Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (99 page)

The papacy must be restored as an office of
diakonia,
service, to be exercised in partnership with other Christians (not just Catholics, not just bishops and priests, and not just men). For the purposes of this book, and extending Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's insight into the link between patriarchy and anti-Judaism, it is notable that the pope who instituted the
Sicut Judaeis
tradition of defending Jews and forbidding their forced conversion, Gregory I (590–604), was also the pope who defined his function as being not
Papa,
an ultimate patriarch, but, as he put it, "servant of the servants of God."
⁷
As Hans Küng points out, Gregory was the author of perhaps the most influential work written by a pope,
Pastoral Rule,
which located the soul of ministry in personal example and in service, real acts of meeting human needs—not in the concentration of control and not in the preempting of local leadership. The phrase "pastoral rule" can be taken as a rebuttal to "holy rule," which is the meaning of "hierarchy."
⁸
That this pope is called "the Great," one of only two so honored, suggests that the witness of such a life, as with John XXIII, weighs more in the balance than the witness of popes who take their greatness for granted. That Gregory's rejection of patriarchal triumphalism was accompanied by a sense of obligation to the well-being of Jews is no coincidence. As we have seen again and again, as long as the Church defines itself triumphalistically, Jews remain a living contradiction to all such claims, and the offense taken by Christians at their "prophetic critique refused"
⁹
is squared. It is then that Christians become most dangerous to Jews.

St. Peter's Basilica enshrines the problematic history we have studied, but it also enshrines the "dangerous memory" of Jesus Christ, which remains the "countermemory to all tales of triumph," Tracy says. "Christianity is always a memory that turns as fiercely against itself as against other pretensions to triumph ... To become historically minded is to seize that memory for the present and to recall the past in that memory's subversive light."
¹⁰
Among Catholics, the main custodian of the antitriumphal impulse has been the tradition of Church councils that have steadily, if imperfectly, checked the temptation to papal imperium. Therefore, in the name of the authentic Catholic tradition, and to counter the universalist absolutism that underwrites all "pretensions to triumph," the conciliar principle—the bishop of Rome exercising authority accountably, within the college of bishops—must be reestablished. Due regard for the regional autonomies of bishops, the cultural distinctions of local churches, and the idea that all Christians share the priestly office must be retrieved. It is in this context that the Catholic Church can finally honor the various regional differences that gave rise to most Protestant and Orthodox denominations. The primacy-enforcing ideas of Roman supremacy and papal infallibility, based as both are on a shallow urge toward certitude, reflect the universalizing pseudoscience of the Enlightenment more than the Gospel.

The members of Vatican III owe it to themselves "to become historically minded," in Tracy's phrase, including becoming more fully acquainted with the bizarre political and personal circumstances of Vatican I that prompted its fathers to issue
Pastor Aeternus.
Knowing of the nationalist siege that was closing in on them, we can honor their good intentions, sympathize with their fears, and salute their loyalty to the pope while still forthrightly acknowledging that the definition of papal infallibility was a mistake. Twentieth-century Church history, with the Holocaust as its epiphany, establishes it as such, down to and including the inability of Pope John Paul II to say of Pius XII, "What my predecessor did, and what he failed to do, in the crucible of 'faith and morals' was wrong."
¹¹
The defining of the doctrine of papal infallibility amounts to the low point in the long story of patriarchy, a legitimation of Church exceptionalism, a reversal of the meaning that Jesus gave to ministry, and, finally, an abuse of power. Instead of trying to slide past the embarrassment of the blunder, or hoping that the doctrine will wither into disuse over time, Vatican III—since the point is to acknowledge fallibility—should repeal it.

58. Agenda Item 3: A New Christology

G
OD IS GREATER
than religion..." Rabbi Heschel wrote. "Faith is greater than dogma."
¹
If the human species is constitutionally inclined to forget the created character of its creation myths, it is also true that its most absolutely asserted dicta are the products of relative intellectual constructs that are rarely recognized as such. Theology is profoundly tied to real-world political consequences, and for that reason Vatican III must initiate a Church-wide reimagination of sacrosanct theologies, or rather, sponsor the Church-wide dissemination of the inventive work that theologians have already been doing. Such a project is necessary because, however much intended as timeless acts of devotion, sacrosanct theologies have underwritten violence, intolerance, sexism, and, in particular, antisemitism. An example of this theological reconsideration of basic texts and dogmas, in light of the Church's historic negation of Judaism, is the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether, referred to earlier, whose classic formulation of the problem—Christology as "the other side of anti-Judaism"
²
—remains unaddressed by the Church. The Church has yet to face, in David Tracy's phrase, "the revolting underside of Christology in the history of Christian antisemitism."
³

A summary return to the era of the Crusades, when politics and theology came together in tragic ways, can illuminate the source of this problem as it still exists and how we might leave it behind. Recall that 1096, the beginning of the First Crusade, which nearly coincided with the writing by Saint Anselm (c. 1033–1109) of
Cur Deus Homo,
is widely regarded as the year Europe began to wake from the slumber of its Dark Age. The Crusades both reflected and advanced a vigorous new social movement. Intercultural exchange, and with it the return of rationalism, reflected in Anselm's proofs for the existence of God, led to a renaissance in the West. But recall further that the Dark Age itself was, in part at least, an unintended consequence of powerful but ambiguous developments occurring in Christian theology, an intellectual equivalent of the Church's political accommodation of the imperium in the aftermath of Constantine's conversion. The theological formulations that jelled between the Council of Nicaea (325) and the Council of Constantinople (381) had reflected an accommodation with Greek thought, and so had the work of the great Augustine (354–430). In this period, the metaphors that early Christians used to describe their experience of and faith in Jesus of Nazareth were reinvented in the categories of Hellenistic metaphysics. Obviously, the movement from religious expression which began, essentially, as poetry, which prizes ambiguity and allusiveness, to religious philosophy, which values precision above implication, represents a decisive shift.

When the Church fathers found the mysteries of revelation to be illuminated by their understanding of Plato's dichotomy between form and matter—between the world, that is, of ideal perfection and the inherently flawed material world of everyday experience—a new idea of the cosmos braced the Christian vision. Less a construct of Plato than of his syncretist interpreters of late antiquity, especially Plotinus (c. 205–270), Neo-Platonism posited a dualism that would become Christianized as between grace and sin. This was one culture's form of the perennial human temptation to binary thinking, as evidenced among Gnostics of various kinds in the ancient world. The Neo-Platonic divide between soul and body would have its later equivalents in the post-Descartes alienation between the self and the world, and even in the postmodern deconstruction of the bond between the self and the self's expression.

Now God was understood to be the True, the One, the Holy; the material world—enigmatic, chaotic, profane—could only be ontologically unrelated to such a God. Creation was merely the Creator's shadow. For a people with roots in the biblical view of reality, this was a massive mutation, for the God of Israel, while very much a transcendent God, was the Lord of human history who had chosen to be intimately involved in that history. Among Christians, a new idea of the person took hold too, one equally foreign to the biblical idea, with a split between the body and the soul, which in nature could not be reconciled. This split posed large problems for theologians who sought to define exactly how Jesus could be both God and man, and disagreements over the formulas constructed to answer the question—"begotten, not made," "hypostatic union," "
filoque
" —became violent, leading to the first great condemnations of heresy. But perhaps the most damaging consequence of this new dualism was the devaluation of the physical world that seemed logically to flow from a Neo-Platonic suspicion of "matter." This led not only, say, to the distrust of sexual pleasure—original sin defined as the sex act—which has been a mark of Christianity ever since, but to the idea that human beings, mired in the material world, were inherently unable to arrive at a state of happiness—in religious language, salvation—that was natural to the realm of the ideal. The body, that is, condemned the soul to live in permanent exile from the realm for which it was made. It is only when such Hellenistic categories shape Christian theology that the idea of the immortality of the soul becomes the content of religious hope—a notion that has nothing in common with biblical hope, which is based on personal wholeness, not dichotomy; on God's promise, not the soul's indestructibility. But in the scheme of Christian Neo-Platonism, even the soul's intrinsic immortality was no hope, because its pollution by the body left it doomed.

The gulf between body and soul was itself a pale shadow of the infinitely larger gulf between God and the human person. For the purposes of this book, it cannot be emphasized enough that one effect of this thoroughgoing Hellenization of the meaning of Jesus, whatever positive results it had as an intellectual construction, was the final obliteration of the Jewish character of that meaning. With the Christian adoption of Greek intellectual categories, the parting of the ways became turnpikes set in concrete. From now on, most ominously, since there was nothing intrinsically Jewish about Jesus, there would be nothing to prevent Christians from defining themselves in opposition to Jews.

Despite the intellectual monuments created by Church fathers from Tertullian to Augustine, a collapse of intellectual pursuit and scientific inquiry was an ultimate consequence of the Christian adoption of a dualistic worldview, since there was no reason to take the experience of the senses seriously. On the contrary, the senses became the enemy, and where once the sexual body was celebrated as the very image of God—"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."
⁴
—the sexual body now became an "occasion of sin" to be subdued. Among Christians, the Greek idea of soul became entirely removed from the biblical idea of spirit, which, since it literally means "breath," is intrinsically physical. Indeed, now the body, even with its breath, was defined as the source of all evil. Christian piety became penitential—the self-flagellation of body hatred became the highest form of devotion—and even work of the mind, like reading and study, because dependent on the senses, became defined as worldly distraction. A culture based on such assumptions was bound to shrivel, and the culture of Western Europe did just that.

And so too with Christology. The memory of Jesus was pressed into service as the antidote to the despair that flowed from such dualism. If the gulf between heaven and earth, between soul and body, was infinite, then the infinite Son of God alone could bridge it. The coming of Jesus was now defined as God's effort to repair the fallen creation, and consistent with the new attachment to flagellation, the flagellation of Jesus—the punishment of his body—took on a centrality it had not had for early Christians. The Son of God could bridge the gulf between Creator and creation, between soul and body, only by the destruction of his body. The Passion and death became the heart of the meaning of Jesus' life. The cross became the essential icon of faith, and the fact that these systems of belief affected the realm of politics is revealed by the coming of the war of the cross, the Crusades. We also took note of the way this combination of theology and politics inevitably escalated the Church's war against the Jews.

Ironically, the highest form of this philosophically dualistic Christology came with
Cur Deus Homo
, Anselm's explanation of "why God became human." I say ironically because it is also true that Anselm's embrace of the rational method, and his trust in the essentially physical process of thought, marked a turn away from anti-intellectualism and anti-corporeality. Indeed, Europe's recovery from the legacy of a rigid Neo-Platonism would be tied largely to its reacquaintance with Aristotle—his celebration of the unity of being as opposed to its dichotomy. In contrast to Neo-Platonic "idealism," Aristotle's "realism" defines the sensed world as "real" and not just as the insubstantial and inferior shadow of a higher realm. Such a real world is worthy of careful scrutiny, and only such a system of thought can support scientific inquiry. The return of Aristotle meant the return of
scientia,
which was the precondition for the thriving of the universities. Anselm, with his own trust in the rational method, marks the beginning of Europe's reacquaintance with Aristotle. Anselm, as we saw, was among the first outside Iberia to benefit from the
convivencia
that would restore Aristotle to Europe, as he came to be filtered through Maimonides (1135–1204) and Averroes (1126–1198). Only with Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), nearly two hundred years later, would an Aristotelian alternative to the Neo-Platonism of the patristic era be fully constructed, not as a replacement but only as a counterweight. Dualism survives vigorously in the Church, as its attitudes toward sexuality reveal.