Adolf Wuttke · 41 of 107
Section LXXVIII. The Inner Revelation and the Conscience. (Concl'd) · SECTION LXXXVII.
II. The moral activity as strengthened by its moral relation to God, that is, by communion with Him, comes now, and only in consequence of this strengthening, into a truly moral relation to the created,—comprehending both the moral person himself and also the, to him, objective world.
(1) The moral person is his own object. Man is morally to form, to cultivate himself—to make his personal peculiar reality a product of his moral activity. Man is what he is as a person solely in virtue of moral activity; without this activity he remains in spiritual unculture, and is essentially impersonal. Hence man is, in so far, an object of his own moral activity, as he has not yet attained to his ultimate perfection,—in so far as he is a cultivable and, as yet, relatively incompleted being, that is, in so far as there is yet a difference between his ideal and his reality. Man is to form himself into a good entity, that is, into a personal reality that is in full harmony with God, with itself and with the All, in so far as this is good.
The possibility of man’s bearing a moral relation to himself rests on the nature of rational self-consciousness, wherein man becomes in fact an object to himself. If man were from the very start absolutely perfect and complete, he would still be, even then, an object of his own moral activity, only however under its conserving, but not under its formative, phase. Progressive development is implied in the very nature of the created spirit, and there is no stage of temporal life conceivable where man would not have a still higher perfection to attain to, and further moral culture to work out.—All self-forming, unless kept in harmony with God, becomes necessarily anti-moral. Man can, it is true, develop himself in harmony with himself without being in harmony with God, —this is, however, a culture of self into the diabolical; and if he forms himself merely in harmony with the world, he becomes an immoral worldling, and if in this he leaves self-harmony out of the question, then he becomes simply characterless.
(a) The spirit is an object of the moral activity in virtue of its being per se merely the possibility of its real development into a rational spirit,—the germ of itself,—and because it does not develop itself into its full reality by inner nature-necessity, but by freedom. Man has, in virtue of his very constitution, the task of forming himself into the full reality and truth of spiritual being, namely, in respect both to his knowing, to his feeling, and to his willing,—that is, into the perfect image of God. The soul-life of brutes shapes itself by inner nature-necessity; brutes have no need of education; man, however, without education and without moral self-culture would sink below the brute, and for the evident reason that he would thus fall into complete self-antagonism; his freedom would become unbridled barbarity. Spirit lives only by continuous development; where it is not morally trained, it pines away and degenerates. What Christ says of the received talents [Matt. xxv, 14 sqq.] is especially true also of the moral culture of the spirit.
(b) The body is an object of the moral activity in so far as it is the necessary organ of the spirit in its relation to the world. It is not from the very start an absolutely subserving and perfectly spirit-imbued organ (§ 65, 66), nor does it become such by purely natural development, but it is trained into such only by the rightful dominating of the rational spirit over it. The merely natural development of the spirit forms not as yet a spirit’s-body, but only an unspiritual animal body. Even as in the features of the countenance, spiritual unculture and spiritual refinement are almost always visibly expressed, so is also the body in its entire being subject to the refining influence of the moral spirit; and this influence ought not to be of a merely mediate and unintended character, as resulting from the unconsciously-ruling potency of the spiritual life in the body, but in fact also of an immediate character. The good that inheres in the body is to be faithfully preserved,—the germs of higher perfection to be developed. Whatever is originally given in the body, whether as actuality or as capacity, is a legitimate possession of the spirit and should not be lightly esteemed. To despise the body is to dishonor the Creator. It should not be honored, however, as merely corporeal, but as subserving the spirit in its rational life-work,—not as an end in itself, but as an end for the spirit. “Glorify God in your body;” this moral precept, the apostle bases on the fact that this body is “a temple of the which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own” [1 Cor. vi, 19, 20]. The body is not a mere nature-object, but a holy temple of a spirit,—bears the of a sacred destination; man has not discretionary power over it, as over a mere nature-object,—not merely as over an unconditional possession, but as over a good intrusted to him by God, and belonging to God, and for which he must give account to God.