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VIII. Jesus (1954) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Next>> If we were to assemble together all of the philosophers we have considered thus far and we gathered together all of the qualities of the creative human person that they discovered, qualities that can only be developed in freedom, qualities that make man a being that can be, that can enable him to become the human being, then we would find that not only did none of these men ever experience sin, but they never experienced themselves-because a self experience is something that, philosophically speaking, might make us agree that there is such a thing as sin! And I don't mean sin in the sense in which it is religiously understood today, because it is precisely in that sense that Jesus wanted to deliver us from sin, and if we had understood him he would have done so long ago. Responsibility and a feeling of guilt; all of this comes only with self reflection when human reason becomes completely critical of itself, and at this very moment it must become clear to the philosophical mind (which Jesus of Nazareth was) that the others, so to speak, had left out the decisive thing, they had left out the will, and they had done so quite rightly and innocently. Anyone who has become creative or who is creative is always far from one experience, the experience that this very creativity took a decision, and so it is with the men we have been considering. It seemed to them so natural, it seemed that way to Socrates for instance, and there is a certain naiveté in his saying "virtue is knowledge" or "virtue is wisdom" although he meant, as we have seen, that in not being able to know absolute wisdom we can keep going in the direction of it by developing our virtue. Nevertheless, there is a naiveté in it, and that is in his failure to see that there might be beings in the world who are as gifted for reasoning as Socrates, as gifted and as brilliant, but who will not go the way of reasoning because either they make a fundamental decision against it, or the decision has been made for them. This decision is not a conscious one, but it is a decision, and I talked about it once before when I said that one has to make a decision for freedom, because otherwise freedom cannot be reached. Jesus knew that there are always people in the world who make a constant decision against freedom, or, as he himself would have put it, against goodness. He knew that sin is the negative sign of freedom -- that man can lose himself, and quite consciously so, and that this is a matter of the heart. But what is the heart? What does he mean by the heart? To understand that, we must understand another thing he broke with. In this context, he analyzes a Hebrew term, the Am-ha-Aretz, the "unlearned man", the very man who was condemned in the Jewish world of his time, because Rabbi Hillel (perhaps the greatest Rabbi during the time of Jesus) who said:
which became a Christian saying as. well, also said:
He must be a sinner. He is condemned by definition. With this Jesus of Nazareth broke completely. Instead, he told them the exact opposite was the case, because if you believe, so to speak, that God is the Law, then the Law is also God, and you have no contact with God anymore. Absolute obedience is your fate. The tax collector who does not enter the Temple, because he does not feel dignified enough and just hits his breast and says "God have mercy on my soul, I am a poor sinner" -- he is the real religious man; not the Pharisee who goes straight into the Temple and thanks God for not having made him like other people, for making him better. He has taken the judgment of God upon himself; this is his sin, to pass judgment upon other human beings positively or negatively, because nobody can do that. Nobody is entitled to say "I am lost forever" and nobody is entitled to say "I am saved forever", because he cannot know the value of his own person, nor can anybody else know it, and nor can he know the decisive value of anybody else's. Jesus established the infinite value of the human person by a religious saying: Namely, that every single person is of divine value. We can, as philosophers, question this divine value and I certainly do so, that is, if we don't want to take it as a value given by God, because it can be argued that the value of an atom is also a value given by God, nevertheless it is not divine, although it is divinely made. If on the other hand we take it as the church does, that is, we think there is a divine soul in man that has to be saved, then I am ready to accept it as a metaphor, but as a metaphor for one definite thing. The infinite value of every human person which everyone, whether believer or nonbeliever can recognize and have insight into. With this recognition and insight the infinite value is established. How? In our time a philosopher living under the conditions of modern nihilism, the French Existentialist Albert Camus, had the courage to speak out, and he said that every guarantee we have had against murder up until now has been a guarantee which could be sustained only by belief. As soon as we discard every belief (which we have) then we will be driven by the logic of our own thinking to find that there is no valid reason against murder. Furthermore, the whole of philosophy will not be able to find a valid reason that could be transmitted to every reasonable thinking person which would convince him that murder must not be done. This conclusion makes much for the nothingness of our times. When we see the believers in modern totalitarianism coming who tell us "You must only obey orders!" and we try to say to them "But you know thou shalt not kill", then we find that it is to no avail. We are not talking to people who believe in that any more and we are lost. Jesus of Nazareth is the philosopher who discovered the very reason why we cannot take the life of another human being and still remain human, and he established it with those few words on the cross when he said "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do". Yes, philosophically speaking, the man who takes the life of another man cannot know what he is doing, because a human being is the only being in the world which can be, which is an infinite possibility of creative acts. Judgment can never be passed on him absolutely and it takes almost the belief in a hereafter to execute even a murderer, because we have to say to him "And may God have mercy on your soul", which means that we are aware we have not passed definite judgment since definite judgment cannot be passed. But if we did not believe in a hereafter even the killing of murderers might become harder (though it would still be understandable). What Jesus meant was that the infinite value of every person consists in the fact that man and only man is an evaluator, and who can evaluate an evaluator except God? That is how it can be stated philosophically, and its meaning is absolutely clear. So there is a reason against murder. Choosing between life and death is the choice Jesus of Nazareth has put before us, but it is eternal life or eternal death, not eternal life or eternal damnation, which is a very different thing. When in order to make Christianity into more than a transpolitical institution, or rather less than it, that is, into a half political institution, because it was necessary to tame and convince its converts, then the absolute belief in a hereafter came into being in the form of eternal salvation and eternal pain. In the high Middle Ages, when all of these things came to be an issue, one of the greatest of our poets, Dante, trying to put the teachings of Saint Thomas Aquinas into poetry, invented the following inscription which, in his Inferno, is placed over the entrance to Hell: GIUSTIZIA MOSSE IL MIO ALTO FATTORE
JUSTICE MOVED MY HIGH MAKER
Love? Oh No, that cannot be, because Hell is the work of eternal hatred and hatred is something that stands in a dialectical relation to love. Nobody who can hate a person he has loved before has ever loved. Hatred is the absolute opposite of love. Anyone who is able to hate the smallest thing in the world might lose the capacity to love his most beloved person, because the capability of hatred is the capability of death. |
