CHRISTIANITY HAD NEED OF JUDAS
Frithjof Schuon's Reflection on a Good Friday Enigma
Considering that it is Good Friday, Frithjof Schuon's reflection on Judas (as well as Caiphas and Pilate) seems appropriate, in order help with some of the difficulties of the Christian account of redemption. From "An Enigma of the Gospel”, a chapter in “The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity”[1]:
In speaking of the Last Supper, the Gospel relates an enigmatic and even disturbing incident: Christ gives Judas a sop of bread to eat and tells him, “That thou doest, do quickly”; and at that moment, Satan enters into Judas, who then leaves the room. This gives the impression that Christ took upon himself the responsibility for the betrayal, quod absit.
The explanation of the enigma is as follows: nothing can happen counter to the Will of God; the fact that something happens means that God has “willed” it. Now God cannot expressly will a particular evil, but He must tolerate in a certain fashion evil as such, since this is included in the limitlessness—in part paradoxical—of the divine All-Possibility. For this reason, God cannot not allow some particular evil, but it should be said that He “permits” it and not that He “wills” it; and He permits it, not inasmuch as it is an evil, but inasmuch as it is an indirect and inevitable contribution to a good. Christ willed, certainly not the betrayal in itself, but Redemption.
It remains to be understood why Christ acted as we have said, for his acceptance of the evil could have been silent; now it could have been so in principle, but not in fact, and that is the root of the problem. It was necessary to show the world that the devil has no power over God, that he can oppose God only in appearance and thanks to a divine will, that nothing can be done outside the Will of the Sovereign Good, that if the powers of evil oppose—or believe they can oppose—Divinity, this can only be in virtue of a divine decision; whence the injunction, “That thou doest, do quickly.” Thus, the devil does not even have the power to betray without a divine causation, metaphysically speaking; in the Gospel account, this power escapes him; therefore he could not triumph. And if, in this account, the devil enters into Judas, this is because he obtained the freedom to do so—a subtle entanglement of causes, but ontologically plausible. What is “ill-sounding” in the salvific drama of Christianity is that Redemption seems to depend upon a traitor; it was necessary to deprive the adversary of this satisfaction.
Be that as it may, the fact that Christianity had need of Judas implies—and this seems the height of paradox—that this traitor could not be a fundamentally bad man, as the popular belief would have it; and in fact he was not, as is proven by his repentance and despair. Neither were the other two accused, Caiaphas and Pilate, as black as they are painted; for Caiaphas the extenuating circumstance was his orthodoxy, and for Pilate his good will. We would even go so far as to say that their necessary cooperation in the Redemption implies that in the final analysis all three were forgiven; only this conclusion, so it seems to us, can protect Christianity from the possible charge of depending upon criminal causes and of being founded upon them, so to speak, at least materially. And we think here of this prayer of Christ: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”; now it is impossible to assume in good logic that a prayer of Christ would not have been granted.
It would have been a kind of victory if the Church had instituted a feast of the three great Pardons, but it could not—for moral reasons—“ allow itself this luxury”, because it would have given a free rein to all evildoers; de facto, not de jure, of course. It is for this reason that Christ had to say, speaking of Judas, that “it had been good for that man if he had not been born”; this does not mean that Judas is in the eternal hell that Christian theology imagines, but it may mean that Judas, while not being damned, must remain in purgatory until the end of the world.
Caiaphas could be blamed for not having been sensitive to the divine nature of Christ nor to the profound intentions of his preaching, but besides his Mosaic orthodoxy, he had also as an extenuating circumstance the fact that Christ was never concerned with making himself comprehensible. In addition, Christ was not interested in the “commandments of men”, even if they were plausible; what mattered to him was solely the sincerity of our love for God. This is not exactly the perspective of Moses, and the Pharisees cannot be blamed for not adhering to it at their level, any more than one can blame the authorities of Brahmanism for not having converted to the Buddha’s perspective.
It could be argued that the Jews have had to suffer as heirs of Judas and Caiaphas, but it could as well be argued that the Christians as heirs of Pilate—through the Renaissance—have had, and still have, to suffer by undergoing the consequences of the “humanist”, but finally inhuman, world which they created at the time of the Borgias and which they continue to create in our day incontestably, the Renaissance was a betrayal, although it also comprised some positive elements, but these were not able to compensate for its sweeping errors.
In order to understand Christ’s attitude towards “the scribes and the Pharisees”, one has to keep in mind the following: at that time, Judaism was undergoing a phase of “ossification” comparable to that of Brahmanism at the time of the Buddha, and this was providential in both cases. The history of mankind is a lîlâ, a “divine play”: possibilities have to manifest and exhaust themselves each in its turn. Be that as it may, Caiaphas and his partisans can be blamed for not wanting to acknowledge the decadence of their surroundings, which was incontestable, or else Christ would not have stigmatized it; and it is certainly not for the first time in the history of Israel that a prophet hurls thunderbolts at a corrupted and hypocritical clergy.
Like al-Hallaj—that “Christic” manifestation in the midst of Islam—Christ manifested his celestial nature without being concerned with making it intelligible; he incarnated his destiny, and he wished to be what he had to be in the economy of religious and mystical possibilities. A founder of religion personifies a spiritual perspective and a path of salvation; he expresses himself in a direct and quasi-absolute fashion and need not offer the commentaries which theologians and wise men will later provide.
“And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” This concerns not only Jews and pagans, but also Christians, as history proves. Christ, like Moses, put God above man; the Renaissance, like Tiberius, put man in the place of God; whereas Christ had said: “Thy kingdom come.”
[1] Frithjof Schuon and James S. Cutsinger, The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity, World Wisdom, 2017 <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1rfss2f.13>.