Die Liebe zu Einem ist eine Barbarei: denn sie wird auf Unkosten aller Übrigen ausgeübt. Auch die Liebe zu Gott.
the love of *one* is barbaric: for it is exercised at the expense of others. likewise the love of god.
aside from the jab at the commandment of jesus to love god as being one of the most important commandments, doesn't nietzsche sounds like levinas here? the character of love is preferential, necessarily so (?). to love who i love at any one time means to not love another person at the same time. to love one means to hate another.
what this reminds me of is luke 14:26 and matthew 10:37
Εἴ τις ἔρχεται πρός με καὶ οὐ μισεῖ τὸν πατέρα ἑαυτοῦ καὶ τὴν μητέρα καὶ τὴν γυναῖκα καὶ τὰ τέκνα καὶ τοὺς ἀδελφοὺς καὶ τὰς ἀδελφάς, ἔτι τε καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν ἑαυτοῦ, οὐ δύναται εἶναί μου μαθητής.
if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and his mother and his wife and his children and his brothers and his sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my follower.
Ὁ φιλῶν πατέρα ἢ μητέρα ὑπὲρ ἐμὲ οὐκ ἔστιν μου ἄξιος· καὶ ὁ φιλῶν υἱὸν ἢ θυγατέρα ὑπὲρ ἐμὲ οὐκ ἔστιν μου ἄξιος·
the one who loves his father or mother over me is not worthy of me. and the one who loves his son or daughter over me is not worthy of me.
well this is disturbing, since it looks like jesus wants all our love. and yet we too want to leave some space for the love of others, don't we? if you think of jesus as your lover, and jesus is a jealous lover, well then he is asking us for our love, our complete and undivided attention on him. in this way i see these verses as the command of a lover and there's no room to argue here by saying to him, ohhh but sweetie, that's a bit extreme. in the same way that when someone says to you that 'i'll love you forever' the appropriate response is rarely if ever 'actually, you'll probably only love me for a couple of years but whatevs'.
but surely jesus can't mean hate, right? some people try to lessen the force of this disturbing verse. they interpret hate to mean love less than. i think that misses the point. put simply, i don't think jesus is telling us 'if anyone comes to me and does not love less his own mother [than me], he cannot be my follower'. i don't think love is that kind of quantifiable thing and shouldn't even be talked about in a quantitative way. we should get rid of talk about loving less or more or numbers or percentages here. how can you talk of love at the expense of another (auf Unkosten), as if love was a kind of currency and you have a piggy bank of love into which you make deposits and make transactions! i think nietzsche was onto something, but i don't think he's saying that love itself is a bad thing. only the kind of love that one assumes is love. the kind of mercantile love that is assumed to be love, because heck isn't that what love is? i scratch your back, you scratch mine? payment for services rendered?
no. i don't think so.
matthew's jesus is talking about loving one *over* the other, not loving one less or more than the other. by loving your mother *over* jesus, what you are doing is hating jesus. this is absolute talk, without negotiation of prices and a little bit of love in this corner and a little bit of love portioned for that person. siimilarly if you love your life, you hate the life of someone else.
have a look at luke 17:33
ὃς ἐὰν ζητήσῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ περιποιήσασθαι ἀπολέσει αὐτήν, ὃς δ' ἂν ἀπολέσει / ἀπολέσῃ ζωογονήσει αὐτήν.
whoever should seek to preserve their life for themselves, they will lose it, but whoever should lose their life, will keep it alive.
it's a super amazing line if you stop to think about it. i've more often that not just skipped over it by saying that it's just rhetorical. but it's not. i believe jesus means it.
the person who seeks to preserve their life for themselves is like a person who won't take the bread from their mouth to feed the hunger of the other. the one who is afraid of being hungry, and so keeps the food for themselves. but levinas sees the possibility of another way of living:
Donner, être-pour-l’autre, malgré soi, mais en interrompant le pour-soi, c’est arracher le pain à sa bouche, nourrir la faim de l’autre de mon propre jeûne.
to give, to-be-for-the-other, despite oneself, but by interrupting the for-oneself, that is to take the bread from one's mouth, to feed the hunger of the other with my own fasting.
jesus goes farther than levinas, says the full implications where levinas falls silent. in seeking to preserve your life, you will destroy it. keeping your bread for yourself will end up starving YOU.
similarly, could you say that the love you have for your friends and family will not actually end up as love at all? is it possible that your love for another will end up as hatred, not only of that distant foreign other other whom you neglect (the person in trouble you see on tv), but that your most beloved is also hated in the very fact that you love them? how could this be so?
Kierkegaard says that loving jesus is not simply an interpolation or intrusion into the secret love of two. but that where there is two lovers, there is always the third lover, without whom there is no love at all.
the god-relationship is the mark by which the love for people is recognised as genuine. as soon as a love-relationship does not lead me to god, and as soon as i in the love-relationship do not lead the other to god, then the love, even if it were the highest bliss and delight of affection, even if it were the supreme good of the lovers' earthly life, is still not true love. this the world can never get into its head, that god in this way not only becomes the third party in every relationship of love but really becomes the sole object of love, so that it is not the husband who is the wife's beloved, but it is god, and it is the wife who is helped by the husband to love god, and conversely, and so on. the merely human view of love can never go beyond mutuality: the lover is the beloved, and the beloved is the lover. christianity teaches that such a love has not yet found its true object - god. the love-relaitonship requires threeness: the lover, the beloved, the love - but the love is god. therefore to love another person is to help that person to love god, and to be loved is to be helped.
if that is so, then in the context of the bible passages i just quoted, to privilege your mother, father, son, daughter or yourself over jesus, it turns out, is to not love them at all. this especially makes sense if you believe as i do that we cannot love others without god, who is the mysterious fount of love, from which all love derives. to 'love' the other over god, is like grasping at the air, for you'll never successfully attain that love.
Doesn’t this mean that to love god, that means to hate your beloved? Again yes, but no. it is not a matter of what you do, but a matter of dispossessing yourself. God does not ask anything for himself, but asks everything from you.
