Opinionator | Returning to the Sermon on the Mount
Returning to the Sermon on the Mount
April 19, 2012 9:30 pm April 19, 2012 9:30 pm
"Forget the church, follow Jesus" is the cover message on a recent issue of Newsweek, featuring an essay by Andrew Sullivan. He maintains that what's really important about Christianity is the moral code of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, freed from the dubious theology and corrupting politics that have plagued the history of the institutional church. The idea is widely attractive, with non-Christians and even some atheists professing admiration for what Sullivan (quoting Thomas Jefferson) calls "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered."
Why should we think that the world would be a better place if everyone followed Jesus' path of renunciation?
What is this code? There's no doubt that the core message is love. In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, "The entire Law of the Gospel is contained in the new commandment of Jesus, to love one another as he has loved us." But what does it mean to love someone? As Aquinas put it (citing Aristotle), at a minimum "to love is to will good for someone"; that is, to do what we can to see that a person has a good life.
But what is a good life? We might, thinking of the core message of Jesus, say that it's a life of loving others. But this response just takes us in a circle. Jesus tells us that to lead a good life we should love one another, but loving one another requires helping one another lead good lives. Unless we first know what it is to lead a good life, Jesus' law of love gives us little guidance on how to live.
This is no mere abstract worry. There are many competing conceptions of a good life. Utilitarians like John Stuart Mill think it is one that maximizes the pleasure of mankind as a whole. Others, like Immanuel Kant, think it is a life of virtue for its own sake, even if this requires renouncing pleasure. Followers of Aristotle think it requires flourishing through various intellectual, psychological and social virtues. How a life of love for others should be lived depends on which conception of a good life is correct.
The Sermon on the Mount, however, does not offer a clear view of what makes for a good life. Many seem to think Jesus is saying little more than be nice to everybody. Others see a call to a heroic life of total non-resistance or self-sacrifice. Still others hear him as requiring little more than an enhanced version of the Ten Commandments (e.g., avoiding not only murder but also anger, not only adultery but also lustful desires).
Almost all Christians ignore many of the things Jesus said on the Mount. Who literally takes no thought for their lives or for tomorrow? Who never resists evil? Who gives to anyone who asks? Who says "Hit me again" to an unjust attack? There may be ways of integrating such injunctions into our morality without reducing them to banalities, but the bare text of Jesus' sermon doesn't tell us how to do this.
Some of the saints have tried to live up to something like Jesus' literal sayings. Sullivan cites Francis of Assisi, who rejected all the ordinary human enjoyments and achievements in favor of what Sullivan calls a "religion of unachievement." He even denied himself simple physical comforts. (Sullivan cites Francis' angry rejection of a pillow a friend offered to make him more comfortable on his deathbed.)
We can imagine that there might be a few individuals for whom such a life would make sense. But this sort of "unachievement" is absurd as a general ideal of human excellence. It is, as Sullivan says, a "renunciation" of all human values in order to "transcend our world and be with God." But what reason is there to think that the world would be better, even from God's viewpoint, if everyone renounced all but the bare minimum of human goods?
Another problem is that Jesus does not explicitly or decisively endorse central contemporary values like democratic government, the abolition of slavery and the equality of women. Proponents of these values have found inspiration and support from his morality of love, but Jesus' words alone do not push us in their direction.
None of this is to say that the Sermon on the Mount is not a source of profound moral truth. But this truth is accessible only by reading the sermon in the light of 2,000 years of interpretation and development. Much of the history of Christianity consists of trying to develop a viable way of life from Jesus' puzzling sayings.
These efforts, moreover, have had to go far beyond interpreting Jesus' words in their own terms. Augustine and Aquinas, for example, used ideas from Plato, Aristotle and other pre-Christian thinkers to help them understand the "law of love." Conversely, Christian ideas and practices have inspired secular thinkers like Kant and Mill to develop ethical views that can provide plausible explications of Jesus' teachings.
Sullivan is right that Christian churches, as fallible human institutions, have often been obstacles to the fruitful understanding of Christ's moral message. But these churches have also been central in sustaining the traditions of thought and practice that transformed Jesus' passionate but enigmatic teachings into coherent and fruitful moral visions. They have been the air — however polluted — that has fed the fire of his message.
Read alone, the Sermon on the Mount will either confuse us or merely reinforce the moral prejudices we bring to it. To profit from its wisdom we need to understand it through traditions of thought and practice within or informed by Christianity. This does not require membership in any particular church, but it does require immersion in the culture and history of the Christian world. In this sense, to forget the church is to forget Jesus.
Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, "Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960," and writes regularly for The Stone.
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