So deeply is love rooted in human nature, so essentially does it belong to the human; and yet men so frequently find excuses in order to deprive themselves—of this blessedness, hence they elicit deception—in order to deceive themselves, or to make themselves unhappy. Sometimes the excuse assumes the form of sadness; one sighs over men and over his own unhappiness; one can find no one to love. For to sigh over the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one’s breast and sigh over one’s self. Sometimes the self-deception sounds like an accusation; one accuses men of not being worthy of love—one “groans against” men; for it is always easier to be the accuser than the accused. Sometimes the self-deception lies in the proud self-satisfaction which believes that it seeks in vain for a worthy object of its love—for it is always easier to show superiority by being fastidious about others than by being strict with one’s self. And yet, yet we are all agreed that this is an unfortunate attitude, and that such behavior is wrong. And what is it then that is wrong? What other than the constant seeking and rejecting by these men! Such men do not notice that their talk sounds like a mockery of themselves, because the fact of their not being able to find any worthy object for their love among men, indicates that they are themselves utterly lacking in love.

Is it really love to wish to find it outside one’s self? I supposed love consisted in bringing it with one. But he who has love in himself when he is seeking an object for his love (and otherwise it is not true that he seeks an object—for his love), he will easily, and the greater his love the more easily, find an object, and find it to be such that it is lovable. For the ability to love a man in spite of his weaknesses and faults and imperfections is not the perfect love, but perfect love consists in being able to find him lovable in spite of and with his weaknesses and faults and imperfections.

Let us understand each other. It is one thing to be finicky and wish to eat only the most delicate and rarest dishes, most exquisitely prepared, and even when they are of this kind, then to be finicky in finding one fault or another in them. It is quite a different matter not only to be able to eat the more modest fare, but to be able to find this simpler fare the choicest, because the problem set for him is not to develop his fastidiousness, but to transform himself and his tastes.

Or if there were two artists, and one of them were to say: “I have traveled a great deal in my time and have looked about a good bit in the world, but I have looked in vain for a man who was worth painting. I have never found a face which pictured such perfect beauty that I could decide to draw it; in every face I have always found one or another little defect, and therefore I have sought in vain.” Would this be a sign that he was a great artist? On the other hand, the second artist said: “Now I do not really pretend to be an artist. I have not traveled in foreign countries, but have remained in the little circle of people who were my neighbors; among these I have not found a single face so insignificant or so irregular that I could not distinguish a more beautiful side and discover something pleasing in it. Therefore the art I practice gives me pleasure and satisfies me, without my claiming to be an artist.” Would this not indicate that this man really was an artist, who by bringing a certain something with him found at home what the muchtraveled artist found nowhere in the world, perhaps because he did not bring a certain something with him! Hence the second man was the artist.

Would it not be distressing if that which was intended to embellish life were only to be a curse upon it, so that “art,” instead of beautifying life for us, merely fastidiously discovered that none of us was beautiful! And how much more distressing as well as confusing it would be if love should only become a curse, because its requirement alone revealed that none of us was worthy of love, instead of love being precisely recognizable by the fact that it is loving enough to find something lovable in all of us, hence loving enough to be able to love all of us.

It is a distressing absurdity, which is, however, altogether too general, always to be perpetually talking about how the object of love ought tobe, in order to be worthy of love, instead of talking about how love ought to be in order to be love. It is so common, not only in daily life, but, oh, how often is it not seen, that even the one who calls himself a poet ascribes all his merit to the refined, soft, aristocratic fastidiousness which, in contrast to loving, cold-bloodedly knows how to reject and reject; assumes it to be his task in this respect to initiate men into all the abominable mysteries of fastidiousness. Still some are inclined to do this; many are still so disposed, so inquisitive to learn this, that is, to get a knowledge which really only serves to embitter life for themselves and others! For of how much in life does it not hold true that if one had never learned it, then one would have found everything beautiful, or at least more beautiful than one does. But after one has been infected with the taint of fastidiousness, how difficult it becomes to regain what he lost, the natural gifts of good nature and love, with which God has fundamentally endowed every man!

But if no one else can or will, an apostle always knows how to lead us in the right way in this respect, the right way which both leads us to do right to others and to make ourselves happy. So we have chosen some words of the apostle John: “If any of you say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar, for he who does not love his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” We shall make these words the object of our reflection, as rejoicing in the task, we choose to speak about

The Duty of Loving the Men We See

But this is not to be understood as if the discourse were about loving all the men we see, for that is the love for the neighbor which we discussed earlier. On the contrary, let it be understood that the discourse concerns the duty of finding those in the actual world whom we might love in particular, and in loving them to love the men we see. If this is our duty, then the task does not consist in finding—the lovable object; but the task consists in finding the object already given or chosenwlovable, and in continuing to find him lovable however changed he is. However, we shall first consider a little difficulty respecting the Gospel passage read, a difficulty which it might occur to an earthly shrewdness, perhaps conceited at its own cleverness, to raise, whether it actually does so or not. When the apostle says: “He who does not love his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” then a clever man might raise the objection that this is a deceptive turn of thought. For he had really assured himself that the brother he had seen was not worthy of love, but from this fact (that he did not love the one he regarded as undeserving of love) how could it be inferred that there was anything to prevent such a man from loving God whom he had not seen? And yet the apostle believes that there is something which prevents such a man from loving God, although by this word “brother” he certainly is not speaking about some quite definite individual man, but chiefly about the matter of loving men. The apostle believes that it is a divine contention that is submitted against the unreliability of a man’s assertion about loving the invisible, when it appears that this man does not love the visible; whereas it might seem just as visionary to say that one loves the invisible by not loving anything visible. It is a divine contention submitted against human romanticism with respect to loving God, for it is visionary, even if it is not hypocritical, thus to wish to love the invisible. The matter is quite simple. Man must begin by loving the unseen, God, for thereby he will himself learn what it means to love; but the fact that he really loves the unseen will be recognized precisely by the fact that he loves the brother he sees; the more he loves the unseen, the more he will love the men he sees. Not conversely, that the more he rejects those he sees, the more he loves the unseen. If that were true then God would be transformed into an unreal something, a figment of the imagination. Therefore only a hypocrite and a deceiver would hit upon such ideas for the sake of finding an excuse; or one who misrepresents God by making it seem as if God were jealous for Himself and for being loved, instead of the blessed God being merciful, and, as it were, constantly subordinating Himself by saying: “If you will love me, then love the men you see; what you do to them you do to me.”

God is too exalted to be able simply to accept a man’s love, to say nothing of His being able to find pleasure in those things in which a visionary delights. If someone says about a gift through which he would be able to help his parents, that it is “Corban,” that is, that it is already dedicated to God, this is not well-pleasing to God. If you wish to show that it is dedicated to God, then give it in the name of God. If you wish to show that your life is dedicated to the service of God, then let it serve men, but always in the name of God. God is not a party to existence in such a way that He demands His share for Himself. He demands everything, but when you bring it you learn to know at once, if I may speak thus, by the endorsement on it, where it will be further negotiated; for God demands nothing for Himself, although He demands everything from you. So the apostle’s words, if rightly understood, lead directly to the subject of the discourse.

When it is a duty to love the men one sees, then must one primarily renounce all imaginative and overstrained ideas of a dream-world, where the object of love would be to seek and to find; that is, one must become sober, gain reality and truth by finding and remaining in the world of reality, as thd sole appointed task.

The ntost dangerous of all evasions as regards loving, is to wish to love only the invisible, or that one has not seen. This evasion is so high-flying that it soars completely above reality; it is so intoxicating that it easily tempts and easily imagines itself to be the all-supreme and most perfect kind of love. Certainly it seldom occurs to a man shamelessly to speak derogatorily about loving; on the contrary, that deception is more general by which men defraud themselves of really beginning to love, just because they talk too enthusiastically about loving and of love. The reason for this has a far deeper ground than we might suppose; otherwise the confusion could not have established itself as firmly as it has, the confusion that arises from calling that a misfortune which is a fault: the fact of their not finding any object of love whereby they still further hindered themselves from finding it; for as soon as they realized that it was their own fault, then they found it. The general conception of love is that it is the opened eye of admiration which is looking for superiority and perfections. That is why one complains that one looks in vain. We shall not attempt to decide how far the individual is right or not; whether or not that lovable superiority and perfection which he seeks, are to be found; whether he has not confused his search by his fastidiousness. No, we shall not dispute in this way. We shall not dispute within the limits of this conception of love, for this whole conception is an error, since love is rather the closed eye of forbearance and mildness, which does not see the deficiencies and the imperfections. But it is very essential that we emphasize the difference between these two conceptions, for there is a world of difference, a revolutionary difference between them. It is only the latter conception that is true, the first is an error. And it is well known that an error never halts of itself, it only leads farther and farther astray, so it becomes increasingly difficult to find the way back to truth. The way of error is easy to find, but to find the way back is so difficult—as we are told in the legend about that mountain of Venus, which must lie somewhere on earth, that no one who found his way to it could ever find his way back. So if a man with the wrong idea of what love is, goes out into the world, then he seeks, and seeks, as he believes, to find the object of love, but, as he thinks, in vain. However, he does not change his conception of what it is; on the contrary, enriched by his manifold knowledge of the fastidious, he seeks ever more fastidiously, but, as he believes, in vain. It never occurs to him that the mistake might lie in himself or in his wrong conception of what love is. On the contrary, the more refined he becomes in his fastidiousness, the more exalted opinion he entertains of himself and of the perfection of his conception of love—the more clearly he sees how imperfect men are, and this can be discovered only through the assistance of his own perfection! Nevertheless, he is absolutely certain that this is not his fault, that he does not act from any evil or hateful motive—he who is seeking only love.

For far be it from him to renounce love, he who so vividly realizes how his conception of it becomes ever more enthusiastic—what indeed could ever become more enthusiastic than an error! And he has not checked the error, exactly the reverse; by its aid he has made himself giddy—in loving the invisible, an apparition one does not see. Or does not all this come to one and the same thing: seeing an apparition—and: not seeing? For if you take away the apparition you see nothing, the man himself admits that; but the man forgets that if you take away the seeing, then you still see an apparition. But, as was said, he will not give up love or talk humbly about it; he will talk enthusiastically about it and preserve it—the love of the unseen. Distressing error! We say about worldly honor and power, about wealth and happiness, that it is as a vapor, and this is indeed true. But that the strongest power in man, a power which according to his own definition is simply nothing less, since it is life and strength, that this should become as vapor, and that the man intoxicated by these vapors, proudly believes that he has apprehended the highest—that man has indeed seized upon clouds and fancies, which always soar high above reality: lo, that is terrible! Ordinarily one devoutly warns against wasting the gifts of God; but which of God’s gifts is comparable to the love which he implanted in the human heart? Alas, and then to see it wasted in this way! For the clever man believes—ifoolishly, that one wastes his love in loving the imperfect, the weak men. I should suppose that this would be to apply his love, to make use of it. But to be able to find no object for love, to waste it in a vain search, to squander it in empty space by loving the unseen: that is truly wasting it.

Therefore be sober, come to your senses; understand that the fault lies in your conception of love, that this ought to constitute a claim, a most glorious one, since the whole of existence would not be able to pay it, any more than you can prove your right to collect this claim. At the very moment in which you changed your conception of love, that it is the exact opposite of a claim, that it is an outstanding indebtedness to which God binds you; that very moment you have found reality. And just this is your duty, thus with closed eyes (for in love you close your eyes to weakness and frailty and imperfection) to find reality, instead of with open eyes (aye, open and staring like a sleepwalker’s) to overlook reality. For duty this constitutes the first condition, so that in loving at all you may come to love the men you see. The condition is to find a foothold of reality. Error always vacillates, that is why it sometimes looks so easy and so spiritual, because it is so airy. Truth takes firm and therefore sometimes difficult steps. It stands upon solid ground, and therefore sometimes looks so simple. There is also a significant change: instead of having a claim to recover to get a duty to fulfill; instead of having a world to traverse to take, as it were, a world upon one’s shoulders; instead of ardently wishing to seek the pleasant fruit of admiration to have to bear patiently with want. Ah, what a change! And yet it is through this change that love comes into being, the love which can perfect the duty: in loving, to love the men we see.

When it is a duty in loving to love the men we see, then it is important that in loving the mdivndual, actual man, we do not slip in an imagined conception of how we believe or might wish that this man should be. He who allows himself to do this does not love the man he sees, but again something unseen, his own idea, or something like it. There is in loving a manner of conduct which contains a considerable alloy of doubt and fastidiousness. It is one thing to reject and reject, and never find an object worthy of love; it is another thing in loving what one calls the object of his love, truly and sincerely to perfect this duty in loving what he sees. It is in truth a worthy wish, a truly worthy wish, that the one we love should possess the lovable perfections; we wish it not merely for our own sake, but also for his. Above all, it is worth while to wish and to pray that the one we love might always act and be such as we are able to approve of and agree with. But, for God’s sake, let us not forget that it is not to our credit if he is so, even less to our credit to demand it of him—should any question of our merit arise, which is, however, improper and unseemly talk in relation to love, which should simply be to love equally faithfully and tenderly.

But there is a fastidiousness which always, as it were, works against love, and wishes to prevent it from loving what it sees, when the fastidiousness with a wavering and yet in a certain sense critical glance, effaces the actual form of love or offends against it, and cunningly demands to see something else. There are men about whom one may say that they have not yet taken form, that their reality has not consolidated itself, because inwardly they cannot make up their minds as to what they are and what they wish to be. But by the way in which one sees, one can also make another man’s form vacillating and unreal, because the love, which should love the man it sees, cannot really decide, but sometimes would do away with one fault in its object; sometimes would demand a perfection in it, which would be, if I may say so, as if a bargain was not quite completed. Yet the one who by loving in this way is inclined to be fastidious, does not love the man he sees, and really makes his love objectionable, as hard for the beloved.

Your beloved, your friend, is also in the more general sense a man, and he exists as such for the rest of us; but for you he should essentially exist as the beloved, if you will to perfect your duty in loving the man you see. If there is duplicity in your relationship, so that he partly exists for you in a general sense as an individual man, partly in a particular sense as the beloved, then you do not love the man you see. It is rather as if you had in that sense two ears, so that you do not as ordinarily hear the same thing with both ears, but you hear one thing with one ear, and another thing with the other ear. You hear with one ear what he says, and whether it is wise and correct and shrewd and spiritual and so on; alas, and with the other ear you hear that it is the voice of the beloved. You scrutinize him probingly with one eye, searchingly, critically, alas, and only with the other eye do you see that he is the beloved. Oh, but thus to divide, that is not to love the man one sees. Is it not as if there were constantly a third party present, even when the two are alone, a third party who tests and rejects, a third party who disturbs the inwardness, a third party who may sometimes make the concerned disgusted with himself and his love, because it is so critical; a third party who would alarm the beloved if he knew that this third party was present! What, too, does it mean, that this third party is present? It signifies that if… this or that is not in accordance with your wish, then you might not love; hence the third party signifies divorce, separation; so consequently the thought of separation is present—confidentially, alas, as when in paganism the destructive being is insanely included in the unity of the godhead. Does the presence of the third party not signify that the love-relationship is yet in a certain sense no relationship, in that you stand above the relationship and test the beloved? Do you not consider that in such a case something else is tested, whether you really have love, or rather that there is something else decided, that you do not really love? For life certainly has tests enough, and these tests should precisely find the lovers, find friend and friend, united in order to endure the test. But if the test is to enter into the relationship, then a treachery has been committed.

Truly this mysterious reserve is the most dangerous kind of faithlessness; such a man does not break his vow, but he makes it constantly indecisive whether he is bound by his vow. Is it not faithlessness when your friend clasps your hand, and there is in this handclasp something vague, as if it were doubtful to him who pressed your hand how closely at that moment he corresponded to your idea of him, so that you would reciprocate in the same way? Is the relationship to be such that it must every moment begin from the beginning to come into the relationship; is this to love the man you see, every moment to test him, as if it were the first time you saw him? It is abhorrent to see the fastidiousness which rejects all food, but it is also abhorrent to see the one who, to be sure, eats the food which is politely offered him, and yet in a certain sense does not eat, but constantly, as if he were already satiated, only tastes of the food or takes pains to taste a tidbit, while he is satiated by plainer food.

No, if a man wishes to fulfill his duty in loving to love the men he sees, then he must not only find those he loves among actual men, but he must eradicate all doubt and fastidiousness in loving them, so that in earnestness and truth he loves them as they are; he must in earnestness and truth apprehend the task: to find the given or the chosen object lovable. We do not mean by this to recommend a childish infatuation with the accidental circumstances of the beloved, even less a fond indulgence in the wrong place; far from it, the earnestness lies in the fact that the relationship itself must with a united effort fight against the imperfect, overcome the defects, remove the differences. This is earnestness; fastidiousness makes the relationship itself ambiguous. His weakness or his fault does not make the one a stranger to the other, but the union regards the weaker as the stranger, which it is equally important to both to overcome and to remove. It is not you who because of the weakness of the beloved must, as it were, withdraw from him, or make your relationship less close; on the contrary, the two must hold themselves more closely and inwardly together in order to remove the weakness. As soon as the relationship is ambiguous, so that you do not love the man you see, then it is as if you demanded something else in order to be able to love; since on the contrary, the fault or the weakness makes the relationship more inward, not as if the fault should be retained, but just in order to overcome it, so you love the man you see. You see the fault, but the fact that the relationship becomes more inward, shows precisely that you love the man in whom you still see the fault or the weakness or the imperfection.

As there are hypocritical tears, hypocritical sighing and complaining about the world, so too is there hypocritical sorrow over the weaknesses and imperfections of the beloved. It is so easy and so complacent to wish the beloved to have all possible perfections, and then, if some are lacking, it is again so easy and so complacent to sigh and sorrow and become self-important over one’s own presumably pure and profound distress. It is perhaps, on the whole, a more general form of sensualism selfishly to wish to show off the beloved or the friend, and to wish to despair over each insignificant fault. But would that be loving the men we see? Oh, no, the men we see, and hence ourselves when others see us, are not so perfect; and yet it is so often the case that a man develops in himself this delicate frailty which is only calculated to love the complete conception of the perfect. And although we are all of us so imperfect, one rarely sees the strong, sound, efficient love which is calculated to love those imperfect ones, that is, the men we see,

When in loving it is a duty to love the men we see, then is there no limit to the love; if the duty is fulfilled, the love must be limitless, that is, unchanged, however its object changes.

Let us consider what we were reminded of in the introduction to this meditation: the relation between Christ and Peter—I wonder if Peter, especially in his relation to Christ, was like an epitome of all perfections. And, on the other side, Christ certainly knew his faults! Let us speak in human fashion about this relation. God knows how many generally insignificant trifles are yet scrupulously gathered up and carefully concealed, which either at once, or, what is even more distressing, after a long lapse of time, give us occasion to accuse the one the other of selfishness, faithlessness or treachery. God knows how very infrequently the accuser makes even a slight effort to put himself in the place of the accused, so that the judgment, the strict, the merciless judgment, might not be an overhasty one, but judicious, but at least insofar thoughtful, that it knows with certainty about that which it judges. God knows how often one sees this sorry sight, how passion immediately equips even the perhaps ordinarily restricted man, if he is presumably the injured party, with a shrewdness which is astonishing; and on the other hand, how it strikes even the perhaps ordinarily intelligent man with stupidity with respect to every appeasing, extenuating, exonerating interpretation of the injury, because it pleases the offended passion to be shrewdly blind: but this we shall all agree upon, that if in a relation between two friends there had happened what happened to Christ with Peter, then there would truly be a sufficient reason for breaking—with such a traitor. If your life had been brought into the utmost danger, and you had a friend who of his own accord had sworn a solemn oath of loyalty, moreover, of being willing to lay down his life for you; if then when the danger came, he did not even remain away (that would almost have been more forgiveable), no, he came, he was present, but he did not move a hand; he stood and looked on quietly, or, no, he did not stand quietly, his only thought was to save himself and on any condition; he did not even take to flight (that would almost have been more forgivable), no, he remained standing as a spectator, which he asserted that he was—by denying you: what then? We shall not even let the apodosis follow; let us only present the relationship very vividly and speak in quite human fashion about it. Hence, you stood accused by your enemies, condemned by your enemies. It was literally true that you stood everywhere surrounded by enemies. The powerful, who might perhaps have been able to understand you, had hardened themselves against you, they hated you. Therefore, you now stood accused and condemned—while a blinded, raging mob hurled insults against you; maddened, even rejoiced at the thought that your blood would be upon them and upon their children. And this pleased the rulers whe ordinarily despised the mob so deeply; it pleased them because it satisfied their hatred, so that it was animal ferocity and the lowest paltriness which had found its victim and its prey in you. You had reconciled yourself to your fate; you understood that there was not a single word to say, since the insult only sought occasion, so that the magnanimous word about your innocence would only give insult a new occasion, as if it were defiance; so the clearest proof of your righteousness would embitter the mob and make the insults even more violent; so that an expression of pain would give a new occasion for insults, as if it had expressed cowardice. Thus you stood, an outcast from human society, and yet not an outcast; you stood surrounded by men enough, but none of them saw in you a man, even if in another sense they saw in you a man, for they would not have treated a wild beast so inhumanly. Oh, horror, more terrible than if you had fallen among wild beasts; for I wonder if even the nightly howling of the most bloodthirsty beasts of prey is as horrible as the inhumanity of a raging mob. I wonder if in a herd of wild animals one beast can so excite another to a greater ferocity than that which is simply natural, as in an innocent crowd one man can excite another to more than animal bloodthirstiness and cruelty. I wonder if the baleful or burning eye of the most bloodthirsty beast has such an evil burning as this which inflames the eye of the individual when, excited and exciting, he joins with the wild, raging mob! So you stood accused, condemned, insulted; vainly you looked about to discover a figure which still resembled a man, to say nothing of a friendly face on which your eye could restthen you saw him, your friend, but he denied you, and the insult which had before sounded raucous enough was now like an echo multiplied a hundredfold! If this had happened to you, would you not truly have considered yourself magnanimous if, instead of considering revenge, you had turned your eyes away from him and said to yourself: “I do not care to look at this traitor’!

How differently Christ acted! He did not turn His eyes away from Peter, as if He were unconscious that Peter existed; He did not say, “TI will not look at this traitor”; He did not leave him to shift for himself. No, He “looked upon him”; He reminded him at once with a glance; had it been possible He certainly would not have refused to speak to him. And how did Christ look at Peter? Was it an indignant glance? Was it like a glance of dismissal? Oh, no, it was as when a mother sees her child in danger through his own carelessness, and then, if she is not able to reach the child, she overtakes it with her reproachful yet also saving glance. But was Peter in danger? Ah, who cannot see this: for how terrible for a man to have denied his friend! But an injured friend cannot see in the passion of anger that the one who denied him is in danger. But He who is called the Saviour of the world, He could see clearly where the danger was, that it was Peter who was in danger, Peter, who should and must be saved! The Saviour of the world was not mistaken. He did not see His cause lost if Peter did not hasten to help Him, but He saw Peter lost if He did not hasten to save him. I wonder if there lives or ever has lived a man who cannot understand this which is so clear and so obvious; and yet Christ is the only one who saw this at the critical moment, when He Himself was the accused, the condemned, the mocked, the spit-upon, the denied. A man is seldom tried in a crisis which involves life and death, and hence he seldom gets occasion to test the devotion of friendship to its extreme limit. But merely in some more important moment to find timidity and shrewdness where you were prepared because of your friendship to look for courage and resolution; to find duplicity, fickleness and evasion instead of candor, decision and refuge; to find only frivolity instead of sober-minded reflection: alas, how difficult then in the haste of the moment and the heat of passion, to be immediately able to understand on which side the danger lies, which one of the friends is in the greater danger, you or he who thus leaves you in the lurch; how difficult then to love the man you see—when you see him so changed!

Nowadays we are accustomed to praise Christ’s attitude towards Peter; let us guard against this commendation becoming a delusion, a figment of the imagination, because we are not able or willing to exert our thought, to imagine ourselves contemporary with the event, so that while we praise Christ on the one hand, on the other hand, insofar as we are contemporaneous with a similar event, we act and speak quite differently. We have no report handed down concerning the contemporary interpretation of Christ’s attitude towards Peter, but if you meet them, those contemporaries, then ask them, and you will learn that on this occasion, just as on the occasion of almost everything which Christ did, people said: “The fool! Even granting that his case was desperately lost, yet not to have power to muster all his strength for the last time in a single glance which would crush this traitor! What craven, unmanly weakness! Is that acting like a man!” Thus was He judged, and the insult found a new expression. Or it would be said by the powerful ruler who intended to review the circumstances: “Well, why did he seek his company with publicans and sinners, his followers among the poorest class of people? He should have associated himself with us, the leaders of the synagogue, but as it is, he gets what he deserves. This shows how far one can rely on that kind of people. Well, as he has always abandoned himself to that class, he keeps it up to the last. He does not even become infuriated by their shabby faithlessness.” Perhaps the more clever among them, wishing to seem magnanimous, would explain: “The fact that the high priests have allowed him to be taken, the fact that he, fanatic though he was, now sees that everything is lost, may have weakened his reason and broken his courage, so that he has become depressed in a cowardly, spiritless stupor. Perhaps this explains his forgiving such betrayal, for of course no real man would behave in this way!” Alas, it is only too true: no man does behave in this way. That is just why Christ’s life furnishes the only instance where a teacher, just at the moment His case is lost along with His life, and everything is most terribly forfeited through the apostasy of His disciple, by His glance at that very instant wins His most zealous adherent in this disciple, and thus His cause to a great extent, although the latter fact is hidden from everyone.

Christ’s love for Peter was, therefore, boundless; in loving Peter He perfected the task of loving the man one sees. He did not say: “Peter must first be changed and become another man before I can love him.” No, exactly the converse. He said: “Peter is Peter, and I love him. My love, if it amounts to anything, will precisely help him to become another man.” Hence He did not break off His friendship, in order perhaps to resume it again when Peter had become another man. No, He maintained His friendship unchanged, and through that was helpful to Peter in becoming another man. Do you believe that without this loyal friendship of Christ Peter would have been rewon? But it is so easy to be a friend when this does not entail anything more than asking some definite favor from the friend, and, if the friend does not comply with this request, then allowing the friendship to lapse, until it is perhaps renewed when he complies with the request. Is this the relation of friendship? Who should be more ready to help an erring one than the one who calls himself his friend, even if the fault was committed against the friend! But the friend avoids him and says (and it is as if some third party were speaking): “When he changes and becomes another man, then he may perhaps again be my friend.” And it is not far from being the case that we men regard such conduct as magnanimous. But truly, it is far from being true that a man can say about such a friend, that in loving he loves the man he sees.

Christ’s love was boundless, as it must be if this is to be perfected: in loving to love the man one sees. This is very easy to perceive. However much and however a man is changed, he is not yet so changed that he becomes invisible. If this—the impossible—is not the case, then we see him, and our duty is to love the man we see. Generally we are inclined to believe that when a man has essentially changed for the worse, he is then so changed that one is excused from loving him. What a confusion of language: to be excused—from loving, as if it were a compulsory matter, a burden one wished to cast off! But Christianity asks: “Can you because of this change no longer see him?” To this the answer must be: “Certainly I can see him. I see exactly that he is no longer worthy of love.” But if you see that, then you do not really see him (which in another sense you cannot deny doing), you see only the unworthiness, the imperfection, and thereby you admit that when you loved him, in another sense you did not love him, but you loved only his superiority and his perfections. From the Christian standpoint, on the contrary, loving consists exactly in loving the man one sees. The emphasis lies not on loving the perfections one sees in a man, but the emphasis is placed on the man one sees, whether one now sees in this man perfections or imperfections, moreover, no matter how sadly this man has changed, since he still has not ceased to be the same man. He who loves the perfections he sees in a man, does not see the man, and therefore he ceases to love when the perfections cease, when a change enters, which change, even if distressing, still does not indicate that the man has ceased to exist. Alas, but even the wisest and most intelligent purely human interpretations of love are still somewhat highfalutin, somewhat hazy; Christian love, on the other hand, descended from heaven to earth. Its direction is consequently opposite. Christian love will not soar to heaven, for it comes from heaven and with heaven: it descends and thereby it succeeds in loving the same man in all the changes, because it sees the same man in all the changes. The merely human love is constantly prepared, as it were, to flee away after, or to flee away with the perfections of the beloved. We say about a seducer that he steals a maiden’s heart; but we must say about all merely human love, even when it is most beautiful, that there is a little thievishness in it, that it still steals the perfections of the beloved, while the Christian love grants the beloved all his imperfections and weaknesses, and in all his changes abides with him, loving the man it sees.

If this were not so, then Christ would never have come in love; for where would He have found the perfect! Wonderful! What it would really do would be to prevent Christ from finding the perfect; for was He not Himself exactly the perfect, which is recognized by His boundless love for the men He saw? What a wonderful crossing of concepts! We speak constantly with regard to love, about the perfect and the complete; Christianity also speaks constantly in relation to love about the perfect and the complete: ah, but we men speak about finding the perfect in order to love him; Christianity speaks about being the perfect which illimitably loves the man it sees. We men wish to look up in order to see the object of perfection (the tendency is still constantly towards the invisible), but in Christ perfection looked down to earth and loved the man it saw. And from Christianity we should learn, for it is still so in a far more general sense than is realized, that no one ascends to heaven except One who first descended from heaven: however enthusiastic the speech sounds about soaring to heaven, it is a delusion, unless you first, as Christianity says, descend from heaven. But from the Christian point of view to descend from heaven means to love infinitely the man you see, just as you see him. If you will, therefore, become perfect in love, then strive to perfect this duty, in loving to love the man you see; to love him just as you see him, with all his imperfections and weaknesses; to love him as you see him when he has completely changed, when he no longer loves you, but perhaps indifferently turns away to love another; to love him as you see him when he betrays and denies you.

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