Love Is the Fulfilment of the Law

“It is honourable to promise, but difficult to keep one’s promise,” says the proverb. But what right has it to say so? Surely it is keeping the promise that is honourable. The proverb may therefore be right that keeping a promise is both honourable and difficult. But what does that make promising? On this reading, the proverb says nothing about it. Perhaps promising is nothing at all; perhaps it is less than nothing; perhaps the proverb is actually warning us against it: do not waste time making promises, for keeping them, which is the honourable part, is difficult enough.

Truly, making a promise is far from being honourable in itself, even when it is not dishonestly meant. Is it not dangerous to dignify “promising” with the name of honour, especially in a world that makes so many deceptive promises, among a generation only too ready to promise and, by promising, honestly to deceive itself? It is dangerous even for the proverb’s own sake, since another proverb, equally well acquainted with the world and with human beings, has learned from experience that “a loan repaid as promised is money found”.

It might be better, then, to go to the opposite extreme and say that “promising is dishonourable”, on the assumption that true faithfulness characteristically makes no promises. It does not waste time promising, flatter itself with promises, or claim double payment, first for the promise and then for performing it. Better still, we should concentrate wholly and decisively upon keeping the promise, while an awakening admonition from one in authority serves by way of introduction to warn us against promising.

Holy Scripture contains a parable (Matthew 21:28–32) which is seldom discussed in devotional discourse, although it is both deeply instructive and capable of awakening us. Let us pause over it. There was “a man who had two sons”. In this he resembles the father of the prodigal son, who also had two sons. The resemblance is greater still, for one of the sons in this parable was himself a prodigal son, as the story will show.

The father “went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in my vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but afterwards he regretted it and went. The father went to the other and said the same. He answered, ‘Lord, I will’; but he did not go. Which of the two did his father’s will?”

We could put the question another way: which of them was the prodigal son? Was it not the son who said yes, the obedient one, who said not merely “yes” but “Lord, I will”, as though to display his unconditional and obedient submission to his father’s will? Was he not the one who became lost in silence, so that his lostness was not as obvious as that of the other prodigal son, who squandered his property with prostitutes and ended by tending swine, but who was also finally restored?

The son who said yes also strangely resembles the elder brother of that other prodigal. The Gospel casts suspicion upon the elder brother’s righteousness, although he considered himself the righteous or good son. Perhaps this brother too regarded himself as the good son. Danish has its own expression for such a person, which we may use for brevity: the Yes-brother. After all, did he not say yes? Did he not say, “Lord, I will”? And the proverb tells us that promising is honourable.

The other brother, however, said no. A “No” which nevertheless means that a person does precisely what he refused to do can sometimes arise from an understandable peculiarity. Honesty, exiled and alien upon the earth, sometimes hides in such an assumed “No”. Perhaps the speaker has become so disgusted by repeatedly hearing a “Yes” which means that people will not do what they say that he has become accustomed to saying No where others say Yes, and then to doing what the Yes-brothers omit. Perhaps he distrusts himself anxiously and avoids promising anything for fear of promising too much. Or perhaps, in his sincere zeal to do the good, he wants to ward off the hypocritical appearance that a promise can create.

But the “No” in the Gospel is not merely assumed. The son means it; his refusal is real disobedience. Yet he regrets it and goes to do his father’s will.

What, then, does the parable seek to impress upon us, if not the danger of saying “yes” too hastily, even when we mean it at the time? The Yes-brother is not portrayed as a deceiver at the moment when he says yes. He becomes a deceiver because he fails to keep his promise; more exactly, his very eagerness to promise makes him one. The promise becomes the snare. Had he promised nothing, he might more readily have done it.

When we say yes or make a promise, we easily deceive both ourselves and others. We behave as though we had already done what we promised, or at least accomplished part of it by promising, or as though making the promise were meritorious in itself. If we then fail to do what we promised, the road back to the truth becomes very long. We must travel it merely to regain the starting point from which we might do even a little of what we promised. What we promised may have been ambitious enough, but the unfulfilled promise has now placed us at an illusory distance from the beginning. Things are no longer as they were at the moment when we took the wrong turn and used the promise to swing around the work instead of beginning it. We must retrace the entire detour before we can reach the beginning again.

The road from saying no, through repentance, to making amends is much shorter and easier to find. A promise’s “Yes” lulls us to sleep; an uttered “No”, which we ourselves therefore hear, awakens us, and repentance is usually not far away. The person who says, “Lord, I will”, immediately thinks well of himself. The one who says no becomes almost afraid of himself. This difference matters greatly in the first moment and decisively in the second. But the first moment carries the judgement of the moment; the second carries eternity’s judgement.

That is why the world is so fond of promises. The worldly belongs to the moment, and in the moment a promise looks so good. Eternity, for the same reason, distrusts promises as it distrusts everything momentary. Suppose neither brother had done the father’s will. Even then, the one who said No would have been nearer to doing it insofar as he was nearer to recognising that he was not doing it. A “No” hides nothing. A “Yes”, however, can so easily become an illusion and a self-deception, perhaps the hardest of all difficulties to overcome.

It is only too true that “the road to perdition is paved with good intentions”. Nothing is more dangerous than going backwards by means of good intentions and promises, because it is so difficult to detect that one is really retreating. When a man turns his back on you and walks away, you can easily see him go. But suppose he faces what he is leaving and walks backwards, greeting you with face, eyes, and voice, repeatedly assuring you that he is coming at once, perhaps even crying incessantly, “Here I am!” Although he is moving farther and farther away, it is far harder to notice, precisely because he retreats backwards while facing you.

So it is with someone rich in good intentions and quick to promise, who backs farther and farther away from the good. His intention and promise give him the right direction: he faces the good. Yet, while facing it, he walks backwards away from it. Each renewed intention and promise looks like a step forwards. In truth, he does not merely stand still; he takes another step back.

The frustrated intention and unfulfilled promise leave discouragement and ill humour behind. These may soon flare into an even fiercer intention, which in turn produces only greater exhaustion. Just as a drunkard needs ever stronger stimulation to become intoxicated, the person addicted to intentions and promises needs ever more stimulation in order to go backwards.

We do not praise the son who said No. We are trying to learn from the Gospel how dangerous it is to say, “Lord, I will”. In relation to action, a promise is a changeling, and we must beware of it. Superstition says that hostile powers come just after a child is born, when the mother’s joy is greatest because her suffering is over and when joy has perhaps made her less attentive, and substitute a changeling for the child. So too at the great and therefore dangerous moment of beginning: just as we are about to begin, hostile powers press the changeling of a promise upon us and prevent the true beginning. How many have been deceived in this way, almost as though bewitched.

See, then, how important it is, in every human relation and with every task, for attention to be gathered at once, wholly and without division, upon what is essential and decisive. It is the same with love. Love must never be allowed to appear as something other than it is, lest the appearance take hold and become a snare. It must not take its time or delight in flattering fantasies about itself. It must begin the task at once and be made to understand that every preceding moment is wasted, and worse than merely wasted; every other supposed expression of love is delay and retreat. This is exactly what the words of our text express:

Love is the fulfilment of the law,

and we shall now take this saying as the subject of our deliberation.

If someone asks, “What is love?”, Paul answers, “It is the fulfilment of the law”, and the answer immediately prevents every further question. The law is already an extensive matter; and if the law is to be fulfilled, you can see for yourself that there is not a moment to waste.

The world has often asked curiously, “What is love?”, and often some idle person has been willing to engage the curious questioner with an answer. Curiosity and idleness like one another so well that they can scarcely tire of each other, or of endlessly asking and answering. Paul, however, does not enter into a prolonged discussion with the questioner. His answer catches the questioner. It places him under the law in obedience, immediately gives him his direction, and sets him moving to act accordingly.

This is true not only of this answer of Paul’s, but of all Paul’s answers and all Christ’s answers. The distinctively Christian way of answering turns away from a question aimed at something remote and immediately brings the task, what the questioner must do, as close to his life as possible.

The simple sage of antiquity who judged paganism in the service of knowledge understood the art of questioning: by his question he caught each respondent in ignorance. What is Christian, however, is concerned not with knowing but with acting. Its distinctive art is to answer and, through the answer, to bind each person to the task. That is why it was so dangerous for Pharisees, sophists, word-splitters, and speculators to question Christ. The questioner always received an answer, but in a sense the answer told him far too much. It did not cleverly prolong the question. With divine authority it seized him and bound him to act, although he may have wanted only to remain at curiosity’s, intellectual appetite’s, or conceptual definition’s comfortable distance from himself and from doing what is true.

How many have asked, “What is truth?”, while secretly hoping that truth would remain far away for a long time before coming close enough to determine, at that very instant, what it was their duty to do. When the Pharisee asked, “Who is my neighbour?”, “wishing to justify himself”, he surely imagined a long investigation. It might take a very long time and perhaps end with the concession that the concept “neighbour” could not be defined with perfect precision. That was exactly why he asked: to find an escape, waste time, and justify himself. But God catches the wise in their foolishness. Christ caught the questioner in an answer which contained the task.

Every answer of Christ’s works in this way. He does not use a long discourse to warn against useless questions which breed only quarrels and evasions, for the long discourse would then be little better than what it opposed. As he taught, he also answered with divine authority, because authority consists precisely in setting the task.

The hypocritical questioner received the answer he deserved, but not the answer he wanted. It could not feed his curiosity or be carried away as an interesting remark. Christ’s answer retains a remarkable power: whenever it is retold, it immediately catches the single individual who hears it and binds that particular person to the task. Someone may presumptuously try to repeat one of Christ’s answers as an anecdote, but it cannot be done. The answer catches its hearer by obligating him to act.

A clever answer addressed to human cleverness is essentially indifferent to who said it and to whom. Christ’s answers have the opposite, twofold character. It is infinitely important that Christ spoke them; and whenever an answer is told to a single individual, it is addressed precisely to him. Eternity’s whole emphasis falls upon this: it is you, even when the same answer is spoken in this way to every single individual.

Cleverness is turned inward and is blind in that respect. It neither knows whether anyone is looking at it nor comes close to anyone by looking at him. Divine authority, by contrast, is all eye. It first compels the person addressed to recognise with whom he is speaking; then it fixes its piercing gaze upon him and says through that gaze, “It is you to whom this is spoken.” People therefore prefer ingenuity and profundity, because they can play blind man’s buff with them. Authority frightens them.

People may therefore be reluctant to engage with Paul’s answer, because, as we have said, it catches them. The moment any other answer is given to the question “What is love?”, time and distance open up, an unoccupied interval which concedes something to curiosity, idleness, and selfishness. But if love is the fulfilment of the law, there is not even time to make a promise. Here promising stands for the last thing that can misdirect love away from action and from beginning its task at once. A promise lies right beside the beginning and deceptively resembles it, without being the beginning.

Even if a promise of love were not so apt to be an instant’s excitement which becomes disappointment in the next instant; a sudden blaze which leaves exhaustion behind; a leap forwards which carries us back; an anticipation which delays and restrains us; an introduction which never reaches the matter itself; even if none of this were so, the promise would still be a form of lingering.

It may linger over love dreamily, pleasurably, wonderingly, frivolously, or conceitedly, as though love first had to collect itself, were considering what to do, or stood amazed at itself and at what it would accomplish. A promise lingers over love and is therefore a jest, one which can become dangerous. For in earnest, love is the fulfilment of the law.

Christian love gives everything away and for that very reason has nothing to spare, neither a moment nor a promise. Yet this is not busyness, least of all worldly busyness, for worldliness and busyness are inseparable ideas. What does it mean to be busy? People generally suppose that the manner of a person’s occupation determines whether he is busy. This is not so. Manner becomes decisive only after the object of the occupation has been determined.

Someone who occupied himself only with the eternal, uninterruptedly and at every moment, if that were possible, would not be busy. Whoever is truly occupied with the eternal is never busy. Busyness means occupying oneself, in division and distraction, with the manifold things among which a human being cannot possibly be whole, either whole in them all or whole in any one part. Only a madman can succeed in this. To be busy is to occupy oneself, divided and distracted, with what divides and distracts a human being.

Christian love, as the fulfilment of the law, is whole, gathered, and fully present in each of its expressions; yet it is sheer action. It is therefore equally far from inactivity and busyness. It never anticipates action by offering a promise in its place; never satisfies itself with the notion that it has finished; never lingers pleasurably over itself; never sits idle, amazed at itself.

It is not the hidden, secret, enigmatic feeling behind the lattice of the inexplicable which the poet tries to entice to the window. Nor is it a mood in the soul which tenderly recognises no law, refuses every law, or appoints itself its own law and listens only for songs. Love is sheer action, and each of its deeds is holy, because love is the fulfilment of the law.

Such is Christian love. Even if it is not, or never had been, present in this form in any human being, although every Christian who abides in love works for his love to become such, it was present in the one who was love, our Lord Jesus Christ. The same apostle therefore says of him (Romans 10:4), “Christ was the end of the law.”

Christ was what the law could not produce, any more than the law could make a human being blessed. The law and its demand became everyone’s downfall, because no one was what it required and through the law people only came to know sin. Christ, however, became the downfall of the law because he was what it required. He was its downfall and its end, for when a demand is fulfilled it exists only in that fulfilment and no longer stands apart as a demand.

When thirst is quenched, it remains only in the soothing relief of refreshment. In the same way, Christ came not to abolish the law but to fulfil it, so that henceforth the law exists in its fulfilment.

Yes, he was love, and his love was the fulfilment of the law. “No one could convict him of any sin”, not even the law, which shares with conscience the knowledge of everything; “neither was deceit found in his mouth”, for everything in him was truth. In his love there was no interval of a moment, a feeling, or an intention between the law’s demand and its fulfilment. He did not say no like one brother or yes like the other, for his food was to do the Father’s will. He was one with the Father and with every demand of the law; fulfilling it was his inward need, the one necessity of his life.

Love in him was sheer action. There was not a single moment of his life when love was merely an inactive feeling searching for words and letting time pass, or a mood which satisfied itself and lingered over itself while no task was being done. His love was sheer action. Even his tears did not merely occupy the time. Jerusalem did not know what made for its peace, but he knew it; the mourners at Lazarus’s grave did not know what was about to happen, but he knew what he would do.

His love was wholly present in the smallest thing as in the greatest. It did not concentrate itself more powerfully in a few great moments, as though the ordinary hours of life were exempt from the law. It was equally present at every instant, no greater when he breathed his last upon the cross than when he consented to be born. The same love said, “Mary has chosen the better part”, and with a look reproved, or forgave, Peter. The same love received the disciples when they returned joyfully from performing miracles in his name and found them when they were asleep.

His love made no claim upon another person’s time, strength, assistance, service, or love in return. Whatever Christ required of another person was solely for that person’s good and solely for that person’s sake. No one who lived with him loved himself as highly as Christ loved him.

His love entered no bargaining, indulgent, or partial agreement with any human being apart from the agreement already within him with the law’s infinite demand. Christ’s love sought no exemption for himself, not the slightest, not a farthing.

His love made no distinction, not even the most tender distinction between his mother and other human beings, for he pointed to his disciples and said, “These are my mother.” Nor did his love distinguish disciples from others, for his one wish was that everyone should become his disciple, and he wished this for each person’s own sake. Nor did he discriminate among the disciples. His divine-human love was equally directed towards every human being in willing to save them all, and equally towards all who were willing to let themselves be saved.

His life was sheer love, and yet his whole life was a single working day. He did not rest until the night came when he could work no more. Until then his work did not alternate with day and night, for when he was not working he kept vigil in prayer.

Thus he was the fulfilment of the law. He demanded nothing as a reward. His one demand, the single purpose of his entire life from birth to death, was innocently to offer himself, something which not even the law, when exacting its utmost due, dared to demand.

Thus he was the fulfilment of the law. He had, as it were, only one witness capable of following him at all, one fellow knower attentive and sleepless enough to examine him: the law itself, following him step by step and hour by hour with its infinite demand. Yet he fulfilled the law.

How poor it is never to have loved! But even the person made richest by love possesses only poverty beside this fullness. We must not, however, make the comparison in that way. Let us never forget the eternal difference between Christ and every Christian. Even if the law has been abolished, here it remains in force and secures an eternally yawning abyss between the God-man and every other human being. No human being can comprehend, but can only believe, what the divine law itself had to acknowledge: he was the fulfilment of the law.

Every Christian believes this and appropriates it in faith, but no one has known it except the law and the one who fulfilled it. What is present only weakly in a human being’s strongest moment was present in Christ far more powerfully and with equal constancy at every moment. A person may understand this in his strongest moment, only to lose that understanding in the next. He must therefore believe and hold fast to faith, lest his life be confused by understanding for one moment and failing to understand for many others.

Christ was the fulfilment of the law. From him we must learn how to understand this thought, for he was its explanation. Only when the explanation is what it explains, the explainer is the thing explained, and the explanation is transfiguration, is the relation true.

We cannot explain in this way. If we learn nothing else from that fact, we can at least learn humility before God. Our frail earthly life must separate what we explain from what we are. This inability is an essential expression of our relation to God.

Suppose a human being, humanly speaking, loves God in sincerity of heart. God has nevertheless loved him first. God is an eternity ahead, and the human being is that far behind. So it is with every eternal task. By the time a person at last begins, infinitely much has already been wasted, even if for a moment we overlook all the deficiencies and imperfections of the striving which finally began.

Suppose a person, humanly speaking, sincerely seeks first God’s kingdom and his righteousness. How much time passed before he even learned to understand what this means! He was therefore infinitely far from having sought God’s kingdom and his righteousness first. At every point wasted time precedes the human beginning.

In earthly affairs we lament that someone must go into debt in order to begin an enterprise. Before God, every human being begins with an infinite debt, even before we count the debt contracted daily after the beginning. This is only too often forgotten in life, and why, except that God too is forgotten?

One person then compares himself with another, and whoever understands a little more than others congratulates himself on being something. Would that he understood within himself that before God he is nothing. Human beings are so eager to be something; is it any wonder that, however much they speak about God’s love, they are reluctant to enter fully into relation with him? His demand and his measure reduce them to nothing.

Use one tenth of the strength granted to you when you exert yourself to the utmost; then turn your back upon God and compare yourself with other people. In a very short time you will be advanced among them. But turn around and face God; use all ten tenths and, if possible, force out one last reserve. You will still be as nothing, infinitely far from having attained anything and infinitely in debt.

That is why, in one sense, it does no good to speak to a human being about the highest. A revolution is required of a kind no speech can produce. If you want an easy life and an easy way to be something, forget God. Never fully notice or clearly understand that he created you from nothing. Assume that a person has no time to waste considering the one to whom he owes everything, infinitely and unconditionally, and that no one has the right to question another about it. Forget it, then, and join the crowd’s noise. Laugh or weep; keep busy from morning until night; be loved, respected, and esteemed as a friend, an official, a king, or a pallbearer. Above all, be a serious man by forgetting the one serious matter: relating yourself to God and becoming nothing.

But consider what you would lose. Speech cannot accomplish this, so may God grant you understanding. This annihilation before God is so blessed that at every moment you would seek to return to it more strongly, warmly, and inwardly than blood returns to the place from which it has been forcibly driven. To worldly prudence, of course, this is and must be the greatest foolishness.

“Never hold fast to God.” One would have to speak this plainly in order to reveal the secret of the half-heartedness which falsely pretends that it too holds fast to him. “Never hold fast to God, for in holding to him you will lose what no person who held to the world has ever lost, not even the person who lost the most: you will lose absolutely everything.”

That is true. The world cannot take everything, precisely because it cannot give everything. Only God can do that. God takes everything, everything, everything, in order to give everything. He does not take a little, much, or very much, piece by piece; if you truly hold fast to him, he takes infinitely everything.

“Flee him, therefore. A king may be dangerous enough to approach if you want to be something; proximity to a powerfully gifted spirit is dangerous; but God is infinitely more dangerous to approach.”

But if God is to be excluded and forgotten, I do not know what it could mean to preach upon such words, or what could remain in the saying “Love is the fulfilment of the law” except repellent meaninglessness.

Let us not shrink from understanding it, fearfully and treacherously towards ourselves, as though we feared what the natural human being really does fear, however loudly he professes a desire for knowledge and insight: learning too much. It is impossible to speak of love as the fulfilment of the law without at the same time acknowledging one’s own guilt and finding every human being guilty.

Love is the fulfilment of the law. Despite its many precise provisions, the law remains in some respect indeterminate, while love is the fullness. The law resembles someone struggling to speak who, despite every effort, cannot say everything; love is the fullness.

It may sound strange to call the law indeterminate, since its strength lies precisely in its determinations. The law possesses and commands them all. Yet it remains indeterminate, and here again lies its powerlessness. A shadow is powerless beside vigorous actuality, and something indefinite always remains in a shadow. So too something indefinite remains in the law’s shadow-outline, however precisely it is drawn.

Holy Scripture therefore calls “the law a shadow of the things to come”. The law is not a shadow cast behind love’s actuality, for in love the law is taken up and included. It is the anticipatory shadow of what is to come.

However accurately an artist draws a plan or preliminary design for a work, something in it remains undetermined. Only when the work is finished can one say that nothing whatever remains indefinite, not one line or point. There is therefore only one completely determinate sketch: the completed work itself. But that is simply to say that no sketch can be absolutely and unconditionally determinate.

The law is the sketch; love is the fullness, the completed and fully determinate work. In love the law itself becomes fully determinate. Only one power can execute the work for which the law supplies the design, and that power is love. Yet law and love have the same origin, just as design and finished work come from the same artist. They do not conflict. A work of art which fully answers to its design does not conflict with it merely because the finished work is more precisely determined than every provision in the design.

Paul therefore says elsewhere (1 Timothy 1:5), “Love is the sum of the command.” In what sense? In the same sense as the saying that love is the fulfilment of the law. In another sense, the sum consists of all the individual commandments: You shall not steal, and so forth. But try to reach the sum by that route. However long you keep counting, the labour will be in vain, because the law is by its nature inexhaustible, infinite, and unceasing in its determinations. Each provision gives rise to another more exact than itself; new considerations and relations then produce another still more exact, and so on without end.

Love stands to the law here as faith stands to the understanding. The understanding counts and counts, calculates and calculates, but never attains the certainty that faith possesses. The law likewise determines and determines but never reaches the sum, which is love.

The word “sum” seems to invite us to count. But when a person has grown tired of counting and at the same time still more eager to discover the sum, he realises that the word must have a deeper meaning. The law, as it were, sets all its provisions upon a person and hunts him to exhaustion. There is a determination everywhere, yet even the most precise can always be made more precise. This perpetual indeterminacy within the provisions and their multitude is an unrest that never dies. The exhausted person is thereby taught that something else must constitute the law’s fullness.

There is no conflict between law and love, any more than between a sum and the things of which it is the sum, or between the unsuccessful attempts to calculate it and the happy discovery, the happy conclusion, that the sum has been found.

Under the law a human being groans. Wherever he looks he sees demands without a boundary, like someone looking across the sea and seeing wave after wave but never the shore. Wherever he turns, he meets a strictness which can always become infinitely stricter, never the boundary at which strictness becomes mercy.

The law, as it were, starves a person out. It cannot bring him to fullness, for its business is to take away, demand, and exhaust him to the utmost. The indeterminacy which always remains within the multitude of its provisions is the law’s relentless exaction. Each provision demands something, yet there is no limit to the provisions.

The law is therefore life’s direct opposite, while life is fullness. The law resembles death. Yet in one respect life and death know the same thing: life knows precisely everything that has received life, and death knows just as precisely everything that has lived. In a certain sense, then, law and love do not conflict in their knowledge. But love gives and the law takes; or, stated in the right order, the law demands and love gives.

Love does not wish to abolish a single provision of the law. On the contrary, love gives every provision its fullness and determinacy. In love, every determination of the law becomes far more definite than it was in the law itself. There is no conflict between them, any more than between hunger and the blessing which satisfies it.

Love is the fulfilment of the law, for love does not shirk its tasks. It is no indulgent dispensation which slips between love and the law’s fulfilment, demanding or granting exemption, pampering others or being pampered itself. Love is not an idle feeling too refined to express itself in action, a demanding incapacity which neither can nor will satisfy what is required.

Only foolishness speaks of love as though law and love were in conflict. There certainly is such a conflict, but within love there is none, because love fulfils the law. Foolishness speaks as though there were an essential difference between the law’s demand and love. There certainly is such a difference, but not within love, where fulfilment and demand are completely one.

Only foolishness sows discord between law and love, imagining itself wise when it talks first with one and then with the other, or perhaps even speaks badly of one to the other.

Love is the fulfilment of the law, but which law do we mean? Our text is apostolic and our subject is Christian love, so it can only be God’s law. The world, insofar as it differs from what we have called foolishness, agrees with God on one point; worldly wisdom agrees with Christianity that love must fulfil a law in order to be love. They disagree about which law, and that disagreement is an infinite difference.

Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relation between one human being and another. Christianity teaches that love is a relation of human being–God–human being: God is the middle term. A relation of love between two or among many people may be beautiful; mutual devotion and sacrifice may constitute all their delight and blessedness; everyone may praise their relation. But if God and the relation to God have been excluded, then in Christian terms it was not love. It was a mutual and enchanting deception mistaken for love.

To love God is truly to love oneself. To help another person love God is to love that person. To be helped by another to love God is to be loved.

Worldly wisdom does not suppose that a lover may arbitrarily define love for himself. Since love is devotion and sacrifice, the world thinks that love’s object, whether the beloved, the friend, loved ones, a social association, or one’s contemporaries, all of whom we shall briefly call “the beloved”, must judge whether devotion and sacrifice have been shown and whether they amount to love. Everything therefore depends on whether these human judges know how to judge rightly.

If the beloved who judges does not possess before God a true conception of loving himself, namely that it means loving God, then he also has no true conception of being loved by another, namely that it means being helped to love God. He will therefore mistake a false kind of devotion and sacrifice for true love, and true love for lovelessness. Merely human judgement is not the true judgement of love, because loving God is true self-love.

When God is the middle term in judging love, a final twofold judgement remains. Although this is the only fundamentally decisive judgement, it begins only after human judgement has decided whether something is love. First: divinely understood, is it really love to show the devotion demanded by the beloved? Second: divinely understood, is it love on the beloved’s part to demand such devotion?

Every human being is God’s bondsman. No one may belong to another in love without belonging to God in that same love; nor may anyone possess another in love unless both people belong to God within it. No human being may belong to another as though the other were everything to him, and no one may allow another to belong to him as though he were everything to the other.

Imagine a relation between two or among several people so happy and perfect that a poet had to exult over it, so blissful that even someone who was not a poet became one through wonder and joy at the sight. The matter would still not be settled. Christianity now steps forward and asks about the God-relation: does each single individual relate first to God, and does their relation of love then relate to God?

If not, Christianity, precisely because it protects love, must not hesitate in God’s name to split the relation apart until the lovers are willing to understand. If only one party will understand, Christianity must not hesitate to lead that person into the horror of a collision no poet has dreamed of or dared to portray. The poet can no more engage with the Christian command to love one’s enemy than with the still stranger Christian task of appearing, out of love and within love, to hate the beloved. Yet in God’s name Christianity does not hesitate to strain the relation so high.

It does so not merely to collect God’s due as the lord and owner of his bondsman, but also out of love for the lovers. To love God is to love oneself; to love another person as though that person were God is to deceive oneself; and to allow another person to love one as though one were God is to deceive that person.

If love is to fulfil the law, Christianity can press the demand to what human understanding regards as madness. It therefore teaches that a Christian must, if required, be able to hate father, mother, sister, and beloved. Does this mean actually hating them? Far be this abomination from Christianity. It means that faithful and sincere love, divinely understood, may be regarded as hatred by loved ones, those nearest to us, and our contemporaries. They refuse to understand that loving oneself means loving God and being loved means being helped by another person to love God. This remains the lover’s task whether or not his willingness to be hated actually brings the other person to that understanding.

Worldly wisdom has a long list of sacrifices and forms of devotion. Does it include these: out of love to hate the beloved; out of love to hate the beloved and therefore oneself; out of love to hate one’s contemporaries and therefore one’s own life? Worldly wisdom knows many forms of unhappy love. Do any include the suffering of having to appear to hate the beloved, of having hatred as the final and only expression of love, or of having to be hated by the beloved as love’s reward because Christian truth places an infinite difference between what each party means by love?

Before Christianity the world had seen unhappy love collide with terrible events, with love’s opposite within a shared basic understanding, and with partly different conceptions still contained within that common understanding. It had never seen that love could involve a collision between two conceptions separated by eternity: the divine and the merely human.

When such a collision occurs, love, divinely understood, means holding fast to eternity’s true conception and loving by its power, even though the people who are loved, if they possess only the human conception, must regard it as hatred.

Let us speak in fully human terms about the highest. In so-called Christendom we too easily imagine that we believe something which has not even impressed itself upon us enough to awaken our attention. We may speak humanly about the highest, provided that we never forget the eternal difference separating the one of whom we speak from every human being: Christ’s life is properly the only unhappy love.

Divinely understood, he was love. He loved the whole human race by virtue of the divine conception of love. Out of love he could not surrender that conception, for to do so would have deceived the race. His whole life was therefore a terrible collision with the merely human conception of love. The ungodly world crucified him, but even the disciples failed to understand him. They constantly tried to win him over to their conception, so that he had to say even to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan.”

What unfathomable suffering lies in that terrible collision! The most sincere and faithful disciple, not merely well-meaning but burning with love, tries to offer the best advice and to express how deeply he loves his Master. Yet because his conception of love is false, the disciple speaks in such a way that the Master must tell him: “You do not know it, but to me your words are as though Satan were speaking.”

Christianity entered the world in this way, and with it came the divine explanation of love. We often complain of being misunderstood, especially when misunderstanding is most bitterly mixed with love. In its every expression we recognise that love is unhappily present: we are certainly loved, only not understood, and everything becomes bitter precisely because a misunderstanding acts from love. But consider being misunderstood as no human being has ever been misunderstood by another, being misunderstood as Christ was, and at the same time being love as Christ was.

People act as though only ungodliness had to collide with Christ. What a misunderstanding. The best and most loving human being who ever lived, humanly speaking, also had to collide with and misunderstand him, because even this best person first had to learn from Christ what love means before God.

By merely human standards Christ’s love was anything but self-sacrificing. He did not make himself unhappy in order to make his own people happy. He made both himself and them as unhappy as it was humanly possible to be. He had the power to establish Israel’s kingdom and make everything good for himself and his followers, as every contemporary could plainly see. If he could have done it but refused, the fault, humanly judged, must have lain in him and in his heart. He would not sacrifice his ideas, his delusions, but preferred cruelly to sacrifice himself and his own people, squandering his life and the lives of those he loved.

He established no earthly kingdom, nor did he sacrifice himself so that the apostles might inherit what he had won. Humanly speaking, this was madness: he sacrificed himself in order to make those he loved as unhappy as himself.

Was it really love to gather a few simple, lowly people around him; win their devotion and love as no one had ever won them; let them glimpse the apparent fulfilment of their proudest dream; and then suddenly change his mind and his plan? Was it love to remain unmoved by their pleas, show them no consideration, plunge from that alluring height into the abyss of every danger, surrender without resistance to his enemies, and amid mockery, while the world rejoiced, be nailed to a cross like a criminal?

Was it really love to part from the disciples in this way, abandon them in a world bound to hate them for his sake, and drive them like straying sheep among ravening wolves whose thirst for their blood he himself had aroused?

What did this man want with these trusting and honest, if limited, human beings whom he so terribly deceived? Why did he call his relation to them love, persist in calling it love, and die without confessing that he had deceived them? He died maintaining that it was love, while the disciples, broken-hearted but touchingly faithful, dared form no judgement upon his conduct, presumably because he had overwhelmed them. Every ordinary person could easily see that, whatever else he may have been, and however excusable he might seem if regarded as a religious enthusiast, he had acted towards the disciples like a deceiver.

And yet he was love. He did everything out of love and wished to make human beings blessed. By what means? By their relation to God, for he was love. He knew within himself and with God that he was offering the sacrifice of atonement; that he truly loved the disciples and the whole human race, or at least every person willing to let himself be saved.

The fundamental falsehood in the merely human conception of love is that love is removed from the relation to God and therefore from the law meant by the saying “Love is the fulfilment of the law.”

A strange misunderstanding may lead someone to think that neighbour-love must remain related to God but that erotic love and friendship should be exempt, as though Christianity were a half-measure which did not penetrate every relation, or as though the teaching of neighbour-love were not intended precisely to transform erotic love and friendship. Many may suppose, through the same strange misunderstanding, that they need God’s help to love the neighbour, the less lovable object, but can manage erotic love and friendship best by themselves, as though God’s involvement would only disturb and inconvenience them.

No love and no expression of love may be removed from the relation to God and left on merely worldly and human terms. Love is a passion of feeling, but within that very feeling, even before relating to love’s object, a human being must first relate to God and learn the demand that love fulfil the law.

Love is a relation to another person or to other people. But it is not, and must not become, merely a marital or friendly compact, a purely human solidarity between people, however faithful and tender. Before anyone relates in love to the beloved, friend, loved ones, or contemporaries, that person must first relate to God and to God’s demand.

Once the God-relation is omitted, the highest court becomes the merely human definition agreed by the people concerned: what they choose to mean by love, what they demand of one another, and the mutual judgement they form upon that basis. It is not only the person wholly devoted to a divine calling who must not belong to a woman and be delayed by trying to please her. A man who belongs to a woman in love must also belong first and wholly to God. He must not seek first to please his wife, but first strive for his love to please God.

The wife is therefore not to teach the husband how to love her, nor the husband the wife, the friend the friend, or one contemporary another. God must teach each single individual how to love, if that love is even to answer to the law of which the apostle says, “Love is the fulfilment of the law.”

A person possessing only a worldly conception of love will naturally regard as selfishness and lovelessness precisely what Christianity understands as love. But when the relation to God determines what love is between human beings, love is prevented from ending in self-deception or illusion. At the same time, the demand for self-denial and sacrifice is made infinite.

Love which does not lead to God, and has no single aim of leading the lovers to love God, stops at human judgement about the nature of love, sacrifice, and devotion. By stopping there it avoids the possibility of the last and most terrible collision: an infinite difference within the relation itself between the parties’ conceptions of love.

On merely human terms this collision can never arise, because the parties must share the same basic conception of love. It becomes possible only in Christianity, as a collision between the Christian and the merely human.

Yet Christianity knows how to navigate this difficulty. No teaching has taught such endurance in love. For the sake of the loved ones themselves, it teaches a person to hold fast unchangingly and unwaveringly to the true conception of love, and willingly to accept being hated by the beloved as love’s reward. An infinite difference, an eternity’s difference of language, separates what the two parties mean by love.

To accommodate oneself to the beloved’s conception is, humanly speaking, to love; and doing so wins love in return. The collision arises when a person, directly against the beloved’s merely human conception, denies the beloved’s wish and also denies what he himself might humanly wish, in order to hold fast to God’s conception.

Merely human thought could never imagine that a person might stand in another’s way by being loved by that other as highly as one human being can be loved. Yet Christianity recognises that such love can obstruct the lover’s relation to God.

What can be done? A warning from the person so loved will accomplish little, since it will only make him more lovable and the lover still more deceived. Christianity resolves the collision without abolishing love. It requires just one sacrifice, though in many cases it is the heaviest possible and is always very heavy: willingly to accept being hated as the reward for one’s love.

Wherever a person is so loved and admired that he is becoming dangerous to the admirers’ relation to God, this collision has arisen. Wherever it arises, the sacrifice is also required, although the merely human conception of love cannot imagine it.

The Christian teaching is this: truly to love oneself is to love God. Truly to love another person is, at any cost, including the cost of being hated oneself, to help that person to love God or to support that person in doing so.

This is very easy to understand, but in the world it meets great difficulties. An opposing view of love, worldly and merely human but worked out with both ingenuity and poetry, either declares the entire God-relation an illusion and a delaying tactic or simply keeps silent about God when it speaks of love.

In these times people seek in many ways to free human beings from every bond, including beneficial ones. In the same way they seek to free the emotional relation between one person and another from the bond which binds each to God in everything and in every expression of life. They want to teach humanity something entirely new about love, although supposedly antiquated Scripture already possesses an exact phrase for it: the freedom of being “without God in the world”.

The abominable age of serfdom is over, so people imagine they can advance by means of another abomination: abolishing the human being’s bondsmanhood before God. Every human being belongs to God, not by birth but because God created him from nothing. He belongs to God as no serf ever belonged to an earthly master, since even such a master conceded the freedom of thought and feeling. A human being belongs to God in every thought, however hidden; every feeling, however secret; and every movement, however inward.

People nevertheless regard this belonging as a burdensome appendage and more or less openly plan to depose God and install the human being. Install him in human rights? No, that is unnecessary; God has already done so. They install him in God’s rights, since that office becomes vacant once God is dismissed.

The reward for such presumption will be the progressive transformation of all existence into doubt or a whirlpool. What is law at all, and what does it require of a human being? Human beings will decide. Which human beings? Doubt begins at once.

Since no human being stands essentially higher than another, I may arbitrarily choose the people with whom I will join in defining the highest. More arbitrarily still, I may invent a new definition myself and recruit supporters for it. I may equally choose one thing as the law’s demand today and another tomorrow.

Perhaps the law’s demand is to be defined by an agreement, a common decision of all humanity, under which each individual must bow. An excellent proposal, if only we could find a place and appoint a time for the assembly of all human beings. Would it include all the living, and what of the dead? It is just as impossible that all should agree upon one thing.

Perhaps agreement among a multitude, some fixed number of votes, would suffice. How many votes are required?

And if the law’s requirement is to be whatever human beings collectively determine, though not whatever one individual determines, since that would be plainly arbitrary, how is the single individual ever to begin acting? Where he enters the process will be accidental, instead of everyone beginning at the beginning.

Before acting, each individual must learn from “the others” what the law demands. But every one of those others, as an individual, must learn it in turn from “the others”. The whole of human life becomes one great excuse. Is this the race’s magnificent common enterprise, its unparalleled heroic deed? “The others” become a fabulous entity, and the fabulous pursuit of the law’s requirement becomes a great fuss over nothing.

If the inhumanly extensive task of forming a universal agreement is not completed in one evening but drags on from generation to generation, each individual’s starting point will be entirely accidental, depending on when he happens to enter the game. Some begin at the beginning but die before the process reaches halfway. Others enter halfway but die before the end. No one really sees the end, since it comes only when everything is over and world-history has finished. Only then does humanity learn completely what the law requires.

Unfortunately, human life is not then about to begin. It has just ended, and every person has lived without complete knowledge of the law’s demand.

Suppose seven people are accused of a crime which no one else could have committed. When the seventh says, “It was not I; it was the others”, “the others” means the remaining six, and so with each. But what happens when all seven say, “It was the others”? They conjure up a phantom which doubles the actual seven and makes us imagine many more people, although only seven exist.

The same thing happens when every single member of the human race says, “the others”. They conjure an appearance as though the race existed a second time in addition to its actual existence. Because the race is innumerable, the falsehood, dazzling us with an appearance of profundity, is harder to expose. Yet the relation is exactly the same as in the fairy tale of the seven and the seven others.

This is what happens when the merely human definition of the law’s requirement is supposed to become the requirement itself. People haul themselves upwards by the fabulously dizzying fiction of “the others”, while supporting one another from below with a little solidarity.

Humanity does indeed have another existence, but not a fabulous one. It exists in God. Or rather, this is its first existence, in which every single individual learns the law’s demand from God; its temporal actuality is the second.

What does the confused condition just described resemble, if not a mutiny? Should we hesitate to use the word if the whole race at some time became guilty, provided we add that it is a mutiny against God? Is the ethical so dependent upon chance that wrong becomes right when a multitude, or all of us, commit it?

That answer would only repeat the mutiny’s thought, or thoughtlessness, since human beings would still determine the law’s demand instead of God. Whoever forgets this not only commits his own rebellion against God but contributes to the mutiny’s triumph.

Who is to stop such a mutiny? Shall we repeat its error in a new form, each saying, “I cannot stop it; ‘the others’ must”? Every single individual is obligated before God to stop it. This does not mean shouting, assuming self-important airs, or imperiously forcing others to obey. It means obeying unconditionally oneself, holding unconditionally to the relation to God and God’s demand, and thereby expressing for one’s own part that God exists and is the sole ruler, while one is an unconditional servant.

Only then do existence, truth, and actuality possess weight and meaning: when all of us, each one individually, receive our orders from one place and unconditionally obey the same command.

Because the command is the same, one person could in principle learn it from another, if it were certain enough that the other communicated it rightly. Yet even this would be a disorder contrary to God’s order. For the sake of certainty, equality, and responsibility, God wills that each single individual learn the law’s demand from him.

Then existence has stability because God holds it firm. There is no whirlpool. The individual does not begin with “the others” and therefore does not begin with evasions and excuses. He begins with the God-relation, stands firm, and as far as his reach extends arrests the dizziness from which mutiny begins.

So too with the law of love. Existence has weight, truth, and stability when all of us, each individually, learn from God the demand by which we must govern ourselves. Each must then guard against human confusion, although if everyone did so there would of course be no confusion. If necessary, we must even guard against the beloved, the friend, and those nearest to us, love’s particular objects, whenever they try to teach us another interpretation or lead us astray. We should, by contrast, thank them when they help us towards what is right.

Let us not forget this or deceive and be deceived by vague and misty ideas of love. We must attend to God’s interpretation, regardless of what beloved, friend, or loved ones may think. But no, not regardless: if they disagree with us, we should be inwardly and deeply concerned, yet continue undisturbed and unchanged in loving them.

There is a real conflict between what the world and God mean by love. An apparent agreement is easy to produce, since both use the same word. Discovering the disagreement is harder, but unavoidable if we are to know the truth.

The world often says that the wisest course is to be selfish. This hardly gives us a favourable impression of the world, since a world in which self-love is wisest or most profitable can scarcely be good.

Even if the world regards self-love as wisest, it can still regard love as nobler, and indeed it does. But the world does not understand love. Once again, God and the world appear to agree because both call love noble, while a misunderstanding hides inside the common phrase. It does no good to praise love’s nobility, as Christianity also does, if the world means something different by both “love” and “noble”.

To speak clearly, the world should say: “Self-love is not only the wisest course. If you want the world to love you and praise both your love and your nobility, you must be self-loving in the Christian sense, because what the world calls love is self-love.”

The world distinguishes as follows. If someone wants to be selfish alone, which is actually very rare, the world calls it selfishness. If he joins his self-love to that of several other selfish people, the world calls it love. The world can go no further in defining love because it has neither God nor “the neighbour” as its middle term.

What the world honours under love’s name is solidarity in self-love. This solidarity also demands sacrifice and devotion from anyone it calls loving. He must sacrifice part of his private self-love in order to participate in their united self-love. He must also sacrifice his God-relation in order to maintain worldly solidarity with the group, which excludes God or at most includes him for appearance’s sake.

God, however, means sacrificial love in the divine sense: a love which sacrifices everything to make room for God, even when the heavy sacrifice is made still heavier because no one understands it. In another sense, being misunderstood belongs to true sacrifice. A sacrifice understood and approved by other people has already received its reward in their approval; to that extent it is not the unconditional and unrewarded sacrifice.

We must therefore reject the superficial claim that a person who truly loves will also be loved by others. In interpreting the apostle’s saying that love fulfils the law, we should expect the opposite. Such a person is more likely to be accused of selfishness, precisely because he will not love people in the self-loving way they want to be loved.

The pattern is this. The world calls the most extreme private self-love “self-love”. It calls the self-love of a group “love”. It laughs as foolishness at a noble, sacrificial, and magnanimous human love which is not yet Christian. But the world hates, abhors, and persecutes Christian love.

Nor should we hide the difficulty by saying, through a dubious compromise, that this describes “the world” but not Christians. That distinction is true. Yet if every baptised person is a Christian and baptised Christendom contains Christians only, then “the world” simply does not exist in a Christian country, as the parish clerk’s and police assistant’s registers could prove.

There is a genuine conflict between God’s and the world’s understanding of love. If it is inspiring to fight for hearth and homeland, surely it is also inspiring to fight for God. A person does so by holding fast before God, before his face, to the God-relation and its definition of love.

God needs no human being, any more than he needs the whole race or the entire universe, which at any moment is for him the nothing from which he created it. Nevertheless, a person fights for God when he fights the good fight to express that God exists and is Lord, and that God’s interpretation must be obeyed unconditionally.

The God-relation is the mark by which love for human beings is known to be genuine. If a relation of love does not lead me to God, and if within it I do not lead the other person to God, then it is not true love, even though it may be the highest happiness and delight of inclination and the greatest earthly good the lovers possess.

The world cannot grasp that God is not merely a third person in every relation of love, but properly the sole beloved object. The husband is not ultimately the wife’s beloved; God is. Through her husband the wife is helped to love God, and through his wife the husband is helped in turn, and so with every relation.

The merely human conception of love can reach no further than reciprocity: the lover is beloved and the beloved is lover. Christianity teaches that such love has not yet found its proper object, God.

Every relation of love is threefold: the lover, the beloved, and love; but love is God. To love another person is therefore to help that person love God, and to be loved is to receive that help.

The world speaks confusingly about love. A young man going out into the world may be told, “Love, and you will be loved.” This is entirely true if his journey leads into eternity and the land of perfection. But he is going into the world. It is therefore deceptive to speak this way without reminding him to hold fast to God and learn what love is. Unless the world has learned the same from God, in which case it would itself be the land of perfection, its conception of love is entirely different.

If Christ had not been love, and his love the fulfilment of the law, would he have been crucified? Suppose he had lowered the demand upon himself and agreed with those who make love anything except the fulfilment of God’s law. Suppose that instead of becoming the world’s teacher and saviour out of love, he had remodelled his conception of love to conform to the world’s. Would everyone not have loved and praised him, perhaps even, in a terrible madness, deified him as his adherents’ idol?

If the apostles had not held fast to love as the fulfilment of the law, something different from keeping human agreements and participating in human solidarity, would they have been persecuted? They persisted in loving human beings in this divine sense and refused to accommodate themselves to the world’s conception.

What the world loves and calls love is half-heartedness and wholly earthly solidarity within worldliness, which from eternity’s standpoint is precisely half-heartedness. No one is denounced more loudly as selfish than a person who holds to God’s demand and faithfully loves others by it, continuing to love them even while persecuted and unrecognised. It is natural that the world resents there being One whom he loves more highly, the One in love for whom he loves human beings.

If your aim is earthly advantage, it is unfair to complain that the world offers no friends. At that price you can be loved, win friends, and find more or fewer people with whom lovingly to make common cause. But suppose your aim, unconditionally and at every cost, impoverished, despised, and excluded from the synagogue, is to join with God in loving human beings. You might as well advertise in the newspaper that you seek a friend, provided that you give the terms, with special emphasis upon “not for the sake of advantage”. You will have difficulty finding anyone.

We wonder that Christ chose such lowly people as apostles. The lowlier the apostle was in human terms, the greater the emphasis upon the divine authority granted to him. Yet it may be still more remarkable that Christ found them at all. He succeeded in forming a society of eleven whose purpose was to remain united in readiness to be scourged, persecuted, mocked, crucified, and beheaded, and not to flatter one another but to help one another mutually towards humility before God.

In an age which forms so many societies, imagine someone announcing his intention to establish such a society of love. It would sound like a terrible satire upon the world’s understanding of love, but it might also awaken people beneficially.

The world understands the easier form of participation: one person makes every sacrifice while a group comfortably profits from them, wholly involved in the proceeds and not even half involved in the work. True participation also exists on earth, of course, but wherever you find it you will also find it hated and persecuted by the world.

Imagine a human being; you need not give him the perfection of those glorious people who were rejected by the race and became its honour. Imagine someone who was or became so unhappy that earthly goods and advantages lost their attraction. “Weary of sighing” (Psalm 6:7), he is like the unhappy Sarah in Scripture (Tobit 3:12), who “being exceedingly sorrowful, wished to hang herself”.

At the darkest hour of his need he sees something clearly. All the world’s goods could not relieve his unhappiness, since their invitation to joyful enjoyment would only remind him painfully of his misery. Earthly adversity could scarcely increase it either, for like dark weather suited to a sorrowful mood, adversity would accord with his state. Yet the highest possibility still remains: to will to love human beings, to serve the good and the truth solely for truth’s sake. This alone could truly encourage his troubled spirit and give him the desire to live for an eternity.

Place such a person in the world and things will go badly for him. He will not win the world’s love or be understood by it. According to how much people belong to the world, some will pity him, some smile at him, and some wish to be rid of him because they feel his sting. Some will envy him and yet not envy him; some will be drawn to him and then repelled; some will oppose him while preparing to honour him after his death. Some young men will be enraptured by him in a womanly way, but a little later in life will no longer quite understand him.

The world will openly prove him selfish because he has secured no earthly advantage for himself or anyone else. It is no better than this. At its very highest, the world recognises and loves devotion to the good and to human beings only when a person also looks after his own earthly advantage and that of a few others.

Even with its “best will”, which is only a figure of speech, the world cannot grasp anything beyond this point. Take one step further and you lose its friendship and love.

Such is the world’s love. An observer testing a liquid’s specific gravity with a graduated scale could not attest its degree more confidently than I attest this judgement. The world’s love is not absolutely evil, as heated rhetoric sometimes claims, nor is it uncorrupted. It is good and evil “to a certain degree”. Yet from the Christian standpoint, this “to a certain degree” belongs to the evil.

We do not say this in order to judge, so let us not waste time doing so. This deliberation uses thought and a little knowledge of human beings only to penetrate illusions and to understand the apostolic saying within the daily relations of life, where illusions have their home.

Deception takes no time. We can be deceived instantly and remain so for years. Becoming aware of the deception takes time.

It is far easier to acquire a quick fantasy about love and satisfy oneself with it. It is easier still to gather in haste a few people with whom to unite in self-love, remaining loved and respected by them to the end. Nothing is easier or more sociable than losing one’s way.

But if your highest and final aim is to make life easy and companionable, never become involved with Christianity; flee it. Christianity intends precisely the opposite. It will make your life difficult by making you solitary before God.

No earnest person tires of tracking down illusions. As a thinker, he fears above all being in error, however comfortable the arrangement or agreeable the company. As a Christian, he fears above all being lost without knowing it, however flattering and splendid his surroundings and companions.

It seems so obvious that demandingness is not love that we might suppose no one could think otherwise. Yet people do, and here is an illusion created whenever merely human judgement is treated as decisive.

If a demanding person called his own behaviour love, others would object, and no illusion would arise. The illusion appears when other people want to become the objects of his demands, regard those demands as love, and praise both the behaviour and the person as loving.

No great knowledge of human nature is needed to recognise situations in which people will like someone and praise his love precisely if, under love’s name, he demands everything from them. Some people know nothing of love except caressing indulgence. They actively want the person they cherish to be demanding.

Some have inhumanly forgotten that every person must be strengthened by the divine equality common to all. Whether man or woman, poorly or richly gifted, ruler or slave, beggar or wealthy, the relation between two human beings must never become one in which one worships and the other is worshipped.

This appears so evident that we may assume the abomination can arise only from a superior person’s abuse of superiority. It can also arise from the powerless person who desires it as a way of acquiring at least some significance for the superior.

Remove eternity’s equality and its divine raising up, or let them be forgotten. The weak woman before the superior man; the weakly gifted but vain person before the powerfully gifted; the poor but merely worldly-minded person before “the almighty man”; the deeply subordinate but earthly-minded person before the ruler: none knows another way to express the relation than by throwing the self away.

Because they refuse to know anything higher, they do not know it and passionately desire this abomination. They want to exist for the powerful person. They cannot do so through worldly power, so they desire self-abasement instead.

Have we not seen a girl choose inhumanly to cast herself away and worship the man she idolises, asking only that he inhumanly demand everything from her and praising his love on that condition? She would rather do this than understand that before God all these differences between one human being and another are play and vanity, often leading to destruction. Yet she will call the idolised man selfish if he tries to teach her this truth.

Have we not seen a weak person, made base by forgetting God, desire only to throw himself into the dust before a ruler so that he might at least exist for him, begging the ruler to tread upon him and then joyfully praising the ruler’s gracious love and kindness?

Have we not seen vain people who have entirely forgotten God desire nothing but a relation to someone distinguished, willingly calling even the basest treatment a sign of his love? If the distinguished person refuses and tries instead to help them towards blessed equality before God, they call him selfish.

Once the eternal has been removed from a human being, or remains in him as though absent, there is no protection against calling the most abominable thing love and passionately desiring to become its object. The eternal can cool every unhealthy fervour between human beings and kindle the relation when temporality would freeze it.

A person may inhumanly try to make himself indispensable through power. He may also try to become indispensable through powerlessness and, cringing and pleading, call another person’s demandingness love.

Eternity’s demand does not exempt a human being from fulfilling God’s law, even if the whole world would excuse him and love his demandingness while misunderstanding his love. True love may have to lead the despairing through despair before they learn to hold fast to God rather than suffer harm in their souls through pleading.

Eternity’s demand must prevent love from stopping in self-deception or satisfying itself with an illusion. It is no excuse that people themselves desire demandingness, call it love, and think that to be loved is to become its object.

God has implanted love in the human being, and God must determine what love is in every case.

When the friend, beloved, loved ones, and contemporaries discover that you intend to learn from God what love is rather than from them, they may say: “Spare yourself and abandon this excess. Why take life so seriously? Lower the demand, and together we can live a beautiful, rich, and meaningful life of friendship and joy.”

Yield to this false friendship and you will be loved and praised for your love. Refuse, because in loving you will betray neither God, yourself, nor the others, and you must accept being called selfish.

Your friend may have no interest in your conviction that truly to love oneself is to love God and to love another person is to help that person love God. He senses that if your life genuinely answers to God’s demand, it contains a reminder and a demand upon him even when you say nothing. He wants this removed. His friendship, and the good name of being called his friend, are the reward.

Worldliness has gained such control that “false friendship” immediately suggests deceit about earthly advantages or betrayal over earthly goods. Your friend intends neither. He wants only to cheat you of the God-relation and to have you help him deceive himself. Within that deception he will faithfully stand by you in life and death.

Talk of the world’s falsity usually means that it cheats us of earthly goods, disappoints great expectations, or mocks bold plans. Yet the world can deceive most dangerously when it keeps every temporal promise, almost giving more than it promised. Its most dangerous falsity is less often considered: through sincere friendship it can teach us to forget God, since only a friendship which cheats us temporally is ordinarily called false.

People speak of signing themselves over to the Evil One and list the benefits offered in exchange: power, honour, pleasure, and the like. They forget that such a bargain may also win human love and praise for one’s loving nature.

This follows from the opposite case: people who loved human beings out of love for God have been hated by the world. The world may tempt someone to forget God by offering power and might, then treat him as an outcast because he resisted. It may likewise offer friendship as temptation, then hate him because he refuses to be its friend.

The world dislikes hearing about the eternal and God’s demand upon love; it likes still less to see that demand embodied in a life. Does it therefore call itself selfish? Not at all. It calls the person who holds fast to God selfish instead. The expedient is ancient: sacrifice one person when all the others can profit.

God and the world agree that love fulfils the law. The difference is that the world calls whatever it invents “the law”, and calls a person loving if he agrees and conforms.

How many men have been corrupted by a girl’s love, divinely understood! This happened precisely because, cheated out of his relation to God, each became all too faithful to her, while she in return never tired of praising his love. How many people have been corrupted by family and friends, while each person’s corruption seemed not to exist, precisely because family and friends now loved him and praised his love!

How many people has an age corrupted, while in return idolising each person’s loving disposition because it had made him forget his relation to God? The age transformed him into something it could parade noisily, cheer, and admire sentimentally without sensing any reminder of the higher.

Let us ask a different and genuinely serious question. We need not point to the highest exemplar, but can be content with a lesser one who is unfortunately more than sufficient in so-called Christendom. When the simple sage of antiquity was accused by self-love and worldliness before frivolity’s court, condemned to death, and defending his life, why did he call himself both a “gadfly” and a divine gift? And why did he love young men so greatly?

He called himself the gadfly because, to the extent possible for a pagan, he had loved human beings within something higher. He sought to awaken them and refused to be enchanted by temporality or by any person, by any sluggish or feverish solidarity of erotic love, friendship, agreement with others, or conformity to his age. He preferred to become the supposedly selfish and irritating person whom no one loved.

He loved young men because he saw that they still possessed a receptivity to the divine which is easily lost with age, business and ordinary life, erotic love and friendship, and submission to merely human judgement and the demands of the times.

Through eternity and “something divine” he prevented his love for human beings from ending in self-deception or illusion. By keeping himself close to the demand, he himself became like a demand upon others.

If, even in human frailty, you seek in any way to accomplish the apostolic saying that love fulfils the law, then beware of people. Does this mean that you should stop loving them? What an absurdity; how could your love then fulfil the law?

Beware instead that being thought to love them does not become more important than actually loving them. Beware that being loved does not become more important than the One within whom you are to love one another. Beware that they do not cheat you of the highest because you cannot bear to be called selfish.

Do not appeal to human judgement as proof of your love. It is valid only insofar as it agrees with God’s demand. Otherwise those who approve are merely your accomplices.

Learn and never forget this melancholy truth of earthly life: no love between human beings can or should be perfectly happy, and it must never be perfectly secure. Before God, even the happiest human love contains a danger which merely human thought overlooks. Earthly love may become so intense that it disturbs the relation to God; and the God-relation may require even the happiest love as a sacrifice when, humanly speaking, there is perfect peace and no visible danger.

Because this danger remains possible, you must always keep watch with concern, even within the happiest love. The concern is not that you will tire of the beloved or the beloved of you. It is concern that together, or one of you separately, you may forget God.

This possibility returns us to the deliberation’s opening. It is difficult in the Christian sense to promise love when keeping the promise may require being hated by the beloved.

Only God, who is love’s sole true object, can always be loved happily and blessedly. Before him you need not keep an anxious watch, but only a vigil of adoration.

Love is the fulfilment of the law. But the law consists of an inexhaustible multitude of provisions; how can we ever finish speaking about them? Let us gather the many into what is decisive. The law makes a double demand: inwardness and continuance.

What is the inwardness required? The merely human conception of love also demands inwardness, devotion, and sacrifice, but defines them in purely human terms. It understands inward devotion as making every sacrifice necessary to satisfy the beloved’s conception of love, or at least daring to decide upon one’s own responsibility what love is.

Before God, however, loving oneself means loving God, and truly loving another person means helping that person to love God or supporting that person in doing so. Inwardness is therefore determined not simply by the relation between the lovers but by their relation to God.

The required inwardness is self-denial. It is defined not by what the beloved thinks love should be, but by the task of helping the beloved love God. The relation of love itself may therefore become the sacrifice demanded.

Love’s inwardness must be sacrificial and require no reward. The purely human conception also claims that love wants no reward, but it wants to be loved, as though being loved were not a reward and did not keep the entire relation within a merely human exchange.

Christian love’s inwardness is willing to receive the beloved’s hatred as its reward. This proves that its relation is purely to God. It receives no reward, not even the reward of being loved. It belongs wholly to God, and within it the human being belongs wholly to God.

Self-denial, self-control, and self-sacrifice which merely exchange one temporal good for another within the human horizon are not yet Christian in truth. Compared with Christian earnestness they are like a jest, a first run towards Christian resolution.

A person may sacrifice this, that, and everything, yet still hope to be understood. He remains within a shared human world of meaning, where others recognise and rejoice in his sacrifices. He is willing to leave everything, but does not expect to be abandoned by language and human understanding.

The movement of sacrifice is then only apparent. It gestures towards leaving the world while remaining inside it. We do not disparage this; even merely human sacrifice may be rare enough. Yet from the Christian standpoint it stops halfway.

Sacrifice climbs to a high place, since humanly speaking sacrifice is exalted. It casts everything away to reach a height which admiration recognises, while the person sacrificing sees that he is seen. But imagine standing upon this exalted place accused, despised, hated, and mocked almost more than the basest person; imagine exerting oneself beyond human strength to reach the height, only to appear to everyone else to occupy contempt’s lowest place. That is Christian sacrifice and, by human standards, madness.

Only One sees the true relation, and he does not admire, for God in heaven admires no human being. True sacrifice has God as its sole support and yet seems abandoned even by him. Before God it knows that it has no merit whatever. Humanly, it also knows that if it had sacrificed only half as much, people would have understood, loved, and admired it, while in one sense it would have meant the same before God, since no sacrifice has merit before him.

This is Christian sacrifice and human madness. This is love in the Christian sense. If loving is the highest happiness, such love is the heaviest suffering, unless relation to God is the highest blessedness.

The law’s second demand is that love continue through time. The merely human conception also demands duration, but the Christian demand is different because the inwardness to be sustained is different.

Continuance means preserving the same inwardness throughout the length of time; in this sense continuance itself is a new expression of inwardness. The moment you think that you have done enough in love or loved long enough and may now demand something from the other person, you reveal that your love is becoming a claim. It is as though, however sacrificial and devoted your love may be, there were a boundary at which it must reveal itself to be fundamentally a demand. But love is the fulfilment of the law.

We are not discussing one great moment of self-denial. The law demands the same inwardness over the whole length of time. Yet does this not seem to twist the soul out of shape? Does the demand not contradict itself by moving simultaneously in two such different directions, length and depth?

An arrow flies swiftly forwards through the air. Imagine that at the same time it must bore down into the earth and still continue at an arrow’s speed. What a demand!

In the great moment of enthusiasm the eternal lingers. Then time begins its restless busyness and continues to pass. The task is not to move with time away from enthusiasm, but to hasten with time’s speed while still moving slowly with eternity’s lingering.

Suppose a person has made self-denial’s heaviest sacrifice and received the beloved’s hatred as love’s reward. He is like someone lying at the point of death. Yet a future and a long life remain before him although everything is over. At every moment he must lie at his last extremity and simultaneously walk upright forwards. What a demand!

Lying down is the opposite of walking upright, and lying at one’s last extremity is the furthest possible condition from uprightness. You may have seen a weary traveller under a heavy burden struggle at every step not to fall. With great difficulty he remains upright and fights against collapse. But imagine that he has already collapsed and lies at his last extremity, yet must hurry boldly forwards with an upright gait. How astonishing!

Such may be the demand, and it may at the same time require perseverance through the length of time.

The world of spirit contains a deception with no counterpart in the external world. A child must learn to spell before learning to read; this is an unavoidable necessity. No appearance or illusion has ever led a child to imagine that it could read long before it could spell.

How seductive spiritual life is by comparison. Everything begins with the great moment of decision, intention, and promise, when we read as fluently as the most accomplished reader delivering a thoroughly rehearsed passage.

Only afterwards do we reach the very small and wholly everyday things. They make no great impression and give us none of a bold resolve’s sense of coherence. They resemble spelling, which tears words apart into pieces. So it is through the long, long hours when we cannot reach the meaning and wait in vain for coherence.

The struggle with oneself in self-denial, especially if one is to win, is considered the hardest struggle. To struggle with time and win completely is considered impossible.

In one sense time is the heaviest burden laid upon a human being, since he laid sin’s burden upon himself. Do we not say that time can be killingly long? Yet time also possesses an extraordinary power to soften, soothe, and bribe.

This softening and bribery create a new danger. Let time pass after a person incurs guilt, especially if he seems during that interval to have improved, and the guilt appears far milder to him.

But has it really become milder? When a thoughtless person forgets his guilt a moment later, has the guilt itself been forgotten?

Say, then, whether anyone can preach upon the saying “Love is the fulfilment of the law” without judging against his will, even when he wishes only to judge himself.

Could anything express more exactly how infinitely far a human being remains from fulfilling the demand? The distance is so great that he cannot even calculate it or settle the account.

So much is neglected each day, quite apart from the guilt incurred. After time has passed, a person cannot even state his guilt exactly as it once appeared to him, because time alters and softens his judgement of the past.

But no passage of time alters eternity’s demand: love is the fulfilment of the law.