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Love: A Denouncement

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Kierkegaard - The Greater Love

Worldly wisdom would have us believe that love is a relationship between one person and another. Christ’s life teaches that love is a relationship between three: person-Godperson. However beautiful a love-relationship is between two or more people – however complete all their enjoyment and all their bliss in mutual devotion and affection are for them, and even if all people praise this relationship – if God and the relationship to God is left out, then this is not love but a mutual and enchanting illusion. For only in love for God can one love in truth. To help another human being to love God is to love another person. And to be helped by another human being to love God is to be loved.

Love is by no means merely a human bond, no matter how faithful and tender it is. As soon as you leave God out, the power of human judgment becomes highest. Such judgment loses sight of love altogether. As soon as a love-relationship does not lead me to God, and as soon as I do not lead another person to God, this love – even if it were the most blissful and joyous attachment, even if it were the highest good in the lover’s earthly life – nevertheless is not true love.

Not only should the celibate belong solely to God, so should the person who in love is bound to a woman or a man. He shall not first seek to please his wife, but shall strive first that his love may please God. Consequently, it is not the wife who shall teach the husband how he should love her, or the husband his wife, or a friend his friend, or associates their associates, but it is God who shall teach each individual how he or she should love. Only when the God-relationship determines what constitutes love is love prevented from being some illusion or self-deception.

Love that does not lead to God, love that does not have the single goal of leading us to love God, such love eventually comes to a standstill. Moreover, it escapes the ultimate and most terrible collision: in the love-relationship there is an infinite difference between God’s conception of love and ours. A purely human conception of love can never comprehend that anyone, through being loved as completely as possible by another person, would be able to stand in the other person’s way. And yet, Christianly understood, this very thing is possible, for to be loved thus can be a hindrance to one’s God-relationship.

So what is to be done? Christ knows how to remove the collision without removing love. It demands only this sacrifice (in many cases it is the greatest sacrifice possible): being willing to accept that the reward for your love is to be hated. Wherever someone is loved in such a way as to endanger another’s Godrelationship, there is a collision. And wherever this collision occurs, there is the requirement of a sacrifice that cannot be humanly grasped. For the Christian view means this: to truly love oneself is to love God; to truly love another person is, though it mean being hated, to help the other person love God.

The world cannot seem to get it through its head that apart from God love is a chimera. For God alone is love. Where love is, God not only becomes the third party but essentially becomes the only loved object, so that it is not the husband who is the wife’s beloved, but it is God, and it is the wife who is helped by the husband to love God, and conversely. The love-relationship is a triangular relationship of the lover, the beloved, and love – not love by itself but love in God. For ultimately it is God who has placed love in us humans, and it is God who shall finally decide what is love.

In matters of love it takes no time at all to become deceived. It is so easy to get a quick, fanciful picture of what love is and then be satisfied with the fancy. It is still easier to get a few people to associate together in self-love, to be sought after and admired by them till the end. But if your ultimate and highest purpose is to have an easy and sociable life, then don’t have anything to do with Christ or his love. Flee from him, for he will do the very opposite. He will make your life difficult and do this precisely by making you stand alone before God.

Thus when a friend, a beloved, or other lovers and associates notice that you want to learn from Christ what it is to love instead of learning from them, don’t be surprised when they say to you, “Spare yourself. Give up this eccentricity. Why take life so seriously? Cut out the straining, and let us all live a beautiful, rich, and meaningful life in friendship and joy.” And if you give in to the suggestions of this false friendship, you will surely be loved and praised for it. But if you don’t, if in loving you will be a traitor neither to God nor to yourself nor to the others, you must expect your love to be refused and to be called selfish. Even if you say nothing, the others will notice that your life contains, if it is truly related to God’s demand, an admonition, a demand on them. It is this they want to do away with.

How many have been corrupted – divinely understood – by such friendship, or by a woman’s love, simply because, defrauded out of his God-relationship, he became far too attached to her while she in turn was inexhaustible in her praise of his love? How many have relatives and friends corrupted by their love because they got him to forget his God-relationship and changed it to something people could shout about, admire, without being sensitive to any admonition about higher things?

Do not appeal, therefore, to the judgment of others in order to prove your love. Human judgment has validity only as far as it agrees with God’s demand. No love between one person and another can, in and of itself, ever be perfectly happy, ever perfectly secure. Even the happiest love between two people has still one danger, the danger that earthly love can become too intense, too important, so that the God-relationship is hindered. You must always watch apprehensively, lest this danger overtake you, lest you too should forget God, or that the beloved might do so. Such apprehension may mean being hated by the beloved. But only God, who is the one true source of love, is the continuously happy, the continuously blessed object of love. You should thus not watch too apprehensively; watch only in adoration.

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Kierkegaard - Neighbor Love

If anyone asks, “Who is my neighbor?” then Christ’s reply to the Pharisee, who asked this same question, contains the only answer, for in answer to this question Christ turned everything around. Christ says: “Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” The Pharisee answers correctly, “The one who showed mercy to him” (Lk. 10:36). This means that by doing your duty you easily discover who your neighbor is. The Pharisee’s answer is contained in Christ’s question. He towards whom I have a duty is my neighbor, and when I fulfill my duty, I prove that I am a neighbor. Christ does not speak about recognizing our neighbor but about being a neighbor yourself, about proving yourself to be a neighbor, something the Samaritan showed by his compassion. Choosing a lover, finding a friend, yes that is a long, hard job, but your neighbor is easy to recognize, easy to find – if you yourself will only recognize your duty and be a neighbor.

In this way, Christ has thrust romantic love and friendship from the throne, the love rooted in mood and inclination, preferential love. He does so in order to establish a spiritual love in its place, love to our neighbor, a love which in all earnestness and truth is inwardly more tender in the union of two persons than romantic love is and more faithful in the sincerity of close relationship than the most famous friendship. Let us not confuse the matter. Christ does not ask for a higher love in addition to praising friendship and romantic love. No, Christian love teaches love for all people, unconditionally all.

The poet and Christ explain things in opposite ways. The poet idolizes feelings and since he has only romantic love in mind, believes that to command love is the greatest foolishness and the most preposterous kind of talk: Love and friendship contain no ethical task. Love and friendship are good fortune, the highest good fortune. To find the one and only beloved is good fortune, almost as great as to find the one and only friend. For the poet, the highest task in life is to be properly grateful for one’s good fortune. But one’s task can never be an obligation to find the beloved or to find this friend. This is out of the question.

Christianity, however, dethrones feeling and good fortune and replaces them with the shall. The point at issue between the poet and Christ may be stated precisely in this way: romantic love and friendship are preferential, the passion of preference; Christian love, however, is self-renunciation’s love and therefore trusts in the you shall. According to Christ, our neighbor is our equal. Our neighbor is not the beloved, for whom you have passionate preference, nor your friend, whom you prefer. Nor is your neighbor, if you are well educated, the learned person with whom you have cultural affinity – for with your neighbor you have before God the equality of humanity. Nor is your neighbor one who is of higher social status than you, and you love him because he has higher social status. This is mere preference and to that extent self-love. Nor is your neighbor one who is inferior to you, and you love him because he is inferior to you, because such love can easily be partiality’s condescension and to that extent self-love.

No, Christian love, this you shall, means equality. In your relationship to people of distinction you shall love your neighbor. In relation to those who are inferior you are not to love in pity but shall love your neighbor. Your neighbor is every person, for on the basis of distinctions he is not your neighbor, nor on the basis of likeness to you as in contrast to others. He is your neighbor on the basis of equality with you before God.

We must take care not to be led into self-love. The more decisively and exclusively preference centers upon any one single person, including husband and wife, the farther it is from loving the neighbor. Husband, do not lead your wife into the temptation of forgetting your neighbor because of love for you. Wife, do not lead your husband into this temptation either! Lovers may think that in their love they have the highest good, but it is not so. No, love your beloved faithfully and tenderly, but let love to your neighbor be the sanctifier in your covenant of union with God. Love your friend honestly and devotedly, but let love to your neighbor be what you learn from each other in the intimacy of friendship with God!

Moreover, the person who does not see that his wife is first his neighbor, and only then his wife, never comes to truly love his neighbor, no matter how many people he loves, for he has made an exception of his wife. To be sure, one’s wife or husband is to be loved differently than the friend and the friend differently than the neighbor, but this is not an essential difference. The fundamental equality in love lies in the category neighbor. Whatever your fate in romance and friendship, whatever your privation, whatever your loss, the highest still stands: love your neighbor! You can easily find him; him you can never lose. No change can take your neighbor from you, for it is not your neighbor who holds you fast – it is your love, this you shall, which holds fast your neighbor.

In this sense love is blind. Perfection in the object has nothing to do with perfection in love. Precisely because one’s neighbor has none of the excellencies which the beloved, a friend, or an admired one may have – for that very reason love to one’s neighbor has all the perfections which none of these others have. Let people debate as much as they want about which object of love is the most perfect – there can never be any doubt that love to one’s neighbor is the most perfect love. Love to one’s neighbor is determined by love. Since your neighbor is unconditionally every person, all distinctions are indeed removed from the object. True love is recognizable only by love.

Therefore he who in truth loves, loves his neighbor. And he who in truth loves his neighbor loves also his enemy. This is obvious; for the distinction of friend or enemy is a distinction in the object of love, but the object of love to your neighbor is always without distinction. Your neighbor is the absolutely unrecognizable distinction between one person and another; it is eternal equality before God – enemies, too, have this equality.

Distinction, this or that quality – be it a virtue or a vice – is selfishness’ confusing element that marks every person as different. But neighbor is eternity’s mark, a mark found on every human being. Take many sheets of paper and write something different on each one. They do not, at first glance, resemble each other. Then take every single sheet, do not let yourself be confused by the differentiating inscriptions, and hold each one up to the light and you shall see the same water-mark on them all. Thus is neighbor the common mark, but you can see it only by the help of the light of the eternal when it shines through every such distinction.

To love one’s neighbor, therefore, means essentially to will to exist equally for every human being without exception. If then you really do meet the king, gladly and respectfully give him his due. You should see in him his inner glory, the equality of glory, the neighbor that his human magnificence only conceals. If you meet a beggar – perhaps suffering in sorrow over him more than he himself – you should nevertheless also see in him his inner glory, the equality of glory, the neighbor which his wretched outer garments conceal. Yes, then you shall see, wherever you turn your eye, your neighbor. In being king, beggar, scholar, rich man, poor man, friend, enemy, we do not resemble each other – in these ways we are all different. But in being a neighbor we are all unconditionally alike.

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And you thought CCM couldn't get any worse....

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1984 Revisited

WAR IS PEACE                

 FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

And this bumper sticker was just too good to not post:

Goodbye, Giuliani.  I won't miss you. 

Also, goodbye Edwards.  May Huckabee soon follow you both.