ThreeVersions of Judas*

Jorge Luis Borges

There seemed a certainty in degradation.

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- T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith(when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolentimprovisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might havedirected, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries.Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name mighthave augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus andCarpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, mighthave been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses ormight have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the lastexample of the Syntagma. Instead, God assigned him to the twentiethcentury, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published thefirst edition of Kristus och Judas; there, in 1909, his masterpiece Demhemlige Frälsaren appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists aGerman version, Der heimliche Heiland, published in 1912 by EmilSchering.)

Before undertaking an examination of the foregoing works, it isnecessary to repeat that Nils Runeberg, a member of the National EvangelicalUnion, was deeply religious. In some salon in Paris, or even in Buenos Aires, a literary person might well rediscover Runeberg's theses; but thesearguments, presented in such a setting, would seem like frivolous and idleexercises in irrelevance or blasphemy. To Runeberg they were the key with whichto decipher a central mystery of theology; they were a matter of meditation andanalysis, of historic and philologic controversy, of loftiness, of jubilation,and of terror. They justified, and destroyed, his life. Whoever peruses thisessay should know that it states only Runeberg's conclusions, not his dialecticor his proof. Someone may observe that no doubt the conclusion preceded the'proofs'. For who gives himself up to looking for proofs of somethinghe does not believe in or the predication of which he does not care about?

The first edition of Kristus och Judas bears the followingcategorical epigraph, whose meaning, some years later, Nils Runeberg himselfwould monstrously dilate:

Not one thing, but everything tradition attributes to Judas Iscariotis false.

(De Quincey, 1857.)

Preceded in his speculation by some German thinker, De Quincey opinedthat Judas had betrayed Jesus Christ in order to force him to declare hisdivinity and thus set off a vast rebellion against the yoke of Rome; Runebergoffers a metaphysical vindication. Skillfully, he begins by pointing out howsuperfluous was the act of Judas. He observes (as did Robertson) that in orderto identify a master who daily preached in the synagogue and who performedmiracles before gatherings of thousands, the treachery of an apostle is notnecessary. This, nevertheless, occurred. To suppose an error in Scripture isintolerable; no less intolerable is it to admit that there was a singlehaphazard act in the most precious drama in the history of the world. Ergo, thetreachery of Judas was not accidental; it was a predestined deed which has itsmysterious place in the economy of the Redemption. Runeberg continues: TheWord, when It was made flesh, passed from ubiquity into space, from eternityinto history, from blessedness without limit to mutation and death; in order tocorrespond to such a sacrifice it was necessary that a man, as representativeof all men, make a suitable sacrifice. Judas Iscariot was that man. Judas,alone among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible purposeof Jesus. The Word had lowered Himself to be mortal; Judas, the disciple of theWord, could lower himself to the role of informer (the worst transgressiondishonor abides), and welcome the fire which can not be extinguished. The lowerorder is a mirror of the superior order, the forms of the earth correspond tothe forms of the heavens; the stains on the skin are a map of the incorruptibleconstellations; Judas in some way reflects Jesus. Thus the thirty pieces ofsilver and the kiss; thus deliberate self-destruction, in order to deservedamnation all the more. In this manner did Nils Runeberg elucidate the enigmaof Judas.

The theologians of all the confessions refuted him. Lars PeterEngström accused him of ignoring, or of confining to the past, the hypostaticunion of the Divine Trinity; Axel Borelius charged him with renewing the heresyof the Docetists, who denied the humanity of Jesus; the sharp tongued bishop ofLund denounced him for contradicting the third verse of chapter twenty-two ofthe Gospel of St.

Luke.

These various anathemas influenced Runeberg, who partially rewrotethe disapproved book and modified his doctrine. He abandoned the terrain oftheology to his adversaries and postulated oblique arguments of a moral order.He admitted that Jesus, 'who could count on the considerable resourceswhich Omnipotence offers,' did not need to make use of a man to redeem allmen. Later, he refuted those who affirm that we know nothing of theinexplicable traitor; we know, he said, that he was one of the apostles, one ofthose chosen to announce the Kingdom of Heaven, to cure the sick, to cleansethe leprous, to resurrect the dead, and to cast out demons (Matthew 10:7-8;Luke 9:1). A man whom the Redeemer has thus distinguished deserves from us thebest interpretations of his deeds. To impute his crime to cupidity (as somehave done, citing John 12:6) is to resign oneself to the most torpid motiveforce. Nils Runeberg proposes an opposite moving force: an extravagant and evenlimitless asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades andmortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor,good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as others, less heroically, renouncedpleasure.¹ With a terrible lucidity he premeditated his offense.

In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; inmurder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendor.Judas elected those offenses unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence(John 12 :6) and informing. He labored with gigantic humility; he thoughthimself unworthy to be good. Paul has written: Whoever glorifieth himself,let him glorify himself in the Lord. (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas soughtHell because the felicity of the Lord sufficed him. He thought that happiness,like good, is a divine attribute and not to be usurped by men.²

Many have discovered post factum that in the justifiable beginningsof Runeberg lies his extravagant end and that Dem hemlige Frälsaren is a mereperversion or exacerbation of Kristus och Judas. Toward the end of 1907,Runeberg finished and revised the manuscript text; almost two years passedwithout his handing it to the printer. In October of 1909, the book appearedwith a prologue (tepid to the point of being enigmatic) by the Danish HebraistErik Erfjord and bearing this perfidious epigraph: In the world he was, andthe world was made by him, and the world knew him not (John 1:10). Thegeneral argument is not complex, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God,argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to be a man for the redemption of thehuman race; it is reasonable to assume that thesacrifice offered by him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuatedby any omission. To limit all that happened to the agony of one afternoon onthe cross is blasphemous.³ To affirm that he was a man and that he wasincapable of sin contains a contradiction; the attributes of impeccabilitasand of humanitas are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemercould feel fatigue, cold, confusion, hunger and thirst; it is reasonable toadmit that he could also sin and be damned. The famous text 'He willsprout like a root in a dry soil; there is not good mien to him, nor beauty;despised of men and the least of them; a man of sorrow, and experienced inheartbreaks' (Isaiah 53:2-3) is for many people a forecast of theCrucified in the hour of his death; for some (as for instance, Hans LassenMartensen), it is a refutation of the beauty which the vulgar consensusattributes to Christ; for Runeberg, it is a precise prophecy, not of onemoment, but of all the atrocious future, in time and eternity, of the Word madeflesh. God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to thepoint of being reprehensible - all the way to the abyss. In order to save us,He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertainweb of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, orJesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.

In vain did the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund offer thisrevelation. The incredulous considered it, a priori, an insipid and laborioustheological game; the theologians disdained it. Runeberg intuited from thisuniversal indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. /kassandra-serial-acasa-tv.html. God had commandedthis indifference; God did not wish His terrible secret propagated in theworld. Runeberg understood that the hour had not yet come. He sensed ancientand divine curses converging upon him, he remembered Elijah and Moses, whocovered their faces on the mountain top so as not to see God; he rememberedIsaiah, who prostrated himself when his eyes saw That One whose glory fills theearth; Saul who was blinded on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simon ben Azai,who saw Paradise and died; the famous soothsayer John of Viterbo, who went madwhen he was able to see the Trinity; the Midrashim, abominating the impious whopronounce the Shem Hamephorash, the secret name of God. Wasn't he, perchance,guilty of this dark crime? Might not this be the blasphemy against the Spirit,the sin which will not be pardoned (Matthew 12:3)? Valerius Soranus died forhaving revealed the occult name of Rome; what infinite punishment would be hisfor having discovered and divulged the terrible name of God?

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Intoxicated with insomnia and with vertiginous dialectic, NilsRuneberg wandered through the streets of Malmö, praying aloud that he be giventhe grace to share Hell with the Redeemer.

He died of the rupture of an aneurysm, the first day of March 1912.The writers on heresy, the heresiologists, will no doubt remember him; he addedto the concept of the Son, which seemed exhausted, the complexities of calamityand evil.

up¹ Borelius mockingly interrogates: Why did he not renounce torenounce? Why not renounce renouncing?

up² Euclydes da Cunha, in a book ignored by Runeberg, notesthat for the heresiarch of Canudos, Antonio Conselheiro, virtue was 'akind of impiety almost.' An Argentine reader could recall analogouspassages in the work of Almafuerte. Runeberg published, in the symbolist sheetSju insegel, an assiduously descriptive poem, 'The Secret Water': thefirst stanzas narrate the events of one tumultuous day; the last, the findingof a glacial pool; the poet suggests that the eternalness of this silent waterchecks our useless violence, and in some way allows and absolves it. The poemconcludes in this way:

The water of the forest is still and felicitous,

And we, we can be vicious and full of pain.

up³ Maurice Abramowicz observes: 'Jesus, d'apres cescandinave, a toujours le beau role; ses deboires, grace a la science destypographes, jouissent d'une reputation polyglotte; sa residence detrente-trois ans parmis les humains ne fut, en somne, qu'unevillegiature.' Erfjord, in the third appendix to the

Christelige Dogmatik, refutes this passage. He writes that thecrucifying of God has not ceased, for anything which has happened once in timeis repeated ceaselessly through all eternity. Judas, now, continues to receivethe pieces of silver; he continues to hurl the pieces of silver in the temple;he continues to knot the hangman's noose on the field of blood. (Erfjord, tojustify this affirmation, invokes the last chapter of the first volume of theVindication of Eternity, by Jaromir Hladlk.)

Translator unknown.

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* From: 'Artificios' (1944). In the introduction, Borges writes: 'Schopenhauer, De Quincey, Mauthner, Shaw, Chesterton, León Bloy, form the heterogenic census of the authors I continually re-read. In the christological fantasy titled 'Three Versions of Judas' I think I perceive the remote influence of the last [Bloy].'

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