CHAPTER III: THE OBJECT OF THE MORAL ACTIVITY.

THE OBJECT OF THE MORAL ACTIVITY.
SECTION LXXXVI.

As the moral is the free realizing of the good, and as the good itself is the inner law and nature of the divinely-created All, hence, in every moral activity, man comes into relation to this All, and this All--as well as also God himself--becomes in its entire existence, so far as within the scope of man, an object of the moral activity, namely, either in that as a good it is brought into unity with the moral person, or appropriated by the same,--or in that, as material capable of being modified, it is formed by the moral activity.

I. The moral life relates primarily always to God. God can be an object of the morally-pious activity only in so far as he is conceived of as a personal spirit; to an impersonal God there can be no moral relation. This moral activity is not a mere receiving, but it is a real acting, namely, in that man not only turns himself toward God, but in that he also turns God toward himself; the good that is realized by this activity becomes actual, however, not in God, but in us, in that it brings us into communion with God, so that consequently all pious activity is at the same time a moral producing for ourselves.--As God upholds, and rules in, all creatures, hence all moral activity without exception stands in relation to God, and all realizing of the good works communion with God. All that is moral is also pious, and all that is pious is also moral. Hence all duties are also duties to God, and religious duties do not stand along-side of other duties, but they include them in themselves.

Every view is defective which excludes from the moral life any thing whatever that comes into the life-sphere of man. This is precisely that which distinguishes rational creatures from the irrational, namely, that the latter have always simply a quite definite and restricted scope for their life-manifestation, while every thing else is indifferent to them, and as good as not existing, whereas rational creatures have an interest in all that exists, and bring it into some manner of relation to themselves. Perfect indifference to the world is Indian, but not Christian, wisdom; God is indifferent to nothing, and for this reason moral man, the image of God, is so also. The collective All and God himself constitute the life-sphere of the moral. Because of the inner unity of all things, every moral act not only reverberates in the whole universe, and there is joy among the angels in heaven over one sinner that repents, but this act itself acts upon the All, for all that is good and all that is capable of good belong together in one great unity. The declaration: "Whether life, or death, or things present or things to come--all are yours" [1 Cor. iii, 22], holds good in its fullest sense of the moral life, although indeed our moral bearing toward the different forms of existence is correspondingly different; to nature the moral spirit is related as dominating, to God as obeying.

The conceiving of God himself as an object of the moral activity is a fundamental point in Christian ethics. It is true the heathen also required reverence toward the gods, but this exercise of piety did not rise to a dominating power over the entire moral life. In recent times it has become a favorite view to regard the moral as not relating to God at all, but only to man, or indeed also to nature; it is even said that God cannot be an object of the moral activity, seeing that because of his unapproachable sublimity he must be inaccessible to all human influence. Evidently, with this view of the matter, prayer is narrowed down to a mere pious exercise without any other possible efficacy than to benefit the person so exercising; it would be more consequential, however, for those who think thus to follow Kant, and discard prayer altogether as empty and meaningless. It does not come within our scope to answer here the question, how the answering of prayer is reconcilable with the eternally-immutable nature of God, but we simply accept from dogmatics the unquestionably Scriptural principle, that God actually does hear and answer prayer, that prayer and its answering are not a delusion, but that proper prayer really and truly conditions the answering of the petitions, and that consequently it has a positive influence on the bearing of God toward man. True prayer is impossible so soon as I entertain the opinion that it has no effect, that the gracious turning of God toward me is not in some way conditioned thereby. This does not imply that God comes into any manner of dependence on man; whatever he does is eternally self-determined, but it is determined in view of the moral bearing of man as divinely gifted with rational freedom. In this sense, prayer is really a moral activity in relation to God, and God is a real object of the same. Prayer is the beginning and the end of all moral activity. The sentiment: "Pray and work," holds good of all and every moral life; the two do not stand beside each other, but consist only in and with each other.

God, as living and personal, cannot sustain a relation of indifference to human conduct. If we can speak in any proper sense of a displeasure of God at sin, of a wrath of God against sin, then must also, conversely, the pleasure of God in the moral conduct of man be of a real character, and hence, in some manner, conditioned by said conduct. The moral activity as relating to God is per se necessarily pious; but to presume, for this reason, to exclude it from the sphere of the moral, would be very inconsistent; for in fact it takes place with freedom, and with moral consciousness and with moral purpose, and it is frequently, in the Scriptures, expressly required as a duty; and all duties are moral. But, on the other hand, all duties are also pious, inasmuch as morality is always in very close association with piety (§ 55), and no duty can in fact be truly fulfilled without being regarded as an expression of the divine will, and hence without pious submission to that will. We therefore must reject the view that there are no moral duties toward God, and no moral influencing of God; if there are sins against God, as, for example, blasphemy, then there must also be duties toward Him,--and we must, further, reject the view that the duties toward God constitute a special group entirely distinct from the others, so that in fact the duties toward man might be fulfilled without at the same time also fulfilling those toward God.

The distribution of the subject-matter of ethics into duties toward God, duties toward one's self and duties toward other men, was formerly very usual; it was, however, only partially correct. God fills, in fact, heaven and earth, and the statement of Christ that whatever "ye have done unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" [Matt. xxv, 40], is of course true also in relation to God. It might, however, be said that, while it is true that all other duties imply in themselves also a fulfillment of duty toward God, yet that the converse is not true, so that consequently the duties of piety might be considered by themselves, seeing that in fact in the duty of worshiping God no other duty is directly implied. This is, however, only seemingly so; for in every duty toward God, I fulfill also directly at the same time a duty toward myself: I cannot possibly love and honor God without exalting myself into communion with Him; whatever man does to the honor of God is at the same time a self-transfiguration; he cannot praise God as his Father without confirming himself as the child of God. Moreover he can do this only in so far as he, at the same time, divests himself of illegitimate self-love; and only that one can be in communion with God, who likewise enters into communion with the God-fearing. The fulfilling of our moral duties toward God implies consequently in itself, really and directly at the same time also, the fulfilling of our duties toward those who are beloved of God. Hence, the moral relation to God is the central spring of all other moral life, and our duties toward God do not stand co-ordinate with and apart from our other duties.

SECTION LXXXVII.

II. The moral activity as strengthened by its moral relation to God, that is, by communion with Him, comes now, and only in consequence of this strengthening, into a truly moral relation to the created,--comprehending both the moral person himself and also the, to him, objective world.

(1) The moral person is his own object. Man is morally to form, to cultivate himself--to make his personal peculiar reality a product of his moral activity. Man is what he is as a person solely in virtue of moral activity; without this activity he remains in spiritual unculture, and is essentially impersonal. Hence man is, in so far, an object of his own moral activity, as he has not yet attained to his ultimate perfection,--in so far as he is a cultivable and, as yet, relatively incompleted being, that is, in so far as there is yet a difference between his ideal and his reality. Man is to form himself into a good entity, that is, into a personal reality that is in full harmony with God, with itself and with the All, in so far as this is good.

The possibility of man's bearing a moral relation to himself rests on the nature of rational self-consciousness, wherein man becomes in fact an object to himself. If man were from the very start absolutely perfect and complete, he would still be, even then, an object of his own moral activity, only however under its conserving, but not under its formative, phase. Progressive development is implied in the very nature of the created spirit, and there is no stage of temporal life conceivable where man would not have a still higher perfection to attain to, and further moral culture to work out.--All self-forming, unless kept in harmony with God, becomes necessarily anti-moral. Man can, it is true, develop himself in harmony with himself without being in harmony with God, --this is, however, a culture of self into the diabolical; and if he forms himself merely in harmony with the world, he becomes an immoral worldling, and if in this worldliness he leaves self-harmony out of the question, then he becomes simply characterless.

(a) The spirit is an object of the moral activity in virtue of its being per se merely the possibility of its real development into a rational spirit,--the germ of itself,--and because it does not develop itself into its full reality by inner nature-necessity, but by freedom. Man has, in virtue of his very constitution, the task of forming himself into the full reality and truth of spiritual being, namely, in respect both to his knowing, to his feeling, and to his willing,--that is, into the perfect image of God. The soul-life of brutes shapes itself by inner nature-necessity; brutes have no need of education; man, however, without education and without moral self-culture would sink below the brute, and for the evident reason that he would thus fall into complete self-antagonism; his freedom would become unbridled barbarity. Spirit lives only by continuous development; where it is not morally trained, it pines away and degenerates. What Christ says of the received talents [Matt. xxv, 14 sqq.] is especially true also of the moral culture of the spirit.

(b) The body is an object of the moral activity in so far as it is the necessary organ of the spirit in its relation to the world. It is not from the very start an absolutely subserving and perfectly spirit-imbued organ (§ 65, 66), nor does it become such by purely natural development, but it is trained into such only by the rightful dominating of the rational spirit over it. The merely natural development of the spirit forms not as yet a spirit's-body, but only an unspiritual animal body. Even as in the features of the countenance, spiritual unculture and spiritual refinement are almost always visibly expressed, so is also the body in its entire being subject to the refining influence of the moral spirit; and this influence ought not to be of a merely mediate and unintended character, as resulting from the unconsciously-ruling potency of the spiritual life in the body, but in fact also of an immediate character. The good that inheres in the body is to be faithfully preserved,--the germs of higher perfection to be developed. Whatever is originally given in the body, whether as actuality or as capacity, is a legitimate possession of the spirit and should not be lightly esteemed. To despise the body is to dishonor the Creator. It should not be honored, however, as merely corporeal, but as subserving the spirit in its rational life-work,--not as an end in itself, but as an end for the spirit. "Glorify God in your body;" this moral precept, the apostle bases on the fact that this body is "a temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own" [1 Cor. vi, 19, 20]. The body is not a mere nature-object, but a holy temple of a sanctified spirit,--bears the consecration of a sacred destination; man has not discretionary power over it, as over a mere nature-object,--not merely as over an unconditional possession, but as over a good intrusted to him by God, and belonging to God, and for which he must give account to God.

SECTION LXXXVIII.

(2) The external world as an object of the moral activity,--the widest and almost endlessly diversified field of this activity,--is--(a) the world of rational beings,--primarily and chiefly the world of humanity. To the moral person other persons stand, on the one hand, in the relation of similarity, in virtue of the common possession of a rational nature, and, on the other, in the relation of difference, in so far as each individual is an independent moral person with a special peculiarity; and it is the part of the moral activity at once to respect, to acknowledge, to preserve, and to promote both these features, and to bring them into reciprocal harmony. A human being never becomes, for the person acting upon it, a merely dependent rightless object, but in all cases continues to be a personality that is to be respected in its legitimate peculiarity, and hence it should never become an unfree and as it were impersonal creation of another, but it is an object for the moral activity only so far as it is itself at the same time recognized and treated as a moral subject. The moral bearing of man to his fellows rests essentially on the thought of the inner, and not merely conceived, but also real, unity of the human race, which finds its whole truth only in the thought of the common origin of all men from a first-created primitive individual.

Here also Christian morality comes into striking antagonism to all non-Christian morality. The thought of mankind as a homogeneous whole of which each individual is a legitimate rightful member, is peculiar to Christianity; the heathen know only nations and compatriots but not humanity and man; even the free Greek and the Roman make the distinction both in fact and in law between persons and slaves; the slave is only a thing, not a moral personality. All acting upon others which aims simply to exert an influence upon them without also receiving an influence from them, is immoral. Even the immature child necessarily exerts some influence upon its educator; and when Christ presented a child to his disciples as a moral pattern [Matt. xviii, 3, 4], this is not to be regarded as holding good simply in a loose sense and for the morally immature, on the contrary it is the moral essence of the child, its God-likeness, that is, in fact, a true mirror of the moral even for the relatively mature educator, and that has a right to his respect. That person is a pernicious educator who has never experienced a real moral influence upon himself from the child,--who has never recognized in the soul of the child the features of the image of God, nor been impressed with respect for child-naïveté; and it is the acme of meanness not to respect and sacredly to protect child-innocence.

The moral conceiving of man as an object of the moral activity, presupposes that we have in fact to do with real true men, men who are not only similar to us, but who are bound to us as members of one body. To creatures which, while belonging to the zoological order bimana, and while differing from the ape by the formation of the skull and of the feet and by an erect walk, yet should have been from of old distinguished, both in their origin and also in their spiritually-inferior nature, from the so-called "nobler" race of the whites, we could not come into the same moral relation as to those who are our brethren. The question as to the origin of the different races of men has a deep moral significancy, and is of fundamental importance for ethics. The natural science of the present day, which has become largely infected with a spirit-denying materialism, is well known to have until quite recently declared it as a fully-established fact that the various physically-differing races of men are of different origin, and cannot have descended from a single primitive race; and there are not a few persons, in other respects favorable to the Christian faith, who recognize these pretended "results of modern science" as really such, and regard them as beyond question. It is not here the place to examine the scientific worth of these so-esteemed results; we have to do with the question here only in its moral significancy. We merely remark in passing, that we must absolutely deny to an experimental science--and this is the pretended source of said results--the right to decide upon matters that lie beyond all experience. Such science can simply affirm what is, or is not, but it cannot decide what cannot possibly be. "Empirical" natural science may be justifiable in saying, that so far as experience goes, a white person is never born of a negro, nor a negro of a white person, though even this is not uncontested, but it has no scientific ground for inferring, that, consequently, it can also never have been otherwise. Inferences of this kind, illegitimate even according to the simplest rules of logic, are overturned almost daily by the mere progress of science. Moreover, it is not unworthy of remark that the position: "as it is in the life of nature now, so must it always have been" is applied to the question before us by the very same persons who cannot admit that the human race could have otherwise originated than through some extraordinarily potent nature-process--through human germs, forsooth, that were cast from the sea upon the shore,--and who in reply to the question: why then this interesting nature-process has not repeated itself also in our own day, or at least during the historical period in general? immediately exclaim, that nature has declined in her generative power. On the whole, therefore, and in view of the fact that the latest "progress" of this particular wing of natural science takes ground in direct antagonism to the above pretended unassailable "results," namely, in regarding man as an advanced development of the ape (Darwin), we may without the least anxiety spare ourselves the trouble of refuting the above-mentioned earlier view, and abandon this "modern" science to its own further self-dissolution.

Christianity has from the beginning had a clear consciousness of the moral significancy of the original unity of the human race. Though God had undoubtedly the power to create thousands of men in the different parts of the earth, instead of one, as he did in fact do in the case of plants and animals, nevertheless it must be for good reasons that in the Scriptures the whole human race is assumed to have sprung from a single stock [Gen. i, 27, 28; ii, 18; iii, 20]. There is involved here an antagonism of the natural and the spiritual stand-points, and that too in a moral respect. According to naturalism the unity of the world is a merely conceived something,--in reality it is a product of a presupposed multiplicity of single existences; and also the good, which in its nature is a manifestation-form of unity, is not an element fundamental and presupposed in every single existence, but it is simply a consequence--a product of the active individual; the good is ever to be without ever and truly being. According to the Christian system, however, the real unity and the real good are every-where the first, the fundamental, while multiplicity is only of a derived character. Here the moral is simply and solely the following of God as the absolutely good One, a free manifestation of a unity with God which in fact, however, originally existed,--which had not first to be realized, but only revealed, witnessed, and freely virtualized. Man is able to be moral only because, in his nature, he is already at one with God. So is it also in his moral relation to mankind; the unity of the total sum of individual men is not first to be created out of an original multiplicity, and to be constituted as an entirely new something, but it is simply (and this is the origin and the reason of this plurality) to be freely and morally witnessed and confirmed. Humanity is to become morally one, for the reason that in their origin they are already one; love to mankind is simply fidelity to the nature of man as existing from the beginning. This view is in diametrical antagonism to naturalistic ethics; and hence Paul presented it very prominently, at Athens, as the peculiarly-Christian view in contrast to heathenism [Acts xvii, 26; comp. Rom. v, 12, sqq.]; the latter estranges humanity into an original diversity; the former attributes all hostile antagonisms to the workings of sin.

The very natural and in fact morally legitimate feeling, that blood-relatives stand to us in a closer relation of duty than entire strangers, contains a profound truth. It calls forth really a very different and morally more potent feeling, when we know that even the degenerated negro is of our own blood, our brother, sprang from one father, than if we should assume that he is originally, and by nature, of a spiritually and corporeally inferior species [August., De Civ. Dei., xii, 21]. That which forms no unessential part of the world-historical honor of Christianity, namely, that it has made slavery morally impossible, has been again absolutely put into question by the teachings of naturalism; and it is scientifically as well as morally a signal indication of inconsideration, and especially so on the part of theologians, to declare the decision of the question as to the original unity of the human race as a mere non-essential matter. By the assumption that there were originally different races, the slavery-system is not only excused, but it is directly justified. In fact man has not only not the duty, but he has not the right to break down the original and naturally-constituted differences of spiritual existence. But the moral influencing of the degenerate races consists essentially in raising the actually lower-standing individuals of the colored races to the height of the whites,--in placing them both, in spiritually-moral respects, on an equal footing, in making of the colored races our true and proper brothers, in doing away, in fact, with whatever places them actually below the whites. But the effort to do this would be, in the eyes of the above-mentioned teaching, a simple presumption, a transgression of the limits prescribed to us by nature herself; according to it, the negro is destined by his primitive and manifestly inferior peculiarity, to service under the higher race, and it would be a criminal interference with the ordinances of nature to wish to change this. That which has hitherto passed for the greatest stain upon a perverted Christian civilization, the re-establishment of slavery, can find no more desirable an apology than these results of a perverted science; and it is a standing and entirely consequential opinion among even the most liberal-thinking champions of this tendency, that negroes are in fact but half-men and should remain such.

SECTION LXXXIX.

(b) External nature as an object of the moral activity is such not merely in its single manifestations, but also in its totality. On the one hand, nature exists not for itself but for the rational spirit for man; on the other, it is, as a work of divine creation, a good thing, and hence has rights in and of itself:--(1) Nature is by origin and essence destined to be dominated by the rational spirit as God's image,--to be formed by the spirit into its organ and for its service. As nature is not per se moral, hence man's moral relation to it does not consist in his receiving from it a direct moral influence, though indeed he does receive from it a mediate moral influence through the contemplation of the image of God as manifesting itself therein, but in his acting morally upon it. For the single individual, this action is always limited to a narrow theater, but for humanity it extends to all terrestrial nature. As the body is related to the individual spirit, so is nature related to humanity in general; nature's destination is to be perfectly subservient to man and to be exalted in the service of his rational destination.--(2) But this dominating of nature is essentially conditioned on the truly moral and hence rational self-culture of man, in virtue of which nature is not to be subjected to the whims of irrational caprice; for, as God's work, nature has claims upon man; it is legitimately an object for human activity only in so far as main subordinates himself to the divine will, whose peculiarity it is not to destroy but to preserve.

The relation of nature to the rational spirit is neither that of an object absolutely different from and foreign to it, seeing that both are the work of one creative spirit, nor that of a power entitled to dominate over the same; this would be a reversing of the moral order of the world; for that which is per se higher and rational should not be enslaved under that which is inferior and irrational. If, therefore, nature and spirit exist for each other, and if they are to constitute an intimate unity, then the only relation possible is, that the spirit shall be the dominating power over nature,--the power that forms and molds it. And if in reality the relation is in many respects now actually otherwise, still this should not lead us astray in conceiving of the true relation between them in a sinless state. The rational consciousness of all nations has at least some presentiment of the proper relation. Even as in all forms of superstition a more or less clear expression is given to a presentiment, though indeed misapplied, of a corresponding deeper truth that lies beyond the grasp of the superficial understanding, so also has the notion of magic, so widely prevalent throughout heathendom, its roots in a presentiment of the true relation of reason to nature. [11] It is but the childishly perverted thought, that the spirit should not be enslaved under unspiritual nature,--that its true destination is to cause nature to subserve it in its own purposes. When Christ, in his character of Son of man, exerts his mastery over nature, and by his miraculous deeds counterworks the sufferings that have sprung from the enslavement of sinful humanity under nature, and when he promises like power also to his disciples on condition of faith [Matt. xvii, 20; Mark xvi, 17, 18; Luke x, 19; xvii, 6; John xiv, 12], he simply indicates, though primarily only in a typical manner, the true goal of human development in its relation to nature. The miracle does not play feats with nature, it simply dominates it,--subjects it not to the irrational caprice of the individual will, but to the rational will of man as in union with God; and it is a rational demand of the rational will, to be free from all fetters that lie outside of the rational will,--to be. untrammeled in its activities by sufferings that spring from bondage to spirit-hostile nature.

Nevertheless nature is not to be considered as mere material for the active spirit, and absolutely without rights of its own; it has a right to be respected, because of the rationality that is impressed upon it. From the face of nature the Spirit of the Creator beams forth upon us with striking evidence; here also there is holy ground which man should not tread with unwashed feet. That is not a moral bearing toward nature which forgets the image of God that is stamped upon it, and which, in the zeal of shaping and enjoying it, perceives not that also natural objects, even while as yet untouched by the plastic hand of man, proclaim the glory of God. The Hindoo's dread-reverencing of natural objects, though indeed oblivious of the Creator, has yet a positive presentiment of the divine in the works of the, to him, unknown God.