Initiating Unscientific Prelude | Works of Love, Preface
Why Kierkegaard is worthy of your time
No book—barring the Bible—has changed my life more than Søren Kierkegaard's Works of Love. I first read through it two years ago, and through this text, this book, something changed within me. A shift. A tremor, perhaps. A development in my ethical framework, a reworking of its very foundation this book did cause, and I am a better man for it.
My second read, soon after the first, was during an episode of profound suffering. For the first time, I experienced true, heart-rending loss. A warmth no longer present. A great, barren chasm soaked with sorrow was ripped open, and not soon to be filled. Kierkegaard taught me what it is to love in a time such as that, when the world is a desert and no oasis is in sight. He taught me that to truly love a person is to love them exactly when I can receive no benefit, no gift, no return on my love. It is to love in the face of despair, of hopelessness, of "worldly sagacity" telling me to give up and move on. Indeed, it is to love as God loves. But I digress; all in due time.
It is for these and many unnamed reasons besides that I must implore you, singular reader, to read this book yourself. Do not just read my summaries of the text—they are but a bland, tasteless thing in comparison with Works of Love. Kierkegaard is an exacting master; he will push our conception of love, forcing it to bend or be broken. Join me as we learn together under that singular Dane, him who truly understood what it is to be human.
If you do heed my suggestion and decide to read along with me, I recommend buying the Princeton University Press edition. It is regarded as the seminal English translation, and contains nearly a hundred pages of additional quotations and quips from Kierkegaard's corpus of journals and papers.1 This is the version I will be using.
Works of Love is partitioned into two series; the first is more concerned with the general characteristics of love, the second is focused on particular examples of what love does. Kierkegaard began writing Works of Love sometime after January 1847. He finished the first series in April, and the second series on August 2nd, 1847. This was not his only project at the time; he devoted much of his time during these few months to other projects as well.
The theme of love is extant in most of Kierkegaard's corpus:
Preparation, however, for writing Works of Love preceded the actual writing by many years. ...Either/Or (1843) as a complex whole covers the spectrum of arbitrary self-love, erotic love, and marital love, and Judge William ends with a borrowed sermon on the love of God. Two of Three Upbuilding Discourses (1843) are titled "Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins." The third discourse in Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (1845) is "On the Occasion of a Wedding." ...Works of Love, then is Kierkegaard's climactic consideration of erotic love and Christian love against the background of the multifarious characterizations of love in the earlier pseudonymous and signed works.2
Kierkegaard calls it a collection of "deliberations", which stand in opposition to his "discourses". A deliberation, to SK,3 "does not presuppose the definitions as given and understood." D. Anthony Storm explains in his online commentary on WoL, "A deliberation is meant to awaken with the goal of provoking action. A deliberation is a 'gadfly'. An upbuilding discourse, by contrast, is meant to persuade, move, soften, and reassure."
I do not have a set or planned schedule for when articles will come out; I recommend reading the book at your own pace regardless. We'll just cover the preface in this article; the next article will be on the first chapter, entitled Love's Hidden Life and Its Recognizability by Its Fruits.
The Preface
It is a rare thing that a 1.5-page preface is worth discussing in any length.
They are Christian deliberations, therefore not about love but about works of love.
They are about works of love, not as if hereby all its works were now added up and described, oh, far from it; not as if even the particular work described were described once and for all, far from it, God be praised! Something that in its total richness is essentially inexhaustible is also in its smallest work essentially indescribable just because essentially it is totally present everywhere and essentially cannot be described.4
This point—that love, by its very nature, is indescribable—is a recurring theme of the book. Reading this preface, I am continually struck anew by how profound and important that fact is. Any individual work of love, from the smallest to the greatest, if it is truly a work of love, shares in God's infinitude, since God is love. If we truly take seriously that God is love5 then Love, like God, is ineffable, indescribable.
The preface also includes one of my favorite prayers of all time:
How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth; you who spared nothing but in love gave everything; you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you! How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you who revealed what love is, you our Savior and Redeemer, who gave yourself in order to save all. How could one speak properly of love if you were forgotten, you Spirit of love, who take nothing of your own but remind us of that love-sacrifice, remind the believer to love as he is loved and his neighbor as himself! O Eternal Love, you who are everywhere present and never without witness where you are called upon, be not without witness in what will be said here about love or about works of love. There are indeed only some works that human language specifically and narrowly calls works of love, but in heaven no work can be pleasing unless it is a work of love: sincere in self-renunciation, a need in love itself, and for that very reason without any claim of meritoriousness!6
So often my 21st-century, Western, sceptic brain wants to see the world as wholly, purely physical. I struggle with believing in supernatural anything. And yet, reading a passage like this, something just feels correct. My participation in love is more than just a feeling, synapses firing, it is a participation in the divine and the foundation of reality itself. God is the source of all things, and God is love.
If this small taste brings you to want more, I implore you: do not just read my summaries over the coming weeks and months. No, you must read the words of the man himself, from the source. Join me as a fellow student and compatriot as we study under this master of love, Søren Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard’s corpus of journals and papers span nearly 10,000 pages; collating all of the relevant source material into an appendix is a monstrous task. The Hongs, Howard and Edna, made it their lives’ work to translate and collect Kierkegaard’s works together; most of the translations of SK published by Princeton University Press are their work.
Howard and Edna Hong, Works of Love Historical Introduction, x-xi.
Walter Lowrie, one of the first to write a biography of Kierkegaard, called him S.K. throughout his book as a term of endearment. Since then, it has become relatively common practice to refer to Kierkegaard as such, whether as SK or S.K. I will likely interchange all three throughout.
Works of Love, p. 3.
1 John 4:8 and 4:16.
Works of Love, p. 3-4.
so excited about this!! i've decided i'm going to read WoL for the first time alongside your commentary. i love your other writing and i think i find myself at a similar stage with regards to Christianity, so i'm very happy to join you in this study of Kierkegaard :)