The Beginning of History
REVIEW ESSAY
The Innocence of Pontius Pilate:
How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History
by David Lloyd Dusenbury
Hurst, 2021, 411 pages
Recently, the Finnish international law scholar and lawyer Martti Koskenniemi claimed that, once again, “the Montaigne Principle impose[s] itself on us.” Namely, there can be no “mystical” or “transcendent” basis for conceiving law in the absence of peace and security; rather, one must, in Hobbesian fashion, “shut up and obey.” The first “Montaigne moment” arrived amid the Cold War when political and ideological strife made it imperative that international law be subservient to state-backed power. With the end of the Cold War and the rise of what Susan Marks at the time termed “Liberal Millenarianism,” Francis Fukuyama’s (in)famous “End of History?” was perceived to herald a “global rule of law.” The idea was supported further when, in 1994, the security-general of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, proclaimed the dawning of the “Grotian Moment.” For the 17th century jurist Hugo Grotius, the efficiency of international law could be grounded anew by conjoining natural law with global-economic policy and thereby disentangle them from their theological roots. Thus, the “central task of our time,” Boutros-Ghali believed, was expanding neoliberal economic practices with secular political policies across the globe.
Many rejected the idea that history had come to an end, that they were witnessing a “Grotian moment,” or that such a “moment” was desirable. Samuel Huntington was one of the first to argue (just a year before Boutros-Ghali’s assertion) that even if ideological struggles had waned after the decisive political, ideological, and economic victories of liberalism over fascism and communism, disputes would flare up between Islamic and Judeo-Christian civilizations. Legal historian Randall Lesaffer has noted that while at the time the inevitability of civilizational conflict was overstated, Huntington was indeed correct that persistent tensions between secularized politics and religious fundamentalism meant a “return to history.” As both Koskenniemi and Lesaffer make clear, a world reduced to “endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” is a fiction.
As Koskenniemi argues, the problem is not that we have become “disenchanted;” instead, we have become “enchanted by the tools” of the post-Cold War era. We “believe that there really are no other relevant problems than technical ones.” The concern is that there is a tacit assumption of “objectivity” as to how such “tools” should be employed and to what purposes.
This problem was present at what many believe to be the origins of our concept of the secular. As Brad Gregory claims: “[E]ven when highly educated, well-intentioned Christians interpreted the Bible, beginning in the early 1520s they did not and manifestly could not agree about its meaning or implications.” It was not a metaphysical problem of whether God exists but of knowing precisely what His existence entailed for human belief. The result was the privatization of religion and the idea of sola scriptura that pierced at the very heart of the pre-modern political authority. Questions regarding political ends were to be disjointed from religious or ultimate ends. This is, in part, the essence of the “Montaigne moment” that we inherit today.
Few deny that secularity is a modern phenomenon deriving from the Reformation and the bellum civile between Catholics and Protestants, as little as they deny that it is a guiding principle of modern life. Indeed, most believe it is an absolute good. As Charles Taylor remarked: “[M]odern humanism prides itself on having released energy for philanthropy and reform . . . it encourages us to reach high.” With the waning of theological-political power in the aftermath of the Reformation came the flowering of the Enlightenment and the birth of the natural sciences. “Hence the Reformation,” as Gregory further remarks, “is the most important distant historical source for contemporary Western hyperpluralism.”
Recently, in The Innocence of Pontius Pilate, David Lloyd Dusenbury has proposed a counternarrative that our historical conceptions of the secular not only extend much further back, but that its origins are of the most unlikely of places. While “Western hyperpluralism,” “the end of history,” or our “Grotian moment” may all derive in particular from sensibilities forged during the Reformation, Dusenbury believes that these ideas could have only come about at the dawn of modernity because the logic of secularity was already present. By “exploring a recurring theme in the history of European political thought, and a neglected topos in the history of philosophy,” Dusenbury has sought to show that interpretations of the Roman trial of Jesus have not only “shaped history,” but are the origin of our concept of the secular.
The book is divided into five parts, hundreds of footnotes, and close to fifty pages of bibliographical sources with a prologue, nineteen chapters, and an epilogue. It is staggering in research, proportion, and historical scope. The central premise is that the rupture between ancient and modern political theory is traceable to interpretations of Pilate and Jesus’ exchanges in John 18, where Pilate asks: “What have you done?” and Jesus responds: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my followers would fight.” This is, according to Dusenbury, where we initially glimpse an idea that “survives twenty-one centuries later,” namely, our distinction between secular power (potestas) and sacred authority (auctoritas), and the idea of religious toleration. The argument hinges on tracing two genealogies: How the trial of Jesus was variously interpreted, and those interpretations were geographically dispersed, and how they intersected with theorizations of secularity.
A Superlative Irony
The trial of Jesus represents not only a “sublime irony” but a “superlative irony.” Arguably the foundational legal text of the Western world—Justinian’s Institutes—contains in the first lines this “revolutionary” sentence: “By the law of nature, all humans were initially born free.” Yet an “epochal absence” is also detectable. Missing from Justinian’s prologue was the term used to designate the Roman Emperor’s absolute sacred and secular authority—pontifex maximus. What we find instead appended is: “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Moreover, among the various nations mentioned under Justinian’s rule is the “curious presence” of North Africa. The “superlative irony” of all this rests on two insights. First, undoubtedly the most influential legal tract of the Western world—whose traces are still visible in Europe, the Americas, and all their former colonies—is legitimated in “the name of a man who was crucified by a Roman judge as a Roman convict.” Second, and as we will see further, “that European legal history is rooted in Romanized North Africa.” How did Jesus’ trial and Pilate’s perceived innocence bear upon the historical trajectory of secularity?
The idea is that Pilate, the man who judged and condemned Jesus to the cross, has historically, and paradoxically, also been persistently viewed as an innocent man. There are three “myths” surrounding the idea. First, Pilate was innocent because he was reluctant or hesitant to judge Jesus. Second, Pilate was innocent because he made no such judgment, and thus, Jesus was not legally or juridically executed, but killed. Third, and one of the more nefarious myths, Pilate was innocent because the Judean elite killed Jesus. These themes are explored in great detail as they derive from Pagan and Judaic to Islamic and Christian sources. For instance, in the Roman-Pagan tradition, Pilate’s innocence originates from the fictitious idea that Jesus was a “hostis humani generis” or “terrorist” who intended to overturn Roman rule with a “900-man force.” In Christian sources, the “Lactantian tradition” has persisted up to the present (Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben recently revived the theory in his 2015 Pilate and Jesus), holding that Pilate never juridically sentenced Jesus to death, “but handed him over to the Judeans.” This idea would also manifest itself in Judaic interpretations of the trial where Jesus was understood to have been rightly put to death for being a heretic or Jewish dissenter. Finally, in the Islamic tradition, the uncanny idea is put forward that Jesus was not put to death, but rather his body double.
For Dusenbury, all such “myths” are precisely that—false. It is irrefutable that Jesus was legally judged and juridically crucified by Pilate in his capacity as a Roman governor. Nevertheless, what is vital is not so much the factuality of Pilate’s guilt, but the historically persistent idea that he was innocent. The reoccurring question that has inspired the development of secularity is how Pilate, in his capacity as a Roman judge, put to death an innocent man who had made the “great refusal” in claiming: “My kingdom is not of this world.”
How do the genealogies of Jesus’ trial and secularity intersect? It is fascinating where the word secular (saeculum) appears in Justinian’s Digest, under the chapter “The Legacy of Furniture.” According to the commentary by the Latin jurist Julius Paulus, older Roman jurists did not believe furniture decorated with silver was inheritable. For “in keeping with the severity of the age (saeculi severitatem),” such furniture was not mere furniture, but silver. Secular (saeculum) then originally referred to a “space of time,” or more generally, to particular human ages or generations. Thus, the early Latin term had no inherent connection to politics or what we would understand today as religion (religio). This was in keeping with the ancient “temple-state” structure of power, where politics and religion were conceived as both spatially and temporally conjoined. Nevertheless, saeculum would eventually become linked to the idea of not merely a temporal distinction, but a metaphysical distinction.
This is indicated in the writings of St. Paul, where the earthly kingdoms of the saeculum are separated from the eternal “kingdom of God.” In interpreting the crucifixion of Christ as the fulfillment of an eternal life to come, Paul divides Christ’s kingdom away from the worldly kingdoms of the saeculum. As Dusenbury “crudely” puts Paul’s position: “the political machine belongs to the saeculum (and vice versa), and the church belongs to the mysterium (and vice versa).” Paul’s analysis of the trial is premised on the idea that “rulers of this age” (read Pilate) did not know whom they had crucified, for if they had, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” The “rulers of this age” thought they were executing Jesus, the man, but were ignorant of having killed the “Lord of glory.” Pilate is then, in one sense, innocent and in another sense guilty. Although Pilate was undoubtedly (and consciously) guilty of killing Jesus, the innocent man, he was (unconsciously) innocent of killing Christ. Thus, a mere twenty years after Jesus’ death, in St. Paul, the temple-state is distinguishable from the eternal kingdom of Christ, and in preliminary form, Christianity is conceptually distinct from the temple-states of antiquity.
The genealogy of Jesus’ trial and, in particular, interpretations of John 18 would continue for centuries in numerous and varied elucidations. It was Augustine of Hippo, however, who would put forward the most potent and lasting assessment of the trial, namely, Pilate’s guilt. While similar to St. Paul, Augustine argues that Pilate and the Judeans were innocent of killing Christ—as they acted in ignorance—they were nevertheless guilty of killing Jesus “the just man.” What is novel about Augustine’s interpretation is that Pilate explicitly judges Jesus “in a formal, juridical sense.” Pilate’s judgment, while “seated on his dais,” is a “legal fact” for this very reason, and thus, “a thoroughly Roman affair.” Yet Jesus is not only legally and juridically condemned, but killed as an “enemy of his city.” Augustine understands Jesus’ kingdom to be “radically” distinct from the Judaic and Roman temple-states because whereas Pilate must resort to physical coercion for fear of losing power, Jesus claims: “My Kingdom is not of this world.” When reading this remark, Augustine interprets this to be Jesus’ defense: “I obstruct not your dominion. . . . Come to the kingdom which is not of this world; come by believing. . . .”
The trial of Jesus is “a thoroughly Roman affair” in the city of Jerusalem, whose implications throw the entire idea of legal justification into question. For if Pilate et al. were innocent of what they were ignorant of, but guilty of what they knew to be the case, human law is shown lacking. Augustine hears in Jesus’ reply to Pilate a legal defense that is so radical “that [it] renders all other forms of jurisdiction, eo ipso, worldly—which is to say, secular.” If legal judgments are only in conformity with human law, they are never more than “imperfect justice.” The temple-state is faulty not merely because it rests on coercive power, but because any justice attempted will always fall short of truth. For as Pilate mockingly asks Jesus: “What is truth?”
According to Augustine, deprived of justice in the saeculum, Christians must await the “kingdom to come.” What is Christ’s kingdom? Dusenbury argues that it is crucial to understand that Augustine is not merely a Roman, but a Roman African. While it is almost certain that there were ethnic and cultural tensions between africanitas and romanitas (Julian of Eclanum being representative), in the context of the world-altering Sack of Rome in 410, Augustine countered these tensions by remarking: “What is Rome after all but Romans.” Augustine is an African, but his “cultural and intellectual romanitas is so robust,” that it defies geographic restrictions. Dusenbury believes that traces of this earlier remark—“Rome without Romans”—is reflected in how Augustine understood Christian life: “What is Christ’s kingdom but those believing in him?” The earlier remark is given to a people “suddenly who are bereft of an imperial city,” the second is addressed to a people “bereft of a terrestrial city.” What kingdom did Jesus speak of as a defense during his “legal ordeal?” It is “those believing in him,” and not a kingdom of the saeculum. Augustine, however, would not be the only African to influence the history of secularity; so, too, would the Pope who first formulated what we would today recognize as the secular. Just a few generations later, Pope Gelasius I would thematize Augustine’s insight into the political-theological distinction of religion (religio) and the secular (saecularis) with his succinct utterance: “There are Two” (duo sunt). Thus, as we saw above, “European legal history is rooted in Romanized North Africa,” and not the European continent.
Dusenbury believes that if Augustine and the Augustinian tradition had not taken up Jesus’ “great refusal” of an earthly kingdom, “the secular could not have been theorized.” Furthermore, he argues that wherever Augustine’s Homilies were not widely read—the Byzantine and Islamic regions—the idea of the secular never becomes firmly entrenched. Nevertheless, Augustine’s Homilies would go on to influence Dante and Marsilius of Padua as they sought to counter papal authority. Grotius would interpret the trial of Jesus and Pilate’s interrogation to signify the end of coercive power and the beginnings of a “reign of persuasion.” Yet it would be Thomas Hobbes, influenced by Augustine’s Homilies vis-à-vis Thomas Aquinus, who would radically alter political philosophy in what Dusenbury terms his “momentary orthodoxy.”
Hobbes understands the “great refusal” to signify Jesus’ denial of political power. If having a kingdom is to possess coercive authority, as Hobbes understands it, then John 18 explicitly presents Jesus’ refusal to take up such power. As Hobbes claims: “Faith hath no relation to, nor dependence at all upon compulsion.” For Hobbes, where humans are made so equal as to be able to kill every other human, radical equality is to be subordinated to political inequality, the Leviathan, which requires sovereignty and coercive force. As Dusenbury argues, however, Hobbes’s Leviathan is not theorized relative to the concept of the secular but to that of the sacred. There is to be a “dissolution” or subordination of spiritual power into state power, for the reason that Jesus himself refused to take up the temporal power of judgment—“who made me a judge, or a divider, among you?”
Where the Augustinian tradition understood the saeculum to be distinct from the mysterium, Hobbes conjoins them in his “mortal god”—the state. Yet where Hobbes also understood that the solution to maintaining peace was political intolerance towards religious dissent, Samuel von Pufendorf would maintain the opposite. For Pufendorf, Jesus denies the accusation of being a king precisely because “His kingdom is a kingdom of Truth,” as distinct from a kingdom of secular power. The “kingdom of Truth” is non-coercive, as Pufendorf believes, because Truth is “to be convincing of itself.” Alternatively, “Truth is not subject to human empire.”
With this, religious toleration becomes conceptually consolidated as “the ‘secularization’ genre is born in the second half of the seventeenth century in the states that now comprise the German Republic.” In the very last lines of the prologue, however, Dusenbury also claims that by the eighteenth century, “there is a tendency to forget, or suppress, the Latin Christian logic of the secular.” It appears hardly accidental, then, that in the epilogue, he further theorizes when this “tendency to forget, or suppress” took on a new fanatical form. Where Jesus at the cross says, “Father, forgive them,” King Louis XVI of France would utter upon the scaffold, “I, with all my heart, forgive those who are become my enemies.” This brings full circle the “king-killing” of a Judean whose birth inaugurated our own historical calculations of time (à la Dionysius Exiguus) to the revolutionary king-killing that attempted to usher in a new saeculum or a year zero with the French Revolution. Echoed here is the idea that Puritans, Jacobins, and Bolsheviks alike would all take up the sword against their perceived religious authorities in the name of even higher ideals, in a bid to stop time and set the past aright.
It is no mistake that the genealogy Dusenbury traces from the Jesus trial to Augustine, and from there to modernity via Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Thomasius—all Protestants—would influence the “post-Protestant” revolutionary theorist par excellence, Rousseau. To say the least, Rousseau is unsympathetic to the entire Christian tradition. Influenced by the Roman trial, however, Rousseau was also led to understand that Jesus did not claim to set up a political kingdom. Rousseau agrees that what distinguishes ancient from modern political life is indeed the splitting of the temple-state. Where in antiquity every war was both political and religious, Christianity severed the political from religious conceptions of war. For this reason: “[L]ate modern critics of Christianity would tend to assume that Rousseau’s argument . . . is partisan . . . [or] subconsciously pro-Christian.”
The interesting point is not that Rousseau accepts the salience of the Christian division of territorial political power from non-territorial spiritual power, but rather, like Hobbes, that he rejects it. What Rousseau calls “good” political governance is akin to that “Under the Caliphs”—a “totally unitary” temple-state. What the contemporary world has come to view as an absolute good, namely, secularization, in Rousseau’s realpolitik reading is contemptible. The implications of this are profound, given Rousseau’s prodigious influence. It has been little noted that Rousseau’s critique of Christianity is not based on its supposed perpetuations of cultic-violence, but rather, that by splitting the temple-state, it foreclosed the possibility for such cultic violence.
The End of History
In the first lines of the prologue, Dusenbury paints contrasting pictures of what Fernand Braudel termed “European civilizations”—“At the heart of every European city lies a mystery: the figure of the cross.” Yet in the contemporary world this “mystery” has become “bleak and inert.” We have become “fundamentally uninterested” in the historical origins and development of Christianity, and it is safe to say, its claim upon us. Dusenbury goes on to claim that he “first drafted this page” among the “imposing Neo-Gothic churches” of Baltimore, Maryland. A city, he points out, where the “intense Catholic” Jacques Lacan would remark: “The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.” Before either Dusenbury or Lacan would grace the city of Baltimore, however, it was home to arguably the most influential American political philosopher, and even more coincidentally, one of the great political and ethical theorists of the secular: John Rawls.
In his massive A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls sought to challenge the intellectual dominance that utilitarianism had held for close to a hundred and fifty years. According to Rawls, if it was possible for individuals to design society from an “original position,” with a “veil of ignorance” placed over them, they would tend to choose those principles of justice that maximized the lowest positions in society. Being so decontextualized, Rawls argued, would heighten the individual’s level of impartiality and fairness. For if unaware of where you would eventually end up in society, you would choose principles that would be most fair to all such positions, and most particularly to the lowest positions. Therefore, what was necessary was an “original position” or year zero to get the ball rolling, a place yet to be created or outside time in which no one knew of their place in society.
Nonetheless, Rawls was far from naïve to what Miguel de Unamuno termed “the tragic sense of life.” “Rawls was,” as Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel argue, “not the product of a secular culture.” Not only had he written his bachelor’s thesis at Yale on the theological topic of sin and salvation, but aspired to become an Episcopalian priest, that is, until he saw action in the Pacific theater during the Second World War. The question remained as to why Rawls turned away from theology until shortly after his death in 2002, when a paper was discovered titled “On My Religion.” Supposedly written for friends and family but never distributed, Rawls described how in the experiences of war, he “abandoned” religion “entirely by June of 1945.” He would “come to think of the denial of religious freedom and liberty of conscience as a very great evil . . . freedoms and liberties became fixed points of my moral and political opinions . . . realized in institutions by the separation of church and state.” For Rawls, the ultimate truths of religion, or what he also called “comprehensive doctrines,” were not only impossible to be realized, but were naturally intolerant as they allowed of no room for dissent.
Reviewing A Theory of Justice in 1975, philosopher Allan Bloom would remark that with the “institutional castles Rawls builds on the sands of his original position,” a better title for the work would have been: “A First Philosophy for the Last Man.” But it is rather more intriguing that one of Bloom’s pupils would go on to defend such “castles” of the Nietzschean “Last Man,” albeit with some regret. Just three years after his seminal article in National Interest, Fukuyama dropped the question mark at the end of his essay title and expanded it to book-length form with the curious addition: The End of History and the Last Man.
This end of history has perpetuated a false idea and validated the acceptance of discarding history in the hopes of a self-constructed future; to be “enchanted by the tools” as Koskenniemi worried, or to await the “Grotian moment” as Boutros-Ghali announced. “History worked sometimes with glacial slowness,” the historian Daniel Rodgers wrote, “at other times with revolutionary and unpredictable swiftness. But it was not an empty chasm that could be leaped.” There are profound difficulties in attempting to bypass or “leap” across the expanses of becoming in the expectance of being. As Machiavelli argued, and Bloom echoed, it is the attempt to build castles in the sky or on shifting sands that are bound to come crashing down without support.
“Cultural memory is not a sovereign measure of history,” Dusenbury writes at one point. Although such memory eventually crystalizes into what the historian Reinhart Koselleck termed “sediments of time,” if cultural memory cannot be sovereign, what can? Maybe the idea that history must be jettisoned leads inevitably to cultural memory being the only possible “sovereign” left. What Dusenbury appears to be getting at is that the secular could have no more been conceived in the absence of Christianity than any true antithesis can be decontextualized or dehistoricized. The sacred is a guiding thread of the secular, eternity to history, being to becoming. At our present, we appear to have left the “unipolar moment” that Charles Krauthammer proclaimed had arrived just a year after history had ended for Fukuyama, and are now entering the harsh “Montaigne Moment” of multipolarity. If justice is imperfect in such a world, then we would do well to resist forgetting our historical conceptions of it, as Dusenbury’s work is indeed one such attempt at resisting.