Works of Love by Søren Kierkegaard

Overview

Works of Love (1847) is the book in which Søren Kierkegaard — writing under his own name, without pseudonyms — sets out the Christian ethic of love as he understands it. The subtitle announces the form: Some Christian Reflections in the Form of Discourses. It is not a treatise in moral theory and not a devotional manual; it is a series of meditations on the commandment "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," written to disturb the reader's complacency about what love is. Kierkegaard's central claim is that love is not a feeling but a duty — a command — and that the command, properly understood, transforms every relationship in which a human being stands.

The book is divided into two series of discourses. The first series considers the nature of neighbor-love: that it is a duty, that it is commanded, that it is love for the neighbor rather than for the beloved or the friend, and that it is known by its works rather than its feelings. The second series examines love in its works and life: how love builds up, how it believes all things and hopes all things, how it does not seek its own, and how the lover is known — ultimately, only to God. Throughout, Kierkegaard is doing something distinctive: he is treating the command to love not as an external rule but as the form of a life, the deepest expression of existentialist seriousness about how one lives.

The book stands at the center of Kierkegaard's mature authorship. It was written after the pseudonymous works (Either/Or, Fear and Trembling) and after the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in the period when he was writing the edifying discourses that he regarded as the core of his authorship. It is also the book that most directly answers the objection that existentialism is a philosophy of isolated individuals: for Kierkegaard, the single individual is defined, before God, precisely by the command to love. His answer to the question what is love is that love is a task.

Key Ideas

Love as Duty and Command

Kierkegaard's opening move is deliberately provocative. He insists that love is commanded — "You shall love" — and that this is not a limitation of love but its definition. A feeling cannot be commanded, because feelings come and go; what can be commanded is an act, a decision, a way of relating. By making love a command, Kierkegaard removes it from the realm of what happens to us — the wave of passion, the lucky accident of affinity — and places it in the realm of what we must do. "The matter is quite simple," he writes. "The commandment is that you shall love; but when you shall love, then, precisely then, your love is the greatest."

The move has a polemical edge. The romantic culture of the nineteenth century (like ours) treated love as the most spontaneous of experiences and therefore as the thing least subject to obligation; love that is commanded, on this view, is not really love. Kierkegaard inverts the claim. What the romantics call love, he argues, is preference, need, and self-seeking dressed in the language of feeling. The command to love is what saves love from being at the mercy of mood, merit, and mutability. Love as duty is love that can be depended on — which is to say, the only love that deserves the name.

Neighbor-Love Versus Preferential Love

The book's most famous distinction is between neighbor-love and preferential love. Preferential love — the love of the beloved, the friend, the child — is love for this particular person because of what they are to us: their beauty, their charm, their kinship, their usefulness. Kierkegaard does not condemn such love; he says it is natural and good in its place. But he insists that it is not the love the commandment requires, and that it carries within it the seed of self-love, because we choose the beloved for reasons that are, at bottom, our own.

Neighbor-love is different in kind. The neighbor is not the one closest to us but the one who is simply there — the person in need, the stranger, the one who has nothing to offer us. "The neighbor is the whole human race," Kierkegaard writes; the neighbor is every person, without exception, and love of the neighbor does not depend on any quality of the neighbor or any reward for us. This is why the commandment is a "school of eternity": it strips love of its object's attractiveness and makes it a matter of duty. In the vocabulary of the philosophy of love, Kierkegaard's neighbor-love is the agape tradition — love that creates value rather than responding to it — stated in its most rigorous modern form.

The Hidden Inwardness of Love

Kierkegaard's account of love is insistently inward. Love, he argues, is known by its works, but its works are not the public and impressive things: not the great gift, the eloquent declaration, the admired sacrifice. The works of love are the hidden things — the faithful attention, the forgiveness offered without being noticed, the patience that no one sees. "Love is a hidden life," he writes, "and its works are hidden." The lover is known only to God, who alone sees the heart; and this hiddenness is not an imperfection of love but its very nature.

The claim cuts against two errors at once. Against the sentimentalist, who identifies love with the felt emotion, Kierkegaard says love is what you do, and what you do can be hidden. Against the public moralist, who identifies love with visible achievement, he says that the most important works of love are precisely the ones that cannot be displayed — because as soon as they are displayed for admiration, they have become self-seeking again. The hidden inwardness is also the link between this book and the rest of his authorship: the single individual, before God, in a relationship that no public can verify, is the recurring figure of existentialist ethics.

Love Believes All Things and Hopes All Things

The second series of discourses unfolds the works of love through the famous Pauline catalog: love builds up, love believes all things, love hopes all things, love does not seek its own. Each phrase receives a meditation that turns it into a psychology. To believe all things, for example, is not naivety but a choice: the lover trusts the other even when evidence is ambiguous, because mistrust is a way of holding the other at arm's length. To hope all things is to refuse to close the account on another person, to keep open the possibility of their good. To build up is to help the other stand, not to make the other dependent on us.

These are not counsels of softness. Kierkegaard is clear that love can require the hardest things — that the lover may have to wound in order to heal, and that love of the neighbor may demand that we refuse to flatter. But the direction of love is always the same: it seeks the other's good, not its own, and it does so in the concrete particularities of real relationships. This is the book's answer to the modern question whether love gives life meaning: love does not find meaning in some grand feeling but in the daily, hidden work of willing the good of particular people.

Structure and Style

The book's form is as deliberate as its content. Kierkegaard writes in the first person, as himself, in the language of the edifying discourse rather than the pseudonymous experiment; the style is spare, repetitive, and relentless, circling the same points until the reader cannot escape them. The two series — "You Shall Love" and "Love's Works and Life" — mirror the movement of the commandment: from the command to the life, from the definition of love to its hidden practice. Readers who expect a systematic ethics will be frustrated; readers who expect edification will be unsettled. Both responses are intended.

The structure also reflects the book's relationship to the rest of Kierkegaard's authorship. It is the positive counterpart to the pseudonymous works: where Either/Or dramatized the aesthetic and ethical stages of existence, Works of Love describes the religious stage from inside. It belongs with Fear and Trembling as one of the two books in which the ethical is most fully examined — and it is the more directly constructive of the two, because it is addressed to every reader as a task.

Legacy and Influence

Works of Love has become the classic modern statement of the ethics of neighbor-love, and its influence extends far beyond theology. It shaped the twentieth-century debate about agape in Christian ethics, informed the existentialist reading of love as decision rather than feeling, and has been taken up by philosophers of love who want to distinguish love from mere preference. Its distinction between neighbor-love and preferential love remains one of the most powerful instruments available for thinking about relationships and love, because it exposes the self-reference hidden in much of what we call love.

The book also matters as the existentialist answer to the question of the good life. Against the claim that the individual creates meaning in isolation, Kierkegaard argues that the individual's deepest task is love — and that this task is commanded, and therefore available to everyone, and therefore the true foundation of ethics. For the reader who wants to understand what it would mean to take love seriously as a discipline rather than a feeling, Works of Love is the essential starting point, and it remains the indispensable companion to the more famous but less demanding books about love in the modern canon.