Kierkegaard by Hampson Daphne;

Author:Hampson, Daphne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

II. A. You Shall Love; II. B. You Shall Love the Neighbour, II. C. You Shall Love the Neighbour

Matt. 22.39: But the second commandment is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself

Kierkegaard will expound the whole structure of what he would say. Recall that the biblical word for ‘neighbour’ in Danish is naeste (the next one, the one near to you); cf. German Nachbar.

II. A. You Shall Love

Presupposing that a person loves himself, Christianity adds that you shall love your neighbour as yourself. The scripture does not say you shall love God as yourself but ‘with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind’. A person should love God ‘unconditionally in obedience and love him in adoration’ (19). Without proper self-love neither can a person love the neighbour. Most people have not learnt to love themselves. ‘To love yourself in the right way and to love the neighbour correspond perfectly to one another; fundamentally they are one and the same thing’ (22). Failing to love themselves, one is suicidal, another wastes time in inconsequential pursuits.

Kierkegaard moves to the distinction basic to the book between ‘the love of preference’ and Christian love (Danish Kjerlighed, Greek agape). Agape is marked by the ‘change of eternity’. No more than do Luther before him or the Swedish 20th-century theologian Anders Nygren after him, does Kierkegaard conceive that God takes up and transforms human love.11 It is revelation that makes apparent what love is, while in its light eros and philia are found wanting: Christianity ‘did not arise in any human being’s heart’ (24). The love of the beloved (eros) or the friend (philia) are ‘soaring’ loves, based on preference. By contrast it is our duty to love the neighbour. To choose a beloved or find a friend is a complicated business, but if one will only acknowledge one’s duty the neighbour is easy to find. The love which ‘self-ignites’ can turn to hatred or jealousy, while the love arising from God’s love endures (cf. 1 Cor. 13). The love of desire is dependent on the other; the love of duty liberating.

There is a falseness about an independence which, feeling no need to be loved, is simply in need of another to love, thereby gratifying its self-esteem. Rightly ordered love ‘certainly feels a need to be loved’ (39). But loving another with adoration is a mark of despair. Despair ‘is not something that can happen to a person, an event such as good fortune and misfortune’. It is ‘a mis-relation in a person’s innermost being’ (40).12 The only security against despair is ‘to undergo the change of eternity through duty’s shall’ (40): you must not love another in such a way that the loss of that other would make evident that in actuality you were in despair. Does this mean you should not love? Far from it. What secures against despair at the loss of the other is not ‘feeble, lukewarm grounds of comfort—that one must not take something too hard, etc.

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