NEUOFFENBARUNGDeutscher Text · Book contents
24 January 1844, evening
[Ste.01_021,01] ‘But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear!’
[Ste.01_021,02] What do you think this passage means? At once you say, ‘We do not know!’
[Ste.01_021,03] For if you said, ‘We know!’, you would plainly be lying. First you must look very closely at the passage in the outward sense of the letter. If you find it very sensible according to ordinary understanding, you are still far from the truth and the light within it. If, however, you find the passage nonsense to ordinary understanding, you are much closer to its truth and light.
[Ste.01_021,04] Some wit might say here, ‘I agree, and whoever sees that the whole Bible is nonsense is already light and truth itself.’ But it is not in that worldly, witty sense that I mean it when I say, ‘You must first find the passage nonsense from the standpoint of your worldly understanding if you wish to come nearer its light.’
[Ste.01_021,05] Why do I say this? Because this passage has a purely heavenly sense, directly opposed to the whole sense of worldly understanding.
[Ste.01_021,06] But how is this passage nonsense to worldly understanding? Listen, I will make it known to you.
[Ste.01_021,07] You know that within you only the heart, or love alone, is capable of feeling delight or any kind of bliss. This is because love alone, or the spirit in the human being, is life and therefore alone capable of any sensation. So bliss cannot properly be ascribed to the eye and the ear. They are merely instruments of sense that serve the spirit in its living activities. Neither the eye nor the ear of itself can ever be capable of bliss. The spirit, however, can experience it through the eye and the ear and through the other instruments of sense.
[Ste.01_021,08] So if the passage says, ‘Blessed are the eyes that see this, and blessed are the ears that hear this!’, it plainly says something contrary to reason according to worldly understanding. But now we shall see whether that is how the matter really stands.
[Ste.01_021,09] Ordinary worldly Christians of the somewhat better sort take it to mean that only the eyes and ears that saw and heard Me during My life on earth are blessed. People say it is only a rather beautiful figure of speech in which the sign is used for the thing and parts of a whole for the whole itself. Or, as the rhetoricians put it more learnedly, signum pro re, pars pro toto. In substance, they say, it means, ‘Blessed are the people who saw and heard Me Myself!’
[Ste.01_021,10] Is that not the right explanation, and, mark you, from the mouths of the better worldly Christians? Certainly. Yet I must add at once that neither I nor the evangelist in question ever studied rhetoric or took any account of synecdoche or any of the various kinds of syllogism.
[Ste.01_021,11] Our figure of speech had only one name: inward divine and spiritual truth. According to this figure found in My rhetoric, the passage quoted above is neither a synecdoche nor any kind of syllogism. It is no paraphrase, nor a prologue or epilogue. As I have said, it is pure, innermost divine and spiritual truth!
[Ste.01_021,12] It consists in this: people in the world generally have a great fear of bodily death. They are worldly and therefore can see nothing that is of the spirit, and cannot hear what would be a living teaching for their spirit.
[Ste.01_021,13] But in this passage lies a heavenly praise of those who through a true life of love have come so far that the world with its night fell from their eyes like a heavy covering and the ear of their spirit was opened to hear My fatherly voice. As a whole it says, ‘Happy are those who are reborn!’ In this sense it refers in no outward way to those who happened to be My countrymen and contemporaries. It applies to all who have ever lived on earth and who will yet live, as well as to the inhabitants of all other worlds.
[Ste.01_021,14] For everything must be regenerated in spirit before it can enter what is spiritual and therefore eternally living and truly gives bliss. So ‘eyes’ here means recognising divine truth, and ‘ears’ means taking it into oneself and acting upon it. The meaning is therefore this: blessed is the person in his spiritual understanding when he fully recognises divine truth. He is truly blessed when he takes divine truth into his life and acts upon it alone. For only in this way will he receive the rebirth of the spirit, out of which he will never again see, feel or taste death.
[Ste.01_021,15] That is the right meaning of the passage! But it would be altogether mistaken to apply it to those who look through and read very many books with their eyes and thus seek the light, or to those who, even if they cannot read, hear many sermons, lessons in Christian doctrine and guides to confession. They always leave the sermon just as they went in.
[Ste.01_021,16] Many, indeed, are already unable at the threshold of the house of prayer to remember a word of what was preached. During many a sermon the hearers' ears are anything but blessed, especially when a preacher, who has little brotherly love to spare, makes hell as hot as possible for them and the path to heaven exceedingly narrow, steep and thorny. In the end the hearers can scarcely choose which road to take and think, ‘Hell is hot, but the road to it is exceedingly easy. Heaven offers the highest bliss, but who can reach it if the only path is almost impossible to climb?’
[Ste.01_021,17] Such ears are scarcely the most blessed, any more than the eyes of the learned, who see many things yet can never behold what they would most like to see. Blessed, therefore, are only those who strive for the rebirth of the spirit and attain it more and more.
[Ste.01_021,18] No one is reborn all at once, only little by little. Yet the act of rebirth does not begin in anyone before he has begun to recognise divine truth. No one is fully reborn and comes to the perfect inward seeing and hearing of the living Word until he has, by freely acting, banished the world from within himself, which is what sin really is. Only then does the quoted passage find its consoling application in purely heavenly light, and only then are the eyes that see and the ears that hear blessed.
[Ste.01_021,19] I think this passage too has been set forth clearly enough. Strive, then, for it to become real within you! Amen.