Life of Christ

by Giovanni Papini

And we who are so much lower than God, poor finite creatures, who are scarcely capable of remembering yesterday, who do not know to-morrow, we unfortunate, inferior creatures, have we not many more motives to feel for our brothers in wretchedness what God feels for us? God is the supreme substance of our ideal. To draw away from Him, not to be as we pray that He may be with us, is this not to draw away from our unique destination, to keep perpetually and despairingly out of our reach that happiness for which we are created, which we believe to be the aim of our lives, imagined by us, dreamed of by us, longed-for, invoked and followed in vain through all the false felicities which are not of God? “Let us be Gods,” cries Bossuet. “Let us be Gods. He permits it, that we may imitate His holiness.”

Who will refuse to be like God? Dii estis. Divinity is in us; animality hampers and constricts it, stunting our growth. Who would not wish to be God? Oh, men, are you in very truth content to be only men? Men as you are to-day, half-men, half-beasts? Centaurs without robustness, sirens without sweetness, demons with fauns’ muzzles and goats’ feet? Are you so satisfied with your bastard and imperfect humanity, with your animality scarcely held in leash, taking no step to win holiness save to desire it? Does it seem to you that the life of men as it has been in the past, as it is to-day, is so dear, so happy, so contented that there should be no effort to make it otherwise, entirely different, the opposite of what it is, more like that which for thousands of years we have imagined in the future and in Heaven? Is it not possible to make another life out of this life, to change this world to a world more divine, at last to bring down Heaven and the laws of Heaven upon earth?

This new life, this earthly but celestial world is the Kingdom of Heaven, and to bring about the Kingdom we must transfigure and deify ourselves; become like God, imitate God. The secret of the imitation of God is love, the certain way of the transfiguration is love, love of man for man, love for friend and enemy. If this love is impossible, our salvation is impossible. If it is repugnant, it is a sign that happiness is repugnant to us. If it is absurd, our hopes of redemption are only absurdity. Common sense tells us that to love our enemies is insanity, and to count such love as a prerequisite of our salvation seems simple madness. Love for enemies is like hatred for ourselves; hence it follows that we can only earn beatitude by hating ourselves.

This conclusion should alarm no one, for it has been proved; all the experiments have been tried. It is not true that there has been no time to test it. For thousands of years we have been proving and proving it, over and over. We have tried the experiment of fierceness; and blood answered blood. We have tried the experiment of lust; and lust has left in the mouth the odor of corruption and a fiercer fever. We have forced the body into the most refined and perverse pleasures and found ourselves worn out and heavy-hearted, lying upon filth. We have tried the experiment of the Law, and we have not obeyed the Law; we have changed it and disobeyed it again, and Justice has not satisfied our hearts. We have tried the experiment of intellectualism, we have taken the census of creation, numbered the stars, described the plants, the dead things and the living things, we have bound them together with the thin threads of abstract ideas, we have transfigured them in the magic clouds of metaphysics; and at the end of all this, things have remained the same, eternally the same; they were not enough for us, they could not be renewed; their names and their numbers did not quiet our hunger, and the most learned men ended with weary confessions of ignorance. We have tried the experiment of art and our feebleness has brought the strongest to despair, because the Absolute cannot be fixed in any form; the Many overflow from the One; the carefully wrought work of art cannot arrest the ephemeral. We have tried the experiment of wealth and have found ourselves poorer; the experiment of force and have come to ourselves, weaker. In no thing has our soul found quiet. We have found no welcoming shade, where our bodies can lie down and be at rest; and our hearts, always seeking, always disappointed, are older, weaker, and emptier because in nothing have they found peace, because no pleasure has brought them joy, no conquest, happiness.

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 perforce 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 right 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 pitch? 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 reparation for the suffering of which we are often the real cause, immediate or distant.