Works of Love

What does it mean to love somebody? What should we expect from those that we love? What is Christian love? What distinguishes Christian love from regular worldly love?

These are questions that Kierkegaard answers in Works of Love, a book he wrote near the end of his writing career under his own name. It is a brilliant exposition on what Christian love consists of and what sort of love is required of the believer in Christ. It is almost 400 pages long, and yet every sentence is full of significance for the task of loving others.

One of the main distinction Kierkegaard makes in this book is between worldly love, which he sees as simply self-love disguised as loving others, and Christian love, which is based on the commandment that we shall love, regardless of our own desires.

The distinction the world makes is namely this: if someone wants to be self-loving all by himself, which, however, is rarely seen, the world calles this self-love, but if he, self-loving, wants to hold together in self-love with some other self-loving people, particularly with many other self-loving people, then the world calls this love...what the world honors and loves under the name of love is an alliance in self-love.

No, there is actually a conflict between what God understands and what the world understands by love...the God-relationship is the mark by which the love for people is recognized as genuine. As soon as a love-relationship does not lead me to God, and as soon as I in the love-relationship do not lead the other to God, then the love, even if it were the highest bliss and delight of affection, even if it were the supreme good of the lovers' earthly life, is still not true love...to love another person is to help that person to love God, and to be loved is to be helped.

Any other form of love that is dependent on how someone is toward me or reliant upon what good things they can bring to me, all the while neglecting my task to draw that person closer to God, is not Christian love; it is self love.

This reality of Christian love hits me so hard, mainly because I realize how far I am from it. I think about the people I love, and I realize that no matter how well I love them, there is always a part of me that expects something in return, some sort of reward or benefit for my efforts. It is a concern for myself over everyone else. What would it take for me to love others regardless of how well they loved me in return? It feels almost impossible. Sure, I have surrounded myself with people who are able to love me well, and I am incredibly blessed by it. But could I love someone that never gave me anything in return? It becomes so difficult, because it doesn't fit with the way I understand love, and that's a hard thing to let go of. I have to constantly ask myself whether the love I show others is worldly love that is ultimately only concerned about myself, or Christian love that is only concerned with honoring God's commandment, that I simply shall love and not expect anything in return.

This is not to say that we cannot prefentially choose certain people to spend our time with and benefit from (i.e. friends, family, spouses, significant others, etc). After all, Jesus spent a great deal of time with his disciples, whom he called his friends, and very likely benefitted from their friendship, yet he was still perfectly able to love everybody else in the midst of these relationships. What is important is that in the midst of our different types of relationships, regardless of who we are with or happen to come across, that we make the choice to love each one as our neighbor without expecting anything in return.

Here's another passage from Works of Love, one of my favorites about how love abides:

Yes, praise God, love abides! Then whatever the world may take away from you, though it be the most cherished, then whatever may happen to you in life, however you may come to suffer in your striving for the good that you will, if people turn indifferently away from you or against you as enemies, if everyone disowns you or is ashamed to admit what he owed to you, if even your best friend were to deny you...take comfort, because love abides.

When despondency wants to make everything empty for you, to transform all life into a monotonous and meaningless repetition...[when] you do indeed know that God is, but it seems to you as if he had withdrawn into himself, as if he were far off in heaven, infinitely far away from all this triviality that is scarcely worth living for; when despondency wants to deaden all of life for you, so that you do indeed know, but very faintly, that Christ has existed, but with a troubled clarity know that it was eighteen hundred years ago, as if he, too, were infinitely far away from all this triviality that is scarcely worth living for - oh, then bear in mind that love abides! Meet all the terrors of the future with this comfort: love abides; meet all the anxiety and listlessness of the present with this comfort: love abides.

Either/Or

One of Kierkegaard's more well-known books and his first major publication, Either/Or, is where Kierkegaard's use of pseudonyms first comes into major play. One of the biggest reasons Kierkegaard tends to be so misunderstood is that most of his well-known works, particularly the early ones, were written under different fictional names or "characters" that embodied particular worldviews, some of them radically different than Kierkegaard. His purpose was to present a first-person account of a particular way of life and allow the reader to reflect on their own life in response to it. 

In other words, instead of just telling someone directly what to believe, e.g. that pursuing pleasure above all else leads to despair, Kierkegaard would write a first-person narrative of a person pursuing pleasure and falling into despair, allowing the readers to judge for themselves and reflect on how much their own life might be similar.  This is where he is typically misunderstood, because people will quote passages from these books and attribute it to him, but that's exactly what he hoping wouldn't happen.  To provide a religious balance to the pseudonymous work, he would also publish uplifting Christian Discourses at the same time under his own name, but, of course, these tend to be neglected by a lot of modern readers.

Either/Or is the perfect example of this literary approach. The book is edited by a man named Victor Eremita, who claims to have found a collection of papers in an old desk he bought, and has decided to arrange and publish the papers, though he doesn't know exactly who wrote them. The first collection of papers is the personal diary of a nameless man Victor calls 'A', and the second is a number of letters by a judge named William written to 'A' in response to the life 'A' is living.

This is one of the reasons for the title of the book: 'A' and Judge William have two completely different approaches to life. 'A' is concerned only with possibility, while Judge William is interested in morality and actuality. Kierkegaard believed there were three main stages in a person's development: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. In Either/Or, he is presenting two characters, 'A' and Judge William, who embody the first two stages, the aesthetic and the ethical. In other words, two different ways to live life: either aesthetically or ethically. [Kierkegaard would later bring the religious stage into this either/or more directly]

The collection of passages here will be from 'A', the aesthetic, someone whose interest in immediate wordly things was slowly leading to despair. Again, these are not Kierkegaard's personal beliefs.  This is instead a first-person depiction of one who is concerned only with worldly possibility (and the despair such a life leads to):

"I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own, anything."

"What is going to happen? What will the future bring? I do not know...before me is continually an empty space, and I am propelled by a consequence that lies behind me. This life is turned around and dreadful, not to be endured."

"No one comes back from the dead; no one has come into the world without weeping. No one asks when one wants to come in; no one asks when one wants to go out."

"I don't feel like doing anything. I don't feel like riding - the motion is too powerful; I don't feel like walking - it is too tiring; I don't feel like lying down, for either I would have to stay down, and I don't feel like doing that, or I would have to get up again, and I don't feel like doing that, either."

"What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music...and people crowd around the poet and say to him, 'Sing again soon'- in other words, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before, because your screams would only alarm us, but the music is charming."

"It takes a lot of naivete to believe that it helps to shout and scream in the world, as if one's fate would thereby be altered. Take what comes and avoid all complications."

"Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it...laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it...trust a girl, and you will regret it; do not trust her, and you will also regret it...hang yourself, and you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it...this, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life."

"My soul has lost possibility. If I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere. Pleasure disappoints; possibility does not."

Kierkegaard believed that many of the people in Copenhagen who claimed to be Christian were simply living aesthetic lives under a false guise of Christianity.  His hope was that they would identify with this character, relate to the despair that 'A' was experiencing, and, through this despair, be in a place where they could respond to the message of true Christianity.

So many questions

This is a quick excerpt from Repetition, one of Kierkegaard's shorter works. It is through the voice of a character simply known as 'the young man', who is frustrated with his existence and wondering exactly why he was set down here:

"Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of that word? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought from a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager - I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?"

I know this isn't for everyone. I know not everyone asks these sorts of questions. But I can relate. I ask these sort of questions quite often and can't help but wonder how peculiar our situation here really is. It's like what the lady said to Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "Seems like we're just set down here and don't nobody know why."

I know there are Christian answers to these questions; Kierkegaard knew them, too. But the issue is not necessarily what the answers are, but what I do with the answers. The answers are there and are simple for me to say, but they can be incredibly difficult for me to live out, to actually exist in. Sometimes I despair of the answers because they don't feel satisfying enough. I can raise countless objections. But other times I'm struck into an awe-filled silence, fascinated by the whole thing, that I am called to believe that somehow this message of hope, love, and mercy, a God who has entered the world, truly underlies everything I see. But even in these times, faith is still incredibly difficult. It becomes something that I can barely grasp against all my objections, a ridiculous hope that I can only cling to desperately. I risk everything to believe against my own understanding, that somehow this thin message, this whisper in the shouts of uncertainty, this rumor of something greater that is so easily ignored, might somehow be true. How can I rest my entire existence on something so fragile and mysterious? How can I let go of everything I think the world should and should not be? How can I cry out to God with everything I am, hear only stillness, and yet somehow continue to believe that I am not only heard, but loved as well? I can only answer these questions with the greatest difficulty, because I must risk everything I am, absolutely everything, on the hope of these answers.

The "how" of belief

What does it mean to believe in Christianity?  How does one have faith?  How does one exist as a believing Christian?

These are the questions that Kierkegaard answers in what he thought would be his last work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosphical Fragments.  It's not the most marketable title.  It probably won't end up on Oprah's book list any time soon.  But the 'Concluding' part of the title refers to the fact that Kierkegaard thought he was done as writer.  Later, he decided it would be important to return as an author and attempt to explain Christianity more directly because of the injustices he saw around him done in the name of Christ.

One of the biggest reasons Kierkegaard tends to be so misunderstood is that nearly all of his major works, particularly his early works, are written under different fictional names or "characters" that embodied particular worldviews, some of them radically different than Kierkegaard.  His purpose was to present a first-person account of a particular way of life and force the reader to reflect on their own life in response to how that character is living.  In other words, instead of just telling someone directly what to believe, for example that pursuing pleasure above all else leads to despair, Kierkegaard would write a first-person narrative of a person pursuing pleasure and falling into despair, allowing the readers to judge for themselves and reflect on how much their own life might be similar.  These weren't just characters in a book with Kierkegaard's name on it as the author.  His name didn't show up anywhere on the book, as he was hoping that no one would know he wrote it.

Postscript is no different.  It's written by a man named Johannes Climacus, a character Kierkegaard created who is closer to Christianity than all of K's previous pseudonyms, but he isn't quite ready to become one.  He claims to have discovered what it truly takes to become a Christian, but the twist is that he has realized that it is much too difficult for him to do.  This was obviously directed to those in Kierkegaard's time who felt that it was quite easy to become a Christian, that existing in one's belief was a simple matter.

So here are a few selected passages from Postscript.  It's very long (over 600 pages), but the major point that Kierkegaard was trying to convey (through Climacus) is that becoming a Christian is a matter of inwardness, an individual subjectively coming to terms with the fact that God has entered the world, and relating every aspect of one's existence to that fact.  The key emphasis here is not so much on what a Christian believes.  Although that is important, what is more important is how one believes, how one relates him/herself to the truth of Christianity:

"Christianity has made the way most difficult, and it is only an illusion, which has snared many, that Christianity has made the way easy, since it helps people precisely and only by making the beginning such that everything becomes much more difficult than ever."

"If an existing person is to relate himself with pathos [i.e. with passionate inwardness] to an eternal happiness, then the point is that his existence should express the relation…yet no one knows it except the individual himself in his own consciousness….He needs only to attend to his own existence; then he knows it. If it does not absolutely transform his existence for him, then he is not relating himself to an eternal happiness; if there is something he is not willing to give up for its sake, then he is not relating himself to an eternal happiness."

"Although in the world we frequently enough see a presumptuous religious individuality who, himself so exceedingly secure in his relationship with God and jauntily sure of his eternal happiness, is self-importantly busy doubting the salvation of others and offering them his help, I believe it would be appropriate discourse for a truly religious person if he said: I do not doubt anyone’s salvation; the only one I have fears about is myself; even if I see a person sink low, I still dare not despair of his salvation, but if it is myself, then I certainly would be forced to endure the terrible thought."

"Suppose that a person with a deeply religious need continually heard only the kind of pious address in which everything is rounded off by having the absolute telos [i.e. eternal happiness] exhaust itself in relative ends – what then? He would sink into the deepest despair, since he in himself experienced something else and yet never heard the pastor talk about this, about suffering in one’s inner being, about the suffering of the God-relationship. Out of respect for the pastor and the pastor’s rank, he perhaps would be led to interpret this suffering as a misunderstanding, or as something that other people presumably also experienced but found so easy to overcome that it is not even mentioned."

"God rescues from delusion the person who in quiet inwardness and honest before God is concerned for himself; even though he is ever so simple, God leads him in the suffering of inwardness to the truth."

Spiritual trial

The following passage is from one of Kierkegaard's later works called For Self-Examination.  The second period of K.'s writing, called the secondary literature, is mored direct and more Christian.  In a general sense, with regard to Christianity, K. was concerned with emphasizing the negative aspects of Christianity - the struggle, the suffering, the uncertainty - as a reminder to those who had forgotten these aspects.  He did write about the positive as well, but he was writing to a culture (19th century Copenhagen) where everyone believed they were Christian by virtue of their nationality, their attendance at church, their baptism, etc.  In a culture where Christianity had become too easy, K. wanted to re-establish the difficulty that can come with being a Christian (dying to the world, persecution, being an offense, etc).  This passage on spiritual trial is a good example:

"These thousands and thousands and millions, each one is looking after his own business; the public official is looking after his, and the scholar his, and the artist his, and the businessman his, and the slanderer his, and the loafer, no less busy, his, and so on and on; everyone is looking after his own business in this criss-crossing game of diversity that is actuality.  Meanwhile, like Luther in a cloister cell or in a remote room, there is not far away a solitary person in fear and trembling and much spiritual trial.  This is the state of that solitary person sitting there; he is sitting - or, if you so wish, he is pacing, perhaps up and down the floor like a lion imprisoned in a cage; and yet what imprisons him is remarkable - he is by God or because of God imprisoned within himself.

That for which he has suffered in spiritual trial must now be transposed into actuality. Do you think he enjoys it? Truly, rest assured that anyone who comes down these paths shouting with joy has not been called. There is not one of those called who has not preferred to be exempted, not one who, as a child begs and pleads to be let off, has not pleaded for himself, but it does not help - he must go on. 

Thus he knows that when he now takes this step the terror will rise up. When the terror rises up, the person who is not called becomes so alarmed that he turns and runs. But the one who is called - ah, my friend, he would rather turn back, shuddering before the terror, but as soon as he turns to flee he sees - he sees an even greater horror behind him, the horror of spiritual trial, and he must go forward - so he goes forward; now he is perfectly calm, because the horror of spiritual trial is a formidable disciplinarian who can give courage.  The terror rises up. Everything that closely or remotely belongs to the given actuality arms itself against this man of spiritual trial whom it nevertheless is impossible to terrify because, strangely enough, he is so afraid - of God. All attack him, hate him, curse him. The few who are loyal to him cry out, 'Be careful! You are making yourself and everybody else unhappy. Stop now and do not make the terror more intense. Check the words on your lips and recant what you have just said'.  O my listener, faith is a restless thing." (For Self-Examination, 19-20)

Why a Kierkegaard blog?

Well, I'm working on my PhD at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and since my thesis subject is Søren Kierkegaard, I thought it would be worthwhile to give those who aren't familiar with his writing an occasional passage to hopefully give a sense of his depth and brilliance as a philosopher, a theologian, a psychologist, and, most of all, a real person. Nothing fancy, just something from his writing that catches me as particularly worthwhile. Given, Kierkegaard isn't really meant for sound bites, but it's a start.

I'll try to let passages stand on their own, but if there's anything worth adding, I will. And I'll try to post new passages every couple days or so. Feel free to comment, ask questions, etc.

All excerpts are from the Princeton translations (Kierkegaard's Writings) by Howard and Edna Hong. If you like the passage, you can buy the related book at http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/kw.html

So, here we go. This first passage is from a letter Kierkegaard wrote to his brother-in-law, before his "official" writing career began. He was 22 at the time, just about to graduate from the University of Copenhagen and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life:

"What I really need is to get clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die...of what use would it be to me to be able to formulate the meaning of Christianity, to be able to explain many specific points - if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life...I certainly do not deny that I still accept an imperative of knowledge and that through it men may be influenced, but then it must come alive in me, and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all."