by Jack Miles
The self-martyrdom of God Incarnate was an inspiration for Christian martyrs during the first three centuries of church history. Imperfectly distinguished from martyrdom, suicide did not become a theoretical problem for Christianity until martyrdom itself became a practical problem for the church. This happened when the Roman empire became Christian and dissident Christians began using martyrdom against the now established church as effectively as their forebears had used it against the empire. It was only then that a sharp distinction between glorious martyrdom and shameful suicide began to be actively propagated. The great change owes most to the philosopher and theologian Augustine of Hippo (354–430 C.E.), a bishop of the established church in whose diocese heretical martyrs were winning converts. It was Augustine’s influence that brought about the revision in Christian thought whereby martyrdom in any but an approved cause could be judged to be self-homicide and therefore, like any other homicide, an offense against God.
By this time, however, the ideal of sacred suicide had had three hundred years to put down social as well as intellectual roots in Christianity. To be sure, the socially and even ecclesiastically disruptive power of the idea was enormous, but then this aspect of it had been grasped long before Augustine. Two centuries before his day, the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria was prepared to dismiss certain Christian martyrs as mere “athletes of death.” But how far could Clement or Augustine or any Christian theologian go in this direction before skirting the possibility that Jesus himself was a mere athlete of death? Had his death not been unwelcome to established religious authority? And so the question remained unresolved. Against Clement, Origen honored martyrdom as “a second baptism in blood.” In the persecution of Christians that broke out in the third century, his was understandably the more appealing idea. When the persecution passed, it lost some of its appeal, and so on, back and forth.
In the end, however, the ideal of sacred suicide was too well established in Christian behavior, beginning with Jesus himself, and too well documented in scripture to be altogether suppressed, even when opposed by the brilliance of an Augustine. It could be and was muted, submerged, softened, and rationalized, but it could not be and never has been entirely eliminated. Instead, it has lived a kind of stop-and-start life in theology, repeatedly forgotten, repeatedly revived. As Dauzat puts it, “Both the durability of the theme and the circuitous, fragmentary, or, if you will, episodic approach that it inspired were quick to appear.”
Dauzat offers Le Suicide du Christ as a kind of “theological novel,” revisiting the kinds of theology that have been written in each chapter of Christian history, starting with the earliest. Strikingly, what was true back then has remained true: The “lost” idea has been rediscovered and reexplored by Christian theologians far more often than by anti-Christian polemicists. What might be the consequences of a revival in our own day? Dauzat suggests that both conservative and radical theology will be undercut if and when this marginal idea begins to move toward the center. Conservative “atonement” theology, according to which God sacrifices Jesus so as to make amends to himself for the sins of mankind, will be undercut when God is understood to be sacrificing himself. Radical “death of God” theology will be undercut when the Incarnation is understood to be not a conceptual culmination but simply a premise for the drama in which God subjects himself to human dying.
In his distinctly sardonic style, Dauzat writes: “From the agnostic side, they crowd around the gate. It’s a question of who will get to deliver the fatal blow. From the side of the theologians, the same silly airs, the like intrigues. Pilate, Judas, our sins, the Romans, the too famous ‘Jews’ of John: Everyone has his place in this macabre mise en scène for courtroom buffs. Except God.” Dauzat’s own, postmodern way of bringing God onto the “macabre mise en scène” may be suggested by the title of his introduction, “Theology Stripped Naked by Her Bachelor, Even.” That title echoes the title of Marcel Duchamp’s epoch-making The Bride Stripped Naked by Her Bachelors, Even. The meaning this endlessly discussed painting acquired (whatever Duchamp intended) was that the art of painting was itself about to change. For Dauzat, theology’s bachelor is God himself, the one and only one of his kind in the universe. Theology will change, or could change, Dauzat implies, when the self-sacrificing, suicidal, cosmic bachelor takes the place in contemporary Christian consciousness that he had in early Christian consciousness. In the postmodern manner, Dauzat’s theology goes backward and forward at will, assuming that any new chapter in the ongoing “theological novel” of the West may draw as eclectically as it chooses on all the previous chapters. The history of theological thought, like the history of all thought, is a story whose entire plot must stir in its sleep as each subsequent chapter is written.
Traditional biblical theology has been ideological criticism of the text of the Bible and as such has been far more deferential toward its subject than, for example, the comparable criticism of the plays of Shakespeare has been toward its. From Shakespeare’s plays alone, even without detailed study of the playwright’s historical setting, it is possible—if one is determined to do so—to infer an entire worldview. Rarely is it suggested, however, that once the ideology of a Shakespeare or any other author is established, it should be taken as normative. In recent decades, quite to the contrary, ideological criticism has been used more often to belittle than to aggrandize the major writers of the Western canon. In this regard, ideological criticism of the Bible—that is, biblical theology—has remained at a striking remove from other ideological criticism, for its assumption has continued to be that the thought of the Bible should indeed be normative or, if not normative in every regard, then at least relevant by definition for the conduct of personal and political life. To a point, the Bible, rationalized by biblical theology, still functions in just this way for a large religious constituency. It continues to do what imaginative literature, at its most ambitious and evangelically “humanistic,” had begun to do for a secular constituency in the West until a loss of secular faith brought that kind of humanism to a close at the end of World War I. Perhaps biblical theology will continue to function in some such normative way, but if so, what new challenge must it meet?
In 1942, Albert Camus opened The Myth of Sisyphus with the famous line “There is only one serious philosophical problem—the problem of suicide.” At the turn of the twentieth century, the Netherlands became the first country in modern times to legalize euthanasia. Dauzat suggests that the way in which Christianity imagines the suicide of God may have much to do with how the ongoing philosophical question of suicide, and the many questions to which it relates, will be engaged in the twenty-first century. To say this is not to sketch the outline of a theology but only to name a starting point. New starting points, however, may be what theology needs most.
For the modest purposes of this book, no overarching theological thesis need be advanced. It should be enough to note that strange as the idea of the suicide of Christ may seem to some, it is an idea that a Christian, even a devout Christian, can entertain. Among many possible illustrations of this point, one must suffice, an example of particular clarity and poignancy taken from the career of one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the poet and theologian John Donne.
In 1610, Donne wrote Pseudo-Martyr, a dismissal of the dissident Catholic martyrs of the early seventeenth century as deluded suicides. Then, just a year later, he wrote Biathanatos, a defense of outright suicide in which Jesus himself is chief among the exemplary suicides of the past. Biathanatos—so daring in its day that it could be published only after Donne’s death—is a tour de force of authentic intellectual passion. A fiercely brilliant scholar who once confessed a “sickely inclination” to become a biathanatos (that is, a suicide: the Greek word means “one dead by violence, especially self-inflicted”), Donne was paradoxically strengthened by his pathology to trace Christian martyrdom to its source in the suicide of God Incarnate. Pseudo-Martyr, by contrast, seems a politically expedient work of convention
al religious propaganda. Yet who is to say that Donne did not believe what he wrote both times?
The ambiguity of the question resides in the fact that Christ is a suicide by metaphysical definition, whether or not he is a suicide in some more ordinary sense of the word. That is, if Jesus is God Incarnate, then no one can have taken his life away from him against his wishes. His suicide is, in this regard, as deeply built into the Christian story as the doctrine of the Incarnation. Thus, for Thomas Aquinas, Jesus was the cause of his own death as truly as a man who declines to close a window during a rainstorm is the cause of his own drenching. Thomas strongly implies, moreover, that those who actually killed Jesus, or conspired to kill him, were less than fully responsible agents, that they were tools in the hand of God, a species of human rainstorm drenching God because God wished to be drenched. There is support for the latter view in the New Testament itself. From the cross, Jesus says of his executioners, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Peter, preaching in the Temple after Jesus’ death, says, “Now I know, brothers, that neither you nor your leaders had any idea what you were really doing; but this was the way God carried out what he had foretold when he said through all his prophets that his Christ would suffer” (Acts 3:17–18).
But granting that Jesus is a suicide at least in this unique sense, is he a suicide in any more ordinary sense? Can his death be linked with the despair that precedes “private” suicide? Or was the ignominious suicide of Judas, Jesus’ betrayer, added to the Gospel story precisely as a reminder that a chasm separates ordinary human suicide from the suicide of the God-man? Dauzat, building on the contemporary philosophical debate over suicide, wants to see an overlap such that what is said theologically about Christ’s suicide can bear philosophically on the discussion of suicide in general. Voluntary, self-inflicted death, he says, typically represents the rejection of a marred or strangled life in the name of “une vie dont on ne meurt pas,” “a life you don’t die of.” One thinks of the dying dream of the purged communist in Arthur Koestler’s 1941 novel Darkness at Noon. Did the disturbing eagerness of some early Christians for martyrdom perhaps express their political rejection of the Roman empire no less than it expressed their identification with the slain Redeemer? Were the Roman emperors who persecuted them not essentially correct in recognizing their martyrdom as a political threat? Did the martyrs not, in the end, defeat Rome as the armed insurrections of Judea could not?
Perhaps so, but just there the complications begin. Donne, a kind of prophet for our own day, managed both to defend the British crown in its need for order, as Augustine might have done, and to defend the human soul in its sickness unto death, as Kierkegaard would and as Christ might have seemed to do when he said, “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain.” Donne was torn between these two views, just as Christianity itself has been torn and as perhaps it must always be torn whenever it allows itself to look this inherently disruptive question in the eye.
HE RESOLVES THE GREAT CRISIS IN HIS LIFE
In Jerusalem more than in Galilee, when Jesus appears in public, he often seems to be alone. This is particularly true as his life nears its end, and true above all in the Gospel of John. Except at the time of his triumphal entry into Jerusalem just before Passover, no enthusiastic crowds gather to hear him speak as they did in Galilee. Individual, anonymous voices do express wonder, but the people he addresses in the Jerusalem Temple—typically referred to as “the Jews,” perhaps in contradistinction to “the Galileans,” perhaps from the perspective of an ethnically mixed Christian community outside Palestine—respond to him with skepticism that escalates into hostility, and he contributes to the escalation. They wonder aloud whether he intends to kill himself. He insists that they are out to kill him. They say that he is possessed by a devil. He counters that they are servants of the Devil. They call him a Samaritan—that is, not a descendant of Judah, not a Jew. He counters that, in spirit, they are sons of Ishmael, not sons of Isaac—in effect, Arabs. The confrontation climaxes when he speaks of himself using the sacred, unspeakable proper name of God, and they take up stones to execute him on the spot for blasphemy. His engagement with them grows steadily more hostile, yet he succeeds in changing the terms of that engagement, terms that are—though they do not yet see this—the terms of their covenant with God.
The escalation from skepticism to hostility begins innocuously enough when Jesus says:
If you take shelter in my word,
you will be my disciples.
You will come to know the truth,
and the truth will set you free.
(John 8:31–32)
Finding his promise of freedom presumptuous, they rebuke him: “We are descended from Abraham and have never been anyone’s slaves” (8:33). Why do they need Jesus to set them free? The obvious answer, never spoken aloud by either side in this exchange, is “Because you are the oppressed colony of a foreign power.”
Jesus gives, instead, an answer that transforms the meaning of freedom as well as of Abrahamic descent and, in the process, transforms the nature of God’s acknowledged obligation to them:
Truly I tell you,
anyone who commits sin is a slave.
Now, a slave has no permanent standing in the household,
but a son belongs to it forever.
(8:34–35)
Why does Jesus make this reference to the differential standing of a slave and a son in a household? Because, taking up their reference to Abraham, he wishes to allude to the fact that the legendary patriarch had two sons: Isaac, by his wife, Sarah, and Ishmael, by her slave and his concubine, Hagar. The Jews understand themselves to be the legitimate descendants of Abraham through Isaac. But by equating slavery and sin, Jesus equates Jewish sinners with Abraham’s descendants through Ishmael, whose mother was a slave. He turns Jewish sinners, in other words, into spiritual slaves.
“I know that you are descended from Abraham,” he explains,
but you are seeking to kill me
because my word finds no reception in you.
I speak of what I have seen in my Father’s presence.
You do what you have learned from your father.
(8:37–38, italics added)
For Father Abraham, Jesus now abruptly substitutes God the Father. Somewhat surreptitiously, he also introduces a “Satan the Father” without yet saying the words God or the Devil. He taunts them by a rhetorical sleight of hand. Lagging a step behind him, they continue to insist “Our father is Abraham” (8:39), but Jesus drives his point home:
If you are children of Abraham,
do as Abraham did.
As it is, you are seeking to kill me,
a man who has told you the truth
as I have heard it from God
[“my Father”].
This is not what Abraham did.
You are doing your father’s work.
(8:39–41, italics added)
As they begin to catch his drift, they reply defensively that they are children of God the Father no less than he is: “The only father we have is God” (8:41). What other father could he be referring to? But Jesus now confronts them more bluntly. It is not he but they who are under the Devil’s control:
If God were your father, you would love me,
since I have come from God and am here.
I am not here on my own.
He sent me.
Why do you not understand what I say?
The fact that you cannot accept my words
means that you must be from your father, the Devil,
and you prefer to do as your father wishes.
(8:42–44)
In God’s innumerable past denunciations of Israel, his claim was invariably that they had turned away from him and were worshipping Baal, Asherah, Moloch, or some other of the gods of Canaan. They were thus violating the covenant commandment to “love the Lord” (Deut. 6:5), which was, more exactly, a commandme
nt to remain strictly loyal to the Lord. In John 8, God Incarnate’s denunciation of “the Jews” for not listening to him is structurally identical to those ancient complaints but for the fact that the role of Baal is now being played by the Devil. The Lord’s people do not love him; instead, they “prefer to do as [their] father [the Devil] wishes.”
But what is it that the Devil wants? The question matters crucially, because by defining his own mission in opposition to the Devil’s, Jesus will redefine the mission of God himself. What the Devil wants, according to Jesus, is death. He is a murderer, a bringer of death. If God is now to be defined as the Devil’s enemy, then God must be a savior, a bringer of life. And God’s ancient command that Israel “choose life” (Deut. 30:19) by accepting his Torah becomes a new command to choose life by accepting “truth”—namely, the preaching of Jesus.
Your father, the Devil, … was a murderer from the start.
He stands outside the truth;
there is no truth in him.
When he lies,
he betrays his true nature,
for he is a liar, and the father of lies.
But it is because I speak the truth
that you do not believe me.
(John 8:44–45)
By the defeat of Caesar, God might retake the land of Canaan, but that is not the war he chooses to fight. He has chosen, instead, by the defeat of Satan to defeat death itself and to lead his people into the new promised land of eternal life.
