[517] not as a past story, but as something which happens to us all the time---in degrees, not in one act, but this one act embraces all the little degrees of all our daily life. In the moment in which the self-actualization ^ais done, man is separated from what he essentially is. He is now in existence. He actualizes himself. But he is not what he essentially is any longer. And in this moment the commandment appears. The law comes in between, as Paul^b has called it. The law appears in the moment in which man is outside of his dreaming innocence, in which he has over- stepped the warning voice and the anxiety of self-actualization and has become an actual, historical human being---because NOW, what he essentially is stands against him as commandment. Only what we

NOT are, can be ASKED of us as a commandment. Insofar as we ARE what we essentially are, no commandment is needed. And here again the old famous law of all myths ^cand of the whole Bible^d becomes actual, namely the vision of the correspondence of what was in the beginning and what will be in the end. There was no law in the beginning, and there will not be law in the end, in the fulfillment. Law^e lasts, AS LAW, only as long as there is estrangement.^f He who is what he is essentially, is not under a law. The content of the law, of course, is, from this point of view, what man essentially is. But now, since he is not identical with it, he is UNDER the law, it stands against him, it is not in him, he is not identical with it. So we can say: All moral laws are man's essential nature put against him because he is ESTRANGED^g from his essential nature. This is the first and fundamental insight which we must have with respect to the moral imperative^h.