The flower of the field: God's grace and Judas Iscariot

A roundabout route can sometimes bring you to an unexpected and valuable insight. This intellectual journey began with something rather mundane: I was sorting out books, trying to make space for more. SCM produced a series of books in the 1970s each of which gathered together a selection of studies by a British theologian, mostly drawn from relatively inaccessible journal articles. The theologians were the New Testament scholars Denis Nineham and Christopher Evans (who taught me at King's), Leslie Houlden and Maurice Wiles. Volume 5 was by Donald MacKinnon and included his article “Tillich, Frege, Kittel: Some Reflections on a Dark Theme”. In it he explores the relationship of moral goodness to intellectual insight and the extent to which a thinker’s intellectual achievement must be judged damaged by grave moral faults in the man.

Gottlob Frege was a "a racialist of the most bigoted sort, narrowly nationalist, obsessively anti-Catholic as well as anti-semitic." Gerhard Kittel used his special familiarity with first century Judaism to develop the theological apologia for Nazi racial laws. MacKinnon is concerned with the way Paul Tillich emerges from his wife's memoirs as wilfully promiscuous. It was more than thirty years since I had read Hannah Tillich's book From Time to Time, at the time when I was studying her husband's systematic theology, so I got the rather battered copy of it from the London Library. Although Hannah's account is informed by her passionate love for Paulus, as she calls him, they had a marriage that did not exclude other sexual partners and she certainly depicts Tillich as obsessed with the seduction of ever younger women. Langdon Gilkey was a student, colleague and friend of Tillich's and his book, entitled simply Gilkey on Tillich, does a great deal to reveal the pathos and comedy in his life, as well as exloring the important themes of his now rather neglected theology.

Hannah said this of Tillich:

“Now I was seeing Paulus, the man with the golden mouth, who looked like a Riemenschneider carving in his earlier years. He had a body like a Gothic statue, lean, from the hungry years of World War I. His face was finely carved, with a well-shaped mouth over animal-like teeth. He was the desperate child of the century, who dared to give word to dreams of disaster and hope, carrying on to an ecstatic ‘yes,’ in spite of his philosophy of the demonic, of Kairos. He preached the agony of death in war, instead of heroism.”

The carving to which she referred would have been by Tilman Riemenschneider of Wurzburg, active as a master sculptor from 1485 until the middle 1520s. He is one of the sculptors featured in Michael Baxandall's marvellous study The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany and so I turned up the pages concerned with the Altarpiece of the Holy Blood in the St Jakobskirche, Rothenburg-on-the-Tauber. The altarpiece was commissioned in April 1501; it is in limewood and it is nine metres high. Baxandall says that it "declares itself as a gigantic monstrance". The main part of it depicts the Last Supper but the figure that displaces Christ from the centre is Judas, described by Baxandall as "a strange begging dog-like figure".

Why is Judas at the centre? Baxandall thinks that an answer lies in the preaching of an Upper Rhenish Franciscan, Johannes Pauli, and that it concerns "the lack of discrimination with which God offers grace."

You might say: seeing that Christ well knew what Judas would not follow his call and election, but rather betray him and be damned, why did he then call him, and receive him among the Apostles and entrust him with the bag...? The angelic Doctor Saint Bonaventura give the answer saying: Christ called Judas to him and chose him for his fellowship to show us that he will share his grace and mercy among both good and bad, and is ready to give his grace to all men who apply themselves to receive the grace of God. Thus he says: "I am the flower of the field, and the lily of the valleys". Why does he not say: "I am a flower of the garden or the meadow"? Because the sweet scent of the garden flower is only for those who have the key of the garden; but the flower of the field is at large, it grows on the open road, and every pilgrim who passes by may gain it and enjoy its sweet scent.

The reference is to Pseudo-Bonaventura rather than to the Franciscan doctor himself but the idea, of free access to grace, of lack of discrimination on God's part, giving to whoever asks, allowing them the freedom to work out what to do with what is given them, is both hopeful and appealing. The initiative comes from God, the response from the human being and even if the seed does not bear fruit nevertheless it is widely cast. The ways of God are deeper than the systems devised by men. And I am certain that Paul Tillich, whatever his failings, received and conveyed the grace of God.