Kierkegaard, from the very start, sets out what this book will be all about, “They are Christian deliberations, therefore not about love but about works of love.” He begins by explaining why the love of God is different from worldly love, “But you shall love God in unconditional obedience, even if what he requires of you might seem to you to be to your own harm, indeed, harmful to his cause; for God’s wisdom is beyond all comparison to yours, and God’s governance has no obligation of responsibility in relation to your sagacity. All you have to do is obey in love.”
Kierkegaard relates how being bound by love eternally is actually the truest form of freedom that a human has, “But the love that has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty and loves because it shall love—that love is independent and has the law for its existence in the relation of love itself to the eternal…. Alas, we often think that freedom exists and it is law that binds freedom. Yet it is just the opposite; without law, freedom does not exist at all, and it is law that gives freedom…. If when another person says, “I cannot love you any longer,” one proudly answers, “Then I can also stop loving you”—is this independence? Alas, it is dependence, because whether he will continue to love or not depends upon whether the other will love. But the person who answers, “In that case I shall still continue to love you”—that person’s love is made eternally free in blessed independence. He does not say it proudly—dependent upon his pride—no, he says it humbly, humbling himself under eternity’s shall, and for that very reason he is independent.”
In fact, love only becomes true love when it becomes an eternal duty. “The love that has undergone eternity’s change by becoming duty is not exempted from misfortune, but it is saved from despair, in fortune and misfortune equally saved from despair…. See, passion inflames, worldly sagacity cools, but neither this heat nor this cold nor the combination of this heat and this cold is the pure air of the eternal…. But this “You shall love” removes all the unhealthiness and preserves the healthiness for eternity. So it is everywhere, this shall of eternity is the saving, the purifying, the ennobling element.” True love always requires an element of self-denial. “Wherever the essentially Christian is, there is also self-denial, which is Christianity’s essential form…. Self-denial is the very transformation by which a person becomes sober in the sense of eternity.” Universal love is also in constant danger of being replaced by particular loves, “But erotic love and friendship are the very peak of self-esteem, the I intoxicated in the other I. The more securely one I and another I join to become one I, the more this united I selfishly cuts itself from everyone else. At the peak of erotic love and friendship, the two actually do become one self, one I.”
True Christian love can only be recognized in the form of the love of one’s neighbor. One must love all of humanity equally and only in this way love God. But that also means loving your enemy just as you would love yourself, “The neighbor is the utterly unrecognizable dissimilarity between persons or is the eternal equality before God—the enemy, too, has this equality…. Shut your eyes and remember the commandment that you shall love; then you love—your enemy—no, then you love the neighbor, because you do not see that he is your enemy. In other words, when you shut your eyes, you do not see dissimilarities of earthly life…. The kinship is secured by each individual’s equal kinship with and relationship to God in Christ; because the Christian doctrine addresses itself equally to each individual…. Just as little as the Christian lives or can live without his body, so little can he live without the dissimilarity of earthly life that belongs to every human being in particular by birth, by position, by circumstances, by education etc.—none of us is pure humanity…. This must continue as long as temporality continues and must continue to tempt every human being who comes into the world, inasmuch as by being Christian he does not become exempt from dissimilarity, but by overcoming the temptation of dissimilarity he becomes a Christian. In so-called Christendom, therefore, the difference of earthly life still continually tempts—alas, perhaps it even more than tempts, so that one person is haughty and another defiantly envies. Both ways are in fact rebellion, are rebellion against the essentially Christian…. Christianity and worldliness will never come to a mutual understanding.”
Care for one’s station in the world is the enemy of Christian ethics. The temporal and eternity can never be reconciled. “Christianly the world’s opposition stands in an essential relationship to the inwardness of Christianity…. Christianity cannot keep anything other than what it has promised from the beginning: the world’s ingratitude, opposition, and derision, and continually to a higher degree the more earnest a Christian one becomes…. Therefore if anyone can demonstrate that the world or Christendom has now become essentially good, as if it were eternity, then I will also demonstrate that Christian self-denial has been made impossible and Christianity abolished, just as it will be abolished in eternity, where it will cease to be militant.”
Love is the only act that fulfills Christian law, “The relation of love to the Law is here like the relation of faith to understanding. The understanding counts and counts, calculates and calculates, but it never arrives at the certainty that faith possesses.” Love of your neighbor is the only debt in the temporal world worth owing, “If possible, owe no one anything, no courtesy, no service, no sympathy in joy or in sorrow, no leniency in judging, no help in life, no advice in danger, no sacrifice, not even the hardest—no, in all this owe no one anything. But along with all this still remain in the debt that you certainly have not wished and before God have certainly not been able to pay off, the debt to love one another!”
The nature of true love is its immeasurability. It is immeasurable both for the lover and for the one loved. “In everything done for you by the one who loves, in the least little triviality as well as in the greatest sacrifice, there is always love along with it; and thereby the smallest service, which in the case of the hired servant you would scarcely find worth taking into account, becomes immeasurable…. The object of love confesses in love that with the least little thing the lover does infinitely more than all the others do with the greatest sacrifices; and the lover confesses to himself that in making every possible sacrifice he is doing infinitely less than he perceives the debt to be.”
In order to love one’s neighbor properly, there is the necessity of granting belief freely and giving to all the benefit of the doubt. “The person who loves believes all things. With the blessed joy of amazement, he will someday see that he was right; and if he made a mistake by believing too much of the good—to believe the good is in itself a blessing.” It is similar with hope. “That is why the person who hopes can never be deceived, because to hope is to expect the possibility of the good, but the possibility of the good is the eternal…. The loving one hopes all things. No indolence of habit, no pettiness of mind, no hairsplitting of sagacity, no quantities of experience, no slackness of years, no bitterness of evil passions corrupt for him his hope or counterfeit the possibility for him; every morning, yes, every moment, he renews his hope and refreshes possibility, while love abides and he in it…. Love hopes to the limit, yes, to the “last day,” for not until then is hope over.”
Kierkegaard circles back to the temptations of the worldly, “Acting sagaciously is, actually, a halfway approach, whereby one undeniably gets further ahead in the world, wins the world’s goods and advantages and the world’s honor, because, in the eternal sense, the world and world’s advantages are half-measures. But neither the eternal nor Holy Scripture has taught anyone to aspire to get ahead or furthest ahead in the world; on the contrary, it warns against getting too far ahead in the world in order, if possible, to keep oneself unstained by the defilement of the world…. If the hope is not fulfilled it perhaps will become apparent in one’s bitterness and despair how firmly one was attached to that for which it was a shame to hope.” The lust for money holds particular scorn for Kierkegaard, “From the eternal point of view money is less than nothing…. Think of eternity in whatever way you want to; only admit that many of the temporal things you have seen in temporality you wished to find again in eternity, that you wished to see trees and the flowers and the stars again, to hear the singing of birds and the murmuring of the brook again—but could it ever occur to you that there would be money in eternity? No, then the kingdom of heaven itself would again become a land of misery…. Of all the things you have seen, there is nothing of which you can be so sure that it will never enter heaven as—money.”
In fact, the rich and the poor can practice mercy alike. “Eternity understands only mercifulness; therefore if you want to learn to understand mercifulness, you must learn it from eternity. But if you are to have an understanding of the eternal, there must be stillness around you while you concentrate your attention completely on inwardness…. Mercifulness does not arouse amazement. What indeed is there to be amazed at if even the poorest wretch, and he best of all, can practice mercifulness? Mercifulness, if you in truth perceive it, does not arouse amazement; it stirs you, just because it is inwardness, it makes the deepest inward impression upon you.”
Kierkegaard concludes, “In the Christian sense, a person ultimately and essentially has only God to deal with in everything, although he still must remain in the world and in the earthly circumstances assigned to him…. The adult also readily imagines that his dealings with the world are actuality, but God brings him to understand that all this is only being used for his upbringing…. Thus God is the educator; his love is the greatest leniency and the greatest rigorousness…. But everything in you that is of flesh and blood and is timorousness and attachment to things of this earth must despair, so that you cannot acquire external certainty, a certainty once and for all, and in the easiest manner. See, this is the struggle of faith in which you can have occasion to be tried and tested every day.”
In the end, what happens on earth is irrelevant compared to eternity and God’s eternal love. Forgiveness of others is the necessary path to the forgiveness of yourself. “Christianity’s view is: forgiveness is forgiveness; your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness; the forgiveness you give is the forgiveness you receive, not the reverse…. God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive those who have sinned against you.” Kierkegaard returns once again to the unknowability of God’s love, “How rigorous this Christian like for like is! The Jewish, the worldly, the bustling like for like is: as others do unto you, by all means take care that you also do likewise unto them. But the Christian like for like is: God will do unto you exactly as you do unto others. In the Christian sense, you have nothing at all to do with what others do unto you—it does not concern you; it is a curiosity, an impertinence, a lack of good sense on your part to meddle in things that are absolutely no more your concern than if you were not present. You have to do only with what you do onto others, or how you take what others do unto you. The direction is inward; essentially you have to do only with yourself before God…. The Christian like for like belongs to this world of inwardness…. In the Christian sense, to love people is to love God, and to love God is to love people.”
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