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Where's the Theology?
| Article
# : |
14661 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1988 |
2,722 Words |
| Author
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George Szamuely
George Szamuely writes for Commentary and The Wall Street
Journal. He is a former editor of the Times Literary
Supplement. |
Since the eighteenth century, the intelligentsia has been at war with itself. Arrayed on one side were all those who, echoing the heroic cries of the Enlightenment, called for yet further efforts in the struggle to bring to an end the tyranny of "despot and dogma"--usually meaning the power of the church. On the other side were to be found all those who believed the symbol of Christ on the cross--the image of suffering and sacrifice for the salvation of mankind--to be expressive of everything that was of any value in our civilization. And since the church was the custodian of this symbol, its power and prerogatives had to be defended at all costs. Yet, curiously enough, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth remained almost completely unscathed throughout this ferocious battle. Not even the freest of free thinkers dared to call his oral stature into question. (His divinity was, of course, a different issue altogether.) Not only was there something admirably rebellious and egalitarian about this carpenter whose closest confidants were fishermen, but if one read the Gospels in a certain way, one might even come away with the idea that Jesus was a patron saint of the Enlightenment. Counterposing Jesus' teaching with the official doctrine of the institutionalized church (of whatever denomination) became a much-favored standby in malicious polemicizing.
Dictates of the Torah
Had Jesus not claimed that the Temple was an obstacle to the spread of holiness? Did he not teach that mere obedience to the dictates of the Torah would not ensure salvation? And was he not an early champion of the doctrine of the separation of church and state when he commanded "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's"? Dostoevsky masterfully turned this line of argument around when he had the Grand Inquisitor explain to a bemused Jesus that without intolerance and dogma, his teaching would never have gripped the minds of men. But the point is that no one else--not Socrates, none of the Christian saints, not Galileo, not Copernicus--came through the ordeal of the "twilight of the idols" (as Nietzsche dubbed the Enlightenment) with his reputation as unsullied as Jesus.
To put it crudely, for the Left, Jesus was a frustrated revolutionary who, unable to overthrow the rule of Rome, turned toward the invention of an apolitical ethic, which in the end did have exactly the same result, though neither he nor his immediate followers lived to see it. But his movement--based as it was among the pariahs and outcasts of society and possessed of a doctrine claiming that poverty, ignorance, sinfulness, and
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