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

If love is the motive to all moral action, and consequently also the necessary presupposition thereof; hence there must also be an ante-moral love, one that is per se not yet moral but which simply leads to the moral. In man’s originally-possessed, though not as yet developed, God-likeness, there is in fact implied an original love antecedent to all moral volition,—an immediate love of the created spirit for the Creator as revealing himself to it, and for the surrounding universe as proclaiming the Creator’s love. This direct and not morally-acquired love is, however, not an unfreely-operating, compelling instinctive impulse, but receives the character of moral freedom through the simultaneously awakening consciousness of personal independence and of the therein-contained love of the person to himself, so that in virtue of this twofold primitive love, which offers the possibility of an antagonism as well as of a harmony, man is invited to a free self-determination.

If the feeling of love is a directly excited one, and, as such, the presupposition of the moral activity to which it leads, it would seem as if moral freedom were actually precluded. For this feeling is as yet involuntary and unfree; and love and hatred produce, directly, a desire or a rejection. On the other hand, we cannot possibly exclude love from the sphere of the moral, and make of it a mere antecedent condition of the same; for according to the Christian consciousness at least, man is morally responsible for his love and his hatred; love is an object of duty, and is required by Christ as the essence of all fulfillment of the law. This seems like an irreconcilable contradiction.

In the first place, it is unavoidably necessary to admit that there is an ante-moral love. Brutes even have love, and are thereby impelled to activity; also the child at its mother’s breast feels and manifests love. This is not a love springing from free conscious volition,—not a moral love,—but a purely natural love, which forms, however, the necessary antecedent condition of all development to morality. Primitive man must also have had such a love, inasmuch as without this a life of God’s image is not conceivable. Created in harmony with God and with the All, he must have had also a direct feeling of this harmony, must have felt happy in his existence and in his Paradise-world; and in this feeling of happiness he must also have loved that whereby it was produced in him; there met him on every hand the image of divine love, of the harmony of the universe, and he must have felt and loved it; and when God revealed himself to him as the loving Father, then must man have experienced also toward Him a feeling of harmony and love. But all this love is as yet simply a directly-excited one,—is not freely produced by moral activity, and is consequently not yet a moral love, though it indeed conducts to moral activity and thereby to a transformation of itself into moral love. If now this first ante-moral love of man for God and his work were the sole love really existing in man, then evidently the action answering to it, and hence also to the will of God, would flow out of it so immediately and necessarily that the possibility of a contrary self-determination would be scarcely conceivable, so that though indeed moral freedom in general would not be thereby destroyed, yet liberty of choice would actually and essentially be precluded. Man would not stand in free self-determination between the choice of the good and the evil, but he would be overpoweringly driven by an inner potent impulse to a choice of the good. Now, though this would in fact render conceivable an absolutely sinless development, still it would render all the more inconceivable the possibility of a determination to the sinful.

But the matter assumes a very different aspect when we take into account the equally natural and immediate ante-moral impulse of self-love. This must, in fact, also be regarded as ante-moral, for the reason that it is the involuntary natural expression of soul-life in general, and hence exists also unconsciously among brutes. The fact that with man it is conscious, and constitutes a phase of rational self-consciousness, does not make it per se moral, but simply renders it capable of being formed into a moral quality. While now in the case of the brute the unconscious self-love can never become really evil, the self-love of man is, by virtue of the higher independence of the free spirit, only in a possible harmony with the love to God and the universe, but should come into real harmony therewith. Self-love is per se good,—is by no means the same as self-seeking or selfishness; Christ himself represents self-love as morally right, and as the measure for our love to our neighbor [Matt. xxii, 39; Luke x, 27; comp. Rom. xiii, 9; Gal. v, 14; James ii, 8; Eph. v, 28, 29, 33; 1 Sam. xviii, 1, 3]; but the goodness of this love consists not in an antecedently-established harmony with the love to God and the world, but simply in its liberty to confirm this harmony spontaneously. The love of God and the love of self are both equally primitive, and are per se not in antagonism with each other in the least, but yet they are different from each other and relatively independent of each other. In this mutual independence of these two forms of love there is afforded opportunity for the freedom of human choice. Man is called freely to confirm the harmony of his self-love and his divine love, and that too not by suppressing the one or the other, nor by making his love of God dependent on his self-love, but in fact by making his self-love dependent on his love of God,—by freely subordinating it thereto. As soon as the divine command was given to him, man was at once conscious that there was a difference between his self-love and his love to God, but also, at the same time, that it was his duty to develop this difference, not into antagonism but into harmony. The one (logically) possible mis-choice, of suppressing the per se legitimate self-love by disproportionate exaltation of the love to God, was impossible in fact, inasmuch as the love to God necessarily involves in itself all possible good, and hence also the proper love of self, for God preserves that which He himself has willed; so that consequently there remained possible only the other mis-choice (which was therefore morally forbidden), namely, of subordinating the love of God to self-love, instead of preserving the latter in its true character through its proper subordination to the former. If simply the love of God had been primitive in man, then a choice of the ungodly would have been impossible; if simply self-love had been primitive in him, then a choice of the good, of submission to the divine will, would have been equally impossible, and man would have been in the one case irresponsible for the good, and in the other for the evil—without desert and without guilt. But by virtue of the fact that the love to God and the love of self are alike primitive, as the ante-moral germ of the moral, it follows that man is fully responsible for the confirmation or the disturbance of the harmony of this twofold love; for this determination was not already involved in the constitution of man, but was proposed as a moral task to his free will. The mere love to God would have made man good but not free, the mere self-love would have made him seemingly free but not good; the twofold love made him free for choosing the good, but also free for the possible choice of the evil,—which, under these circumstances, assumed, in consequence of the equally real original love to God, the form of to God, of a punishable sin. The case is quite similar with the moral culture of the child. The child, as soon as self-conscious, has love for its mother, and also a per se strictly legitimate love for play; when the will of the mother calls the child from its play, it becomes conscious of the difference of the two forms of love; it knows also that it can prefer its love for play, and leave the will of the mother unheeded. It must by a morally-free choice, make a decision,—must subordinate the one love to the other; if it chooses obedience, then in thus choosing, and thus only, it feels itself truly free. If there had been no difference of a twofold love, the child would have had no choice; it would have just as unfreely, and without a consciousness of the good or a right to praise, followed its mother, as, on the other supposition, it would have unfreely and without a consciousness of the evil or a desert of blame, preferred its play. It is only such cases of choice, of moral self-determination, that bring the child’s morality to development and to maturity.—It would be very erroneous to consider self-love as per se evil, and as a natural germ of the evil; the fact is, it simply offers-not per se, however, but in its normal difference from the love to God—the possibility of evil, but equally so also the possibility of moral good in general. It is only in the consciously-wrought free subordination of self-love to the divine love, that the latter as well as the former becomes moral. There can be no question of a “must” in the determination, whether in the one direction or in the other, but only of a “should” and a “should not.”