THE LUCKY ONES

 

Rereading some old posts on the Beatitudes, I thought that they should be available again, as a single text. It's a longish post, but perhaps coherent enough to be worth it. Feel free to copy if wanted. 

One is always a little shy of writing about something like the Sermon on the Mount, knowing there is nothing one can say that has not been said several thousand times by better men than oneself. This, however, we are reliably told, is no reason not to do it anyway, as that was then, this is now, and those who read this may not have read the others. So, greatly daring, we rush in where angels have frequently feared to tread or even peek. 

 

            I want to begin, as Yeshua did, with the Poor in Spirit. We do not know what he said in Aramaic, but whoever translated the shorthand notes of ‘Matthew the Exciseman’ into clear if clumsy Greek said it thus: ‘Makarioi hoi ptōchoi tōi pneumati, hoti autōn hè basileia tōn ouranōn.’  Let’s try to parse this. Makarios (some us are old enough to remember a Greek political bishop of that name) means ‘fortunate, lucky’ more than religiously ‘blessed’: but St Jerome clearly thought this unworthy of both the speaker and the occasion and translated it asBeati; and all English translators from Wyclif on followed him. A ptōchos in ordinary Greek is a beggar: here, though, it is at once metaphorised by being followed by ‘in the spirit’ (spiritus/pneuma/ruach, the great noun of which the meaning runs from Him Who brooded over the primeval waters in Genesis to the breath that comes out of our nose or mouth.  So it does not necessarily limit itself to the beggar in rags at the gate: a rich man may well be ptōchos tōi pneumati.

            Considering that these people, whoever they are, are fortunate, because theirs is the rule of the heavens, it seems important to find out who and what they are. How is one poor, a beggar, in spirit? To start with the highest: one cannot imagine that the Heavens will be ruled by those who have little of the Holy Spirit. Poor, perhaps, in divine inspiration? Perhaps. And, in a year of Covid-19, there are of course many who are poor in breath and hooked up to respirators; but those surely also are not meant. (If I sound deliberately obtuse it is because I’m trying to recover the way this must have read to those original readers who were not already converted.) The consensus among theologians is that those who are meant are those who are spiritually poor, and especially who are so in their own estimation: those who know that they have few resources and that they are dependent on the Father for literally everything. It is those who have that kind of humility, and therefore that kind of instinctive trusting dependence on the Father, who – beggars as they feel themselves to be – are fortunate, He reassures them. Why? Because theirs is – to them rightfully belongs – the basileia, the kingship, the rule, of the heavens. (ouranos in daily Greek was the sky, the vault of heaven, but also the heaven of the deities, a heaven which in the Old Testament’s Psalm 96/7 had become plural.)

            Goodness. The last shall be first, indeed. At least, those who see themselves as the last, those who do not think much of their powers, those who are, in fact, ‘as little children’, utterly dependent on their parent and content to be so because living in complete unquestioned trust. Those who, as Yeshua puts it later on in the same discourse, do not take thought for the morrow, but take each day as the Father sends it. Those who, like the Samaritan trader, interrupt their business trip when they chance upon a bleeding robbery-victim, take him to the nearest pub, tell the landlord to see to him, promise to pay all costs on the return journey, and go on to their destination. Those who, working in a hospital, do not think much about being saintly but just do their job and say a prayer while doing it. Those who, without metaphysics or other philosophy, can see that ‘heaven and earth are full of Thy glory’ because they are so little occupied with their career plan that they have eyes to spot glory, divinity, in all the tiny nooks and crannies where it lodges. 

            They are makarioi. Already here on earth, because being what they are they are happier than others: not given to bitching, kvetching, grouching, glooming, weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. And this happiness, this good fortune, this makaria, follows them to heaven. To heaven where, true to the ancient Athenian wisdom that governance should be given only to those who do not desire it, they will be placed in charge. It is a comfort to think that Heaven will be ruled by the simple, the einfach, the onefold, those for whom one Father, whose Will they happily do from day to day, is enough. 

            Now, who are they? Referred to here as a class, they might appear to us as people with a specific gift. Poverty of spirit: well, A has it, B doesn’t. Like blue eyes, or an inborn talent for mathematics. But the whole trend of the Sermon is not that way. The Sermon is the new Torah. The fulfilled, not the abolished, Torah. The Torah fulfilled in inwardness. So it is filled with what we should learn, learn to do, learn to understand, learn to become, as was the old Torah: see Psalm 119, which is a lingering love-song to that old Torah. Hence the ptōchoi tōi pneumati, those lucky, fortunate people, those makarioi, are Us. They are what we could be. What we should be. What we may be, if we learn not to be too clever or too ambitious or too rebellious for our own good.  

 

 

 

II

 

Makarioi hoi penthountes, hoti autoi paraklèthèsontai. ‘Fortunate are they that mourn: for they shall be consoled.’

 

            Very different from the first Beatitude, this one. It refers, not to the nature or character of the fortunate ones, but to a condition arising from a specific situation. 

 

            The situation involving the verb pentheō is usually death; and the root of the consoling verb is the same as that of the Paraclete: the Defender sent to help us when we are the prisoner at the bar: the Holy Spirit. This may help us understand what is meant. All of us are mortal; hence all of us except the loneliest will at some time be mourners. Mourning is not the same as grief: it is a reaction to grief. Psychologists speak of the ‘work of mourning’ – a task that needs to be undertaken and accomplished before life can go on. And in traditional societies it is a very outwardly-evident work, undertaken collectively by family, friends and acquaintances; visible and audible in wearing black (or, in the Far East, white) and keening or wailing, in keeping vigil, in sitting Shiva: a work of the community of which the deceased was a part. This is added to, and partly absorbs, the individual grief of the nearest and dearest, thus already providing a level of consolation: a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved or at least reduced.

 

            Beyond this comes the Paraklètos. Why, here, a Defender? A friend summoned to help us in court? In the modern, psychological sense because guilt is always a part of mourning. We feel we could have, should have, been closer, more supporting, more positive, a better friend, lover, spouse to the deceased. In mourning, a part of us is always the prisoner at the bar. And the Judge is He ‘in whose sight no man living is justified’ (Ps. 143:2). As always, for now, He is silent, which only increases our apprehension. Someone once wrote that Hell is the confirmation of all our worst thoughts about ourselves as definitively true.

 

            But here comes the Defender. As invisible to earthly eyes as the Judge, he wraps himself around us and brings to remembrance all that is good in us, and notably the fact that we have been bought back – at a high price. Bought back: ‘redeemed’, like a pledge, or a hostage. And bought back by that other Person of the Trinity: the Judge’s own Son. If we were worth buying back, redeeming, by him at the cost of his own life, and if we recognise and accept that, then surely, says the Defender, we are free? Free, and consoled. For moreover, those for whom we mourned are now in the direct presence and care of Him who loves them as He loves us. 

            

            A final word: prayers for the departed. Benedict XVI said: “praying for one’s departed loved ones is a far too immediate urge to be suppressed; it is a most beautiful manifestation of solidarity, love and assistance, reaching beyond the barrier of death. The happiness or unhappiness of a person dear to me, who has now crossed to the other shore, depends in part on whether I remember or forget him or her; he or she does not stop needing my love.” Whatever the detailed theology, this (typically for JR) allows and encourages us simply to follow our impulse; remembering the Second Collect for Evensong, which reminds us that “all holy desires”, as well as all good counsels and all just works, proceed from the Triune God.

           ‘Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted’ says the Authorised Version. And perhaps here that version of makarioi is truly a good one.

 

 

 

 

III

 

Makarioi hoi praeis, hoti autoi klèronomèsousin tèn gèn: ‘Fortunate are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.’

 

In his television series (later a book) ‘Civilisation’ Kenneth Clark wrote ‘We are so much accustomed to the humanitarian outlook that we forget how little it counted in earlier ages of civilisation. Ask any decent person in England or America what he thinks matters most in human conduct: five to one his answer will be ‘kindness.’ It's not a word that would have crossed the lips of any of the earlier heroes of this series. If you had asked St. Francis what mattered in life, he would, we know, have answered ‘chastity, obedience and poverty’; if you had asked Dante or Michelangelo, they might have answered ‘disdain of baseness and injustice’; if you had asked Goethe, he would have said ‘to live in the whole and the beautiful.’ But kindness, never. Our ancestors didn't use the word, and they did not greatly value the quality — except perhaps insofar as they valued compassion.’

 

I used to agree with this, and think that it was perhaps the Victorians who made the change; and broadly I still do. But there is a precedent, and I believe it is in the Third Beatitude. It is usually remembered, because of the Authorised Version, as saying that ‘Blessed are the meek’, and that translation has caused untold harm. ‘Meek’ is not an adjective most people sense as positive or attractive: it conjures up images of a donkey bowing under a rain of blows from a cruel master’s stick; of oppressed or tyrannised people too passive to rebel; of Nietzsche’s characterisation of Christianity as ‘slave morality’. But if we look at the Greek praos, the meanings given are subtly different. Of things, it is ‘soft, mild’ as in a mild breeze; of animals, it is ‘gentle, tame’ as of a horse not restive; of persons, it is ‘mild, gentle, meek’ – in a case in Herodotus, of one who has been toweringly angry and subsides into being praos again. 

 

So I think it would be much better to translate its use in the Beatitude as ‘gentle’ or ‘kind’, thus providing a precedent for that long-underrated value mentioned by Lord Clark. The praeis, then, are the ‘dear hearts and gentle people’ that Bing Crosby sang (nostalgically) about as living in his home town in Idaho. And who, indeed, live everywhere, though they are only very rarely in the news. And being gentle, they are of course often taken advantage of, trodden upon, ignored, looked down on, sneered at, the butt of those (like Nietzsche) with ‘stronger, tougher’ values. 

 

They also live, though, in all our memories. Almost all of us remember one or more truly gentle persons we knew when we were young. And we are certainly right in that, because the young have an unerring feeling for true gentleness in adults. And later we remember amusing posters calling for ‘random acts of kindness’ which resonated because we had known such acts, and perhaps even from time to time performed them. 

 

Now, why are the gentle fortunate? Because, says Yeshua in a breathtaking sweep, ‘they shall inherit the earth’, no less. The planet, the whole kit and caboodle. Inherit it, as heirs; take possession of it, as the Children of Israel took possession of Canaan; be given it,  be left it, take possession of it, own it. And, my children, this is the new Law. This is the new Torah. The earth will no longer belong to the strong, the mighty, the superrich, the One Percent, the strongmen and dictators, the Führers and the corporations. It will belong to the gentle, the kind. In a way, this continues the First Beatitude, in its reversal of the values we take for granted. The basileia, the kingly rule, of Heaven will belong to the Beggars of the Spirit, while the earth will belong to the Gentle, the Kind. 

 

And while the Greek leaves it at that, the English translators added a twist that Yeshua himself might have approved: they changed ‘will’ to ‘shall’. Now those of us old enough to remember prescriptive grammar recall that ‘shall’ can mean a simple future only in the first person, singular or plural: in the third person, as here, ‘shall’ combines future with imperative in a uniquely compact way. So, faced with the new Law, we should not simply wait for it to happen, but get on with making it so, in every small way we can. 

 

 

 

 

IV

 

‘Fortunate are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be fed.’

Makarioi hoi peinōntes kai dipsōntes tèn dikaiosunèn, hoti autoi chortasthèsontai.

 

In our time, in Western societies, those who ‘hunger and thirst for justice’ tend to be those we see on television demonstrating in the streets for a righteous cause, usually on behalf of some group of people less fortunate. But in simpler societies, the people indicated in this sentence are the downtrodden, the oppressed, the cheated themselves, hungering and thirsting for justice. And the ’justice’ referred to here is not ‘social justice’ but downright legal justice as meted out by a righteous judge. We get a picture of the situations meant when we read the Psalms. Time and again we meet references to false witnesses, to the poor being robbed of what little they have, of unjust judges and neighbourhood tyrants: the overall picture is more that of some Neapolitan slum with its slumlords and its judges in the pocket of the Mafia. Here it is the poor who are the victims and who hunger and thirst for equitable justice, for honest judges, for witnesses who will tell the truth. They do not ask for charity; all they want and need is for decent institutions manned by decent people who will award them what they are entitled to. And this need goes right to the bone. It is not something that it would be nice to have: it is as necessary as the most basic food and drink.

 

The victims are turned out of their meagre lodgings, they are impoverished by being forced – sometimes at sword- or gun-point – to pay the vig on a desperate loan, they are jailed for stealing food for their children. So, in the Psalms that are so often the background, the score, the text for Yeshua’s words and actions, they cry to the heavens: ‘Up, Lord, do something!’ ‘Lord, judge thou my cause: thou seest that I am innocent!’ And all too often, nothing happens, the heavens do not open, the oppressors are not struck by lightning.

 

This, I think, is the background to this Beatitude. In the Reign of God that is now beginning; under the new Torah, the new Law that will go further than the old because it is a Law of Inwardness; the poor who hungerand thirst for justice, for righteousness, for simple decency, will be fed. Again, this metaphor of feeding is so often met in the Psalms -- ‘my soul is satisfied as with marrow and fatness’ (Ps 63:5) – and in the closely-related Isaiah: ‘And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.’ (Is. 25:6) For those who often go hungry, in a world where the rich are fat and the poor mere skin and bones, the promise of being fed, well fed, richly fed, is a pleasure and a joy. 

 

Now: why and how ‘will’ this happen under the new Law? Is it a promise for some unimaginable time in the future, to be realised in one great sweep by a distant Saviour? Is Yeshua’s audience being promised ‘pie in the sky’? I think we should read it differently. The basileia tou Theou, the regnum Dei, the Kingship (not ‘Kingdom’!) of God is that of the Meshiach; the Meshiach in question is Yeshua; therefore, it is here and now. On the other hand, it has to be realised by humans. So the key is the new Torah of Inwardness. What will feed the hungry is the fact that a judge who believes in Yeshua and ‘follows his words’ cannot give unjust judgements; a man who believes in Yeshua, if he is called as a witness, cannot give false testimony; a landlord who believes in Yeshua cannot cheat or brutally evict a tenant family. Once again, what is spoken here is the description of a situation that has not hitherto been brought about but that will be – and in the English translation shall, must be – brought about. 

 

 

 

V

 

Fortunate are the merciful, for they shall experience mercy in return.

Makarioi hoi eleèmones, hoti autoi eleèthèsontai.

 

The Greek text translates with eleos the Hebrew chesèd (ch as in ‘loch’), one of the three words that could become English ‘mercy’. In one sense it can mean ‘kindness’, but not, like praios, as a character trait but rather as a form of action. Chesed is taking care of someone else’s need: Jonathan protects David from Saul in an act of chesed. It is always seen as reciprocal: someone who receives chesed from another is expected to return it. 

 

So this Beatitude does not really introduce something new or unexpected, but rather reminds the audience of the way conventional relationships ought to be. It is really a form of ‘do as you would be done by’. And yet it goes beyond that also. God shows chesed to his people, both collectively, as the people of Israel whom he feeds in the wilderness, and individually in persons such as Abraham, Jacob, David and Job. For human beings it is of course impossible to return this to the Father himself; but He expects them in return to show it to others. So there may well also in this Beatitude be a sense that those who are merciful to others may receive the mercy of the Father, just as in the Lord’s Prayer those who forgive others’ debts to them may receive the forgiveness of their own debts to the Father.

 

In Psalm 85/86:11, ‘Mercy and truth are met together’, it is chesed that is joined to emet; and the ‘truth’ that is also characteristic of the Father is not so much ‘truth’ in the sense of conformity to a factual norm as ‘truth’ in the sense of faithfulness, of being ‘true’ to a loved one, one’s lord, or one’s country. So if that is joined to chesed, it means that Fidelity is joined to Care. 

 

It is both interesting and useful to pursue these words a little, because the English word ‘mercy’ has a connotation of opposition to ‘justice’ which in this case is not present. Our ‘mercy’ is usually closer to ‘compassion’, which translates the Hebrew racham/rachamim. The latter is word that does not imply as much reciprocity as does chesed: its root is linked to the Hebrew word for ‘womb’, hence the otherwise curious English term ‘the bowels of compassion’. So in the case of the fifth Beatitude, one might almost translate the text as ‘Fortunate are those who care, for they shall experience care in return’. And one should always remember that this does not refer merely, or even especially, to human interactions only, but to the very real Care and aid we children receive from our Father in heaven, and which we must pass on. 

 

 

 

VI

 

Fortunate are the clean in heart, because they shall see God.

Makarioi hoi katharoi tèi kardiai, hoti autoi ton theon opsontai.

 

This Beatitude seems simple. Katharos means, at bottom, simply ‘clean’ but goes on to a host of further kinds of cleanliness: ‘purified’ as in water or grain, ‘free of pollution’, ‘free of additions’. And it quickly goes on to the human, where it can mean ‘free of debt’, ‘free of defilement’, ‘honourable’ and even, as for a priest, ‘ceremonially pure’. Kardia is the heart, the seat of feelings and passions, but also the inclination, desire or purpose, and the kardia of wood is its core or pith. And opsontai is the future of horaō, which means ‘to see or behold’.

 

So just as those who are poor in spirit will inherit the earth, so those whose heart is clean, pure, free of pollution, honourable, will see God. Simple. 

 

Yet the Gospel of Yochanan, John, says ‘No one has seen God at any time’. (John 1:18) Has there never been one who is pure in heart? If this were so, the Beatitude would not be a joyous promise but at worst a savage criticism and at best a Yeshuan hyperbole, like ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.’ Surely this is not what is meant here.

 

I suspect that we have to ponder and probe the seeing. We know that here on earth we see ‘as through a glass, darkly’, and that sin, the lack of love, can make us blind to many things. We also know that in such a condition grace may help us: ‘I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.’ Note that we do not help ourselves: Christianity is not like Buddhism, a constant activity of scrupulous self-help to eliminate the dross, to make oneself pure. We are dependent, even for our daily bread. Only grace can make us pure, only the Spirit, the pneuma, the ruach, can make us katharoi. What we can do, what we need desperately to do, is to clear away the junk blocking the doors and windows, and to open them as wide as we can to let the pneuma (which is breath, wind, and spirit) in.

 

And when we do that, when He, that third person of the Trinity, does enter, when the wind blows where it listeth in our soul, then it brings with it the sun: the sun that is also the Son, and the glorious sun that is the emblem of the Father. And then we see God. Not with the eyes of our lurching, rebellious body, perhaps; but with the inward eye that is the bliss, not only of solitude but of faith.

 

(One should perhaps also consider here the astonishing saying that ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ [John 14:9]. If you add this to the present Beatitude, then perhaps the pure in  heart are those who recognise Yeshua for what he is: ‘before Abraham was, I AM’ [John 8:58] – God Himself. Overwhelming.)

 

 

 

VII

 

Fortunate those who make peace, because they shall be called sons of God.[1]

Makarioi hoi eirènopoioi, hoti huioi theou klèthèsontai.

 

The peacemakers are not difficult to understand. The Greek word is exactly the same, composed of ‘peace’ (hence the name ‘Irene’) and ‘makers’ (the same root as ‘poesy’ and ‘poet’). However, their connection with the ‘sons of God’ is a little trickier, especially if one sticks to the Greek. If one goes through to the Hebrew, though, some clarity emerges. First of all, the original peacemaker is God. In the important Amidah prayer, the ending is ‘He Who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace for us and for all Israel. Now say, Amen.’ This authoritative, divine making of peace makes Him oseh shalom; but it is of course not easily imitable by fallible humans. 

 

The human way of making peace is what is meant in Psalm 34:14, which says ‘seek peace, and ensue (pursue) it.’ And ‘peacemakers’ in that sense are rodfei shalom. And the full quotation tells how this may be done: ‘Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.’ And in the Mishnah tractate Avot, Rabbi Hillel says ‘Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving your fellow creatures and bringing them close to the Torah.’ (m.Avot 1:12) Why Aaron? In another version of Avot, Avot de Rebbe Natan, this is explained in a, for us, very useful way: 

   ‘So, too, when two men had quarreled with each other, Aaron would go and sit down with one of them and say to him: ‘My son, mark what thy fellow is saying! He beats his breast and tears his clothing, saying, ‘Woe unto me! how shall I lift my eyes and look upon my fellow!  I am ashamed before him, for I it is who treated him foully.’ ‘ He would sit with him until he had removed all rancor from his heart, and then Aaron would go and sit with the other one and say to him: ‘My son, mark what thy fellow is saying!  He beats his breast and tears his clothing, saying, ‘Woe unto me! how shall I lift my eyes and look upon my fellow!  I am ashamed before him, for I it is who treated him foully.’ ‘ He would sit with him until he had removed all rancor from his heart.  And when the two men met each other, they would embrace and kiss each other.  That is why (of Aaron’s death) it is said, They wept for Aaron thirty days, even all the house of Israel (Num. 20:29)’

 

So now we can understand much better what Yeshua meant with this fundamentally simple, but huge, saying. Those who pursue peace can make peace; and when they make peace, as Aaron did, they shall be called ‘sons of God’. They will, by making peace among men, do what God does. Now, does that make them the equals of the Meshiach, who is the Son? Uncertain; but I find it significant that ‘they shall be called sons of God’. In other words, they will be regarded by others of their human kind as almost divine, so precious is the making of peace. 

 

In the Latin oratio that is the original for the Second Collect of Anglican Matins, God is called auctor pacis et amator, which Cranmer expanded to ‘author of peace and lover of concord’. God makes peace, and loves peace when humans make it. So those who do are fortunate, indeed ‘Blessed’.

 

 

 

VIII

 

Makarioi hoi dediōgmenoi heneken dikaiosunès, hoti autōn estin hè basileia tōn ouranōn.

Fortunate are they who are persecuted because of righteousness, because theirs is the kingship of the heavens.

 

Interestingly, the second part of this sentence is an exact copy of that in the first Beatitude: the kingship of heaven there belonged to the beggars in spirit, here to those who are persecuted for their righteous, or just, behaviour. So either these two share the heavenly reign, or they are the same people; or, conceivably, there is poetry and hyperbole at work here. For later on, in Matthew 14:19, he says of the little children that ‘the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these’.

 

There is no confusion about the words. Basileia means ‘kingdom’ in the sense of the office, not the geography – so ‘kingship, dominion, reign’. The heaven, or heavens, is/are the seat of divinity. So if this basileia is variously attributed to the poor in sprit, the righteous victims of persecution, and ‘such as’ little children, it is the thought, not the words, that needs to be teased out. Let us try to imagine that it might refer to the same people. Who would they be?

 

We have seen that the ptōchoi tōi pneumati are likely to be those who in their love for the Father tend to be simple, uncomplicated; and in fact the expression that instinctively occurred to me was ‘as children’ who trust their parent without complication. So the first and the third indications of who is referred to here agree.

But what about the persecution?

 

Why are they being persecuted? hekenen dikaiosunès: for the sake of – the translations say ‘righteousness’ but the noun can also mean ‘justice’ of ‘(the things of) the law’. They are being persecuted (the verb can also mean ‘prosecuted’) for the sake of, because of, justice – being just, being righteous. They practice that which, in an earlier Beatitude, people hungered and thirsted for. And for doing so, they are persecuted. By whom? The answer is not given, but there are plenty of examples in the New Testament (and in the Old, for that matter). It might be the religious authorities, the Scribes and Pharisees, the High Priests, who after all were on the way to persecuting Him for the very same reason; it might be the Romans, whose persecution of Christians reached a paroxysm under Diocletian and Galerius (303-311 AD), but who persecuted them for nonconformity to new Romanising edicts: among the Christians themselves, such nonconformity may well have been considered ‘righteous’.

 

So what it amounts to is that the simple, the innocent, the poor in spirit are those who know instinctively how to react to the Father’s love, and who therefore are likely to be victims of the kind of authority that demands obedience over any other behaviour, and punishes those who obey a different lordship: ‘my basileia is not of this world’ says Yeshua to Pilatus (John 18:36). 

 

What we see happening at this point in the Sermon on the Mount is the movement away from the declaration of good fortune to those of a certain nature or those in a certain condition, and toward a similar declaration toward those to whom certain grim realities are happening. Yeshua is modulating toward the incipient, and in future overwhelming, pattern of opposition that He will undergo first, and that awaits His followers afterwards. We see here the seeds of the martyrs’ blessedness.

 

 

 

 

IX

 

Fortunate are you, when they reproach you and persecute you and say all wickedness about you, lying, because of me. Be joyful and rejoice exceedingly, because your reward is great in heaven; for so did they reproach the prophets before you.

Makarioi este hotan oneidōsin humas kai diōxōsin kai eipōsin pan ponèron kath’umōn pseudomenoi heneken emou. Chairete kai agalliasthe, hoti ho mismos humōn polus en tois ouranois: outōs gar ediōxan tous prophètas tous pro humōn.

 

This final Beatitude elaborates the previous one, and confirms the movement away from character traits towards events and behaviour. The fortunate are no longer ‘they’ but ‘you’; and the persecution is made more specific. Meanings of the verb diōkō can range from ‘pursue’ as a deer in the hunt, via ‘prosecute’ in the courts to ‘persecute’, so that the place where the lies and the reproaches are uttered may well be the courts, where followers of the Meshiach might be charged with blasphemy in a Jewish tribunal or with nonconformity in a Roman one.

 

 

 

EMET HATORAH  

 

It may, now, be time to put the nine Beatitudes together and consider them as one Torah, or teaching. (Note that it is given to his disciples, not to the multitude.) 

 

The first element is the ninefold anaphora of makarioi. It translates the Hebrew ashrei which, because it opens in anaphora (from Psalm  84:5-6) the central daily Jewish prayer, has given to that prayer its name. As so often, Yeshua’s teaching is very close to the Book of Psalms.

 

Secondly, each example of the makarioi’s fortunate condition is a reward, mostly for enduring what seems unfortunate in an earthly human context – with the exception of being pure in heart. In this way they form part of the central Christian paradox: the last shall be first. The Meshiach and his teaching deliberately disrupt and overturn a great deal of received wisdom. So far from being the new King David, arriving with an army to liberate Israel from Rome by chasing out the occupiers, this unlikely Saviour is an itinerant rabbi in Galil-haGoyim, ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’, not really thoroughly Jewish at all, who wanders around with a dozen talmidim, ‘disciples’, pupils[2], and whose teaching is as disconcerting as it is paradoxical. How can he be the Meshiach? How can he liberate Israel? Well, his idea is that Israel needs liberating from sin more than from Rome; and that such liberation applies as much to the ‘nations’, the Goyim, as to the Chosen People. 

 

The makarioi themselves fall into two categories. There are those who have certain characteristics, and there are those to whom certain things happen. The first are the poor in spirit, the gentle, the caring, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers; the second are those who mourn, those who hunger for justice, and those who are persecuted, especially those persecuted because of Him. The former are cited as examples of a way to be and to live; the latter are cited to show that the miseries of humanity are seen and recompensed by the Father.

 

A picture emerges. The new Torah shows the makarioi, the fortunate, the new Chosen, as being not of a tribe but of a kind: not warlords, not brave fighters, not conquerors, not even prophets: they are simple in the best sense, one-fold, not multiple; their love for, and obedience to, the Father is uncomplicated and unquestioning; they care for and help the unfortunate, not sentimentally but effectively; they heal the wounds of conflict in their surroundings; and they avoid what, and whom, they know to be evil. Very simple, and un-glamorous. Yet as such, they will be – they are -- Ransomed, Healed, Restored, Forgiven; and they will see God, they will rule in Heaven. And when things go pear-shaped, when their loved ones die or when they are pursued, persecuted, prosecuted, and sometimes tortured and executed, they will be given consolation, they will receive a Paraclete, a Spirit to defend them, they will be granted joy and in turn astonish those who see them. And they pray, constantly, like the Meshiach Himself. 

 

One does, finally, see St Jerome’s point. For such people, in such a relation to their loving Father, ashrei, makarioi, may perhaps indeed be translated as ‘Blessed’.

 

---

[1] For the Torah and Mishnah citations, I am indebted to the website Emet haTorah at www.emethatorah.com .

 

[2] A talmid is someone who leaves home to attach himself to a rabbi as his pupil.

THOU DAMN WELL SHALT

 Ἀγαπήσεις κύριον τὸν θεόν σου ἐν ὅλῃ ^]τῇ καρδίᾳ σου καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ ^]τῇ ψυχῇ σου καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ διανοίᾳ σου

I was pondering love, and thinking of writing about it, when I remembered I had in fact already done so. So I dug into the blog's archives, and found a post that said at least the first part of what I was going to write, and said it in such a way I couldn't do better now. So for those who weren't around the first time, or who have forgotten it, here it is again. And there will be a sequel soon.

We all know the commandment “Love thy neighbour as thyself” and most of us have heard it explained by the parable of the Samaritan. But we tend to shy away from the fact that it’s the second commandment, because the first is, well, more bothering. I checked a few of the Greek words used in the passage from Matthew 22, and they are interesting. “Commandment” is entolè: an order or an instruction. So there is no getting away from it: we are ordered, or at least instructed, to love God. How, we ask (or we damn well should), can one be ordered to love anyone? Moreover, we are instructed to do so not in any half-hearted way, but with our kardia, our heart; our  psuchè, our breath, life, or soul; and our dianoia, our intelligence. What on earth (well, maybe not entirely on earth) are we to make of that?

Perhaps in the first place we’d do well to look at “love”. The Greek word used is agapao, which is used in the senses of “to have affection for, to care for” (for example, one’s children or one’s parents), “to honour” and very occasionally “to love” (a lover or a spouse). I remember reading a commentary on St Paul that interpreted the New Testament “love” as not so much an emotion as a being-there-for someone. The Samaritan, in that sense, “loved” the beaten traveller. So if we are told to “love” God it means we are to be there for Him, to care for Him as for a child or a parent, to be such that He can depend on us as they would. You can “love” a parent, or a sibling, you don’t much like on a daily basis: in a pinch you’d be there for them.

But why? Why would we do all that for someone whom we can’t even see, who half the time doesn’t answer our prayers, and who expects us to be “good” all the time? Because, when you get down to it and listen to the people who know Him better, in the first place He loved, and loves, us. (More about this in a minute.) Secondly, we can see Him: we can see Him in His Son, the celebration of Whose birth we are even now preparing. He sent His Son, part of Himself, not just to repair the broken toy we had made of the world, but to show us what He is like, in a form our tiny brains can handle. He couldn’t really have done more.

OK, that was then, a couple of thousand years back; but as the Carthusians I love to read (they are the guys who really spend time on this) tell me, He is still doing it, every hour of every day. Doesn’t much feel like it, we grouch. And the Carthusian says, “Don’t get Him wrong. Don’t confuse receiving His love with feeling His love. Sometimes you feel it, and that’s marvellous. But even when you don’t, you are still receiving it. And if you can get your kardia, your psuchè, and your dianoia round that, how can you not love Him back? He is giving you the example. However grouchy you are, however miserable you are, however much of a shit you are, He is there, loving you and hoping to God you will return His love.”

           

         So how about that entolè, that instruction? Perhaps it’s an instruction in a different sense. My father used to say that he thought moral laws were not so much like penal laws as like natural laws, showing the consequences of certain types of behaviour: if you stick your fingers into the candle-flame, you will get burnt and feel serious pain; if you jump off a cliff, you will fall until the rocks stop you and crack your spine, and you will die. Something like this perhaps applies also to the instruction to love God. It may be an instruction of the kind put in owner’s manuals: if you want your car to work properly, as the manufacturer intended, change the oil every 3,000 miles. If you want your life to work properly, as the Maker intended, accept Him as your parent and treat Him accordingly. Things will then tend to fall into place, often surprisingly. And who knows? You may even end up “loving” Him in the way we small humans normally understand it, as a vast feeling that lights our day.

Image: sunrise over the Sea of Galilee

WHAT JOY - ! - ?

 

“let the righteous be glad and rejoice before God : let them also be merry and joyful.” (Psalm 68)

 

As the number of self-confessed Christian believers continues to dwindle in virtually every Western country, I sometimes wonder if the above quotation is not among the reasons. I suspect that for the author of the psalm there was no real problem: the ungodly and wicked should disappear (and a merciful God could be trusted to take care of that, sooner or later), and those who believed, and who worked at keeping His commandments, should be merry and joyful. That is one of the beauties of Judaism. 

            Christianity, though, can never take this simply: the minute a Christian reads and begins to ponder this verse, and this Psalm, he at once realises that while the righteous should be merry and joyful, he cannot count himself one of them. Who am I, to call myself righteous? Think of all the ways in which I have not lived up to what the Lord expects of me. Think of all the ways in which I have not been constantly alert and awaiting the Bridegroom’s coming. Think of my oil lamp, long since dry. Think of all the poor I have not helped. Think of all the misery of the world I have not done much to allay. Righteous, me? Merry and joyful, me? You’re joking. 

            And yet, he’d be wrong. If, as Luther and the Catholic catechism both say, we are saved by faith, then the criterion for the happiness of being accepted as a loved child of a loving Father is not whether we are good enough but whether we honestly believe that Yeshua bar-Yosef was the Meshiach, that he was crucified for us, and that he arose from the dead. And moreover, it is not even demanded of us not to have doubts: as long as we incorporate those into our prayers and say “Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief”, we are accepted. And being accepted, we are what ‘King David’ called righteous; however unperfect we are in our daily life. And as such, we have every reason to be merry and joyful. 

            Ah, but. In our relentless search for obstacles, we say, OK, fine, but what about all the people around me whom I love but who feel not the slightest interest in, let alone need for, faith in their life, and who cheerfully live, not in wickedness at all, but in perfect ungodliness? If I try to convert them it will only drive them further away; if, as the Church sometimes counsels, I live a noticeably good life while being known as a believer, they will simply think I’m a good man and make no connection whatever to my faith. So will they, in the Psalm’s words, perish as wax melteth before the fire? A friend’s evangelical mother said to her daughters in all seriousness how sad it made her to think that after she died she would never see them again, because she, being a believer, would go to Heaven while they, being unbelievers, would not. (She did not actually mention Hell, but the implication was there.) I’m prepared, if you insist, to be merry and joyful, but what about my faithless loved ones? 

            I believe – not in the sense of full faith, but in the sense of a trusting guess – that the answer to that question is just that: trust. I think that if we have faith, we need to trust the God we believe in and love back to deal with our loved ones as He, the God of love, thinks fit. “Thy will be done” applies. You may call it smorgasbord Christianity, but we are asked to trust our Father’s wisdom rather than even the collective and cumulative theorising of centuries of theologians. I suspect that on this particular question He is telling us to butt out and leave it to Him.

            Ah, but. In our relentless search for obstacles, we say, OK, fine, but what about the people whose houses in Mariupol are flattened by missiles; the people who are fleeing wildfires everywhere; the women maltreated by Taliban or murdered by ex-spouses; the farmers committing suicide because their farms will not feed their families; what about the sheer accumulated misery of humankind? How can anyone who has a heart even think of being merry and joyful, righteous or otherwise? Now that everyone on this overcrowded and overheated planet is deemed to be my neighbour, how can I not be devastated every single day? How dare I be merry and joyful?

            I believe – and yes, in the sense of faith – that such a question puts us before some basic choices. Seeing all this, we have to make up our minds. Either 1) there is no God; 2) there is a God, but he is monstrous in uncaring or evil; 3) there is a God of love, and we are getting something wrong. If our faith opts for 3, then we have to figure out what we are getting wrong. 

            The “neighbour” may be the clue we need, as it will send us back to the parable of the Good Samaritan. He – remember – was a businessman on a business trip. Seeing the wounded victim he stopped, took time and energy to administer first aid and set him on his own horse, then took him to the nearest inn, told the landlord to look after him and said he would pay the bill on his return. He then continued his business trip. His “neighbour” was not someone of his own tribe or nation, but it was not someone 1500 miles away either. It was someone who turned up. An inconvenience, but not a sacrifice.              What, then, is the answer? Faced with the world’s misery, the answer seems to be: Live your life and keep an eye open for need. If there is need on your way, stop and do what you reasonably can to take care of it. If and when it goes beyond your capacity, get help. If there is not at this time need on your way, carry on while staying alert. And as for distant miseries, pray to the Father that he may find and send Samaritans in other places. And having done all that, be merry and joyful; for joy and merriment are gifts of God it is ungrateful and graceless to refuse. 

 

image: dancing at a Lebanese wedding

FURTHER TO THE KATHAROI

 

Makarioi hoi katharoi tèi kardiai, hoti autoi ton theon opsontai.

Fortunate are the clean in heart, because they shall see God.

I wrote a blog post on this as I did on the other Beatitudes, and thought at the time that the “seeing” was through the Spirit. This may be true, but another thought occurred to me. In John 14 (8), Philip the disciple says to Yeshua, ‘Show us the Father and that’s enough for us,’ and Yeshua replies, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still don’t know me? He who has seen me has seen the Father.’

This stunning reply should make us think, inter alia about the Beatitude. ‘No one has ever seen God’, true: but ‘Who has seen me, has seen the Father.’ Could it be, then, that whoever saw, and sees, Yeshua and believes, is pure in heart? For he, the Meshiach, the Anointed, is, then, the visible form of the Creator. And the cleanness, the purity, of heart that is required to see, really to see, is faith. Because it is the eye of faith that sees through the lean, tough, dark-haired, brown-skinned man, the Father of an infinite majesty, the God of endless, suffering love.

Tricky for Philip. Trickier for us, who do not see him face to face. There are, possibly, three ways through this enigma. 1) First, the icon. Not necessarily an Orthodox icon: it can be a painting or a sculpture, a Gospel scene, a Pietà, or a crucifix. Really to see such an icon, with the eye of faith, is perhaps to come close to seeing Him, and through Him, the Father. 2) Secondly, meditation. In the first part of an Ignatian meditation we are asked to take a Gospel scene and to recreate it as vividly as possible with our own mind, assigning ourselves the place of a minor character. If we do this with complete engagement, we may again, perhaps, come close to seeing Him, and seeing through Him. 3) And finally, we should remember that He also said that ‘‘whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ (Mt 25:40) If, then, we are to look on any man and see Yeshua, are we to look on any man and see the Father? The mind not only boggles but rebels. And yet. What does the eye of faith behold? It sees, in the beaten and wounded traveller, a neighbour. It sees, in the down-and-out begging for food, Yeshua. It sees, in the man Yeshua Bar-Yosef, the Father. What have they all in common? Suffering. 

If, now, we go to the end of this trail of learning, what do we find? A Father who suffers. A Father who is denied and rejected, a Father who continually sees his love thrown back in his face. Could it be that that is exactly what Yeshua meant us, through Philip, to learn? We see the Son on the Cross. We see the Father in the Son. How much discernment does it take to draw the conclusion? 

KIDDING?

 

We all know the Gospel story of Yeshua calling up a little child, pointing to it, and telling the disciples and passers-by that whoever is not ready to accept the Kingdom (read: kingship) of God like such a child cannot enter there. But what does he mean? Those who have small children love them desperately but in no way and at no time idealise them. They are adorable, selfish, slobby, brattish, quarrelsome and difficult at meals. Yeshua, as a 31-year-old bachelor, might have idealised the child in question; but as one who was Divine as well as very human, it’s doubtful. So, knowing everything about children, how could he say that that is what we should become to be citizens of the Kingdom?

            I think he was thinking first of all about a child’s simplicity. If a little girl is standing by the roadside with her father, waiting to cross, she sticks up her hand without looking, knowing that it will find the big strong secure hand beside her. A small boy who wants something from his parents asks for it. (He may or may not get it, but that doesn’t stop him asking.) Children, in relation to adults they trust, are simple and direct.

            Secondly, children naturally and necessarily experience love as a gift. They know that adults are powerful in ways that they themselves are not, and so they know that love is something they receive. Not necessarily in the form of concrete gifts, but in the form of hugs, comfort, bedtime stories, occasional treats, and Winnie-the-Pooh. If they are fortunate enough to have such love on a daily basis, they take it for granted. One day, if they meet other children who do not have it and are miserable, they will begin not to take it for granted. But meanwhile, they regard it as natural. And return it, naturally. 

            Thirdly, how do they love? First of all, it’s a love of belonging. My Daddy’s mine. My Mummy’s mine. Jackie is my brother. Lucy’s my sister. This is my house. Bingo is my dog. They all belong to me – this I know. What I don’t know, or can’t put into words,  is that I belong to them, and that thus we belong to each other.

 Then, it’s without question. Sometimes they hate Daddy, sometimes they love him, but they don’t doubt him. 

 

            Here, surely, there are lessons for those of us who wondered what the man across from us was talking about when pointing to the little kid. In relation to our Father (who is in heaven), be simple. Be direct. When you receive blessings in whatever form, recognise them as gifts from that large being who loves you. Give him a hug in return. Then go on with your day, and learn to live the  same way with those around you. If it moves, hug it. If it hits you, hit it back smartly and then hug it while you both cry. If you break something, confess and say you’re sorry (and mean it), and He will forgive you. Don’t be clever and doubt him; don’t be clever and try to outsmart him; if you want to be clever, find new ways of loving him and loving your neighbour. Channel your inner 7-year-old.

 

[What, a friend’s voice whispers in my mind, if you have never known this kind of loving happy childhood? If yours was miserable, violent, poor, and abusive? Well, I think that he would tell you a) to realise that you are now loved for real, b) that you can therefore know that trust is possible, and that c) you can therefore tell him all your past miseries, knowing that he will never tell anyone and that he will love you all the more for having told him.]

[And if you are handicapped or sick or in pain, tell him that and listen. You may hear him whisper that he knows what pain is like, he’s been there before you, and that he hopes you’ll remember what he said to the Good Thief on the cross next door. He may not be able to make it all go away, but he will give you without stint, give you strength and endless love.]

HOCUS POCUS

 

            This term for threadbare illusionism was coined by the Reformation to represent the ‘ordinary’ (i.e. non-Latinate) person’s hearing and interpretation of the priest’s words of consecration at the altar: Hoc est corpus meum, ‘This is my body’ – Christ’s words at the Last Supper, instituting the Eucharist. The Roman Catholic belief that at these words the substanceof the wafer was changed from bread into the real body of Christ – ‘transubstantiation’, a word never used by the Church itself – was seen by Reformers as a degeneration from a mystic truth into a form of magic.

            Rather than concentrate, as the Reformers did, upon what happens to what during the Consecration, I want to think for a moment about the Why. Why did Yeshua Meschiach create not merely a solemn moment (it was, after all, a Goodbye event) but at that moment a ceremony of symbolic sacrifice, to be repeated (‘Do this, whenever ye shall drink it, in remembrance of me’)?

            It is a fearful thing to attempt to enter into the workings of the Divine Mind. But between waking and sleep, I like to meditate drowsily on the life, thoughts and actions of Yeshua bar-Yosef before he became the Meshiach in deed as well is in potential. And at such moments I imagine him, with his brother Ya’akov, shaping a scroll-case for a wealthy client, Mr Salamon, in the city of Tsippori (Sepphoris in Greek) about five miles up the hill from Nazareth, and discussing the then-popular topic of the Meshiach and his coming. Unlike Ya’akov, who liked to think of that magical Liberator as a new King David arriving with an army out of the desert, Yeshua imagined an itinerant rabbi, a healer, preaching the Law and the Prophets, but in a different way, a way that stressed inwardness rather than outward observance.

            To the question (asked, either by Ya’akov or by the interested Mr Salomon), ‘But how can an itinerant rabbi walking around Galilee liberate Israel?’ Yeshua, after considerable thought, replies ‘I’m not sure his purpose is to liberate Israel from the Romans. I suspect it is to liberate Jews and Romans both – and Greeks, and others – from sin, and from evil.’ And to the obvious next question, ‘How?’, he replies by citing his study of the prophet Yeshayahu (Isaiah), who shows somebody very like the Meshiach going ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’: being, in other words, the sacrifice that atones for the sins of others.

            Joe Rat, the sainted Joseph Ratzinger, reminds us, in his Jesus of Nazareth, that our culture has largely forgotten the concept of atonement and the need for it. It responds to a very deep element of our human and social nature: an evil committed cannot simply be forgotten as if it never happened. Before we (individuals, or society as a whole) can ‘move on’, it must be atoned for. This not the same as punishment, but something needs to be done to ‘appease the gods’ in the old term, to right the wrong, to restore the balance. Hence the idea of a sacrifice, the surrendering of something precious. 

            Following Yeshayahu, Yeshua explains that the Meshiach can liberate humanity from sin by himself being that sacrifice, that offering. After all, it was always already likely that those who consider themselves the guardians of the Law and the Prophets would not take kindly to one who preached following them differently: they would almost certainly act against him, and given the importance attached to even minor points of observance, they might well go so far as to condemn him to death.

            I imagine him explaining this to Ya’akov and Mr Salomon as, the lovely scroll-case duly installed, they sit down and drink a glass of wine to celebrate. There is a long silence, as the others assimilate this stupendous concept. And then Mr Salomon says, ‘I think I understand, young man. But tell me: such a liberation by sacrifice may wipe out the sin of the whole present generation; but what about the unborn? You can’t efface it pre-emptively for coming generations. Imagine our great-grandchildren. How would the Meshiach’s liberation apply to them?’

            At that moment, Yeshua (we are still a year or two away from Yohanan’s baptism of him) does not yet know the answer to that question. But at some point before that fateful Supper (whether or not it was a Pesach meal) he understood that the best, perhaps the only, way for future men and women to be the beneficiaries of the Meshiach’s sacrifice was to institute a ritual, a ceremony of the utmost solemnity, in which the sacrifice was mystically repeated, in their own time and era. In that way, there would be a genuine Atonement for sin and evil in each generation. And each man and woman taking part in it would be able to feel, in the deeply-moving words of a Victorian hymn, ‘Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’. In other words, reborn. 

Image: Laure Albin-Guillot, 'Consecration' from Missa Est by Daniel-Rops

THE LOWDOWN

 

I’ve often said that the worst thing, emotionally speaking, humans can do to one another is humiliation. The Nazis knew this, when they set elderly Jewish gentlemen to cleaning sidewalks on their knees with a toothbrush. Schoolchildren often have a diabolically fine sense of it, when they find just the right insult for the victim of their bullying. And at the other end of the scale governments upon occasion do it to whole countries. 

            Humiliation is almost never forgiven, and never forgotten. A woman in her mid-eighties remembers with crystal clarity the day when a grade-school teacher made an example of her for some transgression, in front of the whole class. And thousands of Russians now support their murderous and vengeful Führer because a generation ago, when Berlin’s vile wall came down, they felt their country had been humiliated beyond bearing. 

            The French language has two words for “pride”: orgeuil and fierté. The former is the chief of deadly sins; the latter is the healthy pride one may feel in an achievement of one’s own, of one’s daughter’s, of one’s football team’s or of one’s country’s. English has an additional word of great value, “self-esteem”: the form of psychologically healthy, indeed essential, pride that allows one to hold up one’s head, to walk tall. In humiliation, all these are battered, as one is made to feel worthless and of no account. The word, after all, comes from humilis, low, close to the humus, the earth, the soil, the mud.

            What, if anything, defends us against humiliation? One may take refuge in overweening pride, orgeuil, but that is a bitter draught that corrodes: not for nothing is it the chiefest of all sins. No: there is one defence, and I suspect one only, against this terrible condition. T.S. Eliot expressed it memorably and with perfect accuracy in “Four Quartets”:

 

                                    the only wisdom we can hope to acquire

                                    is the wisdom of humility. Humility is endless. 

 

In what is nearly a form of homeopathic medicine, we find a word with the same root, the root of eartth, of soil: humility. He that is down need fear no fall: he that is low, no pride. Humility does not mean hating or feeling contempt for oneself: humility means the openness and the generosity of looking at most other people with admiration for their unique talents or achievements, and not thinking of oneself as better than they. And it protects one against humiliation, because if that’s the way you feel and someone snide snarls “you’re not much” you quite naturally feel that he has a point, unpleassant though he is about it. It is hard, if not impossible, to humiliate a genuinely humble person. 

            What message is there here at the level of nations? A major reason for the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party was the Treaty of Versailles, which in sealing the Allied victory after the Great War humiliated the German nation as well as bankrupting it. And it has been said that one reason for the present war in Ukraine is the humiliation Putin and many Russians feel was infliucted upon their country at the fall of the Soviet Union. “In victory, magnanimity” prescribed Churchill:  a phrase sometimes remembered but rarely acted upon. 

            It would be a Good Thing if every government’s foreign policy included a constant, recognized, and expressed, contemplation of every other nation’s especial talents and achievements. Thus we, as citizens, might be taught to look upon, say, the Turkish nation with admiration for its long history of Ottoman civilization and governance; to admire the Moroccans for their medieval philosophers; to be grateful to Spain for teaching us a certain kind of pride and courage, and to Portugal for introducing us to the exquisite melancholy of saudade. We might then tell our Russian neighbours on this planet how we admire the depth and intensity of feeling that their particular culture has made known to us, and compliment the Dutch for having almost invented the precious quality of religious tolerance. We might send a memorandum to the Chinese, gravely thanking them for having presented the world with the wisdom of Confucius. And who knows? the climate of international relations might possibly improve to the point where the other kind of climate would actually benefit.