Human life is good only to the extent that it is fulfilling the law of life, God’s law.
Evil, in the form of death and suffering, is visible to a human being only when he takes the law of his material, animal existence for the law of his life. It is only when he, a human being, descends down to the level of an animal, only then do death and suffering become frightening to him. Death and suffering hoot at him like bogeymen from every side and drive him onto the only path of human life open to him: the fulfillment of God’s law, which is expressed in love. Death and suffering only mean something for a human being transgressing this law. For a human being living wholly by God’s law, there is no death and no suffering.
What should we do when everything is leaving us: health, joy, affection, freshness of feeling, memory, capacity for work, what should we do when it seems to us that the sun is growing colder and life is losing all its charms? What can we do when there is no hope left? Should we be stupefied or petrified? The answer is always the same: merge your will with the will of God. It does not matter what happens as long as your conscience is at peace, as long as you feel content and in the right place. Become what you are supposed to be—the rest is up to God. And even if there were no God of love, but only a universal law, duty would still be the solution to the mystery.
— Amiel
The fulfillment of duty has nothing in common with personal pleasure. Duty has its own special law, its own special court, and if you were to mix duty and personal pleasure in order to live by this mixture, then duty and pleasure would at once separate from each other by themselves.
— After Kant
We know God’s law from all religious traditions and from our own consciousness, when it is not darkened by passions and the deceptions of thought, and by applying this law to life we can discover all the demands of the law that give us the inalienable good, everything that the true law demands.
