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.