Part 18
They commanded men to renew their souls and at once with all the power which had been given them they aided them to commence this renovation. They did not leave them alone with this command, so difficult to execute. After the prophetic word, “The Kingdom is at hand,” they began their labors; they worked to restore, to cleanse, to make over these souls which had been abandoned by their rightful shepherds. They explained what it was necessary to do to be worthy of the new Heaven on earth and they lent a hand at once to the work. In short, to complete the paradox they assassinated and brought to life. They killed the old Adam in every convert, but their words were the baptism of the second birth. Pilgrims without purses or bundles, they carried with them truth and life,—peace.
“And when ye come into an house salute it,” and this was the salutation, “Peace be with you.” Those who received them gained peace, those who rejected them continued their bitter warfare. Coming away from the house or from the city which had not received them, they were to shake the dust from their feet, not because the dust of the houses and of the cities of those who were not willing to hear them was contaminated, but because shaking it from their feet is a symbolic answer to their deafness and niggardliness of soul. You have refused all, and we will not accept anything from you, not even the dust which clings to our sandals. Because you, made of dust and fated to return to dust as you are, will not give a moment of your time, nor a piece of your bread, we leave behind us the dust of your streets, down to the least grain.
SPEAK YE IN LIGHT
In their faithfulness to the sublime paradox of Him who sends them, the apostles bring peace and at the same time war! All men are not capable of conversion. In the same family, in the same house, there are some who will believe and others who will not. And there will spring up between them division and warfare, the hard price with which absolute and stable peace can be secured. If all men should listen at the same moment to the voice, if all could be transformed on the same day, the Kingdom of Heaven would be founded in a twinkling of an eye, with no bloody preface of battles.
Furthermore those who do not wish to change themselves, because they do not understand the news, or believe themselves already perfect, will attack the converters and accuse them before tribunals. Representatives of wealth and of the old law will be cruel to the poor who are teaching the new law to the poor. The rich are not willing to concede that their wealth is dangerous poverty; the scribes are not willing to admit that their learning is only deadly ignorance.... “They will scourge you in their synagogues.... But when they deliver you up, take no thought of how or what ye shall speak.” Jesus is sure that the poor fishermen, though they have never studied in the schools of eloquence, will find for themselves great words in their hour of accusation. One thought, when it is a great thought and profoundly fixed in the heart, engenders of itself all the derivatory and accessory thoughts, and with them perfect form in which to express them. The arid-hearted man who has nothing in himself, who has faith in nothing, who does not feel, burn, and suffer, though he may have studied long with the sophists of Athens and the rhetoricians of Rome, is incapable of improvising one of those powerful and illuminating answers which trouble the conscience of the hardest judges.
They are to speak therefore without fear and without hiding anything of what has been taught them. “What I tell you in darkness that seek ye in light, and what ye hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops.” With these words Jesus does not ask his Disciples to be more daring than he has been. He has spoken in the darkness, that is obscurity; He has spoken to them, to His first faithful followers, but what He has said to them along deserted roads and in solitary rooms they are to repeat as He Himself has given them the example, on open squares of cities before crowds of people. He has whispered the truth into their ears, because the truth at first might alarm those not prepared for it, and because there were so few of the Disciples that there was no need to cry aloud. But this truth must be cried out now from the heights, in order that all may hear it, in order that there may be no one to say on that Day that he has not heard it.
Men can kill the body of the man who spreads the truth abroad, but they cannot kill his soul; from the death of a single body thousands of new souls will be born into life. But not even your body will die, because there is One who protects it. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.” The birds of the air who do not sow, do not die of hunger; you who do not carry even a staff shall not die at the hands of your enemies.
They have with them a secret so precious that the flesh which contains it will not be allowed to perish. Jesus is always with them, even though from afar. What is done to them is done to Him. A mystic identity is created for all eternity between Him who sends them out and those disciples who are sent. “And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones, a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you he shall in no wise lose his reward.”
Jesus is the fountain of living water destined to quench the thirst of all the weary, and yet He will take account also of the cup of water which shall have quenched the thirst of the least among His friends. Those who carry with them the water of truth, which purifies and saves, may need some day a cup of the stagnant water buried at the bottom of village wells. Any person who will give them a little of this ordinary, material water will have in exchange a well-spring which intoxicates the soul more than the strongest wine.
The apostles who go about with one garment, with a single pair of sandals, without belts or wallets, poor as poverty, bare as truth, simple as joy, are, in spite of their apparent poverty, diverse forms of a king who has come to found a kingdom greater and happier than all kingdoms, to bring to poor people wealth which is worth more than all measurable riches, to offer to the unhappy a joy more profound than any fleshly pleasures. It suits this new King, as it did the kings of the Orient, to show Himself under many forms, to appear to men in diverse garments. But the disguises which He prefers even to-day are these three: Poet, Poor Man, and Apostle.
MAMMON
Jesus is the poor man, infinitely and rigorously poor. Poor with an absolute poverty! The prince of poverty! The Lord of perfect destitution! The poor man who lives with the poor, who has come for the poor, who speaks to the poor, who gives to the poor, who works for the poor! Poor among the poor, destitute among the destitute, beggar among the beggars! The poor man of a great and eternal poverty! The happy and rich poor man, who accepts poverty, who desires poverty, who weds himself to poverty, who chants of poverty! The beggar who gives alms! The naked man who covers the naked! The hungry man who feeds others, the miraculous and supernatural, who changes the men owning false riches into poor men, and poor men into those with real wealth.
There are poor men who are poor because they were never capable of acquiring wealth. There are other poor men who are poor because they give away every evening what they earned that day; and the more they give the more they have. Their wealth, the wealth of this second class of poor men, grows greater in proportion as it is given away. It is a pile which becomes greater as more is taken away from it.
Jesus was one of these poor men. Compared to one of them, men materially rich, rich as the world esteems wealth, rich with their chests of talents, mina, rupees, florins, shekels, crowns, francs, marks, and dollars, are only lamentable beggars. The money-changers of the forum, the great feasters of Jerusalem, the bankers of Florence and Frankfort, the lords of London, the multi-millionaires of New York, compared to these poor men are only unfortunate beggars, despoiled and needy; unpaid servants of a fierce master; condemned every day to assassinate their own souls. The wretchedness of such indigence is so terrible that they are reduced to pick up the stones that are found in the mud of the earth, and grope about in filth. Theirs is a poverty so repugnant that not even the poor succeed in bestowing on them the charity of a smile.
Richness is a curse like work, but a harder and more shameful curse. He who is marked with the sign of wealth has committed, perhaps unconsciously, an infamous crime, one of those mysterious and unimaginable crimes which are nameless in human language. The rich man is either under the burden of the vengeance of God, or God wishes to put him to the test to see if he can succeed in climbing up to divine poverty. For the rich man has committed the greatest sin, the most abominable and unpardonable. The rich man is the man who has fallen because of an exchange: he could have had Heaven and he chose Earth. He could have lived in Paradise and he has chosen Hell. He could have kept his soul and he has exchanged it for material things. He could have loved and he has preferred to be hated. He could have had happiness and he has desired power. No one can save him. Wealth in his hands is a metal which buries him alive under its icy mass; it is the tumor which consumes him still alive in his corruption; it is the fire which burns him and reduces him to a terrible, black mummy, a blind paralytic, black mummy, a ghostly carrion which everlastingly holds out its empty hand in the cemeteries of the centuries, begging in vain for the alms of charitable remembrance.
For him there is only one salvation: to become a poor man, a true and humble poor man; to throw away the horrible destitution of wealth in order to enter again into poverty. But this resolution is the hardest that the rich man can take. The rich man by the very fact that he is sickened by wealth cannot even imagine that the entire renunciation of wealth would be the beginning of redemption, and because he cannot imagine such an abdication, he cannot even deliberate on it, cannot weigh the alternatives. He is a prisoner in the impregnable prison of himself. To liberate himself he must first be free.
The rich man does not belong to himself, but belongs to inanimate things. He has not the time to think, to choose. Wealth is a pitiless master who allows no other masters near him. The rich man cannot think of his soul, bowed as he is under the care of his riches, under his thirst to increase his riches, under the fear of losing his riches, under the material joys which are offered to him by those pieces of matter which are called wealth. He cannot even imagine that his sick, suffocating, mutilated, worm-eaten soul needs to be cured. He has taken up his abode in that part of the world which, according to contracts and laws, he has the right to call _his_, and often he has not even the time, the wish, or the power to enjoy it. He must serve it and take care of it,—he cannot serve or take care of his own soul. All his power of love is absorbed by these material things, which order him about, which have taken the place of his soul, which have robbed him of all his liberty. The horrible fate of the rich man lies in this double absurdity: in order to have the power to command men he has become the slave of dead things; in order to acquire a part (and such a very small part!) he has lost the whole.
Nothing is ours as long as it is ours alone. Outside of himself man can possess, actually own, nothing. The absolute secret of owning other things is to renounce them. Everything is given to him who has refused everything. But he who wishes to grasp for himself, for himself alone, a part of the goods of this world, loses both what he has acquired and everything else. And at the same moment he is incapable of knowing himself, or possessing himself, making himself greater. He has nothing more, not even the things which in appearance belong to him, but to which in reality he belongs; and he has never had his own soul, the one piece of property which is worth possessing. He is the most destitute and despoiled beggar of all the universe. He has nothing. How then can he love others, give to others himself and that which belongs to himself, exercise that loving charity which would conduct him so soon to the Kingdom? He is nothing and he has nothing. He who does not exist cannot change. He who does not possess cannot give. How then can the rich man, who is no longer his own, who has no longer a soul, transform a soul, the only possession of mankind, into something nobler and more precious?
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” This question of Christ’s, simple like all revelations, expresses the exact meaning of the prophetic threat. The rich man not only loses eternity, but, pulled down by his wealth, loses his life here below, his present soul, the happiness of his present earthly life.
“Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” The Spirit and Gold are two masters who will not tolerate any division or sharing. They are jealous; they insist on having the whole man. And even if he wishes, the man cannot divide himself in two. He must be all here, or all beyond worldly things. For the faithful servant of the spirit, gold is nothing; for him who serves gold, “spirit” is a word without meaning. He who chooses the spirit throws away gold and all the things bought by gold; he who desires gold puts an end to the spirit and renounces all the benefits of the spirit: peace, holiness, love, perfect joy. The first is a poor man who can never use up his infinite wealth; the other is a rich man who can never escape out of his infinite poverty. By the mysterious law of renunciation the poor man possesses even that which is not his—the entire universe; through the hard law of perpetual desire, the rich man does not even possess that little which he believes to be his. God gives immensely more than the immensity which He has promised. Mammon takes away even that very little which he promises. He who renounces everything has everything given him; he who wishes a part for himself alone, finds himself at the end with nothing.
When the horrible mystery of wealth is deeply probed, it is easy to see why the masters of men have considered wealth the kingdom of the Demon himself. A thing which costs less than everything else is bought by everything else. A thing which is nothing, the actual value of which is nothing, is bought by giving up everything, is secured by exchanging for it the whole of the soul, the whole of life. The most precious thing is exchanged for the most worthless.
And yet even this infernal absurdity has its reason for being, in the economy of the spirit. Man is so universally and naturally drawn by that nothingness called wealth that he could only be dissuaded from his insensate search for it by putting a price so great, so high, so out of all proportion that the very fact of paying it would be a valid proof of insanity and crime. But not even the conditions of the bargain, the eternal exchanged for the ephemeral, power for servitude, sanctity for damnation, are enough to keep men away from the absurd bargain with the powers of evil. Poor people do not rejoice that they are poor. Their only regret is that they cannot be rich; their souls are contaminated and in peril like those of the wealthy. Almost all of them are involuntarily poor men, who have not known how to make money and yet have lost the spirit; they are only poverty-stricken rich people who have not as yet any cash.
For poverty, voluntarily accepted, joyfully desired, is the only poverty which gives true wealth, spiritual wealth. Absolute poverty frees men for the conquest of the absolute. The Kingdom of Heaven does not promise poor people that they shall become rich, it promises rich people that they shall enter into it when they become freely poor.
SELL EVERYTHING
The tragic paradox implied in wealth justifies the advice given by Jesus to those who wish to follow Him.
They all should give whatever they have beyond their needs to those in want. But the rich man should give everything. To the young man who comes up to ask Him what he ought to do to be among His followers, Jesus answers: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” Giving away wealth is not a loss or a sacrifice. Instead of this, Jesus knows and all those know who understand mankind and wealth that it is a magnificently profitable transaction, an incommensurable gain. “Sell whatsoever thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through nor steal; for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow from thee, turn not thou away, for it is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Men must give and give without sparing, light-heartedly and without calculation. He who gives in order to get something back is not perfect. He who gives in order to exchange with others, or for other material things, acquires nothing. The recompense is elsewhere, it is in us. Things are not to be given away that they may be paid for by other things, but by purity and contentment alone. “When thou makest a dinner or a supper call not thy friends nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen nor thy rich neighbors, lest they also bid thee again, and a recompense be made thee. But when thou makest a feast call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind; and thou shalt be blest, for they cannot recompense thee, for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.”
Even before Jesus’ time men had been advised to renounce wealth. Jesus was not the first to find in poverty one of the steps to perfection. The great Vaddhamana, the Jain, or triumpher, added to the commandments of Parswa, founder of the Freed, the doctrine of the renunciation of all possessions. Buddha, his contemporary, exhorted his disciples to a similar renunciation. The Cynics stripped themselves of all material goods to be independent of work and of men, and to be able to consecrate their freed souls to truth. Crates, the Theban nobleman, disciple of Diogenes, distributed his wealth to his fellow-citizens and turned beggar. Plato wished the warriors in his Republic to have no possessions. Dressed in purple and seated at tables inlaid with rare stones, the Stoics pronounced eloquent eulogies on poverty. Aristophanes puts blind Pluto on the stage distributing wealth to rascals alone, almost as though wealth were a punishment.
But in Jesus the love of poverty is not an ascetic rule, nor a proud disguise for ostentation. Timon of Athens, who was reduced to poverty after having fed a crowd of parasites with indiscriminate generosity, was not a poor man as Christ would have men poor. Timon was poor through the fault of his vainglory, to feed his own desire to be called magnanimous and liberal. He gave to everybody, even to those who were not needy. Crates, who stripped himself of all his property to imitate Diogenes, was the slave of pride: he wished to do something different from others, to acquire the name of philosopher and sage. The professional beggary of the Cynics is a picturesque form of pride. The poverty of Plato’s warriors is a measure of political prudence. The first republics conquered and flourished as long as the citizens contented themselves, as in old Sparta and old Rome, with strict poverty, and they fell as soon as they valued gold more than sober and modest living. But men of antiquity did not despise wealth in itself. They held it dangerous when it accumulated in the hands of the few, they considered it unjust when it was not spent with judicious liberality. But Plato, who desires for his citizens a condition half-way between need and abundance, puts riches among the good things of human life. He puts it last of all, but he does not forget it. And Aristophanes would kneel before Pluto if the blind God should acquire his sight again and give riches to worthy people.
In the Gospel, poverty is not a philosophical ornament nor a mystic mode. To be poor is not enough to entitle one to citizenship in the Kingdom. Poverty of the body is a preliminary requisite, like humility of the spirit. He who is not convinced that his estate is low never thinks of climbing high; no one can feel a zest for true treasures if he is not freed from all material property,—from that winding-sheet which blinds the eyes and binds down the wings.
When he does not suffer from his poverty, when he glories in his poverty instead of tormenting himself to convert it into wealth, the poor man is certainly much nearer to moral perfection than the rich man. But the rich man who has despoiled himself in favor of the poor and has chosen to live side by side with his new brothers is still nearer perfection than the man who was born and reared in poverty. That he has been touched by a grace so rare and prodigious gives him the right to hope for the greatest blessedness. To renounce what you have never had may be meritorious, because imagination magnifies absent things; but it is the sign of supreme perfectibility to renounce everything that you actually did possess, possessions that were envied by every one.
The poor man who is sober, chaste, simple and contented because he lacks means and occasions for anything else, is inclined to look for a recompense in pleasures which do not cost money, and as it were for a revenge in a spiritual superiority where prosperous people cannot compete with him. But often his virtues come from his impotence or from his ignorance; he does not turn from the right course—he cannot afford to do so—he does not pile up treasure because he possesses only the strictly necessary; he is not drunken and licentious because wine-sellers and women of the streets give no credit. His life, often hard, servile, dark, redeems his faults. And his suffering forces him to lift his eyes towards Heaven in search of consolation. We do so little for the poor that we have no right to judge them. As they are, abandoned by their brothers, kept far from those who could speak to their hearts, avoided by those who shrink from the proximity of their sweaty bodies, excluded from those worlds of intelligence and the arts which might make their poverty more endurable, the poor are, in the universal wretchedness of mankind, the least impure. If they were more loved, they would be better men. How can those who have left them alone in their poverty have the heart to condemn them?