One of the great scandals of Christianity is the radical challenge it poses to conventional morality. In the tradition of Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, French intellectual Emmanuel Carrère in his book “The Kingdom” emphasizes the punishing sacrifice of self that Jesus’ teaching enjoins. Classical and Jewish thinking had promoted the Golden Rule — Hillel said it was the essence of the Torah — but had never said, “Love your enemies.” And not only love your enemies but also Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. This overriding command cannot be a worldly imperative; it is impossible. It is the shocking inversion of health that Nietzsche railed against, and perhaps the “hatred of humanity” with which, Tacitus says, Christian were charged. Everything natural and human is turned upside down. With only slight exaggeration, Carrère summarizes this outrageous benevolence:
Love your enemies, take joy in being unhappy, prefer being small to being big, poor to rich, sick to healthy. And whereas the Torah posits the elementary, evident, and verifiable truth that it’s not good for men to be alone, Jesus said: Don’t desire women, don’t take a wife, if you have one, keep her so as not to harm her, but it would be better if you didn’t have one.[ * ] Don’t have children either. Let them come to you, take inspiration from their innocence, but don’t have any. Love children in general, not in particular, not like men have loved their children since time began: more than those of others, because they’re their own. And even — no, above all — don’t love yourselves. It is human to want one’s own good: don’t.
You can feel both the attraction and the recoil in Carrère’s stridency. He fears what he deeply admires; he is repelled by an ideal he cannot quite dislodge.
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* Holwick: This attitude is more reflective of what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7:29-40 than anything Jesus says.