Henrik Ibsen and the Two Christianities
When I read multiple books at once, I usually try to keep them firmly segregated by genre and topic. I like to minimize the likelihood that the audio book I’m listening to at breakfast bleeds into the mental space occupied by the novel I page through at night. But even with the most disparate pairings, there are transcendent moments of mutual illumination. In my evening read, Henrik Ibsen’s rarely produced 1873 historical drama Emperor and Galilean, the spiritually tormented heir to the Roman throne, Julian, wrestles with contradictions in the message of his kingdom’s reigning deity:
>Everything I’ve ever done, Christ has been there, all the time, judging, commanding, the poisoned hypocrisy of the words themselves. Thou shalt not. Words that crush life…. When my spirit, starved of beauty, dreamt of the ancient world, Christ told me to look only at His one hard truth. Thou shalt not. When I felt the natural sweet yearnings of the flesh, Christ, the lord of self-denial, terrified me into chastity. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not! Everything human, everything beautiful, forbidden. With Him, to live fully is to die. To love as we can and to hate as we must, both are sinful. And why?
The next morning, essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan's collection Pulphead, jumped its boundaries to directly reply to Julian’s Christ-haunted tirade.
>[Jesus] was the most beautiful dude. Forget the Epistles, forget all the bullying stuff that came later. Look at what He said…. There’s your man. His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile, and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation. “Let anyone who has power renounce it,” he said. “Your father is compassionate to all, as you should be.” That’s how He talked, to those who knew Him. Why should he vex a person? Why is His ghost not friendlier? Why can’t I just be a good child of the Enlightenment and see in His life a sustaining example of what we can be, as a species? Once you’ve known Him as a god, it’s hard to find comfort in the man.
How could the omnipotent judge vexing Julian be the same man as Sullivan’s power-averse humanitarian? Ibsen and Sullivan were both grappling with the inherent tension between the two Christianities, one focused on the tolerant humility of the “Carpenter’s son,” as Julian calls him, and the other fixated on his elevation to the strata of ultimate power. The historical Emperor Julian (331- 363) tried to halt the growth of this second Christianity by restoring the polytheistic paganism of his forefathers. In Ibsen’s telling, however, Julian’s only alternative to the oxymoronic concept of a “Christian Empire” is to place his own conflicted, vacillating self at the head of another bullying theocracy.
Ibsen said in an 1873 letter that Emperor and Galilean, which contained “more of my own spiritual experience than I care to acknowledge to the public,” portrayed “a struggle between two irreconcilable powers.” The letter does not define these powers, but a line from William Archer’s 1907 English translation of the play clarifies Ibsen’s meaning by repeating his terminology. In the scene containing the “Thou Shalt Not” monologue quoted above, Julian’s pagan spiritual advisor Maximus confronts the aspiring leader with a stark choice between submitting to oppressive Christian purity and employing political power in the pursuit of happiness. “Emperor or Galilean;—that is the alternative. Be a thrall under the terror, or monarch in the land of sunshine and gladness!” declares Maximus. “You cannot will contradictions; and yet that is what you would fain do. You try to unite what cannot be united,—to reconcile two irreconcilables.” (The emphasis is mine.) The edition I read, a streamlined 2011 National Theatre adaptation by Ben Power that distills Ibsen’s pedantic monologues into brisk action-oriented dialogue, states this line more directly: “Live … under Christ’s terror and judgement or rule a world of light! Emperor, or Galilean, that’s your choice.” Either way, Maximus is telling Julian, why wallow in spiritual resentment when you are uniquely positioned to be the change you wish to see in the world?
Elsewhere in the play, Maximus frames this choice as trifold, suggesting that Julian offer an alternative not only to the austerity of Christianity but also to the emptiness of hedonism, which Ibsen associates with the pagan beliefs embraced by the historical Julian. Ibsen betrays his cultural biases by persistently couching his discussion of Hellenistic paganism in Biblical terms. For example, take this exchange between the young Julian and Gregory of Naziansus, a classmate who later became Bishop of Constantinople:
>GREGORY. Beautiful things were written about pagan sin, but it was not beautiful.
>JULIAN. Wasn’t Socrates beautiful in the Symposium? What about Achilles? Heracles? Odysseus!
>GREGORY. Poetry! You mistake poetry for reality.
>JULIAN. Then look at our Scriptures. There was beauty in Eden and we called it sin. There was beauty in Sodom and Gomorrah and we said it was so ugly that God was forced to destroy it. That’s our truth. Our truth is the enemy of beauty.</blockquote>
>After a few perfunctory allusions to antiquity, Ibsen retreats to more comfortable terrain for a Norwegian raised in the Lutheran church.
Despite Ibsen’s misgivings about that tradition, which he explored in his 1886 play about the apostate pastor Rosmersholm, the dramatist can’t bring himself to endorse its replacement by paganism. William Archer suggests as much in his introduction to the play:
>The secret of Julian’s failure lay in the hopeless inferiority of the religion he championed to the religion he attacked. That religion, with all its corruptions, came to seem a necessary stage in the evolution of humanity; and the poet asked himself, perhaps, whether he, any more than Julian, had even now a more practical substitute to offer in its place.
So, Ibsen has the pagan prophet Maximus advocate for the development of a third kingdom. “The first is the kingdom born of sin, in the garden, on the tree of knowledge,” explains Maximus. “The second is the kingdom born of death, on the hill, on the tree of the cross.” Julian is visited by mystical representatives of these kingdoms, who turn out to be Cain, the murderous brother from the Old Testament, and Judas, the traitorous apostle from the New Testament. Maximus wants Julian to use his power to provide a third way.
This vision was an expression of Ibsen’s Hegelian optimism (it reflects Hegel’s idea that history is refined by synthesizing thesis and antithesis), but it was opaque enough to result in chilling misinterpretations. Historian Stephen F. Sage argues that Ibsen’s vision for Julian’s third kingdom, which translates to “Third Reich” in German, inspired another disturbing vision of Christian conquest: that of Adolf Hitler. “What Christianity wrote against Julian is the same drivel as the stuff the Jews pour forth about us,” said Hitler in a dinnertime chat reported in Sage’s Ibsen and Hitler. “While the writings of Julian are the pure truth.” Hitler’s theological thinking is unsurprisingly muddled, but his approval of Julian’s vision remains a caution for those who would impose Christ’s bottom-up ethic from the top down.
In any case, Ibsen’s Julian is too weak and insecure to realize his lofty vision. In the first section of Power’s condensed four-part structure (Ibsen’s epic was originally divided into two five-act plays), Julian is a devout Christian tortured by paralyzing doubts. He longs to escape to Athens, where he would defend Christ in the “lion’s den” of secular academia. He gets his wish in the second part, but Julian the scholar is reportedly more interested in Dionysian revelry than his studies. The last two parts detail his gradual political ascension from soldier to Caesar to Emperor.
In the end, Julian’s ambitions of establishing a utopian third kingdom prove to be just as impracticable as those of the second Christianity. Julian initially promises to institute liberal reforms to the religious state (“Under my rule, there will be freedom of worship for all citizens of the Empire”). But he grows jealous of the citizenry’s continued devotion to Christ, persecutes believers mercilessly, and is consequently assassinated. Julian wants to transcend the judgmental “Thou Shalt Not” of Christianity, but having acquired the power to do so, Christ’s demand that “anyone with power renounce it”—as quoted by Sullivan from the extracanonical Gospel of Thomas—becomes a threat. In one scene, Julian describes a recurring dream:
>What is victory? When Christ still reigns as the king in human hearts. I’ve been dreaming about Him, the same vision over and over. In my dream, I conquer the whole world, erase all memory of the Galilean… But then a procession passes me on this other world. At its head are soldiers and priests, weeping women following. And in the middle of the crowd walks the Galilean, fully alive, a cross on His back. I shout to Him, ask Him where He’s going. He turned to me, smiles, and says, ‘To the place of the skull.’ Maximus, what if His death on this planet was just one amongst many? Defeating Him on Earth is meaningless if He keeps on suffering, dying and conquering again and again from one world to the next? Then He rules the whole universe and my efforts count for nothing.
Empires must be built, defended, and maintained at sword-point. Religions are unenforceable. As soon as they are enforced, they lose their moral authority and become monstrous.