Monday, July 23, 2012

"The measure of what we shall do to men cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us.  For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong, and our foolishness more than our wisdom.  This is the limit of the Golden Rule.  This is the limit of calculating justice.  Only for him who knows what he should wish and who actually wishes it , is the Golden Rule ultimately valid.  Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice.  Love makes justice just.  Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet.  For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are a unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love.  If this call is not heard by listening love, if it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself.  He who loves listens to the call of his own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to his own being... But we speak for a love in which justice is the form and the structure of love.  We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what he is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons.  Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which love unites.  Love makes justice just."
-Paul Tillich, The New Being, 32-33.

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