Works of Love

This book, a series of in-depth philosophical-theological-social-ethical meditations on the nature of Christian love by the great Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, is one of the most rewarding, challenging, and uplifting books I've ever read. I started reading it way back in October 2014 as it was one of the recommended readings for a philosophy module I was doing - I used it as one of the foundations of my mini-dissertation but never actually finished it, despite finding it thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating. This was probably because it's very long and very dense, and I prefer reading shortish easyish books so I can finish more sooner so my blog racks up more posts (only half-jesting here): but in the last months of 2015, given a particular prolonged mindset that came over me, I returned to Søren's work and it has genuinely helped me keep my mind and heart oriented in joy toward God who is love. The blurb of my copy proclaims boldly how 'LIFE CHANGING' a 'SEMINAL WORK' this is, and it is, but like Emily Dickinson (another writer whose work in recent months helped me continue to know God, love and joy), Kierkegaard's life is not as fondly celebrated as his works, because it was also often characterised by loneliness, illness, and sadness.* What I find brilliant about these two, American poet and Danish philosopher, is that their work does tell of this misery - but refuses to let it define it (or them) by being the ending: both resolutely turn to God, to love, to joy, and adroitly display what a complete comfort that is. So yes, for a struggling Christian, this book probably would be life-changing, for the depth, breadth and persistence of its complaints, rebukes and encouragements.

   I should probably discuss the book's content a bit.

   This is easier said than done: Kierkegaard is a highly analytical but far from a systematic philosopher, and the subject matter lends itself to deep idiosyncratic meditations on a particular aspect, angle, or argument. It's not just random reflections bundled into chapters though: coherent structures to his thought are evident throughout, and every point he makes or conclusion he reaches is, with some thought (or, thankfully, more often, his own continued explanation) consistent with the overarching pictures he paints about what love is and how it works. I won't really go into these, as they run very broad and deep. The first half of the book tackles the meta-nature of love: how Christians understand God as being love, how God's eminence as the primary and defining being therefore makes love the primary and defining force and essence of all reality and how this should upend everything we think we know about goodness, since human ideas about 'love' are minute, immature, corrupt and skewed compared to the actuality of God-as-love. He also explores the notion of commanded love, how there is no contradiction in love being a compulsory facet of human activity, questions of who our neighbours are (hint: everyone) and why human nature's relationship to God's nature compels the loving-each-other-as-ourselves core of Christian ethics.

   The second half of the book is applications of this radical conception of Christian love to various active aspects of life: encouraging people, trusting people, being hopeful, seeking others' good, forgiving and forgetting, remaining loving, being merciful, winning over the unloving to the cause of love, mourning the dead, and praising love itself. Kierkegaard examines each of these facets of how we live in love, building from the conceptual base of the first part. One point that he frequently restates I will mention because it's a brilliant realisation: if God is love, then in any functional relationship between humans, all feelings and actions between those humans is irrelevant, as a functional relationship is a loving one, which necessarily includes God as a third element in that relationship, and God in perfection necessarily flattens all non-perfectly-loving elements of each of the two persons as they are no longer just relating to each other but to God. This holds for any two persons, be they friends, enemies, you and some homeless guy you'd really rather not feel compelled to buy a sandwich. Of course, such relationships, in our broken and sinful world, do not de facto occur, but by the grace of God and the uplifting work of his loving Spirit, we can (should) strive to emulate them.

   If I've made it sound complicated please forgive/disregard me (or leave an angry comment if you're so inclined, goodness knows it'll be nice to at least know that I've got readers). Søren is a philosopher but this is not a philosophy book: he's not developing complex theoretical structures or proposing grand intricate maps of reality: he's a Christian, using his ability as a philosopher to walk the reader in wisdom through his many thoughts about the most important thing a Christian thinks there is - God-as-love. And yes, these thoughts are extremely deep at points, yes, at points he goes into a lot of detail to argue for a particular point and so the prose becomes difficult and dense, but stick with these passages, because he uses them to connect thoughts that bring you to a realisation of some truly beautiful things, some intensely challenging things, some immeasurably encouraging works of love.
   For a Christian reader, this book is now one of the first I would ever recommend someone read - it is supremely uplifting, and you genuinely feel you are discovering more about how to know, serve and emulate God. Non-Christian readers might also enjoy it but I would expect they'd find it confusing: the active reality of Christian love is so counter-intuitive, so against the grain of our modern cultural sensible individualism, that Kierkegaard's conclusions would just come across as mad. And in a way they are - I certainly felt that - but that's why it's such a refreshing challenge, because humans are built to know God, to know love, but we are so distant from its reality that hearing extensive in-depth truths about what it is and how it works and how we fit into it doesn't immediately feel like good news. But, of course, it is. [I was going to find a quote from the book to lend this concluding sentence a bit more oomph, but there's just too many good ones, and I can't be bothered to comb back through the whole thing. Anyway; absolutely worth a read.]

* A fact that is better reflected in his other philosophical works, most of which are about irony, despair, godlessness, and so on. Also, this hasn't got much to do with anything I've mentioned in this post but I want to include a link to it anyway because it's hilarious: follow this twitter account for a superb feed of Kierkegaardian thinking combined with the everyday lifestyle reflections of Kim Kardashian. You're welcome.