“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 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 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 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. 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 pagans, 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 judges 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.