radical and without fear. This is His greatness, His eternal freshness
and youth, the secret of the turning sooner or later of every great
heart toward His Gospel.
He became incarnate to recreate men sunk in error and evil; He found
error and evil in the world; how could He fail to overturn the maxims of
the world? Read over again the words of the Sermon on the Mount. At
every step it proclaims the desire of Jesus that what is low shall be
recognized as lofty; that the last shall be first; that the overlooked
shall be the preferred; that the scorned shall be reverenced, and
finally, that the old truth shall be considered as error, and ordinary
life as death and corruption. He has said to the past, benumbed in its
death agony, to Nature, too easily followed, to universal and common
opinion of mankind, the most decisive “NO” in the history of the world.
In this He is faithful to the spirit of His race which in its very
downfall always found reasons for greater hope. The most enslaved people
dreamed of dominating other peoples with the help of the Son of David.
The most despised race felt that glory was promised them, the people
most punished by God believed itself the most loved; the most sinful was
certain that it alone was to be saved. This absurd reaction of the
Hebrew conscience became in Christ a revision of values, became, because
of His superhuman origin, a divine renovation of all the principles
followed and respected by humanity.
Christ’s first discovery is like that of Buddha, “Men are unhappy, all
men—even those who seem happy.” Siddharta to put an end to pain
counseled the suppression of life itself. Jesus had another hope, more
sublime in that it appears absurd. He taught that men are unhappy
because they have not found true life. Let them become the opposite of
what they are, let them do the contrary of what they do, and the
festival of happiness on earth will begin.
Until now they have followed Nature, they have let themselves be guided
by their instincts, they have accepted and that only superficially a
provisional and insufficient law, they have worshiped lying gods, they
have thought they could find happiness in wine, in flesh, in gold, in
authority, in cruelty, in art, in learning; and the only result has been
that their suffering has become more intense. The explanation is that
they have lost the path, that they must turn straight around, renounce
what seemed good, pick up what was thrown away, worship what was burned,
and burn what was worshiped, conquer the animal instincts instead of
satisfying them, struggle with their nature instead of justifying it,
make a new law and live by it, faithfully, in the spirit. If until now
they have not obtained what they looked for, the only possible cure is
to turn their present life upside down, that is, to transform their
souls.
Our permanent unhappiness is a proof that the experiment of the old
world has failed, that Nature is hostile, that the past is wrong, that
to live like animals according to the elementary instinct of animals,
only slightly furbished up and varnished with humanity, results in
wretchedness and despair.
Those who have laughed at or wept over the infinite wretchedness of man
have seen clearly. The pessimists are right. Those who denounce our
boasting, those who scorn our strengthlessness, those who despise our
ignominy, how can they be refuted?
Whoever is not born to wriggle contentedly in the worm heap, eating his
particle of earth, he who has not only a stomach and two hands, but a
soul and a heart; he whose soul is of finer temper because it has been
so beaten upon, is bound to feel a horror of mankind. For hard, arid
natures this horror changes into repugnance and hate; for others richer
and more generous it turns to pity and love.
When we read Leopardi and consider how he lost (perhaps because of the
imperfect Christians surrounding him) his youthful love of Christ and,
eating his heart out in reasoning despair, ended with the despairing
lines, “Tiresome and bitter is life, never aught but that”; who of us
will have the insight to reply, “Be quiet, unfortunate man! If you taste
nothing but bitterness, it comes from the wormwood you are eating; if
you find life tiresome the fault is yours; you yourself have used the
infernal stone of barren reasoning to cauterize those feelings which
would have made your life cheerful or at least endurable”?
No, Leopardi was not mistaken, for when you see men as they are and have
no hope of saving them, or changing them, and you cannot live like them
because you are too different from them, and cannot succeed in loving
them because you believe them condemned to eternal unhappiness and
wickedness, when you feel that the brutes will always be brutes and the
cowards always cowards and the foul always more sunk in their foulness,
what else can you do but counsel your heart to silence, and hope for
death? There is but one question: are men unchangeable, not to be
transformed, not capable of becoming better? Or, on the other hand, can
man rise above himself and make himself holy? The answer is of terrible
importance. All our destiny is in that question. Among superior men many
have not been fully conscious of this dilemma. Many have believed and
still believe that the form of life can be changed, but not the essence;
and that to man everything will be given except to change the nature of
his spirit; that man can become yet more master of the world, richer and
more learned, but he cannot change his moral structure. His feelings,
his primary instincts will always remain as they were in the wild
occupants of the caves, in the constructors of the lake cities, in the
first barbarians and in the peoples of the most ancient kingdoms.
Others feel an equal horror of man as he has been and as he is, but
before they sink into the despair of moral nihilism they look at man as
he could be. They have a firm faith in his perfectibility of soul and
find happiness in the divine but terrible task of preparing the
happiness of their brothers.
For men who are truly men there is no other choice: either the blackest
anguish or the boldest faith; either death or salvation. The past is
horrible, the present is repellent; let us give all our life, let us
offer all our power of loving and understanding in order that to-morrow
may be better, that the future may be happy. If up to now we have erred,
and the irrefutable proof is the black past from which we have come, let
us work for the birth of a new man and a new life. There are but two
possibilities: either happiness will never be given to men or, and this
Jesus believed firmly, if happiness could be our ordinary and eternal
possession there is no other price for attaining it but to change our
course, transform our souls, create new values, deny the old, answer the
“No” of holiness to the false “Yes” of the world. If Christ _was_
mistaken, nothing remains but absolute and universal negation, resolute
faith in nothing. Either complete and rigorous atheism, not the maimed
hypocritical atheism of the cowardly sects of to-day; or active faith in
Christ who saves and resurrects us by His love.
YE HAVE HEARD
The first prophets, the earliest legislators, the leaders of young
nations, the Kings, founders of cities and institutors of justice, the
wise masters, the saints, began the domination of the beast. With spoken
and sculptured word they tamed wolfish men, domesticated the men of the
woods, held barbarians in restraint, taught those bearded children,
softened the violent, the vengeful, the inhuman. With the gentleness of
the word or the terror of punishment (Orpheus or Draco), by promises or
by threats, in the name of the gods of high heavens or the gods under
the earth, they trimmed the nails, which immediately grew long again;
put muzzles over the sharp-fanged mouths; protected the defenseless, the
victims, pilgrims, women. The old law that is found with only a few
variations in the Manava Dharmasastra, in the Pentateuch, in the Ta-Hio,
in the Avesta, in the traditions of Solon and of Numa, in the
sententious maxims of Hesiod and the Seven Wise Men, is the first
attempt, rough, imperfect and inadequate, to mold animality into a
sketch, a beginning, a simulacrum of humanity.
This law reduced itself to a few elementary rules; not to steal, not to
kill, not to perjure, not to fornicate, not to tyrannize over the weak,
not to mistreat strangers and slaves any more than was necessary. These
are the social virtues, strictly necessary for a common life, useful to
all. The legislator contented himself with naming the most ordinary
sins, asked for a minimum of inhibition. His ideal rarely surpassed a
sort of approximate justice. But the law took for granted the
predominance of evil, the sovereignty of instinct, earlier than the law
and still existing. Every precept implies its infraction, every rule the
practice of the opposite. For this reason the old law, the law of the
first peoples, is only an insufficient channeling of the brute force
eternal and triumphant. It is a collection of compromises and
half-measures between custom and justice, between nature and reason,
between the rebellious beast and the divine model.
Men of ancient time, carnal, physical, hearty, lusty, muscular,
sanguine, sturdy, solid, hairy men with ruddy faces, eaters of raw meat,
ravishers, cattle-stealers, mutilators of their enemies, fit to be
called, like Hector the Trojan, “killers of men,” strong, zestful
warriors who, having dragged by the feet their slaughtered antagonists,
refreshed themselves with fat haunches of oxen and of mutton, emptying
enormous cups of wine; these men ill-tamed, ill-subdued to the law such
as we see them in the Mahabharata, and in the Iliad, in the poem of
Izdubar, and in the book of the wars of Jehovah, such men without the
fear of punishment and of God would have been still more unrestrained
and ferocious. In times when a head was asked for an eye, an arm for a
finger, and a hundred lives for a life, a law of retaliation which asked
only an eye for an eye and a life for a life was a notable victory of
generosity, appalling though it seems after the teaching of Jesus.
But the law was more often disobeyed than observed; the strong endured
it against their will, the powerful who ought to have protected it,
evaded it; the bad violated it openly; the weak cheated it. And even if
it had been entirely obeyed by every man every day it would not have
been enough to conquer the evil perpetually boiling up, held down only
for a moment, rendered harder to enact but not impossible, condemned but
not abolished. It was a reduction of innate fierceness, not its total
extirpation. Men, shackled but reluctant, had learned to pretend
obedience, did a little good where every one could see them in order to
be more free to do wrong secretly, exaggerated the observance of
external precepts that they might the better betray the foundation and
spirit of the law.
They had come to this point when Jesus spoke on the Mount. He understood
that the old law was doomed, drowned in the stagnant swamps of
formalism; the endless work of the education of the human race was to
begin over again, the ashes must be brushed away, the flame of original
enthusiasm must be blown into it, it must be carried through to its
original destination which is always metanoia, the changing of the soul.
And for this it was necessary to terminate the old law, the dried and
burnt-out old law.
With Jesus therefore begins the new law: the old is abrogated and
declared insufficient.
He begins at every example with the words—“Ye have heard it said” ...
and at once He substitutes for the old command, which He purifies by
paradox or actually overthrows, the new command, “But I say unto
you....”
With these “buts” a new phase of the human education begins. It is not
the fault of Jesus if we are still groping along in the twilight of very
early dawn.
BUT I SAY UNTO YOU
“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill
... but I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother ...
shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his
brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall
say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” Jesus goes straight to
the extreme. He does not even consider the possibility of striking a
brother, much less of killing him. He does not conceive even the
intention, the wish to kill. A single moment of anger, a single abusive
word, a single offensive phrase, are for him the equivalent of
assassination. Unimaginative, mediocre people cry out, “Exaggeration.”
There can be no grandeur where there is no passion and passion is
exaggeration. Jesus has His own logic and makes no mistake. Murder is
only the final carrying out of a feeling. From anger follow evil words,
from evil words, evil deeds; from blows, murder. It is not enough
therefore to forbid the final act, the material and external act. That
is only the result of an interior process which has made it inevitable.
The right thing to do is to cut at the root of the evil to destroy the
evil plant of hate which bears the poisonous fruit.
Achilles, son of Peleus, that same Achilles who was wrathful because
they took away his concubine, and who begged the Gods to let him become
a cannibal so that he could set his teeth in his dead enemies’ flesh,
Achilles of the silver-footed mother said: “Whether they come from Gods
or from men, ill-omened are quarrels and the anger which drives even a
wise man to wrath, wrath which sweeter than honey in the mouth grows
greater in men’s hearts.” Achilles, after the massacre of his
companions, after the death of his dearest friend, discovers finally
what a thing is wrath, which kindles and burns and not even a river of
blood can quench it. The wrathful hero knows what an evil thing is
wrath, but he is not converted. And he foregoes his wrath against the
king of men only to vent the fury of his vengeance upon the murdered
body of Hector.
Anger is like fire: it can be smothered only at the first spark;
afterwards it is too late. Jesus uttered the profoundest truth when He
decreed the same penalty for the first hot words as for murder. When all
men learn to conquer at the very start their outbreaks of resentment and
to curb their imprecations, quarrels of words or of deeds will flame up
no longer between man and his brother man, and homicide will become only
a black memory of our wild-beast past.
“Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, thou shalt not
commit adultery, but I say unto you that whoever looketh upon a woman to
lust after her hath committed adultery already in his heart.” Even here
Jesus does not stop with the material fact which seems of importance to
gross men. He always soars from the body to the soul, from flesh to
will, from the visible to the invisible. The tree is judged by its
fruit, but the seed is judged by the tree. Evil visible to all is seen
too late. In its maturity it can no longer be prevented. Sin is the
pustule which suddenly appears, but which would not have appeared if the
blood had been purged from its malignant humors in time. When a man and
another man’s wife desire each other, the betrayal is complete, they
have committed adultery whether or not they are guilty in deed. A man
marries not only the body of his wife, but her soul. If her soul is lost
to him he has lost the greater part. To lose also the lesser part may be
unendurably painful, but it is not vital. A woman overcome and forced
without her consent by a stranger not loved by her, does not commit
adultery. What counts is the intention, the feeling. He who wishes to
maintain himself pure must abstain also from the mere silent passing
look of desire, because the look of desire if not repressed is repeated
and a look passes into a word, into a kiss, and into love which spares
no lover. To think of, to imagine, to desire a betrayal is already a
betrayal. He alone who cuts the first thread can save himself from the
great net of perversity which, starting from a glance, grows until not
even death can break it. And Jesus advises expressly to pluck out the
eye and cast it away if evil comes from the eye, and to cut off the hand
and throw it away if evil comes from the hand,—advice which dismays the
cowardly and even the strong. Yet even the most cowardly, when
threatened by cancer, have their arms or legs cut off, and if a tumor
grows in the bowels, are ready to have their bodies cut open to save
their lives. Men are concerned to save the body, but grudge any
sacrifice necessary to keep in health the soul, without which the body
is only an insensate machine of flesh and blood.
“Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou
shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths:
“But I say unto you, Swear not at all, neither by heaven; for it is
God’s throne:
“Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it
is the city of the great King.
“Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one
hair white or black.
“But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is
more than these cometh of evil.”
He who swears to the truth is afraid, he who swears to the false is a
traitor. The first believes that the power invoked could punish him, the
other is an impostor who profits by the faith of others the more readily
to deceive them. In both cases swearing is wrong. For us impotent men to
call on a superior power to bear witness or to be a judge in our
miserable quarrels of opposed interest, to swear by our heads or by our
sons’ heads when we cannot change the appearance of the smallest part of
our body, is an absurd challenge, a blasphemy. He who always speaks the
truth not through dread of penalties, but through natural desire of his
soul, needs no oaths. Oaths can almost always be called in question, and
never serve to give perfect security even to those who seem to be
satisfied with them. In the history of the world there are more stories
of broken oaths than of oaths kept, and he who uses most words to swear
is precisely the man who is already thinking of breaking his oath.
“Ye have heard it said, Honor thy father and thy mother, but I say unto
you, he that loveth his father and mother more than me is not worthy of
me.” And also, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and
mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his
own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Here also the old precept
which ties the new order to the old order with the tether of reverence
is brusquely reversed.
Jesus does not condemn filial love, but He puts it in its right place,
which is not first of all, as the people of antiquity thought. For Him
the greatest love, the purest is paternal love. The father loves in the
son the future, what is new; the son loves in the father, the past, the
old. But Jesus comes to change the past, to destroy the old. Homage paid
to parents, shutting oneself up in tradition and in the family, is a
barrier to the renovation of the world. Love of all men is a greater
thing than love for those who gave us life. Salvation for all men is
infinitely preferable to the service of the few who make up a family. To
have the greater, one must needs abandon the less. It would be more
convenient to love only those of our family and to make this love (often
forced and simulated) an excuse for not being friendly to any one else.
But he who is devoting his life to something which transcends him has a
great undertaking which takes all his strength and every moment of his
every hour until the last. He who wishes to serve the universe with a
broad spirit must give up, and if that is not enough, deny the common
affections. He who wishes to be Father in the divine sense of the word,
even without physical paternity, cannot be merely a son. “Let the dead
bury their dead.” In the old law, and more than ever in the learned
traditions, there were hundreds of precepts for the purification of the
body, minute, tiresome, complicated precepts without any true earthly or
heavenly foundation. The Pharisees made the best part of religion
consist in the observance of these traditions because it is much less
trouble to wash a cup than your own soul. For a dead thing like a cup a
little water and a towel are enough; for the soul there must be tears of
love and the fire of desire. “Not that which goeth into the mouth
defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a
man. Do ye not understand that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth
into the belly and is cast out into the draught? But those things which
proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the
man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries,
fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things
which defile a man; but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.”
The bath with water from the well or from the fountain, the bodily and
ritual bath, does not take the place of the essential inner
purification, and it is better to eat with hands soiled with sweat than
to repel a hungry brother with hands washed in three waters. Filth
issues from the body, disappears into the vaults and enriches orchards
and fields. But there are many finely dressed gentlemen so full to the
throat with another sort of filth that the stench of it comes out with
the words from their mouths, vainly washed and rinsed. And this filth
does not disappear into underground vaults, but soils every one’s life,
poisons the air, befouls even the innocent. From these excremental men
we should stand far away, even if they are washed twelve times a day;
the soaping of the skin is not enough if the heart sends up noisome
thoughts. The sewer-cleaner, if he thinks no evil, is certainly cleaner
than the rich man who, while splashing in the perfumed water of his
marble bath tub, is meditating some new fornication or fraud.
NONRESISTANCE
But Jesus had not yet arrived at the most stupefying of His
revolutionary teachings. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye
for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist
not evil: But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him
the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away
thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee
to go a mile, go with him twain.”
There could be no more definite repudiation of the old law of
retaliation. The greater part of those who call themselves Christians
not only have never observed this new Commandment, but have never been
willing to pretend to approve of it. For an infinite number of believers
this principle of not resisting evil has been the unendurable and
inacceptable scandal of Christianity.
There are three answers which men can make to violence: revenge, flight,
turning the other cheek. The first is the barbarous principle of
retaliation, now smoothed over and emasculated in the legal codes, but
nevertheless prevailing in usage: evil is returned for evil, either in
one’s own person or by the means of intermediaries, representatives of
our tribal lack of civilization, called judges or executioners. To the
evil committed by the first offender are added the evils committed by
the officers of justice. Often the punishment turns on the punisher and
the terrible chain of violence from one revenge to another stretches out
interminably. Wrong is two-edged; it fails even if inflicted with the
desire of doing good, in nations, or families or individuals. A first
crime brings after it a train of expiations and punishments which are
distributed with sinister impartiality between offenders and offended.
The law of retaliation can give a bestial relief to him who is first
struck, but instead of lessening evil it multiplies it.
Flight is no better than retaliation. He who hides himself redoubles his
enemies’ courage. Fear of retaliation can on rare occasions hold back
the violent hand, but the man who takes flight invites pursuit. He who
hides invites his adversary to make an end of him. His weakness becomes
the accomplice of the ferocity of others. Here also evil begets evil.