Original Value

본연의 가치 · 本然의 價値 · Bonyeon-ui Gachi, Inherent Value, Absolute Value, God-given Worth

What Is Original Value?

Original Value is the inherent, God-given worth that every created being possesses by virtue of being created — the value beings would express in the original, unfallen state, before any distortion by the Fall.

In Unification thought, it is not a feeling, a preference, or a social construction; it is an objective property of created reality, anchored in the Creator’s purpose and structurally manifest as Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Love.

The Exposition of the Divine Principle grounds it in the dual purposes of creation — individual purpose and whole purpose — and Unification Thought, the systematic philosophy developed by Dr. Sang Hun Lee, organizes it as the foundational concept of axiology.

The technical claim is simple but consequential. Every being — from a stone to a star to a human person — has the value God invested in it when he made it, and that value is not changed by the being’s fallen state, only obscured. To recognize Original Value is to see things as God sees them; to live from Original Value is to act in accord with the Creator’s purpose.

Going to the place where one can claim one’s own position, value, and place of glory — this is what “returning” means. To live for this purpose, to gather as that substance, and to return and become God’s family-level, tribal-level, national-level object, existing eternally in the infinite world as the substance of all glory — this is the ideal of our existence.

— Sun Myung Moon (264-153, 10/09/1994) Cham Bumo Gyeong

The bridge from this metaphysical anchor to systematic philosophy is Sang Hun Lee’s Unification Thought, which articulates Original Value through the four-position foundation, the Three Great Blessings, and the triad of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

Etymological Analysis

In Korean, the term is 본연의 가치 (bonyeon-ui gachi). The compound 본연 (本然) combines 本 — “fundamental, root, origin” — with 然 — “thus, so, the way it is.” Together, it means “fundamentally so” or “in its original-essential state.” 가치 (價値) — the standard Korean word for value — combines 價 (“price, value”) with 値 (“worth”).

The phrase, therefore, literally means “the worth a being has in its original, essential state.”

Two distinctions are operative in Unification usage. First, 본연의 가치 (Original Value) is contrasted with 현실의 가치 (actual value) — the diminished, distorted value fallen beings actually express. Second, 절대가치 (absolute value) is sometimes used as a near-synonym, particularly in Sun Myung Moon’s articulation of absolute-value theory at the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences.

The distinction is one of emphasis: Original Value names the origin of worth (it comes from God, inheres in creation); absolute value names its character (it does not vary with culture, period, or personal taste).

In ordinary Korean philosophical usage, “value” is contested terrain — relativists, utilitarians, and existentialists all stake claims. In Unification usage, the term retains its philosophical breadth but is grounded in a specific metaphysics: value is what the Creator invested when he made the world.

Theological Definition

The Exposition of the Divine Principle’s Chapter on Creation establishes the structural source of Original Value. God created with two purposes simultaneously — the purpose of the whole and the purpose of the individual — and these two purposes are designed to harmonize. A being expresses its Original Value when it fulfills both at once: serving the larger pattern in which it is embedded while flourishing as itself.

A flower fulfills its individual purpose by blooming and its whole purpose by feeding bees and beautifying its setting.

A person fulfills individual purpose by becoming fully themselves and whole purpose by giving and receiving love within ever-larger spheres — family, society, nation, world, cosmos.

This dual-purpose structure is realized through what the Divine Principle calls the four-position foundation: a center (God), a subject, an object, and the multiplied result of their give-and-receive action.

Wherever this foundation is genuinely formed — in a family, in a community, in the relation between humanity and nature — Original Value is actualized. Wherever it is disrupted, Original Value is obscured but not destroyed.

Absolute, unique, unchanging, eternal — these are the four principles. If something is absolute, alone, how can it meet a partner? It must possess uniqueness, and only then does it have a counterpart. Absolute-ness and unique-ness mean that two beings have become one. They can exchange contents — what is one’s own becomes the other’s, and what is the other’s becomes one’s own. This describes the inner content that can supplement eternally.

— Sun Myung Moon (586-066, 02/06/2008) Cham Bumo Gyeong

This passage articulates the structural law of Original Value: it is constituted in relation, not in isolation. A being’s worth is not generated from inside itself; it is realized when subject and object give and receive purposefully under God.

At the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences I educated the world’s renowned professors on the theory of absolute value. I drew the conclusion of absolute-value theory in 2004 — at the very moment of transition from the era preceding heaven to the era following heaven, absolute value was set forth. The qualification that allows a parent to be the master of love is determined by the child. The qualification that allows a husband to be the master of love is determined by the wife, and that of the wife by the husband.

— Sun Myung Moon (515-316, 02/01/2006) Cham Bumo Gyeong

This is one of the most counterintuitive teachings of Unification axiology. The “master of value” is not the powerful party in a relation but the partner — the child confers parental dignity on the parent; the spouse confers marital dignity on the spouse. Absolute value is born in the moment one being absolutizes another.

The Three Original Values: Truth, Beauty, Goodness

Unification Thought, developed by Dr. Sang Hun Lee, organizes Original Value into the three classical values — Truth (진, 眞), Beauty (미, 美), and Goodness (선, 善) — corresponding to the three faculties of the human mind: intellect, emotion, and will.

Truth is Original Value as known by the intellect when the subject and object enter their proper give-and-receive relation. To know a thing truly is not to dominate it conceptually but to recognize the value God invested in it.

This is why the Exposition of the Divine Principle insists that the Bible, however revealed, is “a textbook teaching the truth” rather than truth itself — Truth is not in the symbols, but in the reality the symbols point to.

Beauty is Original Value as experienced in emotion when the subject and object are harmoniously joined. A face is beautiful not because it accords with a cultural template but because, in the perceiving relation, the perceiver’s response and the object’s character resonate.

Beauty in Unification axiology is therefore objective in its source, though felt subjectively — exactly the inverse of post-Romantic aesthetics.

Goodness is the original value as realized in will when an action fulfills the dual-purpose structure. An act is good not because it accords with private conscience or social convention but because it serves both individual purpose and whole purpose, both the agent’s flourishing and the larger pattern’s well-being.

The three values are not separable; in their full realization, they converge. To know truly is to be moved beautifully and to act well. Underneath all three, in Sang Hun Lee’s mature account, lies a fourth term — Love (애, 愛) — which is not a value alongside Truth, Beauty, and Goodness but the source from which all three flow and the goal toward which all three return.

Original Value and Actual Value

The Fall did not destroy Original Value; it obscured it. Created beings retain the worth God invested in them, but their actual expression of that worth is diminished, distorted, and sometimes inverted.

A human person made for unconditional love often loves conditionally; a marriage made to image God’s heart often becomes its caricature; a body made as the temple of the spirit becomes a machine of appetite.

This distinction between Original Value and actual value structures the entire project of restoration. The work is not to invent new values or to negotiate between competing relative values, but to restore the value already there — to return creation to what it was made to be.

Science, without value-standards established, can only be destructive. The possibility of nuclear war is what tells us this. From theology to physics, all knowledge must be called meaningless if its purpose and direction are unknown. The pursuit of value-standards is the pursuit of this purpose.

— Sun Myung Moon (095-201, 11/25/1977) Cham Bumo Gyeong

This passage from the founding period of the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences frames the modern crisis precisely as a crisis of detached actual value. Knowledge has multiplied; the metric for what knowledge is for has gone missing.

The Unification proposal is that the missing metric is Original Value — the worth God invested in creation, recoverable through the structure of give-and-receive that creation itself embodies.

The practical consequence is far-reaching. Education aimed at Original Value seeks not to produce skilled workers or successful careerists but persons who recognize and live from the worth God invested in them.

Economics oriented to Original Value treats things not as commodities whose worth is set by exchange but as goods that have intrinsic value because God invested love in their making. Politics organized by Original Value subordinates power to the dignity of every human person.

The Four Domains of Original Value

Original Value manifests in four interlocking domains, each named in the Three Great Blessings.

Personal — Every human being possesses Original Value as the image of God, before and independent of accomplishment, status, or social recognition. This is the dignity that grounds human rights in Unification thought. It is not earned and cannot be lost; only obscured.

Familial — The family is the school of Original Value. Through the four-position foundation of parents and children, husband and wife, brother and sister, people learn what God’s heart looks like when it is made flesh.

The Original Value of the family is not a sociological observation; it is the metaphysical claim that the family was the first institution in the order of creation and remains the irreplaceable site of human formation.

Creational — Nature is not raw material; it is invested with God’s love. Stones, plants, animals, ecosystems — all bear the worth God put into them. The ecological imperative in Unification thought follows from this: to abuse nature is to deny Original Value, with consequences that propagate through the structure of give-and-receive.

Absolute — Behind and beneath the three relative domains stands the Absolute, the source from which all Original Value flows. God is the only being whose value is self-grounded; every other being’s value is derived.

This is why Sun Myung Moon insisted that absolute-value theory cannot be developed without theology and why the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, which he convened from 1972 onward, made the relation of value to ultimate reality its central concern.

Only the ideal that absolutizes the value of the other can settle into the new heaven and earth. Such an ideal — and only such an ideal — can become the foundation of family, of love, of peace, of every domain. Because the time was not yet ripe, I had not given the conclusion of unification thought centered on this content at the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences. The world’s educational systems speak only of relative value; absolute value is missing.

— Sun Myung Moon (506-267, 09/04/2005) Cham Bumo Gyeong

The diagnosis is precise. Late-modern culture is value-saturated and value-impoverished simultaneously: it has many relative values and no absolute one. The Unification claim is that until the value of the other is absolutized — that is, until subject and object regard one another as bearers of God-given worth — neither family nor peace nor any other lasting good is possible.

Practical Dimension

For Blessed Families, the doctrine of Original Value is not abstract. It restructures how a family raises children, how spouses regard one another, and how members engage the wider world.

In raising children, recognizing Original Value means treating each child as a unique image of God whose worth is given, not earned. Discipline aims at the restoration of the original character rather than at conformity. Education aims at the awakening of original gifts rather than at the imposition of external metrics.

In marriage, Original Value names the conviction that the spouse is not chosen for accidental qualities — beauty, status, compatibility — but received as a co-bearer of the divine image whose intrinsic worth is constant. This is the metaphysical ground of the Blessing’s commitments to lifelong fidelity and to seeing the spouse as God sees them.

In economic life, Original Value tempers the language of exchange and price. The value of a thing is not exhausted by what someone will pay for it. A house is not just a market asset; it is the place in which a family enacts the four-position foundation. A meal is not just calories; it is the daily renewal of bodies God invested with love.

In community life, the principle generates a politics of care. Every person met — the cashier, the stranger, the opponent — is a bearer of Original Value. Treating them as such is the small daily work that scales, eventually, into the world Sun Myung Moon called Cheon Il Guk.

Academic Note

The systematic axiology of Original Value belongs to Unification Thought, the philosophical articulation of Sun Myung Moon’s teaching developed by Dr. Sang Hun Lee from the 1970s onward.

The principal English-language presentations are Explaining Unification Thought (1981), Fundamentals of Unification Thought: The Head-Wing Thought (1991), and New Essentials of Unification Thought (2006), available through uthought.org.

Sang Hun Lee’s axiology engages Western philosophy directly, drawing on and contesting Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Max Scheler, and Nicolai Hartmann, and is recognized in scholarship as one of the more philosophically substantial systematic theologies produced by a new religious movement.

George Chryssides, in The Advent of Sun Myung Moon (1991) and his later reference works, identifies Unification Thought as exegetically and philosophically sophisticated.

Massimo Introvigne, in The Unification Church (2000), notes the unusual investment the Movement has made in academic engagement with axiology through the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS), convened from 1972, and the Professors World Peace Academy, founded in 1973. Frederick Sontag, in Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church (1977), highlighted absolute-value theory as the philosophical core of the Movement’s social engagement.

Critical scholars have observed that the Movement’s axiology, though developed in dialogue with Western philosophy, remains an axiology of the Korean Confucian-Christian synthesis Sun Myung Moon inherited and reworked.

Comparative Religion and Philosophy

Christianity — The classical doctrine of the imago Dei (Genesis 1:26-27) underwrites Western theology of human dignity. Aquinas’s account of the transcendentals — verum, bonum, pulchrum (true, good, beautiful) as convertible with being itself — anticipates the Unification triadic structure of Original Value.

The Catholic social teaching tradition, especially since Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), develops a doctrine of intrinsic human dignity that closely parallels the Unification position.

Differences arise on the doctrine of the Fall: classical Christianity holds that the imago is wounded but human nature retains its orientation; Unification thought holds that the structure of Original Value is intact while its expression in fallen humanity is systematically distorted.

Judaism — Rabbinic Judaism’s account of kedushah (holiness) as inherent to creation, and the Talmudic principle of every person bearing the divine image (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5: whoever destroys a soul, it is as if he destroyed an entire world), parallels the Unification insistence on the absolute worth of each person.

Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah, develops a value theory linking knowledge, virtue, and divine likeness that shares structural features with the three Original Values.

Islam — The Qur’anic doctrine that humanity is khalīfah (vicegerent) on earth (Q 2:30) places ultimate worth in the human as bearer of God’s trust. Sufi philosophy, particularly Ibn Arabi’s metaphysics of the Perfect Man (al-insān al-kāmil), articulates a theory of inherent value through reflection of the divine names that echoes the structure of Original Value, though within a different ontology.

Confucianism — Mencius’s account of innate moral nature — the four sprouts of ren, yi, li, zhi — is the Asian source closest to the Unification claim. Both hold that worth is given, not constructed, and that moral life consists in cultivating what is already there. Sun Myung Moon’s articulation of Original Value is shaped, recognizably, by this Confucian inheritance read through a Christian lens.

Buddhism — The Mahayana doctrine of Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha) — the inherent capacity for awakening present in every sentient being — is the closest Buddhist parallel.

The traditions diverge on metaphysics: Buddha-nature is the seed of liberation from saṃsāra; Original Value is the worth of being itself in the order of creation. Both insist that what fundamentally is in beings is good, and that delusion (in Buddhism) or fall (in Unification) does not destroy this.

Western philosophy — Plato’s Forms, especially the Form of the Good above the line in Republic VI; Aristotle’s account of telos and intrinsic flourishing; Kant’s principle that persons are ends in themselves; Max Scheler’s hierarchy of values; Nicolai Hartmann’s ontological ethics — these are the Western interlocutors with whom Unification axiology engages.

What makes the Unification position distinctive is its insistence that absolute value is structurally personal — not a Form, not an a priori of reason, but the love of a personal God invested in personal creation.

Key Takeaway

Original Value is the inherent, God-given worth every created being possesses by virtue of being created — objective, structural, anchored in the Creator’s purpose.
It is constituted relationally in the four-position foundation: subject and object give and receive purposefully under God; the “master of value” is not the dominant party but the partner who absolutizes the other.
It is realized through three classical values — Truth (intellect), Beauty (emotion), Goodness (will) — and grounded in Love, the source from which all three flow.
The Fall did not destroy Original Value; it obscured it. Restoration is the work of returning creation to the value God invested in it.
It manifests in four domains: personal dignity, familial, creational, and absolute — corresponding to the Three Great Blessings.
Articulated systematically as Unification Thought (Sang Hun Lee), Original Value is the philosophical foundation of the Movement’s engagement with science, education, economics, and politics.

How is Original Value different from absolute value?

Original Value names the origin of worth (it comes from God’s investment in creation); absolute value names its character (it does not vary with culture, period, or taste). They are two angles on the same reality — Sun Myung Moon used “absolute value” especially in academic contexts at the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, while “Original Value” is the term of Unification Thought’s systematic axiology.

Is Original Value subjective or objective?

It is objectively grounded — it inheres in beings as God created them — but realized only in subjective relation. A flower’s beauty is real before any perceiver exists, but its full actualization happens when a perceiver enters a give-and-receive with it. The dichotomy of objective versus subjective dissolves in the four-position foundation.

Why does Unification Thought add Love as a fourth term?

Because Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are not floating abstractions but emerge in the give-and-receive relation that Love constitutes. Sang Hun Lee’s mature axiology treats Love as the source of the three values rather than a fourth alongside them — the heart from which truth, beauty, and goodness flow as expressions.

Key Texts

Exposition of the Divine Principle — The Principle of Creation (Chapter 1) sets out the dual-purpose structure and four-position foundation that ground Original Value.
Cheon Seong Gyeong — Books on creation, true love, and absolute value gather Sun Myung Moon’s teachings on the worth God invested in creation.
Cham Bumo Gyeong — Especially the chapters on the True Parents and creation, where the structure of Original Value is articulated.
World Scripture and the Teachings of Sun Myung Moon — Reads Original Value alongside parallel concepts from other traditions.