Kierkegaard’s ethics of love

by Erik Paul Bergren

Though often overlooked and ridiculed during his time, Søren Kierkegaard’s unconventional attitude on duty, faith, and love have important applications for us today. Kierkegaard’s life (1813–1855) was marked by a series of combative writings critiquing the trivial culture he saw his contemporaries embracing. One such book central to this article is his treatise “Works of Love” (1847), wherein he grounds love in the Christian faith through unwavering moral obligation; in other words, he understood love to be a divine duty toward another individual, not something one can “fall” into.

Love often is commodified today. We try to buy love with diamonds and vacations, with words and promises, through dating apps and reality TV shows. Kierkegaard believed these types of “spontaneous love”¹ to be mere indulgences — not authentic love. He even goes so far as to critique self-reflective marriage, wherein each person vows to the other. “Therefore,” Kierkegaard writes, “this spontaneous love . . . is not consciously grounded upon the eternal and thus it can be changed.”² For the swearing of love to mean anything, Kierkegaard says it has to be sworn to something higher than itself — for him, that was the Christian God. Once love is grounded through God, “love has undergone the change of eternity by having become a duty, it has gained enduring continuance.”³

First and foremost authentic love to Kierkegaard is not an erotic endeavor. It is not an emotion that is felt. This is most evident by his irony-laden, pseudonymously published chronicle “Diary of a Seducer,” which mocks both romantic infatuation and detachment. Instead, authentic expression of love, according to Kierkegaard, is through obligation grounded in the radical “love thy neighborness” of Christianity.

When something is a duty, it demands action; in other words, it demands that “you shall.”⁴ To understand love as a duty — as grounded in the Christian faith — is to first understand its unconditional nature. Didn’t Christ eat with the tax collectors and sinners? What is the value of divine grace if it is withheld from some? Jesus did not discriminate in love; in fact he would die on the cross for his love of humanity. Kierkegaard would argue that this is the most powerful manifestation of love — love as known through action. In “Works of Love” (1847), Kierkegaard writes, “love is recognizable by its fruits,”⁵ just as “the tree is known by its fruits.” In this light, love does not spontaneously appear at first sight. Instead, love requires effort and sacrifice; hence, it can be known only through actions.

Interestingly, one can examine Søren’s own life and find a foundational event that would fuel his later musings on “love as duty.” In 1839, a relationship blossomed between Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen; they were engaged a year later. However, in 1841 he would break off the engagement. It is important to know that Kierkegaard suffered from a chronic affliction of severe “melancholy” as he put it, or, what we would call depression. He believed his extreme despondence would be a torturous burden on Regine. He wrote: “But then it occurred to me that this would not be good for her, that I might bring a thunderstorm upon her head, since she would feel responsible for my death.”⁶

Rather than subject Regine to such a life, Kierkegaard resolved to make her believe that she was better off without him; he had to deceive her into thinking that he was a “deceiver.”⁷ He would return to this theme in his book “Fear and Trembling” (1843), wherein he describes his sacrifice of Regine: “When the child is to be weaned, the mother blackens her breast. It would be hard to have the breast look inviting when the child must not have it. So the child believes that the breast has changed, but the mother — she is still the same, her gaze is tender and loving as ever.”⁸ Despite much public gossip in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard maintained that his decision came from a place of love. Shortly after the split he would write, “However painful it might be to my human pride, I would rejoice to see her happy with another.”⁹

Later, Kierkegaard would describe this event as “so deep a wound” on his life, writing: “And though I generally consider myself able to suffer what I regard as God’s punishment, this sometimes becomes too much for me.”¹⁰ This suffering is what would profoundly shape his understanding of love as duty — a duty so absolute that it required personal sacrifice. Yet, Kierkegaard also came to question whether his decision was a failure of faith: “My sin is that I did not have faith, faith that for God all things are possible, but where is the borderline between that and tempting God?”¹¹

This sense of inadequacy permeates Kierkegaard’s entire authorship. To imitate the ideals set forth by Christ is the task of a Christian, to live up to those ideals is a much harder task. Kierkegaard recognized this distance between the ideal and the achievable,

and felt he himself could not live up to the religious motions he was presenting. The same is true of his separation from Regine: Though he wished for the lovingly-simple repetition of marriage, Kierkegaard knew that he could not meet the standard of “love as duty” modeled by Christ.¹² His decision to leave Regine, then, was not a rejection of love but — paradoxically — a submission to what he saw as his loving duty.

Kierkegaard believed very few of his contemporaries had an adequate understanding of what love truly means; thus, they could never actualize what love truly demands. He writes, “But you shall love God in unconditional obedience, even if what he requires of you might seem to you to be to your own harm.”¹³ Regine, in recollecting a few years before her death in 1904, came to a similar conclusion about her relationship with Søren: “Kierkegaard’s motive in this breach was the conception he had of his religious task; he did not dare to bind himself to anything upon earth lest it might check him in his calling; he must offer the best thing he possessed in order to work as God required him. . . . The pain he was obliged to inflict upon himself and me was unspeakably heavy and grievous and indeed left its mark for life: easy my life has not been, but happy.”¹⁴

What can we learn from this reflection on an all too brief relationship nearly two centuries ago? Kierkegaard’s decision to end his engagement with Regine was neither a triumph of moral strength nor a simple failure of faith — it was a tragic effort to love “rightly.” Rather than judge him as either selfless or cowardly, we should understand the tension in which he lived: between personal suffering and divine obligation. So how can we learn to love “rightly” then? One would be hard pressed to find a simple answer in the thousands of pages that Kierkegaard wrote. To Kierkegaard, part of becoming a Christian meant struggling with your faith; to enter the dark forest volitionally and come out on the other side.

In absence of a “simple” answer, Kierkegaard would describe both love and faith as one in the same in his journals: “Love for God and love for neighbor are like two doors that open simultaneously, so that it is impossible to open one without also opening the other, and impossible to shut one without shutting the other.”¹⁵ Kierkegaard believed that you cannot love your neighbor unless you also love God. He writes that “a person should begin with loving the unseen, God, because then he himself will learn what it is to love.”¹⁶

For a man with much to say, Kierkegaard lived largely in his head. He would write — with an unmatched intellectual fervor — influential texts on many topics within philosophy and theology. However, in accordance with the Word of God that he valued so highly, we are reminded that “the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13). In Kierkegaard’s thought, love is not an emotion that ebbs and flows with time, but a divine duty; one that endures even in suffering or separation. Understanding love as a duty speaks forcefully to an age of contractual relationships and emotional consumerism when many view love as something that must continually earn its worth. This kind of love is cheapened in the eyes of Kierkegaard: “People take it as if it were nothing, discern nothing in it, least of all become aware of its precious nature.”¹⁷ In a time that often reduces love to pure emotion, Kierkegaard reminds us that love is known by the fruit it bears.