Den hemlige Frälsaren

The heresy is not that Judas is interesting. The heresy is that a pious man, reasoning from the Incarnation, cannot stop.

First book: Judas is the necessary counterpart — the Word lowered itself to flesh, so a man must lower himself to infamy, or the sacrifice is asymmetrical. The bishop of Lund points at Luke. Runeberg revises. Second version: Judas is the greater ascetic. Other men mortify the body; he mortified the spirit, and gave away honour, the good, and the Kingdom. Third book, the masterpiece: if God became man, he became capable of sin, and to be fully man he became the worst of men. Judas is the secret saviour. Den hemlige Frälsaren is, Borges says, a perversion or exacerbation of Kristus och Judas. The conclusion was there from the epigraph.

This catalogue already has a scripture that kills its god by being believed (the Septateuch) and a lost Aristotle that kills its readers by being read (the second Poetics). Runeberg’s book kills its author by being thought through. He is not a blasphemer having a joke. He is a member of the Evangelical Union who followed a sentence to the place it went.

Menard wanted to arrive at the Quixote. Runeberg wanted to arrive at the Gospels. Both men got what they asked for, and neither was forgiven for it.

On the readability rating. The three doctrines are given; the dialectic, Borges says, is withheld. We have the heresies. We do not have the pages.