Section LXXVIII. The Inner Revelation and the Conscience. (Concl'd) · SECTION XCI.

Feeling as relating to the object that excites it, is, as a feeling of pleasure, love, and, as a feeling of displeasure, hatred. Between these two there is no third, although both may exist in different degrees and even in association with each other. Hence love is the feeling of pleasure which springs from the consciousness of the harmony of a real or conceived object with the actual state of the subject, together with a desire to preserve and to perfect this harmony, and hence also to preserve the being and essence of this object. Hatred is the feeling of displeasure which springs from the consciousness of an irreconcilable antagonism between the object and the subject, together with a desire to destroy this antagonism in the object, even should this involve the destruction itself of that object. In a normal moral condition of things where all that exists is good, love alone has a real object, while hatred has only a possible one.—Love is essentially of a preserving character, hatred is essentially of a negating, destroying character; as, however, all moral action aims to create a reality by continuous development, hence preserving love is necessarily at the same time also promotive of the being and nature of the beloved object, and negating hatred is at the same time a confirming of the opposite of the bated object. Hence love works in order to be able to love always; hatred works ill order to destroy itself; love lives in order to be eternal; hatred lives in order to come to an end; only that hatred can be endless whose object is eternal—namely, Satanic hatred. As moral hatred is necessarily an effort to destroy the antagonism of existence, that is, to re-establish its harmony, hence it is in essence the same thing as love. Hatred is per se as moral as love,—is but its necessary reverse phase. There is no moral love without hatred, and no moral hatred without love; pure hatred without love would be simply Satanic hatred. As moral hatred is in its essence love, hence the actual motive of all moral activity is love.

“Love is the fulfilling of the law” [πλήρωμα, Rom. xiii, 10]; in this formula the Christian idea of the moral motive is very definitely expressed; love leads to the fulfillment of the law; it is the rich fullness in which all law is included. Without love there is no morality; and where love is, there morality is truly free, for love develops itself into all forms of the moral. Hence Christ, after the example of the Old Testament [Deut. vi, 5; x, 12; xi, 13], sums up the whole law in the one precept of love to God and to our neighbor [Matt. xxii, 37; Luke x, 27]; “This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments” [1 John v, 3]; love is not and cannot be a mere inert feeling, but it is by its very nature active, it produces that which its subject loves,—brings about the full and free harmony of the person and his life with God. Whoever assigns any other motive for morality than love, knows nothing of the moral. But love tends by its essential nature to a unity of the diverse,—seeks not its own mere isolated being. Mere self-love to the exclusion of love to others is not love at all, but only immoral self-seeking; it is indeed a motive to action, but to anti-moral action; Even that which appears in the animal world as an unconscious symbol of moral virtue, is based on love, and is an expression thereof. There is no form of moral activity conceivable which would not be an expression of love [1 Cor. xvi, 14].—The moral love of the divine is, per se and necessarily, also hatred against that which is ungodly. But as the ungodly is primarily not real but only conceivable, and as this thought itself becomes really vital only through the reality of sin, it does not come here properly within our scope.

Love is taken here primarily as not yet a virtue or a disposition, but as a simple feeling occasioned by a consciousness of harmony or of disharmony. The love that is required as the fulfilling of the law is more than mere feeling, though indeed it has feeling as its basis and essence. And yet the love here in question is not a mere feeling of pleasure, not a mere impressed state of the heart, but it contains in itself at the same time a power prompting to an active relation to the beloved object. All love has for its object a something that is good, and hence, as relating to the subject, a good (§ 51), and it evidences the existence of this good by the outgoing and recognizing life-movement of the subject toward it,—by the effort of the subject toward the object in order to preserve or intensify its unity, its harmony therewith. Now as all existences are created for each other and destined to a self-harmonious life, hence love is the primitive feeling of all rational creatures,—the direct witness of the goodness of existence, an echo of that first witness of the Creator as to his created work, and hence also the innermost vitality of the moral life, the purpose and essence of which is in fact, harmony, or the good. Directed toward the good, and hence the divine, love has for itself the pledge of eternity; whereas moral hatred, as directed against all non-good, that is, anti-divine, has, in virtue of its negating nature, for its purpose, the destroying of its object and of itself with it. Peace is the goal of love and also of hatred,—is an essential phase of the highest good itself.