doggerel: “Throughout all Eternity / I forgive you[,] you forgive
me / As our dear Redeemer said / This the Wine & this the Bread.”
Blake suggests, and the great phi los o pher Arthur Schopenhauer
actively argues, that the gap between the Old Testament and the
teachings of Jesus is so wide that what Jesus off ers is in signifi cant
ways a new religion. It is a religion, Schopenhauer argues, much
closer to the wisdom of the Upanishads and the teachings of the
Buddha than to the lessons of Abraham or Moses, profound as
those lessons may be.
Compassion is the core of Jesus’ ministry. Compassion is the new
ideal, the good news that Jesus brings, displacing the ethos of jus-
tice that dominates the Hebrew Bible. Love your neighbor as your-
self. Who is my neighbor? the lawyer asks Jesus. Jesus answers with
a story. A man is beaten and robbed and left in a ditch. Members of
his own group pass him by, leaving him to suff er. But a Samaritan
comes along, and he lifts the poor man from the side of the road.
He binds the man’s wounds and mounts him on his own beast. He
takes the suff ering man to an inn and pays his bill and says that he
will return to visit the wounded man and also to settle accounts.
Then the Savior’s question: Which of these was a neighbor to the
unfortunate man?
Every man is my neighbor. Every woman is my neighbor. This
is the central teaching of Jesus, and though it is not an easy teaching
to put into practice (Jesus himself seems to fail it on at least one
occasion), it may confer on living men and women a sense of
wholeness, presence, and even joy. No longer is one a thrashing Self,
fi ghting the war of each against all. Now one is part of everything
and everyone: one merges with the spirit of all that lives. And per-
haps this merger is heaven, or as close to heaven as we mortals can
come.
Who takes seriously the gospel of love, the love that Paul called
agape, in the pre sent? Surely there are some. A monk here, some
8 Polemical Introduction