Oh, it is only too true that the “way to perdition is paved with good intentions,” and it is certain that the most dangerous thing of all is for a man to backslide by the aid of good intentions, that is, by the way of promises. It is so hard to realize that it actually is retrogression. When a man turns his back and goes away, then it is easy to see that he is going away; but if a man hits on the idea of turning his face toward that from which he is going away, hits upon the idea of going backwards, while with face and glance and voice he greets one, protesting again and again that he is coming at once, or even saying incessantly, “Here I am” —although, mind you, he is withdrawing farther and farther backward: then it is not so easy to realize it. And so, too, with the one who, rich in good intentions and swift to promise, withdraws farther and farther from the good. Aided by good intentions and promises, his direction is toward the good, he is turned toward the good, and yet with this tendency toward the good, he yet is going back farther and farther away from the good. Every time he renews his intention and his promise, it looks as if he took a step forward, and yet he does not merely remain stationary, but he actually takes a step backward.

The vain intention, the unfulfilled promise, leaves a despondency, a dejection, which perhaps soon blazes up again in an even more fiery purpose, only to die away again in an even greater languor. As a drinker constantly needs stronger and stronger stimulation—to become intoxicated, so he who forfeits his promises and good intentions constantly needs greater incitement—in order to go backward. We do not commend the son who said “no,” but we endeavor to learn from the Gospel how dangerous it is to say, “Lord, I will.” A promise may be compared to the dealing with a changeling—caution is needed. Just at the moment the child is born, when the mother’s joy is greatest because her suffering is past, when just because of her joy she is perhaps less perceptive, then, as the superstitious believe, a hostile power comes and leaves a changeling in place of her child. And at the great but also dangerous moment of beginning, when one ought to begin, then comes the hostile power and slips the changeling promise into one’s hand, preventing one from actually making the beginning. Ah, how many have not been deceived in this way, deceived by the changeling promise!

That is why it is so important for a man in all his relations, in his every task, immediately to center his complete undivided attention upon the essential and the decisive. So too with love, so that it may not at any time acquire the power to seem other than it is, or the changeling appearance be able to establish itself firmly and become a snare. For love does not come to have a good time, or to amuse itself with flattering conceits, but it is immediately in line with the task and is forced to understand that every previous moment was a wasted moment and more than merely wasted time, that any other expression of it is retardation and retrogression. This is exactly expressed in the words of our text:

Love Is the Fulfillment of the Law

and we shall now make these words the subject of our reflection.

Hence if someone asks, “What is love?”, Paul answers: “It is the fulfillment of the law,” and any further questioning is immediately halted by that answer. For the law is already a complicated matter, but to fulfill it—moreover, you yourselves perceive that if this is to be accomplished, then there is not a moment to waste. The world has certainly many times asked out of curiosity, “What is love?” and as many times there has been some idler who by answering joined himself with the curious, and these two, curiosity and idleness, liked each other so much that they almost tired each other out in asking and answering questions. But Paul pays no attention to the questioner, least of all to the difficulties; on the contrary, by his answer he catches the questioner in obedience under the law; by his answer he immediately gives the direction and gives the impetus to act accordingly. This is not only the case with this answer of Paul’s, but it is true of all Paul’s answers and with all of Christ’s answers; this method of replying, swinging far away from the direction of the question in order immediately to bring the task the questioner has to perform as near to life as possible, is simply characteristic of the Christian method. That simple wise man of antiquity who by encouraging the pursuit of knowledge doomed paganism, he understood the art of asking questions; he knew how through his questions to ensnare in the web of their ignorance those who answered. But the Christian who does not restrict himself to knowledge alone but to action, is peculiarly able to answer and by his answer to commit everyone to the task. This was why it was so dangerous for the Pharisees and the sophists and the hairsplitters and the dialecticians to question Christ; for the questioner always received an answer, but through the answer he also learned in a certain sense far too much; he received an embarrassing answer which did not cleverly elaborate on the question, but which seized upon the questioner with divine authority and pledged him to act in accordance with it, whereas the questioner perhaps had only wished to satisfy his curiosity or his inquisitiveness or to define his own ideas, while keeping at a distance from himself and from—doing the truth. How many have not asked, “What is truth?” and have secretly hoped that it would be a long time before the truth came so close to them that it would in that very moment decide what it was their duty to do at once. When the Pharisee “in order to justify himself” asked, “Who is my neighbor?”, he certainly thought that it would call for a very long investigation, that it would perhaps require a very long time, and even then perhaps would end with the admission that it would be impossible to define with absolute accuracy the concept “neighbor”’—and this was exactly why he had asked the question, in order to find an excuse for wasting time, in order to justify himself. But God takes the wise in their own foolishness, and Christ took the questioner captive in the answer which included the task.

And so with every answer of Christ. He does not warn against unprofitable questions by long, tiresome speeches which only breed quarrels and evasions, for the long elaborate speech would not be much better than the one it is designed to counteract. No, as He taught, so too He answers with divine authority, for the authority simply consists in setting the task. The hypocritical questioner got the answer he deserved, but not the one he desired. He did not get an answer which would encourage curiosity, nor one he could run with, for the reply has the remarkable quality that when it is spoken it at once commits the individual to whom it is spoken unequivocally to the task. Even if someone presumptuously wished to repeat one or another of Christ’s answers, merely as an anecdote, it is no good, it cannot be done; the answer catches by making the one to whom it is repeated responsible for the task. In the case of a clever answer which appeals to human ingenuity, it is of no consequence who has said it or to whom it was said. Every answer of Christ has exactly the opposite quality, which is, however, two-edged: it is infinitely important that it is Christ who has said it, and when it is said to an individual, it is precisely to Aim that it is said, the whole eternal emphasis is on that him, even if in a way it is said to all individuals. Human ingenuity is introspective, and inasmuch as it is blind, it is ignorant of whether anyone looks at it or not, and whether anyone comes close enough to look at it; the divine authority, on the contrary, is like the pure eye; it first compels the accused to see with whom he is talking, and then it fixes its piercing glance upon him and with this glance it says: “It is you to whom this is said.” Therefore men will readily have dealings with ingenuity and intellectuality, for one can play blindman’s buff with them, but they are afraid of authority.

And this is why men will perhaps not so readily have anything to do with Paul’s answer, which, as was said, is ensnaring. As soon as anything else is said in answer to the question about what love is, then there is also time, an interval, an idle moment, which then becomes a concession to curiosity and idleness and selfishness. But if love is the fulfillment of the law, then there is no time for a promise—for the fact of promising is here used as an expression for the last thing which wishes to turn love in the wrong direction away from doing, away from immediately beginning upon the task; the promise lies exactly at the. beginning, and resembles it deceptively, yet without being the beginning. Therefore even if this promise about love were not so apt to be a momentary excitement, which in the next moment is a disappointment, an immediate blazing up which leaves a languor behind, a springing forward which leads backward, an anticipation which delayingly retards, an introduction which does not lead to the matter—even if all this were not so, the promise is still a dwelling upon love, a dreaming or gratifying or light-minded or conceited dwelling upon love, as if it must first collect itself, or consider itself, or as if it wondered at itself, or at what it was able to do; the promise is a dwelling on love, and therefore a jest, a jest which may become dangerous, for taken earnestly love is the fulfillment of the law. But the Christian love which gives everything away, has just for that reason nothing to give away, no moment and no promise. Still this love is not a busyness, least of all a worldly busyness, and worldliness and busyress are now inseparable ideas. For what does it mean to be busy? We generally think that the way in which a man occupies himself determines whether he can be called busy. But this is not so. It is only within more narrow limitations that the manner of occupation is decisive, that is, not until the object of the occupation is determined. He who occupies himself only with the eternal, uninterruptedly, at every moment, if this were possible, is not busy. Hence the one who really occupies himself with the eternal is never busy. To be busy is, dividedly and distractedly (which follows from the object of the occupation) to occupy one’s self with the whole manifold, in which it is absolutely impossible for a man to be undivided, undivided as a whole, and undivided in any individual part of the whole, which only the insane succeed in doing. To be busy is dividedly and distractedly to occupy one’s self with that which makes a man divided and distracted. But Christian love, which is the fulfillment of the law, is completely and undividedly present in its every utterance; and yet it is perpetually active; it is, consequently, just as far from being idleness as it is from being busyness. It never takes up something in advance and gives a promise instead of acting; it never satisfies itself by making believe that it has finished the task; never lingers with enjoyment on itself; never sits idly wondering about itself. It is not that hidden, secret, mysterious feeling behind the lattice of the inexplicable which the poet wishes to lure to his window; not a mood of the soul which fondly knows no law, wishes to know none, or wishes to make its own law, and only listen for the songs: it is sheer action, and each of its deeds is sacred, for it is the fulfillment of the law.

Such is the ideal Christian love; even if it does not or did not manifest itself in this way in any man (while yet every Christian by continuing in love, strives that his love may become such), it still was true in Him who was love, in our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore the same apostle says about Him, that “Christ was the end of the law.” What the law could not bring to pass, any more than it could save a man, that Christ could do. Whereas the law, therefore, through its demand became the destruction of everyone, because they were not able to fulfill it, and only through it learned to know sin: Christ became the destruction of the law, because He was what it demanded, its destruction, its end; for when the demand is fulfilled, the demand exists only in the fulfillment, but hence it no longer exists anywhere as demand. As thirst when it is quenched exists only in the relief which follows the refreshment, so Christ did not come to abolish the law, but to perfect it, so that from this time forth it exists in its perfection.

Moreover, He was love, and His love was the fullness of the law. “No one could convict Him of any sin,” not even the law which knows every conscience; “there was no deceit in His mouth,” but everything in Him was truth; there was in His love not the hairsbreadth of a moment, of an emotion, of an interval between His purpose and the demand of the law for its fulfillment. He did not say “no,” like that one brother, or “ves,” like the other brother, for His meat was to do His Father’s will; thus He was one with the Father, one with every demand of the law, so its perfecting was a necessity to Him, His sole need in life.

The love in Him was perpetually active; there was no moment, not one single instant in His whole life when His love was merely a passive feeling which seeks expression while it lets time pass; or a mood which produces a self-satisfaction and dwells on itself while the task is neglected. No, His love was expressed in perpetual activity; even when He wept, was this not redeeming the time? For not even Jerusalem knew what belonged to its peace, but He knew; if those who stood at the grave of Lazarus sorrowing did not know what was about to happen, He knew what He would do. His love was as completely present in His least as in His greatest acts; it rallied itself no more strongly in some single great moment than in the hours of daily life outside the demands of the law. It was equally present at every moment, not greater when He breathed His last upon the Cross than when He let Himself be born. It was the same love which said, “Mary has chosen the better part,” and the same love which with a glance rebuked—or forgave, Peter. It was the same love when He accepted His disciples who gladly left their homes to perform miracles in His name, and the same love when He found them sleeping. There was in His love no demand upon any other man, not on another man’s time or strength or assistance or reciprocal love; for what Christ demanded of him was solely the other man’s good, and He demanded that only for the sake of the other man. No man lived with Him who loved Him as deeply as Christ loved him. There was in His love no bargaining, no indulgent, partial agreement with any man except the agreement which was to Him the infinite demand of the law. There was in the love of Christ no exemption demanded for Him, not the poorest, not a farthing’s worth.

His love recognized no differences, not the tenderest between His mother and other men, for He pointed to His disciple and said, “This is my mother.” Again His love made no difference between His disciples, for His sole wish was that everyone should become His disciple, and He wished this for their own sakes. And again His love made no difference between the disciples, for His divine-human love was exactly the same to all men, in wishing to save them all, and equally for all men, who would allow themselves to be saved.

His life was pure love, and yet this whole life was only a single working day; He did not rest until the night came when He could no longer work; His labor did not cease with the changes of day and night, for when He was not working, then He watched in prayer. Thus was He the fulfillment of the law. And for a reward He demanded nothing, for His only requirement, His only purpose throughout His whole life from birth to death, was to sacrifice Himself as an innocent victim—which not even the law in its most extreme demand—dared to demand. Thus was He the fulfillment of the law. The only one privy to His life, as it were, who was even able to follow Him, who was attentive enough and sleepless enough to follow Him, was the law itself, which followed Him step by step, hour by hour, with its infinite demand; but He was the fulfillment of the law.

How poverty-stricken never to have loved! Oh, but the man who became richest through his love, how poor was not all his wealth of love in comparison with this fullness! And yet, not so. Let us never forget that there is an everlasting difference between Christ and every Christian; even if the law has been done away with, it still stands in power and fixes an everlasting yawning gulf between the God-man and every other man, who cannot even understand, but who can only believe what the divine law must admit, that He was the fulfillment of the law. Every Christian believes this and appropriates it in believing, but no one has known it except the law and He who was the fulfillment of the law. For what weakness in a man is present in his strongest moment, that weakness far more strongly and yet proportionately would be present at every moment—that fact a man can understand only in his strongest moment, but the next moment he cannot understand it; and that is why he must believe and cling to his faith, so that his life may not become confused through being able to understand at one moment, but not being able to understand at many other moments.

Christ was the fulfillment of the law. From Him we should learn how to understand this thought, for He was the explanation, and only when the explanation is what it explains, when the one who explains it is the thing explained, when the explanation is the transfiguration, only then is there the right relationship. Alas, if we are not able to explain in this way; for if we can do nothing else, we can learn from this, humility before God. The frailty of our earthly life must divide it into explaining and being explained, and this, our weakness, is an essential expression of our own attitude toward God. Let a man, humanly speaking, love God in all sincerity of heart, ah, God has first loved him, God is an eternity ahead—so far is the man behind. And so with every task of eternity. When a man finally comes to begin, what an infinite time has not already been wasted, even if for a moment we forget all the deficiencies, all the imperfections in the struggle which has finally begun! Let a man, humanly speaking, aspire first in all sincerity of heart to the kingdom of God and His righteousness, yet how long a time elapsed before he merely learned to understand this in the right way, and hence how infinitely long before he first aspired to the kingdom of God and His righteousness! And so at every point, before every human beginning, there is wasted time. We are accustomed to speak concerning worldly conditions, about the distressing fact that in order to prepare himself for some career, a man often must run in debt; in the God-relationship, man begins with an infinite debt, even if we forget how that debt increases daily after the beginning. Only too often this is forgotten in our daily life, and why should it be unless it is because God too is forgotten? So one man measures himself by another, and the one who has understood more than the other prides himself on being something. Oh, that he might himself understand that before God he is nothing. And since men are now so anxious to be something, what wonder that they, however much they talk about God’s love, are so reluctant to have anything to do with Him, just because His demand and His standards make them into nothing.

For use one tenth part of the strength that is yours when you exert it to the uttermost, then turn your back on God, compare yourself with men—and in a very short time you will be distinguished among men. But turn around, turn toward God, use ten tenth parts of your strength, torture if possible every last makeshift into your service— and you will still be as nothing, at an infinite distance from having gained anything, in an infinite debt to God! Lo, therefore we have a right to say that in a certain sense it does not help to speak to a man about the highest, because a revolution must precede it, absolutely dif-”; ferent from that which any speech can produce. If, for instance, you wish to have good times and easily get to be something, then forget God, never really notice Him, nor allow yourself to understand clearly that it was He who created you from nothing; start with the presupposition that a man has no time to waste in considering the One to whom he infinitely and unconditionally owes everything. Nor would one man be justified in asking another about it; hence, let it be forgotten, and shout in chorus with the multitude, laugh or weep, be busy from morning to night; be loved and respected and esteemed as friend, as officer, as king, as pallbearer; above all, be a serious man through having forgotten the only serious matter, that of maintaining your relation to God by becoming nothing. Oh, but consider then—still it does no good to talk, but God grant that you may understand what you lost, so that this annihilation before God may be blessed in such a way that you again retrace your way back to this annihilation every moment more strongly, more fervently, more inwardly than the blood returns to the place from which it was forced out. But to worldly wisdom this is and. must be the greatest folly. Therefore never cling to God (for we must speak so, if in so many words we would reveal the secret of the indecision which with lying words also pretends to cling to God), “never cling to God, for by clinging to Him you lose what no man who clung to the world ever lost, not even the man who lost most—you unconditionally lose everything.” And this is true, for the world truly cannot take everything, simply because it cannot give everything; only God who takes everything, everything, everything—in order to give everything, who does not take piecemeal little or much, or immeasurably much, but infinitely everything, only God can do this, if you truly cling to Him. “Therefore, flee from Him! A king may certainly be dangerous to approach, if you wish to be something, the proximity of a powerfully endowed spirit is dangerous, but God is infinitely more dangerous to approach.”

Still, if God is left out and forgotten, then I do not know what meaning there can be in such an expression, or what meaning other than arrant nonsense there could be in any talk about this expression: that love is the fulfillment of the law. So let us not in timidity and treachery to ourselves deprive ourselves of understanding these words, as if we were afraid of that which the natural man, however much he shouts about his desire for knowledge and insight, fears—of getting to know too much; for to speak of love being the fulfillment of the law is an impossibility, without at the same time recognizing one’s own guilt and making every man guilty.

Love is the fulfilling of the law, for the law is, despite its many provisions, still somewhat indeterminate, but love is its fulfillment; like a powerful speaker, who despite his exertions still cannot sdy everything, so is the law, but love is the fulfillment of the law.

It might seem strange to say that the law is indeterminate, for its strength lies in its provisions; it owns and rules over all the provisions. And, nevertheless, it is so, and therein also lies the weakness of the law. As a shadow is weak in comparison with the powerful reality, so is the law; but as there is always something vague about a shadow, so too is there vagueness in the outline of the law, however meticulously this is executed. Therefore in the Holy Scriptures the law is called, “a shadow of things to come,” for the law is not a shadow which follows the reality of love; the law is assimilated in love, but the law is the shadow of things to come. When an artist outlines a plan, a sketch for his work, however exact the sketch is, it is always somewhat indefinite. Only when the work is finished, can one say: “Now there is not the least thing indefinite, not one line, not a single indefinite point.” There is, therefore, only one sketch that is absolutely definite, that is the work itself, but that is saying that no sketch is or can be absolutely and unconditionally definite. So the law is the plan, love the fulfillment and the absolutely definite; in love the law is absolutely definite. There is only one power which can carry out the work for which the law furnishes the preliminary sketch, and that is love. Still the law and love, like the sketch and the finished work, are by one and the same artist, from one and the same source; they are not at variance with one another any more than the finished work of art, which completely corresponds to the sketch, is at variance with that, because it is even more clearly defined than all the outlines of the sketch.

Therefore Paul says in another place, “The end of the commandment is love.” But in what sense is this said? It is said in the same sense as it is said that love is the fulfillment of the law. In another sense, it is the sum of all the individual commandments, “Thou shalt not steal,” and so on. But try to see if in this way you can find the sum however long you continue to count, and you will see that this is labor in vain, because the concept of the law is inexhaustible, endless, irresistible in its provisions; every provision produces an even more exacting provision, and then from that another still more exacting, and so on interminably.

Here love stands in the same relation to the law as reason does to faith. Reason counts and counts, reckons and reckons, but it never attains the certainty which faith possesses: so too with the law, it makes provisions and more provisions, but it never reaches the end, which is love. When the sum is mentioned, the very expression seems to suggest counting; but when a man has become tired of counting, and yet is even more anxious to find the sum, then he understands that this expression must have a deeper significance. And so, too, when the law has sicke all its provisions on a man and pursued him to exhaustion, because there are provisions everywhere, and yet every provision, even the most definite, has the uncertainty of interpretation that permits it to be made even more definite (for there is perpetually a vagueness in the provisions and an anxiety caused by their numbers, which never dies): then a man becomes trained to understand that there must be something different which constitutes the fulfillment of the law. But there is no more conflict between the law and love than there is between the sum and those numbers whose sum it is; as little as there is conflict between the vain attempt to find the sum and the successful finding of it, the happy decision that it has been found.

Man groans under the law. Wherever he looks he sees only its demand, never the limitation of its demand; like one who looks out over the sea and sees wave after wave, but never an end to them; wherever he turns he meets only the severity which can always become infinitely more severe, never the boundary where it passes over into mildness. The law is starving, as it were; by its aid one does not attain fullness, for it provides simply for taking away, for imposing demands, for exhausting to the uttermost, and the vagueness constantly inherent in its multitudinous provisions is the inexorable collecting of the claims. In each of its provisions the law demands something, and yet the number of provisions is unlimited. The law is, therefore, the exact opposite of life, but the life is the fulfillment. The law resembles death. But I wonder if life and death do not really know one and the same thing; for just as accurately as life knows everything that makes for life, just so accurately does death know everything which makes for life. There is, therefore, in a certain sense no dispute between the law and love as regards knowledge, but love gives, the law takes, or, that we may express the relationship more properly, the law demands, love grants. There is not one provision of the law, not a single one, which love wishes to abolish; on the contrary, it is love which first gives them all fulfillment and definiteness; in love all the provisions of the law are far more clearly defined than in the law. There is no more conflict between them than there is between hunger and the blessing which satisfies that hunger.

Love is the fulfillment of the law; for love is no shirker of tasks, no indulgence, which demanding immunity or making excuses, coddling or being coddled, slips in between love and the fulfillment of the law, as if love were an idle emotion, too superior to express itself in action, an exigent incapacity, which neither can nor will give satisfaction. Only folly speaks thus about love, as if there were a conflict between the law and love, as there certainly is, but sx the love there is no conflict between the law and the love which is the fulfillment of the law; as if there were an essential difference between the demands of the law and love, as there certainly is, but not n the love in which the fulfillment is completely one and the same with the demand. Only folly sows dissension between the law and love, believes it speaks wisely when it whispers between them, or even maligns one of them to the other.

Fulfillment of the law—still, what law are we speaking about? Our text is the apostolic word, we are speaking about Christian love, hence this discourse can only refer to the law of God. In this the world (insofar as this is different from what we have called “folly”’) and God, worldly wisdom and Christianity, agree that there is a law which love must fulfill in order to be love, but they disagree about what the law is, and this disagreement is an infinite difference. Worldly wisdom believes that love is a relationship between man and man; Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between man—God—man, that is, that God is the middle term. However beautiful a love-relationship has been between two or among many, however absolutely this love has been to them the source of all their happiness and all their blessedness in mutual sacrifice and renunciation, whether all men have praised this relationship—if God and the God-relationship have been neglected, then from the Christian viewpoint it has not been love, but a mutually enchanting illusion of love.

For to love God is in truth to love one’s self; to help another man to love God is to love the other man, to be helped by another man to love God is to be loved. Worldly wisdom certainly does not believe that the one who loves will arbitrarily determine what he wishes to understand by love. Love truly means devotion and sacrifice; therefore the world thinks that the object of love (be it the beloved, or a friend, or all those loved, or a social union, or one’s contemporaries, which for the sake of brevity we shall hereafter call “the beloved”) must decide whether self-sacrifice and devotion are displayed, and whether the selfsacrifice and devotion displayed are love. Hence it will depend on whether the men who do the judging know how to judge correctly. If the object of love, the judge, does not before God have a true conception in himself of what it means to love himself, that it means to love God, then neither will the beloved have any true conception of what it means to be loved by another man, that it means to be helped to love God; but if this is true, then, as a result, the beloved will take a false kind of devotion and self-sacrifice for true love, and true love for false love. The merely human judgment about love is not a true judgment, for to love God constitutes the true self-love. If God, on the other hand, is the middle term in judging love, then there follows a final and twofold judgment, which still only, although the only one at bottom decisive, begins where the human judgment has finished and has decided whether it is love or not.

The judgment is this: is it really love, from the divine standpoint, to show such a devotion as that demanded by the object of love? Next, is it, from the divine standpoint, really love to demand such devotion from the object of love? Every man is a bond servant unto God; therefore he dares not belong to anyone in love unless in the same love he belongs to God, or to own anyone in love unless this other and he himself in this love belong to God: a man dares not belong to another man in such a way that this other man is everything to him; a man dares not permit another to belong to him in such a way that he is everything to the other. If there were a love-relationship between two people or among many, so happy, so perfect, that a poet must rejoice over it, moreover, so blissful that one who was not a poet must become one from wonder and joy at this sight: that by no means ends the matter. For now Christianity enters and inquires about the God-relationship, whether each individual has first established a relationship with God, and whether the love-relationship maintains itself in God. If this is not the case, then will Christianity, which is still the protector of love, or just because it is, not hesitate to break up this relationship in the name of God, until the lovers are willing to understand it. And if only one party is willing to understand it, then Christianity, which still is the protector of love, will not hesitate to carry him into a horrible conflict, such as no poet has dreamed of or ventured to describe. For just as little as the poet will have anything to do with the Christian teaching of loving one’s enemy, just as little, and even less if possible, can he accept the Christian teaching of hating the beloved from love and in love. Still Christianity does not hesitate in the name of God, to strain the relationship so intensively. Christianity not only does this in order, as it were, to collect the outstanding debts due to God (since God is indeed the master and owner of bound men), but He does it out of love for the lovers; for to love God is to love one’s own self; to love another man like God is to deceive one’s self; and to allow another man to love one like God, is to deceive that other man. To such an extreme madness, humanly speaking, can Christianity drive its demand, if love is to be the fulfillment of the law. Therefore it teaches that the Christian must, if required, be able to hate father and mother and sister and the beloved—I wonder if it really means that he should hate them! Oh, may such an abomination be far from Christianity! But certainly in that sense, love, the divinely understood, steadfast and sincere love, may be looked upon as hate by the beloved, the neighbor, the contemporaries, because these will not understand what it means to love themselves, that it means to love God, and that to be loved means to be helped by another man to love God, whether this is actually achieved or not by the lover submitting to being hated. Lo, worldly wisdom has a long list of diversified expressions for sacrifice and devotion; I wonder if among these, this is also found: hating the beloved from love; hating the beloved and insofar himself from love; hating the contemporary and insofar his own life from love. Lo, worldly wisdom knows many and highly diversified cases of unhappy love; I wonder if among all these you find the suffering that might seem to hate the beloved, that might have hate as the last and sole expression of its love, or that suffering which for a reward of its love must be hated by the beloved, because there is the infinite difference of the Christian truth between that which the one party understands by love, and that which the other understands by it.

Whatever the world before the time of Christianity had seen of unhappy love, whatever it had seen of the collision of love with appalling events, whatever it had seen of its collision with what, within the same fundamental conceptions of what love is, is the converse of love, whatever it had seen of its collision with partially divergent ideas within the common fundamental idea: before the time of Christianity the world had never seen that in loving, there was a collision possible between two conceptions between which there is an eternal difference—between the divine conception and the merely human conception. But if there is such a collision, then it is, divinely understood, precisely love to cling to the true, the eternal conception, to love by virtue of it, whereas that one, or those, who were loved, if they had only the human conception of love, must regard it as hate. If we may be permitted to speak quite humanly about the highest, we are unfortunately easily tempted to imagine in our so-called Christendom, that one believes that which one does not even have an impression of, at least not noticeably so; if we may be permitted to speak quite humanly about the highest, yet never forgetting that the one about whom we speak is separated by an eternal distance from every other man: the life of Christ is really the only unhappy love. He was, divinely understood, love. He loved by virtue of the divine understanding of what love is; He loved the entire race; He dared not—on account of His love, give up this, His understanding, for that would precisely be to deceive the race. Therefore His whole life was a terrible collision with the purely human understanding of what love is. It was the ungodly world which crucified Him; but even His disciples did not understand Him, and constantly sought to win Him to their conception of what love was, so that even to Peter He was obliged to say, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Unfathomable suffering in the terrible collision: that the most sincere, the most faithful disciple, when he, not only meaning well—oh, but burning with love—wishes to counsel Him for the best, wishes only to express how greatly he loves the Master—that this disciple, then, because he had a false conception of love, spoke in such a way that the Master must say to him: “You do not know it, but to me your words are as if it were Satan himself who spoke!” Thus Christianity came into the world, and with Christianity came the divine explanation of what love is.

Oh, we often complain about misunderstanding, especially when it is most bitterly mixed with love; when in each one of its expressions we know that the love is unhappy, that we are certainly loved hut not understood; that everything is so bitter because it is done by love through a misunderstanding: but to be misunderstood as no other man was ever misunderstood by another man, to be thus misunderstood as Christ was—and then to be love as Christ was! We pretend that it was only the ungodly who were offended at Christ. What a misunderstanding! No, the best and most kindly man, humanly speaking, who has ever lived, must be offended at Him, must misunderstand Him; for what love is, divinely understood, this the best of men could learn only from Him. The love of Christ, humanly understood, was not self-sacrificing—anything but that; He did not make Himself unhappy, in order, humanly understood, to make His disciples happy. No, He made Himself and His disciples, humanly speaking, as unhappy as possible. And He who had had it in His power to establish the kingdom of Israel and make everything so pleasant for Himself and His followers, as every contemporary could see clearly enough!

Consequently He could have done it, consequently He would not do it, consequently the fault must have lain in Him, in His heart, that He would not sacrifice His ideas and His conceptions, but cruelly preferred to sacrifice Himself and His followers, that is, to forfeit His own life and the lives of those He loved! He did not establish any kingdom on earth, or sacrifice Himself so that the apostles might inherit the established kingdom. No, humanly speaking, it was indeed madness: He sacrifices Himself—in order to make the beloved equally unhappy with Himself! Was this really love: to gather some poor, simpleminded men about Him, to win their devotion and love, as no other had ever won it, to pretend for a moment to look out for them, as now the prospect of the fulfillment of their proudest dream is revealed to them—in order suddenly to reconsider and change the plans; in order without being moved by their prayers, without paying the least attention to them, to plunge them down from this seductive height into the abyss of all dangers; in order, without resistance, to give His enemies power; in order, under mockery and insult while the world rejoiced, to be nailed to the Cross as a criminal! was this really love?

Was it really love: to be thus separated from the disciples, to leave them forsaken in a world which hated them because of Him, to drive them out as wandering sheep among ravening wolves, whose bloodthirstiness He had Himself aroused against them: was this really love! What does this Man want, what does He want of these honest, simplehearted even if simple-minded men whom He so cruelly deceives? Why does He call His relation to them love? Why does He continue to call it love? Why does He die without confessing that He deceived them, so that He therefore dies asserting that it was, nevertheless, love —alas, while the disciples with bruised hearts, but with touching loyalty, do not venture to have any opinion of their own about His conduct, presumably because He had overborne them? Meanwhile every other man can easily see that, whatever He was to the rest of the world, perhaps excusable as a fanatic, in relation to His disciples He acted like a deceiver! And yet He was love, and He exalted love above everything, and wished to make men happy, and how? Through their relationship to God—for He was love. Yes, He was love, and He knew in Himself and in God, that it was the sacrifice of reconciliation that He brought, that He truly loved His disciples, loved the entire race of men, or at least everyone who would permit himself to be saved!

The fundamental error in the merely human apprehension of love is, that love is deprived of its relation to God, and thereby of its relation to the law to which it refers when it says, “Love is the fulfillment of the law.” By a strange misunderstanding one is perhaps inclined to believe that love for a neighbor must not be without a relationship to

God, but only earthly love and friendship. As if Christianity were something halved, as if it could not penetrate every relationship, as if the teaching about love for the neighbor did not exactly count on this, and therefore transformed earthly love and friendship; while many, through a strange misunderstanding, perhaps believe that they need God’s help to love their neighbor—the less lovable object, but as to earthly love and friendship, they believe that, on the contrary, they can best help themselves—alas! as if God’s intervention here would even be disturbing and inconvenient!

But no love and no expression of love may, in the merely human and worldly sense, be deprived of a relationship to God. Love is a passionate emotion, but in this emotion, even before he enters into a relation with the object of his love, the man must first enter into a relationship with God, and thereby realize the claim that love is the fulfillment of the law. Love is a relation to another man or to other men, but it is by no means and dares by no means be a matrimonial, a friendly, a merely human agreement, however steadfast and tender the connection between man and man. Everyone individually before he in love enters into a relation with the beloved, with the friend, the loved ones, the contemporaries, has first to enter into a relation with God and with God’s demands. As soon as one leaves out the God-relationship the questions at issue become merely human determinations of what they wish to understand by loving; what they will require of one another; and their mutual judgment because of this becomes the highest judgment. Not only the one who listens absolutely to the call of God will not belong to a woman, in order not to be delayed through wishing to please her; but also the; one who in love belongs to a woman, will first and foremost belong to God; he will not seek first to please his wife, but will first endeavor make his love pleasing unto God. Hence it is not the wife who wil teach her husband how he ought to love her, or the husband the wife or the friend the friend, or the contemporary the contemporary, bu it is God who will teach every individual how he ought to love, even i his love still only lays hold on the law referred to when the apostle says, “Love is the fulfillment of the law.” This makes it quite natural that the one who has only a worldly, or a merely human conception! about what love is, must come to regard that as self-love and unkindness which, understood in the Christian sense, is precisely love. When, on the other hand, the God-relationship determines what love is between man and man, then love is kept from pausing in any self-deception or illusion, while certainly the demand for self-abnegation and sacrifice is again made more infinite. The love which does not lead to God, the love which does not have this as its sole goal, to lead the lovers to love God, stops at the purely human judgment as to what love and what love’s sacrifice and submission are; it stops and thereby escapes the possibility of the last and most terrifying horror of the collision: that in the love relationship there are infinite differences in the idea of what love is.

Merely humanly understood this collision can never enter, for merely humanly understood, the fundamental conception of what love is must essentially be a common conception. Only when understood in the Christian way is the collision possible, since it is the collision between the Christian and the purely human understanding. Nevertheless, Christianity knows how to steer through this difficulty, and no other doctrine has ever taught how to persevere so long in love as has Christianity. Unchanged and immovable, it teaches, precisely for the sake of the beloved, how to hold fast to the true conception of what love is, and then be willing to find the reward for its love in being hated by the beloved—ifor there is indeed the difference of infinity, an eternal difference in language, between what one party understands by love, and what the other party understands by it. To yield to the conception of the beloved as to what love is, that is humanly regarded as loving, and if one does it, then one is loved. But to hold out against the beloved’s purely human conception of what love is by denying the wish, and insofar, also against what the lovers, from the human standpoint, must themselves wish, in order to hold fast the God-idea: that is the collision. It can never occur to the purely human apprehension of what love is, that a man through being loved as intensely as possible by another man, might be an obstacle in the way of the other man. And yet from the Christian standpoint this is exactly possible, for to be loved in this way may interfere with the God-relationship of the lovers. But what is there then to do?

That the beloved should wish to caution against this will certainly not help much, for that would only make him even more lovable—and consequently the lovers would be even more deceived. Christianity knows how to remove the collision without breaking off the love; there is required only the sacrifice (that is certainly in many cases the hardest thing possible, and always very hard): of being willing to find the reward for his love in being hated. Wherever a man is so loved, so admired by others, that he is in the way of becoming dangerous to their God-relationship, there is a collision; but where there is a collision there is also demanded the sacrifice which the merely human conception of what love is does not suspect. For the Christian conception is: truly to love one’s self is to love God; truly to love another man is by every sacrifice (even to one’s self being hated), to help the other man to love God or in loving God.

This is certainly very easy to understand; in the world, on the contrary, it certainly meets with great difficulties, because a contrary view of what love is, a worldly, a merely human, but withal a both effectively ingenious and poetical view, either explains that all this about the God-relationship is really a delusion, a retardation, or else, in speaking about love, it keeps silent about the God-relationship. As in these times there is an effort made in so many directions to free men from all restraint, even the beneficial restraint, so there is an effort to free the emotional relation between man and man from the bonds which bind him to Godand which bind him in everything, in every expression of life. One wishes in relation to love, to teach men something entirely new, something for which the now outmoded Holy Scriptures nlready have the significant expression—one wishes to teach men the liberty which “is without God in the world.” The abominable age of serfdom is past, so one thinks to go farther by the aid of the abomination: to abolish man’s bondage with relation to God, to whom every man—not by birth, but by his creation from nothing—belongs as a serf, and thus as no serf has ever belonged to an earthly master, who does still admit that the thoughts and emotions of his serfs are free: but he belongs to God in every thought, the most hidden, in every feeling, the most secret, in every movement, the most inward. Still, one finds this serfdom to be a troublesome adjunct, and therefore more or less openly considers setting God aside and establishing man—in the rights of man? No, that is not needed, God has already done that—hence in the rights of God; consequently the place remains vacant, if God is dismissed. Lo, as a reward for such presumption, one will in this way tend more and more to transform the whole of existence into doubt or turmoil.

After all, what is the law? What does the law require of a man? That must be decided by men. Which men? Here the doubt begins. Since one man does not essentially stand higher than the other, then the condition is entirely left to me as to whom I wish to agree with in determining what the highest is, insofar as I might not by myself be able, if possible even more arbitrarily, to hit upon a new provision, and as promoter gain support for it. It is likewise left to my decision to select one requirement of the law today, another tomorrow. Or shall the determination of what the law requires perhaps be an agreement between men, a common decision of all men, to which agreement the individual must then subject himself? Excellent! If it were otherwise possible to select a place and fix the moment for this assembling of all men (all living, all?>—but how about the dead?), and if that were possible, which is manifestly impossible, possible that they would all agree on one thing! Or is perhaps an agreement of a majority, a certain number of votes sufficient for a decision? How great a number is needed then? And, above all, if the purely human determinations of what the law requires is the requirement of the law (yet not the individual man’s, for thereby we fall into the purely arbitrary, as was shown), how can the individual come to begin to act; or if it is not left to chance, where does the individual happen to begin, instead of everyone starting at the beginning? Before the individual can begin to act, he must first learn from “the others” what the law requires; but each one of the others will again as individuals have to learn from “the others.” In this way, all human life transforms itself into one huge excuse—can this possibly be what we call the great, matchless, common undertaking, the great achievement of the race? The category of “the others” becomes fantastic, and the fantastically aspiring determination of what the law requires a false alarm.

And if now this inhumanly extensive effort toward a common agreement among all men were not finished in a single evening, but dragged along from generation to generation, then as a consequence it would be quite accidental as to where the individual happened to begin; it would depend, so to speak, on where he came into the game. Some would begin at the beginning, but would die before they reached the halfway mark; others would begin midway, but die without seeing the end, which no one would ever really see, for that would only come when the whole thing was past and world history ended; only then would one completely learn what the requirement of the law was. What a pity that human life should not be forced to begin until just as it is over, and in consequence have to be carried on by all men without complete knowledge of what the law required!

When of seven men who are all suspected of having committed a crime which could not have been committed by any one else, the seven each say: “It wasn’t me, it was the others,” then we understand that “the others” refers to the other six, and so on. But now when all seven, each severally, have said, “It was the others,” what then? Is there not a phantasm conjured up which has doubled the actual seven, and which would have us believe that there were many more, although we know that there were only seven? So, too, when the whole race, each individual severally, hits upon the idea of saying “the others,” then a phantasm is conjured up, as if the race had once existed before the time which marks its actual existence; but here it becomes so difficult to prove the falsity, the dazzling appearance of profundity, because the race is innumerable. Nevertheless, the situation is entirely the same as in what we might be tempted to call a fairy story about the seven and the seven others. For this is exactly the situation that arises when the purely human determination of what the law’s requirement is, constitutes the law’s requirement: one helps one’s self up by using that romantically fantastic “the others,” and down below they assist each other by forming a little union. For certainly if there is to be a second existence of the human race, but not a fantastic one, its existence the second time must be its existence in God, or rather this is its first existence, wherein each individual learns from God the requirement of the law. The actual existence is the second existence.

But what then does that confused condition described resemble? I wonder if it is not like a mutiny. Or should we hesitate to call it by that name if at a given moment it were the whole race who became guilty of this, and we then, it is well to note, add that it is a mutiny against God? Or is the moral so subordinated to the accidental that when a great number do wrong, or we all do wrong, then this wrong becomes the right? This explanation would again be merely a repetition of the mutinous thought, or of its thoughtlessness, for if it is still, in the final analysis, men instead of God who determine what the law’s requirement is, he who forgets this is not only guilty of rebellion against God on his own account, but he also assists others in becoming guilty, so the mutiny gets out of hand. For who could halt such a mutiny if it started? Should we perhaps, only in a new pattern, repeat the error of the mutiny, and everyone in particular say, “I cannot stop it, the others’ must”? I wonder if every individual is not pledged to God to halt the mutiny, naturally not by shouting and imaginary self-importance, not by ruling and wishing to force others to obey God, but through his own unconditional obedience, his own unconditional laying hold on the God-relationship and the God-requirement, and thereby expressing for himself personally that God exists and is the only ruler, he, on the contrary, the unconditionally obedient.

Only then is there sense and meaning and truth and reality in existence, when all of us, each one personally, if I may say so, accept our orders at one place, and then, each one personally, unconditionally obey this same order. Since it is one and the same order, then to that extent one man might be able to learn it from another-—if it was certain, or at least reasonably certain, that this other man would communicate it rightly. However, there would still be a confusion everywhere, as it is in conflict with God’s order, for God wishes, for the sake of certainty and equality and responsibility, that every individual should learn the law’s requirement from Him. When this is so, then there is stability in existence, because the stability has God in it; there is no turbulence in it, for each individual does not begin with “the others,” and consequently not with excuses and evasions, but he begins with the God-relationship, and hence he stands firmly, and thereby he also checks, as far as he can reach, the capriciousness which is the beginning of mutiny.

So, too, in relation to the law of love—when there is sense and truth and stability in existence, when we all, each one personally, learn from

God what the requirement is to which we must conform, and when, for the rest, we all, each one personally, defend ourselves against the human confusion (it goes without saying that if we all did this, there would then be no confusion), aye, if necessary, defend ourselves against the beloved, against the friend, against our nearest, who are, nevertheless, especially the objects of our love, insofar as these in some way wish to teach us a different explanation, or help us on a bypath; on the other hand, indebted to them if they wish to help us in the right direction. Let us not forget this, let us not deceive or be deceived by vague, misty conceptions of what love is, but let us heed God’s explanation, indifferent as to whether the beloved, the friend, or the loved ones believe or do not believe—yet no, not indifferent, on the contrary, inwardly concerned if they disagree with us, but still calmly and unchanged continuing to love them.

There is really a conflict between what the world and what God understand by love. It is easy enough to bring about an apparent agreement (as is already apparent in the use of one and the same word, “love” ); on the other hand it is more difficult really to detect the disagreement; but this difficulty is inevitable if we are to know the truth. There is a saying current in the world: “Selfishness is the wisest policy.” Certainly this saying does not give one the most favorable opinion of the world; for that is scarcely a good world in which selfishness is the wisest policy or that which brings the greatest advantage. But now, even if the world regarded selfishness as the wisest policy, it by no means follows that it might not in turn regard love as the nobler quality. It does this too, only the world does not understand what love is. Again, it is easy enough to bring about a surface agreement between God and the world’s interpretation of love; it is even apparent in the use of the familiar expression that “love is noble.” Still, misunderstanding hides in this. What good does it do to commend love as noble, as Christianity also does, if the world understands by love something different, and hence also understands something different by the word “noble”! No, if the world will be explicit, it must say: “Not only is selfishness the wisest policy, but if you wish to be loved by the world, if you wish it to praise your love and you as noble, then you must, in the Christian sense, be selfish, for that which the world calls love is selfishness.” The distinction which the world makes is, namely, this: If one wishes to be alone in being selfish, which, however, very rarely happens, then the world calls it selfishness; but if in his selfishness he unites with some other selfish people, especially with many other selfish people, then the world calls it love. The world can never get any further in determining what love is, because it has neither God nor the neighbor as the middle term. What the world honors and loves under the name of love, is a union in selfishness. The union also demands sacrifice and devotion from the one whom it will call affectionate; it demands that he shall sacrifice a part of his own self-love in order to unite in the united selfishness; and it demands that he shall sacrifice the God-relationship so that in worldliness he may enter into the union which excludes God, or at most accepts Him for the sake of appearances. On the contrary, God understands by love sacrificial love; in the divine sense, sacrificing love, which sacrifices everything in order to secure God a place, even if the heavy sacrifice became even heavier because no one understood it, which, however, in another sense, is proper for true sacrifice; for that sacrifice, which is understood by men, truly has its reward in their approbation, and insofar is not the true sacrifice which must unconditionally be without reward. Therefore we dare not in our understanding of the apostolic word, that love is the fulfillment of the law, assent to the superficial saying that if a man really has love, then he will also be loved by men. He will far more probably be accused of selfishness, just because he will not love men in the same sense in which they selfishly love themselves. The facts are these: the highest degree of self-love, the world also calls selfishness; the self-love of the union, the world calls love; a noble, sacrificial, magnanimous, human love, which yet is not the Christian love, is ridiculed by the world as foolishness; but the Christian love is hated and abominated and persecuted by the world. And so let us not again, through a doubtful compromise, conceal irregularities by saying: “That is the way of the world, but it is otherwise with the Christian.” For this is quite true, but if every baptized individual is a Christian, and a baptized Christendom sanctifies the Christian, then the “world” simply does not exist in a Christian land, which in such a case is proved by the help of the lists of the sexton and the superintendent of police.

No, there is really a conflict between what God understands by love and the world’s understanding of it. Oh, but if it is inspiring to fight for home and fatherland, then it is also inspiring to strive for God, which he does who before God and in His sight, holds fast to the God-relationship, and its definition of what love is! It is true God does not need any man, any more than He needs the whole race, or everything which exists at the moment, which to Him is the nothing from which He created it; but he fights for God who fights the good fight, in order to express the fact that God exists and is the Lord, whose explanation must unconditionally be obeyed.

The God-relationship is the sign by which the love for men is recognized as genuine. As soon as the love-relationship does not lead me to God, and as soon as I in the love-relationship do not lead the other man to God, then is the love, even if it is the greatest happiness and delight of affection, even if to the lovers it is the highest good of the earthly life, still not the true love. The world can never get this into its head, that God does not thus merely become the third party in every loverelation, but really becomes the sole object of affection, so it is not the husband who is the wife’s beloved, but it is God; and it is the wife who is helped by her husband to love God, and conversely, and so on. The merely human interpretation of love can never get any further than reciprocity: the lover is the beloved, and the beloved is the lover. Christianity teaches that such a love has not yet found its right object—God. A love-relationship is threefold: the lover, the beloved, the love; but the love is God. And, therefore, to love another man is to help him to love God, and to be loved is to be helped to love God.

What the world says about love is confusing. When it is said to a youth who is going out into the world, “Love, then you will be loved,” this is quite true—especially if the journey he entered upon were into the eternal, into the land of perfection. But the youth must go out into the world, and therefore it is deceitful to speak thus, without reminding him about laying hold on God in order to learn what love is, and in order to learn that the world, if it had not learned the same lesson from God (alas, for then it would have been the land of perfection the youth entered!), has a completely different conception. If Christ had not been love, and the love in Him the fulfillment of the law, I wonder if He would have been crucified! If He had abated His demand for Himself and had agreed with those who make love anything but the fulfillment of the law, divinely understood; if instead of being the world’s Teacher and Saviour, He had in comformity with the world’s conception, transformed His conception of what it means to love: I wonder if He then would not have been loved and praised by everyone, even idolized (oh, terrible madness!) by His followers. If the apostles had not held fast to the idea that love is the fulfillment of the law, and hence something different from the fulfillment of the human agreements and participation in the human society; if they had not held fast in this same sense to loving men without being willing to accommodate themselves to the world’s conception of what it means to love: I wonder if they would have been persecuted! For what is it the world loves and calls love, what other than indecision and completely earthly union in worldliness, which from the standpoint of eternity, is precisely indecision?

I wonder if any man ever became more notorious for selfishness than the One who really held to the God-requirement, and, faithful to this, loved men, and therefore also continued to love them, although persecuted and misjudged. Is it not also natural that the world should be angry if there is One who is loved more dearly by such a man, One in love to whom such a love exists for men? When one’s endeavor is exerted to gain earthly advantage, then one certainly complains unjustly about the world if one complains about not finding friends; for at that price one can be loved enough, gain friends, have many or few with whom—one affectionately associates.

But when a man’s endeavor is put forth unconditionally in a total sacrifice, in the sacrifice of everything, impoverished, despised, excluded from the synagogue, in order to unite with God in loving men: then you can, for that matter, advertise in the paper that you are looking for a friend—if only you add the conditions, and hence with special emphasis, “that it is not for the sake of advantage’; you will have trouble in finding anyone. We ourselves marvel that Christ chose such humble men for apostles, but, disregarding what was certainly intentional in the choice, the humbler the apostle was as man, the stronger the impression of that which the divine authority granted to him. I wonder if it is not almost more wonderful that Christ nevertheless got them, hence that He really succeeded in forming a union of eleven, whose purpose was to unite in their readiness to let themselves be scourged, persecuted, mocked, crucified, beheaded, and whose purpose too was not mutually to flatter one another, but, on the contrary, mutually to help one another in humility before God. I wonder if this would not sound like a terrible mockery of what the world understands by love, but I wonder if it might not besides act like a beneficial awakening, if in these times, when so many societies are being formed, someone were to advertise that he planned to establish such a union of love! For that there are a lot of people, if someone wishes to make all sacrifices, who would indolently like to take advantage of his sacrifices, that is something the world can understand; the kind of participation which is for one hun- dred per cent profit but less than half of that for the work, is common enough in the world. And it goes without saying that there is also true participation to be found here on earth, but where you find it, you will find it hated and persecuted by the world.

Try it. Imagine a man (and you need not even think of him as possessing the perfection which distinguished that glorious One who, repudiated by the race, became the honor of the race), imagine a man who was or became, or was and became, so unhappy that earthly goods and earthly advantage had lost their allurement for him; so unhappy that he, “weary of his groaning,” as we read in the Holy Scriptures about the unhappy Sara—so distressed she wished to hang herself” imagine that then, just in his darkest hour of need, it became quite clear to him that in spite of his unhappiness, which certainly would not be alleviated by gaining the goods of the whole world, since their possession by encouraging happy enjoyment would be to him a painful recollection of his wretchedness, and would really not be augmented by worldly adversity, which, like dark weather for the melancholy, would harmonize with his mood; imagine that it became quite clear to him that the highest even still remained to him in wishing to love men, in wishing to serve the good, in wishing to serve the truth for the sake of truth alone, the only thing which could truly cheer his anxious heart and fill him with an eternal joy of life—imagine such a one in the world, and you will see it will go hard with him. He does not gain the love of the world, he will not be understood or loved by the world. In proportion as men belong a little more or less to the world, some will pity him, some smile at him, some will prefer to get rid of him because they would feel the sting, some will envy him and yet not envy him, some will feel attracted to him but aiso repelled by him; some will work against him, but yet have everything in readiness to honor him after his death. Some young women will feel themselves fascinated by him, but those only a little older will not completely understand him. But the world would simply and plainly prove his selfishness because he secured no earthly advantage either for himself or others, not for a single other man. The world is not better; the highest it recognizes and loves, when it aims highest, is: to love the good and men, but in such a way that one also secures an earthly advantage for one’s self and some others. Anything more the world, even with the best of intentions—now this is of course only playing with words—cannot grasp; one step too far and you have lost the friendship and love of the world. Such is the world and its love. No scientist who tests with a hydrometer the specific gravity of a liquid, can more certainly vouch for how many degrees it registers, than I am willing to vouch for this appraisal of worldly love, which is not entirely evil, as it is sometimes passionately represented to be, or entirely sound, but to a certain degree both good and bad. But from the Christian standpoint this “to a certain degree” is evil,

Nevertheless, we do not say this in order to judge; let us not waste time on it. Reflection only seeks by the aid of thought and by the help of a little knowledge of human nature, to penetrate the illusion, or to understand that apostolic saying with respect to the daily life, where the illusion exactly belongs. Certainly no time is needed in order to be deceived; one can be deceived immediately and continue to be so for a long time; but it takes time to notice that one is deceived. It is certainly easier hastily to imagine what love is, and then satisfy one’s self in the imagination; it is far easier hurriedly to get some kinds of men to associate themselves in selfishness, loved and honored by them to the last: there is after all nothing so easy and nothing so sociable as this going astray. But if this is your ultimate and highest ambition, to get life made easy and sociable, then never have anything to do with Christianity; flee from it, for it wishes exactly the opposite, wishes to make life difficult for you, and to do it just by making you solitary before God. No earnest man therefore becomes tired of tracking down illusions; for inasfar as he is a thinker, he fears most of all being in error—however convenient the arrangement, however pleasant the company might be. And as a Christian, he fears most of all being lost without knowing it —however flattering, however brilliant the environment and the company are.

That such pretentiousness is not love seems so easy to perceive that one might believe that no one would think of supporting it. Still this is not always the case, and here is precisely an example of an illusion insofar as the merely human judgment might be decisive. If the pretentious man himself were to think of calling it love, then one would certainly raise a protest, since there was no illusion; the illusion arises only when others wish to become the object of this pretentiousness, regard it as love, praise it as love, and the pretentious man as kind. Without pretending to be any great judge of human nature, it is not difficult to point out life-relationships where a man can be so placed that there are those who, just to gain his good will, simply praise his love if in the name of love he wishes to demand everything from them. There are indeed men who really know nothing about love other than that it is petting. Such men would like to have the one they love and are fond of, be pretentious. There are men who have inhumanly forgotten that every man ought to develop himself through that divine resemblance common to all men, and that therefore, whether a human being is man or woman, poorly endowed or richly endowed, lord or bond servant, beggar or rich man, the relation between man and man should never and dare never be such that the one adores and the other is adored. This is so easy to perceive that one perhaps thinks that this abomination can originate only from the misuse of superiority, hence in the supercilious. Alas, it can also arise in the impotent, in the one who himself desires it in order thus to have some significance for the superior.

Take away the equality of eternity and its divine satisfaction, that is, assume that it is forgotten: then the weak woman in her relation to the supercilious man, the man poorly endowed who is yet vain of his relation to the mighty man, the poor man who has but a worldly concern in his relation to the “big man,” the very subservient and yet worldly-minded man in his relation to his master—none of them know any other way to express this relationship except by abjectly prostrating themselves. And since they still, because they wish to know nothing higher, know nothing higher, therefore they themselves desire this abomination, desire it passionately. Their desire is to exist for the powerful; as power cannot be secularized, so subserviency becomes the thing desired. Is it perhaps not apparent that a girl would prefer ruthlessly to throw herself away and worship the idolized (desiring only one thing from him, that he would ruthlessly demand everything from her, and under these circumstances she would highly praise his love), rather than to understand that before God all these human differences are a joke, are nonsense, often leading to perdition? And yet the girl would call it selfishness for the adored to try to impart this knowledge to her. Have we not seen that the man weak through forgetting God, the debased man, had but one wish, that he might cast himself in the dust before his lordin order to exist for him; only one desire, that the lord will tread upon him so that he may joyfully praise the gracious love and goodness of his lord! Have we not seen that the vainglorious man, who had quite forgotten God, desired only some relation to the distinguished man and readily called the most debased actions a sign of his love! And if the distinguished man does not desire this, if he wishes to prevent this by helping that man to the blessed equality before God, this is called selfishness. Oh, if the eternal is taken away from a man, or is in him as if it were not present, the eternal which can at once cool the unsound passions in the relation between man and man, but which can also enkindle when the temporal existence would chill; if the eternal is taken away from a man, then there is no assurance that it will not occur to him to call the most abominable practices by the name of love, and even passionately desire to be the object of these abominable practices. One can ruthlessly wish to make himself indispensable through his power, but he can also do this through his weakness, and therefore, cringing and begging, call another man’s superciliousness love.

But the demand of eternity will not excuse a man from fulfilling the law of God, even if the whole world were to excuse him, even if the whole world were to love his pretentiousness but misunderstand his love, because perhaps only through despair can the despairing learn to hold themselves to God, instead of through their importunities injuring their own souls. The demand of eternity will prevent love from lingering in any self-deception, and from being satisfied with any illusion; and it will be no excuse to say that the men themselves wished it, that they themselves called it love, and believed that being loved consisted in being the object of such pretentiousness. It is God who has implanted love in man, and it is God who must decide what in every case is love.

But then when your friend, your beloved, your loved ones, your contemporaries, notice that you wish to learn from God what it means to love, instead of learning it from them, then they will perhaps say to you: “Spare yourself; give up this overstraining; why will you make your life so hard? Lessen your demands; then we shall live a beautiful, a rich, a significant life in friendship and joy.” And if you give way to the suggestions of that false friendship, then you will be loved, be praised for your love. But if you will not do it, if you will not in loving be a traitor to God or to yourself or to the others, then you may find yourself being called selfish. For your conviction that to love yourself is in truth to love God, that loving another man is helping him to love God, this, your conviction, your friend will perhaps not trouble about. He notices indeed that your life, if it truly conforms to the God-demand, contains, even if you say nothing, a reminder, a demand upon him—this he will have nothing to do with. Your reward is, therefore, the sacrifice of your friendship and your reputation for being a friend. In the world the worldly has, so much the worse, the upper hand to the degree that when one talks about false friendship, one immediately thinks of some deception with respect to worldly advantages, or a faithlessness regarding earthly goods. And this was certainly not your friend’s intention or meaning. He only wished to defraud you of the God-relationship, and that you as his friend would be helpful to him in deceiving himself: then in the deception he would loyally unite with you for life and death. We speak about the duplicity of the world, and in so doing at once suggest that it deceives one with respect to earthly goods, disappoints one’s great expectations, mocks one’s bold plans. But, if in this respect it honestly fulfills its obligations almost more abundantly than it had promised, that this is just the time when it can deceive most dangerously, that this its most dangerous duplicity, one more rarely thinks about: that the world through its—siticere friendship (for false friendship would consist in its defrauding one of the temporal things), wishes to teach one to forget God. They talk about making a covenant with evil, and if one asks what advantage is offered as compensation, then people will mention power, glory, honor, the satisfaction of desires and so on. But that one can by such a covenant also win the love of men, be praised for one’s love, that is something they forget to speak about and to think about. Nevertheless, this is the case —for the converse is and would indeed be the case, that they who in love to God loved men, would be hated by the world. As the world by offering power and might has wished to tempt a man to forget God, and then has treated the same man as refuse because he endured its temptation: so has the world also temptingly offered a man its friendship, and then hated him because he would not be its friend. The eternal, the God-demand for love, the world will not readily hear anything about, even more reluctantly will it see it expressed in life. But I wonder if the world therefore says about itself that it is selfish. By no means. And then what does the world do? The world says about the one who insists on maintaining his relation to God, that he is selfish. The way out is old: sacrifice one, if all the others can profit thereby.

In this God and the world agree, that love is the fulfilling of the law; the difference is that the world understands by law something it hit on itself; and he who agrees to this and observes it faithfully, he is kind. How many a man has not a maiden’s love, from the divine standpoint, destroyed, just because he, defrauded of his God-relationship, remained too true to her, while she in turn was unlimited in her eulogies over his love! How many a man has not been corrupted by family and friends, while yet his corruption did not appear to be so, for now he was loved and praised for his love—by his family and friends? How many a man has not an age corrupted, the age which for compensation adored his affectionate disposition because it made him forget the God-relationship, and transformed it into something one can vociferously make a show of, rejoice over and effeminately admire without being consciously reminded of anything higher? For, in order to raise another and truly earnest question, and also in order not even to point at the highest pattern but to be content with a humbler one, which yet in the so-called Christendom unfortunately is adequate enough: why, I wonder, did that simple wise man of antiquity when, accused before the court of frivolity by the worldly and selfish, he was condemned to death, defend his life; why, I wonder, did he compare himself to a “gadfly” at the same time he called himself a divine gift; and why, I wonder, did he love the young so much? Was not the first because, as a pagan could, he had loved men in some higher sense, hence because he had really awakened, and had not in any way allowed himself to be seduced by the temporal existence, or by anything human; not by a dull or fiery union in love, in friendship, in agreement with others or with an age, but he had preferred to be the selfish, the teasingly annoying man whom no one loved! Was not the latter because he perceived that the young still had the susceptibility to the divine which is so easily lost with the years in busyness, in love and friendship, in submission to a merely human judgment and to the demands of the times? Hence, because through his concept of the eternal and through “something divine,” he had prevented his love for men from halting in self-deception and illusion; hence, because through keeping himself close to the demand, he had made himself a demand on men.

If, therefore, in some way, even if in human frailty, you aspire to fulfill the apostolic saying that “Love is the fulfillment of the law,” then give heed to men! Does this mean that you would be loved by them? Oh, how absurd! How then could your love become the fulfillment of the law? But give heed that it does not become more important to you that you should be esteemed for loving them than that you do love them! Take care that being loved is not more important to you than the fact of loving each other! Take care that you do not deprive yourself of the highest, because you cannot bear to be called selfish! Do not appeal to men’s opinions of you in order to prove your love; for the opinion of men has validity only insofar as it harmonizes with God’s demand; otherwise men are only your accomplices! Learn also, and never forget the lesson, this sad truth of the earthly life, that no love between man and man ever can or will be perfectly happy, will ever dare to be perfectly confident! For, divinely understood, even the happiest love between man and man has still one danger which the merely human understanding of love does not consider, the danger that the earthly love might become too intense, so that the God-relationship would be interfered with; the danger that the God-relationship, when humanly speaking there is nothing but peace and no danger even in sight, may exact even this, the happiest love, as a sacrifice. And from this possibility of danger it follows that even in the happiest love-relationship, you must always anxiously watch, although this concern is not the fear that you might grow tired of the beloved or the beloved of you, but lest you should both forget God, or that the beloved might do so, or you yourself. And from the possibility of this danger it follows, recalling the introduction to these reflections, how difficult it may be in the Christian sense, to promise love, when the fact of keeping the promise may signify that you will come to be hated by the beloved. Only God, who, as we have explained, is also the only true object of love, is always happy, always blessed in loving; you must not watch in concern, but watch only in adoration.

Love is the fulfillment of the law. But the law consists of an inexhaustible multitude of provisions. How then could we be prepared to speak about them? So let us then assemble the multitude of decisions. The demand of the law must therefore be twofold, partly a demand for inwardness, and partly a demand for continuity.

What then is the required inwardness? The merely human understanding of love also requires inwardness, devotion, sacrifice, but it defines these only humanly. The devotion of inwardness is: that every sacrifice should satisfy the conception of the beloved (the object of love) as to what love is, or, on its own responsibility, venture to decide what love is. But divinely understood, inwardness believes that loving one’s self is loving God, and that truly loving another man is being helpful to him for or in loving God. Hence inwardness is not here determined merely by the love-relationship, but by the God-relationship. The inwardness demanded is then the inwardness of self-abnegation, which is more closely defined, not according to the understanding of the beloved (the object of affection) about love, but with regard to helping the beloved to love God. It follows as a matter of course that the loverelationship may, as such, be the sacrifice which is demanded.

The inwardness of love must be sacrificial, and consequently must not demand any reward. The purely human understanding of love teaches also that love demands no reward—except that it wishes to be loved, as if that which constitutes the entire relationship, yet not within the category of the relation between man and man, were no reward. But, the inwardness of Christian love is willing, as the reward of its love, to be hated by the beloved (the object of affection). This proves that this inwardness is a pure God-relationship; it has no reward, not even the reward of being loved: thus it belongs absolutely to God, or absolutely to man in God. The self-abnegation, the self-control, the selfsacrifice, which are still but media of exchange within the temporal, within the human horizon, are not truly Christian; they are as a jest in comparison with the Christian earnestness; they are like the first start toward a Christian decision. One will sacrifice this or that or everything, but one still hopes that this sacrifice will be understood and have sense and meaning for men, who then must recognize and rejoice at one’s sacrifices. One is willing to forsake everything, but still one does not think that along with that his sacrifice should be forgotten in the conversation and understanding of men.

The promptings of the sacrifice then become apparent; it pretends to abandon the world, but it still remains within the world. We by no means wish to disparage this. Oh, even this merely human sacrifice is perhaps met with seldom enough. But from the Christian standpoint, we must say that it remains standing at the halfway mark. It ascends to a high place, for, humanly speaking, the sacrifice stands high; it throws everything away in order to ascend to this exalted place, whose elevation admiration discovers, while the sacrifice perceives that it is seen. But to stand upon this exalted place (for truly, sacrifice is elevation) accused, despised, hated, ridiculed almost worse than the most debased among the base; hence superhumanly taxed in attaining the lofty place, to stand there in such a way that it seems to everyone as if one stood at the lowest level of the contemptible: from the Christian standpoint this is sacrifice, and from the human point of view it is also madness. Only One sees the true connection, and He does not admire; for God in heaven does not admire any man.

On the contrary, while true sacrifice has but one single place of resort: God, so he is as if once more forsaken by God, for he understands that before God he is simply without merit. But humanly he also understands that had he but sacrificed a half of what he did sacrifice, then men would have understood him, loved and admired him, and yet, in a certain sense, that before God this partial sacrifice would have the same significance as the true satrifice, for before God no sacrifice, not one, has merit. This is sacrifice according to the Christian standpoint, and also, humanly understood, it is madness. This is loving from the Christian standpoint; if it is true that loving is the highest happiness, this is indeed the hardest suffering—if then the holding of one’s self to God were not the highest bliss!

The other requirement of the law is for the continuation of love for the duration of time. The merely human conception of love also demands this; still from the Christian standpoint it is a different demand, since the inwardness demanded is different. The demand for the continuation in time means that the same inwardness of love shall be preserved throughout the duration of time, which insofar is in a certain sense a new expression for inwardness. As soon as you think that you have done enough in your love, or have loved long enough, and now may ask something from the other, then through that you discover that your love is prepared to become a demand, as if, however devoted and sacrificing your love is, there were still a limit where it must at bottom appear to be a demand—but love is the fulfillment of the law. For it is not some great moment of self-abnegation that we are speaking about; the law demands the same inwardness for the duration of time. The duration of time! But is not this, as it were, to do violence to one’s soul, and a self-contradiction in the demand, at the same time to demand continuation in such different directions, in the direction of length and in the direction of depth? Lo, the arrow flies swiftly forward through the air, but if at the same time it ought to bore itself down into the earth and still continue to fly with the speed of an arrow: ah, what a demand! Lo, in the great moment of enthusiasm, then the eternal tarries, but then when time begins its restless activity, when it continues to pass —then not to go enthusiastically with time, but to go hurriedly with the haste of time, and yet slowly with the lingering of eternity! To lie on one’s deathbed (and when a man in self-renunciation has been obliged to make the heaviest sacrifice: and for a reward of his love is hated by its object, then he is like the one who lies at the point of death), and then to have a future, a long life before one, although everything is past, hence, at once and at any moment, lying on his deathbed to have to stand erect and go forward: what a demand! To lie down is exactly the opposite of walking upright, but to lie upon one’s deathbed is certainly the most decisive expression for lying down, and hence the farthest possible removed from standing erect. Have you ever seen a weary traveler bearing a heavy burden, fighting at every step in order not to sink to earth? He holds himself erect only with the greatest difficulty, he struggles in order not to sink down. But to have sunk down, to lie down, to lie upon his deathbed, and then to hasten confidently forward with the stride of the erect: wonderful! And the demand may require this, and also require its continuance for the duration of time.

Alas! in the world of the spirit there is something fraudulent, for which there is nothing analogous found in the external world. We say for instance that a child must learn to spell before it can learn to read. Fortunately or unfortunately, this is undoubtedly a necessity. It has never happened to any child that through a phenomenon, an illusion, it had occasion to imagine that it could already read long before it could spell. But in the spiritual relation, how seductive! For here does not everything begin with the great moment of the resolve, of the purpose, of the promise—where one reads as fluently as the most accomplished reader, the one best trained in reading by book? And so, if the next comes first, what is the use of the very petty things, the plainly commonplace things, which simply do not make any strong impression, or wish to help one by the daring context? Alas! on the contrary, it is like the spelling which tears the words apart into letters, so that there are long, long hours when one cannot arrive at the meaning, and vainly waits to see the connection. To strive with one’s self in self-abnegation, especially if one must conquer, is regarded as the most difficult struggle; and to strive with time, if one would completely conquer, is regarded as an impossibility.

The heaviest burden laid upon a man (for he has laid the burden of sin upon himself) is in a certain sense, time—do we not say, too, that it can be deadly long! And yet, on the other hand, how gentle, how soothing, how seductive a power time has! But this alleviation, this seductiveness, is a new danger. If a man became guilty of somethinglet but a little time pass, especially if he seems to have made some progress toward betterment: how much more trivial his guilt appears! But is this really so? Is it then also true that if the next moment the thoughtless has forgotten his own guilt, it is then forgotten?

Tell me then if it is possible to speak about this saying, that love is the fulfillment of the law, without judging against one’s will, if one’s will is merely to judge one’s self! Is there any more precise way of expressing how infinitely far a man is from fulfilling the law than this, that the distance is so great that he really cannot even compute it, cannot make up his reckoning For not only is so much neglected daily, not to speak about what is deserved, but then when some time has passed, one is not even able to state the debt exactly, as it appeared to one’s self, because time changes and softens one’s judgment about the past—alas! but time never changes the demand, eternity’s demand: that love is the fulfillment of the law.

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