What Do You See?

The Eyes of the heart and the darkness within

By Anthony Esolen*

Sermon on the Mount by Henrik Olrik, Altarpiece from St. Matthaeus Church in Copenhagen, Denmark

Suppose you are attending a concert, and you are listening to an intricate work of musical genius, such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. You are expecting to hear it all the way through, and to hear its themes and motifs played upon, modified, expanded, and set in a variety of musical contexts, all building up to a grand culmination. You expect to hear it as a coherent whole, and to experience its mystery also as such.

But suppose this is what you get instead. Suppose that at several dozen points in the work, the conductor stops, turns to the audience and says something on this order: “This is now a whimsical Turkish air,” or, “This is a resumption of the leading motif in the second movement,” or, “The composer here uses the kettledrums to interrupt the melody.” In one sense, you are receiving some instruction, and if you are not familiar with classical music, you may believe that it has benefited you.

But you do not actually hear the symphony. You hear instead a series of fragments, and you hear them as interpreted and labeled by the conductor, who narrows your focus, and actually prevents you from having a deeply human encounter with the music.

That is what the editors of Bibles risk doing when they divide the text into small pieces and label them with headings. They do so, at best, for the convenience of the reader. But there is a cost. Let me take an example from the Sermon on the Mount, from the generally acceptable Revised Standard Version (Mt. 6:19-24):

Concerning Treasures

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. 

The Sound Eye

“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

Serving Two Masters

“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”

When we read the text in this way, which the edition makes almost inevitable, we read the three sayings as separate, as obiter dicta, the kinds of things Jesus might have tossed out on the wayside in many a sermon, here collected in a convenient place, with a vague sense that they should be near one another. But what if we remove the labels and the indentations? What if we assume that this is one tapestry of thought?

Jesus says that we should not lay up for ourselves treasures on earth, which moths and rust can corrupt, and thieves break in and steal. The moths, the rust (in Greek, brosis, suggesting something that eats, that gnaws away), and the thieves all work in darkness. That is, of course, because they are not seen, but it is also because of the nature of the treasure concerned and where it is laid.

The Greek thesauros is a treasure box. We put rich clothes aside, in a cedar chest, perhaps, to keep them sweet-smelling and, we hope, to keep the vermin away. We put gold in a locked chest to hide it from thieves. Jesus is not saying that we should strew money around the floor and hang woolen robes from the window.

But if things like these are what we treasure most in life, we will have much to do with darkness, and with the creatures of darkness, and no matter how hard we try, the moths and the rust and the thieves will come. Death, that great silent bat, will come.

So then, it is a fool’s investment to set all your hopes on the things of earth. But it is also what a blind man does. There are glories all round us, and God directs our eyes to heaven, where no good thing is lost, where nothing whole and sound can be corrupted, and where no evil can break the peace. We are meant to look to heaven because we are meant to see what really is to be treasured. If we are dazzled by gold or silk or fame or prestige or power, even if it is but a golden coin or two, a silk scarf, a notice in the newspaper, a name-plate on a door, or the mayoralty of a village, we will be blind to what is truly good and beautiful. The eye, which Jesus calls the lamp of the body, will not be sound. It will see, but it will not see. Instead of filling the body with light, it will fill the body with a kind of active darkness.

It is a terrible sentence we thus lay upon ourselves. The vision is inverted. We would be better off seeing nothing at all, but, as Jesus says to the Pharisees after his cure of the blind man, we say that we see, so that our sin remains. Those men saw Jesus with the eyes of malevolence in action. Better had they been living on the banks of the Indus River, and never heard his name.

Now we can understand why Jesus turns to the worship of Mammon. No man can serve two masters. No one can commit himself both to light and to darkness. Men hate the light, says Jesus elsewhere, because their deeds are evil. The human heart must choose.

We can serve God, and we should always remember that in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, there are no separate words for servant and slave; or we can slave for wealth, prestige, and so forth, earthly things, mutable, corruptible, and eventually to be lost forever. If we serve God, we will see that those other things are to be despised, that is, we can look down upon them with a bit of healthy scorn. Why be a slave for what the ultimate thief will steal?

But if we serve Mammon, we will not want to hear about God, and we may go so far as to despise his true servants, as fools who cannot get on in the world.

So we must choose between sight and an acute blindness that sees all things wrong.

To serve Mammon is to have the eye full of darkness, to see wrongly by means of the darkness within.

Such is what I see when I shut my eyes to the editors.

* Dr. Anthony Esolen, currently a faculty member at Thales College in North Carolina, has been a professor of literature and humanities for 35 years and is the author or translator of more than 30 books, which include a range of English translations, analyses of culture, literary and Biblical criticisms, meditations on modern education, meditations on the Christian life, and original poetry. Dr. Esolen also serves as a senior editor and regular writer at Touchstone magazine, has published well over 1000 articles in various journals, and publishes a web magazine dedicated to language, music, poetry, and classic films called Word and Song with his wife, Debra.