THE GREATER LOVE




    

Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

Worldly wisdom would have us believe that love is a relationship between one person and another. Christ’s life teaches that love is a relationship between three: person-God- person. However beautiful a love-relationship is between two or more people – however complete all their enjoyment and all their bliss in mutual devotion and affection are for them, and even if all people praise this relationship – if God and the relationship to God is left out, then this is not love but a mutual and enchanting illusion. For only in love for God can one love in truth. To help another human being to love God is to love an- other person. And to be helped by another human being to love God is to be loved. Love is by no means merely a human bond, no matter how faithful and tender it is. As soon as you leave God out, the power of human judgment becomes highest. Such judgment loses sight of love altogether. As soon as a love-relationship does not lead me to God, and as soon as I do not lead another person to God, this love – even if it were the most blissful and joyous attachment, even if it were the highest good in the lover’s earthly life – nevertheless is not true love. Not only should the celibate belong solely to God, so should the person who in love is bound to a woman or a man. He shall not first seek to please his wife, but shall strive first that his love may please God. Consequently, it is not the wife who shall teach the husband how he should love her, or the husband his wife, or a friend his friend, or associates their associates, but it is God who shall teach each individual how he or she should love. Only when the God-relationship determines what constitutes love is love prevented from being some illusion or self-deception.
 Love that does not lead to God, love that does not have the single goal of leading us to love God, such love eventually comes to a standstill. Moreover, it escapes the ultimate and most terrible collision: in the love-relationship there is an infi- nite difference between God’s conception of love and ours. A purely human conception of love can never comprehend that anyone, through being loved as completely as possible by an- other person, would be able to stand in the other person’s way. And yet, Christianly understood, this very thing is possible, for to be loved thus can be a hindrance to one’s God-relationship. So what is to be done? Christ knows how to remove the colli- sion without removing love. It demands only this sacrifice (in many cases it is the greatest sacrifice possible): being willing to accept that the reward for your love is to be hated. Wherever someone is loved in such a way as to endanger another’s God- relationship, there is a collision. And wherever this collision oc- curs, there is the requirement of a sacrifice that cannot be humanly grasped. For the Christian view means this: to truly love oneself is to love God; to truly love another person is, though it mean being hated, to help the other person love God. The world cannot seem to get it through its head that apart from God love is a chimera. For God alone is love. Where love is, God not only becomes the third party but essentially becomes the only loved object, so that it is not the husband who is the wife’s beloved, but it is God, and it is the wife who is helped by the husband to love God, and conversely.

The love-relationship is a triangular relationship of the lover, the beloved, and love –not love by itself but love in God. For ultimately it is God who has placed love in us humans, and it is God who shall finally decide what is love. In matters of love it   takes no time at all to become deceived. It is so easy to get a quick, fanciful picture of what love is and then be satisfied with the fancy. It is still easier to get a few people to associate together in self-love, to be sought after and admired by them till the end. But if your ultimate and highest purpose is to have an easy and sociable life, then don’t have any- thing to do with Christ or his love. Flee from him, for he will do the very opposite. He will make your life difficult and do this precisely by making you stand alone before God. Thus when a friend, a beloved, or other lovers and associates notice that you want to learn from Christ what it is to love in- stead of learning from them, don’t be surprised when they say to you, “Spare yourself. Give up this eccentricity. Why take life so seriously? Cut out the straining, and let us all live a beautiful, rich, and meaningful life in friendship and joy.” And if you give in to the suggestions of this false friendship, you will surely be loved and praised for it. But if you don’t, if in loving you will be a traitor neither to God nor to yourself nor to the others, you must expect your love to be refused and to be called selfish. Even if you say nothing, the others will notice that your life con- tains, if it is truly related to God’s demand, an admonition, a demand on them. It is this they want to do away with. How many have been corrupted – divinely understood – by such friendship, or by a woman’s love, simply because, de- frauded out of his God-relationship, he became far too at- tached to her while she in turn was inexhaustible in her praise of his love? How many have relatives and friends corrupted by their love because they got him to forget his God-relationship and changed it to something people could shout about, admire, without being sensitive to any admonition about higher things?

Do not appeal, therefore, to the judgment of others in order to prove your love. Human judgment has validity only as far as it agrees with God’s demand. No love between one person and another can, in and of itself, ever be perfectly happy, ever perfectly secure. Even the happiest love between two people has still one danger, the danger that earthly love can become too in- tense, too important, so that the God-relationship is hindered. You must always watch apprehensively, lest this danger overtake you, lest you too should forget God, or that the beloved might do so. Such apprehension may mean being hated by the be- loved. But only God, who is the one true source of love, is the continuously happy, the continuously blessed object of love. You should thus not watch too apprehensively; watch only in adoration.

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