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 unavoidably 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 feel
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 light 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 ground? 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 compensation
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 shameful 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
also 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 produce 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 today. 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 gloom will shine out the pure splendor of a miraculous spring.
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