This explains what Jesus meant when he said he and his Father were one. Bellori compared this to what happens when a person dies. I and my corpse are one, he writes, the two things are identical, but also not, as the I has given itself up in the transformation, and the corpse’s emergence is dependent on this very surrender.
If the Son of Man’s appearance was predicated on God’s relinquishment, as Bellori believed, it means that he thought as a man, felt as a man, behaved as a man, indeed that he was a man. A man with special talents certainly, clearly uniquely gifted, clearly singularly charismatic, but a man for all that. When God became man through Christ, he also became one with man’s doubt, uncertainty, longing, restlessness, and despair, just as much as with man’s hope and joy. The desperation in his condition lay in that he was never, at any time, certain that he really was divine. For how could he be certain? It is in the very nature of incarnation that God has relinquished his hold. It means that Jesus didn’t know who he was. But he had his suspicions, stronger on some occasions than others. It’s during these moments of clarity that he says he is one with God, and it’s worth noting that they increase the nearer to the end he gets.
The divine was something he’d been, and would be again, but not something he was. That’s why at one moment he can say that he and the Father are one, only to fall to his knees the next praying to that same Father. No one took these contradictions for what they were: contradictions. No one took his confusion for what it was: confusion. The reason for this is obvious: as long as the divine is regarded as perfect, always complete and in absolute balance, one must either brush aside all contradictions one finds within its sphere, or neutralize them. There are no other possibilities. But Bellori regarded the divine as mutable and therefore didn’t repudiate the discrepancies. Rather, he took them as confirmation that he was right: the divine was incomplete and not in balance.
In this context incarnation was especially important. Is there any greater imbalance imaginable than the one incarnation brought with it? Is there any greater change? In the Old Testament the divine reveals itself as flaming angels and vast wheels in the air, burning pillars and seas that open, cities that are destroyed in a rain of fire and sulfur, plains full of skeletons that get back their flesh, sinews, and skin to rise again, ladders that reach up to heaven, terrible scourges, entire armies that are annihilated from one moment to the next. The divine is always something outside mankind. With Christ the divine moves within and assumes quite different forms. With its strange mixture of comedy and beauty, foolishness and innocence, candor and theatricality, brutality and tenderness, there is something almost vaudevillian about Christ’s Passion, a kind of night of misrule, in which the king whom no one knows is a king is whipped and dressed up as a jester-king with a fool’s cloak and a fool’s crown, and then nailed up to die on a cross between two robbers, with the doubly ironical legend above his head: This is Jesus the king of the Jews.
This is my body, he says, and they betray him. This is my blood, he says, and they deny him. My heart is ready to break with grief; stop here, and stay awake, he says, and they doze off. The guards come to take him prisoner, and an ear is cut off. He says he’s the Son of Man, and they tear his robes. They spit on him. They place a cloth over his face and beat him. He is led to the governor’s headquarters, and the soldiers dress him in a scarlet mantle, place a crown of thorns on his head, and shout, Hail, King of the Jews! They beat him over the head with a cane and then kneel and acclaim him. When, exhausted from carrying his cross through the city, he asks for something to drink, they give him wine mixed with gall. Then they nail his palms to the cross, and then they nail his feet, and then they raise the cross. When they’ve done this, they draw lots for his clothes. Those who pass by and see him shout: If he’s God’s son, let God rescue him.
He hung there for an entire day.
And darkness fell over the whole land. Then Jesus cried aloud.
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?
All his life he has struggled against doubt, but now, in the moment before he dies, sapped of all strength, he can’t keep it at bay any longer, and he gives way in the most famous of all laments.