COME ON, HUMANS, ONE MORE EFFORT!therein. He is not deposed: He has lost his power but not his authority. He has just
committed an act of faith, definitely not the first such act in his existence—Adam was
also left to his freedom—but a far more decisive act of faith in the exit from the religious.
The attribution to Adam of original sin was still a way of admitting that men, who are
sinners by nature, will not pull through on their own, and that if they want salvation,
they will have to wait for the Messiah who will deliver them. Basically, they did not
deserve their freedom. But now the issue of merit has vanished, and it is this above all that
is meant by the dispatch of the Messiah, and his death. He came, nothing has changed, so
it’s up to you from here on out. The God who abandons his Son to his ignominious death
is under no illusions. In other words, he has no belief. He had to take things this far for
the death of his Son to be the sign of his act of faith. God himself had to exit from the
religious for his act of faith to be credible. The death of the Son attests to this. Through
this death, God shows human beings that he leaves the use that they will make of their
freedom up to them. He henceforth relies on them to disentangle the political from the
religious, while He withdraws.
God exits from the religious when Christ dies, and men, at the same moment, enter
the society of the spectacle. Let us remember Isaac’s sacrifice, of which that of Christ at
Golgotha was, mutatis mutandis, the New Testament repetition. I said earlier that the Old
Testament had to take extraordinary measures to show men that fathers are subject to the
law of the signifier, and do not decree it. Indeed, to force a father to sacrifice his son with
the sole purpose of reminding him that fathers do not make the law is a bit excessive.
Abraham obeys, and God, in his goodness, dispatches an angel who restrains his arm.
The intervention is quite spectacular, and more than one Baroque painter made use of it.
But Baroque painters are Christians and have received from the doctrine of incarnation
the right to make images, even, since the Council of Trent, the injunction to put the full
might of images at the service of the Church’s propaganda. What their painting erases is
the fact that there were no onlookers at Isaac’s sacrifice, for God insisted that it be carried
out in a remote and barren place. The contrast comes across: there are people at Golgotha,
plenty of people. The mise-en-sce`ne is highly successful: a long preamble with fourteen
stations, each one with its moment of emotion; the simultaneous arrival of actors and
spectators at the top of a natural hillock (much better than a raised podium); sound and
fury, an incredible hubbub, the din of hammers, Roman soldiers all over the place; a man
who is still young and quite handsome, wearing no more than a loin cloth; two thieves
crucified to lend symmetry to the scene; a crown of thorns, a sponge soaked in vinegar, a
spear wound, what a spectacle! And that cross! As Oliviero Toscani (the former Benetton
photographer and art director), who knows about such things, says, a logo that holds up
for twenty centuries has what it takes to make Madison Avenue jealous. Especially when
the society of the spectacle has at its disposal today’s technological means, when it has
absorbed the lay civil society that issued from the French Revolution, when it has com-
pletely invaded the political stage, when it takes on the anthropological and sociological
PAGE 669669.................16224$ CH33 10-13-06 12:37:38 PS