INTRODUCTION (continued 3)

BLESSED ARE THE POOR

Jesus sat on a little hill in the midst of the first apostles surrounded by hundreds of eyes that were watching His eyes; and some one asked Him to whom would be allotted this Kingdom of Heaven, of which He so often spoke. Jesus answered with the nine beatitudes.

The beatitudes, so often spelled out even nowadays by people who have lost their meaning, are almost always misunderstood, mutilated, deformed, cheapened, distorted. And yet they epitomize the first day of Christ’s teaching, that glorious day!

“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Luke leaves out the words “in spirit,” seeming to mean the “poor” and nothing else; and many people after him (some modern and malicious) have understood him to mean the simple-minded, the silly. They see in the words only a choice between the bankrupt and the imbecile.

When He spoke, Jesus was not thinking either of the first or the second. Jesus had no friendship for the rich and detested with all His soul the greedy desire for riches, the greatest obstacle to the true enrichment of the soul; Jesus was friendly to the poor and comforted them because they had less comfort than other people; He kept them near Him because of their greater need to be fed by loving words. But He was not so foolish as to think that to be poor, materially poor in the worldly sense of the word, is a sufficient title to enjoy the Kingdom, without any other qualifications.

Jesus never gave any sign of admiring that intelligence which is solely the intelligence of abstraction and the memory for phrases. Purely systematic philosophers, and metaphysical 88sophists, gropers in nature, devourers of books, would never have found grace in His eyes. But intelligence, the power of understanding the signs of the future and the meaning of symbols—enlightened and prophetic intelligence, the loving mastery of the truth—was a gift in His eyes also, and many times He grieved that His listeners and His disciples showed so little of it. For Him supreme intelligence consisted in realizing that the intelligence alone is not enough, that all the soul must be changed to obtain happiness, since happiness is not an absurd dream but eternally possible and within reach. But he fully understood that intelligence ought to aid us in this total transmutation. He could not therefore call to the fullness of the Kingdom of God the dull and the imbecile. Poor in spirit are those who are fully and painfully aware of their own spiritual poverty, of the faultiness of their own souls, of the smallness of the good that is in us all, of the moral indigence of most men. Only the poor who realize that they are really poor suffer from their poverty, and because they suffer from it try to escape from it. Very different these from men apparently rich, from those blind arrogant self-satisfied people who believe themselves fulfilled and perfected, in good standing with God and man, who feel no eagerness to climb upward because they delude themselves with thinking they are already on high, who will never enrich themselves because they do not realize their own fathomless poverty.

Those therefore who confess themselves poor and undergo suffering to acquire that veritable wealth named perfection, will become holy as God is holy, and theirs shall be the Kingdom of Heaven; those complacent people on the other hand who drape themselves in self-satisfaction, taking no heed of the foulness accumulated and hidden under their vainglory, will not enter into the Kingdom.

BLESSED ARE THE MEEK: FOR THEY SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH

The earth here promised is not the literal field of clods, nor monarchies with built-up cities. In the language of the 89Messiah, “to inherit the earth” means to partake of the New Kingdom. The soldier who fights for the earthly earth needs to be fierce; but he who fights within himself for the conquest of the new earth and the new heaven must not abandon himself to anger, the counselor of evil, nor to cruelty, the negation of love. The meek are those who endure close contact with evil men and with themselves—often harder to bear—who do not break out into brutish rage when things go badly, but conquer their inner enemies with that quiet perseverance which more than sudden sterile furies shows the force of the soul. They are like water which is not hard to the touch, which seems to give way before other substances, but slowly rises, silently attacks, and calmly consumes, with the patience of the years, the hardest granites.

BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. The afflicted, the weeping, those who feel disgust for themselves and pity for the world, who do not live in the supine stupidity of everyday life, who mourn over their own unhappiness and that of their brothers, who grieve over failures, over the blindness which delays the victory of light—because light for men cannot come from the sky if their own eyes do not reflect it—who grieve over the remoteness of that righteousness dreamed-of again and again, promised a thousand times, and yet always further away through our fault and every one’s fault; those who mourn over an offense received instead of increasing the wrong by revenge, and who weep over the wrong they have done and over the good they might have done and did not; those who care little about the loss of a visible treasure but strain after the invisible treasure; those who mourn, hasten with their tears the day of grace, and it is right that they shall some day be comforted.

90

BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER AND THIRST AFTER JUSTICE: FOR THEY SHALL BE FILLED

The justice which Jesus means is not the justice of men, obedience to human law, conformity to codes, respect for usage and for the established transactions of men. In the language of the psalmists, the prophets, the saints, the just man is he who lives according to the will of God, because God is the supreme type of all perfection. Not according to the law written by the Scribes set down in the Bible, diluted by Talmudic casuistries, obscured by the subtleties of the Pharisees; but according to the one simple Law which Jesus reduces to one commandment, “Love all men near and far, your fellow countrymen and foreigners, strangers and enemies.” Those who hunger and thirst after this justice shall be filled in the Kingdom of Heaven. Even if they do not succeed in being perfect in all things, much will be pardoned for their endurance of the long vigil.

BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL: FOR THEY SHALL OBTAIN MERCY

He who loves shall be loved, he who gives help shall find help. The law of retaliation is nullified for evil but remains valid for good. We constantly commit sins against the spirit and those sins will be forgiven us only as we forgive those committed against us. Christ is in all men and what we do to others will be done to us. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” If we have pity on others we may have pity for ourselves; God can pardon the evil which we do to ourselves only if we pardon the evil which others do to us.

BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART: FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD

The Pure of Heart are those who have no other wish than for perfection, no other joy than victory over the evil which hunts us down on every side. He who has his heart crammed with furious desires, with earthly ambitions, with carnal pride 91and with all the lusts which convulse this ant-heap of the earth, can never see God face to face, will never know the sweetness of His magnificent felicity.

BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS: FOR THEY SHALL BE CALLED THE SONS OF GOD

These peacemakers are not the meek of the second beatitude. The meek refrain from answering evil with evil; the peacemakers do more, they return good for evil, they bring peace where wars are flaring up. When Jesus said He had come to bring war and not peace, He meant war to evil, to Satan, to the world, to evil which is wrong, to Satan who is Death, to the world which is an eternal battle. He means, in short, war against war. The peacemakers are those who wage war upon war, those who placate, those who bring about concord. The origin of every war is self-love, love which becomes love of riches, pride of possession, envy of those more wealthy, hatred for rivals; and the new law comes to teach hatred for oneself, contempt for measurable goods, love for all creatures, even for those who hate us. The peacemakers who teach and practice this love cut at the root of all war. When every man loves his brothers more than himself there will be no more wars, neither great nor small, neither civil nor imperial, neither of words nor of blows, between man and man, between class and class, between people and people. The peacemakers will have conquered the earth and they will be called the true sons of God, and they will enter among the first into His Kingdom.

BLESSED ARE THEY WHO HAVE BEEN PERSECUTED FOR JUSTICE’ SAKE: FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

I send you out to found this Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven, of that higher justice which is love, of that fatherly goodness whose name is God; I send you out therefore to fight against those who uphold injustice, the servants of materialism, the proselytes of the Adversary. They will defend themselves 92when attacked, and to defend themselves they will attack you. You will be tortured in body, crucified in soul, deprived of liberty and perhaps of life; but if you accept this suffering cheerfully to carry to others that justice which makes you suffer, this persecution will be for you an incontestable title to enter into the Kingdom which you have founded as far as was in your power.

BLESSED ARE YE WHEN MEN SHALL REPROACH YOU AND PERSECUTE YOU AND SAY ALL MANNER OF EVIL AGAINST YOU FALSELY FOR MY SAKE. REJOICE AND BE EXCEEDING GLAD: FOR GREAT IS YOUR REWARD IN HEAVEN: FOR SO PERSECUTED THEY THE PROPHETS WHICH WERE BEFORE YOU

Persecution is a material attack through physical, legal and political means. The persecutors can take away your bread, and the clear light of the sun, and divine liberty; they may break your bones, but you must endure more than mere persecution. You must expect insult and calumny. They will condemn you because you wish to change bestial men into saints. Wallowing in the foulness of their bestiality, they detest the idea of leaving their filth. But they will not be satisfied to strike only at your body, they will strike also at your soul. They will accuse you of all crimes, they will stone you with slander and contumely. Hogs will say that you are filthy, asses will swear that you are ignorant, ravens will accuse you of eating carrion, rams will drive you away as ill-smelling, the dissolute will cry out upon the scandal of your corruptness and thieves will denounce you for theft. But you must always rejoice because the insult of evil men is the consecration of your own goodness, and the mud thrown at you by the impure is the pledge of your purity. This is, as St. Francis says, “the perfect joy.” Beyond all the graces which Christ gives to His friends is the grace of conquering oneself and willingly enduring injury, opprobrium, pains, discomforts. All the other gifts of God are not ours to glory in, because they come not from us, but from God; but in tribulation and in 93affliction we can glory because that is ours. All the prophets who have ever spoken upon the earth were insulted by men, and men will insult those who are to come. We can recognize prophets by this, that smeared with mud and covered with shame, they pass among men, bright-faced, speaking out what is in their hearts. No mud can close the lips of those who must speak. Even if the obstinate prophet is killed, they cannot silence him. His voice multiplied by the echoes of his death will be heard in all languages and through all the centuries.

This promise brings the beatitudes to their end.

By means of the beatitudes, Christ fully explains who are fit to be the citizens of His new Kingdom. Those citizens are henceforth found and sealed; every one can recognize them. The unwilling are warned, the uncertain are reassured. The rich, the proud, the satisfied, the violent, the unjust, the warlike, those who mock, those who do not hunger after perfection, those who persecute and outrage, can never enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. They cannot enter there until they are altogether conquered and changed, and have become the opposite of what they are now. Those who live happily according to the world, those whom the world envies, imitates and admires, are infinitely further from true happiness than those others whom the world scorns and hates. In this exulting beginning Jesus has turned upside down the human hierarchy; now as He goes on He will turn upside down the values of life, and no other revaluation will ever be so divinely paradoxical as His.

THE DIVINE PARADOX

Emasculated Gymnosophists and the cowardly sect of the Saturnists,—these are serious-minded men who can understand plain facts but cannot interpret those facts but merely repeat and spoil them—have always looked with unfriendly eyes on what is called the paradoxical. To save themselves the trouble of distinguishing between sacred paradoxes and those which are only a fatuous amusement, they make haste to pass judgment 94on all paradox as nothing else than the overturning of recognized old truths; hence, false and—they add, to clip the wings of vanity—as easy as possible to invent. One would suppose it seems to them more difficult to walk along the road already laid out, and to spell over line by line what was written before they were born by men who certainly had not their cowardly temperament.

But if these priests of the already-said would consider the few master ideas on which modern thought is living, or rather on which it is dying, they would discover that they are almost all overturnings, that is to say, paradoxes. When Rousseau says that men are born good but that society makes them bad, he turns inside out the accepted doctrine of original sin; when the disciples of progress affirm that from the worse comes the better; when the evolutionist affirms that the complex springs out of the simple; and the monist that all diversities are but manifestations of the One; and the Marxist that economic history is the basis of spiritual development; when the modern mathematical philosophers affirm that man is not as he has always been believed, the center of the universe, but a minute animal species on one of an infinite number of spheres scattered in the infinite; when the Protestants cry, “The Pope is of no account but only the Scriptures”; when the French Revolutionists say, “The Third Estate is nothing and should be everything”—what are all these people doing except overturning old and commonly held opinions?

But Jesus is the greatest overturner, the supreme maker of paradoxes, 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 95life 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.

96Our 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 97unchangeable, 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.

98

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, 99sanguine, 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.

100With 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 101are 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 102look 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. 103Oaths 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 104true 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 105unto 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.

In spite of its apparent absurdity the only way is that commanded by Jesus. If a man gives you a blow and you return another blow, he will answer with his fists, you in turn with 106kicks, 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 107command; 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 108before 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 109the 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 110streets, 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 111that 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 112reason: 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 113cannot 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.”

114His 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 115companions 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 116would 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 117cannot have sprung from these timid maxims hidden away in a corner of the Scriptures.

But there is, they say, Hillel, the Rabbi Hillel, the great Hillel, master of Gamaliel, Hillel Hababli or the Babylonian. This celebrated Pharisee lived a little before Jesus and taught, they say, the same things which Jesus afterwards taught. He was a liberal Judean, a rational Pharisee, an intelligent rabbi; but was he therefore a Christian? It is true that he said these words, “Do not do unto others what is displeasing to you; this is the whole Law, the rest is only explanation of it.” These are fine words for a master of the old law, but how far away they are from those of the overturner of the ancient law! This is a negative command, “Do not do.” He does not say, “Do good to those who wrong you,” but “Do not do to others (and these others are certainly companions, fellow-citizens, members of the family and friends) what you feel to be evil.” He mildly forbids harmfulness; he gives no absolute command to love. As a matter of fact, the descendants of Hillel were those Talmudists who mired the law in the great swamp of casuistry. The descendants of Jesus were the martyrs who blessed their torturers.

And Philo, the Alexandrian Jew, the Platonizing metaphysician, some twenty years older than Jesus, left a treatise on the love of men; but Philo, with all his talents and with all his mystical and Messianic speculations, is, like Hillel, a theorist, a man of pens and ink-pots, of learning, of books, of systems, of abstractions, of classifications. His dialectic strategy brings into the field thousands of words in parade formation, but he is never inspired to pronounce the one word that burns up in an instant all the past, the one word which brings hearts together. He has talked of love more than Christ, but he could never have said, and he would not have been able to understand, what Christ said to his ignorant friends on the Mount.

ACHILLES AND PRIAM

Is it possible that in Greece, that well-spring from whence all have drunk, there was no love for enemies? Would-be modern 118pagans, enemies of the “Palestine superstition,” claim that Greek thought has everything in it. In the spiritual life of the Occident, Greece is like China to the East, mother of all invention.

In the Ajax of Sophocles, famous Odysseus is moved to pity at the sight of a fallen enemy reduced to misery. In vain Athena herself, Hellenic wisdom personified in the sacred owl, reminds him that “the most delightful mirth is to laugh at one’s enemies.” Ulysses is not convinced. “I pity him, although he is my enemy, because I see him so unfortunate, bound to an evil destiny; and looking at him, I think of myself. Because I see we are not other than ghosts, and unsubstantial shadows, all we who live.... It is not right to do evil to a dying man even if you hate him.” It seems to me that we are here still very far away from love. Wily Ulysses is not wily enough to conceal the motive of his unnatural softening. He pities his enemy because he thinks of himself, remembers that evil could happen also to him, and he pardons his enemy only because he sees him dying and unfortunate.

A wiser man than Ulysses, the son of Sophroniscus, the stone cutter, asked himself, among many other questions, how the righteous man ought to treat his enemies. But reading the texts, we discover with astonishment two Socrates, of different opinions. The Socrates of the Memorabilia frankly accepts the common feeling. Friends are to be treated well and enemies ill, and thus it is better to anticipate one’s enemies in doing ill: “The man most greatly to be praised,” he says to Cherocrate, “is he who anticipates his enemies in hurtfulness and his friends in helpfulness.” But Plato’s Socrates does not accept the common opinion. He says to Crito, “Injustice should be rendered to no one in return for injustice; nor evil for evil whatever has been the injury that thou hast received.” And he affirms the same principle in the Republic, adding in support that the bad are not bettered by revenge. But the ruling idea in Socrates’ head is the thought of justice, not the feeling of love. In no case should the righteous man do evil, out of self-respect (notice this), not out of affection towards his enemy. The bad man must punish himself, otherwise the 119judges in the lower world will punish him after death. Aristotle, the disciple of Plato, turns tranquilly back to the old idea: “Not to resent offenses,” he says in the Ethics to Nicomachus, “is the mark of a base and slavish man.”

In Greece, therefore, there is little to the purpose for those who are looking for precedents for Christianity.

But in order to make us believe that Christianity existed before Christ, those who deny Jesus, have found a rival to Jesus even in Rome, in the very palace of the Cæsars. Seneca, the director of conscience to young gentlemen, leader of the fashionable cult of reformed stoicism; the abstract aristocrat never moved by the troubles of the poor; the proprietor who despises riches, and clutches them tightly, who affirms the equality between free and slave, and owns slaves; the talented anatomist of scruples, of evils, of active vices, and complacent virtues; he who canalized the old doctrine of Chrisippus, dull but clear, towards the estuary of preciosity; moral Seneca they claim was a Christian without knowing it during Christ’s very lifetime. Thumbing over his works (many were written after the death of Christ, for Seneca waited till he was sixty-five years old before committing suicide), they have found that “the wise man does not avenge but forgets affronts,” and that “to imitate the Gods we should do good also to the ungrateful because the sun shines equally on the wicked and the seas bear up the pirate ship,” and finally that “We must succor our enemies with a friendly hand.” But the “forgetting” of the philosopher is not “forgiveness”; and “succor” can be philanthropy but is not love. The imperious, the stoic, the Pharisee; the philosopher proud of his philosophy, the righteous man complacent over his righteousness, can despise the affronts of the small, the pricks of enemies, and through pride of magnanimity and to win admiration can deign to give a loaf to a hungry enemy in order to humiliate him more harshly from the heights of perfection. But that bread was prepared with the leaven of vanity and that would-be friendly hand could never have dried a tear or dressed a wound.

The world of antiquity did not know love. It knew passion for a woman, friendship for a friend, justice for the citizen, 120hospitality for the foreigner; but it did not know love. Zeus protected pilgrims and strangers; he who knocked at the Grecian door was not denied meat, a cup of wine, and a bed. The poor were to be covered, the weak helped, the mourning consoled with fair words; but the men of antiquity did not know love, love that suffers, that shares another’s sorrow, love for all who suffer and are neglected, love for the poor, the lowly, the outlawed, the maligned, the downtrodden, the abandoned; love for all, love which knows no difference between fellow-citizens and strangers, between fair and foul, between criminal and philosopher, between brother and enemy.

In the last canto of the Iliad we see an old man, a mourner, a father who kisses the hand of his most terrible enemy, of the man who has killed his sons, who has just killed his most loved son. Priam, the old king, head of the rich, ruined city, father of fifty sons, kneels at the feet of Achilles, the greatest hero, and the most unhappy among the Greeks, son of the Sea-Goddess, avenger of Patroclus, slayer of Hector. The white head of the kneeling old man is bowed before the proud youth of the victor, and Priam mourns for the slain, strongest, fairest, most loved of all his fifty sons, and kisses the hand of the slayer! “Thou also,” he says, “hast a grey-haired, failing, defenseless, far-distant father. In the name of thy father’s love, give me back at least the dead body of my son.”

Achilles, the fierce, the wild, the slaughterer, puts the suppliant gently on one side and begins to weep; and both of them, the two enemies, the conqueror and the conquered, the father bereft of his son and the son who will never see his father again, the white-haired old man and the golden-haired youth both weep, drawn together for the first time by sorrow. The others round about gaze at them silent and astounded: we ourselves after thirty centuries are shaken by their grief.

But in the kiss of Priam there is no pardon, there is no love. This king humbles himself to obtain a difficult and unusual favor. If a God had not inspired him he would not have stirred from Ilium; and Achilles does not weep for dead Hector, for weeping Priam, for the powerful man who is brought to humble himself, for the enemy who is brought to kiss the 121hand of the slayer. He weeps over his lost friend; over Patrocles, dearer to him than all other men; over Peleus, left at Phthia; over his father, whom he will never more embrace, for he knows that his young days are numbered. And he gives back to the father the dead body of his son—that body which he has dragged for so many days in the dust—because it is the will of Zeus, not because his hunger of vengeance is stilled. Both of them weep for themselves; the kiss of Priam is a harsh necessity, the restitution of Achilles is obedience to the Gods. In the noblest heroic world of antiquity there is no place for that love which destroys hate and takes the place of hate, for love stronger than the strength of hate, more ardent, more implacable, more faithful, for love which is not forgetfulness of wrong, but love of wrong, because wrong is a misfortune for him who commits it rather than for him who suffers. There is no place for love for enemies in the world of antiquity.

Jesus was the first to speak of such love, to conceive of such love. This love was not known till the Sermon on the Mount. This is the greatest and the most original of Jesus’ conceptions. Of all His teachings this was the newest to men, this is still His greatest innovation. It is new even to us, new because it is not understood, not imitated, not obeyed; infinitely eternal like truth.

THOU SHALT LOVE

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.” A few bare, plain words! But they 122are the Magna Charta of the new race, of the third race, of men not yet born. The first race was that of the animal without law, and its name was War; the second were barbarians tamed by the Law, whose highest perfection was justice. This is the race living now, and justice has not yet conquered War, and the Law has not yet supplanted animality. The third is to be the race of real men, not only upright but holy, not like beasts but like God.

Jesus had just one aim: to transform men from beasts to saints by means of love. Circe, the enchantress, the Satanic consort of the old mythologies, converted heroes into beasts by means of animal pleasures. Jesus is the anti-Satan, the anti-Circe, He who saves from animality by a force more powerful than pleasure. This undertaking, which seems hopeless to all animals barely risen above animality and to beings just entering upon real humanity, must be based on the imitation of God. To approximate sanctity one must look toward divinity: “Be holy because God is holy. Be perfect because God is perfect.”

This is not the first time that this appeal has been made to the heart of man. Satan said in the Garden: “You will be as gods.” Jehovah said to His judges: “Be gods, be just as God is just.” But now there is no question of being wise like God, nor is it even enough to be just, like God. God is now more than wisdom and justice. With Jesus, He becomes our Father, becomes love. His earth gives bread and flowers even to the homicide; he who takes His name in vain sees the glorious sun every morning, the same sun which warms the clasped hands of the laborer praying in the field. A true father loves the son who turns from him as he loves the son who seeks him out; a father cherishes the child who obeys him in his house, or who vomits him out with his wine. A father can be saddened, can suffer, can mourn, but no sinning man is capable of making a father become like to himself. No one can induce a father to take revenge.

And we who are so much lower than God, poor finite creatures, who are scarcely capable of remembering yesterday, 123who do not know to-morrow, we unfortunate, inferior creatures, have we not many more motives to feel for our brothers in wretchedness what God feels for us? God is the supreme substance of our ideal. To draw away from Him, not to be as we pray that He may be with us, is this not to draw away from our unique destination, to keep perpetually and despairingly out of our reach that happiness for which we are created, which we believe to be the aim of our lives, imagined by us, dreamed of by us, longed-for, invoked and followed in vain through all the false felicities which are not of God? “Let us be Gods,” cries Bossuet. “Let us be Gods. He permits it, that we may imitate His holiness.”

Who will refuse to be like God? Dii estis. Divinity is in us; animality hampers and constricts it, stunting our growth. Who would not wish to be God? Oh, men, are you in very truth content to be only men? Men as you are to-day, half-men, half-beasts? Centaurs without robustness, sirens without sweetness, demons with fauns’ muzzles and goats’ feet? Are you so satisfied with your bastard and imperfect humanity, with your animality scarcely held in leash, taking no step to win holiness save to desire it? Does it seem to you that the life of men as it has been in the past, as it is to-day, is so dear, so happy, so contented that there should be no effort to make it otherwise, entirely different, the opposite of what it is, more like that which for thousands of years we have imagined in the future and in Heaven? Is it not possible to make another life out of this life, to change this world to a world more divine, at last to bring down Heaven and the laws of Heaven upon earth?

This new life, this earthly but celestial world is the Kingdom of Heaven, and to bring about the Kingdom we must transfigure and deify ourselves; become like God, imitate God. The secret of the imitation of God is love, the certain way of the transfiguration is love, love of man for man, love for friend and enemy. If this love is impossible, our salvation is impossible. If it is repugnant, it is a sign that happiness is repugnant to us. If it is absurd, our hopes of redemption are 124only absurdity. Common sense tells us that to love our enemies is insanity, and to count such love as a prerequisite of our salvation seems simple madness. Love for enemies is like hatred for ourselves; hence it follows that we can only earn beatitude by hating ourselves.

This conclusion should alarm no one, for it has been proved; all the experiments have been tried. It is not true that there has been no time to test it. For thousands of years we have been proving and proving it, over and over. We have tried the experiment of fierceness; and blood answered blood. We have tried the experiment of lust; and lust has left in the mouth the odor of corruption and a fiercer fever. We have forced the body into the most refined and perverse pleasures and found ourselves worn out and heavy-hearted, lying upon filth. We have tried the experiment of the Law, and we have not obeyed the Law; we have changed it and disobeyed it again, and Justice has not satisfied our hearts. We have tried the experiment of intellectualism, we have taken the census of creation, numbered the stars, described the plants, the dead things and the living things, we have bound them together with the thin threads of abstract ideas, we have transfigured them in the magic clouds of metaphysics; and at the end of all this, things have remained the same, eternally the same; they were not enough for us, they could not be renewed; their names and their numbers did not quiet our hunger, and the most learned men ended with weary confessions of ignorance. We have tried the experiment of art and our feebleness has brought the strongest to despair, because the Absolute cannot be fixed in any form; the Many overflow from the One; the carefully wrought work of art cannot arrest the ephemeral. We have tried the experiment of wealth and have found ourselves poorer; the experiment of force and have come to ourselves, weaker. In no thing has our soul found quiet. We have found no welcoming shade, where our bodies can lie down and be at rest; and our hearts, always seeking, always disappointed, are older, weaker, and emptier because in nothing have they found peace, because no pleasure has brought them joy, no conquest, happiness.

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THE LAST EXPERIMENT

Jesus proposes His experiment, the only remaining possibility, the experiment of love, that experiment which no one has made, which few have even attempted (and that for only a few moments of their lives), the most arduous, the most contrary to our instincts but the only one which can give what it promises.

As he comes from the hand of Nature, Man thinks only of himself, loves nothing but himself. Little by little, with tremendous but slow efforts, he succeeds in loving for a while his woman, and his children, in tolerating his accomplices in the hunt, in assassination and in war. Very rarely is he able to love a friend; more easily he hates the man who loves him. He does not dream of loving the man who hates him.

All this explains why Jesus commands us to love our enemies. To make over the entire man, to create a new man, the most tenacious center of the old man must be destroyed. From self-love come all the misfortunes, massacres and miseries of the world. To tame the old Adam self-love must be torn out of him, and in its place must be put the love most opposed to his present nature, love for his enemies. The total transformation of man is such a sublime paradox that it can be reached only by fantastic means. It is an extraordinary undertaking, wild and unnatural, to be accomplished only with an extraordinary exaltation, opposed to Nature.

Until now man has loved himself and hated those who hate him; the man of the future, the inhabitant of the Kingdom, must hate himself and love those who hate him. To love one’s neighbor as one’s self is an insufficient formula, a concession to universal egotism. For he who loves himself cannot perfectly love others, and finds himself perforce in conflict with others. Only hatred for ourselves is sufficient. If we love ourselves, we admire ourselves, we flatter ourselves too much. To overcome this blind love, we need to see our nothingness, our baseness, our infamy. Hatred of ourselves is humility, is the beginning of improvement, of perfection. And only the humble shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven because they alone 126feel how far they are from it. We are angered at others because our dear ego feels undeservedly offended, not sufficiently served by others; we kill our brother because he seems an obstacle to our good; we steal for the love of our body, we fornicate to give pleasure to our body; envy, mother of rivalry and of wars, is merely sorrow because another has more than we, or has what we have not; pride is the expression of our certainty of being of more account than others, of possessing more than others, of knowing more than others. All the things which religions, morals, and laws call sins, vices, and crimes begin in self-love, in the hatred for others which springs out of that one solitary, disordered love.

What right have we to hate our enemies, when we ourselves have been guilty of the same fault for which we think we have the right to hate them; when we ourselves have been guilty of hatred? What right have we to hate them, even if they have done wrong, even if we believe them wicked, when we ourselves nearly always have done the same wrong actions, have been defiled with the same pitch? What right have we to hate them if nearly always we are responsible for their hate? We, who with the endless errors of our monstrous self-love, have forced them to hate us? And he who hates is unhappy, is the first to suffer. We ought to respond with love to that hatred, with gentleness to that harshness as reparation for the suffering of which we are often the real cause, immediate or distant.

Our enemy is also our savior. We ought every day to be grateful to our enemies; they alone see clearly and state openly what is ignoble in us; they make us conscious of our moral poverty, the realization of which is the only beginning for the second birth. For this service we owe them love. For our enemy needs love, and needs our love. He who loves us already has his joy and reward in himself. He needs no reward from us. But he who hates is unhappy; hates because he is unhappy. His hatred is the bitter outlet for his sufferings. We are partly guilty for this suffering, and even if, over-confident in our innocence, we do not feel that we are responsible, we ought nevertheless to comfort with love the unhappiness of the man who hates, to calm him, make him better, convert him 127also to the beatitudes of loving. We will know him better if we love him, and knowing him better, we will love him more. We only love heartily what we know well. If we love our enemy, his soul will be transparent to us, and as we penetrate further into it, we will discover much more to call forth our pity and our love; because every enemy is an unrecognized brother; we often hate in him what resembles our own natures. Something of ourselves, unknown perhaps to us, is in our enemy and is often the cause of our hostility. When we love our enemies we purify our spirit by understanding and lift his spirit upward. Hatred, instead of driving men apart, may thus engender a light that liberates men’s souls. The worst of evil may bring about the highest good.

This is the reason why Jesus commands us to reverse the ordinary and customary relations of men. When man loves what he now hates, and hates what he now loves, he will be the opposite of what he is to-day. And if life now is made up of evils and despair, the new, changed life being the opposite of what we now have, will be all goodness and consolation. For the first time we shall know happiness; the Kingdom of Heaven will begin on earth. We will find that eternal Paradise, lost because the first men wished to learn the difference between good and evil. But for absolute love like the love of God the Father, there is neither good nor evil. Evil is overwhelmed by the good. Paradise was love, love between man and God, between man and woman. The new earthly paradise, the paradise regained, will be the love of every man for all men. Christ is He who leads Adam back to the gates of the garden, teaches him how he can enter and live there always.

The descendants of Adam have not believed Christ; they have repeated His words but have not obeyed them, and because their hearts are stubborn, men are still groaning in an earthly Hell, which century by century goes on becoming more infernal. When the torments finally become unendurable, then the damned themselves will suddenly learn to hate hatred, the dying rebels in the extremity of their despair will learn to love their executioners. Then, at last, from the depths of sorrowful 128gloom will shine out the pure splendor of a miraculous spring.

OUR FATHER

The apostles asked Jesus for a prayer. He had told them to pray briefly and secretly, but they were not satisfied with any prayers recommended by the lukewarm, bookish priests of the Temple. They wanted a prayer of their own which would be like a countersign among the fraternity of Christ. Jesus on the Mount taught for the first time the Pater-noster, the only prayer which He ever taught. It is one of the simplest prayers in the world, the most profound which goes up from human homes to God, a prayer neither literary nor theological—neither bold nor servile—the most beautiful of all prayers. But though the Lord’s Prayer is simple, it is not always understood. The century-old, mechanical reiteration of tongues and lips, the formal ritual repetition, have made it almost a string of syllables from which the original meaning has been lost. Reading it over word for word to-day like a new text, which we read for the first time, it loses its ritual banality, and freshens into its first meaning.

“Our Father”; for we have sprung from Thee and love Thee as sons; from Thee we shall receive no wrong.

“Which art in heaven”—in that which is opposed to the earth, in the opposite sphere from matter, in spirit and in that small but eternal part of the spirit which is our soul.

“Hallowed be Thy name”; let us not only adore Thee with words but be worthy of Thee, drawing nearer to Thee with greater love, because Thou art no longer the avenger, the Lord of Battles, but the Father who teaches the joyfulness of peace.