ABSTRACT
For here we have the unique instance of the sovereign victim. As Thomas Aquinas put it: ‘the most efficacious argument for His Divinity has been this: without the support of the secular power he has changed the whole world for the better.’1 As unique sovereign victim, perhaps, the God-Man was alone able to inaugurate forgiveness; for here was not a single instantiation of human nature, victimized like all humans by other humans, but rather a human victim suffering the maximum possible victimage, by virtue of its personification by the divine Logos, all-wise and all-innocent and therefore able to let the human nature plumb the full depths and implications of suffering. In this way a single suffering became also a sovereign suffering, capable of representing all suffering and of forgiving on behalf of all victims. One can note here that it is also a uniquely personal sovereignty, whereas human sovereignty – which only exists in modern political theory – is necessarily an impersonal cipher to which all our freedoms are initially sacrificed.
