Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy
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The next time Judas appears in The Passion, he has begun descending into madness. His lips are bloodied, his eyes frenzied, and the young boys who find him declare that he is cursed. Judas runs, terrified by a vision of Satan’s face and chased by boys who seem to turn into demons. Ultimately, as in the Gospel of Matthew, Gibson’s Judas takes his own life.
Certainly, what Judas did was horrible. He betrayed a friend for money, and with a kiss—a gesture of love. If it were a simple matter of guilt or innocence, I would have no qualms about declaring Judas guilty. But our reaction to Judas is much more than a declaration of guilt. What is it about his betrayal that makes it such an outstandingly terrible crime in the popular imagination? Even Jesus seems to think that Judas’s guilt is deeper than that of any other person. In The Passion, Jesus reassures Pontius Pilate, who seems unwilling to condemn him: “It is he who delivered me to you who has the greater sin.” The words hang there, rich with the implication that Judas’s guilt is greater than Pilate’s. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus puts it even more strongly: “Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man if he had not been born” (Matthew 26:24). It sounds as though no one in history is guilty of a worse crime than Judas.
Many treatments of Judas suggest just this. Dante places him in the lowest circle of hell, along with Brutus and Cassius, the betrayers of Caesar. The nineteenth-century theologian Carl Daub views Judas as evil incarnate, Jesus’s evil opposite. He argues that Judas embodies unparalleled evil and that he is utterly condemned. There is no possible excuse or repentance for him (see Klassen 1996, p. 5). To this day Judas’s name is uttered with hush and dread. But is Judas really so much worse than all others?
In The Passion Judas is clearly more guilty than Pilate, presented by Gibson as a noble man forced to execute Jesus against his better judgment. But why is Judas’s guilt greater than that of Caiaphas, the High Priest? Why is he more guilty than the Roman soldiers who derive great pleasure from whipping Jesus? Why is he worse than the blood-thirsty crowd Gibson puts in the courtyard? Is he guilty of the worst crime in history? Is his crime worse than the crimes of Hitler or Stalin, Caligula or Nero? Philosophy, specifically the branch of philosophy known as ethics, helps us think about these questions.
Did Judas Freely Choose to Betray God?
A crucial consideration in determining guilt is whether the person freely chose the bad action. In other words, was the bad action voluntary? If it was not, then the person can’t be held morally responsible. Aristotle’s analysis of voluntary and involuntary action is instructive. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) points out that we excuse people, in whole or in part, if we believe that they were forced to do what they did. Thus, we partially excuse Peter for denying Christ in The Passion because of the threatening crowd surrounding him. We understand that his freedom to choose was limited.
Aristotle uses the example of throwing the cargo overboard in a storm in order to save a ship. The owner of the cargo would normally be furious if the captain jettisoned his property, but given the circumstances, he might consider the action excusable and even say it was the best thing to do. Or consider a situation in which a prisoner is ordered to kill another prisoner and told that unless he does so, both of them will be executed. The prisoner doesn’t want to kill, but he knows that the other man will die regardless of what he does and that, if he refuses, he will die too. Under these circumstances, he might decide that killing is the best option available to him because the other man’s life is lost anyway.
In these situations, the person is free to do otherwise. Peter could have said that Jesus was his rabbi even though that would have been a very dangerous admission; the ship’s captain could have decided to risk the life of everybody on board instead of abandoning the cargo; and the prisoner could have refused to kill his mate, accepting that he too would die. As Aristotle notes, the circumstances of these actions provide excuses, but the actions are still a lot like voluntary actions. The circumstances don’t eliminate moral responsibility; they just alleviate it.
By contrast, consider the kind of case in which the person didn’t choose the action at all—for instance, if he was possessed or insane or if the action was accidental. In such situations, we wouldn’t consider him guilty. In The Passion, when Jesus falls, carrying the cross, he almost makes Simon fall as well. But Jesus would never be held responsible for making Simon fall because he didn’t intend for him to fall. It was an accident, caused by exhaustion.
Consider Judas’s betrayal and final suicide in this context. In Gibson’s version, Judas was tormented and chased after the betrayal. John goes one step further by saying that “Satan entered [Judas]” at the Last Supper (John 13:27; see also Luke 22:3). We might interpret this metaphorically to mean merely that Judas decided to betray Christ at that point. If so, Judas remains responsible. If we interpret it literally, however, the entry of Satan lessens, and might even eliminate, Judas’s responsibility for the actions that followed. If Judas acted while he was controlled by Satan, then Judas didn’t choose to betray Jesus. Satan made him do it or, perhaps Satan even used Judas to do it.
Similarly, Gibson’s portrayal suggests that Judas might have been driven insane by his guilt and by the boys chasing him. Insanity alleviates responsibility very much like accidents do, because a truly insane person doesn’t choose his actions; he doesn’t know what he is doing. Thus, if Judas was insane when he killed himself, he isn’t morally responsible for his suicide. The basic issue here is freedom of choice. Did Judas choose to do what he did, and could he have done otherwise? If the answer is yes, he is responsible; if the answer is no, he isn’t. If Judas was insane or possessed, he was not responsible for his actions; but if he was not, he bears responsibility.
Could Judas Have Done Otherwise?
Did Judas act freely? Was Judas free to do something other than what he did? Was it possible for him not to betray Jesus? These questions lead us to the thorny issue of divine foreknowledge. In the Last Supper scene in The Passion, Jesus tells his disciples that one of them will betray him and that another will deny him three times. They all react in horror, assuring him that they will do no such thing. Yet, when Christ starts his painful journey, carrying the cross to Golgotha, Peter has denied him three times and Judas has betrayed him.
If I make a prediction of what another person will do, it doesn’t impinge upon her freedom because I am a fallible human being and I could be wrong. I might predict that Peter will deny Jesus tomorrow, but Peter might still do something completely different. Given Christian theology, however, divine predictions are different because God is all-knowing. This means that he cannot be wrong. If God knows that Judas will betray him tomorrow, Judas can’t avoid doing it. But then, how can Judas be held accountable for his betrayal? How can he be responsible for what he did? He had no choice. To make the situation worse, the problem recurs for each and every one of us because God knows what we will do ahead of time. All of us seem to lose our freedom and, with it, the moral responsibility for our actions.
Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with this problem for millennia, trying to reconcile human freedom with divine foreknowledge, and they have come up with a variety of solutions. Boethius (around 480–524) tried to solve the problem by arguing that God is outside of time. Human beings exist in time. Only the present moment is truly there for us, and we can only act in it. We remember the past, experience the present, and imagine the future. God’s existence is different, Boethius argues. His entire existence and the entire history of the world are fully present to him at once: “His knowledge transcends all movement of time and abides in the simplicity of its immediate present. It encompasses the infinite sweep of past and future, and regards all things in its simple comprehension as if they were now taking place” (Boethius 1962, Prose 6, p. 116).
How does Boethius’s explanation enable us to hold Judas responsible for his betrayal? Because God can see Judas’s entire life at once, it is all present
to him: God’s knowledge is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. He doesn’t foresee Judas’s betrayal; he simply sees it, just as the people who were there could see it—the only difference being that, while those present saw it for a brief moment, He can see it eternally. And because God merely watches Judas act, His knowledge doesn’t impact Judas’s freedom. We can still say that Judas acted freely and he is morally responsible.
This solution is ingenious but problematic. First, it isn’t clear that it makes sense to say that God is outside of time. Second, saying that God is outside of time seems to make it impossible for Him to act in the world because all actions take place in time. This is not acceptable because one of the most important things about the Christian God is that He acts in the world. Third, saying that God is outside of time and hence doesn’t have foreknowledge doesn’t seem to solve the problem. If God eternally knows that Judas will betray Christ, then it was true a hundred years before the betrayal that God eternally knows that Judas will betray Christ. And if it was true a hundred years before the betrayal, then we are back to the original problem: Judas had to betray Jesus, or God would have been wrong.1 So, we ask again, can his decision to do so be free?
A better solution was first proposed by Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) and then clarified by Henry Frankfurt (born 1929). Edwards suggests that we need to rethink our understanding of freedom. I’ve said that freedom requires the ability to do otherwise. This means that Judas betrayed Jesus freely only if he could have avoided betraying him. Edwards argues that this reasoning is mistaken. A free action simply is one in which we do what we want to do. To ask whether Judas was free to do otherwise is to ask the wrong question. Instead, we should ask whether he chose to betray Jesus. If he made that choice, he betrayed Jesus freely even if he couldn’t have done otherwise.
Applying Edwards’s and Frankfurt’s insights, we can think about Judas’s betrayal in the following way: God ordained that Jesus would die for our sins and he knew that Judas would be the instrument. So, He needed to make sure that Judas really did betray Jesus. This means that God couldn’t permit Judas to do anything other than betraying Jesus. Were Judas to hesitate, we’d have to assume that God would interfere and force him to go through with the betrayal. If that had happened, Judas’s action would have been involuntary and he would not have been morally responsible. But it didn’t happen that way. Judas believed that he had a choice and he made it; he betrayed Jesus. Judas could not have acted otherwise because God would not have permitted it, but Judas did not know that. In fact he didn’t try to act otherwise because he didn’t want to, and this means that he acted freely.
What Was the Result of Judas’s Betrayal?
If Judas freely betrayed Jesus and Jesus is God, then Judas betrayed God. But we still don’t know the extent of Judas’s guilt. We also need to know why he betrayed Him (his intention) and what happened as a direct result of his betrayal (the consequences or outcome). Consequentialists like John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) argue that our moral assessment of actions should focus upon the outcome. When we try to figure out what to do, we should choose the action that provides the greatest good for the greatest number. We often think in this way. We assign more or less responsibility, depending on outcome: less if the outcome is better, more if it is worse. Think about the legal distinction between attempted murder and murder: The intention is the same in both crimes, but attempted murder receives a lesser punishment because the outcome is different.
What happens if we focus on outcome in judging Judas? We might be tempted to say that Judas’s betrayal produced an outcome which otherwise wouldn’t have occurred, namely Jesus’s death. But surely this is not true. The Jewish authorities could have found Jesus without Judas’s help. Jesus was not in hiding and there is no reason to assume that he was planning to go into hiding. In fact, he was a famous preacher, and great crowds gathered as soon as he appeared. Judas might have helped the authorities to find Jesus sooner, but they would have found him soon enough without his help. So, Judas’s initial betrayal in the Temple did little or nothing to produce a different outcome.
What about his second betrayal, the disturbing kiss in the garden that identified Jesus? Again, this didn’t change the outcome at all in Gibson’s version of events. In The Passion, by the time Judas kisses him, Jesus had already identified himself. We must conclude that Judas’s actions did little to change what ultimately happened. Judas revealed the location of a man whose whereabouts were already known or could easily have been discovered; he identified a man who had already identified himself.
Indeed, one might even argue that Judas’s betrayal had good consequences. His action led to Christ’s death, and Christ’s death redeemed us, saving countless human beings from eternal damnation. If any action in the history of the world has produced the greatest good for the greatest number, surely this one did!
Nevertheless, this assessment seems to miss something crucial. Even if we accept that Jesus would have been arrested and executed without Judas’s help, and even if we accept that Jesus’s death had good consequences, betraying Jesus was still morally wrong. Consequentialists recognize that an action can be bad even if it has a good or neutral outcome. They argue that an action is bad if others like it usually have bad consequences. Even though betrayal did little to change the outcome on this occasion and even if it helped produce a great good, in most cases it would have had harmful effects. Therefore, they conclude, betrayal, and especially the betrayal of a trusted friend, is a wrongful action.
Still, the focus upon outcome seems unsatisfactory. We generally believe that when we assess the moral worth of an action and the culpability of the agent who carries it out, intentions are central. For instance, we distinguish between manslaughter and murder, unintentional and intentional killing, and consider the killer more culpable if he acted intentionally. Indeed, deontologists such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argue that considerations of intention are all-important in assessing the character of an agent and the moral worth of his actions—consequentialists think they are relevant only for the evaluation of character.
To evaluate Judas’s guilt, then, we must take into account what he intended to do and whether or not the intended action is moral. Here, matters quickly become complicated. Outcomes are relatively easy to judge because they can be seen. By contrast, motives are hidden in the human heart, sometimes so well hidden that we don’t even understand our own motives. We know that Judas chose to betray Jesus. But we don’t know what his motive was, and we don’t know if he was aware that he was betraying God and not just a man.
Why Did Judas Betray Jesus?
Tradition offers a couple of possible motives for Judas’s action, and our evaluation of Judas must differ radically depending upon which of these we ascribe to him. In The Passion, the scene in the Temple when Judas receives the money suggests that he betrayed Jesus for money: his motive was greed. Two of the Gospels support Gibson’s interpretation. In the Gospel of John, Judas protests the use of expensive ointment for Jesus’s feet, saying that the oil could be sold and the money given to the poor. John stresses Judas’s greed: “He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it” (John 12:6). Matthew indicates that Judas betrayed Jesus immediately after the argument about the oil: “Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, ‘What are you willing to give me if I deliver Him to you?’” (Matthew 26:14–15). If he couldn’t get money by stealing the money from the poor, he would get it by betraying Jesus. This might be the worst possible motive Judas could have had. To betray anybody is bad enough, but a person who betrays a friend out of greed deserves utter contempt. This interpretation, I suspect, underlies the complete condemnation of Judas.
Another possible motive stems from the traditional identification of Judas as a Zealot. This means that he was among those who believed in the imminent return of a Messiah who would be a k
ing and a leader in this world. The Messiah would lead the Jewish people in an uprising that would end Roman occupation. If Judas was a Zealot and a follower of Jesus, he probably believed that Jesus was going to be that leader.
If this were Judas’s motive, he may not have intended for Jesus to die or even to be arrested. Judas might have been trying to force Jesus to reveal himself as the future king, provoking him into picking up the sword and attacking the oppressor. If this was Judas’s hope, it was of course thwarted. Gibson shows how Jesus meekly went with the guards. He didn’t fight them but instead told Peter to put down his sword. Instead of witnessing the king take power, Judas saw him humiliated and beaten. As Jesus says in the Gospels and in The Passion, his kingdom isn’t of this world. Judas had misunderstood what sort of king Jesus intended to become and what results he’d deliver. Finally realizing that Jesus was no worldly king, Judas killed himself in despair, recognizing too late that he had betrayed “innocent blood” and perhaps understanding that he had betrayed God.
Regardless of what his motive was, Judas’s actions after Jesus was arrested in The Passion suggest that he had not realized what would happen to Jesus. He seems genuinely shocked to see that Jesus is chained and abused. If he sold Jesus for money, perhaps he didn’t fully understand what they would do to him. He might have expected them to let him go after a light lashing, some version of a slap on the wrist. Or perhaps he knew what would happen, but still was unprepared for actually seeing it done.