According to the teaching of Christ, love is our highest law. "The
commandment of love is the expression of the inmost heart of the
teaching."[909] There are "three conceptions of life, and only three:
first the personal or bestial, second the social or heathenish,"[910]
"third the Christian or divine."[911] The man of the bestial conception
of life, "the savage, acknowledges life only in himself; the mainspring
of his life is personal enjoyment. The heathenish, social man recognizes
life no longer in himself alone, but in a community of persons, in the
tribe, the family, the race, the State; the mainspring of his life is
reputation. The man of the divine conception of life acknowledges life
no longer in his person, nor yet in a community of persons, but in the
prime source of eternal, never-dying life--in God; the mainspring of his
life is love."[912]
That love is our supreme law according to Christ's teaching means
nothing else than that it is such according to reason. As early as 1852
Tolstoi gives utterance to the thought "That love and beneficence are
truth is the only truth on earth,"[913] and much later, in 1887, he
calls love "man's only rational activity,"[914] that which "resolves all
the contradictions of human life."[915] Love abolishes the insensate
activity directed to the filling of the bottomless tub of our bestial
personality,[916] does away with the foolish fight between beings that
strive after their own happiness,[917] gives a meaning independent of
space and time to life, which without it would flow off without meaning
in the face of death.[918]
3. From the law of love Christ's teaching derives the commandment not to
resist evil by force. "'Resist not evil' means 'never resist the evil
man', that is, 'never do violence to another', that is, 'never commit an
act that is contrary to love'."[919]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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