“There seemed a certainty in degradation.” - T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, CIII.
In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith, when Basilides revealed that the cosmos was a reckless or wicked improvisation of deficient angels, Nils Runeberg would have directed, with singular intellectual passion, one of the gnostic convents. Dante would have sent him, perhaps, to a grave of fire; his name would have been added to the catalogue of minor heretics, between Saturninus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preachings, adorned with insults, would endure in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses, or would have perished when a fire in a monastic library devoured the last copy of the Syntagma. Instead, God gave him the 20th century and the university town of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of Kristus och Judas; there, in 1909, his important book Den hemlige Frälsaren. (Of the latter there is a German version, executed in 1912 by Emil Schering; it is called Der heimliche Heiland.)
Before attempting an examination of the works cited above, we should repeat that Nils Runeberg, a member of the National Evangelical Union, was a deeply religious man. In a salon in Paris or even in Buenos Aires, a man of letters might rediscover Runeberg’s theses; those theses, proposed in a salon, would be light, useless exercises in negligence or blasphemy. For Runeberg, they were the key that deciphers a central mystery of theology; they were a matter of meditation and analysis, of historical and philological controversy, of pride, of joy, and of terror. They justified and ruined his life. Whoever goes through this article must likewise consider that it records only Runeberg’s conclusions, not his dialectics or proof. Someone will observe that his conclusions undoubtedly preceded the “proof.” Who resigns himself to searching for proof of something he does not believe, or whose teaching is not important to him?
The first edition of Kristus och Judas contained that categorical epigraph, whose sense, years later, Runeberg himself would broaden monstrously: Not one thing, everything that tradition attributes to Judas Iscariot is false (de Quincey, 1857). Preceded by some German, de Quincey speculated that Judas handed over Jesus Christ in order to force him to declare his divinity and ignite a vast rebellion against the yoke of Rome; Runeberg suggests a vindication of a metaphysical nature. Skillfully, he begins by highlighting the superfluousness of Judas’ act. He observes (like Robertson) that to identify a teacher who preached daily in the synagogue, and who worked miracles before crowds of thousands of men, an apostle’s betrayal is not required. That, however, is what happened. To suppose an error in Scripture is intolerable; no less intolerable is to allow for coincidence in the most precious event in the history of the world. Ergo, Judas’ betrayal was not coincidental; it was a predetermined act which has its mysterious place in the economy of redemption. Runeberg continues: The Word, when it was made flesh, passed from ubiquity to space, from eternity to history, from bliss without limits to mutation and death; to correspond to such a sacrifice, it was necessary for a man, representing all men, to make a sacrifice of equal worthiness. Judas Iscariot was that man. Judas, alone among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible purpose of Jesus. The Word had lowered itself to being mortal; Judas, disciple of the Word, could lower himself to informer (the worst crime that infamy can bear) and to dwell in the neverending fire. The lower order is a mirror of the higher order; the forms of the earth correspond to the forms of the heavens; the marks of the skin are a map of the incorruptible constellations; Judas in some way reflects Jesus. Hence the thirty silver coins and the kiss; hence the voluntary death, to deserve even more the Reprobation. Thus Runeberg elucidated the enigma of Judas.
Theologians of all confessions refuted him. Lars Peter Engström accused him of ignoring, or disregarding, the hypostatic union; Axel Borelius, of renewing the docetic heresy, which denied Jesus’ humanity; the steely bishop of Lund of contradicting the third verse of the twenty-second chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke.
These various condemnations influenced Runeberg, who partially rewrote the censured book and modified his doctrine. He abandoned to his adversaries the theological terrain and proposed oblique moral arguments. He admitted that Jesus, “who disposed of the considerable resources that Omnipotence can offer,” did not need a man in order to redeem all men. He refuted, then, those who claim that we know nothing about the inexplicable traitor; we know, he said, that he was one of the apostles, one of those chosen to herald the kingdom of the heavens, to heal the sick, to cleanse lepers, to raise the dead and to exorcize demons (Matthew 10:7-8, Luke 9:1). A man so distinguished by the Redeemer deserves from us the best interpretation of his acts. To attribute his crime to greed (as some have done, citing John 12:6) is to resign oneself to the clumsiest motive. Nils Runeberg proposes the opposite motive: a hyperbolic and almost limitless asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades and mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor, good, peace, the kingdom of the heavens, as others, less heroically, renounce pleasure.1 He premeditated his sins with terrible clarity. In adultery tenderness and abnegation often play a part; in homicide, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic glimmer. Judas chose the sin unvisited by any virtue: betrayal of trust (John 12:6) and denunciation. He worked with gigantic humility, believing himself unworthy of being good. Paul wrote: “He that glories, let him glory in the Lord” (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought hell, because the Lord’s bliss was enough for him. He thought that happiness, like goodness, is a divine attribute and that men should not usurp it.2
Many have discovered, post factum, that in Runeberg’s justifiable beginnings his extravagant end is found, and Den hemlige Frälsaren is a mere perversion or exacerbation of Kristus och Judas. At the end of 1907, Runeberg finished and revised the handwritten text; almost two years went by without him delivering it to the press. In October of 1909, the book appeared with a prologue (tepid to the point of being enigmatic) by the Danish hebraist Erik Erfjord and with this perfidious epigraph: “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not” (John 1:10). The general argument is not complex, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to being a man for the redemption of the human race; it can be surmised that his sacrifice was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by omissions. To limit his suffering to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous.3 To claim that he was a man and that he was incapable of sin contains a contradiction; the attributes of impeccabilitas and of humanitas are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold, embarrassment, hunger and thirst; it can also be admitted that he could sin and stray. The famous text, “With all this he shall grow up before him as a tender sprout and as a root out of a dry ground. There is no outward appearance in him, nor beauty. We shall see him, yet nothing attractive about him that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected among men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with weakness;” (Isaiah 53:2-3), is for many a vision of the crucified in the hour of his death. For some (viz Hans Lassen Martensen), a refutation of the beauty that common consensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, the punctual prophecy not of a moment but of the whole awful future, in time and in eternity, of the Word made flesh. God made himself totally man to the point of infamy, man to the point of reprobation, to the abyss. To save us, he could have chosen any of the fates that weave the confused web of history; he could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; he chose a paltry fate: he was Judas.
The bookstores of Stockholm and Lund proffered this revelation in vain. The incredulous considered it, a priori, an insipid and laborious theological game; theologians scorned it. Runeberg intuited in this ecumenical indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. God ordered that indifference; God did not want his terrible secret to spread across the Earth. Runeberg understood that the time had not come: he felt that divine ancient curses were converging on him; he remembered Elijah and Moses, who covered their faces on the mountain so as not to see God; Isaiah, who was terrified when his eyes saw him whose glory fills the Earth; Saul, whose eyes were blinded on the road to Damascus; the Rabbi Simeon ben Azzai, who saw Paradise and died; the famous sorcerer John of Viterbo who went mad when he saw the Trinity; the Midrashim, who abhor the impious who pronounce the Shem Hamephorash, the secret name of God. Was he not, perhaps, guilty of this dark crime? Would this not be the blasphemy against the Spirit which would not be forgiven (Matthew 12:31)? Valerius Soranus died for having divulged the secret name of Rome; what infinite punishment would be his, for having discovered and divulged the horrible name of God?
Drunk on insomnia and dizzying dialectics, Nils Runeberg wandered through the streets of Malmö, crying out prayers that he be granted the grace of sharing hell with the Redeemer.
He died of a brain aneurysm on March 1, 1912. Heresiologists will perhaps remember him; he added to the concept of the Son, which had seemed exhausted, the complexities of evil and misfortune.
Borelius asks mockingly, “Why did he not renounce renunciation? Why not renounce renouncing renunciation?” ↩
Euclides da Cunha, in a book unknown to Runeberg, notes that for the heretic of Canudos, Antonio Conselheiro, virtue “was almost an impiety.” The Argentine reader will recall analogous passages in the work of Almafuerte. Runeberg published, in the symbolic leaflet Sju insegel, a rigorous descriptive poem, The Secret Water; the first stanzas narrate the events of a tumultuous day; the last, the discovery of a glacial pond; the poet suggests that the endurance of this silent water rights our senseless violence and somehow permits and absolves it. The poem concludes thus: “The water in the forest is happy; we can be wicked and painful.” ↩
Maurice Abramowicz observes: “Jésus, d’après ce scandinave, a toujours le beau rôle; ses déboires, grâce à la science des typographes, jouissent d’une réputation polyglotte; sa résidence de trente-trois ans parmi les humains ne fut en somme, qu’une villégiature.” Erfjord, in the third appendix of the Christelige Dogmatik refutes this passage. He notes that the crucifixion of God has not ceased, because what has happened just once in time repeats itself without relief in eternity. Judas, now, is still receiving the pieces of silver; is still kissing Jesus Christ; is still casting down the pieces of silver in the temple; is still tying the knot of the rope in the field of blood. (Erfjord, to justify this statement, invokes the last chapter of the first volume of the Vindication of Eternity, by Jaromir Hladík). ↩