Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Three Inseparable Elements of Higher Life

Properly, the three elements of higher life are inseparable; and it is therefore extremely difficult to propound any invariable law applying to individual cases, as to the order in which these three grades of internal development must or ought always to succeed one another. Essentially they are one and indissoluble. As faith and hope are based upon love, so is love dependent on both the former; and this is as true of genuine love on earth as it is of that which lives in a higher domain. If its faith be hostilely disturbed, then it loses its hope also, and the very root of its existence. If hope is entirely cut off, it does not, indeed, lose thereby faith itself, and its object, but it preys on itself.

Friedrich von Schlegel, Philosophy of Language, Morrison, tr., pp. 478-479.