which gives true wealth, spiritual wealth. Absolute poverty frees men
for the conquest of the absolute. The Kingdom of Heaven does not promise
poor people that they shall become rich, it promises rich people that
they shall enter into it when they become freely poor.
SELL EVERYTHING
The tragic paradox implied in wealth justifies the advice given by Jesus
to those who wish to follow Him.
They all should give whatever they have beyond their needs to those in
want. But the rich man should give everything. To the young man who
comes up to ask Him what he ought to do to be among His followers, Jesus
answers: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give
to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” Giving away wealth
is not a loss or a sacrifice. Instead of this, Jesus knows and all those
know who understand mankind and wealth that it is a magnificently
profitable transaction, an incommensurable gain. “Sell whatsoever thou
hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven where
neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break
through nor steal; for where your treasure is, there will your heart be
also. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow from
thee, turn not thou away, for it is more blessed to give than to
receive.”
Men must give and give without sparing, light-heartedly and without
calculation. He who gives in order to get something back is not perfect.
He who gives in order to exchange with others, or for other material
things, acquires nothing. The recompense is elsewhere, it is in us.
Things are not to be given away that they may be paid for by other
things, but by purity and contentment alone. “When thou makest a dinner
or a supper call not thy friends nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen
nor thy rich neighbors, lest they also bid thee again, and a recompense
be made thee. But when thou makest a feast call the poor, the maimed,
the lame, the blind; and thou shalt be blest, for they cannot recompense
thee, for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.”
Even before Jesus’ time men had been advised to renounce wealth. Jesus
was not the first to find in poverty one of the steps to perfection. The
great Vaddhamana, the Jain, or triumpher, added to the commandments of
Parswa, founder of the Freed, the doctrine of the renunciation of all
possessions. Buddha, his contemporary, exhorted his disciples to a
similar renunciation. The Cynics stripped themselves of all material
goods to be independent of work and of men, and to be able to consecrate
their freed souls to truth. Crates, the Theban nobleman, disciple of
Diogenes, distributed his wealth to his fellow-citizens and turned
beggar. Plato wished the warriors in his Republic to have no
possessions. Dressed in purple and seated at tables inlaid with rare
stones, the Stoics pronounced eloquent eulogies on poverty. Aristophanes
puts blind Pluto on the stage distributing wealth to rascals alone,
almost as though wealth were a punishment.
But in Jesus the love of poverty is not an ascetic rule, nor a proud
disguise for ostentation. Timon of Athens, who was reduced to poverty
after having fed a crowd of parasites with indiscriminate generosity,
was not a poor man as Christ would have men poor. Timon was poor through
the fault of his vainglory, to feed his own desire to be called
magnanimous and liberal. He gave to everybody, even to those who were
not needy. Crates, who stripped himself of all his property to imitate
Diogenes, was the slave of pride: he wished to do something different
from others, to acquire the name of philosopher and sage. The
professional beggary of the Cynics is a picturesque form of pride. The
poverty of Plato’s warriors is a measure of political prudence. The
first republics conquered and flourished as long as the citizens
contented themselves, as in old Sparta and old Rome, with strict
poverty, and they fell as soon as they valued gold more than sober and
modest living. But men of antiquity did not despise wealth in itself.
They held it dangerous when it accumulated in the hands of the few, they
considered it unjust when it was not spent with judicious liberality.
But Plato, who desires for his citizens a condition half-way between
need and abundance, puts riches among the good things of human life. He
puts it last of all, but he does not forget it. And Aristophanes would
kneel before Pluto if the blind God should acquire his sight again and
give riches to worthy people.
In the Gospel, poverty is not a philosophical ornament nor a mystic
mode. To be poor is not enough to entitle one to citizenship in the
Kingdom. Poverty of the body is a preliminary requisite, like humility
of the spirit. He who is not convinced that his estate is low never
thinks of climbing high; no one can feel a zest for true treasures if he
is not freed from all material property,—from that winding-sheet which
blinds the eyes and binds down the wings.
When he does not suffer from his poverty, when he glories in his poverty
instead of tormenting himself to convert it into wealth, the poor man is
certainly much nearer to moral perfection than the rich man. But the
rich man who has despoiled himself in favor of the poor and has chosen
to live side by side with his new brothers is still nearer perfection
than the man who was born and reared in poverty. That he has been
touched by a grace so rare and prodigious gives him the right to hope
for the greatest blessedness. To renounce what you have never had may be
meritorious, because imagination magnifies absent things; but it is the
sign of supreme perfectibility to renounce everything that you actually
did possess, possessions that were envied by every one.
The poor man who is sober, chaste, simple and contented because he lacks
means and occasions for anything else, is inclined to look for a
recompense in pleasures which do not cost money, and as it were for a
revenge in a spiritual superiority where prosperous people cannot
compete with him. But often his virtues come from his impotence or from
his ignorance; he does not turn from the right course—he cannot afford
to do so—he does not pile up treasure because he possesses only the
strictly necessary; he is not drunken and licentious because
wine-sellers and women of the streets give no credit. His life, often
hard, servile, dark, redeems his faults. And his suffering forces him to
lift his eyes towards Heaven in search of consolation. We do so little
for the poor that we have no right to judge them. As they are, abandoned
by their brothers, kept far from those who could speak to their hearts,
avoided by those who shrink from the proximity of their sweaty bodies,
excluded from those worlds of intelligence and the arts which might make
their poverty more endurable, the poor are, in the universal
wretchedness of mankind, the least impure. If they were more loved, they
would be better men. How can those who have left them alone in their
poverty have the heart to condemn them?
Jesus loved the poor; He loved them for the compassion which He felt for
them; He loved them because He felt them nearer to His soul, more
prepared to understand Him than other men. He loved them because they
constantly gave Him the happiness of service, of giving bread to the
hungry, strength to the weak, hope to the unhappy. Jesus loved the poor
because He saw that if they were justly treated they would be the most
legitimate inhabitants of the Kingdom. He loved the poor because they
rendered the renunciation of the rich easier by the stimulus of charity;
but most of all He loved the poor men who had been rich and who for the
love of the Kingdom had become poor. Their renunciation was the greatest
act of faith in His promise. They had given that which considered
absolutely is nothing, but in the eyes of the world is everything, for
the certainty of sharing in a more perfect life. They had been obliged
to conquer in themselves one of the most profoundly rooted instincts of
man. Jesus, born a poor man among the poor, for the poor, never left his
brothers. He gave to them the fructifying abundance of His divine
property. But in His heart He sought the poor man who had not always
been poor, the rich man ready to strip himself for His love. He sought
him, perhaps He never found him. But He felt this longed-for, unknown
brother man tenderly nearer to his heart than all the docile seekers who
crowded about Him.
THE DEVIL’S DUNG
Note well, you men who are yet to be born! Jesus was never willing to
touch a coin with His hand. Those hands of His which molded the clay of
the earth as a cure for blind eyes, those hands which touched the
contaminated flesh of lepers and of the dead, those hands which clasped
the body of Judas, so much more contaminated than clay, than leprosy,
than putrefaction, those white pure healing hands which nothing could
sully, never suffered themselves to be touched by one of those metal
disks which carry in relief the profiles of the proprietors of the
world. Jesus could mention money in His parables; He could see it in the
hands of others, but touch it—no! To Him who scorned nothing, money was
disgusting. It was repugnant to Him with a repugnance that was like
horror. All His nature was in revolt at the thought of a contact with
those filthy symbols of wealth.
But one day even Jesus was constrained to look at a piece of money. They
asked Him if it was permitted to the true Israelite to pay the tribute,
and He answered at once, “Show me the tribute money.” They showed it to
Him, but He would not take it. It was a Roman coin stamped with the
hypocritical face of Augustus. But He wished to seem not to know whose
face it was. He asked, “Whose is this image and superscription?” They
answered, “Cæsar’s.” Then He threw into the faces of the wily
interrogators the answer which silenced them, “Render therefore unto
Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s; and unto God the things that are
God’s.”
Give back that which is not yours, money does not belong to us. It is
manufactured by the powerful for the needs of power. It is the property
of kings and of the kingdom, of that other kingdom which is not ours.
The king represents force and is the protector of wealth; but we have
nothing to do with violence and reject riches. Our Kingdom has no
potentates and has no rich men; the King of our Heaven does not coin
money. Money is a means for the exchange of earthly goods, but we do not
seek for earthly goods. What little is necessary for us, a little
sunshine, a little air, a little water, a piece of bread, a cloak, will
be given freely to us by God and by God’s friends. Tire yourselves out,
you other people, all your lives to gather together a great pile of
those round minted tokens. We have no use for them. For us they are
definitely superfluous. Therefore we give them back; we give them back
to him who has had them coined, to him who has had his portrait put on
them, so that all should know that they are his.
Jesus never needed to give back any money because He never possessed
any. He gave the order to His disciples not to carry bags for offerings
on their journeys. He made one single exception, and that a fearful one.
The Gospel tells us that one apostle kept the common purse. This
disciple was Judas, and even Judas felt himself forced to give back the
payment for his betrayal before disappearing in death. Judas is the
mysterious victim sacrificed to the curse of money. Money carries with
it, together with the filth of the hands which have clutched and handled
it, the inexorable contagion of crime. Among the unclean things which
men have manufactured to defile the earth and defile themselves, money
is perhaps the most unclean. These counters of coined metal which pass
and repass every day among hands still soiled with sweat or blood, worn
by the rapacious fingers of thieves, of merchants, of misers; this round
and viscid sputum of the Mint, desired by all, sought for, stolen,
envied, loved more than love and often more than life; these ugly pieces
of stamped matter, which the assassin gives to the cut-throat, the
usurer to the hungry, the enemy to the traitor, the swindler to his
partner, the simonist to the barterer in religious offices, the lustful
to the woman bought and sold, these foul vehicles of evil which persuade
the son to kill his father, the wife to betray her husband, the brother
to defraud his brother, the wicked poor man to stab the wicked rich man,
the servant to cheat his master, the highwayman to despoil the traveler;
this money, these material emblems of matter, are the most terrifying
objects manufactured by man. Money which has been the death of so many
bodies is every day the death of thousands of souls. More contagious
than the rags of a man with the pest, than the pus of an ulcer, than the
filth of a sewer, it enters into every house, shines on the counters of
the money-changers, settles down in money-chests, profanes the pillow of
sleep, hides itself in the fetid darkness of squalid back-rooms, sullies
the innocent hands of children, tempts virgins, pays the hangman for his
work, goes about on the face of the earth to stir up hatred, to set
cupidity on fire, to hasten corruption and death.
Bread, already holy on the family board, becomes on the table of the
Church the everlasting body of Christ. Money too is the visible sign of
a transubstantiation. It is the infamous Host of the Demon. He who loves
money and receives it with joy is in visible communion with the Demon.
He who touches money with pleasure touches without knowing it the filth
of the Demon. The pure cannot touch it, the holy man cannot endure it.
They know with unshakable certainty its ugly essence, and they have for
money the same horror that the rich man has for poverty.
THE KINGS OF THE NATIONS
“Whose is this image?” asks Jesus when they put the Roman money before
his eyes. He knows that face, He knows, as they all do, that Octavius by
a sequence of extraordinary good luck became the monarch of the world
with the adulatory surname of Augustus. He knows that falsely youthful
profile, that head of clustering curls, the great nose that juts forward
as if to hide the cruelty of the small mouth, the lips rigorously
closed. It is a head, like those of all kings, cut off from the body,
cut off below the neck; sinister image of a voluntary and eternal
decapitation. Cæsar is the king of the past, the head of the armies, the
coiner of silver and gold, fallible administrator of insufficient
justice. Jesus is the King of the future, the liberator of servants, the
abdicator of wealth, the master of love. There is nothing in common
between them. Jesus has come to overthrow the domination of Cæsar, to
undo the Roman Empire and every earthly empire, but not to put Himself
in Cæsar’s place. If men will listen to Him there will never be any
Cæsar again. Jesus is not the heir who conspires against the sovereign
to take his place. He has come peaceably to remove all rulers. Cæsar is
the strongest and most famous of His rivals, but also the most remote,
because his force lies in the slothfulness of men, in the weakness of
peoples. But One has come who will awaken the sleeping, open the eyes of
the blind, give back strength to the weak. When everything is fulfilled
and the Kingdom is founded—a Kingdom which needs no soldiers nor judges
nor slaves nor money, but only renewed and living souls—Cæsar’s empire
will vanish like a pile of ashes under the victorious breath of the
wind.
As long as Cæsar is there, we can give back to him what is his. For the
new man, money is nothing. We give back to Cæsar, vowed to eternal
nothingness, that silver nothingness which is none of ours. Jesus is
always looking forward with passionate longing to the arrival of the
second earthly Paradise and He takes no heed of governors because the
new land which He announces will not need governors. A people of holy
men who love each other would have no use for Kings, law-courts and
armies. On one occasion only does He speak of kings, and then only to
overturn the common established idea. “The Kings of the Gentiles,” He
says to His disciples, “exercise lordship over them, and they that
exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be
so, but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger, and he
that is chief, as he that doth serve.” It is the theory of perfect
equality in human relationship. The great is small, the master is
servant, the King is slave. Since, according to Christ’s teachings, he
who governs must become like him who serves, the opposite is true, and
he who serves has the same rights and honors as he who governs. Among
the righteous, there may be some more ardent than others; there may be
saints who were sinners up to the last day; there may be other innocent
ones who were citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven from their birth.
Different planes of spiritual greatness may exist as variations of the
perfection common to all; but to the end of time every category of
superior and inferior, of master and subordinate, shall be abolished.
Authority presupposes, even if it is badly wielded, a flock to lead, a
minority to punish, bestiality to shackle; but when all men are holy,
there will be no more need for commands and obedience, for laws and
punishments. The Kingdom of Heaven can dispense with the commands of
Force.
In the Kingdom of Heaven men will not hate each other and will no longer
desire riches; every reason and need for government will disappear
immediately after these two great changes. The name of the path which
conducts to perfect liberty is not Destruction but Holiness. And it is
not found in the sophistries of Godwin, or of Stirner, or Proudhon, or
of Kropotkin, but only in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
SWORD AND FIRE
Every time that the sycophants of the powerful have desired to sanctify
the ambition of the ambitious, the violence of the violent, the
fierceness of the fierce, the pugnacity of the pugnacious, the conquests
of the conquerors, every time that the paid sophists or frenzied orators
have tried to reconcile pagan ferocity with Christian gentleness, to use
the Cross as the hilt of the sword, to justify blood spilt through
hatred by the blood which flowed on Calvary to teach love; every time,
in short, that people wish to use the doctrine of peace to legitimatize
war, and make Christ surety for Genghis Khan or for Bonaparte or even
through refinement of infamy, the outrider of Mahomet, you will see them
quote, with the inexorable punctuality of all commonplaces, the
celebrated gospel text, which everybody knows by heart and very few have
ever understood.
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send
peace, but a sword.” Some more learned add, “I am come to send fire on
the earth.” Others rush forward to present the decisive verse, “The
kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”
What angel of eloquence, what supernatural enlightener, can ever reveal
to these hardened quoters the true meaning of the words which they
repeat with such light frivolity? They do not look at the words which
come before and after; they pay no attention to the occasion on which
they were spoken. They do not imagine for a moment that they can have
another meaning from the common one.
When Jesus says that He has come to bring a sword,—or as it is written
in the parallel passage of Luke, “Discord,” He is speaking to His
Disciples who are on the point of departing to announce the coming of
the Kingdom. And immediately after having spoken of the sword, He
explains with familiar examples what He meant to say: “For I am come to
set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her
mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s
foes shall be they of his own household. For from henceforth there shall
be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three.”
The sword therefore does not mean war; it is a figure of speech which
dignifies division. The sword is what divides, cuts in two, disunites;
and the preaching of the gospel shall divide men of the same family.
Because among men there are those deaf and those who hear, those who are
slow and those who are quick, those who deny and those who believe.
Until all are converted and “brothers in the Word,” discord will reign
on earth. But discord is not war, is not massacre. Those who have heard
and believe—the Christians—will not assault those who do not hear and do
not believe. They will, it is true, take up arms against their
refractory and stubborn brothers, but these arms will be preaching,
example, pardon, love. Those who are not converted perhaps will begin
real warfare, the warfare of violence and blood, but they will begin it
exactly because they are not converted, precisely because they are not
yet Christians. The triumph of the Gospel is the end of all wars, of
wars between man and man, between family and family, between caste and
caste, between people and people. If the Gospel at first is the cause of
separations and discord the fault is not in the truths taught in the
Gospel but in the fact that these truths are not yet practiced by all.
When Jesus proclaims that he comes to bring fire, only a literal-minded
barbarian can think of murderous and destructive fire, worthy auxiliary
of human warfare. “What will I if it be already kindled!” The fire
desired by the Son of Man is the fire of purification, of enthusiasm,
the ardor of sacrifice, the refulgent flame of love. Until all souls are
burning and consumed in that fire, the word of the Gospel will be but
useless sound, and the Kingdom still far away. To renew the contaminated
and hateful family of men, a wonderful outburst of grief and of passion
is needed. The complacent must suffer, the cold must burn, the
insensible must cry out, the tepid must flame like torches in the night.
All the filth accumulated in the secret life of men, all the sediments
of sin which make of every soul an offensive sewer, all the corruption
which shuts the ears and suffocates the hearts, must be burned up in
this miraculous spiritual fire, which Jesus came to kindle in our
hearts.
But to pass beyond this wall of flame there is need for strength of soul
and a boldness not possessed by all, possessed only by the valorous; and
thus Jesus can say, “The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the
violent take it by force.” The word violent has as a matter of fact in
the text the evident meaning of “strong,” of men who know how to take
doors by assault without hesitating or trembling. “Sword,” “fire,”
“violence,” are words which are not to be taken in the literal sense, so
pleasing to the advocates of massacres. They are figurative words which
we are forced to use to reach the torpid imagination of the crowds. The
sword is the symbol of the divisions between those first persuaded and
those who are last in believing; fire is purifying love; violence is the
strength necessary to make oneself over and to arrive on the threshold
of the Kingdom. Any one who understands this passage in any other way
either does not know how to read, or is determined to misread.