Catholic Sensibility

I hope that some of you have read the cover article in the current Commonweal, “The Catholic Bard: Shakespeare and the ‘Old Religion.’” The author, Clare Asquith, is a Shakespeare scholar who happened to spend some time in the Soviet Union as the wife of a British diplomat. She suggests that we should interpret Shakespeare as an early modern Catholic dissident in a Protestant police state who made use of “the double-speak of subversive drama” that “gave initiates an enjoyable sense of complicity, but was innocent enough to hoodwink the authorities.” One example: in some often omitted lines from the first scene of Much Ado About Nothing, the misogynistic Benedick’s friends joke that, if he ever does fall in love, he will sign a letter on “the sixth of July.” “Mock not, mock not,” Benedick responds, “‘ere you flout old ends any further, examine your consciences.” Elizabethan Catholics would remember that Henry VIII had executed St Thomas More on that day for refusing to sign a letter, and Henry’s much-desired son Edward VI had also died on July 6 – a glaringly obvious judgment, it was thought, against his father. Benedick’s “Mock not, mock not” reminds his friends that the deaths of More and Edward should not be reduced to facetious banter, and his “examine your consciences” is a clear reference to More’s exemplary martyrdom as “God’s servant first.” Those who catch on will begin to detect a “hidden drama” behind Benedick’s behavior and the identity of Beatrice. Here’s an interesting question: Does the idea of “the double-speak of subversive drama” help us understand Holy Scripture? Much of the New Testament, after all, was written in the shadow of the cult of the Roman emperor. The Lutheran exegete Harry O. Maier has written about a “sly civility” in St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians. The Letter to the Colossians tells us of a pre-existing Son of God in whom “all things hold together” (3:17), and through whom God “reconciled to himself all things, whether on earth on in heaven, making peace by the blood of the cross” (3:20). The church should have a harmonious communal life issuing forth from the incorporation of believers (1:18; 2:11-12, 15, 19) into the resurrection life of this “Christ seated at the right hand of God” (3:1). Rev. Maier says that a first century Christian audience would have recognized similarities to a familiar imperial-sounding theme “celebrating the Roman order as a divinely ordained order representing a pacification of erstwhile hostile and ethnically dispersed peoples, brought by military might into a global pax by a divinely appointed emperor heading a moral, natural and spiritual renewal.” Paul clearly speaks the political language of diplomacy and civil concord – even his description of the Colossian church as “stable and steadfast and not shifting” borrows from the architectural language common in civic representations of political peace. Christ is a “making of peace” (eirenopoios), he says. Well, Dio had described Julius Caesar as an “eirenopoios” and by the time of Commodus, it would become one of the emperor’s official titles. Keep in mind that this imperial peace was meant to be not just political, but cosmic. Nero’s coins rather ambitiously associated him with the enthroned Jupiter. Less than 50 miles from Colossae was the temple complex at Sebasteion with representations of the emperors depicted in the company of Olympian deities and personified natural and cosmic powers, all overlooking fifty statues representing the pacified peoples of the world. Perhaps Paul’s evocation of imperial themes was meant to be “innocent enough to hoodwink the authorities.” But Paul’s allusions do not show the weakness of accommodation; they are actually deeply subversive. The pax of Colossians comes from the self-emptying of the cross, not the violence of military triumph. The Household Code of 3:18-4:1 might look like the Roman political ideal of the well-governed household, but the insistence upon love, justice, and equity (3:19, 4:1) “unsettles the traditional absolute rule and exploitation of Graeco-Roman patresfamilias over their subordinates.” And the reconciliation of the cross – bringing a cosmic peace to even those “barbarians and Scythians” (3:11) at the farthest boundaries of Roman rule - makes the extra rituals and practices of Empire simply redundant. Those who catch on will begin to detect that Caesar is reduced to being a subject - just another “principality and power” (2:10), Of course, the Letter to the Colossians can be read as a call for Christendom. One example of this is Eusebius’ fawning Oration in Praise of Constantine, in which, as Rev. Maier says, “Christ and Caesar conspire together in a cosmic and global rule, as saving religion guarantees imperial peace and concord and a global imperial reach brings the gospel to the furthest points of the compass.” But Rev. Maier believes that a closer reading of Colossians brings us to a “destabilizing truth.” The cruciform peace of the Son of God, manifested by the “love, that is the bond of perfection,” (3:14) of those who have died and risen with Christ, shows that the imperial peace of “the dominion of one over the vanquished who owe him honor” is really no peace at all. Paul’s letter “urges believers gathered in local house churches to realize by love what Rome seeks to achieve by the force of arms, and thereby to be the visible ecclesial manifestation of an alternative cosmic rule centered finally in an empire-renouncing logic. … Colossians twists Empire and makes it slip.” Of course, we do not live under a Protestant police state or the cruel persecution of Nero. But in a time of suspicion, fear, and an inescapable preoccupation with survival and security, do we find ourselves at least tempted towards the “dangerous religion” of a “theology of Empire”? If so, might we need to learn once more the “sly civility” of a Shakespeare – or a St Paul?