IN the preceding treatise we have endeavored “many times and in many ways” to recommend love. As we thank God that we have succeeded in finishing the work we wished to do, we shall in our conclusion introduce the apostle John who says: “In love, let us love one another.” These words, which consequently have apostolic authority, have also, if you reflect on them, a mediating sound, a mediating mood in relation to the contradictions in love itself, which may be due to the fact that they are spoken by a man who became perfect in love. In these words you do not hear the austerity of duty; the apostle does not say, ‘“You shall love one another”; but neither do you hear poetic passion or the violence of affection. There is something transfigured and blessed in these words, but there is also a sadness which touches upon life and is softened by the eternal. It is as if the apostle said, “Well, what is there after all to prevent your loving? What on the whole do you gain by selfishness! The commandment is that thou shalt love. Oh, but if you wish to understand yourself and life, it ought not to be necessary to be commanded; for the fact of loving men is still the only thing that is worth living for; without this love, you do not really live. And the fact of loving men is the one blessed consolation, both for here and hereafter; and the fact of loving men affords, the only true knowledge of whether you are a Christian” —truly a confession of faith is not enough. Love is from the Christian standpoint commanded; but the commandment of love is the old commandment which is always new. It is not with the commandment of love as with the human commandment which becomes antiquated and disregarded with the lapse of years, or is changed in accordance with what those agree on who must obey it. No, the commandment of love continues new until the last day, equally new, even on the day when it has become the oldest. Consequently the commandment is not changed in the slightest degree, least of all by an apostle. The only change then may be that the lover becomes on more and more intimate terms with the commandment, becomes as one with the commandment he loves: that is why he speaks so gently, so sadly, almost as if he had forgotten that love is a commandment. On the other hand, if you forget that it is the apostle of love who is speaking, then you will not understand him; for such words are not the beginning of a talk about love, but they are its consummation. We do not ourselves presume to speak in this way. What is truth on the lips of a venerable and consecrated apostle might very readily be an affectation in the mouth of a beginner, whereby he would run away from the school of the commandment much too early, and escape the “school yoke.” We introduce the apostle who is speaking; we do not make his words our own, but we make ourselves his hearers, “In love, let us love one another!”
And so, only one thing more, remember the Christian like for like, the like for like of eternity. That Christian like for like is such an important and decisive Christian qualification that I could wish to end at least one, if not every work, where to the best of my ability I develop the Christian idea, with this thought.
Christianity is less talked about relatively in these times (I mean compared with those things about which there is so much said). But in the discourses which are heard (for attacks upon it are certainly not speeches about Christianity), the Christian doctrine is frequently presented as a certain soft, almost enervated form of love. After all, there is love and love; you predict for yourself and for your own flesh and blood, good days or happy days without anxiety, for God is love and love—about austerity there must be nothing said; everything must be about the free and easy language and nature of love. Yet thus understood, God’s love easily becomes a fabulous and childish conception, the figure of Christ something so insipid and mawkish as to render it impossible that He could have been a stumbling block to the Jews or foolishness to the Greeks: that is, as Christianity was taught in our childhood.
The matter is simple enough. Christianity has abolished the Jewish like for like: “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”; but it has substituted in its place the like for like of eternity. Christianity always: directs the attention entirely away from the external, turns it inward, and makes each one of your relationships with other men into a God-relationship: so you will surely in both senses get like for like. From the Christian standpoint a man has ultimately and essentially to do only with God, although he will still remain in the world and in the earthly relationships as they are allotted to him. But the fact of having to do with God (so one is consequently never retarded on the way, or halfway, by information or by human judgment, as if that were decisive) makes at one and the same time for the highest consolation and the greatest exertion, the greatest mildness and the greatest severity. This is man’s education; for the true God-relationship is an education, God is the Teacher. But true education must be just as strict as it is mild, and conversely. And when a human teacher has many children to train at the same time, how does he carry this on? To do all this, there is naturally not time for much talking and reproof and verbosity, and if there were time, that education becomes bad as a matter of course, where there is too much talk. No, the efficient teacher trains preferably by means of the eyes. He takes the individual child’s eyes away from him, that is, he compels the child to look to him for everything. God does just this. He rules the whole world, and He trains these innumerable men by His glance. For what is conscience? In the conscience it is God who looks at a man, so the man must in everything see God. Thus does God educate. But the child who is being educated easily imagines that his relationship to his companions, the tiny world they form, is actuality, whereas the teacher by his glance teaches him that all this is used for the purpose of educating the child.