Part 3
better to die than to corrupt a child, to take away his childlike spirit.
Anything that puts an end to childhood is corruption.
Anything that destroys a child's true nature is corruption.
We despise children not only when we mislead them to sin, but when we in any way deprive them of their childlikeness. Therefore Jesus calls us to hold children in highest esteem, to love the childlike spirit, to long for nothing else than to become like children.
Talk, October 1935
Love Divine and Love Human
In this essay from 1921, Arnold maintains that sexual love represents only a small part of the overpowering love of God. As such, Eros is not inherently suspect, but ought to be celebrated - as long as it remains subordinated to Agape. This bold assertion is consistent with Arnold's view that nature itself should be redeemed for God - and that the idea of being redeemed "from" our earthly nature is simply not Christian.
In his "Christmas Carol", Dickens portrays a rich old merchant in whom all but the last spark of love has died.
His life has been ruined because he has given himself over completely to earning money. Nothing but coldness comes
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D from him; he is a man without a heart. This is so tangible that no child or beggar on the street dares ask him for the time of day or approach him for help.
In deathly loneliness he lives a purely commercial existence, devoid of human relationships. He has sacrificed even the love of his youth to the idol of money.
Any pure hope he might once have had has been consumed in his quest for recognition and success; every noble feeling has been extinguished in his craving for financial gain. A man of established fortune, he is a soulless being. His life is so completely turned away from the community of men that his death is merely the confirmation of a long-established condition. Only if the spirit of his youth once more awakens will his lonely coldness and emptiness give way to God's warmth.
No one can live without love. Those without love are aging and dying; in truth, they are already dead. Where love sickens and degenerates, the innermost life is poisoned. Those who allow love's ardent urge and long ing to go unused suffer the loss of their most precious possession.
Deep down, all of us worry about love. Every person feels that love is his destiny. Yet there are many who, in anxious moments, fear the love-life; to these people, love appears as a fire so hot it must be avoided. Others, no more fireproof, come too close to the blazing fire and E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D are burned. They allow themselves to be destroyed in a smoldering fire. Their outward persons deteriorate because they let their inner beings go to ruin.
For most people, love is a labyrinth in which every step seems a blunder. They have not discovered the secret of how to guide the living stream into the right channel. They feel that all love must end in God, just as all rivers flow into the ocean. They realize that much water trickles away or evaporates instead of finding its destination. They want nothing but the fulfillment of their own being and God's being, and yet they lack the vision to separate the pure, original force of love from its weakened forms.
Our language has only one word for the many different degrees of love - including all its sick and deviant forms.
This simplicity of expression hides the mystery of love, and does not distinguish the relationships of body and soul that are healthy from those that are sick. The Greeks, on the other hand, differentiated between Eros, which includes but is not limited to possessive desire; and Agape, which is divine love - God's all-embracing love that gives itself to all.
People frequently ask how these spheres of love are related. Some are inclined to deny any essential difference between possessive love and personal affection, while others try to separate "holy" love from any contact with E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
Eros. Still others insist that since there can be no radiance of love without erotic energies, divine love does not exist at all.
Only those who have distanced themselves from God can judge in this way. Those who have been overwhelmed by God know that all forms of love, no matter how impure or distorted, are simply reflections of his unending and outpouring love. They are sure that God's holy love alone is what is essential in the love-life, and they know that the only important question regarding love is whether it remains in touch with this center of life, or whether it strays from it.
Scientists have pointed out that the areas in the brain responsible for religious experience and for the experience of love are adjacent. Herein lies a deep symbolism that points to the ultimate truth: "God is love; he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." Even the most degenerate and besmirched feelings of love have something from God hidden in them! Sadly, such feelings consume what is of God within them, to the extent that a person drowning in the flesh no longer has any eye for God at all.
Those who squander the energies of their love in the intoxication of the senses deprive the neighboring centers of the brain of their vital power. They exhaust and ruin their feeling for the life of God. They become dull to the E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D noblest impulses that come from the heart of God. Their vision is clouded, and they grope in the dark. But God sees with pure eyes. God floods us with Agape, the di vine love that is devoid of lust or possessiveness.
Most people equate Eros with lust, which in its worst form continually exchanges one possession for another.
But the erotic life can be ruled by Agape. How often this actually happens is another question.
In this visible world of time and space, we are unable to relate to one another without experiencing the attractions and repulsions of soul and body. This is the sphere of emotionally stimulated love, manifested in the holding of hands, the meeting of eyes, the striding together arm in arm. This is fellowship in word and song, in hiking and sport; it is friendship in joy and sorrow, in faith and in hope; this is the community of humankind without which we could not live.
We rejoice about these powers of Eros that cannot be mistaken for sultry eroticism. For Eros does not represent mere lust, but communal experiences of the soul that belong to a relatively pure atmosphere. Yet the purest air of love is still the breath of the Spirit that goes out from Jesus; Socrates and Plato could only sense this.
The essence and basis of all life and community is Agape, the love that comes from God and leads to God.
Agape is the love that never ends and knows no bounds.
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
It is the revelation of the transcendent in the immanent
- the revelation of the spiritual in the material, the cosmic in the earthly.
The love between two people or between the members of a community can be fulfilled only in God's inexhaustible and everlasting eternity. Only in God can love flow freely through our lives; only in him can we radiate a love free from the possessive desire of Eros.
Only in him can the intoxication of the senses be replaced by the ecstasy of the divine Spirit, which is so often mistaken for asceticism. Eros has submitted to the rulership of Agape. The all-embracing Spirit has replaced the isolated, possessive will.
Nietzsche himself recognized that all love leads to the eternal and the endless: "All desire seeks eternity deep, profound eternity!" Goethe, too, recognized the power of Eros: Faust at first exults in the physical, but ultimately finds fulfillment in building and preserving the community of humankind.
Our love-life determines our fate in the most serious sense of the word. Either Eros hurls us down into the hellish abyss of demonic self-destruction, or it lifts us up to the pure heights of God. This depends on the inner nature of our love-life - on the nature of the spiritual powers with which we align ourselves. At times we may be unaware whether we have joined with the powers of E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D darkness or with the light of God, but this will become obvious by what effect our love has. One who goes to the harlot becomes flesh and spirit with her. One who enters into the union of two before God and in God experiences rich blessings.
God compares his covenant with his people and the unity of Christ with his church to the union of betrothal and marriage. Christ is the single object of the devotion of his church; he kindles in her all the powers of love and of the Spirit. In the same way, true marriage awakens and unfolds all the powers of manhood and womanhood.
This will - to create something beyond the self - should awaken all our energies for the will of God.
But even if the way of marriage is barred by bitter experience or inverted inclination, we can still find happiness through God's love. We must not estrange ourselves from life and love in bitterness, nor stifle the best in ourselves by turning to possessive desires.
Rather, we must accept that higher calling in which all powers of love are kindled and revived by the generous, sunny love of God. Then none of love's energy will be wasted or left unused; no power of life suppressed. But we must rise up out of the smoke and fog so that our vision becomes free and our hearts wide; we must open our lungs to the pure air. Here, love comes into its own, E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D love that wants nothing for itself but is fulfilled in lavish giving.
It is true that there is a certain asceticism in the life-affirming love of God, an asceticism that rejects possessive desire. But those who are liberated from the sexual in this way belong to the happiest of people. They are able to love more abundantly than others because their entire time and strength are free, because Agape, God's love, dominate their relationships to others.
Many people who struggle against degeneration and defilement end up embracing a purely negative asceticism.
But Jesus did not want this. He had no distrust of life; he joyfully affirmed all those forces of life that are illumined, penetrated, and ruled by God's love. He held marriage and its inviolability in high esteem, and honored it by discerning its desecration in the impure thought and the covetous look. He established brotherly love as the sign of his church, and in his own life he embraced all people without anxiety or compromise.
He loved the rich young man and yet challenged him to give away all that he had, and he welcomed those who sought redemption from their sick sensuality when he allowed women of ill repute to kiss his feet and anoint his hair. Even on the cross, he gave his mother a son, and his friend a mother.
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
Jesus transcended the Eros-life completely. He did not stifle emotional relationships, but rather revealed the love of God free from fleshly desire. And God's love is eternal and imperishable. Greed and vanity, possession and property perish before it, as do the highest gifts of language, knowledge, and prophecy. "He who lives in love lives in God, and God in him." Love begets love.
He loved first who himself is love; only through him are we able to love.
The warmth that comes from God's heart cannot be produced in any laboratory, by any decree, or by any organization. No friendly effort or zealous benevolence can imitate it. Whoever has felt its unique life-power radiating from the aged or from the wheelchair of a cripple knows that it is independent of the physical freshness of youth. It is life itself. It is a primary force, an original power of the deepest source.
This Agape knows no bounds of space and time. It is the strength of unconquerable perseverance. It is steadfast faithfulness, and it is equal to every task. It clothes the energy of our love in inexpressible purity, and never injures the modesty or sensitivity of the soul. It is free from inflated arrogance, from pretense, and from presumption for its own advantage. It is real and genuine, and has nothing to do with passing effervescence or superficial enthusiasm.
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
Agape seeks and demands nothing for itself because it lives completely in the object of its love. It knows nothing of rights, and instead finds happiness in giving.
It is never harsh, never excited, never provoked to bitterness. It sees both the essential and the potential in everything, and does not take into account what might still be evil. Yet it has nothing to do with injustice. It sees through everything that still delays the holy calling of a soul. It wards off all that threatens to obstruct a person's destiny. And it can do this because it is one with God, because it hopes and believes in the final fulfillment of humanity.
No founder of a religion, no philosopher or moralist has lived this love as Jesus did - Jesus, who entered the life of the physical and the emotional. And the love of Jesus is forever and is boundless, or it is nothing. It gives and forgives everything, and includes enemies as well as friends. It is not limited by possession or property.
It is unconditional and absolute, and is never frustrated by outward circumstances. By it, his followers will be known to the world. In it, we no longer look to be loved but seek to love others.
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
Responsibility, Desire, and Love
Euripides said that love is the most wonderful thing, but also the bitterest. The gravity of this truth must touch us deeply, for lack of responsibility in love is sin.
And the wounding of soul and spirit by irresponsible passion is more murderous than the killing of the body.
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.
A temple is desecrated when it becomes a public place exposed to every profane look.
Reverence for the emotional and physical aspects of love is necessary because the experience of love spans starkly opposing poles. The love-life reaches from the lowest degradation to the rarest heights; from the filthiest breath of plague to 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. And at the same time we see in love - or what is called love - a consuming flame that drives countless unhappy people into ruin and crime. Love is either abundance of life, of generation, birth, and creation; or E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D else what is called love is sin and death - the poisoning and killing of life.
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 need only think of the bondage and slavery of marriage under the German
Civil Code, against which the women's movement rightly fought. They wanted marriages founded on faithfulness, not based on the duty of civil law. But what is at stake is not the different forms of church or civil marriage. What we must find is a morality that is altogether higher and deeper.
Sensuality throws itself into ever new channels of untruthfulness and perverse aberration when suppressed by moral compulsion, convention, or legal control. The monastic ideal is no better than the libertine ideal: sexual repression, like sexual subjection, begets oppression and falsity in all other areas of life. To be cold and without desire can never be considered a virtue.
We cannot deny that legalistic morality and neoplatonic introspection have influenced institutional
Christianity. But intellectual consideration or social tradition can never be decisive in this fight between life and death. It is not true that "Whoever has never exchanged forbidden kisses, never been intoxicated with sinful love... has forgotten how to live!" That E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D which is called sin by the creator of life is always one thing: sacrilege against the soul.
Eros can have no exceptional position in life. The sexual life, like everything else, is subject to the laws of soul and spirit. Thus weakness in this area throws a harshly illuminating light on the lives of people who otherwise seem to show courage and strength of conscience. Impurity never pollutes us from without, nor can it ever be wiped away at will. It breaks out of our innermost depths like an infected sore, poisoning the whole bloodstream, and leaves behind indelible traces on the character and soul.
We are more than body and soul, more than animal.
We are spirit. And intellect and reason are not the whole of our being. What is deepest in us is our consciousness of God, his feeling for the universe, his expectation of future unity in all things. What distinguishes us from animals is our longing for unity of body and spirit, our sensing of the Spirit as the great eternal connection of all living things in love. Even the "atheist" Voltaire confessed that in a land of atheists, love would lead to the worship of God.
Thus Kant was wrong in recognizing only cold duty and sensual inclination. The living soul strives for what is ultimate, for the divine love that is free of lust and self-seeking - for the communal spirit, the outpouring
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D will to love, which stands as much opposed to the covetous sensual will as to moralistic law and order. Our love life will be healthy and happy only when it is guided by this ultimate will.
Our love for each other must be redeemed. With Augustine, we must pray that its "ardent fervor for the world become an ardent fervor for the Master of this world": Love, 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 persons is not to be assessed according to what they know, but according to what they love.
Essay, 1928
The New Morality
Until Jesus appeared, the greatest goodness anyone could offer God was moral endeavor. People strove strenu ously toward an ideal, scrupulously obeying commands
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D and prohibitions, repressing and stifling contrary inclinations, and frantically attempting to deny and mortify the flesh. They tried with human strength to ascend the mountain where the light would not be obscured nor the air polluted. But Jesus brought a justice better than anything human effort could achieve, and different in every sense from what the law and the prophets offered.
Even so, the law and the prophets reveal God's being and will. Jesus did not undo or obscure in any way the clarity of their revelation; those who try to break down these moral commandments are desecrating that which God has laid in the conscience. In doing so, they lose their security against the powers of lying, hatred, and greed, which then hound them from one situation to another until they finally fall prey to death.
Not one letter of these ethical commands and moral prohibitions can be canceled until the essential spirit of these laws has been revealed and has taken on flesh and life. These commands express the holy "thou shalt" of our inner calling, the holy "must" of our inner destiny the only absolute that lives in the human soul. More and more people reject one after the other of these laws to day, declaring them null and void. They will be poorly prepared for God's kingdom.
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
Before the word became flesh in Jesus, God expressed the essence of his holiness in a form at once demanding and forbidding. His will had to be expressed in the letter of the law, because there was no living heart to give it expression. The law must still take over where greed rules, and where the truthfulness and purity of Jesus has not yet taken root. The state with its coercive power and the law with its statutes are a necessary safety valve for the chaotic mass of humanity which, like steam in a boiler, would explode if unrestrained by the iron vessel of governmental force and the safety valves of its laws.
But as soon as people are gripped by God's love, all of life is different. They grow close to one another and become organs of a mystical body, ruled by the spirit of unity - one heart and one soul. The necessity of force and coercion, of law and moral striving, is removed; the true spirit, which the law expressed imperfectly, comes to rule. The new righteousness of Jesus, the goodness of heart and divine strength that embrace all human existence, are not bound by restraints of legal relationships.
The scribes and Pharisees had a firm conviction, a moral direction, and an iron will. They were better than their reputation; they were morally upright, devout figures who commanded respect - men who felt deeply their responsibility for their people. But they lacked the free
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D spirit that blows from God: the gift of life that grows and bears fruit.
The new justice is God's goodness. God's nature cannot be imitated or created, and nothing can replace his power. So too, the works of the first love cannot be artificially manufactured. No intelligent reflection, no resolution or effort, can produce the warmth of heart that is God. Where God is alive, active love takes the place of dead moralism.
Essay, 1920
Love Is Work
Working together with others is the best way to test our faith, to find out whether or not we are ready to live a life of Christian fellowship. Work is the crucial test of faith because such a life can come into being only where people work for love. Love demands action, and the only really valid action is work. Christian fellowship means fellowship in work...
Talk, May 1934
Though he could never escape his privileged upbringing or scholarly bent, Arnold loved the working class. He abhorred the sterility and mechanization of factory work, but rejected
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D the notion that all physical work was demeaning; he asserted that farm or garden work was not only healthy but necessary for the development of the soul. Thus he found joy and relaxation in turning compost and gardening, and did not hesitate to hand a second pitchfork to the many visitors -including young idealists and intellectualswho came to him hoping for theological discussion. Irmgard Keiderling, his secretary, remembers seeing him at the manure pile with the mayor of Quedlinburg, a town councilor from Munich, and even the local doctor from Hanau.
Justice and love demand that everyone take part in simple practical work with a spade, hatchet, or rake.
Everyone should be ready to spend a few hours each day in either the garden or on the field: digging and spreading manure, plowing, or hoeing potatoes; on the reaper, at the circular saw, or in the locksmith's shop. Everyone should be ready to devote a few hours every day to this practical work; those who have done purely mental work till now will feel its humanizing effect especially.
In this way it will be possible for each person's unique gifts to be kindled. The light that flickers within each heart will then exhibit its once-hidden glow in scholarly research or in music, in expressive words, in wood, or in stone.
Essay, 1920 * * * * *
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
In his enslavement to the principles of investment and profit, the much-admired industrial magnate Henry
Ford has achieved the very utmost in soul-killing enslavement to dead machinery. He has robbed work of its soul to such an extent that 79 percent of all the operations in his industrial plants are performed by completely unskilled labor. Forty-three percent of his workers require only a day's training; another 36 per cent require only eight days. Only 21 percent of all the workers, mechanics, and foremen he employs are al lowed to put even a little thought and skill into his fa mous cars. The great majority - the other 79 percent are imprisoned in their work as soulless slaves. They are condemned to a humdrum existence, sacrificed to capitalist profit.
Lecture, March 1925
Community as Work
In this address from 1921, Arnold speaks of the church as a living organism: a dynamic, changing, growing, and living body that reflects the communal order of the natu ral world. His metaphors reflect a thorough knowledge of modern biology, and he draws heavily on this knowledge to emphasize the necessity of community not only for plants and animals, but for women and men as well.
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
Community presupposes life. We know that life is community of life, and that there is no life that is not living community. We can see this clearly from the community the hermit crab enjoys with the sea urchin in the depths of the sea. These remarkable crabs have soft and sensitive backs, and so defend themselves by crawling into the shell of a dead snail. But even there they are not yet safe from the polyps, those extraordinarily dangerous and ravenous creatures of the deep sea, which can pull them out of their shells with their tentacles. So the hermit crab forms a settlement com munity with the urchin, which fastens itself to the snail shell in which the crab lives. This urchin, with its prickly arms, clutches the whole shell so firmly that it seems almost impossible to loosen it. Thus the urchin protects the hermit crab from danger.
The crab also contributes to this mutual relationship.
It provides mobility for the otherwise stationary urchin, allowing it to catch any prey that might cross the path of the wandering crab. Each creature shares its surplus with the other. These two creatures arise from such irreconcilably different genera that no sexual relationship could ever exist between them. Yet from time immemorial, they have represented a relationship of life as community and community as work.
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
But we do not need to descend into the depths of the sea to see other examples of the same kind of thing. In the mountains, for example, we can find the lichens: fungi that live in community with algae. These two very different plants are unable to live without each other.
Only in community are they capable of life.
On a different level, colonies of ants or bees live in a primitive and yet powerful common life, sacrificing themselves as workers to provide for the propagation of the greater colony by the queen. These insects show us humans something which, in our desire for progress, we have lost with miserable weakness: the social instinct for the context of life, and for the common challenge.
There are many other examples from the practical life of the animal world. But we do not need to look for extraordinary and interesting examples in the world of nature alone. There is also a church-community of men and women on this earth! Humanity is of course divided; we have not yet arrived at earth-wide community.
But the fact that this church-community exists is reality. And if we want to understand life-community, the mystery of this emerging, growing church-community must dawn on us.
This church has nothing to do with any denomination or sect. The mark of the emerging church and the coming kingdom is the building up of quiet, hidden life
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D relationships, beginning with tiny cells which constantly renew their relationships with each other, become organs and members, and then again become one in a single body.
This church cannot be brought about by authoritative decisions, laws, or regulations. No human effort can bring it into existence. No dictatorship can prepare for it or create it. It is far from anything our self-will can achieve - far from all the efforts of self-seeking, power-hungry men or groups. It can come only as a gift of the Creator's spirit of love.
But for this very reason, we must guard against the false notion that God is a purely transcendental power, removed from matter and the stuff of this earth. The coming community of life will be a kingdom of work on this earth. Work will be the binding factor in the cells of human community. The only work a man can do with his whole soul, work full of spirit and pulsing life, comes from love. And there is no love that does not get to work.
Love is work: practical, strenuous work of muscle and mind, heart and soul. The kingdom of love, therefore, must be a kingdom of work. Work, truly unselfish work, animated by the spirit of brotherliness, will be the mark of the future, the character of the mankind to be. Work as spirit, work as living reality, such as we all have lost; E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D work as dedication in enthusiastic love of togetherness
- that is the fundamental character of the future. Joy in togetherness will show as joy in work.
How infinitely remote present-day mankind is from work like this! And since today we have only a faint conception of the possibility of this common life, we will be troubled again and again by pessimism, like a shadow from the abyss.
But we do know that it is not some fantastic, unattain able future; on the contrary, it is the quiet reality of a church already emerging today. God is - everywhere and always. We cannot make the kingdom of God - that is impossible - but we can live in God's kingdom all the time. Christ comes to us. And as certainly as this is true for individuals, it will be fulfilled as fact for the whole world.
We are on a rope stretched tautly between two worlds. Let us walk out on this rope toward the land for which we long! If we believe this kingdom is approaching, if we are sure of this final transformation of all things, then let us live now in accordance with the spirit of this future.
Just this is the mystery of the emerging church, germinating and blossoming among us in secret - that we can live and work already now, here and everywhere, in the community of the Spirit. Faith in God and faith in E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
Christ is the power that makes this possible. Where alienation and hostility prevailed, people will find the relationship to one another which is community.
Address, 1921
Jesus and the Future State
Jesus repeatedly challenges us to work while it is still day. He compares his kingdom to labor in a vineyard, to the careful investment of entrusted money, to the good use of one's talents. If God's kingdom is to transform our vale of tears into a realm of joy, then God's kingdom must be a kingdom of work. Work alone befits the destiny of man's spirit.
Our very nature calls us to a life of productive labor.
We will find joy in life only by joining in the untainted fellowship of work. Those ruled by the spirit of mammon hold that man takes no pleasure in work without profit.
But that is a lie; in reality, what makes a person truly happy is his deep vocation to work - his urge to get a job done, to do something worthwhile, to give practical help. True happiness is found not in making money, but in the productive and successful use of our strength
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D though we must each find that activity which suits us best, which corresponds to our particular gifts, interests, and inclinations.
It is commonly argued that this is utopia - that no one would perform menial tasks unless he were compelled.
But such reasoning arises only out of the debased morality of our modern-day humanity. Most people today are unable to find any joy in simple or lowly tasks. Yet at the same time, they affirm quickly that the difference between so-called respectable and degrading work disappears when they are caring for a loved one. Love ignores these distinctions; whatever we do for the beloved person seems good to us.
That so many people value the work of the mind over physical labor shows the unhealthy state of our society.
Man is simply not meant to concern himself continually or exclusively with lofty ideals and spiritual matters.
Those who seek only intellectual sophistication will one day pay a bitter penalty: a rude awakening to life's ugly realities. True, a person's intellectual life needs to be stimulated and deepened, if he is to become human. But only when he knows the pleasures of physical labor will he experience the joy of being - joy in God and joy in his creation.
A person who feels estranged from nature is sick.
Healthy people long to exercise their bodies, to do E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D simple farm work, to be in the sun and the light; to make friends with woods and mountains, to touch plants and animals, to feel the soil. These longings may have receded before the pressures of our big cities with their hypercivilization, but in the end they will break through all the more forcefully.
Tolstoy's Russian peasants may thus surprise us with their primitive bliss, which seems to depend on the possession of a sound body and the ability to work with healthy hands. But this spirit of loving dedication bestows on their experience of nature a profound consciousness of fellowship, through which the simplest physical activity becomes a source of bounteous joy.
Such joy cannot even be imagined by the depraved hedonists of our sham civilization.
People will never stop longing for a life of simple fellowship in nature. To take pleasure in nature, to work with nature - as well as to deepen the intellectual life, and to be creative in works of love - these things are the immediate objects of our longing. It is not in keeping with God's will that these ends should be opposed or disparaged. In fact, we cannot even attain these things on our own. They can be given to us only by God.
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
The love of Jesus bought and won us before we were born, when we were still his enemies. This love is like the sun calling the greenness of life out from the deadness of winter. The sun - God's love - awakes us from death to life. It comes to us in Christ, and it brings forth the fruit of deeds: activity and labor.
The unfruitful tree is under a curse. Woe to the church where Jesus searches in vain for deeds, for action and work, in keeping with the life he has awakened.
For he died just for this very reason: that none might live for himself any longer, but that all who have life live for him who died and rose for their sake. That means surrender. It means overcoming the selfish life, overcoming all self-interest and private property. And for this to happen we must be moved and urged by the love of God.
There is a legend about a proud hunter who was snatched from the threat of imminent death by the timely intervention of passing traveler. From that moment on, this hunter lived for nothing other than the daily service of his rescuer. He undertook no other work or occupation but this. He remained constantly in attendance upon his rescuer. So it must be with us, if we want to live for Christ. It is not enough for followers of Christ to devote to Jesus only those few hours which their middle-class profession or business leaves free.
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Just as Jesus dedicated his whole life to us, so we too must leave our vocations and our businesses in order to live for Christ and his church.
All of us are invited to the banquet of his kingdom.
The table is set; everything is prepared. But if we are unwilling to come because of our fields, or because of our oxen or the management of our farm or business, or because of our marriage, or any other personal concern
- then we are under the wrath of God and have no part in community with God. Those who surrender their strength to the service of the church must leave forever their own occupations and interests. Perfect love to Jesus means devoted communal work. And we can achieve this love only when we receive the perfect love of his surrendered life - his death and his resurrection.
The most terrible reproach that Jesus can direct against a church is when he says, "I have this against you, that you have left your first love." No one should resign himself to such a depressing development. As long as we bear even the faintest spark of love to Jesus within us, we cannot remain unmoved. His call must pierce our hearts: "Think, think, from where you have fallen."
There is no other conversion to the first love but that of deed. Therefore Jesus goes on: "Repent, and do the first works of love." If we do not get as far as deeds and E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D works, then we are not converted. For if our love to Jesus is sincere, it will compel us to surrender all our bodily strength and mental and spiritual energies.
Service in the church is the only deed that can possibly be meant by the first work of the first love. If love has truly taken possession of us, we will do our utmost in the daily life of the church.
None of us can claim a personal savior just for himself; it is the mystery of faith that all members of the church believe in the same Christ. The church is one body; there is one Spirit and one hope; there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and one Father. And in this unity the love of Christ, in its breadth, length, depth, and height, surpasses and exceeds all understanding.
From Islolation to Community
Religion and devout feelings are useless unless they are expressed in action and in truth, that is, in real community. Jesus says, Love God! And his other command is exactly the same: Love your neighbor!
We cannot love God if we do not love our neighbor.
Public address, September 1935
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Consciousness and Community
" No man is an island, entire of himself." If this is true, it follows that man is a communal being - and that the basic sickness of modern man is isolation and egocentrism. The remedy Arnold prescribes is a greater consciousness - an awareness of the people around us, and ultimately an awareness of God - that leads inevitably to community.
Each human being is a coherent organism. All the organs in the body, and the individual cells within them, invigorate and serve each other, giving and receiving life through the same blood stream. This is the secret of the living body: its many diverse members and activities are integrated into one whole. Each part of every organ contributes to the structure of this whole. And even the individual cells that make up these parts draw life from ever smaller units.
Life consists in overcoming isolation through community. This is true even in the most primitive cells we can observe in nature. No primitive cell lives for itself. Its life depends on reciprocal relationships with other cells. Its very division is a sign that it does not want to live alone, that it cannot live in isolation. It
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D would rather divide itself into two living creatures than go on living in isolation.
At all times and in all places, individual organisms build creative, living relationships in order to serve one another. Life is community. There is no other life!
We may well be tempted to ask whether our stomachs and ears, for example, are truly conscious of the unity of the body - or whether they are not separate beings assembled within the body simply for their own limited ends. But to grasp all this is impossible. All we know is that no matter how individually complex our various organs are, the body functions only when they are linked by a single pervading consciousness into a unified organism.
Babies begin to sense his own unity of consciousness very early on, though of course differently from us adults. They feel that not only the parts of their own person but also everything they see, everything that happens to them, belongs to their consciousness as a whole. Babies do not regard their bodies as the bound ary of their existence. They see farther than we do. The toy hanging over their carriage appears to them just as much a part of their lives as the fingers they move or the E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D toes they put into his mouth. Subconsciously, they live with a unified awareness of all they perceive through their senses and experience. There is unity about everything that enters his consciousness.
Later they begin to draw distinctions. They begin to speak of themselves in the third person: "he" wants the bottle, or "she" wants some other thing. Later still, their growing realization of themselves as individuals emerges; they now speak of themselves as "I" and strongly emphasize the demands of this "I." In this period of healthy egoism, they assert the "I" of self over the greater "we" of community. But once they recognize however slowly and reluctantly - the limitations of the individual self, they look again for community with people and animals. And more - the true child senses a mystery above and beyond these: the great "Thou" of God with his stars, angels, and spirits.
We adults lose this feeling for community quickly.
Very easily, we reach the point at which we feel ourselves to be quite separate: entirely independent units of consciousness that are perplexed by the very existence of other conscious units. And in our egocentric state, we are amazed that other people make the same sort of exaggerated claims to self-importance as we do. We are completely taken up with our own small selves, both in E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D our secret thoughts and, above all, in our basic attitude to life.
The 19th-century German philosopher Max Stirner writes about this problem quite frankly: What is the purpose of my dealings with the world? I want only to enjoy the world; therefore it must be mine. Thus I need power over the world. I need to make it my property; that is, I need to take advantage of the world and the people in it. My happiness comes at the cost of their happiness, but I will never sacrifice myself. I am an egotist and I relish it! And I am not one ego among others; I am the only ego. I am unique.
No one should imagine that he is far removed from this extreme egotism. We need to ask ourselves honestly if we do not, at least in our private lives, live exactly as Stirner describes: I exist only for myself. Everything I do, I do to expand and protect my sphere of influence. I am "good" to people only to take pleasure in them and to assert myself and in crease my power. And I wrong all those who might hinder, disturb, or restrain me, who stand in the way of my enjoy ing life. I live for myself and for nothing else.
The history of philosophy, especially in the West, shows us where such thinking leads. The philosophic egotist, believing himself to be the only source of all his thoughts, cannot help but tell himself: "I certainly see
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D people talking, and I see others listening and acting, but this all has no objective existence. It exists only in my mind. I believe in only one thing - my own existence."
There have been thinkers, for example, who have laid an empty book on the table and asked themselves what they could write in this book that was perfectly certain.
One of these philosophers concluded: "I think, therefore I am. I am, since I have a consciousness."
And it is surely the most remarkable step in this whole progression that still more radical doubters have had to cross out this proposition as well. They have lost even the certainty that they themselves exist. This last doubt puts into question the one thing that the isolated individual thinks about - his own small ego - and should lead beyond the limits of knowledge: to belief in God.
Most people, however, hold on to the assurance that because they think, they are.
III
Consciousness itself demands that we recognize this state as a mortally diseased condition. But healing can begin immediately when we recognize our origin in that source where there is not isolation but vibrant unity.
Just as a child's awareness reaches beyond the bounds of E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D his own small body, so the consciousness of a healthy person reaches out far beyond his own mind. True consciousness is all-embracing. Its cosmic outlook goes beyond the bounds of the whole world. Ultimately, it is consciousness of the divine.
Consciousness wants to comprehend everything, to penetrate everything. It is not content with what I am as an individual and what I do within the limits of my individuality. Consciousness pushes me to measure the breadth and depth of the earth, of the entire universe.
Consciousness demands the impossible: it wants me to survey the entire history of life, to understand its deepest relationships.
Consciousness demands that mind and spirit strive for what is infinite. It demands totality and universality.
It demands the whole, the comprehension and penetration of the whole of life. It is hostile to isolation in every form.
In its longing for infinity, it points to the Source and the Creator - to God. Life and community exist in him alone. He is the Spirit that surrounds and connects all things. He rejoices in the self-sacrificing relationships of everything that lives. And he creates unifying life in the face of isolating death.
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Healthy persons see and act in love. They have been redeemed from isolation and are turned to God. Their love goes out to all. They are no longer preoccupied with themselves, but look at themselves in the context of the whole. They know quite well that they are meant to exist, but they are certain that life does not come from themselves; they feel themselves to be part of a greater whole. They know that the Holy Spirit is the only power that makes everything truly alive. So their affirmation of life finds voice in different words than his previous self-delusion did.
Conscious of their smallness and limitation in the face of the greatness of their calling, they can only say, "I am, for I am being thought. I am alive, for I am being lived! I have been created and called by the conscious ness that penetrates all things." They place their life un der God, under the comprehensive whole.
Persons who are on the way to health have to grasp the whole and live for the whole. They throw their own small, incapable self - which nonetheless has been called into the great task of the comprehensive consciousness.
They permit their own ego to flourish only insofar as it brings fruit and life to the whole.
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Each of us suffers from separation and isolation. We are sick and dying, diseased to the core. Our very life is death. But before we can attain the health and vitality of true life we must diagnose our illness - we must recognize that we ourselves are the cause of this disease. Our thoughts are repeatedly bound up within ourselves; fundamentally, we are able to see only our own point of view. We constantly call attention to ourselves, and fight for our own advantage, for our own small existence.
It is unhealthy for a single organ of the body to force itself on the whole. The loud pumping of the heart during climbing, cycling or rowing tells us that something is out of order. In the same way, a stab of pain in the chest, or worse still the coughing up of blood, makes us keenly aware of our lungs. We are forced to concern ourselves with them, because it is clear that they are sick.
It is exactly the same with the individual person within the community of mankind. When a person makes himself noticeable - when he calls attention to himself, emphasizing and giving prominence to his own ego - then it is obvious that he is sick. He is in danger of destroying the contexts necessary for healthy life. This is seen most clearly in people with hysteria and neurasthenia
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- those whose minds and bodies collapse under the strain of worry and depression. We all know such people; perhaps all of us are even like them to a greater or lesser degree.
We all know the unhealthy state in which we try to impress those around us by making outlandish remarks.
If this does not succeed, we attempt to attract attention by witticisms and jokes. When this does not work, we force people to notice us by angering them with our insolence. When even this fails, some induce hysteria, shivering, weeping, fainting, or even attempting suicide.
Such extremes succeed in forcing everyone around, however unwilling, to notice them.
The diseased ego turns to audacious and peculiar behavior because it can no longer attract attention through talent or achievement. And it remains sick as long as it lets its own little self come to the fore; as long as it is touchy and hypersensitive; as long as it feels pushed into the background; as long as it seeks preferential treatment. This disease is fatal: it is a sign of inner decomposition. An obtrusive ego exposes a disintegrating life.
The sickness of the world lies in this isolation of the accentuated ego. An individual who feels no pain but his own cannot identify with the world's suffering. He cares only for himself, fights only for his own existence, E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D and seeks only his own improvement and happiness. In this way, he increases the suffering of others. He is a parasite that endangers the whole. He has severed himself from the reality and unity of life. He has cut himself off from the whole, and must finally perish.
The only thing people really have in common today is suffering. This should call us to solidarity. But we cannot speak of solidarity and interdependence without speaking first of joy - joy in others, which is love. This joy should be the common property of all, but it is not. Most working people are cut off from all access to joy - cut off from the practical possibility of a communal life. People do hope for better days, however, and this is important; apart from this faith in the future, there is no reason for them to help each other.
The subconscious behavior of our own bodies demon strates unity of action for the good of the whole. If a finger is hurt, for example, the whole body becomes involved and is drawn into active sympathy. The injured member conveys its message of distress to the brain through the bloodstream, and within minutes a powerful defense force has been assembled; defenders rush to the place of attack from all parts. When one member suffers, all members suffer with it. We see the same courageous interventions in humankind as well, when we meet each other with love and joyful assistance.
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It is deadly for one member of the body to withdraw from mutual service. It is demonic when an individual organ breaks away from the rulership of the uniting soul. This separation of body and soul is most obvious in diseased sexuality, but it is present as well wherever the individual will separates itself from the spirit of the whole.
The demonic power of self-centeredness rules personal and public life everywhere. It dominates political, social, and even religious groups to the extent that they emphasize their own exclusive goals and interests, acting autonomously and acknowledging only their own, self-serving laws. Such groups have turned their backs on the spirit of community. They do not give themselves wholly in the service of others, because they are estranged from the spirit that leads to future unity.
They evade the creative and renewing power that transforms crumbling matter into coherent life. They lack the impulse of life - the joyful dedication in love to all that is alive.
The need of the world results from this one disease: isolation as world suffering and world suffering as iso lation. But the spirit of love can heal us and bring us back to unity - unity in common work and fellowship.
And this spirit of love is already alive, amidst all division
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D and death, in the hidden, mysterious working of God's living church.
Essay, 1927
Living or working together with other people, even those who supposedly share our ideals and goals, can be extremely difficult. Joy in one another quickly gives way to irritation
- and then gossip and finally betrayal - when we allow ourselves to be annoyed by a person's character or way of doing things. The solution, according to Arnold, is forth right honesty and humility.
There is no law but love. Love is joy in others. What, then, is anger at them? Words of love convey the joy we have in the presence of our brothers and sisters. It is out of the question to speak about another person in a spirit of irritation or vexation. There must never be talk, either in open remarks or by insinuation, against any brother or sister, or against their individual characteristics - and under no circumstances behind their back. Gossiping in one's family is no exception. Without this rule of silence there can be no loyalty and thus no community.
Direct address is the only way possible. It is a service we owe anyone whose weaknesses cause a negative reaction in us. An open word spoken directly to another
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D person deepens friendship and will not be resented.
Only when two people do not come to an agreement quickly is it necessary to draw in a third person whom both of them trust. In this way they can be led to a solution that unites them on the highest and deepest levels.
Touchiness, opinionatedness, self-love, and self centeredness: all these are obstacles to the common life.
To have a higher opinion of oneself than of others is a deadly poison; it renders a person completely incapable of living in community. Such persons can never experience what is crucial: the unity of the great cause.
They suffer from a disease that will destroy body, soul, and spirit.
People who live with themselves in the center - who think about themselves all day long, who see everything in relation to themselves, and from their own point of view - are seriously ill. They are mentally disturbed.
They are far from becoming true brothers and sisters.
They are lost even in the midst of a communal household.
We are inclined to see the shortcomings of others far out of proportion to our own weaknesses. If we look
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D carefully, however, we will see that we are actually all the same. We must become reconciled to human imperfection. And self-centeredness is a lying spirit. It is completely false. Those who have such a high opinion of themselves that they cannot admit to making mistakes are living in the deepest untruthfulness and insincerity.
Their egotism must be condemned, not only because it does not fit into community or because it is morally wrong, but also because it brings death and destruction.
Self-centered people are mortally sick. They must be redeemed. They must recognize that Christianity has an objective content - that it is a cause for which we can completely forget ourselves and our own little egos.
Self-importance is nothing but autosuggestion. It leads to hypocrisy. And unless we are freed from all posturing, from all affected holiness, we are utterly lost.
The people who are most endangered are those who see God from their own point of view and make God relate to themselves. But God's cause is a cause for which we are not needed. We are not indispensable. We are not just unimportant; we are an obstacle. We are adversaries of the cause. Redemption cannot begin until we recognize this and see ourselves, and our piety, as adversaries.
Until that happens we are deluding ourselves.
We are not the truth, and because we are not the truth we cannot and should not place our own persons in the E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D center of our thoughts. We would make idols of ourselves.
The cause must be in the center. And redemption from the life of self, from wanting to be in the right, from imposing our own ways, comes only through a cause that exists completely outside of our own selves.
We human beings can recognize light only in contrast to shadow and darkness. We can grasp the cause only through an awareness of its adversaries, for we are not gods but men. Think of a campfire: when it is lit at night, we who sit around it are illuminated even though we remain seated in the dark. But it is the dark background that makes our shining faces visible.
Those who are still in love with themselves cannot recognize the cause; nor can they who are still in love with their own religious experience, their conversion and rebirth. Not until we see the great cause against the wretchedness of our own insignificant beings will we grasp its greatness.
In the early church the Holy Spirit came to people only after they had recognized themselves as the murderers of the longed-awaited Messiah - as adversaries of the Holy Cause for which they had always striven. We are afraid of this awful awakening, especially if we have sought for years or decades to live holy lives and suddenly recognize ourselves to be murderers and adversaries.
That is hard but necessary.
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
Paul was blinded when the Spirit came upon him, and it was not exaggeration but deep conviction that led him to say, "I am the worst of all men." He had been personally responsible for the persecution of the church, for the murder of Christian martyrs. Paul had to recognize that he was a persecutor of the Messiah, a persecutor of the kingdom of God. Not until he recognized this could he become an apostle of God's cause. This cause, which Karl Barth rightly says is "totally other" than what we our selves are, is the only thing that can free us from our self centeredness and touchiness, from our opinionatedness and our quarrelsomeness, from all that makes us unfit to live in community.
But unless we recognize ourselves as adversaries we will never grasp the greatness of the cause. People who make vows on the basis of their own radicalism, their own piety, or their extreme "thoroughness," are incapable of standing firm. Their vows are bound to collapse in disgrace. But a vow that springs from the cause and for the cause, a promise that leads us away from self, simply cannot be broken...
Talk, August 1933
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Even when Arnold's own children were still quite young, he took in both homeless tramps and unwanted pregnant women. He saw Christ in everyone he met, and welcomed with love each one who came to his door. Karl Keiderling, who came to Sannerz in the 1920's, arrived with dirty clothes and wild, unkempt hair. Though a complete stranger, he was embraced as an old friend: "We've been waiting for you," Arnold said, and he meant it: Love sees the good Spirit at work within each person and delights in it. Even if we have just been annoyed with someone, we will feel new joy in them as soon as love rules in us again. We will overcome our personal disagreements and joyfully acknowledge the working of the good Spirit in each other.
Augustine goes even further. He says we ought not to see each other as we are now, but that we should see others as they are meant to be, as they will be when God's
Spirit fills them completely.
Talk, March 1933
From Private Property to Community
For Arnold, community was the answer to all of life's prob lems. And he believed in community not because of any one biblical commandment, but because he felt that the very life of Jesus - and the witness of the entire New
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Testament - pointed toward it. But he did not stop at mere intellectual or even spiritual recognition of this truth; rather, he pursued it to the point of practical realization. The result was community: community of goods and community of spirit.
Humanity writhes in agony, on the verge of death, and the most obvious sign of its mortal sickness is private property. The root of property is separation and dis integration, decay and corruption. These ills arise through self-isolation, through the self-seeking of the covetous will. Private property destroys the relationships we have with each other and with God.
Private property is the root of murder, the cause of war, the cause of vicious competition in business. It leads to prostitution and marrying for money, which are really the same thing, and is the cause of dishonesty in business and of every other kind of lie. Our entire economy is based on greed, on the profit motive, on the individual's urge to self-preservation and his craving for greater power.
Jesus rightly said that if the kingdom of Satan were divided against itself, it would have fallen long ago. But our highly developed capitalist economy does not fall, because the demonic forces of greed work hand in glove with each other. They all follow the same line. The possessors thus become possessed.
E B E R H A R D A R N O L D - W R I T I N G S S E L E C T E D
When one sphere of human activity sets up its own laws, irrespective of all others, it becomes an idol. Then we are ruled by demons; life is rent apart and torn into