Meanings of the Mote and the Beam [pt. 2]

[See part 1]

Translating Matthew 7, the King James Bible chooses ‘mote’ for kárphos, and ‘beam’ for dokós.

³ And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

⁴ Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

⁵ Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

The ambiguity of English ‘mote’ and ‘beam’ creates an image that can be read in two ways. It can still be taken as a comparison of weights of sin, where the preponderance rests with the joist in my own eye; but a beam in English can also be a shaft of light, and the mote a glowing speck of dust. The metaphorical image could therefore be a dustmote drifting past an illuminated window.

How the relation between the kárphos and the dokós is changed! For a dustmote cannot exist in the absence of a sunbeam, but vanishes as soon as it drifts beyond the margins of the light. So the teaching now could be this: the fault I see in my brother exists only because it is caught in the ray of my own judgement, and in the absence of that ray there is no fault at all.

In this way the King James translators transform the banal surface moral psychology of Matthew 7 into a breathtaking affirmation of compassion: my brother has no faults except that I project my own judgement upon his traits. Nor do I need to berate myself for being worse than he is. My task is to refrain from any judgement, and simply accept.

Immediately, though, the part of me which has been acculturated into Christian guilt pipes up and complains that this is not very Christian. To give up the habit of blaming myself would be sheer irresponsibility: it would turn me into an egotistical monster! And I want to reply, first: relax. For my own life history shows me that self-blame is by no means a protection against being such a monster.

Yet I admit that this secondary interpretation has a character that I do not associate with Christianity. Church sermons routinely exhort the congregration to be kind to other people, but I have never heard any engagement with the practical question of what stops people being kind, nor any practical suggestions for ways to overcome the barriers. The sermons lay down a principle that is posited as unattainable, and leave us to berate ourselves for our failure to attain it. I was recently told by the leader of a local church that the teaching of Christianity was not that we should in practice not commit sins, but rather that we should continue to sin and also continually repent. This seemed to me an unhealthy condition.

Although the secondary interpretation of the Mote and the Beam does not offer practical advice, it presents the psychology of judgement in such a concrete way that one feels there is a definite goal to strive for, and practical experiments one could make in that respect. In fact it feels more like Buddhism than Christianity: the ‘heavenly glory’ to which it points is one in which there may be cessation of suffering through giving up the habits of judging others and blaming oneself. Consider this description by David Edwards, a political activist and practicing Buddhist, of how a meditative technique transformed his negative state of mind after an unfortunate incident with his partner:

thanks to an hour of self-observation, the resentment had not merely been controlled by force of will, and it had not merely vanished. It had been alchemised into a loving, blissful energy. It wasn’t that I’d made a mental decision to forgive anyone; the angry energy had been transformed. It was astonishing to have somehow emerged into delight from a pit of despair.
As a result, not least because I knew and trusted my partner enough, I was able to see the whole thing as a misunderstanding, a kind of accident in which I had also played a part. Without the dark emotional baggage, I was able to see the event for what it really was – ugly, silly but not actually important. [MediaLens, ‘Resist not Evil’?]

I think this interpretation of Matthew 7 stands for itself. The text now appears as a perfect example of spiritual writing. It has two layers of meaning which are in dialogue with each other: the manifest interpretation, of the splinter and the plank, which ought not to satisfy us; and the inner interpretation, of the dustmote and the sunbeam, whose humane wisdom strikes us all the more forcefully since, in the moment of seeing, there is a shock as the tension of the manifest interpretation is resolved.

But now there is a new mystery: is this interpretation really to be found in the Greek of Matthew 7, or has it been imposed by the translators? Is there an ambiguity in Greek which matches the ambiguity exploited in King James, or is this all projection, and really was not intended at all? This is the subject of the third part.