• Email Link
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Digg

James Carroll explores the history of Christian anti-Semitism - and what it means for his own redemption. Constantine's Sword , a documentary feature based on Carroll's book, opens this week in New York City, and in cities across the country later this month.

When I found myself in Rome with [my family], I took them to St. Peter’s Basilica, wanting them to seea Michelangelo’s Pietà , the work that had so moved me when I saw it as a boy. Soon we were standing before the statue of Mary holding her son, and it still worked a spell on me, and perhaps it did on my family. Despite its subject, there is an unrestrained spirit of optimism in the Pietà , the human form never rendered more lovingly, the possibility of meaning in the midst of anguish never affirmed more directly. Michelangelo created the Pietà as a young man, and it was as a boy on the threshold of manhood that I had found it irresistible.

It was when, on another occasion, I stood before The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel that I experienced another realm of the artist’s work. The huge painting behind the high altar, toward which the room is oriented, portrays nothing less than the end of history.

Michelangelo was an old man when he mounted the scaffolding to paint this last great masterwork, and you can see how time had flogged him. In the years since he had created the serenely poignant Pietà , Luther, Copernicus, Magellan, Henry VIII, and several Borgia popes had all helped to upend the moral universe. The grand inquisitor Gian Pietro Caraffa had come to Rome, and soon, as Pope Paul IV, would establish the Roman ghetto, the antechamber of Auschwitz. The Last Judgment , painted between 1534 and 1541, reflects the era’s loss of faith in the human project, and it is a certain window into Michelangelo’s soul.

His scathing vision is staggering, especially because it so contrasts with the earlier hopefulness of the scenes on the ceiling just above, with their triumphal rendition of the Creation. The Last Judgment , as it were, rebukes The Creation , for the beautiful creature to whom God had entrusted the spark of divinity, with that unforgettably outstretched finger, is now repudiated. Sinners and the righteous alike cower below the upright figure of the judging Lord. It is as if Michelangelo, looking afresh into the soul of humanity, had glimpsed the coming religious wars, slavery, Inquisition, genocide, death camps, and the black hole of the Führerbunker.

In the burly nakedness of the majestically centered Christ figure, whose right arm is raised above his head, poised for one cannot say what, the doomed and the saved equally search for, in Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility — of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing.” If the past is irreversible, then we are all doomed. No one can be saved. Is the history of Christian anti-Judaism reversible? That is a far more potent question than Is it forgivable?

There is no recovery from the past without a commitment for the future. The capacity to be forgiven resides in the simultaneous capacity to make and keep a promise that “serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men.” Forgiveness for the sin of anti-Semitism presumes a promise to dismantle all that makes it possible.

I return again and again to the story of Simon Peter spying a stranger on the beach. It is some days after the death of Jesus, the one whom this Peter betrayed not once but three times. Simon Peter is in his fishing boat with the others. They have worked through the night. In the haze of dawn, he watches the figure on the beach. The boat draws closer to shore. The figure is bent over a fire, preparing a meal. When Peter steps from the boat and approaches the man, he seems familiar. The meal is the first hint. The second is the act of judgment, for this stranger faces Peter with the truth of his condition as fiercely as the Christ of Michelangelo will the human world with the truth of its condition. The irreversible act that stands between these two is betrayal. Peter had loved Jesus, but also, three times — “and at once the cock crowed” — he denied him.

Here is the real power of the Church’s ancient association of itself, centrally, with Peter — not that he was a rock of virtue, not that his authority was absolute, but that his failure of the Lord was so complete. Peter at its mythic center — this is how the Church defines itself as a Church of sinners and betrayers: the cowardly Church, which has so often put power over service; the threatened Church, which has used its old feud with the Jewish people to wall itself off from the fear that its faith in Jesus is misplaced. As the story of Jewish- Christian conflict renders undeniable, the Church, having betrayed Jesus in its first generation, has been betraying Jesus ever since. That a flawed Peter is the patron saint of this Church is the principle of its self-criticism.

For each time that Peter denied Jesus, the figure shrouded in the haze of dawn puts to him the question, “Simon Peter, do you love me?” And each time, Peter replies, “Yes, Lord, I love you.”

Then, “Feed my sheep.” Three times the figure calls Peter to this service. The threefold betrayal is reversed by a threefold ritual of forgiveness, built upon a promise.

Nietzsche warned that if we stare into the abyss, it may stare back. My faith is forever shaken, and I will always tremble. The Christian conscience — mine — can never be at peace. But that does not say it all. This tragic story offers a confirmation of faith, too. God sees us as we are, and loves us nevertheless. When the Lord now turns to me to ask, “Will you also go away?” I answer, this too with Simon Peter, “Lord, to whom shall I go?”

James Carroll is a best-selling author of fiction and nonfiction, a former Roman Catholic priest, and a lifelong activist for peace.

Excerpted from the book CONSTANTINE'S SWORD: THE CHURCH AND THE JEWS by James Carroll. Copyright (c) 2001 by James Carroll. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

This article appears in the Religion and Violence issue of Trinity News.