nothing but proclamations and instructions for Peace. The very night of
His birth celestial voices sang in the sky the prophetic augury: “Peace
on Earth to men of good will.” On the Mount one of the first promises
which flowed from the heart and from the lips of Christ is that directed
to the peacemakers, “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be
called the children of God.” When the apostles are ready to depart on
their mission He commands them to wish peace to all the houses where
they enter. To the disciples, to His friends, He counsels, “Have peace
one with another.” Drawing near to Jerusalem, He looks at it pityingly
and exclaims, “If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day,
the things which belong unto thy peace!” and the terrible night on the
Mount of Olives, while the mercenaries armed with swords are binding
Him, He pronounces the supreme condemnation of violence, “For all they
that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” He understands the
evils of discord, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to
desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not
stand.” And in His talk on the last things, in the grand apocalyptic
prophecy, He announces among the terrible signs of the end together with
famine, earthquakes and tribulation, also wars. “And ye shall hear of
wars and rumours of wars.... For nation shall rise against nation, and
kingdom against kingdom.”
For Jesus discord is an evil; war is a crime. His God is not the old
Lord of Battles. The apologists for great massacres confuse the Old and
the New Testament. But the New is new exactly because it transforms the
Old.
Only when considered as a punishment can war be thought of as divine.
War is the terrible retribution of men who have recourse to war; it is
the cruelest manifestation of the hatred which broods and boils in human
hearts, the hatred which drives men to take up arms to destroy one
another. War is at the same time a crime and its own punishment.
But when hate is abolished in every heart, war will be incomprehensible:
our most terrible punishment will disappear together with our greatest
sin. Then at last will arrive the day longed for by Isaiah when, “they
shall beat their swords into plow-shares, and their spears into
pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither
shall they learn war any more.”
That day announced by Isaiah is the day on which the Sermon on the Mount
shall become the only law recognized on earth.
ONE FLESH ONLY
Jesus sanctions the union of man and woman even in the flesh. As long as
kings remain, we are to give back to them the coins stamped with their
names; as long as men are not like angels the human race must perpetuate
itself.
The Family and the State, imperfect expedients compared with heavenly
beatitude, are necessary during our terrestrial probation; and since
they are necessary they should at least become less impure and less
imperfect. As long as rulers exist, at least the man who rules should
feel himself the equal of the man who serves. As long as marriage
exists, the union between man and woman should be eternal and faithful.
In marriage Jesus sees first of all the joining of two bodies. On this
point He ratifies the metaphor of the Old Law, “So then they are no more
twain, but one flesh.” Husband and wife are one body, inseparable. This
man shall never have another woman; this woman shall never know another
man until death divides them. The mating of male and female, when it is
not the expression of careless wantonness, or furtive fornication, when
it is the meeting of two healthy virginities, when it is preceded by
free choice, by a chaste passion, by a public and consecrated covenant,
has an almost mystic character which nothing can cancel. The choice is
irrevocable, the passion is confirmed, the compact is for eternity.
Within the two bodies clinging to each other with bodily desire, there
are two souls which recognize each other and find each other in love.
Their flesh becomes one flesh; their two souls become one soul.
The two have been fused into one, and from this communion will be born a
new creature formed of the essence of both, which will be the visible
form of their union. Love makes them like God, creators of a new and
miraculous creation.
But this Duality of the flesh and of the spirit—the most perfect among
imperfect human relations—should never be disturbed or interrupted.
Adultery corrupts it, divorce destroys it. Adultery treacherously
corrodes the union; divorce repudiates it definitely. Adultery is a
secret divorce founded upon untruth and betrayal; divorce followed by
another marriage is sanctioned adultery.
Jesus always condemns adultery and divorce in the most solemn and
absolute manner. His whole nature holds unfaithfulness in horror. There
will come a day, he warns people, in speaking of heavenly life, in which
men and women will not marry; but up to that day marriage should have at
least all the perfections possible to its imperfection. And Jesus who
always goes below the surface of things does not call adulterer only the
man who robs his brother of his wife, but also the man who looks at her
in the street with lustful eyes. The man who has underhand relations
with another man’s wife is an adulterer, but no less an adulterer is he
who, having put aside his own wife, marries another. On one occasion
alone, He seems to admit the possibility of divorce to the husband of an
adulteress; but the crime of the repudiated wife could never justify the
crime which the betrayed man would commit in taking another wife.
Confronted with a law so absolute and so rigorous, even the Disciples
took alarm. “If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good
to marry. But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying,
save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so
born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs which were
made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves
eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it,
let him receive it.”
Marriage is a concession to human nature, and to the propagation of
life. “All men cannot receive this saying,” are not capable of remaining
chaste, virgin, and alone, but only “they to whom it is given.” Perfect
celibacy is a grace, a reward of the victory of the spirit over the
body.
Any man who wishes to give all his love to a great undertaking must
condemn himself to chastity. He cannot serve both humanity and the
individual. The man who has a difficult mission to carry out, demanding
all his strength up to the last of his days, cannot tie himself to a
woman. Marriage means abandoning oneself to another being—but the
Saviour must abandon himself to all other beings. The union of two souls
is not enough for him—and it would make more difficult, perhaps
impossible, union with all other souls. The responsibilities which come
with the choice of a mate, the birth of children, the creation of a
little community in the midst of the great community of the human race,
are so heavy that they would be a daily hindrance to undertakings
infinitely more serious. The man who wishes to lead other men, to
transform them, cannot bind himself for all his life to one being alone.
He would need to be faithless to his wife or to his mission. He loves
all his brothers too much to love one only of his sisters. The Hero is
solitary. Solitude is his penalty and his greatness. He renounces the
pleasures of marital love, but the love which is in his heart, when
communicated to all men, is multiplied into a sublimation of sacrifice
surpassing all earthly joys. The man with no mate is alone, but is free;
his soul, unhampered by common and material thoughts, can rise to the
heights. He does not beget children of his own flesh, but he brings to a
second birth the children of his spirit.
It is not given to every one, however, to resist and abstain. “He that
is able to receive it, let him receive it.” The foundation of the
Kingdom needs all men who will give all their souls to it; the lusts of
the flesh, even when confined to legitimate marriage, are weakening for
him who should give all his attention to the things of the spirit.
Those who will know the resurrection of the great day of triumph will
have no further temptations. In the Kingdom of Heaven the joining of man
and woman, even sanctified as it is by the permanence of marriage, will
exist no more. Its real end is the creation of new human beings, but in
that day Death will be conquered and the everlasting renewing of the
generations will no longer be necessary. “For when they shall rise from
the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the
angels which are in heaven.”
With this attainment of eternal and angelic life—the two promises and
the two certainties of Christ—what has seemed endurable will become
unthinkable, that which seemed pure will become vile, that which was
holy will become imperfect. In that supreme and happy world all the
trials of the human race will be over. A hasty mating with a stolen
woman was enough for the primitive bestial man. Man rose to the higher
level of marriage, to union with one woman alone; the saint rose higher
yet, to voluntary chastity. But the man who has become an angel in
Heaven, who is all spirit and love, will have conquered the flesh even
in memory. In a world where there will be no poor, sick, unhappy or
enemies, his love will be transfigured into a superhuman contemplation.
The cycle of births will then be closed. The Fourth Kingdom will be
forever established. The citizens of the Kingdom will be eternally the
same, themselves and no other through all the centuries. Woman will no
longer bring forth her young with suffering. The sentence of exile will
be revoked, the Serpent will be conquered; the Father will joyfully
welcome his wandering son. Paradise will be found again and will never
more be lost.
FATHERS AND SONS
Jesus was speaking in a house, perhaps at Capernaum, and men and women,
all hungering for life and justice, all needing comfort and consolation,
had filled the house, had pressed close around Him, and were looking at
Him as they would look at their Father returned to them, their Brother
healing them, their Benefactor saving them. They were so hungry for His
words, these men and women, that Jesus and His friends had not stopped
to take a mouthful of food. He had spoken for a long time, and yet they
would have liked Him to go on speaking till nightfall, without ever
stopping for an instant. They had been waiting for Him for so long!
Their fathers and their mothers had waited for Him in wretchedness and
dumb resignation for thousands of years. They themselves had waited for
Him, year after year, in dull wretchedness. Night after night they had
longed for a ray of light, a promise of happiness, a loving word. And
now before them was He who was the reward of their long vigil. Now they
could wait no longer. These men and these women crowded about Jesus like
privileged and impatient creditors who finally have before them the
Divine Debtor, for whom they have been eternally waiting; and they
claimed their share down to the last penny. He certainly should be able
to get along without eating bread just this one time—for centuries and
centuries their fathers had been forced to go without the Bread of
Truth; for years and years they themselves had not been able to satisfy
their hunger for the Bread of Hope.
Jesus therefore went on talking to the people who had filled the house.
He repeated the most touching figures of His inspiration, told the most
persuasive stories of the Kingdom, looked at them with those luminous
eyes which shone down into the soul as the morning sun penetrates the
shut-in darkness of a house.
Any one of us would give what remains of his life to be looked at by
those eyes, to gaze for a moment into those eyes shining with infinite
tenderness; to listen for a moment only to that thrilling voice,
changing the Semitic vernacular into melodious music. Those men and
women who are now dead, those poor men, those poor women, those wretched
people who to-day are dust in the air of the desert, or clay under the
hoofs of the camels, those men and those women whom in their lifetime no
one envied, and whom we the living are forced to envy after their remote
and obscure death; those men and those women heard that voice, saw those
eyes.
But there came a stir and voices were heard at the door of the house:
some one wished to come in. One of those present told Jesus, “Behold,
thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee.” But Jesus did not
stir, “Who is my mother or my brethren?” And he looked round about on
them which sat about him, and said, “Behold my mother and my brethren!
For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my
sister, and mother.”
My family is all here and I have no other family. The ties of blood do
not count unless they are confirmed in the spirit. My father is the
Father who made me like unto Him in the perfection of righteousness; my
brothers are the poor who weep; my sisters are the women who have left
their loves for Love. He did not mean with these words to deny the
Virgin of Sorrows, of whose womb He was the fruit; He meant to say that
from the day of His voluntary exile He belonged no more to the little
family of Nazareth, but only to His mission as Saviour, to the great
family of mankind.
In the new organization of salvation, spiritual affiliations surpass the
simple relationships of the flesh. “If any 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.” Individual love
must disappear in universal love. We must choose between the old
affections of the old mankind and the unique love of the New Man.
The family will disappear when men, in the celestial life, shall be
better than men. In the world as it is, the family is an impediment for
him who helps others to rise to higher things. “And call no man your
father upon the earth: for one is your Father which is in heaven.” He
who leaves his family shall be infinitely rewarded. “And he said unto
them, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or
parents, or brethren, or wife, or children for the kingdom of God’s
sake, Who shall not receive manifold more in this present time, and in
the world to come life everlasting.”
Your Heavenly Father will never forsake you, your brothers in the
Kingdom will never betray you; but the fathers and the brothers of
earthly life might become your assassins. “And ye shall be betrayed both
by parents and brethren and kinsfolks and friends; and some of you shall
they cause to be put to death.”
And yet fathers at least should be faithful, because, according to
Jesus, fathers have more duties toward their sons than sons toward their
fathers. The Old Law recognizes only the first. “Honor thy father and
thy mother,” said Moses. But he does not add, “Protect and love thy
children.” Children seemed to Moses to be the property of those who had
begotten them. Life in those times seemed so fair and precious that
children were always thought to be in debt to their parents. They were
to remain servants forever, everlastingly submissive. They should live
only for old age, by the orders of old age.
Here also the divine genius of the Overthrower sees what is lacking in
the old ideals and insists upon righting the balance. Fathers should
give without sparing and without rest; even if the children are
ungrateful, even if they abandon their father, even if they are unworthy
in the eyes of the platitudinous sagacity of the world. The Paternoster
is a prayer of sons to a Father. It is the prayer which every child
might address to his father. He asks for daily bread; the remission of
sins, pardon for his failings, and daily protection against evil.
And yet fathers, even when they give everything, are sometimes forsaken.
If their sons leave them to throw themselves into evil ways, they must
be forgiven as soon as they come back, as the Prodigal Son in the
parable was forgiven. If they leave their fathers to seek out a higher
and more perfect life—like those who are converted to the Kingdom—they
will be rewarded a thousand times in this life and the next.
But from every point of view, fathers are debtors. The tremendous
responsibility which they have accepted in giving life to a new human
being must be met. Like the Heavenly Father, they must give to those of
their children who ask and to those who keep silence, to the worthy and
the unworthy, to those who sit about the family board and to those who
are wanderers over the earth, to the good and to the bad, to the first
and to the last. They must never become weary, not even with the
children who flee from them, with those who offend against them, with
those who deny them.
“Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give
him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?” Who will
refuse to a son who departs asking nothing, the supreme gift of a love
which asks no requital?
LITTLE CHILDREN
All men are children of the Son of Man, but no one could call Him father
in the flesh. Among the disappointing joys of men perhaps the only joy
which does not disappoint is to hold in one’s arms or on one’s knees a
child whose face is rosy with blood which is also yours, who laughs at
you with the dawning splendor of his eyes, who stammers out your name,
who uncovers the springs of the lost tenderness of your childhood; to
feel against your adult flesh, hardened by winds and the sun, this fresh
smooth young flesh where the blood seems still to have kept some of the
sweetness of milk, flesh that seems made of warm, living petals. To feel
that this flesh is yours, shaped in the flesh of your mate, nourished
with the milk of her breasts; to watch the birth and slow flowering of
the soul in this flesh; to be the sole father of this unique creature,
of this flower opening in the light of the world; to recognize your own
aspect in his childish eyes, to hear your own voice through his fresh
lips; to grow young again through this child in order to be worthy of
him; to be nearer to him; to make yourself younger, better, purer; to
forget all the years which bring us silently nearer to death, to forget
the pride of manhood, the vanity of wisdom, the first wrinkles on the
face, the expiations, the ignominies of life and to become a virgin
again beside this virginity, calm beside this calmness, good with a
goodness never known before; to be in short the father of a child of
your own, this is certainly the highest human pleasure given to a man
who has a soul within his clay.
Jesus, whom no one called Father, was drawn to children as to sinners.
Lover of the absolute, He loved only extremes. Complete innocence and
complete downfall were for Him pledges of salvation. Innocence because
it does not need to be cleansed; abject degradation because it feels
more keenly the need to be cleansed. The people in danger are those
midway; men half depraved and half intact; men who are foul within and
wish to seem upright and just; those who have lost with their childhood
their native purity and do not yet recognize the filthiness of their
inner depravity.
Jesus loved children with tenderness and sinners with compassion; the
pure and those who stood in dire need of purification. His hand
willingly caressed the floating hair of the newly weaned child and did
not draw back from the perfumed tresses of the prostitute. He drew near
to sinners because they often had not the strength to come to Him; but
He called children to Him because children know by instinct who loves
them, and run willingly to him. Mothers brought their children to Him to
have Him touch them. The Disciples, with their habitual roughness, cried
out on them—and Jesus once more was obliged to reprove them, “Suffer
little children, and forbid them not to come unto me, for of such is the
kingdom of heaven.” “Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive
the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.”
The Disciples, bearded men, proud of their authority as mature men and
as lieutenants of their future Lord, could not understand why their
Master consented to waste time with children who could not yet speak
plainly and could not understand the meaning of grown people’s words.
But Jesus set in their midst one of these children and said: “Verily I
say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye
shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall
humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom
of heaven.... And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name
receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which
believe in me, it were better for him that a mill-stone were hanged
about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”
Here, too, the transposition of values is complete. In the Old Law, the
child was to respect the grown man, to revere and imitate the old man.
The little child was to take the grown person as his model. Perfection
was supposed to lie in years of maturity, or, better yet, in old age.
The child was respected only as containing the hope for future manhood.
Jesus reversed these ideas; grown people were to take their example from
little children, elders were to try to become like infants, fathers were
to imitate their sons. In the world as it was, as it is, controlled by
force, where the only valued art is the art of acquiring riches and
overcoming others, children are at the most only human larvæ. In the New
World announced by Christ, which will be governed by fearless purity and
innocent love, children are the arch-types of happy citizens. The child
who seems an imperfect man is thus more perfect than the grown man. The
man who imagines that he has come into the fullness of his time and of
his soul is to turn back, despoil himself of his complacent complexities
and return to his first youth. From having been imitated he becomes an
imitator, from his position as first he becomes last.
Jesus reaffirms His own likeness to a child, and declares with no
hesitation that He is identical with the children who seek Him out, “And
whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.” The
saint, the poor man, the poet, present themselves under this new form
which sums them all up: the child, pure and candid as the saint, bare
and needy as the poor man, marveling and loving like the poet.
Jesus loves children not only as unconscious models for those who wish
to attain the perfection of the Kingdom, but as the actual mediums of
truth. Their ignorance is more illumined than the doctrines of learned
men; their ingenuousness is more powerful than the intellect which shows
itself in reasoning words. Only a clear and untarnished mirror can
reflect the images of the revelation.
“I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid
these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto
babes.” Their own wisdom stands in the way of the wise, because they
think they understand everything. Their own intelligence is an
impediment for the intelligent, because they are not capable of
understanding any other light than that of the intellect. Only the
simple can understand simplicity, the innocent, innocence, the loving,
love. The revelation of Jesus, open only to virginal souls, is all
humility, purification and love. But man, as he grows older, becomes
more complicated, more corrupt, prouder, and learns the horrible
pleasure of hatred. Every day he goes further from Paradise, becomes
less capable of finding it. He takes pleasure in his steady downfall and
glories in the useless learning which hides from him the only needful
truth.
To find the new Paradise, the Kingdom of innocence and love, it is
needful to become like children who have already what others must strive
and struggle to regain.
Jesus seeks out the company of sinners, of men and women, but He feels
Himself with his true brothers only when He lays His hands on the heads
of the children whom the Galilean mothers bring to Him as an offering.
MARTHA AND MARY
Women also loved Jesus. He who had the form and flesh of a man, who left
His mother and never had a wife, was surrounded all His life and after
His death by the warmth of feminine tenderness. The chaste wanderer was
loved by women as no man was ever loved, or ever can be loved again. The
chaste man, who condemned adultery and fornication, had over women the
inestimable prestige of innocence.
All women, who are not mere females, kneel before him who does not bow
before them. The husband with all his legal love and authority, the
satyr with all his mistresses, the eloquent adulterer, the bold
ravisher, have not so much power over the spirit of women as he who
loves them without touching them, he who saves them without asking for
even a kiss as reward. Woman, slave of her body, of her weakness, her
desire and of the desire of the male, is drawn to him who frees her, to
him who cures her, to him who loves her and asks no more from her than a
cup of water, a smile, a little silent attention.