[…]the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.
— Matthew 13:45-46 (NIV)
What is in-valuable is beyond all valuation. The invaluable is priceless. That is, it cannot be bought by all the cash one makes by selling all one has, even if one has a tremendous amount, like Jeff Bezos, Elan Musk, or other corporate capitalist multi-billionaires. Rather, the invaluable is that to acquire which one must completely surrender — pay over, as it were — oneself. That is the price one must pay to buy the invaluable, the pricelessly precious: what is so precious that it cannot be purchased at any price whatever, no matter how high.
In reading the citation at the start of this post, one should take heed to remember that in the chapter at issue Matthew is speaking in parables. He is telling revealing stories, not conveying information.
Indeed, the very expression “kingdom of heaven,” whether in Matthew’s parables or anywhere else where it is used non-idolatrously, should itself always be taken metaphorically, not literally. To take it literally would be to hear it asserting that what is called “God” is some great potentate sitting on some throne somewhere above us, amidst or beyond our universe. That is sheer absurdity.
To borrow an earlier line from the same Gospel:
Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear. — Matthew 11:15 (NIV)
An instance of the invaluable
* * *
In his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals), first published toward the end of the 18th century CE, Immanuel Kant gave three formulation of one and the same “categorical imperative,” as he labelled it. That, and that alone, is the imperative, the order, the command that provides the groundwork or foundation for all morals, thereby defining morality itself as such. Here, in the original German followed by my English translation, is the second of Kant’s three formulations of that categorical imperative, that command which permits no exceptions whatsoever:
Handle so, daß du die Menschheit, sowohl in deiner Person, als in der Person eines jeden andern, jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, niemals bloß als Mittelbrauchest. (Act in such a way that you treat humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other, always also as a purpose, never just as a means.)
Human beings are all invaluable, each and every one of them. No human being is a consumer product, to be sold at a profit and then used by the purchaser. Any violation of that rule is immoral.
Immoral violation of an invaluable person (picture from 1863)
* * *
Once, in the South Atlantic, I saw a whaler in the process of killing a female accompanied by one of her offspring. The harpooner, a red-bearded Irishman, kept putting harpoons into the whale. The intestines were hanging out of the mangled body of the huge animal, and nevertheless it continued to swim back and forth in the water made red by its blood, trying with its shattered body to shield the little whale. Since then, and the sight of that harpooner’s freckled face as he laughed derisively, and of that poor creature, faithful to the end, I have believed in the existence of Satan as I believe in the existence of God.
— Friedrich Reck, Diary of a Man in Despair (from diary entry for June 1942)
Many centuries before Kant, Aristotle proclaimed the truth that not just humans but all natural beings, as opposed to artificial products, have no purpose beyond themselves. Coming about through nature herself, such beings are not “for” anything beyond just being themselves.
As I have written before on this blog, in my own university classes throughout my career as a philosophy professor I liked to use chipmunks, those beings of nature, to illustrate Aristotle’s point. “Chipmunks,” I would say, “are for chipmunking.”
Precisely for that reason, chipmunks are invaluable beings. That is not in the least affected by the fact that someone might capture a chipmunk, put it in a cage, and sell it to the highest bidder at some chipmunk-auction. Indeed, just so have countless human beings been sold throughout history.
Whatever price they may bear on the open market, however, neither caged chipmunks nor enslaved human beings ever cease to be invaluable. Abuse continues to be abuse, regardless of how profitable such abuse may prove to be for the abusers. That is what makes it abuse in the first place.
All beings of nature, whether human, animal, vegetable, or other, are invaluable, regardless of how much money they might sell for in today’s worthless global capitalist market.
Such money matters are Satan’s business.
Simone, my invaluable pet, who died on March 13, 2019, five years ago last month