Humboldt, Translation, Film, and The Odyssey

 Wilhelm von Humboldt (born right around the corner from where I live) who gave me the idea (which is certainly not original to me) that the meaning of a work can be thought of as the summation of all the possible faithful translation, or something like that. Humboldt  believed that every language embodies a distinctive Weltansicht (world-view), not merely a different vocabulary. Thus no translation can completely reproduce an original. Yet every good translation reveals some aspect of the original that other translations leave hidden. Therefore, a plurality of translations is not a defect but an approach toward the inexhaustible richness of the work. Barbara Cassin, a Humboldt scholar, beautifully summarizes this by saying that Humboldt preferred "a pantheon, not a church" of translations: that is, a whole collection of worthy translations rather than one canonical version.

   So Homer's Odyssey. Fitzgerald reveals one Homer; Lattimore another; Wilson, Mendelsohn, Lombardo, and Johnston still others. None simply replaces the others. Each lets certain aspects of Homer become visible. Taken together, they approximate the original more closely than any single translation could. In that sense, the "meaning" of Homer is not exhausted by any one English text. It is disclosed through the dialogue among them. 

 That idea is the source of my wanting to connect metaphysics and translation: reality itself may be like the original text. Every philosophical or theological tradition is, in a sense, a translation of reality into a conceptual language. No single translation captures everything but comparing faithful translations enlarges our understanding. (I also got this idea from Alasdair MacIntyre's discussion of rival Homer translations in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Chapter Two.) There is also a quotation from Humboldt that points in this direction: "Objective truth always rises from the entire energy of subjective individuality." That is, we approach truth not by eliminating perspectives but through the disciplined interaction of different, faithful perspectives.

    This is one of the reasons I enjoy reading several translations of the Odyssey. I am not merely comparing English styles. I am trying to engage in what Humboldt would regard as a philosophical exercise: allowing the original to disclose itself through multiple faithful acts of understanding. That is my reason for owning four translations, not just to come different translators’ prose. (I was privileged to study Greek for three years – with wonderful instructors at the University of Kentucky classics department, whom I will never forget – before having to change universities for financial reasons. I struggled through Xenophon, Plato, and Herodotus, but had to leave just when I would have had a seminar reading Homer. Bitter! Perhaps a retirement project.)

. . .

   The making a movie of an ancient poetic tale is also a kind of translation, not from language to language but from medium to medium, from the printed word – itself a translation from the original oral tale – into the medium of moving pictures, the carrying of meaning, structure, tone, and experience from one medium into another ("an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems," Roman Jakobson).

    There are major challenges to such an undertaking. Words become images, for example. Homer tells us what characters think and what the narrator judges important. Film must show them through facial expressions, gestures, camera angles, music, and acting, since it can't just tell us things. An inner conflict that occupies twenty lines in Homer may require only a glance or may be impossible to convey fully.

     Narration has to be translated into action. The Odyssey contains long speeches and stories within stories. Odysseus recounts his adventures to the Phaeacians; characters constantly narrate past events. A filmmaker must decide whether to preserve these speeches, use flashbacks, or replace narration with direct action. Curious to see what Nolan does.

     Of course, the poetic language is mostly lost. Much of Homer's beauty lies not simply in the story but in the language itself: similes, repeated epithets ("rosy-fingered Dawn," "resourceful Odysseus"), rhythm, and formulaic expressions. Film has no direct equivalent. It must create beauty through cinematography, music, lighting, and editing.

     Something that disturbs me about all translations from word into film (moving pictures) is that the imagination becomes fixed. Every reader imagines a different Cyclops, Ithaca, or Penelope. A film must choose one appearance, one voice, one face. Something is gained in vividness but something is lost in imaginative openness. I almost feel like this is an colonization of the imagination unless one has first read the work before seeing the movie. Even then the picture/image is so powerful that it can repress one’s own imaginings. This has partly happened to me with the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films. Gandalf and Aragorn, I am partly losing my imagining of the characters as they are being replaced with Ian McClellan and Vito Mortgensen’s.

    Of course, it is impossible to keep the pace of the written poem. Homer lingers over scenes, speeches, and rituals that modern audiences may find slow. A film usually compresses, omits, or rearranges events to sustain dramatic momentum. This will be lost.

    I am curious what will happen in the film when ancient values meet modern audiences. The translator of a text decides how foreign or familiar to make Homer. A filmmaker faces the same dilemma. Should Odysseus appear as an authentic Bronze Age warrior, accepting slavery, revenge, and divine intervention? Or should he be reshaped into a modern psychological hero with contemporary moral sensibilities?

      The gods pose special difficulties. Athena's interventions, divine disguises, and Olympian politics are perfectly natural within the poem's world. On screen they can easily appear childish, implausible, or unintentionally comic. Directors must decide whether to portray them literally, symbolically, psychologically, or omit them altogether.

    The background music will have to replace the meter of the poem. The rhythm of dactylic hexameter helped carry the oral performance. Film cannot reproduce this rhythm directly. Instead, music, editing, and visual rhythm become functional equivalents. A huge transformation.

    And every adaptation is an interpretation. Just as every translation emphasizes certain aspects of the original, every film foregrounds particular themes. One director may present The Odyssey as an adventure story, another as a meditation on homecoming, another as a psychological journey, another as an anti-war narrative. There is no neutral adaptation.

 

    There is no such thing as a completely faithful translation or adaptation. Every act of translation necessarily involves interpretation because different languages, and even more radically so, different media, possess different expressive resources. The translator or filmmaker must constantly decide what is essential to preserve and what can or must be changed. It is like a negotiation, as Umberto Eco put it. Thus a film adaptation is not simply based on The Odyssey. It is a new reading of the Odyssey, just as Emily Wilson's translation, Lattimore's translation, and Fitzgerald's translation are different readings of the same poem. One might even say, borrowing Hans-Georg Gadamer's language, that each adaptation is a new fusion of horizons: Homer speaks again, but through the possibilities and limitations of a different art form and a different historical age.

 

 

Works

 

Eco, Umberto. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. Translated by Alastair McEwen, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003.

 

(Eco's central claim is that translation is never a matter of producing identical meaning. The translator is constantly negotiating among competing values.)

 

 

Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” On Translation, edited by Reuben A. Brower, Harvard UP, 1959, pp. 232–239.

 

 

Rereading the Odyssey

 

In anticipation of the Nolan movie, I am rereading the Odyssey, in new translations (Wilson and Mendelsohn). I loved the tale from the first time I read it in freshman class at Centre College, Literature and Philosophy. We read the Fitzgerald translation. I then came also to love the Lattimore translation. Both I love. I must confess, I have never been able to read the Bible or New Testament with that sense of joy and wonder, just the small number of parables and sayings speak to me, the Passion disturbs me, the Luke Christmas story is magical, but again these move me as fragments, not part of a larger story.

    Still, coming back to the Odyssey, although the homecoming, the father and son theme, the coming of age, of course the adventures and mythical creatures, the scene with Argos the dog, the tension leading up to the slaughter of the suitors are all wonderful, two things disturb me. The picture of the gods and the way Homer sets up the reader to delight in what is actually horrible, the slaughter of the terrible suitors, like a Hollywood film setting up a revenge plot by dehumanizing the bad guys (though  there were ambiguous cases among the suitors - but Athena wanted them all slaughtered). Athena you don't want as an enemy!

  Homer is masterful at drawing us into Odysseus' perspective. We have been with this man for twenty years of wandering. We have watched him weep, long for home, resist despair, lose his companions, and finally arrive as a beggar in his own house. We know the suitors through his eyes and through those loyal to him. Long before the slaughter begins, Homer has carefully cultivated our indignation.

  And he does more than that. Athena herself participates in shaping events and our attitudes. She repeatedly clouds the judgment of the suitors, encourages their arrogance, and explicitly says that their doom is fixed. The moral universe is therefore not one in which free human agents simply choose evil and are judged. The gods are actively steering them toward destruction. That is quite different from most modern moral intuitions. There is a striking passage (Book 18) where Athena inspires the suitors to become even more insulting "so that Odysseus' anger would be all the greater." The poem is not pretending to be impartial. It is deliberately intensifying both Odysseus' wrath and ours.

  Then comes the slaughter. From a Homeric perspective, this is not primarily revenge. It is the restoration of cosmic and social order. The suitors have violated guest-friendship – a divinely sanctioned good in Homer’s world – consumed another man's wealth, plotted the murder of his son, and attempted to force his wife into marriage and deprive the son of his rightful inheritance. They are polluting the household. The house must be cleansed.

    The language of pollution and cleansing is crucial because it explains why mercy scarcely appears as a virtue. Once the pollution reaches a certain point, complete removal is the appropriate response. That ain’t our moral world. Although we still know of it (think of how Germans and Germany were experienced after the unimaginable crimes became known; I feel something of that mentality is alive in the genocidal hatreds that are such a horrible part of the Middle East today).

  It is worth asking whether anyone in the poem ever asks the question we instinctively ask, at least I do and did from my first reading as a 17-year-old boy: Could Odysseus have spared them? Some of them? The poem barely entertains the possibility.

 Leodes, the priest among the suitors, throws himself at Odysseus' knees and says, in effect, I tried to restrain them. I never approved of their behavior. Odysseus kills him anyway. Phemius, the bard, survives only because Telemachus intervenes. Medon, the herald, survives only because Telemachus remembers his kindness. Those scenes are fascinating because Homer briefly allows mercy to enter the story, but only at the margins. It is Telemachus who first speaks for clemency. Leodes receives none. I find his killing hard to justify.

 I recall something Simone Weil writes in The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (although writing about the Iliad). Force turns everyone into an object. Not only the victims but also the victors become possessed by force. Even justified violence threatens to become morally intoxicating. Which changes how we feel about slaughter. I don’t just want to ask whether the suitors deserve what they get but also – my constant question – what kind of world requires this.

  There is an interesting comparison with Tolkien. When Frodo claims the Ring, Gollum is still alive. Had Bilbo killed Gollum decades earlier, as almost every epic hero would have done, the Ring could never have been destroyed. Mercy, which appears weak, becomes the hinge of providence. That is almost the opposite moral imagination from Homer's.

    Also in the New Testament, Peter asks how often one should forgive. Jesus' answer "seventy times seven" would sound absurd in Homer's world. The heroic code is built around honor, loyalty, reputation, and rightful vengeance. Jesus redirects the moral imagination toward mercy, even where justice might seem to permit retaliation. (The Odyssey shows that “an eye for an eye” – which Jesus explicitly repudiates – is still more morally restraining than Homer’s world. The slaughter Odysseus inflicts on the suitors is way beyond what “an eye for an eye” calls for.)

  All this doesn't necessarily make Homer morally defective. It makes him a faithful poet of an earlier moral universe, which, by allowing the reader (or listener in his day) to glimpse mercy, he subtly also calls into question at points. 

   Homer's tale expresses an entire conception of what it means to flourish as a human being. Virtues like courage, loyalty, intelligence, endurance, and honor are central. Compassion toward defeated enemies occupies a much smaller place. To condemn Homer for not fully embracing later moral developments would be anachronistic. But we should not suppress our own deep moral attitudes. The discomfort I felt even as a 17-year-old is evidence that I – we to the extent we all share a world – inhabit a different moral world, one shaped, directly or indirectly, by Judaism, Christianity, Stoicism, and centuries of reflection on the dignity of every person. The preciousness of every human being as human being is a gift of culture (Gaita). Which does not in any way entail cultural relativism, though it can also be understood in a way that is compatible with it.

  What disturbs me is how much I enjoyed the slaughter, after all the lead-up to it – except for when someone begs for mercy. This is psychologically revealing. Homer still succeeds in drawing me into the ancient desire for justice and homecoming. I want the house restored. I want evil defeated. But my sympathy no longer ends where Homer's (largely) does. Once a defeated enemy becomes simply a frightened human being asking to live, another moral voice begins to speak.

  Perhaps that is one reason I continue to love the Odyssey while also being troubled by it. Great works often survive precisely because they can be read from within their own moral world and from beyond it. Homer invites me into the heroic imagination; my own conscience, formed by later traditions and my own philosophical commitments, refuses to stay there completely. The conversation between those two worlds is itself part of the richness of the poem.

 

 

 

Reflection on Matthew 10:34-36

 

 Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. – Matthew 10:34-36

 

 Like many, I find this more than uncomfortable. It seems to stand in direct tension with other sayings of Jesus: "Blessed are the peacemakers" (Matt. 5:9), "Love your enemies" (Matt. 5:44), "Put your sword back into its place" (Matt. 26:52), and the image of Christ as the Prince of Peace. 

   How have theologians "tamed" this? How have I managed to bracket it out? For I tell you my first thought is the way sects divide families and turn children against parents and siblings. And the thought of loving a God / God-man who requires me to make an enemy of my beloved parents, well, I don’t think by definition God, who is love, could do that. But I want to reflect on the passage from this starting point. 

     The dominant interpretation from the early Church Fathers onward is that Jesus is not commanding violence. The "sword" is a metaphor for the division that inevitably results when some accept the Gospel and others reject it. (Though one asks why a disciple was armed with a sword in Gethsemane.) The image comes partly from the prophet Micah (7:6), which Matthew is explicitly echoing, as I have learned. So the point is descriptive rather than prescriptive – Jesus’s purpose in coming is not to make everyone get along. He knows his message will divide households because ultimate loyalties are being challenged. Aquinas writes that Christ is the source of true peace, but that peace with God can produce conflict with those who oppose that higher good.

     Another common interpretation is that Jesus is radicalizing loyalty to God. Immediately after the passage, Matthew has Jesus say: "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me." For Augustine, Aquinas, and much later thinkers like Joseph Ratzinger, the issue is ordo amoris, i.e., the ordering of loves. Parents, children, nation, tribe, and culture are genuine goods. But none is ultimate; love for a child or a parent can lead to one losing one’s soul – imagine if a human being did unspeakable evil to your child. If you are like me, you would probably go insane with bloodlust and see the evil-doer as a monster to be destroyed without pity. Is my faith strong enough to prevent that? I think not. It is an extreme example, but I am trying to think of how my love for my family could come into tension with my soul, as conceived by Christ.

    The point is, the painful possibility exists that obedience to conscience or God may require breaking with one's family. The Christian martyr who refuses emperor worship, the convert rejected by relatives, the dissident who opposes an unjust regime. . .these are examples of the "sword." The division is tragic, but the alternative would be subordinating truth to social harmony.

     For Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, Christ does bring peace, just not the cheap peace of avoiding conflict. Truth itself creates a crisis. The Cross is the supreme example: reconciliation with God comes through an event that provokes opposition, rejection, and suffering. The peace Christ brings comes after truth and conversion, not in the mere absence of conflict. 

     Modern historical-critical scholars like Ehrman and Martin emphasize the apocalyptic context. Jesus expected God's kingdom to arrive in a decisive way. Such moments of divine judgment were often imagined as producing sharp divisions even within families. These historians credit Matthew 10:34-36 with a high probability of being authentically from Jesus precisely because it seems to undermine the overall theological message of Jesus as a founder of peace. (“The peace of the Lord be with you always” – thus concludes every Catholic mass. “Peace be with all” is the Orthodox variant, I have read.) And it is evidence for their reading of the “historical Jesus” as an apocalyptic prophet. What is that?

   As I have learned from Ehrman and Martin, in the context of first-century Judaism, an apocalyptic prophet was not just someone predicting the end of the physical universe. Rather, he proclaimed that God was about to intervene decisively in history and establish his rule. Concretely, an apocalyptic preacher would typically believe: 1) the world is deeply corrupted; 2) human efforts cannot ultimately fix it; 3) God will soon intervene; 4) the wicked will be judged; 5) the righteous will be vindicated; 6) a new age will replace the present age.

     The key word is soon. Jesus believed that this divine intervention was imminent, according to these historians. That allows us to make sense of many otherwise shocking sayings. "Leave your nets." Why? Because the Kingdom is arriving. "Do not worry about tomorrow." Why? Because God is about to transform the world. "Let the dead bury their dead." Why? Because ordinary social obligations are less important than responding to the approaching Kingdom. "I have not come to bring peace but a sword." Why? Because the final crisis is dividing humanity into those who accept and those who reject God's reign. Seen this way, Jesus begins to resemble figures like John the Baptist much more than the gentle moral teacher often presented in modern churches. John says: "The axe is already laid to the root of the trees." That is classic apocalyptic language. Judgment is not someday. It is about to happen.  So on this reading, Jesus is saying that the crisis of God's kingdom is so urgent that even the most sacred earthly relationships may be disrupted. Well, I do not think one can deny this account plausibility. It just takes away the Christ Christians love. Indeed, I find this reading more disturbing for faith than Darwin or anything science could possibly discover.

     The interesting thing is that the great theologians often transform this expectation of imminent apocalypse. For example, Augustine, Aquinas, and Ratzinger read these sayings less as predictions of an imminent historical event and more as revelations of enduring spiritual truths. The Kingdom becomes partly present in the Church. Judgment becomes an ongoing reality. The end becomes both future and already present. This is one reason historical scholars and theologians sometimes seem to be discussing different Jesuses. The historian wonders what Jesus probably meant in Galilee around 30 CE. The theologian wonders what this saying means in light of the Resurrection, the Church, and two thousand years of Christian reflection. Related questions, but not the same. 

. . . 

   Rereading Matthew, this text remains unsettling for me in spite of all the reasonable attempts to take away its sting. The text does not merely say that conflict may occur. It says: "I have not come to bring peace but a sword." The wording is stark. I can understand that some readers would feel that the later explanations soften language that Matthew intentionally leaves hard and shocking. If you reads Matthew straight through, you will notice a recurring pattern: Jesus' demands often seem absolute, uncompromising, and willing to subordinate ordinary human attachments to the coming Kingdom. This is not unique to this passage. One finds similar tensions in "let the dead bury their own dead" and in the demands of discipleship generally. That is why even great theologians rarely claim the passage is easy. Rather, they argue that the "sword" is not physical violence but the painful division that arises when ultimate commitments confront one another.

    The deeper question, the one that troubles me, is whether this is a profound truth about conscience and ultimate loyalty, or whether Matthew's intensely apocalyptic vision pushes the demand beyond what many people can wholeheartedly affirm. That question is not really resolved by the traditional interpretations; they explain the text, but they do not entirely remove its sting. If Jesus was speaking from an intense expectation that God was about to act very soon, then sayings like "hate father and mother," "let the dead bury the dead," and "I came not to bring peace but a sword" become historically intelligible. They are the language of emergency. But if you read them as timeless instructions for ordinary life over the next two thousand years, they become much harder to accept without substantial reinterpretation.

     That tension lies behind a great deal of modern scholarship on Jesus and also behind many of the theological efforts to soften, spiritualize, or universalize these difficult sayings. The historian often explains them by their urgency; the theologian often explains them by their deeper meaning. The two approaches are not necessarily incompatible, but there is a tension. 

    Finally, this fits in with the reinterpretation of Jewish theological concepts from the last entry. So apocalyptic comes to mean something more spiritual, eventually the Roman Empire becoming Christian. So from a historical perspective, scholars say that Jesus proclaimed an imminent apocalyptical Kingdom – God is about to intervene in history, judge evil, raise the dead, and establish his reign. But the expect end does not arrive. Thus Christianity reinterprets the apocalyptic language. The Kingdom becomes partly a future expectation but partly present in the Church and partly present in the heart transformed by Christ’s love. Judgment becomes again partly a future event but also a present moral reality. Resurrection becomes partly the future bodily resurrection, but also present spiritual rebirth. The Messiah becomes not merely Israel's king, but the cosmic Logos. The Temple becomes Christ, the Church, the community of the faithful. Israel becomes the Church, or at least the Church as the fulfillment of Israel. Apocalyptic itself becomes increasingly spiritualized. Augustine rejects the expectation of a literal thousand-year earthly kingdom and interprets the "millennium" of Revelation symbolically. The Kingdom is already present in the Church, though imperfectly. In that sense, the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great and his successors could be understood by many Christians as a kind of historical manifestation of Christ's victory. Not the final Kingdom, but evidence that Christ was already reigning. 

   From the perspective of a historian like Ehrman, this would is a profound reinterpretation of Jesus' original message. From the perspective of a theologian like Augustine or Joseph Ratzinger, it is not a reinterpretation but a deeper understanding of what Jesus meant all along. That is why the debate never ends. 

    Finally, I would refer back to the pattern I clumsily tried to trace in Matthew in the last entry. The Jewish concepts remain, but their meaning shifts. I seem to have just added apocalypse to the list. Thus the question I raised in that entry – new wine in old bottles or a new bottle for new wine? – appears again here. The fulfillment or the overturning of the Torah? For Matthew, the fulfilling but the book shows just how on the razor’s edge it is. The old Jewish vocabulary was retained, but its meaning was gradually transformed, a historian might claim. The old vocabulary finally disclosed its deepest meaning, the theologians. It is easy to see how other Jews of the time would have seen this as completely heretical. 

    When is a concept stretched to the limit and when does it break and become a different concept altogether? I cannot resist a little philosophy here. Think about the example of marriage. Over time, many features traditionally associated with marriage have changed, but not all changes have generated the same level of controversy. The decline of arranged marriages, changes in property rights, or the reduced social expectation of having children were widely understood as modifications within the institution, within the concept. The recognition of same-sex marriage, however, raised a more fundamental question. For some, marriage is essentially a public, lifelong commitment of love and mutual support, and extending it to same-sex couples represents a development of the concept. For others, sexual complementarity is one of the defining features of marriage, and removing it creates a radically (at the root) different concept while retaining the old name. The disagreement is therefore not primarily about social policy but about conceptual identity. A concept can stretch remarkably far while preserving continuity with its past, but at some point reasonable people may disagree about whether they are witnessing the development of an existing concept or the emergence of a new one under an inherited label.

 This, I think, is an analogy to the tension between the old and the new in Matthew. 

. . . 

   Perhaps my problem is just that Matthew was writing for a Jewish-Christian audience in a Jewish world and thus uses the vocabulary he does. It is not just that I am post-Enlightenment but Greek largely, i.e. Plato or Aristotle would also have struggled with this world version as much as any post-Enlightenment person. Matthew's world, even if heretical from a Jewish point of view, is profoundly Jewish in a way that neither Plato nor Aristotle would have found intelligible. The central questions are not things like What is the nature of Being? What is the highest good? What is virtue? What is the structure of reality? Rather, Matthew’s questions are more Who is the true Israel? How is God's covenant fulfilled? Who is the Messiah? How is the Law rightly interpreted? When and how will God establish his Kingdom? Different kinds of questions. I can imagine a Greek philosopher encountering Matthew wondering why the ultimate meaning of existence should depend on the destiny of Israel, a Messiah descended from David, the fulfillment of prophecy, disputes with Pharisees, or the fate of the Temple. That is not how Plato approaches reality in the Republic, nor how Aristotle approaches it in the Metaphysics or Nicomachean Ethics. Plato begins from the question of the Good and Aristotle from the question of Being and flourishing. Matthew begins from the conviction that God is acting decisively in the history of Israel. What a difference!

   What is fascinating is that Christianity itself gradually became a meeting place between those two worlds, even in Matthew. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas basically translated the biblical world into Greek metaphysical language. The Kingdom becomes participation in the Good. The Logos becomes the rational principle of reality. Salvation becomes the fulfillment of human nature, of our final end or telos. The Beatific Vision becomes the ultimate end of rational creatures. One could even say that much of classical Christian theology is an immense act of translation between Jerusalem and Athens. 

    When I reflect on Matthew's polemics against Pharisees, his concern with fulfillment of prophecy, his genealogy from Abraham, his emphasis on the Kingdom of Heaven, and his apocalyptic urgency, I feel I am entering a very different conceptual universe. The irony is that many of the theologians that I consider my teachers from Augustine to Aquinas, to Ratzinger, von Balthasar, and Ware, were themselves engaged in bridging exactly that gap. They loved Matthew, but they often read him through lenses already shaped by Plato, Aristotle, and later metaphysical reflection.

      So I suppose what I am trying to do is the same translation that much of Christian theology has performed for two thousand years: asking how these historically Jewish symbols and narratives disclose truths about reality, goodness, and human flourishing more generally. I guess the difference is that these great theologians (representative for many others) assumed that the translation preserves the original meaning, whereas I am haunted by modern historical-critical scholarship in that I wonder whether something important was lost or transformed beyond recognition in the process, changing the original in fundamental ways. That is at the heart of the tension I have been trying to explore.

 

Reflections on the Book of Matthew

 

Reflections on the Book of Matthew

 

The Gospel of Matthew is at the heart of what draws me to its protagonist – Christ Jesus – and what disturbs me. What draws me is what has drawn most people over the centuries: the Sermon on the Mount, especially the Beatitudes (Matthew, 5:3-12) and the “Judge not…” commandment (Matthew, 7:1);  the compassion of Jesus toward the part of humanity that meant nothing in terms of wealth, power, or status; the very idea of God translating some part of his being into our form to bring light and truth into the world (and the true understanding of the Law in Matthew), to suffer death on the cross to do so; the most important commandment – “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew, 22:36-40); and the true meaning of the commandment and indeed of the first book of Genesis, God creating the human form in his own image – “What you do to the least of your brethren, you do to me.” Indeed, together with “The Good Samaritan” and "The Prodigal Son" from Luke (10:35-47; 15:11-32), and the forgiveness of the adulteress in John (8:1-11) and a few other passages like the opening of John and John 3:16, the prophetic appeals to social justice and compassion . . . that is essentially what gets past my head and goes into my heart. I confess very little else does (Psalm 23). 

    Matthew is said to be the “most Jewish” or the gospels in that – modifying Mark, which is said to be a main source along with Q – it understands Jesus as preserver and indeed fulfiller of the law; as the Jewish Messiah ushering in the Kingdom of God, fulfilling the deeper meaning of Judaism by universalizing it; by framing the life of Jesus as fulfilling Old Testament / Torah prophecies; and by framing how we should live in terms of Deuteronomic law and the proverbs, which emphasize reward for obedience and threaten punishment for disobedience. It’s just with Jesus the meaning of all of this, the Law, the Messiah, the Kingdom of God, reward and punishment take on a radically new and paradoxical twist. "Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved" – Matthew 9:17. Indeed! 

    I only want to focus on the main difficulty I have with Matthew, leaving out as secondary for me the changes to Mark in order to stress Jesus embeddedness in Jewish prophecy. My main difficulty is that Matthew usually writes as though goodness is rewarded from outside. The sheep inherit the kingdom; the goats are cast out. The righteous receive reward; the wicked – i.e., those who do not believe in Jesus and embrace the Law as he understands it in Matthew, receive terrible, eternal punishment – burning mostly. What must these images mean if God is truly the highest Good; if God is love? If there is no evil in God?  And the answer is, basically, that Heaven is not a prize beyond goodness. That Heaven is goodness, truth, beauty, holiness, and love brought to completion in union with God. Hell is the final refusal of that union.

    Well, I again have to rely on thinkers more able to grasp all this than myself, for every time I reread Matthew as a whole I suffer the same tension.

 

St. Augustine, Confessions (Book X)

    Augustine argues that everyone wants happiness. But what is happiness? He follows Plato here. The answer is not pleasure, success, power, honor, or even virtue considered abstractly. His first answer: "And the happy life is this – to rejoice unto Thee, in Thee, and for Thee; this it is, and there is no other." Radical stuff.  He does not say that the happy life is to obey God so that one may obtain heaven. Nor does he say that the happy life is to receive rewards from God or the happy life is to possess happiness which God gives. He says plainly that the happy life is joy in God himself. Period.

     The implication is clear. For Augustine, God is not the means to happiness; God is happiness. Then, in the next chapter, he goes even further: "For a happy life is joy in the truth. For this is joy in You, who are the Truth, O God..." The chain of reasoning is: Truth is God; joy in truth is joy in God; happiness is joy in truth; therefore, happiness  is joy in God. This is a different key from Matthew's reward language. The structure is no longer ‘be good, get to Heaven.’ It is loving truth leads to loving God, which as a by-product leads to joy and happiness, all converging into a single reality. "This is the happy life which all desire; this life which alone is happy, all desire; joy in the truth do all wish for."

    He is saying that every human being already seeks God, even if unknowingly. We think we seek all the worldly goods people connect to happiness. But happiness itself is secretly joy in Truth. And Truth is God. Thus every finite desire is, at bottom, a hidden search for God.

     Then comes an interesting move: "I have known many who wished to deceive, but none who wished to be deceived." Augustine uses this as evidence that human beings are naturally ordered toward truth. Even liars want the truth when they are the ones receiving information. Therefore, something in us loves truth as such. The tragedy is that we often love other things more. As he puts it, people are "more strongly taken up with other things which have more power to make them miserable than that which they faintly remember to make them happy." In other words, we know, dimly, where happiness lies but we become absorbed in lesser goods.

   Now connect this back to doing good for the reward of Heaven and avoiding evil to avoid horrible punishment. Augustine denies you should love God to get to Heaven because that still treats God as a means. You love God because God is Truth itself. God is Beauty itself. God is Goodness itself. God is Happiness itself. And therefore heaven cannot be something added on afterward. Heaven is simply the complete possession and enjoyment of the God already loved. "The happy life is this – to rejoice unto Thee, in Thee, and for Thee." Is this what I take from Matthew as a whole? Not the parts I cited above, but from Matthew as a whole?

 

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles

     Aquinas also rejects the Heaven as the reward, or wage, for faith and Hell as the punishment imposed on the faithless soul. The key theme of the Contra Gentiles is that every creature tends toward its ultimate end (finis ultimus), and the ultimate end of rational creatures cannot be anything finite. In Book III, Aquinas argues – as did Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine – that things like wealth, honor, power, even virtue cannot our final end, or fulfillment. Can’t lead to true happiness. The final end is the vision of God. We do not seek God in order to get happiness; rather, happiness consists in God’s (infinite love, the source of all finite love and longing) full presence. In Book III, chapters 25–63 (especially the sections on ultimate happiness), Aquinas argues that beatitude (the vision of God or living in God) is not an external reward added onto virtue but the fulfillment of the intellect's natural desire for truth and the will's desire for goodness. “The final end of every intellectual substance is to understand God.” That also moves away from the idea of heaven as payment.

 

 Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger)

   Benedict writes: 

Jesus admonishes us through the image of a soul destroyed by arrogance and opulence, who has created an impassable chasm between himself and the poor man; the chasm of being trapped within material pleasures; the chasm of forgetting the other, of incapacity to love, which then becomes a burning and unquenchable thirst….

 

The encounter with Christ is the decisive act of judgment before whose gaze all falsehood melts away. Judgment is not first a courtroom and not primarily sentencing. It is simply reality revealed, fantasy, illusion, rationalization, narcissism stripped away, the naked soul make manifest. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation "as through fire." The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. The fire is not something external to Christ. Christ himself is the fire. The encounter burns away illusion and the pain is simultaneously judgment and healing. This was my view long before I read the Pope had the same view, which of course was a nice conformation. The pain, as I imagined, was feeling all the pain others and the world suffered on account of your words and actions. Be that as it may, as Benedict writes: 

There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell,

 

The point is that Hell is not God the judge sentencing the soul to eternal damnation. Hell is the terrifyingly possible consequence of a life which has totally failed to become what it was meant to be, like a rose failing to blossom, and has “lost the good of intellect” (Dante) i.e. can no longer truly love, can no longer apprehend reality, and can no longer  care that they can’t love, and live in self-imprisoning fantasies but don't care.

 

 Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way

  I always consult Orthodox theology, which I consider very deep. Unfortunately, my knowledge of it is limited. But in this book Kallistos Ware gives the Eastern form: heaven and hell are not two different “places” where God either loves or stops loving; the same divine love is joy to the receptive and torment to the self-closed. Ware cites a theme found in figures such as Isaac the Syrian: namely, those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love. The idea is that God's love never ceases. The same divine reality is experienced differently. Ware writes in several places that heaven and hell are not two separate locations where God is present in one and absent in the other. Rather God is present everywhere: the saints experience that presence as joy whereas the self-enclosed experience that same presence as torment.

 

C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”

   So, to add an Anglican Christian and one of the best Christian minds. His starting point is the objection that Christianity seems to be appealing to self-interest. "Be good and you'll get heaven." (and Santa will bring you toys.) Lewis argues that this objection assumes all rewards are of the same kind when they are not.

     He distinguishes two kinds of reward. 1)External or mercenary rewards, that is, rewards that have no intrinsic connection to the activity. His examples are money paid to a worker; a schoolboy studying only for prizes; a man marrying a woman solely for her fortune. The reward is something different from the activity. In these cases, one may indeed be motivated by greed or self-interest. 2) Natural rewards, i.e., rewards that are not really "added on" at all but are the fulfillment of the activity itself. Lewis gives examples such as these: the proper reward of a successful courtship is marriage; the proper reward of a journey is arriving at one's destination; the proper reward of learning is knowledge; the proper reward of battle is victory. So marriage is not a payment for courtship; arrival is not a payment for traveling; knowledge is not a payment for studying; victory is not a payment for fighting. Rather, each is the completion of what was already being sought.

   Now Lewis applies this to Heaven. The critic imagines heaven as a kind of celestial paycheck, which is the wrong picture. The Christian claim is not that you first love God and then later receive a prize. The reward of seeking God is finding God. Or the reward of loving God is more of God. In that sense Heaven resembles marriage after courtship much more than wages after labor.

     Lewis says Christianity does not encourage us to desire heaven because heaven contains pleasant things. The desire for heaven is already present in our deepest longings. The joy we occasionally glimpse in beauty, in nature, in friendship, in music, in love…is not the thing itself. It is a sign, the famous Lewis idea of Sehnsucht of a certain kind of joy (explored to brilliantly in Surprised by Joy). The longing itself points beyond itself. Thus heaven is not a reward added to the longing but the reality toward which the longing was directed all along. This is very close to Augustine: Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee. For Lewis, the reward is the thing itself brought to completion.

     Lewis's argument works beautifully if Heaven is understood as union with God, truth, beauty, and goodness. It works less well if one returns to some of Matthew's imagery: rewards, thrones, punishments, outer darkness, separation of sheep and goats, etc. Lewis is explaining what he thinks those images ultimately mean.

  

Two Readings

   The simple picture in Matthew is ‘be good, receive Heaven as your reward; be bad, and you are sentenced to eternal torture in Hell. In that picture, goodness is a means and heaven is the end. I think Matthew (and Jesus) believed many Jews implicitly practiced their faith in this spirit. The Pharisees and Sadducees are fiercely targeted by Jesus.

     On the one hand, Matthew seems to reject acting from external rewards. Jesus castigates giving for public praise, praying to be seen by others as pious, opening fasting so as to impress others with your righteousness, not just refraining from lust in public but not lusting in your heart, not only not murdering but not feeling rage and hatred in your heart, etc. All of this points inward. The concern is not merely what one does but why one does it. Matthew 6 seems almost obsessed with motivation. The hypocrite performs virtue for applause; the humble person performs virtue because it is right.

   But Matthew also contains threats of Gehenna, outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth, eternal punishment, rewards in heaven, treasure stored up, crowns and thrones, wages paid in full. Those passages appeal to consequences. The result can feel like two moral psychologies sitting side by side.

    Jesus may be attacking one kind of consequentialism while retaining another? The Pharisee in Matthew 6 seeks status, honor, prestige, admiration. Those are immediate social rewards, which causes Jesus to warn: If that's what you wanted, you've got it. The phrase "they have received their reward" is almost sarcastic. In that reading, Jesus is not condemning all reward-seeking. He is condemning seeking the wrong reward. The question is whether you desire human approval or God's kingdom? That softens the tension but does not remove it.

    A deeper interpretation – enter Augustine and Aquinas. They basically say that Jesus is gradually educating desire itself. At the beginning, people may obey from fear. Then from hope of reward. Then from love. This is close to Aquinas's distinction between servile fear, imperfect charity, perfect charity. Aquinas posits that the fear of hell as a motive for love is not ideal, but it is better than indifference. It can be the beginning of moral formation. The end is loving God for God's sake.

    If perfect love is the goal, why continue appealing to reward and punishment at all? Why not simply love the good because it is good. That sounds closer to philosophers I love like Plato, Murdoch, Weil, and Gaita. Of course, Jesus was not mainly a moral philosopher. He was speaking as a Jewish prophet announcing judgment if we can trust Ehrman. The atmosphere of Matthew is not the atmosphere of the Republic or the Nicomachean Ethics. More in the world of the Old Testament prophets. A covenantal and apocalyptic world. The question is how we shall stand when God judges? (not why is the Good worthy of love? This question becomes central later, when Christianity encounters Greek philosophy.)

     Perhaps there is a real tension between two kinds of moral maturity within Matthew. It is like a child who asks what will happen to it if it does this. The mature adult asks whether this is good. Matthew contains language that addresses both. Sometimes Jesus speaks to fear, sometimes to hope, sometimes to love. And sometimes – especially in the Sermon on the Mount and the other parts that speak most deeply to me – he points beyond both fear and reward toward a transformed heart.

Take Matthew 5:8: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. One can read this two ways. The simple reading: be pure and then you'll get a reward. But for Augustine purity of heart is already the beginning of seeing God. The reward is not something different from the purity; the purity is the beginning of the reward. That is the move the theologians I mentioned take.

    Or I could connect this to Iris Murdoch, for whom moral growth consists in learning to attend to reality rather than to oneself. For Matthew's hypocrites, the self remains at the center: How do I appear? What do I gain? How am I judged? But in the pure heart, attention turns outward, toward God, reality, neighbor.

    Does Matthew fully escape the self-regarding framework he critiques, or does the Gospel contains an unresolved tension between prophetic reward-and-punishment language and a deeper vision of goodness loved for its own sake. That question is substantial enough that Augustine, Aquinas, Lewis, Benedict, and von Balthasar can all be read as attempts to answer it. When I read Matthew, I feel the tension.

 

New Wine in Old Bottles?

   According to scholars like Ehrman and Martin, Matthew reflects the pressures of a community of Jewishs-Christians around 80 A.D., after the destruction of the Temple. Matthew's Gospel is not primarily an attack on Judaism but an argument within Judaism. That is, it reflects a period in which different Jewish groups were competing to define the future of Israel. Matthew's community and the emerging Pharisaic-rabbinic movement both saw themselves as heirs of the biblical tradition, accepted the authority of the Torah, and awaited God's final vindication. The sharp criticisms of the Pharisees therefore arise not from a rejection of Judaism – forgetting this, Matthew later became a source of antisemitism – but from a dispute among people who shared many of the same assumptions and concerns.

    What Matthew criticizes is a tendency he perceives within the religious practice of his day: the danger that fidelity to the Law can become external, public, and self-regarding rather than inwardly transformative. Again and again Jesus shifts attention from visible conformity to the condition of the heart, from almsgiving, prayer, and fasting performed for recognition to acts done in secret; from avoiding murder to overcoming anger; from avoiding adultery to purity of desire; from meticulous observance to "the weightier matters of the Law," namely justice, mercy, and faithfulness. At the same time, Matthew retains the traditional Jewish language of law, judgment, reward, punishment, kingdom, and Messiah, yet reinterprets these concepts in increasingly radical ways. It like he is on the razor's edge of fulfilling the promise of the Torah or throwing it over for something true. Thus the tension of the so-called antitheses: for example, "Ye have heard that it hath been said,  An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." (5:38-40) Is that fulfilling the Law or overturning it? 

    This tension is evident in Matthew's treatment of reward and punishment, which is my theme here. On the one hand, the Gospel retains the traditional language of heavenly rewards, final judgment, and eternal consequences. On the other hand, Jesus repeatedly attacks forms of religious behavior motivated by visible rewards such as prestige, status, and public approval. The center of gravity shifts from the question, "What will happen to me?" toward the question, "What kind of person am I becoming?" Thus Matthew can be read as standing between two moral visions. One remains rooted in the prophetic and apocalyptic language of reward, punishment, and divine judgment; the other points toward a deeper ideal in which goodness, purity, truth, and love are valued for their own sake. Later Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Lewis would develop this second strand by arguing that Heaven is not an external reward added to virtue but the fulfillment of a life already oriented toward God, who is himself the highest Good and the true source of human happiness. That is the only reading I can accept.

 

   Many of the central concepts inherited from Judaism are retained by Matthew but given a deeper and more universal significance. The Law is not only commandments but a call to purity of heart and the transformation of desire. The Kingdom of Heaven is no longer simply the future restoration and vindication of Israel but God's hidden and growing reign within human lives and history. The Messiah is not a political liberator or conquering king but the suffering servant who establishes his kingdom through self-sacrifice and love. Reward and punishment are no longer understood chiefly in terms of earthly blessing or retribution but are increasingly connected to one's relationship with God and the orientation of the heart. Even love itself is radicalized, extending beyond family, tribe, and neighbor to include enemies and persecutors. In each case Matthew preserves the traditional Jewish vocabulary while stretching its meaning beyond conventional expectations, transforming concepts rooted in covenant, law, and national hope into expressions of an inward, universal, and ultimately spiritual vision of God's purposes for humanity. Either bringing out the hidden meanings or overturning the concepts into radically new one. 

    And so back to the tension. Is Matthew pouring new wine in old bottles, or is his gospel, different as it is from Mark, Luke, and John, a new bottle for new wine? The question is whether Matthew's Gospel represents a sufficiently "new wineskin" for the vision of reality that is emerging in Jesus' teaching. This is of course Jesus’ own saying: “Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved” (Matthew 9:17; also in Mark)

    One way of answering the question would be historical – Ehrman and Martin. To what extent does Matthew remain dependent upon inherited Jewish categories such as Law, Messiah, Kingdom, judgment, reward, punishment, covenant, and Israel? Clearly the dependence is enormous. Matthew is far more embedded in these categories than John or Luke. If one focuses on language and imagery, one might conclude that Matthew is indeed trying to express something radically new through concepts inherited from Second Temple Judaism.

      A second approach would be philosophical, which is my approach. Do the inherited concepts adequately express the deeper vision of goodness, purity of heart, enemy-love, and union with God that seems to emerge in the Sermon on the Mount? I am not sure. I would rely on the judgment of people who know more than I do. Still, for me the language of reward and punishment, kingdom and judgment, sit uneasily alongside the vision of goodness loved for its own sake. This is why later thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, Lewis, Benedict XVI, and von Balthasar reinterpret these concepts. Their work may be understood as an attempt to reshape the bottles (or wineskins) so that they can better contain the wine.

     A third approach – also Ehrman and Martin – would be to compare Matthew with the other Gospels. Mark remains more apocalyptic and paradoxical. Luke often emphasizes mercy, reversal, and the universal scope of salvation. John transforms almost everything into the language of life, light, truth, love, and abiding in Christ. In John's Gospel the movement toward a new conceptual framework is perhaps furthest advanced. Matthew stands in a more intermediate position. He retains the traditional Jewish framework while stretching it toward meanings that transcend it. Thus one possible historical-critical reading.  

    In any case, the old Jewish concepts are still present, but they are being reinterpreted from within by a vision centered on purity of heart, the inwardness of the Law, enemy-love, the suffering Messiah, and the Kingdom as participation in God's life. From the philosophical perspective of a MacIntyre or a Gadamer, that is exactly what one should expect. Traditions do not simply discard their concepts and invent new ones. They carry inherited language forward into new circumstances, discovering possibilities of meaning that were only partially visible before. The question is not whether Matthew abandons Judaism, but whether he - his portrayal of Christ - succeeds in revealing dimensions of Judaism that its earlier forms had not yet fully grasped. Perhaps because I am so steeped in Greek philosophy, and later theologians, the old concepts remain a barrier of sorts for me.

 . . .

 The questions I raised here arise from my philosophical interest in the concepts and moral vision found in Matthew's Gospel. Many Christians, particularly within more conservative Protestant traditions, approach the text from different assumptions. For them, the primary task is not to trace the historical development of ideas or to explore tensions within inherited concepts, but to receive the Gospel as a divinely inspired and internally coherent revelation. It’s like the Holy Spirit does the reading for you and in you. I don’t engage with that view, it is just my purpose is different, to try to make sense of how his language of law, kingdom, judgment, reward, and love relates to broader questions about goodness, happiness, and the human search for God, appealing to greater minds than mine to do so. I cannot be inspired by what I do not understand. I am deeply inspired by part of Matthew, and need to make sense of the rest, how it fits to what inspires me.

 

Bibliography

 Augustine. Confessions. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin, Penguin Classics, 2003.

 Thomas Aquinas. Summa Contra Gentiles. Translated by Anton C. Pegis, University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.

 Hans Urs von Balthasar. Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”?: With a Short Discourse on Hell. Ignatius Press, 1988.

 Pope Benedict XVI. Jesus of Nazareth. Vol. 1: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. Translated by Adrian J. Walker, Doubleday, 2007.

 Pope Benedict XVI. Spe Salvi. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2007.

 C. S. Lewis. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Harper One, 2001.

 Kallistos Ware. The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed., St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995.

 

Courses and Lecture Series

 Bart D. Ehrman. The New Testament. The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2001. Audio/video lecture series.

 ———. The Historical Jesus. The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2000. Audio/video lecture series.

 Dale B. Martin. Introduction to the New Testament History and Literature (RLST 152). Open Yale Courses, Yale University, 2009. YouTube, YaleCourses.