If the Salt Loses Its Flavor

Part of my Lent entails going back to the New Testament, and since Matthew practically leads with the Sermon on the Mount, I’m already reading about how to be blessed and how not to be.

Vos estis sal terrae. Quod si sal evanuerit, in quo salietur? ad nihilum valet ultra, nisi ut mittatur foras, et conculcetur ab hominibus.

I’ve always thought the bit about throwing the salt out was oddly harsh.  Not oddly harsh for the New Testament—there is fire and brimstone in there too—but harsh in the context.  After all, Jesus says nothing about, oh, pouring unused lamp oil into the gutter, or breaking a lamp hidden under a bushel  into potshards.  Then it hit me today: he doesn’t really say the salt is useless.  He says it is tasteless (evanuerit); but that doesn’t as far as I know imply (at least not to a premodern mind) that it loses its other chemical properties.

Salt in the ancient (and not so ancient) world was scattered over the land of one’s enemies or of condemned traitors; it was more difficult to farm the salted area, and thus symbolized the complete rejection of the persons who had inhabited it.  Given that background, it’s not hard to imagine the fate of the tasteless salt as being to serve in precisely this purificatory way: to be cast on the ground, and trodden on (mittatur foras, et conculcetur), that is, to be worked into the soil by those who pass over it, until both the bad salt and the bad soil have worked themselves out (as it were).

If this is the right way to understand the lines, then it has interesting implications for the salt-and-light metaphor.  When a Christian loses their “flavor,” it’s not as if God just says, “Oh, well, there goes Molly.  Time to try another one.”  God is nothing if not a recycler.  When a Molly the Christian becomes tasteless, he puts her to another use: she becomes, in some sense, a fertilizer for in hospitable soils.  Nor does this need to be a mutually punitive exercise: both Tasteless Molly and the people she rubs up against can still find their redemption in the unpleasant process.

But it is so much more pleasant to cooperate in an artistic project than to be used for one unwittingly!