Works of Love

A founding figure of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard is perhaps best known for his writing on anxiety and despair, particularly in such works as Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness unto Death. Yet love, too, is a common theme in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, underlying his various collections of edifying discourses, as well as Either/Or, Stages on Life’s Way, Christian Discourses, and especially Works of Love.

First published in 1847, Works of Love is the most important explicitly religious work Kierkegaard published under his own name. Intended to awaken rather than convince—replicating, in Socratic fashion, the stinging, impatient character of a “gadfly”—the book consists of two sets of “deliberations” on love, the first set addressing love as a duty, and the second examining the applications of love. Throughout, Kierkegaard contrasts romantic love and love of one’s friends with the selfless Christian love, or agape, of the New Testament, ultimately contending that the only way to purge self-interest from love is to love one’s neighbor as oneself, and oneself as one’s neighbor, who is “indeed unconditionally every person.”

Although careful to distinguish his “deliberations” from clerical “sermons,” Kierkegaard insisted that in order to grasp the full meaning of the texts that constitute Works of Love, one must hear them. Kierkegaard makes this point repeatedly in his journals, and indeed, the preface of a work he published a few years after Works of Love begins with the words: “My dear reader! If possible, read aloud! If you do so, let me thank you for it.” While previous translations have not given sufficient attention to this critical aural aspect of the text, Bruce H. Kirmmse’s translation preserves it, thus making the same request of its readers that Kierkegaard once made of his—to hear the argument by reading it aloud.

Featuring an illuminating introduction by Kirmmse, this new translation of Works of Love promises to become the standard for generations to come.