Love is a possessedness, not as my feeling--as such I rather keep it in my possession as property--, but through the alienness of the object. For religious love consists in the commandment to love in the beloved a "holy one," or to adhere to a holy one; for unselfish love there are objects _absolutely lovable_ for which my heart is to beat,--_e. g._ fellow-men, or my wedded mate, kinsfolk, etc. Holy love loves the holy in the beloved, and therefore exerts itself also to make of the beloved more and more a holy one (_e. g._ a "man"). The beloved is an object that _should_ be loved by me. He is not an object of my love on account of, because of, or by, my loving him, but is an object of love in and of himself. Not I make him an object of love, but he is such to begin with; for it is here irrelevant that he has become so by my choice, if so it be (as with a _fiancée_, a spouse, and the like), since even so he has in any case, as the person once chosen, obtained a "right of his own to my love," and I, because I have loved him, am under obligation to love him forever. He is therefore not an object of _my_ love, but of love in general: an object that _should_ be loved. Love appertains to him, is due to him, or is his _right_, while I am under _obligation_ to love him. My love, _i. e._ the toll of love that I pay him, is in truth _his_ love, which he only collects from me as toll. Every love to which there clings but the smallest speck of obligation is an unselfish love, and, so far as this speck reaches, a possessedness. He who believes that he _owes_ the object of his love anything loves romantically or religiously. Family love, _e. g._, as it is usually understood as "piety," is a religious love; love of fatherland, preached as "patriotism," likewise. All our romantic love moves in the same pattern: everywhere the hypocrisy, or rather self-deception, of an "unselfish love," an interest in the object for the object's sake, not for my sake and mine alone. Religious or romantic love is distinguished from sensual love by the difference of the object indeed, but not by the dependence of the relation to it. In the latter regard both are possessedness; but in the former the one object is profane, the other sacred. The dominion of the object over me is the same in both cases, only that it is one time a sensuous one, the other time a spiritual (ghostly) one. My love is my own only when it consists altogether in a selfish and egoistic interest, and when consequently the object of my love is really _my_ object or my property. I owe my property nothing, and have no duty to it, as little as I might have a duty to my eye; if nevertheless I guard it with the greatest care, I do so on my account. Antiquity lacked love as little as do Christian times; the god of love is older than the God of Love. But the mystical possessedness belongs to the moderns.