In this stirring and powerful book, a psychoanalyst looks at God as man on the night of his greatest humanity, lonely and betrayed, awaiting death. Jesus suffered on this night with ‘the suffering of all human beings confronting their inevitable appointment with death’. ⁣
⁣On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus and his disciples go to the Garden of Gethsemane following their Last Supper. There Jesus is alone. His Father is silent and his disciples fall asleep on the one occasion when it is he who needs them. He is then betrayed with a kiss, sold for the price of a slave. This betrayal would be echoed a few hours later by the disciple closest to Jesus’s heart. ⁣
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I have known this story many times, but never fully considered how heartbreaking Jesus’ plight was on that night, the pain of abandonment and betrayal by those we love. Recalcati examines both betrayals, one by an oft maligned man who it is easy to forget ‘isn’t the evil one, isn’t the devil, isn’t a Satan. He was a man in love with his teacher...Maybe Judas expected something from Jesus that wasn’t in Jesus’. In his reading, Judas is a political man disappointed by his teacher and with the ferocity of love turned to hate, betrays him to purge Jesus from himself. The other betrayal is even more painful, reflecting ‘the dramatic ambivalence that runs through every bone of love’. Meanwhile the other disciples sleep in order to avoid seeing ‘their Ideal fall in the dust...his imperfection, his humanity. They don’t want to have contact with the wound of the son abandoned by his Father.’ ⁣
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Jesus prays twice and God is silent, a silence that ‘roots Jesus still deeper in man, reveals him, in fact, to be profoundly human, and therefore exposed, like all men, to God’s silence’. Therein lies the greatest faith, not from God’s presence but his absence. ⁣
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This is a beautifully written book and I thought that it read with the intellectual vigour and excitement of one of Lenu or Nino Sarratore’s essays. (I later discovered that it was translated by Ann Goldstein, who also rendered Elena Ferrante’s work in English.)
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