Saint Judas

A Slight Provocation

In my essay on the timē of Jesus, I gave a general overview of my developing position. The basic position remains the same. Jesus is the medium between aeon of signs and the aeon of the signified, typified in the Torah as the entire Israelite religious complex, the temple, its laws, festivals, myths, etc. This is typified in John where he is both priest and sacrifice. John was my centre in that essay. Here though, while reading Matthew, I realized I saw something that is fascinating in relation to that view. The story can easily be mentally mapped as a series of ascents and descents, some more loosely connected than others. But what caught my eye was the order of disciples and how reading this mythically can show how Jesus anchors to the world below the “heaven” of his ascension. 

“Now the names of the twelve disciples are these: first Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James the son of Zebedee and his brother John, Philip and bar-Tholomaeus, Thomas and Matthew the tax-collector, James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus, Simon the Kananaian, and Judas the Iscariot - the one also betraying him.” - Matt 10:2-4 (D. B. Hart Translation) 

Note the order. It starts with Simon (Peter) and ends with Judas. Previously, Simon had stepped up to establish the confession that Jesus says he will build his Ekklesia on as a “Rock”, and had gained a corresponding name “rock”. Personally, although the Catholic idea that Peter is this “Rock” that the Church is built on is misguided on historical grounds, it is not without merit on “mythical grounds”. Unfortunately, theological readings of these texts by taking them as myth is not the Catholic way, at least not explicitly. Taking these texts as myths, who says and does what is quite significant in this way. The fact that Peter the rock confesses the very Rock Jesus wants to use as foundation is significant. I believe it establishes Peter as quite significant, and his placement as the first official counted disciple of the twelve cements what is possibly his position in a divine series as its leader. Peter the rock that confesses the Rock, the top of the mountain on which the rest would descend from and build the temple they seek.  

More significantly though, for my purposes, is Judas, the betrayer, who is last on this list. His placement is also significant. If we follow the logic of the divine series enumerated here, Judas is the “lowest”. But as Schuon says: 

“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” (cf. “An Enigma of the Gospel”) 

For Schuon there is no one special entity named “devil” in the colloquial sense. He says “the Devil is the consciousess most remote from pure Intelligence, the divine Intellect” (cf. “What Is Matter and Who Is Mara?”). Basically, “the devil” is the generic name of any consciousness, human or not, that pulls one towards (extreme) materiality. “Extreme” because materiality as such is not evil for Schuon. In Platonic terms, the “devil” for Schuon is any material daimon, and perhaps those Gods that are tasked with developing ever more unique levels of material existence, typically described as “wrathful” and perhaps “chaoslike”. For Schuon, these realities do not escape the divine will, thus universal salvation still holds. For me, however, these entities are not evil at all, except one holds a gnostic-like conception of evil as opposite the intelligible (Plotinus is said to hold this position. If he did, I disagree). We are evil insofar as we participate them inappropriately. However, that they are not evil doesn't mean they are not still described as “wrathful” or that: 

“One should get used to reading any ‘injustice’ in myth through the lens of Anaximander’s fragment, which states that “the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, ‘according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time’,” (Simplicius, In Phys. 24, 17; trans. in Kirk, Raven & Schofield, p. 118). ‘Injustice’ in myths is almost always a question of physics, of the emergence of some structure whose incorporated energy will have to be ‘paid back’. One might compare the modern concept of negative entropy, according to which living systems need to ‘export’ their disorder. This structure is the key, I think, to unlocking so much of the symbolic richness in narrative itself. 
 
Since divine ‘wrath’ in a myth so often goes together with a narrative about ‘injustice’, it should come as no surprise that divine ‘wrath’ is essentially productive of such negentropic structures, and that so much of the innovation that occurs on the material plane in myths does so as a result of divine ‘wrath’, and why ‘wrathful’ deities in cultures as diverse as Egypt and India are so often the deities not of last but of first resort. Divine ‘wrath’ of this sort is productive specifically of things that possess this negentropic tension and thus ‘pay penalty … according to the assessment of Time’.” (E.P. Butler, “More on Hera”) 

Applied to Judas, we should see his “betrayal” as “injustice” in this sense, whereas the confession teased out of Peter by Jesus finally enters “wrathful” materiality. Thus, as Schuon says, Judas is in the divine will, and the “devil” here is a daimon that presides over this activity. This is best seen in context in what Judas exchanges Jesus for: money, the example of sign separated from signified par excellence. Judas is the one who brings the Gospel – not the words, but the one who is this Gospel as sign and signified, into the economy it is supposed to disrupt. Jesus’ “materiality” before this was still a bit “ethereal”, moving about on “waters” and still exercising magical powers, the powers of Gods and angels. But here, he is in his most “human”, subject to division at its most extreme. This materiality gained through Judas is never just physical materiality. This “wrathful” materiality includes the sense in which the Marxist says “material” in “material analysis”, it is the mutable changing economy itself, the one that institutions have as bodies. This is the birth of the Church as an earthly institution. The ideal Catholic church, its plan and charter, is established by Jesus in the confession by Peter in Peter, but the material for this construction (Jesus himself) is provided by Saint Judas.