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Note: Journals (Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 242.
INTRODUCTION ix command that acknowledges no off-season, no exception, no moratorium, and judges our right to self-concern in terms of whether we have already shown equal concern for our neighbor.
This universality is further applied by making my neighbor, just as in Tolstoy’s famous story of The Three Questions, whomever I am in touch with, whoever is in need. “If you do not see him so close at hand that before God you see him unconditionally in every man, then you do not see him at all.” This makes him not my well beloved and most obviously pleasant neighbor, but my neighbor irrespective of his faults, his unpleasant manners, his failings. My neighbor thus may be my enemy, and I am still bound by God’s holy authority to be liable for him, to love him as myself. I may even be brought to know how much I love God by how much I love that neighbor to whom by natural inclination I am least drawn.
This universality is made still more binding by Kierkegaard’s emphasis upon the “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This command is not to mankind in general, as a wise course of conduct to take. There is no option in it and it is addressed personally to me. If I live in earnestness before God, then I, apart from all evasive comparison with what others might be inclined to do in a similar situation, apart from all attempts at extenuating circumstances that might excuse me for this time, quite apart from my capacities or resources which may apparently be quite insufficient materially to assist my neighbor by my love, hence apart from all assurance of results, J] must nevertheless love him. “If someone has cut my hands off, I cannot play the zither, and if someone has cut my leg off, then I cannot dance… and if I myself lie with a broken arm or leg, then I cannot rush into the flames to save another’s life” (11, 7), Kierkegaard wrote, but went on to add, “but I can be compassionate everywhere.” A compassionate glance or an inward prayer, when more cannot be given, may in God’s sight be the most complete fulfillment of this command. “As for accomplishing anything, a man has nothing to do with it, it is God’s affair, God’s bestowal upon the individual.”
This makes it possible for the command to be carried out by all. “Love is not an art like poetry, possible only to the few endowed for it, it is open and accessible to all” (II, 10). For by placing the fulfillment of the command of neighbor-love in the intention of the actor and not in the physical means of fulfillment it becomes binding on all who accept God’s authority, no matter what their age or condition or wealth or station may be.
Yet, after calling attention to the Kantian formalistic character of this Christian ethic of neighbor-love in contrast to an ethic based on 8 Training in Christianity (Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 182.
x INTRODUCTION feeling, it is important to note the genuine difference in the frame in which the two ethical systems of Kant and Kierkegaard are set, a difference which profoundly affects the whole tone of the two positions. For Kierkegaard in both his Either/Or and his Stages on Life’s Way has depicted the strictly ethical category and has done it almost wholly in Kantian terms. But like the aesthetic category which is also depicted there, he has then shown its basic instability and shown how it may collapse and compel the individual to seek a deeper existence sphere (the religious) in which to live. The critical point in the ethical category Kierkegaard insists is its inability to get over the hiatus or chasm between recognized duty and its performance, when performance involves pain to our pride or our inclination or the defiance of the momentary way of the crowd. This failure to follow duty in old-fashioned terms is called sin, and Kierkegaard has shown the ethical category shattering on that rock of sin, and no ethical appeal to reason or duty or ultimate pleasure is sufficient to stay the condition where “I do those things which I ought not to do and leave undone those things which I ought to do, and there is no health in me.”
It is in this way that Kierkegaard depicts the ethical category as dethroned from ever providing a permanently satisfying, self-sufficient existence-sphere for men. On the other hand, once one has entered the deepest religious sphere of existence, both the aesthetical and the ethical are restored again, but now restored as dependent phases of existence, drawing their central strength and directive from the object of the religious commitment into which the man has entered. Thus the Christian ethic, according to Kierkegaard, involves the Grace of God and involves a life in active response to that Grace, a life therefore that is lived in inward earnestness. This “earnestness is a man’s God-relationship. Everywhere where the thought of God is present in what a man. does, thinks and says, there is earnestness” (II, 8). This is no remote relationship to a noumenal order which is postulated from the solid experience of Kantian duty. It is an ethic whose formal character is derivative from an intensely personal center. Kierkegaard’s opening prayer in the Works of Love sets the note of God’s Grace to which a Christian’s love must always be in debt and be a lesser response, when he writes, “Thou who didst hold nothing back, but didst give everything in love.” This indebtedness on our part is a central theme of the book and the command “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” is made to those who have become aware of that debt. “As the peaceful lake is grounded darkly in the deep spring, so is human love mysteriously grounded in God’s love.” In the chasm, the hiatus between my interest and my neighbor’s interest, that neither egoistic nor universalistic hedonism, nor a feeling of
INTRODUCTION X1 the beauty of the act, nor an instinct of benevolence, nor even a stern voice of rationally discernible duty can regularly bridge, Kierkegaard places not alone a new factor but a new ground. He places a third party, a third person: the loving God to whom we are hopelessly indebted. In this intensely personal relationship as we love back to Him, he places our neighbor before us. God is made the middle term who lifts this relationship with neighbor up out of all partiality, out of all the vagaries of human feelings, and has us love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and do it always in the light and power of our love for Him. “For ultimately love to God is the decisive thing; from it stems love to the neighbor.. In earthly love and friendship partiality is the middle term. In love to the neighbor, God is the middle term; if you love God above all else, then you also love your neighbor and in your neighbor every man. Only by loving God above all else can one love his neighbor and in the neighbor every man” (I, 2 B).
However, this middle term of all true love is not alone to bridge the chasm with an impetus and an authority that raises man above his momentary whims and impulses. It is also to purge the relationship with my neighbor of all partiality—for before God all souls are of equal worth. “Your neighbor is your equal… for with your neighbor you have human equality before God… but every man unconditionally has this equality, and has it unconditionally.” This lifts the relationship from being qualified by its object, as earthly love and friendship outside the Christian pale are qualified. Now it is made a relationship that embraces everyone, and yet everyone individually.
It is this radical Christian leveling of the barriers of rank between persons, even if it is only done inwardly, that Nietzsche so bitterly opposed in his Will to Power, and Nietzsche even came to regard it as his life mission to seek to restore the order of rank and caste and station which he saw Christianity undermining. And it has been this very force of equality before God that many have regarded as the revolutionary power in Christianity, that dwarfs the programs of all secular revolutionary movements into puny insignificance, compared to its continually exercised power.
Yet Kierkegaard is cautious in the conclusions which he accepts from the middle term’s drawing us into an impartial love for each neighbor which cuts through every worldly difference. His central position of inwardness is strictly adhered to here, and this issue of equality lays bare the position and presents it both in all of its fascinating power and in all of its scandalous vulnerability to abuse. The vulnerability to abuse stands out as Kierkegaard acknowledges the “differences” as inevitably present so long as the world exists: “As little as the Christian lives or can live without a physical body, just as little can he live outside the difxii INTRODUCTION ferences of earthly life to which every individual by birth, by condition, by circumstances, by education, etc., belongs… These differences must continue as long as the temporal existence continues, and must continue to tempt every man who comes into the world” (I, 2 C). “Externally it [Christianity] does not wish to bring about any change at all in the external; it wishes to understand the external, purify it, consecrate it, and so make everything new, while everything remains old” (I, 3 B). Taken by itself, this position could amply justify the most intransigent social conservatism, which all evidence goes to show was the political and economic position which Kierkegaard personally espoused in the Denmark of his day. And his pleas to the poor to find in their lot an inward devotion to God which accepted it without bitterness or protest, could also be construed in the tradition of a completely other-worldly religion which administered an opiate upon all demands for improvement of the conditions of this life.
Yet the impressive power of his doctrine of a religious ethic of inwardness becomes apparent as he explains how he would have the Christian inwardly overcome these differences by the aid of the middle term. “Christianity has not wished to storm forth to abolish the differences, neither those of distinction nor of humbleness, nor has it wished in a worldly sense to effect a worldly agreement between the differences; but it wants the differences to hang loosely on the individual, loosely like the cape the king casts off to reveal himself; loosely like the ragged cloak in which a supernatural being has concealed itself. When the difference hangs thus loosely, then that other essential self is always glimpse in every individual, that common to all, that eternal resemblance, the equality… This expectant solemnity which, without halting the course of life, renews itself every day through the eternal and through the equality of eternity, every day saves its soul from the differences in which it still continues: this would be the reflection of eternity” (I, 2 C). Or he expresses it again: “Christianity has not wished to tumble governments from the throne in order to set itself upon the throne; it has never in an external sense striven for a place in the world of which it is not a part, and yet it has infinitely changed everything which it permitted and which it permits to continue. As the blood throbs through every nerve, so Christianity in the conscience-relation wishes to penetrate everything… This is the miracle of Christianity, more wonderful than that one of changing water into wine; this miracle in all stillness, without any change of rulers, moreover without a hand being moved, of making every man, divinely understood, into a king.. And there within, where the Christian dwells in the conscience-relation, there is everything changed… Thus Christianity transforms every relationship between man and man into a conscience-relationship” (I, 2 C).
INTRODUCTION xiii As the Christian’s supreme task, this hidden inward revolution is in keeping with his portrait of the true knight of faith in Fear and Trembling, who outwardly appears like everyone else, has an excellent appetite, works hard at a common occupation, sleeps without a dream, and yet at every instant is yielding his life utterly to God. And it contains within it a transforming power by which God may reshape the world, i.e., by the consciences of individual knights of faith who are devoted to Him, and who, without any identifiable uniform of a common pattern or plan in their role and station in life, serve the good.
DouGrAs V. STEERE Haverford College Haverford, Pennsylvania August, 1944
Contents Page
I The Hidden Life of Love and Its Recognition by Its Fruits 5 II A. Thou Shalt Love 15 B. Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor 37 C. Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor 51 IIT A. Love Is the Fulfillment of the Law 98 B. Love Is a Matter of Conscience 110 IV. Our Duty To Love the Men We See 125 V Our Duty To Remain in the Debt of Love to One Another 142