Here the high priest turns to Nathanael and says to him, ‘Following your Master’s direction, I turn to you at random. Therefore explain to me at least the hardest point of your Master’s teaching. But I ask you for clear, plain words only, for mist upon mist lights up no room! So, speak!’
Nathanael says, ‘Are you really so devious in disposition that you will not grasp such a clearly given teaching in its true meaning? Did not almost all the prophets foretell of Christ that He would open His mouth only in parables and would not speak to people without parables?’
— [Omitted, since this unit is absent from the 1871 text.] —
Nathanael continues, ‘If you know this as one versed in Scripture, why do you call the Lord a fool when, according to Scripture, He opens His mouth in parables? You may implore the Lord for light to understand them, but you cannot call Him a fool because His figurative speech is incomprehensible to you, when you yourself are full of incomprehension in such things of God!
‘Look, the things of nature have their order and can exist only in this order proper to them. Likewise, the things of the spirit have their most particular order and cannot exist, be thought, or be expressed outside that order. But between natural things and spiritual things there is and exists a precise correspondence, because the former have proceeded from the latter—a correspondence that, of course, the Lord alone knows best of all.
‘Now, when the Lord proclaims purely spiritual things to us, who are all still within the rigid order of the natural realm, He can do so only by means of figurative images of correspondence. But to understand these rightly, we must strive to awaken our spirit by observing God’s commandments. Only in such an awakened state will we become clear about all that the Lord has said and revealed through such a corresponding figurative image; and precisely in this His divine word will differ eternally from our human word.
‘But now pay close attention! What the eye is in natural human beings, the faculty of beholding divine and heavenly things is in the spirit—things that alone accord with the spirit’s nature for its most blissful eternal existence.
‘But in accordance with the most necessary divine order, the spirit must be immersed for a certain time in the matter of the flesh of this world, so that it may become firm in its freedom and almost complete independence from God, without which it could never behold God, still less exist in, beside, and with God. But precisely while the spirit matures in matter and grows firm in freedom and independence from God, it stands in the utterly unavoidable danger of being swallowed by matter itself and killed along with it. An awakening from this death to life in God is and must be exceedingly difficult and full of suffering. Therefore the Lord said—understand this well!—not to the person of flesh, but to the person of spirit: “If your eye gives you offense, tear it out and cast it from you, for it is better to enter the heavens with one eye than hell with both.” This means: if the light of the world entices you too much, exert force upon yourself and turn away from such a light, which would draw you into the death of matter! Thus deprive yourself, as a spirit, of the empty enjoyment of contemplating the world, and turn with your soul toward purely heavenly things! For it is better for you to enter the kingdom of eternal life without any knowledge of the world than, too knowledgeable about the world, to be swallowed in the hereafter by the death of matter!
‘When the Lord spoke here of two eyes, hands, and feet, He did not mean the two eyes, hands, and feet of the body, but only the plainly twofold faculty of sight, activity, and progress of the spirit. He warns not the flesh, which has no life, but the spirit not to occupy itself with the world if it notices that the world attracts it too strongly; for in that case it is better to enter eternal life without any ignorance of the world than, through too much knowledge of the world, to be swallowed in the end by the world’s necessary judgment.
‘The spirit certainly should also behold the world and become knowledgeable about it, but it should find no pleasure in it. If it begins to feel that the world entices it, it should turn away from it at once, for danger already threatens it! And look, the corresponding image of tearing out the eye expresses this necessary turning away. And He who can give us so apt an image must surely be well versed in all the spiritual and material relations of the human being, which, in my conviction, can be possible only for Him through whose power, love, and wisdom all things, spiritual and material, were created! I think you will now have understood me and will see how grievously you have sinned against Him who holds your life, like the life of us all, in His almighty hand!’