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CHAPTER TWO

The Command of God the Creator

§7

THE COMMAND OF LIFE

God’s command applies to me inasmuch as I exist as a creature. As he speaks to me, he acknowledges me to be alive. And as he wills something from me, he commands me to live. I cannot be told this without understanding that the life of the creature in general is ⌜willed by God⌝1 and is an object of respect.

1

In the first chapter we spoke about the reality of the divine command as such. We saw how it becomes manifest to us in the concrete decision of our acts. We saw that precisely as God’s command it is a very concrete and definite command. We saw to what extent its presence is our sanctification. We now take up the task of analyzing this command from the general standpoint that it meets us in the medium of our own human reality. We worked out in §3 a plan of approach to this task. In doing theological ethics here, we will keep to the same concrete understanding of human reality as emerges naturally from God’s Word. This Word is the Word of God as Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer. We recall that this division is necessary on the one side because it denotes the categories above which there are no higher apart from God’s name in general. We also recall that the division can have only logical and not ontic significance. To understand God’s command as the command that is given to God’s man we have thus entered a definite and integrated path, but at every step on this path we shall have to understand the command as one and the same even though it meets us in specific forms at the three different points, for according to our deliberations in the first chapter there is only one real command, namely, that which is given to each of us in our own here and now. Ethics does not have to set up the command of God, this one real command. It has to see it as already set up on the presupposition that it is always set up in the life of a man. We do not have to show what is commanded us. In this regard no ethics can intervene between God and men. We have to show rather what the fact that we are commanded means, or, conversely, what it means for the fact that we are commanded that the command is given within our human life.

Man is the creature of God. This is where we start. If we know that we have to do with God, when in the decision of our acts we are set under the judgment of a command, then we know also that we have to do with our Creator, with him who is in such a way and so much our Lord that our existence over against him offers us no occasion to have even the least reservation about his lordship, let alone to oppose him as Prometheus opposed his Zeus. He does not meet us on the basis of a great or even perhaps the greatest power confronting a small or even perhaps the smallest power, but on the basis of power confronting absolute impotence. We exist, but only from him. He holds us over the abyss of nothing as truly our Creator out of nothing. It is his free goodness that we have our own reality, the reality of our life, alongside and outside his reality. This neither is nor will be, however, anything but a creaturely and therefore a secondary reality which originally is not ours but his, and which never for a single moment does not need the renewing of his free goodness. We do not know the command as command—and it is then no wonder that we do not know how seriously it judges us—if we do not understand it as the command of the Creator and do not understand ourselves, who are subject to it, as his creatures. The claim of the command is one of right, for we belong to him who commands from the very first. The claim of the command is inescapable, for we have no place where we might command, or co-command, ourselves, our mere existence being a witness to the majesty of him who commands us. The claim of the command is emphatic, for he who commands here is not tied to our existence but we are to his, and he truly exercises penal authority over us.

We should not weaken the significance of the command by forgetting that it is always the command of God the Creator and always applies to us also as creatures. It does not begin to apply to us as transgressors and as those who are reconciled again to God; it applies to us already as those who exist. Our existence as such is not a hiding place where, appealing to our ignorance of good and evil and free from God’s command, we think we can be left alone. The command obviously comes already to Adam and Eve in paradise before the fall. This is how it always is. The command already seizes us in our existence ⌜as such.⌝ It is inadvisable, then, to construct an antithesis between the command of the Creator and the command of Christ. In Christ we have to do with the Creator and in the Creator we have to do with Christ. What the Creator really commands is not a “natural” but a Christian command, and what is really a Christian command is an order of creation. All abstractions between the “natural” and the Christian command lead to a weakening of either the one or the other and therefore necessarily of both. In the shadow of an order of creation regarded as not Christian and a Christian order regarded as not natural the hubris of man usually flourishes, assuring itself of a sphere where man does not come into judgment. No such sphere exists and the area of creation is least adapted to provide one. The command of God always entails a question to the whole man, an attack on the whole man, a promise for the whole man. It is always to be understood as a defect of our hearing of the command, not a defect or division of the command itself, if the command of creation and the Christian command seem to collide. The goodness of God is one. So, then, is the goodness which causes us to exist and the goodness which opposes forgiveness to our transgression. We thus investigate the command of God the Creator with the expectation of hearing God’s total command. We may not hear it totally, but it will still be the total command.

It is the total command from the specific standpoint that we understand ourselves, those whom the command addresses, to be created by God. It applies to us even as such and already as such. We have to understand the command, too, to be directed to us as such. We realize that ethics is not called upon to establish what is commanded us. What is commanded us is and will be established by him who commands here, and no general moral truth, no matter where it comes from, must intervene between him and us with the claim to be this “what.” There are, however, unavoidable and generally valid components of this “what” which arise as the command is given to us, to man, and we must try to guard against caprice in selecting these components by seeking to grasp and structure the concept of man in terms of the Word of God directed to man. As, then, we start with man as the creature of God, we obviously run up against the concept of life as the first of the components of what is commanded. My own life is always included in what is commanded. There are, of course, limitations. There are more precise definitions which remind us that what is commanded comprises more than my life and which thus warn us against advancing this standpoint as the standpoint and forgetting that when we speak about the command of life this is not the “what” of the command but only a specific, unavoidable, and generally valid modification of the “what.” This modification is clearly restricted, or needs to be supplemented, for (1) my own life is not what is commanded as such but only a component of what is commanded, (2) the reference is to my life as something commanded and not as something to which I have a claim, over which I have control, and of which I have an unequivocal concept, and (3) the life at issue belongs only secondarily to me but primarily and originally to God, by whose command I have to let myself be told how far it is in fact my own life. We shall have to speak about what this limitation of the concept means for our understanding of it. Apart from this limitation, however, it has also a positive side, and we must speak about this first. |

At this point we come up against the trends in philosophical ethics which are usually called hedonistic, utilitarian, and naturalistic, and which are characterized in modern times by the names of the English writers J.S. Mill and Herbert Spencer,2 the French writers Jean-Marie Guyau and Alfred Fouillée,3 and, in very different ways, the German writers F. Nietzsche, E. Haeckel, and A. Schweitzer.4 The feature common to all these thinkers is the orientation of ethics to the concept of life no matter whether they are thinking of physical or spiritual life, of individual or social life, of the will for life or reverence for life. I cannot see the relevance of the rigorism with which W. Herrmann5 would remove the affirmation of the necessity of life from ethics as a purely natural and therefore a premoral thought. On the other hand it is one of the advantages of the ethics of Schlatter that in the fourth part, under the title “power,” he can do justice to the concern of the ethical naturalists and accept it with all its implications.6 The man who is claimed by the moral command as the command of God does not begin only above the line that distinguishes him from a purely natural creature. Nor does his claiming by the command begin only here (and we must let ourselves be told this by the ethical naturalists). The danger of an elegant, a far too elegant distinction between moral and natural will and conduct is that man’s life, to the extent that in spite of all elegant ethics it is contantly lived below that line, is abandoned to a naturalistic ethics of chance and circumstance. We have to understand the command in its relation to real human action. But real human action, irrespective of its moral character, is always a life-act too. The fact that it is this must not be suppressed in determining what is ethical. The ethical has to be considered and evaluated in this respect as well. The command is given to us not only as the law that encounters us (we shall have to get to know it in this form in the third chapter) but also and already, as it meets us (and it always does), in the fact that we are, that we live. It meets us originally and inescapably because it comes up against our existence, because it comes home to us, so that we have no chance to deny it. This is the concern of ethical naturalism, which in my view should be fully adopted precisely by a theological ethics. |

We shall not, of course, follow ethical naturalism—nor A. Schweitzer, who has recently taken this direction in a very distinctive and impressive way—to the extent that we cannot set up and accept the necessity of life as the standpoint of ethics. No standpoint here must seek to be tyrannically the standpoint. We simply have standpoints in the plural, or components of what is commanded. It is in this regard, it seems to me, that a theological ethics must be rigorous and pitiless in relation to naturalism, and not, as in Herrmann, by protecting the concerns of idealism. One of the components is the necessity of life. In this respect we must pay heed to naturalism. But if it tries to press a naturalistic imperative on us as the command, we have to reply to it, too, that this is only one component or modification of the command. Problems arise in naturalistic ethics, such as the relation between egoism and altruism which is discussed a good deal by the English authors. Because of its one-sidedness, instructive naturalistic positions exist, e.g., that of Nietzsche, which make plain the limitation of the naturalistic standpoint, just as there are others which show that the spiritualistic moralism of Herrmann for its part can be only one word and not the word, the last word. The same will have to be said when beyond naturalism and spiritualism we shall have to speak in the fourth chapter about the eschatological significance of the command, about the command as the command of promise. All these limitations point to the fact that ethics, precisely as theological ethics, does not have to speak an ultimate word but only a series of penultimate words. As we shall now show, the necessity of life is one such penultimate word, one unavoidable and generally valid standpoint from which the command, because it is given to man, has to be understood.

2

What life is we know originally only as we know the fact of our own life. My knowledge of the life of my fellows, and, with different degrees of clarity, the life of animals and plants, not to speak of a real or supposed knowledge of the reality of life in general, is an analogous knowledge going back to my knowledge of my own life. In the strict and primary sense of the term, however, we do not, theologically speaking, know even our own life originally. We know it because God addresses us and acknowledges that we are alive. Four points are to be noted here which, together, give us a full concept of life.

1. As God addresses us, he acknowledges, and we are clearly and legitimately told, that we exist and that we are distinct from God. If we were nothing, or if conversely we were God, there would be no Word of God that comes to us, is spoken to us, and is heard by us. God’s Word as such constitutes our knowledge of the reality and autonomy (however understood) of our existence in distinction from the being of God. As God’s Word it also constitutes, of course, our knowledge of the absolute dependence in which we are real and autonomous in relation to God, the knowledge of the creatureliness of our existence. The reality and autonomy of our existence, understood with this caveat, is the simplest and most obvious meaning of the concept of life. To that extent the life that God ascribes to us by addressing us has a part in the concept of being. When we say that it has a part, we remember that being, and therefore life, belongs properly and originally to God alone, so that they are ours only by his goodness which allows us to take part in his life and being.

2. As God addresses, us, he acknowledges, and we are told, that each of us is somebody, this specific individual being. God’s Word does not presuppose only a reality distinct from God but also difference, distinctness, and individuality in this reality. God’s Word is, of course, a Word to all, but this means that it is a Word to the sum of all individuals and not to a totality, not to the reality that God has created and distinguishes from himself conceived of as a unity. God’s Word as such constitutes my knowledge of the autonomy of my existence in distinction not only from God but also from all else that seems to exist alongside me with the same autonomy. As God’s Word, of course, it constitutes also my knowledge of the relativity of the fact that I am this specific person. I am this, not in and by myself, not with a certainty which I can control, but through God and for God within the limits of the creature. The second thing that lies in the concept of life is, then, that life is something individual and specific. To that extent the life that God ascribes to us as he talks with us takes part in the concept of the individual. We say that it takes part in this, and remember that individuality, and therefore life, belong properly and originally to God alone, and belong to us only as a loan through his goodness, in virtue of which life outside him is real only through himself.

3. As God addresses us, he acknowledges, and we are told, that we exist in time, that we are caught up in the movement from a past through a present to a future. God’s Word presupposes that we exist in a succession of different moments. This means two things: first, that our existence is identical with itself in a flow of moments, and second, that our existence, identical with itself, moves in a flow of moments. A word spoken to us, whether it be understood by us as information, question, or command, presupposes the ability to accept, answer, and obey it, and therefore the ability at least to be the same in a before and after (e.g., the before of the question and the after of the answer) and to be the same in a before and after (e.g., in the before of the command and the after of obedience). God’s Word as such constitutes my knowledge of the reality of a movement in which I find myself, but as God’s Word it again constitutes my knowledge of the secondary creaturely character of time and therefore of my movement too. The third thing in the concept of life, then, is that life means existing in time and to that extent the life that God ascribes to me takes part in the concepts of continuity and change. In saying that it takes part, we say that immutability and actuality are qualities of God in which again his goodness allows us to participate within the limits of our creaturely reality.

4. As God addresses us, he acknowledges, and we are told, that an originality, however limited, is proper to our existence. It is not just that we are the same in a movement, the same in a movement, but that we are the same, we are in movement. We are subjects of continuity and change. God’s Word cannot be directed to an individual being that is simply the channel or functioning organ of a movement that originates elsewhere. God’s Word acknowledges that, within whatever limits, we are the origin of our movement. God’s Word as such constitutes my knowledge of my autonomy in respect also of the continuity and change in which I find myself, my knowledge that is my continuity and change, although as God’s Word, of course, it also constitutes my knowledge of the dubiousness, of the secondary creaturely character, of my originality. The fourth thing, then, in the concept of life is that my life exists where the movement of something which exists through God begins in and with itself. To that extent the life that is ascribed to me participates in the concept of freedom. It participates, for original freedom that is subject to no reservation, i.e., aseity, belongs to God alone and is loaned to us by his goodness.

Thus far concerning the relevant understanding of life in the present context. That I am alive is certainly not the only thing that I know on the basis of its being ascribed to me by the facts of the Word of God that comes to me. Yet on the basis of this presupposition I do know also that I am alive, that I exist alongside God in unrepeatable distinction and individuality, in movement, in a movement which is a predicate of the subject I which the divine Thou encounters in the divine Word and which is finally compelled by this encounter to recognize itself and to take itself seriously as an I. All this stands in the brackets and under the caveat that the Word which ascribes this to us is God’s Word, so that my life is real only within the limits of the creature. It is a created life, created out of nothing, conditioned absolutely by God’s goodness. It is of doubtful reality when see in itself, even of illusory reality when seen in its unavoidable correlation with death. It is real only in relation to the Word. It is “upheld” by the Word (Heb. 1:3) which, being God’s Word, is the eternal Word that cannot be given the lie by death. In this bracket and under this caveat it is real life.

This life of mine is obviously placed in the command of God that is issued to me, whatever it may be. God’s command concerns my conduct, my action, my decision. Necessarily embraced in my decision is the fact that I live. As God wills something from me he commands—not only, of course, but also—that I live. What this means concretely is the content of the command which he himself determines, but which will always also mean life. Life is not in itself decision. But decision is also life, my life. Decision is not made apart from the substratum of a specific life-act. Because the command relates to my decision, I cannot abstract it from this life-act or this life-act from it. I cannot regard and treat the life-act as no more than neutral material for my decision. I must see my life itself as reached and affected by the command, in the sense that I also see my life-act as such set in the crisis of the command and realize that I myself am responsible for my life-act as such. |

Really to live is necessary and good, and is obedience to the Creator. The will to live is a good will. But this cannot be an unequivocal statement because the life that we accept and will is not the divine life but our own creaturely life. The will to live is a good will insofar as I will my life in the way that the Creator to whom it belongs would have it. This means already that my will is not good just because I will my life as such. It is good if I will my life as such in this particular relation, in obedience to the Will of God the Creator. Hence this specific relation relativizes the goodness of my will to live as such. It sets it in brackets and calls it into question. We shall be on guard, then, against thinking ⌜with the ethical naturalists⌝ that those forms of human action in which it is predominantly and blatantly concerned with the activation of the will to live are abstractly good acts and their opposites are bad acts. We can only say that in regard to such acts the question arises whether they are commanded or forbidden by the command of God the Creator, whether obedience or disobedience to the divine command may be seen in them, for in their way they obviously come under this command. In relation to no acts or modes of action have we any authority to identify the reality of the divine command and of obedience to God with them, or to deny this reality to them. They impress themselves upon us, however, as a likeness of this divine reality. They are obviously a subject for reflection and, if our action stands in question, they are an occasion for our readiness, for our readiness for the command of God that judges us to the extent that it is also the command of the Creator and therefore the command of life. |

Let us recall some of the forms of human action which may be regarded as a likeness of the reality of the command of the Creator, which force upon us the question of what is commanded precisely to the extent that what is divinely commanded is also our life, and which thus demand of us reflection, watchfulness, and readiness. Naturally it is not with any claim to fullness, but only by way of example, that we shall say what has to be said throughout the rest of the present lectures. Nor will it be with the intention of developing all the problems involved in these forms of human action, but only with that of hearing in relation to them the questions that result from the reality of the divine command as this is seen specifically as the command of the Creator. Nor—an urgent warning once and for all—should our interest focus on the unavoidable concretions or the equally unavoidable personally conditioned light in which they appear here, but solely and exclusively on the light of the command itself, which it is our task to see in the likeness when we have come to the point of trying to understand the command as the command that is directed to man.

My life-act takes place every moment in the factual unity of a double event which we usually call that of the soul and the body. Never in any connection do I live for myself and others except in the totality of my being as soul and body, although never also, of course, except in the differentiation of the two as well. Both apply here: there is neither one thing nor a third. That is, I am never in any respect only soul or only body, nor am I ever in the synthesis or unity of the two beyond their duality. Materialism and spiritualism, which try to understand man one-sidedly in terms of physis or psyche, are just as unsatisfactory as interpretations of the phenomenon of man as is the trichotomy of older Lutheran dogmatics, which with its distinction of soul and spirit thought it could dissolve the dualism in which we exist into a higher unity. My creaturely life is unity in distinction and distinction in unity. Will to live, then, is to be construed as will to live as physis and psyche. Never will it be either just the one or just the other. But never will it be dominated by either one side or the other. This consideration makes it right for us and indeed compels us to distinguish between the will to uphold and maintain our physical life and that of our psychical life, but also to keep in view that in each we do have to do with the other. Since corporeality is, in the biblical creation story, not only the end7 but also the beginning of the ways of God, we shall begin with physis and then, as is proper, gradually mount up to psyche, being instructed in advance, however, that at all stages we have to do with the one whole man.

The simplest form of the will to live as physis and psyche is undoubtedly that whose negation or apparent negation may be seen most strikingly in the possibility of suicide. It is the simple affirmation of life, the readiness, indicated by a specific action or nonaction, to continue that movement from the past through the present to the future of which our life-act consists. Quite apart from its creatureliness, and as a sign of this, our life is bordered by death. Beyond this frontier we can seek its reality only in God, who has taken back to himself what belongs to him, and in whom we know that it is not lost as we believe in him. That our willing and doing, our life, is not absolute but relative may be seen palpably in the fact that we can make that simple affirmation of our life only relatively, for “in the midst of life we are in death.”8 Yet we can do it. We have means, effective only in certain connections and only for a while, not absolutely, but still means to evade death. We have also a number of very effective, and even absolutely effective, means to hasten or bring on death. This demonstrates the relative reality of our life, will, and action. The very simple affirmation of our life, or its real or apparent negation, undoubtedly falls already under the command of God. It cannot be said that the affirmation of life is intrinsically good. On the contrary, even this primitive will to live can be the sin, the revolt of the creature against the Creator, who has given us life not that we might affirm it but that in affirming it we might affirm him. |

To affirm life in obedience to the Creator can mean sacrificing it, not evading death, but hastening it and even bringing it on by inaction or action. When Jesus went up to Jerusalem, he obviously chose this possibility in opposition to the “this shall never happen to you” [Matt. 16:22] of his disciple. But obedience to God the Creator will always mean also affirming one’s own life. For only affirmed life can be sacrificed. When we are tired of life (when perhaps whole peoples and cultures grow tired of life), when we think we should consent not to use the provided means of warding off death (there is an apparently purely passive and psychical dying), when we hazard our life (perhaps in sport or a duel or for scientific or technical ends, e.g., oceanic flights), when a whole nation resolves to expose itself to the fire of the cannon of another nation, then, apart from all other questions, there also arises the question what becomes of the affirmation of life which is not left to our own caprice but is required of us by the command of the Creator, and we always have to consider that our life does not belong to us but that in all its relativity it is loaned to us, that it stands at God’s disposal and not at ours. If this “standing at God’s disposal” can mean very concretely that we have to sacrifice it, we cannot sacrifice it unless we have first affirmed it. When men do apparently sacrifice their lives, the question always is whether it is in obedience to the command that they give free rein to death, whether their sacrifice is thus a genuine one, or whether it is not negligence or caprice. Death in an air crash or a mountaineering accident does not fall self-evidently under the concept of sacrifice any more than every simple affirmation of life falls under that of the required sustaining of life. In ethics we do not have to determine whether this or that is the commanded or forbidden affirmation or negation of life. God alone determines that. But we do have to consider the rule that the command of the Creator (even though very concretely it may be: Die!) always includes the command of life, the natural fear of death which even Jesus showed (and was, of course, obedient in so doing), and the avoidance of death that lies within our power. |

In this light the possibility of suicide must not be judged as occurs in most ethics despite all assurances to the contrary, but, more accurately, the divine command must be considered and its relation to this possibility. I do not think it right to say with Schlatter (p. 339) that the destruction of one’s own life is always in conflict with the faith that lays hold of God, since it is a rejection of God’s help, a seizure of unlimited power of control over ourselves, and a rejection of our allotted destiny.9 How do we know whether this applies in an individual case? Are there not instances in which one might ask whether the direct opposite is not true? Since a public and representative figure is at issue, we are not violating the rights of a fellowman if we take the example of Kaiser Wilhelm II and ask (as Reichskanzler Michaelis has asked) whether he would not have done well in the Christian sense to demonstrate his concept of monarchy and people in the autumn of 1918, and perhaps give a different aspect to the whole subsequent course of affairs by seeking death in the nearest trench instead of offering Christian reasons for not doing so. But if we can and must ask in this way on both sides, if we have also to consider that it will not always be easy to differentiate true suicide indisputably from other related possibilities, we have to concede at once to Schlatter and all the other ethicists who make short work of this issue that the obvious question in face of the possibility of suicide will always be whether the command of life is not misunderstood in a more shattering way because the wrong decision, if it be such, is the final decision of the person concerned, a wrong decision on the very threshold of eternity. Does there not lie in the background here an absence of fear of death for which we have neither command nor occasion, a totally useless fear and a forbidden cowardice in face of life? Is not the first thing that God has put in our hands rejected here in a revolt that cannot be excused on the plea that continuation of the life concerned might have to be judged as an even worse revolt? It is precisely when we stand by the position that we should not judge people and actions but consider the command of God that, in face of the possibility of suicide, we cannot see too clearly that even a voluntary death, if it is to be right, must not rest merely on permission—for what does permission mean if we ourselves have to decide?—but must be done in conformity with the command. Even if the most concrete command is: Die! it presupposes the command: Live! Is this command really considered, am I ready to meet what is commanded, if for any reason I must take up my revolver? What does it mean for a nation or for a confession in relation to the ultimate question of its existence if statistics show an increase of this possibility within its ranks? The church’s task in this regard cannot be to set up and propagate the doctrine that suicide is reprehensible and forbidden. If it does not do this, it must also decline to advance the opposing doctrine that suicide is permitted. Its task is to proclaim the command of God the Creator. Genuinely leaving the verdict to him, it has to drive home the point that this command is the command of life, so that people are certainly disobedient to this command if, as obvious suicides or in some other way, they throw life away, if they bring disgrace on what they might, or perhaps should, merely sacrifice, and by doing so evade the sacrifice.

The next and very primitive form of the will to live is that which, according to the familiar formula, arises out of hunger and love. Our life is conditioned by the necessity of metabolism and by sexuality. In view of the unheard-of fact that we spend at least a third of our brief life asleep, I might mention the need of rest as a third primitive motif of life. The form of the will to live triggered by these conditions of existence is not ethically irrelevant and should not be treated as such, for scientifically considered—and there is no reason why it should not be considered scientifically—this is unquestionably the basic form of this will, and any deeper insight into one’s own life, or that of others, or the reality of history, makes it disconcertingly clear how vigorously this form of our will persists and asserts itself in every higher form by means of refined, and even very refined, translations. Not everything, but a great deal in the phenomenon of man both individually and more generally may, in fact, be explained by the fact that we are continually hungry, sexually unsettled, and in need of sleep. Not by this alone, but by this too. And it is, in fact, no indifferent matter whether we understand this form of our will to live as a given factor which is self-grounded and not open to question, or whether we are clear that the will and action at issue here come into the crisis of the divine command because it is not in ourselves but as God’s creatures that we have life, the life that even in its most refined expressions is also characterized by hunger and love and tiredness. We need not answer the question in what circumstances it is good to will and act in accordance with these conditions, to care for the satisfaction of the needs of hunger, sex, and sleep. God’s command tells us when and how and how far this is good, and no ethics must interrupt at this point. It may be seen, however, that caring for these needs of life does at all events stand under the question how it relates to the command that is given us in and with this life and its relativity in relation to its Creator. To put this question is to say that activating the forces corresponding to these needs is not good in itself. Nor is it bad, of course. The question arises, however, whether it is good or bad. This question arises because the command of God always concerns this activation too and does not just claim it later.

One might see the question put in different ways. First, if it is a matter of the activation of needs grounded in our creatureliness, does one obey the command of life when this form of the will is perhaps acknowledged either theoretically or practically to be the dominant and possibly even the only dominant one? Does the possibility of a glutton like Lucullus or of a Don Juan in the erotic field mean the possibility of a man who is really “seeing life,” as the phrase goes for such people? Are we really “living life to the full” when that activation is given that role? Again, can the economic outlook of a peasant of the old style, with its exclusive orientation to the satisfaction of needs, really do justice to the will to live when this is properly understood? Again, in individual and social life are there not obvious exaggerations of the will for satisfaction in this most primitive respect—exaggerations which no longer stand in any relation to the need that is to be satisfied, or, therefore, to the life-act to which the needs go back, so that we have a pointless enjoyment which no longer seems to be enjoyment but a stupid animality in which one cannot even admire the animal force? Again, are there not aberrant forms and corruptions of this will for satisfaction which, far from really satisfying the needs of hunger and love, threaten the life-act itself? We have in mind alcoholism and prostitution, and also the puzzling dilemma of so-called homosexuals. Yet the question of too little satisfaction arises as well as that of too much. It might be asked, e.g., whether the modern working class had to act as it did when one day, in distinction to the satisfied proletariat of an earlier age, it could no longer be content with the minimal existence allotted to it by employers but took mass measures to better its situation in the most primitive way. Again, if someone willingly—and this might mean with a weak will—stops taking what is needed by way of food or sleep, then, no matter how he may try to justify himself, this person will have to consider not only whether he can do this but also whether he should. And he who theoretically or practically accepts the great possibility of the voluntary celibacy that has often been practiced in the religious sphere, even though he do it for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, cannot evade the question (Luther, as is well known, put it with particular emphasis) how this arbitrary nonsatisfaction of the need of sex really relates to the command of creation regarding human life, in which this need is included. Whether the modern vocation of the hunger-virtuoso, or the skills pursued in India regarding the nonactivation of these primitive forces, are really possibilities and not perverse impossibilities in the light of the command, can hardly be a question any more; they resemble, in this respect, some of the forms of activation. But if ethics is to keep to the point, then even in face of the most striking impossibilities it must keep on putting questions, or rather showing that they are already put. It should not hand out either good or bad testimonies. It should not judge. Knowing the radical antithesis of good and bad, it should point to the command of God which alone can really and properly judge, and which will tell each of us what is good and bad.

Another noteworthy form of the will to live may be seen in the will to be healthy. Our life does not merely will to be lived, i.e., preserved directly from death. Nor does it will to be lived merely in satisfaction of those primitive needs. It wills to be lived also in the maintaining and achieving of its possibilities, in power. To be healthy is to be in possession of one’s physical and intellectual powers. It is to will what is necessary to achieve and assert these powers. It lies in the nature of the case that physical powers must constitute the direct object of this aggressive will, and intellectual powers the indirect object. Again it should be clear that in itself this will is neither good nor bad, but that the command is present here, too, with its question. The command enters in first where it is not perhaps considered that we owe our life that higher affirmation, the maintaining and activating of its possibilities. Are not air and light and water and mobility, etc., there to fulfill this higher affirmation, and is not hygiene, therefore, commanded of us? Perhaps concretely this or that diet? Perhaps this or that sporting activity? Perhaps prophylactically or in case of emergency the use of the services of a physician? May we leave these possibilities unused? We must ask this no matter what the answer may be. Nor can we answer lightly by boasting about the health of the soul apart from that of the body, as though man were not a unity of body and soul in which, to an uncontrollable extent, the whole is healthy or the whole is sick, and as though the boasting about the spirit might not easily be occasioned more by the indolence of the flesh than the vitality of the spirit. Not to speak of a resignation in principle to the possibility of sickness threatening our vital force and perhaps even our life—a resignation for which it might be hard to assume responsibility in face of the fact that Jesus constantly thought it necessary to set up against sickness the sign of the imminent kingdom of God in the form of his miracles of healing. A serious affirmation of life in this regard seems to be commanded, then, not only by creation but also by the hope of the resurrection. Yet the question of the command will also arise when people are perhaps too deeply concerned about what is good or not good for them, when sun, air, and water, the power of various herbs and fruits, the dynamism of hardened arm and leg muscles, and perhaps the possibilities of the medical art have become, in the consciousness of man, something like benevolent demons to which worship and belief are brought and which are served with a concentration and enthusiasm which make it seem dubious whether it really is a matter of the health of real man, i.e., the total man. May it be that concern for a very healthy body has given rise to a threat to the healthy mind? And should we not also consider whether it is perceived that what is always at issue is the health of the life which is not our own but is at the disposal of the Creator, so that health is unequivocally present only when his power of disposal is obeyed, which concretely might mean a strong indifference to the question of what is good for us, an intentional lack of concern about the desires of our dear body and our even dearer soul, a readiness to serve the same Creator with a suffering body and a suffering soul, not in strength but in weakness, not in health but in sickness, not living but dying? Resignation in face of sickness and the will to be healthy at all costs seem to be equally impossible in relation to the command. Both bravery in the upholding of health and bravery in surrendering it seem to be commanded in the same way by the command. That we live with force the life that is loaned to us is what it wills from us either one way or the other. We may rely upon the fact that its reality is unequivocal. Ethical reflection has rendered its service, however, when it has described this reality with approximate completeness.

We look higher when we understand the will to live as the affirmation of pleasure, as the will to be happy. It would make no sense, and would be a very superficial understanding of Kant, if we were not to apply the ethical question to this determination of the will to live too, but were to allow moral action to begin only where this determination is supposedly excluded. Supposedly, for a will to live in which it really is excluded exists only in books and not in real people. In all that we want we also want at least to be happy. Life wills to be lived intensively as well as extensivly. It wills to be lived as life and wonder, in its glory, in the whole unheard of beauty of its reality as this is grounded in the life of God. This is obviously in view when we are in the happy position of being able to confess with Hutten that it is a “pleasure” to be alive;10 [this] is in view whenever a person may be happy, knowing that happiness exists and can be his too. In distinction from health, happiness is the intensive enhancement of the affirmation of life. In itself the will to be happy, too, is neither good nor bad, but it is a very problematical will. Why should it not be good? If it is true that life, being from God, is beautiful, why should not the living of this life mean that it is enjoyed, that it makes us happy? Why should not the affirmation of life be commanded in the sense of an affirmation of the happiness of life? What would gratitude to the Creator mean if we did not want to be merry when we can? On the other hand, why should not the same will be bad?—that is, when our pleasure in life is not, perhaps, pleasure in our real creaturely life but pleasure in a demonic abstraction, in a life of our own which is lived to its own glory and in whose affirmation and cultivation we take pleasure, but a bad pleasure, a pleasure that has nothing to do with gratitude, a pleasure through which we lose pleasure in our real creaturely life. We ourselves cannot possibly draw the line between good pleasure and bad. But it is in fact drawn. We always have at least a warning in this regard when the will to enjoy life collides with the affirmation of its primitive needs or the will to be healthy. But we have an even clearer warning when the will to be happy, instead of fulfilling itself as the affirmation of happiness already present, as the expression of joy one already has, must seek means of stimulation to summon up that joy which precedes the joy that is a mark of real joy in life, experiencing its fulfillment only after first establishing this presupposition. This can mean that our will has nothing whatever to do with our real life nor our pleasure with real pleasure. It is clear that from this standpoint all the human possibilities that can be summed up under the concept of festivity are in a very serious crisis, for a special apparatus of joy is part and parcel of this concept. This apparatus can mean that man is not merry but wants to be and needs some spur to be so. His will to enjoy life does not spring from the self-evident gratitude of real creaturely life but from the self-will of that fictional demonic life. If, for example, one needs to be a little or very much drunk to be merry; if music is enough to evoke the mood (Saul and David [cf. 1 Sam. 16:23]); if the average man in the cinema or at the fairground can find joy only by the paradoxical detour of a little thrill at the danger, sin, or need of others; if a number of individuals or married couples who would be bored on their own gather together to overcome this unhappy state, and from 8 o’clock to 1, over a meal, etc., most unnecessarily share most unnecessary things under the title of fellowship; if a society (or even a university) anxiously searches the records for the possibility of a jubilee because it wants a celebration; if.… These are not bad things—we must not be too schoolmasterish—but they are things in face of which we have to ask whether they can be justified as an exercise of real joy in life or whether there is not something forced about them which makes real joy in life impossible. It might be different. We do not know what these things mean for others. For some they could perhaps be genuinely pleasurable, expressing a joy that is already there and therefore expressing gratitude. We on the Christian side would certainly do well to be very restrained in passing definitive judgments on the final meaning of the pleasures of the world. But whether the things that please the world and Christianity really express gratitude is the question, the question of the divine command, which is raised in face of what the human race does in this regard. Nor can we evade the further consideration that if our life as creaturely life does not belong to us, then we obviously cannot be unequivocal about what constitutes real pleasure in our real life. As the affirmation of life in general can sometimes be meaningful only as a presupposition of readiness for sacrifice, so life’s pleasure in particular may perhaps show itself at times only in readiness for life’s pain. The intensive enhancement of the affirmation of life may perhaps occur only in the form of openness to unlimited affliction in the same creaturely life. Merry feasts can sometimes make sense only in inseparable correlation to bitter weeks.11 The test of our obedience in relation to the will to be happy is not laughter nor of course crying, nor again the Stoic “apathy” which can neither laugh nor cry, but this correlation between the capacity for pleasure and the capacity for pain; the readiness to honor the miracle of creaturely life, the beauty of the life loaned to us by God, both in its heights and also in its depths, both when we speak of happiness and also when we speak of unhappiness; the maturity which can handle both. Whether and how this test is really imposed on anyone is another question. It is beyond question, however, that the will to live in this form, too, finds its criterion within itself in the sense that our real life belongs to God, so that our joy in life is according to his good pleasure and not ours.

Another form of the intensive affirmation of life is obviously the will to be distinctive, individual. Living, whether it be in strength or weakness, in pleasure or pain, means living one’s own life. It means following one’s native bent, becoming a definite personality, being a character. Discovery of the concept of individuality by Romanticism was analogous to a scientific insight. This does not count against it—why should nature be bad in this regard either?—but it counts against overestimation of the concept. That I find myself; that my one life as such becomes an experience to me; that I recognize the structural laws of my nature, which is mine alone, and that in so doing I recognize the possibilities that are given to me and also, of course, the limits that are set for me; that I try to realize these possibilities of mine and respect my limits; that I try as little to imitate or put on the intellectual face of another as I can alter what is distinctive about my physical face—all this is to live. In this sense the young especially want to live, battling for their own lives against parents and teachers, only to see later, perhaps, that really being oneself, having to be oneself as it was so fiercely desired in youth, is also a very problematic affair. For if, as we can, we want to take Goethe’s view that “personality” is “the supreme happiness of the children of earth,”12 this is not to say that the achieving of personality has in itself anything to do with the good. Even to be full of character is not as such to be good. If, however, willing to act in one’s own way is an inalienable part of the life-act as such, and if the life-act as such stands in the crisis of the divine command, then here, too, the question of good and bad can and must obviously arise. What is commanded is obviously not the individuality of life in itself. If this were so, it would mean the worship of all kinds of demons that have nothing whatever to do with our real creaturely life. What is in fact commanded—and this is something very different—is the individuality of this creaturely life of ours. As we understand our life as such, renouncing our right to ourselves, our will-to-be-ourselves becomes a relative thing compared to the only true will-to-be-himself of God. It becomes a matter of obedience instead of desire. Lack of character, lack of the courage to confess oneself, the sloth of making less of oneself than one should, the torment of making oneself other than one is—all these are threatened by the question whether there is any will to take seriously the life that one has been loaned. At the same time there is an exaggeration of character, a commitment to character in and for itself, which reminds us that we cannot take ourselves seriously with final seriousness; that the picture we see in the mirror, for all the interest we may have in what it shows, primarily and finally deserves only friendly-serious irony and not the fervor that Schleiermacher showed for it in his Monologues;13 that real personalities are usually much less concerned about themselves that they should be according to the rules for the cultivation of personality. Individuality is obedience. This is its necessity and it is also its limit. The same may be said of the individuality of nations and families and voluntary societies. It is wholly right that the positive meaning of the command should be in force in relation to them too. Societies have by creation a certain nature which they must realize and not deny. But the fact that this nature is by creation constitutes also its limit. It denotes the glory of the Creator, not the creature. There is no point in trying to speak final words here, for we cannot do so. In the language of modern advertising a car can be a “thoroughbred.” The leaf on a tree is “distinctive”—the favorite word of Romanticism. And if we are inclined to speak solemnly of the special nature of our own nation or federation we have to remember that particularity is not a content but a form which is filled with good and bad, and that we are somewhere in the middle between humility and loyalty or indolence and arrogance, not as owners but as good or bad stewards of our particularity—in a middle which concretely can mean either its assertion or its surrender. For in this regard, too, God as the Lord of life can at any moment, with the same creative power and wisdom, cause us to live or to die. Here, too, to be ready for both is what is always required by his command.

In conclusion we return to the extensive affirmation of life when we understand the will to live as a will for power. Asserting our creaturely life takes place under demands and restrictions that are not primarily under our own control. For my creaturely life does not exhaust God’s creation. It is lived in the sphere and under the determinations of the general creaturely life around it. In the third subsection we shall have to talk about the way in which this gives a meaning to the command of life that basically transcends the concept of the will to live. It also gives rise to a problem, however, which still falls under this concept. This is the problem of power. To be powerful means to be successful in maintaining one’s life by using whatever help the creaturely life around us affords, and overcoming the obstacles it poses. This will for power is the will to succeed in this way. The simple affirmation of life, the will to satisfy natural needs, the will to be healthy, the will to be happy, and the will to be individual all mean that I also have the will for power, the will to be able to do what is necessary in all these matters, the will to achieve lordship over the possibilities that arise in all these areas. Conversely, in all these forms of the will to live I practice also and with its own value and weight the will for power. I will in all these forms because I will power. I live as I can live. To be able to live is itself life. In accordance with its radius of activity my life can concretely mean very little or very much without any difference at all in material significance. The serious grasping of a child for its bread and butter, Napoleon’s Russian campaign, the enterprise of teaching and learning in which we are involved here, the flight of a rocket to the stratosphere or the moon, what we hope is the gentle self-assertion which is not wholly dispensable in even the most affectionate marriage or friendship, and the powerful gesture of the dictator bringing a million people to order, are all phenomena which occur on the same plane in this respect. Precisely as we always will pleasure, so we will power. And as we know that our life-act is neither good nor bad in itself but reveals itself to be good or bad in the event of our encounter with God’s command, so it is with the will for power which is always implicated in this life-act.

As is well known, F. Nietzsche14 thought and said that it is good as such, while J. Burckhardt15 in the same remarkable city of Basel thought and said that it is bad. Both statements must first be understood. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the superman, who like a “laughing lion” is simply happy in his power on the far side of all ethical commitments, cannot be dismissed with the charge that it glorifies brutality. If Nietzsche might have given some occasion for this charge with many of his words, he did not do so with his life. On the contrary, his concern was for the realization of man in a spirituality which is content with its inwardness and is not therefore serious. His concern was for the call to take seriously as a requirement of life the possibility of an optimum of human ability and of human vitality as these might be seen in certain great leader personalities. He hated the morality of Christianity as a slave morality because in it he seemed to recognize the epitome of the impotence or indolence of the far too many—something he had first hated in the by no means Christian morality of the German cultural philistine of the seventies. In Nietzsche—who admired the Latin, and especially the French, spirit as opposed to the German—the will for power was the will for form, i.e., for the aristeia of form. The aristos in relation to formation (power must also be beautiful) is the superman. It was thus one of the most malicious of misunderstandings, especially in French war propaganda, to point to Nietzsche as a typically German prophet of force. On the other hand, Germans needed to be reminded by Nietzsche that a phenomenon which did not arise on German soil—that of Roman imperialism with its reincarnations in certain popes, in Napoleon, and obviously at the present time in Benito Mussolini16—does not necessarily stand outside the light of the moral idea and that we should not too easily think we should see in such figures monsters from hell. |

If, however, it cannot be denied that in Nietzsche’s naturalism, which reaches a climax in this doctrine, the positive side of the problem of power has been worked out in a creditable and unforgettable way, there is no evading the fact that careful consideration must be given to the relative antithesis of J. Burckhardt that power is intrinsically evil. One should call this only a relative antithesis even though it has the form of a contradiction. It is worth noting that the same historical survey, namely that of the powerful princely and papal figures of the Italian renaissance, led both men to their conclusions. The reality of human life is not so unequivocal that the development of its potential may not also mean and be the manifestation of the proponent of an empty abstraction or unreality of life which is grounded and exists only in the negation of real creaturely life and therefore only as a demonization of life. With the same naiveté with which other philosophical ethicists and even theological ethicists believe in their ideal pictures, Nietzsche believed in the possibility of an immanent actualization of that aristeia of power. In opposition, one must point out that the will for power, too, is never self-evidently the will for the good, or obedience to the life-requirement, and that even though it be understood as God’s will for power it can never be adequate as a standard for the transvaluation of all values, the radical crisis, in which all human willing and doing finds itself. If, e.g., it is true that knowledge is power,17 if, then, there is undoubtedly a power of knowledge and learning, this power cannot evade the question whether it is legitimate power in virtue of its actuality, the worth of its object, and the service it renders to life. Behind the unheard-of ability of modern technology there stands the threat of the question what can really be done. The war has opened our eyes to the fact that at every point the answer, so far as technological achievement is concerned, may just as well be murder and the destruction of life as its affirmation and upbuilding. We need not waste words on the ambivalence of the truth that money is power, though it is not perhaps superfluous to note, as George Bernard Shaw has clearly shown,18 that as Christianity, too, grasps at this power in order to put it in the service of the good, it is seizing an instrument to which tears and blood unavoidably cling, so that it might well ask itself whether in these circumstances (“Where would we be without money?”) its supposed building of the kingdom of God might not always ineluctably be the very opposite. The powerful apparatus of social and charitable care is undoubtedly another development of power and under the wheels of this machine many supporters and helpers of the enterprise are dragged along by its impetus, not to speak of its objects who often seem to feel more like its victims. And if we admire personalities like Napoleon, Bismarck, and Mussolini because of their unusual ability to serve the political power of their nations by awakening, uniting, and utilizing their resources, here particularly we are forced to ask whether the instrument that such leaders put in the hands of their peoples corresponds to their real situation, or whether the initial successes which seem to be allotted to them in this direction are not dubious from the very outset because a claim lies behind them which stands in no relation to the resources that are really available. This being so, was not their leadership a false one? Is not Burckhardt right? Can we want power, as we all do, without becoming guilty, guilty in relation to the very life for whose sake we grasp this instrument?19 Where the will for power is present, as it always is, there it is always questionable, and the likelihood is—this is the tragic mistake—that the relativity of creaturely power will be forgotten, and secretly or openly the battle [will be] joined for an absolute power—a battle in which man on a small scale or a great can only finally rush into disaster. |

It seems to be a truism that God alone is absolutely powerful. This truism, however, is the dividing point of good and evil in the question of the will for power. We can also offer the counterproof here that if God alone is absolutely powerful then the relative power of the creature, its true vitality, will necessarily manifest and demonstrate itself just as much in what we call weakness, in being hampered and restricted by the world around us, as it will in what we call power. How our power will glorify his, as must be done by the will for power if it is good; whether it will be in our strength or in our weakness; what the aristeia of the form is for which he has determined us—this is according to his good pleasure and not ours. The real power of real life does not have to be bound up with our victory and triumph. The criterion of the true will for power in individuals and nations might be whether man is able to live with the breaking of his will for power, whether the breaking of this will means disaster for his life, whether the lion can just as well be a lamb. This is the possibility of the power of Jesus Christ [cf. Rev. 5:5f.]. Here, in fact, is the crisis of our will for power. The command of the Creator, which is also the command of Jesus Christ, is unequivocal in itself, but it can be a two-sided order for us and obedience to it means openness to all the possibilities that are included in the supremacy of God’s power over ours.

3

As I let myself be told that I am to live, I understand life generally to be necessary and it becomes an object of respect to me. This is the second basic thing that we must say about the problem of the command of creation. The step in thought to be taken here signifies the crux for every naturalistic ethics which thinks it can dispense with the fundamental force of the concept of God and for which at most this concept has only a later, formal significance. From the concept of life in itself, without what is for us the decisive definition, namely, creaturely life, there derives forcefully and centrally only the postulate of an affirmation of my own life, around which, according to Spencer, we have first to consider that of my descendants and then in a broader circle that of all other fellowmen,20 without any serious questioning even for a moment of the healthy egoism of the starting point, and without its altruistic intersection by commanded regard and care for others acquiring the significance of a second commanded attitude to life which transcends in principle the will to live. It is hard to see what other option there is. If my knowledge of the life of others is not established by God’s command, in itself it can be only an analogous knowledge. The true thing that we know about life will always be that we ourselves live. This life of ours will necessarily be the true content of our will, that of others being so, as we have seen in our discussion of the will for power, only to the extent that this life may be relevant to our own will to live either by promoting it or restricting it. ⌜For this reason naturalistic ethics has always come under the suspicion that it is a system of radical egoism sentimentally decorated with an altruistic margin. In terms of its own presuppositions it is hard to see how it can be anything better.⌝

The situation changes when we understand the command of life as the command of the Creator of life. Thus understood the command implies—and this already makes impossible the ringlike arrangements of Spencer’s ethics21—a radical relativizing of my will to live as the will to live my own life. I must see my own life both posited and set aside in the thought of God the Creator. In this thought my will to live must be readiness to maintain my life and also to surrender it. What is unequivocally commanded is that I live for God, not that I just live in general. With this relativizing the concept of the life of others already comes into my field of vision, and first of all the concept of the life of God which alone is original and self-grounded. If this is so, if in my attention a space has been created for a life that is not my own, this liberated attention, which we cannot direct to the life of God as such, is necessarily claimed vicariously by the fact of outside life of another kind, the creaturely life outside and alongside us. We know this life analogously from its expressions as life. But through the command, which has told us about our own life, we have to regard it as creaturely life like our own. We have to see that our own life, in spite of all its mysterious distance from it (because it is not our own, but inalienably that of another), stands in solidarity with it by reason of its being in the same relation to the Creator as we are. Necessarily if I really see my life as a creaturely life that is set under the command, the creaturely life around me is freed from being pushed into the second or third rank of my attention, from playing the part of a mere means to promote or hinder my own will to live. I know it in the relative autonomy that is no less proper to it than to me. Its factuality has a significance, if a very different one, for my willing which prevents me from simply defining the will to live as a good will. Naturally I can will to live only my own life. An alien life is the life of another which only the other, not I, can will to live. But more important than what we will is how we will. As I exercise my will to live, what might be more important for this will than its object is the fact that I will to live only with respect, with respect, of course, for the Creator, but also with a very different respect for the life of his creatures in which my own creatureliness, the absolute otherness of the life of God from which I also have my life, encounters me relatively, in a likeness.

The concept for respect or reverence for life is borrowed from Albert Schweitzer.22 As an opponent of Nietzsche among the naturalistic ethicists, Schweitzer had the great merit of one-sidedly, but for the first time comprehensively and forcefully, referring to the point which is at issue here, namely, the necessary determination of a good will by the factuality of the life of others as such. |

I cannot follow Schweitzer, of course, when, under the express title of ethical mysticism, he makes the will to live coincident with reverence for life. His own statement is that, when my life gives itself in some way to life, my finite will to live becomes one with the infinite will in which all life is one (K. und Eth. II, 243).23 This implies an erasing of the distinction between command and obedience, between God and man, which naturally will not do. That we will to live, but to live primarily with respect, may be one in the command but not in human fulfillment. Nor can I agree with Schweitzer when he allows all ethics to be exhausted in the ethics of reverence for life, bringing everything under this one common denominator. This is impossible for a theological ethics which does not know the God who commands merely as God the Creator. Again, Schweitzer himself robbed his argument of its true and final force when he failed to base the command of reverence on the concept of God, but retreated to his mystical experience and thus gave his whole presentation an element of biographical contingency.

Apart from these objections one must perhaps be more grateful for Schweitzer’s achievement than Nietzsche’s in view of the greater relevance of the weak point in all previous ethics which he has underlined. His concept of reverence or respect for life expresses very beautifully and carefully what is at issue here. It is not a question of our relation to our fellows or neighbors as such. Our fellows become an ethical problem through the command of God the Reconciler, and this problem cannot be simply subsumed under the concept of the life of others. That another human being lives alongside and with me is obviously a fact of a distinctive kind. Naturally, he also lives with and alongside me as the alien lives of other beings are lived alongside men. The concept of this alien life in general, which includes the life of animals and plants, cannot be an indifferent matter so far as the definition of the good will is concerned. In spite of his fatal mysticism, then, Schweitzer spoke felicitously, not of love, but of respect for life. Respect is in fact what alien life as such demands of us, or rather what is demanded for it by God the Creator. As we exercise our will to live, this life of others must be handled with awe and responsibility: with awe—we might also say piety, or, more deeply and basically, sympathy—because we know that the divine command can mean life or death at any time not only for our own life but also for all other life; and with responsibility because our attitude to this other life, by what we fail to do as well as by what we do, can mean its life or death, and thus represents God’s own action toward it, so that, whether we admit it or not, we have to signify and know in some way the crisis of this alien life. It is not that we are to stand in awe of the alien will to live as such—just as we cannot understand our own will to live to be good as such—but we are to stand in awe of the sword of the Lord under which it, too, stands and because of which its will and ours must be broken into a will to live and also a will to die, seeing that the command of life as the command of God can mean both. Nor are we responsible to the alien will to live as such but to the will of God in virtue of which what we fail to do, or do, means always the hindrance or the promotion of that alien will to live. This takes place either in the name and service of the Creator or by our own arrogance and arbitrariness. To act in that awe in face of the threatened nature of all creaturely life, and in that responsibility for what our own inaction or action means for it is to act with respect for life.

Albert Schweitzer complained not unjustly about the “narrowness of heart” with which previous ethics, including naturalistic ethics, had limited its attention to self-giving to men and human society. “Just as the housewife, having scrubbed the step, closes the door so that the dog will not come in and spoil her work by the marks of its paws, so European thinkers take good care that no dogs will run around in their ethics” (225).24 An ethics which knows God’s command seriously as also the command of God the Creator will in fact have to draw its circle much more widely at this point than is usually done. Let us listen first to what Schweitzer himself has to say on the point. According to him a person is truly ethical only when he follows the compulsion to help all life that he can, and is hesitant to do harm to anything living. He does not ask how far this life is valuable and deserves sympathy nor does he ask whether or how far it is capable of feeling. Life as such is sacred to him. He does not pluck a single leaf from a tree or break a flower and is careful not to crush insects. If he works by a lamp on a summer night he would rather keep the window closed and breathe stuffy air than see insect after insect fall on his table with singed wings. If he goes out on the street after rain and sees an earthworm that has wandered on to it, he remembers that it will dry up in the sun if it does not reach in time the earth in which it can crawl and he carries it back from the deadly pavement to the grass. If he comes across an insect that has fallen into a pond he takes time to hand it a leaf or a stalk to save it (240).25 It was easy, of course, to criticize this teaching by raising all kinds of questions about the practicability of such rules, and even to poke a little fun at it as Alsatian sentimentality. I regard that as cheap. If we divest the teaching of what is perhaps its too indicative or imperative form and understand it as a question, the simple question how we can justify ourselves if we act otherwise, then precisely with its unusual content it is unquestionably the most authentic ethical reflection because it obviously arises out of direct observation, and those who can only laugh are themselves a little deserving of our tears. |

It is clear, of course, that the problem of other creaturely life and our relation to it can probably be really seen first only in the encounter of man and man, but it does not first begin where other creaturely life as human life can state and represent its claim upon us on an equal footing as it were. The test whether we really hear this claim is whether we hear it when it can address us only in silence, when we must detect it in the “groaning of creation” [cf. Rom. 8:22], when it is enigmatically concealed behind the apparent objectivity of animal and plant life. We cannot be deaf here if we really hear in the encounter of man and man. Or has a man really heard the command of life, which, as we have seen, is always also the command of respect for life, if he knows nothing about the synōdinein and systenazein of the ktisis that is shut up in corruptibility, if it does not matter to him that we continually contribute to it in the most outrageous fashion, if for him the slaughterhouse and vivisection, the chase, and the pitiless locking up of all kinds of forest animals and birds behind the bars of zoological gardens present no questions, or no questions applicable to him, since directly or indirectly we all of us have a share in these things? By what right does man do all these things to creation? It may be that we have a commission to do them. At any rate we should not put the question in a milder and more comfortable form—the form whether these things are allowed. Do we really have a commission? Is it not all due to our thoughtlessness, crudity, and folly? Have we a commission, not from our demonized and brutalized will for power, but from God? And if we have, are we remembering that the respect for life with which we must act cannot be invalidated, but must simply take another form, so that, fundamentally conceding the possibility of all those possibilities, the question has to be put afresh with each execution of it? Is it not clear that efforts to protect animals represent a concern that has always to be heard as a serious one? Can we deny even to fanatics, e.g., antivivisectionists or those who are vegetarian on these grounds, the relative right of a necessary reaction? |

Naturally an absolute veto, a condemnation of the honest trade of the butcher or of high-class hunting, can as little be deduced from the command of God as an absolute permission or an absolute command on the other side. For we cannot expect either from direct participants in such things, or from all of us as indirect participants, a solemn rehabilitation and confirmation of our conduct. Here again, then, we cannot count on it that ethics will draw a line for us between what is commanded and what is forbidden. The command of God alone draws this line for the one to whom it speaks, and ethics can only recall what has always to be considered to see this line. One such thing is that respect for life as obedience to God’s command is respect for the life created by God, and this recollection will keep us from one-sidedly understanding by respect merely the will to preserve this life. Created life is life that in relation to both life and death is placed wholly in God’s good pleasure. It can be, therefore, that we have not merely permission but a commission to perform the sacrifice which all creation, ourselves included, owes to its Creator in all its temporal existence. It can be that our own will to live in one of its components must be the instrument to make this offering, just as the world too, from the Bengal tiger to the race of bacteria, seems to be full of an alien will to live which makes us the sacrifice. While recognizing the serious concern of sentimentalists and fanatics in this area, we must say to all of them that we cannot defame the Creator as a blunderer, as Marcion did, and as the poet C. Spitteler has very impressively done in our own day,26 and as all consistent apostles of the protection of animals do in fact and practice. We cannot attack the will in virtue of which creaturely life, as we first laid down in relation to ourselves, is always life and death, becoming and decaying; ⌜in virtue of which the big fish does not greet the little fish but eats it;⌝ in virtue of which the perfection of creation is to be sought in the fact that in order to be the site of his revelation it offers a radiant vision of day and a terrible vision of night, so that being is always a struggle for being, or better, an offering of being. With the same obedience with which we may not ourselves evade this revelation, with the same obedience with which the will to live must also be the will to suffer and die, with this same obedience we cannot evade the fact that we constantly have an active share in this sacrificing. We have to remember that alien life can be only vicariously the object of our respect. We do not argue for any liberation from this respect. We do not plead for permissible exceptions and the like. We contest man’s tyranny over creation: he has no right to lord it over even the tiniest fly or the smallest blade of grass. On the other hand, we cannot help but concede that respect for the Creator in the creature can mean severity against the creature, just as God’s own goodness to his creation means both gentleness and severity.

Having considered this aspect of the matter, in a certain correction of Schweitzer’s complaint we may go on to say that the problem of plant and animal life, which is undoubtedly posed and has to be pondered, can finally have only propaedeutic significance in relation to the problem of human life. It is certainly no accident that Schweitzer himself did not take up service in an animal hospital but did the work of a native doctor in Central Africa. “Thou shalt not kill” [Ex. 20:13] means “Thou shalt not kill men.” It protects man from man. It makes man an object of respect. We are not referring as yet to humanity but simply to living human beings. Why and how far has ethics to pay special regard to the life of man? I reply: Because only as life together with man can our life be genuine life together, because only as such can it place us primarily before the command of respect for life. Naturally we are not considering here the scientifically verifiable distinctions between man and his nearest fellow-creatures, about which not too much can be stated that is certain and unequivocal. We are starting instead at the point that for us truly and indissolubly alien life is not the life of animals and plants, which on account of its absolutely concealed intellectuality it is hard for us to sense and acknowledge as life or to treat as more than a mere object, namely, an object of respect. Life, absolutely alien life, which cannot be just object, which is thus the likeness of the life of the invisible God and its primary vicar and representative, is the life of our fellowmen. This always places us primarily, and this alone places us strictly, before the factuality of an alien life that is to be respected for the Creator’s sake, before an eye-to-eye claim of this alien life which—no matter how close we may be to the rest of creaturely life—is alone made on the same footing, a claim to be the object of my awe, my piety, and my sympathy. And [it places] my own life with my will to live in a context of mutual responsibility for the promotion and restriction of life which in fact we constantly cause one another.

We may suitably begin with the problems posed by the possibility and reality that a man may, by a direct and intentional act, transport another man from life to death. In this regard we have to consider (naturally within the limits staked out by us for this chapter) the three related questions of killing in self-defense, capital punishment, and war. If we take the first of these concepts rather broadly (including within it such special issues as the duel and tyrannicide), the three together cover all the possibilities of permissible and even commanded killing. We can only put questions here. A feature of the admitted or nonadmitted knowledge of the command of life as the command of respect for life is that all these possibilities, which may actually take very different forms, have, in all the historical periods and areas that have made use of them, the character of final reasons, borderline possibilities, extreme and by no means obvious or self-evident necessities. The form: Thou shalt not kill, seems to be one of the most original and powerful ways in which the command has always reached man and grasped him. The genuinely or supposedly permissible or commanded killing of men has always and everywhere been felt to be a final and dreadful thing, or at least something that is surrounded by all kinds of restraints. At this point, then, our first task is simply to emphasize that in all cases it is true that here no less than in suicide we have an extreme, a most extreme possibility which the command of respect for life surrounds with all kinds of possible question marks. Ethical reflection and instruction has done a great deal when it has simply underlined as heavily as possible the borderline character of this possibility. |

But we must now go on to make a second observation. We are today at a stage in human history where—for reasons that need not detain us here—the borderline character of this possibility—for all the constant interruptions and crying contradictions—is on the whole being increasingly felt and established. Ethical reflection on the dubious nature of the permission or command that men may be killed even within these three possibilities is now wide awake, where in the Middle Ages it seems to have been at least asleep. We are not saying that men today have become better even in this one respect—what does better mean?—but that they have on the whole become more scrupulous. This can mean, and to a large extent it does in fact mean, that the mutual killing of men now takes for the most part an indirect form, and in this form has a stronger real or supposed sanctioning by permission or command. But this does not alter the fact that for all the episodic exceptions (the 1914–1918 war is an outstanding one) a growing uneasiness about permitted or commanded direct killing is simply a fact. A storm of indignation such as that which rightly or wrongly shook the whole world on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti27 would have been quite impossible fifty years ago. And the greatest of all wars was also the first war which, from the very outset and in all countries, was accompanied by a radical protest against all war, a protest which rose and fell but was never totally suspended. In this respect, then, we can simply sail with the wind—and yet not do anything superfluous—as we take the matter, for which others might find a different basis, and set it in the light of the command of the Creator, emphasizing and affirming that there is indeed a place here for the sharpest suspicion, for the most exact testing of what traditional ethics has taken for granted, for asking whether the final reasons can really be supported as final after all. No basis for these reasons which has its source elsewhere—and we do not intend to adopt a closed attitude to these reasons—and certainly no contempt for modern sentimentality and the like should prevent us from saying that the horror at the thing which is growing today (even though in many forms it may be self-deception), the horror also at all attempts to justify it ethically and theologically, is right, not as a definitive answer, but as a sharper form of the question as to the command of the Creator. And it is one of the most incomprehensible absurdities in the history of theology that theology has dared to refer to the divine order of creation in order to beat down and silence the concern largely represented here by the children of the world, indeed, by publicans and sinners of all kinds. Ethics, theology, can as little appropriate pacifism as any other-ism, but what certainly should not have happened is that, at a time when (no matter what view we may take of pacifism) the question of the command has arisen, the dominant and most articulate theology should be explicitly a militaristic theology.