For Passion Sunday...
...These attempts have given the Christian faith an image to the unbelieving world of strenuous saintliness by men who were unconscious of what Jonathan Edwards termed "the labyrinthian depth of self-deception in the human heart." For the fact is that the self can be beguiled from its self-concern by being engaged in its affections, responsibilities, and creative concerns. But one cannot "deny" or "forget" the self by conscious and fretful preoccupation with the power of self-concern.

"The self is like an onion" is the well-known cry of the mystic, "you must peel off skin after skin of the onion and the self to eliminate it." But this is forgetting that the self is like the onion in another way than intended. For the onion is a vegetable which becomes more and more pungent as you peel off its innumerable layers and skins. The tears in the eyes of a cook who is peeling an onion are symbolic of the tears of pity and derision with which observers behold the sweaty and self-conscious efforts of conscious unselfishness. Furthermore, the pretensions of righteousness of these too conscious saints are an offense to the whole enterprise of morals in human history. For virtue which is not conscious of the mixture of motives in the human heart is bound to be as unimpressive to the observer as it is impressive to the deluded agent.

Two chapters of Christian history were informed by the passion of conscious selflessness. The oldest one, that of medieval asceticism, was rather impressive. But it is significant that medieval monasticism was most creative when, unfaithful to its principles of calculated selflessness, it dared the corruptions of the world in order to serve the culture of Europe with the monks acting as architects, teachers, manuscript copiers, and expert agronomists; in other words, as creators rather than as saints.

Although some may question the enterprise of calculated selflessness, it must be remembered that this rigorous effort at ascetic purity produced Francis of Assisi, whose lyrical quality of life refutes all strictures against monastic pretensions. Perhaps even St. Francis was deficient in the self-knowledge, which, rather than self-repression, is the first virtue of the truly religious life. There is the story of Francis fasting in repentance because the monks had violated one of the extremely rigorous rules of his order. Brother Elias, who was the Sancho Panza to Francis's Don Quixote, made the perceptive remark, "Brother Francis, are you so sorry because the brothers defied the will of God, or because they defied your will?" Thus, Brother Elias revealed that he was more aware than Brother Francis of the fact that even saints, and perhaps saints in particular, were inclined to identify their will with the ultimate norm of human existence. If this be true, the primary problem of human existence is the prevention of human idealism from becoming a screen and veil for all these "baser" impulses which the self refuses to acknowledge...

This is the theme which the Reformation set against all the moral pretensions of medieval Christianity when it asserted that "God's grace is nothing but his forgiveness to sinners," and confessed with Luther that the final sin of man is his effort to prove himself sinless. It is the theme elaborated by Christ himself in his parable of the Pharisee and Publican which ends with the observation that "everyone who exalts himself will be humbled; and whoever humbles himself will be exalted," or in the parable of the unmerciful servant in which the lesson is driven home that only men who know themselves to be impure and forgiven in their impurity can treat their fellows with compassion.

The rigor with which the Reformation emphasized this gospel theme did not prevent many new forms of moral pretension from arising on the ground of the Protestant version of the Christian faith. Thus the history of Protestantism shows that a rigorous form of moral idealism is more popular than a rigorous form of self-knowledge. For the one may enhance the prestige of the good man, while the other threatens the cherished distinction between the good and evil men, proving us all to be brothers under the skin.

Yet distinctions between good and evil, between justice and injustice, between the honest teacher and the propagandist, between the responsible statesman and the irresponsible demagogue are very im- portant, and must be made. Our precarious virtues and moral standards depend upon these careful judgments and distinctions. But the multifarious drama of history reveal the provisional nature of these distinctions. Ultimately considered, evil is done, not so much by evil men but by good men who do not know themselves.

One thinks immediately of the long history of fierce idealists from the "incorruptible" Robespierre and the Jacobins to Lenin and the Communists, who derived a cruel fanaticism from their fierce idealism. Even Cromwell ..could invade Ireland and wage cruel warfare in the name of an evangelical faith.

One of the most significant reinterpretations by Jesus of all the traditional eschatological symbols of the sharp distinction between justice and injustice, virtue and vice, was his reinterpretation of the apocalyptic story of the "last judgment," with the separation of the "sheep and the goats." According to Jesus, the righteous, who stood "on the right hand" of the Messianic judge, protested that they were not really virtuous-- "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you?"-while the unrighteous were equally unconscious of their deeds of omission and commission. This version of the last judgment prompted Pascal to the observation, "The world is divided between saints who know themselves to be sinners, and sinners who imagine themselves to be saints..."

All of Jesus' teachings on forgiveness declare in effect that only God and sinful men, that is, men who are aware of their sins, can be forgiving to their fellowman. That is the point of the parable of the unmerciful servant.

The final mystery of good and evil in life and history is in fact that love, compassion toward our fellowmen, which is the ultimate good according to our Christian faith, cannot be achieved by strenuous striving; rather, it is achieved by an honest self-scrutiny and self-awareness which discovers affinities between the foe's obvious weaknesses and our hidden vices...
Reinhold Niebuhr