The Sermon on the Mount, learning by heart and trusting the future
In October 2025, I tried to commit philosophy handbooks to memory. Not academic handbooks, but collections of wise sayings produced by ancient philosophical schools so that students may memorize them. My curiosity got captured by the Sermon on the Mount (sayings spoken by Jesus, found in the Gospel of Matthew) because the scholar George B. Branch-Trevathan claimed that it counted as one of those philosophical handy books. I agree! Attempting to learn it by heart was an exercise in understanding faith and justice.
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Keeping philosophy at hand
In the conclusion of my last post, I stressed the importance of “putting pen to paper” when you read a philosophical text that seeks to improve your life. The pen in your hand (the notes you take, the journaling you do in response to the text) is tangible proof that you are actually grappling with the text. It’s not meant to be a proof for the benefit of other people, it’s only meant for your own benefit. It signals to you that you are putting in the work and you are not just daydreaming about putting in the work.
Interestingly, there is another way to test yourself like this. Memorization! Committing a text to memory and being able to recite it exactly. This engagement with texts was a much more widespread spiritual practice in the ancient times. For example, Stoicism and Epicureanism both have their handbooks (Epicurus’ Kyriai Doxai and Epictetus’ Encheiridion): you are meant to memorize them, and by the same token, to internalize their philosophical systems. If you didn’t do this, the teachings wouldn’t be available to you when you needed them most. These teachers urged you to keep philosophy close at hand, always at the ready. Their wise sayings and handbooks were created with that goal in mind.
It’s curious to think that nowadays “learning things by heart” has a certain stigma attached to it. People worry that being able to “parrot” a text is the sign of a superficial relationship with it, rather than the opposite. Memorizing is seen as unnecessary and suspicious. What’s more, in the realm of philosophy, the very idea of the philosophical system (which I see as an opportunity for memorization) strikes us as cumbersome and unwieldy. I think we should challenge those prejudices.
As an experiment, I started memorizing these stoic and epicurean handbooks. It was going well, but I felt like it was going too well. It was too easy. I was too familiar with those systems. I wanted something different to sink my teeth into.
Perusing this excellent bibliography of Philosophy-as-a-Way-of-Life scholarship, I came across an interesting proposition: according to George B. Branch-Trevathan, the passage in the Bible known as The Sermon on the Mount (in the Gospel of Matthew) is actually a handbook of wise sayings whose function is similar to the philosophical handbooks!
So then, my goal was set: I was going to memorize all of the Sermon on the Mount, as a way to internalize it, and to see how it all feels when tested against the vicissitudes of daily life.
Learning by heart
Unlike the Stoic and Epicurean Handbook, committing to memory the Sermon did not happen smoothly. In spite of the challenge I had set myself, I felt no compulsion to memorize things that I did not yet understand. (is it due to the ingrained prejudice against rote learning that I mentioned earlier? I don’t know.) So I fell behind schedule. My efforts were mostly spent trying to understand the text as best as I could, and since this is a complex piece, this took up all of my time. But I did focus on memorizing the order of broad sections of the text, and this was enlightening.
When I tried to memorize the text, I was hit with a big obstacle: the wise sayings of Jesus seemed to be delivered in a completely random order. That did not bother me when I was merely reading the text, but now that I was trying to memorize it, it was really irritating. What makes us jump from one section to another? I asked myself: is there truly no structure to this thing? I knew the structure of stoic philosophy so well that it was too “easy” and “trivial” to memorize it, but here, it felt structureless and impossible. It was this irritation that forced me to read more of the scholarship (the aforementioned George B. Branch-Trevathan dissertation) in order to uncover the inner structure of the text. This was very exciting as it reminded me of my roots: Pierre Hadot was always clear that what led him to think about “Philosophy as a Way of Life” was a hermeneutical problem. Certain philosophical texts are completely disorderly until you realize the way of life they are trying to inculcate; only then do they begin to shine with a certain inner logic, a certain pedagogical order.
As Branch-Trevathan points out, the keystone of the text is Matthew’s idea that a pure soul implies right actions and vice-versa (the metaphor of the healthy tree producing healthy fruits; the tree is known by its fruits, and vice-versa). This idea is coloured by another idea: the way people react to what Jesus is doing and to what God promises is really revelatory of their characters. All sections will be variations on that same theme, touching on different aspects. Once that central theme is understood, the necessity of different sections is way easier to tackle. They basically cover everything that would come up in a Q&A if the people on the Mount asked Jesus to clarify his central thesis: “what does it mean vis-a-vis the Old Testament?” “what does it mean regarding the spiritual practices that we are already doing (fasting, praying, charity, etc)?”, “what about the relationship to myself/others/God/worldly goods?” This all makes sense pedagogically, as these would be the Frequently Asked Questions.
But what is Jesus doing and what does God promise? The issue of Christian faith
Something I had a difficult time with was my learned distaste for Christian faith – an unavoidable aspect of this text. I was born in a society moulded by Christianity as an organized religion, and also moulded by the backlash against this hegemony. It makes it difficult to approach this ideology with an open mind. Especially given that, very often, my enthusiasm for various spiritual practices, ancient and foreign, comes from a place of trying to get away as much as possible from the stuffy air of Christian hegemony! The entire point is to find something different!
So there was a big mental block there. And I knew that I was never going to push through this mental block. I was not going to get on my knees and pray to a personal supernatural God. The way I made it work in my mind is to think of the Spinozist compromise. According to Spinoza, the authors of the Bible made certain truths accessible to uneducated folk, but these truths find their full expression in, well… the philosophical system of Spinoza. I do think that this compromise is a “creative misreading” of the Bible; one that transmutes certain literal supernatural beliefs into metaphorical wisdom, but I see no other way to overcome my mental block and not bristle at the importance of eschatological prophecy.
So this was to be my way forward: I would only assent to my own understanding of God – which is the God of Spinoza – and I would unfortunately force the hand of the text by pretending that the God of the Bible is a metaphor for the God of Spinoza. If you do this, do you absolutely distort the text beyond recognition? Surprisingly no, much of it remains intact (though not all of it). The Spinozist compromise is not an outrageously bad compromise.
For all its emphasis on “belief”, “prophecy”, and “the other world beyond”, Christianity remains committed to the teaching of philosophical exercises, whose truths have to be measured in pragmatic terms, not in realist terms. What looks like “facts to be believed or not” on the outside, is often actually “practices to be tried out” inside a community of practice. I think it’s a stretch to claim that everything supernatural in there must actually be a wise metaphor, but I think it is still true what David Collins says, “if you take religious language literally, you’re not taking it seriously enough” and also “I find it wholesome to ask, not do I believe this or not, not is this right or wrong, not even is this true or false, but… how does this work?”1 I think that’s spot on.
What struck me, this time around, reading some passages of this Gospel, was that, you can read the proposition “how you react to what Jesus is doing is revelatory of your character” in two ways. Either you emphasize that Jesus is claiming to be the son of God (belief); in that case, it seems unfair to make people feel bad for not believing that claim. Or you emphasize that Jesus is providing support for the needy (practice); in that case, it does seem bad that you are not able to tolerate him, no matter how weird his metaphysical claims might be. You should be able to tolerate weirdos, especially if they’re trying to help out.
The passages that moved me most
Some passages were more amenable than others to the Spinozist compromise, and they were the ones that moved me most. For instance the text says “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” I found this moving, and let me tell you how.
Here, we find the idea, common to a lot of philosophies, including Spinozism, that you should put your happiness in sturdy things like broad features of existence (gratitude for being alive, gratitude for the world existing, etc), rather than getting too attached to breakable things. What I especially liked about that passage is that, in a pragmatic vein and a phenomenological vein, I could reduce this “heaven” to the very act of “storage”. In other words, I need not believe in a supernatural other-world that I can access when I die. The very act of detaching myself from breakable things and feeling gratitude towards existence itself IS heaven on earth, or as Spinoza would say, it is blessedness in this life. At the same time, the metaphor offers added value, not found in the “deflating” intellectual translation: the image of heaven is associated with the sky, and as readers of this blog will know, there is a certain “sense of sky” that you can acquire by tuning up your body in the right way, with the right posture and poetry. As Hayden Kee writes “the openness before the sky stands for the body’s receptivity towards any possible object, its radical openness to possibility and the unknown”2
So in the end, what we have here is this very intuitive open attitude, fed by encouragement, beautiful metaphors, and slight paradoxes. Yes, paradoxes. I was struck by this passage in particular: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” Tomorrow will take care of itself! What a strange proposition, now that I think about it. Like many many lines in the Sermon of the Mount (pearls to the swine, salt of the earth, blessed are the poor in spirit, etc) this passage has become a cliché in my culture. People around me use this phrase all the time, though we do not know where it comes from. And I find it funny (I mean “irritating”) that people dismiss what they think of as “thought terminating clichés” (clichés like “It is what it is.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “You only live once.”) when they have absolutely no idea or curiosity about how those clichés are actually the remnants of spiritual work. “Tomorrow will take care of itself” is a beautiful encouragement towards heaven on earth, towards blessedness in this life. As someone with an anxiety disorder, it is exactly what I need to hear! And understood in its proper context, it is attached to an entire reasoning, pedagogy, way of life, that “makes you think”, rather than terminates thinking.
Backtracking a little bit, I must say that I was absolutely floored to discover that the line “Blessed are the simple minded” (in French we will say “simples d’esprit” so that’s why I render it like this here), that I and everyone around me always took to mean “if you are stupid that’s good, it’s easier for you to believe in the Holy Father” actually meant something entirely different in context and was subject to a fascinating translation problem. I cannot pretend to understand all the ins and outs of this translation problem, but basically you have this idea of a Mind/Heart and this idea of Simplicity/Poverty. For instance, this phrase will be translated as “poor in spirit”. It’s not obvious what it means, but it seems to be the crux of the entire Sermon on the Mount (the purity of soul). Though, whether it is the end goal, or the preliminary step, (or both?) is not entirely clear. It is connected to the idea of “humbleness”. It is very inspiring as a call for action “make your soul simpler, and simpler”, and if you do that, you will achieve the turn towards heaven, and away from breakable things.
Again, this is the beautiful idea of humble open-mindedness: “radical openness to possibility and the unknown”.
Words of conclusion
I had a wonderful time.
Last time, I practiced stoic virtues and had to focus on the virtues of courage. Here, it was a beautiful mix of encouragement and the virtues of justice. Indeed there is a big emphasis on forgiveness of other people. Once you forgive other people, you feel forgiven yourself, and it is a doorway to this state of mind of simplicity and humbleness.
I now feel more open to re-discovering the philosophy of Christianity, and also more open to the project of giving the God of Spinoza a certain sky-oriented aesthetic, so that I may fully embrace it in times of need, even when the logical brain is not firing on all cylinders.
(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. For example, we achieved the cosmic perspective via the View from Above. Another time, we explored what we shoulddo when we are shocked by politics. Take a look around the blog for more exercises!
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(12/11/2025)
Pierrick Simon
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
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NOTES:
2p.143. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness.
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