Dante’s two reports of his looks back to earth frame this section. After the first, Dante has a vision of Christ himself.Despite this theophany, Dante must undergo an examination of his Christianity, testing him on the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.The eager “bachelor” answers the masters’ queries with definitions memorized from authoritative texts.The test, however, exceeds rote memorization.The question of the texts’ truth, which concern the most significant matter of our happiness, moves the participants to inquire more deeply.

Dante rethinks the Christian virtues as he rethought the sins in Purgatorio.His reassessment reconsiders Adam, the figure most intimately connected with the meaning of Scripture’s supremacy, namely, its discouragement of philosophic inquiry. Through this conversation, Dante reinterprets the text that originates the faith in which he’s tested. He recurs to that origin to direct it onto an alternative path, one that encourages rather than prohibits the philosophic life.

This alternative way of life requires an alternative divinity. In this realm of the fixed stars, to which he traces his origins as man and poet, Dante undertakes the ultimate poetic act, that of theopoiesis. Dante’s vision of Christ, he writes, prepared him to see Beatrice.

Chapter 3 begins with how the Donatist controversy shaped Augustine’s theology of justification by faith because the Donatists represented the real possibility of having faith without charity. The chapter then turns to the key features of Augustine’s theology of justification formed by the Pelagian controversy, especially participation in Christ’s righteousness. Both controversies pressed Augustine to consider how justification is by faith if faith sometimes fails to justify, as in Donatists, lax catechumens, and impenitent Christians. In both de spiritu et littera (The Spirit and the Letter) and his sermons, Augustine addresses this through a deeper psychology of faith: faith only obtains the grace of justification when it is motivated by hope and fails if it is motivated primarily by fear. The chapter concludes with de fide et operibus (Faith and Works), exploring Augustine’s understanding of faith, works, and charity, his criticism of sola fide (faith alone), and his development of a new terminology for justifying faith: fides Christi (faith in Christ).

It is widely known that the ancient Greek language distinguished three main kinds of love. With the exception of one sustained discussion that I consider carefully, friendship receives scarcely a handful of references in its own right in Works of Love, for it is usually lumped together with erotic (or romantic) love – “and friendship” is the phrase used to conjoin philia to eros as a kind of afterthought, and this occurs dozens of times in Kierkegaard’s tremendous yet maddening 1847 text. Incessantly, the flaws of philia are declared in Works of Love to be exactly the same as the flaws of eros. For the most part, that leaves no room for a consideration of friendship itself. My chapter seeks to remedy this neglect, turning to Kierkegaard’s example of Jesus’s love for Peter.

This chapter focuses on the Works of Love deliberation “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins” (and, where relevant, Kierkegaard’s 1843 discourses on that topic), exploring the figure of the “one who loves” [den Kjerlige]. Drawing on the deliberation’s discussion of silence, mitigation explanations, and forgiveness, and some arguments from my book Love’s Forgiveness about love’s way of seeing ambiguous evidence, I sketch the contours of a virtue manifested in den Kjerlige: generosity of spirit. I then ask: If we took seriously Kierkegaard’s portrait of den Kjerlige, what are the implications for contemporary moral and social discourse? How would such a person engage in moral criticism or social critique? What does this suggest about the controversial category of “microaggressions?” Through a consideration of “Love Hides,” some recent work on the ethics of “social punishment,” especially online public shaming, and contemporary debates about microaggressions, this exercise in “applied Kierkegaard” will argue that Kierkegaard’s deliberation offers an important counterweight to hyper-suspicion, judgmentalism, and self-righteousness in a polarized world.

Early in the text of Works of Love (1847) Kierkegaard makes the claim that “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.” The purpose of this chapter is to interrogate how this claim might relate to his later claim in The Sickness unto Death (1849) that it is faith that is the opposite of despair. The first section introduces the intertwined dynamics of love and despair as they are traced out by Kierkegaard in both Works of Love and The Sickness unto Death. The second section of this chapter argues that there is a genuine therapy that the loving person undergoes and is able through love of others to heal the sickness unto death that is nothing other than despair. The third and final section of this chapter considers the basis on which we might attribute to Kierkegaard a view of the theological virtues at least as being closely related by dint of a common structure and a common aspiration to consolation and integration of the self with itself in peace and reconciliation despite the unavoidable sorrows of our lives.

On a standard approach, love’s proper object is construed in terms of personhood or rational agency. Some philosophers in this broadly Kantian tradition deny that love has a proper aim: specifically, they reject the idea that love properly aims at the good of the beloved. They worry about paternalism and encroachment. In this chapter, we show how Kierkegaard’s Works of Love advances a rival approach: one which provides an account of how love can properly aim at the good of the beloved, without thereby becoming objectionably paternalistic or encroaching, together with an alternative conception of love’s object. We bring out the significant advantages of this approach, which emphasizes our human interdependence and mutual vulnerability. Through a comparison with the ethical thought of K. E. Løgstrup, whose philosophy of love we present as standing in significant continuity with Kierkegaard’s, we further show how the expressly theological framework advanced in Works of Love may also be developed in a more secular direction.

This chapter provides an analysis of the structure of love in Kierkegaard’s thought, which takes its most developed shape in Works of Love. This analysis will help us understand the four key elements of Kierkegaardian love that constitute it in its proper sense. The four elements of love are: repetition, time, commitment, and the good of the other. The overall argument in this chapter is that for Kierkegaard love necessitates a repeated, hence time-oriented, commitment to the good of the other. The object of this commitment is the other and that which is truly their good, which is their “abiding in love.”

Positing the question concerning the meaning of life in terms of "how should one live so that the value of life be accessible to one," my claim is that Kierkegaard’s answer to this question is "by loving." To explain this answer, I focus on the idea of "God as a middle term" that Kierkegaard presents in Works of Love. Further to interpreting this as saying that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis for loving, I claim that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis also for living. Having God as "the middle" in love, I suggest, is in fact to experience goodness, and by this to affirm one’s existence as valuable. Experiencing this goodness, however, depends on becoming oneself, which, for its part, depends on loving another. Thus, in the context of loving, one in fact sustains three sets of relationships: with God, with the beloved, and with oneself. In the chapter I demonstrate the interdependency of these relationships, and how they constitute a meaningful life.

The paradox Works of Love approaches is that love is commanded. Taking up the description of love as fulfilling the law, Kierkegaard presents an account of law that is never actualized except in the decision that is love, and an account of love that is continuously called or goaded into becoming by the law. The ambivalence of this temporal “sequence” is of the kind that Kafka would later portray in his story “Before the Law.” This chapter argues that Kierkegaard’s law cannot appear for us except through a political reading in which I ask in my specific historical context, “what is justice”? Works of Love thus opens a reading of the paradoxical Christian commandment which would allow philosophers like Levinas to articulate a radical ethics of response. To read Kierkegaard’s Works of Love faithfully is to be charged to love.

“Manners” alternates between the portrayal of self-reliant “gentlemen” like Montaigne, Socrates, and El Cid, who are “original and commanding” and “fashion,” an imitative “hall of the Past” where “virtue [has] gone to seed.” But near the end of the essay he turns away from forms of aristocratic morality by introducing two new heroes: a woman, “the Persian Lilla,” who reconciles “all heterogeneous persons into one society”; and then “Osman,” a poor beggar at the gates of the Shah who is a “great heart … so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country,” and whose wealth lies in his ability to “harbor” madness without sharing it. The introduction of Lilla and Osman late in “Manners” raises the question of how they align with its other heroes. Are they part of a turn or contrary tendency showing up late in the essay, or a deeper exploration of forms of virtue – especially love – already introduced?

Love holds the most exalted place in the Christian account of the virtues. In this chapter we propose that our actions are most of all determined by what we love. If we want to find the motivation to make changes to how we live, in response to climate change, we can do that best by thinking through what it is that we love, and what that might require of us. We think about how love often involves some sort of restraint or letting go (as in marriage, where we ‘forsake all other’), not out of any cold disdain, but on account of the warmth that characterises our attitude to what we love most.

Chapter 5 explores the construction of women, especially young women, as dubious and untrustworthy figures in male discourse, a source of cynicism and doubt about kinship’s future. It captures men’s fears about ‘greedy’ women and ‘gold diggers’ who only want to marry men in order to expropriate their wealth. At the same time, the chapter explores counter-discourses of young women getting by in a world of male failure, their relations with their male kin, and their ambitions to become successful ‘hustlers’ in their own right. Speaking to regional literature on love, marriage, and youth relationships, it explores the gendered tensions created by a world of masculine destitution, illuminating male fears about the capacity of women to exploit their ‘in-betweenness’ to acquire patrilineal land.

Action at scale on climate change is urgent. It is unavoidable that such action must for a period of some decades include restraint, because we do not have time to construct enough emissions-free substitutes for all today’s emitting activities. Leaders in politics and businesses cannot promote restraint without losing their jobs, so leadership must come from us, individually and collectively, making decisions to live differently. We can all act, at home and at work or in other teams. We can prioritise our most emitting activities, make changes where possible and, where it is for now beyond our reach, we can promote change through raising awareness of what matters and what help we need. These choices and actions are virtuous. Not ‘virtuous’ in the sense we parodied in the opening, of something admirable but prim and outdated, but a joyful, life-enhancing virtue that expresses the best of what we hope to be. The virtue of restraint in climate action is an act of leadership, an expression of faith and charity, and above all, an act of love.

Chapter 10 explores the range of love in Plotinus, going from human earthly (including sexual) loves up to the One/Good as itself love. Plotinus takes over Plato’s interest in love and makes it into a feature of reality in general. Human love – the desire to unite with the beloved, the feeling of need – anticipates aspects of higher levels of love, soul’s love which brings it to union with transcendent Intellect, Intellect being itself love of the One. I discuss the special sense in which the One can be said to be love and self-love.

Mœurs, the second major censorship topic, were cornerstones of how contemporaries shaped their world, especially as regimes changed. This chapter is organized thematically around the topics of love and relationships, titles (especially ‘citoyen’ or the lack thereof), brigands, justice, and false appearances, before concluding with new material on the fate of Le Mariage de Figaro – a play that touches on many of these themes. These examples, which include major comedies as well as works at the Porte Saint Martin, the Gaité, or the Ambigu-Comique, and secondary theatres in the provinces, demonstrate how the state and contemporaries used censorship around the depiction of mœurs to advance their specific view of the world. Interestingly, when it comes to mœurs, the limit of the tolerable where lateral censorship kicks in is often within the legally permissible, revealing a gap between what people wanted and the reality of a new political regime.

Chapter 4 brings together the works of French poet and lyricist Guillaume de Machaut with those of bilingual English poet John Gower, as well as some of Geoffrey Chaucer’s lyrics. These authors take part in the ‘intellectualisation’ of love poetry that sees the language of phantasmatic love’s joy be confronted with that of Boethian happiness and sufficiency. This confrontation, I argue, demonstrates the incompatibility of love’s joy with happiness: the latter is a form of self-mastery whereas the former fragments the subject in self-delusion. This chapter also traces the transmission of the French language of joie d’amour into Middle English and its relationship with the native blisse, which I show to be at the convergence between philosophical, mystical and erotic languages of love. While Gower foregoes the native blisse, Chaucer’s lyrics bring the languages of joie and bliss together to build a new form of love’s joy as the consummation of desire and an escape from earthly temporality.

This book on the language of love’s joy starts with the acknowledgement that such a language has repeatedly been expressed as impossible. The poetic and vernacular tradition of joie d’amour originates in the lyrics of the troubadours, which famously sing the absence of fulfilment in the endless prolongation of desire: it is thus born in a lyrical language that presupposes its impossibility. This study on the language of love’s joy is thus grounded in the paradox that love’s joy is beyond language. The elusive nature of the emotion has resulted in a lack of studies on love’s joy. If there is an important scholarly tradition on the semantics of Old Occitan joi, this critical interest has been confined to the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and has not been picked up by the field of emotion history nor by more recent studies on medieval love literature.