Killing the conscience
Can you ever really silence John the Baptist?
The Bible overflows with salaciousness. The serpent in the Garden sounds the first note. Winding himself round the Tree of Knowledge, he whispers seductive lies into Eve’s ear and she succumbs; winding her husband round her little finger, she uncovers their nakedness, prompting their shame. Ten generations later, Noah’s son Ham discovers his father drunk inside his tent, nakedness uncovered, genitals exposed. (Or does Ham perhaps castrate his father? Or rape his mother? So many interpretations.) Another ten generations pass, and now a fierce mob of Sodomites attempt to gang-rape two angels, which is prevented only when Lot offers them his daughters instead, who, perhaps in revenge, having escaped the destruction of Sodom with their father, get him drunk and then rape him.
And that’s only halfway through Genesis!
The New Testament isn’t nearly so steamy. However, it does contain one episode which, for sheer perversion and bloody gruesomeness, rivals all comers: the story of the martyrdom of St John the Baptist. Especially in the expanded form which the story has taken in the cultural imagination, it is a tale ripe for artistic treatment, and in a modern era where sexual psychologicalisation is omnipresent, many great artists have had their way with it. (Richard Strauss’s opera Salome is my favourite. A production at the Royal Opera House once held me completely rapt, gaping wide-eyed into the heart of darkness.)
The story is, I think, familiar to most.
The Tetrarch of Galilee, Herod Antipas, a Roman puppet from Edomite stock and therefore only spuriously Judean, marries his own half-brother’s wife Herodias, who is also his niece. An incestuous union, though that in itself is not necessarily a problem. The problem is, the half-brother (confusingly also named Herod, and also sometimes Philip) is still alive, and though Herod Antipas and Herodias’s marriage is among the lesser of the evils regularly indulged in by the extended Herodian family, it is strictly illegal according to the Law of Moses. It therefore attracts the ire of John, a prophet, as it were, right out of the Scriptures. John has been baptising his fellow Jews, and also haranguing them, holding them to exacting moral and legal standards, standards which they have failed to meet. Now Herod feels the sting of his tongue.
To that point, Herod Antipas had felt no animosity toward John. In fact he’s rather fond of him, and also terrified of him—an emotional blend often found in hedonistic narcissists like Herod. Even after John publicly condemns Herod’s marriage, accusing the couple of transgressing the Law—and though yes, Herod does now want to kill him—he is afraid of how the people might react—and also, for all he knows, John is the prophet long foretold—so he does nothing, keeping him under his protection. It is only when the much less scrupulous Herodias demands that the holy man be thrown into prison that her husband, by far the weaker of the two, has him arrested.
This is where it gets dark. Herodias has a teenage daughter by her first husband called Salome, who followed her mother to Herod’s court. It wasn’t long before Herod conceived yet another illicit passion, this time for the girl: his step-daughter, half-niece and half-grandniece. One evening, during a party for his birthday, Salome dances suggestively before her lecherous uncle, a dance sometimes known as the dance of the seven veils. Herod’s passion now fully aroused, he is overcome. Standing before the revellers, he makes a fateful oath, swearing to reward the girl by giving her whatever she asks. ‘Up to half my kingdom!’
Deep down, Salome is a good girl really. Nurture, not nature, is to blame for what happens next. She runs to her mother, who is not a good girl. Seizing the opportunity, Herodias tells her daughter what to say to her stepfather-uncle. ‘I want you to give me, right now,’ Salome demands, ‘the head of John the Baptiser on a plate.’ Crestfallen and deeply unwilling, but bound to his oath, Herod orders the execution.
In the opera, Salome is truly deranged, possessed by sado-sexual obsession for the prophet. After she is handed his head on the silver platter, she takes it and does unspeakable acts to it. Blasphemy. (The opera is a guilty pleasure.) The Gospel does not go that far. ‘His head was brought in on a platter and given to the young woman,’ writes St Matthew, ‘and she took it to her mother.’
The Commemoration of the Beheading of John the Honoured & Glorious Prophet, Forerunner & Baptiser of the Lord, as the feast is officially known, is celebrated each year on 29th August, just this past Thursday. Though technically a feast, it’s unusual, one of only two feast days where the faithful are expected to keep a strict fast, the other being the feast of the elevation of the Holy Cross on 14th September; both feasts are reminders of martyrdom and therefore are fittingly commemorated ascetically. In a homily that he gave sometime in the mid-14th century, St Gregory Palamas provides a spiritual interpretation of the feast:
Brethren, our mind too suffers something similar. It was created by God to be king and absolute ruler of the passions, but when charmed by them, it is led into unnatural servitude and alien deeds. All those enslaved by sin and passions, when they are accused by their own conscience, are grieved and displeased. Their first reaction is, so to speak, to shut their conscience, as Herod imprisoned John, because he did not want to hear him. They cannot even bear to hear words of Scripture which reject sin, and encourage every kind of goodness. Finally, once they are completely in the power of the Herodias who unlawfully shares their life—in other words, of a mind that is prone to sin—they destroy the word of grace dwelling within them, that is, their conscience. Annulling it utterly, they disbelieve and contradict the Scripture inspired by God, becoming entirely unscrupulous and opposed to God’s word, as Herod was against John.
St Gregory echoes what St Basil laid out in Be Attentive to Yourself, the sermon that we read over the past two episodes of Life Sentences. The mind is the ‘king’ of the soul, by nature meant to rule over the passions and keep them in order; in biblical terms, the mind is King of Israel. That is the ideal but in reality almost never the case. Like Herod the Edomite, our inner king is corrupt and compromised; he is not King of Israel, he is Tetrarch of Galilee, pawn of the Whore of Babylon. Instead of subjecting our passions to reason, he is subjected to them, like a wealthy debauchee bewitched and subjugated by a seductive and domineering wife. (The gendered language is unavoidable.)
St Gregory also echoes St Leo, whose Sermon 19, which we read in episode 3, stressed the voice of conscience that we all innately possess. ‘Who is so partial or so unskilled a judge of his own conscience,’ St Leo wrote, ‘as not to know what ought to be removed and what ought to be developed? Surely no one is so devoid of reason as not to understand the character of his mode of life or not to know the secrets of his heart.’ Even Herod in the story could not claim that he didn’t know in his heart that the Baptist’s words were true. That is why he was captivated by him, why he feared him, and why he hated him.
Captivation, fear, and hatred. See with what artistry the Evangelist tells his tale, to create, in Herod, a character expressing all three feelings toward the Baptist. For St John is the voice crying out, ‘Prepare in the wilderness the way of the Lord!’, the voice of conscience within us. And when faced with our own conscience, is it not the case that we have that same threefold response? Captivated, we can’t ignore conscience entirely; afraid, we can’t outright reject it either; and, determined to pursue the desires of our own hearts, we hate it too, and would do anything to shut it up.
However, as is often the case, the final word lies not with the Bible but with holy tradition. In this case, tradition has embellished the ending of the story in such a way as to suggest that, however much we might wish to, we can never silence conscience entirely.
When the executioner brings St John’s severed head into the assembly, Herod’s worst fears are realised. Infused by otherworldly grace, the lifeless head suddenly revives. Miraculously reanimated, the martyr’s God-bearing tongue speaks a terrible refrain: ‘It is not lawful,’ Herod hears once more, ‘for you to have your brother’s wife!’ In the words of a Byzantine hymn chanted at vespers of the feast: ‘Shedding innocent blood, Herod wished to conceal his iniquitous sin; but he could in nowise stop the voice which calleth all to repentance.’
A typically hopeful note amidst all the blood and shame: the voice of conscience does not condemn; rather, it invites you to turn back, to repent, and to receive forgiveness and illumination.
That is just a sliver of the disturbing and wonderful afterlife of St John the Baptist, an afterlife full of deep and mystic meaning. He descends into Hades in advance of the Saviour’s own descent, preaching the Gospel to its shadowy inhabitants, preparing the way down there as he’d prepared the way up here. His head is recovered, then buried, then discovered, then vanishes, then is re-discovered, and is now found, in whole and in pieces, in reliquaries across the Christian and indeed Muslim worlds. He reveals himself wearing angel’s wings carrying his own head on a platter. He stands in heaven at the left hand of Christ enthroned, as his namesake St John the Theologian stands on earth at the left hand of Christ crucified. He is everywhere, and yet also nowhere, insofar as wherever he is, he directs attention away from himself and toward his Lord, always decreasing so that Christ may increase.
Each one of those details carries a meaning for the spiritual life—as shall no doubt be revealed over the course of Life Sentences.
I love Salome and same as you I felt her deranged obsession with John was something inoculated by her mother. A young girl desired by old men, mentally frail who needs to feel loved and the Holy John in a way becomes her father in death.