Here are some more quotes from Kierkegaard’s book Works of Loves.

In relationship to God every man begins with an infinite debt, even if we forget the debt which is added daily after beginning. ( pg. 108)

[Regarding Jesus] He founded no kingdom on Earth; neither did he sacrifice himself so the apostles could inherit the gains. No it was—humanly speaking—madness; he sacrificed himself –in order to make the beloved as unhappy as himself. (pg. 116)

For the Christian view is this: truly to love onself is to love God; truly to love another person is with every sacrifice (even to become hated) to help the other person to love God or in loving God. (pg. 119)

The purely human conception of love can never go further than mutuality:  that the love is the beloved and the beloved is the lover. Christianity teaches that such a love has not yet found its proper object: God. (pg. 124)

If the apostles had not  held fast to the truth that love is the fulfilling of the law, and consequently something different from the fulfillment of human agreements and participation in human society, if they had not held fast to loving men in this sense without wishing to undertake an adaption to the world’s conception of what it is to love–would they, I wonder, have been persecuted? (pg. 125)

But if your ultimate and highest purpose is to have life made easy and sociable, then never have anything to do with Christianity. Flee from it. for it will do the very opposite; it will make your life difficult and do this precisely by making you alone before God. (pg. 127)

How many a man has been corrupted, divinely understood. by a girl’s love, simply because, defrauded out of his God-relationship, he became too faithful to her while she in turn was inexhaustible in her praise of her love? (pg. 131)

This is Christianity. Our primary task is so far from getting busy looking for the beloved that, instead, in loving the beloved, we are first to love our neighbor…the wife shall first and foremost be your neighbor; the fact that she is your wife is then a narrower definition of your special relationship to each other.  (pg. 141)

Christ’s love for Peter was so boundless that in loving Peter he accomplished loving the person one sees. He did not say, “Peter must change first and become another man before I can love him again”. No, just the opposite, he said, “Peter is Peter and I love him; love is anything will help him become another man”. (pg. 168)

No, it is the one who loves who is in debt; because he is aware of being gripped by love, he perceives this as being in infinite debt. Remarkable! To give a person one’s love is, as has been said, certainly the highest a human being can give–and yet, precisely by giving it he comes into infinite debt. One can therefore say that this is the essential characteristic of love: that the lover by giving infinitely comes into infinite debt. (pg. 172)

Just because this is the case, because he who will in earnest to try to comply with this will quite rightly fall into double danger, precisely for this reason we say that it is the Christian’s duty; to be in the debt of love to one another. (pg. 196)

One more next week.

———————————————————–W.