The Oneness of Love in Works of Love

Abstract

Kierkegaard’s claim that God just is love implies that love is ultimately one reality. Indeed, on more than one occasion, Kierkegaard will make this point explicitly as well as implicitly by frequently asserting the oneness of love. For example, early on in Works of Love, he states plainly that “this love for the neighbor is not related as a type to other types of love. Erotic love is defined by the object; friendship is defined by the object; only love for the neighbor is defined by love”. What Kierkegaard means by this is that preferential loves are defined by a factor in addition to love itself: the object of that love. Neighbor-love is defined by love itself, which takes as its object the neighbor, or in other words, “unconditionally every human being”. Preferential loves are specified as it were by the person loved in this manner. Neighbor-love is not related as a type to other types of love in that neighbor-love is paradigmatic love; preferential loves are specified, but as recent commentators have shown, are not thereby precluded from also being or filtered by or infused by or coincident with neighbor-love as well. The point of this passage is that there are not distinct, enumerated types of love that, taken together, can be amalgamated into something called “love”, which would be inclusive of distinct kinds. The current paper argues that neighbor-love is meant to be thought of as paradigmatic. Therefore, as a paradigmatic unity, it will also exhibit qualities ordinarily associated with preferential love. Put differently, my claim is that we have reason to conclude that, in the end, features of preferential love will be manifest in neighbor-love just as surely as neighbor-love has an effect on preferential love. I wish to take seriously the claim of Works of Love that, ultimately, love is one. Love, being one, is not comprised of distinct types or subsets. I demonstrate the importance of this point by explaining how all love has its ultimate origin in God (and God just is love). While seemingly a truism, I argue from a variety of passages that the oneness of love has multiple implications throughout the text, implications that further support the theory that neighbor-love is not an alternative to, but rather encompasses features of, preferential loves.

Recent critical responses to Kierkegaard’s Works of Love have argued, contrary to the original critical reception of this long and difficult text, that in this work, eros and agape are not to be thought of as mutually opposing and exclusive forms of love. A number of influential readers have lately united behind the conviction that there is no obvious and consistent correlation in Works of Love between eros and Elskov on the one hand and agape and Kjerlighed on the other.1 This same generation of commentators then sought further to complicate the relationship of preferential loves with neighbor-love, having already cast into doubt any overly tidy association of Elskov with eros and Kjerlighed with agape.2 This paper essentially complements an emerging consensus that we must read Works of Love as presenting an account of love in which these two categories are embroidered together rather than strictly delineated. Obviously, Elskov and Kjerlighed are different, and the terms imply distinct emphases. Works of Love is largely about how Elskov needs to be corrected in some way by Kjerlighed. Distinction, however, does not necessitate opposition, and contemporary commentators have advanced a number of promising ways of understanding the relationship between Elskov and Kjerlighed.

John Lippitt, for example, has argued for thinking of the role of God in loving relationships as a sort of “filter” that challenges romantic loves by testing their moral integrity. In this way, he seeks to account for how neighbor-love can vindicate romantic love (Lippitt 2013, pp. 82–84). Similarly, Carl S. Hughes concludes his book with this aim: “I will show that Kierkegaard believes that preferential love and neighbor love can coincide, so long as neighbor love is what governs how we act within our preferential relationships” (Hughes 2014, p. 183). Finally, John J. Davenport uses the language of “agapic infusion” to describe how “neighbor-love is not only compatible with the special loves but can also be expressed in and through the other loves (including even romantic love)” (Davenport 2017, p. 49).

I agree with Lippitt, Hughes, and Davenport that the concerns that Kierkegaard raises against preferential loves can be largely blunted by the recognition that he thinks neighbor-love is able to (and indeed should) purify and transform preferential loves rather than merely replacing them. According to an argument I have been developing, however, I go beyond these perspectives to argue for another corollary thesis, namely, that not only can and should neighbor-love purify and transform preferential loves, but preferential loves can and should inform neighbor-love as well.3 What I argue then is that preferential love and neighbor-love are not two distinct and irreconcilable types of love but rather that neighbor-love at its highest pitch will also bear features of preferential love within itself.

Kierkegaard’s claim that God just is love implies that love is ultimately one reality. Indeed, on more than one occasion, Kierkegaard will make this point explicitly as well as implicitly by frequently asserting the oneness of love. For example, early on, he states plainly that “this love for the neighbor is not related as a type to other types of love. Erotic love is defined by the object; friendship is defined by the object; only love for the neighbor is defined by love” (WL, 66/SKS 9, 73). What Kierkegaard means by this is that preferential loves are defined by a factor in addition to love itself: the object of that love. Neighbor-love is defined by love itself, which takes as its object the neighbor, or in other words, “unconditionally every human being” (WL, 66/SKS 9, 73). Preferential loves are specified as it were by the person loved in this manner. Neighbor-love is not related as a type to other types of love in that neighbor-love is paradigmatic love; preferential loves are specified, but as Lippitt, Hughes, and Davenport have shown, are not thereby precluded from also being or filtered by or infused by or coincident with neighbor-love as well. The point is that there are not distinct, enumerated types of love that, taken together, can be amalgamated into something called “love”, which would be inclusive of distinct kinds.

The current paper argues that neighbor-love is meant to be thought of as paradigmatic. Therefore, as a paradigmatic unity, it will also exhibit qualities ordinarily associated with preferential love. Put differently, my claim is that we have reason to conclude that, in the end, features of preferential love will be manifest in neighbor-love just as surely as neighbor-love has an effect on preferential love. I wish to take seriously the claim of Works of Love that, ultimately, love is one. Love, being one, is not comprised of distinct types or subsets. I demonstrate the importance of this point by explaining how all love has its ultimate origin in God (and God just is love). While seemingly a truism, I argue from a variety of passages that the oneness of love has multiple implications throughout the text, implications that further support the theory that neighbor-love is not an alternative to, but rather encompasses features of, preferential loves.

1. The Invisible Spring

Readers of Works of Love are likely to remember the opening image of the text that likens the love of God to an invisible spring that feeds a placid lake. “Just as the quiet lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has seen, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love. If there were no gushing spring at the bottom, if God were not love, then there would be neither the little lake nor a human being’s love. Just as the quiet lake originates darkly in the deep spring, so a human being’s love originates mysteriously in God’s love” (WL, 9–10/SKS 9, 17–18). The claim here is that the source of love is God, and love itself therefore is “hidden” as Kierkegaard repeatedly says, from the view even of the individual who loves (WL, 8–10/SKS 9, 16–18). God just is love, and all love finds its hidden origin in God. As there is just one God, it follows that love is also one. The distinction between preferential love and neighbor-love, which has consumed pages and pages of critical discussion in recent commentary, has yet to even be mentioned in Works of Love at this point in the text’s exposition. Near the end of the book, the image of the spring returns: “But love abides—it never wastes away. In spiritual love itself is the spring that flows into an eternal life” (WL, 311/SKS 9, 308). Here again, the spring is the leading image for the hidden origin of love, a spring that flows into eternal life and abides without ever wasting away because its life is precisely eternal. God is thus at the beginning and end of the book the hidden source of love—all love. According to this image, preferential love and neighbor-love alike flow from the eternal source of divine love and life.

While the bulk of Kierkegaard’s energy is spent in what appears to be an exercise in sharply delineating the difference between these two types of love, the fact is that by the time the book reaches its conclusion, he has effectively come to show that neighbor-love is at its highest pitch of development no longer a matter of strict compulsion but of free spontaneity, a quality we normally associate with preferential loves. Despite his relentless emphasis on the category of duty as the only one appropriate to neighbor-love, the book ends with an admission on Kierkegaard’s part that for the person perfected by love, there is no need to think of it as a duty at all.

These reflections come in the context of Kierkegaard’s final meditations on the exhortation of St. John in his first epistle: “Beloved, let us love one another”. Contrary to the ethical rigorism that colored the early discourses in the text, here Kierkegaard deliberately strikes a different note with the authority of the apostle, what he calls “an intermediate mood in connection with the contrasts in love itself” (WL, 375/SKS 9, 368). This tone is possible because these words are penned “by one who was perfected in love” (WL, 375/SKS 9, 368). “You do not hear the rigorousness of duty in these words; the apostle does not say, ‘You shall love one another’; but neither do you hear the vehemence of poet-passion and of inclination” (WL, 375/SKS 9, 368). Note carefully then that here, in the unity of “love itself” and in recognition that the one love has within itself “contrasts”, Kierkegaard is finally harmonizing the distinction that he has heretofore been underscoring. This utterance of St. John has none of the rigor of duty since the epistle does not invoke the language of commandment; at the same time, though, it does not feature the passion of the poetic.

Given that the language of commandment has been consistently associated by Kierkegaard with the demands of neighbor-love and the passion of the poetic has been associated with the delights of preferential love, it would seem that here, in the end, we find that love is after all one and features contrasts within itself that are at love’s pinnacle muted: neither stressing the austerity of duty nor the passion of poetry. “There is something transfigured and beatific in these words, but there is also a sadness that is agitated over life and mitigated by the eternal” (WL, 375/SKS 9, 368). Here, the eternal God himself, who is love, pervades over the one love of which God is the source and origin, transfiguring and beatifying love but also resignedly sorrowing over how human beings “should not need to be commanded, because to love people is the only thing worth living for, and without this love you are not really living” (WL, 375/SKS 9, 368). Indeed, love is commanded from a Christian point of view, and this remains the case throughout the text from beginning to end, but here at the conclusion, Kierkegaard maintains that the love commandment, while always in place, also “always remains new” (WL, 375/SKS 9, 368). For the person perfected in love similar to St. John, love has not become any less a duty, “thus the commandment is not changed in the slightest way, least of all by an apostle. The change then can be only that the person who loves becomes more and more intimate with the commandment, becomes as one with the commandment, which he loves” (WL, 375–376/SKS 9, 369). For one who has been perfected in love, the duty to love is in no way mitigated, but one becomes transformed by that duty to the point that one simply loves. In fact, one loves the commandment to love itself; love has become fully self-reflexive and self-motivating.

This is why Kierkegaard is careful to qualify his concluding claim on this subject: Most of his audience, most of us, are not perfected in love and therefore need to be reminded that love is, Christianly speaking, a duty. The words of St. John “are not the beginning of the discourse about love but are the completion” (WL, 376/SKS 9, 369). Readers of Works of Love who panic over the seemingly rigorous demands of the text should be reminded that for Kierkegaard, there is such a thing as moral progress in love. The discourse begins where Kierkegaard surmises his audience stands: in a comparatively superficial appreciation of love and lackluster dedication to its demands. The saint is not his primary audience, but his primary audience should be aspiring to sainthood. “That which is truth”, therefore, “on the lips of the veteran and perfected apostle could in the mouth of a beginner very easily be a philandering by which he would leave the school of the commandment much too soon” (WL, 376/SKS 9, 369). This danger is perhaps obvious. Less obvious is the fact that ultimately, love is one, progress in love is possible, and the person who is perfected in love will no longer need even the rhetoric of duty, having already long since outgrown the blandishments of poetry.

2. Infinity the Medium of Love

A neglected passage on the human being’s capacity for moral progress in the face of an apparently infinite demand on the part of love can further demonstrate how Kierkegaard thinks of love as finally one and attainable by way of harmonizing the demand of duty and the attractiveness of the poetic. “If one wants to help a child with a very big task”, Kierkegaard asks, “how does one go about it? Well, one does not set out the whole task at one time, because then the child despairs and gives up hope. One assigns a small part at a time, but always enough so that the child at no point stops as if it were finished, but not so much that the child cannot manage it” (WL, 252/SKS 9, 252). The analogy, of course, is to the task of love, which is indeed infinite (and we will say more about infinitude as the proper medium of love soon). Just as the parent perpetrates a kind of “pious fraud” upon the child, so too God imposes upon each human being the eternal task to love, and “surely this is the greatest task ever assigned to a human being” (WL, 252/SKS 9, 252). So great, in fact, is this task that “if eternity were to assign the human being the task all at once and in its own language, without regard for his capacities and limited power, the human being would have to despair” (WL, 252/SKS 9, 252). Interpretations of this text that persist in seeing a stark contrast between the joyless demands of duty and the inferior consolations of preferential love have, in fact, been driven to just this sort of despair.

Yet this is an unwarranted conclusion because “eternity can make itself so small that it is divisible in this way, this which is eternally one, so that, taking upon itself the form of the future, the possible, with the help of hope it brings up temporality’s child (the human being), teaches him to hope (to hope is itself the instruction, is the relation to the eternal)” (WL, 252/SKS 9, 252). Note again that the eternal is “one”, but it presents itself as “divisible”. The task of love is one task, the eternal task, but eternity itself makes itself small, parceling itself out, so to speak, in such a way that love can be accomplished day by day, work by work until one is truly perfected in love. This picture of moral progress is not that of the stern Kantian who has mirthlessly denied himself for the sake of his neighbors without any humane consolation or reward but rather the providential ordering of human affairs in recognition of our limits and infirmities, in such a way as to make of the human being a saint who no longer speaks of duty but of exhortation to the only real life, which is the life of one love.

That love is the site of connection between the eternal and temporal is affirmed by Works of Love from the very beginning. “What is it, namely, that connects the temporal and eternity, what else but love, which for that very reason is before everything and remains after everything is gone. But precisely because love is eternity’s bond in this way, and precisely because temporality and eternity are heterogeneous, love can seem a burden to temporality’s earthly sagacity; and therefore in temporality it may seem to the sensate person an enormous relief to cast off this bond of eternity” (WL, 6/SKS 9, 14–15). Readers of Kierkegaard are accustomed to thinking of the eternal and temporal as being heterogeneous, or separated as he often says by the “infinite qualitative abyss”, and indeed he repeats that point here, but the most salient fact is that the heterogeneity is most apparent to the “sensate person”, the one far from perfection in love. Note that it is love that “connects” temporality and eternity, not that entrenches the chasmic distinction between them. Love, similar to God, who is love, is, therefore, before all things and endures after the end of all things. It is what connects the two distinct realms, the distinction between which is felt most acutely by the sensate, by those immature in love. Those perfected in love by implication are those who do not feel these two realms to be utterly heterogeneous but connected. “The self-deceived person”, by contrast, “thinks that he is able to console himself…. The self-deceived person may even think he is able to console others who became victims of perfidious deception, but what insanity when someone who himself has lost the eternal wants to heal the person who is extremely sick unto death!” (WL, 7/SKS 9, 15).

The self-deceived person imagines he can be consoled by shirking the burden of the eternal, but this is precisely how the self-deceived person has deceived himself. Such a person imagines it is a relief to be rid of the eternal, but this is to be in despair, as the reference to the biblical sickness unto death that serves as the title to Kierkegaard’s treatise on despair proves. The person perfected in love is consoled by their having shouldered the burden of the eternal, thereby connecting the ever ancient, ever new commandment to love your neighbor as yourself with the temporal realm of the sensate, the affective, the embodied. Such a person does not perfect herself in love by spurning the temporal in favor of the eternal, denying the preferential in favor of the neighbor exclusively, but by connecting them.

The reason it is important to acknowledge that Kierkegaard provides an account of moral progress, or what theologians would not be reluctant to call sanctification, is that the goal of this process of perfection in love is the attainment of love itself, an attainment that is by no means without consolation. That human beings can make progress in love in this comprehensive way is part of what makes love a virtue. Love is a passion, of course, but it is also a moral excellence that stands (as St. Paul teaches (1 Corinthians 13:13)) at the summit of the theological virtues (WL 248/SKS 9, 248). That one can be perfected in love means that love is a virtue at which one can be either more or less practiced. At the height of ethical perfection, the saint is one who just loves, and they love in the recognition that they no longer need to be commanded to do their duty. This perfection in love, therefore, exhibits features that are shared by love as the one and final reality of perfected love: Yes, it is a duty, but it is also a source of joy. The saint acts in the conviction that self-denial is simultaneously self-fulfillment. They exhibit the ease, joy, and spontaneity that imperfect people only experience in preferential loves (or on perhaps rare occasions of ethical enthusiasm). For this reason I want to stress that perfection in love for Kierkegaard is not only perfection in a kind of Judge William-esque attainment of the bourgeois ethical ideal, but a complex of love that attains both ethical discipline and poetic beauty.

That God is love is the basis for Kierkegaard’s assertion in the sixth of the second set of deliberations that “love abides”. “When we speak this way, we are speaking of the love that sustains all existence, of God’s love” (WL, 301/SKS 9, 299). This is one of the comparatively few occasions in the text on which Kierkegaard makes a more explicit and elaborate distinction between divine and human love. Since his emphasis in Works of Love is on the latter, he writes that “no human being is love; he is, if he is in love, one who loves. Yet love is everywhere present where there is one who loves” (WL, 301/SKS 9, 299). Because God is love, and no human being is love, the human being can only be in love or act with works of love. In every such instance, however, God is secretly present. “One would think, and probably most often does, that love between human beings is a relationship between two. This is indeed true, but untrue, inasmuch as this relationship is also a relationship among three. First there is the one who loves, next the one or the ones who are the object; but love itself is present as the third” (WL, 301/SKS 9, 299). In any loving relationship, then, the one God who is love is always present, and it is for this reason that love always abides. While two people may end a relationship, love itself abides insofar as those who love continue to remain in love, even if that be with another person (WL, 303–304/SKS 9, 301–302). Given that there is always someone to love, because anyone and everyone is my neighbor, love itself abides and does so wherever love is present.

Put another way, the proper medium of love is infinitude. That love abides means, as Kierkegaard argues in the final of the first set of deliberations, that its proper medium is infinity. “Everything that is to be kept alive must be kept in its element; but love’s element is infinitude, inexhaustibility, immeasurability” (WL, 180/SKS 9, 180). That love’s element is infinitude is yet another consideration for why we ought to think of love as ultimately one. And indeed, this is exactly what Kierkegaard goes on to argue in his diatribe against invidious comparison. “There is a reciprocal relationship here, but infinite from both sides. In the one case, it is the beloved, who in every manifestation of the lover’s love lovingly apprehends the immeasurability; in the other, it is the lover, who feels the immeasurability because he acknowledges the debt to be infinite—it is one and the same thing that is infinitely great and infinitely small” (WL, 181/SKS 9, 181). Just as we saw above with the “pious fraud” by which God parcels the infinite task into infinitely small achievable valences realizable by limited persons with limited capacities day by day, so too here again the infinite is both infinitely great and infinitely small.

The infinitude of love is all-encompassing: The lover recognizes that the debt of love is infinite and that this makes an infinite difference to the quality of his works of love. This can be seen by the thought experiment that Kierkegaard puts before us in these pages. Imagine, he asks, that a servant does exactly the same services for you as one who loves you and another who renders the exact same services without love, and you can easily perceive that there is nevertheless an infinite difference between the two cases, though one that is outwardly imperceptible. The same logic holds for the reverse scenario: Imagine a person hypothetically undertaking to perform all the same works that a lover performs only without love, and here again, the difference is immeasurable, though outwardly the works are identical (WL, 180–181/SKS 9, 180–181). Thus, the reciprocal nature of love: The beloved is easily able to perceive that the difference love makes to the lover’s works of love is immeasurable.

Because the element of love is infinitude, it is impossible to make comparisons within love as if it were finite and thus subject to measured evaluation. The nature of love is such that it is not amenable to being “broken down” into fractions, though it manifests itself partially, refracted in innumerable works of love. Love is emphatically not a “zero-sum game” wherein some love given to one beloved means less given to another.4 On the contrary, and perhaps paradoxically, the more love is shown, the more love there is to show “because the one who loves needs no calculation and therefore does not waste a moment in calculating” (WL, 181/SKS 9, 181). There is, thus, in the end, no real rivalry between one and another set of works of love and another set.

Consistent with his arguments in many upbuilding discourses, Kierkegaard inveighs sharply here against what he calls “comparison”. “Love cannot infinitely compare itself with itself, because it infinitely resembles itself in such a way that this only means that it is a redoubling, and therefore it is no comparison” (WL, 182/SKS 9, 182). A redoubling, of course, is in Kierkegaard’s writings a performance of what the phenomenon is meant to signify.5 That love is a redoubling simply means that love just is what love does. This is why he goes on to assert that love “is an action and not an expression about, not a reflective view of, love” (WL, 188/SKS 9, 188). All love must be expressed in action because it is nothing but its own expression, a redoubling, a doing of what it says. Love is thus always enacted, given to us in works. This is part of what makes love a virtue (and arguably a virtue with a heavily Socratic coloring)6 as well as a passion. “Love is a passion of the emotions, but in this emotion a person, even before he relates to the object of love, should first relate to God and thereby learn the requirement, that love is the fulfilling of the Law” (WL, 112/SKS 9, 116). Love is, therefore, at once obligatory and a natural passion.7

Comparison, however, is the mortal enemy of action. “In comparison, everything is lost, love is made finite, the debt is made something to repay—exactly like any other debt” (WL, 183/SKS 9, 183). Cleaving too closely to a view of the text that takes Kierkegaard to be advancing two types of love in problematic or competitive relationship runs the risk of converting love from an infinite to a finite and, therefore, calculable, measurable quantity. This danger pertains even to those commonplace interpretations that read Kierkegaard as advocating for neighbor-love above preferential love. Once again, he repeats his claim that “In comparison, everything is lost, love is made finite, the debt is made something to repay, regardless of which position, even if it is the top, love by way of comparison thinks it occupies in relation to others’ love or in relation to its own achievements” (WL, 183/SKS 9, 183). Even if it were true that a lover loved more than others, the very invocation of comparison itself is “not to love” at all (WL, 184/SKS 9, 184).

3. Love Is a Matter of Conscience

Because comparison is militantly to be avoided, according to Kierkegaard (WL, 186/SKS 9, 186), the transvaluation of love by Christianity, which is the revelation that places love in its proper element of infinitude, is wholesale. Kierkegaard argues for this point in the deliberation on love as a matter of conscience. It is in these pages that we find Kierkegaard arguing most explicitly for the ultimate synthesizing of the qualities of love as aspects of one reality. He also most clearly unpacks the implications of love being one on the paradigmatic standing of neighbor-love vis-à-vis preferential loves. Kierkegaard’s primary argument in this deliberation is that by making love a matter of conscience, Christianity has revolutionized love as such. Because love as such has been revolutionized by Christianity, the relationship between preferential love and neighbor-love must also be rethought and not merely by elevating neighbor-love above preferential love. “Christianity has not selectively made erotic love a matter of conscience, but because it has made all love a matter of conscience it has made erotic love that also” (WL, 139/SKS 9, 141).

Recent efforts to rehabilitate preferential loves or to blunt the criticism that Kierkegaard is overly harsh toward preferential loves tend to rely on strategies that interpret him as saying that preferential loves are provisionally acceptable so long as they pass the rigorous moral test of neighbor-love.8 Clearly the arguments of Lippitt, Hughes, and Davenport are defensible, and they are quite persuasive so far as they go. However, passages similar to the one just quoted suggest to me that Kierkegaard is not merely arguing that neighbor-love can and should filter or infuse or coincide with preferential love but rather that in so doing, neighbor-love will also exhibit qualities ordinarily associated primarily with preferential love. Christianity, to return to the quote above, does not merely offer a moral corrective to preferential love, as if this is the only aspect of love to which revelation is relevant. Christianity makes love itself a matter of conscience and thus preferential love is necessarily also made a matter of conscience, but preferential love is not targeted for this transformation because it is specifically in need of it.

Obviously, throughout the book, Kierkegaard underscores the need for preferential love to be brought into line with neighbor-love, and how this might work has been well explained by Lippitt, Hughes, and Davenport. Even when Kierkegaard seems to highlight the intractable character of preferential love in the most pointed terms, he is still at pains to say that preferential love is not specifically targeted by neighbor-love. “If it would be difficult to transform any kind of love into a matter of conscience, then certainly erotic love, which is based on drives and inclination” (WL, 139/SKS 9, 141). This makes it sound like preferential love is especially difficult to moralize, given that it is based on drives and inclination, but this is not what Kierkegaard is saying. “Drives and inclination themselves seem to be quite adequate to decide whether erotic love is present or absent, and to that extent erotic love seems to challenge the essentially Christian, just as the essentially Christian challenges it” (WL, 139/SKS 9, 141).

Preferential loves need nothing more than drives and inclination in order to be assured of their validity, which means that they have their own integrity that seems to challenge Christian love as much as vice versa. “For example, when two people love each other—something they themselves must of course know best—and nothing otherwise stands in the way of their union, why then make difficulties, as Christianity does, by saying: No, they must first have answered the question whether they have consulted with God and with their consciences. Christianity does not want to make changes in externals; neither does it want to abolish drives or inclination—it wants only to make infinity’s change in the inner being” (WL, 139/SKS 9). The point of the example is that when two people love each other, they do not need Christianity to tell them that. Preferential loves have a perfectly valid basis in drives and inclination, and Christianity is not here to abolish that basis nor to raise objections to the lovers’ union when nothing stands in the way of it. Christian love thus makes the change of the infinite in the lovers’ inner being while disturbing nothing of the externals. So even in the apparently difficult case of preferential love, preferential love is not being selected for particularly pointed moral critique but is being transformed along with all love. “On the whole, one cannot make something particular a matter of conscience; either one must make everything that, as Christianity does, or nothing at all” (WL, 139–140/SKS 9, 141). This is why Kierkegaard says that the change Christianity makes to love is “fundamental” (WL, 142/SKS 9, 144).

Because of this fundamental wholesale change, there is really only one love in the end.

The worldly or merely human point of view recognizes a great many kinds of love and is well informed about the dissimilarity of each one and the dissimilarity between each particular one and the others. It studies in depth the dissimilarity of these dissimilarities—if it is at all possible to study in depth something that has no depth. With Christianity the opposite is the case. It recognizes really only one kind of love, the spirit’s love, and does not concern itself much with working out in detail the different ways in which the fundamental universal love can manifest itself. Christianly, the entire distinction between the different kinds of love is essentially abolished.

(WL, 143/SKS 9, 145)

So, while it is the case that Kierkegaard goes on for pages about the differences between neighbor-love and preferential love, in the end, these differences are subtly reconciled. From a human point of view, the point of view of the “natural man” unillumined by revelation, it is possible to be positively bogged down in dissimilarities—or comparisons, as we have seen—but the Christian point of view sees only one love, the spirit’s love. This love is both “fundamental” (which recalls the nature of the change that Christianity makes in the one love of the spirit) and “universal”. “Christian love is the essential love, just as in the Christian sense there is only one kind of love. To repeat, Christianity has not changed anything in what people have previously learned about loving the beloveds, the friend, etc., has not added a little or subtracted something, but it has changed everything, has changed love as a whole” (WL, 147/SKS 9, 148).

Christian love is “essential”, and once again, it is not “related as a type to other types of love” (WL, 66/SKS 9, 73). It is not an addition to or subtraction from any extant love, such as friendship or romantic love. Kierkegaard is clear on this point: Christian love “does not wish to bring about any eternal change at all in the external sphere; it wants to seize it, purify it, sanctify it, and in this way make everything new while everything is still old. The Christian may very well marry, may very well love his wife, especially in the way he ought to love her, may very well have a friend and love his native land; but yet in all this there must be a basic understanding between himself and God in the essentially Christian, and this is Christianity” (WL, 145/SKS 9, 146). Friendship, patriotism, and spousal relationships gain nothing by having Christian love added to them as if there were an itemized list of loves to which Christian love is added as one more item on the list. Christian love renews these relationships and forms of love and places them on the foundation of obligation. Preferential loves are thereby transformed, sanctified, and purified.

Because Christianity transforms, sanctifies, and purifies love in this way, Kierkegaard calls Christian love “the eternal foundation” that undergirds “every expression of the particular” (WL, 141/SKS 9, 143). That Christianity is ultimately concerned only with one love further entails that the universal, fundamental, and essential love finds its expression in every particular loving relationship, including preferential loves, which are less in need of rehabilitation than is commonly thought: “Thus Christianity has nothing against the husband’s loving his wife in particular, but he must never love her in particular in such a way that she is an exception to being the neighbor that every human being is, because in that case he confuses what is essentially Christian—the wife does not become for him the neighbor, and thus all other people do not become for him the neighbor either” (WL, 141–142/SKS 9, 143).

Because the transformation of all love by the one Christian love is total, any exception to it invalidates the whole. If anyone less than everyone is the neighbor, then, in effect, no one is the neighbor. Christianity has no objection to spouses loving each other as spouses, which is to say, preferentially. Obviously, spousal loves are distinctive, but Kierkegaard denies that the specific quality of love that attaches to romantic relationships and friendships is sufficient to mark these relationships out as comprising a distinct type. “To be sure, the wife and the friend are not loved in the same way, nor the friend and the neighbor, but this is not an essential dissimilarity” (WL, 141/SKS 9, 143). Christian love makes the preferential simultaneously a matter of conscience, a matter of obligation, and duty. Strictly speaking, nothing thereby is added to the spousal love, nor is anything taken away from it. All love is transformed, and all love is purified.

Kierkegaard asserts the unity of love at least three times in this deliberation. Once again: “Christianity, however, knows only one kind of love, the spirit’s love, but this can lie at the base of and be present in every other expression of love” (WL, 146/SKS 9, 147–148). We saw above that the essential foundation finds expression in every particular relationship. Christian love, then, is not another type added to existing integral romantic relationships and friendships but is more similar to a solute that, once incorporated, is then inseparable from every love of whatever form. “So it is with Christian love in relation to the different kinds of love; it is in all of them—that is, it can be, but Christian love itself you cannot point to” (WL, 146/SKS 9, 148). The transformation effectuated by Christianity interpenetrates all forms of love to such an extent that it can no longer be picked out in isolation from any one of them. This thesis would be entirely consistent with my argument that neighbor-love, for one perfected in love, would also exhibit qualities of preferential love: If Christian love seeps into all love, then preferential love will be moralized, and neighbor-love itself will remain a duty of course but will be embraced with the spontaneity and joy normally associated only with preferential love.

This reciprocity, implied by the oneness of love realized most especially by one perfected in it, is figuratively compared by Kierkegaard to a sort of circle, an image of oneness. “If we want to think of a starting point in Christianity’s doctrine of love (even though it is impossible to fix a starting point in a circular motion), we cannot say that Christianity begins by making erotic love a matter of conscience, as if this matter had first and foremost attracted the attention of the Christian doctrine” (WL, 140/SKS 9, 142). A circular motion is indivisible, a whole, into which there is no fixed entry point or exit point. That being said, the entry point is not preferential love, which Kierkegaard denies is the primary target of Christian doctrine, as if this quality of love required some special moral attention.9 The beginning point, insofar as we can even talk about such a thing, is “from the foundation and therefore with the Spirit’s doctrine of what love is. In order to determine what love is, it begins either with God or with the neighbor…. From this foundation, Christianity now takes possession of every expression of love” (WL, 140/SKS 9, 142).

The Spirit’s doctrine of what love is presumably is another way of saying “the spirit’s love”, the one love that Christianity recognizes. This foundation is indeed neighbor-love, but neighbor-love is only discoverable by way of the God-relationship, which uniquely discloses that every human being is my neighbor. The impact this foundation has on how we should be thinking about the relationship of neighbor-love and preferential love is explicitly asserted by Kierkegaard with somewhat alarming clarity: “Thus one can say that it is the doctrine about the human being’s God-relationship that has made erotic love a matter of conscience just as well as one can say that it is the doctrine of love for the neighbor. Both are equally the Christian objection to the self-willfulness of drives and inclination” (WL, 140/SKS 9, 142). Kierkegaard asserts openly that both neighbor-love and romantic love, despite their undeniably different qualities, are equally revolutionized by the foundation of love being placed on the one God who is love.

4. Conclusions

I will now offer a concluding thought on how to understand the relationship between preferential love and neighbor-love if they are to be regarded as a unity and not rivalrous opposed alternatives. At the outset of this paper, I called neighbor-love paradigmatic, and I have argued throughout that neighbor-love, as paradigmatic, will also exhibit features of preferential love. As C. Stephen Evans (forthcoming) has suggested, Kierkegaard’s view of love is essentially in line with the tradition of Christian Platonism.10 Neighbor-love is the paradigm of love, particularly as we have seen when it is developed at the highest level of saintly perfection attainable by human beings. Other forms of love, and of course, we are thinking primarily here of preferential love, participate in neighbor-love to greater or lesser degrees. These forms of love fully participate in the wholeness of neighbor-love when they are transformed by it. As paradigmatic, though, neighbor-love will also exhibit the wholeness of transformed preferential loves while not violating their unique character. Implied in this view as well is that God’s love, which would on this broadly Christian Platonist view be the absolute paradigm of love as well as its source (which, as we have seen, is clearly Kierkegaard’s view), also exhibits qualities of preferential loves. That consequence will have to be expounded on another occasion.