“But look, Guzmán, how quickly the scenery of the painting is changing, the backdrop remains the same, but the clothing of the figures is changing, the set is being replaced, the invisible, cruel, and capricious artist is arranging his tale in a new order, he has prepared a new performance for us.”
The painting: Neither divine nor miraculous: I am a Palestinian, a political agitator; I convince my companions and intimates that a mock martyrdom is absolutely necessary to our cause; we cast lots to determine who is to betray me to the authorities and who is to take my place when, as I foresee, I am condemned to death. The lots fall to Judas and to Simon of Cyrene. Our group is very small for reasons of security, mobility, and purity of convictions; but also because it is composed of men who physically are very similar. In this way we can disguise ourselves as one another, appear simultaneously in different places under the generic name of Messiah, and astound the ignorant and ordinary folk with false miracles carefully organized and executed not by one but by several of my companions, but always attributable to me, as I am the symbol of the rebellion and its intellectual author. Only in this way am I different from my companions; my mother forced me to burn the midnight oil reading the Sacred Scriptures; I articulated the spontaneous rebellion of my untutored companions and channeled, organized, and intellectualized it. I lament that Judas and the Cyrenian were those elected by chance. I would have preferred to lose Peter, the most insecure and the weakest among us all, or John of Patmos, too whimsical to be politically effective. But sentiment must not intervene in these decisions that are more important than our own personal likes and dislikes. Thus, along the road to the cross, we all follow behind a double prepared to give his life for me and for my cause; there we all feign tears and despair; pretending only to a certain point, it’s true, for Simon of Cyrene is a good man and a loyal, although expendable, warrior; we feign tears and despair to deceive the authorities and to cement our subversive legend, and then all of us who are actors in the drama withdraw into the darkness from which we will emerge for a short time to perform the sacramental play of the individual insurrection of the slaves against the collective ethic of Rome and the weighty tradition of Israel. That afternoon on which the weather so opportunely collaborated with us, that afternoon begun in heat and sun and dust and ended in storm, that early darkness and the motionless violence of the stones, were necessary so that our rebellion might fly on the wings of a legend of sacrifice. Only from sacrifice are new worlds born. But men have always been sacrificed. So it occurred to me: sacrifice a God. The ancient gods and their divine history were born from human sacrifice. From divine sacrifice human history would be born. It was a very effective inversion, well worth the effort. My fate and that of my followers are not important. No one ever again knew anything of us. But there was no one who did not know what happened that afternoon on Golgotha. Our creation is called history.
“Doubt no more, Guzmán: the soul of Christ abandoned the suffering body of Jesus, who upon dying was again only the son of Mary and an unknown father. Write, Guzmán, write the principal section of my testament, dictated today, the day of the final burial of all my ancestors whom I shall one day join, write: In the name of the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost who are one Being, unique, three names that are one essence, as the body, the intelligence, and the soul are the one essence of every man, and if we do not doubt the existence of this union, mysterious though it may be, why would we doubt the substantive union of our dogma: the intelligence of the Father, the body of the Son, and the soul of the Holy Spirit, like the Sun a unique substance that manifests itself as light, heat, and as the sphere itself: light, the Spirit; heat, the Son; and the sphere, the Father. So was the Son one day sent forth, like a ray of light; but doubt this, too, and believe in what this painting is telling us; I told you it would speak to us as we spoke to it, look at its space, suddenly empty, or invaded by a light so white it erases everything, blinds everything, converts everything into blackness, into absence of light…”
The painting: Because I am God I am unique; and I, that unique God, was the One who descended unto Mary the virgin and got her with child, and from her I was born, the only God who had never been born before: I, Father of Myself; I, Son of Myself; a unique, indivisible God, it was I who suffered and I who died, men crucified the one God, I, the Father.
“And so you will accept, Guzmán, that our Christianity bleeds because of simple arithmetic, and attempts to explain the inexplicable with the weapon of the Devil instead of forever defeating the Devil by denying the temptation of the rational, by drawing the fangs of the forbidden, by accepting that everything is magic, that everything is mystery, that everything is the intellectual liberty of the few — faithful, persecuted, eternally heretical, and eternally nonconformist: God’s triumph, Guzmán, is that enduring, persecuted, and ever triumphant Christian community; Christianity exists because Jesus was defeated, not because Constantine triumphed; I know Nero’s temptation, I sometimes dream it, I ask myself whether in order to strengthen my Faith there are not, in truth, more than two roads: to be either the persecutor or the persecuted…”
“You, Señor, ordered the unruly mob in your father’s castle to be killed and you led your armies in crusades against the Waldensian, Abelite, Adamite, and Cathari heretics. Whom, then, did you persecute?”
“Ease my heavy spirit, Guzmán; perhaps that tiny community of true Christians is hidden in the souls of madmen and rebels, of children and lovers, those who live without need of me or need of the Faith … and by persecuting them and killing them, perhaps without knowing it I have strengthened that Faith.”
“You are the Defender. Your battles, your escutcheon, and your laws so proclaim; and also a papal bull.”
“Yes, yes, the Defender; seal my mouth, Guzmán, as you will put the seal to this my testament when it is completed, and repeat with me, now, this very moment, on your knees, the eternal truth: We believe in one God, a supernatural Father, the Maker, Creator, and providential Monarch of the Universe, from whom cometh all things, and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, His Son, a God procreated by the Father before the beginning of time, God of a God, totality issued from totality, unity of unity, King of a King, Lord of a Lord, the Word Incarnate, living wisdom, the true light, the way, the resurrection, the shepherd, the door, the essence, the purpose, power, and the glory of the Father; eternal image of the Deity, irreplaceable image, the unique image that no infidel can exchange for one of sullen stone and harrowing grimaces: Your image, Lord, is the sweet face of the Italian painting that stares down upon me as, kneeling, I praise your Name, and that image can be no other: God the Creator, divine Christ, most human Jesus, but only in that face consecrated by tradition, and never in the stone masks of savage idolaters; those who attempt to change your face, O God, shall see their works burned, torn down, destroyed by the combined anger and piety of my armies; never again will new Babylons arise to deform your sweet likeness, my God. Repeat with me, Guzmán, this credo, for if doubt transforms the dogma of the Trinity or stains the conception of Mary or separates Christ’s divinity from his humanity or changes the most precious face of Jesus, endangered all by the heresies I have exposed for the purpose of exorcising them, then I would lose my power and it would be gained by madmen, rebels, children, and lovers; and it is not that they may not deserve it, no; it is that they would not know how to use it, it would be useless to them, and above all, a contradiction: once they had the power they would cease to be what they are: children and madmen, lovers and rebels. Better it be this, better it be I, better one single dogma, any dogma, than a million doubts and debates, whatever they may be. Now you must understand the reasoned order of my apparent lack of reason, Guzmán: all doubts are consigned to paper, dictated by me, written by you. They are there, and they will remain written; but they will remain in my possession, like black envoys of the luminous truth of the Faith, they will not be loosed and rained and carried and fluttered in the wind of temptation and the incoherent noise of mockery. Let us incorporate evil into knowledge, Guzmán, and it will be but a healthful contrast and warning to the life of truth and good. Write my words, Guzmán: evil is only that which we do not know; and only that which does not know us is evil; and it is that unknown and unknowing evil, unsubmitting, irreducible, not to be possessed even through the writing that is our privilege, which we must extirpate without mercy.”