# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S76
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

76   On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith etc.

its own selfhood would have been incapable of any personal relationship to its heavenly benefactor, fell into doubt and mistrust against the word by which the ordering, highest wisdom and love had been called to mind. In this way it could then happen that the basic desire for the furtherance of its own life was raised to a ruling principle, whereby, rather, fear of God had to fill the heart, and its capacity to unite itself morally even with the most perfect Being remained clinging only to the world. Everything within it was thereby wholly modified, and

to another, where sin, in equal measure, would vanish contrary to all experience. Most questionable of all is that here the entire antithesis of good and evil is dissolved into a quantitative difference of more or less, and must finally be lost in the sea of pantheistic consequences, according to which even God is no longer distinct from the world. The proper seat of the error is to be sought in the conception of evil according to metaphysical categories (which, in a wholly formal sense abstracted from ethical significance, call something good insofar as it serves to fulfill the drives present in a being, is recognized as agreeing with some will), so that evil is supposed to consist only in this: that, in comparison with more perfect objects of our desire, one turns more toward the less perfect objects that enclose less reality. But that is a consequence of the estrangement within man's own being, which in turn is itself first conditioned by his fall from God. When teachers of the Church, especially Augustine and later followers of his, described this as a conversio a bono majori ad minus, a bono incommutabili ad commutabilia, as a defectio ab eo, quod summe est, ad id, quod minus est — they did not mean thereby, as the words themselves show, to restrict it one-sidedly to a gradual hindrance of the soul through its corporeality, which would after all stand only in a certain connection with a creaturely-metaphysical imperfection, because will and understanding always press toward constancy of the moments of life, whereas sensuousness requires a changing, momentary enjoyment. To them, too, it is an activity of self-determination in a creature that runs counter to the original purpose — a creature which, in the delusion of exalting itself to equality with God, put its own self-will in the use of the outer world in the place of the commandment, and through this being-for-itself forfeited the highest good. The basic desire, which seeks to satisfy individual existence through self-perfection, withdrew itself from a connection, guided by conscience toward God, with that faculty in man which is directed toward the objects outside us in which we perceive perfection — so that, under the co-working of a sensuous craving, the self fell into dependence on temporal things which, cut off from their relation to God — whose love and wisdom they were meant to reveal — could no longer be enjoyed and used by it in accordance with the absolute destiny of its existence. The health of human life was recognizable only where, with all the impulses of conditioned significance in their natural vitality, the most intimate positive union and undivided harmony had been entered into by a striving that hallows them all. The consciousness of man embraces the self together with the world and the content of its conscience, which determined the two basic drives — the desire for perfection as such, and for our own in particular — in their mutual, normal relation. The former has as the object of its love not merely created things, but is able to possess the Creator Himself, the highest perfection outside of us, and therefore supplies the matter for the noblest goodness of the will, when the creature has been received into the fellowship of this holy love and the enjoyment of the Beloved. Through the tearing apart of this beautiful, lovely bond, the spirit of man has sunk down to flesh; here there can be no talk of a mere subordination of the greater to the lesser; the loss of the infinite object is likewise of infinite significance.