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

Natural sexual love is, as a manifestation of the divine love ruling in nature, per se a type of moral communion, but it does not itself suffice to create this. The merely natural, and hence extra moral, element of the same is confined entirely to the unconscious natural inclination; the exalting of the mere inclination to real love is never an ante-moral or extra-moral process, but springs of moral determination; the actual accomplishing of the sexual communion should never follow upon mere natural love, but must, as a free act, be simply a manifestation of the already realized moral communion of the persons in virtue of moral love. Without this condition it is not extra-moral, but anti-moral, as an actual destruction of moral communion.

Sexual communion is the first possible communion, and hence has in nature its first incitation. As man was not an absolutely other and new creation but the divinely-animated nature-creature, so also is the first moral communion not one that was absolutely new-created by man, but a morally-exalted natural communion. Sexual love prevails throughout animated nature,—is its highest life-function, and, therefore, also the highest manifestation of the divine love as ruling in nature The flower develops in its sexual bloom its highest force and splendor; the brute has, in sexual love, the highest pleasure-feeling, that of a perfect, mutually life-unifying harmony with its like; it is the feeling that it is not a mere isolated unit, but a living member of a higher whole. It is not man’s duty to suppress this life-manifestation, but to exalt it,—to raise the unconsciously-prevailing love of the animal into a conscious and moral love. Though in idea the same, the sexes are in reality different, mutually complementing each other to the full idea of man. The somewhat clumsy myth as to the original androgynous forms of humanity, as given in Plato’s Symposium, is but a distorted echo of the thought, much more suggestively expressed in the Biblical account, of the formation of Eve from a rib of Adam.

Love, according to its inner idea, is not only preservative but also communicative, awakening new life and promoting it; hence the propagation of the human race is conditioned on the highest earthly love. All love is an appropriating and a forming at the same time. In sexual love the sexes mutually appropriate and form each other as natural beings, though in different degrees; the spiritually moral appropriating and forming must, however, precede the natural, as its moral and conditionment; the reversing of this relation, the letting the moral and personal love simply follow the sexual communion, is morally impossible, as thereby the latter is degraded to a purely bestial, immoral character, and cannot become the starting-point of a moral communion.

A possession is moral only as property, that is, in virtue of its having been morally-acquired and appropriated; now the communion of the sexes is the complete giving up and appropriating of each party as the property of the other; hence when it is not a manifestation and fruit of an already-accomplished, morally-personal, spiritual unity,—of the appropriation of the persons as moral and hence as permanent inalienable property,—it is then not only not a simply natural action but an immoral throwing away of one’s moral personality, an irremediable ruining of the moral personality of the other. Lost innocence is irrecoverable; mere sexual communion without moral love is a defamation. But moral love is in its very essence permanent; that which is by love appropriated to the person as property is inalienable,—can be destroyed only with the personality itself. Whoredom is not mere bestiality, but, as a moral self-abandonment, it is below bestiality; for the brute does not throw itself away. Even in the case of the first man, moral love preceded sexual communion. “And Adam said: this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man” [Gen. ii, 23 sqq.]. This is a child-like, natural expression of moral love, the full consciousness of the harmony and unity between man and wife; the wife is the man’s other ego, belongs to him, is destined to him as property, as also he to her; she is of, and for, him. Hence to this expression of moral love joins itself, as a sequence, the further thought: “therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh;” the becoming one in the flesh follows only from and upon the being one in spirit; they become one also sexually, because they have mutually recognized each other as joined in a personally-spiritual unity. The moral consciousness of the personal belonging of the one to the other, the free recognition of their mutually-possessing each other as property, is the indispensable antecedent moral condition of sexual communion. Without this moral condition, that which is the acme of the nature-life, the innermost center of nature-mysteries, the synthesis of all that is wonderful in nature-force, namely, the generative act,—which, as moral, is a sacred act,—becomes an absolutely immoral one, and sinks man toward the brute more than any other natural action.