Jesus. If a man gives you a blow and you return another blow, he will
answer with his fists, you in turn with kicks, weapons will be drawn and
one of you may lose your life, often for a trivial reason. If you fly,
your adversary will follow you and emboldened by his first experience
will knock you down. Turning the other cheek means not receiving the
second blow. It means cutting the chain of the inevitable wrongs at the
first link. Your adversary who expected resistance or flight is
humiliated before you and before himself. He was ready for anything but
this. He is thrown into confusion, a confusion which is almost shame. He
has the time to come to himself; your immobility cools his anger, gives
him time to reflect. He cannot accuse you of fear because you are ready
to receive the second blow, and you yourself show him the place to
strike. Every man has an obscure respect for courage in others,
especially if it is moral courage, the rarest and most difficult sort of
bravery. An injured man who feels no resentment and who does not run
away shows more strength of soul, more mastery of himself, more true
heroism than he who in the blindness of rage rushes upon the offender to
render back to him twice the evil received. Quietness, when it is not
stupidity, gentleness, when it is not cowardice, astound common souls as
do all marvelous things. They make the very brute understand that this
man is more than a man. The brute himself when not incited to follow by
a hot answer or by cowardly flight, remains paralyzed, feels almost
afraid of this new, unknown puzzling force, the more so because among
the greatest exciting factors for the man who strikes, is his
anticipated pleasure in the angry blow, in the resistance, in the
ensuing struggle. Man is a fighting animal; but with no resistance
offered, the pleasure disappears; there is no zest left. There is no
longer an adversary, but a superior who says quietly, “Is that not
enough? Here is the other cheek; strike as long as you wish. It is
better that my face should suffer than my soul. You can hurt me as much
as you wish, but you cannot force me to follow you into a mad, brutal
rage. The fact that some one has wronged me cannot force me to act
wrongly.”
Literally to follow this command of Jesus demands a mastery possessed by
few, of the blood, of the nerves, and of all the instincts of the baser
part of our being. It is a bitter and repellent command; but Jesus never
said it would be easy to follow Him. He never said it would be possible
to obey Him without harsh renunciations, without stern and continuous
inner battles; without the denial of the old Adam and the birth of the
new man. And yet the results of non-resistance, even if they are not
always perfect, are certainly superior to those of resistance or flight.
The example of so extraordinary a spiritual mastery, so impossible and
unthinkable for common men, the almost superhuman fascination of conduct
so contrary to usual customs, traditions and passions; this example,
this spectacle of power, this puzzling miracle, unexpected like all
miracles, difficult to understand like all prodigies, this example of a
strong, sane man who looks like other men, and yet who acts almost like
a God, like a being above other beings, above the motives which move
other men—this example if repeated more than once, if it cannot be laid
to supine stupidity, if it is accompanied by proofs of physical courage
when physical courage is necessary to enjoy and not to harm—this example
has an effectiveness which we can imagine, soaked though we are in the
ideas of revenge and reprisals. We imagine it with difficulty; we cannot
prove it because we have had too few of such examples to be able to cite
even partial experiments as proofs of our intuition.
But if this command of Jesus has never been obeyed or too rarely obeyed,
there is no proof that it cannot be followed, still less that it ought
to be rejected. It is repugnant to human nature, but all real moral
conquests are repugnant to our nature. They are salutary amputations of
a part of our soul—for some of us the most living part of the soul—and
it is natural that the threat of mutilation should make us shudder. But
whether it pleases us or not, only by accepting this command of Christ
can we solve the problem of violence. It is the only course which does
not add evil to evil, which does not multiply evil a hundredfold, which
prevents the infection of the wound, which cuts out the malignant growth
when it is only a tiny pustule. To answer blows with blows, evil deeds
with evil deeds, is to meet the attacker on his own ground, to proclaim
oneself as low as he. To answer with flight is to humiliate oneself
before him, and incite him to continue. To answer a furiously angry man
with reasonable words is useless effort. But to answer with a simple
gesture of acceptance, to endure for three days the bore who inflicts
himself on you for an hour, to offer your breast to the man who has
struck you on the shoulder, to give a thousand to the man who has stolen
a hundred from you, these are acts of heroic excellence, supine though
they may appear, so extraordinary that they overcome the brutal bully
with the irresistible majesty of the divine. Only he who has conquered
himself can conquer his enemies. Only the saints can charm wolves to
mildness. Only he who has transformed his own soul can transform the
souls of his brothers, and transform the world into a less grievous
place for all.
AGAINST NATURE
Nonresistance to evil is profoundly repugnant to our nature, but to obey
the teachings of Christ means that our nature will come to feel disgust
for what now pleases us, and find happiness in what now fills us with
horror. His every word takes for granted this total renovation of the
human spirit: He fearlessly contradicts our most ordinary inclinations
and the deepest of our instincts. He praises what every one avoids. He
condemns what all men seek. He not only gives the lie to what men teach
(often very different from what they really think and do), but He
contradicts what they actually think and do every day.
Jesus does not believe in the perfection of the natural soul, of the
original soul. He believes in its future perfection, only to be reached
by a complete overturning of its present nature. His task is the reform
of man; more than that, the making-over of man. With Him begins the new
race; He is the model, the arch-type, the Adam of humanity remodeled and
recast. Socrates tried to reform the mind, Moses the law, others went no
further than altering a ritual, a code, a system, a science; but Jesus
did not aim at changing one part of man but the whole man from top to
bottom, changing the inner man who is the motive-power and origin of all
the facts and the words of the world. Therefore we need not expect Him
to compromise or to wheedle. He will make no concessions to evil and
imperfect nature; He will not find specious reasons to justify it as the
philosophers do. You cannot serve Jesus and Nature. He who stands with
Jesus is against the old animal nature and is working for the higher
nature which must conquer it. Everything else is idle talk, dust and
ashes.
Nothing is more common among men than the thirst for riches. To heap up
money by any means, even the most infamous, has always seemed the
sweetest and most respectable of occupations. But he who wishes to come
with me, said Jesus, must go and sell that which he has and give it to
the poor and he shall have treasures in Heaven. Poverty is the first
requisite for the citizenship of the Kingdom.
All men anxiously take thought for the morrow. They are always afraid
lest the ground give way under their feet, lest there may not be enough
bread to last to the next harvest. They fear that they will not have
enough clothes to cover their bodies and the bodies of their children.
But Jesus teaches us, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow:
sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Every man would like to stand first even among his equals. He wishes to
be superior to those who surround him, to command, to dominate, to seem
greater, richer, handsomer, wiser. The whole history of men is only the
terror of standing second; but Jesus teaches us, “And whosoever of you
will be the chiefest shall be servant of all.” The greatest is the
smallest, the most powerful shall serve the weakest, he who exalts
himself shall be humbled, he who humbles himself shall be exalted.
Vanity is another universal curse of men. It poisons even their good
actions, because nearly always they perform those insignificant good
actions so that they may be seen. They do evil secretly and good openly.
Jesus commands us to do just the opposite. “But when thou doest alms,
let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth;... And when thou
prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray
standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they
may be seen of men.... But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy
closet.... Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad
countenance: for they disguise their faces, that they may appear to
fast.... But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy
face.”
The instinct of self-preservation is the strongest of all those which
dominate us. No infamy, cruelty or cowardice is too much for us to pay
for the safety of this handful of animated dust. But Jesus tells us:
“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose
his life for my sake the same shall save it.” For what we _call_ life is
not true life and he who gives up his soul ruins also the flesh which
houses it.
Every one of us has a hankering to judge his fellows. To sit in judgment
makes us feel that we are above those judged, better, more righteous,
innocent. To accuse others is like saying, “_We_ are not thus.” As a
matter of fact it is always the hunchbacks who first cry out on those
whose shoulders are a little bent. But Jesus says, “Judge not that ye be
not judged, condemn not and ye shall not be condemned, forgive and ye
shall be forgiven.”
Every man boasts of being really manly, that is, a grave, mature, wise,
substantial, worthy person, who understands the nature of things and who
can reason and have an opinion on all subjects. A speech that is too
sincere is said to be childish; a simple person is scornfully called
childish. But when the disciples asked Him who is the greatest in the
Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus answered, “Verily I say unto you, Whosoever
shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise
enter therein.”
The serious-minded man, the devout, the pure, the Pharisee, avoids if
possible the company of sinners, of the fallen, of the defiled, and
receives as equals at his table only the righteous. But Jesus tirelessly
announces that He has come to seek for sinners and not for the
righteous, the bad and not the good, and He feels no shame in sitting
down to dinner in the house of the publican, where a prostitute anoints
his feet. The truly pure man cannot be corrupted by the corrupt, and
does not feel that for fear of soiling his garments he needs leave them
to die in their own vileness.
The avarice of men is so great that every one tries to take as much as
he can from others and to give back as little. Every one seeks to
possess; praises of generosity are only an attempt to cover professional
beggary with a decent mask; but Jesus affirms, “It is better to give
than to receive.”
All of us hate most of the people we know. We hate them because they
have more than we, because they will not give us all we would like to
have, because they do not pay enough attention to us, because they are
different from us; in a word, because they exist. We even go so far as
to hate our friends, even our benefactors. And Jesus commands us to love
men, to love them all, to love even those who hate us.
No one who disobeys this command can call himself a Christian; though he
is on the point of death if he does not love his slayer, he has no right
to call himself a Christian.
Love for ourselves, the origin of our hatred for others includes all
other tendencies and passions. He who conquers self-love, and the hatred
toward others, is already entirely transformed; the rest flows from this
as a natural consequence. Hatred toward oneself and love for enemies is
the beginning and end of Christianity. The greatest victory over the
fierce, blind, brutal man of antiquity is this and nothing else. Men
cannot be born again into the happiness of peace until they love those
who have offended against them. To love your enemies is the only way to
leave not an enemy on earth.
BEFORE LOVE
Those who refuse Christ have many easily understandable reasons for not
accepting Him: they would need to renounce their old personalities and
they cannot see that they would gain much by this renunciation; and they
are afraid of losing the dusty rubbish which seems magnificence to them.
People who deny Christ as an excuse for not following His teachings have
justified themselves of late by another reason, a learned reason: they
claim that He said nothing new. His words can be found in the Orient and
in the Occident centuries earlier. Either He stole them, or plagiarized
unconsciously. If He said nothing new, He is not great; if He is not
great, there is no need to listen to Him. Let the ignorant admire Him,
the stupid obey Him, the foolish respect Him!
However, these experts in the genealogy of ideas do not say whether the
ideals of Jesus, let them be new or old, should be accepted or rejected;
they do not dare to pretend that Christ did nothing of value when He
consecrated by His death a great truth, a forgotten, unused truth. They
do not look carefully to see whether there is a real identity of sense
and of spirit between the ideas of Jesus and those other older ideas, or
whether there is merely a simple assonance and a distant verbal
resemblance. And in the meantime, in order to avoid being misled in that
matter, they reject Christ’s law and that of the philosophers who, they
pretend, were Christ’s teachers, and they continue tranquilly to lead
their filthy lives as if the Gospels had not been addressed to them as
to other men.
After the promulgation of the old Law there was amity between blood kin;
and the citizens of the same city bore with each other and did one
another no harm; but for strangers, if they were not guests, there was
only hatred and extermination. Inside the family a little love; inside
the city an approximate justice; outside the walls and the frontiers
inextinguishable hatred. Centuries later voices were heard which asked a
little love also for the neighbor, for those who were not of the same
household but of the same nation, which asked for a little justice even
for strangers, even for enemies. This would have been a wonderful step
forward; but these voices—they were so few, so weak, so distant—were not
heard, or, if heard, were not heeded.
Four centuries before Christ a wise man of China, M’-Ti, wrote a whole
book, the Kie-Siang-Ngai, to say that men should love each other. He
wrote, “The wise man who wants to improve the world can improve it only
if he knows with certainty the origin of disorders; if he does not know
that, he cannot improve it.... Whence come disorders? They spring up
because men do not love each other. Workmen and children have no filial
feeling for their employers and parents. Children love themselves but do
not love their parents; they cheat their parents for their own purposes.
Younger brothers love themselves but do not love their older brothers;
subjects love themselves but do not love their princes; the father has
no indulgence for the son, the older brother for the younger brother,
the prince for his subjects. The father loves himself and does not love
his son; he wrongs his son to his own advantage ... thus, everywhere
brigands love their own homes and not their neighbors’ homes, and for
this they sack other men’s houses to fill their own. Thieves love their
own bodies and do not love men, wherefore they steal from men for the
good of their own bodies. If thieves considered the bodies of other men
as they do their own, who would rob? The thieves would stay their
hands.... If universal mutual love should come, countries would not
resort to blows, families would not be troubled, thieves would hold
their hands, princes, subjects, fathers and sons would be respectful and
indulgent and the world would be better.”
For M’-Ti, love, or, to translate it more exactly, benevolence composed
of respect and indulgence, is the mortar to hold citizens and the state
more closely united. It is a remedy against the evils of life-in-common,
a social panacea.
“Answer insults with courtesy,” suggests timidly the mysterious Lao-Tse;
but courtesy is prudence or mildness, not love. His contemporary, old
Confucius, according to his disciple Thseng-Tse, taught a doctrine which
consisted in uprightness of heart, and in loving one’s neighbor as
oneself (neighbor and not the distant one, the stranger, the enemy) as
much as ourselves and not more than ourselves! Confucius preached filial
love and general benevolence, necessary to the good ordering of
kingdoms, but he did not dream of condemning hate. In the same Lun-Yu,
where the words of Thseng-Tse are read, we find these other words, taken
from the oldest Confucian text, the Ta-Hio: “Only the just and human man
is capable of justly loving and hating men.”
His contemporary Gautama recommends love for men, for all men, even the
most wretched and despised. And the same love is to be felt for animals,
for the smallest among animals, for all living beings. In Buddhism love
of man for man is only a salutary exercise for the total eradication of
self-love, first and strongest prop of life. Buddha wishes to suppress
suffering; and to suppress suffering he sees no other way than to drown
personal souls and universal souls in Nirvana,—in nothingness. The
Buddhist does not love his brother out of love for his brother, but out
of self-love,—that is, to avoid suffering, to overcome egotism, to
approach absorption in the stream of life. His universal love is cold
and self-seeking, egotistical, a form of indifference, stoical in grief
as in joy.
In Egypt every dead body took with it into the tomb a copy of the book
of the dead, an anticipatory apology of the soul before the tribunal of
Osiris. The dead praises himself: he has been righteous and has given to
the needy, “I have starved no one! I have made no one weep! I have not
killed! I have not commanded treacherous murder! I have defrauded no
one! I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to
the naked, a boat to the traveler halted on his journey, sacrifices to
the gods, funeral banquets to the dead.” This is righteousness and these
are works of mercy (had they really as a matter of fact done all that
they claimed?) but we find no love here, much less love for enemies. If
we wish to know how the Egyptians treated their enemies let us read an
inscription of the great king, Phiops I Miriri: “This army went in
peace; it entered as it pleased into the country of the Hirushaitu. This
army went in peace; it laid waste the country of the Hirushaitu. This
army went in peace; they cut down all their fig trees and their grape
vines. This army went in peace; they set on fire all their houses. This
army went in peace; it massacred their soldiers by myriads. This army
went in peace; it carried away their men, women and children in great
numbers, and for this, more than for any other thing, did his Holiness
rejoice.”
Zarathushtra also leaves a law for the Iranians. This law commands the
faithful of Ahura Mazdâ to be kind to their companions in the faith.
They are to give clothes to the naked and they are not to refuse bread
to the hungry working man. We are still concerned with material charity
towards those who belong to us, who serve us, who are our neighbors.
There is no talk of love.
It has been said that Jesus added nothing to the Mosaic law, and only
repeated the old Commandments. “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for
hand, foot for foot, Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for
stripe.” Thus speaks Moses in Deuteronomy, “And thou shalt consume all
the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shalt
have no pity upon them.” Thus it is written in Deuteronomy: a step
further and we have reached Love, “Also thou shalt not oppress a
stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers
in the land of Egypt.” This is a beginning: do no wrong to strangers in
memory of the time when you also were a stranger; but the stranger who
lives with us is not an enemy, and to refrain from wronging him, does
not mean to do good to him. Exodus commands not to wrong him. Leviticus
is more generous, “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land ye
shalt not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto
you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself....”
Always the foreigner who lives with you and has become your
fellow-citizen, hence like one of your friends. In the same book we
read, “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children
of thy people.” This is another step forward. Do no harm to him who
offends you, provided that he is of your own nation. We have come, if
not to pardon, to generous forgetfulness, although only for neighbors.
“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Neighbor, fellow-citizen, the
man who is your racial brother, who can help you. But your enemy? There
is also an admonition about the treatment of your enemy: “If thou meet
thine enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it
back to him again. If you see the ass of him that hateth thee lying
under his burden, and wouldest forbear to help him, thou shalt surely
help with him.” Oh, great kindness of Jewish antiquity! It would be so
sweet to drive the ass further, so that his master would have more
trouble in finding him: and when you see the ass fallen down under his
pack-saddle, how amusing it would be to smile in your beard and pass on;
but the heart of the old Jew was not hardened to this degree: an ass was
too precious in those times and those conditions: no one could live
without at least one ass in the stable, and every one had an ass. To-day
yours has escaped and to-morrow mine may run away. Do not let us avenge
ourselves on our animals even if the master is a brute. Because if I am
that man’s enemy he is my enemy. Let us set him a good example, an
example by which we hope he will profit; let us lend him a hand to
readjust the pack-saddle of his ass; let us do to others what we hope
others will do to us, and above the crupper and the ears of the ass let
us, as merciful men, lay aside every evil thought.
This is rather too little: the old Jew has already made a tremendous
effort in caring for the animals of his enemy, but the Psalms, to make
up for it, resound at every step with outcries against enemies and with
violent demands to the Lord to persecute and destroy them. “As for the
head of those that compass me about, let the mischief of their own lips
cover them; let burning coals fall upon them ... let them be cast into
the fire; into deep pits, that they rise not up again. Let destruction
come upon him unawares; and let his net that he hath hid catch himself;
into that very destruction let him fall. And my soul shall be joyful in
the Lord!”
In such a world it is natural that Saul should be astounded that he was
not killed by his enemy David, and that Job should boast of not having
exulted in the misfortunes of an enemy. Only in the later proverbs do we
find words which forecast Jesus’ saying, “Say not thou, I will
recompense evil; but wait on the Lord, and he shall save thee.” The
enemy is to be punished, but by hands more powerful than thine. Then the
anonymous moralist of the Old Testament comes finally to charity, “If
thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give
him water to drink.” This is progress: pity does not stop with the ox,
but extends itself also to the owner. But the marvels of love of the
Sermon on the Mount cannot have sprung from these timid maxims hidden
away in a corner of the Scriptures.