SO then go out and practice it; forget the diversities and their like, so that you can love your neighbor. Do away with the distinctions of partiality, so that you can love your neighbor. This will not lead you to cease to love the beloved, oh, far from it! For in that case, the word “neighbor” would be the greatest deception ever invented, if, in order to love your neighbor, you must start by giving up your love for those for whom you feel affection. What is more, it would also be a contradiction, for since the concept “neighbor” embraces all men, certainly no one can be excluded—shall we say, least of all the beloved? No, for that is the language of partiality. Consequently if it is only partiality which must be taken away—and this does not also in turn apply to the neighbor, then you would love your neighbor with an extravagant partiality in contrast to the beloved.
No, as one says to the solitary, “Take care that you do not become ensnared in selfishness,” so we may say to the two lovers: “Take care that your love does not ensnare you in selfishness.” For the more decisively and exclusively partiality encloses one single man, the further he is from loving his neighbor. You, husband, do not subject your wife to the temptation arising from her love for you, of forgetting to love her neighbor; you, wife, do not subject your husband to this temptation! The lovers certainly believe that in their earthly love they have the highest possible. Oh, but it is not so, for in it they have not yet secured the eternal through the eternal.
It is true the poet promises the lovers immortality, if they are truly lovers; but who is the poet who gives them this promise? One who cannot even vouch for himself. The “royal law,” on the contrary, the commandment of love, promises life, eternal life, and this commandment simply says, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor.” And as this commandment wishes to teach every man how he ought to love himself, so it also wishes to teach love and friendship the right kind of love: preserve in loving yourself your love for your neighbor; preserve in your earthly love and friendship your love for your neighbor. This idea will perhaps repel you—then you will know that the signs of offense are always present to the Christian. But, nevertheless, believe this; believe that the Teacher who would not quench any smoking flax, will not extinguish any noble fire within a man; believe that He who was love, simply wishes to teach every man to love; believe that if all the poets united in one song in praise of earthly love and friendship, all they had to say would be as nothing in comparison with the commandment, “Thou shalt love, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself!” Do not cease to believe because the commandment almost offends you, because the discourse does not sound as flattering as that of the poets who by their songs insinuate themselves into your happiness, but sounds repulsive and terrifying, as if it would snatch you out of your beloved retreat of partiality—do not therefore cease to believe it; consider that just because the commandment is thus and the discourse thus, just because of this, its object can be the object of faith! Do not indulge yourself in the conceit that you might be able to bargain, that by loving some men, friends and relatives, you would be loving your neighbor—for this would be giving up the poetic without apprehending the Christian, and it was for the sake of preventing this bargaining that the discourse attempted to place you between the pride of the poet, who disdains all bargaining, and the divine majesty of the royal law, which makes all bargaining an offense. No, love your beloved faithfully and tenderly, but let the love for your neighbor be the more sacred in the covenant of your union with God! Love your friend sincerely and devotedly, but let your love for your neighbor be what you learn from each other in the confidence of friendship with God! Behold, death levels all differences, but partiality always retains the difference, yet the way to life and to the eternal is through death, and through the leveling of differences: therefore only the love to the neighbor truly leads to life.
As the joyous message of Christianity is contained in the teaching about mankind’s kinship with God, so is its problem man’s likeness to God. But God is love, therefore we can resemble God only in loving, as we also, according to the Apostle’s word, can only be “God’s fellowlaborers in—love.” Just because you love your beloved, you do not resemble God, for with God there is no partiality, as you many times in your humility, but also many times in your self-satisfaction, have considered. Insofar as you love your friend you do not resemble God, for before God there is no difference. But when you love your neighbor, then you resemble God.
So, then, go out and act accordingly; forget the differences so that you can love your neighbor. Alas, perhaps it is not even necessary to say this to you, perhaps you found no one in the world to love, no friend on the wdy, so that your way lay in solitude. Or perhaps God took from your side and gave you a beloved, but death took and took her from your side; he took again and took your friend, but gave you no one in his place, so that now you walk alone, so that you have no beloved one to protect your weak side and no friend at your right hand. Or perhaps life separated you even if you continued unchanged—in the loneliness of separation. Perhaps change separated you, so that you walk alone in sorrow because you found, but also found what you found changed! How disconsolate! Moreover, only ask the poet how distressing it is to live in loneliness, to have lived in loneliness, without being loved and without having any one to love. Just ask the poet whether he knows other than that it is comfortless when death steps in between the lovers, or when life separates friend from friend, or when a change of feeling separates them as enemies from one another. For certainly the poet loves solitude, he loves it—in order in solitude to discover the missing happiness of love and friendship, just as one who would gaze at the stars in wonder, seeks a dark place. And yet if it were not his own fault that a man found no one to love; and if through no fault of his own he sought in vain to find a friend; and if the loss, the separation, the change in feeling, were not his own fault: under these circumstances what more does the poet know than that this is very distressing? But then the poet too is subject to change if he, the proclaimer of happiness, knows nothing else than the shriek of desolation in the day of need. Or are you not willing to call it change, do you wish to call it loyalty in the poet that he—disconsolately sorrows with the desolate sorrowing? Oh, well, we shall not quarrel about that. But if you wish to compare this human fidelity with that of heaven and eternity, then you will certainly admit that there is a difference. For heaven not only rejoices more than any poet with the glad, but heaven not only sorrows with the sorrowing, no, heaven has a new, a more blessed joy in store for the sorrowing. So Christianity always has consolation, and its consolation is different from all human consolation, in that human consolation is conscious of being only compensation for the loss of gladness: the Christian consolation is gladness. Humanly speaking, consolation is a later invention: first comes suffering and pain and loss of joy, and then later, alas, sometimes much later, man came on the track of the consolation. And the same thing is true of the individual life: first come suffering and pain and loss of joy,.and then later, sometimes after a long time, comes the consolation. But the Christian consolation can never be said to come too late, for since it is the consolation of eternity it is older than all temporal happiness. And as soon as this consolation comes, it comes with the impulse of the eternal, and swallows up, as it were, the pain, for pain and loss of happiness are the momentary—even if this moment is prolonged into years—are the momentary which is swallowed up in the eternal. And the Christian consolation is therefore not a compensation for the loss of happiness, since it is happiness; all other happiness is in the last analysis only despondency in comparison with the consolation of Christianity. Alas, if man’s earthly life were not so perfect, so that the eternal happiness might be proclaimed to him as happiness he had and has himself forfeited! That is why the happiness of eternity can only be preached to him as consolation. As the human eye cannot stand looking at the rays of the sun except through a dark glass, so a man cannot endure the joy of eternity except through the dimness which comes from its being preached as consolation.