BEFORE LOVE

BEFORE LOVE

 

 

Those who refuse Christ have many easily understandable reasons for not accepting Him: they would need to renounce their old personalities and they cannot see that they would gain much by this renunciation; and they are afraid of losing the dusty rubbish which seems magnificence to them. People who deny Christ as an excuse for not following His teachings have justified themselves of late by another reason, a learned reason: they claim that He said nothing new. His words can be found in the Orient and in the Occident centuries earlier. Either He stole them, or plagiarized unconsciously. If He said nothing new, He is not great; if He is not great, there is no need to listen to Him. Let the ignorant admire Him, the stupid obey Him, and 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 repetition 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 calmly to lead their filthy lives as if the Gospels had not been addressed to them as to other men.

After the announcement of the old Law there was peace 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, and 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, be cannot improve it. . . . Whence come disorders? They spring up because men do not love each other. Workmen and children have no loving 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 leaders; the father has no indulgence for the son, the older brother for the younger brother, and 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 gangsters 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 family love and general benevolence, necessary to the good ordering of kingdoms, but he did not dream of condemn­ing hate. In the same Lun-Yu, where the words of Thseng-Tse are read, we find these other words, taken from the oldest Confucian text, the Ta-Hio: "Only the just and human man is capable of justly loving and hating men."

His contemporary Gautama recommends love for men, for all men, even the most wretched and despised. And the same love is to be felt for animals, for the smallest among animals, for all living beings. In Buddhism love of man for man is only a salutary exercise for the total eradication of self-love, first and strongest prop of life. Buddha wishes to suppress suffering; and to suppress suffering he sees no other way than to drown personal souls and universal souls in Nirvana,—in nothingness. The Buddhist does not love his brother out of love for his brother, but out of self-love,—that is, to avoid suffering, to overcome egotism, to approach absorption in the stream of life. His universal love is cold and self-seeking, egotistical, a form of indifference, stoical in grief as in joy.

In Egypt every dead body took with it into the tomb a copy of the book of the dead, an anticipatory apology of the soul before the tribunal of Osiris. The dead praises himself: he has been righteous and has given to the needy, "I have starved no one! I have made no one weep! I have not killed! I have not commanded treacherous murder! I have defrauded no one! I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, a boat to the traveler halted on his journey, sacrifices to the gods, funeral banquets to the dead." This is righteousness and these are works of mercy (had they really as a matter of fact done all that they claimed?) but we find no love here, much less love for enemies. If we wish to know how the Egyptians treated their enemies let us read an inscription of the great king, Phiops I Miriri: "This army went in peace; it entered as it pleased into the country of the Hirushaitu. This army went in peace; it laid waste the country of the Hirushaitu. This army went in peace; they cut down all their fig trees and their grape vines. This army went in peace; they set on fire all their houses. This army went in peace; it massacred their soldiers by myriads. This army went in peace; it carried away their men, women and children in great numbers, and for this, more than for any other thing, did his Holiness rejoice."

Zarathushtra also leaves a law for the Iranians. This law commands the faithful of Ahura Mazda to be kind to their companions in the faith. They are to give clothes to the naked and they are not to refuse bread to the hungry working man. We are still concerned with material charity towards those who belong to us, who serve us, who are our neighbors. There is no talk of love.

It has been said that Jesus added nothing to the Mosaic Law, and only repeated the old Commandments. "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burn­ing, wound for wound, stripe for stripe." Thus speaks Moses in Deuteronomy, "And thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shalt have no pity upon them." (Deut. 7:16) 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." (Exod. 23:9) 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 dwells with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself. . . ." (Lev. 19:33-34) 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." (Lev. 19:18) 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." (Lev. 19:18) 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 hates thee lying under his burden, and would forbear to help him, thou shalt surely help with him." (Exod. 23:4-5) Oh, great kindness of Jewish antiquity! It would be so sweet to drive the ass further, so that his master would have more trouble in finding him: and when you see the ass fallen down under his pack-saddle, how amusing it would be to smile in your beard and pass on but the heart of the old Jew was not hardened to this degree: an ass was too precious in those times and those conditions: no one could live without at least one ass in the stable, and everyone had an ass. To­day yours has escaped and tomorrow 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 saddle strap 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 then); let burning coals fall upon them . . . let them be cast into the fire; into deep pits, that they rise not up again. (Psa. 140:9-10) 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!" (Psa. 35:8-9)

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." (Prov. 20:22) The enemy is to be pun­ished, but by hands more powerful than yours. 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." (Prov. 25:21) This is progress: pity does not stop with the ox, but extends itself also to the owner. But the marvels of love of the Sermon on the Mount cannot have sprung from these timid maxims hidden away in a corner of the Scriptures.

But there is, they say, Hillel, the Rabbi Hillel, the great Hillel, master of Gamaliel, Hillel Hababli or the Babylonian. Phis 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 over turner 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 vindication. 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.