Does the conception of worship – in expressing, as it does, a direct relationship with God – prevent an understanding of love for God as mediated by love for humans? Taking the latter to be an existential model of one’s relationship with God, in this chapter I answer in the negative to the above question by demonstrating the role that worship plays in such a model. To do so, I turn to Kierkegaard’s image of “resting transparently” in God. For Kierkegaard, this image represents what he perceives as the highest possible state of the believer’s relationship with God; a state that is achieved, according to Kierkegaard, when one becomes the self – the individual – that God intends one to be. And how does one become this self? By loving properly the neighbour (that is, another individual). The suggestion I develop in this chapter is that it is the worshipping of God – that is, by being in a state of respect and attendance to God’s will – that directs one in loving properly the neighbour. Hence, it is worship of God that paves the way to fully loving the neighbour and thus to fully loving God.

Kierkegaard’s thesis that lacking faith is necessarily a state of despair leads to the conclusion that Either/Or’s fictional character Judge William, who belongs to the “ethical” rather than the “religious” stage of life, is, despite the many virtues of his position, in a state of despair. What does his despair amount to, then? Relying on Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death, I claim that the failure in the Judge’s view of life is rooted in his misguided understanding of what it is to be a “self.” By taking himself to have ultimate control over the way he is (in a manner akin to what Sartre’s means by “radical freedom”), the Judge fails to acknowledge that he possesses what I term an individual essence, bestowed upon him by God in a state of potential. This chapter explains the conception of individual essence and demonstrates how it applies to the Judge’s despair.

Although signed pseudonymously, The Sickness unto Death is taken to reflect Kierkegaard’s authorized view of the value and content of the religious life. This chapter argues that the ideal of religiosity that Kierkegaard develops it in this text is primarily existential, namely focused on the believer’s way of living in the world. To demonstrate this, a detailed analysis of Kierkegaard’s conception of selfhood is presented. Distinguishing between “being a self” and “becoming the self that one is intended by God to be,” it is shown how the latter is achieved by way of living correctly. While one’s quality of selfhood – the quality that makes one a self, an individual – is possessed in a state of potential, the actualization of this potential is a function of one’s worldly existence. There is therefore a tight connection between unfulfilled life, unfulfilled self, and unfulfilled relationship with God. And on the other hand, one “rests transparently” in God (in Kierkegaard’s words), when one becomes the self that God intends one to be. And we become who God intends us to be by living correctly.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a prolific author who published his philosophical writings in various styles and often pseudonymously. In this diverse authorship, The Sickness unto Death stands as something of an exception. Although signed pseudonymously – a method that Kierkegaard often used to put distance between his own view and the one expressed in the text – Kierkegaard regarded this book as highly reflective of his own understanding of the religious life. Rapidly written in the spring of 1848 and published in 1849 after some agonizing, the motivation behind The Sickness unto Death, according to Kierkegaard’s journal, was in part a conscientious conviction that the whole of his authorship needed to be curated in the direction of the religious. The appearance of the second edition of Either/Or in particular provoked him to accompany the reissue with a new and more religiously inflected text. “The second edition of Either/Or really can’t be published without something accompanying it,” he fretted in his journal. “Somehow the emphasis must be on the fact that I’ve made up my mind about being a religious author … If this opportunity passes, virtually everything I’ve written, viewed as a totality, will be dragged down into the aesthetic” (KJN 5, NB10:69/SKS 21, 293–294).

The universal significant of faith

Our existence is pervaded with sorrow. Loss – the painful absence of what one values – is silently present everywhere. The evident cases of loss – death, harsh diseases, horrors of war – are easy to discern, but all around we also find less conspicuous instances of loss. The hug of a young couple betrays the future challenges threatening their love; a new mother’s gaze reflects the sorrow over her inevitable separation from the grown child; the smile of an elderly man expresses his recollection of years past and his sad acknowledgment of the approaching end. Confronted with loss, then, either evident or unnoticeable, one’s existence may seem like a source of endless pain. Ephemeral, frail, doomed to extinction – can one nevertheless affirm life while suffering loss?

This chapter claims that Kierkegaard’s analysis of Abraham’s faith in Fear and Trembling offers a positive answer to this question. This may sound a little strange. After all, can Abraham’s strikingly unusual and terrifying experience have anything in common with a range of experiences that, at least in their less severe forms, are the lot of every human being? What is the connection between Abraham’s experience on Mount Moriah (that does not seem to bear even the most remote resemblance to one’s ordinary experience) and the intimate and familiar experience of loss? As I shall attempt to show, Kierkegaard’s analysis of faith turns the story of the Binding into a tale of the human condition. Without making God’s demand any less dreadful, and without making Abraham’s response to that demand any less exceptional, Kierkegaard nevertheless retells the story in a manner that makes it relevant to every human being. Abraham’s trial becomes an expression (albeit an exceptional one) of the ‘existential drama’ involved in temporal, ephemeral, and finite human life. Accordingly, Abraham’s faith becomes an inspiring model: a “guiding star that rescues the anguished” (FT 18/SKS 4, 117), a guiding star for all. My claim is that Abraham’s faith manifests a desirable existential position: it exemplifies a unique way of approaching the loss that living in time entails.

Love and the works of love

In the second paragraph of the Preface to Works of Love Kierkegaard states the following: these ‘are Christian deliberations’, he says, ‘therefore not about love, but about works of love’ (WL, 3, emphasis in the text). This brief but emphatic declaration delineates the scope of the long discussion in the book before us: first, it is Christian in character and second (in accordance with the first point), it is about works of love and not about love. However, this should make us wonder: what is the difference between love and its works and why does Kierkegaard wish to emphasize that the latter is the business of Christianity?

One of the prominent tasks that Works of Love takes upon itself is to clarify the confusion regarding the nature of true love, as against the way the poets understand it. Kierkegaard believes that the common understanding of love – rooted in and advanced by the poets' praises of it – is a confused and misleading understanding, and that only a Christian point of view can overcome this confusion. At the same time, Kierkegaard is not interested in conducting a conceptual (or metaphysical) analysis that will fathom the mysterious essence of love, examine it from every possible angle, and conclude with a clear-cut definition of it.

Kierkegaard, love, and romantic love

Romantic love, in contrast with neighbourly love or love for God, is rarely viewed as an important issue for Kierkegaard. Despite the textual evidence regarding the centrality of this kind of love in his works, scholars in this field often seem reluctant to take the matter seriously. When required to address Kierkegaard's repeated references to love stories, the secondary literature tends either to interpret this as a literary device or, more frequently, to relate this to his unhappy personal relationship with Regine Olsen, his forsaken fiancée. This ‘biographical’ approach is common among interpreters of Kierkegaard who believe that a complete understanding of his work requires a thorough understanding of his life, and vice versa. Such an interpretative method was dominant among earlier scholars (P. A. Heiberg and Walter Lowrie, for example), but it still has its ardent followers today (as demonstrated by Gene Fendt's book on Works of Love and especially by the comprehensive biography of Kierkegaard by Joakim Garff). However, intriguing as this approach to interpreting Kierkegaard may be, it is evident that it does not take his preoccupation with romantic love to be philosophically enlightening.