CHAPTER I.

THE MORAL SUBJECT.

SECTION LVIII. The Moral Subject.

THE moral subject is the personal spirit, in a stricter sense, the created spirit. Between the different grades of spiritual beings, there is, in respect to the moral life-task, no essential difference; and, hence, for the individual spirit, the life-task never comes to a definitive close. The basis of the moral life is the individual moral person; but in so far as a plurality of persons constitute themselves into a spiritual life-whole, such a collective totality becomes also itself a moral subject with a peculiar moral task.

In the widest sense of the moral thought, even God himself, as the holy One, is a moral subject. But in so far as ethics has regard not to an absolutely infinite, eternal Being and life, but to a task accomplishing itself in time, it considers only the created spirit as a subject of morality. But all created personal spirits without exception are moral subjects, and that too with an individual task that never comes to a close; the blessed spirits, angels included, have not only, like earthly men, constantly to accomplish morality, but so soon as we leave sin out of view as an abnormal reality, their moral task is essentially the same as that of man; and Schleiermacher is wrong in limiting moral acting, and hence also ethics, to the, as yet, militant life, and in excluding them from the perfected life of the blessed (Syst., p. 51, 61). Unless we are to conceive the blessed as spiritually dead, then they must have a life-activity answering to the divine will,—that is, a moral one. Were this not the case, then Christ’s 36holy life would be moral only so long as he had to do with an opposing world; and only the earthly, but not the glorified, Christ, as also not the saints in heaven, could be looked upon as moral examples for us. It is true, the manifestation-form of the morality of a blessed spirit will be different from that of the yet militant; nevertheless the essence remains the same.

The distinguishing of the moral collective subject from the individual subject is a point of essential importance; for, the moral activity of the two is by no means the same. For the member of a moral community, there arise special moral duties that fall to him, not as a moral individual but as an organic member of a whole, and which he is to fulfill not in his own name but in that of the totality. The action of the individual is, of course, the first, the presupposition of the other; the moral community is always the fruit of a precedent moral activity of the individuals,—is itself a realized-good, which, however, at once becomes in turn itself a morally-active subject, unless indeed it is to cease to be.