Eberhard Arnold

Responsibility, Desire, and Love

[Arnold, Eberhard and Emmy papers – Df.]

[Draft Translation by Bruderhof Historical Archive]

EA 20/20

Responsibility, Desire, and Love

Today, as never before, it is high time to declare: away with the lies and the meaningless, empty words about sex, away with sexual hate and superstition! Together with all young people who are urged as we are by this concern, we cannot be silent. Together we must strive for clarity and truth in a life question that goes deeper than any other.

In this area of life, more than in any other, courage for truthfulness is the pressing need. We must be ready to let ourselves be judged so that within us and around us a place may be made for new and pure growth. It is not a matter of any one person being better than any other, but a matter of an awareness of a deep inward solidarity, of equality in the struggle, in all the pain and guilt. In no other area of life do truthfulness and responsibility more strongly forbid passing on or allowing to go unopposed whatever is untrue or irresponsible, whatever is unclear and not fought through, whatever is not good and still carries poison within it, whatever is impure and enlarges the stain on the conscience, whatever is unfaithful and injures the responsibility of trust.

For this very reason, those who feel any responsibility find it infinitely difficult to speak up. Nothing but pure clarity, which we do not have, can stop the torment of uncertainty and indecision. Any word spoken in this sensitive area has an enormous effect. Whoever feels that silence and waiting are the greater wrongs must dare to speak out for purity and freedom just as clearly and definitely as it has been revealed to him.

In its actual effect upon the weak, the noblest but undecided struggle can be just as devastating and destructive as the lowest filthiness. Already during the early times of the art of printing, Agrippa of Nettesheim in The Vanity and Uncertainty of the Sciences said that no guns are as powerful in capturing a castle as the reading of poetry is in conquering and overcoming chastity and modesty. He names artists as the most useful instruments of matchmaking. Second only to the influence of literature he mentions the influence of persuasion and the arts in the service of seduction.

A great deal depends on the decision to seek one's own way with responsibility and truthfulness. But even more depends on the fact that everyone who is of the truth hears the voice of truth and gains his direction on the path upon which he will not slip away from life.

It is true that the law of love knows only one crime: the lie. There is but one sin: sacrilege against life. But is it an overcoming of sexual sin when one believes in sensual pleasure as one believes in a god who can destroy lies and deception? Up to now, anyone with vision has seen that nowhere has there been more perjury, more broken oaths, more spiritual murder than in the self-deceit of sensuality, than in the self-deceit of enjoyment derived merely from the senses. Most shocking of all is that again and again the ignoble conduct which deceives and breaks trust is afterwards represented as something quite different from what it actually was. By means of such untruthfulness we try to protect ourselves from the Furies of our consciences. We try our utmost to see the loved one not as base, but as good as possible in every way. Yet anyone who, like Mme. de Stael, has tried out of love to carry this untruthfulness through to the end will feel that she was right in saying, "A dagger thrust is punished by law, and the wounding of a feeling heart is the subject of a joke; it would be better to suffer the dagger thrust."

The wounding of soul and spirit by the lack of responsibility in love is sin; its effect is more murderous than the killing of the body. Responsibility for oneself, for one's fellow men, and for the effect upon all men, will never tolerate physical harmony being seen as something separate from the spiritual, and from the unity of conscience in the spirit.

Euripides asked, "But what is that which men call love? It is the most wonderful thing, my daughter, and the bitterest!" We must be aware of this tension and carry it reverently through all our speaking and living; only then will the truth be able to reach us. Otherwise, in all of our striving for truthfulness, responsibility, and purity the judgment of Schopenhauer will apply to us, "In the struggle with this passion, there is no motive which is so strong that it can be certain of victory."

Any separated, isolated form of pleasure in one's own body, such as the vice of masturbation, is disastrous. A child should regard it as his duty to resist this inclination because there is more at stake here than health and bodily harm. If in the past there has been a good deal of exaggeration in this direction then more clarity is needed now. The calamity consists not in the danger of physical disease, not in the consequences, but in the spiritual and emotional source of such an act.

This vice of the body has its origin in the fantasy of the physical, emotional, and spiritual life. It is far removed from the possibility of true community which can come only from the unity of spirit through the emotional into the physical. Something happens here which is separated from the spirit, something which defiles the thought of community, which degrades every person in his own eyes. Impure and sordid elements lie in the imagination which, separated from the spirit, tries to steal something for itself for which the moral obligation, moral justification and the responsible power of the spirit are lacking.

Thus it is a matter of spiritual purity reflected in physical purity. The freeing and cleansing of the imagination can penetrate only in the realm of the soul and only there bring about new physical purity and freedom, even when purity and freedom have been lost for a long time.

Purity is reverence for the meaning of love. The unveiling of the body's secrets and of the mysteries of procreation and birth before many people is a lack of reverence, a betrayal of what is sacred and will remain sacred only if kept for the one great experience of two. The temple is desecrated when it has become a public place accessible to every profane look. The more highly one thinks of the emotional and physical love life the more respect and reverence are needed not to betray it. This reverence will be felt strongly only if people are aware of the tremendous contrasts connected with love:the lowest degradation and the rarest height of human life, the filthiest breath of plague and the purest air of the spirit.

We owe to love the finest productions of art in poetry and music and painting, as well as the entire cycle of nature and life. We recognize in love the basis of civilization and the family, of the peoples, and of the whole development of mankind. And at the same time we see the consuming flame that drives countless unhappy people into ruin and crime.

Love is either abundance of life, of generation, birth, and creation; sacrifice and redemption life itself; or else what is called love is the poisoning and killing of life; it is sin the weapon of death. Vice is death.

Moralism has nothing to say to these questions. Civil codes and social traditions cannot be authoritative in regard to the basic forces of life. One needs only to think of the bondage and slavery of the marriage duty under the German Civil Code against which the women's ethical movement rightly fought. Instead of the duty of civil law they wanted marriage firmly founded on faithfulness, cleansed of mammonism and serfdom. The point is not to defend something old or to make a new attack; what is at stake is not the different forms of church or civil marriage. Everything depends on achieving a higher, deeper morality through the deepening and fulfilment of its substance.

Sensuality when repressed or suppressed by moral compulsion, convention, or legal control throws itself into ever new channels of untruthfulness or perverse aberrations. We should strive neither for the monastic ideal nor for the libertine ideal. Sexual repression, like sexual subjection, begets equal oppression and falsity in all other areas of life as well. To be cold and without desire can never be considered a virtue.

An intellectual consideration, an intention of the will, a dogmatic or social tradition can never be the decisive factor between life and death. But neither can sacrilege against life, the wounding and destruction of life's innermost and holiest values, the forsaking and discarding of entrusted and trusting life, appear as an improvement of the new life over the old. It is not true that "Whoever has never exchanged forbidden kisses, never been intoxicated with sinful love. . . has forgotten how to live!" That which is called sin by the creator of life, that which is disclosed as sinful by the bringer of life upon the earth is always one thing: sacrilege against the soul, the destruction of life in body and soul.

Certainly we know that other influences of death have flowed as undercurrents into institutional Christianity. Legalistic morality and Neoplatonic introspection have caused an estrangement from life. Nietzsche's saying cuts two ways, "Christianity has given Eros poison to drink. He did not die of it, but degenerated to a vice." This is a judgment on a corrupted Christianity's enmity to the body, but it also opens up the question of why Eros could and had to succumb to this poison. Was Eros really poisoned only by Christianity? Of course this is not the case.

Eros has no exceptional position in life. The sexual life, like everything else, is subject to the laws of the soul and the spirit. When people, who in other respects seem to show courage and strength of conscience, are weak in this area of responsibility and are miserably defeated, this fact throws a harshly illuminating light on the total picture of their lives. Impurity never pollutes us from without, nor can it ever be outwardly wiped away at will. It breaks out of the innermost state of the spirit like an infected sore from the poisoning of the whole bloodstream, and leaves behind indelible traces in the character, a rent in the soul, a loss in the sense of responsibility for people, corruption of the conscience, death.

It is clearly evident that there can be no desire that is amoral, that is without moral responsibility. If desire were a narcosis, an intoxication in the sense of a loss of awareness, in the sense of an elimination of responsibility, then it would indeed be a negation of the spirit which makes the man. Desire would then be the deepest degradation, never the highest blessing. Then perfection would really be lack of desire. Then the highest spirituality would, in fact, mean the greatest possible denial and overcoming of every natural wish. But that cannot be. Certainly no desire can degrade man more easily than the will to conception and birth. Yet every desire has in it something from God, otherwise it would no longer be living. Death alone is the ultimate enemy of divine life.

It is clearly seen that every desire becomes more brutish and low the more it is debased for the satisfaction of a refined lust, of a naked sensuality or debauchery, when gratification is used as the meaning and purpose of desire. But what does this mean: sexuality without love is the desecration of the mystery which fills the universe, the mystery of community between God, man, and nature? Is it not quite wrong to say that out of the storms of love the most unconscious sexuality shall emerge as the purest? It is true that the desire of the old life finds its mysterious consecration in the new life of a child. But this consecration is the sanctification of the conscious responsibility of both loving persons for the future child. It is the sanctification of a responsibility that is enduring, lasting, never to be dissolved or given up.

Abstinence and activity only become good or bad according to their manner and object; just because of this it is necessary to be as clear as possible about the content and nature of the love life, whether it is abstaining or active. It is said that the sensual life of man deserves the same respect and sympathy as man himself. Yes, that is so. But the sensual is an area which reveals, more than almost any other area, what a person really is. If in this respect his actions toward his fellow men and toward himself are not good, then self-respect and sympathy for just what is most essential in man must be called into question.

"The mother of intemperance is not joy, but joylessness!" Sensual intemperance is not the human as created by God, but the all-too-human which is of the devil because it is inhuman, demonic. Gaining true life and learning to rejoice are the best ways to unlearn doing harm and thinking up injury to others. Then the stirring of the sensual emotions does not need to be rejected and struggled against, for then desire is at the service of a higher life and a better future. Then faith becomes decisive in the love life itself, and hope gives direction to the future. "Marriage: this is what I call the will of two to create a oneness which is more than those who created it. I call marriage reverence for one another as for those who have this will." (Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra)

It needs to be said clearly that faithfulness is the only attitude which is in keeping with the character of true love. There is but one unity and freedom in the love life, and that is faithfulness. It is the only attitude which corresponds to a sense of responsibility for one's own life and for the soul entrusted to one. Unfaithfulness is irresponsibility; it is lying, deathly wounding of the soul; it is sin against the soul, sacrilege against life. Faithfulness shows that the joy of love springs forth from permanent and ever new sources.

To say that love is nothing but an episode in a man's life is true only of a superficial relationship, a relationship of physical attraction which lacks the deeper communion of souls and is far removed from the spirit. Mutual love springing from a common spiritual content and from the harmony of emotions demands increasing mutual support. Such love can never end because it originates in the eternal Spirit and is independent of physical and emotional states.

Goethe distinguishes between the first outpouring of young love and the longing for marriage, home, and children of one's own; and distinguishes these from the emotionally mature love of full spiritual development. True marriage, then, would be that rare happiness which consists of the oneness of two originating in the spirit for the sake of the inner life of the family, the unity of two souls that reaches into every outpouring of love.

In this area it is clear how far removed from the physical appetites found on the city streets are the trust and the longing of love in the youth movement. All those who were in any way gripped by the youth movement confessed in common with Giordano Bruno, "In truth it is a sign of a base and vulgar disposition to direct one's whole aim and endeavor toward the merely physical beauty of a woman." It cannot be disputed that there is an inner and physical state during which everything in us dies; in our spirit, in our heart, in our mind; duty, past, future. But Giordano Bruno shows himself to be a true champion of freedom and of the future life, for he recognizes clearly, "Love opens up paradise. Love is not blind, as many say. And love does not make everyone blind, but only those who are ignoble by nature. They are the ones who know only the bastard sister of love, inconstant sensual desire. True love illuminates, clears, and keeps the mind and spirit alert, and creates wonderful powers in those who are worthy of it . . . With the primeval stirring of the elements, quick as thought love penetrates every power far beyond its sphere and effect."

Where would soul and spirit be if the peace of perfection were seen to be in the physical? Can we still try to depict the landscape of the body impressionistically without the soul of the landscape, without the Spirit of God over the depths? Happiness of the senses does not bring peace of soul. Certainly it is not a matter of choosing between sensual enjoyment and peace of soul. It is a matter of the spirit which can bring peace of soul into the happiness of the senses. Spirit cannot be amoral; spirit is not irresponsible unawareness. Spirit is the holy power of conscious love which ennobles, completes, develops, and activates all powers. Only the penetration and deepening of the spirit, never physical desire, can satisfy the longing to be possessed with all one's soul, the longing that grows with sacrifice.

We all know that pleasure by itself kills. The separation of the soul from the senses is what truly debases. Nothing can be built up except upon relationships of the soul. On this we are agreed. But communion of souls can exist only in the coequal, enduring, ever deepening mutual trust built upon unity of spirit.

We want to leave behind us the degraded level of life in which the instinct of the flesh rules. We do not want to climb the false ladder of legalistic, moralistic churchdom. On the other hand, the path of unconscious ruling by the emotions and feelings follows the will-o'-the-wisp into the swamp. Love that is only emotional must rock like a boat on the sea. Such love cannot achieve anything eternal; it cannot achieve marriage whether it goes by the name of marriage, or liaison, or any other name.

The spirit of true love which is truth, wisdom, excellence, and self-control was already anticipated in pagan times. With Jesus the new possibility of being immersed in the Spirit has come to life. The instinct of the Holy Spirit comes into men's lives, stronger than the desires of the flesh, more substantial than any moral law. Being filled with this Spirit which Christ brings does not mean mental unawareness, but the opposite. It means that feeling and thought, joy and clear vision press forward to decision and determination of the moral will. In the doing of God's will, in the recognizing of Christ's will, the power of love of His Spirit is revealed. Spirit of Christ, Holy Spirit, leads to the doing of God's will and thus to faith in Christ and His future.

This Spirit from God seeks our spirit. Man is more than body and soul, more than animal. Man is spirit. Intellect and reason are not the whole of man's being. The deepest in man is his consciousness of God, his feeling for the universe, his expectation of future unity in all things, the image of God in his longing for the All-One.

We are so created by nature that our instincts are meant to come under the guidance of the spirit and to be healed should they grow diseased or degenerate. Man can govern his desires, like the members of his body, by the spirit. He should not yield himself without control to the magnetic forces of the blood. Even his subconscious is under the leadership and guidance of his spirit to the extent that man becomes man.

The mutual relationship between spirit and body indicates that there is nothing of the body for which man is not in some way morally responsible. It also points out that neglect and spoiling of the body and its nerves not only brings about physical slackness, but actually saps power from the spirit so that its stimuli and warnings no longer flow as in healthier times. Therefore the ethics of the body is an essential condition for a high spirituality, whether one thinks of gymnastics or of will power directed toward physical ends. Self-seeking, effeminacy, and untruthful self-indulgence are the evil sources of impure thoughts and wishes. This tendency to softness and spoiling must be opposed; then the power of resistance, also to specific sexual temptations, will of itself be stronger. Thus there is nothing physical which does not have its source and cause in the soul and ultimately in the spirit.

Only the unconditional love which is a gift of the Spirit creates marriage ever anew, marriage which can never be dissolved or destroyed. Only infinite life is capable of infinite action, boundless fulfilment, and infinite pain. Love which is found in this way feels touched by the forces and the essence of the universe; it knows itself to be one with the powers which shape the future of humanity, the powers whose influence extends over tremendous spaces in distance and time, reaching infinitely further than we are able to reckon in thousands of years.

Here we are confronted with the question of God, insofar as the question can be understood by man. What distinguishes man from animal is the longing for unity of body and spirit, the sensing of the Spirit as the great eternal connection of all living things in love. Anyone who goes no further than this in his questioning and in his inner openness may doubt whether this eternal Spirit of infinity has consciousness, and he may thus consider the highest in his love of mankind to be unconscious. Yet anyone should be disconcerted by what led the "atheist" Voltaire to express in Lord Rochester's confession, "in a land of atheists, love would lead to the worship of God."

Jesus, through the men He sent into the world, carried the witness of His life and of His love-death over the earth. God is love. God is strength. God is Spirit. "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." (John 20:21) In Him the love of God appeared in a purity and clarity which no longer had anything to do with the physical sources of human powers of love. Thus He was able to intimate that there can be people who, deemed worthy of a special task of God's love, are released or absolved from physical love for the sake of the future world order based on love. In Jesus it is shown that the love which is from God and is poured out on men in His Spirit is not a sublimation of human desire. Rather, here it is revealed that the pure love which is in Christ has nothing to do with the emphasis on man and the emphasis on self which betray the core of death in even the most exalted human love.

It is clear that only from God, who alone holds everything in His hand, can we expect the answer. He gave examples of self-mastery to mankind. He has sent men of character who lived in life-affirming asceticism, without whose living example we could not hold out in this tremendous struggle. Such asceticism does not despise nature and the body. On the contrary, it points to a deep reverence for natural life, subordinating natural life to the unconditional rulership of the higher life of the spirit.

Freedom from possessive desire must be lived out as the freedom of outpouring love, as freedom of the all-embracing Spirit. Poverty and chastity shall be a living example to us, a sublime possibility of the highest will of love. Freewillingness and grace alone will lead to this way of obedience and faith; for it is God's Spirit who claims such obedience. On this way mere outward order is contrasted with the higher life. The higher life alone is capable of giving an inner direction to the practical everyday life of all men; for it springs not from rigidly exacting law but from bountiful grace. Marriage and career, society and state are not threatened by this living asceticism; instead, everybody is challenged to take up the crucial struggle within, which wills and ventures the victory of the spirit over material things everywhere, again and again.

Kant was obviously wrong in recognizing only cold duty and sensual inclination. The living soul knows another desire, one that strives for everlasting perfection, a desire quite different from the sensual driving force of a love life which is directed only to physical satisfaction and the feeling of the moment. It is an urge of the liberating spirit which is something completely different from moralistic compulsion. In man there is a sacred urge which in truth wants love, which always has in view the whole of life and everlasting perfection, rather than the momentary condition alone.

Such intense heightening of man's living activity opposes all possession, including the possession of love, whereas sensual desire and legal order have to be concerned with lust and possession. The spiritual urge seeks the ultimate, true value of life, the mystery of life, because it overcomes all other values. This deepest value of life lies in the indestructible community of spirits, in divine spiritual love which is free of sensuality and self-seeking. The urge to find this true value of life is the communal will of the spirit; it is the outpouring will to love; it is in God alone. It stands just as much opposed to the covetous sensual will as to moralistic law and order.

Man's love life will be healthy and happy in the deepest sense only when it is guided by this ultimate evaluation of life. The rulership of the spirit means riches, for the spirit determines and guides and governs all living impressions in their manifold vitality. It does not destroy true values while overcoming false ones.

In practical life one can test the significance of this evaluation with every beloved person. Love begins with interest in the being of the person one loves, but love will rejoice in this being only if it recognizes in the beloved person the true worth of his or her innermost calling. Love's incentive is directed basically toward the perfecting of the beloved one, and always in the one sense: to recognize and enhance the worth of the beloved's life within life as a whole.

Every community which seeks this love is not built upon pleasure, but always and completely upon the importance of men's calling. Dedication, which is a part of love, will break through in men who are seized by this calling. The happiness of this pure love consists in putting aside one's sensual desires in the freedom which is given when the spirit rules one's life, when men's highest calling prevails.

Augustine shows us how today's questions have always been the concerns of mankind and its leading minds. His words about love, therefore, shall sound the closing note.

The love of man must be redeemed. "May its ardent fervor for the world become an ardent fervor for the Master of this world. Love, yes; but take care what it is you love. Love is the self of the soul, the hand of the soul. When it holds one thing, it cannot hold something else. If it is to hold what one gives it, it has to put down what it is holding. The one kind of love is turned toward community, the other is limited to the ego; the one looks to the good of all and thinks of the spiritual fellowship, the other tries to bring even the cause of fellowship under itself. The worth of a man is not to be assessed according to what he knows, but according to what he loves."

The love of God desires nothing. It only gives and sacrifices itself. Its only memorial is the cross.