The Parable of the Talents

How Are We To Live?

Exegesis of Jesus’s Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–46)

Πορεύεσθε ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ κατηραμένοι εἰς τὸ πῦρ τὸ αἰώνιον τὸ ἡτοιμασμένον τῷ διαβόλῳ καὶ τοῖς ἀγγέλοις αὐτοῦ…καὶ ἀπελεύσονται οὗτοι εἰς κόλασιν αἰώνιον, οἱ δὲ δίκαιοι εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον.

One of the most widespread modern assumptions in the field of Christian theology is that contemplation resolves or rather dissolves philosophical reflection within itself, marking its conclusion or embodying its limits as its terminus ad quem.1Yet, no didactic-moral formula represents the medieval spirit, if such an expression be allowed, better than fides quærens intellectum: faith not being an alternative to rational understanding,2 rather characterizes its dawn, exposing us to the concrete foundation or vital principle of reason itself. Far from calling us to resolve philosophical reflection in faith, or worse yet in an ecstatic feeling,3 ancient-medieval canonical Christianity calls us to the spark or divine providential act that constitutes the alpha and omega of the natural desire or search for a wisdom understood as return to the principles of things (where sapientia/scientia denotes possession of these principles).4

Where faith constitutes man’s original opening to the perfection of Being and therefore to the primordial inherence of every experience in that perfection, it makes no real sense to maintain that faith puts an end to philosophical reason, converting it into “ecstatic contemplation” rather than exposing it to its essential/natural parameters and therefore to the identity (coincidentia) of the origin and end of reflection. Faith will consist of man’s spontaneous trust in the natural sense (and therefore integrality/unity) of reason—trust that 1. there is a truth behind or beyond all appearance and that 2. human doubt is naturally receptive to that truth. Faith will show, against any corruption of natural reason, that the desire for wisdom denoted by philosophical reason is fundamentally nothing other than the “backwards” (anamnetic or archaeological) discovery of the principles of things as contents of a truth coinciding with the act proper to Being. The search for truth will therefore not imply, as it is typically supposed to do in a modern context, the “selfish” appropriation of death-defying power in establishing a new world and a new life based on the autonomy of power with respect to a natural foundation of meaning. Hence the radical incompatibility between Christianity and modernity, regardless of the modern/Machiavellian abuse of Christianity as a Trojan horse of its progressive subversion.5

The Gospels highlight the Socratic intuition that philosophy is not essentially sophistic, since the acquisition of knowledge presupposes the reception of truth. The wisdom that Socrates loves spontaneously is not a conquered power, but a truth underlying every power, a truth understood as living or vital knowledge, integral plant of every partial knowledge. What matters to Socrates is not the fruit but the tree of wisdom and therefore the spirit that animates every scientific certainty, a spirit aside from which every science would be dead, such is the poetry (poesì) that Dante brought to light in the seventh verse of the first canto of his Purgatory.

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In Matthew 25:14-15, Jesus tells the story of an anthropos who, upon going abroad (ἀποδημῶν) offered (ἔδωκεν from δίδωμι) his belongings to his own three servants, giving to each a quantity of gold proportionate to his own “power”: five “talents” or bags of gold to the first servant; two bags to the second; and one to the third. (A term appears twice here: ἴδιος/idios, one’s own, or belonging to one’s own people.)

The man, the anthropos, is said to have gone abroad immediately (εὐθύς) upon giving out his belongings. There and then the first two servants, they being most capable, invested their gold, thereupon doubling it. The third servant, however, took “the money” (τὸ ἀργύριον) away and dug a hole in the ground to hide it in. The third servant considered his gift as money. In conjunction with this consideration, here for the first time the anthropos of the story is referred to as master (ὁ κύριος).

Now, after a long time, the master returns asking his servants to give him a reasoned account (λόγον) of what they had done with their gold. The first servant proves to be faithful (πιστός) and is placed in charge, no longer of a few thing (ἐπὶ ὀλίγα) in private, but of many things (ἐπὶ πολλῶν) sharing in his master’s joy (χαρά).

Upon being summoned, the thirst servant speaks to his master declaring that he knows him to be a “harsh man” (σκληρὸς...ἄνθρωπος) who takes what is not his own (25:24). This supposed knowledge makes the servant fearful of losing his possessions, prompting him to go away to hide the gold in the ground, apparently lest he would not be able to render it to his master one day. Why were first two servants not afraid? Because they had seen the gold, not as money to be rendered, but as gifts to be invested? Did the third servant believe to be investing his gold well by hiding it in “the earth” (γῆν), under the assumption that his master would eventually claim it “harshly” for himself? Till that fateful day, the servant could at least feel safe, certain that his gold was ready at hand—perhaps that it could provide safety for him on earth.

The master scolds the third servant harshly as being slothful. Knowing that his master harvested where he had not sown, gathering where he had not scattered—and so that he would eventually take for himself what the servant had hidden away in the ground/earth—the servant should have placed the money with “bankers” (τοῖς τραπεζείταις) for interest. Having failed to do so, he is now called to offer (once again, the verb is δίδωμι) his single bag of gold (talent) to the servant who has ten. Whence the moral of the parable: to everyone who has (τῷ...ἔχοντι παντὶ), an abundance will be offered, while for he who does not have, even that which he has will be taken away from him.

Having spelled out his lesson, the master rejects the third servant as “useless” (ἀχρεῖος) in the dark. Thereupon, Jesus illustrates the metaphysical, theological-political, or properly spiritual background of the parable (Matt 25:31-46).

What is the parable’s master referring to when speaking of “having”? What is it that we must have in order to be given in abundance and so that we may be raised to eternal life as opposed to being cursed and cast into eternal fire (εἰς τὸ πῦρ τὸ αἰώνιον)? Matthew 25:31-32 points us to a proper answer by calling the nations of the world to place what is given to us into the service of the sincere lovers of truth, the “brothers and sisters” of “the son of man” (ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου) in his heavenly glory as otherworldly king. The abundance that nations are to receive for their service of the divine man’s brothers and sisters is an inheritance prepared “from the foundations of the world” (ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου), namely a divine kingdom (Βασιλεία). By serving those who live for eternal or spiritual things, as earthly nations we partake in theirheavenly kingdom.

What is it then that we must “have” in order to be offered salvation from eternal damnation? We must have what our master gives us to cultivate, namely our gold or spiritual “talents”. Those who do not multiply their “talents”—if only by fearing that “one” alone cannot yield fruits—should at least entrust them to those who can, instead of placing their talents in the earthly, thereby hiding luminous spirit in the dark.

Originally or by nature we are all offered “gold”—what is our master’s own (ἴδιος/idios), namely our own life or spirit—to cultivate, so that we may partake in the glory of our heavenly master. Yet, some betray our common mandate by burying their “gold” in earthly pursuits, instead of preparing for eternal life. At the very least, they could place their talents—which is to say the spirit or living form of their own power (δύναμις)—in the service of those who do cultivate their “gold”. On the other hand, those who, out of fear of losing their possession, hide it in the dark realm of earthly certitudes, will be condemning themselves to eternal darkness.

No amount of earthly gain, or power, will ever buy us eternal life. No matter how much we justify our earthly possessions as offerings to be eventually rendered back to a harsh God, they will simply draw us into an abyss of godless darkness. Only by recognizing our “gold” as a spiritual gift to be cultivated, if only where we serve lovers of truth, will we partake in eternal life and so in the spiritual light of a divine order of things.

Concluding Reflections: “Time” between Gospels and Modernity

The parable of the talents tangentially invites us to reflect upon the meaning of time, especially given the opposition between the immediacy of the action described at the beginning of the parable and the temporal “extension” suggested by the formula μετὰ δὲ πολὺν χρόνον (post multum temporis): “after a long time”.6 In light of what we have already noted, the “long time” indicated by Jesus reveals itself to encompass the totality of our earthly life. Since the gift of the Lord is nothing other than our life, the departure of the divine anthropos will coincide with our birth, while the return of the Lord will coincide with our death, that is, our return to our inherence in the divine.

The “doubling” of the talents offered to us and referring to the cultivation of virtue—and therefore to the placing of the gift in the act of donation—addresses the origin of our earthly life and therefore of temporal extension. For man in his divine essence, time does not exist. To the extent that it is found in God, human life will be concentrated in the unity of spirit. The question of time will arise only with respect to the movement/becoming (δύναμις) of life, a “power” which is not in itself earthly, but spiritual, so that we will be well advised to recognize that the parable of the talents refers specifically to human consciousnesses as the determination of a divine intellectual act. What will the “servant” of the parable essentially be if not the brother or sister of truth, in which term we find the revelation (recalling that this is the etymological sense of “truth” in Greek) of Being?

The talent that the “servant” is called to invest is none other than the human consciousness called to “exit” the earthly world and therefore temporal extension, discovering itself entirely spiritual in the act of investing itself—of giving itself in preparation for the return of consciousness’ unity in the fullness of Being.

The good servant, like good reason (λόγος), is said to be faithful since he responds to his mandate, returning to his own vital principle and therefore to the intellectual act that is proper to the eternal Being.

Finally, it is worth highlighting the radical divergence of the evangelical warning with respect to the trajectory of modernity, given that the project of modernity aims not at the unification of human consciousness in the divine intellective act, but at the reification of the “extension” received by our consciousness in a machine embodying the total absence of original or natural divinity (a divinity mysteriously or transcendently intrinsic to the very nature of things).

Christianity’s theosis is now replaced by the singularity of the cyborg, Frankenstein’s monster re-emerging in the context of today’s technocracy whereby time is unified, no longer naturally in a rational intuition, but virtually in a new, consummate machine or technological process, the presumed universal receptacle of all (mnemonic) data of consciousness. Here, in its mechanical self-determination, the present pretends to include both the future, as terminal form of the past, and the past, i.e., the extension of temporal consciousness.

Insofar as time is the measure of the distance between two aspects of a quality (e.g., size, weight, beauty, or justice) considered by consciousness, i.e., by an embodied thought,7 in our technocratic context where becoming does not entail the natural unity of the act to which it consequently no longer refers, since temporal extension is mechanically alienated from the present, the only connection granted between temporal extension (i.e., the past) and its form excludes any entelechy, in favor of tyrannical manipulation of the past and therefore of memory now virtually freed from any why beyond the factum brutum of the technological dictate that in fact would like to embody the very end of the past. Every human desire should be neutralized by a technological intervention for which the future itself has no meaning aside from the technological management of the past. It would then be necessary to “realize” the future, that is, integrate it into the action of a technology governing the totality of human memory.

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1Since the term contemplatio, traditionally corresponding to Aristotelian theoria, is often read in the context of modernity’s criticism or critical instrumentalizing of Christianity, today we are faced with misunderstandings suggesting a substantial gap between contemplation and reason/reflection. David Roochnik reviews prevalent misconceptions in his, “What is Theory? Nicomachean Ethics Book 10.7–8,” Classical Philology, 104.1 (January 2009): 69-82. On the "ecstatic" reading of contemplation, see also the very dense first paragraph of Giambattista Vico’s Principi di Scienza Nuova (1744).

2See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, In Sent. I.3.4.1, ad. 5, where we read that, while knowing means possessing the notion of something, intellection (or rational understanding) also indicates introspection (nosse...est notitiam rei apud se tener, intelligere autem codicit intueri).

3Let us recall, in this regard, Leopardi's lesson on the modern transition from true (classical) poetry to selfish sentiment/sentimentalism. See further my “True History of Western Civilization (From Poetic Wisdom to Technocracy),” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw9TUo2YMeQ&t=82s.

4See Vico, Principi di scienza nuova (1744), Book 2: “Della sapienza generalmente” (Of Wisdom Generally).

5See Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978 [1958]. Machiavelli had no intention of ignoring Christianity, but of exploiting it, converting it into a sentimental “faith” that is “subjective” in the Cartesian sense of the term.

6Let us recall in parallel the single quality that Descartes attributes to nature conceived pragmatically in terms of objects of egoic experience. The expression res extensa mirrors the implicitly non-extended “thing” that Descartes calls ego: the “thinking thing” (res cogitans). What does Descartes’s ego “do” if not reduce what is extended (or what is given to the ego, what the ego receives in extended form) to what is in-tended, thereby converting the world of experience into an egoic unity. But now, such a unification of experience appears out of reach in the absence of an appropriate method. What we know as “the Cartesian Method” is essentially an instrument that the Cartesian ego uses to convert extension into intention, and so to master nature, regardless of the possibility that nature had not intended to be mastered, if only relatively to the fruits it bestows upon us. Indeed, Descartes remains strategically silent about the possibility that the contents of experience are naturally meant, not to fuel the rise of a world of Cartesian certainties, but to guide us back to the unity of nature in God as “first act” or “absolute actuality”.

7I consider the size of a tree, noting two different aspects or “moments” and deriving from the difference between the two aspects consciousness of a temporal measure or “distance” that I can thereupon define by relating it to a substantial reference (hence notions such as day, month, year, etc. relating to the sun, moon, or other reference point). I will thus have “translated” an intimate sense of time (and therefore of the hiatus/passage between aspect x and aspect y of a singular discrete quality) into a specific quantity. In any case, time will denote a becoming that in turn presupposes a scale of values whose sum will be the scale’s end or completion. Before being conceived in terms of quantity, becoming is an indistinct sense(presupposing the perfection of a quality). By translating or projecting itself into units of measurement, our sense can acquire temporal certainty.