See believe to have been the mission of their career as an author. OME great writers are more articulate than others about what Sgren Kierkegaard, with a power of introspection and self-analysis that has rarely been matched in history, was singularly specific about his objective as a writer. He sought to point out how a man might become a Christian when he already was one. Not that this restoration was an easy task. Kierkegaard once went so far as to say, “It is easier to become a Christian when I am not a Christian than to become a Christian when I am one.” Kierkegaard never tired of pointing out that there is a certain immunity to the full implications of Christian commitment built up by imbibing it in diluted form from birth. He felt himself, therefore, called to the “role of the missionary within Christendom itself, aiming to introduce Christianity into Christendom.’
Writing in Denmark a century ago to reach a church well established in a broad pattern of bourgeois security, to a people who rendered lip service to this church but who in personal, social and political decisions took little account of their obedience to God and His revelation, to a generation that had not yet openly rebelled against Christianity but who were quietly burying it under a deceptive funeral coverlet of the roses and ferns of surface observance, Kierkegaard presented by means of a whole religious literature the costly claim of what it meant to be a Christian. “In all eternity,” he wrote, “it is impossible for me to compel a person to accept an opinion, a conviction, a belief. But one thing I can do: I can compel him to take notice.” And his presentation of the Christian claim on the life of the individual was so ruthlessly searching that again and again during the past century German, Russian, French, Italian and Spanish, and now English and American, thinkers have turned to him and have felt his rapier draw blood from them and sting them into a fresh reckoning with the Christian witness.
It is this kind of task that he is about in his greatest single work on Christian ethics, his Works of Love. It was finished, so he tells us in his Journals, on August 2, 1847, and actually published the following year. Europe was on the verge of another of those social earth tremors that was to carry the late eighteenth century revolutions into nearly every capital of Europe and seek to compel further recognition of the principles involved. But these events in no way influenced the content of the Works of Love nor would they have done so even if Kierkegaard had been writing after they had occurred. For Kierkegaard sought to enunciviii INTRODUCTION ate these Christian moral principles from the very nature of the Christian message itself, and left it to others to make the appropriate personal application of them to the contemporary scene. “But the maximum of attainment is simultaneously to sustain an absolute relationship to the absolute end, and a relative relationship to relative ends.” The absolute end is always set forth as an inward unconditional obedience to Godand in his Works of Love Kierkegaard explores what is involved in that unconditional obedience if we are to follow Jesus’ formulation of the great commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” and to carry out what is involved in Paul’s conception of love, found in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians.
Note: Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 327. 2 The Point of View (Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 138. 8 The Point of View, p. 35.
In his Journals, Kierkegaard whimsically remarks that “most people really believe that the Christian commandments [e.g., to love one’s neighbor as oneself] are intentionally a little too severe—like setting the clock ahead half an hour to make sure of not being late in the morning.”” His Works of Love is a presentation of the inward ethical demand of neighbor-love as having been given without a shade of oriental hyperbole (Christ did not permit a cheaper edition of what it was to be a follower), and is laid upon us in such a way that we can, by living under it, recognize what an absolute ethical demand really means and what it calls for in regard to our whole life orientation.
The Christian ethic of neighbor-love as depicted by Kierkegaard is not kin to Shaftesbury’s emotion of the beauty of love or to Hume’s loving feeling of sympathy for all. It more closely approaches the sterner character of the Kantian categorical imperative. Its ob jectivity and universality are not made to rest upon the intermittent character of fickle human feelings, or upon emotions that may be even more variable than the weather, but instead are laid upon the will. Nor is the universality of its application made subject to the political or social constellation of the moment that decrees whether it is good form to love a Samaritan or a Russian or a Finn or a German or an Oriental or a Negro or a proletarian or the President of the Chamber of Commerce. Jesus, in gathering up the Old Testament witness at its highest, declares, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” and in that Thou shalt, issuing from the very nature of God Himself, the will has an authoritative directive given to it which lifts the love of neighbor, the unlimited liability for the neighbor, out of the realm of the optional. Now it is no longer a matter of private inclination, of private aptitude, or of following the current pattern of the racial, national or social group to which I belong. Now neighbor-love has been grounded in the deep earnestness that comes from having God, the unchanging One, lay this command upon us, a Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 371.