Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews by James Carroll Read Free Book Online Page B

manhood that I had found it irresistible. In the statue's presence I entered the presence of the young man I had been. That was the spell. I realized that the Pietà was not what it had been to me all those years before.
    Was I already preparing for a task I had barely begun to imagine, but which Lizzy, with her border question, was sponsoring? Whose side were these stone figures on? Only now do I see why I then instinctively turned away from the high Renaissance triumphalism of Michelangelo's celebration of the death of Jesus.
    We moved through St. Peter's, stunned less by its beauty than by its mass. In Maine, we had been on a mountain; here, we were inside one. It was when, on another occasion, I stood before The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel that I experienced another realm of the artist's work as the place where I belonged, and it is in that realm I find myself now. To enter the chapel, with its remarkable frescoes on the ceiling and walls, is to enter a jewel box. The cardinals of the Church meet here to elect the pope, an ultimate act of historical continuity. But the huge painting behind the high altar, toward which the room is oriented, portrays nothing less than the end of history.
    Michelangelo was an old man when he mounted the scaffolding to paint this last great masterwork, and you can see how time had flogged him. In the years since he had created the serenely poignant Pietà, Luther, Copernicus, Magellan, Henry VIII, and several Borgia popes had all helped to upend the moral universe. The grand inquisitor Gian Pietro Caraffa had come to Rome, and soon, as Pope Paul IV, would establish the Roman ghetto, the antechamber of Auschwitz. The Last Judgment, painted between 1534 and 1541, reflects the era's loss of faith in the human project, and it is a certain window into Michelangelo's soul. His scathing vision is staggering, especially because it so contrasts with the earlier hopefulness of the scenes on the ceiling just above, with their triumphal rendition of the Creation. The List Judgment, as it were, rebukes The Creation, for the beautiful creature to whom God had entrusted the spark of divinity, with that unforgettably outstretched finger, is now repudiated. Sinners and the righteous alike cower below the upright figure of the judging Lord. It is as if Michelangelo, looking afresh into the soul of humanity, had glimpsed the coming religious wars, slavery, Inquisition, genocide, death camps, and the black hole of the Führerbunker.
    To me, the most heart-rending and fearsome aspect of Michelangelo's dark masterpiece is not despair overtaking the created world, but a smaller and more personal statement. Among the multitude of figures in The Last Judgment is a rare Michelangelo self-portrait. It is so discreetly done that his contemporaries failed to see it as him, and no wonder. Michelangelo, the genius celebrant of the human body, the creator of David and Moses and the Pietà, chose to put his own face, at last, on a shriveled, limp, formless skin that had been flayed from the body of a martyr. 4 Apparently the artist had lost all sense of the noble things he had done, and was still doing. The self-portrait of a face ripped from its bones is an abject confession of sin, impossible to behold out from under the crushing weight of conscience. The portrait says, "I stand as accused by God as anyone in this scene." As the artist who, in fact, conjured the devastating judgment of his own era, Michelangelo is saying, through his portrait, "There is nothing of which I accuse any other person here—popes, Borgias, Medicis—that I do not accuse myself of."
    "You have utterly betrayed me," one hears the damning Lord declare—and what Christian, mindful of the story we have recounted here, would not know what, among all else, is being referred to? But The Last Judgment is not thereby a Christian vision. It is biblical faith that is fully in touch with the mystery of evil as it lurks in the human heart, and it is