delicacy and imperceptibility and would not have to change anything, because his arrival would change everything.
This pious suspicion was the consequence of a strict creational monotheism: the only true messianism would be one that least criticizes the workmanship at the beginning of the world and of the Bible and does not imply any rejection of creation. This would best describe Maimonides’s concern.
What if the Messiah comes? If everything were to change, the people who think that a Great Revolution is the secularized form of messianism would be right. If everything, or almost everything, stays the same, the people who do not expect more from the coming Jewish Messiah than from the already departed Christian one would be right. It is important to realize that the ineffectiveness of both would answer to a common necessity beyond all theological strife: protecting the creator of all things against criticism of his workmanship by a changer of all things. How can a world be in need of complete change without humiliating its god? Any spectacular turn in the need for salvation would imply such humiliation. Appearances have to be kept up when the time for the decision is near. The Messiah to come, who is not supposed to be a suffering and dying ‘servant of God,’ is further removed from conflict with the work of the six days. Because he does not suffer and die, the world does not have to be changed to avoid such drastic consequences.
But the Passion of the one who had already come? What would be its equivalent in terms of changing the state of the world? The theological idea of an ‘inexhaustible treasury of grace’ may imply the avoidance of this question, but it raises another: What degree and what extent of new wickedness does humanity have to assume to reach the bottom of the thesaurus gratiae? To put it differently: If the crucified truly was the Messiah—a claim no reliable witness attributes to him but theologians demand of him—does not the continuance of the world conceal and render doubtful that the Messiah truly had already come? The ‘first article’ of faith of the Apostles’ Creed gains in proportion to the weakening of the ‘second.’
Discrediting creation and calling for the Messiah are related reciprocally. Walter Benjamin’s earliest note on Kafka’s The Trial is enclosed in a letter to Gershom Scholem from November 1927, and begins to elevate this relation into a thesis: “To present history as a trial in which man as the advocate of mute nature makes a complaint against creation and against the nonappearance of the promised Messiah.”11 That Benjamin did not resign himself to this thesis is shown in the great essay he wrote in 1934 on the tenth anniversary of Kafka’s death. There he compares Kafka’s figures that are crushed by an unfathomable guilt with the ‘hunchback’ of the folksong, who is “at home in a distorted life” and will disappear “with the coming of the Messiah, of whom a great rabbi once said that he did not wish to change the world by force, but would only make a slight adjustment in it.”12 Later in the essay he speaks of ‘distortions,’ which the Messiah “will return to adjust” and which are not confined only to space, because in the indifference of space the world as a whole would be displaced to no effect whatsoever: no, “they are also distortions of our time.”13 This is vague enough, but corrects for the spatial focus of metaphors of rearrangement and adjustment.
The identity of the ‘great rabbi,’ whom Benjamin claims as the authority for this messianic minimalism, does not become clearer in his sketch “In the Sun,” written on Ibiza and first published on December 27, 1932, in the Kölnische Zeitung. A tired wanderer under the midday sun of the island lets his imagination run wild as it anticipates the path he intends to take. “Does the imagination move rocks and hilltops? Or does it touch them only like a breath? Does it leave no stone unturned, or does it leave everything as it was?”14 The keyword is “move” with its options of both violence and gentleness.
This leads to the minimalism of the promised change to the world, identified here more specifically as part of Hasidic culture: “The Hasidim have a saying about the world to come: everything there will be arranged just as it is with us.… Everything will be the same as here—only a little bit different.” Not even the privacy of home will be touched: “As our room is now, so it will be in the coming world; where our child now sleeps, it will sleep in the coming world.”15 Everything seems predicated on calmness, as if an apocalyptic threat, rather than a promise, formed the background. For the time being, one has to content oneself with Hasidic authority—there is not yet a ‘great rabbi.’
This landscape picture in Ibiza is nothing more than a metaphor for the power of the imagination, which does not disturb or destroy the landscape: “Thus it is with the imagination. It merely draws a veil over the distance. Everything might remain as it is, but the veil billows and beneath it things are displaced imperceptibly.”16 It is not that this soft power of the imagination is the prototype of messianic imperceptibility, but that the latter is a metaphor for the former. This is not an unimportant relation, because Benjamin makes the messianic allusion only in passing, as an ‘illustration,’ without going deeper into it than into the Potemkin-Schuvalkin anecdote with which he begins and attunes the reader to his Kafka essay.
Hasidic rabbis have names. That is how their stories and sayings are preserved for history. Who was the ‘great rabbi’ who had taught the minimalism of the ‘adjustment’ of the world by the Messiah? We learn about him in a letter from Scholem to Benjamin in which he responds to the request for a “fundamental critique” of the Kafka essay. At the end he writes: “One question: Who is actually the source of all these stories? Does Ernst Bloch have them from you or you from him? The great rabbi with the profound dictum on the messianic kingdom who appears in Bloch as well is none other than I myself; what a way to achieve fame! It was one of my first ideas about the Kabbalah.”17 In the 1980 edition of his correspondence with Benjamin, Scholem will drily comment: “I learned from this instance what honors one can garner for oneself with an apocryphal saying.”18 This is not one of those academic detective cases, whose collection had become such an unexpectedly expansive hobby for Dimitri Tschizewsky. But neither is it a case of violating ideological property, because the saying about the rearranging nonviolence of the Messiah has the authority of ‘connoisseurship.’ The imperceptibility of the Messiah’s advent not only solves the Christian dilemma of reconciling the first two ‘articles’ of the Apostles’ Creed, it also suspends the problem of time in messianism in a way that in other contexts could be called ‘elegant.’ No one can ever know whether what is supposed to happen has already happened; but neither can anyone ever usurp the role of messiah and thereby disfigure it to the point of rendering it visible. It may be preferable to not be allowed to know how far in the process we are, when so little needs to be done to transform the world of creation (zimzum) into its messianic state (tikkun). Violence loses its chance. It is always too much, because it is rooted in a dualism, whatever the names of it poles.
Even if this is not simply a mind game, the cunning of the story’s inventor is unmistakable: Scholem tested the usefulness of a type of thinking and writing entirely unknown to his contemporaries and of which he alone was perhaps the sole world expert. What would come of it? In any case, nothing that would run counter to his own dislike for the salvific expectations of a “great” renovation of the world or favor the revolutionary illusions of his friend Benjamin. The “new heaven and the new earth” of John’s apocalypse were not on the horizon (Rev. 21:1).
One is tempted, in fact forced, to think of Leibniz, whom Scholem demonstrably knew: the ‘monads’ seemed to derive directly from the sefirot of the Kabbalah. More important, though less visible, is the temporal dimension of the ‘best of all possible worlds.’ The analysis of this concept required not only the highest static quality of simultaneity—in this case, the better world still could be thought to be the best, if it could acquire over time all those perfections that would have been incompatible simultaneously. That is why the optimal world had to be defined as being capable of becoming ever better ‘over time’ (cum tempore), although this was possible without contradiction only if the continuous transitions are imperceptible. Imperceptibility is the condition of perfection; it excludes the perception of lack at any moment in time—whatever the ‘reality’ of that time.
We can see now that the messianic minimalism of the ‘great rabbi’ was embedded solidly in two traditions, and did not require the spectacle of an apocalypse.
It seems pedantic when Goethe, at the beginning of Poetry and Truth, reports the time and place of his birth as if copying it from a document. Yet already in the next sentence the pedant changes colors when he uses the exact date to determine the cosmic dimension and to cast himself a horoscope. In spite of Goethe’s inclination toward omens, this contrast is not a serious one: a decided lack of fatalism lets the irony shine through. It is okay to be a favorite of the universe, but one should not count on it. Goethe scholarship has not always succeeded in perceiving and accepting the balance between these two.
Goethe’s beginning is openly declared anachronistic in Sigmund Freud’s letter to Wilhelm Fliess from November 14, 1897, in which he announces an urgent discovery, ‘repression.’ “ ‘It was on November 12, [18]97; the sun stood precisely in the eastern quarter, Mercury and Venus were in conjunction’—No, birth announcements no longer start like that.” Then follows the ‘contemporary’ equivalent, the setting of an objective thought—however speculative it might be—in private and familiar surroundings: “It was on November 12, a day dominated by a left-sided migraine, on the afternoon of which Martin sat down to write a new poem, on the evening of which Oli lost his second tooth, that, after the frightful labor pains of the last few weeks, I gave birth to a new piece of knowledge.”19 What had shown itself repeatedly stayed this time “and looked upon the light of day.”20
Reading this with a good portion of leniency, it is important not to forget the addressee, the Berlin friend and rhinologist Wilhelm Fliess, who had spent his entire life identifying organic rhythms and periods, and who never doubted—indeed, who affirmed—the cosmic interrelation of human life with its different sexual periods and its bisexuality. Fliess’s calculations concerning patients and friends were, in fact, pedantic. Freud’s admiration for him as someone who was still his superior in matters of the imagination dwindled in proportion to the increase of Freud’s own strokes of genius. This first break among many with members of the ‘school’ is too well known to be recounted.
At a time when the intimacy between the friends had already suffered—how could it be otherwise, given that over time they knew everything about each other?—one of Freud’s lifelong wishes, a trip to Rome, became reality in the summer of 1901: “As such fulfillments are if one has waited too long for them, this one was slightly diminished, yet a highpoint of my life.”21 Happiness, Freud once wrote, is always the fulfillment of a childhood wish. In this case, it was a wish for ‘Bildung,’ a Goethean desire at that.
Happiness at last, even if long after these early wishes. Too close to the reality principle? Surprisingly not: ‘modern’ Rome is not at all sobering for Freud; he finds it “full of promise and likeable.”22 Coming from a Vienna he loathed, it might have been the contrast to the Viennese fin de siècle. With his ancient Rome he was entirely undisturbed, as he wrote to Fliess on September 19, 1901, in particular in front of the “abased and mutilated remnant of the Temple of Minerva,” which he “could have worshiped.”23
In contrast to Goethe, he could not enjoy the ‘second Rome’ of Christianity. It is not so much the cross that bothers him, as it did Goethe in 1790 in the sixty-sixth Venetian Epigram. No, for Freud it is the inability to “cast off the thought of my own misery and all the other misery I know about.”24 What disturbs him in Christian Rome is that messianism appears as realized—it disturbs him not as an observing Jew, which he was not, but as an explorer of the depths of souls into which nothing of the light of two thousand years of salvation seems to have penetrated. Even this side of the failed ‘self-analysis’ and before the great mysteries of the unconscious, Freud is not susceptible to any seemingly easy form of overcoming. That is why he could “not tolerate the lie concerning man’s redemption, which raises its head to high heaven.”25
This is not the resistance of the classicist, of the aesthete, of the ascetic—it is the resistance of the psychopathologist who seems already to know quite a bit about how to overcome the misery that he has recognized as his own as well. The relationship to the ‘second Rome’ is like a test case for overcoming the propensity for illusions and the pleasure principle that drives it—if only there were not the suspicion that a more sophisticated illusion had replaced the one that ‘raises its head toward heaven’ in Rome.
Freud was a nonbeliever, but also one who never would have converted to Christianity, no matter what advantage it might have brought him. Yet there is a ‘formal’ incongruity that keeps him from fully understanding Christianity. Expressed in nonsecular language: Everything of any importance indicated that the Messiah had not come. It is possible to understand the psychoanalytical ‘expenditure,’ its therapeutic as well as its theoretical side, as correlates to this deficiency; in any case, not as its secularization. Hardship and life circumstances did not matter as long as there was no ‘redemption.’ And there would never be!
The ‘second Rome’ was opposed to this view like nothing else, not even the anti-Semitism of Doctor Lueger in Vienna or, later, the ethnologist Wilhelm Schmid and his hostility toward Freud’s primal horde with its patricide and its totemism. The ‘first Rome’ had not known these conflicts: neither the expectation of a messiah nor the violence unleashed under the assumption of his advent. Had the ‘third Rome,’ that of a unified Italy, renewed this indifference and ‘innocence’?
I know I will be criticized when I say that in Freud self-analysis and self-staging cannot always be distinguished. That, too, joins his world to that of Goethe; only that he disposed of more subtle means to disguise this indistinguishability. Even to himself.
To give an anticipatory illustration: In 1907, during another stay in Rome, Freud issues the infamous and much-admired edict to his Wednesday evening circle in Vienna, dissolving the group and inviting members to join a new foundation so that they may conceive of themselves as free associates. On a postcard from Rome! Not an excommunication exactly, but with the same effect of keeping the unbelievers away from the mysteries. Rome had become the center of his own self-assertion, which consisted in nothing less than overcoming the inhibition of entering it. Just like Hannibal, the Phoenician from Carthage, Freud had turned around in 1897 at Lago Trasimeno and renounced entry into Rome. He had shown respect for an inconceivable barrier, which might have been as trivial as the cost of living in the capital but became a symbol for the not yet deposed father figure. “My longing for Rome is, by the way, deeply neurotic. It is connected with my high school hero worship of the Semitic Hannibal, and this year in fact I did not reach Rome any more than he did from Lake Trasimeno. Since I have been studying the unconscious, I have become so interesting to myself.”26 More insight is provided by a mistake in the Interpretation of Dreams, published late in the year 1899, where he confuses Hannibal’s father Hamilcar with his brother Hasdrubal: not a lapse of memory but a symptom—and yet critics of the dream book “find nothing better to do than to highlight these instances of carelessness, which are nothing of the sort.”27 Thus wrote Freud in a letter to Fliess on December 12, 1899.
And then Freud finally reached the city that had been denied to Hannibal, and the vivid “lie of redemption” was in front of his eyes. Here too he has his own paths to salvation, shielded from the light of reason: He performs the tourist’s ritual at the Fontana di Trevi, and then adds something, “and I invented this myself—dipped my hand in the Bocca della Verità at Santa Maria Cosmedin and vowed to return.”28 Before that return would become reality, the overcoming of his Hannibalesque inhibition about entering Rome has another, immediate consequence: Freud refuses to continue to suffer. He decides no longer to tolerate the humiliation in the delay of his appointment as professor. And he talks about it in the language of the ‘second Rome.’ “One must look somewhere for one’s salvation, and I chose the [professorial] title as my savior,” he writes to Fliess on March 11, 1902.29 The reference to the victory over the Roman inhibition is the final act in this self-staging for the spectating friend and himself: “When I came back from Rome, my enjoyment of life and work was somewhat heightened and that of martyrdom somewhat diminished.” Now he entered upon the path that everybody took to ‘salvation’: “Others are that clever without first having to go to Rome.”30
Enlightenment critics of Christianity, and even theologians, have worried too little that a religion, for the sake of redeeming humanity from guilt, permitted the most disproportionate expenditure—the incarnation and death of its God—and at the same time announced in its first proclamation a new sin that now could not be redeemed through any salvation: the sin against the Holy Spirit.
Although two of the evangelists, Mark and Matthew, know of it, and Mark introduces Jesus’s declaration with the amplifying amen, it remains unsaid and unknown in what this unforgivable transgression consisted; nothing else is its equivalent, because Jesus had confirmed that all sins and blasphemies—even those against him—would be forgiven, but the sin against the Holy Spirit would not be forgiven in all eternity (eis ton aiona). In the language—still unknown to the New Testament—of Trinitarian dogmatics: A lèse-majesté against the third person of the Godhead would not be worthy of the grace of redemption from the first person even through the suffering and death of the second. The ‘infinite reparation’ provided in the act of the crucifixion was impotent when finite beings with their paltry means acted against the majesty of the Holy Spirit.
Given the lack of interest on the side of the authorities, I will try to make an extra effort. Because majesties have become rare, it is difficult to imagine the gravity of such ‘infringements.’ We know the epoch of terrible curses and accursedness only from novels. Among all the commandments brought down from Mount Sinai, the second, against taking the Lord’s name in vain, has paled the most, even more than the sixth. Yet already the knowledge of the true name of the Lord was a sanctioned treasure, because it held the access key to the ear of the highest power, made the magic of the cult possible, and therefore had to be kept secret from the servants of Baal. The name of God is in the process, as it were, of dissociating itself from its bearer, of ‘hypostasizing’ itself like the aura of majesty (kavod) of JHWH and his ‘dwelling’ (shekinah) as the presence among his people.
God can be insulted and blasphemed by these preliminary manifestations because they represent him actively and passively. ‘Wisdom’ and ‘Logos’ are similar filiations of God, and the tendency to hypostasize properties to ‘figures’ is not restricted to the history of religion, as Neoplatonism shows—especially with its influence on the development of doctrine of the Trinity. Hence my assumption that the pneuma hagion [Holy Spirit], in the two instances in which the unforgivable blasphemia is mentioned, indeed meant the ‘name’ of God, or one of its ‘substitutions.’ Most likely, one of the substitutions whose translation from the original text was especially difficult—like the above mentioned kavod [glory of the Lord] and shekinah [dwelling of the divine presence]—compelled later interpreters to grasp for the Holy Spirit. The indirect lèse-majesté that was produced by the explication of the second commandment was applied so extensively to the ‘messengers’ of God, to the angels and the powers, that not even Michael dared to ‘blaspheme’ the fallen archangel Lucifer whom he had vanquished, if we are to believe the Epistle of Jude in the New Testament. Put differently: the angel did not curse the devil, because a ‘remnant’ of immunity may still be attached to him.
If we now ask what is meant at the climax of the trial in Matthew’s Passion when the high priest Caiaphas says to Jesus: “I put you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God!” (Matt. 26:63), one has to be aware of the extreme sanction that Jesus’s answer “So say you” elicits in its simplicity, unadorned by any protestations or oath. Then follows a further hyperbole of the messianic claim: Jesus is also the Judge of the World who will return on the clouds of the heavens. It is at this moment that the high priest tears Jesus’s clothes asunder and utters the death sentence: “He has blasphemed God” (eblasphemesen). No further investigation was necessary. But apparently it is only the apocalyptic vision of Judgment Day—“sitting at the right hand of power” (another of these figurations) (Matt. 26:64)—that makes the blasphemy worthy of capital punishment. The names ‘Christos’ and ‘Son of God’ were too vague to rend someone’s clothes. Caiaphas was still unaware of the dogma of the ‘Second Person’; the ‘anointed’ was just one messianic attribute among many, that of the Davidian King of the End Times. There is, therefore, a tight connection between the Logion of the unforgivable sin and the reason for Jesus’s death sentence; what is at stake in both is the extremity of turpitude, the unsurpassable insult to the Godhead.
Luke did not incorporate the Logion of the unforgivable sin. Can we guess why he did not? Matthew and Luke are the ones that report—even if in different ways—the Holy Spirit’s authorship of Mary’s pregnancy. Matthew passes over it so conspicuously that it looks as if he did not quite know what to do with this ‘finding’ (heurethe): she “was found with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 1:18). The angel in Joseph’s dream uses the same language to soothe him and prevent him from rejecting his betrothed. This dream angel is a substitute for the angel of annunciation in Luke who even details that the Holy Spirit will ‘overcome’ her and who introduces an additional authority that will return in the interrogation before Caiaphas: the “power of the Highest” (Luke 1:35) will ‘overshadow’ Mary.
In both Luke and the interrogation scene of Matthew’s Passion, the seating arrangement “at the right hand of power” is the same; except that Luke had introduced this synonym at the beginning of the story of the Son of man. But Luke did not seem to have understood the meaning of this intensification. He inverts the sequence in the interrogation: first the ‘anointed,’ then the ‘Son of man to the right of the power of God,’ then, separately, the ‘Son of God’ (Luke 22:66–70). It is the last denomination that is supposed to render any further investigation superfluous. One could say that, dogmatically speaking, nothing much became of the ‘power of God,’ whereas the Spirit gains theological contours. This might be the reason Luke later does not incorporate the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’: it would have implied that Jesus extends to the author of his incarnation the special protection that he, as redeemer, is powerless to do anything about, if someone were to blaspheme the mystery of his provenance.
Luke confronts this danger without reference to the indissoluble curse: he tells the story with the protective addition of a named angel—in contrast to the anonymous angel of the dream in Matthew—and adds the ‘power of the Highest’ known already from the Passion. At the beginning and at the end, Luke has the milder words. An unforgivable sin was not in line with his way of thinking.
The history of biblical exegesis shows that the sin against the Holy Spirit was difficult to interpret. This is the case even for Augustine, a specialist in sins, who identified it as the hardening of the heart until the end of life (duritia cordis usque ad finem huius vitae), in which humans refuse to accept the forgiveness of sins earned by Christ. But so it was with every sin insofar as the sinner does not disavow it and the sin can be forgiven. The sin against the Holy Spirit, in this view, is a kind of meta-sin that renders all other sins final. And yet neither here nor anywhere else it is stated what this atrocity entails.
It is therefore understandable that in spite of a noted enthusiasm for confessing one’s transgressions, no one in two thousand years of Christianity has ever confessed to this ultimate guilt. With the exception of Kierkegaard’s father, who was prepared to believe that cursing God as a young shepherd in Jutland was this unbearable sin, and who found proof of this conviction in his worldly success, which he took as a sign of his terrestrial ‘compensation’ and hence of his eternal ‘rejection.’ None of which prevented his son Søren from using this compensation to support his existence as a writer.
Here we have the paradox of justification by faith alone in its clearest form: a man, intensely conscious of his guilt, assumes that he must have committed the greatest sin mentioned in the Bible. Only by accepting this biblical ‘exception’ can he testify to the intensity of his faith. He believes even what should destroy him. His faith obscures the paradox that keeps him alive: whosoever believes in the unforgivable sin cannot have committed it, because otherwise the ‘justification by faith alone’ would be untrue. And yet for that there is no guarantee. The believer must remain in doubt as to whether he has committed this unknown sin. The most extreme means of redemption from the most extreme guilt suspends even the certitude of salvation.
The childhood story of Kierkegaard’s father seems to have taken on a life of its own. Friedrich Dürrenmatt recounts that in the village of his childhood the custom had been that his mother told stories from the Bible, while his father, who was a pastor, told stories about the pagans. The stories the father told, when returning with the child from the ‘woods’ after ministering to the lonely farmers, mentioned the names of the stars in the sky. In these myths, there was talk of the curse of the gods on rebels and blasphemers, and the son understood neither what a curse was nor why there were so many gods when his mother had said everything depended on there being only one. And yet this one God also seems to be dealing in curses, and that was what, in the midst of his father’s Greek myths, startled the child as an alien ingredient: “… once, when we returned from a snowy night in the ‘woods,’ my father told the story of a man who as a poor boy had cursed God, and from then on had prospered, had become rich, but also sadder; and he told me that there is a sin that God cannot forgive, but that no one really knows what it consists in—a secret that preoccupied me because it also seemed to preoccupy my father.”31
It is strange that there is no clear connection in this story between what the poor boy, of unknown age, understands as a curse and the unforgivable sin; at most, the misunderstood curse could be an indication of the direction where the unknown sin could be found. But why would one search for it, given that there was no benefit in recognizing it as the sin that one had already committed? The answer can only repeat what has been said: because just believing in the unknown sin is already everything it can be and is about. Dürrenmatt’s point is the reason this story bothers the child in the first place. It is not the mysterious transgression that worries him but the perception that the father seems to be worried by it.
The reason can only be conjectured from the context. Dürrenmatt’s father loved to tell the myth of Theseus, who, upon returning from Crete and killing the Minotaur, forgot to raise the white sails as the sign of his victory and survival. This caused the father to believe falsely that his son was lost and to throw himself into the sea in desperation. What did that mean? The distraction of the sons kills the fathers if the latter get too attached to the former. For the son listening to the father’s tale during the nightly walk, it means that he, too, does not do justice to the father: “… I thought too little about him, and I reflected on him even less.”32 This doubt about never being able to do enough lends this winter night in the mountains an aura of indeterminate significance that on a larger scale accrues to the unforgivable sin: his father seems confused by it, because his God is a god who can be insulted and cursed, and who, with the splendor of worldly success, beguiles sinners into not seeing that they are lost. And the village pastor probably did not even know that his son carries on this legacy and its guilt and erects from it a vast edifice of thought. Otherwise the son’s reminiscence would not have omitted the name of the sin.
To be persecuted by God with blessings is a thought that can be borne only in its self-dissolution, in its reflexive deviousness that does not make the Passion entirely superfluous. It nonetheless belongs to the mysteries of the history of Christianity how an ‘inclusion’ like this could survive in its founding document. Or was it one of its strengths to have this instrument handy?
Indeterminateness is perhaps the last chance that an idea has to exert power over minds. Christianity had to abandon its indeterminateness when it made it its core certainty that the one who is to come had already been here. Although a second coming on the clouds of heaven is, joyously or fearfully, promised on Judgment Day, the decision for this salvific event is already anticipated by justification or disbelief. Whatever was yet to come, what really mattered had already happened.
The intellectual condition of Judaism is the uncertainty of the Messiah’s coming. No one could say when or how he would come, not even who he would be: whether he is someone who will return or someone as yet unnamed. It is this state of suspension—in which everything is still possible, in which no single event could ever prove the failure of the Lord of the Covenant and every event could exculpate him with an increase of expectation—that Christianity had jeopardized. It might have been a minor functional equivalent that the savior left his faithful with a new uncertainty: what the greatest and absolute sin might be.
This sin’s only intelligible and exclusively eschatological meaning could have been that everybody at every moment has to fear committing it. Only then would they prefer above all else the destruction of the world in order to eliminate the risk of committing this sin. No amount of time granted to the world could outweigh the unknown temptation, the consequences of which not even the dearly purchased release from the bonds of Satan could compensate.
Montesquieu once said that every power becomes despotic at that moment when it is no longer clear what constitutes treason. To be sure, treason is not the secularized version of the sin against the Holy Spirit, but functionally it occupies the same position. Treason and sin are both mythical, when one can become guilty without having committed them—as with original sin—or when one cannot avoid them, as is the case in spiritual or ideological betrayal. Here the covenant between moral consciousness and dogmatic system escapes all rational control. At the same time, power increases infinitely when it makes accomplices out of those who are still supposedly innocent and turns them against those who are already or supposedly guilty.
One of the achievements of a state governed by the rule of law is that it demands the designation of its secrets. If revealing them is treason, they have to be known to be secrets. The price for this is that the levels of classification and the stamps to signal them continue to multiply. And at the same time, so do the risks of using them. The guilty one is not only the person who divulges the secret but also the one who uses the stamp TOP SECRET too sparingly. That is how the discipline of arcana proliferates.
The degree of betrayal and the risk of committing it become inescapable, if the suspicion is omnipresent that it has already been committed. This wasn’t successful with the sin against the Holy Spirit and could not happen once the imminence of the apocalypse had to be postponed. In the case of the betrayal of state secrets, enemies and situations can be invented to justify the vividness of the suspicion.
Conspiratorial groups of a different kind—given that no one believes in real mysteries anymore—live by the fiction of managing secret insights. Decades ago they still could be of an aesthetic kind. The ‘Cosmics’ in Munich at the turn to the twentieth century threatened to kill anyone who betrayed their secrets. But even the members of the inner circle did not know what these secrets were. They could have been communicated just as little as the nature of injustice in the sin against the Holy Spirit.
The Countess of Reventlow, an insider, rendered this situation in a short scene in her Munich novel Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen [1913, The Notebooks of Mr. Dame]: “Konstantin turned pale: ‘Have I betrayed cosmic secrets?’ he asked, looking questioningly at Mary. She just shrugged: ‘You never know’.”33
The discourses of ‘coming to terms with the past’ and the ‘work of mourning’ exhibit, in their burdensome indeterminateness, similarities to the exegetical fate of the biblical ‘sin against the Holy Spirit.’ Where are those who have committed it? Where are the others who worry that they may be capable of committing it? Thus, it remains a threat with an indelible consciousness of guilt for all those who one day will have to realize, in despair as much as surprise, that they have committed it.
How does this fit into a theological landscape in which it cannot be denied on principle—even if it is not explicitly affirmed—that even the devil could be redeemed with gifts from the infinite treasury of forgiveness that Jesus has provided with his death of atonement? For an infinite measure of mercy may not be negated or doubted by excepting a single creature from its efficacy. The sources of revelation do not say whether or not the fallen angel actually benefited from this gift, but the doctrine of infinite grace certainly does not deny it. Even Origen, the most profound of the early theologians, did not claim that in the apocatastasis God’s antagonist would be pulled from the deepest recess of hell; he only wanted to leave open the possibility that, in the repetition of the world, everybody from the highest to the lowest could be or become anything.
The freedom between Good and Evil would be restored by suspending the finality of having to be one or the other. After all, the leader of the angels’ rebellion had not simply become evil; in his place in hell, he could only remain evil. Origen had taken the principle of the inexhaustibility of the treasury of mercy so far, because he thought it appropriate that an infinity makes the infinite possible—and under the auspices of traditional metaphysics, this was possible only through repetition: of the same, but not by the same.
We do not know how Origen coped with the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit.’ It could not fit into his system. For it shares the invaluable advantage with similar injunctions that no one will ever be happily free of guilt. People free of guilt would appear as an ominous threat to all officers administering feelings of guilt.
What else can we do if, hardly having escaped from the womb, we already have to plot the murder of the parent who stands in the way of our libido? That we are murderers from the very beginning is no longer a demonic figure of projection, it is virtually each of us, even if the fulfillment of our desire happens only in the latency of our dreams. Why has no theologian—always eagerly searching for sources of guilt—ever considered declaring the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ to be the one that everybody has always already committed?
And perhaps this sin consisted in not having refused life in the womb already, and not having killed one’s mother to prevent similar ‘misdeeds’? Or is it the boundary concept of a will to live that, on the other side of being (that is, mortality), refuses to acquiesce in its finitude and instead insists virtually—in every biotropic act of defense, of procreation, of borrowed deferral—on immortality? The Idea of the Good can never fully appear in the world—but could that of Evil? Only if one shares the biblical premise that among all transgressions there is one that was not expiated through the sacrifice of the Son of God, and that someone had committed it—by accident, because no one knows what it consists in.
One has to try to imagine these ‘sinners against the Holy Spirit’ as people who got the idea that they are just that. What can they do? Do they repent, even if they did not know what they did? Will they, like Gregory on his stone, become penitents and appeal for an unattainable pardon? If the world knows of their guilt, will it demand from them the renunciation of passing time and the related abatement of identity? Why did Jesus say to his apostles, when they criticized his anointment, that the poor would always be among them? When instead he could and should have said that they would never lack guilty people—that they would live off the guilt of others, which they are authorized to forgive with the exception of the unforgivable sin? Or maybe not?
The refusal of absolution from this one sin—should it not lead to the much more pressing need to learn to live with guilt? Are those who impose ‘the work of mourning’ not at the same time its supervisors? Might the unforgivable sin have been invented as an instrument to burden all-too-facile forgiveness with the suspicion that the unforgivable might have been ‘overlooked’? This is not a random problem: whoever was uncertain of salvation might have committed unforgivable deeds.
In this case, someone could appear as a benefactor and yet be cursed. The presupposition that the catalog of sins is continuously enlarged in order to accommodate the offer of forgiveness is of no use here; just as in the case of a death, posterity demands from the survivors a visible tribute of mourning in order to then offer the service of solace.
Solace lies in the fact that it could happen to anyone. But consoling should not be conceded to everyone; at the limit, this is exactly what must not happen and for which solace may be withheld. There are always approximations to the point where the futility of solace and forgiveness emerges. Should there be no name, no threat for it? We can almost sense how everything converged on introducing this possibility: the contradiction to the inexhaustibility of redeeming mercy.
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”34 Advice that was followed, and remains to be followed, in the case of the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit.’