Christ

by Jack Miles

What the sea would say

  For a significant and growing population of lay readers, the appeal of the Bible as art, good or bad, sacred or secular, has come to exceed its value as history, true or false. No doubt those for whom the Bible is only itself, only sacred, to the extent that it corresponds with some set of intrinsically sacred events, will resist this development. To them, the Bible as art will seem worthy of the library, perhaps, but unworthy of the sanctuary. I myself believe that the Bible, read as art, may remain sacred so long as a distinction can continue to be made between religious art and secular art.

  Since the rise of modernism, this distinction has commonly been made, even if it has usually been made to the disparagement of religious art. Art produced in service to a received, collective religious vision has been thought inferior to art whose vision—the original, personal creation of the artist—emerges only in and through the making. Leaving aside that value judgment, I would insist for the moment only on the distinction itself, which in most instances is perfectly valid. Religious art does differ, and in just the way alleged, from secular art. Religious history differs from secular history in the same way. The Gospels are the despair of secular historians, for they were not written, as secular history must be written, for the sake of history itself but, rather, for the sake of the faith. The authors of the Gospels know the meaning of the events they narrate before they begin the narration; they knew it before they began whatever, for them, constituted research. By the same token, the medieval religious sculptor knew the point of his statue before he began to carve it. Framed in this way, the distinction between religious and secular art remains valid, breaking down only in the case of the neoreligious modern artist, the artist whose personal vision can be described not just as personally but also as pedagogically and interpersonally spiritual, though in the service of no group beyond the congregation of those whom the artist aspires to “convert” to the vision that shapes her work itself.

  In a comment made while the National Gallery in London was still showing the exhibition “Seeing Salvation,” Neil MacGregor said:

  One of the aims of this exhibition is to demonstrate that religious paintings can hold on to their spiritual dimension in the exhibition rooms of a museum. Every visitor is free to discover what interests him or her, but every religious painting has a specific aim, which is different from the aim of a secular painting: to transform the soul of the spectator.25

  MacGregor makes two relevant points. First, even though a work of art may have been produced in service to a received, collective vision, a vision not personally that of the artist, its power need not disintegrate when the collectivity breaks up. An altarpiece without a church, at which no liturgy is any longer celebrated—an altarpiece moved to a museum—may lose much, but it does not lose everything. Second, there is a difference between artists whose ambition is “to transform the soul of the spectator” and those who have no such ambition. I would add that those who might say that any true artist must have such a vision have themselves unacknowledged ambitions on the souls of all artists, for to say such a thing is to deny artists the hard-won freedom of genuine secularity, secularity that is neither explicitly nor even implicitly religious.

  Once the inherent artfulness of all writing has been acknowledged and a distinction between religious and secular art has been accepted, the two necessary conditions have been met for a latter-day sacralization of the Bible on the basis of its character as art rather than its reliability as a testimony to ancient events. If the sacredness of historical events does not inhere in the events themselves but must be conferred upon them by interpretation, then interpretation may also confer sacredness upon imagined events. Creation and interpretation are points on a mental continuum in both history and fiction. The act by which a historical report is created is interpretive vis-à-vis some event: Creation entails interpretation. Conversely, the act by which the same report is later interpreted is inevitably countercreative vis-à-vis the originating event: Interpretation entails re-creation. Similarly, the act by which a fictional story is invented is interpretive vis-à-vis the author’s not-yet-verbalized experience, which must ultimately be the source of the story: The author’s creation entails interpretation of his own experience. Similarly again, the act by which the same story is later criticized is inevitably recreative or countercreative vis-à-vis the story as first told: Interpretation duplicates creation at least to some extent. Without erasing the line between the real and the imagined, one may insist on the close analogy that exists between the creation and appropriation of history, on the one hand, and of fiction on the other. In both cases, creator and interpreter—the historian and the critic of history, the storyteller and the critic of fiction—may be either two people in dialogue or one person talking to himself. In both cases, when the motive is religious, the results are religious. In short, an event need not have happened for it to convey religious meaning, while the fact that an event did happen does not in and of itself make the event religiously meaningful.

  The point may be illustrated by imagining that Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan—a parable that Christian preaching has always read as a fictional but nonetheless paradigmatic expression of Christianity’s reinterpretation of the Old Testament command (Lev. 19:18) to “love your neighbor”—appeared in the Gospel of Luke as an episode in which, instead of a Samaritan rescuing a Jew, Jesus himself rescued a Samaritan. A story now fruitful for preaching, though it is only a story, would then have crossed the line and become a kind of history. But what if we further imagine that the consensus of historical scholarship about this episode in the career of Jesus were that it never happened? Suppose historians were unanimous that the historical Jesus never actually rescued any such Samaritan? What would have been lost? The episode would be fiction by Luke instead of fiction by Jesus, but would its meaning not be the same, and could it not continue to function as revelation? (Many scholars believe, even now, that the story as told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke is actually Luke’s creation, though there is no real way to determine this.) Moreover, even if the scholarly consensus were that the historical Jesus did indeed rescue some such Samaritan, his deed would only have paradigmatic force if a subsequent, religiously motivated decision had granted it that force. Kindness may speak for itself, but what it says is never “I am a paradigm.”

  While insisting in this way on the legitimacy of a religious appropriation of the Bible as art, or, perhaps better, on an artistic appropriation of the Bible as religious, I would insist with equal force on the possibility and legitimacy of a fully secular appreciation of the art of the Bible. Never underestimate the human capacity for sympathy across ideological lines. One need not be a Nazi to appreciate the brilliance of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will. One need not love American materialism to be awestruck at the Manhattan skyline. There is, of course, a risk: One thing may lead to another. Someone may begin merely acknowledging that a certain power lingers in a Christian painting displayed at the National Gallery and end up at the baptismal font. But if one thing may lead to another, it need not. At this point in the history of the West, the secular option is open for good. We need only note, by way of balance, that so is the religious option. In our era, a detached but sympathetic openness to the art and literature of unbelief is no more difficult for believers than the reverse is for unbelievers.

  The intellectual and emotional access that belief and unbelief, religious participation and religious abstention, have to one another in our era reminds me of a famous poem and a much less famous reply to it. Matthew Arnold wrote in “Dover Beach” (I quote only part of a longer poem):

  Listen! You hear the grating roar

  Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

  At their return, up the high strand,

  Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

  The eternal note of sadness in.

  Sophocles long ago

  Heard i
t on the Aegaean, and it brought

  Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

  Of human misery; we

  Find also in the sound a thought,

  Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

  The Sea of Faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating, to the breath

  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world.26

  Half a century later, W. B. Yeats replied laconically in “The Nineteenth Century and After” (this is the whole poem):

  Though the great song return no more,

  There’s keen delight in what we have:

  The rattle of pebbles on the shore,

  Under the receding wave.27

  If the tide of religion will inevitably recede to the point that there is no sea at all, Yeats seems to say, we may still enjoy, for now, the sound of the pebbles under the receding wave. But then, too, he implies with the faintest of smiles, do we really fear, as the tide goes out, that the sea will not be there in the morning?

  A half-century and more after Yeats, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Protestant/Catholic polemics of the sixteenth century are extremely remote even for most Protestants and Catholics. Rather more important, perhaps, the religious/secular polemics of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries—the cultural anxieties and furies that linked Arnold and Yeats—are almost equally remote. An immense population that thinks of itself as neither particularly religious nor particularly antireligious neither gloats if much of the Bible proves unhistorical nor feels any noteworthy quickening of interest if some of it proves historical after all. The fascination of the text—and clearly it does continue to fascinate—begins to lie elsewhere, in the work itself rather than in the events that the work may partially record or in the tangled history of how the work came to be written. Pebbles under a receding wave? Perhaps, but I prefer the analogy that I started with. What attracts viewers, believing or unbelieving, to the great rose window of the Bible is neither what can be seen through it nor how the glass for it was stained and assembled, but what the window looks like in and for itself and what all those jagged fragments of light and color, working together, make happen behind the eye of the beholder.

  Acknowledgments

  As Luke tells the story, Simon Peter had fished all night in the Sea of Galilee and caught nothing when Jesus told him to put out into the deep water and let down his nets one last time. “ ‘Master,’ Simon replied, ‘we have worked all night long and caught nothing. But if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they did, they caught so many fish that their nets were about to break.… But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ ” (Luke 5:5–8).

  No one who lets his nets down into the sea of the New Testament can have escaped a moment of terror like Peter’s—terror at the abundance and at one’s own inadequacy to it. The list of those who have helped me keep my nets from breaking begins with Barry Munitz, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, to whom my debt could scarcely be larger than it is. It is a pleasure to thank as well, and for the second time, Joel Conarroe, president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, whose support in 1990 led to the book that led to this book. Jonathan Segal, who has edited both books for Alfred A. Knopf, is a consummate professional and a treasured friend, working for the best publisher in America. I honor the memory of the late Charles Ronsac of Éditions Robert Laffont, Paris, whose wit during a four-year, bilingual email correspondence brightened many a dark day. For winning my work a welcome around the world, I am pleased to acknowledge the support and friendship of my literary agent, Georges Borchardt, as well as Anne Borchardt and the staff of the agency. For comments of varying length at various points during the gestation of this work, I am grateful to Frederick Borsch, Junko and Rafael Chodos, Nicholas Goodhue, Thomas Jenkins, George Leonard, Ross Miller, Philip Roth, Mark C. Taylor, and Peter J. Thuesen.

  As regards my translations of quoted passages from the New Testament, I am reminded of how the late John Ciardi spoke of his predecessors in translating Dante. He acknowledged “a debt of borrowed courage to all other translators of Dante; without their failures I should never have attempted my own.” In some similar sense, having never taken even an undergraduate course in the New Testament, I am both humbled by and remote from the mighty enterprise that is contemporary New Testament scholarship. Let me then acknowledge its greatness in the round but spare individual scholars from a paternity claim that might be most unwelcome.

  Finally, I thank my wife, Jacqueline, and our daughter, Kathleen, for courage, endless patience, and the consolation, through ten years of time, that they and they alone could provide.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  1 “Someone dying in such a hideous way”: How strange it is that a scene of supreme ugliness should have become the supreme subject of Western art. Though there are many ways to make art of this subject, there is no way to make beauty of it; and its largest impact on Western art may consist of the space that it opened between the concept of art and the concept of beauty. Its inherent repugnance is ineradicable except perhaps by the aesthetic (or anaesthetic) expedient of displaying the cross without the crucified.

  The reaction of a non-Christian Japanese to this icon is the correct reaction, then, yet it is worth recalling that the concepts of suicide and martyrdom, which diverged in the West after Augustine (see p. 166), have remained far less divergent in Japan. Though suicides in the eyes of the West, the kamikaze pilots of World War II were martyrs in the eyes of the Japanese; their deaths were understood to be not just heroic but also religiously sanctioned and supremely, artistically beautiful. Something very similar may be said of the Vietnamese Buddhist monks who immolated themselves during the Vietnam War; see Richard Jock Hearn, The Soldier and the Monk (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1984).

  2 “Truth forever on the scaffold”: from James Russell Lowell, “The Present Crisis,” in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One: Philip Freneau to Walt Whitman, selected and annotated by John Hollander (New York: The Library of America, 1993), p. 684.

  3 The guilt of God: To speak of the guilt of God or, as elsewhere in this book, of a wound in God or a crisis that God faces or a change that must and does occur in God is to open oneself to the charge of Gnosticism. But then Gnosticism—the ancient heresy in which, broadly, divinity and humanity save each other reciprocally—does not constitute a “charge” that can legitimately be brought against literary criticism. Theology may have a mandate to conform to the agreed-upon teaching of a church, even if not all who call themselves theologians accept that mandate. But there exists no church of literature in the first place, and therefore no true orthodoxy or heterodoxy in literary criticism.

  4 “The real reason”: Albert Camus, The Fall, translated by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 112. I have slightly modified the translation.

  5 “God on the cross”: The Anti-Christ, no. 51, quoted from The Portable Nietzsche, selected and translated, with an introduction, prefaces, and notes, by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), p. 634. The phrase that Kaufmann translates as “the horrible secret thoughts” is, in Nietzsche’s German, “die furchtbare Hintergedanklichkeit.” This is the phrase that I re-translate as “the frightening hidden premise” in the paragraph immediately following on this page. See Der Antichrist, no. 51, critical study edition edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), vol. 6, p. 232.

  6 stank in his nostrils: The Anti-Christ, no. 46: “… one does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this. We would no more choose the ‘first Chri
stians’ to associate with than Polish Jews—not that one even required any objection to them: they both do not smell good.” Ibid., p. 625. The first of these two sentences is often quoted; the last, never.

  7 “What is good?”: Ibid., p. 572.

  8 to give him just these verses: The Ethiopian, a diaspora Jew, is reading the Jewish scriptures in Greek, for the verses quoted translate the Septuagint, the pre-Christian Greek edition of the Jewish scriptures. The Septuagint differs from the Masoretic, the surviving Hebrew text of the Tanakh, in a way suggesting that certain passages must have been translated from a variant Hebrew original. This passage from Isaiah may be one such. See Appendix I on the importance of the Septuagint in Christian exegesis and in the genesis of the Bible.

  9 eternal life—as atonement: “Atonement” in Christian theology ordinarily refers to atonement by Christ to God for the sins of mankind. Atonement theology, though its roots are medieval, had a particularly long and active history in American Protestantism through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. See Thomas E. Jenkins, The Character of God: Recovering the Lost Literary Power of American Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). A German Protestant theologian not afraid to speak of the suffering of God as God is Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). Yet this notion, though more generously accommodated in such contemporary theology than when it was dismissed as the “patripassionist” heresy, lives on even now principally in the informal, unregulated rest of the Christian tradition—which is to say in its literature, its music, and its art. For a striking confrontation of Christian art and Protestant atonement theology, see Thomas J. J. Altizer, “The Protestant Jesus: Milton and Blake,” in The Contemporary Jesus (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997), pp. 115–37.