JUDEO-CHRISTIAN CULTURE AS SACRED PRESENCE


        “Before Abraham was, I am.”  This proud affirmation of Jesus has a more ordinary human parallel in the “Oedipal” revolt of son claiming (temporarily) unmediated metapsychiological sovereignty.  The “family romance” (Freud) is similar: the child feels he must have been abducted from the home of his true parents, a king.  But there is apt to be a “prodigal son” moment of penitent return in all those instances: Jesus acknowledges Abraham and his Covenant—“I have not come to destroy the Law, but to strengthen it”—elsewhere in the Gospels.  The other sons are likely to do the same in later years, as in Jesus’ parable and modern instances such as The Jazz Singer or Ingmar Bergman’s own case, reflected in Wild Strawberries, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.  More profoundly, the tendency of Marceonites and other Christians to replace God with Jesus was scolded by Jesus himself in Mark: “Why do you call me good?  Only God is good,” and St. Paul’s vision of God is ultimately “all in all” (Corinthians).
        But for most Christians, there was generally a defining continuity of Old and New Testaments: Saint Louis had himself depicted as a successor to a row of Hebrew kings in the stained glass of the Sainte Chapelle.  The Hebraic prophets and stories are prominent in stained-glass windows everywhere in France and Europe.  
        The springwater-related purity of Rebecca and Rachel, by their wells, is prolonged in the tears Rachel’s son, Joseph, sheds for her, and the tenderness of the Childhood of the Virgin illustrated manuscripts.  This is close to the transparent intimate tone of French art altogether, especially Verlaine, Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Renoir, Picasso.  The riverry French r as in Mallarmé, Verlaine, Renoir, is a part of this: “L’ombre des arbres dans la revière embrumée” (Verlaine).  Christianity as a whole made such a “prodigal son” move in Vatican II, when the Abrahamic Covenant was declared to be the equal of the Christians.
        The return to the original simplicity of Judaic monotheism is a recurrent tendency of this sort, as in the French seventeenth century: the “hidden God,” as Lucien Goldmann wrote, came back in Jansenism.  The Hebraic purity colored Racine’s late masterpieces, Esther and Athalie.
        Albert Thibaudet, the leading French critic, spoke of the “Franco-Semitic pairing,” referring particularly to Montaigne and Proust, but really implying a vaster, subtle coloration of the entire French culture, now mostly in eclipse in secular, overly-digitized modernity.
        That tender Judeo-Christian tone of French culture at its finest is like Jesus himself in this respect: he is a warmly, sweetly present figure who may make us weep, as deep art and music easily can.  Michel Deguy confessed to me that the thought of Mallarmé brought tears to his eyes.
        Pure Judaism and severe Christianity like Tertullian’s and Savanorala’s (or Henri Bremond’s in Poèsie et Prière) eschewed “graven images” and any art that seemed to rival the sacred.  But art persisted as the human figure of Jesus did; the Jewish painter, Marc Chagall, included him in his stained-glass windows in the Chicago Museum of Art.  (Chagall was influenced by the Judeo-Christian Jacques Maritain and his wife Raissa, as was philo-Semitic marriage).
        When biblical criticism (as in Spinoza, David Strauss, Renan) weakened the authority of Jesus, many modernists, notably in the 18th century, turned to deism, which was closer to the Judaic.
        In the 19th century, Arthur Rimbaud, in A Season in Hell, exclaimed in a flash of piety, “I said God,” and added, “I don’t think I’m embarked on a marriage with Jesus.” Others, like Jean Pascal and Nietzsche, announced the death of God altogether.
        Mallarmé turned against his adolescent Catholicism as a faith, but retained a Judeo-Catholic coloration in his major work, Hérodiade.
        The exquisite Jewish princess (inherited from Heine) was paired with Judeo-Christian Saint John.  But what was he announcing here?
        The same question could be asked about Leonardo’s picture of him where he is pointing upward.  As if to answer their question, Leonardo added a cross at the top of the painting.  But the hesitation is perhaps significant: perhaps the Mona Lisa suggests the sort of religious revolt we see later in Mallarmé’s substitution for “O Mother who created” for “O Father,” in Les Fleurs, followed by “the Mother who thinks and conceives us” in his essay “Catholicism.”
        George Eliot, his contemporary, translated David Strauss’s skeptical study of Jesus, and must have been summarily motivated to seek a substitute.
        In her Daniel Deronda, the figure of Mordecai, a saintly invalid desiring of the return of the spirit of Judaism from its long exile in Christendom, was based on Emanuel Deutsch who was dying of tuberculosis and inspired George Eliot to study Judaism in the last three years of her life.  But the Judaic theme is closely associated with music in the main characters, and the tone of Eliot, as always, is warmly and sweetly human.
        Benjamin Disraeli called Christianity “Judaism for the masses,” with obvious attachment to both faiths, that Judeo-Christian fusion is akin, I submit, to the sacred/human clearly recognized in Jesus and also to the sacred/natural fullness of the Old Testament.  I disagree with Paul Johnson on this point: he saw Judaism as fundamentally anti-natural, and I feel that Jews have always been sacred/natural, other-worldly and this-worldly—musical and artistic, life-loving.
        A freethinker who believes in the sacred, as Camus did and many of us do, can easily cherish the Judeo-Christian tone and coloration and feel it as a sacred-based presence.  Camus, who avowed he shared with Faulkner a sense of the sacred, evoked, in his late masterpiece, The Fall, the genocide of the Deutsch Jews which he called “one of the great crimes of history.  He thinks of Rachel “weeping in the night for her dead children and refusing to be consoled.”  His protagonist is plainly a modern John the Baptist, both nostalgic and failed, a false prophet.
        That makes Camus very French in the glorious tradition he (unlike Sartre) fervently celebrated.  That “seminal culture of the West” (Churchill) is largely gone and is now utterly imperilled by imperialistic, radical, Islamic strife, as well as, internally, a widespread despiritualization of the West.  It has been betrayed and largely abandoned even by our best-known American universities.
        Whence this elegiac look back in fond memory, and wistful hope like Pope John Paul II’s.