When we cannot obtain a thing, we comfort ourselves with the reassuring thought that it is not worth nearly as much as we believed.
In ressentiment morality, love for the small,” the poor,” the weak,” and the oppressed” is really disguised hatred, repressed envy, an impulse to detract, etc., directed against the opposite phenomena: wealth,” strength,” power,” largesse.” When hatred does not dare to come out into the open, it can be easily expressed in the form of ostensible love—love for something which has features that are the opposite of those of the hated object. This can happen in such a way that the hatred remains secret. When we hear that falsely pious, unctuous tone (it is the tone of a certain socially-minded” type of priest), sermonizing that love for the small” is our first duty, love for the humble” inspirit, since God gives grace” to them, then it is often only hatred posing as Christian love.
All ancient philosophers, poets, and moralists agree that love is a striving, an aspiration of the lower” toward the higher,” the unformed” toward the formed,” … appearance” towards essence,” ignorance” towards knowledge,” a mean between fullness and privation,” as Plato says in the Symposium. … The universe is a great chain of dynamic spiritual entities, of forms of being ranging from the prima materia” up to man—a chain in which the lower always strives for and is attracted by the higher, which never turns back but aspires upward in its turn. This process continues up to the deity, which itself does not love, but represents the eternally unmoving and unifying goal of all these aspirations of love. Too little attention has been given to the peculiar relation between this idea of love and the principle of the agon,” the ambitious contest for the goal, which dominated Greek life in all its aspects—from the Gymnasium and the games to dialectics and the political life of the Greek city states. Even the objects try to surpass each other in a race for victory, in a cosmic agon” for the deity. Here the prize that will crown the victor is extreme: it is a participation in the essence, knowledge, and abundance of being.” Love is only the dynamic principle, immanent in the universe, which sets in motion this great agon” of all things for the deity.
Let us compare this with the Christian conception. In that conception there takes place what might be called a reversal in the movement of love. The Christian view boldly denies the Greek axiom that love is an aspiration of the lower towards the higher. On the contrary, now the criterion of love is that the nobler stoops to the vulgar, the healthy to the sick, the rich to the poor, the handsome to the ugly, the good and saintly to the bad and common, the Messiah to the sinners and publicans. The Christian is not afraid, like the ancient, that he might lose something by doing so, that he might impair his own nobility. He acts in the peculiarly pious conviction that through this condescension,” through this self-abasement and self-renunciation” he gains the highest good and becomes equal to God. …
There is no longer any highest good” independent of and beyond the act and movement of love! Love itself is the highest of all goods! The summum bonum is no longer the value of a thing, but of an act, the value of love itself as love—not for its results and achievements. …
Thus the picture has shifted immensely. This is no longer a band of men and things that surpass each other in striving up to the deity. It is a band in which every member looks back toward those who are further removed from God and comes to resemble the deity by helping and serving them.
Человек способен к трем видам знания: к знанию ради господства или ради достижений, к образовательному знанию и к знанию ради спасения.
Antiquity believed that the forces of love in the universe were limited. Therefore they were to be used sparingly, and everyone was to be loved only according to his value.