Rearing Monarchs #9:

A child’s understanding of its family
Unification Thoughts, January 2022

Welcome back
Blessed and peaceful New Year to you and yours. And thank you for your continued interest in these Unification Thoughts.

In case you’re joining us for the first time, the focus of this series for we Golden Agers is to look into the remarkable role of grandparents in a family. This article is the eighth in the series and its foundation points are here —> Realms of True Love and here —> Three Great Kingships. If you take a look at those two links, you’ll understand the perspective of the preceding seven articles, if not the details.

Summary of UT Education

So then, picking up from where we left off: In December, we’d introduced the most essential education that a child needs: an education of heart. And by that, it specifically means an education about the Three Hearts of God. As the Principle textbook mentions, this is one of its core tasks¹. This is the key for a child to achieve their first blessing. So a main task of a grandparent is just that—to educate a child to understand God’s heart.

Having covered that first form of education, we now move on to the second one, the Education of Norm:

Education of Norm

A norm means a "standard of conduct". The theory in UT that explains these standards is the theory of Ethics. UT defines Ethics as “The form of behavior toward the object in the family.” It goes about this by discussing:

• attendance
• its theoretical foundations in the Principle
• the difference between Ethics and Morality
• the relationship between Ethics and Order
• the Scope of Ethics
• the relationship of Ethics and Equality

Ethics is so important to living well that great thinkers and teachers throughout history have concerned themselves with it². It touches on so many areas that a great deal of time could be spent on it. We’ll need to take this a step at a time and spread it out over several articles.

To start, we’ll look at the theory’s foundations in the Principle, UT’s observation about ethics and morality, and finally its rational bases in nature.

UT’s ethics is actually ethics for attendance

There’s one important comment that’s made in an earlier UT textbook (from 1981) that’s profoundly relevant for a Unificationist. In the opening paragraph of the chapter on Ethics, it’s mentioned that the theory is an ethics of attendance:

“In an ethical society, people will lead the life of attendance to God, centering on the True Parents of mankind. (See Divine Principle, part I, Ch. VII, Sec. IV, 2.) All aspects of social, cultural, and economic life will be based on the life of attendance….” • Explaining Unification Thought, p. 231

Attendance is such an essential idea in Godism’s way of life that we had dedicated the entire third installment of this series to it, so we won’t rehash that here.³

Let’s move on to the theory itself.

UT’s ethics begins with core ideas in the Principle

As with all UT’s theories, Ethics begins with ideas in the Principle - in this case the Principle of Creation. Without getting into detail, I’ll merely indicate that they’re God’s True Love, the Family Four Position Foundation, the Three Objects Purpose⁴, and the Realms of True Love. For visual reference, here’s one diagram from Dr. Lee’s handouts:

This figure contains the diagram we know from our youth: the four-position foundation. And it includes the idea of the Three Objective Purposes that each person in the family has. The diagram’s title indicates that this is how God’s True Love is realized in our actual day-to-day lives. I assume that we’ve heard the Principle of Creation lecture so many times that there’s no need to explain these foundation points again. But there is one very important reason that the diagram is here, and that is the first position: it’s the Grandparents, because they represent God in the 4PF as HP initially conceived it. It’s also why the first article in this series started off with that point.

There’s one more thing about this diagram which will help with what follows:

“Parents’ love is a downward love, from parents to children; conjugal love is a horizontal love between husband and wife; and children’s love is an upward love, from children to parents. …love has twelve directions, because the person in each of the four positions has a different kind of love for each of the three object partners, respectively.” • NEUT, p. 281-282

Here’s another diagram that Dr. Lee gave us which expanded my understanding of how God’s True Love flows into the family:

Perhaps you’d seen this diagram at a speech Abonim gave sometime, but I never had, so I found it very intriguing. It places the four position foundation “flat” (in the “real” world) to show the relationships between family members in actual life. It can be seen that vertical love meets horizontal love at a “90° angle”. That connection allows God’s True Love to come through each family member and flow to each of that person’s “three objects” of heart.

There’s an important difference between Ethics and Morality

Next, UT makes an important distinction between Ethics and Morality. In common usage, the words ethics and morality can be interchangeable, as you can see from this definition. In contrast, observe Dr. Lee’s handout:

In UT, morality has to do with personal, internal standards of behavior, which is related to the First Blessing. Ethics on the other hand has to do with interpersonal relationships, which are related to the Second Blessing. Furthermore, morality is “subjective”. This means that the integrity of an ethical family (or society) depends upon the good morality of its individual members. That may be obvious to a Unificationist, but don’t forget that normal views don’t necessarily make this clear of a distinction between ethics and morality. Which can result in attempts to define an “ethical” society by people whose personal morals are matters of individual preference. I think that our children and grandchildren face this and that some are unfortunately influenced by it.

So this precision isn’t just an academic matter; rather it reflects Godism’s uncommon depth of understanding about the nature of true love.

Ethics and Order (the “Way of Heaven”)

The last point in this article is that the ethics of Godism are deeply tied to the order that underlies nature and its structures. This natural law is best seen at the macrocosmic level. This UT diagram illustrates it clearly:

And the textbook continues:

“Applied to the human individual, the law of the universe manifests itself as morality, and applied to the family, it manifests itself as ethics. Hence, the law of the universe, and moral and ethical laws are in a relationship of correspondence. A society is the extension of a family. Accordingly, social ethics is to be established, in correspondence to the Way of Heaven.” • NEUT, p. 148

And so the above diagram transforms into this one:

The textbook then says:

“When an individual being violates the law of the universe, that being becomes unable to maintain its own existence. Indeed, if one of the planets of the solar system were to deviate from its orbit, not only would that planet be unable to maintain its own existence, but great calamities in the solar system would also ensue. Likewise in a family and in a society, if people violate ethical laws, that can only give rise to destruction and disorder.” • NEUT, p. 148

You can imagine the calamitous effects that would befall our solar system if gravity failed and the planets couldn’t maintain their proper orbits! That’s analogous to the effect that abuse, disrespect, or infidelity would have on a family. Thus, the importance of vertical and horizontal order in the human family and society becomes pretty evident.

A final insight that I’d like to share isn’t directly from the Ethics or Education chapters of UT. Rather, it’s inspired by the Ontology chapter. I mention it here not because it directly bears on our moral or ethical behavior, but because it revealed something about God’s heart for us that I simply cannot forget. It’s detailed in the third article in this series⁵.

There, it was explained that the very first idea (DP and UT call it the “individual image”) in the mind of God before the Creation was the image of the first man and first woman. HP poured out everything to conceive them as exquisitely as possible. That was because of the fundamental motive for the Creation in the first place: HP deeply desired an object of love and joy that fully resembled HP. These two true and beautiful people became the basis for HP’s design of everything else that exists. As DP explains:

“God created the natural world by expressing partial reflections of the internal nature and external form He had conceived for human beings. Consequently, a human being contains within himself the sum total of the essences of all things. This is the reason he is called the microcosm of the cosmos.” • Expo DP, p. 35

Then these two beautiful people were to make a true and beautiful family. That means that the idea of a human family preceded the idea of a solar system; i.e., the human family is actually the model for the solar system, not the other way around. The only reason we now have to look to nature for the right ways to relate is that we fell away from our original true positions. It is that original beauty within us that God and Godism fights for.

Conclusion, for now

Because we’re concerned here with educating our young grandchildren, I have tried to minimize the philosophy behind this article and keep things as short and clear as possible. When they’re growing up at home, the young ones will (hopefully) follow our guidance because they have an innocent trust in our benevolent love for them.

Please be aware however, that when our grandchildren reach school age, they will likely run into curricula which discredit traditional morality and ethics. They might learn that such traditions are not only outdated religious or cultural baggage, but that they’re “insidious” devices of control and manipulation. At that point, you will find the value of Unification Thought’s explanation that its moral and ethical ideas are not just religious custom or inherited tradition. Rather, they are grounded in natural laws that manifest clearly in the observable world. That was extremely important to me when I was young, and I’ve observed that our school-age youth also really appreciate knowing that.

That said, in the following articles, we’ll get directly to the practice of ethics and morality that the young ones need to learn.

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