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8 LOVE AS A THIS-WORLDLY MIRACLE: THE SONG OF SONGS Christian Love LOVE AS A THIS-WORLDLY MIRACLE, THE DIRECT LOVE BETWEEN MAN and man and for man's sake is alien to Christianity. It knows only the love of God (noble misfortune), and only through that agency does there exist "Christian love of one's neighbor," which, assisted by Charles Dickens for instance, people like to imagine, and not without reason, as being something weak, boring, and of little effect. For love is impossible without a positive attitude towards this world, as it is viewed by Judaism, at least potentially. Without that positive attitude each one of us is tied to God with a wire, and we act without being connected with one another, in an ethical puppet theater. To the consistent Christian, a direct feeling between man and man is in itself too worldly, too material. An immediate share in the fate of an individual or a group becomes impossible. Remember, however, Jeremiah's roaring outburst, "My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard, 0 my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Destruction upon destruction is cried...." (IV. 19) But Christian love is abstract and directed entirely towards the world beyond. Thus ignoble misfortune has no place, nor has man's care for his fellow man. The Jewish concept of love has been beautifully illustrated in a legend concerning Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov, which Martin Buber (The Tales of the Hassidim : the Later Masters, p. 86) tells like this: Rabbi Moshe Leib told this story: How to love men is something I 142 PAGANISM-CHRISTIANITY-JUDAISM learned from a peasant. He was sitting in an inn along with other peasants, drinking. For a long time he was as silent as the rest, but when he was moved by the wine, he asked one of the men seated beside him, "Tell me, do you love me, or don't you love me?" The other replied, "I love you very much." But the first man replied, "You say that you love me, but you do not know what 1 need. If you really loved me, you would know." The other had not a word to say to this, and the peasant who had put the question fell silent again. But 1understand. To know the needs of men and to bear the burden of their sorrow~that is the true love of men. Christian love, on the other hand, transpires entirely between the I and God, and it fastens on other objects only through an agency. Thus Scheler believed that one could also demonstrate one's love of an enemy by killing him, as long as the latter's metaphysical I is preserved . This means he must be killed in a gallant manner, in an honest struggle, without hatred or resentment. Such is the logical extreme at which we arrive if we consistently carry through Christianity's unconcern with this world. Here is one of the main areas where Christianity and paganism merge, that cancer on Europe's Christian-pagan civilization. To make it quite clear, the Christian unconcern with material needs, the avoidable misfortune of one's fellow man, is equivalent to the onesided pagan emphasis on one's own strength, which can be found, for instance, in Gomperz's concept of freedom (in his Die Lebensauffassung der griechischen Philosophen und das Ideal der inneren Freiheit): "Yielding oneself out of inner strength, sufficient to itself, and not considering it a catastrophe when an individual goal is not reached." What is the "inner freedom" which represents the principle of classical, Indian, Christian-hence non-jewish-ethics, and, according to Gomperz, t:hat of ethics in general? "Inner freedom means a power, not determining outer fate in an arbitrary manner, but rather a power that determines one's inner fate independently of the outside world." This is only possible if we have within ourselves "an excess of strength," which goes forth in "loving devotion" or in "creative productivity": Here the deed is not performed in order to arrive at a certain goal, but it is an aim in itself, and the effect is of secondary concern. If fate obstructs one activity or one effect, another deed or effect can do the same service ... Regardless of the means, the discharge and [3.145.156.46] Project MUSE (2024...

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