Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855), philosopher, theologian, poet and critic, is known as the father of existentialism. Still widely read today, any well-managed bookstore would be amiss without a copy of Fear and Trembling or The Sickness Unto Death sitting somewhere on a shelf.
As is often the case with the output of a prolific and influential author, we may hold a personal favorite. Of this Danish thinker, Works of Love is mine. A collection of philosophical discourses on Christian love, it was meant as “edifying” writing, to be read meditatively.
Kierkegaard opens Works of Love by insisting that love’s life is mysterious, its source hidden. Deep within every person, it often sleeps, and yet can awaken. Once roused however it presses the human heart open with an inexhaustible need for expression.
He writes, “Need, to have need, and to be needy—how reluctantly a person wishes this to be said of him! … Alas, even the most needy person who has ever lived—if he still has had love—how rich his life has been in comparison with the person, the only really poor person, who lived out his life and never felt the need of anything.”
An insatiable need to love, and to do because of love, that’s love’s passionate calling card. Making us vulnerable in its need for loving (we may say), “it would be torture,” states Kierkegaard, “for love to require itself to keep hidden.” A life of quiet desperation is certainly not indicative of love.
Reading Works of Love, I find is edifying in the manner I think Kierkegaard intended. I am encouraged to think that my needs, felt even painfully at times, can be a mark of greatness, of something everlasting moving deep within me, yearning for expression. It is uplifting, and refreshing, to hear that being needy—having a real need to love someone or something—doesn’t relegate a person to the spiritual waste-bin of the less enlightened, who can’t rise above the materiality of the world.
Certainly, there are crippling dependencies that can feel like needs as they choke us, and stubborn refusals to release ourselves from childish attitudes and habits that smother our lives. One must be watchful and discerning, of course! As a person who likes to think of himself as at least half-awake, most of the time, I find it deeply consoling to hear that my needs, if surfacing from the ocean of God’s Love, can make me both more human and divine.
“Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?”
