He was in the world,

and the world was made by him,

and the world knew him not.

John 1:10

Obscene, brilliant, blasphemous, revolutionary, intolerable, audacious, immoral: Nils Runeberg (1).

March 12, 1922: A ruptured aneurysm killed the one who, in the wake of Nestorius and Luther, shocked and transformed Christendom. Through Runeberg’s mind, an exercise of meditation and analysis becomes a rhetorical and theoretical apparatus capable of re-framing an entire world.

Today we celebrate the Genius, the Work, the Life and the Man originator of the ultimate Schism.

Runeberg was born in 1883 in Västra Sallerup, a small Swedish town not far from Lund. His parents, salmon merchants, were members of the National Evangelical Union and contributed to young Nils’ religious upbringing.

He spent his childhood in a bourgeois and deeply religious environment, where, however, there was no lack of opportunity to range into other worlds. The library at the Runeberg’s home contained books of all sorts, and Nils, from an early age, proved to be an avid reader – an interest that his parents did not fail to nurture.

At only sixteen, Nils has read the entire bibliography of Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, authors he will not stop consulting for the length of his short life.

At nineteen, he moved to Lund to attend the local university’s Faculty of Philosophy. Runeberg was a promising and precocious student. He had a predilection for classical German philosophy, but – accomplice to the environment in which he was educated – he soon developed a deep interest in the philosophy of religions, which he cultivated assiduously in his spare time.

Runeberg did not just read books: from the time he was twelve years old, he methodically analysed every text that passed under his nose and transcribed his reflections on notebooks (most of them are in the Vatican Library, the remnants – those not about theology – are in the Lund University Library, but special permissions are needed to consult them).

By his early twenties, he had about thirty notebooks at his disposal, which he drew on to write his first work: Kristus och Judas (Christ and Judas). Published in 1904, when Runeberg was only twenty-one, it was immediately panned by theologians of all denominations.

The criticism directed at him is mostly hollow, lacking theoretical grounding and the power to refute. Nevertheless, they questioned the young author, who had lost confidence in his analytical and logical abilities.

Right when Runeberg was on the verge of abandoning his studies to follow in his parents’ footsteps and be initiated into the trade of salmon, he was tracked down by Pavel Aleksandrovič Florenskij (2) and, a few years later, by Paul Johannes Tillich (3), his peers. The two were enraptured by Runeberg’s work: Florenskij called it “daring and revolutionary,” and Tillich thought it was the “prelude to a revolution comparable to the one carried out by Newton.” This began a copious correspondence that contributed to the evolution of Runeberg’s Theory and the writing of his masterpiece – Den hemlige Frälsaren (The Secret Saviour) – published in 1909 by Bonnier’s publishing company.

From here began Runeberg’s ordeal.

The most flattering comment that the critics affixed to him was ‘heretic.’ Intellectuals from all over the world derided and denigrated him. In many states, the book was banned from distribution and, dulcis in fundo, he was excommunicated from the Evangelical Church.

This terrible combination leads Runeberg to withdraw completely from public life. Suddenly, he had become a pest, and as such, he confined himself to a quarantine that lasted thirteen years. As World War I inflamed Europe, Runeberg was corroded by loneliness and hysteria.

He reappeared only in 1922, in Malmö, where, drunk with insomnia and dizzying dialectic, he was seen wandering the streets. Witnesses reported that he was begging at the top of his voice that he be granted the grace to join his Redeemer in Hell, and, just like that, death came to his rescue.

Humanity succeeded where war failed: it killed Runeberg.

Runeberg’s theoretical apparatus resembles one of Immanuel Kant’s Critiques and is known by us today as the Three Versions of Judas.

Although he rejected the first two formulations, it is necessary to start from these to fully understand Runeberg’s Theory and the development that led to reinterpreting Christian texts and re-founding the Doctrine.

In his first work, Kristus och Judas, Runeberg states, “not one, but all of the things attributed by tradition to Judas Iscariot are false.”

In the First Version, Judas embodies the rebellious and revolutionary spirit that aspires to enlighten and tear reality apart. According to Runeberg, Judas – of all the apostles, the closest to Jesus – fully understood the latter’s divine nature and the scope this revelation would have on all humankind. Then, Judas denounced him to force him to reveal his divinity and thus, spark a rebellion against the tyranny of Rome.

The intense correspondence with Florenskij and Tillich led him to reconsider his theory, reformulated in the essay of 1906: Den Första av Asketikerna (The First of the Ascetics).

Runeberg argues that the crime committed by Judas did not stem from greed but from infinite asceticism.

The thesis, according to which Judas premeditated his sins, is supported by two arguments. First, Judas did not consider himself worthy or good enough to receive grace and access the happiness that Heaven grants by God’s will. Second, he believed that Paradise was a place too sacred to be usurped by any human who, by inherent nature, is prone to evil and cannot fully know good, since it would mean having knowledge of Him, the Unknowable.

Judas, therefore, gave up his honour, morality, and peace to complete the Divine plan: God’s happiness was sufficient for him.

Finally, the Third Version of Judas, his masterpiece, the breakthrough.

To redeem humanity, God became man, but completely a man, an infamous traitor, the Sinner: Judas.

His final theory is based on an inner contradiction contained in the Sacred Scriptures: a human cannot be incapable of sin since

human : sin = God : virtue

Impeccabilitas and humanites are neither compatible nor reconcilable.

He lowered Himself to become a human to save humanity, to open the Kingdom of Heaven to them. To do so, it was necessary to kill Christ. God hung himself on a tree after condemning Jesus, after saving us. God is the first of all martyrs.

The Runeberg Theory or the Three Versions of Judas was given justice forty-six years after the death of its maker, due to the uprisings of ’68.

Ultimately, Nils Runeberg’s discovery changed the foundation of an entire doctrine, but he remains misunderstood in his time, a martyr as Judas, as Him.

If he had been born later, in liberated Europe, Runeberg would have been celebrated for his genius and would have been sanctified. Instead, God afforded Runeberg the twentieth century and the university town of Lund.

Notes

(1) The main character of Borges’ Three Versions of Judas, part of Ficciones (1944), a collection of his short stories.

(2) Russian-Georgian Orthodox theologian, priest, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, electrical engineer, inventor, polymath and neo-martyr who lived between 1882 and 1937.

(3) German-American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist and Lutheran theologian who lived between 1886 and 1965.