Adolf Wuttke · 91 of 107
Section LXXVIII. The Inner Revelation and the Conscience. (Concl'd) · SECTION CXXXVII.
(3) The perfection of the moral will, that is, the full moral freedom of self-determination as effected by wisdom and love, the perfect mastery over one’s self, the completed possession of one’s self, constitutes the fully developed personal character. As distinguished from all mere fortuitous character-forming, the truly moral character is the copy of the divine as attained to through free moral culture,—the moral law as become the real free property of man, the harmony of the human with the divine will as become a dominant power, a moral nature, so that consequently the willing and accomplishing of the ungodly becomes to man a moral impossibility,—so that the love to God becomes perfect hatred against sin. The constantly advancing development of the moral striving toward this , constitutes the ever-progressive of the soul, the ultimate fruit of which is the perfect freedom of the will, and as contained therein the enjoyment of blessedness.
In that the moral activity becomes fact, that is, becomes a moral possession of the person, it transforms the original, as yet, undetermined will-freedom into a determined moral will-quality, into moral character. Character-formation illustrates clearly the nature of moral freedom. An, as yet, undetermined character has a much wider possibility of choice in single cases than a definitely shaped one; a characterless man is unreliable because his freedom has no moral determinedness, but is merely external freedom of choice. Character is reliable, and upon the degree of its firmness rests the confidence which it inspires; we know in advance with certainty how, in a definite moral conjuncture, such and such a character will choose. This is now surely no limitation of freedom, but rather its moral maturity. The freedom is all the more perfect, true, and mature, the more it is character-firm, the more it has moral determinedness; and the highest moral freedom is that where the person can no longer waver in any moral question, where it has become for him a moral impossibility to choose the immoral,—and this is the state of . is related to innocence as morally-acquired good to ante-moral natural good—as moral property to mere possession.
Human as a copy of the divine differs from the latter in this, that with God constitutes his essence itself, and the possibility of sin is not in any sense conceivable; whereas human is simply a morally-acquired good, and presupposes the possibility of sin, which in fact it has morally overcome. God’s is eternal; human is, in its true character, the goal of development,—depends on progressive , which advances from a mere non-willing of the sinful to hatred against it and to abhorrence of it. The moral requirement of complete heart-purity and may not in any manner be lowered, as if a limited measure thereof were enough, and as if a lower requirement were to be made of feebly constituted man than, e. g., of the angels. According to the testimony of Christ, men are in fact to become equal to the angels [ἰσάγγελοι, Luke xx, 36]; and also in their moral essence they should and must not remain below them. Man ought (and the word ought expresses the fundamental condition of all morality in general) to become morally perfect, and hence holy. This requirement is fully maintained even in the state of sinfulness, where primarily, that is, before the completion of , the entire fulfilling of the same was not possible. The legislation from Sinai places this moral requirement, as the fundamental idea of morality, in great prominence: “Ye shall be holy, for I am holy, the Lord your God” [Lev. xi, 44, 45; xix, 2; xx, 7]; and the apostles adopt the same words as fully valid also for Christians [1 Pet. i, 15, 16]. The utterances of the Scriptures elsewhere fully harmonize therewith [Eph. i, 4; iv, 24; 1 Thess. iii, 13; comp. Matt. v, 48; Luke i, 75; and other passages], and the fact that the faithful of God are so frequently styled “” is clearly an expression of their moral destination.
Man is originally innocent, but not yet holy; he is not, however, to remain merely innocent, but is to advance to real . Man is created in innocence unto . The mere unconscious retaining of the first innocence would be a lingering in the child-consciousness; and the going beyond it,—not of course in the direction of sin but only in that of conscious ,—was the true normal course; Christ’s was not mere innocence. As a morally-acquired property, as distinguished from the mere possession of innocence, is a permanent quality, and constitutes the moral character itself of man; he for whom there is yet possible a single sinful moment, has not yet attained to . There is not only a natural but also a moral must; and when the child Jesus says: “ ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” [Luke ii, 49], this is a direct reference to this moral “must” of a holy soul. is consequently not a quality of single actions, but it is character-peculiarity; not the single volitional act, the single frame of mind is holy, but the heart itself. This purity of heart is not a merely negative state, a mere non-presence of sin, for that would be only innocence, but it is a moral fruit, a morally-acquired power over sin, and hence where sin has once actually existed it cannot be attained to by a mere ceasing to sin, but only by ceaselessly militant santification. (ἁγιασμός) is consequently by no means a merely negative bearing, even in the ante-sinful state, but is a positive forming of the will and heart unto . The mentioned in the Scriptures [1 Cor. i, 30; 2 Cor. vii, 1; 1 John iii, 3; Heb. xii, 14, and other passages] designates of course only the putting off of existing sinfulness as taking place in virtue of ; but when Christ says of himself: “For their sakes I myself, that they also might be through the truth” [John xvii, 19], this self- of the holy One is indeed primarily to be understood of his giving himself in sacrifice, but it alludes at the same time also to the perfecting of the moral life-development of the Son of Man unto the plenary possession of morally-acquired in his character as man; such is the duty of man as man.
Through progressive culture of the will man becomes perfectly master over his heart, over his will,—the moral becomes easy to him, becomes his second nature, whereas his first nature is the as yet not morally formed one. The will of the person is now no longer different from the divine will, but it is, in full freedom, at one therewith; the divine will has fully become the inner essence and the vital power of the disposition of the person, not merely in general but also in particular, so that in each special case the will with unfailing certainty chooses the right,—even as a true artist possesses full mastery over his hand, so that it never introduces a false tone or makes a false stroke. Practice leads to mastery; and the morally-matured man is master over his own will.
It is only in this mastery that man is truly free, namely, in that he has then overcome every thing in himself which, as a morally-to-be-mastered material, was as yet different from the moral idea itself. But freedom is bliss; he who has become truly free in his will is thereby necessarily also happy. Master over himself, he is also at the same time master over all that is unspiritual, over nature; and in having put himself into complete and free harmony with God, he participates in the lordship of the absolute Spirit over nature. “The Father that dwelleth in me he doeth the works,” says Christ in reference to his miraculous works—the works of the Spirit upon nature; “, ,” says Christ to his disciples, “he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater than these shall he do” [John xiv, 10, 12]; for God who dwells in him, as he in God, the same does the works; having become free in God, man has nothing more either within or without himself which could prove a hinderance to the moral will of the rational spirit,—which would say, No! to the striving of the Holy Spirit; as an expression of true and complete freedom, and not as the caprice of the immature and unsanctified spirit, this promise of Christ holds good for all his faithful followers. The hard rind of unspiritual nature must be broken through, the longing of the -bound creature must be fulfilled; nature must be “delivered from the bondage of corruption unto the glorious liberty of the children of God” [Rom. viii, 19-22]; all that is natural must be spiritualized, must be exalted into the complete untrammeled service of the free spirit; such is the freedom, such the blessedness of the children of God.
In the possession of knowledge, of purified feeling, and of the mastery of the will, as attained to by moral appropriating and self-forming, man becomes morally cultured, as distinguished from the as yet morally immature and crude man; and in such culture he is truly free. The very first man was called unto perfect culture, and it is quite the opposite of correct to conceive, with Rousseau, the first human beings as living in a state of happy barbarism. As far back as the Biblical account reaches we find even in the state of sin no trace of an actual cultureless barbarism. The fact that Adam was to till his garden was of itself an implication of his destination to culture, for barbarians never till the soil; Adam’s sons appear, from the very first, as persons of culture with a definite savagery-excluding- calling; Cain was a founder of villages [Gen. iv, 17]; and among his immediate descendants appear inventors of manifold articles of skill [Gen. iv, 21, 22]; and from that time forth we find traces of a progressive culture. The progenitors of the Israelites are by no means half-savage nomads; their wandering-about is only a temporary state of necessity, for they are in search of a home; and their entire form of life gives evidence indeed of great simplicity, but yet also of high spiritual and moral culture. True culture is always a fruit of moral effort, and a culture that aims at mere temporal enjoyment and profit is but a deceptive self-defeating counterfeit.