The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist

It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation could stand as a summary of Lagerkvist’s work. Lagerkvist, a lapsed Christian who won the 1951 Nobel Prize for Literature, described himself as a “believer without faith—a religious atheist.” Like his characters, he spent his life grappling with a God who never let him escape.

In Barabbas, Lagerkvist extends the story of the brigand whom Pontius Pilate sets free while Jesus goes to the cross in his place (Matt. 27:15–23), a literal substitutionary atonement. In Lagerkvist’s telling, Barabbas is a terrifying criminal and parricide who witnesses Jesus’s death and eavesdrops nearby when the women discover the empty tomb. Though he doesn’t like the “queer man” on the cross, neither can he escape the power of Jesus and his command to “love one another.” He meets apostles, but they drive him away when they discover who he is. He watches in horror as a Jewish mob stones a devout Christian girl with a cleft lip, and secretly knifes the man who cast the first stone. 

Working in a mine many years later, Barabbas gets chained to Sahak, a simple-minded Christian slave who prays secretly and has scratched Christian insignia over the imperial symbols on his slave token. Barabbas does the same and enchants Sahak with supernaturally embellished tales about Jesus. When the governor of the province charges Sahak with sedition, though, Barabbas denies he was ever a believer. He becomes the governor’s servant but then happens to be with a band of Christians in Rome when they’re rounded up and arrested for burning the city. Like the title character in Shūsaku Endō’s The Samurai, Barabbas dies as a reluctant witness, an accidental martyr, on whom Jesus has an uncanny, inescapable hold. It’s dangerous to meet a god; he’s likely to demand your life.

The Sibyl begins with another witness to the cross, the wandering Jew. As he struggles toward Golgotha, Jesus stops to lean against the man’s house. When the man scolds him and drives him away, Jesus pronounces an unblessing that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Haunted by the curse, the man can no longer take pleasure in his wife, son, or home. He wanders forever, bereft even of the blessing of death.

At a mountain cave above Delphi, he finds an old woman who lives with her mute idiot son. The Jew fills his story with hollow self-justifications: I’m “carefree and heartless,” yes, perhaps even “wicked . . . but not more so than others.” Besides, I didn’t know Jesus was a god, and “is he himself really so loving?” The old woman has had her own divine encounter, but has drawn very different lessons. Years before, Apollo chose her to become the Pythia. When summoned, she dresses as a bride and ascends a tripod that stands over a deep chasm. While she chews hallucinogenic leaves and breathes the vapors that rise from the depths, Apollo strangles and possesses her, while the priests of the temple interpret her shrieks and croaks as the voice of the god. Apollo terrifies her, but also fills her with an ecstasy she finds nowhere else. 

When her mother dies, the sibyl returns home to take care of her father. She meets a one-armed man at a holy spring and falls in love. On the third day, they make love in a river gorge. She descends from heaven to earth, from the temple of the immortals into the natural world of death and sex, and she wants to stay. But Apollo has taken over her soul; she’s as devouring and demanding a lover as the god has been to her. The one-armed man’s love is safe, but she’s not made for safety. When the god summons her back to the temple, he punishes her by raping her in the guise of a black goat. The same day, villagers find the drowned body of the one-armed man in the river: “It was the god’s vengeance on human happiness and on his elect, who had betrayed him and had not been willing to live for him alone.” Expelled from the temple, she escapes a mob, climbs a mountain, and gives birth in a cave surrounded by goats. She slowly realizes she’s borne a son of Apollo, whose unchanging smile reveals the indifference of the gods, who neither pity nor mock human suffering, but merely look on placidly. The god’s son has “come into the world just to show that meaninglessness, too, is divine.”

The wandering Jew wishes he had never met Jesus. The sibyl demurs. “God could not be as I wished him to be. . . . God was not security and repose and rest. He was unrest, conflict, and uncertainty. These things were god.” Gods aren’t bound by human limits or constraints. They bring delight and torment in equal measure. They’re never tame and rarely good. 

Like C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (far and away Lewis’s greatest fictional achievement), Lagerkvist’s parabolic novellas shatter the sentimental religiosity of wrathless gods, sinless men, and crossless Christs. They remind us that God leaves his indelible mark on your soul. Whether you resist or receive him, “your fate will be forever bound up with god, your soul forever filled with god.”