Carlo Suarès: Letter to Jews, Christians, and Muslims |
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Editions "BEING FREE" 1957 BRUSSELS (orig. 1937)
Letter to the Jews, to the Christians and to the Muslims Having no title to write to you, not being the apostle of anybody, nor the propagator of any religion; having no notoriety, having not played a historical role or even contributed to the news of the press; belonging neither to the Synagogue, nor to the Church, nor to the Mosque; it is this very thing that impels me to write to you publicly. Having reached the age of old age, I see that those of the generations born in the last century are dead. The happiest ones have died of natural death. Many were killed young by wars, revolutions, misery, hunger. Others protect their lives by exercising political, religious, industrial, and commercial power. And I see that the best of them have died to themselves from weariness and because having been heroic actors at certain times they can not console themselves for being any more people, in a world that does not do not need them. The fraternity of the groups of combatants, the warlike exaltation they lack. Others, finally, bitter old men, still proclaim, on the threshold of their graves, the excellence of the principles which led us to chaos. The decay of these deaths engenders the mistakes of today's youth. These young people, how can we condemn them? If they did not learn much, we did not teach them anything. We reproach them for adding to the disorder by the abandonment of spiritual values, whose effectiveness we have not believed. We have acted for all sorts of reasons, economic, political, industrial or commercial, rejecting the Eternal as an effective, concrete, real value. The unity of men within the Uncreated has become an abstraction without power. Jews, Christians, Muslims, the most sincere of you, the most daring, say these are three religions whose revelation, whose unique essence is in Abraham, but your hearts and deeds make your lips lie. You Jews do not recognize the other two. You Christians do not recognize the other two. You Muslims, angry at the fact that the other two did not accept the two hands the Prophet Muhammad had extended to them, proclaim the unity of Islam as if a part could be a whole. I see everywhere men of good intentions search in the books of Moses, in the Gospels, in the Koran, for reasons to think that their religion has universal foundations. This is true provided that the universal is not overloaded with peculiarities. But the competence of your authorities is exercised on everything that distinguishes you from each other. I beg you to consider the curious practices which you indulge in, and to recognize that far from opening your ears to the voice of the God of Abraham, they have made you deaf. Abraham lived well before Muhammad, Jesus, and Moses. Abraham did not consult scholars, bishops or rabbis. Abraham did not seek rules of conduct in books. Abraham was not a scholar, let alone a theologian. Abraham served no one and obeyed no one. He was the servant of the Lord, the Ineffable, the timeless, the unthinkable, because his religion held in one word: Justice. Do not try to know what God's righteousness is. You say God, God. But if this word has any meaning for you, this meaning is wrong since you can not conceive of it; and if it represents something for you, this representation is only an image conceived by you. Instead, look for what is unfair because the error is perceptible and definable. Those who seek God will surely not find it: what they will find will be a mistake, because to seek God is to be in the path of error. Seek rather injustice to remove from your mind that which hinders the Lord. Denounce injustice where it is and your human voice will be the echo of the Lord. But what is most opposed to justice is the notion of sovereignty, wherever it may be, however small, fragmentary and modest it may appear. This notion has been implanted in our minds in a tragic way. You must reconsider it, otherwise we will never be smart enough to get out of the conflict era. Only the Lord, the God of Abraham, is sovereign. All human sovereignty, individual or collective, spiritual or material, is established and maintained only within the confines of confessional or territorial boundaries. She rejects the Lord by her own affirmation. Do not seek to know what the sovereignty of the Lord is. See, however, how every act of sovereignty is necessarily unjust. Remember the prophet Samuel: when he became old he made his sons judges over Israel, but they did not walk in his footsteps; they were greedy, received gifts, and violated justice; Then the elders of Israel gathered together and asked Samuel to set up a king over them, as the other nations had done. Samuel heard these words with displeasure and prayed to the Lord. And Jehovah said to Samuel, Hear the voice of the people in all that he saith to you, for it is not you whom they reject, but me, which they reject, that I may not reign over them. Then the LORD commanded Samuel to make known to the people the right of the king to reign over them, and the prophet gave them a picture of the cruel slavery in which they, their wives and daughters, fell, and said, your king whom you have chosen, but Jehovah will not hear you. The people refused to listen to Samuel's voice. "No," said they, "but there will be a king over us, and we too will be like all nations" ... Thus began for this people the era of great catastrophes. King Solomon, clothed with false glory and false wisdom, thought to redeem the rejection of the Lord by a sumptuous temple, which the Lord afterwards destroyed. The kingdom was quickly torn in two. This was the prelude to dispersions. Study this episode of Samuel's prophecy carefully. The prophet listened to the voice of the people, "because" the people had rejected the sovereignty of the Lord. This people was free to be chained and did not fail. He exercised sovereignty by abdicating his sovereignty. Since those distant times, many pontiffs were rulers in the West, and many rulers were pontiffs in the East. When, just recently, the evolution of history provoked revolutions, most of these crowns were overthrown and the peoples invested. Real sovereignties are now succeeding those illusory sovereignties by which the people are forced to elect or plebiscite demagogues, whose impossible goal is to exercise power in order to maintain it. The exercise of these poisoned powers is based on words such as: "We have the right to dispose of ourselves, we are a nation; we want to be a free and strong people; we have the right to be a state; we proclaim the right of peoples to freedom; we exercise the right of sovereignty over our territory; we do not allow anyone to violate our sovereign rights ". And these stupid words are repeated, shouted, shouted, amplified to inevitably unleash other din: those of wars. And the unhappy people, weeping for their dead, dazed before their homes and their crops burned, a thousand times more miserable than before having (as they say) "become aware of themselves", invoke the Lord, but the Jehovah does not hear them. The idea of ?? national sovereignty has become a world religion so respectable that it is enough to invoke it so that the heads bow. Which of your pious men dares to see the religion of Satan, the prince of this world, always in conflict with the Lord? And it was necessary for states, richer and more powerful than all those who existed up to the present day, to reveal both their weakness and their interdependence, so that the dust of the unfortunate misguided, confined to frontiers made at random by fratricidal struggles, proclaim themselves states and want themselves free, strong and sovereign. Jews, you gave a bad example: You wanted to constitute yourself politically in a sovereign state. Your past misfortunes are an explanation, not a justification for this attempt. The LORD had imposed on you a perpetual remoteness from earthly values ?? so that you might remember Jacob so that you would know what Israel is. But which of your doctors has told you that the words "Land of Israel" are a mistake? You are confusing Moses and Jacob, the legislation of a man of his day and the birthright of Israel, the ever-changing human justice and the justice of the Lord. And to the outdated laws of Moses some of you outbid. They disguise themselves in a ridiculous way, persuading themselves that round hats, frock coats, frizzy hair and other nonsense are indispensable to their religion. Admittedly, this religion is not that of Abraham. You seem to have never known that Jacob's birthright, in the face of his brother Esau, necessarily involved the abandonment of land and crops, tents and herds, servants, men-at-arms, in short, from all terrestrial possession. This birthright was that of which the LORD said, "Israel is my son, my firstborn." Before this filiation of the Lord, Isaac, the carnal father bowed. And Jacob went alone through the expanse, having for his luggage only a bundle on his shoulder. You have been told how, having been exploited for fourteen years by Laban, but having managed, by a cunning to have enough flocks to feed his numerous family, he returned, weary and already feeling the weight of age, to his native land, where Esau, who had inherited all the earthly goods of the family, rich and powerful, but all the more angry, was waiting for him at the head of four hundred armed men. Learning this great anger and mobilization, Jacob who was accompanied only by his wives, his children, and some servants, sent to Esau a cattle of choice in the hope of appeasing him by these offerings. Night came without the answer of his angry brother. Jacob pitched his camp near a stream and watched, alone, under the vast sky, in his weakness and his uncertainty. It was then that the angel of the Lord flung himself on him, trying to kill him. Jacob fought all night against the angel. And when he could not kill him, he wounded him, but Jacob, holding him in his arms, took away his blessing and his name: henceforth he was no longer Jacob, he was Israel. If he had not been just the angel would have killed him, just as an artisan bends with all his might a blade of hardened steel to test it: if steel has a defect, let the blade breeze! But no angel takes the trouble to provoke you in single combat: your machine guns and your guns, your cannons and your armored tanks have killed you in advance. You who have measured the inexpiable injustice of those who have expelled you from your homes, it is you who, today, commit it. Jews of dispersion, it is not enough to dissociate yourself from Zionist heresy. Ask yourself for what purpose and for what reasons you prolong the particularism of your commercial lives. Some say that the voice of the Lord is silent but that the echo, the memory remains. What an extraordinary affirmation! How do they know that the voice is silent? Who told them? For the deaf, the waves of the ocean are silent, no noise accompanies the torrents in the hollows of the mountains, the wind does not sing in the trees. And it is not the echo of the voice of Jehovah that dwells, but reports, testimonies, words, translations into out-of-date languages, thus today unrealities. Jews of the dispersion, for centuries you have the rage to make you massacre and die of bad deaths. Dig in your consciences, reject all that is not essential, your manners, your practices, your segregations, thus die of the only good death that you can offer to the world, announcing resurrection, and the voice of the Lord will be heard. Appeal to Christians I am speaking to Christians now to tell them that they have a bad conscience. "Not everyone can be St. Francis of Assisi, you will say, the gospel of infinite love is almost impossible." This is true, but it does not justify you to reject the greatest lesson that Jesus gave us, that of death and resurrection. For twenty centuries you have dwelt upon this death and the sufferings of this death, you adore a corpse by shedding tears, which I beg you to see, that they are suspicious by their abundance. Remember Peter when Jesus let his people know that he must die to resurrect, "God forbid," cried the one who became the prince of the apostles, "it will not happen to you." And Jesus answered him "Behind me, Satan, you are scandalous to me, because your thoughts are not those of God but those of the men". Alas, Christians, these words of Jesus are all too true, for by mourning this death, regretting this death, by accusing deicide of a man or men or a people, by condemning them, rejecting them from your hearts for two One thousand years, you have not ceased to be Satan's henchmen. See the resulting hatred and misunderstanding: The best way for the Prince of this world to rid himself of Christ is to hide his resurrection from Earth. Hence these tendentious chronicles concerning one or two vague and uncertain appearances of a man not recognized by those who had lived with him until the last days, and the subtilization of Jesus in a childish Paradise, which according to some, is very crowded with people who have not given themselves the trouble to be crucified. The pitiless vigilante, witness of your injustices, asserting that wealth excludes salvation, that every weapon turns against the one who uses it, that Master of the Masters who, with reason, proclaimed himself, in the Hebrew way at the same time The son of the LORD, and the son of man, was neutralized, destroyed, and opened the false doors of indulgences which your pontiffs grant and grant you without restraint. From symbols to images, from images to statues, from statues to relics, this religion, for many, fell into paganism. And as if the God of Abraham, as if the Timeless had human image, here it is, for too many people, sitting on a throne: Jupiter having changed his name. Christians who fear to die to yourselves, give up to the idea of ?? making your salvation. Return to the sources and you will know that Christ is alive today among you, that his carnal feet tread on the ground and that he reveals himself to those who, recognizing him, know how to plunge their eyes into the infinity of his gaze, devoid personal assertion. Appeal to Muslims Muslims, I want to speak to you in a less mystical way, because it is less a question for you to know how to die to yourself than to know how to be reborn, less a question of returning to the source than of not poisoning it. We already see in several countries, enlightened spirits among you, who make, in the book of Mohammed, the part of pure prophecy and that of legislation. Perhaps you do not know how important it would be for the world to have these shares clearly defined by you. After the writings of Muhammad, there was the same confusion that Moses' generation produced. These two prophets assembled tribes and made them peoples, and gave them laws adapted to their times, their places, and their customs. The immutable message of the Lord proclaimed by Mohammed was, once again, enveloped in the flow of history. It is easier to conform to the appearances of a cult than to understand its essence. This is how a single source generates the worst discord. Jews and Christians did not recognize the Prophet in Mohammed. They saw only what the Muslims showed them, who also fell into common error. Islam in motion illuminated the Christian world. He died abruptly the same day he settled down as an empire. Israel and Ishmael, son of Abraham the Hebrew, have much in common. On them the blessing and curse of the Lord is exercised in the same way. In Israel is the duration, in Ishmael space. The errors of Israel remove space, those of Ismael remove the duration. And these mistakes are always a single mistake, these mistakes a single fault, inexpiable. This error, this sin, this sin, this treachery of the Lord; always, in every place, is the usurpation of sovereignty, for whatever reason, in whatever domain it may be, however modest and legitimate it may seem, for only the Lord is sovereign and who is the Muslim who will dare to deny me on this point? Suffer, Muslims, my brothers, that a selfless voice, whose name does not matter, gives you this warning: the moment you make the mistake of mixing politics with Islam, the Lord will plunge you into the confusion. I say: at the very moment, the very day of your error, you will measure its weight because the Lord, I tell you once again, does not grant duration to the consequences of your betrayals, as well as he refuses space to Israel. Mix clean water and dirty water, the result is dirty water. Mingle Judaism and politics, Islamism and politics, the result is a dirty politics, a flagrant injustice in the eyes of the Lord. This is the essence of what I have to say to you today. It is up to you to know whether the leaders you choose have the influence of the natural sovereignty conferred by wisdom, or the fleeting burst of some borrowed sovereignty. Are they modest, silent, meditative, penetrated by the insignificance of every man to the justice of the Lord? Do they seek to translate this inexpressible justice into judgments conforming to the requirements of the unity of men and the dignity of the individual? Do they reject the values ?? of possession and profit? Do they have a sense of your obvious needs for food, housing, clothing, education, hygiene? Are they aware of the techniques? Did they learn to be administrators? Do they live retired, far from agitations of all kinds, in order to think clearly? Are they asking that their faces be as little known as possible, and their names hardly mentioned? Jews, Christians, Muslims, have pity on yourselves, have mercy on the God of Abraham. Many peoples are watching you.Some, bringing from Asia multi-millennial wisdoms, can rightly tell you that your three great religions appear to them as three bloody sects, themselves subdivided into sub-sects that are gorging themselves. And what do you have to say to them, if you do not eliminate, each and every one of your particularisms, if you do not bring back your times to the essential? The intelligence of this peace is within your reach. Carlo Suares. Lettre aux juifs, aux chritiens, et aux musulmans par Carlo Suarés - 3e millinaire |