No CrossRef data available.
The Last Temptation of Satan: Divine Deception in Greek Patristic Interpretations of the Passion Narrative
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2004
Abstract
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
Information
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- © 2004 Cambridge University Press
“Perhaps a god has deceived us.”
—Jorge Luis Borges
Introduction
A remarkable number of Greek patristic thinkers gave expression to the theory that Satan was deceived by Christ, who exploited his adversary's mistaken belief that the object of his desires was a mere man and not the deity incarnate. Driven by an insatiable hunger for human bodies, the demonic appetite was inexorably drawn to devour the seemingly mortal flesh of Jesus. That flesh, however, was but a seductive lure concealing the power of divinity that brought about Satan's downfall and even (in some traditions) his salvation. The crucial events in this drama of deception were Christ's agony in the garden and his suffering on the cross, moments of apparent weakness and vulnerability which patristic writers daringly reconfigured as the cunning ruses of a master strategist defeating the enemy through his own devices. Such a radical reinterpretation of Scripture was achieved largely through the tools of typological and allegorical exegesis, by which patristic writers sought to explain—and thereby eliminate—the “shame and folly of the cross” (compare 1 Cor 1:18–25; Heb 12:2; Deut 21:23), along with the attendant spectacles of Christ's apparent fearfulness and uncontrolled emotion.
Having succumbed so pathetically to the fear of death, the suffering figure described in the Gospels was in flagrant violation of Roman decorum, a construction of the Stoics, whose teachings on the endurance of pain were vaunted as the ideal expression of masculine behavior and identity. It will be worth remembering that the Stoics further distinguished between the “sage”
and the “fool.” The sage was a perfected creature who attained wisdom (and thus divine similitude) by divesting himself of the ignominious marks of creaturehood, especially fear and suffering. The primary characteristic of the sage was, in a word, apatheia: freedom from passion. Thus the anti-Christian philosopher Celsus (ca. 176) argued that, if the Christian savior was in any sense divine, “he would have never uttered loud laments and wailings, nor prayed to avoid the fear of death, saying something like: ‘Oh Father, let this cup pass from me’ (Matt 26:39).”
1Cited by Origen (ca. 185–254) in Cels. 2.24; ed. Marcel Borret, Contre Celse, vol. 1 (SC 132; Paris: Cerf, 1967) 348; trans. Henry Chadwick, Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 88. Origen correctly points out that “no statement is found that Jesus ‘uttered wailings,’” and he accuses Celsus of both “altering” the text (of Matt 26:39) and ignoring those passages which “prove that Jesus was ready and courageous in face of his suffering.” Origen concedes that a proper discussion of these problems requires the “help of divine wisdom,” in support of which he cites 1 Cor 2:7, a text that was central to the developing theologia crucis. For related passages, see Cels. 6.34 (ed. Marcel Borret, Contre Celse, vol. 3 [SC 147; Paris: Cerf, 1969] 262; trans. Chadwick, 350); 6.36 (ed. 266, trans. 352); and 6.10: “They would have us believe that (Jesus) is the Son of God, although he was most dishonorably arrested and punished to his utter disgrace, and until quite recently wandered about most shamefully in the sight of all men” (ed. 202–4, trans. 324).
By the fourth century of the Christian era, the Stoic valorization of endurance in the face of pain had found an unexpected ally in the theology of Arianism. Arius, a priest in the church of Alexandria, argued that the passion of Christ was a clear sign that the wounded savior of the Gospels was not to be identified with the impassible divinity. Based on his cowardly performance in the garden of Gethsemane, Arius and his followers concluded that Christ was neither transcendentally wise nor divinely dispassionate. And whereas the Arians conceded that Christ could be said to have “participated” and “grown” in wisdom (compare Luke 2:52), he could in no way be identified with Wisdom itself. In response, the opponents of Arianism argued that the inability to discern the germ of divinity hidden within the husks of suffering was the result of a superficial reading of Scripture. Fixated on surface forms, the Arians had blinded themselves to the deeper meaning of the sacred text. At the same time, the failure to understand the true nature of signification was itself a sign that the superficial reader was incapacitated by a system of ultimately demonic metaphysics. Uninformed literalism, and its accompanying low christology, was a reading of Scripture that the Arians shared with the devil himself.
That Christ suffered, cried out loudly, and died could not be denied by anyone. The Gospels had all put the end of Christ's life at the dramatic center of the story, suggesting a point of convergence for human hopes and expectations. How then, in the cultural atmosphere of late antiquity, could the viability of these narratives be maintained? How could one reclaim the discredited and dehumanized Christ, and restore to him the dignity and value that he seemed to have lost in his shameful death at the hands of the Romans? How, too, could the post-Constantinian church, increasingly institutionalized within the structures of the Roman Empire, promote a criminal condemned to the cross by a Roman governor as the one, true God?
2Compare Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 13.4: “They say that our madness (maniva) consists in the fact that we put a crucified man in second place after the unchangeable and eternal God, the creator of the world”; ed. Miroslav Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Apologiae pro Christianis (PTS 38; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994) 51, lines 15–19. Martin Hengel (Crucifixion [trans. John Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977]) surveys a large number of passages by early Christian writers dealing with this theme. In the fourth century, the emperor Julian ridiculed Christians for worshipping a “Jewish corpse”; see Against the Galileans, in Wilmer Cave Wright, trans., The Works of the Emperor Julian (3 vols.; LCL; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980) 3:376 (206a); compare 3:414 (335b–c).
Luke 2:34), was reconfigured through a movement transforming manifest “shame and folly” into an emblem of the “secret and hidden wisdom of God” (1 Cor 2:7).
3Compare Origen, Comm. Rom. 4.2 (extant in a Latin translation by Rufinus): “The sign in which Christ had come was a ‘sign of contradiction’ (Luke 2:34), because one thing was seen in him and something else was understood. Flesh was being seen, but God was being believed” (PG 14:968a–b); John Chrysostom, De coemeterio et de cruce: “Even though that which is uttered is one, its meaning is twofold”
said with respect to the passion and crucifixion; PG 49:395, lines 32–33); and Ps.-Chrysostom, In sancta et magna parasceve: “Today he is bound who bound the waters in clouds, loosing those who were bound and granting freedom to those who were captive. He is bound who unbound Lazarus from the bonds of death. Led as a prisoner to Pilate is he who is escorted by myriads of angels … therefore do not be ashamed, but look beyond external appearances
, and beholding man, worship God” (PG 50:813–16).
After an introductory discussion of the notion of “divine deception,” the following study turns to a consideration of two works by Gregory of Nyssa (the Catechetical Discourse, and the Sermon on the Three Days between Christ's Death and Resurrection), followed by an analysis of the Homily on the Passion and the Cross attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria. These fourth-century texts, along with others from across the late antique period that will be discussed in this paper, reconfigure the Passion Narrative as a divine strategy cunningly calculated to deceive the devil. The fourth century was a time of crisis for the Christian community, which struggled both to legitimize itself within a cultural system that had long derided its faith in a crucified God, and to define its relationship to a political order that had lately sought to destroy it. At the same time, Christian thinkers had to confront the challenge of Arianism, a culturally sanctioned religious attitude that refused to identify the suffering person of Christ with the transcendent god of the philosophers. In response to these challenges, Gregory of Nyssa and the author of the Homily on the Passion and the Cross developed a sophisticated theory of interpretation, a poetics of representation involving rich and unstable ambiguities, not unlike the intertextual methods of contemporary deconstruction. For these writers, scriptural interpretation was closely coupled with a theological vision of the person of Christ, and thus the hermeneutical possibilities of narrative were made to reflect the metanarrative of divine-human possibility. That is, the interpretive activity of deception and deferral, which refuses to fix its christological referent within a closed narrative destiny, virtualizes the very activity of Christ himself, the Word incarnate, who eludes (and indeed exploits) closure within categories constructed by demonic desire and the culture of power.
Divine Deception
Situated within the hermeneutical framework of a movement from “letter to spirit,” the becrimsoned canvas of the Passion Narrative was given a rather curious coat of varnish. The basic principle of this framework was that meaningful contents are often concealed behind an unprepossessing exterior. Things, in other words, are not always what they seem. But this principle, patently obvious in and of itself, blended readily with the popular Platonic belief that the world of truth was different from the world of appearances. The world of appearances was a world of change and flux. It was an empire of signs, inherently unstable, ambiguous, dissembling, and transitive. It was, in a word, deceptive, and any figure incarnate in that world was just as likely to conceal the truth as to reveal it. Admittedly, the category of deception is an unlikely place from which to launch a successful apologetical reconstruction of the Passion Narratives; but since classical antiquity the use of deception was sanctioned as an acceptable pedagogical, strategic, and therapeutic device.4
Here I am indebted to the work of David Satran, “Pedagogy and Deceit in the Alexandrian Theological Tradition,” in Origeniana Quinta. Papers of the 5th International Origen Congress (ed. R. J. Daly; Leuven: Peeters, 1993) 119–24; and idem, “Truth and Deception in the Contra Celsum,” in Discorsi di verità: Paganesimo, giudaismo e cristianesimo a confronto nel Contro Celso di Origene (ed. Lorenzo Perrone; Rome: Institutum patristicum Augustinianum, 1998) 213–24. See also J. W. Trigg, “Divine Deception and the Truthfulness of Scripture,” in Origen of Alexandria: His World and Legacy (ed. Charles Kannengiesser and W. L. Petersen; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) 147–64; and E. L. Wheeler, Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery (Leiden: Brill, 1988) 93–100.
For example, deception was permissible for fathers who thereby concealed their affection for their children in order to discipline them. So too for physicians, who were expected to sugar their bitter pills and conceal their sharpened scalpels beneath the surface of a sponge. Ancient philosophers also dealt with the question of falsehood and deception. Plato's Lesser Hippias, for instance, deals systematically with lying and deceit in the context of a debate about who was the greatest Homeric hero: honorable Achilles (“true and simple”) or Odysseus the liar (“wily and false”). To the surprise and consternation of historians of philosophy, Plato weaves the crown of victory for Odysseus, arguing that only the liar knows what the truth is, whereas the one who knows only the truth does not truly know even that.5
A similar argument runs through the work of Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), which deals extensively with lies and deception. The conventional nature of language, the author argues, facilitates lying, and the very “freedom of the sign from the signified enlarges the possibilities for falsehood.” The ability to prevaricate is thus a basic “design feature” of language, in support of which Rappaport cites Buber: “A lie was possible only after a creature, man, was capable of conceiving the being of truth” (ibid., 11–13).
Gregory of Nyssa and the Fishhook
The Christian redaction of the notion of “divine deception” is perhaps best known through the work of the fourth-century bishop and theologian Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395), whose metaphor of the fishhook represents a decisive moment in his dramatic theory of the atonement. According to this theory, Satan was initially deceived by the apparent ordinariness of Christ's humanity and unwittingly consumed his mortal body in death. He soon discovered, however, that he had been duped into biting off more than he could chew: Christ is divine, and therefore immortal, and the unexpected presence of the deity in the bowels of the underworld signaled the liberation of the dead from the forces of death and decay. In his Catechetical Discourse, a somewhat popularizing handbook of Christian teaching, Gregory introduces this idea in the context of a striking typological reversal in which the Savior sets out to “deceive the deceiver”:
Since it was not in the nature of the opposing power to undergo the unveiled manifestation
of God, the deity was hidden
under the veil
of our nature, so that, as with ravenous fish, the hook
of the deity might be gulped down along with the bait
of the flesh…. In this way, he who practiced deception
receives the very same in return. He who first deceived
humanity by the bait of sensual pleasure is himself deceived
by the presence of the human form. And whereas the enemy wrought his deception
for the ruin of our nature, the wise one
used his plan of deception
for salvation.
6Cat. Disc. 24, 26; ed. E. Mühlenberg, Gregorii Nysseni Oratio catechetica (GNO 3.4; Leiden: Brill, 1996) 62, lines 3–10; and 65–66, lines 21–25, 1–3; reprinted with a French translation, introduction, and notes by Raymond Winling, Discours catéchétique (SC 453; Paris: Cerf, 2000) 254–64; see also L. F. Mateo-Seco, “El concepto de salvation en la ‘Oratio Catechetica Magna’ de S. Gregorio de Nisa,” ScrTh 4 (1972) 145–71. Compare the remarks of Gregory's brother Basil, for whom the image of a fish caught on a hook is a type of the final retribution for acts of avarice and oppression (Hex. 7.3; ed. Stanislas Giet, Homélies sur l'Hexaéméron [SC 26; Paris: Cerf, 1968] 404, line 9); and those of Gregory's contemporary and colleague, Gregory Nazianzus: “The ‘light shines in the darkness’ (John 1:5) of this life and in this weak flesh, and though persecuted by the darkness, it is not ‘overtaken’ (John 1:5) by it—I mean by the opposing power which shamelessly assailed the visible
Adam, but instead encountered God and was defeated…. For since the specious advocate
of evil baited us with the promise of divinity (compare Gen 3:6), he was himself baited by the snare
of the flesh. In attacking [the new] Adam, he encountered God, and the condemnation of the flesh was abolished (Rom 5:16, 18), death being put to death by the flesh” (Or. 39.3, 13, ed. C. Moreschini and P. Gallay, Discours 38–41 [SC 358; Paris: Cerf, 1990] 152, lines 9–13; 178, lines 22–27); compare Or. 30.6, ed. P. Gallay, Discours 27–31 (SC 250; Paris: Cerf, 1978) 236; Or. 40.10, ed. C. Moreschini and P. Gallay, Discours 38–41, 216; and John Egan, “The Deceit of the Devil according to Gregory Nazianzus,” StPat 22 (1989) 8–13, who deals extensively with this passage.
“Omnipotent Wisdom”
, Wis 7:23; 1 Cor 1:24), coming into the “heart of the earth” (Matt 12:40), was able to make “utterly foolish”
, compare Rom 1:22; 1 Cor 1:18) that great “Mind” (compare Isa 10:12) which dwells in it, turning his counsel to folly, and catching the wise one
in his cunning
and turning back upon him his clever devices
. For this reason, having swallowed the bait
of the flesh, he was pierced with the fishhook
of deity, and so the dragon
was caught with the fishhook, just as it is said in the book of Job, “You shall catch the dragon with a fishhook” (Job 40:25).
7Gregory of Nyssa, On the Three-Day Period between the Death and Resurrection of Christ; ed. Ernest Gebhardt (GNO 9; Leiden: Brill, 1967) 280–81, lines 16–18, 4–16. See the detailed commentary on this passage by Hubertus R. Drobner, Gregor von Nyssa. Die Drei Tage zwischen Tod und Auferstehung unseres Herrn Jesus Christus (Leiden: Brill, 1982) 86–91; as well as the remarks of Mariette Canévet, “Nature du mal et économie du salut chez Grégoire de Nysse,” RSR 56 (1968) 87–95; and Andreas Spira, “Der Descensus ad Infernos in der Osterpredigt Gregors von Nyssa De Tridui Spatio,” in The Easter Sermons of Gregory of Nyssa (ed. idem; Cambridge, Mass.: The Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1981) 195–261, esp. 230–38.
In the first of these two passages, Gregory takes as his point of departure the established theological belief that the deity graciously reveals itself in forms proportionate to the limited capacities of the human mind. Here, however, the gift of divine accommodation is provocatively offered to the devil, inasmuch as the divinity renders itself an object of desire to the mind of the “opposing power.” Implicating itself in the gaze of the demonic, the incarnate God seductively appears as so much “bait,” a graphic image of predatory deception by means of which, according to Gregory, the deity paradoxically appropriates the devil's own artifice. Anticipating the objection that he has committed God to a course of unethical (not to mention diabolical) action, Gregory argues that it was only right that an act of deception should be undone by an act of deception, a notion that accords with the “riddling definition of justice used by the poets” outlined by Plato in the Republic (1.332c–d).
Gregory further stresses that God's deceit, unlike the devil's, was enacted for therapeutic purposes, thereby classifying it among forms of deception culturally acceptable in late antiquity. If God deceives, tempts, and seduces, it is to capture, immolate, and ultimately redeem the desire of the other. In the second passage cited above, Gregory ascribes these activities to “Omnipotent Wisdom,” a feminine figure who is herself the “very being of Christ”: the irreducible ontological core, as it were, of the various guises and modalities of divine revelation, including her persona as “Word.”8
Elsewhere, in the first homily of his Commentary on the Song of Songs, Gregory writes, “The wisdom of Solomon has no measure or limit
… but do not suppose that I mean the same Solomon from Bersabee. Another Solomon is signified here, one who is also descended from David according to the flesh. This one comprehends the knowledge
of all things. His very being
is Wisdom”; ed. H. Langerbeck (GNO 6; Leiden: Brill, 1960) 17, lines 1–6. On Wisdom as the true being of Christ, see also Origen, Prin. 1.2; ed. Henri Crouzel and Manlio Simonetti, Traité des principes (SC 252; Paris: Cerf, 1978) 126; and idem, Commentary on John, 1.289; ed. Cécile Blanc, Commentaire sur saint Jean (SC 120 bis; Paris: Cerf, 1996), where Prov 8.22 is used to subordinate the “Logos” (of John 1:1) to “Wisdom,” because “wisdom precedes the word that announces it.”
Scholarly assessments of Gregory of Nyssa's fishhook have generally been rather prim and patronizing. Hastings Rashdall called Gregory's theory “childish and immoral.”9
Hastings Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement (London: Macmillan, 1925) 364.
J. A. MacCullough, The Harrowing of Hell: A Comparative Study of an Early Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1930) 205; MacCullough also has in view the larger question of the “devil's rights” over fallen humanity.
Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor. An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement (1931; New York: Macmillan, 1986) 47.
George Florovsky, The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century (1933; repr., Belmont, Mass.: Notable and Academic Books, 1987) 195, cited approvingly by Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) 272–73.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Human Destiny (vol. 2 of The Nature and Destiny of Man; New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1941) 59–60.
Cyril Richardson. “Introduction to Gregory of Nyssa,” in Christology of the Later Fathers (ed. Edward R. Hardy; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954) 247.
Frances Young, The Use of Sacrificial Ideas in Greek Christian Writers from the New Testament to John Chrysostom (Cambridge, Mass.: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979) 209; and eadem, From Nicaea to Chalcedon (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) 121.
Anthony Meredith, The Cappadocians (Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995) 94.
Richard Jakob Kees, Die Lehre von der Oikonomia Gottes in der Oratio Catechetica Gregors von Nyssa (Leiden: Brill, 1995). An exception is the work of Franz Hilt (Des heil. Gregor von Nyssa Lehre vom Menschen systematisch dargestellt von Franz Hilt [Köln, 1890] 144–50), who recognized the importance of this theme in Gregory's soteriology; see also the remarks of Hübner (n. 52, below), who builds on Hilt's work, describing Gregory's metaphor of the fishhook as “ein zentrales Theologumenon seiner Soteriologie.”
Disdain for Gregory's fishhook and the theory of divine deception is clearly an established topos within contemporary scholarship, and, like many scholarly constructions, it has distorted the nature of the actual evidence. Far from being a grotesque idiosyncracy limited to the writings of Gregory of Nyssa, the image of a divine fishhook baited with the flesh of Christ was used by dozens of writers from the mid-fourth through the seventh centuries and beyond, including such notables as Athanasius, John Chrysostom, John of Damascus, and Maximus the Confessor, to mention only a few.18
For Athanasius, see n. 37, below. For Chrysostom, see Hom. Matt. 26:39 (PG 61:753). For John of Damascus, see Expositio fidei 45.3.1; ed. Boniface Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, vol. 2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973) 106–7. For further references, see Drob-ner, Die Drei Tage, 89 n. 103. Note that the fishhook also appears in the liturgical texts of the Orthodox Church: “With divinely-wise bait thou didst hook the author of evil, the dragon of the deep, binding him in Tartarus with bonds of darkness” (Pentecostarion [Boston: Holy Transfiguration, 1990] 423). Given the continuity between the flesh of Christ and Mary, Ps.-Epiphanius praises the Virgin as the “bait of the spiritual fish-hook, for in you the divinity is the hook” (Homily 5; PG 43:489d); compare idem, Homily 4, where the devil says: “I was deceived by the son of Mary, not knowing that God had concealed himself
in a human body; I beheld him enfolded
in a human body, and I mistook him for a mere man
” (PG 43:481c–d).
Daniel J. Saunders (“The Devil and the Divinity of Christ,” Theologial Studies 9 [1948] 536–53) provides an incisive survey of this theme from Augustine through Aquinas and Cajetan.
Augustine, Sermon 130: “Along came the redeemer and conquered the deceiver. And what did our redeemer do to our captor? To pay our price, he set the mousetrap of his cross; as bait he placed there his own blood. While the devil, though, was able to shed that blood, he did not earn the right to drink it. And because he shed the blood of one who was not his debtor, he was ordered to release those who were his debtors” (PL 38:726–27). The translator of this passage, Edmund Hill (The Works of Augustine: Sermons III/4 [Brooklyn: New City Press, 1992] 311), notes that this is “one of Augustine's favorite, and more grotesque metaphors for explaining how Christ's death has delivered us from the devil's clutches.” Peter Lombard quotes the sermon in his Sententia in iv Libris Distinctae (3 vols.; Grottaferrata: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971–1981) 2:120; see J. Rivière, “Muscipula Diaboli: Origène et le sens d'une image augustinienne,” Théologie ancienne et médiévale 1 (1929) 484–96; and Meyer Schapiro, “Muscipula Diaboli: The Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece,” Art Bulletin 28 (1945) 81–89. See also C. W. Marx, The Devil's Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1995); and Kathleen M. Ashley, “The Guiler Beguiled: Christ and Satan as Theological Tricksters in Medieval Religious Literature,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 24, no. 2 (1982) 126–37.
Returning to the image of the fishhook, it should be noted that this seemingly peculiar metaphor was not invented ex nihilo and subsequently imposed upon Scripture. Rather, it was derived from a theologically consistent conflation of several biblical passages, including Job 40–41; Ps 104:26 (LXX 103:26); and Isa 27:1, all of which are concerned with mocking the cosmic dragon and dragging him up from the depths of the sea on a fishhook.
21Job 40:25–41:26 (“But wilt thou catch the dragon
with a fish-hook
and put a halter about his nose? Or wilt thou fasten a ring in his nostril, and bore his lip with a clasp? … But thou shalt lay thy hand upon him once, remembering the war that is waged by his mouth … There is nothing upon the earth like him, formed to be sported with
by my angels. He beholds every high thing, and he is king of all that are in the waters.” Ps 104:26 (LXX 103:26): “This dragon whom thou hast made to sport
in it (i.e., in the sea).” Isa 27:1: “In that day God shall bring his holy and great and strong sword upon the dragon, even the serpent that flees, upon the dragon, the crooked serpent: he shall destroy the dragon.” Translations from Lancelot C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint with Apocrypha (1851; repr., Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1986).
and not a man”) was granted a central place in this tradition. Tied to Psalm 22, the fishhook was thereby anchored to the center of the Passion Narrative itself, for when Christ cried out in dereliction from the cross, it was this psalm's first verse which he chose to give voice to his pain.
22Matt 27:46, citing Ps 22:1 (LXX 21:1): “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Note that the Gospel of Luke, written with the sensibilities of a Greco-Roman audience in mind, omits the indecorous cry of dereliction.
Compare Ps.-Chrysostom, In illud, simile est regnum coelorum grano sinapis (Matt 13:31): “What does Isaiah say? ‘We saw him, but he had no form nor beauty, but his form was ignoble’ (Isa 53:2–3), and this is why he called himself a ‘worm,’ for he says, ‘I am a worm and not a man’ (Ps 22:6 [LXX 21:6]), and in Isaiah the Father says to him: ‘Fear not, you worm Jacob’ (Isa 41:14), and afterwards, calling to mind his burial, he says, ‘Thy inheritance
[sic]; LXX
shall be with the worm’ (Isa 14:11), for just like a wise fisherman, it was necessary that he place his flesh like a worm on the brilliantly shining fishhook of his divinity, and cast it into the depths of this world, and thus catch the dragon on a hook, so that what was written in Job might come to pass, ‘Thou wilt catch the dragon with a fish hook’ (Job 40:25)” (PG 64:23, lines 20–32). See also Proclus of Constantinople (d. 446), Homily 29.24, 26: “Christ carried the cross in order to fish out Adam from Tartarus … why do you plot in vain, O devil? Christ carries a cross which you fashioned to your own ruin, for as a wise fisherman he carries the cross in place of a pole in order to fish out Adam from Tartarus”; ed. F. J. Leroy, L'Homilétique de Proclus de Constantinople (Vatican City: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1967) 211.
which Moses raised on a pole in the wilderness (Num 21:8–9). The figure of Jonah swallowed by the whale and regurgitated intact, invoked by Christ as a foreshadowing of his own death and resurrection (Matt 12:39–40), was also influential in the elaboration of this exegetical metanarrative.
24On the dynamics of which, see James L. Kugel, In Potiphar's House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) 247–70.
Two texts will serve to illustrate the place of “Christ the Worm” in the subsequent patristic tradition. The first is from a letter written by the sixth-century Palestinian ascetic Barsanuphius (d. ca. 545), who contrasts the worm of Psalm 22 with the “undying worm” of Mark 9:48 (cited from Isa 66:24), which is said to feed like a maggot on the flesh of the damned. Barsanuphius avers that, just as those Israelites who were bitten by serpents were cured by the “bronze serpent” in the book of Numbers, so too does the crucified worm of Psalm 22 provide the antidote to the afflictions caused by the worm in the Gospel of Mark:
This worm [i.e., Christ] came for my sake to deliver me from the worm of corruption which corrupts the human race. And because the worm of corruption (compare Mark 9:48), which corrupts and is corrupted, goes down into the wounds and causes them to putrefy and stink, the incorruptible worm came, of whom it is said: “I am a worm and not a man” (LXX Ps 21:6). And just as the corruptible worm plunges into the wounds, so the incorruptible worm went down into the “lower parts of the earth” (Eph 4:9), and from there began to destroy all the uncleanness of the old worm; and having thus cleansed them all, he led them up and remained himself without corruption. This is the worm which cleansed Job of the worm of corruption (compare Job 7:5; 25:6), and which said to him, “Arise, gird up your loins like a man” (Job 38:3). This worm also “drew out the dragon with a hook” (Job 40:20) while hanging on the tree [i.e., of the cross].25
Barsanuphius, ep. 62, ed. François Neyt and Paula de Angelis-Noah, Correspondance: Barsanuphe et Jean de Gaza, vol. 1 (SC 426; Paris: Cerf, 1997) 1:308–10. I am thankful to His Grace Bishop Savas Zembillas of Troas, who kindly provided me with this reference, along with the English translation from his unpublished manuscript.
A second example of this motif of “Christ the Worm” may be found among the works of an author who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, an early-sixth-century writer deeply indebted to the theology of Gregory of Nyssa. In his treatise On the Celestial Hierarchy, the psalmic worm appears in a bestiary of “dissimilar symbols of the divine.” In this cabinet of theriomorphic curiosities, the deity is on display as a “lion” (compare Gen 49:9; Hos 5:14; Rev 5:5); a “panther” (Hos 13:7; 5:14); a “leopard” (compare Hos 13:7; Rev 13:2); and an “angry she-bear” (Hos 13:8), although the prize exhibit is the “lowliest and most ignoble of all, for the experts in things divine gave the deity the form of a worm” (Ps 22:6). Dionysius considers such symbols to be particularly appropriate for the unknowable deity which paradoxically “reveals” itself only by “concealment” in finite (and therefore dissimilar) forms and names. The invisible, in other words, can enter visibility only at the cost of essential misrepresentation. In his third letter, the Areopagite suggests that the mystery of the Word incarnate cannot be reduced to the surface narratives regarding Jesus of Nazareth: “The divinity remains hidden even after its revelation, or to speak more divinely, it is hidden in the revelation; for the mystery of Jesus is hidden, and may be uttered by no word or mind, but even when spoken, remains unsaid, and when conceived, unknown.” The otherness of the sign—its utter nonresemblance to that of which it is the sign and presence—is for Dionysius the privileged form of divine self-manifestation, the perfect figuration of that which cannot be figured.26
On the Celestial Hierarchy 2.5; ed. Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter in Corpus Dionysiacum, vol. 2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991) 15, line 20. For Dionysius's concept of “dissimilarity”
the editors provide cross-references to Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium 1.620–23 and 2.234–28. For the passage from Letter 3, see Heil and Ritter, ibid., 159:
Pseudo-Athanasius's Homily on the Passion and the Cross
As the texts cited above suggest, the worms and fishhooks of the Bible became attached to a larger theory of dissimulation and deception that found its fullest application in the narratives of Christ's passion and death. A little-known sermon attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria, the Homily on the Passion and the Cross, applies this theory to virtually the entire narrative of Christ's last days on earth. As its title suggests, the homily is an exegetical sermon expounding the meaning of the Passion Narrative in the Gospel of Matthew. If not written by Athanasius himself, the work is clearly the product of the “school” of Athanasius, and therefore probably stems from late-fourth-century Alexandria.27
The Greek text of the homily can be found in PG 28:185–250 (CPG 2247). On the attribution, see Hubertus R. Drobner, “Eine Pseudo-Athanasianische Osterpredigt über die Wahrheit Gottes und ihre Erfüllung,” in Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Essays in Tribute to George Christopher Stead (ed. Lionel R. Wickham, et al.; Leiden: Brill, 1993) 43–44; Drobner surveys the scholarship on this question. Since the late-nineteenth century, the sermon has been variously attributed to Athanasius (d. 373), Eustathius of Antioch (d. ca. 345), Marcellus of Ancyra (d. ca. 374), Didymus of Alexandria (d. 398), and to an anonymous Palestinian writer of the mid-fourth century. On the basis of internal evidence, Drobner dates the text to some time before 350. The text is also extant in Syriac and Armenian versions: see R. W. Thompson, Athanasiana Syri-aca III, CSCO 324 (1972) 89–138 (text); CSCO 325 (1972) 61–96 (translation); and R. P. Casey, “Armenian Manuscripts of St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” HTR 24 (1931) 43–59.
Compare Ps.-Chrysostom, De confessione pretiosae crucis (PG 52:841–44), which deals extensively with this same theme.
The homiletical drama begins with Satan's fatal desire to discover the true identity of Christ, a thing he was unable to do on the mountain of temptations. Athanasius informs the congregation:
The devil wanted to know what he was unable to know when he tempted him [i.e., Christ] on the mountain, namely, “whether or not he is the Son of God” (Luke 4:3). At that time he was put to shame, and kept watch
compare Gen 3:14,
for the time
of his death. For it is written in Luke that, “When the devil completed all his temptations, he departed from him until an opportune time”
Luke 4:13). This [i.e., the passion] is now that time.
29PG 28:209, lines 25–32. The fourth-century Arians argued that Christ's temptation on the mountain was a scriptural proof against his divinity; see Athanasius, C. Ar. 3.56–57 (PG 26:440b-441c); in this context, Athanasius does not invoke the theory of divine deception, but see n. 30, below.
Fearing, however, direct confrontation with the “divine and unapproachable power” (ibid., lines 39–40), Satan must operate offstage, by inciting the Jews, provoking the Romans, and rousing the rabble of Jerusalem. But “because the Savior knew that the devil's plan depended on the knowledge [of his identity], he concealed
his divinity and acted like a human being
(ibid., lines 43–44). In this regard, Athanasius asserts that Christ is “just like a general conducting a war, who devised
a great and wondrous strategy, and so assumes the appearance
of one staggering under Satan's power, so that when the enemy draws near he might completely subdue him.”
30PG 28:228, lines 16–23. Compare Origen, Comm. Rom. 5.10: “There was a just and noble king, who was waging a war against an unjust tyrant, but trying to avoid a violent and bloody conflict, because some of his own men were fighting on the tyrant's side, and he wanted to free them, not destroy them. He therefore adopted the uniform of the tyrant's men, until he managed to persuade them to desert and to return to their proper kingdom, and succeeded in ‘binding the strong man’ in fetters, destroying his ‘principalities and powers,’ and carrying off those he held captive” (PG 14:1051c–52a); and Athanasius, C. Ar. 2.52: “As if a son, when the servants were lost, and in the hands of the enemy … were sent by his father to recover them, and upon setting out were to clothe himself in a garment resembling theirs, and disguise himself as one of them
, lest the enemy, recognizing him as the master, should take flight and prevent his descending to those who were hidden under the earth” (PG 26:257a–b).
Athanasius further compares Christ to a “noble wrestler”
who, when seeing his opponent about to take flight, feigns weakness in order to lure him back into the ring.
31PG 28:209, lines 47–49; 212, lines 1–5. This form of deception is discussed in the Lesser Hippias: the better wrestler is one who falls purposely than one who falls because he cannot help it (374a–b); compare Dionysius the Areopagite, On Divine Names 8.6: “That sophist [i.e., Elymas the Magician, Acts 13:8] imitates inexperienced wrestlers, who, assuming that their adversaries are weak
, and manfully making a show of fight with them when absent, courageously box into the air with empty blows, and think they have overcome their opponents, not yet having experienced their rival's strength
”; ed. Beata Regina Suchla, in Corpus Dionysiacum, vol. 1 (Berlin: Walter de Grutyer, 1990) 203, lines 17–22.
Od. 18.45–135. On the symbolic function of Irus in Homer's epic, see Daniel Levine, “Odyssey 18: Iros as a Paradigm for the Suitors,” Classical Journal 77 (1982) 200–1.
the devil, having arrogantly presumed
against the Lord, has now become another Irus, cast forth from the universe, and trampled upon by all … and the dragon who boasted that he was rich has been stripped of all, and he is now a naked and impoverished Irus, utterly despoiled.
33PG 28:233, lines 12–14; 236, lines 11–13. Compare Athanasius, Vit. Ant., 5.6–7: “The entire experience put the enemy to shame
. Indeed, he who had thought he was like to God, was here made a fool by a stripling of a man
. He who in his conceit disdained flesh and blood, was now routed
by a man in the flesh”; ed. G. J. M. Bartelink, Vie d'Antoine (SC 400; Paris: Cerf, 1994) 144, lines 35–40. Compare Vit. Ant. 41.3–5, where the devil says:
(ed. Bartelink, 246, lines 10–19).
It is rather astonishing to encounter the mythical figure of Odysseus, the archetypical trickster, making a cameo appearance in a passion sermon in order to vindicate the sufferings of Christ.34
Parallels between Christ and Odysseus were not uncommon in Christian antiquity, although they were not normally introduced into sermons on the passion; see Jean Pépin, “The Platonic and Christian Ulysses,” in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought (ed. Dominic J. O'Meara; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982) 3–18; Philip Sellew, “Achilles or Christ? Porphyry and Didymus in Debate over Allegorical Interpretation,” HTR 82 (1989) 79–100; Dennis Ronald MacDonald, “Homer in the Early Church,” in idem, Christianizing Homer: The Odyssey, Plato, and the Acts of Andrew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 17–34; and J. Daniélou, “Homer in the Fathers of the Church,” in idem, Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture (trans. John Austin Baker; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973) 75–105. That both Odysseus and Christ suffered provided the basic point of comparison; see Sophocles, frag. 880N: “In the eyes of men I am truly what my name ‘Odysseus’ means, for the impious in large numbers have made me suffer
.”
And this is why he was “distressed” around the time of his death, and began to “grieve,” and “prayed that the cup might pass from him” (Matt 26:39), and cried out, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (Matt 26:41)…. But when the evil one heard the Lord saying, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” he [mistakenly] thought that the Word was weakened together
with the body, and not rather that the body was strengthened by the power of the Word
.
35PG 28:212, lines 7–11; 216, lines 29–32. The language of “weakness” and “strength” is derived from 2 Cor 13:4: “If he was crucified in weakness
, he lives by the power
of God” (compare Luke 22:43).
This cleverly scripted agony in the garden successfully dupes the devil inasmuch as the spectacle of Christ's emotional weakness is in fact a grand theater of diversion. Viewed through Athanasius's inversive looking glass, nothing is what it seems to be, and when the homilist arrives at the scourging of Christ by the soldiers, his audience beholds, not the robe of mockery, nor the crown of thorns, jeering soldiers, or death by crucifixion, but rather an imperial and indeed divine triumph, complete with royal purple robe, solemn crowning, acclamation of kingship by the military, dramatic spoliation of the enemy, and public adventus with the trophy of the cross.36
On which see K. Roddy, “Politics and Religion: The Roman Imperial Adventus Ceremony and the Christian Myth of the Harrowing of Hell,” Apocrypha 11 (2000) 147–79. Note that the Homily on the Passion is contemporary with the iconography of the “Christus Victor,” in which Christ is shown alive and dispassionate on the cross; see John R. Martin, “The Dead Christ on the Cross in Byzantine Art,” in Late Classical and Medieval Studies in Honor of Albert Mathias Friend, Jr. (ed. K. Weitzmann; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955); and Anna Kartsonis, Anastasis: The Making of an Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) 33–68, 99.
On the fishhook of your humanity
, fastened to the trophy of the cross, you led about the dragon, the serpent, the devil … and you toyed
with him from the very beginning, creating him for the purpose of mockery
, compare Job 41:25 [LXX]; Ps 103:26 [LLX].
37PG 28:240, lines 18–24. Compare Athanasius, Vit. Ant. 24.4–5: “He [i.e., the devil] overlooks how he was dragged around with a hook
like a dragon by the savior, haltered around his snout like a beast of burden, and had his nostrils ringed like a runaway, and his lips pierced through by an iron band” (ed. Bartelink, 202, lines 23–25).
Christ's visible defeat on the cross is the sign of his invisible (but nonetheless palpable) triumph, and, contrary to all appearances, it is in fact the devil who undergoes crucifixion.
38Compare ibid., 5.3: “The enemy saw that he was powerless in the face of Antony's determination and that is was rather he who was being bested
because of the man's steadfastness and vanquished
by his solid faith and routed by Antony's constant prayer” (ed. Bartelink, 142, lines 13–16).
hanged the king of Gai on a double tree
,” in which he states the following:
There is a mystery hidden in this passage which is “hidden from many” [compare 1 Cor 2:7]; but we will attempt to open it, not with our opinions but with the witness of sacred scripture…. The “king of Gai” can stand for the devil. But how he came to be crucified on a forked tree is worth investigating. The cross of Christ was a double cross. You might think it a strange and novel idea when I say that the cross was double, but what I mean is that it can be considered as double, or from two sides. Because the Son of God was crucified visibly in the flesh, but invisibly on the same cross, the devil with “his principalities and powers was nailed to the cross” (cf. Col 2:14–15). Will not this seem true to you if I bring Paul forward as a witness to it? Hear then what he has to say: “That which stood against us,” he says, “he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them on the cross” (Col 2:14–15).39
Origen, Hom. Josh. 8.6; ed. Annie Jaubert, Homélies sur Josué (SC 71; Paris: Cerf, 1960) 232–34; the translation is from Hans Urs von Balthasar, Origen: Spirit and Fire (trans. Robert J. Daly; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984) 131. On the patristic exegesis of Col 2:14–15, see Michael E. Stone, Adam's Contract with Satan: The Legend of the Cheirograph of Adam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
has suddenly pierced me
; compare John 19:37; Rev 1:7) and I am being torn apart!” In the third stanza, the poet describes the cross as a cosmic tree, the roots of which, Hell complains, “have entered my soul; they have gone down into my depths!”
40Romanos, On the Victory of the Cross; ed. P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) 165. Compare Ps.-Chrysostom, In adorationem venerandae crucem: “Seeing these things, the devil cried, ‘Who has plunged a nail into my heart? A wooden lance has pierced me, and I am torn to pieces … being defeated by the one whom I thought I had defeated” (PG 62:748, lines 23–29). Romanos's poem appears to have been the inspiration for the tenth-century ivory panel of the crucifixion now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which the “base of the cross pierces the stomach of the reclining figure of Hades … transform[ing] the crucifixion into a celebration of the Triumph of the Cross.” See also Charles T. Little, “Triptych Panel with Crucifixion,” in The Glory of Byzantium (ed. Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom; New York, 1997) 151–52; and Margaret E. Frazer, “Hades Stabbed by the Cross of Christ,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 9 (1974) 153–61.
Seduction in the Garden
These dramatic reversals are paralleled in a large number of patristic sermons on the passion which eventually became part of the Byzantine lectionary. Despite the centrality of the cross, however, the pivotal moment in these sermons is not the crucifixion, but rather the scene in the garden of Gethsemane. The agony of Christ in the garden marks an important moment in the metanarrative of divine deception, for it is here that the devil is utterly seduced by the hypnotic flickering of Christ's humanity. In a pseudo-Chrysostomic sermon which deals extensively with Matt 26:39, Satan says, “I have been deceived, for who would not be tricked by such words? For he was frightened in the face of death and said, ‘My soul is very sorrowful, even unto death’ (Matt 26:38), and he prayed to the Father saying, ‘Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me’ (Matt 26:39). These words enticed me like bait.”41
Ps.-Chrysostom, In sancta et magna parasceve (PG 62:722d).
Translation in J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) 187. Compare Acts Thom. 45: “We (demons) believed we could bring him under our yoke like the rest, but he turned and held us in his grip. For we did not know him: he deceived us by his despicable form, by his poverty and indigence. When we looked upon him as such, we believed him to be a man bearing flesh, not knowing him to be the one who gave life to mankind”; ed. Max Bonnet, Acta Thomae (Leipzig: H. Mendelssohn, 1883) 162. I am thankful to Daniel Caner for this reference.
The emphasis on Christ's deception of the devil in the garden of Gethsemane, which seems to detract from the centrality of the crucifixion, is in fact a typological requirement intended to mirror and thus reverse the devil's deception of Eve in the garden of Eden. According to the logic of typological recapitulation, it was only right that an act of deception should be undone by deception. In Gethsemane, therefore, Christ deceived the deceiver by typologically appropriating the devil's allurements and stratagems. Just as the agent of a disease serves also as its homeopathic cure, so does the primal deception determine the ingredients for its own neutralizing antidote.
43As Nyssa himself suggests: “Two persons may both mix poison
with food, one with the design of taking life, the other with the design of saving that life; the one using it as poison, the other as an antitode to poison” (Cat. Disc. 26; ed. Mühlenberg, 65, lines 13–16).
This was the cause of the incarnation, and the reason why God did not hunt for the devil in his unveiled divinity, because the devil himself, when he decided to deceive
humanity, did not approach Eve with his demonic nature unveiled. Rather, he clothed himself in the flesh of the serpent (compare Gen 3:2), and in this manner entered paradise and deceived her. For the cunning one
knew that if he approached Eve with his demonic nature unveiled, he would not have been able to deceive her. This is why he clothed himself with the serpent as if with flesh, and through the flesh-bearing serpent he deceived
Eve. The serpent was plainly manifest
, but the devil was not. And through the visible serpent which appeared
, the invisible
serpent, the devil, acted. For at the fall of our first parent, two natures were brought together in one person
. So too, in the case of Christ, two natures—humanity and divinity—were united in one person
. And the humanity was made plainly manifest, but the divinity was not made manifest, and through the humanity which appeared, the invisible divinity acted. And these two natures, I mean divinity and humanity, restored exiled humanity to paradise. And this is why God was incarnate and became man.
44Ps.-Athanasius, Quaestiones aliae 20 (PG 28:793c–d).
The doctrinal formula promulgated by the Council of Chalcedon (451) states that Christ was composed of “two natures” in “one person and one hypostasis”
, ACO 2.1, p. 129, lines 30–33).
(translated above as “brought together”) means “carried away,” in the sense of “being abducted” or “led astray,” the illicit asymmetry of which serves to mitigate the shock of the Chalcedonian definitio fidei applied to the archetype of demonic indwelling.
Although Gregory of Nyssa does not mention the scene in the garden of Gethsemane, the reversals described above are fundamental to the argument of his Catechetical Discourse, cited at the outset of this discussion.46
Gregory of Nyssa deals with Matt 26:39 in his Antirrheticus adversus Apollinarium; ed. F. Müller (GNO 3.1; Leiden: Brill, 1958) 181. Compare Gregory Nazianzus, Or. 30.12, ed. Gallay, Discours 27–31, 248–52. See also n. 65, below.
Beauty exists both in truth and in appearance. Under these circumstances it is a matter of risk whether we happen to choose the real beauty, or whether we are diverted from it by some deception
arising from appearance
. But [in the garden of Eden] the mind was diverted to that beauty which is not such, being persuaded, through the deception of the devil, that that was beauty which was just the opposite. For his deception would never have succeeded, had not the illusion
of beauty been spread over the hook
of vice like a bait.
47Cat. Disc. 21; ed. Mühlenberg, 56, lines 13–24; compare idem, Life of Moses 297: “Pleasure is truly like evil's bait
; when it is cast out
lightly, it draws gluttonous souls to the fishhook
of destruction,” ed. J. Daniélou, La vie de Moïse (SC 1 bis; Paris: Cerf, 2000) 308.
This is why the deity was concealed
in flesh—in order, that is, to secure that the devil, by looking upon something congenial
and kindred
to himself, might have no fear in approaching that transcendent power, deeming what was seen an object of desire
…. This invention, whereby the enemy was enabled to apprehend
that which cannot be apprehended
, is a manifestation of supreme Wisdom.
48Cat. Disc. 23; ed. Mühlenberg, 60, lines 8–13, 21–23.
Compare ibid., 6: “Concerning all existing things there is a twofold manner of apprehension
inasmuch as they are divided between what pertains to the intellect and what to the senses, and there is nothing in the natural order extending beyond this division” (ed. Mühlenberg, 21, lines 7–10). As for the “movement” of created being, Gregory of Nyssa notes (Cat. Disc. 21), that it likewise has “two forms”
, one oriented toward the “goodness of divine infinity”
, and the other into the “nullity of non-being”
; ed. Mühlenberg, 55–56, lines 23–24, 1–2. For a study of Gregory's use of these categories, see Alden A. Mosshammer, “Gregory of Nyssa and Christian Hellenism,” StPat 32 (1997) 136–67.
Discussed in Cat. Disc. 7 and 21; ed. Mühlenberg, 26–28 and 55–60. See also Werner Beierwaltes, “The Love of Beauty and the Love of God,” in Classical Mediterranean Spirituality: Egyptian, Greek, Roman (ed. A. H. Armstrong; New York: Crossroad, 1986) 293, who notes that “in contrast to modern consciousness, the concept of beauty or the beautiful does not have primarily an aesthetic significance but, above all, an ethical one. The beautiful is the manifestation or outward expression of the Good, an indication that a certain form or being or existence has attained its purpose or perfection or that it is perfection itself.”
Compare Athanasius, Inc. 15: “Like a good teacher he came down to their level…. He took to himself a body and moved as a man among men, drawing to himself the senses of all men
, so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works he did in the body”; ed. Charles Kannengiesser, Sur l'incarnation du Verbe (SC 199 bis; Paris: Cerf, 2000) 318.
The analogy of the eclipse is from the De hominis opificio 21.3 (PG 44:201d); compare Cat. Disc. 6:
(ed. Mühlenberg, 23–24, lines 25, 1); and ibid., 22, for the devil's acknowledgement (ed. Mühlenberg, 66–67). Reinhard M. Hübner (Die Einheit des Leibes Christi bei Gregor von Nyssa [Leiden: Brill, 1974] 95–167) similarly suggests that the interaction of the “worm and the fish” signifies a union of opposed forces in the reintegration of a former fullness; compare Alden A. Mosshammer, “Non-Being and Evil in Gregory of Nyssa,” Vigiliae Christianae 44 (1990) 136–67.
The Poetics of Disguise
The metaphor of the fishhook and the theory of divine deception served to define Christ as a figure who was both within the tumult of the world and yet radically beyond it. It explained how the sufferings of Christ did not compromise but rather enhanced his divine status. Finding strength in weakness (compare 2 Cor 13:4) was, as we have seen, accomplished through the systematic bifurcations of a twofold exegesis, a hermeneutical practice that virtualized the dualities of Christ himself.53
Athanasius, C. Ar. 3.29: “The scope and character of Scripture is this: it contains a double account
of the Savior, i.e., that he was ever God, the Son, being the Father's ‘Word’ (John 1:1), and ‘Radiance’ (Heb 1:3), and ‘Wisdom’ (1 Cor 1:24), and that afterwards he took flesh from the Virgin Theotokos and was made man” (PG 26:383, lines 8–14); and Gregory Nazianzus, Or. 29.18: “You must ascribe the more exalted expressions [i.e., of Scripture] to the deity, and the lowlier ones to the compound of him who because of you ‘was emptied’ (Phil 2:7), and became man”; ed. P. Gallay, Discours 27–31, 216, lines 21–24.
The function of doubling as a response to trauma and violence has recently been studied by Wendy Doniger in her work Splitting the Difference,54
Wendy Doniger, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Ibid., 28–42.
Ibid., 37–38, 58, 111.
The phenomenon of such doubling as a form of bifurcation is a trope, Doniger argues, which seeks to protect and preserve what is most highly valued while at the same time “maintaining appearances.” She emphasizes, however, that the splitting which seeks to obviate the problems of violence, defilement, guilt, or shame by projecting them onto a shadowy substitute inevitably produces a new, destabilizing dynamic that can run counter to the very values it seeks to enshrine. Thus, the “real” Helen is redeemed from the vicissitudes of history only at the cost of a fundamental loss of identity, which Doniger interprets in a later stage of her inquiry as a form of psychological fragmentation and schizophrenia: abuse generates multiple personalities.57
Ibid., 79–87.
Although Doniger does not consider Christian sources in her analysis, it seems clear that the retellings of Christ's passion in patristic literature closely parallel the retellings of Homer's Iliad mentioned above. These revisionist tendencies, moreover, are closely intertwined in the Homily on the Passion and the Cross, which is engaged in a complex transformation of both Homer and the Gospels.58
Compare n. 34, above, and see Mosshammer, “Nyssa and Christian Hellenism,” who deals with Nyssa's interpretation of the Homeric myth of Circe (Odyssey 8).
Also outside of Doniger's survey, but even closer to our patristic sources, is the “passion narrative” of the god Dionysus, who escaped suffering by practicing his own divine deception. When the chorus suggests that Pentheus had “bound his hands with coils and chains,” the god declares that “it was then that I scorned him; thinking that he fettered me he neither touched nor grasped me, but fed on fantasy.”59
Euripides, Bacchae 615–17; trans. Moses Hadas and John McLean, The Plays of Euripides (New York: Dial, 1936).
Cited in Origen, Cels. 2.68: “But if he really was so great he ought, in order to display his divinity, to have disappeared suddenly from the cross
”; ed. Borret, 444; trans. Chadwick, 118. See also n. 1, above.
See, for example, Elaine Pagels, “Gnostic and Orthodox Views of Christ's Passion: Paradigms for the Christian Response to Persecution?,” in Rediscovery of Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1980) 262–88; Pagel's emphasis on persecution bears comparison with Doniger's focus on dissociation (and narrative doubling) as a response to abuse and trauma.
In addition to these suggestive psychological interpretations, the interpretive practice of “splitting the difference,” to use Doniger's phrase, provided orthodox writers with a popular, apologetic, and dramatic response to the christology of Arianism,62
Drobner (Die drei Tage, 89) notes that “im 4. Jh. hat das Motiv der Überlistung des Teufels jedoch zusätzlich eine spezielle dogmatische Bedeutung für die arianische Theologie und deren Abwehr.” On the dramatic and theatrical associations, see Judit Kecskeméti, “Doctrine et drame dans la prédication grecque,” Euphrosyne 21 (1993) 29–67, who argues that Amphilochius of Iconium and Severian of Gabala introduced the form of the dramatic homily, which distinguishes between the suffering humanity and the impassible divinity, precisely as a polemic against the Arians and Apollinarians.
Gregory of Nyssa, Eun. 3.3.31: “It is clear that the reason why Eunomius sets the Father above the Son and exalts him with supreme honor is this: that the shame of the cross is not seen in the Father”; ed. W. Jaeger, Contra Eunomium libri (2 vols.; GNO 1–2; Leiden: Brill, 1960) 2:118–19, lines 25–28, 1–4. Eunomius, Apology for the Apology: “The deity of the Son suffers, while that of the Father is preserved in absolute apatheia. Therefore, the nature that is characterized by apatheia is essentially different from the nature that admits suffering” (apud Gregory of Nyssa, Eun. 3.4.5; ed. Jaeger, 2:135, lines 15–19); and idem, “The Father's nature remained in pure apatheia and could not admit of suffering, while the Son, by reason of the divergence of his nature by way of humiliation, was not incapable of experiencing the flesh and death, proof, that is, of the Son's otherness in nature from the Father” (apud Gregory of Nyssa, Eun. 3.3.38; ed. Jaeger, 2:120-21, lines 29, 1–5).
Ps.-Athanasius, Homily on the Passion and the Cross (interpolated fragment): “When the Lord was hanging upon the cross (for his was the body in which was the Word), the sun was darkened and ‘many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep arose’ (Matt 27:52), yet no one has ever dared
, as now do the Arians, to doubt that the Word was made flesh” (PG 28:249=PG 28:233a, lines 10–13; and 229a, lines 8–12).
“There are those who say that Christ was afraid and acted cowardly in the face of death, causing the heretics to ridicule and mock the passion…. Now Eunomius rejoices and Arius is gladdened, having seized upon this text as a pretext for their blasphemy”; ed. C. Datema, Amphilochii Iconiensis Opera (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978) 139, lines 12–13; 140, lines 34–35. The fishhook
appears no less than five times in this sermon (lines 243, 244, 246, 249, 251); compare id., Or. 7.5; ed. Datema, lines 167–71. See also Ps.-Chrysostom, In illud, Pater si possibile est (assigned by its lemma to Holy Friday): “Many, failing to grasp the aim of wisdom, and overlooking the treasure hidden within the literal meaning, ascribe fear and cowardice to Christ [i.e., in the garden of Gethsemane] … but let not Eunomius, that giant of blasphemy, be exalted, for the heretics at-tack us saying: ‘Do you see his fear and cowardice? Do you see how he prays to the Father?’ And with this, Eunomius rejoices, and Arius is filled with glee … but it was not as you suppose, O Arius, for those words were but bait for the devil, and like a wise fisherman he says: ‘I baited him
with cowardice. For if the devil deceived
Adam in the beginning, how much more should I use deception for the salvation of all? With cunning words he deceived
Adam, and now with divine words the cunning one himself shall be deceived
. For if a fisherman, having cast his hook into the sea, does not let it out, and then reel it in, making the worm appear to retreat, the fish will not be attracted to it, and thus I concealed
the fishhook of my divinity with the worm of my body, casting both into the sea of the world’” (PG 61:751–53).
Even more to the point is Gregory of Nyssa's Catechetical Discourse, which should also be situated in an anti-Arian context. Gregory mentions the Arians in chapters 38 and 39; and in the sections dealing with the fishhook, Gregory addresses himself to those who “ridicule and mock the incarnation.” In a classic anti-Arian move inherited from his brother, Basil of Caesarea (who derived it in turn from Origen), Gregory argues for the unity of the divine attributes in the incarnation. These attributes include goodness, power, justice, and wisdom; and, as noted above, Gregory sees “wisdom” enacted in the cleverness of the incarnate Sophia deceiving the devil with the bait of her trembling flesh. In this way, both the suffering of Christ and the divine status of Wisdom were reclaimed from their Arian detractors, and not only reclaimed, but brought together in a paradoxical unity. Through a poetics of disguise and displacement, the suffering of Christ was carefully positioned between two universes, two temporalities, two modes of signification, vacillating between letter and spirit, surface and depth.66
Here one may profitably consult the rich literature in Homeric studies on this theme. See, for example, Sheila Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Stewart Douglas, The Disguised Guest: Rank, Role, and Identity in the Odyssey (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1976); and Ann Bergren, “Odyssean Temporality: Many (Re)turns,” in Approaches to Homer (ed. Carl Rubino and Cynthia Shelmerdine; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983) 38–73.
For Gregory of Nyssa, the incarnation was precisely (and paradoxically) an act of concealment; and concealment, together with the correlative notion of deception, characterizes for him the entire order of redemption. The sources for such a doctrine were found partly in the kenosis hymn of Phil 2:6–11, in which the deity abandons its divine “form” in order to be reconfigured in the “likeness” of a human being.67
Phil 2:6–11: “Though he was in the form
of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself
, taking the form
of a servant, being born in the likeness
of human beings. And being found in human form
he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” For a study of this verse with emphasis on the notions of concealment and deception, see Gerald Bostock, “Origen's Exegesis of the Kenosis Hymn (Philippians 2.5-11),” in Origeniana Sexta: Origène et la Bible (ed. Gilles Dorival and Alain Le Boulluec; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1995) 531–47. See also Raoul Mortley, From Word to Silence II: The Way of Negation, Christian and Greek (Bonn: Hanstein, 1986) 38–40, for a discussion of Clement's view of language as concealment.
Here one is reminded of Churchill's remark: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”; see also n. 30, above.
As these ideas developed, the formulation of Phil 2:7 (“He emptied
himself and took the form of a servant”) was merged with a phrase from the Song of Songs (“Thy name is myrrh poured out
,” 1:3). For Gregory of Nyssa, the “pouring out of the divine name” indicates that God cannot be contained within the brittle flask of human discourse, and can only enter such discourse through a process of dissemblance and misrepresentation.
69Comm. Song, Homily 1; ed. H. Langerbeck, 36–37. Note that modern commentators generally read the Commentary on the Song of Songs as work of “mysticism,” failing to recognize that it is a sustained refutation of Eunomianism (evidenced in Gregory's exegesis of Song 1:3); compare Homilies 3 (ed. Langerbeck, 86–87); 5 (157–58); 6 (181–83); 11 (336–37); and 12 (356–58).
Comm. Song 1.4, ed. W.A. Baehrens, Origens Werke, vol. 8 (GCS 33; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1925) 102. Compare Gregory of Nyssa, Eun. 3.3.67: “The divinity is ‘emptied out’
, so that it can be contained
by human nature”; ed. Jaeger, 131, lines 19–20.
That which came into this life emptied itself
, compare Phil 2:7), so that through its emptiness
the world would be filled
. And that very emptiness is Wisdom
, because the “foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Cor 1:25), even though they be the wisest of the “rulers of this age” (1 Cor 2:8).
71Hom. Jer. 8.8; ed. P. Nautin, Homélies sur Jérémie, vol. 1 (SC 232; Paris: Cerf, 1976) 372, lines 1–5; for an English translation, see John Clark Smith, Origen: Homiles on Jeremiah; Homily on 1 Kings 28 (FC 97; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998) 74–84.
On Origen's doctrine of divine deception, see Henri de Lubac, “ ‘Tu m'as trompé, Seigneur.’ Le commentaire d'Origène sur Jérémie 20,7,” in Recherches dans la Foi (Paris: Beauchesne, 1979) 9–78; A. M. Castagno, “L'utilità dell'
in Origene predicatore e il suo pubblico (Milan: F. Angeli, 1987) 226–32; J. W. Trigg, “Divine Deception and the Truthfulness of Scripture,” in Origen of Alexandria: His World and Legacy (ed. C. Kannengiesser and W. L. Petersen; Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1988) 147–64; and John McGuckin, “The Changing Forms of Jesus,” in Origeniana Quarta (ed. Lothar Lies; Innsbruck: Tyrolia Verlag, 1987) 215–22. I am thankful to David Satran for these references.
Despite these sonorous resonances with the mystical silence of apophatic the-ology, however, the magnificent imposture of the incarnate Word is not merely a symptom of the incapacity of language to represent that which is beyond language, true as that may be. Instead, the feints and falls enacted by the incarnate deity constitute the intentional manipulation of human signs, the seductive scheme of eternal poetic justice.73
This point is argued by Trigg, “Divine Deception,” 152–54, who corrects the earlier assessment by Crouzel. See also J. J. M. Roberts, “Does God Lie? Divine Deceit as a Theological Problem in Israelite Prophetic Literature,” Vetus Testamentum 40 (1986) 211–20.
When seen in the seductive light of fourth-century patristic exegesis, the suffering of Jesus was shown to have both concealed and revealed the “wisdom and power of God.” And if, in his suffering and death, Jesus became a dehumanized nobody, it was in the rich sense of the image of the emptied flask, which—correctly grasped—signifies not nonbeing, but rather creativity, life, and well-being in the midst of struggle. It marks the place where the suffering Jesus rebounds against failure, forever resilient even when dangling like a bruised worm in the jaws of death. It is the place where every story begins, the place where every story ends, rich with the possibility of another beginning.
Footnotes
This paper began as a seminar project at Hebrew University, Jerusalem (June–August 1995), with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and I am thankful to Gary Anderson, Michael Stone, and David Satran for their comments and criticisms. Early versions were presented at the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society (1997), and at Harvard Divinity School in the spring of 1998, at which time Wendy Larson read through the text and greatly improved it. A subsequent version was presented at “Eros and the Religious Imagination,” the Sixth Annual Conference in Comparative Religion at New York University (April 2000). Translations are my own, except where noted. GNO=Gregorii Nysseni opera (ed. Werner Jaeger et al., 1921–).
You have
Access
- 9
- Cited by